One of BPMN’s most important elements is unfortunately also the most misunderstood.  It’s called a pool, a rectangular shape that serves as a container for a process.  So in that sense a pool is synonymous with a process, and that’s as basic as you can get. The confusion sets in when you understand that a business process diagram (BPD) – the top-level object in BPMN, describing a single end-to-end business process – frequently contains multiple pools.

Problems worthy of innovation range across the map from seemingly simple ones like the design of low-function objects (think tableware) to complex systems so multifunctional it’s hard even to know where to start. For complex problems, as you might expect, we usually insist on some kind of structure to work from; but for the “simple” ones, we almost never feel the need. Somehow it seems right to innovate within structure for a big problem, but its OK to treat lesser problems as one-shot idea generation exercises.

Let’s agree on a fundamental principle. Companies create value for customers and shareholders via the effectiveness and efficiency of activities or work which flows across traditional organization boundaries – often referred to as the firm’s cross-functional business processes. In order to optimize and sustain business process improvements it’s essential to overlay some form of governance that creates the right structures, metrics, roles and responsibilities to measure, improve and manage the performance of a firm’s end-to-end business processes.