The vote on BPMN 2.0 is not the only thing on the agenda at next week's OMG meeting in Costa Rica. There is also the release of an RFP for a new Case Management standard, authored by Henk de Man of Cordys. Response to the announcement of same on OMG's BMI mailing list has been sometimes thoughtful but mostly the kind of doubting, naysaying, and non-sequiturs you often get on that list.
Lest there be any doubt that OMG is not a market-driven organization, they could not even generate a press release to proclaim BPMN 2.0's first big step into the world of official standards. So I asked Dave Ings, IBM's BPMN 2.0 pooh-bah, what actually transpired last month in Costa Rica. Here is what he said (as amended by Oracle's Jeff Mischinsky): Our BPMN 2.0 submission passed four key votes and is on track to be an OMG "
That's the title of my new book. I'm planning for release end of June, coinciding with approval of BPMN 2.0 by OMG. The basic idea is that using BPMN effectively requires more than a summary of the spec... especially with BPMN 2.0, on which the book is based. It needs three things besides that. First, an understanding of BPMN's most basic concepts: what is a process? what do sequence flows and message flows really mean?
I finally shipped the book off to the printer yesterday! Wow, why does the last 5% take 50% of the time? Not certain how long before it ships, but June almost for sure. I've been using the new levels-based method and style approach in private classroom training for the past couple months. I think it makes learning BPMN much easier, especially for business people. On July 1-2, I'll be doing a public two-day class in San Francisco, hosted at the Parc 55 Hotel in Union Square by the BPM Institute.
It came together faster than I thought! BPMN Method and Style is now available on Amazon.com. I had hoped to send out an email blast last night to announce it to all BPMS Watch subscribers from the Mailpress plugin, but I've been learning (the hard way) about gmail's smtp limit... Apologies to those first 100 or so subscribers who probably got 3 or 4 emails. For the rest of you, here is what I was trying to say.
The book should show up on Amazon in the next couple days, but probably not orderable until Ingram (the distributor) gets it set up, which takes up to 4 weeks. But you can be first in line to get the book, and I'll give it to you personally... for free! All you need to do is sign up for my 2-day class at BPM Institute in San Francisco July 1-2. Here's all the info you need on that.
I've taken an interest in cloud-based modeling tools, so I decided to check out a new one from Signavio. This is a German company related somehow to Gero Decker and colleagues at HPI, the authors of that steamy BPMN "novella," The Process. A 30-day trial is free. Here's a quick review. You have to sign a click-through agreement in German to get started. Oh well, who reads those things anyway? You can invite others to share your online space, which stores models in a repository.
I'm trying to decipher Cordys chief strategist Jon Pyke's post today on the case management proposal at OMG. It's hard to tell what he's saying, but I gather things did not go well in Costa Rica. I could have told him that, based on the bmi thread beforehand. He casts as the villain "analysts and consultants [who] do an excellent job of commenting upon products or suggesting ways to take them to market or advising on market trends [but who should not be] vehicles for developing standards.
Two weeks ago Appian launched version 6 of its BPMS, along with a rebooted online collaboration network called Appian FORUM and a suite of professional services offerings. Appian plays in the human-centric business-empowered end of the BPMS vendor landscape along with Lombardi and Savvion. With all the vendors now claiming ease of use, Appian's new claim is "fastest," meaning shortest cycle time from concept to production. It's a distinction without much of a difference, but Appian believes that its tools require less scripting and technical futzing than its natural competitors.
I wrote previously about Lombardi's efforts to open up Blueprint using XPDL 2.1. A BPMN diagram created in Blueprint can be exported as XPDL and imported into itp commerce Process Modeler for Visio, the tool I use in my BPMessentials training. This is great! Even though it is a standard, BPMN is rarely portable between tools, something that baffles users. But I noticed the lanes did not import properly. My investigation into why has increased my understanding of the portability problem.