Summary on the Process Side of Business Systems

We've taken a look at the process side of business systems. We examined how humans and applications work together to create what we call a business system, and we looked at some of the issues that make a system easier or harder to change.

The reason we did this is because the business systems that we have automated are all programmed representations of processes, as described here. How flexible they are, how hard they are to change, and how resilient they are to changes in their environment are all products of how their semantics were implemented.

We introduced two concepts, semantic precision and semantic veracity, as being central, but only just touched on them. They are part of a broader issue: How do we name things, how do we form categories, and how does this affect the systems we build? This is the subject of the next chapter, which is the bridge between semantic behavior and semantic data.