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The growth of the Internet and information technology often leads to more customer requests and can mean that a small staff must cope with a large number of business processes. Effective management under these circumstances requires a computer system able to support these business processes. Such a system cannot be developed without modeling business processes, which requires a great deal of “in‐house” information from the people who participate in business processes – information on routines, rules, etc. In general, it is not enough to get the process participants to describe their actions – they should first achieve a deeper understanding of the processes themselves (in terms of goals, activities, etc). A technique called state flow (SF) has been developed to help process participants understand processes. The paper gives an overview of the application of the SF technique in building models of two business processes: a decision‐making process; and a process of recruiting new members (for a non‐profit association).

Organizations of today are becoming ever more focused on their business processes. This has resulted in an increasing interest in using best practices for business process re‐engineering. Two problems arise in connection to using best practices: how to find a best practice that suits particular purposes, and how to ensure that the process from the best practice has the same nature as the process under re‐engineering. The purpose of this paper is to address these issues.

The paper suggests using business process patterns, i.e. relatively high level business process models, for making near formal comparison of business processes. The paper analyzes widespread modeling techniques to find out which of them suits the task of building patterns for comparison. Based on this analysis, the state‐flow modeling technique is chosen and first steps towards formal definition of business process patterns based on this technique are suggested.

A pattern is defined based on the notions of state space, goal, as a surface in the state space, and valid movements towards the goal. A thinkable procedure of constructing patterns is demonstrated on two real‐life examples. A hypothetical procedure for comparing process is suggested but it still needs to be verified in practice.

The originality of the paper is the way the patterns are formulated and the underlying model, the state‐flow view of processes, upon which the patterns are founded.

The paper aims to improve business processes.

Describes various steps needed to improve business processes and the goals required at each step.

The steps required are: what goals should the process meet? How do we model the goals? How do we map the goals in the (IT) system? How do the goals influence the IT execution? Which goals have been achieved? Must we adjust the process, the goals, or both?

Explains the power of goal‐based processes.

This paper aims to report on a project aimed at using simulation for improving the quality of teaching and learning modeling skills. More specifically, the project goal was to facilitate the students to acquire skills of building models of organizational structure and behavior through analysis of internal and external documents, and interviews with employees and management. An important skill that practitioners in the information systems field need to possess is the skill of modeling information systems. The main problem with acquiring modeling skills is to learn how to extract knowledge from the unstructured reality of business life.

To achieve the goal, a solution was introduced in the form of a computerized environment utilizing multimedia to simulate a case of an apprenticeship situation. The paper gives an overview of the problem that the solution addresses, presents the solution and reports on the trial completed in a first-year undergraduate course at Stockholm University.

The results of the trial indicate that using rich multimedia along with a case-based learning approach did improve the overall performance of the students. It was also shown that both students’ and the teachers’ attitudes toward the solution were positive.

The solution presented in this paper, using computer simulation in teaching/learning by focusing on an apprenticeship situation, can be reused by other university teachers, especially in the Information Systems discipline. This solution can thus be used in teaching, system design, requirements engineering, business analysis and other courses typical for information systems.

The paper aims at providing a conceptual framework based on clearly defined concepts and notions, which integrates goals into process modeling and specifically distinguishes goals from soft‐goals or business measures. The application of this framework facilitates a systematic use of soft‐goals in process design.

The framework is developed on the basis of Bunge's well‐established ontology. It is applied to processes taken from the SCOR supply chain reference model for demonstration and evaluation.

Applying the framework to the SCOR processes resulted in a set of focused relations between soft‐goals and processes, as opposed to the ones suggested originally in the SCOR model. This demonstrates the usefulness of the framework in process design.

The approach presented in the paper is still rather a theoretical framework than a fully validated procedure. It should be tested on larger‐scale cases in more practical settings and evaluated accordingly.

Applying the clearly defined concepts of the framework and the suggested analysis procedure is expected to lead to focused and applicable measures tied to business process during process design, and provide a basis for process measurement requirements to be supported by an information system.

The contribution of the paper is both theoretical and practical. It provides clear‐cut ontology‐based definitions to concepts which so far have been assigned fuzzy and ambiguous meaning and uses these definitions for systematically tying business measures to business processes.

The purpose of research is to examine the communication optimization theory by comparing two business process representation approaches and related redesign guidelines through an experiment.

The experiment examined two process representation approaches involving 114 subjects. Each method gravitated around a different business process representation – one placed emphasis on business process activities and their sequencing, and the other on the web of communication interactions found in business processes.

The key finding was that an emphasis on a communication‐oriented view of processes seems to increase perceived modeling quality and redesign success.

Data were collected from various information systems classes at a university. The participants were not redesign team members in an actual organizational redesign project. Future studies should focus on the characteristics of the designers.

The findings should allow managers and practitioners involved in operational‐level process redesign to acknowledge and focus on the flow of information rather than just the activities performed or at least determine a balance between these two approaches. Further, the information system developers and designers should be able to better align information systems design with business processes techniques. Using communication flow methodologies in the analysis stage should significantly help the design and the development processes.

This research was one of the first experimental studies to test the communication flow optimization theory and its effect on business process redesign.

The paper aims to provide business process designers a formal yet user friendly technique to evaluate the implications of a process design on process performance even before its implementation.

Based on practical experience, the paper has built on past research to hypothesize structural metrics for business processes that help assess the influence of process design on organizational goals.

This paper suggests a list of structural metrics that can be used to approximate common performance goals (i.e. soft goals) at the stage of process design. Distinct views for process depiction are discussed to explain how each metric can be calculated and what kind of performance goals it can approximate.

The paper has assumed an intuitive relationship between process structure and process performance which has to be validated empirically. There is scope for developing formal methods to translate changes in structural metrics to monetary value for business and also to refine the structural metrics further if required.

The suggested list of structural metrics and the corresponding process views can be used to compare process design alternatives to select a process design better aligned to organization goals.

A list of structural metrics based on practical experience can be easily applied by business process designers to create a formal yet user friendly approach for process design evaluation.