On the notion of soft-goals in business process modeling

Purpose – The paper aims at providing a conceptual framework based on clearly defined concepts and notions, which integrates goals into process modeling and specifically distinguishes goals from soft‐goals or business measures. The application of this framework facilitates a systematic use of soft‐goals in process design.Design/methodology/approach – The framework is developed on the basis of Bunge's well‐established ontology. It is applied to processes taken from the SCOR supply chain reference model for demonstration and evaluation.Findings – Applying the framework to the SCOR processes resulted in a set of focused relations between soft‐goals and processes, as opposed to the ones suggested originally in the SCOR model. This demonstrates the usefulness of the framework in process design.Research limitations/implications – The approach presented in the paper is still rather a theoretical framework than a fully validated procedure. It should be tested on larger‐scale cases in more practical settings and e...