Interest in Business Automation is being accelerated by the thousands of public REST APIs available from countless service providers. Most are available on a Freemium basis - free low-volume use for development, with a modest monthly fee for production use. The Trisotech Low-Code Business Automation platform lets you incorporate these services in your BPMN models without programming. You just need to configure a connection to them using the model's Operation Library.
In BPMN Method and Style, which deals with non-executable models, we don't worry about process data. It's left out of the models entirely. We just pretend that any data produced or received by process tasks is available downstream. In Business Automation, i.e., executable BPMN, that's not the case. Process data is not pervasive, available automatically wherever it's needed. Instead it "flows", point to point, between process variables shown in the diagram and process tasks.
A couple weeks ago my attention was called to a LinkedIn post, one of those clickbait polls: "Is BPMN the standard? Do you use it? Would you expect it from others?" About 65% said Yes, but naturally the haters clogged the comment thread. Of most interest to me was a comment by Alec Sharp, a respected process modeling consultant, who says... BPMN is what I call a "claimed standard"... in practice rarely followed, at least as intended.
BPMN has an element that looks very much like a subprocess, except drawn with a thick border. Perhaps you have used it yourself... probably incorrectly. Its name is call activity, and it is similar in several ways to a subprocess, but it is not the same. Both elements are important, but valuable for different reasons. This post will explain. Call activity and subprocess share important characteristics. Both are simultaneously a single activity and an activity flow from start event to end event.
Debugging executable processes can be a challenge because, unlike DMN models, you cannot test them in the Modeler. You need to compile and deploy them first, and problems are often reported as runtime errors. Until fairly recently, to zero in on the problem you needed to isolate it in a small fragment of the process by saving various fragments as test processes, compiling and deploying them, and running them with reconstructed input values.
In recent posts, I have explained why anyone who can create rich spreadsheet models using Excel formulas can learn to turn those into Low-Code Business Automation services on the Trisotech platform, using BPMN and DMN, and why FEEL and boxed expressions are actually more business-friendly than PowerFX, the new name for Excel's formula language. That's the why. Now let's discuss the how. In recent client engagements, I've noticed a consistent pattern: A subject-matter expert has a great new product idea, which he or she can demonstrate in Excel.
Last month I showed why Trisotech is a great Low-Code Business Automation platform, based on its use of FEEL and boxed expressions in executable BPMN. How ironic is it, then, that many decision management vendors don't even include those features in their DMN tools! The only part of DMN they use is the Decision Requirements Diagram (DRD), but what is the point of using a standard diagram to describe business requirements that are not even testable?
There is no hotter segment of Business Automation software today than Low-Code. Low-Code refers to application development based on models - diagrams and tables - and business-accessible expression languages, not program code. Gartner assesses Low-Code as a $13.8 billion market in 2021, growing to $46.6 billion in 2023. And, they say, by 2024 it will account for 65% of all application development! According to Forrester, 100% of companies that have adopted Low-Code report satisfactory return on investment.
Students in my BPMN Method and Style training are often befuddled by how to start a process. I see Conditional events, Error events, all kinds of things. No, stop! While the BPMN spec provides many different types of start events, only three of them are relevant to the non-executable flows most modelers are trying to create. In Method and Style, those are the only ones allowed. This post will explain. Just Three Ways to Start There are really only three ways to start a process: On external request.
In my previous posts on Business Automation, my focus has been on straight-through processes, since this is the sweet spot of the Trisotech platform. But even there, occasionally you need some human input, and that is where User tasks come in. User interaction is not a primary consideration in Trisotech BPMN, so the User task implementation is fairly basic. Even so, how to model User tasks confused me until recently. I think this is because of some default shortcuts in the modeling intended to simplify things.
