A paper examining the benefits of impact analysis at the business process level.

A common operation in Enterprise Architecture modeling is impact analysis; taking an item and examining what the potential effects would be of changing that item, based on the dependencies that you have mapped. For example, you might use impact analysis upon a server to understand what the potential impact would be if you needed to take it offline for an upgrade. You could use impact analysis to find out “if we take this server offline, then employees will not be able to submit expense reports”

At Orbus, we see noticeably less usage of impact analysis in the context of the business process environment. But as we will argue in this paper, the technique of impact analysis is equally useful when applied to processes, and for the same reasons.

We begin by examining a traditional impact analysis scenario, one where an organization is concerned about the possible impact of retiring a server. We will then look at how similar impact analyses deliver value in a variety of business process scenarios.

Please login to continue reading about impact analysis in this white paper from Peter Harrad.