Extending BPMN for Business Activity Monitoring

Real-time access to key performance indicators is necessary to ensure timeliness and effectiveness of operational business processes. The concept of Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) refers to the observation, analysis, and presentation of real-time information about business activities across systems´ and companies´ borders. Designing and maintaining BAM applications is challenging, as the involved concepts (e.g., business processes, audit logs, performance measures) --though being strongly interrelated-- are developed by different communities of practice. Also, they reside on different levels of abstraction, and are handled by different IT systems. Hence, we developed a conceptual modeling language which extends the widely accepted Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) by BAM-relevant concepts. The main results presented in this paper are: (1) a meta-model which formally describes the conceptual aspects of the developed BPMN extension (abstract syntax); (2) graphical symbols as an exemplary representation of this abstract syntax (concrete syntax); (3) a demo scenario that illustrates the application of the language in a fictitious scenario.