Kiran Garimella's BPM Blog

Sorry to be missing from the blog scene for so long. I spent a couple of weeks spreading the BPM vision within BEA and then a couple of weeks off. Luckily this means that I've had some time to do "deep thinking" and have some ideas for blog posts. Unluckily this means that I also have an inbox stacked with work to catch up on and therefore little time to get the ideas into words.

So, while I find the time to get the original posts typed up, here is some quick commentary on things I bookmarked while out.

• Joe McKendrick has an post on ZDNet blogs about BPEL4People. Somewhat apropos, since I had a customer ask me if we supported BPEL4People. Which I found very odd, because as Bruce Silver points out, BPEL4People is nowhere near being even a draft yet. It's like being asked if your application supports Java 7.0, when Java 6.0 hasn't even shipped yet. I think all of the hype around BPEL4People just highlights the huge gaps that remain in BPEL. Unfortunately, after glancing at some of the initial concepts of BPEL4People it's clear that even BPEL4People doesn't consider human activities to be first class citizens of a business process. [Link received from my boss, Steve Carlson.]


• Speaking of Joe McKendrick, he also had a post in the whole SOA vs. BPM meme started by Chrisopher Koch. I think Christopher's article is right on. As I've said before, BPM and SOA are really the flip sides of the agility coin. Christopher just highlights that it's usually the line of business driving the BPM top-down approach and IT driving the SOA bottom-up approach. (Not to mention using the opportunity to make some pointed digs regarding failed BPR projects that just generated really expensive binders of unused information). Unfortunately the title of his post highlighted the conflicts between the line of business and IT and it's caused a little firestorm in the BPM blogosphere. Most of the responses seemed to ignore the fact that he hopes that the SOA/BPM convergence can resolve the business vs IT conflict. More on this in a later (and longer) post.


• While I'm sure that most readers of my blog are also readers of Sandy Kemsley's Column 2, I can't help but link to her multi-part series on the history of BPM. It's a great summary of how we got such a muddled story about what BPM really means and such a glut of vendors claiming to offer BPM.