Week One — Introduction to BPM

Introduction to Model Theory as taught in the BPM course

The form of model theory discussed in this course is based on a book from the 70s titled General Model Theory by Herber Stachowiak. This book is originally in German and has yet to be translated. You can find an outline of the book’s contents on this 2012 blog post: General Model Theory by Stachowiak.

First Assignment

I took a little bit of liberty with this first assignment (Google Drive). I extended a few of the events and parameters to represent some ideas which the model presented to me which I thought were interesting. First, I created nested boundaries which represent the bank and the customer. I then labeled a few of the obvious links such as the notion that a bank will advertise or promote a product. I showed this by labeling the link “advertises” from the bank to the customer between the bank’s products and the client’s chosen product. I found it interesting to consider which perspective to consider. Customers desire and chooses a product and Banks offer and advertise a suite of products.

At the event when an application is accepted or rejected by an employee, I thought it was interesting to consider that the employee is not making this decision based on their own reasons. Instead the threshold is set by the employer. Following this backward, I considered what quality does this threshold have? It could be a high or low threshold. And I imagined a low threshold might be offered by loan sharks. (UPDATE: How about a 99.75% APR for a risky loan?).

Finally, I extended the process to the customer’s reaction to the bank’s response. You may notice I didn’t make it clear which response the customer received, but I nevertheless introduced motivated responses which just came to mind. The Accept branch considers that you’ve been rejected and the customer “accepts” the rejection as no big disappointment, and points back to the advertising relation mentioned above. Who cares if you’re rejected if you’re just shopping? This assumes the bank has a high threshold. On the other hand the Deny branch starts with the assumption the customer was accepted, but they rejected the contract. Why? Because the APR was too high for their budget at 29%.

I think these additions highlight the fascinating capacity for a process to bring many ideas to mind.

BPM_01-First_Model(1)


Fig 1. First Assignment on Google Drive