Now, is there a notation for business modeling which meets the requirements on the previous page?

The following are notations for business modeling which are actually used in the field of practice.

In many cases, the notation for system engineering has been adopted for business modeling. This is partly because the modeling of the target area is carried out at the early stage of system development project (requirements definition step), and mainly because there is no choice but to "borrow" from the field of system engineering.

As samples of current notations for business modeling, the features of flowchart, BPMN and UML are summarized in the following sections.

Flowchart is almost the only business process notation which is widely recognized by the business persons at the present time. Thus it holds the place of sole standard notation in the business community with its long history.

The notation of flowchart has influenced the subsequent variety of notations. Many of the components of the notation has been inherited, such as representation of flow with squares and lines and diamond symbols for conditional branch.

※Example of flowchart

• Flowchart is widely recognized in the business world. Also it can be said that flowchart is the best in terms of intuitive understandability coupled with its simple notation.
• Flowchart is capable of roughly representing the means of business process by symbols, such as by hands or by information systems. These symbols allow users to recognize the execution means of the process visually and intuitively to some extent.
• Needless to say, flowchart is a technique to represent the process, not for the static structure. In addition, flowchart is not capable of representing the business factors like product line-up, sales amount, profit, cost and time required of the process.
  

BPMN is a notation for representing business processes which has been published by the US non-profit organization BPMI (Business Process Management Initiative) in 2004 and is currently managed by OMG (Object Management Group).

BPMN is based on various existing notations, and it is basically an extension of conventional notations.

BPMN, as a method specialized in representation of the process, has been achieved several enhancements for representation of processes and events, such as Timer Event (representation of start time or start timing), Message Event (representation of start-up which is triggered by the messages reception) and Compensation Event (rollback).

These detailed enhancement has been done mainly in order to improve the adaptability for generating the workflow management system from the BPMN model.

※Example of BPMN

• BPMN has been developed by OMG, an industrial association, and now gaining a position as a standard of business process notation.
• BPMN (Business Process Modeling Notation), as its name suggests, is a notation which specializes in process representation, and, as well as flowchart, is not capable of representing the static structure, such as functional structure of the company, customer segments, product line-up and organizational structure. Therefore, BPMN is a notation which is suitable to represent the local processes and workflows rather than to model the large-scale domain.
• BPMN has many similarities with flowchart, but, different from the flowchart, execution means (manual, information systems, etc.) cannot be represented visually with its base specification. Therefore, BPMN is inferior to the flowchart in terms of representation of HOW of processes.

UML is a standard notation for the analysis and design for system engineering. The specification of UML has been managed by OMG (Object Management Group), a technology standards consortium. Since the first edition was formulated in 1997, several revision has been carried out, then standardized by ISO (International Organization for Standardization) in 2005.

UML offers 13 types of diagrams, and suitable and necessary diagram can be adopted according to the nature and purpose of the information systems and programs.

UML does not penetrate the business field, except some cases in which non-object-oriented diagrams such as Activity Diagrams and Use Case Diagrams are used in the requirements definition process of the system development project.

※Example of UML

 

 

As we have seen so far, many of the notations for business modeling are originally for the system engineering, and those have disadvantages and drawbacks respectively by their very nature.

Biz_CAD provided by BizArchitech Corp. is a platform dedicated to business modeling, and offers following features.

• Biz_CAD pursues the ease of understanding for all the business people including executives, managers and field workers based on its simple notation, graphical icons and animation features.
• Biz_CAD is capable of representing the wide range of 5W2H + α of business, including organizations, products, time, sales, cost, execution means, customers, information systems, business risks, etc.
• Biz_CAD represents the static structure and functional structure of the business, as well as the business process and business flow.
• Simulation and monitoring features of Biz_CAD support the BPR/BPM projects.
• Biz_CAD is based on the object-oriented technology, and enables the smooth inheritance of resultst of the business modeling to the system integration projects, including its Java source code generation feature.

What are business modeling tools?