Author Archives: kswenson

London Calling

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It has been a while since I given an update on the work of the WfMC Technical Committee. The last couple of months has been busy, and this is all building toward two standards tutorial events: one in DC and one in London. Before we get to that, it has been a busy couple of months:

XPDL 2.1 – A new update to this specification due to the hard work of a number of people contributing and painstakingly edited and assembled by Robert Shapiro. The WfMC working group 1 met in Nashville and voted for adoption of the 2.1 spec as it is. The new version contains extensions to support BPMN 1.1 (also just released) and include a new section on conformance testing. This is an important step because it allows us to specify several levels of conformance, and a way to measure which level you are at. Bruce Silver contributed significantly to this approach. Tom Laverty from Global 360 developed an XSLT script for performing the test. All in all, it is another step forward in the WfMC effort to allow for a process design ecosystem.

BPAF – A new acronym is born. The Workflow Reference Model describes interface 5 which is a way for events and other historical information to be passed to an analytical tool for processing and mining. At the Nashville meeting a decision was made to call this “Business Process Analytics Format”. This is a standard XML structure which a BPMS can generate, and Process Intelligence product can consume in order to product high quality analytics. Of course many such tools can be programmers to take a stream of event in any format, but a standardized format will allow us to fine tune the precise semantic meaning of each attribute of the event, and make it far easier to hook various types of process engines together without programming. There is a working group led by Michael zur Muehlen and Shane Gabie.

Wf-XML – Main focus on creating a new RESTful version of this specification in cooperation with Open Geospatial Consortium. Find out more about this at GeoBlicki.

Events – there have been a number of successful BPM tutorial events:

  • Las Vegas, Feb 2008, BPM In Practice at Gartner BPM Summit drew a full room of 60+ people for this three hour tutorial by Keith Swenson and Robert Shapiro
  • Nashville, Feb 2008, BPM In Practice at the BPM Tech Show was a repeat success with the three hour tutorial. This one was recorded and is being turned into a book!

Future Events – please mark your calendars, the following:

The Right Amount of BPMN

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After a few months without much BPM discussion, then I blinked and found that I have been missing the Great BPMN Debate. To bring you up to speed: Michael zur Muehlen and Jan Recker have been studying how people actually use BPMN to draw business processes, and have counted the occurrance of rate of various elements. He summarized this in a blog post,which came to the conclusion that practitioners could focus on learning and using a small subset of a dozen BPMN elements, that vendors could prioritize implementations to get the more common elements first, and that some elements were used so rarely that the value of their existence was questioned. Continue reading →

The Right to Royalty-Free Memories

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Will you be forced to pay royalties in order to watch your child’s performance on your TV at home? That videotape of your child’s band concert might be illegal, due to overzealous enforcement of copyright laws by the music industry. Motivated by greed, the music industry has simply gone too far.

Consider the case of Mike. He has two kids playing in the high school band: Tom and Nicole. Mike is a typical band booster: he volunteers on the music association board, he helps load and unload all the equipment at events, sometimes he even drives the truck. Continue reading →

Get Your HDMI Cable Now

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If you don’t have an HD TV yet, you are sure to have one soon. Somewhere I read 50% of households have a digital TV, and I suppose some large fraction of that will be HD. But here is the scam: eventually you are going to need an HDMI cable, and the electronics store knows that you are not going to think ahead. Funny thing: all the cables are so very expensive. Not anything like the TV, but often between $100 and $150 for a 3 to 6 foot piece of wire. If you are lucky, they may have a “discounted cable” for $85.

Why are they so expensive? There is no real reason. HDMI is a digital connection, and there is a certification standard. As long as the cable meets the standard, the picture should be exactly equivalent. If you look around, you can find an HDMI cable on the web for $6 to $8 with gold plated connectors and fully certified. These places have HDMI cables for “normal” prices:

What is going on? Simple psychology. Most consumers will forget to buy the cable, until they discover they need one, and it is 30 minutes to the opening kickoff of the superbowl. They know you are are going to focus on the main purchase: the 50 or so inches of gleaming glass and glow where you will shell out between $2K to $5K or more. “Would you like a cable with that?” they will say. What difference does $100 make in a purchase of this size? Who wants to take home a brand new TV, and not be able to turn it on to watch? Who wants to take home a brand new PlayStation or other high def DVD player, and then have to wait a week or more to be able to enjoy the full resolution? You are going to want the cable right then. The markup on these cable is in the 10x range if you buy from an electronics retailer.

I went (of course) to Fry’s to search for a better deal. In the TV department, they had the standard $85 cable on display. I looked they guy in the eye and pointed out that Fry’s is a discount store, and he said I could find a better deal in the electronic parts department. Over on the other side of the store, I found the rack where HDMI cables hang empty. After rummaging around on top of the overhead shelf, I found a package with a 6 foot cable for $25 that someone had probably stashed up there for possible recovery later. That was clearly the best deal I was going to get three days before Christmas.

The retailers know that they “have you” over the cable and that is why the prices are uniformly high. And, to be fair, none of them are going to sell more TV’s by lowering the prices of the cable. But it just plain bugs me that the price is so inflated.

Here is my recommendation: click on one of the links now (do it right now) and purchase an $8 cable and have it shipped to you the slowest, cheapest way. Eventually, probably in the next year, this is going to save you money. It might save you anywhere from $20 to $50. Either way, a $10 investment with a 2x to 5x return within a year is a good investment in anyone’s book. But the satisfaction of telling the saleman you don’t need the cable is priceless. Even if you don’t have an HD TV, and are not planning to get one in the next year. A you might be the guy (or gal) with a spare HDMI cable, 30 minutes before the superbowl game.

Links to similar articles: arstechnica, gizmodo, macrumors, searchwarp, cnet, playstation.

Human Process: Email Voting

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The BPMN specification includes a sample process to use as an example of how you would use BPMN to draw the process and how it would then be converted to BPEL. Bruce Silver has suggested that this be used as an example process to test interoperability between different process diagramming tools. One point in favor of this is that it is fairly well fleshed out and documented. Also, it is a real process that would be reasonable to use in real life.

As I set out to implement this process, it struck me how dramatically different the process would be drawn if you had an implementation engine that supported human activities directly. Continue reading →

Human Process: Trouble Ticket

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With all the talk about “Human Facilitator Processes“; what actually does a real one look like? The best documented example of a human process is provided by the OMG known as the “Trouble Ticket” scenario.

98-02-09_original_scenario.pdf, also see 98-03-10-TroubleTicket_Nortel.pdf, and 98-07-13-TroubleTicket_Hitachi.pdf

This is a process to allow a software company to handle a customer support issue. Continue reading →

A Methodology for Human Processes

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In earlier posts I write about Human “Facilitator” Processes and BPMN & Methodology Agnosticism where I make the point that how you draw a process diagram depends largely on the methodology you use to define the process, as well as the underlying technology that you are going to use to implement the process. That begs the question then: what is the methodology for human processes? Continue reading →

BPMN & Methodology Agnosticism

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Stephen White made a comment on my Human “Facilitator” Processes post that deserves highlighting.  You probably know the Stephen was the chairman of the working group that developed BPMN.

The discussion of the different diagrams shown in the post really have nothing to do with BPMN per se, but with the methodologies that would be used to model with BPMN. BPMN is generally methodology agnostic. The way that a process is modeled, to what level of detail, and what information should be captured, is really up to the methodology and the purpose for creating the process model. Continue reading →