Business process modeling

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Business Process Modeling (BPM) is the activity of representing both the current ("as is") and future ("to be") processes of an enterprise, so that the current process may be analyzed and improved. BPM is typically performed by business analysts and managers who are seeking to improve process efficiency and quality. The process improvements identified by BPM may or may not require IT involvement, although that is a common driver for the need to model a business process.

Change management programs are typically involved to put the improved business processes into practice. With advances in technology from large platform vendors, the vision of BPM models becoming fully executable (and capable of simulations and round-trip engineering) is coming closer to reality every day.

Business Process Modeling plays an important role in the business process management (BPM) discipline. Since both Business Process Modeling and Business Process Management share the same acronym (BPM), these activities are sometimes confused with each other.

Modeling language standards that are used for BPM include Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN), Business Process Execution Language (BPEL), Unified Modeling Language (UML), and Web Services Choreography Description Language (WS-CDL).^[1] Other technologies related to business process modeling include model-driven architecture and service-oriented architecture.

BPM addresses the process aspects of an Enterprise Business Architecture, leading to an all encompassing Enterprise Architecture. The relationships of a business processes in the context of the rest of the enterprise systems (e.g., data architecture, organizational structure, strategies, etc.) create greater capabilities when analyzing and planning enterprise changes. For example, during a corporate merger it is important to understand the processes of both companies in detail so that management can correctly and efficiently identify and eliminate redundancies in operations. Business Process Modeling has always been a key aspect of business process reengineering (BPR) and continuous improvement approaches, such as Six Sigma. BPM tools such as Holosofx and TIBCO are used in order to represent a business process, to run a simulation of the process and for communication purposes.

[edit] References

[edit] See also

• Business Process Management
• BPMN
• BPEL
• Unified Modeling Language
• Domain Specific Language
• Model Driven Engineering
• Process architecture

[edit] External links

• Business Modeling Forum Business modeling community web that includes information about business process modeling specifications, tools, and publications.
• Why Combine Business Process Reengineering with Object Oriented Analysis?
• Business Process Modeling and Standardization