In my view, BPMN 2.0 is an important milestone in a greater journey with in a trend. The trend is the connecting of models from a business domain with those from system development.
First: What is the purpose of BPMN?
- Description of as-is processes within a company and cross companies
- Using the models for subsequent system development. The model is the high-level specification.
- Execution of the model (for example in Appian Anywhere) – probably translation into another execution language like BPEL.
- Model driven development of systems.
If we want to reach and achieve the fourth step, it is clear, that the execution semantics must be clearer as before – unambiguous.
On the one hand it is required to have “soft” models in the description of as-is models and also shall-be models. This will be so in all future. But especially the connecting of business domain models with system models within a holistic model cycle is a new level of effectiveness that we set our hope to.
In my opinion, this hope is not in vain.
Furthermore a complete meta model is needed for model exchange. This is – in my opinion – overdue anyway.
Why do we model at all? We want to utilize and connect flexibility with quality. This is reached by transparency. Only by transparency it is possible to execute the needed quality assurance on this level. If this is connected with model execution or model driven development, this is even better. We have laid the foundations.
This sounds quite enthusiastic. However I am a notorious BPMN critic. Even now more than enough critics comes to my mind. However I am exhilarated what we have reached within the scope of BPMN 2.0. We have made enormous progress in some key areas. I will elaborate on this in further blog posts.