If it were anyone else but Ismael Ghalimi, I would have simply muttered "idiotic" and moved on without a second thought. But when a guy at the top of my BPM hero list declares that "nobody cares about BPM" any more, my actual reaction was dismay and mild depression. The apparent basis for Ismael's loss of faith: the fact that Google Trends shows searches on "bpm" have declined since 2004, while searches on "soa" have gone up!
OK, to me that reasoning does seem idiotic, while to those who have moved to a more Googlicious orbit it probably carries the aura of Delphic certainty. And, to be honest, I'd probably be heartened myself if searches on "bpm" were on the upswing, even though, as Lombardi's Jim Rudden points out, to most of the world bpm still means "beats per minute" - I searched just now and the number one listing is about "DJ culture and the electronic music lifestyle."
In a followup piece, Ismael tries to put on a happier face by saying BPM is probably still tainted by 1980s Hammer-Champy baggage, but could be made "cooler" if, following the suggestions of Dion Hinchcliffe and Sandy Kemsley, it took on the personality of an "enterprise mashup." Dion's article is kind of interesting, but it's not about processes I recognize from today's BPM mainstream. If I were an entrepreneur or VC looking at new opportunities, I'm sure I'd see mashup-style BPM as a more attractive idea than conventional BPMS today, but not because nobody cares about BPM. (Actually, if you're reading this and have no idea what an enterprise mashup is, you're far more likely to be a potential BPM buyer than someone who does!)
[my latest BPMS Watch column on BPMInstitute.org]
The annual BPM Think Tank, now in its second iteration, is an event I?ve been looking forward to all year. Unlike most BPM conferences, which are generally aimed at helping newbies get started, Think Tank is a forum where experienced BPM vendors, analysts, academics, and user organizations come to discuss what needs to come next in terms of technical standards, software capabilities, and overall business value from business process technology. The event is hosted by OMG, the standards organization that last year absorbed BPMI.org, the original creator of the Business Process Modeling Notation -- the emerging standard for process modeling and, increasingly, for business-driven process design.
This evening, before the event got underway, a number of Think Tank leaders gathered in an informal dinner meeting to discuss a new proposal not even on the official agenda: a way to query running BPM systems about process performance, from the state of an individual process instance to aggregated metrics displayable in a management dashboard. The idea, variously called the Business Process Performance Management Interface or the Business Process Runtime Interface, would complement BPMN?s focus on process modeling and design.
For me, the most troubling part of the BPM Think Tank event was my roundtable on The Business Value of BPMS. The roundtable format was an open-ended discussion with 10-12 attendees on a specific topic, formulating a problem statement and then a proposed ideal future state. I expected a discussion about which of BPMS's putative benefits -- business/IT alignment, process efficiency, compliance, agility, and performance visibility -- was most valuable to the business or had some issue blocking full realization.
No I don't mean moblogging. More like "even my 79-year old Mom is into blogging." Not about BPM (that would be scary), but the more invigorating throw-da-bums-out-in-Washington variety. So over the weekend we both went to the YearlyKos convention in Las Vegas, where 1000 of the top political bloggers and their subscribers -- along with a surprising number of big-name politicians trying to grab onto the "netroots" wave -- got together face-to-face in a bunch of panels, workshops, and general socializing.
Don't ask me how, but Ismael turned the hubbub over BPM vs SOA into a discussion of top-down vs "middle-out." Both threads (including comments) are semi-instructive, but somehow in the course of things he challenged me to come up with proof that top-down (i.e. BPM implementation driven from the business model) has ever worked. The challenge came in the form of a double-dog dare, with the promise of a trip to Hawaii tacked on if I could come up with 3 top-down implementations that met his "
I've been focusing a lot of my publishing and marketing -- monthly column, 2006 BPMS Report, BPMS training -- in the past year through BPM Institute, which is owned by Brainstorm, the conference group, and now I'm thinking about next year. Which BPM portal do you think has the widest reach, most interesting stuff, is best to deal with, etc? Take a minute to vote in the poll in the blog home page sidebar.
Derek Miers called my attention over the weekend to two posts from the SOA blogosphere suggesting "bad blood" between BPM and SOA, framing it as the latest proxy war in an age-old struggle between business and IT. I suppose Derek, who doesn't blog himself (yet), wanted me to point out how ridiculous this is (or at least embarrass myself trying). Anyway, I'm taking the bait.
The original cherry bomb was thrown by Christoper Koch in CIO Magazine's blog, who described BPM vs SOA as "a new front developing in the war between business and IT," and Joe McKendrick on ZDNet quickly poured gasoline on the flames. Koch tries to set himself above the fray but tips his hand by centering the discussion on business's frustration with IT's lack of agility and concluding that SOA is more likely to foster agility than anything he sees from the BPM camp. Thus, like most discussions of BPM from the SOA world, he gets a few facts right but generally misses the point.
Agility is important, and SOA is all about agility, but agility is really IT's concern and not the central focus of business executives, nor is dealing with change the key objective of BPM. Better aligning processes with business goals; making processes faster, more efficient, and more reliably compliant with policies and best practices; making business performance more visible even when the process crosses organizational or system boundaries, and more actionable in real time... these are just as important as agility to business.
Also summaries of the roundtables. Check out this from OMG.
Richard Brown, an IBMer from across the pond, blogged recently about BPEL4People and took issue with my contention that it was too grandiose and after-the-fact to achieve wide adoption as a standard. He tracked back to my original post in February, saying I'm increasingly of the opinion that standardisation often occurs too soon and that major revisions are a reflection that the initial specs fail to anticipate potential problems or extended use cases.
As if we needed more evidence that BPM and SOA are uneasy allies, one of Steve Jones's SOA Anti-Patterns, widely praised in the blogs for their hilarious wit and insight, seems to me a perfect example of how some architects still view BPM's top-down approach as worst practice, not best. The "percolating process" anti-pattern is described this way:
