An Explorative Study for Process Map Design

Process maps provide a holistic view of all processes of an organization and the essential relationships between them. The design of a process map is of central importance as many organizations create them at the start of a business process management (BPM) initiative to serve as a framework. Despite this importance, the design of process maps is still more art than science, essentially because there is no standardized modeling language available for process map design. In this paper, we address the research question of which concepts are currently used in process maps in practice. To this end, we investigate a collection of 67 process maps from industry. Our contribution is a meta-model for process map design which is grounded in actual usage. Furthermore, we discuss the importance of different concepts for process map design.