I had an interesting hallway discussion with a SAP integrator who mentioned that SAP sort of starts from this view, but then weirdly feeds back in on itself. On

I had an interesting hallway discussion with a SAP integrator who mentioned that SAP sort of starts from this view, but then weirdly feeds back in on itself. One of the ideas of SAP is that business processes do have the kinds of pluggable, formalizable patterns you mention, which can be modeled within SAP. And the official idea is that you go from documenting these processes to formalizing them in code. But then over the years SAP's code starts to become a sort of de-facto framework for "this is how you run a company", and people actually start patterning business processes on how SAP models business processes.