Anatoly often posts the best examples and cautionary tales in BPMN2. In the latest post, he derides the limited usability of Swim Lanes in BPMN 2 – And he has a point.

On the one hand, embedded subprocesses can’t have swim lanes (the best way to think about these is simply a set of collapsed activities, for notational convenience).

On the other hand, “Reusable subprocesses introduce additional complexity because unlike embedded they are executed in a separate data context”.

Anatoly’s conclusion is that overusing reusable subprocesses is bad practice, because of this overhead.  I conclude differently:  the BPMS should minimize or optimize this overhead – and the business process designer should be able to ignore it on a robust BPMS.  To make a coding analogy:  we should be talking about the difference between an embedded block of code and a function call.  Yes there is overhead, but it should be managed by the BPMS transparently.

In fact, some BPMS authoring environments don’t even allow for the embedded subprocess- treating it as just a special case of the reusable subprocess who’s primary difference is that it doesn’t happen to be re-used. I don’t think we should optimize around the shortcomings of a particular BPMS too much, in terms of our general BPMS modeling advice.  However, I’ll concede that once you’ve chosen your BPMS, you might as well optimize somewhat around its capabilities as they become known to you, and model accordingly.

Score one for the “BPMN Zealots“, as Bruce Silver reports:

Today Software AG announced a tight integration between ARIS, its leading Business Process Analysis suite, and webMethods, its SOA-based BPM Suite.  The integration features roundtripping and continuous synchronization between business-oriented and developer-oriented models in those tools.  The medium of interchange is BPMN 2.0 XML.

EPC was previously ARIS focus, but as Bruce Silver says:

…and Software AG now recommends that for new modeling projects where the intent is to automate in webMethods, ARIS users model in BPMN 2.0 from the start. This move is really heartening to me, and highlights the key new feature of BPMN 2.0, which is interchange between modeling tools.

Glad to see ARIS and Software AG getting on the BPMN bandwagon.  Interestingly, they ran an April Fool’s joke about ditching EPC…Sometimes the April Fool’s jokes hit a little close to home.

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…