Artefact-oriented Business Process Modelling - An Ontological Dependency Approach

Yu-Chun Pan, Yinshan Tang, Stephen R. Gulliver

2013

Abstract

Business process modelling can help an organisation better understand and improve its business processes. Most business process modelling methods adopt a task- or activity-based approach to identifying business processes. Within our work, we use activity theory to categorise elements within organisations as being either human beings, activities or artefacts. Due to the direct relationship between these three elements, an artefact-oriented approach to organisation analysis emerges. Organisational semiotics highlights the ontological dependency between affordances within an organisation. We analyse the ontological dependency between organisational elements, and therefore produce the ontology chart for artefact-oriented business process modelling in order to clarify the relationship between the elements of an organisation. Furthermore, we adopt the techniques from semantic analysis and norm analysis, of organisational semiotics, to develop the artefact-oriented method for business process modelling. The proposed method provides a novel perspective for identifying and analysing business processes, as well as agents and artefacts, as the artefact-oriented perspective demonstrates the fundamental flow of an organisation. The modelling results enable an organisation to understand and model its processes from an artefact perspective, viewing an organisation as a network of artefacts. The information and practice captured and stored in artefact can also be shared and reused between organisations that produce similar artefacts.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Pan Y., Tang Y. and R. Gulliver S. (2013). Artefact-oriented Business Process Modelling - An Ontological Dependency Approach . In Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems - Volume 3: ICEIS, ISBN 978-989-8565-61-7, pages 223-230. DOI: 10.5220/0004398502230230

in Bibtex Style

@conference{iceis13,
author={Yu-Chun Pan and Yinshan Tang and Stephen R. Gulliver},
title={Artefact-oriented Business Process Modelling - An Ontological Dependency Approach},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems - Volume 3: ICEIS,},
year={2013},
pages={223-230},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0004398502230230},
isbn={978-989-8565-61-7},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF
JO - Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems - Volume 3: ICEIS,
TI - Artefact-oriented Business Process Modelling - An Ontological Dependency Approach
SN - 978-989-8565-61-7
AU - Pan Y.
AU - Tang Y.
AU - R. Gulliver S.
PY - 2013
SP - 223
EP - 230
DO - 10.5220/0004398502230230