The Business Process Knowledge Framework

Keywords: business process management, knowledge acquisition, information systems, semantic technologies Abstract: Organizations today are confronted with huge problems regarding following and implementing their own business process models. On the one hand, due to a lack of planning and requirements analysis, process models are often unfeasible or difficult to execute in practice. On the other hand, process designers often ignore the importance of studying the different roles and their perspectives on a business process when constructing a process model. This leads to the deployment of process models that do not “satisfy” process stakeholders. This paper addresses those two problems and proposes a business process knowledge framework as a possible solution. Our framework for business process knowledge management integrates three elements that we consider fundamental to correctly model business processes: stakeholders’ perspectives, knowledge types and views. It is shown how the business process framework can contribute to the improvement of the process knowledge acquisition phase of process design, and how it can support process knowledge communication to stakeholders. Finally, we argue that the latest developments in the Semantic Web are an interesting solution to support the integration of information and knowledge represented within our framework.