Towards Building Software Systems From the Specification of the Supported Business Processes

Organizations build software systems to support their business processes. There are different levels of support, ranging from simply recording the activities of an essentially manual process, to performing the clerical tasks of the process, leaving decisions to humans, to fully automating the business process, with rule based decision making. The authors propose a framework that, given a (precisely specified) business process, and a desired level of support by a target information system, enables them to sketch the general infrastructure of the target software. This is not a new problem, and this goal has been pursued by MIS researchers since the late 70's.