A few updates on my Method and Style validation tools... The one that works on the BPMN 2.0 export from itp commerce requires Service Release 5 of their tool. My apologies to those who tried to get it to work with SR4. The good news is that SR5 beta is available from the training area of bpmessentials.com. The GA SR5 should be out soon. The one that works from Visio 2010 continues to be an interesting ride.
On the BPMessentials website we are getting ready for the launch of version 5.0 of the BPMN training. The online/on-demand version, normally $730, will be offered for a special price of $495 for 30 days, until April 18. As always, it includes post-class certification and 60-day license to the itp-commerce Process Modeler for Visio tool. On April 19-21 I will be offering a virtual classroom on the new training - i.
The whole reason for BPMN's existence is to provide a notation that is outwardly familiar to flowcharters but has precise semantics and rules as demanded by analysts, architects, and developers. Nevertheless, the BPMN 2.0 spec fails to offer a business-understandable definition of its most basic concepts... starting with "process". What does BPMN mean by a process, anyway? It doesn't mean the same thing many long-time flowcharters think it means, as evidenced in a recent comment thread here.
Probably no aspect of BPM has underperformed versus expectations more than simulation. It should be a valuable tool that is commonly used in the course of process analysis... but it's just not. I've been thinking about why that is, and what it would take to make simulation useful in actual practice. It comes down to two basic things: better tools, and better-defined methodologies for deriving useful results from those tools. I haven't tried every simulation tool out there, so there may be some that do what I ask already.
The most basic user expectation for any language "standard" is interoperability between tools. BPMN 1.x, however, never provided a standard interchange format. For years, WfMC filled that gap with XPDL, an XML format originally developed for interchanging process models between proprietary workflow tools. With each new version of the BPMN spec, Robert Shapiro and, more recently, Denis Gagne, added XPDL support for BPMN elements added or changed. But without a side agreement between tool A and tool B, model interchange between them was essentially impossible.
I have been working on rounding out the BPMN Interoperability (BPMN-I) spec and tool in the area of data flow, and I am puzzled by a fundamental concept where the BPMN 2.0 spec and non-normative "BPMN by Example" documents disagree. I wrote to the experts on the BPMN 2.0 committee but have not heard back, so let me just put it out there and maybe BPMS Watch readers will help sort it out.
Today Software AG announced a tight integration between ARIS, its leading Business Process Analysis suite, and webMethods, its SOA-based BPM Suite. The integration features roundtripping and continuous synchronization between business-oriented and developer-oriented models in those tools. The medium of interchange is BPMN 2.0 XML. Although the vast majority of existing ARIS assets are in the form of EPC models, an ARIS-proprietary format, Software AG's Susan Ganeshan on the press call said that for many reasons BPMN 2.
I have been listening to the chatter about Open Text's recent acquisition of Global 360. Here is my take on it. Both companies historically have followed a rollup strategy - acquiring content management and workflow companies with a decent installed base but low growth, and then mostly leaving them alone. Unlike, say Oracle's acquisition or BEA or IBM's acquisition of Lombardi, there does not seem to be a grand plan for unifying a killer BPMS with the best parts of all the acquisitions.
Today at Impact IBM announced their next-generation BPMS called IBM Business Process Manager v7.5. At heart it is the unification of WebSphere Lombardi Edition (fka Teamworks) and WebSphere Process Server. Some have called it just "a new coat of paint" on the existing offerings, because the (Lombardi) Process Designer and the (WPS) Integration Designer tools are both still there, and both runtime engines are still there as well. But that misses the point.
Uniting Lombardi's business-empowered process tooling with WPS horsepower and integration was a brilliant move by IBM, one that makes them, in my view, the clear BPMS thought leader (in addition to #1 in market share). But I am willing to bet that if you took IBM's top 20 BPM customers and had a way of identifying the most important BPM initiatives in those organizations, only a small percentage of them would be focused on a BPMS solution.