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
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
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
Thinking Matters 