This statistic is not a bad thing.  The fact that BPMN can be useful to so many people without requiring a complete understading of every element of the standard is indeed a great indication of the relevance, simplicity, and flexibility BPMN provides.  Some feel a lack of training contributes to the average model consisting “of just 9 different symbols”, which suggests that people “need” more than they actually use.  That may be the case, and if it is, as BPMN becomes more commonplace, more of the vocabulary will certainly be utilized broadly.

So, perhaps the article would have been more concretely titled “How much BPMN do you acually use?”, which is precisely the time-sensitive, practical information that vendors, organizations, and people can use in determing the maturity of their own BPMN efforts.

Though we are not a typical BPMN “software vendor” in the way that Michael zur Muehlen refers, we are indeed faced with understadning the most important and critical features users take advantage of while modeling business processes.  Supporting multiple specifications as we do requires a huge effort, helped only by educated prioritizing on where to spend our energy.

Following is part of the chart you can find at “How much BPMN do you need?” showing the most used elements from BPMN. Thank you, Michael zur Muehlen, for sharing your findings.

BPMN Construct Usage

The objective of BPMN is to support business process management for both technical users and business users by providing a notation that is intuitive to business users yet able to represent complex process semantics.

Specifically, BPMN sets out to integrate business process with technology by providing an approach that allows for mapping to process execution language like BPEL (Business Process Execution Language).  As technology becomes engrained in every facet of business and as business processes become engrained into technology solutions, BPMN finds itself in a uniquely well-positioned environment.

Future plans for BPMN are to further define this “notation” and turn it into detailed specifications.  This will, of course, help minimize the gaps between the varying  interpretations of BPMN that exist today. Software vendors will have more clarity when conforming to the BPMN standard, allowing for faster development turn-arounds as well as easier and intuitive integration.

Given its unique positioning, existing uptake and momentum, and active continuous improvement, BPMN has a fair number of variables in its favor as it works to become the de facto BPM standard.