SOA - Integration Industry Pulse

I spoke with Greg Carter, the CTO of Metastorm about their 2007 development roadmap for their BPM platform.

What interested me is their plans to provide extensions to their Stage Action Role (STAR™) modeling notation to include BPMN. Their plain is to continue to use their proprietary STAR modeling with business users to define the business processes and then use BPMN for modeling with IT. The underlying data will tie the different models together. The concept is that you can generate different views from the same design repository.

This concept maximizes flexibility, allowing different stakeholders to use the modeling techniques they are most familiar with. This is probably better than just saying to business people - get over it and learn to read BPMN models, or alternatively, saying to BPMN modelers "learn to walk business through the model in their own words". I've seen good facilitators walk business people through E-R diagrams in a way that made it meaningful in them and allowed them to provide feedback. I still think it's possible to do with BPMN. But more troubling is the shortcomings of BPMN. We simply don't have one modeling technique that has the capability of expressing everything necessary for a business-driven approach to designing SOA systems.

The bad news is that Metastorm won't have this functionality until the end of the year. I'm hoping to preview it sooner. But I'm happy to hear that tools vendors are working on the problem.