The practice of improving corporate performance by managing and optimizing an organization business processes. Related life-cycle activities include: design, modeling, simulation, analysis, execution, monitoring, optimization, re-engineering, and continuous improvement.

The practice of representing organizational activities, and their cross-relationships, by dynamic interacting activities; with the objective of documenting, comprehending, and automating the majority of such activities. BPM requires prior business analysis and the presence of an agreed business model to start with. Business analysis involves the discovery of existing activities, manual and automated processes, tasks and procedures, activity owners and role players, and any known issues or deficiencies. The business model is more than a hierarchic organizational chart. it is about the ownership of activities and the multidimensional (matrix) roles that members of the organization perform. Business modeling also involves identifying qualitative and quantitative business policies and rules.

BPMN is the current universally accepted graphical notation for modeling business processes, which may be conceptually considered a successor of OMG's UML "Activity Diagrams." It is represented in XML so that models could be exchanged among editing/diagramming tools and execution platforms. BPMN is convertible (transformable) into an executable code that also adopts XML: WS-BPEL (Business process Execution Language for Web Services), standardized by OASIS. BPEL XML markup contains embedded object-oriented code, maintaining XML as a universal messaging structure that encapsulates executable code fragments, and hence the standard is programming language agnostic.

A BPMS is a software system that either accepts BPMN model files and transforms then into an executable set of interacting processes, or presents a generic solution to a class of related processes (e.g. Procurement, ITSM, IT Governance, etc.) that can be customized to meet the customer's specific functionality requirements.

• - ITSM ITIL (ISO 20K)
• - Information Security Management (ISO 27K)
• - Quality Management (ISO 9000)
• - TM Forum eTOM