A BPMN Extension for Business Process Outsourcing to the Cloud

Abstract

The trend of business process outsourcing (BPO) has been intensified with the advent of Cloud computing that brings a new way of paying and consuming resources. Nevertheless, ensuring the compliance of outsourced business processes (BPs), protecting sensitive data, and making the right choices of offers, remain among the most important challenges in BPO to the Cloud. In this context, it is crucial to clearly specify the awaited requirements when modelling BPs. BPMN (Business Process Model and Notation) is the most used standard for BP modelling. However, it is a generic language and does not support BPO characteristics. This paper proposes a BPMN extension (called BPOMN) that allows specifying the requirements of BP activities in terms of security, compliance, cost, and performance. This enables specifying and considering all relevant information for effective Cloud BPO.