Using process maps to connect enterprise architecture and business processes

What is it about?

Many organisations use business processes to describe how work is carried out, and enterprise architecture to understand how people, systems, data, services and technology fit together. However, these two perspectives are often managed by different specialists, using different languages and modelling tools. This can make it difficult to discuss how business processes support organisational strategy, digital transformation or architectural change. This publication explains how process maps can help bridge that gap. A process map gives a high-level view of an organisation’s business processes and how they are structured, without going into the detailed steps of each individual process. The paper presents BPAL, the Business Process Architecture Language, which is designed to help enterprise architects and process analysts share a common view of business process architecture, including process groups, chains, families and links with other enterprise architecture elements. The study shows how BPAL process maps can act as “boundary objects”: shared artefacts that help people from different professional communities communicate, coordinate and collaborate. The work also evaluates BPAL through a controlled experiment and illustrates how it can support strategic alignment analysis.

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Why is it important?

Organisations increasingly need to align business processes with strategy, information systems, data, services and digital transformation initiatives. Yet process modelling and enterprise architecture are often treated separately, which can lead to communication problems, fragmented views and missed opportunities for improvement. This work is important because it provides a practical and research-based way to connect these perspectives. Unlike BPMN, which is mainly suited to modelling the internal flow of individual processes, BPAL focuses on the architecture of an organisation’s whole collection of business processes. Unlike generic enterprise architecture models, it gives more expressive support for process-specific structures such as process chains, groups and families. The contribution is timely because organisations need better ways to plan and govern digital transformation across business and IT boundaries. By offering a shared language for business process architecture, BPAL can help enterprise architects, process analysts and other stakeholders reason together about strategic alignment, dependencies, responsibilities and change impacts. The experimental results also indicate that BPAL process maps can be easier to understand than the diverse informal notations commonly used in practice.

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