Modeling Business Contexture and Behavior Using Business Artifacts

Traditional process modeling approaches focus on the activities needed to achieve a business goal. However, these approaches often pose obstacles in consolidating processes across an organization because they fail to capture the informational structure pertinent to the business context or contexture. In this paper, we discuss business artifact-centered operational modeling. Artifacts capture the contexture of a business and operational models describe how a business goal is achieved by acting upon the business artifact. Business artifacts, such as Purchase Order or Insurance Claim, provide business analysts an additional dimension to model their business. With operational models, they can describe how a business operates by processing business artifacts and adding business value to the artifacts. This approach has been successfully employed in a variety of customer engagements. We summarize our best practices by describing nine operational patterns. Furthermore, we develop a computational model for operational models based on Petri Nets to enable formal analysis and verification thereof.