Research note: integrating business and network simulation models for IT investment evaluation

Although the inherent interrelationships between business processes (BP) and the underlying information technology (IT) infrastructure imply that the design of these two organisational facets should be performed in parallel, this does not seem to be the case in practice. For example, simulation is being extensively used in both the BP and IT domains, albeit in a disjointed fashion. In this paper, we investigate the potential of integrating different simulation models to facilitate concurrent engineering of business processes and information technology and to support the process of investment evaluation. Drawing on the findings of an example case, we identify a number of pertinent issues and articulate future research directions towards the integration of simulation usage in the business domain.