A Framework for Classifying and Modeling Organizational Behavior
The consistent structuring and modeling of behavioral descriptions is a prerequisite to any successful Business Process Management (BPM) initiative. This chapter presents a simple practical framework for aligning various concepts and representations of or
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Abstract The consistent structuring and modeling of behavioral descriptions is a prerequisite to any successful Business Process Management (BPM) initiative. This chapter presents a simple practical framework for aligning various concepts and representations of organizational behavior, which assists identifying appropriate model types. The framework is presented as a means to improve process modeling within BPM initiatives and as a guide to the development and documentation of process architectures. A set of BPMN 2.0 based templates are described which enable the modeling of the concepts in the framework. Both health sector and investment management industry cases studies are described in which the framework is used to align descriptions of organizational behavior to produce useful integrated behavioral reference models and unified process model sets. The framework is also used to analyze model and process architecture completeness and structure.
1 Introduction The ability to readily compare models is fundamental to any BPM initiative concerned with process re-use, improvement, or integration. Business process modeling is often limited in its effectiveness by the inability to produce unified sets of process models especially where the models have been developed within different organizations or within different contexts. Although there have been approaches to attempt to address this issue (e.g. Becker et al. 2014; Houy et al. 2014), the fundamental problem is that human behavior is expressed as a
C. Aitken (*) Enterprise Architects, Brisbane, QLD, Australia e-mail: [email protected] J. vom Brocke and M. Rosemann (eds.), Handbook on Business Process Management 2, International Handbooks on Information Systems, Second Edition, DOI 10.1007/978-3-642-45103-4_7, © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2015
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continuum and not as discrete components of activity, consequently any partitioning or structuring is necessarily ‘imposed’ and to some extent arbitrary. Furthermore, there is a tendency for the term “process” to be applied to behaviors that vary significantly in complexity and scope. This lack of specificity can result in models of the same behavior that bear little resemblance to one another. Clearly, factors other than the behavior or activity itself need to be taken into account when attempting to determine appropriate representation, and when aligning these representations across levels of abstraction, organizational boundaries or project environments. It is common for a hierarchy of business process models to be developed with a BPM initiative. Typically a “high level conceptual” model is developed to provide a context and frame of reference for “lower level” more detailed ‘as implemented’ process models (Indulska et al. 2006; Bandara et al. 2005; vom Brocke et al. 2012). The development of process architecture is commonly touted as the means to achieve alignment between such models, although there are few if any standardized approaches (Davis and Braba¨nder 2007;
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