Over the years I have gotten requests for a class that goes beyond the basics of my BPMessentials BPMN Method and Style training. OK, we're going to do it! It will be in June, probably replacing my regular live-online class. It will only be available to those who have received the BPMN Method and Style certification, or who have completed Level 10 of my bpmnPRO gamified eLearning app, within the last year.
It would be unfair to say there was absolutely nothing on BPM at IBM's InterConnect conference, which took place this week in Las Vegas... but it would not be far from the truth. InterConnect is the supposed successor to IBM's annual Impact middleware event where "Smarter Process" - IBM's term for BPM and decision management - has always played a large role. I say "supposed" because the new mega-event, triple the size of Impact and split between 2 hotels a mile apart, was such a logistical debacle that I seriously doubt they will try it this way again.
IBM's presentation at bpmNEXT of their implementation of case management inside of BPMN (and their subsequent launch of same at Impact) inspired Paul Harmon to start a lively thread on BPTrends on whether BPMN and CMMN should be merged. To me the answer is an obvious "yes," but I doubt it will happen anytime soon. Most of the sentiment on BPTrends is either against or (more often) completely beside the point.
One of the reasons that BPMN so quickly displaced BPEL in the BPM space is it had a graphical notation that exactly mirrored the semantic elements. What you see is what you get. So whenBPMN 2.0 changed the acronym to Business Process Model and Notation, I stubbornly refused to acknowledge the "and". For me it was all about the notation. The whole basis of Method and Style was making the process logic crystal clear from the diagram, so if some behavior was not captured in the notation, it didn't count.
On Twitter someone posted to me: "Have you ever seen a short overview of BPMN that makes sense to people who have never heard of it?" Hmmm... Probably not. So here is my attempt. Business Process Modeling Notation, or BPMN, is a process diagramming language. It describes, in a picture, the steps in a business process from start to end, an essential starting point whether you are simply documenting the process, analyzing it for possible improvement, or defining business requirements for an IT solution to a process problem.
A frequent complaint about BPMN is that it cannot adequately describe many common business process scenarios, particularly when all possible flow paths are not known in advance. Actually, it can handle a good number of those, but many fall into a "gray area" - patterns that may or may not be technically allowed, depending on your interpretation of the spec. One of those scenarios concerns variant forms of an activity. If activity A has only two or three variants, the modeling is straightforward: You just have a gateway that branches to variant X, variant Y, and variant Z, each shown explicitly as a separate activity in the diagram.
Details of my BPMN Master Class on June 2 and 9 have now been finalized. If you know BPMN Method and Style and you want to take the next step, this class is for you! The class is split into two 5-hour sessions one week apart, so students will have time to complete problem sets assigned at the end of the first session and mail them in before the second session, when selected solutions will be presented.
One of the singular successes of BPM technology is a common language - BPMN - used both for process modeling and executable design. At least in theory.... In reality, the BPMN created by the business analyst to represent the business requirements for implementation often bears little resemblance to the BPMN created by the BPMS developer, which must cope with real-world details of application integration. That not only weakens the business-IT collaboration so central to BPM's promise of business agility, but it leads to BPMN that must be revised whenever any backend system is updated or changed.
In the most significant enhancement to its BPMS since the Lombardi acquisition, IBM revealed at Impact this week that case management functionality will be a native feature of BPM 8.5.5, the June 2014 release. I hesitate to say IBM "announced" it, because it was barely mentioned at Impact. In fact, far more attention was paid to IBM Case Manager, aka Filenet P8, even though nothing new was announced for that product, which has had integration with BPM since the version 7 BPEL offering!
Merging BPMN and CMMN standards in OMG is, for the moment at least, a dead issue. The question remains how best to visually represent logic formerly known as case management, which I will henceforth refer to as responsive processes. Responsive processes are driven forward by events (including ad-hoc user action) and conditions, rather than by sequence flow. In a responsive process, an activity is enabled to start when its preconditions are satisfied.