Modern business can be very complex. To stay ahead and profitable in such a complex environment, a business needs to be able to change rapidly and to support innovations, expansions, acquisitions, and new partnering. Therefore, a deep understanding of the internal business structure, including business processes, rules, data and methods of the business's transformations are critical. The need for this understanding explains the significant growth of new markets, such as:                Business Process Management (BPM) which may be defined as modeling, simulation and improvement of business processes;        Business Process Transformation (BPT), the planning and implementation of new business processes and the enabling of models and technologies that represent significant change to existing business models;        Service Oriented Modeling and Architecture (SOA) which is the identification of business processes, services and their specifications;        Business Process Outsourcing (BPO), defined as the transmission of processes along with the associated operational activities and responsibilities; and        Application Security        
Frequently, companies do not have a clear picture of their business processes. These processes are hidden in volumes of documentation, legacy systems and individuals' minds.
Currently, a significant amount of dollars and resources are spent to understand the state of companies' business to develop further business process (BP) understanding and improvements. The work is often performed manually and may have an ad-hoc nature. The results of this type of effort may not be explicit enough and may also be unreliable due to the possibility of human error.
For the creation of business process definitions practitioners often rely on Microsoft® Visio® and other like tools that were not developed for this purpose. In February 2006, Object Management Group proposed a standard business process modeling notation (BPMN) for definitions of business processes. This new standard was a catalyst for multiple BPMN vendors and tools oriented on the definition and analysis of BP in terms of BPMN and including specialized editors. However, businesses have not widely adapted these tools and many prove difficult and unintuitive.
Today the business process transformation is mainly performed manually using multiple heterogeneous tools. Most of these tools are IT-centric. As a result, business process transformation is often complex, slow and inconsistent. There is a risk of losing essential business knowledge and destroying relations between key business artifacts.
Introducing new lines of business, new partner solutions, outsourcing, and B2B are difficult without integration of multiple business processes. Today, this integration can be time-consuming work that requires significant manual effort.
Implementation of business processes requires their integration with IT solutions. For SOA, as an example, a formal transformation from BPMN to business process execution language (BPEL) is needed. Similarly, an SAP™ implementation requires very clear definition of the business processes and business rules in order to map them to SAP modules and configuration parameters. The integration between business processes and IT implementation modules are often inefficient.
Globalized and distributed business process development require highly evolved collaboration environment. The BPM tools currently available on the market may support collaboration via repositories built on Client Server and Web platforms. This mechanism may create a complex protocol for accessing and updating the information.
While IT stakeholders are comfortable with using repositories, the business users may find them too complex and continue to use less disciplined tools, such as Microsoft® Outlook® and SharePoint®. This may slow down the collaboration process.
There is a need for systems and methods for business process modeling that overcome at least some of the issues present in conventional systems.