A Content Specification for Business Process Models

Abstract

Business process modeling is an essential prerequisite to business process reengineering (BPR), and workflow management (WFM). Process models have been traditionally used to model software processes, and many business process models are adaptations of these process models. Using these process models to represent business processes results in two problems. First, since these process models usually represent different perspectives of systems (or in this case, businesses) the user needs to integrate multiple existing models to completely represent the business processes. This reduces the ease of use, and leads to a lower acceptance by users. Second, business processes contain concepts not found in software processes (e.g., physical objects, roles, etc.). Traditional process models cannot represent these new concepts, and hence traditional process models model business processes inadequately. These two problems can be easily solved if a comprehensive business process model exists, that models all perspectives of a business process, and that allows representation of these new concepts. As a first step towards this goal, we propose a content specification that would need to be satisfied by such a business process model. The primary contribution of this work is a comprehensive content specification for a business process model that will solve the two problems listed above. This content specification also serves as a framework to analyze process models in detail, and to compare them based on their content (i.e., what concepts they model) and the degree to which they model each aspect of a business process (i.e., how much of a business process they model).