Towards a Methodology for Representing and Classifying Business Processes

Abstract

Organizations build information systems to support their business processes. Some of these business processes are industry or organization-specific, but most are common to many industries and are used, modulo a few modifications, in different contexts. A precise modeling of such processes would seem to be a necessary prerequisite for building information systems that are aligned with the business objectives of the organization and that fulfill the functional requirements of its users. Yet, there are few tools, conceptual or otherwise, that enable organizations to model their business processes precisely and efficiently, and fewer tools still, to map such process models to the software components that are needed to support them. Our work deals with the problem of building tools to model business processes precisely, and to help map such models to software models. In this paper, we describe a representation and classification of business processes that supports the specification of organization-specific processes by, 1) navigating a repository of generic business processes, and 2) automatically generating new process variants to accommodate the specifics of the organization. We present the principles underlying our approach, and describe the state of an ongoing implementation.