BPMN value proposition

BPMN has few obvious value propositions:

1. Common notations.
2. Depicts sequence of flow in an e2e process.
3. Identifies messages between various.

It is meant for the whole spectrum of business users both very high level and very detail oriented business process modelers. A set of business users can document their processes; starting from a broad set of activities and decision points to a detailed process definition which captures the intricacies of everyday business including specific details of activities, conditions of gateways, default branches, subprocesses, exception handling and so on.

This will ensure that businesses understand themselves and their processes, are able to document those processes in simple notation and identify the participants. This will ensure that the business can be agile when it comes to adopting new requirements both internal to the org as well as external.

Further it facilitates IT to capture correct business requirements - validate those requirements, understand and capture corner cases. The notation being business user friendly still retains its value.
Another advantage is being able to identify coarse business services which can be further mapped to actual IT services or a combination thereof.

To give an analogy it will do the same to business prcoess modeling as what UML did to software engg, WSDL did to service description.

more details at http://www.bpmn.org

BPMN and BPEL

BPMN is a standardized graphical notation for drawing business processes. The standard has seen considerable traction in the BPM industry. Several pure play vendors have now BPMN representations supported out of the box in the modeling tool. Evidently, the first version of the spec wants to standardize the business process modeling notation. The spec very wisely provides a direct mapping to BPEL for execution. This further adds in favor of close tie up between business processes modeling and loosely coupled IT infrastructure.
The BPD modeled using BPMN can be easily realized as a BPEL process. The BPEL process may not be syntactically complete but has all the semantic elements correctly captured. The business definition of the process is captured with sanctity and transparently provided to IT as a blueprint for implementation.

BPM + SOA = Agile business

There has been a constant need for closer alignment of software with business। Instead of locking all the business process logic in a bunch of programming routines, SOA facilitates disparate independent services that can be orchestrated to accomplish business goals. This paradigm also ensures agile businesses that can accommodate changing business requirements. BPM is now complemented by middleware technologies for agility, and within middleware BPM and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) lead the charge। BPM is an investment in future agility of the enterprise। BPM and SOA together define a new business and IT world, which requires driving innovation and agility based on existing IT systems. The new paradigm promotes loosely coupled IT systems, which replace tightly integrated, hard-wired packaged applications; inherent is the paradigm of business excellence rather than functional excellence. It is difficult for business to predict the future needs of modification of business processes and hence the requirement to keep the processes loosely coupled becomes even more important. IT across industry has been adopting rapidly to SOA. BPEL has become the defacto standard for web services orchestration and integration. It is layered on top of Web services and XML and different component building blocks. Most people are already working in SOAP, WSDL, XML, and XML Schema, and most companies are already moving toward XML-based integration.

BPM Terminology

BPM - Business Process Management, some people also use it for Business Process Modeling.
BPMN - Business Process Modeling Notation - A standard notation orgininally defined by BPMI and subsequently owned and released by OMG. Pl note it is just a notation and has no serialization. It does define a mapping to BPEL4WS.
BPEL - Business Process Execution Language - This is the OASIS standard for orchestrating web services to execute business processes.
BPMS - Business Process Management Suites - A term used for product (or a set thereof) that provides definition and execution of business processes.
BPDM - Business Process Definition Metamodel - A meta model proposal for serializing BPMN diagrams. It is in RFP stage.
XPDL - XML Process Definition Language

BPM - Demystifying Business

Business users and business process modeling mean different things to different people.
One the one end of the spectrum are business users who know their processes in their mind. On the other end of the spectrum are business users who have sufficient technology background and will to make their hands dirty with service definitions.
As for BPModel, again everything from a flow chart on a white board to a graphical representation in a tool is construed as a businesss process model.

Moving my BPM blog here

I am moving my BPM blog here!