My take is this was bound to happen. I'm sure Lombardi has rebuffed any number of BPM suitors over the years, insisting on an eventual IPO. But in today's market, that exit must have looked farther away than ever, so Phil Gilbert and company could forget all about the past Evil Empire bashing and just take the money (amount undisclosed).

The most important role for business is probably documenting current-state business processes and analyzing them for possible improvement. But conventional practices in this area are inefficient and inherently small-scale.

On the flight home, another pleasant surprise: Wi-Fi and AC power at my seat in coach! For about the same price as one of those nasty "snack-paks" they offer, you can get in-flight Internet service coast-to-coast. While other airlines solemnly invoke policies and procedures to ban cell phones, GPS devices, and even powered headphones below 10,000 feet, Virgin America has figured out that giving business travelers an extra full workday might be good for customer satisfaction.

The RFP asserts that BPMN is inadequate for case management but that case management should leverage BPMN for the "process" part, and I agree with that. It also seeks to tie in to OMG government task force efforts on records management for the case folder part. That might be useful as an option, but I hope it's not a requirement.

The essence of BPA is a suite of tools for modeling the business and a repository for those modeling artifacts: not just processes, but strategies, goals, and metrics; value chains and capability maps; process models, from high-level maps to detailed BPMN diagrams; organizational entities and roles; policies and rules. All of these models are linked through the repository. Such suites are central to business process management at the enterprise level, and historically they have been aimed at a small priesthood of architects who don't mind the 5-figure cost per seat, mind-numbing complexity, and three weeks of intensive training. But you can't really create a culture of BPM within an enterprise, or move from isolated projects to an enterprise BPM program, without democratizing modeling and analysis. BlueWorks does that.

Today, as BPMN 2.0 rumbles toward finalization, we're seeing the same bogus charge again from those who should know better. This time it's posts from assorted dead-enders saying that BPMN is too complicated for business analysts. Usually they have their own proprietary notation which they say is far superior. They invariably take comfort from the conclusion by Michael zur Muehlen and Jan Recker, based on their survey around a year ago, that "all the BPMN you need" is the part that is unchanged from 1990s-era swimlane flowcharts. The rest, they say, is overkill.

Most of the effort put into BPMN 2.0 has focused on making the diagrams executable on a process engine. That will be huge for customers of Oracle, IBM, SAP, and other vendors who elect to go that route. But even for the majority of today's process modelers, who are just thinking about BPMN as a diagramming tool for documenting, analyzing, and improving – not necessarily executing – their business processes, version 2.0 offers a lot to love.

Here's my pick of the top-five improvements:

But it would be better to say it could be of great value, if the tools were any good. I recently did a small consulting project for a BPMS vendor on what was good and not so good about their product. They really hyped their simulation tool, but I had to tell them it was, in my opinion, mostly useless, because it did not distinguish between the active time of a process activity, which consumes the assigned resource, and wait time (sometimes called lag time), which does not. It considered the total time to be active time.

I've now been doing BPMN training for two years, and only recently have I begun to appreciate the true nature of BPMN usage levels. This reconsidered view may help you better understand what is rapidly becoming the one significant standard in BPM.

Before the BEA deal there was the Oracle BPM solution comprised of SOA Suite (in particular BPEL Process Manager) and BPA Suite (rebranded ARIS with a BPEL roundtripping extension), and there was BEA's AquaLogic BPM. For details on those, see my BPMS Report series on BPMInstitute.org. Now there is the Oracle BPM Suite, which includes both Oracle BPM (rebranded from ALBPM) and BPEL PM. They "interoperate" in the sense that each can call the other as a subprocess. (Not a big deal, but Oracle did this in 100 days whereas WebSphere-FileNet took a year.) BPA Suite is still there, but more off to the side where it belongs; Oracle now calls it "enterprise modeling."

I like point out really nutty ideas, even when a lot of people have spent a lot of time investing in them... [BPM] created pretty languages for describing business processes, and we started telling the business that once business processes are described using these languages, then you can push a button and "viola" the process becomes automated. According to the 'true believers,' we can give end users one of our pretty languages (BPMN or BPEL) and they will write their own software, and we can fire all the IT developers.

To rationalize the product set, Oracle first sorted the BEA product catalog into one of three buckets: 1) strategic, where BEA was considered superior to existing Fusion components or a new capability; 2) continue and converge, where BEA component would be positioned as secondary, maintained but eventually merged into the current Fusion offering; and 3) maintenance, mostly OEM offerings, which it seems Oracle wants to walk away from as soon as they can. The BEA installed base was reassured that all BEA current products would continue to be "supported," although those that are not "strategic" would not be enhanced.

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 as an Excel download, but had no idea how to do that.

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:

Apparently "the analysts" told TIBCO they wanted to hear executives talk about go-to-market strategy, so we got almost nothing about product and an awful lot about "value propositions." Are there really analysts who want to spend half a day hearing about value props and selling tactics? Scary. But, having lowered my expectations completely, TIBCO's "solution showcase" exhibits — open to the hoi polloi after the analyst event ended — actually blew my socks off:

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. They know they're not there yet, but the commitment to get there is new.