Bridging the Language-Action Perspective and Organizational Semiotics in SDBC

Achieving an adequate business-software alignment should include capturing essential aspects that concern the studied business reality as well as reflecting them in the software specification. This concerns semantic and pragmatic aspects, such as meanings, intentions, negotiations, commitments, and obligations, whose appropriate consideration is beyond the capabilities of current software design methods which focus just on formal language structures and data records. Organizational Semiotics allows for an adequate consideration of essential semantic aspects in conducting a business process modeling. The Language-Action Perspective is capable of grasping pragmatics on top of that. Some examples of combining LAP and OS have demonstrated benefits when conducting business process modeling, for the purpose of further specification of software. To further this work, it is necessary that LAP and OS are incorporated in a modeling framework which integrates business process modeling and software specification. The SDBC approach applies the LAP and OS theories, in order to address the business-software alignment challenge. They support the business process modeling in SDBC, which results in the identification of re-usable business process models and their mapping to software specification, in consistency with the current software design standards. Thus, it is feasible to expect that a LAP-OS combination could bring value to the current application development, in the context of the approach SDBC. In this paper, we further elaborate our SDBC-driven views on how LAP and OS can be combined for a sound business process modeling which builds a foundation for software specification.