management. Indeed this can be seen, for instance, on the figure with the contribution 
of the business goal “problem trends identified” of service management (top right) to 
the goal “risk indicators defined” (bottom left). The relationships between goals of 
different process models show the contribution of some process models to other 
process models. When assessing and improving business processes, this relationship 
must be taken into account: one cannot improve a process and ignoring the 
improvement of other processes contributing to the first one. 
In summary, the process model gives a goal-oriented map of the processes, with 
which precise assessments of the process performance can be made. Examples of their 
various uses are given in the next section. 
3 ISO/IEC 15504 compliant process models used as 
performance goals and performance indicators in support to 
process innovation. 
In each financial institution, the introduction of new financial products or services is 
important in order to keep their clients. However, creating some innovation introduces 
a number of new risks that are difficult to grasp. The typical risks, such as market 
risks and credit risks, have received a lot of attention from the financial institutions. 
They have their methods and tools in order to analyze those risks. The operational 
risks have not been considered so deeply. Actually a lot of different managers are 
concerned by the business processes: business unit managers and business process 
managers, but also risk managers, compliance managers, quality managers and IT 
managers. The process models presented in the preceding section are a strong basis 
for the integration of the activities done by all those managers. 
Business Unit Managers. As can be seen in the Table 1 and the Figure 2, the 
description of their core business processes (e.g. credit management, portfolio 
management, ...) allows them to focus on the business goals that they have to fulfill 
instead of having to analyze operational details of their processes. Moreover, the 
indicators derived from the process descriptions give them a powerful tool for 
monitoring their performance of the processes. 
Business Process Managers. Having a goal-oriented description of the processes, 
it 1s easier for them to analyze the relationships between the corporate business 
processes. In particular, they can make an analysis of the conflicts that can occur 
between processes covering different business units. Moreover, the goal-oriented 
description of the processes is a means that is adequate to find an agreement between 
the Business Process Manager and the Business Unit Managers [5]. Note that due to 
abstract and concise nature of the descriptions, the maintenance of the business 
processes definition can be done accurately. 
32