Before we can get our hands dirty, let's introduce the BPMN standard and its goal: In the past, IT infrastructure relied on a model where it was humans who drove the business process and only the business data was stored, while any knowledge on how to work with the data, the business process, remained with humans.

For example, when a client wanted to open a bank account, they filled out an application form and a bank employee performed and overlooked the processing of the application. Hence errors could have sneaked and the processing could have been flawed due to human error easily.

With BPMN, you can capture such business processes. This BPMN representation of business processes provides common grounds for business people on the one side and programmers on the other: unlike code, the business people can understand the visualization, and check and analyze the process and programmers can work directly with the process, execute, test and fine-tune it.

Process in BPMN notation

You can find information on BPMN and GO-BPMN, conservative extension of BPMN, as well as related mechanisms in the GO-BPMN Modeling Language guide.

Proceed to Introduction to LSPS.