SLAs, KPIs and BPMN Standard for the Digital Transformation of the Enterprises’ IT Business Processes

The SLO Cases of Service Desk Response Time and Fault Detection

Abstract

In order to better define and regulate their business process operations and management, enterprises can apply Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) standard and Service Level Agreements (SLAs). BPMN standard is considered to be the state-of-the-art business process modeling standard in enterprises while SLAs with their Service Level Objectives (SLOs) and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), guarantee the service level of the enterprises’ operations. In this extension paper of (Lazaropoulos, 2022), the evolution of today’s enterprises’ business processes to the next generation SLA – aware business processes that are based on the BPMN standard continues in the light of the digital transformation. With reference to (Lazaropoulos, 2022), the following two contributions / extensions are proposed: (i) two new SLOs for the initial SLA: The SLO cases of service desk response time (SLO C) and fault detection (SLO D) with the corresponding KPIs are reported, programmatically analyzed, added in the initial SLA of two SLOs (SLO A and B) of (Lazaropoulos, 2022) and applied to the real enterprise’s BPMN IT business process of (Lazaropoulos, 2022); and (ii) the MATLAB / Octave simulation methodology: This methodology consists of two steps of innovation. During the first step of the methodology, the extended BPMN basic elements of (Lazaropoulos, 2022) are further enriched with SLO and KPI attributes that are suitable for coping with the two new SLOs. In addition, the BPMN simulation equivalence table of (Lazaropoulos, 2022) is further expanded so that each extended BPMN basic element is corresponded with its MATLAB / Octave code fragment. During the second step of the methodology, the proposed simulation module handles with the applied SLOs / KPIs of the BPMN IT business process SLA and integrates the MATLAB / Octave code development with the interdepartmental SLA definition framework of (Lazaropoulos, 2022). Simulation results are provided so that: (a) the performance of the two new SLOs is assessed and discussed; and (b) the synergy of the MATLAB / Octave simulation methodology and the interdepartmental SLA definition framework of (Lazaropoulos, 2022) is highlighted. The MATLAB / Octave simulation code is freely distributed with the Supplementary Material file of the paper. Finally, new insights into the Human Resource Management (HRM) of the enterprises’ IT personnel and the IT service outsourcing based on SLAs, SLOs and KPIs are given.