This post is a transcript of my keynote at RuleML/DecisionCamp on July 8, 2016. I was surprised to be invited to speak here about DMN, because the inventors of DMN are here in the room but I am not one of them. While they were off inventing DMN, I was working in the related area of business process management, most recently focused on business process modeling using BPMN. But that background is relevant to my talk today because DMN, the new decision modeling standard from the Object Management Group (OMG), is now attempting to replicate the success of BPMN.
By:
Bruce Silver
December 30, 2016
dmn
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[Originally posted on IT|Redux]
This is my latest BPMS Watch column on BPM Institute.
One of the fundamental promises of BPMS was supposed to be improved business-IT alignment through model-driven implementation. We?re headed in the right direction but the tools and standards don?t completely support it yet. In preparation for the upcoming 2006 BPM Think Tank, a gathering of BPM poo-bahs contemplating the next round of process standards, I have a modest proposal for review.
[Originally posted on IT|Redux]
BEA?s acquisition of Fuego this week is a welcome validation of the BPMS market, but what a surprising way to go about it! Probably the strangest BPM acquisition since TIBCO spent big bucks on a workflow engine that couldn?t even receive a JMS message.
FuegoBPM appears to have already morphed lock, stock, and barrel into BEA?s AquaLogic BPMS. Not that FuegoBPM isn?t a fine BPMS, but it?s not based on BPEL -- wasn?t BEA a ?founder? of that standard? -- and you could argue it?s not even service orchestration, at least in the way most in the BPMS community understand it. For example, process activities in Fuego are not SOAP
[Originally posted on IT|Redux]
The world of BPMS is divided into BPEL-lovers and BPEL-haters, and the thing that BPEL-haters seem to hate most is that the OASIS standard "excludes" human tasks. How can you have a "business process" execution language that cannot accommodate human-performed activities? "Out of scope"?! Are you kidding?
Of course, if you're a BPEL vendor interested in selling to the BPM market, you have to integrate human tasks somehow, and they all do already. It's just that they all do it slightly differently. So last summer IBM and SAP -- two of the biggest BPEL-lovers -- proposed something called BPEL4People, an optional extension to BPEL 2.0 that would at last standardize human tasks in a BPEL process. They published a couple white papers on the subject (here and here), put out a press release, and then went silent. Essentially nothing has been heard from them since.
If BPM is going to be widely accepted as an instrument of business-IT alignment, it has some work to do. IBM developerWorks has an interesting monthly series in the context of SOA. In Part 2: How do I translate business needs into IT requirements?, IBM's panel of "visionaries" mainly seems to agree that the right starting point is a tool called Rational RequisitePro, which IT uses to gather business requirements that can later be fed into BPM modeling tools like WebSphere Business Modeler and IT modeling tools like Rational Software Architect.
Doug Henschen, my editor at Intelligent Enterprise, already has posted an interview with Gartner's BPM guru Jim Sinur, live from their shindig in Opryland. Jim makes some interesting points about the market, but the BPM bloggers on site (e.g. Kemsley, Taylor) seem to be most taken by Gartner's new BPM "maturity model." I'm sure it makes a great Powerpoint slide, but not sure I'm buyin' it. It starts off on the safe side: Most companies, he says, are at stage 1(modeling and measuring) or 2(tweaking and optimizing, using business rules).
I got a nice note yesterday from Paul Fisher, an IT exec at the FDA, on my BPM 2.0 manifesto. He was struck, in particular, by the line that said: "[BPM's] top-down design contrasts starkly with current SOA initiatives, which are bottom-up and IT-driven, and where the services exposed for composition are determined by IT's notion of enterprise architecture, not by process-centric analysis." He goes on to say, That's exactly what is going on here, and I'm trying to argue with people who are trying to build services simply to be able to say look ma, SOA!
IBM today unleashed a tidal wave of product announcements under the heading "SOA from a Business Centric Perspective." Details on individual offerings are still sketchy. This was mostly shock and awe: Surrender Earthlings, our technology is simply too vast and powerful... And it really is an impressive array of stuff. In addition to enhancements to WebSphere Business Modeler, Monitor, Process Server, and Integration Developer - all the components of the WebSphere BPM suite - IBM is throwing a bunch of new stuff into the mix.
[Originally posted on IT|Redux] Edwin Khodabakchian, the brains behind Oracle BPEL Process Manager, posts on a set of possible ?BPEL enhancements? suggested to him by Oracle?s application groups ? eBusiness Suite, PeopleSoft, Siebel? They include: 1. Business Process Outline ? ?Enable business analysts to build the skeleton of a business process, skeleton which can be then implemented by an application composer. The outline view also offers a foundation for self-documenting business process and audit trails.
[reprinted from BPMS Watch on bpminstitute.org] Two or three years ago, when I began speaking at BrainStorm BPM conferences, I coined the term "BPM 2.0" to refer to new tools that allowed "process without programming." That technology, featuring integration adapters that could introspect enterprise information systems and turn them magically into ?services? ready for orchestration in a business process, was the beginning of the convergence of SOA and BPM. Looking back now, however, I think a better term might have been BPM 1.
