Suppose you want/need to improve performance across your enterprise. As you pursue organizational excellence, there are many improvement models, standards, and approaches available. Each might help with part of the business, or address selected compliance requirements, but using several separately can be expensive, confusing, and ineffective. How can an enterprise reap the benefits of the knowledge in a bewildering variety of standards and models? How can this be done efficiently and effectively?

How should information be organized? Better yet, how should it be organized for innovation? 

As BPM takes hold, organizations are finally beginning to acknowledge the need for a common language for process description, something that allows a broad base of users spanning departments, geographies – both business and IT – to look at a process diagram and understand what it says.  And in BPMN, the business process modeling notation standard from OMG, we finally have near-unanimous acceptance from tools vendors of what that language looks like. 

Version 1.x of the standard is supported by the majority of BPM Suite vendors as a front end to process implementation tools, as well

With the wide range of available tools on the market today together with the large number of white papers, articles and books on BPM, determining the correct solution for your organization can be daunting. With so much emphasis on the effectiveness of BPM tools for improving productivity, streamlining the value chain and gaining competitive edge, it’s easy to get caught up in all the hype and end up with a much more sophisticated and expensive solution than the business really needs.