BPEL for Process Modeling

Of course, as varied as they may be, there are reasons organizations are succumbing to “BPEL for modeling”. Below I have provided a couple of contributing factors and misconceptions that I have witnessed:

• The budgets for the SOA/BPEL project were requisitioned by IT and they did not plan appropriate time from the business community for process modeling.
• The processes are believed to be “IT processes”, and business process modeling is not needed.
• Processes change, and the cost to maintain both business and BPEL models individually will be high.
• BPEL modeling is “good enough”. Besides, nobody looks at business process models after they are initially designed.
• And the most common: Initially, structured business process modeling was followed, but it was not kept in sync with the BPEL model [for a variety of reasons] and the two diverged.

The list goes on. However, the fact remains that BPEL is a business process execution language, not a modeling language.  Not surprisingly, using it for modeling has serious implications.

• For organizations that did initially set out to perform business process modeling separate from BPEL, only to later diverge, the reality of what is being executed (BPEL) compared to what was agreed/communicated is now also out of sync.  It could be argued that this is worse than never modeling in the first place.  
• For the places that decided to just go ahead and model using BPEL, their models are generally not easily understood by the business, or even people in IT that don’t understand BPEL. They certainly don’t put the organization in the position of easily documenting, updating, and communicating/disseminating process information.
• And for those of you who still think your IT processes do not need to be documented clearly for the business to understand, you will someday.

So, put the BPEL hammer down for a minute, back away from it, and take a look at BPMN and other business process modeling options.  [Sincere Plug] But, if you are stuck with BPEL for modeling processes, procper is the only tool that will allow the business to wrap their arms around the processes you have modeled.  procper is the tool of choice for communicating and disseminating your process  models, regardless of the languages/tools chosen, including BPEL.