Goals, Structure, and Organization in business management:

Arguably, the most important goal of business process management is a
better understanding of the operations a company performs and their relationships.
The explicit representation of business processes is the core concept
to achieving this better understanding.
Identifying the activities and their relationships and representing them
by business process models allows stakeholders to communicate about these
processes in an efficient and effective manner. Using business process models
as common communication artefacts, business processes can be analyzed, and
potentials for improving them can be developed.
Flexibility�the ability to change�is the key operational goal of business
process management. The subjects of change are diverse. Business process
management not only supports changing the organizational environment of
the business process, but also facilitates changes in the software layer without
changing the overall business process. Flexibility in business process management
is discussed in detail in Section 3.10.
A repository of the business processes that a company performs is an
important asset. To some extent, it captures knowledge of how the company
performs its business. Therefore, business process models can be regarded as
a means to expressing knowledge of the operation of a company.
But business process management also facilitates continuous process improvement.
The idea is to evolutionarily improve the organization of work
a company performs. Explicit representations of business processes are well
suited for identifying potentials for improvement, but they can also be used
to compare actual cases with the specified process models. While in principle
more radical business process reengineering activities can also be supported
by business processes, evolutionary measures to improve business processes
might in many cases be the favourable solution.
Business process management also aims at narrowing the gap between
business processes that a company performs and the realization of these processes
in software. The vision is that there is a precisely specified relationship
between an activity in the business process layer and its realization in software.
A metamodel is used to specify the semantics
of control flow patterns. An important part of this book deals with process
modelling techniques and notations. The most important ones are discussed in
a concise manner, including Petri nets, event-driven process chains, workflow
nets, Yet Another Workflow Language, a graph-based workflow language, and
the Business Process Modeling Notation.