ABSTRACT
Chapters 1 and 2 have introduced the Kantian inquiring system. We described there Kant’s interests in understanding the elementary categories for human thinking and how these enable people to perceive reality. These pre-given categories are called analytic a prioris. Typical analytic categories mentioned by Kant are space and time (Hartnack, 1967), which are important for both natural sciences and management sciences. For information science some other additional key categories are task, resource, actor, sequence, and information. Without these categories it will not be possible to organize any kind of service. Many of these categories can be combined with a language for discussing and documenting services. Some of these languages are process analysis and design languages like ARIS (Scheer, 1998) and BPMN (White & Miers, 2008). Such languages are synthetic a prioris, i.e., combined a prioris. These a prioris or languages also have to be shared among the stakeholders involved. This implies that the business process modeling, as a process of integrating the different stakes, goals, objectives, and needs of involved actors, has to be well done before it is feasible to talk about what tasks and processes are needed for the realization of value propositions aimed at via the process models. The information systems and business process analysis disciplines have developed several languages for process modeling, and we follow Stabell and Fjeldsted (1998), who identified three languages for the modeling of business processes: value chains, value shops, and value process nets. After having introduced this classification of business process modeling languages, we describe each of them by examples in the following sections. Finally, we follow Kant’s interest in empirical observations via the construction of what he calls a posteriori propositions. This is realized in two ways:
By testing the quality of existing business processes and possibly identifying best practices
By integrating the expertise and insights of multiple actors in a business process to realize an integrated business process in reality, which thus extends over the insights of individuals
