Representing Business Process Flexibility using Concept Maps

Business process flexibility has been a relevant research topic within Business Process Management (BPM) for the past 20 years. Several taxonomies were proposed along this time, emphasizing certain aspects of flexibility or change within business processes, taking into account the various dimensions of business processes. Although these taxonomies have been most useful in contributing to research advances on flexibility, they contain distinct concept names for the same meaning and vice-versa. Additionally, they are often textual and heavily descriptive, and do not provide a simplified representation of their concepts and relationships. In this paper we propose the use of the Concept Maps (CMaps) approach to achieve this simplified representation of business process flexibility. The main output is concept maps covering the wide and diverse spectrum of business process flexibility concepts and relationships. In this way, researchers can benefit from a simpler and yet understandable representation, which also takes into account the most established business process flexibility definitions found in prominent research literature. (C) 2016 Published by Elsevier B.V.