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There are several approaches on how to model a business process in software applications (BPM software). For instance, a processes can be described in BPMN, EPC, IDEF0, SOMF, etc.

Additionally, different process execution languages such as BPEL, RPC, Wf-XML are available.

If I were to develop software for the BPM-market, which standards should I implement or focus on? Which standards are most suitable if my BPM software was going to be implemented in my client's IT-System?

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I don't mean to discourage you but you must have recognized that there are number of free tools already in the market, why another one? –  Emmad Kareem Mar 14 '12 at 10:35
True. However, this one is different in the sense that it will execute one ore multiple Knowledge-Based Engineering tools that are custom made for a specific engineering problem. The BPM application will act as a 'host' for these KBE tools. –  user1268690 Mar 14 '12 at 11:46
That sounds very cool. Good luck. –  Emmad Kareem Mar 14 '12 at 13:45
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If you are going for an Enterprise market, taking an approach similar to IBMs might be useful.

See Business process standards, Part 1: An introduction which includes a short section on the relationship between the standards and Business process standards, Part 2: How the standards are used in WebSphere products which describes specifically how IBM incorporates them into their own products.

There is also Modeling Standards Supported by ARIS which includes the standards they support and pointing out that each standard is focused for

different stakeholders.

I believe that the full answer to your question depends on who you want to pitch your software to. A BA likely to model the process at a higher level than an Architect, who will likely want to specify some implementation and possibly shares some interest in code generation with the developer, who probably cares mainly about the execution.

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+1 for identifying user roles and ARIS. –  Emmad Kareem Jul 1 '12 at 16:17
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