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I wanted to stop in on the Microsoft session, People-Ready Processes, in part because I'm a bit confused about what Microsoft is doing in this area, and in part because of the Business Process Alliance announcement from Monday. Microsoft sees themselves as a force for commoditizing (and in the subtext, dumbing down) technology so that it is accessible to a much wider audience, and this presentation was Burley Kawasaki's take on how they're doing that for BPM. He describes people-ready processes as a fusion of document-centric processes and system-centric processes, and I really with that he (and many other people in the industry) would stop equating human-centric with document-centric. Although human-facing BPM grew out of the workflow that started in document imaging systems, that was a long time ago, and there are many instances of human-facing BPM that don't include documents -- depending, of course, on how you define a document.

My previous view of Microsoft BizTalk was as a B2B message broker or an internal ESB. My view of SharePoint was as a collaboration and document management platform. I wanted to see how Microsoft was bringing together the technologies and concepts from both of these to create a seamless BPM solution.

Kawasaki showed a spectrum of BPM application types, from collaborative to transactional processes. Individual ad hoc processes (e.g., individual task lists), human semi-structured (e.g., vacation approval), system highly structured (e.g., expense reporting) and fixed process (e.g., supply chain). He then overlaid a split between a collaboration server and a process server, with some overlap in the middle of spectrum, and labelled these as SharePoint and BizTalk. My heart sank.

Okay, you can have a SharePoint collaboration or document kick off a BizTalk process, but that's not the same as having a single end-to-end BPM solution. In the future, the Windows Workflow Foundation will be used as the underlying process infrastructure for both SharePoint and BizTalk, which might help to integrate them more closely.

He finished up with a light-speed overview of the Microsoft process platform roadmap, which includes Windows Workflow Foundation, the .Net framework, Office (including SharePoint) and BizTalk. He also made a big push for the benefits of a platform and partner ecosystem rather than a single vendor "close and proprietary" BPM stack. Not sure that I'm convinced.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 01:13 PM in BPM • ESB • GartnerBPM2007 | Digg This | Add to del.icio.us

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» Has Microsoft got BPM? from Macehiter Ward-Dutton
In October Microsoft finally got SOA (kind of)... now has it got BPM? I've not had a briefing on Microsoft's BPM initiative, but I did see the announcement of the Business Process Alliance partner initiative. And I also read Sandy on Microsoft's B... [Read More]

Tracked on March 7, 2007 04:35 PM