Toward Business Process Representation

摘要

Selecting an appropriate representation of a process is an important task in the field of business process management. Complex processes are often very difficult to describe; hence, diagrams are used to represent them. Diagrammatic descriptions can be expressive and easily understandable by end users. Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) allows diagramming of information flow, decision points, and business processes. It is described as the de-facto standard for representing in a very expressive, graphical way the processes occurring in virtually every kind of organization one can conceive. Nevertheless, this should not discourage further research in developing and exploring new models for process representation. This paper proposes yet another approach to diagrammatically schematizing business processes based on the notion of flow and oscillates among several descriptive levels (e.g., requirements, design, and user interface). The method is characterized by coherence as the schema is built on five basic phases that form the blocks of flow systems. The proposed method is contrasted with BPMN by modeling the same study cases using the two methodologies and then comparing the results side by side. The results suggest the viability of the proposed scheme to enhance diagrammatic representations of business processes.