Standards

Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN)⁴, a deliverable of the Business Process Management Initiative (BPMI) standards body, is a workflow language used by enterprises for documenting their processes. BPMN is the graphical notation for representing a business process. Most of its notations cater to business users, who are comfortable with flow charts representing business processes

Business processes are elicited using process maps or workflows. Two main standards exist for capturing workflows. Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) is an XML-based standard for capturing process definition. BPEL, originally designed for orchestration of Web services, was later adopted by leading BPMS vendors such as IBM, Microsoft®, and BEA as the main standard for orchestrating any type of services or components. The current version of BPEL does not support manual activities, but new versions will. BPMS products that currently support BPEL have also added extensions to BPEL to support manual activities.