Designing a Business Process Architecture: An Overview of Approaches and their Use

With the uptake of business process modeling in practice, the demand grows for guidelines that lead organizations to consistent and integrated collections of process models. The notion of a business process architecture has been explicitly proposed to address this issue. This paper provides an overview and comparison of the prevailing approaches to design such a business process architecture. Furthermore, it includes an evaluation of the usability and actual use of the identified approaches through our interaction with a large group of practitioners. Our findings suggest that practitioners heavily rely on a mix of guidelines instead of embracing any single approach wholeheartedly.