ArchiMate Metamodel

A business process describes the internal behavior performed by a business role that is required to produce a set of products and services. For a consumer, the products and services are relevant and the required behavior is merely a black box, hence the designation "internal".

A complex business process may be an aggregation of other, finer-grained processes, each of which may be assigned to finer-grained roles that are aggregated by roles that are aggregated by the original role.

There is a potential many-to-many relationship between business processes and business functions. Informally speaking, processes describe some kind of "flow" of activities, whereas functions group activities according to required skills, knowledge, resources, etc.

A business process may be triggered by, or trigger, any other business behavior element (e.g., business event, business process, business function, or business interaction). A business process may access business objects. A business process may realize one or more business services and may use (internal) business services or application services. A business role or an application component may be assigned to a business process to perform this process manually or automated, respectively. The name of a business process should clearly indicate a predefined sequence of actions, and may include the word "process". Examples are "adjudicate claim", "employee on-boarding", "approval process", or "financial reporting".

In an ArchiMate model, the existence of business processes is depicted. High-level business, end-to-end processes, macro flows, and workflows can all be expressed with the same business process element in the ArchiMate language. It does not, however, list the flow of activities in

detail. This is typically done during business process modeling, where a business process can be expanded using a business process design language; e.g., BPMN