Business Process Management

What is a business process?

A set of activities performed in coordination in an organizational and technical environment

What is Business Process Management (BPM)?

Concepts, methods, and techniques to support the design, administration, configuration, enactment, and analysis of business processes.

What is a business process model?

A set of activity models and execution constraints between them.

What is a business process instance?

A concrete case in the operational business of a company, consisting of activity instances.

What is process choreography?

The interactions of a set of business processes.

What are the phases of the business process lifecycle?

Design & Analysis, Configuration, Enactment, Evaluation.

Who is responsible for standardizing business processes in an enterprise?

The Chief Process Officer (CPO).

What is the ACID principle?

Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, Durability—a transaction protocol for running applications.

What are the levels of business processes?

Business Goals and Strategies, Organizational Business Processes, Operational Business Processes.

What is a fully automated business process?

A process with no human involvement in its enactment (e.g., ordering an airline ticket).

What is a production workflow?

A well-structured, highly repetitive business process.

What is the purpose of a repository in BPM?

To capture knowledge of how a company performs its business.

What is enterprise application integration (EAI)?

The integration of siloed applications to enable communication and data sharing.

What is point-to-point integration?

A form of EAI where each sender encodes the receiver of a message (not scalable).

What is hub-and-spoke integration?

A centralized hub connects spokes (applications) for integration, improving process-awareness.

What is a value chain?

An approach to organize the work a company conducts to achieve its business goals, including primary and support functions.

What are the primary functions in a value chain?

Inbound Logistics, Operations, Outbound Logistics, Marketing and Sales, Services.

What is functional decomposition?

The process of breaking down a coarse-grained function into finer-grained functions to manage complexity.

What is a workflow?

The automation of a business process, in whole or part, where documents or tasks are passed between participants.

What is a workflow management system?

A software system that defines, creates, and manages workflow execution.

What are the challenges of workflow management?

Lack of support for knowledge workers, technical integration issues, and inconsistent states.

What is a service in enterprise service computing?

Functionality with business value, ready to be used, and loosely coupled.

What is a service-oriented architecture (SOA)?

An environment for describing, organizing, and dynamically discovering software services.

What is an enterprise service bus (ESB)?

Middleware that hides heterogeneity of enterprise applications by introducing service interfaces.

What is a Petri net?

A formal technique for specifying business processes using places, transitions, and directed arcs.

What is a condition event net?

A Petri net where each place can hold at most one token at any time.

What is a workflow net?

An enhanced Petri net with structural restrictions useful for representing business processes.

What is an and split in workflow nets?

A transition that puts tokens on all its output places, enabling parallel execution.

What is an exclusive or split (XOR split)?

A gateway that activates only one outgoing path based on conditions.

What is a deferred choice?

A pattern where the decision on which path to take is deferred to the latest possible time.

What are the triggers in workflow nets?

Automatic, User, External, and Time triggers.

What is BPMN?

Business Process Model and Notation—a standard for modeling business processes with a defined meta-model.

What are the categories of elements in BPMN?

Flow Objects (Events, Activities, Gateways), Connecting Objects, Swimlanes, Artefacts.

What are the types of activities in BPMN?

Task, Subprocess, Transaction, Call Activity.

What is a user task in BPMN?

A workflow task involving user interaction.

What is a manual task in BPMN?

A task performed without software support.

What are the roles of events in BPMN?

Catching (waiting for an event) and Throwing (triggering an event).

What is a boundary event in BPMN?

An intermediate event attached to an activity, which can be interrupting or non-interrupting.

What is a timer event in BPMN?

An event indicating an error occurrence, often used for exception handling.

What is an error event in BPMN?

An event used to undo or compensate for previous actions.

What is a compensation event in BPMN?

An event used to undo or compensate for previous actions.

What is a pool in BPMN?

A representation of a process participant (e.g., a company or role).

What is a lane in BPMN?

A subdivision of a pool representing organizational entities or roles.

What is a black box pool in BPMN?

A pool where internal processes are hidden, showing only external behavior.

What is a public process in BPMN?

A process restricted to communication activities between participants.

What is a private process in BPMN?

A process detailing all internal activities of a participant.

What is process choreography in BPMN?

The interaction between multiple business processes, often modeled using choreography diagrams.

What is a conversation diagram in BPMN?

A diagram representing participants and their communication channels.

What is a choreography task in BPMN?

A task representing one or more related messages exchanged between participants.

What are the phases of the BPM methodology?

Strategy and Organization, Process Landscape Design, Process Design, Process Implementation, Operations and Controlling.

What is the goal of the Strategy and Organization phase?

To establish organizational prerequisites and identify key processes.

What is the purpose of Process Landscape Design?

To analyze supplier-customer relationships between key processes.

What is a key performance indicator (KPI)?

A measurable value indicating how effectively a process achieves its goals.

What is the focus of the Process Implementation phase?

Technical and organizational realization of the process.

What is the Operations and Controlling phase?

Measuring process performance and implementing improvements.

What is structural soundness in process models?

A model with one initial node, one final node, and all nodes on a path between them.

What is soundness in workflow nets?

A property ensuring all tasks can participate, instances terminate properly, and no deadlocks occur.

What is a free-choice net?

A Petri net where the input places of transitions are either disjoint or identical.

What is a non-free-choice net?

A net where transition behavior depends on the firing order of concurrent transitions.

What is the Workflow Management Coalition (WfMC) Reference Architecture?

A framework for workflow systems with standardized interfaces for modeling, enactment, and monitoring.

What are the main W3C web services recommendations?

SOAP (messaging protocol), WSDL (service description), UDDI (service registry).

What is a deadlock in process modeling?

A situation where a process cannot proceed due to unresolved dependencies.

What is a livelock?

A situation where a process is stuck in a loop without making progress.

What is the Deming Cycle (PDCA)?

Plan-Do-Check-Act—a systematic approach for continuous improvement.

What are the 7 Process Modeling Guidelines (7PMG)?

Guidelines like minimizing routing paths, using structured models, and avoiding OR gateways.

What is the 5W + H method?

A problem-solving approach asking Who, What, When, Where, Why, and How.

What is the difference between syntactic and semantic interoperability?

Syntactic ensures compatible message structure; semantic ensures shared meaning of data.

What is bottom-up automation?

Optimizing individual organizational units, which may not improve overall process performance.

What is the purpose of a process engine?

To instantiate and control the execution of business processes.

What is a service task in BPMN?

A task implemented by a software service.