ISSD Fall 2009 School of Information, UC Berkeley

“Process Analysis” can be generically described as follows:

• We perform an "as-is" analysis of how some activity is conducted today
• We identify requirements that may result in new or revised activities / processes / transactions; the "to-be" model
• We look for existing patterns or opportunities to use patterns in the models
• We may "re-engineer" the "as-is" model to optimize the processes; this is process design

The set of processes and activities are usually arranged in a hierarchy of detail, their sequence of execution, or both (depending on which if any stakeholder's or actor's point of view is used to define the context). Some sort of diagram is conventionally used to represent the relationships between the actors and activities in the model.

Many times this semester we've contrasted (or caricatured) two ends of a design continuum between "experiences" and "systems," and we'll do the same for process analysis and models. In this first lecture we’ll discuss the service blueprinting technique often used to model services with a dominant person-to-person context. We’ll also discuss approaches for optimizing process models by eliminating activities and iterations that don’t add value.

(Download recorded lecture (first few minutes are missing) from http://courses.ischool.berkeley.edu/i290-1/f09/files/ISSD-20091102.mp3  )