Transparency as a cross-cutting concern: the case of business process models

The demand for transparency in business is growing. Several organizations and regulatory agencies are demanding more transparency. One approach that has been advocated by many is that businesses processes be documented and available for those wishing to obtain information on how the processes work. Notwithstanding, transparency is far from being achieved by just documenting processes and making them available, since there are several other characteristics pertaining to the transparency concern. However, transparency is an orthogonal characteristic to the predominant functional view of business processes. We explore this fact by understanding transparency as a cross-cutting concern with respect to business processes models. Traditional methods to business process modeling compound the several characteristics in a unified manner, which gives rise to complex models, where different concerns are tangled. Our work uses the case of transparency to show the need to apply concern modularization at the level of business modeling. We propose an aspect oriented approach to deal with the problem, and show how the proposal works for i*, when used as a business modeling language.