With all this talk about BPMN, it seems like a good time to refer people to a Analoly’s excellent blog, where he has constructed a signal event example / walk-through:

Like messages, signals are used to synchronize and exchange information between different parts of the process. They differ from each other by the following:

1. Message flow is drawn in the diagram explicitly by the dashed arrow while in the signal case the sender (”thrower”) and receiver (”catcher”) are linked implicitly by the signal name. That is, if there is a thrower signal (marked by a filled triangle) on a diagram labelled “we won”, then look for a catcher signal (non-filled triangle) with the same label on this and/or other diagrams .
2. Messages can only pass between different pools (i.e. between different processes), there is no such limitation for signals.
3. The most important difference: messages are point-to-point communcations: an instance of a sender process cummunicates to one specific instance of the receiver process (let’s forget about start events for simplicity). Accordingly for a process engine to be able to deliver a message, one must specify the process ID of the recipient – e.g. by a process attribute. A signal passes from one process instance to many: to all instances awaiting a signal of given name at the moment. Thus signals are broadcast messages.

Its a good summary of signal events, which are quite commonly used in some BPM tools, and less commonly in others.

Antiamba’s Ligurio says that “BPMN can bring death to your process“:

The problem lies that BPMN is so complex to implement, that people made some workarounds, simplifying process maps. If a business process needs to be mapped (some don’t like ad-hoc) it should be done in a way everybody understands it, and it can be exchanged using multiple platforms that support process notation. Once it does not happen, there is a high risk of losing process data, because you can’t use things like intermediate message, or timer, that was represented in the process repository you need to move. Thus, you are sending your process data to oblivion (and BPEL, if used, also).

If process map is an asset, imagine re-training people that work in call centrer executing business processes by the book, telling that the decision gateway changed to something different, because process maps were updated to other tool. This has an impact in the way people perform tasks and in customer perception how the company execute. If process managers don’t have this concern they are very far from process execution where everything happens.

I can definitely relate to his criticisms of the tools around BPMN.  We have a problem in our business right now.  Almost every BPM software package supports BPMN.  But what does “support” mean?  It usually means, the BPMS uses a subset of BPMN notation standard.  Anything produced would be BPMN compliant.  However, it does not mean that ALL BPMN notation is available.  Therefore, despite two tools speaking a “common language” there may not be a 1-to-1 translation of a BPMN model in one tool to a BPMN model in another tool.

The definition of BPMN 2 will help.  By defining a storage format, it gives vendors a more concrete target to hit in terms of export/import.  And it will make missing BPMN icons feel more like a bug than an annoyance.

But Ligurio takes the criticism to BPMN, rather than, primarily, the vendors.  Vendors have got to get their act together and embrace BPMN 2 more fully. He blames BPMN for allowing you to model things so many different ways – but in a modeling world absent BPMN, this problem is worse, not better.

Earlier in his post, Ligurio criticizes Blueprint for its Visio importer being less-than-perfect.  However, keep in mind that Blueprint is importing native Visio XML.  This is not some standard BPMN XML that Blueprint is importing – because Visio doesn’t produce it, despite using a BPMN stencil.  He seems disappointed with the idea of manually choosing that one kind of gateway icon maps to a split, or a decision gateway, rather than Blueprint just guessing.  Keeping in mind that Visio can label anything a split or gateway, regardless of what it truly is, this seems to be asking a bit much.  It isn’t as if you have to choose the mapping for every occurrence of an icon – just once per type.

The more accurate criticism is that Blueprint doesn’t (yet) support things like complex gateways and attached events (and pools vs. lanes).  I know the Blueprint folks are trying to avoid these “advanced” use cases, but if they want Blueprint to stay relevant as users get more advanced or import valid BPMN diagrams from other tools, they simply have to add this functionality or risk becoming irrelevant. Having said that, Ligurio’s example diagram has a sequence flow crossing pool boundaries, which looks like a no-no according to the BPMN spec (they often get over-used in tools where they are supported).

He runs into similar issues with ARIS and ITP Commerce.  Bottom line: he has a 25-page process. It will clearly get mangled in import routines today, and require lots of manual work to clean up.

My advice:  for now, stick with one modeling environment.  Choose one that starts with modeling and lets you seamlessly add execution details.  If you use a “modeling only” environment it should stay at a very high level to work out concepts and disagreements – not to model execution-level details.

BPMN2 model portability, along with the diagram interchange format, will help these problems greatly.  But the commercial vendors have to step up their game to support a much larger subset of the BPMN specification if they want customers to consider them compliant.

Meanwhile, it isn’t BPMN killing your process.  It is BPMN exposing the problems in process definition and communication that were always there – but going unnoticed.  They’re now coming to light, and vendors have an opportunity to really address these issues.

I’m not aware of a conference labeling itself an “un”conference prior to bpmCamp 2010 @ Stanford, in january of this year, but that doesn’t mean that there wasn’t one that I’m unaware of.  Our first attempt was a big success, based on feedback from attendees at the event.  I was asked recently by one customer if we could have the next conference focus on more “customer-oriented topics” – to which I responded “of course! which ones?!” because after all, it is a crowdsourced agenda. I should have also asked him if the big industry conferences are more “customer focused” on agenda than bpmCamp?  I find it doubtful.

At any rate, Forrester has announced their own “unconference”.  This has caused some criticism from those who’ve been to unconferences (and from those who simply don’t think an analyst firm can do this).  Although I’m a little skeptical of Forrester’s particular approach, I’m glad that they’re trying to incorporate more attendee-input into their conferences. I’ve previously advocated for conferences to do a better job of this.  It feels like Forrester is dipping a toe in.  I’d encourage them to jump in further.

I’m also just not a purist.  So I try not to attack restaurants for not being “authentic” rather than just for not being “good”.  I try not to attack conferences for not being “pure” – but I will criticize if I don’t think they’re valuable or effective (there is something odd about testing the pureness of the un- in unconference).  I do think that in-person communication and being able to step away from the daily grind is critical to how people synthesize new information and recharge the batteries. And I think crowdsourcing topics and presenters can greatly increase the value of a conference.

Typically, unconferences seem to be free, and have very little agenda planned up front (one coming up in Austin has a featured speaker and a panel discussion to kick off and end the conference, but the middle is unplanned so far as I know)- the idea being that you want to let the wisdom of crowds shape the event.  Being free, and local, makes this a palatable approach.  But for conferences with people traveling from all over the country (or the world), some kind of agenda is necessary to help them make value decisions.  And for conferences that aren’t free – typically some agenda is necessary to help justify the event to the boss, or to the education division.

While I wouldn’t describe SXSW-interactive as an “unconference”, the organizers work harder than any conference I’ve attended before to shape the agenda around what attendees want.  Topics are proposed by the hundreds, if not thousands, and then voted up or down by all the possible attendees.  It seems like barely controlled anarchy at the conference – topics are all over the map.  But there’s a certain beauty to the organization – because the conference shapes itself over time, and renews itself.  It has grown from a conference largely focused on blogging, to one that includes a distinct mobile agenda, and a distinct startup agenda.  This year, looking at topic ideas, geolocation is high on the list.  By allowing the agenda to change, SXSWi stays relevant to a changing technical and business landscape. And it stays relevant to Austin.

While I can’t hope for bpmCamp to compete with SXSW-interactive, or the broader interest ‘camps like ProductCamp, I did feel that bpmCamp needed an identity a bit different from the typical conference in the BPM space, to make it clear that attendees can drive the agenda.  It isn’t perfect, but we’ll keep iterating on the concept and try to develop it.  That’s why we adopted some of the techniques of unconferences, while charging a modest fee to cover costs, and allowing some of the topics to be prepared before-hand by some of the experts in our field.  Let’s face it, some topics deserve preparation time.  As BPM goes more mainstream, the kind of events that can be supported by reasonable populations of people will increase, and we can broaden the focus.

Bruce Silver has recently posted his latest efforts to perform BPMN model interchange.  It has been a recurring theme on his blog, BPMN 2.0 and its potential for interchange, as well as XPDL’s capacity for interchange.  Recently Bruce went on vacation and spent his time in a rather dubious way (just kidding, Bruce!):

On my summer vacation I’ve been thinking a lot about the XML side of BPMN.  While we usually think of BPMN as a diagramming standard, it is also – in principle – a model interchange standard, an XML format than can be exported from tool A and imported into tool B.  BPMN 2.0, XPDL 2.1 (for BPMN 1.2), and XPDL 2.2 (for BPMN 2.0) all purport to deliver this.  In reality, however, BPMN model interchange faces serious – some would say insurmountable – hurdles.  I have been working on a number of tools to overcome these obstacles.

So the holy grail of model portability isn’t fully realized yet.  But BPMN 2.0 does represent progress.  He goes on to outline what has to happen to enable model portability:

1. An explicitly enumerated set of interchangeable model elements and attributes.  The full BPMN 2.0 schema is too open-ended for unrestricted interchange.  Fortunately, we now have such an enumerated list in the Descriptive and Analytic process modeling conformance classes in the BPMN 2.0 spec.
2.  Modeling tools that unambiguously support all the elements and attributes in those conformance classes, meaning the mapping of diagram shapes and labels to the standard is unambiguous.  We have a number of such tools today.  My work has focused on two of them: Process Modeler for Visio by itp commerce, which supports both BPMN 1.2 and 2.0, and native Visio 2010 Premium, which is just BPMN 1.2.

I agree that getting a complete set of BPMN 2.0 elements explicitly enumerated is going to be difficult.  And getting the modeling tools to support all the elements and attributes, not to mention exporting them as XML, is too much to expect from our modeling tool software partners.  I believe the only way we’re going to get this kind of interchange is with an open-source project – because open source projects excel at eventually covering wide specifications as people volunteer to fill in the gaps.  Interchange of data, and support for a wide specification, are both well-suited to open source projects – if they have the right framework in place that makes it clear how a newcomer can add to it (by, for example, adding a new exchange adapter).  I can envision a pretty interesting model interchange utility that would read a variant of BPMN2 produced by some tool, and perform a little magic on it to produce “clean” BPMN 2.  Then a second adapter that would produce BPMN 2 that a target BPMS tool expects.  The author (say, Bruce) doesn’t have to solve all the possible interchange combinations, just provide a framework and an example, and see what other interchange adapters people will add to it.

That’s the beauty of open source – if you build the framework, and make it “accessible” to developers… then if there is a need for something, it will be built.  If not, it won’t.  Not too much wasted effort.

So I couldn’t attend the recent ACM tweet jam live, as I was, well, working. But there were quite a few people participating, and reading the summaries after the fact, I can’t help but feeling a bit underwhelmed.  So much energy has been spent attempting to separate ACM from BPM that I find it kind of ironic when the same criticisms would come full circle.  As Max J Pucher and others have noted, it is difficult to get consensus on a definition of BPM… but it is *also* difficult to get a consensus on the definition of ACM (I can already, almost, hear Max throwing up his arms and sticking with his non-acronym moniker “adaptive process” – no argument from me).  Keith’s summary of the tweet jam lists 6 definitions, but I bet there are more.  Personally, I don’t mind a surfeit of definitions, it is part of the human condition that you can’t get unanimity on things like this.    One of them was “all knowledge work”.  Well, This sounds a bit like BPM – covers just about everything.  Strangely, sometimes people think knowledge work is the only kind of work that doesn’t follow a predefined process.

Next, there’s the justification of “why all the buzz now?”.  These answers are the least reassuring.  Such as this one: “only today limitation of pre-defined BPM became clear. People look for another solution to knowledge mgmt”  Seriously?  BPM has been evolving for 10+ years and only just now, someone says “aha! it is limited! we need another three-letter-acronym!”  Pardon me for being a bit cynical, but I think anyone in the BPM space doing implementation was quite aware of both the limitations and possibilities.  Or this one: “Workflow and BPM is arguably ‘low hanging fruit’ – ACM is harder to get to, which is why it is of interest only today.”  Unless this author was equating BPM with BPEL, this argument misses the mark. BPM is hardly low-hanging fruit, which is why it has taken so long to mature as a market.  Arguably ACM is easier to achieve in many respects because you don’t need to build much of the infrastructure required to support BPM – and you may not be designing as much up front.  Trust me, the “do anything you want” process looks pretty simple in BPM tools… And the supporting technologies for knowledge work are relatively inexpensive.

However, another comment hits closer to home: “The integration vendors hijacked BPM: took a detour. now we see the need to use a diff kind of BPM”  I agree with this statement more than I disagree.  To the integration vendors, business process management was a checkbox feature in their integration stack.  But it needed to be front and center, because it is the new platform for getting process work done in the business.  I believe what people are calling ACM belongs there as well – front and center.  I am just not as convinced that it is a separate product category from BPM, as opposed to part of what BPM should have been doing all along (and for some vendors, exactly what they were doing all along under a BPM flag).  I am going to keep reading and listening to see if new information changes that outlook for me.

One comment was very interesting to me: “More like all vendors saying they do it.  Suddenly all do it – without changing their products.”  The question I have is – is it because they’re just putting out marketing spin, or is this because ACM, as defined, is already (mostly) addressed by existing products?  I wonder if the fact that everyone is so easily claiming to do ACM is because… so many vendors already do ACM… as defined by the chief proponents of ACM.  If that’s the case, then ACM really is about marketing from a software vendor point of view, and about the “approach” to “knowledge work” for those responsible for implementation of solutions (people in my business).

There was a considerable concern that the terms “ACM” and “Case Management” mean nothing to buyers.  I would agree. Buyers don’t seem to differentiate what case management would do that is different than this thing they’ve finally gotten around to tackling called BPM.  Still if a buyer is familiar with case management, it is a good idea to speak their language.  And if a buyer wants BPM, speak their language as well.

There was another section of tweets about what, exactly, constitutes knowledge work.  This gets a little ephemeral to me.  This is sort of like asking someone whether a job is creative or not – most people think they’re own job is very creative and unpredictable, but that all these other people in the organization are doing “routine work”.  A big US magazine “offshored” an issue of their magazine to India once, as an experiment to learn, for themselves, whether journalism could also be outsourced like other work.  They’re “startling” conclusion was that journalism was a particularly local and creative endeavor that could not be offshored (couldn’t see that coming, could we?).  They thought offshoring was only applicable to “rote” work like software engineering, call centers, etc.  Well, I have news for those journalists, writing code takes plenty of creativity.  And some call center work does too, based on the teams I’ve worked with.  So what is the magic creativity threshold that makes work offshorable?  Or, in the case of knowledge work – how much knowledge makes it knowledge work rather than “routine work”?  Difficult to put a gold standard on that one, and I’m not sure it is useful to do so.  These generalizations will only get you so far.

Finally, there is a section referencing “GOOD EXAMPLES OF SPECIFIC WORK THAT ARE SUPPORTED BEST BY ADAPTIVE CASE MANAGEMENT?”  (not my emphasize, it is the author’s emphasis)  The majority of these examples are hypothetical and theoretical.  Not work that is currently being implemented by ACM tooling or ACM-supporting vendors.  Taking each one in turn, I’d just point out that I haven’t seen these in the wild yet:

• Putting the decision of a board of directors to action. No predefined process, but the work must be done.  I don’t recall seeing the press release covering this one, or why ACM would replace the conference call for this.
  
• underwriting of life insurance. Insurance companies are using purpose-built software for this (COTS), and augmenting with things like BPM.  I’d like to hear if anyone is using an ACM “product” that is not also a BPMS to do their insurance underwriting.
• mortgage origination would benefit (just went through a painful one).  Ok, another “hypothetically mortgage origination is a good fit”.  But it turns out, BPM software is already the brains behind several major mortgage origination processes for major lending operations.
  
• architectural design.  So is there a market to sell ACM to architects? The architects I know have pretty specialized software…
  
• investigations, audits, contract and RFP management.  Sure, in theory this is true. But there’s already specialized software for these things as well.  And BPM vendors already has proven deployments in these areas.  So the question I have is: while these may be a good fit, is ACM differentiated or just another good fit? Are there existing deployments not by a BPMS vendor?
  
• I’ve seen examples of adaptive case management ideas applied to patient care, might ACM be especially useful there? Why?  Hm.  ACM “management ideas”.  Well truly, this is getting the order of operations backward.  The patient care practice has certain management ideas.  ACM advocates see similarities to what they think are good ACM practice, and therefore look to patient care as an example of what ACM could do well.  I’m not aware of any ACM patient care deployments (yet).
  
• Interior design every activity is art until order confirmation structured prc.  I don’t see interior designers being a big market for ACM, regardless of product fit.
  
• merger of United and Continental. In theory only.  They did it the old fashioned way, I expect. And as noted in other posts, I think companies that really do mergers, will have fairly organized processes (e.g. Cisco).
  
• Disaster Relief for Haiti.  Again, in theory only. And not exactly a market, so much as a need.
  
• Responding to Oil Crisis in gulf.  In theory only. And when it comes to *preventing* the crisis, so far all signs point to the people on the rig overriding (ACM style) the prescribed safety procedures (BPM style procedures) in pursuit of goal-oriented management (extreme pursuit of profit and cost-cutting)… but wait… Drucker’s Goal Oriented management was supposed to be a Good Thing… problem is, you still have to set *the right goals*… This is the problem with these analogies, the break down under any skeptical scrutiny.  Real deployments of real software will expose the real strengths and weaknesses of the ACM approach and tooling to support it.
  

Finally, a parting thought, I believe this is quoting Max J Pucher:

“ACM is not anarchy – it is empowerment! Authority, Goals and Means to accomplish those goals.”

Empowerment should be the goal of any good BPM or ACM solution, I think.  Enablement, and Empowerment. Great thought to close with.  And sometimes just one nugget like this makes reading the whole train of a tweetjam worthwhile!  Thanks Max, and tahnks to Keith Swenson for taking the time to try to capture some of the session for posterity (or at least, those of us who couldn’t attend).

Lots of news on the Activiti front lately.

First, Tom Baeyens has a list of what industry experts are saying about Activiti.  I was even mentioned in this summary – a sure way to get a mention in our blog ;)

Next, Tom announces that Beta 1 is released (Nice to be out of alpha!).  It includes a release of Activity Cycle, contributed by Camunda.  Pretty good stuff.

All of this is followed by a re-org of the wiki, and the announcement of the first iPhone App for Activiti.  I’ll just say I think the iPhone app follows the obvious path – I’d like to see something a bit more… creative… but you have to start somewhere, right?  I’d like to see something a bit more dynamic… maybe I’ll have to write an iPhone App though before I criticize someone else’s efforts.

Seems as though progress on Activiti is going well.  Congrats to the various contributors -

So Jim Sinur really opened a can of worms the other day with his missive on BPMN, literally calling for it to burn baby burn – nothing like a gentle start like that to initiate a moderate discussion of the finer points of BPMN.  I couldn’t help but respond both within his blog as well as on our own blog.  I feel like Jim is letting the business off the hook – as he puts it – they don’t care about process, and they’re too busy making money to worry about process.  I think this is a cop out.  There is a comment thread on Jim’s blog that I’d recommend reading for the follow up discussion, and the original “burn baby burn” statement got walked back somewhat.

But the debate didn’t stay contained there.  Keith Swenson chimed in, taking advantage of the opportunity to pile on BPMN.  I can’t accept the black-and-white approach he is taking to the discussion, and so of course we had a bit of back-and-forth about whether BPMN is appropriate for no one in the business (his contention) or at least some people (my contention).  I was challenged to name people within the business who read or write BPMN, which was quite easy to do, because this is the kind of stuff we do every day for work.  I think the comment thread on his blog, and on Jim’s, or incredibly telling.

But there was also a great post from Neil Ward-Dutton on the subject, that captures my perspective perfectly:

Or – in other words perhaps – surely it’s not too much to ask non-IT participants in BPM initiatives to take a little time to learn some fairly straightforward modelling technniques?

From our case study work here I think what Scott is saying leads to a sensible, middle-ground answer – which is, that the applicability of BPMN depends on a number of factors; saying that BPMN (especially BPMN 2.0) either is, or is not, suitable for “the business” is too simplistic and black/white. It’s like saying Cloud Computing is the future of IT. Firstly it supposes that we have to talk about BPMN as an all-or-nothing proposition; secondly it supposes that “the business” is some kind of homogeneous organisation with one set of skills, experiences and inclinations.

I literally could not have said this better myself. He goes on to make another important point I agree with:

At the same time, though, there’s significant evidence to suggest that a core subset of BPMN symbols are absolutely usable by business analysts with experience in high-level analysis and design and provide great results in terms of delivering a common language across multi-disciplinary teams. I’ve come across many BAs who know and use (aspects of) BPMN as part of their armoury. They’re not “IT people” – they have business backgrounds and they work in line-of-business departments.

Great read from Neil.

In the comments on this one, Keith takes a nice shot at my assertion that understanding just a few BPMN shapes will allow you to read someone else’s thoughts on a process, or to communicate your own basic processes to others:

Also funny is the comment that learning six (or 7) shapes means that you understand the non-trivial interactions between those shapes at run time without needing the programmer’s insight into how systems function. That would be a little like saying that learning 26 letters makes you a Shakespeare, or able to read all western European languages. (But I must avoid use of similes since this apparently is sometimes confusing.) BPMN certainly is useful is some situations, it simply isn’t useful in all situations.

For the record, I don’t find Keith’s “similes” confusing at all.  I find them inaccurate, misleading, and misrepresentative.  And when we turn the analogy on its head, I think that proves how pointless they are.  In practice, when people read Shakespeare they’re usually in school and get help from cliff’s notes, teachers, and fellow students.  Not unlike those working with business processes and BPMN … and other tools (six sigma, lean, value stream, etc.  ).  Once again, I’ll point out that analogies are illustrative, they simply don’t constitute proof or refutation.

Jakob Freund of Camunda commented on Keith’s blog and summed up a reasonable reader’s interpretation of both Jim’s post and Keith’s post:

I think the main problem is that in both blog posts (Jim and yours) this very important distinction between “all” business professionals and “business (process) analysts” was not made. Analysts are not programmers but very often part of a business department, therefore a subset of “business professionals”. To throw all “business professionals” in one pot judging there skills in working with BPMN (or whatever) makes a good headline, but does not say anything useful.

Furthermore, there has not been made any distinction between “creating” and “reading” BPMN diagrams, and between the extremely different grades of complexity a process diagram can bear (please excuse my bad English).

But those are exactly the parameters you always have to look at when judging modeling approaches (no matter whether they are control flow – based, grids, prosa or what ever).

I guess it just comes down to this: BPMN is quite useful.  It is even useful to people most of us would consider as “business professionals”.  But there are other quite useful tools in our business process management space, and there’s no reason not to use each one when appropriate.  I also recommend as practical reading, this post on practical application of BPMN by Jakob on his own Camunda blog.  I liked how he closed his last comment:

cheers from my customer’s office in Germany (currently introducing BPMN in a 80k-people company, and huh, it works for Business people, but it’s bloody hard work to make that happen  ).

Similarly, as I was writing on the same comment thread, I was about to head in to visit my customer, which also uses BPMN to communicate broad requirements between business stakeholders and IT.  Regardless of what the theory says, the practical reality is our customers’ businesses are using this stuff.

An article in the Austin-American Statesman, not long ago, posited that there was, in 2010, a dearth of ‘camps, after a flurry of them in 2008 and 2009.  However, a quick followup was penned by Omar Gallaga, about the fact that ProductCamp was still going strong.  Mostly, Camps are free events sponsored in someone’s corporate offices or other “free” space, and generally only target local attendees.  But these events are hard work to put on:

Paul Young, who founded ProductCamp Austin, said many events modeled after the same concept simply petered out for lack of interest or organization. “They show up, run their cycles, then die out,” Young said. “I think the reason that happens is that people are surprised for an ‘unconference’ how much coordination it actually takes to put an event on.

I think people are also surprised how difficult it is to pull off a free event!

We’re proud to be having bpmCamp in Austin as well. While we couldn’t pull it off as a free event, we are keeping it as affordable as possible, while still making the event attractive enough for people to travel to Austin to attend.  We also freely admit that we need to produce some of the content up front for similar reasons, rather than doing it all on the fly – but we’ll also keep time (and rooms) available for impromptu sessions that weren’t thought of ahead of time.

If you are interested, the registration page is right here. You just need to be a Lombardi BPM practitioner to attend.

If I know Tom Baeyens, he’s pretty happy with this blog post announcing the collaboration of Activiti and Camunda on “Activiti Cycle”.  Previously, Camunda had announced Camunda Fox, a set of tools to help accelerate using open source software for BPM, while pursuing business-IT alignment.  Cycle has been proposed as the name for the collaborative authoring of Activiti processes, and Camunda has now become the lead developer on that feature set.  This sounds like a win-win for both organizations.