Michael zur Muehlen posts a strange bit of analysis called How Much BPMN Do You Need? The method of research consisted of collecting 126 BPMN 1.0 diagrams from "consultants, seminar participants, and online sources," and counting the frequency of various diagram objects in them. His conclusion is that the BPMN that you "really need" consists of task, start and end event, sequence flow (he calls it "normal flow"), exclusive gateway, and pool.
My latest column on BPM Institute covers the issue of end-to-end process models which involve multiple pools and deeply nested hierarchies. It was motivated by painful experience grading certification exercises in my BPMN training. That experience was critical to my ultimate decision to include this in version 3.0 of my BPMN training, overcoming an initial concern about scaring off would-be process modelers. But the difference between the simple exercises modeled inline in the training and the post-training mail-in certification exercises representing real-world processes was simply too great to ignore.
[Posted 1 Oct 2007 on BPMInstitute.org] Among the numerous virtues of BPMN, foremost is vendor independence, giving process modelers many tools to choose from, all describing processes using the same shapes and semantics. That?s huge, since without low-cost (or even free) tools you?ll never establish a culture of process broadly throughout the business. Occasionally, however, a student in my BPMN training will ask the embarrassing question, ?So that means I can take the models I create in this class and import them into the BPMN tool we use in our company.
[Posted 27 Nov 2007 on BPMInstitute.org] In the early days of BPM ? four or five years ago ? everyone thought BPEL was the BPM standard, at least for runtime execution. Not long after, the importance of business-friendly process modeling came to the fore, and BPMN emerged as the standard for that. The mismatch between graph-oriented BPMN models, where you can route the flow just about anywhere, and block-oriented BPEL, where you can?
In my previous post, I discussed how the meaning of BPMN portability differs between BPDM, XPDL, and students in my BPMN training. Today, BPMN serialization is essentially a two-horse race: it's XPDL 2.0 (maybe 2.x), or BPDM. Don't tell me "these are not competing standards." As far as BPMN serialization goes, of course they are. But that doesn't mean they are fundamentally trying to do the same thing. XPDL 2.0 has a head start in the marketplace, but BPDM (published only in draft form) is the "
Last fall I wrote a column and subsequent blog post called My BPMN Wish List, discussing some useful semantic patterns that were hard to diagram in BPMN. I didn't get much comment on it, so I was a bit surprised to find recently on the OMG site a featured white paper by Antoine Lonjon, better known as the author of the BPDM spec, entitled The BPMN Wish List Revisited. It might seem flattering that my wish list turned into the wish list, but the opener dissed that idea: In recent articles, people have expressed some desires and concerns regarding BPMN.
Antoine of Intalio comments on yesterday's post re the need to tweak BPMN diagrams to make them more BPEL-friendly. One of my complaints had to do with the nasty "interleaving" error that always pops up when you turn on BPEL validation. He references an Intalio presentation at EclipseCon last year, specifically slide 16. I copied his BPMN into my tool (ITP Commerce) and sure enough, it gives the interleaving error: Getting rid of interleaving errors requires making duplicate copies of some of the diagram nodes so that BPEL's block structure is happy.
Keith Swenson revisits the nuisance of BPMN-BPEL roundtripping and casts the obvious solution - executable BPMN - in the guise of WYDIWYE, what-you-see-is-what-you-execute. I pretty much agree with Keith on this, but I have found that even though executable BPMN - as (he says) Fujitsu Interstage provides and (I would add) Lombardi, TIBCO, Appian, and others do as well - is obvously the right answer, it's sometimes not the actual answer in real life.
Tom Baeyens weighs in on my debate with Michael. He mostly sides with Michael, but I think because of a slight understanding of my stance. I'm not saying BPMN is all or nothing. Yes it has parts that are not very useful. And, like Michael, the tool vendors factor into my thinking as well, in particular the BPMS vendors who support BPMN's model-driven implementation style. So I, too, divide up BPMN constructs into different buckets, but with very different criteria.
Alex Toussaint offers a peek at AquaLogic BPM's improved BPMN support in the upcoming v6.1. The palette will include standard BPMN icons such asXOR, OR, and AND gateways, timer and message intermediate events, and I'm glad to see it. Now I just wish they could figure out a way to drag them out of the palette and into the actual process diagram. **Note added 4/29 - Jesper suggests this as a better example of BPMN "