[Nottingham] OS Process Design

[Michael Erskine]

Be sure that your manager actually understands what he's doing when he
starts waving around the much abused term "industry standard". If
you're producing business processes (BP) then there's more important
issues than which tool does the pretty drawings (I use a pencil and
paper initially and then OpenOffice): I suggest that anyone interested
in BP take a look at Business Process Modelling Notation (BPMN) and
further at Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) for the OMG
standard notation and the OASIS standard language for Business
Processes Modelling. Adopting these standards allows you to do cool
things like "interoperate with the rest of the world" (something that
Visio can't help you do!) or, even better since the BPEL (and to a
lesser extent BPMN) is machine-readable, generate control code for
large asynchronous web services and Petri-Nets (see
http://www.bpm.fit.qut.edu.au/projects/babel/tools/).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BPMN
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BPEL

Regards,
Michael Erskine.