DIVIDING BUSINESSES INTO PROCESSES - FOUNDATIONS FOR MODELLING ESSENTIALS By

One important part of information systems development work is business modelling. Traditionally businesses have been regarded as systems consisting of sub-systems. During the 90’s a number of process-oriented approaches for business modelling have gained a lot of interest. One problem about dividing businesses into processes is that there resolves controversy around the number of processes appropriate to a given organisation. The difficulty derives from the fact that processes are almost infinitely divisible. It is therefore a need to find basis of division when adopting a process-oriented view on the organisation. This paper reports on ongoing research concerning understanding businesses by using the notion of business processes. Results reported on are a further developed notion of business processes, a reference model for process determination, criteria for process determination and a theory of imperceivable business systems. These results are generated through a dialectic approach where both transformational and communicational aspects of business processes are taken into consideration as well as the notion of systems for perceiving businesses. By using this theory of imperceivable business systems for business modelling essential characteristics of businesses can be focused on different levels of abstraction.