How Much Language Is Enough? Theoretical and Practical Use of the Business Process Modeling Notation

The Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) is an increasingly important industry standard for the graphical representation of business processes. BPMN offers a wide range of modeling constructs, significantly more than other popular languages. However, not all of these constructs are equally important in practice as business analysts frequently use arbitrary subsets of BPMN. In this paper we investigate what these subsets are, and how they differ between academic, consulting, and general use of the language. We analyzed 120 BPMN diagrams using mathematical and statistical techniques. Our findings indicate that BPMN is used in groups of several, well-defined construct clusters, but less than 20% of its vocabulary is regularly used and some constructs did not occur in any of the models we analyzed. While the average model contains just 9 different BPMN constructs, models of this complexity have typically just 4-5 constructs in common, which means that only a small agreed subset of BPM...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: CAISE
• Authors: Michael zur Muehlen, Jan Recker
• Keywords: BPMN, BPMN Diagrams, Business Process Modeling Notation, CAISE 2008, Information Management