An Integrated Object & Fuzzy Cognitive Maps Approach to Business Process Management

For the last 15 years, in an attempt to successfully face the competition, organisations have been carrying out quality management initiatives such as Total Quality Management (TQM) and Business Process Re-engineering (BPR). A key aspect of quality management is business performance assessment and process re-design. Traditionally, the overall performance of an organisation has been associated with its financial performance. In the last decade however, there has been an increasing criticism of the traditional financial management driven approaches to business performance control (Olve et al. 1999). Financial measures show the effects of actions and decisions based on past market conditions that may in the mean time have changed. Therefore financial measurements fail to provide adequate guidance for long term planning because they may be based on assumptions and figures which are no longer valid. It is now recognised that running a company can hardly be reduced to optimising monetary profits. In fact, the need for more comprehensive evaluation of business performance has led to the development of new techniques such as the Balanced Scorecard (BS) (Kaplan and Norton, 1992,1993, 1996). Since 1992, BS has been widely applied in business management. The BS concept is based on three dimensions in time: yesterday, today and tomorrow; actions taken today for tomorrow may have no noticeable financial effects until the day after tomorrow (Olve et al. 1999). The company focus therefore must be broadened so that it keeps a continuous watch on non-financial performance indicators in addition to the financial ones.