Intelligent Enterprise

Last month, Robert Shapiro of XPDL 2.x fame, also a member of the BPMN 2.0 Finalization Task Force in OMG, delivered an update on progress toward completing both XPDL 2.2 and BPMN 2.0. Here is the link to the unedited replay. Also, Sandy Kemsley does her usual fine job of summarizing the high points here.

I would just add a couple points to the discussion. The first regards an explicit sorting of BPMN 2.0 shapes and symbols into subclasses for the purpose of enabling tool interoperability. I tried hard to get this into the draft last May, but IBM, Oracle, and SAP didn't want to commit to anything specific at that time regarding their initial "BPMN 2.0″-branded offerings. Apparently they are feeling more comfortable about it now, as Robert believes there is a chance this could make the final draft.

Last week, Progress Software announced the acquisition of Savvion for $49 Million. On the heels of last month's acquisition of Lombardi by IBM, I think it's safe to say this marks a real turning point in the market for BPMS. To me it is a disquieting one, as it suggests the failure of BPM's "business empowerment" promise to translate into sustainable revenue for the platform vendor. The transaction price here is kind of shocking, surely a sign of the shaky current economy, but the larger trend is also disturbing.

I would describe IBM's briefing on last month's purchase of business process management (BPM) vendor Lombardi as predictably unrevealing, except for the fact that the acquired firm will be brought into WebSphere/AIM instead of being hung out to dry on its own like FileNet. So I guess we're down to the punditry...

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).

I am a big fan of OMG's Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) 2.0, which has passed its first approval hurdle and is now in the Finalization Task Force stage. A major reason I'm a fan is that for the first time, BPMN has standardized the schema for XML interchange of process models. That means you will be able to create a BPMN model in one tool with confidence you can open it in a different tool. I think that's what every user expects from a "standard," but BPMN never had it until v2.0. There is one part of the standard that the team messed up big time: Diagram Interchange (DI), meaning the graphical layout of the shapes and symbols.

As business process management (BPM) begins to expand beyond isolated projects to mainstream programs at the division or enterprise level, there is a need to engage a far greater number of business people in the effort. That's not easy, and achieving it is going to require significant change in the way BPM is practiced.

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.

In these tough times, even the most change-resistant organizations are reexamining whether past practice should continue to govern standard operating procedures. Government and airlines, for example, spring to mind. I recently saw evidence of this in delivering a BPMN training class to one of the many Federal agencies involved in financial regulation. I was surprised to find that most in the class were experienced process modelers already. Many had prior BPMN experience, for some including BPMN-based BPM Suites. The processes of greatest interest concerned internal policies and procedures: hiring and employee onboarding, granting security clearances, etc.

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 vote on BPMN 2.0 is not the only thing on the agenda at this week's Object Management Group (OMG) meeting in Costa Rica. There is also the release of an RFP for a new Case Management standard, authored by Henk de Man of Cordys.

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.

"Cool" is not a word I would normally apply to IBM's business process management (BPM) software, but for the new BPM BlueWorks offering announced at the company's Impact 2009 event early this month, the term is appropriate. IBM bills BPM BlueWorks as a BPM community in the cloud, and it is that, plus a lot more. Actually, I think its greatest immediate impact could be to transform the market for business process analysis (BPA) tools.

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.

Thus, with unintended irony, did our former president illustrate the consequences of low expectations in the debate over No Child Left Behind. No Child's insistence on achieving a minimum competence in reading and arithmetic was scorned by many as too demanding, even "elitist," even though we all know that without those things both the child and the nation as a whole will suffer.

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.

BPMN 2.0 is almost here. If all goes as planned, it will be voted on by OMG members in June. Assuming it passes, that doesn't mean BPMN 2.0 is officially adopted and available in commercial tools, just that it has entered the "finalization" phase when tool vendors can start building it in. Even though the diagram notation of BPMN 2.0 appears little changed from previous versions, it represents a big step forward.

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:

Keith Swenson's Go Flow blog continues to produce thought-provoking discussions of BPM issues. Check it out if you are not a subscriber. His latest concerns simulation, one of my hot buttons. A couple years ago I wrote that simulation was a "fake feature" -- one of those things vendors put in the tool to tick off the Gartner checklist but that don't do anything useful. Since then the situation has not improved to any great degree. This is too bad, because, as Keith suggests, simulation can be of great value in projecting the expected performance improvement from a process change before committing the resources needed to make that change.

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.

Several months ago, I got an urgent request from OMG – the organization responsible for BPMN and other BPM standards – to give a short blurb I had written a permanent URL on my Web site. The blurb was a promotional piece for my BPMessentials training called "Three Levels of Process Modeling with BPMN." OMG proudly proclaims that BPMN assumes no particular methodology, but the notion of using it at three specific "levels" was just something I made up when I launched my BPMN course, to describe its value to different audiences. Now OMG needed it as a "reference" for their OCEB certification exam? I protested. "That's just ad copy! It's not in the standard. You can't make that a reference." But they did, and you can still find it here.

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.

Anyone interested in the history of business process management (BPM) technology (brief as it is) should not miss Ismael Ghalimi's recounting of it, "Why All This Matters." As a seminal figure in that history, Ghalimi's discussion of the relationship between BPMN and BPEL, the two important standards in BPM, is especially notable. Neither standard is perfect. But while BPMN has succeeded in the BPMS world in spite of its shortcomings, BPEL's shortcomings have largely confined it to the SOA/integration space, where "business-empowerment" does not have especially high priority. And in spite of the fact that BPEL was originally conceived by IBM and Microsoft as an Intalio/BPML-killer — Ismael does not say that directly, but I will — his post insists that BPEL remains central to BPM's (and Intalio's) larger mission.

I will be chairing an all-new BPMS Track at BPMInstitute.org’s upcoming BPM Conference in New York City at The Roosevelt Hotel (November 5-6). This track analyzes the latest generation of BPM Suites, and features an extended panel on November 5 in which leading vendors show how their offerings address key topics such as business-IT alignment, agility and time to value, end user experience, and optimizing business performance. We did this in San Francisco and it worked very well. The discussion was lively and open, and I learned things about each product that I didn’t know before.

At Oracle Open World last week, industry analysts got a good look at Oracle's BPM strategy and roadmap in the wake of the BEA acquisition. Overall, my conclusion is Oracle is showing the rest of the world the right way to do software acquisitions. BPM is progressing along the path of "interoperate, integrate, unify" that Oracle claims it tries to follow with all of its acquisitions.

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."

Are you as sick as I am of so-called "architects" swiftboating BPM with phony strawman arguments? Here's the latest, from blogger Nick Malik:

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.

Yesterday, Oracle lifted the veil on its plans for BEA. Naturally, Oracle said the acquisition as a whole was not just for market share, but for BEA's technology, which would all become part of the Fusion middleware platform. There was a lot of material presented, but I'll focus on the product convergence plan as it relates to business process management suites (BPMS).

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.

The most interesting keynote at last week's Intalio User Conference was by Greg Olson, founder of Coghead, a BPM-in-the-cloud service that uses Intalio as the process engine under the covers. Coghead bills itself as a next-generation platform for situational apps, such as built today on Excel, Access, or FileMaker. Instead of professional developers, Coghead targets independent Web developers and power users. The platform is 100 percent Web based, a multi-tenant service hosted on the Amazon cloud infrastructure, with simple subscription-based pricing (free for single user). You can define data, forms, and perform the usual set of database operations, so it's really easy to build a database app in the cloud.

Did you know Adobe had a business process management suite (BPMS)? Most people don't, even though with more than 5,000 customers they could be considered a major player. One reason people don't know about Adobe and BPM is that the company doesn't talk about it in the usual way. In fact, it treats the normal catalog of BPMS features and functions, like workflow and integration adapters, as commodities. For example, Adobe includes process modeling and a workflow engine inside every copy of LiveCycle Enterprise Suite, although to get full human task support you need to get the Process Management ES component as well.

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.

Lombardi's Jim Rudden posts an admittedly "cranky" piece about software giants like SAP crashing the business process management (BPM) 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 IBM Global Business Services 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.

Regarding the BPMS Watch Ratings report I released last month, 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 (the individual reports on each vendor are available here at BPMInstitite.org. 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 as an Excel download, but had no idea how to do that.

Surprisingly little information has reached public view concerning BPMN 2.0, the update of the Business Process Management Notation standard 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:

Regarding TIBCO's first-ever "analyst summit" at their annual TUCON user conference, I'll leave it to Sandy Kemsley to record the actual content of the presentations to analysts. I'll stick to the impressionistic view.

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:

It seems my last post, drawn from a press release, keynote slides, and mini-briefing, missed the coded messages in IBM's business process management suite 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. They know they're not there yet, but the commitment to get there is new.

You're probably saying, "wait a minute, didn't IBM already have a business process management suite? Yes, I admit, they were in my 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 here at IBM's Impact 2008 conference in Las Vegas, the company actually announced it has an orderable suite — sort of…

We have space left in our two-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.

Is there a business process management 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:

BEA recently completed a "thorough analysis" of the business process management market, based on analyst reports, articles, and customer surveys. Some highlights, with my thoughts:

• BPM is one of the fastest-growing software markets, projected to go from $500 Million in 2006 to $6 Billion in 2011. When I see $6 Billion I have to wonder what they're counting, but yeah, it's definitely moving.

• Rapidly consolidating, from 150 vendors in 2006 to 25 in 2007. That's just silly. It was never 150, and it's more than 25 today. I would say the BPMS market is still ripe for consolidation, which hasn't really happened yet.

• 65% of BPM solutions in BEA's own survey integrate 3+ systems. A good sign I agree. Being BEA customers, though, I suspect that is well above the industry as a whole.

• Company politics and shortage of soft skills outweigh technical challenges. I agree, for a SOA shop, BPM is a piece of cake technically.

In the early days of BPM — four or five years ago — everyone thought BPEL was the BPM standard, at least for runtime execution. Not long after, the importance of business-friendly process modeling came to the fore, and BPMN emerged as the standard for that. The mismatch between graph-oriented BPMN models, where you can route the flow just about anywhere, and block-oriented BPEL, where you can't, didn't seem to worry BPM vendors. After all, a model was just a model, a business requirements document in diagrammatic form. The BPEL designer would use the BPMN as business input to the implementation and go from there.

Then a new concept emerged, the BPM Suite, which included process modeling, executable implementation, and BAM in an integrated toolset that promised the improved business-IT alignment and agility needed to cope with ever-changing business requirements. Suddenly the process model became more than a business requirements spec. It was actually the first phase of the process implementation. No problem, said the BPEL vendors. We'll just generate skeleton BPEL from the process model, and use that as the starting point for the BPEL designer. Voila! Business empowerment! Business-IT alignment!

When I launched my course "Process Modeling with BPMN," I discussed why so many people beginning to "do" business process management (BPM) were looking for training in modeling, and why that was especially needed for BPMN. Now, having delivered the training, I have a better appreciation of Business Process Modeling Notation's strengths and limitations, a better understanding of what students really want, and what they really need to know about BPMN modeling. This post describes what I got right the first time and where I've had to adjust.

Business process management system vendor Metastorm acquired business process analysis vendor Proforma on August 1, which came as kind of a surprise to me, since the last thing most business analysts want is to have their modeling tool funnel them into some proprietary runtime. As usual, Sandy Kemsley has it covered.

I bring it up only because a graduate of my BPMN training pinged me about a white paper on the Metastorm Web site that disses BPMN big-time while at the same time admitting that the company probably needs to adapt its proprietary "SAR" notation to be more like the unlovable standard. The paper raises all of the usual canards about BPMN — it's too complicated for untrained business analysts, but does not cover all the implementation detail needed for execution.

Last week, I got a briefing from the business process management (BPM) folks at Oracle, as part of my BPMS Report series, and I came away surprised at both the completeness and, in many ways, coolness of the offering. A few things stand out (for the rest you'll have to wait for the report, later this month):

Oracle provides a unique solution to the problems of business-IT interaction and round-tripping. For modeling, Oracle OEMs IDS-Scheer ARIS, rebranded Oracle BPA Suite, and has added to it Oracle SOA Extensions that link it to the executable process design and runtime environment, called Oracle SOA Suite. Modelers can use either traditional ARIS EPC or the new BPMN to model process activity flows, but Oracle favors BPMN, in keeping with its marketing theme of "standards-based BPM." Unlike most other BPMN-based offerings, this is full BPMN - intermediate events, pools and message flows, etc.

There's no denying that BPMN is gaining traction in the marketplace. I see it in my training. I see it in BPMS and BPA vendors getting on board. But what's amazing about this is that it's happening without a standard way to store and interchange BPMN between tools. It almost boggles the mind that the creators of BPMN "forgot" about this when they started, and its current owners place model interchange so far down the priority list (it's still not in the draft BPMN 1.1 spec, not yet released).

At the OMG Think Tank last week, I had a small roundtable on "what should be the purpose of BPM standards?" Not well attended, but it was the afternoon of the last day, and half the audience had left for home already. Besides, the topic was sort of a subtext for the conference as a whole, already beaten to death. But clearly there is no unanimity on the subject.

BPMN is the de facto standard for process modeling, but many leading modeling tools, particularly those incorporated within high-end business process analysis (BPA) suites, have so far been reluctant to adopt it. Now that appears to be changing.

Recently IDS Scheer announced that ARIS, generally considered the leading standalone BPA suite, would be supporting the full BPMN notation in the v7.0.2 service release this spring. Announcement of BPMN support was tucked into their press release on new simulation capabilities based on Lanner's technology. IDS Scheer will provide their own BPMN serialization using the "ARIS Markup Language" rather than XPDL or BPDM, asserting that customers are not asking for a standards-based serialization. Also, they are currently working on a mapping between EPC (ARIS’s standard process modeling notation) and BPMN.

Lacking support for fundamental concepts like human tasks and subprocesses, BPEL has become a favorite whipping boy of BPM vendors and consultants. But for all its faults, BPEL enjoys something that BPMN advocates can only dream about: an XML storage and interchange format that makes sense. It's often said that BPEL is an XML language not a graphical notation, but the reality is that graphical BPEL design tools all use more or less the same notation, based on a simple mapping to native BPEL language constructs: Receive, Reply, Invoke, etc. BPMN has a standard notation, but still lacks a standard storage and interchange format consistent with the fundamental goals of BPMN itself.

I've been thinking about this recently with the announcement from OMG that the "official" XML format for BPMN, based on OMG's new Business Process Definition Metamodel (BPDM), is in its final stages of ratification. Besides BPDM, Intalio has developed an alternative XML format for BPMN and has contributed it to the Eclipse Foundation. And let's not forget XPDL 2.0, the Workflow Management Coalition's reworking of its old process interchange warhorse to encompass various pieces of the BPMN spec. But to me, none of these proposals is as satisfying as BPEL's approach, which makes the XML format closely match the terminology and semantics of the process constructs, their target audience, and business purpose.

I'm in the process of updating my 2006 Business Process Management Suite (BPMS) Report series on BPMInstitute.org to the new-and-improved 2007 version. A major change from last year is a beefed-up evaluation scoring. I've discovered that many users (and most vendors) are happy to skip the 25-page walkthrough of the product and go straight to the scorecard at the end. Which product "won?" I haven't figured out the presentation - it will probably be some two-dimensional appoach, like the Forrester Wave or Gartner MQ - but I'm close to having a finished scoring methodology. It's probably asking for trouble, but I'm publishing it right here so that you can comment upon it.

Keith Swenson is one of the true superheroes of BPM, and a pioneer in the development of interoperability standards. Known for his stalwart defense of XPDL, he periodically feels called upon to insist that XPDL does not compete with BPEL… then usually adding that XPDL is actually better. But I've always felt that Keith obscures the real difference between XPDL and BPEL and their relationships to the "real" BPM standard, which is BPMN.

The latest fracas started a couple days ago when Keith claimed victory in the non-war from the fact that eight of the 12 vendors in the top-three Quadrants of the Gartner MQ support XPDL. Even though a number of those vendors also support BPEL, at least as an interchange format for automated fragments of the process, it is fair to say that vendor support for XPDL is probably more widespread than vendor support for BPEL. So let's stipulate that - no problem.

Sandy Kemsley calls attention to an excellent review of BPEL's history and current status from Oracle's Dave Shaffer and Manoj Das in (ironically) WebSphere Journal. Probably the best summary of the differences between the new BPEL 2.0 and the little-lamented BPEL 1.1 standard that I've seen yet in print. She also notes the seeming fakeness of BPEL4People, a joint SAP-IBM white paper that appeared 18 months ago that has achieved what I agree is the highest buzz-to-bang ratio in the history of BPM.

My sources tell me that IBM and SAP have been meeting actively to put forth a BPEL4People spec later this spring, an activity that for some reason the companies' lawyers have shrouded in secrecy. If you recall my original post on this topic, the essence of the BPEL4People white paper is a new BPEL People activity that allows human task management to be integrated more directly with the BPEL logic than is possible with standard Invoke and an external task management service. That means BPEL4People "breaks" BPEL 2.0 engines, except for those with the foresight to implement the People activity. What, you don't have the specs for that? Oh, that's right…

[This is a re-post of something I wrote yesterday on the SAP Business Process Expert megablog, in case you don't follow that site.]

At the recent Gartner BPM Summit, I was shocked to see how high a pedestal the Gartner analysts now place simulation analysis in their gallery of must-have BPM capabilities. Ever obedient, the BPMS and modeling tool vendors now universally throw it into the box. How else to get into that Magic Quadrant?

But have these analysts ever really used these tools, or even scrutinized them closely? I'm not really sure. I haven't looked at all of them myself, but my sampling to date tells me this is a fake feature if ever there was one.

I'm not going to try to compete with Sandy Kemsley's wall-to-wall coverage of this event. Mine will be more impressionistic.

Simon Hayward keynote. Gartner likes to sell futures on technology. It's what they do. Simon has a chart of the value realization from BPM over time, with three curves. Today the "productivity" curve is highest. In 2012 (safely over the horizon) the "visibility" curve overtakes it. In 2017 (I'll be dead by then) the "innovation" curve reigns supreme. After that, I don't know, maybe global warming wipes out the earth. Does this kind of chart really advance the ball?

An interesting difference between the Gartner and Brainstorm BPM conference is that at Gartner the keynoters assume and universally assert that if you're not going through the whole model-design-deploy-execute-monitor-analyze-optimize thing you're not really doing BPM. At Brainstorm the keynoting class generally advances the notion that BPM ends with modeling and "process thinking"… although the vendors who sponsor the thing really wish they would stop saying that. I like the Gartner approach, but which one is addressing the "real" BPM marketplace?

While I've been shouting from the rooftops that process modeling (in BPMN, ARIS or whatever) is not that hard, Lombardi Software has been hearing from its customers that it's not that easy, either. The tools are complex, expensive, and only a small fraction of their features are used. Collaborating on models - while they're being developed - is near impossible. Making the models understandable to executives or business users means reducing them to a simple Powerpoint diagram or Visio flowchart. So process modeling - step #1 in the process of BPM - is already a barrier.

SOA analyst Beth Gold-Bernstein of ebizQ posts about her quest for a BPMN tool to support her effort, together with Brenda Michelson, to create a "service design method."

Our goal is to take a pragmatic, business-driven approach to incremental (i.e., project driven) SOA design and implementation. We plan to use standard modeling techniques and tools where ever feasible. The status of this project is that we have now defined the process and design artifacts, and our next task is to model out a case study and see if it holds water and to find the holes…. I argued that it was time for business and IT to start speaking the same language, and we should start off with BPMN right from the start.

My recent posts on simulation analysis and BPMN naturally lead into simulation use case three, which deals with Activity Based Costing (ABC). A number of users have asked me if simulation provided activity based costing, and I always said yes, since I assumed it could. But it's not built into the tools at all. This turned out to be a really interesting part of the training to develop. All completely original, since the modeling tool vendors don't really talk about it (or at least correctly), and the ABC literature doesn't mention simulation, either.

Continuing my recent post re simulation analysis and BPMN… In Use case 2, the problem is usually framed in terms of "bottlenecks." Usually static analysis gives you a rough idea of the staffing requirement even without simulation. For example, if over the workday you create 100 instances an hour, and Task A takes 1 hour, you need around 100 people to perform Task A to keep up. But what if instead of creating 100 instances an hour, you are getting 800 instances overnight and your resource for Task A also is responsible for Task B? Then simulation gives answers you can't get from static analysis

A couple months ago I wrote about the deficient simulation capabilities of most process modeling tools. More recently I’ve been working with ITP Commerce -- the tool provider for my upcoming BPMN training -- on enhancing its simulation features to address the use cases that figure most prominently in process analysis. I’ve come up with three, and I’m building my BPMN training around the particular modeling and simulation patterns associated with each one. Use case 1, which I think is the most important, focuses on the general type of “process improvement” expected from scrutiny of the modeled as-is process (whether using simulation or not).

webMethods, which at the beginning of 2006 couldn’t even break into the BPM analysts’ magic circle/wave/whatever, ended the year taking top honors in the Forrester Wave for Integration-Centric BPM. For you non-subscribers, you can get the report from the webMethods Web site. webMethods has put a lot into its new version of the offering, part of the Fabric 7.0 suite.

Intalio, which calls itself the Open Source BPMS Company, late last month announced the donation of a Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) tool and a Tempo “BPEL4People-based” workflow framework to the open source community. The BPMN modeler, donated to the Eclipse Foundation, is now available under the Eclipse Public License (EPL) and is part of the SOA Tools Platform (STP) project. This follows Intalio’s donation of its EMF model comparator to the Eclipse Foundation earlier this year, and complements the PXE BPEL Engine it previously donated to the Apache Software Foundation. The Tempo workflow framework is available under the open source Apache Software License. The project is hosted by SourceForge.

Oracle has one of the most widely used BPEL tools on the market, but so far they haven't shown up in the business process management suite (BPMS) magic quadrants. That should change soon.

Recall that Oracle did an OEM deal in July with IDS Scheer for the ARIS Process Design Platform, the leader in business process analysis tools according to Gartner’s quadrant. At the time I speculated this had more to do with keeping up with SAP in the enterprise apps battle than engaging in the BPMS marketplace, but that’s apparently not entirely true.