Essential Business Process Modeling

Summary

The main points of this chapter include the following:

• BPM is replete with competing standards, but a sound architectural approach divides a BPM application into the right parts and selects the correct standard for each.

• The requirement of a BPM application is the ability to design, run, administer, and monitor processes that incorporate system and human interactions.

• Two types of architects benefit from this discussion. Product architects learn, at a high level, a good approach to developing a BPM product. Services architects learn the essential nature of a BPM product platform, enabling them to build good solutions on it and to educate their customers about this emerging technology.

• Design, the modeling of processes by business and technical analysts, requires a graphical notation language and a graphical design tool, such as ITpearls’ Process Modeler. BPMN is the best standard notation language.

• To run a process requires a runtime engine that can load designs and manage the execution of instances. However, there is no way to run a notational drawing; it is just a design artifact. A runtime engine requires an executable language, just as a computer processor requires programs that use the processor’s instruction set. To bridge this gap, a mapping from notational to executable language is needed. The design tool should offer an export option that uses the mapping to generate executable code. With respect to standards, BPEL is the best and most widely adopted executable language, ...