bruce on December 2nd, 2011

At the BPMN Workshop in Lucerne two weeks ago I presented a talk called “Fulfilling the Promises of BPMN 2.0.”  The basic point was that the BPMN 2.0 specification by itself is insufficient to deliver on the standard’s two most fundamental promises: first, as a semantically precise process notation, that the meaning of the depicted process logic is unambiguous from the diagram alone; and second, as an XML process description language (even limited to non-executable model elements in the Analytic subclass), that the serialization rules are sufficiently unambiguous to allow automated interchange between tools.  Fulfilling those promises requires additional constraints, on modelers in the form of style rules,and on tool vendors in the form of serialization rules that I call the BPMN-I Profile.  To address these problems, I created two BPMN validation tools based on XSLT 2.0.  One checks models against both the rules of the BPMN 2.0 spec and the style rules, and another one checks them against the BPMN-I Profile.

Process Modeler for Visio from itp commerce implements the style rules directly inside Visio, and that works great, but now other tools are beginning to export BPMN 2.0 XML, and I wanted to explore an online tool for them.  I hosted the AltovaXML engine (and my XSLT’s) on a website and got a web programmer to wrap it in an iframe accessible from my website.  Unfortunately I wasn’t really happy with the robustness of the web application.

At the Lucerne workshop, Marco Brambilla of Politecnico di Milano and founder of a company called WebRatio made a presentation on WebRatio’s rapid model-driven approach to generating web applications integrated with BPMN.  After the meeting, Marco contacted me and offered to replace my creaky web app with one generated by WebRatio.  While I was thinking about it, he emailed me to say, “We’ve already done it, and here is the URL.”  I don’t know how WebRatio did it exactly – I provided no information about either my XSLT or the web app surrounding it -but it works great!

The link is  www.webratio.com/bpmnValidation.  I invite you to try it out.  You need to upload a file in the BPMN 2.0 XML format.  The tool performs four checks: 1)well-formed XML; 2)valid per BPMN 2.0 XSD; 3)BPMN 2.0 and style rule validation; 4)BPMN-I Profile validation. Thank you, Sebastian and Aldo of WebRatio!  And you as well, Marco.  WebRatio… I’m a believer!

The implementation is still possibly fragile due to the single-threaded AltovaXML engine, but we are talking about reimplementing as a Java app using XSLT libaries, all generated by WebRatio.  Please try out the tool.  Bugs are most likely in my XSLTs, so please report them to me.

 

www.webratio.com/bpmnValidation

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bruce on November 16th, 2011

Here is the schedule of BPMN Method and Style live-online training for 2012.  The class runs on three consecutive days, tentatively Monday to Wednesday from 8am to 1pm US Pacific time, which is 11am to 4pm US Eastern time.  However, some classes may be adjusted to be more convenient for Europe or Australia/New Zealand.  If you are in one of these areas and have a group of 7 or more, and can commit early, you have a chance to influence that.  Contact me directly in that case.  The current price is $1095 (1), $995 (5-9), $895 (10+).

January 9-11, 2012 [Click here to register]

March 5-7, 2012

April 23-25, 2012

June 25-27, 2012

September 5-7, 2012 (Wednesday-Friday)

October 22-24, 2012

December 10-12, 2012

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bruce on November 16th, 2011

The good news is my book BPMN Method and Style 2nd edition, with BPMN Implementer’s Guide, is now showing In Stock on Amazon.com (not yet on Amazon.co.uk, unfortunately, which says 5-8 weeks).  It was available for about 2 days at the end of October, and then I found about half dozen typos I saw on close reading.  I thought I would just fix right away, so that a bunch of ‘imperfect’ books would not go out.   Usually this causes a 2-day hiccup on Amazon, but the printer had to fill all the initial orders before they could create their own proof of the revision (I waived the proof on my end)… and then it was another week or more before it showed up again on Amazon.  So my good intentions really messed up my “launch”.  Anyway, if you had a thought of buying the book but saw it Out of Stock on Amazon, your wait is over.  I expect another week or two before the international sites have it.

If you are buying 15 or more books shipped to a single address, you can order the books direct from me at a 40% discount.  Contact me by email, and soon I will post a link where you can order by credit card for this.

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bruce on November 15th, 2011

It was a longer wait than I expected, but in BPM 7.5.1, IBM is now providing real BPMN 2.0 support.  I haven’t had a chance to play with it yet or look at the documentation – I think GA is later this week – but I got the briefing from the team.  And I have to say, I am very happy with what I saw.

In a recent post, I talked about what “BPMN 2.0 support” really means, in both non-executable and executable model contexts.  It’s not primarily about the notation, although a few shapes and symbols – notably non-interrupting events and event subprocesses – are new in BPMN 2.0. BPMN 2.0 support is really about the XML serialization, the ability to export the process model according to the XSD and rules of the spec, and ideally import from the XML as well.  IBM BPM 7.5.1 can do both.

The new features are part of Process Designer, what was called the Teamworks Authoring Environment in the Lombardi days.  Changes to the server appear to be minimal, if any.  The BPMN 2.0 elements supported are almost identical to those I emphasize in my BPMN training (maybe why I am so happy about it), basically the Analytic subclass (Level 2 palette) less the “minor” events – Escalation, Conditional, and Signal.  The Process Designer BPMN palette appears to include:

  • User task
  • System task (Service task)
  • Decision task (Business rule task)
  • Script task
  • None task (Abstract task)
  • Subprocess
  • Linked process (Call activity)
  • Event subprocess
  • None start event
  • Message start event
  • Ad Hoc start event (not in BPMN 2.0)
  • None end event
  • Message end event
  • Error end event
  • Terminate end event
  • Message intermediate event (throwing and catching, including boundary event)
  • Timer intermediate event (catching and boundary)
  • Error boundary event
  • Tracking event (not in BPMN 2.0)
  • Exclusive gateway
  • Inclusive gateway
  • Parallel gateway
  • Event gateway
  • Event subprocess triggers: Error, Message (interrupting or non), and Timer (interrupting or non)
  • Group and Text annotation
  • Conditional and default sequence flow
  • Conditional activity (not in BPMN 2.0)
  • Pre and post scripts (implement data association mappings)

It’s a good list.  No Send or Receive task, but the corresponding Message events are there.  No pools or message flows.  I think that is a mistake, but maybe a difference in assumption about what their presence implies.  I am trying to convince them that showing message flows is useful even if they are visualization only, not executable.  We’ll see…

No Link event (sorry BWLive users… but it’s not really an event, anyway).  No Signal event, maybe the only thing left for Oracle to attack.

The Ad Hoc start event seems like it would make more sense as an event subprocess trigger than a top-level start trigger — more useful and better aligned with the BPMN metamodel, too.  But I got the sense that the BPMN 2.0 semantics are what the existing process engine supports.

The important thing, though, is not just the palette of shapes but the fact that Process Designer supports export and import of the BPMN 2.0 standard XML format.  (Oracle BPM 11g has had the BPMN 2.0 shapes for a year and a half and still cannot do that.)  I haven’t seen the XML yet but I believe that the export includes data objects, data inputs and outputs, data association mappings (assignment), and other details of executable BPMN 2.0. At least I hope it does.

Even better, BPMN 2.0 XML can be imported as well, either into a new Process Application or a new Toolkit.  The import supports automatic layout (not clear if it tries to follow BPMNDI layout in the XML, or just ignores).  Importing the BPMN 2.0 XML into Process Center generates the Process Designer objects, including default task UI forms (Coaches), so the imported process is immediately available for playback.  Now that is very cool.

Also, tags in the imported XML work with Process Center Smart Folders, supporting industry models in IBM Information Frameworks and Rational tools.  These tags can be added to processes, services, business objects, and participant groups.

Bill Hahn promises that “soon” you will be able to play with BPM 7.5.1 on his “sandbox” site http://IBMBPMDemos.com/.  If you are interested in IBM BPM, you definitely should know about this site.  I can’t wait to try out the BPMN 2.0 import.

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bruce on November 14th, 2011

I was expecting more feedback on my Executable BPMN 2.0 post.  I did get a thoughtful and amusing rant from Alex Pavlov.  He dismisses the whole idea of executable BPMN 2.0 as a cynical ploy by the middleware vendors that created it.  Besides making some good points on the possibility of executable BPMN 2.0, he challenges me to defend why anyone would think adopting the standard is a good idea in the first place.

Alex asserts, probably with good reason, that BPMN 2.0 can never succeed as a process execution language because it tries to be “abstract and detailed at the same time.”  I puzzled over that one for a bit, but I think he means that the abstract nature of the BPMN 2.0 metamodel is in conflict with the requirements for any language that an engine can reliably execute.  And I completely agree with that.

You could, however, define a subset of BPMN 2.0 that is reliably executable.  The subset that maps unambiguously to BPEL is one such.  (I can already hear Michael Rowley laughing.)   But larger subsets as well.  Something like the Common Executable subclass, but expanded to a somewhat larger palette.  Why didn’t they define such a subset in the BPMN 2.0 spec?  (I don’t think Common Executable meets the test.)  Ran out of time, possibly, or maybe Alex is right.

In addition to restricting the palette you need to validate the flow topology.  BPEL is block oriented and BPMN allows gateways to loop back and do all kinds of twists and turns that business users like.  Back in the day, most BPMN tools that offered BPEL export would give “interleaving” errors unless you created BPMN in a very un-businesslike block structure. But eventually the eClarus guys figured out how to solve that problem, leaving only a few pathological topologies to worry about.  Besides, many BPMN 1.x-based BPM Suites have had no problem with executing BPMN flow constructs directly.  So flow topology should not be the stopper.

But let’s say you could define a subset of flow elements – the Analytic subclass, for instance – and flow topologies that are reliably executable.  Without runtime portability, is there really any benefit in serializing the design according to the BPMN 2.0 spec?  Alex makes a good argument that interoperability of executable designs between tools or engines is never going to happen.

It was easier with BPEL – the only process actions allowed were sending and receiving SOAP messages, and all the good stuff happened inside external services. But with BPMN, every BPMS has its own notion of a human task and accompanying design tool for it.  Except for those that support the WS-HumanTask standard (originally designed for BPEL), human tasks in BPMN 2.0 are never going to be portable between tools.  And the same goes for most automated tasks, which are implemented by the set of service adapters that come with the suite.  Each tool has its own set, and its own SDK for building your own, so this isn’t going to be portable either.  That means that the only part of executable BPMN 2.0 that is conceivably portable between tools is the flow logic, not the task implementation.

But even without runtime portability, I think there is still a good reason for tool vendors to support BPMN 2.0 XML export for executable designs: it makes the design more transparent.  The key reason is it exposes the process data model, all the business objects, variables, task inputs and outputs, and gateway conditions, and shows how they are received, produced, or manipulated by the process.  In most tools these definitions are locked up inside tool-specific binary formats, visible to others sharing the same IDE workspace, but hidden to everyone else.  BPMN 2.0 makes them visible in the same XML file that holds the process logic.

This should provide as much value to business analysts and architects as it does to developers.  Just as the BPMN notation provides a graphical language for the activity flow that can be shared between business and IT, executable BPMN 2.0 provides an XML language for process data – and its interactions with the flow logic – that is shareable between business analysts and developers.   Yes, it is more technical than a process diagram, but adopting this standard serialization of the execution-related details makes has a similar benefit of communicating the process definition more broadly.  Remember, the XML is just an interchange format.  Tools will provide user-friendly ways of navigating and displaying the information.  It doesn’t matter if each tool does that differently, as long as the meaning of the information is defined by the standard not the tool.

 

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bruce on November 7th, 2011

About 99% of the effort in drafting the BPMN 2.0 standard, and 95% of the bad rap it has received, relates to “executable” BPMN 2.0 models.  It’s been over a year since publication of the final spec, and it seems that executable BPMN 2.0 tools don’t really exist yet.  I hope I’m wrong.

For years any BPM tool that had some notion of boxes and arrows claimed to support BPMN, and no doubt many BPM Suites now claim to support BPMN 2.0 in their executable design tools.  But putting the marketing spin aside, what does it mean to support executable BPMN 2.0?  I have a whole section of my book, BPMN  Method and Style 2nd edition, devoted to executable BPMN 2.0, so I have given the question some thought lately.

Actually, before answering that, what does it mean for a tool to support BPMN 2.0 at all?  The notation is barely changed since BPMN 1.2.  Version 2 adds only non-interrupting boundary events, Escalation events, data stores, and event subprocesses.  So any tool that supports some of those could possibly claim “BPMN 2.0 support”.  But fundamentally, what’s new in BPMN 2.0 is not the notation but the metamodel and its XML serialization. BPMN 2.0 support really means support for that.  And not even all of it.  The spec enumerates the elements and attributes of three Process Modeling Conformance subclasses, and “support” for them is required in order for a tool to claim BPMN 2.0 conformance or compliance.  The Descriptive and Analytic subclasses relate to non-executable models, and contain only information visible in the diagram – the basic shape type, its icons and markers, border style, and text label (plus ids and id references necessary to hold the model together).  That’s it.  There’s no description of data, gateway conditions, or messages.  All that belongs to the executable process domain.

I suspect that BPMN-based BPM Suites will continue to use the notation part of BPMN, and model the data and data mappings, messages, gateway conditions, and so forth in their own proprietary way, as they have for the past several years.  To me, that’s BPMN support but not BPMN 2.0 support.  What would make those BPMN 2.0-based tools, in my book, would be the ability to export (and ideally import as well) the information visible in the diagram consistent with the BPMN 2.0 XML Schema (XSD).  There are a number that do that today, including a few that include execution engines: Activiti, BonitaSoft, SAP Netweaver Process Integration…  I don’t think Oracle will do it until BPM12c next year.  IBM claims some kind of BPMN 2.0 support in Process Designer 7.51, and I’m supposed to find out more about it in a few days.  I don’t think any of them yet can export all of the base Descriptive subclass in the spec, a limited working set equivalent to what we call the Level 1 palette in my BPMN Method and Style training.  No doubt by next spring several BPM Suites will be able to do that, and maybe even some will do Level 2, which includes the most common intermediate events, as well.

But that’s still not executable BPMN 2.0.  It’s not what took three years in OMG to hash out.  What took all those weekly 7am conference calls (and work in between) were the parts of the metamodel and XML dealing with process data, data mapping, data conditions, service interfaces, messages, and human task assignment.  To me, an executable BPMN 2.0 tool is one that supports those things.  Not necessarily as its internal object model, because BPMN 2.0 isn’t really a process execution language like BPEL.  Most executable BPMN 2.0 tools – assuming they eventually come into being – will treat the XML as an export, an interchange format, that can be mapped unambiguously to and from its internal native objects.  And that is just fine.

The open source tools – BonitaSoft, Activiti, maybe jBPM -  have been much more aggressive than IBM, Oracle, and SAP – the authors of executable BPMN 2.0 – in implementing the standard.  And they’ve been much more interested in my BPMN-I Profile for model interchange than the major vendors, who keep telling me, “our customers aren’t asking for it”.  (I have to ask if they care so little about it, why did they so tightly control the spec-drafting process, or make the standard so complex and hard to implement?)  In one of the last chapters of my book, I use an example from BonitaSoft v5.6 to illustrate what an executable BPMN 2.0-based BPMS will look like.  It’s a bit of an artist’s conception, because the current version of BonitaSoft doesn’t generate the export as it would if the data, mappings, expressions, etc. were all surfaced in BPMN 2.0 XML compliant with the XSD.  But Bonita is  committed to doing that in version 6 early next year, which is really heartening to me.

Perhaps the biggest difference between executable BPMN 2.0 as it appears in the XML and actual design in a BPMS is in automated steps.  In the BPMN metamodel those are called service tasks, invocations of some business function via a service interface.  Unlike BPEL, the implementation doesn’t have to be a SOAP-based web service, but it must be synchronous and must have requests and responses that fit into the XML as messages.  In a real BPMS, the majority of service implementations use some kind of service adapter or “connector” provided by the suite – to send or receive email, do a SQL query, write a file, or insert a new customer into the ERP system.  The service adapter exposes an interface that is configured in point-click fashion using a wizard in the BPMS design environment.  The verbose XML that results – all kinds of data inputs, data outputs, mappings, messages, etc. – must be generated by the tool in the BPMN export.  The tool also should expose the service interface of each adapter in some kind of XSD file imported and referenced by the process model.  It’s a bit of work for the tool vendor, nothing that the process designer needs to think about.  If you’re interested, you will find more details in the BPMN Implementer’s Guide section of my book.

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bruce on November 3rd, 2011

IBM is the big dog in the BPMS landscape.  BPM 7.5 combines the old WebSphere Lombardi Edition and WebSphere Dynamic Process Edition (aka Process Server) in a single offering.  More than two separate products in a single box, there is real integration under the covers, in the form of a shared Process Center repository.  Find out all about it in my latest Industry Trend Report, available here.  You’ll need to be registered on BPMS Watch to access it.

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bruce on October 31st, 2011

The questions of BPM vs Case Management, process vs case, and – almost too horrible for some Case people to contemplate – BPMN extensions for case management – are getting all frothy again.  Here is my take on the topic.

1.  The question is BPM part of case management, or is case management part of BPM? is a metaphysical one.  I think, however, it is a proxy for the real question, can a BPMS do a good job with case management, or do you need a special dedicated tool?  It’s obvious that if a single offering could provide both, users would prefer it over separate dedicated offerings.  And it’s equally obvious that it can be done, although it’s fair to say that the offerings may not be good enough yet.  Back in 2005, people said you needed separate BPM platforms for human workflow and integration processes.  It was just a matter of time, and not that long a time.

2. The question how is a case different from a process? is a more interesting one.  I am not sure there is a precise definition for a case, but there is one for a process, provided by the BPMN standard.  And a case, by any definition, is not the same thing.  A process is what BPMN calls an orchestration, meaning a sequence of activities, performed repeatedly in the course of business, with well-defined start and end, in which the activity flow logic is explicitly defined.  Each process activity is likewise a discrete action, performed repeatedly not continuously, each instance having a well-defined start and end.  Some in the case community have latched on to the term unpredictable to distinguish case from process, but I think this is off target.  The path any particular process instance will take is similarly unpredictable, since the internal logic of a  process task – an approval, for instance – may be completely arbitrary: a flip of a coin.  But the process logic – if approved do task B next, otherwise do task C next – is explicit and handles all possibilities.

A case is defined differently.  The fundamental unit of work is also an activity, which may or may not be identical to a BPMN activity, i.e. action performed repeatedly with a well defined start and end of each instance.  A case is a set of activities related to each other in some way, but the logic of the activity flow is not necessarily an orchestration:

a. It could be that a single case is composed of more than one orchestration, i.e. more than one process.  In fact, this is usually true.  Most of the case management offerings promoted by ECM vendors fall into this category.  It differs from ordinary BPM in superficial ways only.  For example, it requires a shared case folder that aggregates all the case artifacts – activities, processes, documents, and data – and manages the status of the case of the whole, in addition to the states of the processes and tasks.  This type of case management will surely be subsumed into regular BPM Suites.

b. The next activity may be determined by the performer at runtime on an “ad-hoc” basis.  And let’s distinguish two meanings here.

b1. If the next activity is selected from an enumerated menu or list, this is really orchestration, but one in which an orchestration diagram like BPMN would be visually confusing, too hard to construct, etc.

b2. If the performer at runtime can define some purely ad-hoc action and insert it as the next task to perform, this is something different than a process as defined in BPM.

To my way of thinking, b1 calls for a BPMN extension – a notational change more than a change to the metamodel.  I suspect this is the real need here, certainly more than b2.  There may be a need for b2, purely ad-hoc case management (beyond the ad-hoc task management Apple and Google will give you on your phone)… but I doubt it.

c. “Activities” in case management, or some of them, may not be what BPMN means by activity, i.e. having a well-defined start and end.  What case people call the “inflexibility” of BPMN is mostly due to the fact that when a BPMN activity is complete it is done, finished.  It cannot suddenly wake up again and say, Oh my God, I forgot something, or I found a problem in that document I approved earlier.  Those are real world things, and I would love BPMN to see them as further examples of b1 above, i.e.  bending but not breaking the BPMN metamodel, and calling for a notation extension that makes the behavior simpler to draw and understand.  This is possibly just one example of a broader definition of a case activity, which is more like a state than an action.  In fact, case logic is frequently better described by some kind of state diagram than an orchestration diagram like BPMN.

3. All of these examples (except for b2) could, I believe, be incorporated into an extension of BPMN.  One that possibly might require something fundamentally different is where the logic is goal-directed, similar to backward chaining in the rules world.  Some case management might fit this definition, but probably most of it does not.

 

 

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The second edition of my book BPMN Method and Style is now available.  It just went up on Amazon US today, not yet in UK.  Here is the link to the Amazon page.  Wow, that was a lot of work.

I’ve moved the book’s website www.bpmnstyle.com to a section of this site, making it easier to maintain and respond to comments.  I decided this time to wait for the printed book before I sent off copies to reviewers, so reviewer comments should show up on bpmnstyle.com in a few weeks.  Of course, feel free to add your own review on Amazon.  As of now, you’ll be the first!

Even if you have the original, I think you might find the new edition worthwhile.  Self-serving, I know, but let me explain what’s new and different.

About the Second Edition

The first edition was published in June 2009, based on the BPMN 2.0 “beta” specification. The new edition is based on the final specification of August 2010, officially adopted by OMG in January 2011. The graphical notation did not change between beta and the final, but there were a number of significant changes in the metamodel, XML schema, and “rules” of the spec. These are all reflected in the new edition.

The first half of the book is addressed to process modelers – business process analysts, business architects, BPM project team members, as well as developers – and focuses on the graphical notation. It explains Method and Style’s driving principle – that the process logic should be described unambiguously, completely, and consistently from the diagram alone – and presents a methodology and style rules to achieve it. It is a complete rewrite of the original edition, mostly based on the experience of delivering BPMN Method and Style training for over two years.

The new edition explains how BPMN concepts like “activity” and “process” are aligned (or not) with those same terms as used in BPM Frameworks and similar aspects of enterprise architecture. It takes advantage of the fact that BPMN style, described in the first edition as “best practices”, is better viewed as a set of rules that can be used to validate models in a BPMN tool. It continues the levels-based approach of the first edition – Level 1 being a basic working set of shapes and symbols familiar to business people from traditional flowcharting, and Level 2 a somewhat expanded set supporting event-triggered behavior – but makes slight adjustments to each level to match the Descriptive (Level 1) and Analytic (Level 2) Process Modeling Conformance subclasses in the final BPMN 2.0 spec. (A few aspects of Method and Style ultimately did make it into the final specification!) Even if you bought the first edition, there is enough new material in the Method and Style section alone to justify getting the new one.

The second half of the book, the BPMN Implementer’s Guide, is brand new. It is primarily addressed to developers and tool vendors, although analysts and architects will benefit from it as well. It explains the BPMN 2.0 metamodel and XML serialization. Based on my look at the first round of so-called BPMN 2.0-based tools, this is something that few BPMN tool vendors understand. The first part of the BPMN Implementer’s Guide focuses on non-executable models using elements of the Analytic subclass (Level 2 palette) only, explaining the meaning and usage of the various XML elements and attributes. It describes the BPMN-I Profile, a set of constraints on the serialization that guarantee that a given BPMN model has a unique XML representation, important to automating model interchange between tools.

The second part discusses executable BPMN 2.0 and the serialization of data mapping, service tasks, human task assignment, and similar details. It presents an example using Bonita Open Solution to illustrate the relationship between executable design in a real BPM Suite and its representation in the BPMN 2.0 export. It concludes with recommendations to implementers for aligning executable BPMN 2.0 with Method and Style. The BPMN Implementer’s Guide is logically a separate book, but a number of its ideas flow naturally from Method and Style, so the simplest thing was to combine them.

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bruce on October 20th, 2011

My BPMN training includes post-class certification.  It’s optional, and not everyone who tries for it gets it.  For the first few years we offered it, only 10-15% of students got certified.  Now it’s well over half, and in some classes close to 100%.  I actually think it’s the most valuable part of the offering, and I’m glad that students now think so, too.

A number of organizations offer a broad “BPM” certification, including ABPMP and OMG OCEB, but I’m not sure anyone else offers certification in BPMN specifically.  Unlike ABPMP or OCEB, our BPMN certification does not test broad knowledge of BPM lore.  It just tests mastery of BPMN 2.0 at “Level 2″ (equivalent to Analytic subclass elements, especially Message, Timer, and Error events) and ability to construct BPMN diagrams in accordance with my Method and Style approach.  It is based on a reasonably difficult multiple choice exam and a mail-in exercise that I personally review and approve.  Only students of the training are eligible, and they have 60 days to complete certification following the class.

People sometimes ask me, “who recognizes your certification?”  My honest answer is “your manager does, and you will as well”… because it’s not easy to get.  The list of certified students is posted here, and I invite you to email any of them and ask about it. Managers want to make sure their investment in training results in actual learning, and certification gives them that assurance.  Increasingly, they are insisting that all their people getting the training complete the certification.

Another interesting trend is an increasing number of consultancies and SIs are seeing BPMN certification as giving them an edge in competing for contracts, particularly in public sector.  Booz Allen Hamilton, Geocent, Raytheon, Tata, Creetion, Vennster, and CSC are recent examples.

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