C H A P T E R  7

Business Process Mapping

If you can’t describe what you are doing as a process, you don’t know what you’re doing.

—W. Edwards Deming

A lot of what we have been talking about so far is concerns mapping the information for a web site. We have mapped the navigational structure and we have mapped the content structure. What we have not done at all is map (or ‘model’) any type of flow. Information is not static, it doesn’t just sit there. Information has to be created, it may change over time, it may move (change locations), and it may be archived or deleted at some point. In order to understand everything about our data, not just where the information lives or how it is structured, we need to be able to map the data flow as well. Fortunately, there is a well-established body of knowledge on how to map these flows called business process modeling (BPM).