May
6

An Insider’s View of BPMN 2.0

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.

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Posted by bruce BPM, BPMN, BPMS Subscribe to RSS feed

2 Responses to “An Insider’s View of BPMN 2.0”

  1. Conrad Bock says:
    July 7, 2008 at 11:43 am

    Bruce,

    Thanks for this post. Some important information on the Object
    Management Group’s Business Process Modeling and Notation 2 Request for
    Proposal (OMG BPMN 2 RFP, http://doc.omg.org/bmi/07-06-05) was not
    discussed in David Frankel’s otherwise excellent article quoted above
    (“Requirements for BPMN 2.0″, BPTrends, June 2008,
    http://tinyurl.com/5nux7b). A prominent aspect of the RFP is the
    requirement for reconciliation of BPMN 1.x and the Business Process
    Definition Metamodel (BPDM) into a single language and model.

    BPDM accurately captures business processes on a highly reusable
    foundation for business standards. It provides a business-level
    semantics, flexibility across choreography and orchestration, and
    enables compliance with rules and policies, and process management,
    among other capabilities. More introduction is available in:

    – Presentations at http://doc.omg.org/bmi/08-03-14 and
    http://doc.omg.org/bmi/2007-03-09.

    – Section 4, Design Rationale, of http://doc.omg.org/bmi/2008-02-03.

    – Tutorial slides at http://doc.omg.org/omg/08-06-32

    OMG recognized the benefits of BPDM and the popularity of BPMN, leading
    it to require a single, unified notation and model combining BPDM and
    BPMN. This provides the capabilities of both at the same time, as
    compared to mapping between two separate languages. Two models and
    languages would force users to move between them depending on the
    feature they wanted at any particular time. The OMG arrived at this
    requirement through a vetting process open to all members.

    We hope this provides your readers with useful information about BPDM
    and the OMG BPMN 2 RFP.

    Conrad Bock (U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology)
    Cory Casanave (Model Driven Solutions)
    Fred Cummins (EDS)
    Antoine Lonjon (MEGA)
    Dale Moberg (Axway)
    Astier Sylvain (Axway)

  2. Manchurian Candidate in the BPMN Battle? - BPMS Watch says:
    July 14, 2008 at 5:15 pm

    [...] means “more like today’s BPMN” than “dumbed-down.”  SAP’s David Frankel expresses the view that BPMN should have its own schema and metamodel, based on the BPMN spec, and [...]

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