An Integrative Approach to Support Multi-perspective Business Process Modeling

Business process modeling (BPM) has become a dominating approach for organizations to understand, plan and optimize their business processes. BPM has also become an important part in service systems development because it helps to identify service activities embedded in business processes. Several modeling languages have been developed to support BPM, including IDEF, BPMN and EPC. Yet, our research shows that these languages still lack comprehensive constructs for representing some core business concepts, such as business goals, non-functional requirements and resources. This paper has two related purposes: First, it uses the Zachman Framework to assess the modeling capabilities of some of the popular BPM languages to identify their modeling gaps. The Zachman Framework is known to be comprehensive for representing different business perspectives. Second, the paper proposes an integrative approach to support multi-perspective BPM, so as to bridge the identified modeling gaps. This approach is illustrated through an example. The proposed approach aims at supporting the creation of comprehensive models and facilitating a common understanding of business perspectives regardless of the languages that represent them. The main benefit of the proposed approach is its integration of existing modeling languages that are familiar to business analysts, rather than introducing new languages. Further it provides guidance for business analysts and helps them to select appropriate modeling languages.