I recently received an email from Danny Greefhorst of the Netherlands, who says in relation to my 2006 BPMS Report series: "your definition of case management seems to be very document-centric and to be quite different from interpretations I have seen in other places." He attaches a couple articles, also of Dutch origin. The note was timely, as I'm in the process of putting together my 2007 report, and item #1 on the list is revising my list of process use cases and their scoring criteria.
Sandy calls attention to an excellent review of BPEL's history and current status from Oracle's Dave Shaffer and Manoj Das in (ironically) WebSphere Journal. Probably the best summary of the differences between the new BPEL 2.0 and the little-lamented BPEL 1.1 standard that I've seen yet in print. She also notes the seeming fakeness of BPEL4People, a joint SAP-IBM white paper that appeared 18 months ago that has achieved what I agree is the highest buzz-to-bang ratio in the history of BPM.
BPMS Watch is now one year old. While my posting schedule remains erratic, readership keeps growing (see Feedburner chart below). Feed readership is up 200% in 6 months and direct pageviews are up 40%, now 35K per month, plus syndication on several other sites. The Technorati ranking peaked several months ago around 60,000, and has since dropped to around 94,000. Since that's based on trackbacks from other blogs, I attribute the drop to the declining state of BPM blogging in general -- the conversation was considerably more vigorous a year ago than today, even though readership is rising.
Quick question for BPMS Watch readers. In my BPMN training I used Camtasia Studio to produce the Flash videos from Powerpoint and screencams. Of course, now I want to change the slide masters, tweak a few slides, the usual thing. But the simplest change in the Powerpoint can mean a huge effort in Camtasia. Changing the slide master? Probably 20 hours to re-record the video and re-sync the audio to the slides.
[This is a re-post of something I wrote yesterday on the SAP Business Process Expert megablog, in case you don't follow that site.]
At the recent Gartner BPM Summit, I was shocked to see how high a pedestal the Gartner analysts now place simulation analysis in their gallery of must-have BPM capabilities. Ever obedient, the BPMS and modeling tool vendors now universally throw it into the box. How else to get into that Magic Quadrant?
But have these analysts ever really used these tools, or even scrutinized them closely? I'm not really sure. I haven't looked at all of them myself, but my sampling to date tells me this is a fake feature if ever there was one.
Maybe I bit off a bit more than I could chew. I launched my BPMN training this spring and simultaneously the update of my BPMS Reports on BPMInstitute.org. Plus actual paying work. It was stuffing 10 pounds into a five-pound bag, and the BPMS Watch blog was what fell on the floor. But now version 2.1 of the BPMN training is about to go live, and the first 7 of 12 or 13 BPMS Reports are done, and I can at least come up for air.
...to my blog. Yes, guilty as charged. One reason is I've been doing a lot of writing on other sites. Examples: monthly BPMS Watch column on BPMinstitute.org new BPMS reports, also on BPMInstitute.org. Completed so far are Appian, BEA, Lombardi, G360, TIBCO, webMethods (SoftwareAG), FlowCentric, Cordys. In review cycle: Oracle, Singularity. Next up: EMC Documentum, IBM (WebSphere/FileNet). Maybe Adobe. These are free downloads. 6-part series on BPMN and the Business Process Expert, on SAP's BPX community site companion 6-part Flash video training on BPMN, also on BPX (forthcoming, end of December) The least I can do is call your attention to these here, maybe generate some comments.
CMP's TechWeb syndicates my blog, and someone posted a question re my recent post about The Future of BPM at BEA/Oracle. When I tried to reply, the CMP site rejected it for sexual innuendo or something. You be the judge. The comment: I did not see any speific remarks about Aqualogic in your article and pose this question to you: Given the current apabilities of Aqualogic and Oracle's existing 'positioning' of its (OEMd) BPA suite, would not Oracle be able to deliver its BPMS offering that way (I think that's what you are saying) BUT also support the business apps (BPM+SOA) using the same 'tools' (thereby eliminating the requirement & assoiated additional EBITDA impact of having to use the OEM ARIS offering)?
A lot of speculation about the fate of BPM and other BEA goodies after what Sandy calls "the Borg" has its way with them. Oracle will reveal all in a public webcast on July 1 at 9am PT/noon ET. To the analysts they wrote: On July 1st at Noon EDT/9:00 am PDT/5:00 pm in London, as part of the "Welcome BEA and Middleware Strategy Briefing" webcast, Charles Phillips and Thomas Kurian will explain how the addition of BEA products to Oracle Fusion Middleware will create a best-in-class combination.
The most interesting keynote at the Intalio User Conference was by Greg Olson, founder of Coghead, a BPM-in-the-cloud service that uses Intalio as the process engine under the covers. Coghead bills itself as a next-generation platform for situational apps, such as built today on Excel, Access, or FileMaker. Instead of professional developers, Coghead targets independent web developers and power users. The platform is 100% web based, a multi-tenant service hosted on the Amazon cloud infrastructure, with simple subscription-based pricing (free for single user).
