This paper illustrates at a high architectural yet practical level what a business analyst can accomplish in decomposing a process in manageable steps of a workflow, enforcing B2MML messaging to assign measures, hence value, to the process itself.

1. Business Process Modeling. The goal of Business Process Management (BPM) is to describe, execute and monitor the activities performed by businesses to optimize and adapt their processes. Where Business Process Reengineering (BPR) seemed to be more suitable for one-off changes to an organization, the more articulated BPM deals with the continuity and embedding of process orientation in the organization. In 2000, an effort of standardizing this approach was made by the Business Process Modeling Initiative (BPMI), now formally part of the Object Management Group (OMG, who also define very famous standard such as UML). The effort was to create a graphical notation, in a flowchart form, that can be used by business analysts to represent a business process in a visual form. The standard Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) provides businesses with the capability of understanding their internal business procedures in a graphical notation and gives organizations the ability to communicate these procedures in a standard manner. In practice, organizations often start with an objective where management has identified an area for improvement. A project team is tasked to perform Business Process Mapping and use of a common technique such as BPMN to depict the processes as they exist before the intended changes. The team will progress to identify desired changes in work practices which will often be implemented by another team, using different approaches (i.e. Kaizen, Six Sigma, etc.). [explain BPMN core elements] The process definition describes the behavior of a business process in terms of sequences of activities. An activity or task represents a step in a process, such as sending a work order to a production line (a system or a person). [BPMN simple example using Visio or similar]

2. Business Process Execution. BPMN diagrams can feed an execution engine that understands such notation and runs them in the form of executable flows (such as BPEL or XAML instructions). This solution has widely been adopted by many solutions providers (i.e. Microsoft BizTalk, IBM WebSphere, Beeond BPE). [BPEL] The Business Process Execution Language for Web Services (BPEL4WS or BPEL) is a way to represent a business process as an XML document, where BPMN (like UML) is a notational language. A BPEL files contains the encoding of the definition of a process, including its main activities, partner links, correlation sets, variables, and handlers for events and exceptions. [example of a BPEL file, based on the BPMN example]

[XAML] XAML is a declarative XML-based language used to define objects and their properties, relationships and interactions. This language is the core serialization format for the new Microsoft .NET framework 3.0. Microsoft wanted to create a format to enable users to avoid the constraints imposed by focusing on a single standard (e.g. BPEL lacks human workflow and sub-processes). Their Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) is capable of supporting multiple standards and to better represent human workflows. [ example of WF/XAML based on the BPMN example]

3. Business Process Monitoring. Some constraints might arise from the integration layer, where all the key performance indicators of a business process need to be gathered from the production environment. Leveraging B2MML based messaging, especially in the newly proposed version V04, will exploit such constraints allowing a more sustainable deployment of business process models and execution systems, reducing the time and cost of data mapping, name and numbering conventions, regulatory compliance, testing and deployment. An extremely compelling example comes from the Production Performance structure in the B2MML set. Let's see how the standard models and runtime systems described above can use the Production Performance to report key performance indicators to the system and across process activities. [Example B2MML/ProdPerformance using BPMN models and XAML execution].

Conclusion and references.