For me, the most troubling part of the BPM Think Tank event was my roundtable on The Business Value of BPMS. The roundtable format was an open-ended discussion with 10-12 attendees on a specific topic, formulating a problem statement and then a proposed ideal future state. I expected a discussion about which of BPMS's putative benefits -- business/IT alignment, process efficiency, compliance, …
No I don't mean moblogging. More like "even my 79-year old Mom is into blogging." Not about BPM (that would be scary), but the more invigorating throw-da-bums-out-in-Washington variety. So over the weekend we both went to the YearlyKos convention in Las Vegas, where 1000 of the top political bloggers and their subscribers -- along with a surprising number of big-name politicians trying to grab …
Don't ask me how, but Ismael turned the hubbub over BPM vs SOA into a discussion of top-down vs "middle-out." Both threads (including comments) are semi-instructive, but somehow in the course of things he challenged me to come up with proof that top-down (i.e. BPM implementation driven from the business model) has ever worked. The challenge came in the form of a double-dog dare, with the promise …
I've been focusing a lot of my publishing and marketing -- monthly column, 2006 BPMS Report, BPMS training -- in the past year through BPM Institute, which is owned by Brainstorm, the conference group, and now I'm thinking about next year. Which BPM portal do you think has the widest reach, most interesting stuff, is best to deal with, etc? Take a minute to vote in the poll in the blog home page …
Derek Miers called my attention over the weekend to two posts from the SOA blogosphere suggesting "bad blood" between BPM and SOA, framing it as the latest proxy war in an age-old struggle between business and IT. I suppose Derek, who doesn't blog himself (yet), wanted me to point out how ridiculous this is (or at least embarrass myself trying). Anyway, I'm taking the bait. The original cherry …
Also summaries of the roundtables. Check out this from OMG.
Richard Brown, an IBMer from across the pond, blogged recently about BPEL4People and took issue with my contention that it was too grandiose and after-the-fact to achieve wide adoption as a standard. He tracked back to my original post in February, saying I'm increasingly of the opinion that standardisation often occurs too soon and that major revisions are a reflection that the initial specs fail …
As if we needed more evidence that BPM and SOA are uneasy allies, one of Steve Jones's SOA Anti-Patterns, widely praised in the blogs for their hilarious wit and insight, seems to me a perfect example of how some architects still view BPM's top-down approach as worst practice, not best. The "percolating process" anti-pattern is described this way:
The following is my latest column for BPM Institute: You can?t attend a BPM conference or webcast nowadays without hearing how SOA provides the critical technology underpinnings of BPM software. And there is even a grain of truth in that statement. For example, most BPM Suites provide integration adapters that can introspect backend systems and turn them into process components that are, in an …
Yesterday Gartner unveiled their magic quadrant for BPM Suites. For those unfamiliar with the format, it's a square in which the horizontal dimension represents "completeness of vision" and the vertical represents "ability to execute". Only BPMS products meeting Gartner's feature/capability checklist are eligible to compete. The evaluation is generally via a questionnaire and interviews and the …