1. A) All activities of a typical business process are comprised of many roles.
2. B) An individual employee can be involved in just one role.
3. C) The title of that role is also written on the white board.

Now let us consider each of these possibilities in turn. Let’s assume that A is the leader of A B team and B is the C team. If the leader of A has taken a leave of absence, then the leading role in the business process would be occupied by the interim leader who has been properly trained and groomed to fill the role. Under such circumstances as this, the interim leaders, who will be functioning as partners with the leaders, must exhibit the skills that are required for the particular role, since they shall be expected to handle different and unique roles in A B team.

The second example deals with roles that do not necessarily arise until some time after the initiation of a process. Let us take the notion of an executive. This concept can be defined as someone who assumes the role of an executive (even if he does not have the formal executive office). This can be someone like a departmental manager or an interim head.

Now if we look at the example under the first alternative, we find that each of these swimlanes has an identity. These individual swimlanes have functions which are specified at their points of origin. The essential nature of each of these functions is expressed at the point of origin. Each of these functions has an assigned meaning or significance. Therefore, the individual who is playing the executive role, even though he does not have the title ‘departmental manager’, is still playing a particular role, which is related to his job description or definition.

The third example deals with the other concept of roles. This concept is called an actor’s definition. We can define the actor’s definition as something like this: there is a certain situation, and it is a fact that there is no such thing as the situation itself. This is an essential concept of modelling in any language. It is very important to note that the behaviour of individuals involved in any situation can only be described using the same language.

In conclusion, we find that the concept of roles in a business process modeling can be understood as representing the identification of discretely determined functional relationships among the entities involved. These relationships are characterized by external constraints on the agents’ actions. Theoretically, there can be a model in any domain. We saw some examples of this in the previous part of this article where Guizzardi was used to represent the requirement for data transformation.