How Good Is an AS-IS Model Really?

Redesign projects for business processes usually start with analysing and mapping an actual situation within an organization. This step is called "developing an AS-IS business process model". However, many contemporary organizations have invested in developing and sustaining process models of their existing operations, which are often created by domain experts themselves. In case a new redesign project is to be initiated, a dilemma occurs. Is it safe to use a model from the existing collection or should the AS-IS model be developed all over by a BPM specialist? Clearly, an important consideration here is whether AS-IS models developed by domain experts rather than BPM experts is of sufficient quality to drive a redesign effort. To empirically investigate this issue, we examined a business process within a multinational high-tech organization. Unlike most of the studies focused on one specific aspect of quality (e.g. control flow), we used a framework from the literature that covers three quality aspects. The framework was applied to determine the potential problems in the AS-IS model.