By Jason Bloomberg
If you’re an old consultant like me, when you hear the phrase ‘process modeling,’ you probably think of a group of people in a stuffy conference room, arguing over how the business does things while someone draws boxes and lines on a whiteboard. For hours and hours.
Such exercises were painful at best, and only modestly helped to achieve their primary goal of process improvement – although in many cases, what the business people really meant by improvement was automation.
Automation, however, belonged to the world of software, while process modeling was stubbornly human in scope. That room full of people were largely spinning their wheels.
The Rise of BPMN
That is, until XML came along. Today the idea is downright quaint, but the notion of an extensible markup language took the process modeling world by storm.
If we can represent a boxes-and-lines model as XML, so the reasoning went, then we could build software that could execute it – as though the XML representation of the process model were itself a computer program. And behold, all our automation dreams would come true.
Only that’s not what happened. True, the idea of an executable business process markup language rapidly matured, and in parallel, the notion of a standard process notation to go along with it. These two approaches – markup language and process notation – finally merged into the pièce de résistance of process modeling: The Business Process Model and Notation, or BPMN.
As of the time of writing, none of the organizations mentioned in this article are Intellyx customers.
