Business Process Modeling: history and present
Business process modeling (also called “business process modeling”) is the technique by which a formal and explicit abstraction of a real business process of an organization is achieved.
A bit of history.
The origin of process modeling can be traced back to the 19th century when Gantt charts were invented in 1899 (source). However, the most important push came in 1920 with the introduction of the popular flowcharts.
The formalization of process models
The enormous ease of use and flexibility that flowcharts provide has a flip side. They are very informal. And therefore, they can lend themselves to misinterpretation, ambiguity, and are definitely very (or impossible) to automate using a process engine. For these reasons, several initiatives emerged in the following decades that tried to give a more formal framework to process models.
In the 1970s (among other initiatives), the Unified Modeling Language, or simply UML, emerged, which had great success and adoption among the business process management practitioner community. As its name implies, it was based on a set of unified rules for modeling different elements of reality, including processes.
State transition diagrams and activity diagrams are part of UML and were widely used. It is worth noting that they were oriented, and their main audience was computer scientists and people related to computer science. Business users did not adopt them, although it was desired.
BPML and BPEL: they wanted to and they could not.
The Business Process Modeling Language (BPML) emerged as a high-level initiative so that business users could actually adopt it and model their processes. It was not as successful as expected, mainly because it did not achieve mass adoption, and was deprecated in 2008.
It also emerged, with great potential and support from the world’s largest players (IBM and Microsoft among them), the Business Process Execution Language (BPEL). This language was mainly oriented to the orchestration of web services (in fact, its last version was called WS-BPEL 2.0).
And then came the world standard for Business Process Modeling.
After all these initiatives, a notation called Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) finally appeared and was widely accepted by the market. Clearly, the notation balanced the necessary formality with the desired simplicity. This near-perfect balance was the trigger for rapid adoption by the majority of the world’s process management practitioner community. Software Cloud BPM
So important was BPMN that it was adopted as a standard by the OMG and is currently at version 2. In other words, it followed the reverse path, which almost never happens; first, it was embraced by the market, and then it was a standard supported by a recognized organization.
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