Towards Functional and Constructional Perspectives on Business Process Patterns

Contemporary organizations need to be more agile to keep up with the swiftly changing business environment. The Normalized Systems theory has proven to introduce this required agility within an organization, starting at the software level. However, in order to realize an agile enterprise, also business processes have to exhibit this evolvability. Currently, the relevance of Normalized Systems theory at the business process level has been demonstrated, however no equivalent to the software elements at the organizational level have been developed. Therefore, this paper investigates whether it is possible to base such elements on the available business process patterns in literature. After investigating the usefulness of the MIT Process Handbook with regard to this purpose, this paper emphasizes the importance of recognizing the so-called functional-constructional gap and identifies the need for developing modular and evolvable constructional business process design patterns to further extend Normalized Systems theory on the business level. Index Terms—Normalized Systems, business process patterns, analysis patterns, evolvability, MIT Process Handbook

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