|
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. |