Criticizing BPMN

 I like BPMN. We used it in a Start-Up company to align processes globally and we also used the documentation for training. I agree that the complexity is high if you claim to design perfect processes which could be used e.g. for process automization but it is also possible to reduce complexity by using the most common elements only (at the beginning) . In our project we only used the most common elements for documenting core processes of the company. And we were surprised that even people who never heard about BPMN before were able to read the documentation and to understand and use it. BPMN could be learned step by step - even if you are not an autodidact. 

Wow, there's a lot of steam in the discussion and not only because it was Friday :-) But it is an interesting read.

Without the philosophical detour ("we're become a more technological society") and attitude, I think any standard is better than none. I also agree with you that BPMN is too complex, but this is something that can be fixed - and I disagree that we have to have backward compatibilty - (like you do). The problem I see here is that the discussion is dominated by techies and not regular folks.

That means that unsuccessful constructs should be retired in major versions of the spec and standard patterns implemented in the tools (as ARIS fragments "out of the box"?). In addition to that there should be some fall back mechanism for different user roles, for example by creating different views of the same model based on the user role. It doesn't make sense IMHO to have a "level 1" model (and I am using Bruce Silver's classification here) and then two more models for the various other states (analytical and technical).

There should be some cleverness in the tool that shows the simplified version to business users and a more complex diagram to the advanced users, so that you don't have to maintain multiple versions of a model in one release cycle. This should work similar to the layer functionality in graphics programs like the GIMP/Photoshop. AFAIK no BPM tool can do this as of today :-(

Hi Stephanie,

really interesting report, because many people would expect that being startup and doing BPM doesn't fit. Of course, it is the other way around, because startups usually have very limited resources and must optimise their back office processes as much as possible. Here, a standard notation and free tools come in handy I guess.