Keith Swenson's Go Flow blog continues to produce thought-provoking discussions of BPM issues. Check it out if you are not a subscriber. His latest concerns simulation, one of my hot buttons. A couple years ago I wrote that simulation was a "fake feature" - one of those things vendors put in the tool to tick off the Gartner checklist but which don't do anything useful. Since then the situation has not improved to any great degree.
SAP is probably the world's leading supplier of process automation software. Over half of the world?s business transactions, involving 12 Million users in 120 countries, touch one of 140,000 SAP systems. But the company is only now entering the "BPM market" with the launch of NetWeaver BPM, part of the NetWeaver middleware platform. You would not expect SAP's approach to be anything like that of a BPMS pureplay like Lombardi or Savvion, but it's nothing like that of middleware giants like Oracle, IBM, or TIBCO, either.
I finally shipped the book off to the printer yesterday! Wow, why does the last 5% take 50% of the time? Not certain how long before it ships, but June almost for sure. I've been using the new levels-based method and style approach in private classroom training for the past couple months. I think it makes learning BPMN much easier, especially for business people. On July 1-2, I'll be doing a public two-day class in San Francisco, hosted at the Parc 55 Hotel in Union Square by the BPM Institute.
Two weeks ago Appian launched version 6 of its BPMS, along with a rebooted online collaboration network called Appian FORUM and a suite of professional services offerings. Appian plays in the human-centric business-empowered end of the BPMS vendor landscape along with Lombardi and Savvion. With all the vendors now claiming ease of use, Appian's new claim is "fastest," meaning shortest cycle time from concept to production. It's a distinction without much of a difference, but Appian believes that its tools require less scripting and technical futzing than its natural competitors.
Active Endpoints' Alex Neihaus points me to a post by his CTO Michael Rowley entitled "Which is simpler: BPMN or BPEL?" I'm groaning before I even read it, because I know where Michael is headed. Right off a cliff, in my view. Their product ActiveVOS is one of the first to support BPMN 2.0 diagrams, but they use it to create BPEL. Such a use was actually anticipated by the developers of BPMN 2.
I should have known that disputing Michael Rowley's contention that mapping BPMN to BPEL was "simpler" than a straight BPMN 2.0 solution would invite a further response. Two, actually, one from Michael and another from Frank Leymann. Hmmm. In a room with those two, I'm at best the third smartest guy. But unlike the "stacker-bashing" flame wars of 2008, their points are well stated and sort of illuminating. Anyway I can't resist taking another shot.
IBM left a voicemail at 4:58am today about a 6am briefing to announce the acquisition of Lombardi. Thanks for the heads up, guys! Sandy Kemsley does her usual great job with the briefing play-by-play, which I would describe as predictably unrevealing, except for the fact that Lombardi will be brought into WebSphere/AIM instead of being hung out to dry on its own like FileNet. So I guess we're down to the punditry.
Well, sort of... By that I mean you can export a BPMN diagram from your Blueprint account to your desktop and import it into another BPMN tool, like Process Modeler for Visio, the tool I use in my BPMessentials training, or BizAGI (see screenshot). After months of my nagging Lombardi about the need for this, it popped up like a surprise gift in the July Blueprint release. You might think they always had this.
Not a lot of BPM news out of IBM at Impact this week. The most surprising thing for me about it is how thoroughly Lombardi - acquired just a few months ago - has enthralled the WebSphere executives. At the opening keynote, WebSphere GM Craig Heyman called Lombardi Teamworks, rebranded IBM WebSphere BPM Lombardi Edition, "the core BPM product." Really? And at today's keynote session, Beth Smith, another top WebSphere executive, devoted the only demo of the session to a conventional walkthrough of Lombardi BluePrint and Teamworks, I mean WebSphere Lombardi Edition.
A year ago around this time IBM launched BPM BlueWorks, a collaborative BPM learning environment in the cloud where users could read about BPM, set up their own private workspaces, and use free IBM tools for "process discovery." Since then it has pretty much stayed below the radar, but with the recent introduction of a new BPMN 2.0 modeling widget in both BlueWorks and WebSphere Business Compass (fka WebSphere Modeler Publishing Server), IBM is ready to make some noise about it.