Process Architecture

An organised overview of the processes in an organisation and the relationships between them (sources/2018-dumas-fundamentals-of-bpm, ch. 2).

Structure (typical three levels)

Process categories — core / support / management (or equivalent high-level partition).
Process groups — related processes within a category.
Individual processes — the actual units of work addressed in subsequent lifecycle phases.

Larger enterprises may have four or more levels.

Artefacts

Process landscape model — visual map of processes and relations (§2.2.4).
Process portfolio — processes plotted by strategic importance × health → prioritises selection (§2.3.3).
Reference models — reusable process architectures (e.g., SAP's process map, APQC PCF).

Selection criteria (§2.3)

Strategic importance
Health / performance
Feasibility of improvement
(Often combined into a matrix for portfolio view)

Performance measures

Process performance is typically decomposed into time, cost, quality, flexibility — the same four dimensions that reappear as trade-offs in the concepts/devils-quadrangle.

concepts/bpm-lifecycle · concepts/business-process · concepts/bpm-maturity