My previous post on Reframing the BPEL vs BPMN Debate triggered a lively comment thread that somehow got wrapped up in the distinction between semantics and metamodels. It's mostly over my head. But in the midst of it, Marlon Dumas, one of a handful of BPM academics worth listening to, pushed one of my buttons when he repeated the familiar charge that the semantics of BPMN are "vague". He specifically referenced the OR-gateway used as a join.
[My December column on BPMInstitute.org] Several months ago, I got an urgent request from OMG ? the organization responsible for BPMN and other BPM standards ? to give a short blurb I had written a permanent URL on my website. The blurb was a promotional piece for my BPMessentials training called ?Three Levels of Process Modeling with BPMN.? OMG proudly proclaims that BPMN assumes no particular methodology, but the notion of using it at three specific ?
[This month's BPMS Watch column on BPMInstitute.org] Last month I gave you five things to love about BPMN 2.0. This time it?s five they left out. As a member of the development team, I understand why they were left out. And as a BPMN educator and author looking to add value on top of the standard rather than just to summarize the spec, I?m glad they gave me room to do that.
Keith Swenson has a nice post on the representation of human choice in BPMN. He objects to the use of a gateway to represent a human decision at the end of a task, like clicking either Approve or Reject. Instead he proposes a new boundary event for this purpose (he suggests the None boundary event, currently not used in BPMN). He raises some good points, and the comment thread generally agrees with him, but on balance I don't agree.
Keith Swenson's Go Flow blog continues to produce thought-provoking discussions of BPM issues. Check it out if you are not a subscriber. His latest concerns simulation, one of my hot buttons. A couple years ago I wrote that simulation was a "fake feature" - one of those things vendors put in the tool to tick off the Gartner checklist but which don't do anything useful. Since then the situation has not improved to any great degree.
I'm back on one of my favorite topics: portability of BPMN from one tool to another. BPMN is a standard so portability is a given, right? Wrong. Not even close. In version 1.x, BPMN didn't even provide an xml schema to export to, much less a declaration of how much of it needed to be understood by the importing tool. Oh well. BPMN 2.0 will fix this! Right? Well, not exactly.
SAP is probably the world's leading supplier of process automation software. Over half of the world?s business transactions, involving 12 Million users in 120 countries, touch one of 140,000 SAP systems. But the company is only now entering the "BPM market" with the launch of NetWeaver BPM, part of the NetWeaver middleware platform. You would not expect SAP's approach to be anything like that of a BPMS pureplay like Lombardi or Savvion, but it's nothing like that of middleware giants like Oracle, IBM, or TIBCO, either.
BPMN 2.0 is a couple weeks away from its equivalent of "code freeze" and all of a sudden there is this tidal wave of commentary on OMG's BMI list expressing "shock" over the fact that BPMN 2.0 describes processes from the perspective of a process orchestration engine. I haven't heard such feigned surprise and indignation since Congress "discovered" the AIG bonuses. I mean, the hidden underlying pretense of a virtual orchestration engine (if not an actual one) has been baked into BPMN since v1.
BPMN is sometimes criticized for being too complicated for business users. That charge assumes that users need to understand every shape, symbol, and underlying attribute. But no one does, not even the experts, and most tools don't even support them all. The way around this problem is through a hierarchy of modeling "levels." Levels are often used in modeling to distinguish views at different degrees of abstraction, from high-level business-oriented views to detailed technical views.
[My May column on BPMInstitute.org] "Cool" is not a word I would normally apply to IBM's BPM software, but for the new BPM BlueWorks offering announced at Impact this week, the term is appropriate. IBM bills BPM BlueWorks as a BPM community in the cloud, and it is that, plus a lot more. Actually, I think its greatest immediate impact could be to transform the market for business process analysis (BPA) tools.
