The coolest thing I saw at Process World was definitely ARIS Process Performance Manager (PPM), specifically its ability to autogenerate the as-is model from instrumenting the backend systems that perform its activities. IDS CTO Wolfram Jost mentioned this in his keynote, and there were a number of comments about it in my Almost Live... post on Thursday. If you missed the thread, Marlon Dumas pointed me to an excellent academic paper on this technology, called "process mining," by Wil van der Aalst and colleagues. Others commented that it couldn't do magic, and Kiran Garimella did a strange riff on it as well. I obviously didn't explain it very well, because at that time I hadn't seen it. But now I have. It's not magic at all, and still I think very cool. And something Kiran might actually want to take a second look at for webMethods.
A recent client, Santa Clara County, asks that I post on the issuance of their RFP for a BPMS to handle the assessor department processes. A bit unusual, but why not. It's a nice project, a variety of human-centric processes with a bit of custom integration (Vignette, TurboImage database). Interested vendors should look for RFP#605 from www.rfpdepot.com.
I recently received an email from Danny Greefhorst of the Netherlands, who says in relation to my 2006 BPMS Report series: "your definition of case management seems to be very document-centric and to be quite different from interpretations I have seen in other places." He attaches a couple articles, also of Dutch origin. The note was timely, as I'm in the process of putting together my 2007 report, and item #1 on the list is revising my list of process use cases and their scoring criteria.
SOA analyst Beth Gold-Bernstein of ebizQ posts about her quest for a BPMN tool to support her effort, together with Brenda Michelson. to create a "service design method."
Our goal is to take a pragmatic business driven approach to incremental (ie ? project driven) SOA design and implementation. We plan to use standard modeling techniques and tools where ever feasible. The status of this project is that we have now defined the process and design artifacts, and our next task is to model out a case study and see if it holds water and to find the holes.... I argued that it was time for business and IT to start speaking the same language, and we should start off with BPMN right from the start.
She then describes how she downloaded Tibco's free BPMN tool and tried - unsuccessfully - to get it to do what she wanted. I had the same problem when I was looking for a hands-on tool for my BPMN training. Tibco, Savvion, various Visio stencils... the free ones just didn't do what I wanted, either. And my goal was simpler than Beth's -- it was just to explain how to use BPMN!!
Sandy calls attention to an excellent review of BPEL's history and current status from Oracle's Dave Shaffer and Manoj Das in (ironically) WebSphere Journal. Probably the best summary of the differences between the new BPEL 2.0 and the little-lamented BPEL 1.1 standard that I've seen yet in print. She also notes the seeming fakeness of BPEL4People, a joint SAP-IBM white paper that appeared 18 months ago that has achieved what I agree is the highest buzz-to-bang ratio in the history of BPM.
Forrester tries to shove BPMS offerings into pigeonholes: human-centric, integration-centric, document-centric, Microsoft-centric.... Yikes. That's bogus. Most BPMS vendors are trying to make their tools applicable across a broad spectrum of process types. But it's true that today each BPMS offering is probably stronger in some process types than in others. In my 2007 BPMS Report series, now getting off the ground, understanding this is fundamental to the evaluation methodology. If you want to get a sneak preview of the issues involved, including the views of a few other panelists, check out the ebizQ webcast Automated, Human-Centric, and Collaborative Processes next Wednesday March 7 at 2pm ET/11am PT, part of their BPM in Action event.
BPMS Watch invites you to join me at BPMInstitute.org's Business Process Management Conference, April 10-11 at The Drake Hotel in Chicago. As part of my participation in the event, I have secured a limited number of Complimentary 1-Day Conference Passes (a $995 value) for BPMS Watch readers. (Note: this is for the conference events, not the BPMN training, and there is some fine print to note at the bottom... but a great deal nonetheless.
Just received a note from Phil Gilbert of Lombardi, a key contributor to the BPDM effort in OMG, that says:
[I] wanted to let you know that the OMG Architecture Board voted to approve the BPDM spec today. There are actually 2 more small hurdles instead of 1 more as I told you earlier. But these are 99.9% certain to approve specs that have passed the Architecture Board review. Apparently these take several weeks calendar time as the boards that approve aren't on the TC calendar, they have their own.
In any event, it appears that a major milestone for the industry has been passed: a specification for a business process metamodel (as opposed to UML-defined process) is poised to achieve standards status and have the backing (and implementation) of process platform and modeling vendors. This will insure a standards-based way in which BPMN models can be exchanged, and both standards are driven by the same organization, allowing for unprecedented alignment. In fact, at this meeting, the next major version of BPMN is being discussed and it is expected that the focus will be on using that effort to merge the BPMN and BPDM specs, so that there will be one modeling spec, and that spec will have it's explicit notation and its explicit metamodel.
BPMN is the de facto standard for process modeling, but many leading modeling tools, particularly those incorporated within high-end business process analysis (BPA) suites, have so far been reluctant to adopt it. Now that appears to be changing. Recently IDS Scheer announced that ARIS, generally considered the leading standalone BPA suite, would be supporting the full BPMN notation in the v7.0.2 service release this spring. Announcement of BPMN support was tucked into their press release on new simulation capabilities based on Lanner's technology.
BPMS Watch is now one year old. While my posting schedule remains erratic, readership keeps growing (see Feedburner chart below). Feed readership is up 200% in 6 months and direct pageviews are up 40%, now 35K per month, plus syndication on several other sites. The Technorati ranking peaked several months ago around 60,000, and has since dropped to around 94,000. Since that's based on trackbacks from other blogs, I attribute the drop to the declining state of BPM blogging in general -- the conversation was considerably more vigorous a year ago than today, even though readership is rising.
