Over the past several months I've been doing a lot of work with SAP to beef up the modeling-related content on their BPX community site. BPX stands for Business Process Expert, a term intended to describe a new role in the organization, straddling the line between business and IT. I see BPMN as a critical enabler of this role, because it for the first time allows process modeling, a business function, to be directly integrated with process implementation design.
Summary: BPMN has become the standard language of the Business Process Expert, usable for descriptive process modeling, simulation analysis, and even executable implementation design of end-to-end business processes. BPMN extends the familiar swimlane flowchart paradigm with events, the key to incorporating exceptions into process models and mapping to today?s SOA middleware. First of six parts. For the text of this article, go to https://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/sdn/go/portal/prtroot/docs/library/uuid/10852310-ac6a-2a10-02be-d83f4d2dd647
[Posted 15 Aug 2007 on BPMInstitute.org] When I launched my course "Process Modeling with BPMN", I discussed in this column why so many people beginning to "do" BPM were looking for training in modeling, and why that was especially needed for BPMN. Now, having delivered the training for five months, I have a better appreciation of BPMN's strengths and limitations, a better understanding of what students really want, and what they really need to know about BPMN modeling.
Marlon Dumas provided a thoughtful response to my post on roundtripping. In order to address it point by point, I am reposting Marlon's comment here in a new thread., with my responses inserted: Bruce, I agree with many of the points you make, but I strongly disagree with the proposition that BPEL is like an assembly language and that the readability of BPEL code generated from BPMN diagrams is unimportant. My three main counter-arguments are: 1) You won?
...to my blog. Yes, guilty as charged. One reason is I've been doing a lot of writing on other sites. Examples: monthly BPMS Watch column on BPMinstitute.org new BPMS reports, also on BPMInstitute.org. Completed so far are Appian, BEA, Lombardi, G360, TIBCO, webMethods (SoftwareAG), FlowCentric, Cordys. In review cycle: Oracle, Singularity. Next up: EMC Documentum, IBM (WebSphere/FileNet). Maybe Adobe. These are free downloads. 6-part series on BPMN and the Business Process Expert, on SAP's BPX community site companion 6-part Flash video training on BPMN, also on BPX (forthcoming, end of December) The least I can do is call your attention to these here, maybe generate some comments.
BPMS vendor Metastorm acquired BPA vendor Proforma today, kind of a surprise to me, since the last thing most business analysts want is to have their modeling tool funnel them into some proprietary runtime. Sandy as usual has it covered. I bring it up only because a graduate of my BPMN training pinged me about a white paper on the Metastorm website that disses BPMN big-time while at the same time admitting that the company probably needs to adapt its proprietary "
Michael zur Muehlen posts a lengthy response to my post On How Much BPMN Do You Need. He elaborates on his data analysis procedure - their procedure, actually, as Jan Recker was a co-author - and it's actually kind of interesting, looking at statistical correlations between diagram elements in a sample of BPMN collected in the wild. Sort of an anthropological survey - maybe archeological, given where we are on the adoption curve - of which shards of BPMN are used, correctly or incorrectly, in diagrams today.
[Posted 29 Oct 2007 on BPMInstitute.org] The Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) standard from OMG has a lot to recommend it, but it?s not perfect. Since late February of this year, I?ve been doing BPMN training, and through that I have come to appreciate the subtle power of the notation and how it maps ? or sometimes not ? to the way real business analysts and architects want to model their processes.
There's no denying that BPMN is gaining traction in the marketplace. I see it in my training. I see it in BPMS and BPA vendors getting on board. But what's amazing about this is that it's happening without a standard way to store and interchange BPMN between tools. It almost boggles the mind that the creators of BPMN "forgot" about this when they started, and its current owners place model interchange so far down the priority list (it's still not in the draft BPMN 1.
Michael zur Muehlen posts a strange bit of analysis called How Much BPMN Do You Need? The method of research consisted of collecting 126 BPMN 1.0 diagrams from "consultants, seminar participants, and online sources," and counting the frequency of various diagram objects in them. His conclusion is that the BPMN that you "really need" consists of task, start and end event, sequence flow (he calls it "normal flow"), exclusive gateway, and pool.
