Business Process Management (BPM)

The Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) is the new standard to model business process flows and web services. Created by the Business Process  Management Initiative (BPMI), the first goal of BPMN is to provide a notation that is readily understandable by all business users. This includes the business analysts that  create the initial drafts of the processes to the technical developers responsible for  implementing the technology that will perform those processes.

A second, equally important goal is to ensure that XML languages designed for the  execution of business processes, such as BPEL4WS (Business Process Execution  Language for Web Services) and BPML (Business Process Modeling Language), can be visually expressed with a common notation BPMN is a core enabler for a new initiative in the Enterprise Architecture world.

BPM is concerned with managing change to improve business processes. BPM is unifying the previously distinct disciplines of Process Modeling, Simulation, Workflow, Enterprise Application Integration (EAI), and Business-to-Business (B2B) integration into a single standard.  The fact that Business Process Management is a new initiative might lead you to believe that business processes have not been managed previously. This is of course  not true – many organizations have modeled and managed their business processes for years, using an eclectic mixture of tools and techniques.  

These techniques have only been partially successful, or failed outright, because  there has been a lack of standards and a complete lifecycle to control and guide the  design and execution of business processes. Managing the process of change cannot  be an ad-hoc process – it requires management to exercise control over the discovery, architecture, design, and deployment of processes. For management to understand the architecture, design, and deployment of processes, you need business modeling and business execution language standards.