A conceptual comparison of service blueprinting and business process modeling notation (BPMN)

Abstract

The modeling of business processes has become a central aspect in how businesses understand, support, and communicate about their processes. Two prominent approaches are service blueprinting and business process modeling notation (BPMN). Service blueprinting supports customer service processes whilst BPMN helps understand a firm’s processes with particular focus on how information and communications technology supports processes, and also for process automation. To fully support services through an organization’s processes, there needs to be a complete understanding of how these two process representations relate. Hitherto only a partial comparison has been undertaken by Milton and Johnson in 2012. Therefore we ask the question, what are the specific similarities and differences between these two approaches? To answer this question, we employed the method of conceptual evaluation to conduct a two-way conceptual comparison of service blueprinting and BPMN. We found specific similarities and differences between the two modeling approaches. Understanding how to represent service blueprint concepts in BPMN is important for supporting service-processes with information technology and for automating aspects of those processes. Furthermore, knowing the limitations of how service blueprints support BPMN means that mapping internal processes to service processes can be done with minimal loss in semantics.