ProcessModeling.info

I’ve heard that most book projects never reach completion. After the first book is completed, most people either stop at one, or continue writing all their lives. As for myself, I’ve started working on book number 2. I expect a release date sometime around January 2009.

The next project is going to be a focus on process modeling patterns in BPMN. This is not exactly a new concept. I’ve seen a few other publications that touch on this topic, but I’ve found nothing that reaches the level of detail that will be in this book. As stated in the tag line of this site, complex things are only a combination of simple things.

Everything is made up of atoms. Atoms combine to make molecules, and molecules mixed together make up chemical compounds. In process modeling, the BPMN shapes are the atoms, and the basic patterns are the molecules. If I want some lemonade I need water, sugar, lemons, etc. When I go to a restaurant I don’t explain to the waitress how to make lemonade; I just ask for it. The point to this analogy is that I see most process modelers focusing on the technical accuracy of each and every shape, over and over again. There is a business objective to solve, but I see too much focus on the molecular level.

For the business and IT architecture to communicate effectively, it will take more than just a series of shapes. It’s going to take some standardization of the process modeling world. I’m not talking about a standard model for a financial services company or an insurance company. If this we had a standard model for every vertical market, a company would become a commodity that you could simply buy rather than building it up from nothing. In some ways we already have this today. If you buy a franchise, you are also buying the business processes that are used to operate the business. But for a large organization that is unique in its marketplace, a “process in a box” just won’t do.

The real solution to communicating in a process oriented way is to speak in terms that everyone can understand. In my analogy of ordering lemonade, I don’t give the recipe to the waitress and negotiate how much sugar should be added. I simply ask for it by name. I can also ask “is it the concentrate mix of was it freshly made?”.

From where I sit in the process modeling world, I can see that most organizations that work in BPMN have a good understanding of how to create a diagram. But we have not reached a point of being able to ask for things by name. For example, if I want a document to get an approval, this approval pattern can also be used somewhere else like expense approval. The pattern is identical – you just need to change the labels on the boxes and it works in both scenarios. So let’s put a name to it, and that way we can talk about it instead of drawing it every time we want to communicate.