Business processes and the BPMN approach
In this first section, we are going to explain in more detail what business processes are and how we can model them with a software approach, using, in particular, a norm called BPMN. Before talking about processes in the IT world, it is indeed interesting to come back to the definition of a process from a purely functional point of view, as we always do in this book about business/IT alignment.
What is a business process?
A business process is a coordinated set of human and automated actions realized to reach an objective. The term “process” is often replaceable by the almost equivalent “workflow”, which better expresses the fact that the actions (or “tasks”) are actual work that is being done by a human actor or a piece of software and that they are realized in an organized stream (the “flow”) to achieve the business goal that the process aims at.
As explained in the introduction...
