Communication Analysis modelling techniques
This provides incremental improvements for business process analysts and modellers by offering communicational perspectives and complementary techniques.
The report tackles the problem of modeling business processes by introducing Communication Analysis techniques like Communicative Event Diagrams, Message Structures, and Event Specification Templates, which focus on communicative interactions rather than physical activities, and it results in tools that can be applied to other notations like BPMN.
This report describes and illustrates several modelling techniques proposed by Communication Analysis; namely Communicative Event Diagram, Message Structures and Event Specification Templates. The Communicative Event Diagram is a business process modelling technique that adopts a communicational perspective by focusing on communicative interactions when describing the organizational work practice, instead of focusing on physical activities1; at this abstraction level, we refer to business activities as communicative events. Message Structures is a technique based on structured text that allows specifying the messages associated to communicative events. Event Specification Templates are a means to organise the requirements concerning a communicative event. This report can be useful to analysts and business process modellers in general, since, according to our industrial experience, it is possible to apply many Communication Analysis concepts, guidelines and criteria to other business process modelling notations such as BPMN. Also, Message Structures can complement business process models created with other notations different than Communicative Event Diagram.