A Practical Approach to Process Design
One of the problems process patterns have is that they are confused with other software patterns. Object-Oriented (OO) software development benefited greatly in 1995 from the 23 patterns defined in the seminal book by Gamma, et al. Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software. Each of the OO patterns they defined came with a clear explanation of the pattern’s intent, motivation and known uses. OO software developers now could stand on the shoulders of giants.

Since then, software developers and architects have benefited from other types of patterns including software messaging, graphical user interface (GUI) design and application architecture. This rich history is both good and bad news for the adoption of process design patterns. As with most good ideas, the bad news is that over the last 10 years, patterns have at times been over hyped as a cure-all. Fear crept in because OO, software messaging and application architecture patterns are esoteric and intimidating to those of us not already well versed in these fields.

The good news is that 10 years experience has proven that there can be context specific practical pattern solutions to recurring real world design problems. Unlike other technologies - process design patterns are relatively simple to understand, learn and apply immediately. Most business analysts experience the learning curve shown in Figure 1 when using patterns to model business processes.