Coordination and transformation in business processes: towards an integrated view

The purpose of this paper is to contrast two views, a transformative and a coordinative view, on business process management (BPM) in order to propose an integrated view.

The investigation has been made with the purpose of developing a synthesis of these two views working as thesis and antithesis. The core of such dialectic approach is to create a synthesis that transcends contradictions of the thesis and antithesis. Pros and cons in the two perspectives have been identified and an integrated process view has been proposed, as well as operationalised into modelling methods. The integrated process view comprises a number of definitions of different process types (business process, assignment process, transformation process and provision process).

The paper derives characteristics of the transformative as well as the coordinative view. These are used as the basis for pinpointing important characteristics of an integrative view. These characteristics put forward coordination in relation to transformation as well as assignment processes in relation to other types of processes (such as transformation processes and provision processes)

The proposed integrated view has practical implications in the work of modelling, analysing and designing business processes.

The value of the paper is that it presents a complementary view on business processes derived from two existing views. In the paper, coordination aspects are seen as superior to transformation.