BPMS vendor Metastorm acquired BPA vendor Proforma today, kind of a surprise to me, since the last thing most business analysts want is to have their modeling tool funnel them into some proprietary runtime. Sandy as usual has it covered. I bring it up only because a graduate of my BPMN training pinged me about a white paper on the Metastorm website that disses BPMN big-time while at the same time admitting that the company probably needs to adapt its proprietary “SAR” notation to be more like the unlovable standard. The paper raises all of the usual canards about BPMN - it’s too complicated for untrained business analysts, but does not cover all the implementation detail needed for execution. It’s funny when a tool vendor confuses a diagramming standard with the capabilities of a commercial tool. A profound misunderstanding of the real power of BPMN - that it actually can be used, at different levels, by business people documenting their as-is process and by developers building a next-generation executable implementation. If Metastorm’s acid test is usability by business people without any training, I say good luck with the Proforma acquisition.
Certainly BPMN is not perfect. Let’s face it, nobody really loves it, but most agree it’s the closest thing we have today in the BPM world to a real multivendor, architecture-neutral standard, and the one standard that addresses the biggest issue in BPM today, which is true business-IT collaboration. OK, not entirely architecture-neutral, since BPMN effectively demands that the orchestration engine can respond to events in some fashion. That’s usually the place where traditional workflow engines (and BPA tools) can’t handle BPMN. Some deal with the problem by leaving events out of the tool palette. But the right approach, in my view, is to admit it’s the right direction, and incrementally move to accommodate it, as TIBCO and Savvion are doing.
August 1st, 2007
If there is one standard that the BPM world can unite around, it’s BPMN. Today, even those vendors initially reluctant to adopt it can no longer ignore it. But what exactly are the factors that drive this acceptance? How satisfied are end users of BPMN with the notation? Do user experiences on BPMN match those by BPA tool vendors?
Jan Recker from the BPM Research Group at Queensland University of Technology is undertaking a worldwide survey on the use of BPMN by process modelers to shed light into this question. You can help Jan by completing the survey available here. The deadline has been extended to Aug 15.
August 1st, 2007
Yesterday I got a briefing from the BPM folks at Oracle, as part of my BPMS Report series, and I came away surprised at both the completeness and, in many ways, coolness of the offering. A few things stand out (for the rest you’ll have to wait for the report, later this month):
Oracle provides a unique solution to the problems of business-IT interaction and round-tripping. For modeling, Oracle OEMs IDS Scheer ARIS, rebranded Oracle BPA Suite, and has added to it Oracle SOA Extensions that link it to the executable process design and runtime environment, called Oracle SOA Suite. Modelers can use either traditional ARIS EPC or the new BPMN to model process activity flows, but Oracle favors BPMN, in keeping with its marketing theme of “standards-based BPM.” Unlike most other BPMN-based offerings, this is full BPMN - intermediate events, pools and message flows, etc.
Here is the cool part. From BPA Suite, you click a button to “share blueprint with IT”. This validates the BPMN and then exports it - or, let’s say, the part of it relevant to execution - to Oracle BPEL Designer (part of the SOA Suite), which runs in JDeveloper. Oracle calls what is interchanged “shared metadata,” and the interchange format is not XPDL or BPDM, but… you guessed it, BPEL. The blueprint is a quasi-BPMN diagram that is a graphical representation of the shared metadata, serialized in BPEL. So the shapes look (mostly) like BPMN, although the diagram retains some of the block structure of BPEL… but all in all, I would say definitely understandable by any business analyst trained in BPMN. Executable detail added in BPEL Designer is reflected automatically in the blueprint, so business and IT stay in sync through this shared metadata expressed graphically in the blueprint. Very nice.
A second area that surprised me was integration of content management into BPM, leveraging Oracle’s acquisition of Stellent (in addition to its native Content DB), both as backend services and content-centric apps on top of BPM. Most BPM vendors have been slow to appreciate that human-centric BPM typically requires good integration with business documents out of the box.
A third surprise was what appears to be a successful effort to get ISVs to build on top of the platform. Back in the old workflow days there was a vigorous ISV market, but somehow that hasn’t yet materialized with BPM.
August 1st, 2007
