Statistics: (2675 Views) (0 Comments) Print Posted: Monday, December 03, 2007 Categories: Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN), Business Process Management (BPM)

Business process management (BPM) is an emerging discipline that looks at the enterprise in a radically new way. Instead of trying to automate and optimize individual functional units, like sales, supply chain, and customer service, in isolation, BPM views your company from the perspective of end-to-end cross-functional processes – exactly the way your customers and trading partners see you. At the same time, new BPM tools have emerged that let you model, automate, measure, and optimize the business from such an end-to-end process perspective. These tools straddle the traditional business/IT divide, and are elevating the importance of a new role in the organization, the Business Process Expert.

The Business Process Expert is neither a traditional developer nor a traditional business analyst, but is able to apply the concepts, metrics, and performance objectives of business in the analysis, design, and optimization of IT implementations capable of executing and monitoring cross-functional processes. Such a role demands a new common language that bridges the worlds of business and IT as well, and now we have one: the Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN), a standard from OMG.

BPMN is simple enough to be readily understandable by business, yet rich enough to support executable implementation – without changing the underlying metamodel! As a result, it has become the de facto standard or announced future direction of BPM Suite vendors ranging from Lombardi, Savvion, and Appian, to TIBCO, Oracle, IBM, and – yes – SAP. Thus, understanding how to model processes effectively using BPMN is becoming a must-have skill for the Business Process Expert.  Over the next several weeks, this six-part series will explain to the BPX community the unique features and benefits of BPMN; the notation and its underlying semantics; best practices for effective modeling with BPMN; understanding BPMN events; useful patterns for modeling exceptions; and more. In this first installment, we’ll look at exactly why BPMN is vital to the Business Process Expert.

Author: Bruce Silver