Towards a Multi-model Paradigm for Business Process Management

The design and development of information systems (IS) often requires not only software development expertise, but also a deep understanding of the multitude of business processes supported by the given IS. Such understanding is usually elicited via business process modeling and numerous, often interrelated, process models can be created even for a single IS. However, commonly used process modeling languages focus on single processes in isolation, while providing, at best, only limited support for modeling process interactions. This does enforce a clear scope on each process model, but also leads to a non-holistic view of the IS behavior. In this exploratory paper, we take the position that, instead of forcing existing “single-process-focused” models to be changed, approaches should be provided for modeling their interactions in a fine-grained and unambiguous manner. To meet this goal, we propose developing a Multi-Model paradigm for Business Process Management, where the same, already existing, declarative and procedural modeling languages would be used to represent both the individual processes as well as their interactions.