High-Level
Questions
Technical
Questions
High-Level
(business) Questions
What is BPMN?
The Business Process Modeling Notation
(BPMN) is a graphical notation that depicts the steps in a business
process. BPMN depicts the end to end flow of a business process.
The notation has been specifically designed to coordinate the
sequence of processes and the messages that flow between different
process participants in a related set of activities.
Why is BPMN important?
The world of business processes has changed
dramatically over the past few years. Processes can be coordinated
from behind, within and over organizations natural boundaries.
A business process now spans multiple participants and coordination
can be complex. Until BPMN, there has not been a standard modelling
technique developed that addresses these issues. BPMN has been
developed to provide users with a royalty free notation. This
will benefit users in a similar manner in which UML standardised
the world of software engineering. There will be training courses,
books and a body of knowledge that users can access in order to
better implement a business process.
Who is BPMN targeted at?
BPMN is targeted at a high level for business
users and at a lower level for process implementers. The business
users should be able to easily read and understand a BPMN business
process diagram. The process implementer should be able to adorn
a business process diagram with further detail in order to represent
the process in a physical implementation.
BPMN is targeted at users, vendors and service providers that
need to communicate business processes in a standard manner.
What does this mean for UML users?
The unified modelling language (UML) takes
an object-oriented approach to the modeling of applications, while
BPMN takes a process-oriented approach to modelling of systems.
Where BPMN has a focus on business processes, the UML has a focus
on software design and therefore the two are not competing notations
but are different views on systems.
The BPMN and the UML are compatible with each other. A business
process model does not necessarily have to be implemented as an
automated business process in a process execution language. Where
this is the case, business processes and participants can be mapped
to constructs such as use cases and behavioural models in the
UML. Further white papers will follow on the mapping between these
techniques.
Will there be a major rewrite?
Not for 2 or 3 years�
Technical
Questions
What is the relationship between BPMN
and BPEL?
BPEL is an XML-based language for describing
a business process in which most of the tasks represent interactions
between the process and external Web services. The BPEL process
itself is represented as a Web service, and is realized by a BPEL
engine which executes the process description. BPMN is a standard
set of diagramming conventions for describing business processes.
It is designed to visualize a rich set of process flow semantics
within a process and the communication between independent processes.
It is intended to support capture of sufficient detail to allow
it to be the source of an executable process description. Since
BPEL is currently considered the most important standard for execution
languages, a translation to BPEL is specified in the BPMN standard.
By design there are some limitations on the process topologies
that can be described in BPEL, so it is possible to represent
processes in BPMN that cannot be mapped to BPEL. There are a few
concepts, such as Ad-Hoc sub-processes, that BPMN can represent
that may not be implemented with any technology.
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