Statistics: (2445 Views) (0 Comments) Print Posted: Monday, December 03, 2007 Categories: Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN), Business Process Management (BPM)

In the first installment of this series, we saw why BPMN is important to the Business Process Expert. In this part, we’ll look at the notation itself.

In BPMN there are only three first-class diagram elements, or flow objects: 

• Activity, a rounded rectangle, representing work performed in the process 
• Gateway, a diamond, representing flow control logic, such as branching, splits, and joins 
• Event, a circle, representing a signal that something has happened, either outside the process or inside.

Each of these shapes has various subtypes indicated by an icon or symbol inside, or occasionally by border style. The color of a diagram element has no significance in BPMN.

 Author: Bruce Silver