Domain Model Based Design of Business Process Architectures

Fernanda Gonzalez-Lopez,Jorge Munoz-Gama,Marcos Sepúlveda,Guillermo Bustos

doi:10.3390/app12052563

Fernanda Gonzalez-Lopez, Jorge Munoz-Gama + Show 2 more

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https://doi.org/10.3390/app12052563

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Abstract

A business process architecture (BPA) model depicts business processes in an organization and their relations. An artifact for generating BPA models is proposed as the outcome of a design science research project. The proposed artifact consists of a method (i.e., a set of concepts, a proposed notation, and a detailed procedure), which is termed the domain-based BPA (dBPA) method due to using domain models as a starting point. The dBPA method tackles issues of currently available approaches: lack of structured inputs, limited consideration of process relations types, and restricted use of industry-standard modeling languages. The paper formalizes the dBPA method and illustrates its application in the manufacturing industry. Evaluation of the dBPA method revealed that practitioners perceived it as useful to achieve its goal with the benefits of being objective and clear and allowing to create complete and understandable BPA models that enable the integration of processes and the software that automates them.

Highlights

Work carried out in an organization can be conceptualized as a set of business processes [1]
Statistical analysis of the results supports, on the one hand, that the domain-based BPA (dBPA) method was perceived as useful (p ≤ 0.001 for H2) but not easy to use (p > 0.05 for H1), and there was intention to use it in practice (p ≤ 0.001 for H3)
This constitutes preliminary evidence in favor of the method being an improvement with respect to currently available business process architecture (BPA) design methods

Summary

Introduction

Work carried out in an organization can be conceptualized as a set of business processes [1]. A BPA can be graphically represented by a BPA model showing a set of processes and their relations from a high level of abstraction. Multiple definitions of the concept of BPA are available in the literature, e.g., [1,7,10] These definitions emphasize that a BPA: (i) offers a general perspective on the business process structure, and (ii) defines business process relations. The present work adopts a view of the BPA and related concepts that conform with the ISO/IEC/IEEE 42010 standard for architecture description [14], cf [15]. A key BPA view is the one that is concerned with the high-level structure of the system of business processes known as process map [15–18], process landscape [2,9,19], process cartography [20,21], or process architecture (model) [10,22–24]. The remainder of this paper refers to it as the BPA model

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