Bruce Mayfield posts a comment on an old thread exploring different ways to model business exceptions in BPMN. Since that original post I've worked out some best practices for different types of exceptions (business exceptions vs system faults, exception detected interanlly to the process vs signaled by external event, etc). As a reminder that our BPMN training is now available from …
Keith Swenson is one of the true superheroes of BPM, and a pioneer in the development of interoperability standards. Known for his stalwart defense of XPDL, he periodically feels called upon to insist that XPDL does not compete with BPEL... then usually adding that XPDL is actually better. But I've always felt that Keith obscures the real difference between XPDL and BPEL and their relationships to …
[My new column on BPMInstitute.org] Lacking support for fundamental concepts like human tasks and subprocesses, BPEL has become a favorite whipping boy of BPM vendors and consultants. But for all its faults, BPEL enjoys something that BPMN advocates can only dream about: an XML storage and interchange format that makes sense. It?s often said that BPEL is an XML language not a graphical notation, …
Over the past several months I've been doing a lot of work with SAP to beef up the modeling-related content on their BPX community site. BPX stands for Business Process Expert, a term intended to describe a new role in the organization, straddling the line between business and IT. I see BPMN as a critical enabler of this role, because it for the first time allows process modeling, a business …
Summary: BPMN has become the standard language of the Business Process Expert, usable for descriptive process modeling, simulation analysis, and even executable implementation design of end-to-end business processes. BPMN extends the familiar swimlane flowchart paradigm with events, the key to incorporating exceptions into process models and mapping to today?s SOA middleware. First of six parts. …
[Posted 15 Aug 2007 on BPMInstitute.org] When I launched my course "Process Modeling with BPMN", I discussed in this column why so many people beginning to "do" BPM were looking for training in modeling, and why that was especially needed for BPMN. Now, having delivered the training for five months, I have a better appreciation of BPMN's strengths and limitations, a better understanding of what …
Marlon Dumas provided a thoughtful response to my post on roundtripping. In order to address it point by point, I am reposting Marlon's comment here in a new thread., with my responses inserted: Bruce, I agree with many of the points you make, but I strongly disagree with the proposition that BPEL is like an assembly language and that the readability of BPEL code generated from BPMN diagrams is …
Michael zur Muehlen posts a lengthy response to my post On How Much BPMN Do You Need. He elaborates on his data analysis procedure - their procedure, actually, as Jan Recker was a co-author - and it's actually kind of interesting, looking at statistical correlations between diagram elements in a sample of BPMN collected in the wild. Sort of an anthropological survey - maybe archeological, given …
[Posted 29 Oct 2007 on BPMInstitute.org] The Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) standard from OMG has a lot to recommend it, but it?s not perfect. Since late February of this year, I?ve been doing BPMN training, and through that I have come to appreciate the subtle power of the notation and how it maps ? or sometimes not ? to the way real business analysts and architects want to model their …
There's no denying that BPMN is gaining traction in the marketplace. I see it in my training. I see it in BPMS and BPA vendors getting on board. But what's amazing about this is that it's happening without a standard way to store and interchange BPMN between tools. It almost boggles the mind that the creators of BPMN "forgot" about this when they started, and its current owners place model …