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A recent ebizQ question «What is the most important question to ask when starting a BPM project?» collected a record number of responses. Peter did not specify the role - which side asks the question? Since the majority of active participants (writers) are BPM vendors or consultants, they proposed the question as if they were asking a potential clients. The majority agreed that the most important questions are about the context, objectives and metrics of success of the BPM project and I totally agree with this.

But let us turned back to ourselves: what is the toughest question a potential customer can ask a BPM vendor?

For me, the most difficult question is “Where is the money?”

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It was stated in the previous article that from BPMN perspective the top level process analysis deals with process families rather than processes.

Unfortunately BPMN doesn’t provide tools for modeling such things. Analysts resort to IDEF0 most often, I prefer DFD - but anyway it’s no good that we have to use two notations.

So I draw DFD diagrams with BPMN palette. It looks like this:

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Not a Process Yet

Following up the previous post - may we call a business processes things like “Oil Mining” or “New Product Promotion?”

Once again, the answer depends on the context. In BPMN they aren’t business processes, definitely. From BPMN perspective business process is a specific sequence of actions initiated by a specific event and ended by some specific result.

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Everyone knows what a business process is. Yet it’s difficult to find two people agreeing on the term. Should they look in a book for the definition? But there are are dozens of different definitions.

We must face the fact that there is no universally-accepted definition of a business process and probably newer will be. Hence it’s no use to develop the true definition and I won’t do that. I’ll try instead to explain what do I mean by the term “business process”.

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