A lot of the confusion and difficulty in the BPM community is because some people think that BPM is a kind of Software Engineering.
Update: Please reference the post: One Common Definition for BPM where BPM is clearly a practice of a manager who assesses and improves the process for an organizational unit. It is not the development of the application that support activity. This post originally written in 2008, we find that even in 2014 there is still confusion on this point. Continue reading
I received by email a couple questions today, repeated below with my answers.
I am an independent software developer turned architect / business analyst. Over the last year or so I have found quite a bit of work by going into businesses and explaining them how their own internal processes work (through made up flowcharts and long winded explanations).
Question 1: Do you think the BPMN is overkill for documenting a small businesses BP? Continue reading
The article “Why BPEL is not the holy grail for BPM” presents a scenario for implementation which is difficult for BPEL based products to actually execute. It presented a particular product based on BPEL that was not able to execute this diagram. What about products that are based on executing the BPMN directly without conversion? Continue reading
Finally a well considered and detailed article on the limitations of the approach to BPEL.
There are a few vendors who promote BPEL as as the one-and-only-true-way to support BPM. In fact, it is good for some things, but fairly bad at a large number of other things. It is my experience that BPEL is promoted primarily by vendors who specialize in products we might rightly call “Enterprise Application Integration” (EAI). These companies have recently taking to calling their products “Business Process Management”. Potential users should be asking the question “Is BPEL appropriate for what I want to do.” Continue reading
The big feature coming in BPMN 2.0 is the ability to serialize the model into a form that is portable between tools. Regular readers of this blog will know that we have this today with XPDL, but those responsible for the future of BPMN say “We are going to give you something better.” OK, I am all for progress to something better, but are they really going to achieve this? Continue reading
A few weeks ago I became aware of the bxModeller from Engineering Ingegneria Informatica S.p.A. and the University of Salento in Italy which is an open source / free tool for BPMN/XPDL modeling. I got access the bxModeller to see how it would perform. It can be entirely accessed on-line. Nothing needs to be installed. That is certainly convenient. You create projects, give them names, and start designing the processes. Later you export the results as XPDL. Continue reading
There is a new book on BPMN modelling called “BPMN Modeling and Reference Guide” by Stephen A White and Derek Miers. It was launched at the Gartner BPM Summit event in Washington DC last week.
Net Take Away: This is a great resource for those coming up to speed on BPMN. It uses a lot of practical examples of process diagram, starting from simple ones and working toward the more complex ones. Continue reading
The title pretty much says it all. This is another BPM process modeler which represents a process in BPMN, and then saves and exchanges those diagrams using XPDL. I have not been able to actually try it out yet, nor inspected any screen shots in detail. Continue reading
Here is a link to a podcast inteview on the subject of BPM and SOA — Different Sides of the Same Coin addressing these questions:
I will be speaking at SOA World Conference & Expo, June 23-24, in New York City on the subject of “Making Sense of the BPM & SOA Standards Alphabet Soup“.
Here is the description: What is BPEL? What is XPDL? How are they different? What is the best use for each? Continue reading
Thinking Matters 