Desiderata for Languages to be Used in the Defnition of Reference Business Processes

In many modern enterprises, explicit business process denitions facilitate the pursuit of business goals in such ways as best practice reuse, process analysis, process eciency improvement, and automation. Most real-world business processes are large and complex. Successfully capturing, analysing, and automating these processes requires process denition languages that capture a variety of process aspects with a wealth of details. Most current process modelling languages, such as Business Process Modelling Notation (BPMN), focus on structural control o ws among activities while providing inadequate support for other process denition needs. In this paper, we rst illustrate these inadequacies through our experiences with a collection of real-world reference business processes from the Aus- tralian lending industry. We observe that the most signican t inadequacies include lack of resource management, exception handling, process variation, and data o w integration. These identied shortcomings led us to consider the Little-JIL language as a vehicle for dening business processes. Little-JIL addresses the afore-mentioned inadequacies with a number of innovative features. Our investigation concludes that these innovative features are eectiv e in addressing a number of key reference business process denition needs.