I’ve found topics to be more interesting if I can apply them to something or someone I’m familiar with. If a relative has cancer, I’ll listen more intently to news items about cancer treatment. If a friend is moving to Mexico, I’ll think about international events in a slightly different light. I call it the “relevance factor”. We each evaluate information against our own personal scale to determine what to do with it. If we can find some frame of reference for or application of it, we’ll pay attention and store it for future use. If not, we’ll dismiss or ignore it.

Say I am a business manager at an insurance company and my job is to recruit insurance agents. These agents in turn meet the insurance needs of their customers and build their own customer base. If an agent does well, the company does well. With a finite amount of recruiting dollars available, I need to be able to make the best decisions on where to focus my recruiting efforts.

Among the numerous virtues of BPMN, foremost is vendor independence, giving process modelers many tools to choose from, all describing processes using the same shapes and semantics. That’s huge, since without low-cost (or even free) tools you’ll never establish a culture of process broadly throughout the business. Occasionally, however, a student in my BPMN training will ask the embarrassing question, “So that means I can take the models I create in this class and import them into the BPMN tool we use in our company…