Essential Business Process Modeling

Designing a Solution

To design a good BPM solution, you must first step back and examine the project’s environment: understanding the problem, noting the local and larger-scale perspectives, and only then creating a design and testing your solution.

Understanding the Problem

To understand what a good solution looks like, you must first understand the scope of the problem to solve. The main requirement of a BPM application is the ability to design, run, and monitor and administer business processes that incorporate human and system interactions, described as follows:

Design

The design of a business process is intuitively a flowchart that outlines the steps performed over time in the resolution of a business problem. Unlike most object-oriented designs, whose audience is the technical team of a project, a process design is crafted and comprehended by both business and technical analysts . Business analysts are involved because they understand the business aspects of the process best; the design is simply a rigorous expression of what they frequently draw on paper or on a whiteboard. The level of rigor, plus the anticipation of implementing a software solution to the design, draws in technical analysts. Thus, business and technical designers require a common design notation that is at once business-oriented and amenable to computer processing. They also require a graphical editor in which to sketch their design.

Run

The early workflow engines that were actually able to run designed processes, ...