When we look at a business process, it's always from a certain perspective, a view of how a series of activities are performed in an organization. A picture is worth a thousand words, and when it comes to process elicitation, nothing beats a neat graphical representation.

Business communities have been using different techniques to graphically represent processes, mostly flowcharts. The critical problem, however, has been the explosion in multiple methods of representing a process, with business analysts and organizations both tweaking existing representations to suit their needs. This makes it difficult from an understanding and common approach perspective, especially when we look at processes as being key assets for an organization.

Another issue with some of the incumbent process modeling techniques and tools has been their inability to bridge the gap between the business and technology communities. At the business level, there is a need...