What Is Business Process Modeling ?

"The boxes and arrows of outrageous fortune ...." When a business analyst stands at a whiteboard, sketches the flowchart of a business process as a cluster of boxes linked by arrows (apologies to Shakespeare), and asks the software team to make it run, Business Process Modeling (BPM)--sometimes known as Business Process Management--comes to the rescue. BPM is a set of technologies and standards for the design, execution, administration, and monitoring of business processes. A business process is the flow or progression of activities (the "boxes")--each of which represents the work of a person, an internal system, or the process of a partner company--toward some business goal. Over the years, the scope of business processes and BPM has broadened. Less than a decade ago, BPM, known then as "workflow," was a groupware technology that helped manage and drive largely human-based, paper-driven processes within a corporate department. For example, to handle a cla...