A Formal Approach to a Knowledge Base for Business Process Analysis

Business Process Analysis (BPA) is a strategic activity, necessary for enterprises to model their business operations. It is a central activity in information system development, but also for business process design and reengineering. Despite several decades of research, the effectiveness of available methods is still questionable. The majority of methodologies adopted by enterprises are rather qualitative and lack a formal basis, often yielding inadequate specifications. On the other hand, there are methodologies with a solid theoretical background, but they appear too cumbersome for the majority of enterprises. This paper proposes a knowledge framework, referred to as BPA Canvas, conceived to be easily mastered by business people and, at the same time, based on a sound formal theory. The methodology starts with the construction of natural language knowledge artifacts and, then, progressively guides the user toward more rigorous structures. The formal approach of the methodology allows us to prove the correctness of the resulting knowledge base while maintaining the centrality of business people in the whole knowledge construction process.