I'm at the annual OMG BPM Think Tank event in Chicago and, to be perfectly honest, it isn't working any more. This used to be my favorite BPM event, an industry insider deal, just vendors and consultants - no users - talking about standards and how to move BPM forward as an "industry." You had the top technical guys from the tools vendors, top consultants and analysts, lots of energy and spirited debate.
The vote on BPMN 2.0 is not the only thing on the agenda at next week's OMG meeting in Costa Rica. There is also the release of an RFP for a new Case Management standard, authored by Henk de Man of Cordys. Response to the announcement of same on OMG's BMI mailing list has been sometimes thoughtful but mostly the kind of doubting, naysaying, and non-sequiturs you often get on that list.
I'm trying to decipher Cordys chief strategist Jon Pyke's post today on the case management proposal at OMG. It's hard to tell what he's saying, but I gather things did not go well in Costa Rica. I could have told him that, based on the bmi thread beforehand. He casts as the villain "analysts and consultants [who] do an excellent job of commenting upon products or suggesting ways to take them to market or advising on market trends [but who should not be] vehicles for developing standards.
I am a little surprised at the scores on my BPMN self-test. Ten questions, four diagrams each, one of which is the correct answer. The scenarios are typical from real-world processes, and most of the patterns should be used routinely in process models. A couple of questions are a little hard, but I would have thought that more people understood the basic usage of timer, message, and error events, event gateways, loop vs MI activities, etc.
I've been offline for about a month due to a change of location. After 15 years among the calming redwoods of Santa Cruz, I've pulled up stakes and moved home and office to the devil's own playground of Southern California. I used to be able to hear the whir of the hummingbirds. Now it's the roar of the traffic and the incessant mowing and blowing, which appears to be a 24x7 activity down here.
I apologize for the inconvenience, but after a few months of difficulty rooting out a hack to my BPMS Watch site, I had to rebuild it on another host. Since I use BPMS Watch as my main website now, I changed the URL to www.methodandstyle.com instead of www.methodandstyle.com/wordpress. Maybe not the best idea, since bookmarked links don't work any more. The feed should still be the same (I hope). Let me know if you see any other problems with the site.
Haven't we beaten this to death yet? Apparently not, if Keith Swenson and Boris Lublinsky have anything to say about it. The discussion is leading nowhere. Boris inadvertently sums up the pointlessness of it in his conclusion: The confusion about BPEL and BPM in general seems to keep growing in the industry. There is still no agreement on the most basic BPM issues: Is BPM a business Discipline or software engineering?
I rarely disagree with Ismael, but I think his latest piece, in which he argues that a BPMS is the "right" way to build a Complex Event Processing (CEP) platform, is a little off base. All first-tier BPMS platforms today, not just those based on BPEL, can listen for events to instantiate a process, resume a waiting process, or interrupt a running activity. I don't think that has anything to do with CEP, which is about correlating events from multiple streams and applying rules to detect patterns of interest, e.
On April 9 I'll be speaking at Impact, IBM's annual WebSphere mega-event in Las Vegas, on the topic of "Leveraging Enterprise Content in BPM and SOA". I was quite surprised they invited me, as I have been critical of their previous positioning of FileNet vs WebSphere in the BPMS space ("content-centric" vs "process-centric"? are you kidding?) But given the new SOA spin on enterprise content (both FileNet and DB2 CM), sounds like IBM may be loosening up.
Oldish threads sometimes take on a life of their own, and recent comments on a January post What is Case Management? have done just that. If you are interested in this important but mostly ignored corner of the BPM space, check it out. In addition to the G360 Case Manager product, it seems there is another product called Singularity that I need to know more about.