Essential Business Process Modeling

The Morass of BPM

BPM is one of the most fashionable three-letter acronyms in software today. The field is known for having many competing vendors and standards, unusually named academic underpinnings, and a diverse set of potential users, from techies to business analysts, business architects, CIOs, CTOs, and CEOs.

The topic of BPM is profoundly simple to the beginner: the business analyst designs the process, the process is run by an engine, and the engine has EAI and human interaction capabilities. In practice, a morass of concepts, terminology, standards , vendors, and philosophies confounds the intermediate-level student of BPM who knows the basics but is lost in detail—and is also responsible for building a BPM-based solution. Which product to choose? Or is the right solution the combination of several products, such as a design tool product and an execution engine product? Which standard to build on? Which version of which standard? Are the standards too immature? Are the products themselves immature?

The goal of this book is to discover through the morass a system of thought that, like all good systems, depends on a small number of concepts. The medieval philosopher William of Ockham argued:

Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem.

(Entities ought not to be multiplied without necessity.)

Known as Ockham’s Razor , this aphorism implies that a good system is fundamentally simple. Reducing BPM to its essentials yields the following basic criteria:

• A good BPM architecture, ...