BPMS Watch

Lombardi Process-Enables Cognos Analytic Applications

Last week Lombardi Software announced that Cognos, a leader in business intelligence software, had OEM’ed Lombardi TeamWorks for use in a new line of “analytic applications.”  This action adds a new twist to the already-blurring boundaries between BPM and performance management/analytics that has been going on for a year or two.

Performance management is one of the 3 legs of the BPMS stool (the others being analytical modeling and process execution), so it’s no accident that BPMS vendors have been poaching on BI turf with features like process analytics, management dashboards, and BAM.  The BAM situation has been particularly nettlesome, since it requires both real-time event-triggered KPI update and rule evaluation, and a platform for executing rule-triggered actions.  Today’s BPMSs are actually more likely to have this than BI products, the assumed logical “home” of BAM technology.  This is the problem that the Cognos-Lombardi deal addresses (at least in part).

On the other hand, for a long time BPM vendors and BI vendors have happily partnered for “deep analytics,” in which BPMS data is passed to BI where it can be merged with other enterprise data streams, mined and analyzed for subtle trends.  Cognos, for example, is anxious to point out that the Lombardi agreement in no way affects its partnership program with BPM vendors (including FileNet, Savvion, IBM, EMC Documentum, and Pegasystems, plus Lombardi) for the Cognos 8 platform.  The purpose of that program is to jointly develop solutions for:

1. Process intelligence - analytics on process metrics
2. BI “in the process” - access to BI analytics from within a process task or management app
3. Event-driven process - monitor events from BPMS and other data sources to trigger some action (the BAM scenario)

To date, according to Cognos, “we have mapped a framework manager model of all of the BPM vendors in our program’s process repositories. We have also done much deeper integration with FileNet for number 2 and 3.”  But let’s face it, these are basically co-marketing programs, not truly deep integration.

The Lombardi deal is different, representing BPM embedded in Cognos’s analytic applications, which are specific industry solutions layered on top of the platform.  Although Cognos has a few such apps today, I believe new ones will be developed to take advantage of the embedded process capability.  There the process model will be essentially prebuilt in the analytical app; the process design tool will not be exposed to users.  (For the users who feel constrained by this, there is undoubtedly the full BPM upsell opportunity.)

This could turn out to be a big deal for the BPM market.  Once BI vendors understand what BPMS can do (I don’t think they get it yet), we should look for more deals along these lines.

Add comment April 10th, 2006

A New Approach to BPMN-BPEL Round-tripping

The current issue of Business Integration Journal has an interesting piece from Oracle about my favorite topic, how to keep process models (e.g. BPMN) and their BPMS implementations (e.g. BPEL) in sync, what we call the round-tripping problem.  I’ve repeatedly expressed my view that if BPM 2.0 is going to deliver real benefit over what we have today, this capability is essential, but others believe just as strongly that - especially when BPEL is the implementation technology - round-tripping is a mirage, fool’s errand, or worse.

Oracle’s solution, which I don’t believe is available in the current version of Oracle BPEL Process Manager, is what the authors call a “business flow outline” with additional “metadata” that can be populated by a BPMN model using “well-defined guidelines” and fleshed out in a real BPEL design tool like Oracle BPEL Designer.  Hey, “outline” — isn’t that what Edwin K was talking about a while back?  I thought that was his term for modeling, but apparently it’s more in the nature of a skeleton process design created automatically from BPMN. 

Unfortunately the screenshots aren’t in the bijonline version, but the print version makes it look like more than an artist’s conception.  (I don’t believe this is in the current version of the product.)  The outline, representing a “logical view” of the process, appears to run in Oracle BPEL Designer using a BPMN-ish notation called the Process Analysis palette.  A developer can then map those shapes to BPEL activities that represent the actual implementation.  To ensure the round-trip, the BPEL shapes must have guaranteed bi-directional mappings to the BPMN-ish shapes in the outline.

It’s not apparent whether Oracle plans to offer the outline as a modeling tool for business analysts or simply a way to capture BPMN models created in third party tools.  If you’ve been following this thread on BPMS Watch, you’ll remember that BPMN lets you draw things that don’t map quite so easily to BPEL - or at least the kind of BPEL you’d want to edit and maintain, but there are subsets of BPMN diagrams that can be mapped automatically.  If you control the BPMN tool, you can solve the problem by not letting the user draw something that can’t map easily to BPEL.

In the BIJ screenshots, the outline’s BPMN-ish shapes happen to correspond one-to-one with BPEL activities.  If that’s how the thing works, it may be just a gimmick, since you’d expect a many-to-one ration of BPEL activities to BPMN shapes in a real process.  But I suspect that’s just an artifact of the screenshot.  Hoping to find out more…

2 comments April 10th, 2006