In a recent post (Improving BPMN Validation) I described the kinds of errors, not checked by my existing BPMN validator (including itp commerce implementation), addressed by my latest development efforts. This post outlines the approach. My tool is based on XSLT 2.0. It's not a language used by many developers, but it's not a bad choice if you are trying to generate a report (HTML or XML) from an XML source document.
I am excited to announce a brand new course under our BPMessentials training and certification brand, Starting and Organizing a BPM Project. It's taught by Shelley Sweet of I4Process, a colleague who has been providing process improvement consulting for many years and who is really excellent. If you've taken my BPMN Method and Style class or read the book, you know that its starting point is having detailed information about how the process works - whether that's the current-state process or some future-state improved process.
A couple weeks ago I had the pleasure of presenting at the Social BPM Summer School program in Como, Italy, hosted by Marco Brambilla and colleagues from the Politecnico di Milano. My topic was extending BPMN to accommodate Social BPM. It was motivated by recent papers by Marco and others on this subject that, to my thinking, were inconsistent with features of BPMN that must be respected in any extension. And on my return last week I found this post by Keith Swenson on why BPMN is incompatible with adaptive case management - a sentiment I partly agree with, although not for the reasons Keith cites.
Today I read a terrific post from John Reynolds, IBM BPM Product Manager and author of the Thoughtful Programmer blog, entitled Tools for Subject Matter Programmers - Learning from Turbo Tax. Subject Matter Programmers are Subject Matter Experts who know just enough about Programming to craft their own solutions.... I'd like to see a world where Subject Matter Programmers can tackle building something like Turbo Tax. I just about fell out of my chair because this is exactly what I have been lately trying to do in the BPMN space.
Whether you are simply trying to document an as-is process, analyze it for potential improvement, create business requirements for an IT process solution, or design an executable process in a BPMS, you need to be fluent in BPMN. Today BPMN is the critical foundation skill you need for anything you do in BPM. It has the reputation of being "hard" - in some respects, deservedly so - but that's mostly because many people don't realize that you just need a small fraction of the shapes and symbols to express the vast majority of process behaviors.
It took a bit longer than we hoped, but the program at bpmNEXT 2013 is now set. bpmNEXT, which takes place March 19-21 at Asilomar Conference Center on the Monterey Peninsula, is not your typical BPM conference. It's a technology showcase spotlighting the next generation of BPM software innovation. No how-tos, best practices, or case studies, just a fast-paced series of demonstrations of new capabilities that are transforming the BPM (and surrounding) landscape.
All this hubbub about BPMN and case management, would doctors and lawyers use it, and other nonsense... They could learn to do it, but that's not the intended audience. And it would probably surprise some to know that technical developers are not the primary audience, either. So who exactly is BPMN for, and why do they use it? In my experience, the main purpose of BPMN is to document, analyze, and improve business processes.
It was at one of the early Think Tanks, the one where OMG suddenly revealed that BPDM, their process definition meta-language based on, I think, string theory, would be renamed BPMN 2.0, that the intention to support interchange of BPMN graphics was announced. And I recall a spirited barroom discussion with the editor of the BPDM spec, an energetic young Parisian, in which I insisted that graphics portability could never work because each BPMN tool used different sizes and aspect ratios for their activity, gateway, and event shapes, so the coordinates exported from tool A could not possibly be applied to importing tool B.
Have training budget left for 2012? Use it or lose it! There are still seats left in our next BPMessentials BPMN Method and Style live-online (virtual classroom) training December 10-12 from 11am-4pm ET, 8am-1pm PT, or 5pm-10pm CET. This class uses Process Modeler for Visio, a BPMN 2.0 add-in to Microsoft Visio that has Method and Style validation built in. If you can't make that one, we're doing our first Signavio-based class from January 8-10 from 8am-1pm ET, or 2pm-7pm CET - a little more convenient for our European friends.
Summer will be over soon, and time to get back to work. Start the season off right by sharpening your process modeling skills. The next BPMN Method and Style live-online class is September 5-7 from 11am to 4pm ET (that's 5pm to 10pm in Europe) each day. You'll learn how to create business process models that are ... Correct, according to the BPMN 2.0 standard Clear, revealing the process logic unambiguously from the diagram alone Complete, exposing at a glance how the process starts, its possible end states, what the instance represents, and its interactions with the customer, service providers, and other processes Consistently structured, so that given the same set of facts about how the process works, all modelers will create more or less the same diagram People sometimes say that BPMN is "