Improving the quality of business process descriptions of public administrations

Abstract

Purpose Business processes (BPs) of public administrations (PAs) are often described in the form of written procedures or operational manuals. These business process descriptions are expected to be properly understood and applied by civil servants, who have to provide legally compliant service provisions to the citizens. However, process descriptions in the PA are sometimes hard to read, ambiguous, or vague, leading to false interpretations or even incorrect execution of the processes. The purpose of this paper is to focus on improving the descriptions of BPs to be used in PAs. Design/methodology/approach To this end, the authors present an in-depth domain analysis, including a literature review and interviews with PA stakeholders belonging to different realities. From this analysis, the authors identified a set of 52 typical defects of process descriptions. Findings The authors provide a set of guidelines and a template to constrain the definition of these documents and to mitigate the identified defects. Furthermore, the authors outline research challenges in the field of quality assessment of textual process descriptions for the PA. Research limitations/implications This paper addresses the needs of any PA officer who has to write an official procedure or operational manual, and should be studied by researchers who wish to provide automatic strategies to check the quality of these documents. Originality/value Text quality issues have been addressed in various fields (e.g. requirements engineering), but not in the area of BP descriptions of PAs. The contribution consists in the study of the quality issues that occur and create problems in the practice of this particular domain. Based on this insight, we provide directions for research that will find solutions to mitigate the issues.