On the notion of soft‐goals in business process modeling

Purpose – The paper aims at providing a conceptual framework based on clearly defined concepts and notions, which integrates goals into process modeling and specifically distinguishes goals from soft‐goals or business measures. The application of this framework facilitates a systematic use of soft‐goals in process design. Design/methodology/approach – The framework is developed on the basis of Bunge's well‐established ontology. It is applied to processes taken from the SCOR supply chain reference model for demonstration and evaluation. Findings – Applying the framework to the SCOR processes resulted in a set of focused relations between soft‐goals and processes, as opposed to the ones suggested originally in the SCOR model. This demonstrates the usefulness of the framework in process design. Research limitations/implications – The approach presented in the paper is still rather a theoretical framework than a fully validated procedure. It should be tested on larger‐scale cases in more practical settings and evaluated accordingly. Practical implications – Applying the clearly defined concepts of the framework and the suggested analysis procedure is expected to lead to focused and applicable measures tied to business process during process design, and provide a basis for process measurement requirements to be supported by an information system. Originality/value – The contribution of the paper is both theoretical and practical. It provides clear‐cut ontology‐based definitions to concepts which so far have been assigned fuzzy and ambiguous meaning and uses these definitions for systematically tying business measures to business processes.