Perhaps the most significant advance of business process management over its workflow and enterprise application integration ancestors is the integration of modeling with executable process design. Once strictly a standalone technology, process modeling has become a standard feature of BPM suites, which then go on to execute and monitor the modeled processes. By including a modeling tool in the suite, BPMS vendors give process owners on the business side a way to assert direct influence over the IT implementation.
Integrating modeling into the BPM suite adds something crucial. Instead of just creating a business requirements specification, modeling creates a skeleton implementation as well, including the key performance indicators (KPIs) monitored by the BPMS at runtime. By outputting results to the same management dashboard used for runtime manageme
