Business process modeling: How CMMN and DMN complement BPMN

Abstract

The business world’s current markets are characterized by higher levels of competition, forcing organizations to adopt IT solutions that can provide them with a competitive advantage. Thus, they continuously search for approaches that can facilitate the development and maintenance of their Information Systems. To accomplish that, modern organizations increasingly focus on their business processes, as these are considered a main factor for their success. Organizations use a set of approaches to ensure greater control, flexibility and ability to manage their business, while aligning their processes with the organizational strategy. Among these, the hybrid process modeling approach, which combines the Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN), Case Management Model and Notation (CMMN) and Decision Model and Notation (DMN) to model business processes, is gaining momentum. This approach helps to define organizational processes in a more efficient, structured and realistic way, while making them much simpler. In this paper, we begin to explore the combination of the recent CMMN and DMN proposals with the widely used BPMN language, trying to understand the benefits that the integration of these three notations bring to the modeling of business processes.