Integrating new representation perspectives at the operational level of BPM+

Abstract

Business process management has received lots of attention over the past few decades due to the significant benefits for organizations, and it became a primary discipline for operations management. An essential concept of business process management is representing organizational processes using business process models. The representation of organizational business processes in the form of business process models keeps growing in importance and appropriate modeling standards are a critical success element for successful business process modeling projects. One of the main challenges of representing business processes is that there is no definitive best way to represent them. Users prefer a common business process representation and established modeling standards. In the emerging market of business modeling standards, most users are still trying to identify which standards meet their needs. BPM+ is a novel business process modeling approach that helps represent process models in a consistent and structured way to meet the process representation needs of different stakeholders. BPM+ is based on an abstraction hierarchy that includes three levels: strategic, tactical, and operational. This abstraction enables the business process modeling user to represent the business process at different levels of abstraction. The main goal of this thesis is to integrate new perspectives at the BPM+ operational level of abstraction and evaluate how a specialized/operational BPM-stakeholder perspective can be used to improve the existing organizational business process model repository. In order to achieve this goal, this thesis proposes a method to define and validate the many graphical representations perspectives needed at the operational level. An a priori version of the representation perspective was designed based on the findings from the literature review. The a priori version was iteratively refined through a series of ontological analyses and a survey. As a result, an ontologically validated decision tree perspective was proposed to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposal. The research results show that: 1. The operational BPM+ level allows for generating business process models that represent the needs of various stakeholders involved in operational business processes; 2. A new operational process perspective representation, in the shape of a decision tree and its modeling constructs, are ontologically validated then demonstrated to show an example of how an operational process can be represented; and 3. A BPMN extension is presented to show how this new perspective can be used in the modeling language most used by users with BPM experience.

Date	11 May 2021
Original language	American English
Awarding Institution	École de technologie supérieure
Supervisor	Alain April (Supervisor) & Carlos Monsalve (Co-supervisor)