BPMS Watch

What’s Wrong With This Picture, Redux

One of the reasons for my absence from the blogosphere this month is I’ve been heads-down putting together my training on Process Modeling With BPMN.  But when I talk to vendors about what I’m trying to do - teach business analysts how to use things like gateways and events correctly and with a recognizable business purpose - they kind of chuckle at my quixotic delusion.  You’ll never get business analysts to understand that stuff, they say.  But I’m still of the mind that the main reason business people don’t quite get BPMN yet is that the tool vendors themselves don’t follow the spec.  Come on, guys, it’s not that hard.

Let’s start with the free tools.  Savvion, overall a really good one, since it includes simulation analysis (and form builder and other stuff)… for free.  But guys, a parallel split is the diamond with the + inside, not the one with a * inside.  That means something else.

How about Tibco?  This clip came from Sandy’s blog about it, so I’m not sure of the source of this diagram, but it’s not valid BPMN.

There are 2 paths coming out of the exclusive gateway (diamond with an X inside), but they’re drawn from the same point of the diamond.  That’s not illegal per se, but confusing since those are alternative paths not a parallel split.  The thing that’s illegal is drawing a conditional sequence flow (the little diamond on the tail of one of the sequence flows.. here you can’t even tell which one) out of a gateway.  Conditional sequence flows can only come out of an activity.

OK, how about Appian?  Sandy swooned over that one.  And it does look pretty nice.  Just a few spec violations in this diagram.

For example, see that gateway labeled XOR?  Is that a decision or a merge gateway?  It can’t be both, no matter how much Appian wants it to be.  That timer event labeled Wait for Appointment is also used as a merge (2 sequence flows in)… can’t do that in an event.  But those are technical violations, since you can probably figure out what they meant. 

But what about borrowing the ad hoc subprocess symbol (~) and plopping onto a task, which I guess means “this thing may or may not happen.”  Sorry, that’s not BPMN.  They use it in a couple places.  At the top one labeled Cancel Request, I guess it’s supposed to model the possibility of cancellation of the process in flight.  But that’s not how you would do it.  You should wrap the whole thing in a subprocess and use an attached message event.  The other one, on the right labeled Reschedule Appointment, is probably another attached message event (in response to a reschedule request)… but I can’t tell from the diagram exactly what’s happening there.

OK, how about Intalio’s open source modeler?  Admittedly this diagram, from the website hosting the download, would make a business analyst’s head spin, since it looks like using BPMN to model some low-level service invocation.  But too bad it’s not even valid BPMN.

What’s wrong here?  For starters there’s an attached compensation event with a sequence flow out of it going to an event.  An attached compensation event can’t have sequence flow out, just an association (dotted line) to a single compensating activity.  The attached timer event has a sequence flow directly to an event-based gateway (that’s the diamond with the event symbol inside, plus the 2 events hanging off of it).  Not only does that make no sense semantically, it’s not legal in BPMN.  Also you can’t have a “None” event in an event-based gateway, and the gateway has to go somewhere, it can’t just end the process.  This diagram is just a doodle; it shouldn’t be front and center on the Eclipse website.

And last, but not least, there’s ILOG.  I blogged about that one in September.  Fifteen BPMN spec violations in their sample process model!  That has to be some kind of record.

The wrong takeaway from this post would be that BPMN is complex, too complex for business analysts.  Maybe the semantics of the Error event are tricky, but the rest of it is not rocket science.  I’m saying the rules are actually pretty simple, but the tool vendors are simply inattentive in their marketing.  I’m sure someone at each of those vendors knows the spec inside and out, but those aren’t the guys making the sample models and screenshots for the marketing collateral.  Also, the modeling tools obviously don’t include validation routines that weed out illegal diagrams.

All of that is a shame, since the top-tier BPA tools, like IDS Scheer, ProForma, and IBM, don’t use BPMN, or at least don’t use the cool parts of it, like intermediate events.  So when those guys say BPMN’s various gateways and events are too complicated for analysts, how can the BPMN tool vendors argue otherwise?  It looks like they don’t get it themselves.

9 comments November 29th, 2006

IPO for Lombardi?

Last week an item came up on ComputerWire called “Lombardi Gears Up for IPO.”  Wow, did I like doze off and somehow wake up back in 1998?  OK, revenue is up 200% over 2005, but Dataquest reports 2005 software revenue at $18 Million, so since when do $50 Million software companies do IPOs?  Maybe that Bubble 2.0 thing is real.

I think IPO is an unlikely exit for Lombardi’s investors - as well as for Savvion and Appian, the other two private BPMS pureplays in the same revenue and growth ballpark - but even a minor buzz about BPM in the financial pages is great news, because it shows the BPMS idea is really beginning to take off.

But still I felt obligated to at least contact Lombardi and ask if it was true.  Here’s what I found out from the unnamed official in his secret undisclosed location.  They have been growing rapidly - 2006 is 3x 2005, and the installed base (reported to be 100 customers) has doubled in the last year.  They’ve been contacted by investment bankers but haven’t retained any.  They’ve been approached by major software companies as well.

Here is the interesting part.  To succeed they say they need to establish a global footprint, which means adding products, adding headcount - they want to get to 200 by the end of 2007 - and they will ultimately “need to take the company public to raise the capital necessary to establish that global footprint.”  OK, they’re feeling super confident, but I still don’t buy the IPO exit. $50-100 Million is still no-man’s land for a public enterprise software company. Acquisition by a bigger fish is still more likely.

1 comment November 29th, 2006

Intalio Expands Open Source BPM

Intalio, which calls itself the Open Source BPMS Company, yesterday announced the donation of a BPMN modeling tool to the open source community, and tomorrow plans to add a “BPEL4People-based” workflow framework.  The BPMN modeler, donated to the Eclipse Foundation, is now available under the Eclipse Public License (EPL) and is part of the SOA Tools Platform (STP) project.  This follows Intalio’s donation of its EMF model comparator to the Eclipse Foundation earlier this year, and complements the PXE BPEL Engine it previously donated to the Apache Software Foundation. Tomorrow, Intalio plans to announce the availability of its Tempo workflow framework under the open-source Apache Software License. The project is hosted by SourceForge.  Intalio describes Tempo as an implementation of the BPEL4People proposal from IBM and SAP last year, although that proposal, discussed previously on BPMS Watch here, is 15 months later still just a vague “white paper,” not a spec.  It is not clear, for instance, whether Tempo implements all of the process-task configurations described by the white paper.  IBM and SAP previously indicated that support for all of the configurations would be required for “compliance.”

Both of these donations are important, but in different ways, in my opinion.  The modeler is important by adding to the momentum behind BPMN as a modeling standard that can be shared by business analysts and developers.  There are a number of free BPMN diagramming tools, but this one is not only free but open source.  That means it works as is, but you are free to modify the source code.  So we can expect others to improve it, and other vendors to incorporate it in their own BPM tools. 

The developer connection here is key.  Let’s face it, most business analysts have probably never heard of Eclipse, much less the Eclipse Foundation.  But conversely, most developers have not yet made the connection that with BPMN, the model can actually generate the BPEL code.  That code generation is not in the open source tool - it’s just a diagramming tool at this point - but the idea of business-driven process implementation will definitely be advanced here.  This was the original “Third Wave” idea, and Intalio is vigorously pursuing the open source approach to achieving that goal.

The Tempo donation is potentially more significant, because the omission of human workflow from the BPEL 2.0 spec remains a major reason why BPEL models for real business processes are not portable, and one of the reasons (the others are frankly commercial) why most BPMS vendors disdain BPEL.  If Tempo implements even part of BPEL4People it is probably the first offering to do so, open source or not.  If that offering can build any kind of critical mass, it might at least wake up those slackers at OASIS and get them to put a real spec behind it.

The STP BPMN Modeler is available at http://www.eclipse.org/stp/bpmn/.  Intalio will present training on it at EclipseCon 2007 in Santa Clara in March.

Note added 11/30:

Intalio informs me that the link to Tempo is http://tempo.intalio.org.  Taking a look, it appears that Tempo implements one of the 5 configurations (Intalio correctly calls them “constellations”) referenced in the IBM-SAP white paper, the one that uses standard BPEL Invoke instead of the proposed new People activity type.  That makes sense, since the other 4 “break” standard BPEL 2.0 engines.  Sensible, but IBM and SAP would not call that “compliant.”  I’m hoping Intalio will get their PR guys to put the Tempo news out in the trade press, given IBM and SAP’s lack of urgency on promoting BPEL4People as a standard.

Add comment November 29th, 2006

Back to Blogging

I’ve discovered (the hard way) something that experienced bloggers learned long ago.  Blogs attract “real” (i.e. paying) work, and when the blog starts to take off, you suddenly don’t have time to do it any more.  But you just have to make time.  So I will, and I’m back.

Add comment November 29th, 2006