Watch Out for Oracle
This morning I trekked over the hill to Redwood Shores to find out what Oracle is up to in BPM. I came away impressed.
What's Wrong With This Picture - Part 3
Even though I made a point of not identifying the author in print, the creator of Figure 3 in my original What's Wrong With This Picture post takes me to task for not contacting him discreetly with my correction. Welcome to the blogosphere, my man. Anyway, he posts his own correction, basically repeating my explanation.
But if the guy were really engaged, he would have noticed that images 4, 5, and 6 are also his bogus examples. So to accelerate this thing, let's just post the answers here so we can move on to more interesting stuff.
What's Wrong With This Picture? Part 2
Last week I posted several examples of illegal and nonsensical BPMN that you can find online in popular free tutorials and BPMN tools. If you believe that the notation is too hard for business analysts to use, you might consider instead that widely propagated disinformation such as this is mostly to blame. Of course you can teach people to use BPMN effectively, including the part where it represents the biggest advance in process modeling, handling of business exceoptions.
Back to Blogging
I've discovered (the hard way) something that experienced bloggers learned long ago. Blogs attract "real" (i.e. paying) work, and when the blog starts to take off, you suddenly don't have time to do it any more. But you just have to make time. So I will, and I'm back.
More on eClarus and Class 2 Roundtripping
Re yesterday's post, Yi Gao of eClarus wanted to get this image in his response, so I'm posting the following note on his behalf.
From Yi Gao, Oct 13, 2006:
In eClarus Business Process Modeler 1.0 that was released in June, we could translate the BPMN models with synchronization links. We had some samples that show the capability even though we did not explicitly categorize the models in our website.
The simply structured BPMN models defined as Class 3 can be translated to ?readable BPEL? using context-free pattern matching. The technique is similar to computer language parsing based on a finite number of production rules. However, with synchronization link, the context-free pattern matching is not sufficient.
Let me use the following diagram to explain.
Summary of IBM's BPM Announcements
Yeesterday IBM briefed analysts on their latest round of BPM and related "business services" announcements, all part of their broad push on SOA. They start with a message we can all nod our heads about: Services are the building blocks for business processes. But connecting the dots is not that simple.
BPMN and ITIL
Recently a BPMS Watch reader wrote with some questions about modeling ITIL processes in BPMN. ITIL is an industry standard framework for managing IT services. It describes a number of interrelated business processes, including Change Management and Release Management. These processes are linked, but not in a one-to-one correspondence - one release does not correspond to one change - and it thus provides an interesting real-world example of the 1:N problem in BPMN, which I also call the batching/debatching problem.
Intalio Expands Open Source BPM
Intalio, which calls itself the Open Source BPMS Company, yesterday announced the donation of a BPMN modeling tool to the open source community, and tomorrow plans to add a "BPEL4People-based" workflow framework. The BPMN modeler, donated to the Eclipse Foundation, is now available under the Eclipse Public License (EPL) and is part of the SOA Tools Platform (STP) project. This follows Intalio's donation of its EMF model comparator to the Eclipse Foundation earlier this year, and complements the PXE BPEL Engine it previously donated to the Apache Software Foundation. Tomorrow, Intalio plans to announce the availability of its Tempo workflow framework under the open-source Apache Software License. The project is hosted by SourceForge. Intalio describes Tempo as an implementation of the BPEL4People proposal from IBM and SAP last year,
IPO for Lombardi?
Last week an item came up on ComputerWire called "Lombardi Gears Up for IPO." Wow, did I like doze off and somehow wake up back in 1998? OK, revenue is up 200% over 2005, but Dataquest reports 2005 software revenue at $18 Million, so since when do $50 Million software companies do IPOs? Maybe that Bubble 2.0 thing is real.
I think IPO is an unlikely exit for Lombardi's investors - as well as for Savvion and Appian, the other two private BPMS pureplays in the same revenue and growth ballpark - but even a minor buzz about BPM in the financial pages is great news, because it shows the BPMS idea is really beginning to take off.
But still I felt obligated to at least contact Lombardi and ask if it was true. Here's what I found out from the unnamed official in his secret undisclosed location.
Step Up to Full BPMN
[This is next week's BPMS Watch column at BPM Institute.]
When you get started in BPM, the first step invariably is documenting your current, or as-is, process. You can gather the facts from process participants and process owners in a variety of ways ? in a group, putting yellow stickies on the wall, or in separate interviews. But eventually you face the challenge of reducing that collected knowledge into a structured, semantically precise yet intuitively understandable, diagram ? a process model.