Bruce Silver’s latest post “Reframing the BPMN vs BPEL Debate” calls to question whether it is worth continued discussion of the definition of BPM. Like most of Bruce’s posts, it is insightful and well worth reading. This is in response to a post by Boris Lublinsky on “BPEL: Who Needs It Anyway?”
I am a little surprised by Bruce’s response, Continue reading
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
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 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
Thinking Matters 