A Meta-Model for Process Map Design

Process maps provide a holistic view of all processes of an organization by visualizing their essential relationships. The design of a process map is of central importance as many organizations create them at the start of a business process management (BPM) initiative to serve as a framework. Despite this importance, the design of process maps is still more art than science, essentially because there is no standardized modeling language available for process map design. In this paper, we address the research question of which concepts are currently used in process maps and how they are related to each other. To this end, we investigate 67 process maps. Our contribution is a meta-model for process map design which is grounded in actual usage. Furthermore, we discuss the importance of di↵erent concepts for process map design.