BPMI.org

[Simon Brown]

I'm about to spend the next month writing up a research paper for my Diploma in Management Studies, focused on BPM. I have used BPMN already to great success in communicating our investment planning process, however, in getting to the final result I explored the use of IDEF0 modelling and quickly ground to a halt! It seemed far too cumbersome for the task, and that's when I went onto Amazon and found Smith & Fingars's book on Business Process Management which was an enligtening read. I since found the BPMN specification, a free Visio template and I was off and running, and the work I've done now lends itself perfectly to writing up in my last piece of coursework. BPMN is a standard that I'd like to see adopted in our organisation, as we're currently being rolled out with Opentext's Livelink - next steps involve defining workflows, but for the purposes of being ready for BPM when it hits the mainstream, I see BPMN as being the most appropriate modelling tool.

In an attempt to start backing the argument, I was wondering if anyone had come across any research papers weighing up the user friendlinesss of process modeling using BPMN as opposed to IDEF0 or UML?