Applying Business Process Modeling to Organizational Change

Organizational change can be regarded as a process that changes the state of the organization. This simple yet powerful idea is the ground basis for the work being presented in this paper. This original work brings a new dimension to business modeling: time. Looking at the organization as a dynamic entity that changes through time, allows us to reason over the processes that make the organization evolve, in a formal and objective way. The purpose of this research is to develop tools that help managers to drive business more effectively through time, by keeping in perspective all the issues regarding change in the organization. The first step towards this goal is to create an adequate modeling environment that can be used to represent (1) the organization (at different time frames) and (2) the change processes (that make the organization evolve between time frames). The modeling framework being developed uses UML and, more specifically, the CEO Framework, a business process oriented UML modeling framework. This research is based on a vast theoretical study of process modeling techniques and application domains, as well as on hands-on industry experience in several change processes in real-life companies. The paper presents a formal definition of all the concepts involved in this research, the first version of the UML Profile for Business Change Modeling that is under development and the preliminary results of the application of this research in the Portuguese Army.