Goal-Oriented Processes with Gpmn

Business process management is a challenging task that requires business processes being described, executed, monitored and continuously enhanced. This process management lifecycle requires business as well as IT people working together, whereby the view on business process is quite different on both sides. One important means for bridging the gap between both consists in having a modeling notation that can be easily understood but also has a precise semantics and can be used as a basis for workflow execution. Although existing approaches like BPMN and EPCs aim at being such as notation they are already very activity oriented and do not consider the underlying motivations of processes. Introducing the goal oriented process modeling notation (GPMN) a new language is presented that has the objective of bringing together both sides by establishing higher-level modeling concepts for workflows. This results in an increased intelligibility of workflow descriptions for business people and greater consideration for the way processes are described on the business side. The core idea of the approach consists in introducing different kinds of goals and goal relationships in addition to the established activity-centered behavior model. The applicability of the approach is further illustrated with an example workflow from Daimler AG.