Unraveling the Never-Ending Story of Lifecycles and Vitalizing Processes
This work addresses a conceptual limitation in BPM for organizations dealing with continuous or lifecycle-based processes, but it is incremental as it builds on existing BPM foundations without introducing new computational methods.
The paper tackles the problem that traditional business process management (BPM) techniques fail to capture processes without clear start and end points, such as lifecycle processes, and introduces the concept of vitalizing business processes to address this gap, showing their existence across industries and providing a conceptual framework for analysis.
Business process management (BPM) has been widely used to discover, model, analyze, and optimize organizational processes. BPM looks at these processes with analysis techniques that assume a clearly defined start and end. However, not all processes adhere to this logic, with the consequence that their behavior cannot be appropriately captured by BPM analysis techniques. This paper addresses this research problem at a conceptual level. More specifically, we introduce the notion of vitalizing business processes that target the lifecycle process of one or more entities. We show the existence of lifecycle processes in many industries and that their appropriate conceptualizations pave the way for the definition of suitable modeling and analysis techniques. This paper provides a set of requirements for their analysis, and a conceptualization of lifecycle and vitalizing processes.