The Difference Between Process Architecture and Process Modeling/Design (and why you should care) Graham McLeod PROMIS Solutions AG & Inspired www.pro-mis.com www.inspired.org graham.mcleod@pro-mis.com Abstract. A process perspective can assist organizations to deliver attractive products and services to clients and stakeholders, add value to the context in which they operate and facilitate their survival and prosperity in the face of competition. Unfortunately, many process initiatives bog down in excessive detail and lengthy project durations leading to frustration and non-delivery. Quality sometimes suffers due to fatigue of the business participants or the volatility of the business which may change faster than the process modeling effort can track. Over decades of practice in process and enterprise architecture (EA) work as well as analysis of techniques and EA frameworks, we have evolved an approach which separates process architecture from process modeling (detailed analysis and design) while keeping the two perspectives fully integrated and congruent. This paper argues for separation, illustrates how it can be done from a methods and representation perspective, and highlights benefits achieveable. Keywords. Enterprise Architecture; Process Architecture; Process Modeling Introduction There is currently wide recognition in business that organizations benefit from taking a process perspective [1]. This has the following advantages: ● External delivery focus rather than internal organization ● Allows end to end optimisation, rather than local optimisation within a department or function, which does not itself ensure success overall ● Creates better opportunities for monitoring, benchmarking and service improvement ● Identifies opportunities for reduced overheads, better communication, reduced resources - thereby reducing costs Service Orientation and Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) have also been touted widely in recent literature [2] as having major advantages, including: ● Increased flexibility ● Increased agility in meeting new requirements rapidly ● Reduced maintenance due to ability to reconfigure elements to meet changing requirements and to replace service implementations with little impact to overall processes