I agree whith what you say, but I think that supports the observation that the two concepts do not map well.

A common repository may well help, in that it will at least force the two notations to be considered together. I would be very interested to see how the Stage concept will be handled in any common notation or repository, as it is the clear differentiator between Metastorm e-work and any other tool or notation. It is not handled in BPMN either.

I would still very much like to see a real world example to support the assertion that “Today customers are sharing models between ProVisionEA/BPA and Metastorm BPM” as we are interested in seeing this happen ourselves.

Let say right up front, my company, iOctane, has been a distributor for ProVision and Metastorm in Australia/NZ for some years – we also created the current conversion tool for ProVision to BPM.

The problem of conversion is challenging because of the differing focuses in the products – ProVision captures workflow information and produces documentation. It’s proscriptive in nature. While the Metastorm Designer allows the user to express workflow implementation details. It’s far more rigorous in nature.

At a technical level there are some real intersting problems. For a start, in ProVision “boxes” (Activities) on a workflow represent work and links between Activities represent deliverables.

In the Metastorm maps, User/Group Stages represent periods of inactivity (waiting on someone’s T0-Do list) while the links represent Activity.

At iOctane we’ve seen some pretty interesting workflow models, many of which are incomplete and lacking in detail – but this is fine for documenting processes.

The challenge was to create a conversion tool that would take into consideration how people actually use the products.

Of course once Metastorm Corp complete the stated strategy of bringing the tools together using a common repository, the problem will largely go away.

Happy to field any specific technical questions.

Can anyone actually show me a design in ProVision that has been converted to Metastorm BPM using the provided Exchange tool? Nothing I have ever come up with in e-work could be properly represented in ProVision as the elements do not really match. There is no concept of ‘Stage’ in ProVision, and the use of Map Segments for sub-workflows makes the result very difficult to change (which is after all the whol point of e-work).

can anyone show us a real example?

If you’re doing full round-tripping, that’s great — very few vendors that use a separate modeling tool are able to do this, and I feel that it’s critical functionality. Your comments are a bit ambiguous, however: it’s clear that you can move models from ProVision to Metastorm, but once they have been enriched (e.g., adding web services calls) in Metastorm, can they be moved back to ProVision for further model changes without requiring that the enrichment be re-done when the changed model comes back to Metastorm?

Thanks for the link to the modeler. Maybe the fact that I looked around for a minute and couldn’t find it on your site should be feedback to your web designers — if I didn’t find it, then others may be missing it as well. You might consider following the lead of your competitors, Savvion and TIBCO, both of whom put a prominent graphic and link to the free modeler download right on their home page.

-> We are happy to brief you on our strategy here. Just contact us and we’ll set up a meeting.

“but based on my past conversations with Proforma, I’m suspecting that it’s a one-way trip from Proforma’s modelling environment to Metastorm’s process execution environment, since you likely have to tweak the modelled process significantly in order to make it run, and they likely aren’t supporting an extensible interchange format that would allow those changes to stay with the model if it were moved back to the modelling environment.”

-> Today customers are sharing models between ProVisionEA/BPA and Metastorm BPM. The exchange is based on an extensible interface bus that will allow the details required by the respective personas (architect, process analysts, model driven developer) to be stored and passed along, unadulterated, but available to be used as needed. For example, we may capture budgeting data in an organizational model in EA or BPA that has no immediate use in the BPM model. This data will be stored, preserved, and passed back to the EA/BPA tools from the execution platform.

-> Of course when you move from a process modelling platform focused on Enterprise Architecture and Process Analysis to a model driven development platform you do add detail to the model but the amount of information re-use is still amazing. It is not only the process model that is shared but organizational structures, information & business data models, resource assignments, etc. Using metadata from the ProVision model there are even user interfaces automatically created and attached to the appropriate steps in the executable process. Once a ProVision model is opened in the BPM platform the model is enriched – integration components are configured for example.

-> Moving forward this exchange of models will move from being interface driven to metamodel driven. We are currently moving all of our EA, BPA, and BPM tools to a common metamodel and repository. This will make model exchange, reuse, and linkage of architecture, process analysis, and execution data even more fluid.

“I’m just guessing on this, of course, and would love to hear different. And, although Metastorm was one of the first vendors to offer a free downloadable process modelling tool, I can’t find that on their site any more, so they may be putting all of their process modelling eggs in the ProVision basket.”

–> Our free modeler is still available as a download. All downloads can now be found in the new Library section of our website. The direct link to the Business Analyst Process Designer download is: http://www.metastorm.com/library/Prodesig.asp

http://www.metastorm.com/library/overview_index.asp and the Metastorm Process Designer Section.