State Flow as a Way of Analyzing Business Processes - Case Studies

The exponential growth of the Internet and information technology in general leads to the increased volumes of customer requests and often brings about the situation when a small staff has to cope with a large number of business processes. To achieve an effective management under the circumstances one needs a computer system able to support these business processes. Such a system cannot be developed without first modeling business processes. To model business processes relevant for a particular domain analysts need to acquire a great deal of "in-house" information from the people who participate in business processes – the information on routines, rules, etc. In general, it is not enough to get the process participants to describe their actions, they should first achieve a deeper understanding of the processes in which they participate (in terms of goals, activities, etc). A special technique called State Flow (SF) has been developed to give the process participants the idea of in which processes they participate. The paper gives an overview of application of the SF technique to building models of two business processes: a decision-making process and a process of recruiting new members (for a nonprofit association).