Essential Business Process Modeling

BPM Acid Test: The Process-Oriented Application

Irrational exuberance about BPM might compel a vendor or customer to believe that BPM is the solution to all enterprise application problems. After all, BPM empowers the business analyst, who knows the application requirements best, to create a design or flowchart for the high-level logic. And after all, what is an enterprise application but a set of logic? The flaw in this argument is that the logic of a process is not its procedural implementation but its declarative dynamic behavior, or its change in state over time as events occur.

Many BPM vendors provide a graphical process editor that lets the end user design a process by dragging boxes and arrows onto a canvas. The drawing that the user creates looks like a program, but it is really a kind of state diagram for the process. A good BPM product makes it relatively easy to turn the diagram into an executable application; it is a matter of filling in the blanks. But this ease does not make the product the right choice to build all executable applications.

BPM is suited only for applications with an essential sense of state or process—that is, applications that are process-oriented . An application passes the BPM acid test if it is legitimately process-oriented. The travel agency application, for example, passes the test because it is best understood in terms of the state of the itinerary and is defined at all times by how far the itinerary has gotten. Other typical characteristics ...