A Model for business processes analysis and specification

Specification of an organizational process entails the collection and analysis of a particular knowledge that is examined, for example in order to detect possible anomalies. It is then readjusted to reach a process supposed to be "prescriptive", facilitating by this way the implementation of a workflow. This paper deals with the possibility of using the concept of ontology, to obtain a more formal modeling of a given process in order to facilitate its analysis. A review of the best known methodologies that incorporate an approach for process specification shows that they hardly take into consideration the analysis stage, even though it appears that this stage is often fundamental, especially in areas such as Information Systems (IS). We precisely locate our current research in this framework. What follows is a description of our MASP (Model for business processes analysis and specification) model which is based on an ontological modeling of organizational processes (we call them I.S processes). One of the advantages of this modeling is to allow the gradual acquisition and, later, the graphical representation of all concepts and transitions used in the related domain, as they could be collected as part of the analysis by a human expert. The fundamental assumption on which we rely here is that any organizational process can be described through a limited set of concepts, hence the importance of an ontological approach for its formalization. After a brief review of the literature dedicated to the specification of I.S. processes, we describe the MASP modeling, its objectives, its main features and the opportunities it offers. In particular, we show how ontological modeling can allow one to represent both of static and dynamic aspects of a process and how it can be used to improve the analysis approach.