A taxonomy of business process modeling and information systems modeling techniques

Modeling always has been at the core of both organizational design and info rmation systems (IS) development. Models enable decision makers to filter o ut the irrelevant complexities of the real world, so that efforts can be di rected toward the most important parts of the system under study. However, both business analysts and IS professionals may find it difficult to naviga te through a maze of theoretical paradigms, methodological approaches, and representational formalisms that have been proposed for both business proce ss modeling (BPM) and information systems modeling (ISM). This paper sets o ut to put an order to this chaos by proposing an evaluation framework and a novel taxonomy of BPM and ISM techniques. These findings, coupled with a d etailed review of BPM and ISM techniques, can assist decision makers in com paratively evaluating and selecting suitable modeling techniques, depending on the characteristics and requirements of individual projects.