C © 2002 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Manufactured in The Netherlands. Developing a Theory to Explain the Insights Gained Concerning Information Systems and Business Process

Abstract. Business Process (BP) literature promotes the value of business processes as essential gearwheels that help organi-sations to reach their goals. Similarly, many process design ap-proaches claim that information technology is a major enabler of business process, a view also shared by the Information Systems (IS) community. Despite this, BP and IS approaches do not pro-vide clear guidance on how to coordinate the design of BP and IS. Nor is any indication of which modelling techniques could be used to detect and design IT opportunities within a business process context given. The ASSESS-IT project examined this domain and proposed the use of simulation techniques to achieve BP and IT integration. The outcome of this project gave indication that depicting the dy-namic behaviour of IS could be very helpful for BP modellers to predict the impact that the insertion of IS may have on organi-sational processes. This paper proposes a simulation framework to depict IS behaviour within a BP simulation model, namely BPS/ISS, and tests it using the case study that was part of the ASSESS-IT project