I just love that term: “Process Confabulation“. It sounds like something that WC Fields or Mark Twain might say. I saw it used in a slide share presentation from Michael zur Muehlen. What does it mean? It refers to an interesting problem in uncovering the process that a business organization is currently doing. Before any BPM project, you must first answer the question: “What is the current business process?” Continue reading
I am watching a number of comments being placed about a new effort for BPMN 2.0. Vishal Saxena says that the BPMN 2.0 metamodel should maintain this flexibility that BPMN 1.0/1.1 has. No argument there. Sebastian Stein says that BPMN is missing an exchange format, and clearly he does not know about XPDL. He goes on to say that the real problem is a lack of clear execution semantics. He points out that the OMG discusses two approaches: BPMN defines the semantics, and BPDM defines the semantics. Bruce Silver comments that the first approach would be the most value to the BPM community. We seem to agree that BPMN needs more clarity in expression. I suggest that there is a third approach that the OMG should consider. Continue reading
I attended the keynote by Dennis Wisnosky, CTO of Dept Of Defense, today at the Architecture & Process conference. He is currently on a campaign to get vendors to make truly interoperable implementations of BPM technology. He has been testing implementations of BPMN, and found disparity. Continue reading
I just want to highlight an excellent post by William Vambenepe on the subject of BPMN to BPEL: going to battle with one hand tied? He does a very simple experiment: draw a meaningful diagram in BPMN, in this case a fairly simple one involving an Inclusive-OR branch, and then attempt to convert this to BPEL. He does this conversion and presents the results is quite obviously a diagram that fails in fact to capture the exact meaning. He says he has no solution to this problem. Continue reading
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:
Future Events – please mark your calendars, the following:
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 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
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
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
At the last Gartner BPM Summit I gave an overview presentation on BPMN, XPDL, BPEL, and Wf-XML. Due to the positive response from the presentation, I was asked to record it so it could be accessed from the web. Continue reading
Thinking Matters 