Managing business processes as an information resource
by F. Leymann and W. Altenhuber
The relevance of business processes as a major asset of an enterprise
is more and more accepted: Business processes prescribe the way in
which the resources of an enterprise are used, i.e., they describe how
an enterprise will achieve its business goals. Organizations typically
prescribe how business processes have to be performed, and they seek
information technology that supports these processes. We describe a
system that supports the two fundamental aspects of business process
management, namely the modeling of processes and their execution. The
meta-model of our system deals with models of business processes as
weighted, colored, directed graphs of activities; execution is
performed by navigation through the graphs according to a well-defined
set of rules. The architecture consists of a distributed system with a
client/server structure, and stores its data in an object-oriented
database system.
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