Active Knowledge Modeling

Though BPMN has emerged as a dominant business process modeling standard, the jury is still out on whether it is suitable for business people. Even for IT people, some argue that the number of constructs you need to understand in order to build a process model is too large. Future standards for adaptive case management will require even greater end user participation in process modeling.  

Consequently, the requirements for a simple, robust, extensible, and flexible modeling framework are growing. Over the years, we have developed a few principles for making modeling languages simpler to use. These principles represent a move away from the prejudice that everything should be defined as classes, which so dominates OO and MDA.  

The results of applying these principles to BPMN 2.0 could be a reduction of its size by up to 50%. The resulting framework would also handle typical evolution scenarios better, by removing the need for a lot of type change of individual elements. Finally, it would better support complementary visualizations of the process, like the 12 different process views we described earlier.

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