Column 2 : BPM standards

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Business Process Incubator: Another Online BPM Community, But With Standards

BPM standards, I mean.

Yesterday saw the public beta launch of the Business Process Incubator; although this was inadvertently announced by Robert Shapiro during a public webinar last month, it only moved out of closed preview yesterday. I had a briefing from Denis Gagné of Trisotech, one of the driving forces behind BPI, and have had a test account to try it out for the past month.

BPI has a focus on BPM standards, especially BPMN and XPDL, and is intended to a be a hub for content and tools related to standards. That doesn’t mean that this is another walled garden of content; rather, a lot of content is mashed in from other locations rather than being published directly on the site. For example, if you search for me on the site, you’ll find links to this blog and to a number of my presentations on Slideshare, plus the ability to rate the content or flag them on a My Interests list. That means that there’s a lot of content available (but not necessarily hosted) on the site from the start, and it’s growing every day as more people link in BPM-related content that they know about.

The site is divided into four main areas:

Do, including services for verifying, visualizing, validating, publishing and converting process models in various standard formats. These are premium services available either directly on the site or via an API: you can try them out a few times with a free membership, but they require payment for more than a few times each month.
Share, for contributing content such as process models, tools and blogs; this is also used to view process models shared by others.
Learn, for viewing the links, blogs, books, training and other content added in the Share section.
Tools, for viewing the tools added in the Share section; these are categorized as diagramming, BPMS, BPA, BAM and BRE. Trisotech’s own free BPMN add-in for Visio is here, but is also featured directly on most other pages on the site, something that competing diagramming tools might object to.

Most content on the site can be tagged and rated, allowing the community to provide feedback. There needs to be better integration with other social networking besides just standard “community share” options on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, and this site just begs for BPI iPhone app, or at least a mobile version of the site.

Although I like the clean user interface, the categorization takes a bit of getting used to: for example, you add both content and tools in the Share section, but you view the links to content in Learn and the links to tools in Tools. Furthermore, you both contribute and view process models in the Share section; this appears to be the only type of contribution that is viewed in Share rather than another section. Also, the distinctions between some of the functions in the Do section are a bit esoteric: most users, for example, may not make the distinction between Transform (which is an XML transformation) versus Convert, since both turn a file of one type into another type. Similarly, Verify ensures that the file is a BPMN file based on the schema, whereas Validate ensures that there are no syntax errors in the BPMN file.

Although vendors can participate in the community as partners, it is vendor-independent. Rather than vendor sponsorships, the site is monetized through a membership model that allows access to most of the content for free, but requires a $300/year premium membership for unrestricted access to premium features, such as process model validation and translation services. In that way, the bulk of the site revenue is expected to come from corporate end-user organizations that use a combination of free and premium memberships for their users, and can sign up for a corporate membership that gives them four premium memberships plus 50% any additional ones. End-user organizations are becoming more aware of the value of BPM standards, and understand the value proposition of a standard notation when using process models to communicate broadly within their organization; BPI will help them to learn more about BPM standards as well as being a general resource for BPM information.

Businesses can have their own page on the site using a custom URL (e.g., www.businessprocessincubator.com/tibco), fancy it up with their own logo and business description, and list all of the site content that belongs to them, whether links to tools, blogs or other content. Partner pages are free, but are monetized by referral or commission fees on any RFI/RFQs, services, training or paid content offered via those pages.

The cloud-based functions offered in the Do section are also available through a public API for vendors to include directly or white-label them in their own offerings; although monetized for this wasn’t settled last month, it would be possible to do this through an API key, much like other public APIs. Both APIs and a toolbar are available for including BPI content and functions on another site.

Partners are already ramping up on the site, and by fall, BPI will be in general availability for all members. There’s now quite a bit of choice in BPM online communities: in addition to all the BPM-themed social networking sites and discussion groups, there are now several public communities offering tools and functionality specific to BPM, such as BPM Blueworks and ARISalign. Gagné sees BPI as complementary and partnering with those sites – for example, those sites could have a partner page, as BPM Institute does – since they augment the other sites’ content with standards-focused materials. BPI’s openness via APIs and a toolbar allows it to be added as a BPM community from another site, and will likely see many referrals from BPM vendors who don’t want to build their own community site, but like the idea of participating in one that’s vendor-neutral. Although BPI is focused on BPM standards, the open platform gives it the potential to grown into a full BPM social networking site with a broad variety of content.

By the way, as your reward for reading this entire post, here’s a link to get a free premium membership. Enjoy!

The State of BPMN Implementation: Webinar Replay

Here’s the replay of the webinar that I did yesterday with Active Endpoints – it runs almost 90 minutes, because we just kept the Q&A going at the end with all the interesting questions from the audience.

Unfortunately, during Alex Neihaus’ intro to the live presentation, the entire audience may have heard that I forgot to turn my *&$%^ phone off, and it started ringing at just the wrong time: definitely my bad. Then, I was disconnected from GoToMeeting (through no action of mine, just one of those things), which is why I went through a bit of reconnection confusion at the start of my part of the presentation. In spite of these glitches, I was finally reconnected and we got started.

Enjoy the replay.

2010 02 19 Sandy Kemsley Comments (0)

BPMN In The Real World Slideshow

Webinar done, we’re just on the final Q&A; I saw about 170 people logged in at one point, a pretty good turnout. The replay will be available on the VOSibilities blog or on iTunes.

Here’s my slides, with the “Process Model Hall Of Shame” removed:

BPMN In The Real World

View more presentations from Sandy Kemsley.

As I mentioned in the presentation, there are a lot of great resources on the BPMN standard; my presentation was about how people are actually using it rather than the standard itself.

Tagged BPMN

2010 02 18 Sandy Kemsley Comments (2)

Webinar Today on the State of BPMN Implementation

I’ll be speaking on a webinar today about how BPMN implementations are happening in the real world of customer process modeling. This is not going to be an update on the BPMN 2.0 standard itself – you can watch the excellent update from last week by Robert Shapiro for that – but rather a review of what I’m seeing in terms of real-world adoption within customer organizations, plus some tips on how to make that adoption happen.

The webinar is from 12-1pm ET on Thursday, February 18th; I’ll be on first, followed by Michael Rowley, CTO of Active Endpoints (who are sponsoring the webinar), who will demo their BPMN 2.0 product. You can sign up here.

2010 02 18 Sandy Kemsley Comments (1)

BPMN 2.0 Industry Update

It’s webinar day here at Column 2: this is my third in a row, this one an update on the BPMN 2.0 standard by Robert Shapiro, who participates in both the OMG BPMN 2.0 and WfMC XPDL 2.2 standards efforts. We’re already starting to see vendor support for BPMN 2.0, even though it’s not yet fully released, as well as books and training materials.

The concept of subclasses in process modeling has been included in this version, where there is a simple subset of eight elements used for process capture by non-technical process analysts/owners (start, end, sequence flow, task, subprocess, expanded subprocess, exclusive gateway, parallel gateway), then a larger subset for a “descriptive” persona, a larger-still subset for a “DODAF” persona, then the entire set of more than 100 elements:

You can download the accompanying PowerPoint deck for a more complete view of subclasses and their corresponding personas. I can certainly understand why many of the event variations were pushed out of the simple subclass, but I’m not sure that I agree with excluding pools and lanes, since these are pretty commonly used constructs. Also not sure why the US DoD’s enterprise architecture standard is impacting what is supposed to be an international standard.

These subclasses are important for vendors of modeling tools, but also for those looking to use BPMN as a standard for representing processes: this gives a good idea of how to split up the standard by the type of reader (persona) so that you don’t overwhelm the less technical audiences with too much detail, but also provide the greater levels of details for complete process specification.

Shapiro went on to discuss what most consider to be the most important (and likely the most controversial) part of BPMN 2.0: diagram interchange; BPMN 2.0 does not include an XSD schema, and there is ongoing work to create an XSD that is aligned with the metamodel. For those of you who follow BPM standards, you’ll know that XPDL is currently the de facto standard for process model interchange, supported by many vendors; these efforts are continuing in a separate organization (BPMN is managed by OMG, XPDL by WfMC) so it’s good that Shapiro and others are there to bridge the efforts across the two standards. We’re now seeing the emergence of XPDL 2.2, which will support the interchange of BPMN 2.0 process models. XPDL may eventually disappear in the face of a comprehensive BPMN 2.0 diagram interchange standard, but that will take years to happen, and a lot can happen in that time. In the meantime, XPDL will likely be used as an alternative diagram interchange format for BPMN 2.0 diagrams, with vendor support required for both standards.

The Business Process Incubator site has been created by several of the companies participating in both BPMN and XPDL standards efforts as a source for information as well as a variety of standard-related tools such as Visio templates. Shapiro also predicts that many tool vendors will release web-based BPMN 2.0 modelers, as well as BPMN and XPDL converters.

If you’re interested in where BPM standards are headed, it’s worth listening to the entire webinar, especially the Q&A at the end; I imagine that it will be available at the registration link on the WfMC site that I posted in the first paragraph.

Tagged BPMN, XPDL

2010 02 03 Sandy Kemsley BPA Comments (9)

BPMN 2.0 tutorial #BPM2009

Hagen Völzer from IBM Research in Zurich – and a member of the BPMN standards group – gave a tutorial on BPMN 2.0, with a specific focus on the new execution semantics.

BPMN 1.1 has taken us a long way towards a standardized process modeling notation, but has several shortcomings: no standardized execution semantics, no standardized serialization, and lack of choreography support. BPMN 2.0 addresses these and some other issues, but does not include organizational models, data models, strategy and business rules. BPMN 2.0 is still being finalized and will be adopted as a standard sometime in 2010, but many vendors are starting to include the new features in their products. The challenge, as he points out, is representing the interrelationship between the new diagram types.

He walked through BPMN, highlighting the changes to the visual notation in 2.0:

Lanes can be used to structure visualization of activities by any suitable attribute, not just roles
Call activity type that can call another process or a global task.
Business rule activity type (although this could be handled with a service task type).
Non-interrupting boundary events, including all event types except error events.
Escalation events.
Event subprocesses, which is an event handler within a subprocess (hence has access to the subprocess context); this can be triggered multiple times for the containing subprocess, and all event subprocesses must terminate before the containing subprocess terminates.
Inline error handler, which appears similar to the event subprocesses but for handling errors; it can handle the error locally rather than propagating it up the scope tree.
Compensation event subprocess, similar to the previous two handlers but for handling compensation events.
Data are now first class elements, and can be used as an input or output to an activity using the new data association that describes data flow between data objects and activities or events.
Choreography diagrams containing (not surprisingly) choreography activities that represent the activities between the participants; the pools and message flows are hidden, and only the choreography activities and the linkages between them are modeled. The two diagram types can be combined to show the choreography in the context of the pools and message flows.
Conversations, which collapse multiple related message flows to visually simplify a diagram; conversations can include more than two participants.

He also walked through the execution semantics, which are based on token flows, with token being produced and consumed by activities, events and gateways. BPMN 2.0 also specifies the representation of an activity lifecycle to map all of the actions that can occur around an activity. We looked in detail at the token-based execution semantics for an inclusive join (where the number of tokens generated by the split is not known locally) in a variety of nested contexts. The complexity of this explains a lot about why the 7PMG guidelines recommend not using inclusive ORs: if it’s this hard to figure out all the possible execution semantics, it’s going to be complex for a human to understand the model visually.

He ended up with research opportunities that have been created by the new specification, such as formalizing semantics of choreography diagrams (now we know his motivation for sitting on the committee ); it seems that there are many unresolved issues remaining.

It was useful to have a complete walkthrough of the specification as a refresher and to see the changes in context. I’m left with the impression that the event handlers and some of the other new features are exceptionally useful, but unlikely to be well-understood (and therefore used) by non-technical business analysts. As another one of the attendees pointed out, they’ve just invented a new visual programming language.

2009 09 09 Sandy Kemsley BPM2009 Comments (1)

Lombardi Blueprint update

I recently had a chance for an in-depth update on Lombardi’s Blueprint – a cloud-based process modeling tool – to see a number of the new features in the latest version. I haven’t had a chance to look at it in detail for over a year, and am impressed by the social networking tools that are built in now: huge advances in the short two years since Lombardi first launched Blueprint. The social networking tools make this more than just a Visio replacement: it’s a networking hub for people to collaborate on process discovery and design, complete with a home page that shows a feed of everything that has changed on processes that you are involved in. There’s also a place for you to bookmark your favorite processes so that you can easily jump to them or see who has modified them recently.

At a high level, creating processes hasn’t changed all that much: you can create a process using the outline view by just typing in a list of the main process activities or milestones; this creates the discovery map simultaneously on the screen, which then allows you to drag steps under the main milestone blocks to hierarchically indicate all the steps that make up that milestone. There have been a number of enhancements in specifying the details for each step however: you can assign roles or specific people as the participant, business owner or expert for that step; document the business problems that occur at that step to allow for some process analysis at later stages; create documentation for that step; and attach any documents or files to make available as reference materials for this step. Once the details are specified, the discovery map view (with the outline on the left and the block view on the right) shows the participants aligned below each milestone, and clicking on a participant shows not only where it is used in this process, but where it is used in all other processes in the repository.

At this point, we haven’t yet seen a bit of BPMN or anything vaguely resembling a flowchart: just a list of the major activities and the steps to be done in each one, along with some details about each step. It would be pretty straightforward for most business users to learn how to use this notation to do an initial sketch of a process during discovery, even if they don’t move on to the BPMN view.

Switching to the process diagram view, we see the BPMN process map corresponding to the outline view created in the discovery map view, and you can switch back and forth between them at any time. The milestones are shown as time bands, and if participants were identified for any of the steps, swimlanes are created corresponding to the participants. Each of the steps is placed in a simple sequential flow to start; you can then create gateways and any other elements directly in the process map in this view. The placement of each element is enforced by Blueprint, as well as maintaining a valid BPMN process map.

There’s also a documentation view of the process, showing all of the documentation entered in the details for any step.

Not everyone will have access to Blueprint, however, so you can also generate a PowerPoint file with all of the process details, including analysis of problem areas identified in the step details; a PDF of the process map; a Word document containing the step documentation; an Excel spreadsheet containing the process data; and a BPDM or XPDL output of the process definition. It will also soon support BPMN 2.0 exports. Process maps can also be imported from Visio; Blueprint analyzes the Visio file to identify the process maps within it, then allows the user to select the mapping to use from the Visio shapes into Blueprint element types.

There are other shared process modeling environments that do many of the same things, but the place where Blueprint really shines is in collaboration. It’s a shared whiteboard concept, so that users in different locations can work together and see the changes that each other makes interactively without waiting for one person to check the final result into a repository: an idea that is going to take hold more with the advent of technologies such as Google Wave that raise the bar for expectations of interactive content sharing. This level of interactivity will undoubtedly reduce the need for face-to-face sessions: if multiple people can view and interact simultaneously on a process design, there probably needs to be less time spent in a room together doing this on a whiteboard.There’s a (typed) chat functionality built right into the product, although most customers apparently still use conference calls while they are working together rather than the chat feature: hard to drag and drop things around on the process map while typing in chat at the same time, I suppose. Blueprint maintains a proper history of the changes to processes, and allows viewing of or reverting to previous versions.

Newly added is the ability to share processes in reviewer mode to a larger audience for review and feedback: users with review permissions (participants as opposed to authors) can view the entire process definition but can’t make modifications; they can, however, add comments on steps which are then visible to the other participants and authors. Like authors, reviewers can switch between discovery map, process diagram and documentation views, although their views are read-only, and add comments to steps in either of the first two views. Since Blueprint is hosted in the cloud, both authors and reviewers can be external to your company; however, user logins aren’t shared between Blueprint accounts but have to be created by each company in their account. It would be great if Blueprint provided authentication outside the context of each company’s account so that, for example, if I were participating in two project with different clients who were both Blueprint customer and I was also a Blueprint customer, they wouldn’t both have to create a login for me, but could reuse my existing login. Something like this is being done by Freshbooks, an online time tracking and invoicing applications, so that Freshbooks customers can easily more interact. Blueprint is providing the ability to limit access in order to meet some security standards: access to a company’s account can be limited to their own network (by IP address), and external participants can be restricted to be from specific domains.

One issue that I have with Blueprint, and have been vocal about in the past, is the lack of a non-US hosting option. Many organizations, including all of my Canadian banking customers, will not host anything on US-based servers due to the differences in privacy laws; even though, arguably, Blueprint doesn’t contain any customer information since it’s just the process models, not the executable processes, most of them are pretty conservative. I know that many European organizations have the same issues, and I think that Lombardi needs to address this issue if they want to break into non-US markets in a significant way. Understandably, Lombardi has resisted allowing Blueprint to be installed inside corporate firewalls since they lose control of the upgrade cycle, but many companies will accept hosting within their own country (or group of countries, in the case of the EU) even if it’s not on their own gear.

Using a cloud-based solution for process modeling makes a lot of sense in many situations: nothing to install on your own systems and low-cost subscription pricing, plus the ability to collaborate with people outside your organization. However, as easy as it is to export from Blueprint into a BPMS, there’s still the issue of round-tripping if you’re trying to model mostly automated processes.

2009 08 04 Sandy Kemsley BPA
BPM
cloud Comments (6)

Heather Kreger, IBM, on SOA standards

It’s impossible for me to pass up a standards discussion (how sad is that?), so I switched from the business analysis stream to the SOA stream for Heather Kreger’s discussion of SOA standards at an architectural level. OASIS, the Open Group and OMG got together to talk about some of the overlapping standards impacting this: they branded the process as “SOA harmonization” and even wrote a paper about it, Navigating the SOA Open Standards Landscape Around Architecture (direct PDF link).

As Kreger points out, there are differences between the different groups’ standards, but they’re not fatal. For example, both the Open Group and OASIS have SOA reference architectures; the Open Group one is more about implementation, but there’s nothing that’s completely contradictory about them. Similarly, there are SOA governance standards from both the Open Group and OASIS

They created a continuum of reference architectures, from the most abstract conceptual SOA reference architectures through generic reference architectures to SOA solution architectures.

The biggest difference in the standards is that of viewpoint: the standards are written based on what the author organizations are trying to do with them, but contain a lot of common concepts. For example, the Open Group tends to focus on how you build something within your own organization, whereas OASIS looks more at cross-organization orchestration. In some cases, specifications can be complementary (not complimentary as stated in the presentation ), as we see with SoaML being used with any of the reference architectures.

Good summary, and I’ll take time to review the paper later.

2009 07 21 Sandy Kemsley EA
Open Group
SOA Comments (1)

BPM Acronyms

I had a request from a reader for a list explaining the various acronyms that I use in these blog posts, and around BPM in general. I’m sure that there are several lists like this, but I’ve pulled together a starting list and have opened it up by creating it in a Google spreadsheet that anyone can edit.

Please go ahead and edit the Google spreadsheet to add your own here, or to make any corrections to the list. I reserve the right to edit or delete any inappropriate entries.

2009 05 19 Sandy Kemsley BPM Comments (2)

Robert Shapiro on BPMN 2.0

Robert Shapiro spoke on a webinar today about BPMN 2.0, including some of the history of how BPMN got to this point, changes and new features from the previous version and the challenges that those may create, the need for portability and conformance, and an update on XPDL 2.2. The webinar was hosted by the Workflow Management Coalition, where Shapiro chairs the conformance working group.

He started out with how WPDL started as an interchange format in the mid-90’s, then became XPDL 1.0 around 2001, around the time that the BPMN 1.0 standard was being kicked off. For those of you not up on your standards, XPDL is an interchange format (i.e., the file format) and BPMN prior to version 2.0 is a notation format (i.e., the visual representation); since BPMN didn’t include an interchange format, XPDL was updated to provide serialization of all BPMN elements.

With BPMN 2.0, serialization is being added to the BPMN standard, as well as many other new components including formalization of execution semantics and the definition of choreography model. In particular, there are significant changes to conformance, swimlanes and pools, data objects, subprocesses, and events; Shapiro walked through each of these in detail. I like some of the changes to events, such as the distinction between boundary and regular intermediate events, as well as the concept of interrupting and non-interrupting events. This makes for a more complex set of events, but much more representative.

Bruce Silver, who has been involved in the development of BPMN 2.0, wrote recently on what he thinks is missing from BPMN 2.0; definitely worth a read for some of what might be coming up in future versions (if Bruce has his way).

One key thing that is emerging, both as part of the standard and in practice, is portability conformance: one of the main reasons for these standards is to be able to move process models from one modeling tool to another without loss of information. This led to a discussion about BPEL, and how BPMN is not just for BPEL, or even just for executable processes. BPEL doesn’t fully support BPMN: there are things that you can model in BPMN that will be lost if you serialize to BPEL, since BPEL is intended as a web service orchestration language. For business analysts modeling processes – especially non-executable processes – a more complete serialization is critical.

In case you’re wondering about BPDM, which was originally intended to be the serialization format for BPMN, it appears to have become too much of an academic exercise and not enough about solving the practical serialization problem at hand. Even as serialization is built into BPMN 2.0 and beyond, XPDL will likely remain a key interchange format because of the existing base of XPDL support by a number of BPM and BPA vendors. Nonetheless, XPDL will need to work at remaining relevant to the BPM market in the world of BPEL and BPMN, although it is likely to remain as a supported standard for years to come even if the BPMN 2.0 serialization standard is picked up by a majority of the vendors.

The webinar has about 60 attendees on it, including the imaginatively named “asdf” (check the left side of your keyboard) and several acquaintances from the BPM standards and vendor communities. The registration page for the webinar is here, and I imagine that that will eventually link to the replay of the webinar. The slides will also be available on the WfMC site.

If you want to read more about BPMN 2.0, don’t go searching on the OMG site: for some reason, they don’t want to share draft versions of the specification except to paid OMG members. Here’s a direct link to the 0.9 draft version from November 2008, but I also recommend tracking Bruce Silver’s blog for insightful commentary on BPMN.

Tagged BPDM, BPEL, BPMN, XPDL

2009 05 19 Sandy Kemsley Comments (2)

BPM Think Tank: Business Benefits of BPM Standards

Derek Miers gave a short session that was supposed to be about the business benefits of BPM standards, but ended up as a bit of a BPM standards bun fight. As I mentioned in my first post this morning, I think that Think Tank needs more about standards, I’m just not sure that a few minutes of unstructured debate — mostly from vendors who are involved in the standards process — really satisfies the need.

2008 10 06 Sandy Kemsley BPMThinkTank Comments (1)

Business Process Driven SOA using BPMN and BPEL

I just received a review copy of Matjaz Juric and Kapil Pant’s new book, Business Process Driven SOA using BPMN and BPEL. It’s on my list of recent books that I’ve received to review, and I hope to get to it soon.

According to the authors’ description, you’ll learn the following from this book:

Modeling business processes in an SOA-compliant way
A detailed understanding of BPMN standard for business process modeling and analysis
Automatically translating BPMN into BPEL Executing business processes on SOA platforms
Overcome the semantic gap between process models and their execution, and follow the closed-loop business process management life cycle
Understand technologies complementary to BPM and SOA such as Business Rules Management and Business Activity monitoring Approach

I’ll let you know if I learned all of that once I’ve had a chance to read it.

2008 09 20 Sandy Kemsley BPM
SOA Comments (1)

BPM Milan: Instantiation Semantics for Process Models

Jan Mendling of Queensland University of Technology presented a paper on Instantiation Semantics for Process Models, co-authored with Gero Decker of HPI Potsdam. Their main focus was on determining the soundness of process models, particularly based on the entry points to processes.

They considered six different process notations and syntax: open workflow nets, YAWL, event-driven process chains, BPEL (the code, not a graphical representation), UML activity diagrams, and BPMN. They determined how an entry point is represented in each of these notations, with three different types of entry points: a start place (such as in open workflow nets), a start event (such as in BPMN), and a start condition (such as in event-driven process chains). He walked through a generic process execution environment, showing the entry points to process execution.

They created a framework called CASU: Creation (what triggers a new process instance), Activation (which of the multiple entry points are activated on creation), Subscription (which other start events are waited for upon the triggering of one start event), and Unsubscription (how long are the other start events waited for). Each of these four activities has several possible patterns, e.g., Creation can be based on a single condition, multiple events, or other patterns of events.

The CASU framework allows for the classification of the instantiation semantics of different modeling languages; he showed a classification table that evaluated each of the six process notations against the 5 Creation patterns, 5 Activation patterns, 3 Subscription patterns and 5 Unsubscription patterns, showing how well each notation supports each pattern. One important note is that BPEL and BPMN do not support the same patterns, meaning that there is not a 100% mapping between BPMN and BPEL: we all knew that, but it’s nice to see more research backing it up.

Having multiple start events in a process causes all sorts of problems in terms of understandability and soundness, and he doesn’t recommend this in general; however, since the notations support it and therefore it can be done in practice, analysis of multi-start point instantiation semantics is important to understand how the different modeling languages handle these situations.

2008 09 03 Sandy Kemsley BPA
IntlBPM Comments (1)

BPM Milan: Paul Harmon keynote

After a few brief introductions from the various conference organizers (in which we learned that next year’s conference is in Ulm, Germany), we had a keynote from Paul Harmon on the current state and future of BPM. It covered a lot of the past, too: from the origins of quality management and process improvement through every technique used in the past 100 years to the current methods and best practices. A reasonable summary of how we got to where we are.

His “future promise”, however, isn’t all that future: he talks about orchestrating ERP processes with a BPMS, something that’s already a well-understood functionality, if not widely implemented. He points out (and I agree) that many uses of BPMS today are not that innovative: they’re being used the same way as the workflow and EAI systems of 5 years ago, namely, as better programming tools to automate a process. He sees the value of today’s BPMS as helping managers to manage processes, both in terms of visibility and agility; of course, it’s hard to do that unless you have the first part in place, it’s just that a lot of companies spend too much effort on the first level of just automating the processes, and never get to the management part of BPM.

He discussed the importance of BPMN in moving BPMS into the hands of managers and business analysts, in that a basic — but still standards-compliant — BPMN diagram can be created without adornment by someone on the business side without having to consider many of the exception flows or technical implementation details: this “happy path” process will execute as it is, but won’t handle all situations. The exceptions and technical details can be added at a second modeling/design phase while still maintaining the core process as originally designed by the business person.

He also showed a different view of a business process: instead of modeling the internal processes, model the customer processes — what the customer goes through in order to achieve their goals — and align that with what goes on internally and what could be done to improve the customer experience. Since the focus is on the customer process and not the internal process, the need for change to internal process can become more evident: a variation on walking a mile in their shoes.

His definition of BPM is very broad, encompassing not just the core processes, but performance management, people, technology, facilities, management and suppliers/partners: an integration of quality, management and IT. Because of the broad involvement of people across an organization, it’s key to find a common language about process that spans IT and business management.

Although they’re not there yet, you can find a copy of his slides later this week by searching for BPM2008HarmonKeynote at BPtrends.com.

Tagged BPMN, paul harmon

2008 09 02 Sandy Kemsley BPM
IntlBPM Comments (1)

Another new BPMN book

Another new BPMN book, this one by Stephen White (arguably the inventor of BPMN) and Derek Miers: BPMN Modeling and Reference Guide. It won’t be released until September, with a public launch at the Gartner BPM summit in DC. From the product description:

This book is for both business users and process modeling practitioners alike. Part I provides an easily understood introduction to the key components of BPMN (put forward in a user-friendly fashion). Starting off with simple models, it progresses into more sophisticated patterns. Exercises help cement comprehension and understanding (with answers available online). Part II provides a detailed and authoritative reference on the precise semantics and capabilities of the standard.

I wrote earlier this week about the just-released BPMN book by Tom Debevoise and Rick Geneva; this is obviously the year that BPMN goes mainstream, or at least makes the attempt. White and Miers’ book, although a bit longer than Debevoise and Geneva’s, is also more than twice the price, and also doesn’t seem to offer an e-book option: hard to become a staple of every process-oriented person in an organization at a $40 price point.

I’ll be very interested to read Bruce Silver’s review of these books. Unless, of course, he’s writing his own.

Tagged BPMN, derek miers, stephen white

2008 07 22 Sandy Kemsley Comments (4)

Microguide to BPMN

I noticed in one of Tom Debevoise’s posts last week that he recently co-authored the book The Microguide to Process Modeling in BPMN, and on closer examination, I see that his co-author is Rick Geneva of Intalio, with Ismael Ghalimi writing the foreword.

From the product description on Amazon:

With over fifty implementations listed, Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) is an increasingly successful Object Management Group (OMG) standard. Whether you are in government, manufacturing or retailing you can accurately depict your processes in BPMN! Yet, OMG BPMN specification 1.1 is abstract, lengthy and complicated. So, learning to use BPMN can be daunting. So you will need the strait forward [sic] information in this book. This guide gathers all the ideas, design, and problem solving of BPMN into one simple, focused book, and offers concrete true-life examples that explain BPMN’s approach to process modeling.

I haven’t had a chance to read it yet so can’t compare it to the many other sources of BPMN instruction out there, such as the recently-released BPMN, the Business Process Modeling Notation Pocket Handbook. Unfortunately, Debevoise and Geneva’s book doesn’t appear to be available as an e-book.

Tagged BPMN, Ismael Ghalimi, Rick Geneva, Tom Debevoice

2008 07 20 Sandy Kemsley Comments (1)

BPMN 1.1 poster

Previously, I posted about the free BPMN 1.0 poster available for download from ITPoster.net, and now the Business Process Technology Group at the Hasso Plattner Institute has published one for BPMN 1.1. Both provide a good quick reference; the BPT version has just the graphical object notation, while the ITPoster version also includes some patterns and antipatterns.

Also, check out BPT’s BPMN Corner, which has a number of good BPMN links, including Oryx, a web-based BPMN editor, and BPMN stencils for Visio and OmniGraffle.

Tagged BPMN

2008 07 15 Sandy Kemsley Comments (1)

Oracle BEA Strategy Briefing

Not only did Oracle schedule this briefing on Canada Day, the biggest holiday in Canada, but they forced me to download the Real Player plug-in in order to participate. The good part, however, is that it was full streaming audio and video alongside the slides.

Charles Phillips, Oracle President, kicked off with a welcome and some background on Oracle, including their focus on database, middleware and applications, and how middleware is the fastest-growing of these three product pillars. He described how Oracle Fusion middleware is used both by their own applications as well as ISVs and customers implementing their own SOA initiatives.

He outlined their rationale for acquiring BEA: complementary products and architecture, internal expertise, strategic markets such as Asia, and the partner and channel ecosystem. He stated that they will continue to support BEA products under the existing support lifetimes, with no forced migration policies to move off of BEA platforms. They now consider themselves #1 in the middleware market in terms of both size and technology leadership, and Phillips gave a gentle slam to IBM for over-inflating their middleware market size by including everything but the kitchen sink in what they consider to be middleware.

The BEA developer and architect online communities will be merged into the Oracle Technology Network: Dev2Dev will be merged into the Oracle Java Developer community, and Arch2Arch will be broadened to the Oracle community.

Retaining all the BEA development centers, they now have 4,500 middleware developers; most BEA sales, consulting and support staff were also retained and integrated into the the Fusion middleware teams.

Next up was Thomas Kurian, SVP of Product Development for Fusion Middleware and BEA product directions, with a more detailed view of the Oracle middleware products and strategy. Their basic philosophy for middleware is that it’s a unified suite rather than a collection of disjoint products, it’s modular from a purchasing and deployment standpoint, and it’s standards-based and open. He started to talk about applications enabled by their products, unifying SOA, process management, business intelligence, content management and Enterprise 2.0.

They’ve categorized middleware products into 3 categories on their product roadmap (which I have reproduced here directly from Kurian’s slide:

Strategic products

BEA products being adopted immediately with limited re-design into Oracle Fusion middleware
No corresponding Oracle products exist in majority of cases
Corresponding Oracle products converge with BEA products with rapid integration over 12-18 months

Continue and converge products

BEA products being incrementally re-designed to integrate with Oracle Fusion middleware
Gradual integration with existing Oracle Fusion middleware technology to broaden features with automated upgrades
Continue development and maintenance for at least 9 years

Maintenance products

BEA had end-of-life’d due to limited adoption prior to Oracle M&A
Continued maintenance with appropriate fixes for 5 years

For the “continue and converge” category, that is, of course, a bit different than “no forced migration”, but this is to be expected. My issue is with the overlap between the “strategic” category, which can include a convergence of an Oracle and a BEA product, and the “continue and converge” category, which includes products that will be converged into another product: when is a converged product considered “strategic” rather than “continue and converge”, or is this just the spin they’re putting on things so as to not freak out BEA customers who have put huge investments into a BEA product that is going to be converged into an existing Oracle product?

He went on to discuss how each individual Oracle and BEA product would be handled under this categorization. I’ve skipped the parts on development tools, transaction processing, identity management, systems management and service delivery, and gone right to their plans for the Service-Oriented Architecture products:

Strategic:

Oracle Data Integrator for data integration and batch ETL
Oracle Service Bus, which unifies AquaLogic Service Bus and Oracle Enterprise Service Bus
Oracle BPEL Process Manager for service orchestration and composite application infrastructure
Oracle Complex Event Processor for in-memory event computation, integrated with WebLogic Event Server
Oracle Business Activity Monitoring for dashboards to monitor business events and business process KPIs

Continue and converge:

BEA WL-Integration will be converged with the Oracle BPEL Process Manager

Maintenance:

BEA Cyclone
BEA RFID Server

Note that the Oracle Service Bus is in the “strategic” category, but is a convergence of AL-SB and Oracle ESB, which means that customers of one of those two products (or maybe both) are not going to be happy.

Kurian stated that Oracle sees four types of business processes — system-centric, human-centric, document-centric and decision-centric (which match the Forrester divisions) — but believes that a single product/engine that can handle all of these is the way to go, since few processes fall purely into one of these four categories. They support BPEL for service orchestration and BPMN for modeling, and their plan is to converge a single platform that supports both BPEL and BPMN (I assume that he means both service orchestration and human-facing workflow). Given that, here’s their strategy for Business Process Management products:

Strategic:

Oracle BPA Designer for process modeling and simulation
BEA AL-BPM Designer for iterative process modeling
Oracle BPM, which will be the convergence of BEA AquaLogic BPM and Oracle BPEL Process Manager in a single runtime engine
Oracle Document Capture & Imaging for document capture, imaging and document workflow with ERP integration [emphasis mine]
Oracle Business Rules as a declarative rules engine
Oracle Business Activity Monitoring [same as in SOA section]
Oracle WebCenter as a process portal interface to visualize composite processes

Similar to the ESB categorization, I find the classification of the converged Oracle BPM product (BEA AL-BPM and Oracle BPEL PM) as “strategic” to be at odds with his original definition: it should be in the “continue & converge” category since the products are being converged. This convergence is not, however, unexpected: having two separate BPM platforms would just be asking for trouble. In fact, I would say that having two process modelers is also a recipe for trouble: they should look at how to converge the Oracle BPA Designer and the BEA AL-BPM Designer

In the portals and Enterprise 2.0 product area, Kurian was a bit more up-front about how WebLogic Portal and AquaLogic UI are going to be merged into the corresponding Oracle products:

Strategic:

Oracle Universal Content Management for content management repository, security, publishing, imaging, records and archival
Oracle WebCenter Framework for portal development and Enterprise 2.0 services
Oracle WebCenter Spaces & Suite as a packaged self-service portal environment with social computing services
BEA Ensemble for lightweight REST-based portal assembly
BEA Pathways for social interaction analytics

Continue and converge:

BEA WebLogic Portal will be integrated into the WebCenter framework
BEA AquaLogic User Interaction (AL-UI) will be integrated into WebCenter Spaces & Suite

Maintenance:

BEA Commerce Services
BEA Collabra

In SOA governance:

Strategic:

BEA AquaLogic Enterprise Repository to capture, share and manage the change of SOA artifacts throughout their lifecycle
Oracle Service Registry for UDDI
Oracle Web Services Manager for security and QOS policy management on services
EM Service Level Management Pack as a management console for service level response time and availability
EM SOA Management Pack as a management console for monitoring, tracing and change managing SOA

Maintenance:

BEA AquaLogic Services Manager

Kurian discussed the implications of this product strategy on Oracle Applications customers: much of this will be transparent to Oracle Applications, since many of these products form the framework on which the applications are built, but are isolated so that customizations don’t touch them. For those changes that will impact the applications, they’ll be introduced gradually. Of course, some Oracle Apps are already certified with BEA products that are now designated as strategic Oracle products.

Oracle has also simplified their middleware pricing and packaging, with products structured into 12 suites:

He summed up with their key messages:

They have a clear, well-defined, integrated product strategy
They are protecting and enhancing existing customer investments
They are broadening Oracle and BEA investment in middleware
There is a broad range of choice for customer

The entire briefing will be available soon for replay on Oracle’s website if you’re interested in seeing the full hour and 45 minutes. There’s more information about the middleware products here, and you can sign up to attend an Oracle BEA welcome event in your city.

Tagged BPEL, BPMN

2008 07 01 Sandy Kemsley BPM
BRM
CEP
ESB
SOA
social software Comments (16)

Architecture & Process keynote: Bill Curtis

The second part of the morning keynote was by Bill Curtis, who was involved in developing CMM and CMMI, and now is working on the Business Process Maturity Model (BPMM). I’ve seen quite a bit about BPMM at OMG functions, but this is the first time that I’ve heard Curtis speak about it.

He started by talking about the process/function matrix, where functions focus on the performance of skills within an area of expertise, and processes focus on the flow and transformation of information or material. In other words, functions are the silos/departments in organizations (e.g., marketing, engineering, sales, admin, supply chain, finance, customer service), and processes are the flows that cut across them (e.g., concept to retire, campaign to order, order to cash, procure to pay, incident to close. Unfortunately, as we all know, the biggest problems occur with the white space in between the silos when the processes aren’t structured properly, and a small error at the beginning of the process causes increasingly large amounts of rework in other departments later in the process: items left off the bill of sale by sales created missing information in legal, incomplete specs in delivery, and incorrect invoices in finance. Typical for many industries is 30% rework — an alarming figure that would never be tolerated in manufacturing, for example, where rework is measured and visible.

Curtis’ point is that low maturity organizations have a staggering about of rework, causing incredibly inefficient processes, and they don’t even know about it because they’re not measuring it. As with many things, introspection breeds change. And just as Ted Lewis was talking about EA as not just being IT architecture, but a business-IT decision-making framework, Curtis talked about how the concepts of CMM in IT were expanded into BPMM, a measurement of both business and IT maturity relative to business processes.

In case you haven’t seen the BPMM, here’s the five levels:

Level 1 – Initial: inconsistent management (I would have called this Level 0 for consistency with CMM, but maybe that was considered too depressing for business organizations). Curtis called the haphazard measures at this level "the march of 1000 spreadsheets", which is pretty accurate.
Level 2 – Managed: work unit management, achieved through repeatable practices. Measurements in place tend to be localized status and operational reports that indicate whether local work is on target or not, allowing them to start to manage their commitments and capacity.
Level 3 – Standardized: process management based on standardized practices. Transitioning from level 2 to 3 requires tailoring guidelines, allowing the creation of standard processes while still allowing for exceptions: this tends to strip a lot of the complexity out of the processes, and makes it worth considering automation (automation of level 2 just paves the cowpaths). Measurements are now focused on process measures, usually based on reacting to thresholds, which allows both more accurate processes and more accurate cost-time-quality measures for better business planning.
Level 4 – Predictable: capability management through statistically controlled practices. Statistical measurements throughout a process — true process analytics — are now used to predict the outcome: not only are the measurements more sophisticated, but the process is sufficiently repeatable (low variance) that accurate prediction is possible. If you’re using Six Sigma, this is where the full set of tools and techniques are used (although some will be used at levels 2 and 3). This allows predictive models to be used both for predicting the results of work in progress, and for planning based on accurately estimated capabilities.
Level 5 – Innovative: innovation management through innovative practices. This is not just about innovation, but about the agility to implement that innovation. Measurements are used for what-if analysis to drive into proactive process experimentation and improvement.

The top two levels are really identical to innovative management practices, but the advantage of BPMM is that it provides a path to get from where we are now to these innovative practices. Curtis also sees this as a migration from a chaotic clash of cultures to a cohesive culture of innovation.

This was a fabulous, fast-paced presentation that left me with a much deeper understanding of — and appreciation for — BPMM. He had some great slides with this, which will apparently be available on the Transformation & Innovation website later this week.

Now the hard part starts: trying to pick between a number of interesting-sounding breakout sessions.

Tagged BPMM

2008 04 22 Sandy Kemsley Architecture&Process Comments (0)

BPEL for Java Developers Webinar

Active Endpoints is hosting a webinar this Thursday on BPEL Basics for Java Developers, featuring Ron Romano, their principal consulting architect. From their information:

A high-level overview of BPEL and its importance in a web-services environment is presented, along with a brief discussion of the basic BPEL activities and how they relate to Java concepts. The following topics will be covered:

Parsing the Language of SOA with Java as a guide

Breaking out of the VM: evolving from RPC to Web Services

BPEL Activities – Receive, Reply, Invoke

BPEL Facilities – Fault Handling and Compensation (“Undo”)

The VP of Marketing assures me that he was allowed only two slides at the end of the presentation, and that otherwise this is focused on the technical goodies.

You need to register in advance at the link above.

Tagged BPEL

2008 04 15 Sandy Kemsley SOA
Software design Comments (1)

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