They would say they never left it, but from a marketing perspective Savvion is suddenly re-emerging from a quiet period with the introduction of version 7.5 and related vertical application initiatives. Since the beginning of the year they have been able to right the ship financially - reporting 6% net profit for the fiscal year, and 16% operating profit in Q3 - while expanding the platform both horizontally and vertically. Horizontal platform extension includes new features like Project-Oriented Processes (POP), content management, business rule management, expanded process intelligence, and platform architecture for deployment in a multi-tenant/SaaS environment.
[This month's column on BPMInstitute.org] BPMN 2.0 is almost here. If all goes as planned, it will be voted on by OMG members in June. Assuming it passes, that doesn?t mean BPMN 2.0 is officially adopted and available in commercial tools, just that it has entered the ?finalization? phase when tool vendors can start building it in. Even though the diagram notation of BPMN 2.0 appears little changed from previous versions, it represents a big step forward.
I've been quiet lately for a number of reasons. A very significant one is the fact I am now participating with the technical team developing the BPMN 2.0 specification for OMG. I am trying to be a good team member and not scream too loudly about the things that are driving me crazy about it. Particularly when the probability is even slightly greater than zero that one or two of my suggestions will make it into the spec.
My previous post on Reframing the BPEL vs BPMN Debate triggered a lively comment thread that somehow got wrapped up in the distinction between semantics and metamodels. It's mostly over my head. But in the midst of it, Marlon Dumas, one of a handful of BPM academics worth listening to, pushed one of my buttons when he repeated the familiar charge that the semantics of BPMN are "vague". He specifically referenced the OR-gateway used as a join.
[My December column on BPMInstitute.org] Several months ago, I got an urgent request from OMG ? the organization responsible for BPMN and other BPM standards ? to give a short blurb I had written a permanent URL on my website. The blurb was a promotional piece for my BPMessentials training called ?Three Levels of Process Modeling with BPMN.? OMG proudly proclaims that BPMN assumes no particular methodology, but the notion of using it at three specific ?
[This month's BPMS Watch column on BPMInstitute.org] Last month I gave you five things to love about BPMN 2.0. This time it?s five they left out. As a member of the development team, I understand why they were left out. And as a BPMN educator and author looking to add value on top of the standard rather than just to summarize the spec, I?m glad they gave me room to do that.
Keith Swenson has a nice post on the representation of human choice in BPMN. He objects to the use of a gateway to represent a human decision at the end of a task, like clicking either Approve or Reject. Instead he proposes a new boundary event for this purpose (he suggests the None boundary event, currently not used in BPMN). He raises some good points, and the comment thread generally agrees with him, but on balance I don't agree.
Keith Swenson's Go Flow blog continues to produce thought-provoking discussions of BPM issues. Check it out if you are not a subscriber. His latest concerns simulation, one of my hot buttons. A couple years ago I wrote that simulation was a "fake feature" - one of those things vendors put in the tool to tick off the Gartner checklist but which don't do anything useful. Since then the situation has not improved to any great degree.
I'm back on one of my favorite topics: portability of BPMN from one tool to another. BPMN is a standard so portability is a given, right? Wrong. Not even close. In version 1.x, BPMN didn't even provide an xml schema to export to, much less a declaration of how much of it needed to be understood by the importing tool. Oh well. BPMN 2.0 will fix this! Right? Well, not exactly.
SAP is probably the world's leading supplier of process automation software. Over half of the world?s business transactions, involving 12 Million users in 120 countries, touch one of 140,000 SAP systems. But the company is only now entering the "BPM market" with the launch of NetWeaver BPM, part of the NetWeaver middleware platform. You would not expect SAP's approach to be anything like that of a BPMS pureplay like Lombardi or Savvion, but it's nothing like that of middleware giants like Oracle, IBM, or TIBCO, either.
