@jonerp (Jon Reed) kindly sends me a link to an article on the SAP community network website, Value Scenarios and the BPM continuum, discussing the requirement for semi-structured processes.
The author of the article, one Dan Woods of Evolved Media, places "processes automated and supported by BPM" at the "loosely-structured" point of the continuum, but he also talks about "more advanced and structured process design using BPMN and other such techniques"; I don't fully understand his taxonomy of processes, but he certainly seems to understand the need to support semi-structured processes as well as the fully structured processes described by Ann Rosenberg.
Dan's starting point is the SAP book written by Ann Rosenberg and others, but his own analysis goes a lot further. He picks up on a reference to the Geoffrey Moore core/context distinction (which CBDI Forum members will be familiar with - see link below), and takes this distinction to its logical conclusion.
Dan also makes clear his opinion that SAP doesn't currently support this continuum. "SAP's integrated story about BPM, SOA, and Value Scenarios will have to be extended to include more unstructured collaboration." Dan is not an official spokesman for SAP, although it's worth noting that his opinion article is published on an SAP website.
CBDI Forum, SOA Fundamentals (2009) - key extract from page 222
Richard Veryard, Towards the Agile Business Process (CBDI Journal July/August 2007)
Related posts: Activity-Based Computing (March 2006), Semi-Structured Processes (April 2009)
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