You may have seen this announced on other BPM blogs, but there's currently a survey out on the use of, and satisfaction with, BPMN by process modellers. This is part of a PhD research project by Jan Recker at the Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia (a city that I remember fondly, in spite of the fact that it was pouring rain last time that I was there).

As a perq for completing the survey, you'll get the summarized results of the survey, plus access to recent studies on BPMN, so it's worth doing if you're using BPMN. The details, from Jan's request to me:

BPMN is gaining huge momentum in practitioner communities, up to a point that even those vendors who were initially reluctant to adopt it, can no longer completely ignore it. But what exactly are the factors that drive this acceptance? How satisfied are end users of BPMN with the notation? Do user experiences on BPMN match those by BPA tool vendors?

Jan Recker from the BPM Research Group at Queensland University of Technology is undertaking a worldwide survey on the use of BPMN by process modellers to shed light into this question. You can help Jan by completing the survey available here:

http://www.bpm.fit.qut.edu.au/projects/acceptance/survey/BPMN/.

The best way to contact Jan is via email: j.recker@qut.edu.au

I'm hoping that if I publish his request, maybe they'll sponsor me to come down and speak at their BPM conference in September :)

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 05:55 PM in BPMN | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

Last in the morning's general session was Tom Laffey, TIBCO's EVP of products and technologies, and Matt Quinn, VP of product management and strategy. Like Ranadivé's talk earlier, they're talking about enterprise virtualization: positioning messaging, for example, as virtualizing the network layer, and BPM as enterprise process virtualization. I'm not completely clear if virtualization is just the current analyst-created buzzword in this context.

Laffey and Quinn tag-teamed quite a bit during the talk, so I won't attribute specific comments to either. TIBCO products cover a much broader spectrum that I do, so I'll focus just on the comments about BPM and SOA.

TIBCO's been doing messaging and ESB for a long time, and some amount of the SOA talk is about incremental feature improvements such as easier use of adapters. Apparently, Quinn made a prediction some months ago that SOA would grow so fast that it would swallow up BPM, so that BPM would just be a subset of SOA. Now, he believes (and most of us from the BPM side agree :) ) that BPM and SOA are separate but extremely synergistic practices/technologies, and both need to developed to a position of strength. To quote Ismael Ghalimi, BPM is SOA’s killer application, and SOA is BPM’s enabling infrastructure, a phrase that I've included in my presentation later today; like Ismael, I see BPM as a key consumer of what's produced via SOA, but they're not the same thing.

They touched on the new release of Business Studio, with its support for BPMN, XPDL and BPEL as well as UML for some types of data modelling. There's some new intelligent workforce management features, and some advanced user interface creation functionality using intelligent forms, which I think ties in with their General Interface AJAX toolkit.

Laffey just defined "mashup" as a browser-based event bus, which is an interesting viewpoint, and likely one that resonates better with this audience than the trendier descriptions.

They discussed other functionality, including business rules management, dynamic virtual information spaces (the ability to tap into a real-time event message stream and extract just what you want), and the analytics that will be added with the acquisition of Spotfire. By the way, we now appear to be calling analytics "business insight", which lets us keep the old BI acronym without the stigma of the business intelligence latency legacy. :)

They finished up with a 2-year roadmap of product releases, which I won't reproduce here because I'd hate to have to embarrass them later, and some discussion of changes to their engineering and product development processes.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 01:28 PM in BI • BPEL • BPM • BPMN • BRE • SOA • TUCON | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

There's a public domain BPMN poster and set of Visio templates on SourceForge for free download.

Via BPM.com.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 05:01 PM in BPMN | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

A month ago, I had a chance for a comprehensive demo of the Cordys BPMS via Webex, and I saw them briefly at the Gartner show last week. Their suite is of particular interest to me because the entire process life cycle of modelling, execution and monitoring is completely browser-based. I've been pushing browser-based process modelling/design for quite a while, since I think that this is the key to widespread collaboration in process modelling across all stakeholders of a process. I've reviewed a couple of browser-based process modellers -- a full-featured version from Appian, and a front-end process mapping/sketch tool from Lombardi -- and if it wasn't already clear from what Appian has done, Cordys also proves that you can create a fully-functional process designer that runs in a browser and can have participants outside the corporate firewall. Like Appian, however, they currently only support Internet Explorer (and hence Windows), which will limit the collaboration capabilities at some point.

Cordys' claim is that their modeller is BPMN compliant and supports the entire set of BPMN elements including all of the complex constructs such as transactions and compensation rollback, although I saw a few non-standard visual notations. They also support both XPDL 2.0 and BPEL for import and export, but no word on BPDM. Given this dedication to standards, I find it surprising that they can integrate only with their own ESB and business rules engine, although you could call third-party products via web services. They also have their own content repository (although you can integrate with any repository that allows object access via URL) and their own BAM. In general, I find that when a smaller vendor tries to build everything in a BPM suite themselves, some of the components are going to be lacking; furthermore, many organizations already have corporate standards for some or all of these, and you'd better integrate with the major players or you won't get in the door.

Like most BPMS', much of the Cordys process design environment is too complex for the average business user/analyst, and probably would be used by someone on the IT side with input from the business people; a business analyst might draw some of the process models, but as soon as you start clicking on objects and pulling up SOAP syntax, they're going to be out of there. Like most BPMS vendors, Cordys claims that the process design environment is "targetted towards business people", but vendors have been doing this for years now, and the business people have yet to be convinced. To be fair, I was given the demo by the very enthusiastic product architect who knew that I'm technical, so he pulled out every bell and whistle for a ride; likely business users see a very different version of the demo.

There's a lot of functionality here, although nothing that I haven't seen in some form in other products. There's support for human-facing tasks either via browser-based inbox and search functions, or by forwarding the tasks to any email system via SMTP (like Outlook). There also appear to be shared worklists, but I didn't get a sense of how automated work allocation could be performed, something that's required to support high-volume transaction processing environments. There's also support for web services orchestration to handle the system integration side of the BPM equation.

One thing that I like is the visual process debugger: although you have to hack a bit of XML to kick things off, you can step through a process, calling web services and popping up user interfaces as you hit the corresponding steps, and stepping over or into subprocesses (very reminiscent of a code debugger, but in a visual form).

They do a good job of an object repository as well, which helps increase reusability of objects, and allows you to search for processes and artifacts (such as forms or web services) to see where they're used. Any process that's built can also be exposed as a web service: just add inputs and outputs at the start and end points and the WSDL is auto-generated, allowing the process to be called as a service from any other application or service.

<geek>Another thing that I really liked is the AJAX-based framework and modelling layer for UI/forms design, which is an extension of Xforms. In addition to a nice graphical UI design environment, you can generate a working user interface directly from the WSDL of a web service -- something that I've seen in other products such as webMethods, but I still think is cool -- and run it immediately in the designer. In the demo that I saw, the architect found an external currency conversion web service, introspected it with the designer and generated a form representing the web service inputs and outputs that he popped directly onto the page, where he could then run it directly in debug mode, or rearrange and change the form objects. Any web service in the internal repository -- including a process -- can be dragged from the repository directly onto the page to auto-generate the UI. Linked data objects on a form communicate directly (when possible) without returning to the server in a true AJAX fashion, and you can easily create mashups such as the example that I saw with the external currency converter, a database table, and MSN Messenger. For the hardcore among us, you can also jump directly to the underlying scripting code.</geek>

Unfortunately, the AJAX framework is not available as a separate offering, only as part of the BPMS; I think that Cordys could easily spin this off as a pretty nice browser-based development environment, particularly for mashups.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 09:36 AM in BPM • BPMN • ESB • GartnerBPM2007 | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

Last year, I developed a course on process standards for FileNet (now IBM) that they use to train their sales teams and partners. It included a bit on BPMN, among other standards, because FileNet will soon be launching an ability to model in BPMN through an integration with Visio.

Frighteningly, their recent press release says "New features support BPM standards for business process modeling (BPMN) and execution (XPDL) and BPM integration as part of an overall Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) strategy" -- do they think that the X in XPDL stands for eXecution?

This morning, I received an email from someone at a FileNet reseller who recently took the course that I developed online. He said "Thanks for your really great webcast" (I love feedback like that!), and also created a BPMN diagram using icons from The Incredible Machine:

The thought of combining the whimsical -- yet design-like -- diagrams of TIM with those of BPMN gave me a giggle and really made my day.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 11:35 AM in BPMN | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

The opening keynote this morning was by Prof. August-Wilhelm Scheer, the founder and serious brain-trust behind IDS Scheer. You have to love this guy: not only is he brilliant and able to describe his ideas clearly, he opened and closed his session by playing sax in a jazz trio on stage.

He covered a lot of material in his talk, and I can't begin to do it justice but will try to hit a few of the high points.

The goal of a modelling tool like ARIS is to support business processes from strategy to model to detailed description to implementation, including changes to any part of that chain and how the changes ripple through the other layers. The design-implementation-control life cycle of business processes, with a current strong focus on the optimization end of things, serves to bring together process modelling and execution like never before.

The business model at the top of any business process is the key competitive differentiator for an organization, requiring identification of the value proposition, supply chain, and target customer. This places the business model, and the surrounding business architecture, as part of an overall enterprise architecture. Looking at the business process architecture stack (think Zachman column 2), the business model leads to the business process, which requires/populates the business process repository. This, in turn, populates the IT-business process repository for the subset of the processes to be automated, through standardized modelling formats like BPMN and serialization formats like BPEL, which in turn connect to the enterprise service repository that documents the underlying services. Surrounding all this is the business process platform for service assembly/orchestration, portals, B2B, WFMS (wow, haven't heard that term for a while: workflow management systems, for the youngsters in the crowd) and EAI.

IDS Scheer is involved with (or at least concerned with) a number of process-related standards, including ones such as BPMN and IDEF at the business process modelling level. I'm interested to see if they're involved in the BPM Think Tank that OMG runs, such as the one coming up in July in San Francisco -- an email exchange with someone from OMG a few minutes ago indicate that they're not heavily involved in OMG standards. ARIS' business model metamodel and their generally high level of innovation could almost certainly contribute to OMG standards development, if they're not already.

One interesting point that Prof. Scheer finished with (well, before he started playing sax again) was that BPMS (i.e., process execution) vendor platforms will continue to be proprietary in spite of their "commitment" to standards (my quotation marks, since I agree with this thought), so products like ARIS are necessary in order to help facilitate the movement of models between execution systems. The business view needs to be open, while the implementation layer will remain proprietary.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 12:21 PM in ARISProcessWorld2007 • BPA • BPEL • BPM • BPM standards • BPMN | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (1) | Add to del.icio.us

Right after I dissed the new for-pay incarnation of Business Integration Journal Business Transformation and Innovation, it turns out that I'm mentioned in an article in the November/December issue.

For the past 12 to 18 months, there has been growing interest and discussion surrounding BPMN, XPDL and BPEL. What has begun to take form is the recognition of the BPMN-XPDL-BPEL Value Chain, a concept first credited to analyst Sandy Kemsley by XPDL expert Keith Swenson.

I normally don't read this publication cover to cover, but I was checking my email subscriptions folder and saw a message with the title "The BPMN-XPDL-BPEL Value Chain". Having coined the phrase "BPMN-XPDL-BPEL value chain" in a blog post covering the BPM Think Tank last May, I tend to notice when it crops up elsewhere :)

The BIJ article, written by Nathaniel Palmer of WfMC, discusses the three process standards and their interrelationship, particularly around how XPDL and BPEL are complementary, not competitive. Nothing here that I haven't written before, but it's a good overview/summary article on the subject.

Of course, being from WfMC, which authors the XPDL standard, he doesn't mention OMG's BPDM, which could prove eventually to be XPDL's nemesis.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 06:14 PM in BPM standards • BPMN | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

I had a briefing with Jeff Kristick from TIBCO last week about their announcements today, and also had a demo of the new 1.1 release of the TIBCO Business Studio tool.

The big news is that Business Studio, the modeling, management and simulation environment, is now available at no cost -- just download it from developer.tibco.com and install it. In case you're not familiar with Business Studio, it's an Eclipse-based application that and runs standalone without any connection to a server. Unfortunately, the press release states "TIBCO Business Studio V1.1 will be offered as the industry’s first FREE, full-featured BPM studio", which is not true: Savvion started this trend by making their modeling tool available for free back in March at the Gartner BPM Summit. At that time, I wrote:

We're going to see more and more of this, I believe: vendors giving away planning, modelling and analysis tools in order to raise their profile in the marketplace, and potentially drive more interest in the process engines that lie at the heart of their strategy.

In a post in April, I talked more about vendors releasing their modeling tools for free; in fact, at the time, I mentioned that TIBCO was releasing Business Studio 1.0 as a downloadable standalone desktop application, and I made the assumption that it was free, or soon would be. Good to see that I'm right about something once in a while. :)

As with the other BPM vendors providing their modeling tools for free, TIBCO's intention is not to replace a full-up modeling tool such as ARIS or Proforma with Business Studio, but to replace the use of Visio for process modeling, or to fit somewhere in between the two extremes. It can import models directly from ARIS (and, in the hopefully near future, Visio via the Zynium add-on), and export to XPDL since that's its default serialization format. There have been some custom imports from other platforms such as Proforma, but these aren't productized; they do publish the XSLT required to build your own importer, so it would be straightforward for someone to build it and share it around. (In theory, XPDL makes interoperability with these tools easier, although in practice, they only write to their own iProcess Modeler-compliant version of XPDL, and some of the modeling tool vendors don't do XPDL yet.)

I liked a number of things about the interface, especially having the simulation and modeling be two different "perspectives" on the same process model rather than having them in different applications. Simulation is really just another function within process design, so it makes sense that they're integrated, and TIBCO's done a nice integration here -- click over to the simulation perspective, and you'll see the simulation data right beside each activity, very similar to what I saw in the Appian process modeler that I reviewed yesterday.

I also like that they ship a number of industry samples, including the full set of standard workflow modeling patterns, and what appear to be fairly comprehensive tutorials.

There's a few serious limitations to this version, although the near-future product roadmap overcomes all of them:

• Only a limited subset of BPMN is supported. I didn't ask exactly what wasn't supported, but this sounds like a bad move to me: in many cases, partial support for a standard might as well be no support at all. Full BPMN support will be in v2.0, although I didn't catch the timeline for that.
• Business Studio doesn't yet replace the existing iProcess Modeler: you have to export XPDL from Business Studio, then import it into the iProcess Modeler to get it hooked up to the process engine, although the eventual plans are to hook Business Studio up directly to the engine and obsolesce iProcess Modeler.
• You can't set web services parameters, which is part of why you have to scoot over to the iProcess Modeler to finish the technical portions of your design. In early 2007, they'll be adding the web services capabilities directly in Business Studio, then other API functionality such as calling DLLs and .jar files. Their plan is to add a "technical perspective" to the environment for specifying these interfaces, in addition to the existing modeling and simulation perspectives, although that may require some sort of authentication scheme to prevent non-technical users from accessing the technical perspective, since there's currently no role-based security on access to the perspectives.

As I've mentioned many times here before, and discussed with Jeff last week, I believe that there are compelling reasons for a browser-based process design and administration, but I'm not sure that he's buying it yet since he claims that they have no plans for a browser-based process designer. In the meantime, a free downloadable process modeler is a great way to go, since it further lowers the barriers to potential process modelling participants. It does have the disadvantage of requiring that the user have sufficient control over their desktop environment to be able to install new software, however, which is often not the case in corporate environments.

The second part of TIBCO's announcement is the general release of version 10.5 of their iProcess Suite, which is their end-to-end BPMS. Some interesting new upgrades here:

• The next version of the AJAX client workspace is released, based on the General Interface AJAX platform that they acquired two years ago. Apparently, my previous complaints about no GI support for Firefox are going to be resolved by the end of the year, too.
• There is now very granular role-based security built into the client workspace environment that allows the environment to be restricted based on the user's role, for example, by removing controls and menu items.
• Their XML API is now fully exposed so that developers and build their own applications and user interfaces more easily, if they don't choose to use the client workspace for all functions or users.
• Improvements to their BAM product, iProcess Insights, include the ability to drill down directly from the dashboard into the runtime product, so that the AJAX client is launched and the user can work the item that alerted them through the dashboard. Since many BPM vendors have used third-party BAM add-ons such as Celequest, many of the BPM dashboards are quite distinct silos from the execution environment; this requires a user to take note of some index information about a problem work item in the dashboard, then manually search for it in the process execution environment so that they can deal with the problem. This integration in iProcess Insights eliminates this manual step in the middle by allowing a direct drilldown.

I also had the pleasure of reconnecting in these meetings with Carl Hillier, who was a pre-sales engineer then the BPM product manager at FileNet when I was there back in 2000-2001 -- he just started working at TIBCO last week. It's a bit ironic, since Carl was originally based in the UK, and Staffware was his nemesis; since that time, the landscape has changed somewhat: TIBCO bought Staffware, and IBM bought FileNet.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 12:07 AM in BPM • BPMN | Permalink | TrackBacks (1) | Add to del.icio.us

For those BPM vendors out there who say that you can't create a fully-featured browser-based process modeling tool: YOU'RE WRONG. Appian does it, they do it well, and if you don't get moving on this soon, they'll kick your butt.

I was going to just stop there, but that would be mean, so I'll continue on with a more complete review of the Appian 1-1/2 hour, open-the-firehose demo that I received last week via Webex, compliments of Phil Larson (director of product marketing) and Malcolm Ross (über demo god) at Appian.

In case this is the first time that you've read my blog, let me iterate my view that a browser-based process modeler is the way to go if your goal is to lower the barriers to enabling process modelling and design across an enterprise -- this is one of the ways that Web 2.0 is impacting BPM, as I discussed in a presentation at the BPMG conference earlier this year. Appian is the only mainstream BPM vendor that provides a lightweight (dare I say, zero footprint?) browser-based process modeler; the only other mainstream vendor that even has a browser-based process modeler is FileNet, but it's a rather weighty Java applet that downloads with some degree of trouble, in my experience. [btw, if you want to debate the term "mainstream BPM vendor" with me, first of all check if you're anywhere in Gartner's BPMS Magic Quadrant except for the "niche players" quadrant, or anywhere at all in Forrester's Human-Centric BPMS Wave.]

I'd never had the Appian corporate overview until this session, and I found it quite telling that 3 of the 4 founders were from Microstrategy, a business intelligence vendor. Analytics and reporting are baked into everything in the product, including the user interface: all of the grid-based UI screens such as inbox views are actually report views driven straight out of their own reporting/analytics engine, which makes it easy to do things like switch any view to a chart (if it makes sense to do so). It also means that KPIs and business thresholds can be easily built into a process and seen in a number of different views, not just a siloed BAM dashboard, including viewing process execution stats right in the modeler while you're viewing the model. This makes for a more seamless integration between design, execution, monitoring and analytics than you'll find in many vendors' products, although some customers may find a proprietary reporting and analytics engine, as well as their proprietary and built-in rules engine, to be problematic in the face of corporate standards for these types of platforms.

Although nothing to do with process design, but very cool and Web 2.0-y, is the ability for a user to flag a process instance or a task within a process instance as a favourite. Although this isn't quite the full process tagging paradigm that I've written about previously and talked about in my Web 2.0/BPM presentation, it's a great start.

I won't talk too much about the specific functions within the Appian process modeler, except to say that it does everything that I would expect from a process designer, and more: full BPMN-compliant modeling including more complex constructs such as ad hoc activities (i.e., those that aren't attached to the process flow, see section 5.2.3 of the BPMN spec if you want to understand what this means); the ability to chain activities in a process so that they're locked to the same user and present them as steps in a wizard-type interface rather than having to reopen each sequentially from a task list; a full forms designer that will be released next month; import/export to XPDL (which allows you to model offline with Zynium's add-on to Visio and interchange models with the Appian process modeler); different views and capabilities within the process modeler for business analysts and developers; and web services introspection and mapping. And it does it all in a completely AJAX environment, although due to support for VML but not SVG, it's not supported in Firefox yet. Furthermore, all you need to cross the firewall from the modeler to the server is port 80 (i.e., standard HTTP) or port 443 (for HTTP over SSL).

If Appian really wanted to kick some butt, they'd create the browser-based equivalent of a free process modeler download: a free process modeling site exposed on the internet, available for anyone to sign up and try it out. Who would download and install a process modeling tool to try out if you could have the same functionality available online?

I've heard the comment from a couple of BPM vendors that a full AJAX process modeler is "hard". Duh, of course it's hard; if it was easy, everyone would do it. Appian started out with a Java applet process modeler, then ended up building their own AJAX library of JAVA Struts objects and moving over to AJAX in 2003 -- two years before the term "AJAX" was even coined. They've invested a huge amount of time to make their browser-based process modeler every bit as functional and responsive as a desktop application, and it shows. It reminds me of the quote about how Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did, except backwards and in high heels: yeah, it's hard, but it looks great.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 04:10 PM in BPM • BPMN • Web2.0 | Permalink | Comments (9) | TrackBacks (3) | Add to del.icio.us

The OMG's fall newsletter is out (although as my Aussie friends remind me, it's spring down there), including notice of their technical meeting in DC on December 4-8. This will include a session by OMG BPMI on "Improving Business Process Management using a Maturity Model Framework":

"The OMG BPMI Steering Committee has been developing a plan for a Maturity Model for business process improvement, called the Business Process Maturity Model (BPMM). This program will discuss how such a BPMM would guide organizational change, relate to existing OMG standards, and how it could be made available for widespread use and adoption through the OMG standards development process. The BPMM authors include Dr. Bill Curtis and Charlie Weber, who were lead authors for the CMM/CMMI. Dr. Curtis also authored the PCMM (SEI’s People Capability Maturity Model). Topics covered will include introduction and discussion of the BPMM draft, and how it can be used by business, government and vendor communities. Specific attention will be paid to how BPMM could elevate success rates for SOA initiatives."

There's also an interview with Phil Gilbert of Lombardi, who is now the BPMI steering committee chair within OMG. I realize that vendors on standards committees make valuable contributions, I'm just not sure that having one run the whole show is a good idea. Are other vendors worried that the standards produced by BPMI will favour Lombardi? Or is this just a great way of forcing all the vendors to participate in the process, since they'll be afraid of what might happen when they're out of the room?

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 09:50 AM in BPM standards • BPMN | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (1) | Add to del.icio.us

Great webinar on the business value of BPM and BPM standards today on ebizQ, and I'm not just saying that because I'm one of the speakers. :) The full replay should be available tomorrow at the same link. If you attended the live seminar today, there was a technical glitch just before the Q&A where we had a bit of dead air, so if you dropped out at that point you can go back tomorrow and hear the full replay.

In listening to the replay, I realize that I talk WAY too fast -- I was conscious of the short time that I had for my part of the presentation, but this has always been a criticism when I make presentations and I have to force myself to slow down, especially when introducing a lot of new information such as the alphabet soup of BPM standards. As weird as it might sound, I get excited talking about this stuff and tend to talk faster.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 01:22 PM in BPM • BPMN | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

OMG now has a set of directories of vendors that offer products and services related to OMG standards, including BPM (because of BPMN and other emerging standards). It's free to have your company listed here, even if you're not an OMG member.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 10:21 AM in BPMN | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

If you're not using a BPM modelling product that outputs to XPDL and want to get an idea of what it actually looks like, some of the vendors are posting samples of their BPMN/XPDL for interoperability testing on the WfMC forum (you may need to be a member to see the posts, but it's free). For example, here's the sample from Global 360.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 10:57 AM in BPM standards • BPMN | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

Although labelled "The business value of BPM", this is really a webinar on BPM standards as a wrap-up of the recent OMG BPM Think Tank, which I blogged extensively about.

Since I was at the Think Tank and have a lot of opinions on the subject of BPM standards, I'll be presenting at this webinar (as opposed to my previous role as moderator) along with Connie Moore from Forrester and Jeanne Baker from OMG and Sterling Commerce. Connie will be covering the business value of standards, Jeanne will be doing a wrapup of the Think Tank, and I'll be doing an interactive discussion between the three of us on the future of BPM standards.

Being a presenter on this webinar prompted me to finally update my bio on the ebizQ site; a few people who I've met lately assume that I work for ebizQ, which I don't, so this should clear it up.

The webinar is on August 9th at noon Eastern, and you can sign up here.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 05:18 PM in BPEL • BPM standards • BPMN • BPMThinkTank | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

True to my expectations from our earlier interaction, I received an email today from Bluepring:

As well as reminding me about the webinar today, it gave me a link to the in-flight process, which now showed that the reminder had been sent. Unfortunately, a second (manual ) email was required to send out the Microsoft Live Meeting invitation instead of that being embedded in the email auto-sent by the process, so the process reminder served little actual purpose aside from reminding me how cool it was to see my webinar registration process online.

I've never spent any time with the Bluespring BPM suite before -- it's at the lower end of the range, and most of my clients are financial services and other large organizations that tend to buy big -- so today's webinar was a "first look" for me. The PowerPoint presentation at the beginning was thankfully short, but, predictably, included the same list of key differentiators as every other BPM vendor lists (ease of use, deployment speed, zero-code design, web services enabled), which leads me to think that someone is secretly telling vendors that the word "differentiator" is synonymous with "feature".

The Bluespring product looks a lot like most of the other lower-end BPM products that I've seen, so I'll just touch on the things that I liked and didn't like about it. Keep in mind that I had a 20-minute demo, so this is not a formal review:

The integration with desktop applications, including email and Excel, looked good. For example, emailing to a pre-determined email address could instantiate a process that included the email attachment (an Excel spreadsheet, in the case of the demo) as an attachment to the process. I know that many of the other vendors could do that as well, but many of them would have to write a bit of code to do so. I also liked the Excel integration: an activity in the process could read data directly out of a spreadsheet attachment, then use that as a data parameter in the process. In the demo, which was (of course) an expense report approval, the process sucked the expense report total directly out of a specific cell in the spreadsheet and used it to decide if a second level of approval was required for the expenses. Very clean and easy integration.

In spite of the nice integration of the spreadsheet data, I wasn't really happy with the explanation that I heard for how the attachments are handled. It appears that they are saved to the local drive of the BPM process engine server with no specific security beyond just not creating a drive mapping to that location. Presumably, an admin on that server could browse the disk and open the CEO's expense report, or any other documents that were used as attachments. There should be a way to have the attachments in a secure repository, but still allow the level of integration that truly differentiates Bluespring.

The sales engineer who did the demo didn't know about any plans for BPMN (in fact, it wasn't clear that she even knew what BPMN is), and was totally derailed when I asked if they were using XPDL for moving process maps from Visio to their process designer. They need to not only get on the standards bandwagon, but educate their sales teams about it as well -- there were two customers on the line in addition to me, although most likely the BPMN/XPDL conversation went right by them.

The last issue that I have is that the process designer is a desktop (thick client) application rather than web-based, with no plans to make it web-based. A few of the BPMS vendors have gone to a web process designer already, and I'm convinced that this is the wave of the future.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 03:46 PM in BPM • BPMN | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

Also from BPTrends, today's Email Advisor has an article on Alternative Process Analysis Models (direct link to PDF):

There are a number of process analysis models that are designed to focus on more complex human interactions. One example is the RAD approach of Oulds and Harrison-Broninski and another is the Closed-Loop Business Interaction Model of Winograd and Flores. Both are useful in special circumstances, but neither replaces a basic workflow diagram.

I definitely agree with their premise that a single, common notation should be used for describing business processes for both business and IT.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 10:59 AM in BPA • BPMN | Permalink | TrackBacks (1) | Add to del.icio.us

I'm tuned into an ebizQ webinar on SOA standards, News Break: The First Standards-Based SOA Forum to Manage and Govern Your SOA. This link should be good for replay within a couple of hours after the webinar, or within a couple of days if you want the full version with the live Q&A. By the way, whatever happened to the link that would add the webinar directly to my Outlook calendar? I miss that! I'm simultaneously blogging (obviously), packing for my trip to Mashup Camp and listening to the fire alarms being tested in my building, so this may not be as detailed as usual.

The presenters are Keith Swenson of Fujitsu (who I've met a couple of times), Daryl Plummer of Gartner (who I heard speak at their BPM Summit earlier this year), Paul Butterworth of AmberPoint, Peter Kuerpick of Software AG and Jean Francois Abramatic of ILOG. The blurb for the webinar promised:

[A]n exciting multi-vendor announcement on how the leading SOA vendors are partnering to achieve a common SOA infrastructure. This initiative will leverage an open, standards based SOA registry and repository to manage and govern the complete SOA landscape. It will allow you to analyze interdependencies in your SOA including services, processes, applications and other SOA components.

In other words, now that most vendors have figured out that most customers are not going to be using a single-vendor SOA infrastructure, they're getting together to build some standards in the area of registry and repository.

Plummer started with a message about the importance of SOA governance, and the recent focus on this by many organizations. He stepped through Gartner's models of an SOA framework and service registry, and touched on policy management and a few other governance-related issues. He laid a lot of the groundwork for the rest of the webinar, since SOA governance is a key driver for standards.

Up next were Kuerpick and Swenson, the two webinar sponsors, to talk about the CentraSite Community, with is both a standards-based SOA forum and a product that provides an open registry and repository, impact analysis tools, and governance tools that store, tracks and analyze processes and their underlying services and interdependencies. They launched a canned demo of CentraSite that is also available on the site, which happens at just below light-speed, so I'll need another viewing to catch all the details, but it appears to be all browser-based and has some interesting functionality especially around interdependencies of services. CentraSite is already supported by several vendors, and any standards-based vendor should be able to publish directly to it but would need to get a bit more involved to be a full player. It will be interesting to see how this catches on over the coming months, and if it manages to sort out some of the SOA confusion.

One really interesting point is that both XPDL and BPEL are mentioned explicitly, and BPMN was also mentioned although it's not on the slides and isn't used in representing business processes within CentraSite as far as I could see in the demo. CentraSite is not a standards organizations, and much of the underlying standards work will be done by the existing standards bodies such as OASIS.

There is a community edition that is free of charge, and you can register to download a product evaluation.

More to come on this in the future, I'm sure.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 12:58 PM in BPEL • BPMN • SOA | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

I had a chance late last week to talk to Shawn Price (CEO) and Pat Morrissey (SVP Marketing) of Savvion about the news that they're releasing this week. It's always flattering to hear the CEO of a BPM vendor start a sentence with "Having read your blog...", and there's some interesting things that they're announcing that are aligned with what I write about, including their "Show us your models" contest announced shortly after I wrote "Show me your process models". Their call to see your process models is their new ProcessXChange, a forum to share process models, discuss best practices and other topics related to process improvement: more ambitious than what I was suggesting, which was just a library of process models, but at the same time, more restrictive since it is limited to process models developed in the Savvion Process Modeler. I applaud their efforts to start a collaborative community around process improvement, but a vendor-specific walled garden isn't going to cut it in the long run.

Savvion is also launching a new version of their BusinessManager product this week that attempts to increase the range of BPM participants within an organization in an effort to speed the deployment of process automation: Shawn's comment was that an organization must deploy its first application within 90 days in order to be successful at BPM, and allow for ongoing changes to processes two more times every 90 days. I found that comment tremendously interesting, considering that many of my more conservative customers spend three or four times as long to deploy their first application, and end up being not all that succesful because the business has changed during that time and there's been too much over-customization to make the solution agile enough to adapt. I always push for a simpler application deployed sooner, but many customers are sold (usually by a large SI) on the notion of an all-singing, all-dancing "solution" that takes a year to develop and deploy, and ends up solving nothing, in the end.

A cornerstone of Savvion's plan to push BPM out into the organization is their free, downloadable Process Modeler, on the premise that if everyone has a process modeling tool on their desktop, they're more likely to participate in the process improvement efforts. They've also added simulation capabilities to allow an application to be previewed before deployment and improved their BAM capabilities. I've never done an in-depth on their product so I'm not in a position to say how much of an improvement that these things are over previous versions.

One recommendation that I made to them, which I've made to other vendors as well, is the addition of a zero-footprint AJAX-based process modeler, if you're really serious about having this used throughout an organization. Many companies lock down the user desktops so that software can't be installed, and applications requiring installation may take weeks of testing by a central IT group before they are approved for use on a desktop. Move this completely to the web with no download, and the usage rate will shoot up. One thing that I do like about their modeler is that it models in BPMN directly, whereas many other vendors are relying on third-party modeling products such as the Zynium add-on to Visio that exports to XPDL, then imports into their process modeler.

One last thing that we discussed is the role of BPM as an enabler for BPO by allowing for collaboration between an organization and their outsourcer: if the "home office" can model their processes and have those process be implemented elsewhere without re-translation of the models between tools, then use the same set of tools to monitor processes or collaborate on changes to the processes, business process outsourcing would get a lot less painful. Also, the addition of automation to the outsourced processes is becoming a necessity in places such as India where the wages are creeping up and the all-manual methods are becoming less cost effective. Savvion is busy making deals with a number of Indian BPO firms with exactly these ends in mind.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 01:20 PM in BPM • BPMN | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

I had a couple of emails recently from people looking for public-domain process models, related but slightly different. The first was looking for generic process models for those processes that are the same in most businesses:

I am trying to convince [a small healthcare company] that their business is no different than many other service businesses providing service to customers. I am having a very hard time finding a reference model for just a generic enterprise, one that would include all of the standard functions such as Finance, Strategy and Planning.

The second was looking for some real-world examples of BPMN:

I'm looking for a good source for real examples of BPDs that are compliant with the BPMN spec. I've spent ~3 hours surfing for information on BPMN when I came across your blog and decided you might know what you're talking about. I'll admit to being uncompromising when it comes to adherence to the BPMN spec, but I don't have a lot of support. So far, we've generated a whole bunch of examples of how not to draw models, do you know of any good sources?

Aside from not being sure whether to be flattered or not over the comment that I might know what I'm talking about, it's really the same issue: the need for publicly available templates or samples of business processes. Think of it as design patterns for business processes, something that's far more useful than the standard "employee expense approval" flow that seems to ship with every process modelling tool. The biggest problem, of course, is that many companies consider this to be part of their intellectual property, even if the particular process is not part of their competitive differentiation, and don't allow those process models to be shared. What's funny is that every customer I work with thinks that their processes are completely unique, but it usually boils down to something very similar to what I've seen at other customers in the same industry, or even across industries. I think that the attitude that "our business is unique" might be preventing more standardized modelling of business processes.

Anyone out there know of any libraries of real business process models available online, whether generic or industry-specific? Any that use BPMN? Does anyone have process models that they'd like to contribute to an "open source" library? Tim Vojta, the author of the first email above, has kicked things off by creating a Business Process Reference Model after our discussions and publishing it under a Creative Commons licence (yeah!), although it covers only a fairly high-level functional view of the enterprise.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 08:26 AM in BPA • BPMN | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

If you haven't had the chance to see Zynium's Byzio product in action yet, Appian is hosting a webinar on June 21st that will show off how Byzio works with their BPMS. As I discussed previously, Byzio lets you draw your process map in Visio, then export it to XPDL as a standard BPMN map for importing into a BPMS for execution. I expect that a lot of the webinar will not be specific to Appian, so if you want to get a look at Byzio this should be a good forum.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 11:21 AM in BPM • BPMN | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

The Spring OMG newsletter is available online (direct link to PDF) with a 2-page article "OMG and Service-Oriented Architecture":

In essence, SOA is an architectural approach that seeks to align business processes with service protocols and the underlying software components and legacy applications that implement them.

So far, so good. Then they go on to say:

Both processes and services need to be carefully coordinated to assure an effective SOA implementation. You can’t really do SOA without a clear model of the business process to be supported.

Not sure that I fully agree with that: you have to have a clear model of your business process before you can implement SOA? Aren't the underlying services supposed to be reusable even if the business process changes? Isn't that really the whole point of SOA?

And you can’t link your business processes to your service models without the modeling standards the OMG is developing as part of its Model Driven Architecture® (MDA®).

Oh, I get it now.

They do include a nice diagram showing where the OMG standards fit in one representation of an SOA environment (see the newsletter for the full-size version). You can see where BPMN, BPDM and BPEL fit in, which I talked about in my posts from the BPM Think Tank last week, plus other standards such as SBVR (Semantics of Business Vocabulary and Rules) for business rules.

I also like that they're platform-independent about this, and that they don't equate SOA with WS-*.

You can check out the newly-formed OMG SIG on SOA if you want to get involved in discussing this MDA approach to SOA.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 10:44 PM in BPEL • BPMN • BPMThinkTank • SOA | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

Since I only finished posting about yesterday's sessions at the end of this morning, I decided to just do a final conference wrapup instead of separate wrapups for yesterday and today.

In general, the BPM Think Tank was great, and I'll definitely attend again in the future. I learned a lot about some of the standards that I didn't know much about before (like BPDM), and met some really smart people with lots of opinions on the topic of standards. It's been so long since I was involved in any sort of standards work (AIIM in the early 90's, and topographic data interchange formats for the Canadian Council of Surveying and Mapping back in the late 80's), and I had forgotten about both the frustrations of dealing with standards committees and the excitement of being able to contribute to a little bit of computing history that will make things work better for a lot of people.

I'm still mulling over the XPDL/BPDM conundrum (and, to a lesser extent, BPEL), but the fact that different standards bodies are all here participating is a good indicator that there is the collective will to head off problems like this. At last year’s Think Tank, discussions between BPMI and OMG around the competing graphical process models of BPMN and UML activity diagrams helped lead to the absorption of BPMI into OMG, and the championing of a single standard, BPMN, being put forward by the merged organization. We can only hope that something similar will happen with XPDL and BPDM in order to avoid future problems in the BPMN serialization domain.

I had the chance to meet several people who I had connected with online but never met face-to-face: Dana Morris of OMG, Bruce Silver, John Evdemon (who I'll be having ongoing discussions with about BPM and Web 2.0) and others. Jeanne Baker, who did such a great job at keeping things moving along during the sessions, even remembered one of my posts from last year about a webinar that she gave on standards -- she turned to me at lunch yesterday and asked "Did you write that blog post called 'Alphabet soup for lunch'?" -- proof that people will remember if you mention them in print. I missed other people completely in the crowd (Phil, where were you?).

There were a few logistical problems (conference rooms way too cold, no free wifi, not enough herbal tea, and no free t-shirts with vendor logos, about which I heard a lot of whining when I got home), but these were only minor annoyances in an otherwise well-executed conference with excellent content.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 10:33 PM in BPEL • BPM standards • BPMN • BPMThinkTank | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (1) | Add to del.icio.us

The last of the four roundtables that I attended was on BPDM, led by Fred Cummins. I started with my (by now) usual question about the distinctions and overlap between XPDL and BPDM: his response was that XPDL is an XML specification, and BPDM is a metamodel that can be exported to XML via XMI. He seemed to imply that they could coexist, but given that BPDM will include a serialization specification for BPMN (in addition to other models that can be represented in BPDM), I'm not sure I see the need for both in the standards world. He later stated that there is an expectation that people will model in BPDM (as visualized by BPMN or other visualizations as appropriate) and transform to an execution language such as BPEL, rather than BPDM being an interchange format; this seems to leave no room in the landscape for XPDL if you adopt BPDM, unless you need it as a legacy interchange format.

Moving on to other points about BPDM, it will include both orchestration and choreography (process flow, messages and collaboration), and will include more concepts than can be represented in BPMN, hence will support other views, e.g., process dependency diagrams, roles/organization view, choreography. A draft submission of the standard is due on June 5th, with a rough plan to finalize the underpinnings to provide BPMN support within 3-4 months, although there is no plan to issue a version with just the serialization as a preliminary release. In order to complete the release, they will likely do BPEL export from BPDM and a UML mapping to BPDM in order to demonstrate usability of the standard on a broad enough basis to initiate its acceptance.

When Cummins provided a summary of all of his roundtables at the end of the conference, he pointed out a couple of questions that had arisen during the discussions:

• Is there a potential for executable BPDM? [I say that if there can be abstract BPEL then why not executable BPDM?]
• Is there a way to achieve compatibility between XPDL and BPDM? [I think that there better be]

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 10:26 PM in BPM standards • BPMN • BPMThinkTank | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

This afternoon, I attended technology roundtable on XPDL led by Keith Swenson.

Keith went around the table and asked how we (or our customers) are modelling processes now. The biggest faction by far use Visio, but PowerPoint (!), UML activity diagrams (using the IBM/Rational tools) and proprietary/internal tools specific to an industry were also mentioned. For the most part, people are concerned with sharing processes between tools, not between organizations, since most organizations are very protective of their processes. A major issue with most of these tools is round-tripping and process lifecycle issues, since in many cases it's a one-way trip from the modelling tool to the execution engine. We talked about Byzio, the Zynium add-on to Visio that allows BPMN to be modelled in Visio, and a mapping from either a BPMN template or any other Visio set of shapes to XPDL. I reviewed Byzio several weeks back, and Keith is quite familiar with the product too.

We discussed how XPDL could be used to aggregate process models from disparate BPMS' that might be in use within the same organzization.

In discussing BPEL, Keith felt that XPDL provides all of the support for everything that BPEL can do with respect to the interface to web services; this further pushes the issue that BPEL is not really required if it's not being used as an execution language and if there is a transformation from XPDL to the specific engine's execution environment (which implies that the BPMS vendor's design tool can import the XPDL file).

XPDL provides support for extensions modelled in a BPMS vendor's design tool that are specific to that engine; these are preserved in XPDL and should not be affected if the XPDL is manipulated by another process design tool. This is critical for supporting round-tripping from a design tool to the BPMS vendor's engine (via their design tool) and back again, since the design tools should preserve the extensions even if they don't interpret it. An example of such an extension is assigning colour to swimlanes (which Fujitsu allows in its design tool): the file can be read into a tool that doesn't interpret the colour information, but when it is saved and read back into the design environment that does support colour, the colour's there. Vendor extensions such as this may be brought forward at XPDL TC meetings for inclusion in future versions of the standard.

The most recent set of major changes to XPDL were BPMN-related enhancements including X-Y coordinates of lines, topology, etc.; however, they forgot to include scale, since some measures are in real-world units (inches/cm) and some are in pixels. This caused further discussion on the separation of presentation and logic data, since both are included and intermingled in XPDL when it’s used to serialize BPMN, and if logic and presentation be versioned separately, since some purely cosmetic changes can be made to presentation without affecting logic. Other presentation-related information includes a "page" indicator, since a process may span multiple pages when visualized.

We had a lengthy discussion on additional versioning information that could be included in XPDL, and how this ties in with SOA governance initiatives for maintaining the integrity of interfaces and functionality.

I repeated what I said in an earlier post about blaming the large analysts for forcing (sometimes inappropriate) standards by creating RFP checklists that are used (somewhat blindly) by customers -- Keith agreed with this view.

We ended up with a bunch of ideas that deserve more thought: Should Java be extended to subsume BPEL functionality? XPDL is graph oriented, and BPEL is block structured; BPEL4people implies that you can extend a block-structured language to represent human-facing process flows which are inherently graph-oriented. Should BPDM be the metamodel behind XPDL? (This is not a viewpoint endorsed by OMG since XPDL uses some notation not recommended by OMG, and BPDM has a broader scope that inclues BPMN serialization.) If XPDL were made MOF-compliant, could it replace the need for BPDM?

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 10:21 PM in BPEL • BPM standards • BPMN • BPMThinkTank | Permalink | TrackBacks (1) | Add to del.icio.us

I finished yesterday afternoon by attending a technology roundable on BPEL led by John Evdemon. There was a lot of ground covered there that I had heard in his workshop on Day 1 and the panel earlier yesterday that I won't repeat here, so just a few brief notes.

There are some things that can be described in BPEL that can't be modelled in BPMN, which I didn't realize. The example that Evdemon gave was an online order for a book, then a follow-on process kicked off the next day when the customer cancels the order. Although both of the processes can be modelled in BPMN, I think that his point is that the interaction between the processes can't be modelled there. There are apparently a few use cases like this that are being considered for inclusion in BPMN (if I understood correctly), but I didn't hear anything about this in the earlier BPMN roundtable. Stephen White's mappings of BPMN (available on the old BPMI.org site, so I imagine all still available on OMG's site) has many peole thinking that BPMN models a superset of BPEL, which is not strictly true.

Like the BPMN roundtable and some hallway discussions, there were a lot of comments about the linkage between process standards and enterprise architecture.

The issues that we discussed, and the notes that I made from the discussion:

• BPEL doesn't provide all the functionality that can be modelled in BPMN.
• If BPEL isn't used as an execution language, but just as an import/export language as is done by Microsoft, IBM and others, what value does it add over XPDL (or eventually, BPDM)?
• Are we eventually going to end up with just BPMN, BPDM (or XPDL, if you believe Bruce), and a vendor-specific execution language in the process chain?

I have some additional research to do, some of which will start in this afternoon's roundtables on XPDL and BPDM, about whether BPEL does add value over these standards by providing more specific web services information such as endpoints or ports. You can definitely use BPEL as an import/export and exchange format, or to store the representation of a process for future rehydration, but it appears that you could also use XPDL or eventually BPDM to do the same thing and provide a richer interpretation of models created using BPMN.

At the end of the day, when we all reconvened as a group, Evdemon gave a summary of what we discussed:

• What is the value of BPEL if XPDL is a direct serialization of BPMN? BPEL had a lot of press because of who's backing it, not necessarily because of its capabilities. (A direct quote from him during the roundtable itself on this subject: "Unless you're going cross-platform, you may not need BPEL.")
• Use BPEL to store current processes to be rehydrated later if needed for audit or other legal and compliance requirements. BPEL is also being used by other standards such as RosettaNet to provide process-related templates for those standards.
• Process formats may just become different serialization formats with different capabilities, accessible from many tools just like all the document formats that are available if you select File...Save As within Word.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 10:44 AM in BPEL • BPM standards • BPMN • BPMThinkTank | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

Since I'm here in part to firm up my knowledge about BPM standards, I chose to attend four technology roundtables and none of the executive (business focussed) ones. The first one that I attended was on BPMN, led by Petko Chobantonov of Lombardi. Petko's involved with the development of the BPMN standard and was really pushing us to find out what else should be added to the standard in the future. I was the scribe for that session so have a ton of notes, my problem is trimming them down and making them understandable in this post.

First of all, Petko made the statement that OMG is not recommending XPDL for serialization of BPMN (i.e., a file format in which to save BPMN), but recommends the use of BPDM (which isn't released yet, although a very early draft is due next month). This sets up for an interesting showdown between XPDL, which is already in use by 30+ modelling and BPM vendors, and BPDM when it finally is released this year or next.

For the first time, I heard about BPRI, Busines Process Runtime Interface, which incorporates information gathered at runtime such as metrics and statistics about a process (I think). Petko has a bit more on his blog about it here, and I'll be looking at this in more detail since I think that this is a necessary standard as well.

One of the participants from an end-user organization said that they have extended BPMN with 3-4 custom types in their internal use, one for applications and one for data elements. He also said that they have difficulties in publishing and communicating BPMN diagrams because of the complexity, and that there needs to be some easier ways to abstract a flow in order to present it to someone who is not intimately involved with the process, such as executive management. Although using just a linear set of milestones was suggested as an abstraction model, removing all of the split/merge and other flow information, I think that some of the flow information should be left in place even in a