Abstract

This work presents an innovative approach to business design, known as Business Engineering, and its application to service offerings design in general and health services in particular. Such an approach is characterized by:

• Integrating many disciplines—Ontology, Strategy, Business Models, Modularization, Platform Design, Case Management, Business Processes, Business Intelligence, Information Systems, and IT—in generating detailed Enterprise Architecture designs for services, which are aligned with and make operational stakeholders’ interests.

• Providing a hierarchical design methodology that allows managing the complexity of full enterprise design by starting with overall aggregated designs, which are then detailed by hierarchical decomposition.

• Basing designs on Business, Architecture, and Process Patterns that abstract and formalize the knowledge and experience generated from hundreds of business design cases in which the approach has been applied.

• Introducing advanced Analytics—for example, predictive and prescriptive data-based models, optimization techniques, and simulation—to support business development, by using models to generate new or improved service designs, and management by embedding models in operating process design; this allows generating truly Business Intelligence that optimize service performance.

• Using formal constructs to model patterns and designs based on the Business Process Management Notation (BPMN) notation, allowing simulation and eventual execution of the designs using Business Process Management Suits (BPMS) and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) technology.

The book is a sequel to Business Engineering and Service Design, published by this editorial, which provides the foundations of Business Engineering, reviews the several disciplines integrated within its methodology and presents plentiful evidence of its power by giving detailed real application cases, including very impressive results in private and public situations. This volume is dedicated to health care, presenting our view of the foundations for the design of institutions that provide such service, general architectures for making designs operative, and many real cases that show how to do formal design and the benefits to be obtained.

Keywords

Analytics, BPMN, BPMS, Business Design, Business Design Patterns, Business Engineering, Business Intelligence, Business Process Patterns, Enterprise Architecture Design, Health Care Architectures, Health Care Services Design, Service Design, Service Engineering, Service Processes Design