Conceptualizing Business Process Maps

TL;DR

This paper conceptualizes business process maps as architecture models within enterprise architecture, clarifying their role and proposing requirements for a unified modeling language meta-model.

Contribution

It provides a novel conceptual framework positioning process maps within enterprise architecture and derives design requirements for a process map meta-model.

Findings

Process maps are conceptualized as business process architecture models.

A set of requirements for a process map meta-model is derived.

The report complements a detailed meta-model design paper.

Abstract

Process maps provide a high-level overview of an organisation's business processes. While used for many years in different shapes and forms, there is little shared understanding of the concept and its relationship to enterprise architecture. In this report we position the concept of business process map within the domain of enterprise architecture. Based on literature, we provide a conceptualisation of the process map as a business process architecture model that can be integrated with the broader enterprise architecture model. From our conceptualisation we derive requirements for designing a meta-model of a modelling language for process maps. The design of this meta-model is the subject of a research paper, entitled Architecting Business Process Maps, for which this report acts as a complement that details the underlying process map conceptualisation.