Abstract:

Business process modeling has an important role in the modeling of a business and more in particular the modeling of business information systems. It is intended to model the processes and activities in the business, using a sufficiently formal business process modeling language, so the results may be used to specify and design information systems supporting the modeled processes.
Current business process modeling languages are either quite formal and extensive, intended for the design of workflows, or they are biased towards specific software architectures, such as e.g. Service-Oriented Architecture. These business process modeling formalisms are less suited for expressing process flows at the business level. By consequence, they are largely unsuited to be used as a teaching tool for business students, learning the essentials of business processes modeling.
In this paper, we develop a simple and expressive business process modeling language, specifically designed and therefore particularly suited for teaching business process modeling to business students at the undergraduate and graduate level. The main characteristics of this language are:
(1) It is graphically oriented: all constructs are represented by graphical elements.
(2) It is simple: the number of constructs in the language is limited.
(3) It is expressive: the language allows all common process flow structures to be expressed
These characteristics make the language particularly suited for teaching process modeling to business students.
We describe the different constructs of the language and the connection between process flow modeling constructs and the actors and data items, associated to the business processes.
We also report teaching experiences when using this business modeling language to teach business process modeling to an international group of business students at a summer school at the Hof university of applied sciences and to an international group of students in the regular master program of business administration at the Hogeschool-Universiteit Brussel. We discuss the particular teaching tools and the methodologies, used to train students in the use of the language.

Keywords:

business process modelling, formal language, enterprise architecture.