Analyzing Business Processes for an Enterprise System
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Consider the question, “What are you doing now?” We can answer this question at
many levels of abstraction. We might say:
* “Im living in Berkeley and taking courses at the University.”
* “Im studying Document Engineering.”
* “Im reading section 9.1.”
All these answers may be true, but they may not be equally useful or informative to
the questioner. How we answer the question depends on how much context we share
with the person asking the question. What do they already know about us and what
we are doing? Did we last talk to them 10 minutes or 10 years ago? If we have a
common context, it makes sense to answer the question with a very specific answer.
If we dont, a general or more abstract answer is more appropriate.
This simple example illustrates a fundamental challenge when we analyze anything.
Some things have a conventional level of description, and some levels may seem more
intuitive or natural than others, but there are almost always alternatives to any
description.
Business processes can be described at many
levels of abstraction
Business processes are particularly subject to this description ambiguity. Often we
cant directly observe the processes we want to analyze. We can see them more easily when they deal with tangible or physical objects, but many business processes
involve intangible goods or only information about goods. Modeling business
processes is also difficult because the key involvement of people and organizations,
as opposed to mechanical or physical factors, can result in models that have idiosyncratic or unexpected characteristics.
We will attack the level of abstraction problem by systematically decomposing our
process descriptions into a three-level hierarchy. We will use business reference models as a guide because their hierarchical organization of processes has been designed
9.1 THE LEVELS OF
ABSTRACTION CHALLENGE
DOCUMENT ENGINEERING ANALYZING AND DESIGNING DOCUMENTS FOR BUSINESS INFORMATICS & WEB SERVICES277
to reinforce different levels of granularity. We will use metamodels for process
descriptions at each level that provide us with standard metadata for defining what
the processes mean and how they are carried out.
We analyze a business to create a common understanding of how it works and the
domain in which it operates. The level at which we start our analysis, and the
amount of detail in the resulting analysis, depends on where our emphasis lies on the
continuum from strategic initiatives to merely tactical projects.
Well present a modeling approach in this chapter that starts with the most abstract
perspective and works its way down to progressively more granular models. Some
business organizational patterns are described using the B2C, B2B, and the other
acronyms we discussed in Section 4.1.2 that characterize business relationships by
their commerciography.
Even these extremely coarse patterns raise predictable
issues and challenges about producer-consumer relationships, legacy technology,
competition, governance, and regulations.
When we look inside a business, we might be tempted to rely on its organizational
model as an analogy to its process model. But from a business process perspective,
the functional business areas of any organization, such as manufacturing, engineering, marketing, sales, finance, and human resources, are purely logical entities that
exist to carry out a companys business model. There is no necessary relationship
between business process patterns, an enterprises management structure, and the
support for carrying out the processes in facilities, technology, and systems.
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There are no necessary relationships between business
processes, management structure and facilities,
technology, and systems
This is a subtle but important point. The fact that an enterprise performs a purchasing process does not imply that it has a purchasing organization,