Wednesday, February 28, 2007

TO BPMN or NOT TO BPMN

As the interest into BPM is growing quickly these days, the new buzz-words and notification language is becoming hot topic. As the market is trying to push BPMN as business process modeling language, I’m wondering if this not again will lead towards to technical focused orientation of BPM.
The goal of real BPM is to enable business people, to have again control over their processes and not only from a documentation point of view, but also from real execution. Would it not be great that the designed business process model is directly understood by the BPM-engine and can be executed without any code translation? This would give all business users a real view of the business process status and will allow them to react if needed.
What will happen if we force people to use BPMN? Do we have to teach everybody this notation language? I believe this will scare of some people and make it more complicated than needed. Where is the pragmatically and no-nonsense approach?
BPM Notification should be understandable and readable by business users, and make sense to their environment or way of working. Everybody knows that one picture is saying more than one thousand words, so use self explanation notification.

1 comment:

George said...

I have recently been reading up and getting a clearer overview of BPNM. If the goal of BPMN is for business people to have control of their processes from documentation and execution why is this being touted as the standardization for business analysts (who are supporting the business and usually IT focused). If this is for business users it may be great to view this but not necessarily good for them wanting to create the notation. This will be left to supporting consultants of the business unless BPMN takes a different path.