Research Streams

This research initiative addresses the use of business process modelling as an organizational practice to describe, analyse and design business processes within or across organizations, be it as part of an effort to understand current procedures (“as-is” modelling) or to design blueprints for improved operational procedures (“to-be” modelling).

Organisations use a variety of mostly graphical process modelling grammars to develop semi-formal diagrammatic representations of their business processes. The focus of this research initiative is to study these grammars, motivated by the belief that process modelling grammars can be important means to help individuals and organizations in their efforts to understand and design organizational practices, but in order to do so, the grammars must be designed and used effectively.

Based on this belief, we identify three main research streams within the initiative:

• Research Stream 1 aims to reach a deeper understanding of the development and characteristics of process modelling grammars.
• Research Stream 2 aims to reach a deeper understanding of how process modelling grammars are used in organizational practice, and the consequences that stem from their use.
• Research Stream 3 aims to extend and enhance the research method of ontological analysis to support current and future research on process modelling.

To study process modelling and the grammars used for this purpose, this research initiative builds upon the use of ontology as a theoretical lens to gain insights into process modelling grammar development and use. Specifically, we use an a ontological model of representation, which specifies a set of rigorously defined ontological constructs to describe all types of real-world phenomena that a process modelling grammar user may desire to have represented in a process model that is complete and clear. The main contributions informing our choice of theory are:

• Weber, R. Ontological Foundations of Information Systems, Coopers & Lybrand and Accounting Association of Australia and New Zealand, Melbourne, 1997.
• Wand, Y., and Weber, R. “On the Ontological Expressiveness of Information Systems Analysis and Design Grammars,” Journal of Information Systems (3:4) 1993, pp 217-237.
• Wand, Y., and Weber, R. “An Ontological Model of an Information System,” IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering (16:11) 1990, pp 1282-1292.