The "Organized Activity" Foundation for Business Processes and Their Management

This paper introduces a new notional and notational tool - "organized activity" (OA) and its theory (TOA) - to the BP/BPM community. Most of this "introduction" is accomplished via an example - the "Pulsar" - which is: (a) an "organized activity" claimed to be useful to business, but also other activities; (b) new; (c) easy to understand; (d) suitable to computer support; (e) richly illustrative of OA ideas, in its "computerized" and non-computerized versions. A significant terminal part of the paper is devoted to a comparison of OA/TOA to Petri nets - for two reasons: (a) OA/TOA grew out of Petri nets; (b) many readers of this paper are familiar with Petri nets, and rely on them professionally.