The Business Process Management Initiative (BPMI) developed a standard notation, the Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN). The primary goal of BPMN is to provide a notation that is readily understandable by all business users, from the business analysts that create the initial drafts of the processes, to the technical developers responsible for implementing the technology that will perform those processes.
Another goal is to ensure that XML languages designed for the execution of business processes, such as BPEL4WS (Business Process Execution Language for Web Services) and BPML (Business Process Modeling Language), can be visualized with a common notation. Each of these execution languages is equally relevant to BPMN.
The BPMN business process diagram
The Business Process diagram of BPMN can be used in a very simple manner to model business processes, and at the same time offers the expressiveness to model the detailed behavior of complex processes.
To model a business process flow at the simplest level, you simply model the events that occur to start a process, the activities that get performed, and the end results of the process flow. Business decisions and branching of flows is modeled using gateways. A gateway is similar to a decision symbol in a flowchart. You can also optionally place the events and activities into swimlanes or pools that denote who is performing a process. A swimlane typically represents an organization and a pool typically represents a department within that organization (although you can make them represent other things such as functions, applications, and systems).
You can model more complex business processes such as business-to-business web services, by introducing message flows and data objects into the process, and specifying detailed behavior for gateways.
Core element set for BPMN business process diagrams
This section summarizes the core set of elements you use to draw basic business process flows on the BPMN Business Process diagram. Each section provides a link to a more complete set of elements of each type. The core element set for the BPMN Business Process diagram is as follows:
