The Notion of Business Process Revisited

The notion of business process is becoming increasingly important in all business and information/communication technology related disciplines, and therefore gets a lot of attention. Consequently, there is a variety of definitions as well as a variety in preciseness of definition. The research reported in this paper aims at clarifying the different understandings and unifying them in a common conceptual framework. Three fundamental questions concerning business processes are investigated: about the difference between business process and information process, about the distinction between the ‘deep’ structure and the ‘surface’ structure of a business process, and about the difference between system and process. These questions are discussed within the framework of the Ψ-theory and the DEMO methodology.

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