Posts filed under 'BPM'
A lot of speculation about the fate of BPM and other BEA goodies after what Sandy calls “the Borg” has its way with them. Oracle will reveal all in a public webcast on July 1 at 9am PT/noon ET. To the analysts they wrote:
On July 1st at Noon EDT/9:00 am PDT/5:00 pm in London, as part of the “Welcome BEA and Middleware Strategy Briefing” webcast, Charles Phillips and Thomas Kurian will explain how the addition of BEA products to Oracle Fusion Middleware will create a best-in-class combination. Public registration is open here. You can register for yourself and invite your clients to do so too. The webcast will also be available on demand after the event.
Given all the snark to date, I think it’s smart for Oracle to let the people hear it direct from the Borg itself. And my AR friend Avi there promises that, contrary to my speculation, they do know how to spell BPM.
Glad to hear it!
June 12th, 2008
Next week I’m stirring the pot again on one of my favorite topics - BPMN and Business-Empowered Implementation. Not once but twice.
On June 17 I’ll be moderating a panel at the Intalio User Conference in San Francisco. I’m hoping for users who have been-there-done-that with Intalio’s BPMN modeler. What is the business-IT interaction really like? What skills are required? What are the hard parts? The parts that went better than expected? I’m interested to find out myself!
On June 18 I’m doing a webcast on ebizQ: Business-Empowered Process Implementation… Good for Business and IT. Here’s the registration link. It bugs me that some people continue to repeat the old canard about business folks tweaking production apps with no IT involvement. This is a short one that describes what business-empowered implementation - such as possible with BPMN-based BPM Suites - is really all about.
June 11th, 2008
One of BPMN’s most important elements is unfortunately also the most misunderstood. It’s called a pool, a rectangular shape that serves as a container for a process. So in that sense a pool is synonymous with a process, and that’s as basic as you can get. The confusion sets in when you understand that a business process diagram (BPD) - the top-level object in BPMN, describing a single end-to-end business process - frequently contains multiple pools. Usually only one of the pools describes your process; the others typically stand for external participants: requesters of your process, service providers to your process, or possibly sources of unsolicited events that affect your process. Often such external pools are represented as abstract processes, defined only by their interfaces, i.e. their communications with your pool in the form of messages (called message flows in BPMN). They are drawn with no activities inside, just opaque rectangles or “black box” pools.
This is sometimes quite baffling to business users learning BPMN. But you must remember that BPMN originated as a graphical design notation for BPML, a web service orchestration language quite similar to BPEL. In BPEL/BPML, a process is also a service, and in SOA the service requester and service provider are distinct and separate parties. In other words, the requester is not part of the process, but external to it. You might say this is about executable implementation and has nothing to do with process modeling. And I couldn’t really argue with that, except to say that such SOA concepts are deeply baked into BPMN, and if you ignore them you will wind up unable to avoid validation errors in your diagrams. So in my BPMN training, I try to teach this mindset to business users, even if they have no intention of moving to process implementation. Those with no prior experience in process modeling have no trouble with it, but to some experienced practitioners it is a struggle.
One of the first exercises we do in class is a simple time off request process. The diagram above is how a lot of business analysts with prior modeling experience would draw it. The pool is labeled Time Off Request, the name of the process. Lanes representing participants in the process subdivide the pool.
This is not technically incorrect, but I try to teach it a different way, like the diagram below:
Now employee, the requester, is external to the process, not part of it. In a sense this redefines the process as the servicing of a request, and excludes the preparation of the request, which is admittedly an ITish, SOA-conditioned view. The process starts upon receipt of the time off request. If the employee begins to fill out the request, has second thoughts, and never sends it off, no instance of this process is created. To me that makes sense. To some people it does not.
The employee’s own process is opaque, so we show it as a black box pool. As the service provider, we don’t really care what it is. We just want to show how we interact with it, in the form of a request message (time off request) and a choice of response messages.
One of the confusing things to business analysts who find the time to read the BPMN spec is that the spec says pools are used to distinguish process “participants.” But the spec means participants in the SOA sense, i.e. requester or provider, not in the sense of roles within the orchestration, like Manager and HR. Those are depicted as lanes within the internal process pool.
Many experienced practitioners who use process modeling for analysis and process improvement with no thought of automated implementation find my approach annoying, perhaps counter-productive, and would claim that their clients could never understand it. However, I find that business people can understand it easily; it’s the practitioners who may have to adapt their methodology.
Why would they? The answer is that BPMN is an industry standard, supported by a wide variety of inexpensive tools, and provides a common visual language that can be shared by business and IT. Those factors are creating the demand, by business, to adopt that standard, whether it fits their consultant’s pre-existing methodology or not. BPMN offers business the possibility of playing a more active role in defining the to-be process, using a common model shared with IT. But that new role and new common model demands thinking about the process in a new way - when it starts, when it ends, who’s in it and who’s external to it. And that all starts with pools.
June 11th, 2008
CMP’s TechWeb syndicates my blog, and someone posted a question re my recent post about The Future of BPM at BEA/Oracle. When I tried to reply, the CMP site rejected it for sexual innuendo or something. You be the judge.
The comment:
I did not see any speific remarks about Aqualogic in your article and pose this question to you:
Given the current apabilities of Aqualogic and Oracle’s existing ‘positioning’ of its (OEMd) BPA suite, would not Oracle be able to deliver its BPMS offering that way (I think that’s what you are saying) BUT also support the business apps (BPM+SOA) using the same ‘tools’ (thereby eliminating the requirement & assoiated additional EBITDA impact of having to use the OEM ARIS offering)?
My attempted response:
ALBPM stands for AquaLogic BPM, so I believe it was specifically referenced in the post. BPA Suite (ARIS) is at heart a repository for architectural artifacts related to BPM. The role it plays in Oracle’s BPMS, as a BPMN modeling tool that generates BPEL, is a tiny fraction of what you pay for in that offering. If you don’t care about the architectural repository, I am saying yes ALBPM used as a unified modeling/design/runtime for process is simpler than gluing ARIS BPMN to BPEL via a mapping that sort of works. But ARIS has specific features related to Oracle apps that make ditching it hard to do.
Intercession by CMP’s sex police:
Your message has been blocked due to the following words: hard on. Try omitting the word(s) cited, and reposting your message.
No additional comment necessary.
June 6th, 2008
I see my friend Jesper is moving on from BEA, so the reality of the Oracle acquisition is finally sinking in. When I hear people say that Oracle bought BEA for their BPM, I have to laugh. I’m fairly confident the Oracle crew that went after BEA could not even spell BPM. But no doubt the two BPMSs will have to be merged or rationalized somehow into a single primary offering (although IBM/FileNet provides an example of how that can be dragged out for years). I don’t actually know what Oracle’s plans are, and they haven’t solicited my opinion - you can be sure that if they had, I would not be writing about it. But I have thought a bit about what they ought to do.
Since TIBCO-Staffware and BEA-Fuego, both of which seemed crazy to me at the time, I’ve had a change of heart about consolidation in the BPMS business. At the time of those acquisitions, integration middleware vendors had one view of what BPM is - essentially a business wrapper around SOA - and workflow vendors plus the BPM pureplays had different one, focused on improving “work” and optimizing business performance. And it was not clear which vision would prevail. The middleware vendors were certainly bigger companies with more cash and resources, and in the software industry bigger usually wins.
But TIBCO and BEA, confounding my own expectations, did not embed their acquisitions as a human workflow subcomponent underneath their existing integration-oriented suite, but instead made the acquired company the centerpiece of their BPM offering. In fact SOA, the bigger business at both TIBCO and BEA, became the sub-component, with BPM at the top.
And that was smart, smarter than I was at the time for sure, because the energy in the BPM market has proved to be definitely on the human-centric side, with an emphasis on improving human work in the organization and empowering business to play a more direct role in the implementation. The way the acquisitions were handled allowed both TIBCO and BEA to understand that BPM and SOA are not just different brochures for the same product offering, but different things entirely, and require explicit links between them. It’s taken a while to build those links - in fact, they are just rolling out for real this year for the first time in both TIBCO iProcess and BEA ALBPM. In contrast, IBM and Oracle, who continue to embed human workflow as a subcomponent of an overall integration-centric offering, still struggle with the boundary between BPM and SOA.
So what does this say about what should happen now with Oracle-BEA?
First, a couple points about the two existing BPMS offerings. Oracle uses BPMN modeling in an OEM version of IDS Scheer ARIS (extended with some Oracle-specific configuration dialogs for human tasks, business rules, and notifications) to generate skeleton BPEL that is fleshed out in the SOA Suite design tool. There is a simplified BPEL outline called Blueprint intended to serve as a diagram shared by business and IT to eliminate the roundtripping problem, but it’s not as clean as a true BPMN-based design. ALBPM uses a common graphical notation for the process model and the implementation design. In version 6.1, that notation has been made (mostly) BPMN-compliant. I think this is the right way to do it, so on this point score one for ALBPM.
Oracle follows the BPEL paradigm in which the process does not actually perform activities itself but instead invokes services that perform the activities, and those services are defined outside of BPM, e.g. coded in Java and exposed as services in the SOA registry/repository. Or, in the case of human tasks, defined in the BPM environment, but deployed and managed as separate objects independent of the processes that use them. ALBPM follows the more normal BPM pattern in which activity implementations are defined and used within the BPM environment itself. If services are created in SOA and exposed in the registry/repository, ALBPM can bind to those, but it’s not the only way to do it. In a SOA-based production environment, both BPMSs get you to the same place, but it’s easier to do rapid iterative BPM development and deployment the ALBPM way.
So, if Oracle’s goal is to maximize success in the “straight” BPM market, making ALBPM the environment for both modeling (replacing ARIS) and end-to-end implementation makes the most sense, moving SOA Suite (BPEL) down to the SOA layer and replacing the links to AquaLogic SOA components with links to their Oracle Fusion counterparts.
But it’s not at all clear that the straight BPM market is Oracle’s objective. Like SAP, Oracle tends to view BPM primarily as a platform for transforming their enterprise applications from old-style monoliths to composable services. The BPMS developers, I’m sure, would like to make their product a good fit for both the straight BPM market and their own apps business, but that is hard to do. For example, one reason for separating human tasks from BPM is to support the apps business. Also, a reason for hanging on to ARIS, despite the clumsy integration with implementation, is that it provides prebuilt reference models for the apps.
It is possible that Oracle could adopt an IBM-like strategy and keep both threads alive until things sort out, using ALBPM on top of Fusion as the straight BPMS offering, and the current ARIS+SOA Suite to support the apps business. In some ways that’s the path of least resistance, anyway, so I suspect that’s what will happen.
June 4th, 2008
On June 4 at 1pm ET/10am PT, I will be doing a free webcast on BPMInstitute.org entitled “Which BPMS Is Right For You?”, calling attention to my BPMS Report series available through the BPM Institute site, as well as the recent Ratings Report, available also here on BPMS Watch. The BPMS Reports cover 11 leading offerings - Appian, BEA, Cordys, EMC, FlowCentric, Global360, Lombardi, Oracle, Singularity, SoftwareAG, and TIBCO - and the Ratings Report provides a comparative scoring in 3 process types, Production Workflow, Case Management, and Integration-Centric BPM. On the webcast I’ll explain more about the evaluation methodology, the process types, and how to use the data sensibly to create your BPMS short list. Click here to register for the event.
May 30th, 2008
You’re probably saying, what the heck is OCEB? It stands for OMG Certified Expert in BPM, a series of credentials issued by OMG to demonstrate levels of BPM competence based on exams. There are 5 levels - a fundamental level, business intermediate and advanced, and technical intermediate and advanced. It’s not just about BPMN, but pretty wide-ranging across BPM as both a management discipline and a technology. Maybe too wide ranging for my tastes. You can find out more about OCEB here.
The exams and certification are going to cost money (big surprise), but to get the thing off the ground OMG needs beta testers for the Fundamental exam. The beta helps decide which questions to keep and which to discard as too easy, too hard, too stupid, whatever. Beta testers get to take the exam free… well, maybe… and if they pass, they are certified, before the thing even goes out to the general public. Actually here’s what OMG says about the free beta:
OMG will select and accept a limited number of applicants into the OCEB Free Beta Inducement Program. (In addition, a larger number of applicants may be accepted into an OCEB Half-price Beta Inducement Program. Every applicant is automatically considered for both programs.)
Since I was one of those who helped write the test questions, OMG says they will give preferential treatment to my referrals. So here’s how you would sign up. Go to the signup page here and down where it asks, How did you find out about OCEB? check Personal Contact and put in my name. They say that will work… up to a point. We’ll see.
May 30th, 2008
When I began my BPMS Report series a few years back — actually the predecessor reports, called the Manager’s Guide to BPM Software — my thought was that all that BPMS buyers needed to make a rational choice was a walkthrough of process design using the tools, presented in a standard format and terminology. Those reports were 100 pages long, and I soon discovered that few people wanted that long a walk. My current BPMS Report series reports on BPMInstitute.org are 30-40 pages long. That seems to be a much more acceptable length, but after the comparative ratings report came out in April, some vendors told me that nobody wants to read 30-40 pages, either. Buyers just look at the scores.
I suppose such lazy BPMS buyers do exist, but that’s a ridiculous way to “evaluate” software. You still need a way to see exactly what a BPMS does and how it does it. I still like the walkthrough approach, but vendors are reluctant to publish their own online. Products that make solutions quick and easy to build have no better way to demonstrate that than an online walkthrough. That’s why it’s great that BEA’s Jesper Joergensen has published the full lab walkthroughs on AquaLogic BPM 6.1 from the recent BEA Participate event. They’re pdf’s, not ideal for viewing online but handy for downloading and printing out.
I would love to have a space on BPMS Watch where vendors could post such walkthroughs (or links to walkthroughs hosted on their own sites). Flash video, Powerpoint, PDF… it doesn’t matter. Vendors, contact me if this appeals to you. BPMS buyers, don’t be lazy. Check out Jesper’s contribution to marketing through buyer education.
May 27th, 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
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