Can Business Process Management Benefit from Service Journey Modelling Language?

Abstract

Business process management aims to align the business processes of an organisation with customers' needs. Doing this is of particular importance for services and requires a good understanding of interactions among the stakeholders involved in service provision and consumption. Several business modelling languages have been proposed, such as Business Process Modelling Notation (BPMN), Business Process Executable Language (BPEL) and Web Services Choreography Description Language (WS-CDL). Although these languages provide good support for process modelling, their consideration of the customer’s point of view seems to be insufficient. On the other hand, visualisations of customer journeys for the purpose of conceptualisation of new services have been successfully used in the area of service design. Our hypothesis is that a visual language presenting the customer journey through a service might be useful for aligning business processes of service providers with customers' needs and, in turn, contribute to the delivery of better services. We propose Service Journey Modelling Language (SJML) and report our first experience with it.