Chapter 4 Building Business Process Diagrams

Data (BPM)

A data object is a piece of information exchanged, at a high conceptual level, between processes using flows or between processes and resources using resource flows.

A data can be created in a choreography diagram with all Analysis languages (except BPMN).

Data is used in conjunction with a:

Flow or resource flow – to identify the type of data exchanged between processes or between a process and a resource.
Message format – to identify the type and the format of data exchanged between a resource and a process or between processes.
Process – to identify the type of action (Create, Read, Update, and Delete) the process performs on the data required for its execution.

The same data can be shared by several flows, message formats, or processes, but only once each.

You can specify a type for data and link it to an object in order to identify the nature of the piece of information exchanged. Data can be decomposed into sub-data.

Data has no graphical symbol, but you can display a list of data on the flow and resource flow symbols (see the "Customizing the BPM Environment" chapter).

Business data can be analyzed in more details in a Conceptual Data Model (CDM), a Physical Data Model (PDM) or in the class diagram of an Object Oriented Model (OOM) (see Linking data to an external model object):