The Primacy of Process Architecture

Piecemeal development and support for organisational processes may lead to problems: first, it is difficult to know which processes should be supported, and, second, it is unlikely that piecemeal processes will work well together. The solution seems to lie in first developing a coherent process architecture. However, this raises a further problem: a number of different types of process architecture have been proposed, but it is not clear which one should be used in a given situation. To help to address this problem, the paper describes and evaluates one particular process architecture type and its associated development method, Riva [3]. The method was used to create a process architecture for part of a University faculty. It was found to be easy to apply, and, in addition, the resulting process architecture was found to be easy to understand and to use. This result should help others to decide which type of architecture to use when this kind of domain context is encountered.