If you are a regular reader, or used to be, you've noticed I haven't posted for a while. After a quiet Christmas season, BPMN training has suddenly exploded. I'm living in airports and hotels, it seems. Be careful what you wish for, they say. And how true. Since I had my last virtual classroom training at the end of January, I've done classes at Alcatel-Lucent in Paris (not complaining about that), Raytheon in Tucson, Freddie Mac in Virginia, Alcatel-Lucent again in Dallas (it's not Paris), and I'm heading off soon to Sandia in Albuquerque.
Thanks to all of you who took my BPMN Self-Test. BPMN, today accepted as the universal process modeling standard, is outwardly familiar -- it looks like traditional swimlane flowcharts -- but few people really know how to use it effectively. That's what I try to teach in my book and the BPMessentials training. The self-test examines some of those parts of BPMN that are extremely useful in modeling everyday scenarios but which are not part of the traditional flowcharter's existing knowledge. If you haven't taken the test yet, why don't you do it right now? Just click here. Then come back when you're done and check out the answers. If you have taken it and would like to see my explanation of the answers, read on.
I know many of you are planning to put learning BPMN at the top of your 2010 resolutions list. Well, if you're not, you should be! Travel is hard these days, but you're in luck. I'm going to be offering my BPMN training in a virtual classroom format - live, interactive, delivered over the Internet, starting in January. The first public class will be January 25-28, 2010. That's Monday through Thursday, 4 hours a day.
Lombardi's Teamworks 7 adds a wealth of features tosupport massive reuse of process artifacts across multiple projects in various stages of development and maintenance. My latest BPMS Report takes a close look at Lombardi's brand new offering.
I just finished a white paper on case management for Global 360, whose Case360 product comes the closest to my own view of what case management is all about. Click here to download the report. If you are interested in that topic, you might want to subscribe to my BPMN Case Management site, www.bpmncase.com.
I have taken Phil Gilbert's suggestion to heart and stood up a new website BPMN Case Management where we can explore the possibilities for a case management modeling notation closely tied to BPMN... without re-fighting the whole BPMN war from the very beginning, as OMG seems inclined to do. Once the DNS sets up, it will be www.bpmncase.com, but for now you can reach it at www.methodandstyle.com/bpmncase. I've invited a bunch of people that I know, and who have expressed an interest in the topic, to be "
Thus, with unintended irony, did our former president illustrate the consequences of low expectations in the debate over No Child Left Behind. No Child's insistence on achieving a minimum competence in reading and arithmetic was scorned by many as too demanding, even "elitist," even though we all know that without those things both the child and the nation as a whole will suffer. Today, as BPMN 2.0 rumbles toward finalization, we're seeing the same bogus charge again from those who should know better.
BPMN 2.0 is heading for finalization. I've been a part of the team developing it, and it provides some really useful new features. You can get a look at what it adds and how to use it effectively at my 2-day course in Chicago April 8-9, Process Modeling with BPMN, hosted by BPM Institute. This is my full BPMessentials training and certification, updated with a look ahead to BPMN 2.0. Click here for pricing and registration.
Haven't we beaten this to death yet? Apparently not, if Keith Swenson and Boris Lublinsky have anything to say about it. The discussion is leading nowhere. Boris inadvertently sums up the pointlessness of it in his conclusion: The confusion about BPEL and BPM in general seems to keep growing in the industry. There is still no agreement on the most basic BPM issues: Is BPM a business Discipline or software engineering?
In IBM's BPM Suite, the default or foundational offering on the WebSphere side is something called WebSphere Dynamic Process Edition. Here the term 'dynamic process' isn't just the usual marketing doublespeak, but a fundamentally different way of modeling and executing processes, particularly customer-facing ones. It refers to the myriad of process variations that result from differences in the type of customer, channel of contact, date, time, and location, as well as details of the instance itself, such as the total value of an order, or special items in it.
