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.

IBM has put out the latest BPM Blueprint update today.  It isn’t the most exciting update they’ve ever made to Blueprint, but of course I’d rather see incremental and frequent updates than one big overhaul for a service like this.  The August release seems to focus on adding avatars (aka pictures), and has a security model tweak, and a much-needed update to the Word export.

I’m still looking for more support for expert features (not necessarily their target audience yet, but I think the time has come to include more expert functionality in a tool that also appeals to more general collaboration).  Part of the reason I think this support is needed is so that users can import or export BPMN2 XML.  Not that the users will care that it is XML, but this is the modeling format that they’re going to expect BPM tooling to support.

Dr. Stein of Aris has a blog about workflow patterns in BPMN2:

“In many areas, patterns are used to codify best practices. A pattern describes a solution for a problem. Originally, patterns were used in architecture to describe architectural design ideas. In software engineering, patterns are used to describe typical software design solutions, for example like client-server architecture.

In business process management, the so called workflow patterns by Prof. van der Aalst and friends exist. In their original description, they described the most important 20 workflow constructs like loops, decisions, and sequence flows. Later, Prof. van der Aalst and other research fellows extended the list of patterns and revised the initial description (see workflow pattern homepage). Still, the original 20 workflow patterns are valid and a useful tool to learn a modelling language such as BPMN.”

I’m just not excited about the van der Aalst “patterns” that are oft-quoted in BPM circles. The more accurate statement is that they are snippets of BPMN that demonstrate how various “constructs” work.  They’re useful demonstrations of how BPMN can work, and how to use a particular tool to diagram specific constructs.  And the work of van der Aalst and colleagues was very useful as well in identifying edge case diagrams that expose tricky aspects of the notation’s execution semantics.  They are not, truly, patterns as I would think of them.  Showing three activities executing in a sequence is hardly a “pattern” any more than three lines of code that execute in a row are a pattern.  Splits and joins are just constructs of the notation. The patterns don’t identify the usefulness of the pattern or the “why you would want to do this” aspect.  In that sense, they largely fall short of the bar for a pattern in my book.  A typical name for a “pattern” in this study : “Multiple Instances without Synchronization”… huh?  A name only a parent could love.  What’s the business case for this that helps me understand how it relates to business process? There isn’t one.  The point of these patterns, documented here, is to identify technical edge cases and compliance, not to create patterns that you will base your actual design work off of … and maybe that’s my main complaint.

The “four eyes” pattern is a pattern (where n-1 potential reviewers have to approve something before it moves on).  There are lots of real patterns out there – and generally they’ll get names that make sense- an “observer” pattern, the “shadow process” pattern, etc.  Having voiced my complaint, maybe I need to take some time to document a few BPMN2 style patterns to clarify.  Anatoly Belychook has described a few on his blog, in the past (as well as anti-patterns).

BPM Guide has some examples of BPMN 2.0 diagrams, on the heels of Stephen White’s blog post that the BPMN 2.0 spec has been ratified by OMG.  Thanks to Jakob Freund for publishing them.There are a couple of key points that Jakob makes throughout the article, that I’d like to call attention to:

Creating process models for both business AND it is actually one of the absolutely main topics of our consulting business. And it is a very big struggle, of course. For us it was important to show in the document that BPMN is not necessarily “too complicated for business”, because it totally depends on how you actually use the standard when process modeling. That’s why we always need a Framework around BPMN if we want to apply it in bigger modeling engagements.

This is a well-said point – BPMN doesn’t have to be too complicated for the business. But drawing diagrams that are not more complicated than they have to be takes some skill and practice.  I often tell people who aren’t familiar with BPM that it takes a reasonable degree of abstract thinking to really do well.  It is the abstractions and generalizations afforded by a process and its subprocesses that comprise the solution.

Apparently they built these examples with Trisotech’s tools:

The diagrams in the examples document however are all made with Trisotech’s Visio-based BPMN Modeler, provided for this purpose by Denis Gagné. The cool thing is that we could directly serialize the diagrams into BPMN 2.0 XML with that tool.

Denis, where is this tool! Sounds interesting!

Jakob also gives interesting examples of how to take advantage of collaboration diagrams.  His final thoughts:

Make a “strategic” process diagram (Figure 6.1), just a simple sketch for a quick understanding

Make an “operational” process diagram (Figure 6.2) for analyzing the collaborational aspects

Enrich the diagram with the aspects of a process engine, therefore adding a pool for the process engine

Take that process engine pool into your technical environment and enrich it for execution (make a “technical” process diagram).

Good advice for how to approach modeling in BPMN.

Tom Baeyens writes:

We’re very committed to BPMN 2.0. In fact, we’re aiming to build the #1 BPMN 2.0 process engine and deliver the full BPM Suite components, all available as open source.

Glad to hear it – I’m sure the world of BPMN and Open Source BPM will be the better for it.

Bruce Silver writes:

I failed, but Robert Shapiro has carried that effort forward in the Finalization Task Force phase, and today he succeeded in getting it on the ballot.  You can see the proposal here. What that means is that in a few days, FTF members will vote to either approve the inclusion of these process modeling conformance classes in the final specification, or not.  There is still some opposition to the idea, mostly from vendors who may not be able to claim conformance with all of the classes in their first BPMN 2.0 release.  So there is a chance, maybe a good chance, that this will not pass.

So… If you want to see interchange of BPMN 2.0 models between tools, you need to make your voice heard, and quickly.  There are twenty-some voting members of the FTF, including IBM, Oracle, Lombardi, Tibco, Global 360, Fujitsu, SAP, Cordys, Red Hat, CA, HP, BizAGI, iGrafx, Camunda, Trisotech, NIST, and MITRE.  If you are a customer or partner of any of these organizations, please urge them to support the BPMN2.0 Process Modeling Conformance Class proposal.  Time is of the essence, as the vote is in the next few days!

I agree, this is important, and it will be harder to get it done later – no time like the present to push your voting members to vote for this.  Thought this battle was already lost, but it has one more shot before the final spec is approved.

Tom continues to update the world with jBPM updates – in this case, using jBPM 4 and Drools to blend process and rules. His updates definitely play to the technical audience rather than the business – but I don’t find that too surprising in the open source world.  From a technical perspective, it is certainly interesting.  Proof that these memes seem to emerge on their own : Bruce Silver has also recently posted on rules and BPM (part 2 of a previous effort).

At some point I look forward to digging into jBPM more thoroughly, and now that it supports BPMN 2, I’m more inclined to make the time, its starting to get interesting for the kinds of problems we look at.  However, I still fear that it is just a bit too technical in terms of what it requires of process authors still.

A previous update confirms that jBPM now supports BPMN 2.0, as of version 4.0.  This is a niche I think open source can help fill – potentially fully implementing a spec that probably won’t be fully implemented by any commercial software vendor.  (Filling out the corners is just the kind of academic exercise that seems to get tackled by *someone* within an open source effort)

Pretty interesting update from Joram Barrez on jBPM – looks like it now supports BPMN2.0. (or, more accurately, it will come January 1st).

Its a pretty interesting look under the hood of one of the top open-source solutions in the BPM space.  The BPMN2 implementation uses the jBoss PVM (process virtual machine) to execute the BPMN, rather than transforming BPMN into BPEL  or JPDL or some other XML format.

jBPM also gives the developer a good Java programmatic interface into the BPM engine implementation (and, the processes it runs).

This sort of development effort does make me wonder if, eventually, we’ll have a fairly standardized open-source BPMN engine with commercial products that incorporate it in different ways (picture Apache or jBoss as examples, or the WebKit in the browser world).  Hard to say if jBPM (or key pieces like PVM) will turn out to be that open-source engine of choice, but at least from the blog posts it seems like they’re taking an intelligent and focused approach.

I’ve been a skeptic of XPDL as the pre-eminent format for BPMN-drawn Models, but I’ve also been encouraged by Keith Swenson’s efforts to prove that it could be the de facto standard for BPMN model exchanging.

But it looks like my judgment that XPDL would only catch on with vendors like Lombardi (who have been beating the drum for BPDM and BPMN2 for some time) only if BPMN 2.0 didn’t sufficiently address the interchange problem might be a little off.  Lombardi just announced that its Blueprint July ’09 release supports XPDL!  It could be that Lombardi is voting with its feet – perhaps BPMN2 doesn’t seem to solve the problem(s) they were hoping it would with regard to model interchange.  Or, perhaps they see XPDL interchange as the Right Now solution, and don’t see an advantage in waiting on BPMN2 support. After all, not only would Lombardi have to build the BPMN 2 export/import functionality, they would then have to wait on myriad other modeling tools to pick up the baton in order for there to be anyone to “interchange” with.

By picking up XPDL support, Lombardi Blueprint can now exchange models with a host of other modeling tools listed on the XPDL vendor site (perhaps Lombardi will now be added to the site).  Bruce Silver has already assessed portability between Blueprint and Process Modeler for Visio.

Update:  more info from Keith Swenson on his blog, regarding exporting from Blueprint and importing into Fujitsu’s Interstage BPM.

Sandy Kemsley posted a good recap of a webinar on BPMN 2.0 by Robert Shapiro.  Its a good writeup, and must have been a pretty good webinar.

Another link from Sandy – I’m not sure how I feel about this – a book on BPMN, that (I think) is intended to read like a novel… I don’t know whether to be afraid, or very afraid…

Bruce previously had a good post on the 5 things to like most about BPMN 2.  Now he’s back with the 5 things that were left out that might be the most disappointing.  Perhaps disheartening, but not completely surprising, given how difficult it is to pull these kind of specs together.  Hopefully they’ll keep at the revisions on BPMN and react to the feedback once BPMN 2.0 is approved.

Bruce Silver has a nice article on BPMInstitute.org about the 5 things to like about BPMN 2.0 (he doesn’t discuss the 5 things not to like – perhaps material for a future post?!).

OMG votes on the proposal in June, but the history on OMG’s voting on BPM-related standards has typically been that it takes longer than I expect for things to get finalized.  I won’t be shocked if final approval drags out a bit longer.

Interestingly, 4 of the 5 things Bruce mentions address weaknesses that at least one pureplay BPM vendor addresses already in their product (implementing more than what BPMN 1.0 spec requires).  Let’s hope there’s more than 5 things to love about BPMN 2.0 – vigorous vendor adoption would be on my wish list!

Bruce Silver put an update on the BPMN 2.0 specification he’s been participating in, and how its progressing. He pointed out a couple things that I happen to agree with, and if you do too, probably pays to be commenting on Bruce’s blog or elsewhere to help generate some public support for his commentary.

First, the focus on a different notion of “executable” BPMN – where all the attributes necessary for executing are available.  That’s not a bad notion – I don’t think anyone is necessarily “against” it.  But as Bruce points out, we need for BPMN models to conform without being executable – to support use cases for BPMN that are primarily modeling and not execution as schema-valid models (not all processes will be executed).

Its a good read, hope we can hear more about the process before the final submission (or after, as the case may be).  Participating in these efforts is tough for independent consultancies like Bruce because you don’t get paid for the work.  For a big company, the contributors may get paid to participate, or they may do it on their own time.  For independents, it hits the bottom line if the work encroaches on work-hours.  Kudos to Bruce for making the time to assist with BPMN 2.0, and I’m sure the spec will be the better for his input.