At Impact three weeks ago I just got the drive-by version, but now that I’ve gotten the full analyst deep dive, I have to say that IBM now really does seem to have its act together on BPM. The current v6.1 offering has a lot of the improvement built in already, and the July v6.1.2 has more. We’ll be adding IBM to the BPMS Report series and Ratings in Q3, and they should do fairly well.
One of the strong points is something rarely linked to IBM: user experience. The new offering features a unified business user workspace for viewing tasks, instances, performance metrics, and alerts. It features a large palette of prebuilt Web 2.0 widgets that let business users customize their own workspace and mash up the data. The monitoring components seem especially nice.
Another outstanding feature is the repository for modeling artifacts based on Rational Asset Manager, now federated with WebSphere Registry and Repository, which holds executable artifacts. How many presentations have you seen that talk about business users finding business services in a repository and binding them to their process models? Hundreds, I’m sure. And how many BPM/SOA suites provide the federated repositories, business-oriented metadata and query tools that you would need to do it? Probably none. But IBM now does, and lets business users search for related modeling assets - processes, services, policies, KPIs - and reuse them in their own processes.
One of my long-standing complaints about IBM’s approach has been the jarring discontinuity between modeling and process design, and the lack of round-tripping. They have clearly put a lot of work into this aspect of BPM, and while WebSphere Modeler and WebSphere Integration Developer are still very different tools, they share many artifacts - schemas, forms, KPIs - and IBM provides an elaborate mechanism for round-tripping based on propagating changes between the two environments. The software does not automatically make the changes required, but lists the changes required to keep the model and WID design in sync. It’s a lot better than before, and I suspect will be simpler once BPMN 2.0 comes out.
My other long-time complaint about IBM’s BPM approach as been the whole WebSphere-FileNet dichotomy. While pure content lifecycle processes and document workflow processes are “special cases” in BPM, in reality any BPM process may involve content attachments that should be organized, managed, and securely retained in a true content repository. You shouldn’t have to use a special content-centric process engine to secure process attachments. And now, says IBM, you don’t. While I would still go further, IBM now can tell a single “story” that brings process and content together. Essentially, the steps that involve content operations (e.g. adding/revising/securing documents) are done by a FileNet P8 process, which is invoked via WSDL as a subprocess in the end-to-end WebSphere process. Both the FileNet and WebSphere processes are modeled in WebSphere Business Modeler. Not truly seamless, but the seams don’t show too much. IBM hasn’t told this story very well, possibly for fear of freaking out the FileNet base, but I actually think this gives that base a more comfortable (and plausible) way forward.
Look for the IBM BPMS Report around July.
April 28th, 2008
I’ve just finished the BPMS Watch Ratings, a comparative scoring of the 11 leading BPM Suites written up in my BPMS Report series on BPMInstitute.org. Those reports, which are available for free, include Appian, BEA, Cordys, EMC, FlowCentric, Global 360, Lombardi, Oracle, Singularity, SoftwareAG/webMethods, and TIBCO. I would have liked to get Pega and Savvion - they declined. IBM (WebSphere and FileNet), Adobe, Intalio, and Fujitsu have expressed interest but I needed to get the ratings out; maybe we’ll get them in a supplementary round.
**Note added 4/22: All of the reports are now on the BPMInstitute site.**
The BPMS Watch ratings evaluate the offerings separately for human-centric and integration-centric BPM, and further breaks down human-centric into production workflow and case management. The ratings measure all the suites in 11 categories of capabilities, which are weighted differently based on the process type. The ratings are just for the product itself — nothing for “completeness of vision” or other nonsense like that. We plot the aggregate rating for integration-centric vs human-centric, integration-centric vs production workflow, and production workflow vs case management. The idea is that the market is moving beyond point solutions, and you might want a good compromise between multiple process types. Whatever…
This report gives the weightings and the results, but I still want to put out a more detailed report that gets into more detail behind the scoring and lets users tweak the weightings themselves.
If you know anything about how these Wave/MQ things normally work, the last few weeks are usually an intense negotiation between the vendors - who get to review the draft - and the analysts, with lots of screaming and threats. This one is different. The vendors haven’t seen this yet. So by the time they start screaming and threatening, the cat will be out of the bag.
**Note added April 22: Not too much screaming and threats, but vendors asked me to clarify that the reports on which the ratings are based were written over a 9-month interval from July 2007 to March 2008, and some offerings may have enhanced their capabilities since their report was written. The revised Ratings Report (see sidebar) now lists the date of each product report.**
The report is here on BPMS Watch in the sidebar. You need to register to download it. But if you’re like most people you won’t even read it; you just want to know who won. OK here it is.
April 10th, 2008
It seems my post yesterday, drawn from the press release, keynote slides, and mini-briefing, missed the coded messages in IBM’s BPMS announcement. Here is the decoded version.
The announcement of an “IBM BPM Suite” represents a big deal internally at IBM. It is intended to signify a commitment to a single BPMS based on interworking components from separate divisions - WebSphere, FileNet, Lotus, Rational, GBS, etc. It required signoff from all the various warlords - Rosamilia, Goyal, LeBlanc, Bowden, etc. Apparently a big deal. They know they’re not there yet, but the commitment to get there is new.
Second point is investment protection. The starter sets - one for WebSphere and the other for FileNet - are meant to signal that customer investments in those technologies will be protected going forward as the BPMS takes shape. IBM (unlike FileNet) is well known for this. We’ll see how well it works. I sense they are willing to take their hits in the Magic Quadrants rather than rattle the installed base.
Third point is interworking of components across traditional brand boundaries. It always seems to be harder to do that at IBM than at other places. They obsess over details like unifying the install, test, and support. But again the commitment to integrate across brands in the BPMS is apparently significant.
The June-July v6.1.2 release now seems less like a major step forward and more like the first step on a long journey.
April 9th, 2008
You’re probably saying, wait a minute, didn’t they already have one? Yes, I admit, they were in the 2006 BPMS Report series, in which they agreed (reluctantly, I hear) to let the combination of WebSphere Modeler, Monitor, WID, and Process Server be described as a BPM Suite. But today at Impact here in Las Vegas they actually announced it as an orderable thing. Sort of…
One of the problems for BPMS at Big Blue has always been that the required components cut across IBM brands, which appear to resist integration with each other. So WebSphere had its BPM story, FileNet (Information On Demand) had its own, and I suppose so did Lotus and Rational, as well. Last year IBM marketing decreed WebSphere and FileNet would be presented as a single BPM story, but they never succeeded in getting an analyst to tell it… including me. Because there wasn’t a single story to tell. (That’s what has delayed IBM’s inclusion in the current BPMS Report series, and I met another BPM analyst here who told me his own IBM BPMS report is currently stuck in the mud on the same issue.)
So what is the new offering announced today? It’s called the “IBM BPM Suite” (look ma, no branding!) and it includes both WebSphere and FileNet (with some Rational and Lotus, as well). Does that mean they’ve finally integrated the components? Not really. The new suite “includes a choice of two foundational ‘Starter Sets’ that make it easier for customers to get started with BPM.” One of those starter sets is WebSphere Modeler, Monitor, and Fabric (which includes parts of WID and Process Server). The other is FileNet. Other suite components, including the model repository (Rational Asset Manager), some Lotus collaboration stuff, a new Business Event Processing tool based on another recent acquisition, are labeled “extended value offerings.”
Clearly IBM is interpreting the word “suite” to mean a portfolio rather than an integrated platform. So I doubt the new marketing spin by itself is going to do anything. But the mini-briefing I got on this suggests there might actually be something new here, with Fabric playing a more central role. One of my biggest complaints about the WebSphere BPM story has been the jarring discontinuity between Modeler and WID - different process metamodels, different data models, different programming models, no roundtripping. The new story is that Fabric, formerly known as Webify, is a business-friendlier front end that enables “policy-based service composition” and hides the developer-centric guts of WID and Process Server. I am going to need an actual briefing on this before it makes sense, but here is the marketecture diagram from the keynote:
IBM also throws a small bone to BPMN, saying Modeler will support a new “BPMN visualization format.” Somehow that is not quite saying Modeler will support BPMN. I suspect a bit of BPMN hand-waving like BEA does with AquaLogic BPM today. But IBM is a major player shaping BPMN 2.0, and there is no doubt that standard will play a key role when it emerges in 2009 (or later). The WebSphere piece of the new BPMS is a tweak of v6.1. It should be available later this quarter.
***Correction added April 9: I got a demo of Fabric today and, to correct the post, it does not replace WID and Process Server. It adds a new Service Composition perspective to WID, and it will be linked in to Modeler as well. Fabric allows service endpoints to be selected dynamically at runtime based on policies, and allows business users to tweak policy parameters at runtime (similar to rule maintenance applications in the business rules arena). You still need to go into WID to edit the BPEL, SCA assembly diagrams, and other things that make IBM’s BPM development so foreign to the business side. In the future I think IBM is shooting for direct deployment from Modeler (including the Fabric Service Composer) without dealing with WID… but I don’t think 6.1.2 is promising that.
April 8th, 2008
Antoine of Intalio comments on yesterday’s post re the need to tweak BPMN diagrams to make them more BPEL-friendly. One of my complaints had to do with the nasty “interleaving” error that always pops up when you turn on BPEL validation. He references an Intalio presentation at EclipseCon last year, specifically slide 16. I copied his BPMN into my tool (ITP Commerce) and sure enough, it gives the interleaving error:
Getting rid of interleaving errors requires making duplicate copies of some of the diagram nodes so that BPEL’s block structure is happy. In my tool this has to be done by hand, but Antoine sort of suggests that Intalio does this automatically by turning the BPMN into a “directed acyclic graph” and generating BPEL from that. More mathematical gobbledygook to me, but I think he is saying “we fix the interleaving thing automatically” by turning BPMN into a “tree”… I assume under certain conditions. Here is the result from his document:
As you can see, ‘merge’ and ‘do more things’ have been duplicated, but apparently it’s automatic. Sweet. I’m curious, Antoine, does Intalio automatically handle my mixed token diagram from yesterday? And, since those exclusive merge gateways are really optional in BPMN - uncontrolled merge means the same thing in this case - does Intalio require you to draw them?
April 5th, 2008
Keith Swenson revisits the nuisance of BPMN-BPEL roundtripping and casts the obvious solution - executable BPMN - in the guise of WYDIWYE, what-you-see-is-what-you-execute. I pretty much agree with Keith on this, but I have found that even though executable BPMN - as (he says) Fujitsu Interstage provides and (I would add) Lombardi, TIBCO, Appian, and others do as well - is obvously the right answer, it’s sometimes not the actual answer in real life. As in… my company has standardized on BPMN for modeling and WebSphere Process Server or Oracle SOA Suite for execution. I have two clients right now who fit this bill exactly.
With one of them I have been going through the exercise of BPMN-BPEL mapping, and it’s given me a much better appreciation of the problem. The problem Keith mentions is from a post by William Vambenepe who bemoans the fact that a BPMN OR-split and join in Oracle BPA Suite generates a slightly more complex looking graph in Oracle BPEL, i.e. a parallel split with an enabling XOR gate on each leg. I say to that, hey Bill, suck it up. First of all, it’s not all that complex, and second, Oracle is doing the mapping for you automatically. So to imagine that that is the problem is to miss the boat on BPMN-BPEL.
In my experience, the bigger issues are these:
1. “Interleaved” flows. The Pro edition of the BPMN tool we use in our training (ITP Commerce Process Modeler for Visio) lets you switch validation modes between straight BPMN and BPEL generation. That can be an unpleasant experience, when you have a simple diagram that gives no BPMN validation errors, switch on BPEL validation and YIKES! a whole page of “interleaving” errors. The problem has to do with mixing tokens in the flow analysis. I can’t explain it, but here’s a simple case:
A credit application comes in. If the requested amount is high, it goes to manual approval step. If the amount is low, it goes to a rule engine that assesses risk. If risk is high, it also goes to manual approval. If risk is low, it automatically approves (omitted from the diagram) and ends. Simple, right? Yes in BPMN, but to the BPEL generator this is interleaved. The Risk=High path mixes tokens. Yeah it’s all fuzzy math to me, too, but to fix it here’s what you have to do:
It’s essentially the same, except there’s a duplicate of the approval task. Instead of the user task icon it has some other funny icon. That’s called a reference task, and it means it’s a copy of the original. So it clutters up the diagram but it removes the interleaving error. I wish my tool were smart enough to find and fix these automatically, but it’s not.
2. Attached events. In BPMN an attached event (message, timer, or error) aborts the activity and redirects processing down the sequence flow out of the event, called the exception flow. BPMN allows the exception flow to be routed anywhere (as long is it doesn’t cross subprocess or pool boundary). But not BPEL. In BPEL, the exception flow (called fault or event handler flow) has to return to the end of the activity with the attached event. Say what? Yeah really.
My tool handles this automatically, and I thought it was quite clever until I saw that the solution is published in the BPMN spec, appendix A. It works like this. BPEL creates a boolean normal completion variable and initializes it to true before the activity with the attached event. In the exception flow (handler) it changes the variable to false. Following the activity there is a switch (equivalent to XOR gateway) that enables the following activity (what BPMN calls Normal Flow) only if the variable is true. This works well as long as there are no parallel paths, no looping back to previous parts of the process, and other things BPMN allows and BPEL has a harder time with. So in many cases you still need to hand code your BPEL, and the need for hand coding is the real problem with roundtripping.
In the BPEL roundtripping debate, there was a lot of hand-wringing about whether you could automatically create “readable” BPEL from BPMN, meaning the kind of BPEL that you would hand code. From my vantage point, the bigger problem is the other direction: Is it possible to recreate the original BPMN from the autogenerated BPEL? Even accepting those nasty Reference activities, can we get back our original OR gateways and exception flows out of attached events? I doubt it. This is why BPEL will, in my view, remain a poor runtime partner for BPMN, at least for BPMN 1.x.
There is a chance the BPEL vendors now driving the BPMN 2.0 bus will force that standard to conform to the constraints of BPEL. But unless and until that happens, a BPMN “engine” remains a much better solution.
April 4th, 2008
We have space left in our 2-day class Process Modeling with BPMN in Chicago on April 16-17. This is a great opportunity to jump-start your education on what has emerged as the important standard in BPM. The training is hosted by the BPM Institute and taught by me. This is the new v3.0 of the training material, based on BPMN 1.1, and includes 60 days use of what I think is the best BPMN tool around, Process Modeler for Visio from ITP Commerce. We use the tool for simple exercises in class, as well as for the certification exercises mailed in after class, with individualized feedback from me. That part is optional, but that’s where you really learn how to do BPMN.
The training is co-located with the Business Process Management Conference at The Hilton Chicago Hotel that runs April 14-17, 2008. I will be speaking at the conference on April 15 on BPMN and Business-Empowered Implementation, and as a benefit of my participation, I have secured a limited number of Complimentary 1-Day Guest Passes* (a $995 value) and the best available rates for training, which are available until April 10. I recommend you consider attending both conference sessions and training courses to get the most out of these initiatives. As a trainer/presenter, I am pleased to have secured the a Complimentary 1-Day Conference/Workshops Package. Register here for that. Enter Priority Code SILVER to request a Guest Pass and/or register for training/workshops.
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 Hilton.
April 1st, 2008
[My April column for BPM Institute. Please add your own nominees in the comments.]
Is there a BPM Hall of Fame? I don’t think so, but there should be, to recognize the true pioneers and innovators in the field. BPM’s core ideas and technologies come from several divergent fields, and my list would include those who first introduced them – ideas about what a business process is, and what managing one really means. Thinking about who should be in a BPM Hall of Fame is a fun exercise, and you might it helpful in framing your own views. My list emphasizes technology, recognizing those who first recognized that improving business processes demanded fundamentally new technology, often enabled by fundamental shifts in the surrounding IT environment.
My nominees would be:
- Ted Smith. Whatever BPM gurus today might say about agility or end-to-end visibility, the biggest ROI from BPM still comes from automating the flow of work, leveraging the network to make business processes run faster, and get more work done with fewer people. As the founder of FileNet, Ted Smith in the 1980s invented the concept of workflow, and even trademarked the word itself. Back then, business processes were mostly paper-based, inherently manual and slow, but the new technologies of computer networking and digital mass storage offered the possibility of a better way. While competitors like Kodak and Wang promoted document imaging as an electronic file cabinet, Ted Smith realized the real benefit of getting paper inside the computer was not storage and retrieval, but making business processes more efficient by automating the flow of work.
- Fernando Flores. Finance Minister under Allende at age 28 and sprung by Amnesty International from political imprisonment six years later, Fernando Flores spent his exile from Chile at Stanford. There, while Ted Smith was inventing workflow, Flores and Terry Winograd conceived of the business process in a very different way – not as a sequence of assigned tasks to be performed as quickly as possible, but as a set of commitments between requesters and performers, including negotiation, promises, and acceptance of satisfactory completion, the humanistic side of work. Leveraging the new technology of PCs, LANs, and email – intra-office, as this was still pre-Internet – Flores’ Speech-Action theory took shape in a software package called The Coordinator, pioneering what was later called groupware. In today’s terms we would call it collaborative process management. His company Action Technologies later refined the ideas and updated them to the web, but their incorporation into mainstream BPM remains a promise largely unfulfilled. Winograd today is best known as adviser to Larry Page, whose research project on web search turned out, we hear, even bigger than BPM.
- Dale Skeen. There is another dimension to BPM beyond managing the efficiency or quality of human work: using processes to integrate the diverse application systems that, in the view of some, are what really run the enterprise. These systems were never designed to talk to each other, but the pressures of globalization and the web meant that they had to anyway. As a co-founder of TIBCO and inventor of distributed publish-subscribe integration, Dale Skeen pioneered enterprise application integration (EAI) technology. But what puts him in the BPM Hall of Fame is not that. Rather, it was his understanding – long before others in EAI – that optimizing integration requires more than automating a single event-triggered action. It means automating the end-to-end business process, and his second company Vitria brought that approach to EAI, with a unified design environment encompassing integration, human workflow, BAM, and exception management, and a similarly unified runtime environment. Skeen is the inventor of what we call today integration-centric BPM, and most of the big middleware companies just getting into BPM are following the path he blazed back in the dotcom days.
- Ismael Ghalimi. While the first three nominees could be said to have pioneered threads of what later became BPM, Ismael Ghalimi is responsible for many of the things that today define what BPM actually is – a technology based on Internet and web services standards, and, more important, a technology that empowers business to take charge of their own processes. His company Intalio was the first to offer a process engine based entirely on web service orchestration, and he founded the BPM Initiative (BPMI) to make that orchestration language, called BPML, a multi-vendor industry standard. Before this, every workflow system, EAI system, or self-styled BPM system was proprietary from head to toe. BPMI grew to 200 member companies, but BPML was soon eclipsed by a rival proposal from IBM and Microsoft called BPEL. In the aftermath, Ghalimi not only moved Intalio to BPEL but made its BPEL engine open source.
While we are just beginning to feel the impact of standards-based and open source BPM runtime, another BPMI effort – the Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN), now managed by OMG – has already had a huge impact, and promises something even more valuable than inexpensive software: business-empowered implementation. Smith and Fingar’s 2003 book BPM: The Third Wave, heavily influenced by Ghalimi’s efforts, laid out the essential vision, in which BPM solutions would be built and modified by business people working collaboratively with IT in a single tool. In the end, this business-empowered implementation style will be recognized, in my view, as the most important innovation of BPM, and Ismael Ghalimi was its prime mover.
- Phil Gilbert. BPMN’s power comes from the fact that its shapes and symbols are intelligible to business, yet expressive and precise enough to serve as the “abstract” definition of executable process solutions. But lacking support for human tasks, subprocesses, and looping back to previous activities in the flow, BPEL turned out to be an imperfect runtime companion for BPMN. Fulfilling the promise of business-empowered implementation actually required a “BPMN engine,” but no BPMS vendor had one. As CTO (now President) of Lombardi, Phil Gilbert elected to break his own shipping product and build one. That’s either nuts or brilliant, but Lombardi’s Teamworks has emerged as the first and best realization of BPM’s promise of business-empowered implementation based on standards and business-IT collaboration.
Workflow automation, structured collaboration, business integration, standards-based tools, and business-empowered implementation. To me, these are central themes of BPM today, and my Hall of Fame nominees are the ones that gave them to us. I accept that your list might be quite different. You are invited to submit comments and your own nominations on the BPMS Watch blog.
March 22nd, 2008
Tom Baeyens weighs in on my debate with Michael. He mostly sides with Michael, but I think because of a slight understanding of my stance. I’m not saying BPMN is all or nothing. Yes it has parts that are not very useful. And, like Michael, the tool vendors factor into my thinking as well, in particular the BPMS vendors who support BPMN’s model-driven implementation style. So I, too, divide up BPMN constructs into different buckets, but with very different criteria.
I am thinking about the problem of model portability. Yes, I’m on that horse again. I’ve been working with Robert Shapiro and Tom Laverty to define a model portability conformance standard for XPDL 2.1, the new version that supports BPMN 1.1. (Sorry to say, you can’t just download the spec and white paper; WfMC makes you go through an online interview: “First, tell us a little bit about yourself…” Good god…)
XPDL provides a BPMN schema, but just because a BPMN model is XPDL schema-valid doesn’t mean that a) the diagram has been serialized in XPDL properly, or b) another tool can make sense of it. Tom Laverty has developed an XSLT that, when applied to the XPDL instance, generates a list of errors about any improper serialization or internal inconsistencies, and warnings for elements that fall outside of the portability conformance set. It’s very cool.
What portability conformance set? I’m glad you asked! We divide up BPMN into 3 categories, based on the likelihood a BPMN tool supports the constructs.
- The SIMPLE conformance set includes task, collapsed subprocess, gateway (exclusive data-based and parallel), None start and end events, pool, lane, data object, text annotation, sequence flow, and association.
- The STANDARD conformance set includes task (task type User, Service, Send, Receive); collapsed and expanded subprocess, looping or multi-instance activity, gateway (inclusive, exclusive data-based, exclusive event-based, parallel), start events (None, message, timer), catching intermediate events in sequence flow (timer, message), throwing intermediate events in sequence flow (message), attached intermediate events (timer, message, error), end events (None, error, message, terminate), pool, lane, data object, text annotation, sequence flow (uncontrolled, conditional, default), and association. [Looks like we left out message flow... not sure why.]
- The COMPLETE conformance set includes the full BPMN 1.1 spec.
Because this is intended to validate portability of “models” not executable designs, the only attributes of these objects supported are either ids (to hold the model elements together) and labels or subtypes that print in the diagram. The executable details of these objects are rarely added in BPMN, anyway.
Note that my SIMPLE is similar to Michael’s core + extended. To me it’s pseudo-BPMN, but any tool that claims to be BPMN supports all of it. The STANDARD reflects my view of the important parts of BPMN. Not all event types - mostly timer, message, error, and terminate, as those are the ones you need. Some tools are there today - Lombardi, Appian, Tibco, maybe others. Most are working hard to get there. The COMPLETE level is basically for modeling tools with no runtime… they can do whatever.
In my training we focus on the STANDARD constructs and patterns. True, before the training users don’t know how to use all of it, and afterwards, they do. I think that’s the point.
The way I see it, if we can get tool vendors to buy into the portability standard, the marketplace will decide whether SIMPLE or STANDARD is the sweet spot for tools. And that’s as it should be.
March 11th, 2008
Michael zur Muehlen posts a lengthy response to my post On How Much BPMN Do You Need. He elaborates on his data analysis procedure - their procedure, actually, as Jan Recker was a co-author - and it’s actually kind of interesting, looking at statistical correlations between diagram elements in a sample of BPMN collected in the wild. Sort of an anthropological survey - maybe archeological, given where we are on the adoption curve - of which shards of BPMN are used, correctly or incorrectly, in diagrams today. And if it had been presented that way, it would have been interesting, maybe even mildly useful.
But that’s not how it was presented, and that’s why I still say Michael (and Jan) draw the wrong conclusions from the data. The part of BPMN that is no different than a swimlane diagram is not at all “the BPMN you need to know.” It’s better described as “the BPMN you already know.”
In his new post, Michael says,
The process modeling efforts in most organizations at this stage are simply not advanced or mature enough to start specifying service-enable workflows with exception behavior in BPMN. No, most people use it simply for flowcharting. What we conclude from this observation is that the ecosystem of vendors, consultants and trainers should be aware of this and should plan, manage and employ their efforts (be it tool development, BPMN training or modeling workshops) accordingly.
This is the conclusion I just vigorously disagree with. I would rewrite it as follows:
The process modeling efforts in most organizations still lack the knowledge and methodology required to document and analyze their business processes effectively in BPMN. Today most BPMN models are no more than flowcharts, omitting the exception paths that would be necessary to analyze them for potential improvement, either by simple visual inspection or quantitatively using simulation. And they offer no hope of serving as the business view of an automated implementation of the process in a BPM suite. That’s too bad, because the real value of BPMN - the reason why it is important - is that it empowers business analysts, not just developers and architects, to do all of those things. But that requires training, on both the notation itself and a methodology for using it effectively. The BPMN you really need to know is NOT the BPMN you already think you know.
I am not saying BPMN contains no nearly-useless parts. I’d happily get rid of transaction compensation, complex gateway, conditional (fka rule) event, conditional sequence flow, and multiple event (except in event gateway). I personally have little use as well for Link event, the off-page connector, although I have students who can’t give it up. Even timer start event, signifying a scheduled process - harmless enough, but ok, I could live without it.
Those account for 15 of Michael’s useless 17. It’s the other two that get me: exception flow, which means any attached event; and intermediate error event. (In BPMN 1.0 that could mean either throw the error or an attached event, but in BPMN 1.1 just the attached is allowed.) Without attached events you can’t specify deadline-triggered behavior; you can’t let your process respond to an unsolicited event; you can’t easily propagate exceptions from deeply nested levels of your model to a parent level, which makes hierarchical models very difficult to manage.
Michael, I can see you rolling your eyes: attached events, nested levels, propagating exceptions… Those are IT things, not business analyst things. But I have to tell you, having taught these concepts and practices to hundreds of students in the past 12 months, that that attitude is condescending to business analysts. Not to put too fine a point on it, it really pisses them off. The thing that’s energizing BPMN in the marketplace is that it gives the business folks for the first time a seat at the table with IT, lets them go from documentation to analysis to implementation without changing the notation, just layering on more properties.
Can you do this with the flowcharting you already know? No you can’t. It takes a bit of education and practice. And it takes more than your core set or core + extended. To say subprocesses, intermediate timer and message events, event gateways, and repeating activities (loop and MI) are just for “specialists” sets the bar too low. Way too low.
The vendor side of the equation is off target also. Given that no BPMS supports all of the BPMN spec, Michael says:
So which constructs can a vendor neglect initially and which need to be supported? We would argue that it is of best interest to vendors to focus on those constructs heavily used in practice.
Beating a dead horse though, since I doubt I could name one BPMS that claims to support BPMN but doesn’t support all of Michael’s core + extended core set already. The area of interest is what Michael calls the BPMN Specialist Set. These are the constructs at the heart of BPMN-ness, bridging the business-IT divide. To be so dismissive of them is just wrong. And is he saying users should be familiar with them before they are available in the tools? I don’t get it.
Michael ends his piece by asserting that the real BPMN is not what vendors, consultants, and trainers like me say it is, but the way untrained practitioners are using it today. The core set diagrams - start, end, task, gateway - from his sample give a truer view, he says, of the “problems real users face. Instead of the problems we think exist in practice.”
March 10th, 2008
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