Introduction to Business Processes and Business Process Modeling
This chapter contains the theoretical foundation of the book by introducing the topic area of business processes and modeling and the most important concept underlying modeling of business processes. After introducing high-level aspects of business proces
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Introduction to Business Processes and Business Process Modeling
The term “business process” is defined in various ways in the literature (Dumas et al. 2013). In this book, we will use the following definition: A business process is a collection of related tasks that produce a specific service or product to address one or more goals for a particular actor or set of actors with the optimal use of resources. Business processes are the core of organizational activities, both in private and public sectors. All organizational activities contain explicit or implicit processes, and a large body of literature has been developed over the years within both organizational science and information systems/computing. Owing to its increasing importance in business, the management of business processes is receiving increasing interest (Von Brocke and Rosemann 2015). As the definition conveys, however, there are several aspects that must be considered simultaneously: • A process consists of several coordinated tasks; the total result of performing all tasks in concert is the matter of importance. • There are people (actors) involved who receive benefits from the process. • The process is not there for its own sake; it is meant to help the actors reach one or more goals. • A goal is reached through production of a service or product. • Producing the service and/or product takes resources. These can be human resources (employees), natural resources, or financial resources. The production mandates the availability of a capability and must occur somewhere in time and space. All these aspects of a business process as depicted in the upper part of Fig. 1.1 are important to represent, i.e., to model. Business processes are the core of the wider area of business process management (BPM), and central aspects of BPM are discussed in Sects. 1.1–1.3. An important component of BPM is the business process model. Business process models are a type of conceptual model, which we
© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016 J. Krogstie, Quality in Business Process Modeling, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-42512-2_1
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1 Introduction to Business Processes and Business Process Modeling
describe in more detail in Sect. 1.4. Central aspects and approaches in business process modeling are then described in Sect. 1.5. Modeling can be viewed according to Fig. 1.2: Based on one or more goals that the modeling is meant to support the achievement of and the existing resources (which might include existing references or bespoke models and
Task
Consist of Resources
Use of
Produce
Business process
Service/product
Fulfill Achieve Goal
Part of
Within
For
Business process management (BPM)
Organization
Represented in different models
Uses Business process model
Type of
Conceptual model
Achieve Modeling goal
Quality of models
Modeling language
Fig. 1.1 Structure of the area of business process modeling
Modeling method
Modeling tools
1 Introduction to Business Processes and Business Process Modeling
3
Goal of Modelling
Persons
Area of inter
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