On leveraging the fruits of research efforts in the arena of business process modeling formalisms: a map-driven approach for decision making

Abstract

The importance of business process (BP) modeling to Business Process Management can be justified by the serious problems, which may arise in the latter, if the former is not conducted correctly. This can take place, for instance, in the case of an inappropriate choice of a BP modeling formalism. Many frameworks have therefore been proposed in order to guide the selection of the most suitable formalism. Nevertheless, these research efforts still scattered throughout a wide range of publications, unlinked and often with a narrow scope. Hence, there is a need for both a combination of these research labors into a single reference source and an approach to support such combination. This paper is the first contribution toward responding to this need. It proposes a methodological roadmap as a basis for developing a selection support system. The results presented in the current paper stand for a first step toward a reference framework for helping researchers and practitioners in choosing the most appropriate BP modeling formalism given a set of contextual variables. The proposed methodological roadmap is specified using a modeling formalism (MAP) which considers the “decision” as a first-class citizen.