Business Information Systems

HWR inside view: "You'll learn process modeling or you'll eat my spinach, dammit!"

As a deepening follow-up to my last post on blog organisation, please use this week to take a look at Bruce Spear’s article “Multi-dimensional WordPress”, which argues convincingly using many examples and illustrations in favor of turning blogs from a one-dimensional “journal with links and pics” into a story on the page. Since we finally started with business process modeling (BPM), please read the seminal article by Tom Davenport which is contained in your reader, for next week. We’ll use the expert map method to unlock the secrets of this paper.

After taking a look at MS Visio, a simple drawing program, this week and experiencing – via the “biography” exercise – how different process maps can look like without an agreed grammar, we will turn to Event-driven Process Chains (EPC) (see example below) as a simple and yet powerful way to model processes, which is also the basis of the process language used in the design of SAP, one of the most widely used Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems.

EPC example of a simple ordering process - devil's in the detail.

And lastly: your individual blogs. Some of you were concerned this morning that you have not had feedback from me. Now, the main feedback, in such a large group of bloggers, should come from your peers – as you will remember, you are supposed to leave at least one comment per week on the blog of another student from this course, preferably not the same student time and time again. I will make sure to get to your blogs in the course of the next few weeks at least once before the final evaluation via – must I spell it out – the rubric! Hope this helps!