Before you can run a business process you have to design it. Various techniques are used for capturing and documenting business processes, but many people find it easier to think 'visually' at the design stage and use some kind of graphical design tool, which can vary from the proverbial 'back of an envelope' hand sketch to the use of sophisticated business process design and modeling software. There are various proprietary graphical drawing conventions aimed at business process design, but the BPMI (Business Process Management Initiative) has been working on a standardized graphical notation for representing business processes called BPMN (Business Process Modeling Notation) and this is now supported by several of the business process tool vendors. BPMI has recently approved BPMN at version 1.

The factoring of message exchanges which make up business process interactions into transactions is a business process design issue. Choreology participated in the development of BPMN to ensure that it was possible to use the notation to show transactions, and the possibly different paths the business process follows depending on the outcome of the transaction. The result of our involvement is that BPMN can indeed show transaction boundaries and, via an attribute in a process shape, the type of mechanism used to achieve confirmation and cancellation.

We believe that further work could be done for a future revision on the representation of distributed transactions; that is to say, the representation of transactions between different parties to a business process.