Archive for May, 2008
Lombardi’s Jim Rudden posts an admittedly “cranky” piece about software giants like SAP crashing the BPMS party. His beef with those companies, which he calls Stackers, is that they
pursue the promise of BPM half-heartedly. Actually, they have done everything in their power to bury BPM deep in what they view as their real market…
which in the case of SAP and Oracle, he says, is enterprise apps, and in the case of IBM is… well he’s not sure. I would say GBS billable hours. However, if those guys - none of whom can touch Lombardi for speed of development (agility!), business empowerment, and overall elegance in execution - were not succeeding at some level, Jim would surely not be so cranky. But I think he paints the Stackers in BPM with too broad and too black a brush. So let me offer a more nuanced view.
As the nominal trigger of the bashing, SAP’s Project Galaxy takes the lion’s share of abuse, I think unfairly. For one thing, like Lombardi, it has a BPMN engine (and doesn’t try to shoehorn BPMN into BPEL-allowed topologies). Like Lombardi, it starts with a BPMN process model, and IT binds model activities to implementation properties by point-click configuration in Eclipse. It supports collaborative modeling and design, not a standalone modeling tool that must be whacked back in BPEL mode before exporting to the executable design environment. The SAP guys would admit - maybe not publicly - that the Galaxy modeling surface is not as business-friendly as Lombardi today, but it’s just version 1.0, and they are trying to move that way.
Oracle takes a completely different technical approach, taking ARIS’s BPMN tool and adding Oracle extensions for human tasks, business rules, and notifications, all to generate BPEL that runs on the Fusion stack. Those BPEL gymnastics are similar to IBM’s approach in WebSphere. But if IBM, SAP, and Oracle (with BEA) succeed in their BPMN 2.0 proposal, we’ll see BPMN-direct executable design from all of the Stackers in a year or two. Well, maybe not Microsoft…
So it’s more than, as Jim says, getting their BPM pitch down. It’s getting getting their tools down, as well. I call it “learning from Lombardi.” Ironically, I think the Stackers’ engineering guys “get” BPM, that it’s not the same as SOA, more than the sales and marketing guys, who are much slower to move off their IT-centric value propositions.
Jim’s contention that BPM in Stacker companies is secretly a stalking horse for some other business has more merit. There is no doubt, for example, that the applications group - and the installed base it represents - at both SAP and Oracle dwarfs the middleware group building BPM. That is not to say the groups share the same agenda, but in a sense they need each other to succeed. Middleware needs specific hooks to the apps to tap into the installed base, and the apps group needs the middleware to keep IBM out as they turn the application monolith into composable services.
The real reason for Jim to be cranky about the Stackers is that they do have a stack - a SOA stack - that BPM rides on top of. The pureplays - our former term for the non-Stackers - don’t, and as BPM moves to the enterprise, customers increasingly want one. The non-Stackers say, we have a UDDI browser, just layer our BPM on top of any SOA stack. But that is apparently a hard sell.
May 16th, 2008
I will be speaking at BPMInstitute.org’s Business Process Management Conference as well as providing Training at the Hyatt Regency in Reston, VA over June 24-27. I will be presenting at the conference a keynote titled BPMN and Business-Empowered Implementation, as well as instructing my 2-Day Training Course Process Modeling with BPMN .
I recommend you consider attending both conference sessions and training courses to get the most out of the event. As a benefit of my participation, I have secured a limited number of Complimentary 1-Day Guest Passes* (a $695 value) and the best available rates for training, which are available until May 30. See below for details:
- Complimentary 1-Day Conference Package
- $495* to upgrade to a 2-Day Conference Package
- $695 for Individual Training Courses
Enter Priority Code SILVER when requesting a Guest Pass and/or enrolling in Training. You must do this by May 30.
If you have any questions, please call BPMInstitute.org directly at 508-475-0475 x15 between 9am-5pm Eastern.
I look forward to seeing you at the Hyatt Regency in Reston, VA.
May 15th, 2008
I released the BPMS Watch Ratings report last month, available to subscribers on this site and on BPMInstitute.org. Each of the 11 BPM Suites evaluated was scored on the same set of capability categories, based on a weighted list of features/attributes, including “Strength of Execution,” representing a subjective catch-all attribute. Three process types described in the report - production workflow, case management, and integration-centric - apply different weightings to the various capability categories, but use the same score for each category. I have been looking for a way to publish the details of the scoring, and at the same time allow users to apply their own weightings to the features in each capability category, as well as to create custom process types with their own capability category weightings.
I wanted to do it online, not an Excel download, but had no idea how to do that. At a recent conference, Neil Ward-Dutton showed me his solution for his own BPM research - all written in PHP by the man himself in his spare time. (Dude, get a life!) No way I could match that, but I was able to do something respectable using DabbleDB, a hosted database service that is part of Ismael Ghalimi’s “Office 2.0″ suite. Dabble costs about $10/month, and so far the customer service has been great: when I inadvertently trashed my database, they restored it in 10 minutes.
I was pretty happy with the results, which are available here to logged-in subscribers. The custom feature weightings and custom process type weightings allow users to modify values one at a time, but there is no way to enforce a total of 100%. Also, all users are editing the same list of user weightings, so there is the risk that one user will overwrite another’s values. I added a Last Modified field to help a user know if that might be happening, but it just shows the date not the dateTime. So it’s not perfect. Also, I need to work on my Wordpress theme to allow a bit more width to some of the charts. But hey, unlike Gartner, Forrester, or Neil’s own thing, it’s free (for now) to BPMS Watch subscribers. All you have to do is register and log in. If you’re not logged in, the pages will return File Not Found.
Once again, I need to remind readers that the ratings are based on evaluations done from July 2007 to March 2008, so products evaluated last summer may have improved their capabilities considerably since then. I will be starting a new round of evaluations this summer, and will update the ratings as I go along - in a more timely manner this time.
Comments welcome.
May 13th, 2008
Since my recent post, a bit more has dribbled out into the blogosphere about the negotiations over BPMN 2.0, most of it completely off track. But now SAP’s David Frankel, definitely an insider, is shining a welcome light in those dark spaces with his BPMN 2.0 Update.
The biggest difference between the two submissions is in how they define the BPMN 2.0 metamodel. The BPMN-S submission positions the OMG’s Business Process Definition Metamodel (BPDM) as the metamodel for BPMN 2.0. The BEA-IBM-Oracle-SAP submission defines a dedicated BPMN 2.0 metamodel, and proposes a mapping between the dedicated metamodel and BPDM.
Here the BEA-IBM-Oracle-SAP submission is what my post called Approach 1 or the BPMS approach, and BPMN-S is what my post called Approach 2, or BPDM. David gets right to the key point:
The BPMN-S submission uses BPDM as the metamodel, and uses BPDM’s mapping to BPMN notation.
The BEA-IBM-Oracle-SAP submission takes the position that BPDM is not a metamodel of BPMN; rather, it says, BPDM is a metamodel of a new, abstract language for process that, as envisioned by the BPDM RFP, was intended to be mapped to multiple concrete languages. BEA-IBM-Oracle-SAP approach is that BPMN, as one of those concrete languages, requires its own metamodel, whose constructs are clearly recognizable as BPMN elements.
But I think he is being polite here. Since custom behaviors can be expressed in BPDM’s new abstract language, BPMN-S takes the position that the notation semantics should be user-definable, referencing for example my “wish list” post on BPMS Watch for non-aborting attached events. BPDM can express this behavior, and that’s a good thing, says BPMN-S. But I don’t think that’s a good thing if others can’t understand the semantics from looking at the diagram, and I believe that is also the philosophy of the IBM-SAP team as well. BPMN-S seems to throw down the glove with statements like this:
BPMN2 provides capabilities… needed for effective functioning of organizations and productive interaction with industry partners. These capabilities cannot be supported by typical language modeling techniques that simply capture pictures in XML with a computation-dependent semantics.
Ouch. But David goes on to say that despite the trash talk, merger negotiations between the two groups have been ongoing since March, in which the goal is a unified submission.
May 6th, 2008
If you want to jump-start your BPMN efforts, I’ll be offering a half-day pre-conference workshop on Process Modeling with BPMN at the upcoming Gartner Application Architecture, Development & Integration Summit in Orlando. This Gartner event is the leading independent SOA and application infrastructure conference, and the agenda’s 6 tracks and 70+ sessions cover future trends and latest best practices in application development, application integration, SOA, Web Services and Web2.0, as well as SaaS/Cloud Computing. My workshop is on the afternoon of June 8; the regular conference runs June 9-11.
The BPMN workshop provides an in-depth tutorial on what has become the key BPM standard, used for both analytical modeling and model-driven implementation in BPM Suites ranging from Oracle, SAP, BEA, and SoftwareAG to Lombardi, TIBCO, Savvion, Appian, and Adobe. You’ll learn not only the semantics behind the notation, but patterns and best practices for modeling events and exceptions, flow control, and organizing complex end-to-end models.
There is an additional $495 fee for participating in the workshop, but BPMS Watch has secured a saving of $400 off the standard registration fee for the conference. For complete conference details and to view the agenda visit www.gartner.com/us/aadi-spring. To register and claim your discount call 866-405-2511 and mention priority code: ADISA.
Beyond the workshop, the event is a good opportunity to understand the future of SOA and the web, new application and architecture models, and discuss your specific issues through Gartner 1-1s, roundtables, facilitated working sessions, and online community. Guest keynotes include Nick Carr, Leading Tech and Business Writer on “The Big Switch,” and Andrew Lippman, MIT’s Media Lab Futurist on “IT Architecture futures.”
I’ll be available to meet with you one-on-one as well to discuss how BPMN can help bring business and IT together in your organization.
Hope to see you in Orlando.
May 6th, 2008
Surprisingly little information has reached public view concerning BPMN 2.0, now under consideration in OMG. Unlike most standards approval processes, the outcome of this one is not preordained. There are two submissions, quite different, and it could go either way.
Oracle’s Vishal Saxena notes that one reason BPMN 1.x has been so successful is that it “keeps simple things simple” by focusing on abstract business-level modeling, allowing developers flexibility in how to implement the technical details, and argues that BPMN 2.0 “should maintain this flexibility.” In response, IDS Scheer’s Sebastian Stein points out that a problem with BPMN 1.x is that it “only has implicitly defined execution semantics,” and BPMN 2.0 needs to make them explicit. He goes on to neatly summarize the competing proposals:
At the current point there are two different approaches discussed within OMG, how to do that:
- BPMN 1.1 already contains an implicit definition of the execution semantics, so just make them explicit by writing them down.
- Use a more abstract meta model with well defined execution semantics like BPDM and map BPMN elements to it.
Approach 1 is a simple solution, because in the end it does not change much for the BPMN user. The implicit execution semantics are just made explicit, but they are not modified. Approach 2 is more complicated, because a second language is added to the stack and new concepts are introduced. Having more and new concepts might contradict BPMN’s current strength - simplicity. This will increase the learning curve for BPMN modelling and might hinder a further adoption.
I think this is a fair characterization, but it’s not the whole story. Approach 1 is a joint submission by the large platform/middleware vendors, companies used to having their way in W3C and OASIS. Approach 2 is BPDM, which has been incubating in OMG for a long time, and wedded to OMG fundamentals like MOF and xmi. More significantly, Approach 1 reflects (to me, at least) a BPMS approach to BPM solution development, emphasizing unification of the business-oriented process model with the executable design, while Approach 2 is more aligned to OMG’s programmer-oriented MDA vision, in which models are just a more efficient way to generate code.
It’s a subtle distinction, and not everyone would agree with my characterization. A key element is that in Approach 1, the execution semantics of shapes in the diagram are specified by the standard, while in Approach 2 they can be redefined by the user. That’s what the BPMN Wish List controversy back in March was all about.
As a non-voting guest member of OMG, I am not a party to the contest, but I am not neutral, either. I think a win by Approach 1 would greatly assist BPMS become mainstream and better define the relationship of BPM to SOA. Formal action by OMG on this is not scheduled until August-September.
May 1st, 2008