Even though Microsoft introduced a native BPMN editor in Visio Premium 2010, I have continued to use the itp commerce Process Modeler Visio add-in in my training. For one thing, Microsoft for some reason based their tool, which launched at the same time as finalization of BPMN 2.0, on the outdated BPMN 1.2. For another, Process Modeler works with Visio 2003 and 2007 as well. Most importantly, it has my Method and Style validation built in, so in one click the user can see (and fix) not only violations of the BPMN spec but violations of the "
It boggles my mind that we are still having this debate, but there it is: Is BPMN compatible with ACM? The latest round started with a paper presented by Keith Swenson at a BPM conference, stirred up by Sandy Kemsley's review, and kicked into full riot by an ebizQ comment thread. The supposedly winning argument from the ACM side is that a doctor - the purported archetype of an ACM user (really?
I'm just back from bpmNEXT. From my perspective as the event organizer, it could not have gone any better, and the tweets seem to agree. Malcolm Ross @mrappian Great time at the #bpmnext event this week.. looking forward to next year Steinar Carlsen @steinarcarlsen #bpmNEXT - Thank you @bpmswatch and @nathanielpalmer for organizing a great BPM and ACM thought leader conference - http://www.bpmnext.com Miguel Valdes @miguelvaldes Back from #bpmnext. Amazing conference, speakers and discussions.
Because so many people were set back by weather-related issues in the past two weeks, we've extended the early bird discount for bpmNEXT registration until November 19. bpmNEXT is an exciting new event I'm hosting with Nathaniel Palmer next March 19-21 at Asilomar, near Pebble Beach in California. The event will showcase leading examples of the next generation of BPM-related technology - social, mobile, predictive analytics, the "internet of things", decision management, process mining, and more.
This week IBM hosted a special analyst event in San Francisco focused on their BPM/ODM portfolio. ODM is the unification of IBM's acquisitions in business rule and business event technology, and was given equal billing with BPM at the event. That was surprising given the near-complete absence of information about case management, which seems significantly more in need of unification with BPM than does decision management. There were not many new feature/function announcements - most of that occurred last spring at Impact - but with a new executive team in place for the portfolio, there was a definite change in the air.
In a word, no. But ebizQ is trying to stir the pot. What should be in it? As expected, the dead-enders were loudest: Get rid of it altogether! Scott Francis has more patience for this sort of thing, and has a good summary of the thread. One of the more interesting suggestions was to split conformance requirements between the graphical notation and XML serialization. I think that is a good idea with real practical benefits for both end users and tool vendors, but not likely to sway anyone at OMG.
I'm probably the last to chime in on the new Gartner iBPMS Magic Quadrant. Adam Deane's hilarious sendup cannot be topped, and Scott Francis's uber-thoughtful three-parter is also excellent, but possibly takes it more seriously than it deserves. Both are well worth reading. Here is my take. Many of us, at some point in our careers, have suffered through a corporate reorg following a bad quarter. A few people at the bottom get laid off, some bold new theme is announced, and the ones who drove the company into the ditch mostly take new positions within the executive suite.
Oracle has this unfortunate policy of putting almost everything in their Fusion Middleware Analyst Day under NDA and requiring blogs on that to be preapproved by Oracle. So I will just ignore what I heard in the analyst sessions and talk about what I saw in the Exhibition Hall, where bits of the next release of Oracle BPM, version 11.1.1.7 - or, if you prefer the catchier marketing name "BPM 11g Patch Set 6"
SAP, well-known as a leader in the enterprise applications space, is often overlooked as a supplier of BPM technology, but the company has been quietly moving forward with BPM on a broad front, and in fact has a great story to tell. Their goal is to be the preferred BPM technology supplier for SAP customers, not just for application integration and workflow software but for BPM in the large, including business and solution modeling, end-to-end performance visibility, and BPM methodology.
Vishal Saxena, formerly lead BPMS developer at Oracle and Intalio and a member of the BPMN 2.0 technical committee in OMG, today showed me a demo from his new company Roubroo. The interesting thing to me about Roubroo is the ease of modifying process definitions at runtime, either on a single instance or a set of instances, while strictly observing the semantics and rules of BPMN 2.0. Difficulty with ad-hoc behavior is one of the biggest objections some users have about BPMN 2.
