In the last blog post, I emphasized the importance of structuring for gathering information, formalizing (modeling), evaluating and analyzing. This applies to all artifacts and abstractions. How can we structure a business process? How can we classify the individual activities? How can we classify operational decisions? How can we classify risks?

The question "How does the business process work on your site?" or the question "How is the operational decision structured?" is often not effective as a first question. We have to help the user by asking for specific classes of activities (or operational decisions). It should be remembered that we are iterative. A critical review is necessary so that we do not "forget" any activity or decision.

Accordingly, I am always on the lookout for suggestions for classifications of artifacts.

In business process modeling, I find a useful classification in "Business Analysis" by Debra Paul and Donald Yates (Ed.). The activities are classified as follows

In the post "Styleguide and Architecture Principles" I pointed to the fact that finding aggod structure for our  model repository is essential for finding informations, to formalize them into models and to create reports and analize our models. To define a good structure I use "Zachman™-Framework for Enterprise-Architecture" (see zachman.com). Other frameworks follow similar principles (e.g. the Archimate Framework). Often you can map the frameworks to each other.

Unfortunately the Frameworks define only the abstractions interesting for us. In practive userss ask not only about the used abstractions but also the levels of abstractions. Processes are described very globally, but also very detailed from the point of view of an Operator (see "Complex vs. Complicated").

We structure Business Processes also internally by content reasons. Think of the element "Milestone" in CMMN. We structure the business process (the Case) by the information about the Case (stored in the Case Fil). To achieve maintainable and good models, finding a good structure is more important compared to excellent knowledge of the used notation (BPMN, CMMN, DMN, others).