According to a survey of the field by Wil van der Aalst, business process management (BPM) intersects management and information technology, and aims to provide techniques and tools to model business processes. Since a business process can mean any interaction between humans and machines, or even between machines in support of some business goal, BPM tools encompass anything from workflow management systems to Web service orchestration.

A BPM tool that recently received a major overhaul is BEA's AquaLogic BPM. According to Jesper Joergensen, manager of BEA's business process management product line, AquaLogic 6.0, based on Eclipse, is a completely new platform that will serve as the foundation for future releases. New features include,

A completely revamped user interface for process workers, now using AJAX everywhere. A tremendous improvement in look and feel, usability and flexibility... Watch your process inbox from your favorite news reader. AquaLogic BPM now supports RSS/Atom to syndicate process inbox items out to remote feed readers... Improved process intelligence with decision activities. The engine can now do correlations between human decisions and process variables to help support a decision in a current process based on past correlations. Dynamic business rules... Intuitive rule expressions can be modified at runtime by authorized business users...

What do you think of business process modeling tools? Do you believe that the current state of the art in BPM tools provides an effective way for developers and business managers to communicate about business processes?