But how do we get BPMN to generate processes that you can execute and manage, if there’s no path to implementation?

Based on the BPMN specification alone, how can you say “take the billing information I received in this order and send it to accounting using this activity?”. How do you say “do this credit check activity because the order value is over some pre-defined limit?”

I need help, because I can’t find that in the spec.

There’s a lot more that goes into the process definition than goals and objectives. How you manage orders depends on what inventory can do, or how accounting runs. Your business process in practical terms is the back-ends, and the data you store and more around, and the services you call, and the UIs you provide. You can model anything, but the only thing worth modeling is something that actually routes an order through all these systems, involves actual employees, delivers actual products.

And you need a way to express that. Enter service definitions, data and message types, conditions and transformations, UI forms and tasks, and so forth. How useful is a process definition that can’t capture that?

From there on, my post suggest four ways to solve the problem. Ignore it exists. But then there’s customers and their business reality. Do only BPEL, but I happen to think BPMN is much more interesting to our target audience. Re-invent all these solutions again in BPMN. Or find a path to execution and make sure one steps lead to each other.

I see BPEL as a means to an end, as a path from BPMN to actual execution that we can use right now. Why re-invent if you can reuse?