Tag Archives: BPMN

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 →

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 →

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 →

Human “Facilitator” Processes

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In a previous post, I introduced the concept that there are two predominant views of BPM. One view is that of the Automators, who are creating business processes which replace humans by doing the same things that had traditionally been done manually. The other view is that of the Facilitators, who are creating BPM processes to involve actual people in processes can not and probably never will be fully automated. Both groups see themselves as making “human processes”, both groups create BPMN diagrams filled activities and gateways. Continue reading →

An Open Letter to OMG-BMI

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There has been a flurry of discussion on the Business Modeling and Integration Domain Task Force (BMI-DTF) at the OMG over the direction of development of the new versions of their specifications. Whether BPMN should have choreography capability or not. When BPMN should be linked to BPDM the meta-model and file format behind the notation standard. BPDM has essentially no adoption at this point, but it is still very new so this by itself is not indicative of anything. Yet some of the committee believe that putting BPDM into the BPMN spec will force adoption of this file format. Continue reading →

The Diagram IS the Meaning

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Bruce Silver put together a summary of The Real Issues with XPDL, BPEL, and BPMN where he explained better than I could that the aspect of portability that is more valuable depends on what you’re trying to do. He correctly points out that “XPDL captures the diagram, while BPEL captures the process semantics.”

Bruce brings BPMN into the discussion as potentially the standard that is possibly the most important. There have been a number of discussions recently of the relation of these three standards, Continue reading →

Summary: BPM 2006 in Mainz Germany

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It has been two weeks, but I have been so occupied it is hard to keep up. WfMC held the latest meeting in Mainz Germany, which is near Frankfurt, Sept 26-28 concurrently with the Business Process Management 2006 conference.

On Sept 29, WfMC held BPM Standards Tutorial Day where a number of key coalition members presented details on WfMC and other standards relevant to BPM. This is a relatively expensive event (€1295) so the audience expects a small environment with ready access to the presenters.

I must say that I am pleased that all of the people who volunteered to create content for this event all successfully delivered excellent presentations. It happens so often with volunteer organizations that people flake out, but certainly not this time, and I believe this is a sign of vitality of WfMC and the value that these members see in helping to spread information about the WfMC work.

Tom Baeyens who heads up the JBoss jBPM initiative attended the tutorial day, and it was a pleasure and an honor to meet him in person. He wrote up a nice summary of the event on his blog. He accurately points out that WfMC needs to do better in public relations (I would have sayed HYPE) than contenders such as BPEL. So true. But at least WfMC has maintained credibility over the long haul.

WfMC now has a new executive director: Nathaniel Palmer. Founder and President at Transformation+Innovation, and a long time analyst in the BPM space. He has some great new ideas for increasing the effectiveness of the coalition at getting the message out. Of course, it would be hard to completely replace the excellent service that Layna Fisher was bringing to the coalition for the past 5 years, we were glad to hear that Layna will continue to organize and run the Workflow Handbook part of the WfMC.
This day also represent a trial run for a series of tutorial days planned end of October beginning November in three cities in Asia. Information is now becoming available for this:

Oct 30, Tokyo:
http://www.gmacjapan.com/bpm/

Nov 1, Taipei:
http://www.flowring.com/pagelogic/en_index.jsp?pl=in000000000000en

Nov 3, Singapore:
http://www.bizmann.com/wfmc_fareast_tour.htm

More information coming soon.

BPM Standards Tutorials, Sept 29, Germany

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Key members of the BPM standards community are coming together in Mainz Germany on September 29 to present six hour-long tutorials on subjects relevant to getting BPM system to work together. The tutorials range from general overview of the BPM market, to specific detailed presentations on standards. For those vendors who are already familiar with BPM there is an interactive XPDL design strategy session to discuss specific implementation approaches.

This is presented as part of Business Process Management 2006 which is a four day event, the BPM Standards will be presented on the last day, Friday. While the first three days are primarily in German, the BPM Standards day will be presented exclusively in English.

The schedule is:

  • 09:00 Welcome and Introduction
  • 09:10-10:00 BPMN/XPDL overview
  • 10:00-10:45 BPMN/XPDL details
  • 11:15-12:00 Human BPM (workflow) vs. EAI BPM (Service Orchestration)
  • 12:00-13:00 Lunch
  • 13:00-13:45 What is BPM? What is Workflow? The Business Value of BPM & Workflow.
  • 14:00-14:45 Relationship between BPM and SOA – How to leverage what you have.
  • 15:15-16:00 XPDL vs. BPEL
  • 16:00-16:30 Panel Session, Q&A, Roundup, Feedback

The presenters include Jon Pyke (WfMC Chair), Robert Shapiro (Global360), Keith Swenson (Fujitsu), Saša Bojanic (ProZone), Justin Brunt (TIBCO), Ken Mei (Global 360), Philippe Betschart (W4 Global), Philip Larson (Appian Corp), Thomas Olbrich (Chair Business Process Management 2006), and draws upon work created and helped along by the Workflow Management Coalition.

Here is a detailed schedule of the presentations. Hope to see you there!

Throw Out the Diagram?

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I ran a “Round Table” at the BPM ThinkTank on the subject of BPMN and XPDL. There always is the question: “Why not use BPEL?” Then I explain how XPDL holds the graphical layout, the X & Y coordinates, the size the nodes, the paths of the lines. BPEL has not support for the graphical layout.

“But you don’t need to save the graphical layout!” Continue reading →