Business Process Modeling - History

History

Techniques to model business process such as the flow chart, functional flow block diagram, control flow diagram, Gantt chart, PERT diagram, and IDEF have emerged since the beginning of the 20th century. The Gantt charts were among the first to arrive around 1899, the flow charts in the 1920s, Functional Flow Block Diagram and PERT in the 1950s, Data Flow Diagrams and IDEF in the 1970s. Among the modern methods are Unified Modeling Language and Business Process Modeling Notation. Still, these represent just a fraction of the methodologies used over the years to document business processes. The term "business process modeling" itself was coined in the 1960s in the field of systems engineering by S. Williams in his 1967 article "Business Process Modeling Improves Administrative Control". His idea was that techniques for obtaining a better understanding of physical control systems could be used in a similar way for business processes. It was not until the 1990s that the term became popular.

In the 1990s the term "process" became a new productivity paradigm. Companies were encouraged to think in processes instead of functions and procedures. Process thinking looks at the chain of events in the company from purchase to supply, from order retrieval to sales etc. The traditional modeling tools were developed to picture time and costs, while modern methods focus on cross-function activities. These cross-functional activities have increased severely in number and importance due to the growth of complexity and dependencies. New methodologies such as business process redesign, business process innovation, business process management, integrated business planning among others all "aiming at improving processes across the traditional functions that comprise a company".

In the field of software engineering the term "business process modeling" opposed the common software process modeling, aiming to focus more on the state of the practice during software development. In that time early 1990s all existing and new modeling techniques to picture business processes were considered and called "business process modeling languages." In the Object Oriented approach, it was considered to be an essential step in the specification of Business Application Systems. Business process modeling became the base of new methodologies, that for example also supported data collection, data flow analysis, process flow diagrams and reporting facilities. Around 1995 the first visually oriented tools for business process modeling and implementation were being presented.