Oracle has this unfortunate policy of putting almost everything in their Fusion Middleware Analyst Day under NDA and requiring blogs on that to be preapproved by Oracle. So I will just ignore what I heard in the analyst sessions and talk about what I saw in the Exhibition Hall, where bits of the next release of Oracle BPM, version 11.1.1.7 - or, if you prefer the catchier marketing name "BPM 11g Patch Set 6"
SAP, well-known as a leader in the enterprise applications space, is often overlooked as a supplier of BPM technology, but the company has been quietly moving forward with BPM on a broad front, and in fact has a great story to tell. Their goal is to be the preferred BPM technology supplier for SAP customers, not just for application integration and workflow software but for BPM in the large, including business and solution modeling, end-to-end performance visibility, and BPM methodology.
Vishal Saxena, formerly lead BPMS developer at Oracle and Intalio and a member of the BPMN 2.0 technical committee in OMG, today showed me a demo from his new company Roubroo. The interesting thing to me about Roubroo is the ease of modifying process definitions at runtime, either on a single instance or a set of instances, while strictly observing the semantics and rules of BPMN 2.0. Difficulty with ad-hoc behavior is one of the biggest objections some users have about BPMN 2.
Thanks as always to Sandy Kemsley for a detailed summary of all the talks. My review is more impressionistic. The goals of the program were these: Talk about something I haven't seen before Actually, SHOW me don't just tell me Spur my imagination And the program in the end met those goals. It was really really good. There were several themes in the presentations: lowering the barriers to business users; leveraging social networks and mobile devices; handling unstructured work; expanding the boundaries of process analysis.
Process innovation was a central theme of last week's IBM Impact conference - it took center stage in the Day 2 Main Tent - but the term BPM has seemingly been banished at IBM, replaced by "Smarter Process". Now BPM is just the name of one product in the larger Smarter Process marketecture, shown below. The Smarter Process "suite" is the white block in the middle, where BPM, together with Operational Decision Manager and Case Manager, are being extended to integrate with mobile, social, cloud, and big data, as well as with each other.
If you’re interested in the technology side of BPM, there’s an upcoming event you won’t want to miss. It’s called bpmNEXT, and it runs from March 25-27 at the Asilomar Conference Center in Pacific Grove, a stone’s throw from Pebble Beach on the Monterey Peninsula. I'm hosting it together with Nathaniel Palmer of BPM.com. This is the second annual bpmNEXT. Last year’s event got rave reviews, both for the quality of the presentations and the social interaction.
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.
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.
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!