Business process defined

Since business process is one of the areas covered in this blog, I felt it would be useful to provide a clear definition, since it is thrown about so much by people who frankly, don't really understand it.

A business process is simply a collection of like minded activities or tasks that generally occur in a sequence, or flow. A process breaks down, or decomposes, into increasing precise subtypes of activities, called sub-activities. And a business process has a scope and a point of view.

Processes have two kinds of relationships:

Activities in a process sequence can have relationships between other activities — for example, the result, or output, of one activity could initiate another. This is also known as a dependency.

Activities also have constantly changing relationships to resources, such as content, rules and regulations, people and tools. As a process decomposes to greater detail, activity resources refine as well, becoming more and more precise.

About process scope and point of view:

A process scoped at the enterprise level might be called "Grow Business," and would include three levels or stages; at the highest level, it is strategic, which in turn defines the operational level, which then defines the tactical level. A process scoped at the operational level could be "Support Customer." And a process scoped at the tactical level could be "Answer Phone."

Point of view refers to the process perspective, as the CEO could have a different view of the same process than the manager or line worker.

So what's a "business process model?"

A business process model captures, or documents, the flows, decomposition and relationships between activities and resources of a process as defined by scope and point of view. And they ain't pretty.