A Conceptual Comparison of Service Blueprinting and Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN)

Abstract

The modeling of business processes has become a central aspect in how businesses understand, support, andcommunicate about their processes. Two prominent approaches are service blueprinting and business processmodeling notation (BPMN). Service blueprinting supports customer service processes whilst BPMN helpsunderstand a firm’s processes with particular focus on how information and communications technologysupports processes, and also for process automation. To fully support services through an organization’sprocesses, there needs to be a complete understanding of how these two process representations relate. Hithertoonly a partial comparison has been undertaken by Milton and Johnson in 2012. Therefore we ask the question,what are the specific similarities and differences between these two approaches? To answer this question, weemployed the method of conceptual evaluation to conduct a two-way conceptual comparison of serviceblueprinting and BPMN. We found specific similarities and differences between the two modeling approaches.Understanding how to represent service blueprint concepts in BPMN is important for supportingservice-processes with information technology and for automating aspects of those processes. Furthermore,knowing the limitations of how service blueprints support BPMN means that mapping internal processes toservice processes can be done with minimal loss in semantics.