I've just finished up 4 new reports in my 2006 BPMS Report series: Lombardi TeamWorks, BEA AquaLogic BPM, EMC Documentum Process Suite, and Cordys Composite Application Framework. They should be going up on the BPM Institute website next week when the webmaster returns from vacation. The BEA report replaces Fuego; the others are new, bringing the total to 10, plus an overview report that explains …
When you're deep in a hole of your own creation, the usual advice is to stop digging. But Assaf Arkin is not a slave to such conventional wisdom. He took a sound hammering on the comment thread to his original IT|Redux post where he states that BPMN should just be the diagram for BPEL 2.0, but he continues to dig in hard and reaffirms that process portability demands a common execution language, …
Paul Harmon of BPTrends weighs in on a worthy topic, how many perspectives do we need to describe a business process? He acknowledges that while "alternative approaches" like Role Activity Diagrams or the Flores-Winograd interaction model used by Action Technologies are useful in special cases, most of the time it would be better to standardize on a more conventional workflow perspective such as …
Unlike Sandy, I'm not "totally speechless," but on balance pretty surprised by today's announcement that IBM is buying FileNet for $1.6 Billion in cash. It's really about enterprise content management, but there are BPM implications. The ECM vendor landscape has been consolidating for several years now. There used to be 3 top-tier vendors -- IBM, FileNet, and EMC -- so now there are just 2. …
Despite the inclusion of content management functionality in Gartner's checklist of BPMS must-include components, most BPMS vendors cannot even spell ECM. The few that can -- EMC Documentum, FileNet, Global 360, Pega, IBM -- generally had an ECM business long before they got into BPM. I've been thinking about it more lately as I finish up my report on EMC's Documentum Process Suite for the 2006 …
After I posted re the piling-on Assaf Arkin was taking on IT|Redux over insisting that BPMN belonged to BPEL, the man himself posted a thoughtful response on BPMS Watch. I was waist-deep in real work at the time and didn't have time to think through an appropriate continuation of the thread, so I dashed off a quick response by email. That began an interesting out-of-band conversation that, if …
[Here is my latest BPMS Watch column going up today on BPM Institute] One of the core promises of BPMS is that it lets process owners on the business side model, monitor, and maintain their own process implementations. While chronically backlogged IT is hypersensitive to the charge that they take too long to respond to the changing demands of business, it still resists ceding to the business the …
Normally when the Ayn Rand references start flying, I head for cover. But since Phil Gilbert's rant on the futility of foisting an SOA primer on naive business managers tracked back to my post on what BPM on SOA would look like, I guess I'm obligated to say something. Phil's nominal beef is with the mere idea of a book called SOA for Dummies, which commits the sin (in his eyes) of equating SOA …
While all BPMS vendors today mumble something about SOA, BEA Systems is one of very few that are making sense. They acknowledge that you can do BPM either with or without SOA, and that doing it without SOA is quicker and easier, but go on to say that as BPM deployments proliferate in the enterprise, doing it with SOA is ultimately better. And they provide software to do it either way. Quoting from …
BPMS vendors love to throw a bone to SOA, and if you weren't paying attention you might even think that BPM on SOA was real. I've written at length about how BPM and SOA aren't enemies but natural allies, but they are allies with distinctly different goals and aspirations and mental models of the world. Kind of like America and France. Following his post on the subject, I've been having a side …