Yesterday I got a briefing from the BPM folks at Oracle, as part of my BPMS Report series, and I came away surprised at both the completeness and, in many ways, coolness of the offering. A few things stand out (for the rest you'll have to wait for the report, later this month): Oracle provides a unique solution to the problems of business-IT interaction and round-tripping. For modeling, Oracle OEMs IDS Scheer ARIS, rebranded Oracle BPA Suite, and has added to it Oracle SOA Extensions that link it to the executable process design and runtime environment, called Oracle SOA Suite.
My latest column on BPM Institute covers the issue of end-to-end process models which involve multiple pools and deeply nested hierarchies. It was motivated by painful experience grading certification exercises in my BPMN training. That experience was critical to my ultimate decision to include this in version 3.0 of my BPMN training, overcoming an initial concern about scaring off would-be process modelers. But the difference between the simple exercises modeled inline in the training and the post-training mail-in certification exercises representing real-world processes was simply too great to ignore.
[Posted 1 Oct 2007 on BPMInstitute.org] Among the numerous virtues of BPMN, foremost is vendor independence, giving process modelers many tools to choose from, all describing processes using the same shapes and semantics. That?s huge, since without low-cost (or even free) tools you?ll never establish a culture of process broadly throughout the business. Occasionally, however, a student in my BPMN training will ask the embarrassing question, ?So that means I can take the models I create in this class and import them into the BPMN tool we use in our company.
[Posted 27 Nov 2007 on BPMInstitute.org] In the early days of BPM ? four or five years ago ? everyone thought BPEL was the BPM standard, at least for runtime execution. Not long after, the importance of business-friendly process modeling came to the fore, and BPMN emerged as the standard for that. The mismatch between graph-oriented BPMN models, where you can route the flow just about anywhere, and block-oriented BPEL, where you can?
In my previous post, I discussed how the meaning of BPMN portability differs between BPDM, XPDL, and students in my BPMN training. Today, BPMN serialization is essentially a two-horse race: it's XPDL 2.0 (maybe 2.x), or BPDM. Don't tell me "these are not competing standards." As far as BPMN serialization goes, of course they are. But that doesn't mean they are fundamentally trying to do the same thing. XPDL 2.0 has a head start in the marketplace, but BPDM (published only in draft form) is the "
Last fall I wrote a column and subsequent blog post called My BPMN Wish List, discussing some useful semantic patterns that were hard to diagram in BPMN. I didn't get much comment on it, so I was a bit surprised to find recently on the OMG site a featured white paper by Antoine Lonjon, better known as the author of the BPDM spec, entitled The BPMN Wish List Revisited. It might seem flattering that my wish list turned into the wish list, but the opener dissed that idea: In recent articles, people have expressed some desires and concerns regarding BPMN.
Antoine of Intalio comments on yesterday's post re the need to tweak BPMN diagrams to make them more BPEL-friendly. One of my complaints had to do with the nasty "interleaving" error that always pops up when you turn on BPEL validation. He references an Intalio presentation at EclipseCon last year, specifically slide 16. I copied his BPMN into my tool (ITP Commerce) and sure enough, it gives the interleaving error: Getting rid of interleaving errors requires making duplicate copies of some of the diagram nodes so that BPEL's block structure is happy.
[My April column for BPM Institute. Please add your own nominees in the comments.] Is there a BPM Hall of Fame? I don?t think so, but there should be, to recognize the true pioneers and innovators in the field. BPM?s core ideas and technologies come from several divergent fields, and my list would include those who first introduced them ? ideas about what a business process is, and what managing one really means.
I've just finished the BPMS Watch Ratings, a comparative scoring of the 11 leading BPM Suites written up in my BPMS Report series on BPMInstitute.org. Those reports, which are available for free, include Appian, BEA, Cordys, EMC, FlowCentric, Global 360, Lombardi, Oracle, Singularity, SoftwareAG/webMethods, and TIBCO. I would have liked to get Pega and Savvion - they declined. IBM (WebSphere and FileNet), Adobe, Intalio, and Fujitsu have expressed interest but I needed to get the ratings out; maybe we'll get them in a supplementary round.
You're probably saying, wait a minute, didn't they already have one? Yes, I admit, they were in the 2006 BPMS Report series, in which they agreed (reluctantly, I hear) to let the combination of WebSphere Modeler, Monitor, WID, and Process Server be described as a BPM Suite. But today at Impact here in Las Vegas they actually announced it as an orderable thing. Sort of... One of the problems for BPMS at Big Blue has always been that the required components cut across IBM brands, which appear to resist integration with each other.
