State‐flow technique for business process analysis: case studies

The growth of the Internet and information technology often leads to more customer requests and can mean that a small staff must cope with a large number of business processes. Effective management under these circumstances requires a computer system able to support these business processes. Such a system cannot be developed without modeling business processes, which requires a great deal of “in‐house” information from the people who participate in business processes – information on routines, rules, etc. In general, it is not enough to get the process participants to describe their actions – they should first achieve a deeper understanding of the processes themselves (in terms of goals, activities, etc). A technique called state flow (SF) has been developed to help process participants understand processes. The paper gives an overview of the application of the SF technique in building models of two business processes: a decision‐making process; and a process of recruiting new members (for a non‐profit association).