I think this post by Activiti‘s Tom Baeyens reveals a blind-spot in the folks behind open source BPM tooling.

To be clear: it isn’t a bad post, and I agree with his conclusions!

Which are, summarized:

• “hosting traditional BPM engine on the cloud is a big technical challenge with a relative low value for professional consumers”
• The data manipulations required by BPM’s automated steps are too complicated to expect professional consumers to design in a webpage (the example given was getting contents from a spreadsheet into a pdf document).
• “On the other hand, the trend to Advanced Case Management (ACM) really fits well into the cloud.”
• “Dynamic management of tasks without a predefined flow matches perfect with the professional consumer needs and capabilities.” (Author’s note: whether you call it ACM or BPM, we understand what Tom is getting at here. )

So if I agree with his conclusions… what’s the problem?  Just that commercial companies have come to these same conclusions a few years earlier – and open source BPM projects have been more focused on building the engines than on exactly what the deployment architectures will be – and what the implications on product direction would be if you change those deployment choices.  So, it has been a blind spot – but that isn’t the end of the world. BPM in the cloud is still in its very early stages.  Even “ACM” in the cloud is in its infancy. Activiti (and others) have time to address the blind spot, and maybe something new and interesting will come out of new entrants to that combination of cloud and BPM/ACM. I’m looking forward to see what Tom and the team working on Activiti come up with.

Tom’s writeup also confirms another conclusion I’ve long held about “ACM” as software implementation- it just isn’t as technically difficult to produce as a BPM platform (throw out all that integration stuff for example, and any notion of structure).  That isn’t some kind of badge of honor to be “more difficult” – it just means it may not be very defensible for a software company to build around, and it tends to look like a toy to customers, rather than a serious enterprise product that stands on its own.

Well this is interesting news – it isn’t every day you see a major BPM announcement on TechCrunch after all!

BonitaSoft has raised $11M in an effort to take on the big software vendors with their open source BPM solutions:

BonitaSoft, a provider of open source business process management (BPM) solutions, this morning announced that it has landed $11 million in funding in a Series B round led by Serena Capital. Existing investors such as Ventech and Auriga Partners also participated.

It makes me wonder if Alfresco (Activiti) or others will be exploring more funding in the current environment.  It seems inevitable to me that an open source vendor or project would emerge as an interesting alternative to the commercial vendors.  I just wonder which one it will be – or is it possible that I’m wrong and it will be more than one?

Activiti keeps rolling with its incremental releases – impressively so.  In this release, we see new quick-edit capabilities in the Activiti Designer (essentially, it looks like it let’s you model original process / user tasks in the designer directly, skipping the Activiti Modeler), and changing the element type of a BPMN element after it has been added to the canvas – shortening edit times for quick changes (e.g. choosing the wrong gateway type and then wanting to change it after the fact).

Some of these are features that have been in the commercial tools for a while – but despite the rapid progress of Activiti, and great community support, it takes time to catch up to some of the more user-oriented features and conveniences.  So far, I think the Activiti team is doing a great job of making a little progress in each release.

The Activiti in Action blog has great coverage of some of these features, including short videos that aptly illustrate usage.  I assume this designer update will be part of an upcoming Activiti release as well.

The Activiti in Action blog has some great content with regard to integrating Mule ESB or Apache Camel with Activiti.  The technical discussion is motivated with the following preamble:

The Activiti Engine provides a powerful Java API that makes it very easy to for example deploy process definitions, implement custom logic and unit test your processes. When you want to connect remotely to the Activiti Engine there’s a REST API to communicate with the process engine. But what if you want to start a new process instance by sending a JMS message, or invoke a web service from a BPMN 2.0 process?

By default, the BPMN 2.0 specification provides support for doing web service calls via a specific web service task. The Activiti Engine also provides support for a web service task, but it may be a bit cumbersome to implement due to the large amount of additional XML elements needed. And this task does only SOAP web service calls, so JMS messages etc.

Luckily the Activiti community comes to the rescue. In the next release of Activiti you’ll see two interesting new Activiti modules, one for Mule ESB integration and one for Apache Camel integration. A big thumbs up to Esteban (Mule ESB contribution) and Maciek (Apache Camel contribution). But if you already want to play around, just checkout the Activiti source code at http://svn.codehaus.org/activiti/. Let’s walk through some simple examples to get a good overview of these modules.

It is really a great, detailed post with lots of example code and explanation.  It is one of the things I’ve always liked about a good open source community – the level of shared examples and how-tos is outstanding.

(Note: the “next release” referenced above has now been released)

Looks like Alfresco’s Activiti 5.6 was released on Wednesday, with direct Mule and Camel support, and a few other features (some of which look to integrate Activiti better with Alfresco).

The Activiti team keeps cranking out minor releases with frequency, and each time they’re adding some interesting BPMN functionality, but also some “real world integration” capabilities as well.

Bruce Silver is still carrying the torch for BPMN2 interchange – thank goodness someone is- and has yet another update to explain the ins and outs of “valid” models.

That means an interoperability validation tool needs to test, in addition to the normal semantic rules of BPMN, rules that relate the semantic and graphics elements.

For example, the rule in question here might be something like this:  In a diagram (i.e. page of the model), if a process is represented by a pool then all elements of that process on the page must be enclosed within the pool shape.

It is going to be a long road to get there but Bruce is, at least, making progress and uncovering some of the semantic (as well as syntactic) issues.

And since it took me a while to publish this post, we have an update from Bruce regarding BonitaSoft:

I have run across 5 BPMS vendors interested in my BPMN-I work: Activiti, BonitaSoft, Oracle, SAP, and IBM.  Of the five, BonitaSoft is so far the most successful in actually implementing BPMN 2.0-based model interchange.  Not only that, they are the only one so far that has implemented any of my suggestions for conforming to the xsd and BPMN-I.

I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again: when it comes to interchange, I think open-source offers the best alternatives.  Activiti was probably first occupied by providing an upgrade path to folks running JBPM3 and 4, rather than from other BPMN2 tools (very few of which yet export proper BPMN2 XML).

I’d agree with Bruce’s assessment that so far, BonitaSoft does the best job importing someone else’s BPMN2. In a project last summer we exported JBPM4 to BPMN2 (via an xsl transform) and then loaded that into BonitaSoft, and while we ran into a few issues, we could only get BonitaSoft and Oracle to import BPMN2 at the time. Unfortunately for Oracle we had to add quite a bit of custom Oracle decoration to the XML to get the diagram to show up decently.  (BonitaSoft has an auto-layout feature that helped).

(note: another update from Bruce)

Activiti strikes again with the release of 5.4.  They have had a drumbeat of releases since the original GA shipped (and even before, but who’s counting), and they’re at it yet again.

I’m once again humbled by the great information available in the user guide.  It only took a few minutes to download and install Activiti 5.4 – but those interested should bear in mind the installation is really targeted at a developer-persona – you have to run scripts to install etc.  Certainly no worse than many commercial products, and in fact, quite a bit easier than most.

There are a few interesting and useful new features:

• Improvements to Activiti Cycle round-trip
• Support for more “case management” functionality – dynamic comments, attachments, dates, etc.
• Looks like you can scan an IMAP account for tasks (often a useful way to detect process starts or status updates).

In related news, Tijs Rademakers joins the Activiti team at Alfresco.  He’s leading the development of the Eclipse Designer, obviously a key element in the framework. I don’t know Tijs personally but he has a great (and relevant) track record and is working on a book about Activiti.

Very interesting post from Tom Baeyens on Activiti’s approach to ad-hoc processes and how that plays into their overall BPM strategy – as well as how it relates to BPMN2:

The first step that we’re adding now to Activiti is a snappy environment in which that kind of collaboration is supported. Apart from the tasks that are created by process instances, you’ll be able to create tasks dynamically on the fly. It will be possible to involve people with these tasks, have discussions and associate any kind of content like plain URL’s, Alfresco docs, Google docs etc to the task (aka case). Furthermore, it will be possible to create sub tasks dynamically. Here’s one of our early mockups:

I think it is smart for Activiti not to *just* focus on the engine, but also think about collaboration and other features that weren’t as strong in the previous generation of BPM tooling. The interesting tidbit in Tom’s email (to me) was this:

In some cases, this might grow to become pretty complex processes. At that point, Activiti KickStart modeling might be too limited as that is targeted at non technical people. Because Activiti is based on BPMN 2.0, it will be possible to move these organically grown processes into full BPMN 2.0 based modeling tools.

This reveals that even with KickStart and their tackling of ad-hoc, they intend to represent the outcome as a BPMN2 model (XML), and therefore it is a model that can be “uplifted” to a more structured or managed process as it matures or when it becomes valuable enough to manage in that way. If they can pull this off gracefully it sets a high bar for other BPM products.

I’ll share some more thoughts on “unstructured” knowledge work in the next post…

The state of mobile process apps is pretty… underwhelming.  After reading David’s post about process apps, I wasn’t any more enthused:

As the table below shows, the type of BPM App best represented in the App Stores I visited could be described as a ‘BPM Participation App’, that is, an App that acts as a client to a remote BPM server allowing the user to start and track cases, and complete work items from an Inbox. Note that the table is simply the result of myself as a ‘mystery shopper’ visiting these stores (which included an Australian filter in some cases) – there may be other BPM vendors with an iPad story (for example), but they just weren’t in evidence in the store on the week that I looked.

My take on iPhone and iPad and Android BPM apps to-date:  unimaginative.  They don’t re-invent or re-imagine the experience one would want to take advantage of mobility, location, or touchscreens.  They’re just barely-adapted to the new form factor by shrinking the amount of information at your disposal.   If the various BPM vendors exposed better APIs for building apps, and made their support for those APIs more clear and committed, we’d consider writing our own iPhone apps for users (there are a few exceptions, such as Activiti’s interfaces).  For now, we’re in wait-and-see mode.

March has arrived, as well as Activiti 5.3:

• Added BPMN multi instance (==foreach) support
• Added BPMN intermediate timer catch event
• Added business rule task with Drools integration
• Improved Spring integrations: added possibility to limit visibility of beans and also exposed spring beans in scripts
• Added administrator console to manage users and groups
• Added automatic DB type discovery
• Various bug fixes

Not bad for a point-release.  Activiti seems to be adding BPMN support pretty quickly  – important to eliminate those “but it doesn’t do … ” objections early on.  And, to set a precedent of just making progress on extending BPMN support. Impressive so far!

Bruce has been writing about BPMN2 model interchange for some time, and I’m a fan of the work he’s doing in this regard, and the light he’s shining on lack of vendor effort. Here’s his latest take on the status of things:

Last summer I posted on the challenge of achieving process model interchange via the BPMN 2.0 standard.  In the half year since then, vendor progress toward that goal has been about zero.  It seems that vendors, in particular the ones that drove the standard, don’t really care about this most fundamental user expectation of any standard.  Ah well, no surprise there…  But in the past couple weeks, some encouraging developments.  Activiti and BonitaSoft – both are open source startups with a BPMN 2.0-based BPMS – have begun to tout BPMN 2.0 import and export.  Neither one supports even the Descriptive subclass of the spec (what I call Level 1 in the training), but  both vendors are full speed ahead at expanding the capabilities of their process engine.

I’ve always felt (even when I worked at Lombardi) that interchange would be best served in the open source market – no single vendor has much impetus to do it – and invariably there would be bugs that the vendor doesn’t view as high priority (hey, the lombardi to oracle transformation exhibits some obscure bug, not sure whether lombardi isn’t exporting right or oracle isn’t importing right… think either vendor ever wants to fix that?  But in the open source world – even if the sources and targets are NOT open source, if the “interchange” (the spec) and the “transform” (the code that does the work) are open source, then (at least) developers who experience issues can actually attempt to fix them (even if those fixes are a temporary hardcode or hack).

Bruce goes on to comment on IBM:

It will be interesting to see if IBM takes Lombardi Edition in a BPMN 2.0 direction; I’m not sure Phil Gilbert is a believer in its value.  If not, when Activiti and BonitaSoft finish the Common Executable subclass of BPMN 2.0, the BPMS marketplace could get very interesting.

I think Phil Gilbert’s issue with BPMN2 was that it got lost in the weeds (my interpretation based on reading his blog posts at the time). For example, every BPMN2 xml I’ve seen so far has several vendor-specific extensions (which are allowed by the spec, but likely meaningless to other tools until someone writes the adapters). As BPMN2 was getting started he was a fan and wanted it to succeed, and he drove lombardi to be one of the early adopters of a native BPMN 1.0 engine (not that it covered 100% of the spec- but there was no lossy transformation to some other format to interfere with the interpretation of your BPMN – Model preserving, to use Keith Swenson’s terminology).  Certainly, BPMN2 implementations to-date have failed Phil’s test of providing tools so good that no one needs to bother to read the XML behind the model…

I don’t have any inside knowledge of IBM’s stance on BPMN2 with respect to their products, but I, too, will be interested to see what shakes out at Impact. If they don’t make progress it might be interesting to write a BPMN2 exporter or importer. But it is a fair amount of work to do as an outsider.  I can see why IBM might not view interchange as a high priority – again, a good argument for an open source implementation of interchange.

As if to underscore my feeling that open source will pave the way, Activiti releases this video of an import of BPMN2 from another editor into Activiti:

 


Pretty nice demo. I do wonder if the import/export functionality would be better off as a standalone interchange open source project…

I’ve worked chiefly for 3 companies in my career.  In each of the first two, there was quite a focus on installation being easy.  This cuts against the grain for most enterprise software companies.  They mostly get used to a nice tidy sum of installation $ coming their way for each customer they sign up.

But those with a little more vision see a hard installation as a barrier to adoption of software.  The product experience starts with the install (if there is one).  The equivalent analogy for SaaS products is that the experience starts with registration.  The harder you make the process of installing or registering, the more people you’ll lose before you even get started.

Lombardi was big on the “express install” – a single installer that would lay down everything you need to build and deploy processes.  This mindset has, thankfully, been transplanted to IBM, and so far, it has stuck, even though the installer is something well north of 1GB.

Activiti is raising the bar in this arena – and one could argue that install experience is even more important for an open source project.  After all, if you have to configure a build before you can even run software, how many people do you lose during this process?

But as Joram Barrez writes, you can get Activiti started in just one minute after downloading.  Actually he’s a bit late with getting this news out, as it was also true of the alpha and beta builds.  But they’ve made some improvements, and more importantly, they haven’t made it harder as the product has matured.  Hopefully they keep a relentless focus on keeping friction costs low – it is much easier to avoid them than to get rid of the friction once it is introduced.

To me, this is just mounting evidence that the bar for Simplicity and The Experience is being raised higher.  The points of differentiation will be the how not the what.

This isn’t a review of Appian Tempo.  I’m a fan of what Appian is trying to do with Tempo and I hope there is more of this action in the BPM space.

Sandy Kemsley has a thorough review on her blog.  As usual, it covers the details, and the scenario of the demo quite well:

I had a chance for an advance briefing of Appian’s Tempo release last week; this is a new part of the Appian product suite that focuses on mobility, cloud and social aspects of BPM for social collaboration. This isn’t a standalone social collaboration platform, but includes deep links into the Appian BPM platform through events, alerts, tasks and more. They’ve included Twitter-like status updates and RSS feeds so that you can publish and consume the information in a variety of other forms, offering a fresh new alternative to the usual sort of process monitoring that we see in a BPMS. The free app for the iPhone and iPad requires an account on Appian Forum (the Appian user community site) or access to an Appian BPM installation (not sure if this is both an on-premise system and the cloud-based offering) in order to do anything so I wasn’t really able to check it out, but saw it on an emulator in the demo.

Sandy doesn’t pick winners and losers too often – reading between the lines she likes the indications of where Appian, and the BPM space in general, are going with mobile and social tech, but she’s seen enough demos not to get too excited.

Ann All has a further review (“I See the Enterprise Collaboration’s Future and its Name is BPM“), and is obviously impressed.  She attacks the shortcomings of products like Yammer, in that they can result in new information/communication silos rather than unifying an enterprise.  I can’t help but feel that that same fragmentation issue can be a problem for BPM-collaboration tech (How many BPM products does the average Fortune 500 company own?).  But Ann and Sandy both point out a key benefit of BPM + Social: tying interactions to real business events and outcomes.

Next up, Bruce Silver weighs in with his review, in which he not only praises Tempo but takes a few shots at the approach a few other vendors have taken (and it isn’t hard to guess which ones):

First, it’s really well executed.  Clean and smoothly integrated into the BPM environment.  Second, it seems a more reasonable implementation of the social/mobile idea than is typically offered by BPM vendors. [...] Tempo lets you create and track ad-hoc tasks, sure, but that (in my view) is not really BPM.  What’s important is it lets you also do real BPM, i.e. structured processes, within the same environment.  From your smartphone or iPad, you can perform tasks of  either type, often just by “swiping” the entry, quick and easy.   BPM vendors that insist on a separate “place” for users to do ad-hoc BPM are missing the boat.  Who wants that?

Let me take a shot at that.  The question isn’t, whether BPM users want a separate place for users to do ad-hoc BPM.  The question is, do regular users in the business want their ad-hoc stuff to be mixed in with other people’s BPM (which to them, may feel too heavy/complex so far)?  In other words, are we enhancing the existing audience’s experience with BPM (Appian’s Tempo) or are we trying to address a new audience (for example, the approach IBM has taken with Blueworks).  Both approaches have their merit, but I’ll admit Blueworks’ approach has less appeal to me as a consultant – that doesn’t mean that it won’t have *more* appeal to customers (for example, as a customer, we’re already using Blueworks internally and it took all of 5 minutes to get started). A couple other notes from his blog:

The hard part of BPM is the underlying architecture, the plumbing.  The “user experience”, not to diminish its importance, is technically easier to engineer.

Respectfully, I disagree. It *seems* like the underlying architecture is hard.  But, if it were truly hard, you wouldn’t see minimum half-a-dozen products that are pretty viable on the market.  I’ve worked in a product space where the architecture was actually hard.  We solved problems that no other vendor was even capable of solving.  Our engine would produce answers in seconds that took other vendors’ products hours, if they ever completed the computation.  That’s real differentiation in a hard space.  But in BPM engines, the differentiation is in the experience…

In fact, the underlying architecture and plumbing is becoming commoditized.  I don’t really care that much what engine is running my process… I care about the experience of developing and running my processes.  The experience is vastly more important than the plumbing.  And it is much harder to get right.  Not because it is technically difficult, but it is conceptually difficult to get right – and to say “no” to all the unnecessary stuff.  And once you get a bunch of code in place, it creates its own difficulty in changing to reflect the right experience. I’ll say it again, this is where the real differentiation is in BPM.  (And, to be fair, Bruce likes the Appian Tempo experience, which makes it differentiatingly good in his opinion).  Continuing on:

And once you face up to that, you don’t have to reconceive social/mobile BPM as something radically different, needing a totally separate product.  It becomes simply an alternative user interface that lets you extend real BPM to occasional users who wouldn’t otherwise participate, and enhance the value for regular BPM users by letting them perform process activities without being chained to the workflow inbox.  By making event streams and native smartphone UI a simple extension of the BPMS environment, not a whole “new new thing”, Tempo I think puts Appian in the driver’s seat in social/mobile BPM.

I like the idea of the alternate interface for BPM.  It was one of the first things that occurred to me looking at Blueworks (interfaces to existing BPMS installations for event feeds), but it is also so obvious that I’m sure it will happen in a future incremental release.  Actually, the technology to feed events into the stream from a BPMS (or Salesforce, twitter, or facebook) is quite easy across the products I’m aware of.  I like what Appian has done – but integration to their BPM suite isn’t going to be a selling point for customers who have already purchased, deployed, and invested in another BPM suite.  A separate, pluggable product might be preferred.  We’re watching the outcome of innovation being alive and well in BPM – surprisingly, at IBM, and less surprisingly, at smaller outfits like Appian and ActionBase, and in open source projects like Activiti.

It’s a very exciting time to be in the BPM business.  Congratulations to Appian for a great product release – I don’t mean any of my comments to denigrate their product offering – which I have not myself laid hands on – I hope their release is a success, and an indication or precursor of more interesting things to come from other vendors in our space as well.

OpenText is buying Metastorm.  As soon as I saw this announcement, I could guess what transpired.  At first glance, Metastorm has some assets that don’t really fit with the OpenText direction as I’ve understood it (in the recent past, OpenText bought Vignette, formerly a content management powerhouse in Austin).

But if you follow the content management space, you might be aware that in general, the ECM vendors are targeting BPM as a way to stay relevant to their IT and Business buyers.  It is about wallet-share and mind-share.  But there’s more than just the general trend, there are specific data points to look at:

• IBM bought Filenet, along with a BPM software vendor (Lombardi, our coverage under the link).
• EMC owns Documentum. I‘m not aware of a BPM product in their portfolio, but now that all the content management companies seem to be paired up with bigger vendors, it creates some pressure on the remaining players in the space. Looks like they have their own BPMS as well.
• Alfresco has sponsored the Activiti project – an open source BPMS, started by the leaders of the jBPM effort, which has been getting traction and is already in GA.  Activiti is already a key to Alfresco’s value proposition.

I think OpenText was feeling a need to round out its portfolio and the options in the BPM world are a bit more limited than they were a few years ago.  Metastorm has some good product assets, however, and I expect OpenText will find new ways to leverage them, and it will help them stay relevant.

As a BPM services vendor – we see a lot of BPM projects that involve documents, and managing processes relating to key documentation assets.  There’s clearly an overlap at a project or solution level.  But I have to admit I liked the more old-school approach of having clean implementation and interfaces for document management systems, rather than baking the two products into a single offering with a more “UI-driven” integration.  Having said that, the UI-driven integration of ECM and BPM is clearly going to make it easier to build hybrid process solutions.

Side Note:  I can see BPM capabilities being rolled into other products in other horizontal and vertical niches, and improving the value proposition of those products.  That future is coming.

Joram Barrez recently announced that the Activiti team has added the ability to define and run ad-hoc processes on Activiti.  The processes are directly deployable, so they’re first class citizens to Activiti.  This goes along with what I’ve said before, on many occasions: the use cases for ACM-style delivery don’t require a high technical hurdle.  There’s really not much keeping the leading BPM vendors from adding these concepts to their products, as Activiti has done with Kickstarter.

Joram makes the claim that with continued community involvement, the commercial vendors won’t be able to keep up.  However, the announcement of Kickstarter comes a few weeks after IBM’s relaunch of Blueworks, which included a similar “ad-hoc” process automation capability.  So I think the commercial vendors will still have their chance, especially in SaaS delivery modes. Regardless of who leads, the competition is clearly pushing state of the art.

Regardless, I’m gratified to see some of my thoughts pan out in terms of real, concrete software, delivered to the market.

Jacob’s post on what could cause ACM to fail in 2011 is interesting, especially in that it comes from an ACM proponent.  A couple of statements jumped out at me:

Here is the catch – business folks don’t really understand or buy platforms, they buy applications.

[...]

The biggest issue with ACM is that business process management suites, which for many are the platform of choice  for process implementation, are sold to IT. The IT department understands platforms but doesn’t understand unstructured process. On the other hand, the business understands unstructured processes but doesn’t understand platforms.

To me, this is interesting – because BPM also is (typically) sold as a platform as well.  Pega is probably the only BPM vendor of note that seems to take an application-first, platform-second approach to selling BPM.  It seems to have worked out all right for them overall.

Jacob’s concerns about the risks to the ACM market remind me of some of the risks I’ve pointed out myself over the last year in various forums, because his concerns are complementary:

1. It needs to be a platform sale more often than an application sale (I’m sure there are a few applications that might fit ACM, so I won’t conclude that there is no such thing)
2. IT people aren’t bought into ACM – perhaps just aren’t bought into it yet. You could say this is because the IT people don’t understand (the ACM-advocates’ argument), or you could say that it is because the ACM arguments aren’t compelling (the IT side of that argument)… of course, even the ACM advocates are IT folks, so that muddies the waters a little bit!

My concerns are around whether ACM is a market or a feature-set (as far as the software side of ACM goes – there’s also an approach to managing “unstructured” work):

1. It doesn’t seem to me that there’s a big technical barrier to add ACM capabilities to existing BPM platforms.
2. The BPM platforms that I’ve worked with are Turing Complete.  Meaning, within the context of the BPM platform, I can “program” anything another software program can do.
3. IT may not assign much $ value to something they perceive as being technically straightforward.

As a result, given Jacob’s business-side concerns (Businesses don’t often buy platforms), and given its proximity to BPM software, and given a real lack of a real technical barrier to delivery (the BPM firms certainly have the resources to invest to add ACM to their platforms if they desire)… it looks to me that one possible outcome is a very short market window for ACM to catch on as an independent software category.  We already see vendors like IBM adding ACM-style capabilities to their process execution in the cloud (Blueworks).  I think we’ll start to see these capabilities added to the open source BPM products like Activiti as well.

I can sympathize with the difficulty of selling a business proposition to IT, or a platform to the business – because this is exactly the space good BPM vendors have been straddling for the last decade.

My advice to ACM advocates – don’t worry about purity of your arguments and methodology, just be pragmatic.  If people think that all work fits into an overall structure (largely an argument about abstraction and organization – an IT argument), then explain that ACM may help address those parts of the work/process that can’t be easily structured, and explain how it can augment a structured approach.  Don’t worry about which fundamental principle of work is supreme.

Just read the first (last) post from the planetjBPM blog:

It has been over a year now since I posted here.  Any of you who have been following development of opensource bpm solutions and jBPM in particular might have a clue about why it took so long (at least partially). Not that long ago, I made the ‘formal’ decision to not use jBPM anymore. It has to do with a new job, things within the project and alternative solutions.

It seems Activiti has stolen jBPM’s thunder. Folks like Ronald were critical to jBPM’s community.

Looking back at our year in blogging, I thought some of the statistics were interesting to share, as they reflect what our readers are thinking about.

First, which posts were most popular in 2010?  Reading the list, it is a pretty good reflection of the themes of 2010:  Industry consolidation (IBM’s purchase of Lombardi, and Progress’ purchase of Savvion), open source BPM (activiti), the need for services (skills – Pure Play BPM firms), the rise of social BPM, and innovation in the BPM space (in spite of the acquisitions).  It was surprising to me is that the BPMN vs. BPEL article still gets so many views – this is a debate that is well over for most of us in the BPM space.

1. Will Open Source Software Meet the Challenge? Activiti Enters the Ring
2. #IBMImpact: IBM’s Vision for the Future of Lombardi (and BPM)
3. And Savvion goes to Progress #BPM
4. Why We Need Pure Play BPM Consulting Firms
5. BPMN vs BPEL round 15
6. The Rise of “Social” BPM Tools
7. Innovation in BPM is Alive and Well

The other surprising element was how quickly the Activiti post jumped to the top of the list for the year (and stayed there), with about a 20% advantage over the #2 post.  There are a lot of people following Activiti.  Interestingly, despite numerous posts and discussions on the subject, ACM-related posts didn’t crack the top 10.

What else changed in 2010?  Well, if you look at top referrers, in 2009, Google Reader was #1.  In 2010, Twitter jumps to the top of the list (nearly 3:1 ratio over Google Reader). RSS may not be dead, but it has real competition in Twitter.

1. twitter.com
2. google.com/reader/view
3. bp-3.com
4. twitter.com/sfrancisatx (hey, there must be a few people following my links on twitter)
5. activiti.org - this partly explains the high ranking of our first post on Activiti.

What about search terms?  Again, I was surprised that BPMN vs. BPEL leads the list!  Second was a direct query for the bp3 blog:

1. bpmn vs bpel
2. bp3 blog
3. social bpm
4. bpm framework
5. google wave gravity
6. gravity google wave
7. bpel vs bpmn

Not sure if the conclusion should be that people are still too focused on researching technical standards, or if we simply write too much about them on our blog!

Overall, our typical monthly traffic has grown from ~2000 unique views per month to over 3000 unique views per month.  A modest number of views, for sure, but we’re happy to be contributing to the BPM community and fostering some lively discussion on our own blog as well as others!

This isn’t a review of Activiti 5, per se – I haven’t had time to play with it enough to render a review.  This is a bit like my previous post on the subject, where I had time to download, install, and build an example.  Just like last time, I was happy with how easy the process was to download, install, and run on my Mac OSX laptop.

Tom Baeyens announced Activiti 5′s GA, and I have to hand it to the team for meeting their aggressive goal of releasing before the end of 2010!

Moreover, Joram announced the introduction of a feature to “generate” the BPMN diagrams (based on the diagram interchange specification), as of Activiti 5.1.

It is quite an impressive feat of community building and momentum – including the Activiti Cycle module that I’ve been reading about on Camunda’s blog posts. Clearly Activiti has raised the bar for BPM on open source, liberal license, open development community.  While Activiti has a way to go to reach the same level of maturity as some other BPM offerings, it already has a lot to offer for someone who wants to both develop a BPM solution and contribute to a fairly interesting entrant in the BPM space.

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 -