Modeling Enterprises in BPMN

Modelling Enterprises

Modeling business processes

• Why business processes?
• Modelling concurrency and synchronization in business activities
• UML Activity Diagrams
• BPMN Diagrams

Modelling organisational intent

• i* modelling language
• Modelling agents and the strategic dependencies between them
• Explaining these dependencies in terms of agents’ goals

Business Processes

Business Process Automation

• Leave existing business processes as they are
  • Look for opportunities to automate parts of the process
• Can make an organisation more efficient; has least impact on the business

Business Process Improvement

• Make moderate changes to the way the organisation operates
• E.g. improve efficiency and/or effectiveness of existing process
  • Techniques: Duration analysis; activity-based costing; benchmarking

Business Process Reengineering

• Fundamental change to the way the organisation operates
• Techniques:
  • Outcome analysis – focus on the real outcome from the customer’s perspective
  • Technology analysis – look for opportunities to exploit new technology
  • Activity elimination – consider each activity in turn as a candidate for elimination

Modelling Business Processes

Business processes involve

• Multiple actors (people, business units,…)
• Concurrent activities
• Explicit synchronization points
  • E.g. some task cannot start until several other concurrent tasks are complete
• End-to-end flow of activities

Choice of modelling language:

• UML Activity diagrams
  • …based on flowcharts and petri nets
  • Not really object oriented (poor fit with the rest of UML)
• Business Process Modelling Notation (BPMN)
  • New (emerging) standard, loosely based on pi calculus

Modeling actors’ intentionality

i * modeling language

• Developed in the early 90’s
  • provides a structure for asking ‘why’ questions in RE
  • models the organisational context for information systems
  • based on the notion of an “intentional actor”
• Two parts to the model
  • Strategic dependency model – models relationships between the actors
  • Strategic rationale model – models concerns and interests of the actors

Approach

• SD model shows dependencies between actors:
  • goal/softgoal dependency – an actor depends on another actor to attain a goal
  • resource dependency – an actor needs a resource from another actor
  • task dependency – an actor needs another actor to carry out a task
• SR model shows interactions between goals within each actor
  • Shows task decompositions
  • Shows means-ends links between tasks and goals