Jan Mészáros reflections on technology and society

Business process models with open-source tools and standards

Business processes are often described by workflow, which means a sequence of operations declared as work of a person, a group of people, an organization or staff, one or more simple or complex mechanisms [1]. From the analyst point of view, suitable visualisation is often needed for analysing, projection or presentation of workflow sequences. Programmer of workflow sequence needs an effective process notation in form of source code.

There are the XPDL notation standard (XML Process Definition Language) [2] and several tools, which supports this standard fulfilling all the needs mentioned above. Please follow references at the bottom for details on XPDL standard. Let's look on several XPDL tools:

• Enhydra JaWE: an open source visual editor for workflow processes definition written in Java. I have been successfully using this editor for enterprise processes analysis. This tool is available as paid "professional edition" which contains a lot of additional features.
• JPEd: a next one open source editor based on previous editor's source code. This editor offers basically quite the same functionality as Endydra plus some useful features in addition, e.g. PDF reports, plug-in interface and SVG graph outputs.

I will appreciate comments with your own experiences and tools used for business process modeling.

References:

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xpdl

[2] http://www.wfmc.org/xpdl.html