Towards an Enterprise Business Process Architecture Standard

Abstract

An effective process architecture helps provide a high-level blueprint of the complexity underlying an enterprise, which is used by executive committees during key decision and change processes. As existing service standards focus on co-ordination, they fall short in describing the motivational structure depicted in such models. In order to progress towards standardization in this area of complexity, we discuss the ldquopracticalityrdquo of a process architecture, and present a set of 22 questions that can be used in the functional evaluation and construction of a process architecture. We use these questions to evaluate the current "state-of-the-art'' in business process architecture. We then apply the knowledge gathered during our evaluation and other work to develop the proposal for a general mapping framework that is capable of answering the set of queries we have proposed.