Part 1: SOA developer skills announcement

Part 2 (this part): Business process modeling 

Many organizations start their SOA initiative with business process analysis. Focusing on business first allows IT architecture to be derived from the business and, allows better alignment between IT and business. Analyzing business process provides an opportunity to optimize the business process and evaluate the impact of a business change on IT. 

Like you model software as a software designer, you model business processes as a process modeler. In addition to simply modeling business processes, you may also be called upon to simulate business processes and create reports of simulation results. You may be asked to derive IT architecture from the business model. For example, as an architect, you may decide that certain parts of the business process will continue to run in mainframe, others will be implemented using J2EE platform and yet others will be implemented by calling a third party service. You may also have to survey the existing IT systems and find out which parts of business process are already implemented within the organization. You may have to analyze the process for inefficiencies and suggest optimizations to achieve specific business goals (e.g. reduce cost).

To analyze a business processes, you have to model them. Business process modeling has been standardized using Business Process Modeling Notations (BPMN) specification available here. The BPMN notation is to business process what UML is to software. And like UML, BPMN is owned by Object Management Group (OMG) group. Like UML (but fewer), tools are available to model business processes, some use BPMN notation and some don't. Tools that use BPMN are eclipse plugin as part of SOA Tools Project (STP), Intalio Designer, and Microsoft Visio BPMN stencil.  Commercial tools such as BEA AquaLogic® BPM Designer also support BPMN. 

Tools that don't use BPMN notation but still provide modeling capabilities are IBM WebSphere Business Modeler (WBM). Oracle does not use BPMN in its BPM designer but makes a Visio stencil with Oracle support available through its partner. Netbeans does not seem to use BPMN notation in its designer. 

A UML model is typically turned into executable code (e.g. Java). Similarly, a business process model is turned into executable code called BPEL and deployed in an execution environment. The executable version of the process must follow WS-BPEL specification. In other words, like Java and UML are different specifications but Java is typically generated from UML, WS-BPEL and BPMN are different specifications and it is often expected that WS-BPEL will be generated from the business process model. As of this writing, Visio stencil (obviously) and eclipse plugin don't support export functionality but the rest of the tools do. Even the tools that don't use BPMN notation export their business process model as WS-BPEL.

Remember, business process modeling is as much an art as it is science. You need to know why you are modeling a business process, you need to ask the right questions to the subject matter experts to extract information needed to correctly model the process, you need to know which modeling notation to use to model a particular business scenario and you need to decide how granular the process model should be. 

Business process modeling tutorials are available here, here, here, here.