Building block based Modeling of process landscapes with the PICTURE approach -: The example of munsters university administration

Public administrations face a strong pressure to reorganise caused by decreasing financial resources, a changing political environment, and increased customer demand. A process oriented visualisation, analysis and improvement of administrational processes is a key prerequisite for the successful organisational and technical change of public administrations within the current reorganisation activities. In order to successfully conduct reorganisation projects a coherent view on all administrational processes (the process landscape) and their interdependencies is of great value as a starting point. Common approaches to collect and visualise processes lead to such complex models that only a small percentage of the overall process landscape can be examined. The PICTURE-method as the core of this paper surpasses weaknesses of classical approaches and allows for a very efficient means of modelling the process landscape by using 24 domain specific reusable process building blocks. Hence by applying the PICTURE-method one can create a high degree of transparency as a base for reorganisation projects. In this paper we conceptually introduce the PICTURE-method and describe its practical application in a large modelling project within the administration of the University of Monster. We describe the experiences made by applying PICTURE and evaluate the method in terms of the requirements made by the project contractor.