At this week's SAP Tech Ed conference in Las Vegas, BPM is definitely off the main track. The only other BPM analyst here that I recognized is Jim Sinur of Gartner. The keynote sessions were all about HANA, SAP's new in-memory analytics platform that is the key to reinvigorating the entire SAP portfolio (at least the parts they still care about). HANA-enabled BPM won't come until 2012, but it should provide a significant performance boost (process transactions per hour) as well as powerful real-time process analytics.
My BPMN training includes post-class certification. It's optional, and not everyone who tries for it gets it. For the first few years we offered it, only 10-15% of students got certified. Now it's well over half, and in some classes close to 100%. I actually think it's the most valuable part of the offering, and I'm glad that students now think so, too. A number of organizations offer a broad "
About 99% of the effort in drafting the BPMN 2.0 standard, and 95% of the bad rap it has received, relates to "executable" BPMN 2.0 models. It's been over a year since publication of the final spec, and it seems that executable BPMN 2.0 tools don't really exist yet. I hope I'm wrong. For years any BPM tool that had some notion of boxes and arrows claimed to support BPMN, and no doubt many BPM Suites now claim to support BPMN 2.
Visio Premium's BPMN template is a drawing tool for BPMN diagrams, not a true modeling tool that internally understands the BPMN metamodel. It does provide a validation feature that uses Visio 2010's new Validation API to check the diagram against the rules of the BPMN 1.2 spec, and that is helpful. But deep down, the "model" is just shapes on pages. Nevertheless, it is possible to generate from the diagram a true BPMN 2.
I fretted about this for weeks but I finally pulled the trigger. My book BPMN Method and Style is now available as a Kindle ebook, compatible with Kindle, Kindle Fire, Kindle for iPad, or Kindle for PC. I got a lot of requests for this, especially international, so we'll see if there is a market for it or not. I worked hard on the graphics. In the end there is only so much you can do with them in Kindle format.
Our next BPMN Method and Style live-online (virtual classroom) training is May 7-9 from 11am-4pm ET, 8am-1pm PT, or 5pm-10pm CET. This class is the gold standard in BPMN training and certification. It teaches you not only the BPMN shapes and symbols you need to learn (and how to use them correctly!)... and which ones you can safely ignore, but it provides prescriptive guidance that ensures that your BPMN diagrams are clear and complete, shareable across the business and between business and IT.
At the BPMN Workshop in Lucerne two weeks ago I presented a talk called "Fulfilling the Promises of BPMN 2.0." The basic point was that the BPMN 2.0 specification by itself is insufficient to deliver on the standard's two most fundamental promises: first, as a semantically precise process notation, that the meaning of the depicted process logic is unambiguous from the diagram alone; and second, as an XML process description language (even limited to non-executable model elements in the Analytic subclass), that the serialization rules are sufficiently unambiguous to allow automated interchange between tools.
Often the Gartner BPM conference seems to me the same-old same-old, but I have to say I am getting some valuable new perspective at this year's event in Baltimore. The new wrinkle this year is what Gartner is calling iBPMS, the "i" meaning intelligent. It's really shorthand for a number of new technology-based capabilities that have been swirling around the edges of BPM for a couple years, but which have now graduated to the Magic Quadrant checklist: adaptive, predictive, sensor- and event-aware, rule-driven, context-aware, real-time, social, mobile, cloud-based, maybe even gamified.
I spend a lot of my time working on tools to validate BPMN process models. You might ask, don't BPMN tools do that already themselves? The good ones do, but only according to their own interpretation of the rules in the BPMN specification. It is unforgivable, but in the 7+ years that have elapsed from the publication of BPMN 1.0 until today, the spec has never actually enumerated its rules in one place, such as an Appendix.
I was expecting more feedback on my Executable BPMN 2.0 post. I did get a thoughtful and amusing rant from Alex Pavlov. He dismisses the whole idea of executable BPMN 2.0 as a cynical ploy by the middleware vendors that created it. Besides making some good points on the possibility of executable BPMN 2.0, he challenges me to defend why anyone would think adopting the standard is a good idea in the first place.
