Can anyone help me understand how (or if) ESB fits in a BPMS? In the mountains of blather you can Google on either topic I can't find anything that makes sense about how the work together! In fact, the more I try to understand ESB the confuseder I get. For clarity, let's just consider BPEL-based BPMSs like IBM, Oracle, Intalio... Is ESB an inherent/invisible capability of these offerings (I think …
It's good to see Workflow Management Coalition's Keith Swenson blogging now. Keith, whose actual livelihood is as chief architect of Fujitsu's BPMS, has done heroic service over the years in advancing BPM standards consistent with the WfMC reference model, such as XPDL, ASAP, and others. His recent post "Workflow is Back" reflects the irritation of many who are continually forced to watch BPM …
BPM is about empowering people. It was co-opted by integration vendors, who took it down an IT-centric path. ? Connie Moore, Forrester. [Note: Forrester has separate analysts and ?waves? for human-centric and integration-centric BPM. Guess which is Connie?s?] The ultimate goal of BPM is self-aware processes that can recommend changes to process owners. ? Connie again. [Yeah, I hear businesses …
If it were anyone else but Ismael Ghalimi, I would have simply muttered "idiotic" and moved on without a second thought. But when a guy at the top of my BPM hero list declares that "nobody cares about BPM" any more, my actual reaction was dismay and mild depression. The apparent basis for Ismael's loss of faith: the fact that Google Trends shows searches on "bpm" have declined since 2004, while …
[my latest BPMS Watch column on BPMInstitute.org] The annual BPM Think Tank, now in its second iteration, is an event I?ve been looking forward to all year. Unlike most BPM conferences, which are generally aimed at helping newbies get started, Think Tank is a forum where experienced BPM vendors, analysts, academics, and user organizations come to discuss what needs to come next in terms of …
For me, the most troubling part of the BPM Think Tank event was my roundtable on The Business Value of BPMS. The roundtable format was an open-ended discussion with 10-12 attendees on a specific topic, formulating a problem statement and then a proposed ideal future state. I expected a discussion about which of BPMS's putative benefits -- business/IT alignment, process efficiency, compliance, …
Don't ask me how, but Ismael turned the hubbub over BPM vs SOA into a discussion of top-down vs "middle-out." Both threads (including comments) are semi-instructive, but somehow in the course of things he challenged me to come up with proof that top-down (i.e. BPM implementation driven from the business model) has ever worked. The challenge came in the form of a double-dog dare, with the promise …
The following is my latest column for BPM Institute: You can?t attend a BPM conference or webcast nowadays without hearing how SOA provides the critical technology underpinnings of BPM software. And there is even a grain of truth in that statement. For example, most BPM Suites provide integration adapters that can introspect backend systems and turn them into process components that are, in an …
Yesterday Gartner unveiled their magic quadrant for BPM Suites. For those unfamiliar with the format, it's a square in which the horizontal dimension represents "completeness of vision" and the vertical represents "ability to execute". Only BPMS products meeting Gartner's feature/capability checklist are eligible to compete. The evaluation is generally via a questionnaire and interviews and the …
One of the trends I detected at the Brainstorm BPM Conference in San Francisco this week is an effort to make BPM more engaging to users via Web 2.0 and Ajax. This dovetails with Ismael's suggestions about how to make BPM cool again. Adobe is now all over Flex and Flash technology to turn what we used to call "forms" into animated, engaging end user experiences (online or off) for, say, the …