Column 2

Business Process Improvement and Business Architecture: a discussion initiated by Tom Dwyer on the links between process owners, business architects, process analysts and other roles that you'll find involved in a BPM initiative. Some interesting comments on the relative involvement of business and IT.

Brenda Michelson on enterprise architecture: it's about the business, dude. Why EA isn't just an IT initiative.

Anatoly Belychook on where enterprise architecture and BPMS tools meet in the area of process modeling: what enterprise architects see versus process modelers, and why executable models seem to define the divide.

Digging into the nitty-gritty details of BPM implementation, a bit on why you don't want to put too much data into process instance variables. This is a constant struggle that I've had with clients, who I always have to convince to only put in the data that is needed for immediate presentation to the user, or to control flow logic. Everything else just becomes a synchronization nightmare.

Want to get some free online BPMN training, and free tools to try it out with? BizAgi is offering an online course on BPMN fundamentals, a free process modeler (including tutorials) and a fully-functionality evaluation version of their BPM suite.

There was some question about this for a while, but it looks as if conformance subclasses (subsets of the BPMN standard) are going to make it into the BPMN standard. That's good news for tool vendors, who can then claim certain levels of conformance, but also for users who need only a subset of the standard in order to do the type of modeling that is appropriate for their role.

BPMN 2.0 is in its final approval stages; what does this mean for proponents of other process modeling formats such as EPC, the native ARIS format? I think that Sebastian's head-to-head comparison of EPC and BPMN is a bit fruitless, since BPMN is the standard; better to consider the things that EPC does that BPMN doesn't do.

I'll be at IBM Impact in a couple of weeks, and apparently, so will some Lombardi customers. Lombardi's Driven customer conference is being replaced (for now) with a Lombardi day at Impact, since Lombardi is part of the WebSphere brand. It will be interesting to see how long this separate user conference lasts, although FileNet is still holding UserNet events four years after their acquisition.

Next up in CMS Watch's ECM family trees: Documentum. I would have included Proactivity in this acquisition tree, since it became the core for the Documentum BPM that is tightly integrated with ECM. Interesting history, since Documentum was spun off from Xerox originally.

CMS Watch is doing a family tree for ECM suites: most of them are made up of several acquisitions, and it's interesting to track what was absorbed into what products. In this first episode: Open Text, dating back to PC Docs (which I remember well) which was in turn absorbed by Hummingbird before the Open Text Acquisition, as well as Vignette. Many well-known ECM names in this family tree.