Comments on: Interview with Roger Burlton – How to build a Business Process Architecture https://bpmtips.com/interview-with-roger-burlton-how-to-build-a-business-process-architecture/ Practical BPM tips for business process analysts and process managers Tue, 03 Sep 2024 17:57:17 +0000 hourly 1 By: Zbigniew https://bpmtips.com/interview-with-roger-burlton-how-to-build-a-business-process-architecture/#comment-16663 Tue, 03 Sep 2024 17:57:17 +0000 http://bpmtips.com/?p=319#comment-16663 In reply to Mark Gilsdorf.

Hi Mark,
Thanks for your insightful comment!
Zbigniew

]]> By: Mark Gilsdorf https://bpmtips.com/interview-with-roger-burlton-how-to-build-a-business-process-architecture/#comment-16661 Mon, 10 Jun 2024 00:10:07 +0000 http://bpmtips.com/?p=319#comment-16661 It’s interesting that Burlton said, “The true business processes are end to end. They start with the outside world and go back to the outside world.” I’m not sure when this interview took place, but this definition is what today most would call a core process, a specific type of business process.

Note that Burlton defined a business process differently in the Business Process Manifesto which he authored sometime around 2003. The manifesto has gone through several revisions since then including the definition of a business process. Burlton’s most recent definition can be found here
https://www.brcommunity.com/articles.php?id=b672
where a business process includes stakeholders, not just outside customers. This results in the definition being much broader to encompass all processes in an organization, not just core processes.

My take is that defining a business process generically to be any process in a business, and use terms like core process and support process to refer to specific end-to-end business processes, is more intuitive and less confusing to newcomers to BPM. This is also more in line with Porter’s view when he introduced Primary and Support Activities in his book titled Competitive Advantage back in 1985 which some believed started the process revolution.

Thus, we see that there is no universal consensus on what a business process is, and its definition continues to change as the BPM field continues to evolve. It seems that standards, consultants, and other sources define the term in ways that best suits their needs. Confusion reigns when the term is used and not defined or poorly defined.

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