The Three Metaphors of Business Process Modeling

Event Based Architectures and Complex Event Processing (CEP) are an increasingly prominent part of today's advanced enterprise architectures. The event-driven process is one of the  seven important process usage patterns. Organizations use the pattern to interact and respond to a growing volume of business events and transactions on a daily basis. To create an effective event-driven process, you will need a new kind of analysis.

Event analysis is an emerging area of business process modeling that develops support for the decision-based processing of enterprise-significant events. It is also increasingly an essential part of strategies for the evolving Internet of things and crucial aspects of modern architectures in High-Consequence Systems Architectures, including C2 applications such as situational awareness.

Chandy and Schulte define "A business event is an event that is meaningful for conducting commercial, industrial, and governmental or trade activities." The event we refer to here is not the various BPMN events of the circular kind. We are referring to events that occur outside the walls of the organization. An event is Boolean in nature; it either happened (True) or not at all (False). The event is meaningful because it might affect a business process. It provides an external message or a channel that several processes must consume, activate and respond.

Do not confuse the business event with complex event processing (CEP). CEP is an approach to deselecting events that reveal the event with a SQL-like language.

Consequently, we have a new metaphor that is indispensable in business process modeling: the business event. The table below lists the key distinctions between the three business metaphors.

Business Event	Business Process	Business Decision
Unpredictable, random in nature	Stateful in Nature	Stateless In Nature
Is monitored by participants and sorted by rules	Sequence of activities conduction by participants	Logic, computations and business data, create actions and outcomes.
Based on observation	Sequence of activities and monitoring and control for participants	Actions, direction, control for events and processes
Improvements in observations improve risk management, agility and understanding	Improvements in process metrics	More consistent policies, tighter control of business strategies (BMM)
Representation is evolving	Visual BPMN	Visual Logic

Comments

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[Jonathan Boyd]

Another great post by Tom. Good description of the three metaphors between business event vs. business process vs. business decision.

I believe the key issue or challenge with process modeling is the unfamiliarity of most business users and even analysts with how to do this and also the lack of availability of easy-to-use tools that are better than just using Visio or PowerPoint.

We have been using the AccuProcess Modeler in the recent months and have found this to be a great tool which anyone can use without a lot of formal training. It includes process modeling, documentation and even process simulation for the as-is and to-be processes. It is available at: www.accuprocess.com

Thanks.