Requirements Modelling and Specification for Service Oriented Architecture

5.1. What is a Business Process?

To build a business process model we must understand what a business process actually is. Most vendors of business process modelling tools and techniques find it very difficult to answer the question: 'What is a business process?'. Of course, the more unscrupulous may say: 'A business process is anything that you can model with our wonderful software'. Typically, the more erudite might answer that a business is a set of processes connected by data flows, with timings for each process and (possibly) allocationso of process responsibility to functional units. In other words, data flow diagrams enhanced with timings or perhaps UML activity diagrams are all that is needed. As we have seen the most sophisticated variant of this kind of approach is BPMN.

Ask the same question of a management consultant or business school and there will likely be a range of different answers. Some answers will emphasize value chains and so on, though not all businesses are value chains. The analysis will rarely drill down lower than the description of workflow into the ontology modelling that is a prerequisite for service oriented architecture.

What all these approaches have in common is that they lack an adequate theory of what a business process is above and beyond a basis in process algebra or Petri nets that is focused on the language semantics rather than an enquiry into the nature of business itself. It would be nice to be able to use a more scientific approach. ...