BPMN 2.0 : Business Process Model and Notation

The BPMN 2.0 standard specification was formally released in January 2011. This specification is the result of collaboration between companies such as Oracle, IBM, Red Hat, Intalio, and many others within the Object Management Group, to conform  a unified language to model and execute business processes.

The specification aims to reduce/eliminate the gap between technical business process representations and the fact that a lot of business analysts use flow chart representations to define how a company works. This gap can be eliminated using a standardized mapping between the visual notation of the business process and the execution semantic of the model. A business processes modeled using the BPMN notation defines the flow of data and the association of the data artifacts to business activities.

BPMN2 covers more than just the notation that needs to be used to draw our business processes, and the complete specification is divided into four sections that allow different vendors to be compliant with one or more of these four conformance types:

• Process Modeling
• Process Execution
• Collaboration Modeling
• Choreography Modeling 

e.g: A diagram that conforms to process modeling notation is shown below.