Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
BPM stage 2 - formalizing your new processes
When the business process, its owner, and the business goal have been identified, we can
start working in a formal, unambiguous representation of the business process.
Formalizing processes is done using a predefined language. The purpose of the language is
to be able to share the model with other people in a way that can only be understood in one
way, as long as other people understand said language. There are many languages that have
been designed over the last 20 years for this purpose; most of them are based on different
graphical representations to help people quickly understand the activities needed to achieve
the business goal.
When picking a language, you should always consider the ones that define the most widely
accepted standard to make sure that most people can understand it. In 2014, the most
widely accepted standard happens to be BPMN 2.0. We will learn the graphical representa-
tion and execution semantics of BPMN 2.0 in depth in
Chapter 3
,
Using BPMN 2.0 to
Model Business Scenarios
. For the time being, let's just say that it provides a widely accep-
ted formal language to represent processes that is not just implemented by jBPM6, but by
many other process engines. So, even if you decide to use another engine, writing your pro-
cesses in BPMN 2.0 would still be a good idea.
In this stage, business analysts trained in BPMN 2.0 will model the business processes.
They should choose the level of accuracy of the process representation, depending on the
time and information available for this stage. Since BPM is an iterative discipline, they can
improve on that accuracy in later iterations.
This stage is also a very good point to start testing our processes through simulations. By
determining the resources assigned to our process activities (people, time, and money), we
can predict in a statistical way which activities would consume the most of each resource
and plan ahead on assigning appropriate resources based on those simulations.
The resulting artifacts from this stage will be the formalized process with a graphical rep-
resentation that can be shared and understood by different roles in the company.
