Abstract
Considering the history of the formation of the business process management discipline and its concept definitions, and by looking at organisations as social systems, it can be demonstrated that conventional business process management practices can be associated with the functionalist social paradigm and therefore are only applicable in unitary problem contexts. Participants in unitary problem contexts have similar values, beliefs and interests, share common goals and objectives and are all involved in decision-making about how to achieve the common goals and objectives. It can be argued that this problem context covers only a very small percentage of the problems that an organisation is concerned with and that this inherent paradigmatic limitation in the current definitions of business process management concepts causes the outcomes of the BPM practices based on them to be unrealistic, incomplete and even at points misleading. To address this paradigmatic limitation this paper proposes new definitions for BPM’s main concepts to reduce its tight coupling with the unitary problem context and make it more applicable in pluralist and coercive problem contexts and therefore closer in its outcomes to the reality of the organisation.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
van der Aalst, W.M.P.: Challenges in business process management: Verification of business processes using Petri nets. Bull. EATCS 80, 174–198 (2003)
van der Aalst, W.M.P.: Challenges in business process analysis. Enterp. Inf. Syst. (2009)
van der Aalst, W.M.P., Weijters, A.J.M.M.: Process mining: A research agenda. Comput. Ind. 53, 231–244 (2004)
Aalst, W.M.P., Nikolov, A.: Mining e-mail messages: Uncovering interaction patterns and processes using e-mail logs. IJIIT 4(3), 27–45 (2008)
Alvesson, M., Deetz, S.: Critical Theory and Postmodernism Approaches to Organizational Studies. In: Clegg, S.R., Hardy, C., Nord, W.R. (eds.) Handbook of Organization Studies, pp. 191–217. Sage Publications (1996)
Briol, P.: BPMN 2.0 Distilled. lulu.com (2010)
Burrell, G., Morgan, G.: Sociological Paradigms and Organizational Analysis. Heinemann (1979)
Brown, C., Liebovitch, L.: Fractal Analysis, Series: Quantitative Applications in the Social Sciences. Sage Publications Inc. (2010)
Dietz, J.L.G., Habing, N.: The notion of business process revisited. In: Meersman, R. (ed.) OTM 2004. LNCS, vol. 3290, pp. 85–100. Springer, Heidelberg (2004)
Dumas, M., van der Aalst, W.M.P., ter Hofstede, A.H.: Process Aware Information Systems: Bridging People and Software Through Process Technology. Wiley-Blackwell (2005)
Dumas, M., La Rosa, M., Mendling, J., Reijers, A.: H.: Fundamentals of Business Process Management. Springer (2013)
Harmon, P.: Business Process Change: A Guide for Business Managers and BPM and Six Sigma Professionals, 2nd edn. Morgan Kaufmann (2007)
Jackson, M.C., Keys, P.: Towards a System of Systems Methodologies. J. Oper. Res. Soc. 35, 473–486 (1984)
Jackson, M.C.: Systems Thinking: Creative Holism for Managers. John Wiley & Sons (2003)
Jeston, J., Nelis, J.: Business Process Management: Practical Guidelines to Successful Implementations, 2nd edn. Routledge (2008)
Mavaddat, M., Beeson, I., Green, S., Sa, J.: Facilitating Business Process Discovery using Email Analysis. In: The First International Conference on Business Intelligence and Technology (2011)
Mavaddat, M., Green, S., Sa, J.: Improving Organisational Structure, Culture, Communication and Business Processes through Dependency Cycle Extraction and Analysis. In: IADIS International Conference Information Systems 2013 (2013)
Mavaddat, M.: Business Process Discovery through Conversation Log Analysis in Pluralist and Coercive Problem Contexts. Ph.D thesis, University of the West of England (2013)
Morgan, G.: Images of Organization. Sage, London (1997)
Morgan, G.: Images of Organisation. Sage, London (1986)
Omg.org: Business Process Model and Notation (2011), http://www.omg.org/spec/BPMN/2.0/
Ould, M.A.: Business Process Management - A rigorous approach. BCS. The Chartered Institute for IT (2005)
Schumm, D., Karastoyanova, D., Kopp, O., Leymann, F., Sonntag, M., Strauch, S.: Process Fragment Libraries for Easier and Faster Development of Process-based Applications. J. Syst. Integr., 39–55 (2011)
Searle, J.R.: Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language. Cambridge University Press (1969)
Weske, M.: Business Process Management Concepts, Languages, Architectures. Springer (2007)
Winograd, T.: A Language/Action Perspective on the Design of Cooperative Work. ACM SIGCHI Bull. 20, 79 (1988)
Winograd, T., Flores, F.: Understanding Computers and Cognition: A New Foundation for Design. Addison Wesley (1987)
Wright, D., Meadows, D.H.: Thinking in Systems: A Primer. Routledge (2009)
Yu, E.: Modelling strategic relationships for Process Reengineering. In: Social Modeling for Requirements Engineering, pp. 11–152. MIT Press (2011)
Yu, E., Giorgini, P., Maiden, N., Mylopoulos, J.: Social Modeling for Requirements Engineering (Cooperative Information Systems Series). MIT Press (2011)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2014 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Mavaddat, M., Green, S., Sa, J. (2014). Addressing the Paradigmatic Limitation of Conventional Business Process Management Concepts by Proposing New Definitions. In: Bider, I., et al. Enterprise, Business-Process and Information Systems Modeling. BPMDS EMMSAD 2014 2014. Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, vol 175. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-43745-2_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-43745-2_5
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-662-43744-5
Online ISBN: 978-3-662-43745-2
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)