Those of you who have followed the threads in BPMS Watch on the BPMN-BPEL round-tripping problem -- keeping the business-oriented process model in sync with the executable implementation throughout the process lifecycle -- may have noticed a comment from Henry Yu of eClarus saying, essentially, we think we've solved this, check it out. So I did. Very interesting. Not solved yet, to my way of thinking, but I'd agree with Henry that eClarus leads the pack.
The company is a small startup in the Seattle area. Their mission statement is refreshingly encouraging: "Easy, productive collaboration among business analysts and IT architects for agile, well-governed development and integration." Their product is a BPMN modeling tool that generates BPEL, and can also take BPEL and generate BPMN. The latter piece, obviously central to the round-tripping idea, has been described by other vendors I talked to as "too hard" or "huh?", but according to eClarus, BPEL to BPMN is easy. It's the BPMN to BPEL that's hard, because -- as I've written before re my ITP-Commerce experience -- it's easy to draw things that don't map easily to BPEL.
Last week Lombardi Software announced that Cognos, a leader in business intelligence software, had OEM'ed Lombardi TeamWorks for use in a new line of "analytic applications." This action adds a new twist to the already-blurring boundaries between BPM and performance management/analytics that has been going on for a year or two. Performance management is one of the 3 legs of the BPMS stool (the others being analytical modeling and process execution), so it's no accident that BPMS vendors have been poaching on BI turf with features like process analytics, management dashboards, and BAM.
I had an interesting briefing today from Zynium, provider of a tool that maps Visio process diagrams to various BPMS environments, including Fujitsu, Appian, Software AG, and DST. Many BPMS and modeling tool vendors have developed their own Visio import capability, with varying degrees of success, and several of them are talking to Zynium as well. Doing it well is apparently harder than it looks. All these tools work essentially the same way, requiring the user to manually define a mapping between each Visio shape and a corresponding shape or widget in the BPMS modeling or design environment.
Can anyone help me understand how (or if) ESB fits in a BPMS? In the mountains of blather you can Google on either topic I can't find anything that makes sense about how the work together! In fact, the more I try to understand ESB the confuseder I get. For clarity, let's just consider BPEL-based BPMSs like IBM, Oracle, Intalio... Is ESB an inherent/invisible capability of these offerings (I think not) or something that can be added on in some implementations (I think so, but not sure)? What do you get with the ESB version that you don't with the non-ESB version?
There seems to be redundancy between what the BPMS provides and what the ESB provides, including integration adapters, data transformation tools and engines, and of course a BPEL tool and engine. So are they sort of the same thing (except for BPMS's "business-oriented" things like process modeling, performance management, and business rules that no self-respecting SOA Architect would be caught dead worrying about)? I don't think so.
It's good to see Workflow Management Coalition's Keith Swenson blogging now. Keith, whose actual livelihood is as chief architect of Fujitsu's BPMS, has done heroic service over the years in advancing BPM standards consistent with the WfMC reference model, such as XPDL, ASAP, and others. His recent post "Workflow is Back" reflects the irritation of many who are continually forced to watch BPM startups tout their "invention" of functionality that has existed in workflow products for over a decade, followed by lavish praise from industry analysts too young to know better. He also notes that all major workflow offerings have long provided application integration in addition to human tasks -- how could they solve real problems if they didn't? His major beef, though, is over vendors' wholesale abandonment of the term workflow in favor of BPM, when there is in fact little or no distinction between them -- implicitly validating the contention that "workflow failed" as a software technology. Being an engineer, naturally he blames it on "marketing fluff."
Virtually all the modeling notations and tools I know, including BPMN, as well as executable process design tools (both workflow-style and BPEL-based) follow the activity flow paradigm, i.e. like a flowchart or UML activity diagram, in which the flow is generally in one direction. Moreover, to create a valid executable process diagram, many (including the BPEL language itself) exclude arbitrarily looping back to previous steps in the diagram.
But for many real-world processes, particularly those characterized as "event-driven", that no-loopback rule doesn't work. They are better modeled as "business state machines," similar to a UML statechart diagram. Nodes in the diagram are not process activities but states of the process instance. In each state, the process listens for various events, which trigger a specified action (process activity) and transition to a new state (or back to the same state). The triggering can also be conditioned by a rule. This event-condition-action (ECA) paradigm is the hallmark of event-driven processes. UML provides a diagram to let system architects model them, but I don't know of any tools for process analysts to model them. Maybe the concept is too "complicated"?
My previous post just hit the low points. Sandy has a more complete writeup of the day's activities, which is mostly accurate. Kinda long, though, Sandy. Didn't have time to fin
BPM is about empowering people. It was co-opted by integration vendors, who took it down an IT-centric path. ? Connie Moore, Forrester. [Note: Forrester has separate analysts and ?waves? for human-centric and integration-centric BPM. Guess which is Connie?s?] The ultimate goal of BPM is self-aware processes that can recommend changes to process owners. ? Connie again. [Yeah, I hear businesses asking for that all the time.] Portability of process templates was never a goal of BPEL, just interoperability [i.
If it were anyone else but Ismael Ghalimi, I would have simply muttered "idiotic" and moved on without a second thought. But when a guy at the top of my BPM hero list declares that "nobody cares about BPM" any more, my actual reaction was dismay and mild depression. The apparent basis for Ismael's loss of faith: the fact that Google Trends shows searches on "bpm" have declined since 2004, while searches on "soa" have gone up!
OK, to me that reasoning does seem idiotic, while to those who have moved to a more Googlicious orbit it probably carries the aura of Delphic certainty. And, to be honest, I'd probably be heartened myself if searches on "bpm" were on the upswing, even though, as Lombardi's Jim Rudden points out, to most of the world bpm still means "beats per minute" - I searched just now and the number one listing is about "DJ culture and the electronic music lifestyle."
In a followup piece, Ismael tries to put on a happier face by saying BPM is probably still tainted by 1980s Hammer-Champy baggage, but could be made "cooler" if, following the suggestions of Dion Hinchcliffe and Sandy Kemsley, it took on the personality of an "enterprise mashup." Dion's article is kind of interesting, but it's not about processes I recognize from today's BPM mainstream. If I were an entrepreneur or VC looking at new opportunities, I'm sure I'd see mashup-style BPM as a more attractive idea than conventional BPMS today, but not because nobody cares about BPM. (Actually, if you're reading this and have no idea what an enterprise mashup is, you're far more likely to be a potential BPM buyer than someone who does!)
[my latest BPMS Watch column on BPMInstitute.org]
The annual BPM Think Tank, now in its second iteration, is an event I?ve been looking forward to all year. Unlike most BPM conferences, which are generally aimed at helping newbies get started, Think Tank is a forum where experienced BPM vendors, analysts, academics, and user organizations come to discuss what needs to come next in terms of technical standards, software capabilities, and overall business value from business process technology. The event is hosted by OMG, the standards organization that last year absorbed BPMI.org, the original creator of the Business Process Modeling Notation -- the emerging standard for process modeling and, increasingly, for business-driven process design.
This evening, before the event got underway, a number of Think Tank leaders gathered in an informal dinner meeting to discuss a new proposal not even on the official agenda: a way to query running BPM systems about process performance, from the state of an individual process instance to aggregated metrics displayable in a management dashboard. The idea, variously called the Business Process Performance Management Interface or the Business Process Runtime Interface, would complement BPMN?s focus on process modeling and design.
