TOWARDS A META MODEL FOR BUSINESS PROCESS

CONCEPTS

Boriana Rukanova, Mehmet N. Aydin, Kees van Slooten, Robert A. Stegwee

Department of Buisness Information Syatems, University of Twente, P.O. Box 217, 7500 AE Enschede, The Netherlands

Keywords: standard, business process, ontology, meta model, modelling technique

Abstract: Information systems involved in automating parts of a business process need to be process-aware, in order

to become an integral part of it. Before automation is achieved, the part of the business process to be

automated needs to be made explicit and then operationalized. Business process models could be used to

make the process explicit. Domain standards could be used to make it operational. However, there is no

approach available to evaluate to what extent both the chosen modelling technique and standard are able to

cover the actual requirements of the business process. A meta model for business process concepts can help

for such an evaluation. Although there have been attempts to identify business process concepts and to

create a meta model of business process concepts, the current studies do not include an explicit approach on

how to identify these concepts. Further, how to construct such a meta model and how to include new

elements to it remains implicit. This paper presents an approach on how to construct a meta model for

business process concepts. The approach defines how to capture and define business process concepts, how

to construct a meta model using these concepts and how to extend the meta model. The paper also illustrates

how to apply the approach. The actual construction of the meta model for business process concepts is a

subject of further research.

1 INTRODUCTION

When two or more computerized information

systems are involved in automating parts of a

business process, they need to be process-aware in

order to handle complex communication. If we want

to use computer systems to support part of a

business process, this requires the disparate

information systems to be able to express, and

especially interpret a broader range of meanings.

Thus, the applications that support the business

processes, not only have to be able to express what

needs to be said, but also to interpret it, and act upon

this interpretation in an intelligent manner. Thus the

context of the business process needs to be captured

and made operational. One possibility to make this

context operational and embed it in the system is by

using domain standards.

EDI standards promised significant advantages

in facilitating the exchange between business

partners, reducing errors, increasing speed, cutting

cost, and building in competitive advantage (Sokol,

1995; Damsgaardn, 2000). However, the EDI

standards failed to support the complex business

communication. Furthermore, the focus of many IS

professionals on EDI was how to provide technical

tools, rather than to support the way people do

business (Huang, 1998). New standards, which

strive to allow for interoperability between disparate

systems, are currently developed. These standards

try to capture the context of a business process, in

order to allow for meaningful communication (for

example, in the healthcare domain two such

standards are HL7 standard for clinical data

interchange and DICOM for digital images).

Standard development organizations or consortia of

companies develop such standards, based on their

specific interpretation of the domain. However, in

order to have value for a particular business process,

a standard needs to be linked to a particular

situation, which might be different from what the

standard developers had in mind. Thus, the standard

needs to be evaluated (for a specific business

process) whether it can cover the context (of the

particular business process), which needs to be

embedded in the system.

The context of a business process might be to a

large extent implicit. Thus, before making it

operational (by using standards), it first needs to be

made explicit. Models could be used to capture and

373

Rukanova B., N. Aydin M., van Slooten K. and A. Stegwee R. (2005).

TOWARDS A META MODEL FOR BUSINESS PROCESS CONCEPTS.

In Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems, pages 373-377

DOI: 10.5220/0002510703730377

 SciTePress

to make this communication context explicit. A

commonly accepted way of modelling does not exist

(Wand, 1989). However, the modelling power of

various methodologies, their weaknesses and

strengths, can be analysed in terms of ontologically

based common set of constructs (Wand et al, 1989;

Söderström et al., 2002). As it is well known

(Brinkkemper, 1989), a meta model can help to

make such evaluation. Further, it has been argued

that meta models based on ontological constructs

can be very valuable in such evaluation (Rosemann

& Green, 2002). As the specific business situation,

the modelling technique and the standard have in

common that they all address some elements of a

business process, a meta model for business process

concepts can be a common ground for comparison.

However, to our knowledge, a complete meta model

which can capture key business process concepts is

currently not available.

Although we need a meta model for business

process concepts, due to the complex nature of

business processes, such a meta model will be

difficult to construct without following a well-

defined method. Thus, within this paper we focus on

developing a method how to construct such a meta

model. For illustration purpose, we will show how

the method can be used.

The remaining part of the paper is structured as

follows. In Part two, we discuss the possible

approaches for the method construction. In part

three, we describe the method concerning the

construction of the meta model. We illustrate the use

of the method in part four and we end this paper

with conclusions.

2 APPROACH

We have identified three different strategies that can

be followed to arrive at a meta model. The first one

is to take an existing ontology as a starting point,

build a meta model based on this ontology and use

the meta model to evaluate the capabilities of

existing methods, tools, techniques (MTTs) for

business process modeling. The benefit of this

approach is that the concepts are formally defined

within the ontology. Although some work is done in

that direction (see Rosemann & Green, 2002), a

complete meta model for business process concepts

is not provided. Furthermore, some of the limitations

of starting from an ontology are that the robustness

of the ontology and its practical usefulness can be

questionable (Green & Rosemann, 2000; Wand &

Weber, 2002).

The second strategy is to start by identifying the

essential elements of business processes. This can be

done using two types of sources: 1) existing business

process definitions (e.g. Davenport, 1993) and 2)

MTTs for business process modeling (e.g. IDEF0,

REAL). After such elements are identified, they can

be linked within a meta model. The advantage of

such an approach is that the elements identified in

this way are specific to business processes. There is

existing research in that direction (see Lin et al.,

2002; Mayer et al., 2000). This approach can lead to

ambiguities and misinterpretations, since usually the

business process elements are not formally defined.

A third strategy for constructing the meta model

is to follow a hybrid approach- using both an

ontology and MTTs. The advantage of such an

approach is that the business process definitions and

the MTTs will provide essential business process

elements and the ontology can provide formal

definition of these elements. This is the strategy that

we will follow as well. In literature there is an

attempt to provide a meta model for business

process concepts following the hybrid strategy (see

Söderström et al, 2002). However the authors did

not provide clear definitions of the concepts used,

what steps they followed to arrive at that meta model

and how to add new concepts to the meta model. To

overcome such limitations, we use the hybrid

approach in combination with well-defined

procedure to arrive at the meta model. This is further

described in the section below.

3 METHOD

The method to construct a meta model for business

process concepts is schematically represented in

Figure 1. The first step in the approach is the

identification of business process elements from

existing business process definitions. The second

step is to take an existing ontology and to check

whether it is possible to express the business process

elements using concepts from that ontology. If yes,

we include those concepts from the ontology, which

we use to express the business process elements in

what we call “ontology business process concept

base or (OBPCB)”. In this way we include only the

relevant concepts from the ontology.

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374

MTTs

Definitions of a

business process

Key elements and

relationships

Element 1

Element 2

…….

Element N

Ontology

Concept 1

Concept 2

…….

Concept N

Ontology

usiness process

concepts base

(OBPCB)

Ontology

usiness process

concepts

extension base

(OBPCEB)

Element can be defined

using ontology

concepts

Ontology extension

definition

Concept N+1

Concept N+2

…….

Concept N+ M

Element can not be

defined using ontology

concepts

Business process

concepts base (BPCB)

Meta model of

business process

concepts

STEP 1 STEP 2 STEP 3

Figure 1: Method for construction of a meta model for business process concepts.

If a business process element cannot be expressed

using concepts from the ontology, then new

concepts are defined in what we call “ontology

extension definition”. After that the newly defined

concepts are included in the “ontology business

process concept extension base (OBPCEB)”. The

“business process concept base (BPCB)” includes all

the concepts from the “ontology business process

concept base” and “ontology business process

concept extension base”. Finally in step three, the

“business process concept base” is used as a basis

for the meta model construction. The whole process

is then repeated for a number of MTTs.

4 ILLUSTRATION OF THE USE

OF THE METHOD

For the identification of business process elements,

we have used a number of business process

definitions, as well as one MTT (ARIS). We have

chosen to use the FRISCO ontology (see Falkenberg

et al., 1998) for defining the business process

concepts. The choice of FRISCO is pragmatic, due

to the familiarity of the authors with that ontology.

Bunge-Wand-Weber ontology can be an alternative.

Within this paper we will not provide the definitions

of the FRISCO concepts. They can be found in the

FRISCO report.

We apply the method described in the previous

section to the definitions, as well as to ARIS. Some

examples of business process definitions that we will

use for the illustration are presented below.

Examples of business process definitions

1) A business process is “a specific ordering o

work activities, across time and place, with a beginning,

an end and clearly identified inputs and outputs

”

(Davenport 1993)

2) A business process consists of activities ordere

in a structured way with the purpose to provide valuable

results to the customer (Ågerfalk, Goldkuhl et al., 1999)

3) A business process can be viewed as a

tructure

of activities designed for action with focus on the en

customer (Stock and Lambert 2001)

Figure 2: Examples of definitions.

The outcome of the application of the method is

schematically represented in the figure below. The

figure illustrates that based on the business process

definitions, a number of business process elements

were identified. After that, by looking at the

FRISCO concepts and how they are defined, we

have selected those elements that seemed to be able

to cover the elements presented in the definitions.

TOWARDS A META MODEL FOR BUSINESS PROCESS CONCEPTS

375

Elements from definitions

Activity

Structured order of activity

Business process

Beginning

End

Time

Input

Purpose

Valuable result

Customer D1++

FRISCO BPCB

Action

State-transition structure

Composite action

Pre-state

Post-state

Time (relative, absolute)

Input actand

Goal

Output actand

Actor

Basic state transitions (sequence,

choice, concurrency)

ARIS concepts

Function

Function flow

Implicit

Implicit ( initial event+ input of a function

Implicit ( initial event+ output of a function

Time (relative)

A1++

Goal

A2++

A3++

Connector (or, and)

FRISCO BPCEB

Specialization of FRISCO actor:

D1++ customer

….A3+++ Organizational unit

Specialization of FRISCO input actand

A1++

Information services, Other services

Material output, Financial services, Human output, Machine

resources, Computer hardware,

Software, Environmental

Specialization of FRISCO input actand

A2++

Information services, Other services, Material output, Financial

services, Result event

Figure 3: Illustration of the use of the method.

When reviewing the ARIS concepts, we have

identified that there is a concept connector (or, and),

which seems closely related to what FRISCO refers

to as “basic state-transition structure”. As a result,

we have included that concept in the OBPCB.

If we look at the elements from definition box,

we will see that there is an element D1++ and when

we look at the ARIS concepts box we will see

elements A (number)++. This means that the

concept defined in the definitions or in ARIS can fall

under a general category of FRISCO, however it can

also be included in the BPCEB as a specialization of

the general concept. This would provide for richness

of the business process concepts. That is why, we

have included all the element that were marked with

++ in the BPCEB. Within this paper we will not

formally define these new concepts, however they

can be defined as specializations of already defined

FRISCO concepts.

5 CONCLUSIONS

We stared this paper with the problem, that we need

to identify to what extent a modelling technique and

a standard are capable to capture the business

process requirements of given situation. We have

further argued that a meta model for business

process concepts can be useful for such an

evaluation.

Within this paper, we have outlined a method

how to construct such a meta model, we have

provided an illustration of how to use the method

and we have arrived at initial set of business process

concepts.

Although the further elaboration of the business

process concepts and the construction of the meta

model will be subject of further research, we

consider that the method described in this paper is a

necessary step towards achieving the final goal.

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