Architecting Business Process Maps


Geert Poels, Félix García, Francisco Ruiz, Mario Piattini




Process maps provide a high-level overview of an organization'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 business process architecture. In this paper, we position the concept of process map within the domain of architecture description. By ‘architecting' the concept of business process map, we identify and clarify diverging views of this concept as found in the literature and set requirements for describing process maps. A meta-model for a process mapping language is produced as a result. The proposed meta-model allows investigating the suitability of EA modelling languages as a basis for defining a domain-specific language for process mapping along with the creation of a better understanding of business process architecture in relation to enterprise architecture, which can be beneficial for both BPM and EA professionals.