Fortunately I was on vacation last month when Jim Sinur launched his fatuous "Burn Baby Burn" bomb, the one about how BPMN is too hard for Gartner clients. In the ensuing discussion, cooler heads mostly walked Jim back off the ledge, but the back-and-forth still did not get to the heart of the real problem, at least as I have experienced it. In my view, it's not really about "business users"
I am making two BPMN model validation tools, which reinforce the rules of my Method and Style approach, available on BPMS Watch. As I have said in the past, the biggest obstacle most people - business and IT - face in creating good BPMN is attention to proper model structure and labeling... NOT the shape semantics or fuzzy business logic. The best way to get into the habit of properly structuring and labeling BPMN diagrams is to have an automated tool check your model over and report violations of the rules.
Last week I had the chance to stop by Pegasystems in Cambridge for a briefing. As usual, I came away impressed with what they had to show. Pega is an anomaly in the BPM market. They always win the BPMS MQs and Waves, but 70% of their systems are sold to people who did not set out looking for BPM. Pega has mastered the art of BPM solution selling - as CRM, as a healthcare payor solution, as a banking back office solution, whatever.
Appian today launched Tempo, a new social/mobile capability of their BPM Suite. Sandy Kemsley has the full details here, which means I don't need to repeat them. I just have a couple comments about it. First, it's really well executed. Clean and smoothly integrated into the BPM environment. Second, it seems a more reasonable implementation of the social/mobile idea than is typically offered by BPM vendors. I have never really bought into the idea of "
I've been working recently on tools to help BPMN 2.0 tool vendors more effectively interchange process models. (We're starting at absolute zero, so almost anything is an improvement.) In a way the work is similar to that previously reported re the rules of BPMN, but the earlier work was aimed at helping process modelers create diagrams that both conform to the rules of the BPMN spec and are easily understood from the diagram itself, what I call "
Version 5.0 of my BPMessentials BPMN training will soon be available, in live classroom, virtual classroom, and online/on-demand formats. This is the first major revision since publication of my book, BPMN Method and Style, in June 2009. Since then I've trained around 1000 students on BPMessentials 4.x, and a number of lessons learned have been incorporated in the new version. The biggest change is the way we talk about BPMN "
In the past year the "architects" seem to have discovered BPMN. That has been good for the training business, as architects tend to mobilize their organizations on a larger scale than individual project teams do. But I have also found that, despite their fascination with metamodels interconnecting all sorts of information about how the business works, architects tend to have a nebulous - and often incorrect - understanding of the most fundamental BPM concepts, like "
I'm always prattling on about "method and style" in BPMN modeling, and most folks probably don't know what I'm talking about. My goal is maximizing shared understanding of the BPMN diagram, so it is clear and complete to anyone looking at it, even if the reader is unfamiliar with the process or the modeler's terminology. That requires going beyond the requirements spelled out in the BPMN spec to a set of modeling conventions aimed at reducing the need for prior familiarity with the process in order to understand the diagram.
Last summer I posted on the challenge of achieving process model interchange via the BPMN 2.0 standard. In the half year since then, vendor progress toward that goal has been about zero. It seems that vendors, in particular the ones that drove the standard, don't really care about this most fundamental user expectation of any standard. Ah well, no surprise there... But in the past couple weeks, some encouraging developments. Activiti and BonitaSoft - both are open source startups with a BPMN 2.
With the recent launch of Blueworks Live, IBM has posted an updated version of a set of training videos called Process Mapping 101. Together with colleague Shelley Sweet of I4 Process, I created the original set for Lombardi back in 2008 , and the new version updates it to Blueworks Live. This one doesn't focus so much on proper BPMN method and style (although I had to sneak in a little at the end), but rather how to get started using process modeling: how to organize the project, the roles involved in the core process improvement team, and the steps along the way.