BPMS Watch

It’s Alive!

BPMN training v3.0, that is.  Here’s a link to the overview on BPMessentials.com.  Sorry for repeatedly blathering about this, but if you’ve ever tried to produce 6 hours of Flash video material you know the level of pain involved. 

Add comment March 6th, 2008

Organizing Complex BPMN Models

My latest column on BPM Institute covers the issue of end-to-end process models which involve multiple pools and deeply nested hierarchies.  It was motivated by painful experience grading certification exercises in my BPMN training.  That experience was critical to my ultimate decision to include this in version 3.0 of my BPMN training, overcoming an initial concern about scaring off would-be process modelers.  But the difference between the simple exercises modeled inline in the training and the post-training mail-in certification exercises representing real-world processes was simply too great to ignore.  I’m not going to summarize the column here, but I recommend it to anyone interested in BPMN modeling.

For the blog I just want to add that topics like this are emblematic of the evolution of my approach to teaching BPMN from my initial efforts a year ago to version 3.0, which launches tonight on bpmessentials.com.  When I started, my goal was to teach the semantics of the shapes and symbols as defined by the spec, especially where the spec does a particularly poor job of it (plenty of opportunities there!).  But the experience of interacting with students showed me there is a hunger out there for a methodology, not an analytical framework like Lean (although that exists, too) but more of a cookbook approach representing best practice for BPMN.  The spec doesn’t give you that.  As a vendor-independent standard, BPMN has no built-in methodology, and BPMN tools vary in their ability to model complex end-to-end processes in the top-down hierarchical fashion that I think is vital.  Naturally, the tool we use in the training, Process Modeler for Visio from ITP Commerce, does that part very well, but it still demands a cookbook methodology for organizing models stretching over many many sheets in Visio, so that they not only are easily traceable visually but hang together as a single end-to-end model for simulation and ultimately execution.

2 comments March 6th, 2008

Introducing SOA Developers to Content Management

On April 9 I’ll be speaking at Impact, IBM’s annual WebSphere mega-event in Las Vegas, on the topic of “Leveraging Enterprise Content in BPM and SOA”.  I was quite surprised they invited me, as I have been critical of their previous positioning of FileNet vs WebSphere in the BPMS space (”content-centric” vs “process-centric”? are you kidding?)  But given the new SOA spin on enterprise content (both FileNet and DB2 CM), sounds like IBM may be loosening up.  In any case, I don’t have to talk about IBM product strategy, just why SOA and BPM folks need to include managed content in their solutions, and how to do it.

Add comment March 6th, 2008