BPMN 2.0 is a couple weeks away from its equivalent of "code freeze" and all of a sudden there is this tidal wave of commentary on OMG's BMI list expressing "shock" over the fact that BPMN 2.0 describes processes from the perspective of a process orchestration engine. I haven't heard such feigned surprise and indignation since Congress "discovered" the AIG bonuses. I mean, the hidden underlying pretense of a virtual orchestration engine (if not an actual one) has been baked into BPMN since v1.
BPMN is sometimes criticized for being too complicated for business users. That charge assumes that users need to understand every shape, symbol, and underlying attribute. But no one does, not even the experts, and most tools don't even support them all. The way around this problem is through a hierarchy of modeling "levels." Levels are often used in modeling to distinguish views at different degrees of abstraction, from high-level business-oriented views to detailed technical views.
[My May column on BPMInstitute.org] "Cool" is not a word I would normally apply to IBM's BPM software, but for the new BPM BlueWorks offering announced at Impact this week, the term is appropriate. IBM bills BPM BlueWorks as a BPM community in the cloud, and it is that, plus a lot more. Actually, I think its greatest immediate impact could be to transform the market for business process analysis (BPA) tools.
Lest there be any doubt that OMG is not a market-driven organization, they could not even generate a press release to proclaim BPMN 2.0's first big step into the world of official standards. So I asked Dave Ings, IBM's BPMN 2.0 pooh-bah, what actually transpired last month in Costa Rica. Here is what he said (as amended by Oracle's Jeff Mischinsky): Our BPMN 2.0 submission passed four key votes and is on track to be an OMG "
That's the title of my new book. I'm planning for release end of June, coinciding with approval of BPMN 2.0 by OMG. The basic idea is that using BPMN effectively requires more than a summary of the spec... especially with BPMN 2.0, on which the book is based. It needs three things besides that. First, an understanding of BPMN's most basic concepts: what is a process? what do sequence flows and message flows really mean?
I finally shipped the book off to the printer yesterday! Wow, why does the last 5% take 50% of the time? Not certain how long before it ships, but June almost for sure. I've been using the new levels-based method and style approach in private classroom training for the past couple months. I think it makes learning BPMN much easier, especially for business people. On July 1-2, I'll be doing a public two-day class in San Francisco, hosted at the Parc 55 Hotel in Union Square by the BPM Institute.
It came together faster than I thought! BPMN Method and Style is now available on Amazon.com. I had hoped to send out an email blast last night to announce it to all BPMS Watch subscribers from the Mailpress plugin, but I've been learning (the hard way) about gmail's smtp limit... Apologies to those first 100 or so subscribers who probably got 3 or 4 emails. For the rest of you, here is what I was trying to say.
The book should show up on Amazon in the next couple days, but probably not orderable until Ingram (the distributor) gets it set up, which takes up to 4 weeks. But you can be first in line to get the book, and I'll give it to you personally... for free! All you need to do is sign up for my 2-day class at BPM Institute in San Francisco July 1-2. Here's all the info you need on that.
I've taken an interest in cloud-based modeling tools, so I decided to check out a new one from Signavio. This is a German company related somehow to Gero Decker and colleagues at HPI, the authors of that steamy BPMN "novella," The Process. A 30-day trial is free. Here's a quick review. You have to sign a click-through agreement in German to get started. Oh well, who reads those things anyway? You can invite others to share your online space, which stores models in a repository.
I wrote previously about Lombardi's efforts to open up Blueprint using XPDL 2.1. A BPMN diagram created in Blueprint can be exported as XPDL and imported into itp commerce Process Modeler for Visio, the tool I use in my BPMessentials training. This is great! Even though it is a standard, BPMN is rarely portable between tools, something that baffles users. But I noticed the lanes did not import properly. My investigation into why has increased my understanding of the portability problem.
