Business Process Management

Abstract

The recent progress of Business Process Management (BPM) is reflected by the figures of the related industry. Wintergreen Research estimates that the international market for BPM-related software and services accounted for more than USD $1 billion in 2005 with a tendency towards rapid growth in the subsequent couple of years [457]. The relevance of business process modeling to general management initiatives has been previously studied in the 1990s [28]. Today, Gartner finds that organizations that had the best results in implementing business process management spent more than 40 percent of the total project time on discovery and construction of their initial process model [265]. As a consequence, Gartner considers Business Process Modeling to be among the Top 10 Strategic Technologies for 2008.

Despite the plethora of popular and academic textbooks [164, 95, 196, 378, 27, 380, 248, 7, 9, 257, 49, 213, 233, 170, 407, 415, 199, 405, 447, 227, 408] as well as international professional and academic conference series such as the BPM conference [13, 106, 5, 115, 23], there are several fundamental problems that remain unsolved by current approaches. A particular problem is the lack of research regarding the definition of good design. What few contributions there are reveal an incomplete understanding of quality aspects. Business process modeling as a sub-discipline of BPM faces a particular problem in that modelers who have little background in formal methods often design models without understanding the full implications of their specification (see [336]). As a consequence, process models designed on a business level can rarely be reused on an execution level since they often suffer from formal errors such as deadlocks. Formal errors can, however, be identified algorithmically with verification techniques. In contrast, inconsistencies between the real-world business process and the process model can only be detected by talking to stakeholders. The focus of this book will be on formal errors. Since the costs of errors increase exponentially over the development life cycle [306], it is of paramount importance that errors are discovered as early as possible. A large amount of work has been conducted in an attempt to resolve this weak understanding by providing formal verification techniques, simulation tools, and animation concepts. Several of these approaches cannot be applied, however, if the business process modeling language in use is not specified appropriately. Furthermore, this research area does not address the root of the problem: as long as we do not understand why people introduce errors in a process model, we will never be able to improve the design process.

This chapter provides an overview of business process management and business process modeling. Section 1.1 elaborates on the background of business process management through a historical classification of seminal work. Section 1.2 defines business process management and illustrates the business process management life cycle. Section 1.3 discusses modeling from a general information systems point of view and derives a definition for business process modeling. Section 1.4 distinguishes between formal verification and external validation of business process models and emphasizes the need to understand why formal errors are introduced in business process models. Finally, Section 1.5 concludes the chapter with a summary.