Dr. Hal Plain, MIS Consulting & Training1UCLA EXTENSIONDATA MODELING AND ANALYSISPresented byDr. Hal PlainSession 7Chapter 3Dr. Hal Plain, MIS Consulting & Training2ENTERPRISE MODELING WITH UMLDr. Hal Plain, MIS Consulting & Training3Chapter 3: Processes•A business process defines how an organization achieves its purpose, and is designed to add value. It is composed of atomic process steps at the lowest level, which are related to each other by workflow rules. A process step is assigned to an organization role to enable workflow and security management. A user interface or document enables a human actor having the role to interact with the process.Dr. Hal Plain, MIS Consulting & Training4What is a Business Process?•A business process defines how business purpose is to be achieved.–A business process defines how an organization achieves its purpose. Strategic processes develop vision and missions, and tactical and operational processes are designed to achieve specific goals and objectives. The term “business process” has many definitions because a process impacts all aspects of an organization. Selected definitions are as follows.Dr. Hal Plain, MIS Consulting & Training5What is a Business Process?–Concise Oxford Dictionary:•A process is a course of action, a series of operations, or a series of changes.–Object Management Group: •Processes represent the flow of work and information throughout the business. These processes act on the business entities to cause the business to function. Business processes may be long-lived, such as an order life cycle, or may be short-lived, such as an end-of-year report. Long-life-cycle business processes are typically part of business process reengineering (BPR) analysis [BOMSIG 1995].Dr. Hal Plain, MIS Consulting & Training6What is a Business Process?•Every organization exists to add value.–ISO 9000: •Every organization exists to accomplish value-adding work. The work is accomplished through a network of processes. Every process has inputs, and the outputs are the results of the process. The structure of the network is not usually a simple sequential structure, but typically is quite complex [ISO 9000-1 1994].Dr. Hal Plain, MIS Consulting & Training7What is a Business Process?•Every organization exists to add value.–Ivar Jacobson: •A business process is the set of internal activities performed to serve a customer. The purpose of each business process is to offer each customer the right product or service, with a high degree of performance measured against cost, longevity, service and quality [Jacobson et al. 1995].Dr. Hal Plain, MIS Consulting & Training8What is a Business Process?•Every organization exists to add value.–Peter Senge: •A process is a circle of causality that describes a feedback loop of cause and effect. From the systems perspective, the human actor is part of the feedback process, not standing apart from it [Senge 1990].