Business process patterns and frameworks : Reusing knowledge in process innovation

Purpose – To develop a novel approach for encapsulating high level business knowledge and logic of a given application domain in patterns and frameworks, which can be reused and be applied to improve a process for a given business in the domain and to develop an application to support such process. Design/methodology/approach – Formal and explicit business process patterns (BPP) have been developed that synthesize best practices found in hundreds of real projects of process redesign. From these, software business objects (BO) frameworks that encapsulate business logic have been derived. Findings – Good characterization of the processes and associated decisions by means of formal BPP allows including complex generalized business decisions logic in BO frameworks. Such logic is built upon the best current knowledge of analytical methods, such as business intelligence, optimization and heuristics. Practical implications – This approach provides a very flexible way, based on reusable components, to develop solutions and software for complex business decisions, which is an alternative to packaged products. The approach is exemplified by using a specific application domain and applied to a real case in the domain. Originality/value – As it is shown in the literature review in the paper, patterns and frameworks up to now have only marginally included high‐level decision logic.