The “Organized Activity” Foundation for Business Processes and Their Management

Abstract

This paper introduces a new notional and notational tool -– "organized activity´´ (OA) and its theory (TOA) -– to the BP/BPM community. Most of this "introduction´´ is accomplished via an example –- the "Pulsar´´ –- which is: (a) an "organized activity´´ claimed to be useful to business, but also other activities; (b) new; (c) easy to understand; (d) suitable to computer support; (e) richly illustrative of OA ideas, in its "computerized´´ and non-computerized versions. A significant terminal part of the paper is devoted to a comparison of OA/TOA to Petri nets –- for two reasons: (a) OA/TOA grew out of Petri nets; (b) many readers of this paper are familiar with Petri nets, and rely on them professionally.