I want to call your attention to three recent white papers I've written and posted on the site. They are all free downloads available to anyone registered on BPMS Watch. All three deal with the new generation of tools available to help users get started in BPM and bridge the once-formidable divide between business process analysis (BPA) and execution in a BPMS. The worlds of BPA and BPMS have long been poorly integrated.
BPA and BPM Suites have long been ships passing in the night. A few BPMS vendors, like Oracle and IBM, have made efforts to integrate BPA with executable processes, but even there the fact that BPA and BPMS tools are based on different process metamodels has made roundtripping less than ideal. Appian and Mega have solved the problem in a neat but effective way: importing Appian BPMS process modeling into the Mega BPA environment.
Most of the changes between BPMN 1.2 and BPMN 2.0 have to do with extending it from a diagramming notation to a language for executable process design. Both my book BPMN Method and Style and the training that goes along with it deal with non-executable models, what I call Levels 1 and 2. Level 1 is limited to a basic working set of shapes and symbols familiar to business - similar to the new Descriptive conformance class of BPMN 2.
Today, Oracle officially announced Oracle BPM Suite 11g. To my knowledge, Oracle BPM Suite 11g is the first and only executable BPMN 2.0-based BPMS available today. I've had a chance to try it out, and it is really impressive. The product provides a united runtime environment for both BPEL and native BPMN 2.0, uniting two previously distinct BPMS offerings. I expected a minimal implementation of BPMN, but Oracle far surpassed those expectations.
I tuned in to Sandy Kemsley's webcast for Active Endpoints on How to Explain BPMN to Business Users today to see how this pet topic of mine is filtering out to the world. Longtime BPMS Watch readers will recall the spirited discussion I had with Michael zur Muehlen a couple years back, when he did some academic "research" that demonstrated that the BPMN elements most used were the ones carried over from traditional flowcharting.
Ismael Ghalimi of Intalio is still a young man but one of the founding fathers of modern BPM. Maybe the founding father. Anyway, today he briefed me on what he says he was aiming for all along, a project called Helium. It's BPM, it's a database application builder, it's CRM and case management, document management, social networking and online office tools. It's built for the cloud, all browser-based (Ajax, no Flash.
In the past couple years TIBCO kind of dropped off my BPMS radar screen. They don't put a lot into marketing, and in BPM I don't think they had that much to say anyway. Last week I got a briefing on the new ActiveMatrix BPM, and my impression is TIBCO is finally back as a major BPM player. ActiveMatrix used to be a SOA infrastructure product and then a "brand" for a bunch of semi-related SOA products, but it now has morphed into an integrated platform for BPM and SOA.
I mentioned in a previous post I had created a tool that converts BPMN diagrams from Visio Premium 2010 to BPMN 2.0-compliant XML. It was an interesting project because Visio itself does not internally "understand" the structure of a BPMN model. Sure, it can test many of the rules in the BPMN spec, but that is by testing relationships between the shapes in the diagram. A BPMN structural element that has no shape - such as a process or a collaboration - has no associated Visio object to manipulate.
On my summer vacation I've been thinking a lot about the XML side of BPMN. While we usually think of BPMN as a diagramming standard, it is also - in principle - a model interchange standard, an XML format than can be exported from tool A and imported into tool B. BPMN 2.0, XPDL 2.1 (for BPMN 1.2), and XPDL 2.2 (for BPMN 2.0) all purport to deliver this. In reality, however, BPMN model interchange faces serious - some would say insurmountable - hurdles.
From some of the recent comments on my posts, I see that I haven't done a good job of explaining what exactly I mean by my "method and style" approach to BPMN. Also, that approach has gone through a few stages of evolution. So this is a good opportunity to both explain it to BPMS Watch readers and "think out loud" about how to reflect it in the next iteration of my training.