One of my last projects was for the Public Services and it felt that these people tend to live for business processes by definition. But while we went on with the project requirements, a team mate showed the whole team what he did for a former project with similar requirements. It was a single diagram done with the BPMN notation and it covered a pretty thorough picture of the requirements and process dependencies.
BPMN is not just another modelling language for Business Process Modelling but the one orgininally build for this purpose. It is less technical then UML, includes support for timed execution of process steps and can help to run a simulation of the whole process in a tool.
The book by Matjaz B. Juric and Kapil Pant is a good starting point to learn BPMN for your project and get the right focus to it. While chapters 1 and 2 introduce you to the need of a proper modelling technique for SOAs, chapters 3 and 4 explain the BPMN language in more detail, present all available constructs as well as patterns and advanced techniques for better use of BPMN. Chapters 5 and 6 complete the book by showing how BPMN could and should be used in SOA / BPEL projects.
Compared to the UML books on my book-shelf, this one is a refreshingly small, easy to read and quickly to understand and apply. If you are a highly technical person, you might be quickly bored, but with a less technical more process oriented background you can get quickly up to speed with those tech guys. Likewise both types of readers can reach the same level of understanding with a fairly easy modelling language and can better work in a powerful team.
Book Details
Business Process Driven SOA using BPMN and BPEL, Matjaz B. Juric and Kapil Pant, 311 Pages, ISBN 978-1-84719-146-5, Packt Publishing, www.packtpub.com
