Recently, a number of people have been asking me about “BPMN”. Since it is one of the more useful initiatives being progressed in the open standards field I thought it was worthwhile providing a brief explanation.

The Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) is a graphical notation that depicts the steps in a business process. BPMN depicts the end to end flow of a business process. The notation has been specifically designed to coordinate the sequence of processes and the messages that flow between different process participants in a related set of activities.

BPMN was developed by Business Process Management Initiative (BPMI), and is now being maintained by the Object Management Group since the two organizations merged in 2005.

The primary goal of BPMN is to provide a standard notation that is readily understandable by all business stakeholders. BPMN is intended to serve as common language to bridge the communication gap that frequently occurs between business process design and implementation.

So, BPMN is a useful standard way of communicating regardless of whether you are a professional business analyst (BA) who is creating and refining processes, a developer responsible for implementing processes, or a business representative who ultimately manages or performs the processes.

The BPMN and the Unified Modeling Language (UML) are compatible with each other. The UML takes an object-oriented approach to the modeling of applications, while BPMN takes a process-oriented approach to modeling of systems. Where BPMN has a focus on business processes, the UML has a focus on software design and therefore the two are not competing notations but are different views on systems.

To find out more go to the official BPMN website, http://www.bpmn.org