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
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
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
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
Thinking Matters 