Business Process

A business process is a collection of inter-related events, activities, and decision points that involve a number of actors and objects, and that collectively lead to an outcome of value to at least one customer (sources/2018-dumas-fundamentals-of-bpm, §1.2).

Ingredients (Dumas et al. 2018, Fig. 1.1)

Events — things that happen instantaneously (message received, deadline reached).
Activities / tasks — units of work consuming time and resources.
Decision points — branching conditions.
Actors — humans, organisations, software systems performing activities.
Objects — physical or informational entities consumed, produced, or transformed.
Outcomes — positive (value delivered to customer) or negative (rejection, failure).

Parallel APM definition

The APM Manifesto (sources/2026-calvanese-agentic-bpm-manifesto) cites Weske 2024 and Dumas et al. 2018 as the canonical BPM definitions, then reframes business processes in APM as "sets of activities performed to jointly realize a business goal" — foregrounding the goal dimension, which traditional BPM leaves implicit in operational specifications.

Outside-in counterpart: the customer's "job" as a process

Ulwick's Outcome-Driven Innovation claims that "all functional jobs are processes and can be analyzed as such" (sources/2009-ulwick-what-is-odi, p. 10) — with a universal 8-step job map (Define · Locate · Prepare · Confirm · Execute · Monitor · Modify · Conclude). This produces the sharpest bridge between BPM and Jobs-to-Be-Done: the company's business process (inside-out) and the customer's job (outside-in) are two views of the same value exchange, and seams between them are where redesign opportunities live. See concepts/outcome-driven-innovation.

concepts/bpm-lifecycle · concepts/process-architecture · concepts/agentic-bpm · concepts/outcome-driven-innovation · frameworks/jtbd