Today, Oracle officially announced Oracle BPM Suite 11g. To my knowledge, Oracle BPM Suite 11g is the first and only executable BPMN 2.0-based BPMS available today. I've had a chance to try it out, and it is really impressive. The product provides a united runtime environment for both BPEL and native BPMN 2.0, uniting two previously distinct BPMS offerings. I expected a minimal implementation of BPMN, but Oracle far surpassed those expectations.
I tuned in to Sandy Kemsley's webcast for Active Endpoints on How to Explain BPMN to Business Users today to see how this pet topic of mine is filtering out to the world. Longtime BPMS Watch readers will recall the spirited discussion I had with Michael zur Muehlen a couple years back, when he did some academic "research" that demonstrated that the BPMN elements most used were the ones carried over from traditional flowcharting.
Ismael Ghalimi of Intalio is still a young man but one of the founding fathers of modern BPM. Maybe the founding father. Anyway, today he briefed me on what he says he was aiming for all along, a project called Helium. It's BPM, it's a database application builder, it's CRM and case management, document management, social networking and online office tools. It's built for the cloud, all browser-based (Ajax, no Flash.
I mentioned in a previous post I had created a tool that converts BPMN diagrams from Visio Premium 2010 to BPMN 2.0-compliant XML. It was an interesting project because Visio itself does not internally "understand" the structure of a BPMN model. Sure, it can test many of the rules in the BPMN spec, but that is by testing relationships between the shapes in the diagram. A BPMN structural element that has no shape - such as a process or a collaboration - has no associated Visio object to manipulate.
On my summer vacation I've been thinking a lot about the XML side of BPMN. While we usually think of BPMN as a diagramming standard, it is also - in principle - a model interchange standard, an XML format than can be exported from tool A and imported into tool B. BPMN 2.0, XPDL 2.1 (for BPMN 1.2), and XPDL 2.2 (for BPMN 2.0) all purport to deliver this. In reality, however, BPMN model interchange faces serious - some would say insurmountable - hurdles.
From some of the recent comments on my posts, I see that I haven't done a good job of explaining what exactly I mean by my "method and style" approach to BPMN. Also, that approach has gone through a few stages of evolution. So this is a good opportunity to both explain it to BPMS Watch readers and "think out loud" about how to reflect it in the next iteration of my training.
Fortunately I was on vacation last month when Jim Sinur launched his fatuous "Burn Baby Burn" bomb, the one about how BPMN is too hard for Gartner clients. In the ensuing discussion, cooler heads mostly walked Jim back off the ledge, but the back-and-forth still did not get to the heart of the real problem, at least as I have experienced it. In my view, it's not really about "business users"
I am making two BPMN model validation tools, which reinforce the rules of my Method and Style approach, available on BPMS Watch. As I have said in the past, the biggest obstacle most people - business and IT - face in creating good BPMN is attention to proper model structure and labeling... NOT the shape semantics or fuzzy business logic. The best way to get into the habit of properly structuring and labeling BPMN diagrams is to have an automated tool check your model over and report violations of the rules.
I've been working recently on tools to help BPMN 2.0 tool vendors more effectively interchange process models. (We're starting at absolute zero, so almost anything is an improvement.) In a way the work is similar to that previously reported re the rules of BPMN, but the earlier work was aimed at helping process modelers create diagrams that both conform to the rules of the BPMN spec and are easily understood from the diagram itself, what I call "
Version 5.0 of my BPMessentials BPMN training will soon be available, in live classroom, virtual classroom, and online/on-demand formats. This is the first major revision since publication of my book, BPMN Method and Style, in June 2009. Since then I've trained around 1000 students on BPMessentials 4.x, and a number of lessons learned have been incorporated in the new version. The biggest change is the way we talk about BPMN "