Last summer I posted on the challenge of achieving process model interchange via the BPMN 2.0 standard. In the half year since then, vendor progress toward that goal has been about zero. It seems that vendors, in particular the ones that drove the standard, don't really care about this most fundamental user expectation of any standard. Ah well, no surprise there... But in the past couple weeks, some encouraging developments. Activiti and BonitaSoft - both are open source startups with a BPMN 2.
Probably no aspect of BPM has underperformed versus expectations more than simulation. It should be a valuable tool that is commonly used in the course of process analysis... but it's just not. I've been thinking about why that is, and what it would take to make simulation useful in actual practice. It comes down to two basic things: better tools, and better-defined methodologies for deriving useful results from those tools. I haven't tried every simulation tool out there, so there may be some that do what I ask already.
Today Software AG announced a tight integration between ARIS, its leading Business Process Analysis suite, and webMethods, its SOA-based BPM Suite. The integration features roundtripping and continuous synchronization between business-oriented and developer-oriented models in those tools. The medium of interchange is BPMN 2.0 XML. Although the vast majority of existing ARIS assets are in the form of EPC models, an ARIS-proprietary format, Software AG's Susan Ganeshan on the press call said that for many reasons BPMN 2.
I have been listening to the chatter about Open Text's recent acquisition of Global 360. Here is my take on it. Both companies historically have followed a rollup strategy - acquiring content management and workflow companies with a decent installed base but low growth, and then mostly leaving them alone. Unlike, say Oracle's acquisition or BEA or IBM's acquisition of Lombardi, there does not seem to be a grand plan for unifying a killer BPMS with the best parts of all the acquisitions.
Today at Impact IBM announced their next-generation BPMS called IBM Business Process Manager v7.5. At heart it is the unification of WebSphere Lombardi Edition (fka Teamworks) and WebSphere Process Server. Some have called it just "a new coat of paint" on the existing offerings, because the (Lombardi) Process Designer and the (WPS) Integration Designer tools are both still there, and both runtime engines are still there as well. But that misses the point.
Uniting Lombardi's business-empowered process tooling with WPS horsepower and integration was a brilliant move by IBM, one that makes them, in my view, the clear BPMS thought leader (in addition to #1 in market share). But I am willing to bet that if you took IBM's top 20 BPM customers and had a way of identifying the most important BPM initiatives in those organizations, only a small percentage of them would be focused on a BPMS solution.
I have run across 5 BPMS vendors interested in my BPMN-I work: Activiti, BonitaSoft, Oracle, SAP, and IBM. Of the five, BonitaSoft is so far the most successful in actually implementing BPMN 2.0-based model interchange. Not only that, they are the only one so far that has implemented any of my suggestions for conforming to the xsd and BPMN-I. Here's an example. I created the following diagram in itp commerce Process Modeler for Visio: That's the top level diagram.
The questions of BPM vs Case Management, process vs case, and - almost too horrible for some Case people to contemplate - BPMN extensions for case management - are getting all frothy again. Here is my take on the topic. 1. The question is BPM part of case management, or is case management part of BPM? is a metaphysical one. I think, however, it is a proxy for the real question, can a BPMS do a good job with case management, or do you need a special dedicated tool?
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.
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.
