Combining Goal modelling with Business Process modelling

Two Decades of Experience with the User Requirements Notation Standard

Abstract

Goal modelling aims to capture stakeholder and system goals, together with social, intentional, and structural relationships, in a way that supports trade-off analysis and decision making. Goal models and business process models provide complementary and synergetic views of a system, which lead to a more complete understanding of what exists and a better description of what needs to be designed than with only one of these views. The User Requirements Notation (URN), standardized in 2008 by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU-T) with improved versions in 2012 and 2018, combines goal modelling with process modelling, while providing graphical and textual syntaxes for both views. URN helps modellers exploit the value of social modelling in the context of process design and improvement. In this paper, we report on nearly two decades of combined goal/process modelling with URN in different areas -- based on coarse-grained statistics from a literature review and the authors' personal experiences with URN. In particular, beyond the telecommunication services for which URN was created, we highlight applications to goal/process alignments, regulatory compliance and intelligence, process adaptation and improvement, value co-creation and service systems, and goal-oriented process mining, as well as several advanced modelling techniques. An overview of the tool-supported analyses (for satisfaction, alignment, compliance, and others) and model creation mechanisms (composition, aspects, slicing, adaptation, reuse, and others) is also provided. The last part of this paper focuses on important challenges and exciting opportunities for future research, especially in the areas of data-driven applications (e.g, AI/machine learning), socio-cyber-physical systems, and usable automation.