BPMS Watch

eClarus Leads the Pack in BPMN-BPEL Roundtripping

Those of you who have followed the threads in BPMS Watch on the BPMN-BPEL round-tripping problem — keeping the business-oriented process model in sync with the executable implementation throughout the process lifecycle — may have noticed a comment from Henry Yu of eClarus saying, essentially, we think we’ve solved this, check it out.  So I did.  Very interesting.  Not solved yet, to my way of thinking, but I’d agree with Henry that eClarus leads the pack.

The company is a small startup in the Seattle area.  Their mission statement is refreshingly encouraging: “Easy, productive collaboration among business analysts and IT architects for agile, well-governed development and integration.”  Their product is a BPMN modeling tool that generates BPEL, and can also take BPEL and generate BPMN.  The latter piece, obviously central to the round-tripping idea, has been described by other vendors I talked to as “too hard” or “huh?”, but according to eClarus, BPEL to BPMN is easy.  It’s the BPMN to BPEL that’s hard, because — as I’ve written before re my ITP-Commerce experience — it’s easy to draw things that don’t map easily to BPEL.  

The operative word is “easily” because I’m positive that, faster than you can say “pi-calculus,” some math genius is going to tell me it’s proven that BPEL in theory can describe any process that can be implemented in a universe of 10 dimensions or less.  The object, however, is not doing it in theory but actually automating the mapping from BPMN.  That’s tricky when the BPMN, which is “graph-oriented” (like a flowchart), is not “isomorphic” to BPEL, which is “block-oriented” (meaning all paths from a split or branch reconverge at a single node).  Today the eClarus tool analyzes the BPMN and can tell you from static analysis whether the diagram is BPEL-isomorphic or not.  If not, you’ll have to redraw it. 

So far that’s no more than I got with ITP-Commerce.  But eClarus wants to go further.  A white paper by Yi Gao, eClarus’s Chief Architect, says,

Rewriting BPMN diagrams is a semantic analysis process which is very hard for people without in- depth knowledge of BPMN, BPEL and the expression languages. It can be done manually by IT architects and developers. It is also possible to automate in software along with other BPEL mapping steps.

For example, the simple diagram

is not BPEL-isomorphic but an insane genius could redraw it in a way that is, such as

where two BPMN shapes represent the same BPEL activity.  Generating BPEL from either of these BPEL-isomorphic diagrams is straightforward.  The hard part — which eClarus doesn’t do yet — is automatically generating one of them (ideally the second one, not the “links”!) from the non-isomorphic original.  But at least they’re working on it!

The key point that eClarus, ITP-Commerce, and other BPMN-to-BPEL vendors haven’t yet completely internalized is that BPM’s top-down world the model comes first, then the design. If the designer has to redraw the model to make it executable, you’ve broken the round-trip magic linking business and IT.  The business analyst’s view of the process is where the isomorphic analysis has to take place, and the software has to either automatically redraw the model there (while the business analyst is around to approve it) or just redraw it “in its own mind” for use in its BPEL mapping algorithm, hiding the redrawing completely from the business analyst’s diagram.  I don’t think this is far-fetched.  We’re just not there yet.

eClarus allows BPMN activities to be annotated with properties such as costs and KPIs, suggesting its evolution towards a true modeling tool.  Today eClarus provides no simulation analysis capability, but they’re working on it.  The product, which went GA this week, comes in a free community edition that  just allows drawing the BPMN, a business analyst edition ($739/seat) that adds custom attributes like KPIs, a simple model repository, and documentation generation, and the full SOA architect edition ($1339/seat) that adds Eclipse, BPEL generation and — what started the whole discussion — BPEL-to-BPMN round-tripping, also UML and Rose integration (the tech guys come from Rational), and other stuff.  A free 15-day trial license is available through the website.  You should definitely try it out.

One additional point is worth mentioning.  Most of the BPMN “conformance” touted by BPMS vendors today is just adoption of selected BPMN shapes, not support for the full BPMN diagram semantics, including intermediate events, compensation, multiple pools and message flows, etc.  One reason is that most XPDL-based products can’t handle them.  But BPEL can. 

The problem with BPEL is that graphical BPEL designers operate at too low a level for efficient process design.  BPMN is a much better design interface, hiding the ugly details of BPEL behind a high-level graphical front end.  The BPMS pureplays, mostly XPDL-based, have figured it out already that you need that kind of design interface, but the BPEL vendors, still mostly selling to SOA propellerheads, haven’t yet gotten the message.  A few vendors like Intalio and Cordys are beginning to blaze a trail with BPMN as a BPEL design tool.  eClarus is now trying to make that available for any BPEL product — it’s a natural OEM component.  Some features of real-world processes, notably human tasks, are still vendor-proprietary, so we’ll have to see how eClarus deals with that.  But all in all, a major step forward.

1 comment May 12th, 2006

IDS Scheer OEMs Rules from Corticon

One of the biggest changes to the BPM equation in the past year has been the intertwining of process and business rules.  For a long time BPM and business rule management (BRM) did just fine as separate technologies blissfully ignorant of each other, but today users are finding it harder and harder to define the boundary between process and rules.  While many BPM suites now integrate business rules in their IT-oriented design and runtime environments, the same cannot be said for the modeling and simulation tools they offer to process analysts. 

Now that’s about to change.  IDS Scheer, maker of ARIS, a leading high-end process modeling tool, has OEMed Corticon Studio and is integrating rule definition into the ARIS tool and repository.  Unlike better-known BRM vendors like ILOG and FairIsaac, Corticon’s rules do not start from a techical rule language but from a graphical model-driven approach more in keeping with ARIS’s target audience.  From within the ARIS environment, a business analyst will be able to model both process and business rules, and reuse rulesets saved in the ARIS repository.

For now the integration is a simple rebranding of Corticon Studio as ARIS Business Rules Designer.  A new release early next year will rework the user interface to be consistent with other parts of ARIS.  Sometime after that the rule specifications will be integrated into ARIS’s simulation and performance analysis capability.  (The rule engine built into Corticon Studio for rule testing is sufficient to perform the simulation.)  All of this is a good thing.  It will simplify process models, and will help educate the market on the relationship between process and rules.

I think it could have a beneficial effect on the BPMS landscape as well. The recent history of BPMS has shown that innovative features of standalone analytical modeling tools are quickly copied in simplified form and incorporated in the BPMS’s native modeling tool.  Adding rules to process simulation models will be harder because they are driven by data, not just by simple activity parameters like task duration and resource cost.  But I wouldn’t be surprised to see it happen, maybe even before ARIS gets there!

Add comment May 12th, 2006

Zynium Maps Visio to BPMS

I had an interesting briefing today from Zynium, provider of a tool that maps Visio process diagrams to various BPMS environments, including Fujitsu, Appian, Software AG, and DST.  Many BPMS and modeling tool vendors have developed their own Visio import capability, with varying degrees of success, and several of them are talking to Zynium as well.  Doing it well is apparently harder than it looks. 

All these tools work essentially the same way, requiring the user to manually define a mapping between each Visio shape and a corresponding shape or widget in the BPMS modeling or design environment.  Zynium adds a bit of extra intelligence in using text and color attributes of the Visio shapes in the mapping rules.

The attraction to Visio is its ubiquity as a legacy process documentation format and its familiarity to corporate users.  Something like 60-70% of the existing process “models” (I use the term loosely) in the wild exist as Visio documents.  In many ways Visio represents the antithesis of BPMN - ad hoc, unstandardized, no semantic precision, no validation rules.  It’s really a sketchpad.  BPMS vendors like the idea of mapping it because they can leverage the process capture work users have already done and introduce those users to BPMS. It’s certainly better than rekeying the information.

Zynium’s target or “export” formats do not yet include BPMN, but supposedly that is coming.  The company doesn’t see a big demand for it at this stage.  Also coming is a round-trip version, in which the BPMS design can be shipped back to Visio.  I had a hard time understanding the use case for this — I always thought of the round-tripping problem as keeping the analytical model (business view) and executable design (IT view) in sync, but Visio is just a diagram not an analytical model.  Zynium doesn’t really distinguish between analytical and executable models on the target side; it’s whatever the BPMS exposes to the mapping.  For a BPMS that provides both simulation analysis and executable design in a single tool, the round-tripping is apparently between Visio and the native graphical representation of the same business view.  For BPMS that relies on third party modeling such as IDS Scheer, the mapping skips the modeling component altogether.  So I don’t completely get Zynium’s round-tripping story.  I guess what I can say for it is that in some BPMSs the native graphical process representation is so crude and opaque that the user-defined Visio provides a much clearer picture of what’s going on.

It will be interesting to see whether BPMN can dislodge Visio as the default “modeling” environment for BPM.  I’m betting that it can, and the picture may look quite a bit different in 12-18 months.

1 comment May 11th, 2006