Glossary

An Abstract Process represents interactions between a private business process and another process or participant.

Abstraction is a technique for producing a high-level summarization or generalization of more complex or detailed topics or content.

An Activity is work performed by an organization using business processes. An activity can be atomic or non-atomic (compound). Types of activities used within Process Models include Process, Sub-Process, and Task.

Activity Cost Worksheets are a matrix that are used to analyze various costs of a set of activities.

An Actor is a normally used to define a physical or quasi-physical entity, such as a person, organization, or system.

An Ad Hoc Workflow System is a type of workflow system that waits on users to indicate what should happen next.

An Administrative Workflow System is a type of workflow system that tracks what individuals do and assign new tasks based on a defined set of rules.

Affinity Diagrams are a tool used to organize and present large amounts of data (such as ideas, issues, solutions, problems) into sets of logical categories based on their perceived relationships.

An Application is used to represent an operational IT system, which is providing functions and services needed by business users to undertake their processes.

An Application Platform is the collection of hardware and software technology components required to support applications.

An Application Platform Interface (API), sometimes also called Application Interface, is an interface between two or more applications and / or an application and an application platform. The Interface is the means of communication between application(s) and / or the application platform.

APM involves carefully managing and optimizing a company's collection of software applications to achieve specific business goals.