Piecemeal identification, development, and support of an organisation's processes may lead to problems: first, it may be difficult to identify which processes should be supported, and, second, it is unlikely that processes developed piecemeal will either optimise the achievement of an organisation's objectives, or work well together. One solution involves identifying and modelling an organisation's process architecture, and then using it to develop and subsequently support the constituent processes. However, this solution leads to a new challenge: a number of different types of process architecture method have been proposed, but it is not clear which should be used in a given situation. To address this challenge, the article outlines a framework for classifying, evaluating, and comparing process architectures. Following the work of Rolland et al.(1998), the proposed framework considers process architecture methods from four different views: contents, form, purpose, and lifecycle. To partially validate the framework, it was used to classify and evaluate Riva (Ould 2005), a particular process architecture method. The result of this application of the framework suggests how it might be refined. It could then be used for comparing other process architecture methods. Such a comparative analysis should help practitioners choose between process architecture methods.

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