Unraveling the Never-Ending Story of Lifecycles and Vitalizing Processes

TL;DR

This paper explores the concept of vitalizing business processes focusing on lifecycle processes that do not fit traditional BPM analysis, proposing new conceptualizations and requirements for their modeling and analysis.

Contribution

It introduces the notion of vitalizing processes and provides a conceptual framework for modeling and analyzing lifecycle processes beyond traditional BPM methods.

Findings

Lifecycle processes are prevalent across industries.

Existing BPM techniques are insufficient for non-standard processes.

A set of requirements for analyzing vitalizing processes is proposed.

Abstract

Business process management (BPM) has been widely used to discover, model, analyze, and optimize organizational processes. BPM looks at these processes with analysis techniques that assume a clearly defined start and end. However, not all processes adhere to this logic, with the consequence that their behavior cannot be appropriately captured by BPM analysis techniques. This paper addresses this research problem at a conceptual level. More specifically, we introduce the notion of vitalizing business processes that target the lifecycle process of one or more entities. We show the existence of lifecycle processes in many industries and that their appropriate conceptualizations pave the way for the definition of suitable modeling and analysis techniques. This paper provides a set of requirements for their analysis, and a conceptualization of lifecycle and vitalizing processes.