Conceptualizing Business Process Maps
This work addresses a conceptual gap for enterprise architects and business process modelers, but it is incremental as it builds on existing literature to formalize and integrate process maps.
The authors tackled the lack of shared understanding of business process maps by positioning them within enterprise architecture and providing a conceptualization as a business process architecture model, which can be integrated with broader enterprise architecture models.
Process maps provide a high-level overview of an organisation's business processes. While used for many years in different shapes and forms, there is little shared understanding of the concept and its relationship to enterprise architecture. In this report we position the concept of business process map within the domain of enterprise architecture. Based on literature, we provide a conceptualisation of the process map as a business process architecture model that can be integrated with the broader enterprise architecture model. From our conceptualisation we derive requirements for designing a meta-model of a modelling language for process maps. The design of this meta-model is the subject of a research paper, entitled Architecting Business Process Maps, for which this report acts as a complement that details the underlying process map conceptualisation.