Bruce Silver reports that IBM is following through on its promises with respect to BPMN 2.0 in its next release, IBM BPM 7.5.1, which ships this week.

Not that IBM is covering EVERY corner of BPMN 2.0, but it is a significant advance – in that they are surprisingly supporting import and export of BPMN 2.0 XML from the Process Designer:

In a recent post, I talked about what “BPMN 2.0 support” really means, in both non-executable and executable model contexts.  It’s not primarily about the notation, although a few shapes and symbols – notably non-interrupting events and event subprocesses – are new in BPMN 2.0. BPMN 2.0 support is really about the XML serialization, the ability to export the process model according to the XSD and rules of the spec, and ideally import from the XML as well.  IBM BPM 7.5.1 can do both.

[...]

The important thing, though, is not just the palette of shapes but the fact that Process Designer supports export and import of the BPMN 2.0 standard XML format.  (Oracle BPM 11g has had the BPMN 2.0 shapes for a year and a half and still cannot do that.)  I haven’t seen the XML yet but I believe that the export includes data objects, data inputs and outputs, data association mappings (assignment), and other details of executable BPMN 2.0. At least I hope it does.

A few new palette items have been added as well, though as Bruce notes, we’re still missing explicit representation of message flows.  I happen to agree with Bruce that this could improve the readability of IBM BPM models. And knowing how things are implemented underneath, I believe I’m qualified to say there aren’t really any technical barriers to having this “transparently” implement message flows, except to update some of the assumptions that go into the process canvas.

Great news, and great recap from Bruce.

Bruce has left no stone un-turned in his review of IBM BPM 7.5.  In his words:

IBM is the big dog in the BPMS landscape.  BPM 7.5 combines the old WebSphere Lombardi Edition and WebSphere Dynamic Process Edition (aka Process Server) in a single offering.  More than two separate products in a single box, there is real integration under the covers, in the form of a shared Process Center repository.  Find out all about it in my latest Industry Trend Report, available here.  You’ll need to be registered on BPMS Watch to access it.

Registration is simple but you might miss the link in the lower right-hand corner of the site (or just search for “Registration” on the page).  It is a comprehensive report and if you’re considering IBM BPM, this is worth a read.

Bruce Silver, never one to shy from a debate, weighs in with a post I largely agree with:

The question is BPM part of case management, or is case management part of BPM? is a metaphysical one.  I think, however, it is a proxy for the real question, can a BPMS do a good job with case management, or do you need a special dedicated tool?  It’s obvious that if a single offering could provide both, users would prefer it over separate dedicated offerings.  And it’s equally obvious that it can be done, although it’s fair to say that the offerings may not be good enough yet.  Back in 2005, people said you needed separate BPM platforms for human workflow and integration processes.  It was just a matter of time, and not that long a time.

In one paragraph, I think Bruce has succinctly cut down 90% of the noise:

1. This is a metaphysical question. In a practical sense, who cares.
2. To the extent that people care, it is because they’re substituting this metaphysical / philosophical question for a practical one: “Can a BPMS do a good job with Case Management?” (or ACM)
3. Everyone understands customers would like to have one tool that does both. And makes breakfast.  Thus the fear and uncertainty and doubt about this issue among software vendors.
4. Anyone who can code worth a lick can see that it can be done. But as Bruce says, there’s a lot of room for improvement on most of the tooling out there.
5. History suggests the ultimate answer.

He then moves on to discuss how a case might be different from a process.  Overall a great read.

Never one to let a chance to say “I told you so” pass me by, I thought we should recap coverage of this year’s SAP TechEd 2011 in Las Vegas.  I’m not surprised by the lukewarm reactions to the BPM part of SAPs presence, because I’ve written about SAP’s lack of BPM vision before.

First, there’s Jim Sinur, of Gartner:

Bottom Line:
If the SAP BPM architects and technicians can show customer value that catches top managements eye, the wait will be shorter. Right now, it looks to be another two years. With that said, look at what SAP has done in BPM from two years ago. http://blogs.gartner.com/jim_sinur/2009/10/14/teched-09saps-bpm-and-brm-progress-to-date-watch-out-for-construction-cones/

I guess Jim and I are on the same page.  It is *always* another two years with SAP.  Two years from now you’ll be amazed.  Except you aren’t – because two years later, they tell you it’ll be another two years.

But, let’s turn our attention to Bruce Silver’s coverage.  After all, earlier this year he was pretty optimistic about SAP’s BPM.  So what did Bruce have to say?

At this week’s SAP Tech Ed conference in Las Vegas, BPM is definitely off the main track.  The only other BPM analyst here that I recognized is Jim Sinur of Gartner.  The keynote sessions were all about HANA, SAP’s new in-memory analytics platform that is the key to reinvigorating the entire SAP portfolio (at least the parts they still care about).  HANA-enabled BPM won’t come until 2012, but it should provide a significant performance boost (process transactions per hour) as well as powerful real-time process analytics.

Started out sounding pretty down on BPM… But Bruce hasn’t given up on BPM with SAP:

But it would be a mistake to say that SAP has not made significant progress in BPM.  It has, but you had to skip the analyst sessions with the execs and go to the breakout sessions from the BPM product managers to hear about it.  Those sessions were, on the whole, excellent, many of them hands-on with the tools.  In that sense, Tech Ed is the mirror image of IBM Impact, where BPM sizzle was all over the keynotes, but almost no details were available in the breakouts.

(Actually the IBM breakouts had a lot of detail – and got some coverage on our blog.  The analysts just need to break out of the special analyst sessions!)

Bruce notes: “Where conventional BPM (such as NetWeaver BPM/PI) emphasizes BPMN-based activity flow, embedded processes involve transaction events where the order of occurrence at runtime is more flexible.”  But later notes that the embedded processes can be visualized as BPMN diagrams.  Hm.  It sounds contradictory on the surface, but I’ll assume not.

Bruce also mentions “Gravity” – the Google Wave integration and BPM implementation.  But, he’s comparing a (still) “shaky” beta product with BlueworksLive, which has been in production and serving customers for more than 5 years (updating roughly every 6 weeks).

Focus matters a lot for big organizations like SAP, IBM, and Oracle.  At IBM, I’m seeing the focus (for now).  At SAP, I’m seeing some progress, but it looks uneven.  Driven from a level lower down the management chain.  It doesn’t get top billing.  Instead – top billing is HANA and in-memory analytics?  Odd.

Or it would be, if BPM were on the front burner.

Bruce has a nice write-up of the Global 360 acquisition, and hits on a couple points really well:

On the analyst call, Open Text admitted they are still working on the roadmap, but I came away with the impression that nothing would change very much.  Metastorm would keep on being Metastorm, G360 would keep on its track.  Only the company letterhead would change.

And if so, I think that would be too bad.  If you compare IBM’s acquisition of FileNet (leave it alone) versus Lombardi (revitalize the core offering), there is no question which path is better…

I agree, it would be too bad if they don’t really rationalize the offering and carve out a vision for the future.  And yet, it fits the pattern (so far) with OpenText.  Bruce’s recommendation:

Yes, merging case management and conventional BPM is a good thing – a no-brainer, really – but simply recycling 1990s technology is not the way to do it.  Better to take a page from IBM’s  Lombardi playbook and choose the best pieces from across the portfolio and then do the necessary engineering to create a world-class unified offering.

Exactly.  Perhaps the world needs a world-class BPM offering on Microsoft technology.  So far, Microsoft isn’t building it.  Maybe OpenText can fill that void.  But we haven’t heard the vision for that yet.

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.

Good review of Bruce’s training:

There are few people who have this depth of BPMN knowledge, and Bruce is the only one who I know who is doing this as a professional trainer: his is the only BPMN course that I recommend to my clients. He needs to work out a few bumps in how the online course works, but in general, I thought this was a great course, perfect for a business analyst who is already doing some process modeling but doesn’t know any BPMN, but also informative for those of us with some prior knowledge of BPMN.

Sandy’s review is quite an endorsement of Bruce’s training.  Of course, any online training environment is a bit of a challenge compared to on-site or in-person delivery.  Sandy’s isn’t the only endorsement he’s had – many BPM product vendors have also implicitly or explicitly endorsed his training over the years.

The early reviews of IBM BPM 7.5 were out last week, while IBM Impact was still in full swing.  It seems that the analysts in attendance were of differing opinions about the strength of IBM’s update to 7.5 – with Clay Richardson disappointed, and the other analysts ranging from reassured to impressed.

Clay’s review (“IBM Adds Fresh Coat Of Paint And New Tires To BPM Offering, But Still Needs To Rev Engine“) starts off:

So far, IBM is following the product integration roadmap John Rymer and I laid out in our report published immediately following IBM’s acquisition of Lombardi.

I’m sure IBM looks at it as, they were following their own roadmap and some of the points just happen to coincide with what analysts were clamoring for. One thing that the analyst community doesn’t seem to be comfortable with is that IBM doesn’t say much about future releases – they cite disclosure rules – and they only announce releases within the same quarter they’re to be released.  But beyond that, I think it is quite right that the decision about *how* to integrate Lombardi and WPS had not been finalized at this time last year.

With today’s announcement, IBM checks off the first point of integration on our list: establishing a single repository across Lombardi Teamworks and Websphere Process Server. With Business Process Manager V7.5, IBM will deliver a single repository for process assets that leverages Lombardi’s impressive “snapshot” version management and governance capabilities, providing a unified approach to administering and reusing process and integration assets.

I imagine that this retrofit to WPS and integration designer was actually quite a lot of work – and likely addressed the hardest technical parts of the integration of these two products.  But Clay goes on to say:

Although IBM has done a great job of delivering a unified repository, the core BPM engines and development environments will continue as standalone and separate entities — at least for BPM V7.5. While this is not surprising — we predicted that it would take three to four years for IBM to completely integrate Lombardi and WPS into a single unfied environment — we expected IBM to communicate a strategy or vision for merging the engines as part of this announcement.

I think this is a distinction that won’t matter to users.  It might surprise Clay to know that Lombardi, since 2005, effectively had two engines under the hood.  But it certainly never felt that way to users.  And with the integrated rules engine in IBM BPM 7.5, you could say it has 4 engines.  The point is – as long as the functionality works well together, this distinction won’t matter to process authors.  There’s also an option to deploy the whole stack into a single VM – particularly useful for developer machines.  Most people won’t quibble over different sections of code running inside a VM.  After all, an engine is just a body of code that transforms inputs into outputs based on current state plus a model which provides context.  A good BPMS will have more than one such body of code.  Even a good rule suite will have more than one engine.

So the issue in the future isn’t how many engines IBM will have embedded in its BPM suite.  The questions to ask are:

1. Will future versions feel like one product or two or more products.  Clearly the direction is to make IBM BPM feel like one product.
2. Will new versions of IBM BPM provide the same transformations of input to output given the same state and model context.

Information Week ran a story that reads very much like Clay’s:

IBM’s approach can be contrasted with that of Oracle, which took a decisive step in 2010 when it integrated the AquaLogic BPM system it acquired with BEA with its own legacy BPM product. That move yielded a single product and a clear roadmap, but it also forced existing customers of both products to do considerable migration work to move forward.

Except that when their article contrasts IBM and Oracle, it fails to mention that Oracle bought BEA in January 2008, nearly 3 years earlier (Clay, however, was more fair in his comparison).  And yet the expectation is that IBM provide this transformation in a year.

But while Clay was focused on the need to consolidate engines, others focused on the market signals IBM was sending.

As Bruce Silver wrote in his rebuttal:

Some have called it just “a new coat of paint” on the existing offerings, because the (Lombardi) Process Designer and the (WPS) Integration Designer tools are both still there, and both runtime engines are still there as well.  But that misses the point.  Where IBM last year was pushing separate fit-for-purpose BPMSs – something nobody really wants – they now can offer a single BPMS that has the combined functionality of WPS and WLE.

I agree with Bruce – at a detail-level, it also ignores the interface makeover WPS Integration Designer got, to match the repository unification (which added significant versioning functionality to WPS).   At a big picture level, it misses the point, which Bruce makes:

Beyond that, this announcement represents a major shift in IBM’s strategy for addressing the BPM marketplace.  You might even call it a palace coup:  the Lombardi/human/business-centric value system overthrowing the old WebSphere/integration/developer-centric value system, or even a BPM perspective rising above the SOA perspective.  Given the existing installed-base investment on the two sides, this is truly a wag-the-dog moment.

I think this represents IBM’s move to capture the business-oriented perspective of the BPM market – something that was part product functionality, part product design, and partly go-to-market.  Bruce’s summary:

And here’s the thing:  it’s ONE product.  You get it all.  Business-empowered design, what-you-see-is-what-you-execute, and instant playback.  SOA and integration services.  Powerful business rules. [...] but I think everyone is surprised they got it done already.

Bruce has another post on the BPMS Endgame which predicts that IBM will focus on BPMN2 engine work for the 8.0 release timeframe.

Neil Ward-Dutton also rebuts Forrester’s assessment:

However when you look deeper, the release of Business Process Manager marks a significant departure for IBM, and warrants a thorough reappraisal of IBM’s competitive position.

He also hits on a few key points of integration:

1. Unified repository toolset
2. Unified governance toolset
3. Single Deployment runtime foundation (no more copying EAR and WAR files around)
4. Single Administration environment

Better yet:

Business Process Manager makes the relationship clear: Process Designer is aimed at business-facing teams collaborating to optimise business processes; Integration Designer is aimed at IT teams working to orchestrate the integration of systems to support the optimisation of those processes. Again – these two environments work together through the use of a shared repository and governance toolset.

Tony Baer also humorously commented on the Lombardification of IBM BPM.  Unlike David Brakoniecki, I couldn’t resist revisiting the analyst reviews.  David points out a few of the “unsung features” in the 7.5 release:

• A powerful REST API which in theory should allow better and richer user interfaces to be built
• A new charting technology (based on iLog jViews, I think)

I’d add to that the deployment characteristics – the fact that we will be able to build solutions with both the Process Designer and the Integration Designer – and then manage and deploy them from the same repository, to the same run-time clusters – is a big improvement over the state of the art in the previous versions.  And it appears to be a big improvement in how both WLE and WPS previously managed deployments.

Sandy Kemsley took more time to write her analysis, and it demonstrates her extra time to reflect.  I liked the shout out to our sleuthing out the announcement ahead of time (maybe IBM should include me on their analyst briefings so that we’ll be embargoed as well!…).  She writes:

It’s important to look at how the IBM organization has realigned to allow for the new product release: Phil Gilbert, former president and CTO of Lombardi, now has overall responsibility for all of WebSphere BPM – including both the former Lombardi and WebSphere BPM products – plus ILOG rules management. Neil Ward-Dutton referred to this as the reverse takeover of IBM by Lombardi; when I had a chance for a 1:1 with Phil at Impact, I told him that we’d all bet that he would be gone from IBM after a year. He admitted that he originally thought so too, until they gave him the opportunity to do exactly what he knew needed to be done: bring together all of the IBM BPM offerings into a unified offering. This new product announcement is the beginning of that unification, but they still have a ways to go.

When the buyout happened I often heard this argument that Phil would be gone within a year.  But, living in Austin, I’ve seen a few promising startups purchased by IBM in my day (Tivoli and Webify just to name two), and I’ve also known Phil for… 10-12 years now.  My sense was that IBM has the scope and opportunity on the big stage that Phil would really relish taking advantage of.  IBM is big enough to make the right role for someone like Phil – in a way that very few companies can.  If they were willing to do it, I felt like they had a chance to hang on to Phil.  I felt the same way about most of the people acquired with Lombardi – some would leave, but IBM has the reach and size and money to keep people if it chooses (and if it acts in time).

Regarding that “two engines” argument from Clay:

However, from the customer/user standpoint, it’s wrapped into a single Process Server, so if IBM ever gets around to refactoring into a single engine, that could be made fairly transparent to their customers, but would likely have the benefit of reducing IBM’s internal engineering costs around maintaining one versus two engines.

I think Sandy hits it just right.  The issue isn’t how many engines are under the hood – it is what does it feel like to the customer.  Regarding the lack of a cloud offering for BPM: “They need to rethink their strategy on this, and stop offering expensive custom hosted or private ‘cloud’ platforms as their only cloud alternatives.”  Again, I think Sandy’s right. It is hard to tell in what time frame it really starts to hurt, but the trend lines are there, and they’re plain to see.

Great reviews and perspectives to soak up.  Nothing I like more than reading these competing perspectives and conclusions and then reconciling with my own opinions and the impressions of the BP3 team.

Joe Heller, CIO of Caterpillar, gave an outstanding lesson in lasting business partnerships at IBM’s Impact conference on Day 1 (Monday, April 11th, 2011).  Joe was highly quotable (“There is dirt in the wrong place all over the world, and we are there to put it in the right place”), but beneath these quotes is a deep sense of business value over time.

And he wasn’t shy about sharing real dollar values in savings.

I think David Brakoniecki sums it up best in his post:

83 years of Partnership – Caterpillar has had a relationship with IBM for 83 years.
From a business perspective, I find this mind-blowing.  Having worked the last 12 years in small businesses and start-ups, I’m lucky if I can point to a continuing business relationship that goes back 5 years.
In recent times, the recession has claimed several major brands so it’s easy to forget that long-term business partnerships are not only possible but also worth having.  It’s mpressive that the CIO of Caterpillar was willing to stand on stage and say that IBM has never disappointed him in his 38 years of working together.

It is a pretty remarkable partnership.

Other thoughts on Day 1′s General session:

• The video wall is truly massive.  The room itself is massive.  And I can’t imagine how they’ll fit more than 8000 people in one room next year.
• It is also interesting how cultural differences come out in a conference like this.  At one point, Marie Weick, in the middle of a very well-delivered segment, repeated some advice once given to her: “In your career you can only move forward or fall behind”.  From the perspective of someone outside the corporate ladder-climbing world, this sounds off – a career is more than two dimensions measured forward and back.  I would wish for everyone to realize that early in their career rather than late.
• Dr. Burns has one of the most compelling cases for application of technology – pediatric care.  It is well worth watching on the livestream video.
• It takes an immense amount of coffee to serve this many people.  Don’t expect to find coffee at the coffee stations right outside the main event.
• Impact Day 1 kicked off on an odd note, with the opening musical performance.  At some point three of the musicians switched from instruments to iPads to finish their musical number (and of course, you can’t tell if they’re actually playing or if it was all pre-recorded, but one wonders).  It was an interesting choice to kick off the conference.

Notes from the Rest of Day 1

After the General Session, I wanted to see what IBM was saying about “which BPM to use” in one of the early sessions of the day.  Sometimes it is good to get the official positioning so that you understand how far out of alignment your own opinions are.

IBM’s positioning of BlueworksLive is:

1. No training to use
2. Social Application, which helps scale social talk across the business
3. Doc and discovery tool that is easy to use
4. Automate simple processes

At this point, I noticed the room was full.  More than full.  This would continue in virtually every BPM session that touched on Lombardi heritage at all.  IBM’s conference organizers continue to under-estimate the demand for Lombardi-BPM-themed content – but we can hope that next year will be different under the IBM BPM branding.

Someone described BlueworksLive as “Powerpoint for process applications”.

There is an open question for IBM, which remains unanswered: How to support the partner community with this product?  IBM really depends on its partner channel to expose customers to products.  Unfortunately BlueworksLive leaves a lot to be desired from a partner point of view (one could even argue that the automation is competitive with partner service offerings).  I think the answer is to simply add a few features that will make this product more partner-friendly:

• the ability to move models from one corporate account to another (so that I can move drafts created in my sandbox to the customer’s BlueworksLive spaces).
• an expert BPMN diagramming mode that allows expert modelers to be more precise in their process definitions.
• more features like the “playback” feature that was introduced in the last BlueworksLive update.

Next, IBM positioned IBM BPM as targeted at the high volume, repeatable processes, while BlueworksLive is focused on the long tail processes.  Both products offer “tooling that is easy to use” (relatively speaking), “transactional integrity and scale”,  “unified environment for governance, visibility, and control”, and versioning.  (Of course, they achieve this in very different ways and targeted at different processes and users.)

Next up, I went to a hands-on lab for BlueworksLive. But, being a newcomer to Impact, it wasn’t what I expected, so I said hi to a few people and then went to take a certification test in another room.

Lunch was a forgettable affair in the trade show area.  We left lunch quickly and met up with the analysts and bloggers who were sequestered on the first floor of the conference getting the low-down on all things IBM.  Flournoy and I were able to meet with Neil Ward-Dutton , and then he was nice enough to call out Sandy Kemsley (nice to meet for the first time!), Clay Richardson, and Bruce Silver.  It was great to hear their early impressions on the IBM BPM 7.5 release first hand – it definitely added color to the blogs they wrote later.  We shared notes and there was, generally, consensus (except for Clay).   It is too bad they are isolated from the rest of the conference, I think it would be really interesting for them to see how other people interpret what they’re hearing in typical Impact sessions (I imagine they got some of this if they stayed through til Tuesday or Wednesday).

In the afternoon I saw the “Measuring Quality” session by Fahad Osmani and Sean Pizel, of IBM.  It was a wide-ranging presentation, best to get the presentation slides rather than rely on my notes.  They suggest some new measurements for BPM projects, and pointed out that programs that deliver value, repeatedly, almost always turn into successes.

We then went into a meeting with folks from the IBM partner enablement community.  We were impressed by how motivated IBM’s partner groups were to make sure BP3 is successful as an IBM partner.  It was an intense and productive conversation, and we left with concrete follow ups.  The quality of the meetings their partner group set up for us was quite impressive.

After the partner session, I made it to the second Lincoln Trust presentation of the day (I had heard great reviews of their first session of the day, just prior).  In this session they talked about their strategy for addressing a high volume of processes (100′s) with a small team and small budget.  The answer, of course, was to have standard lightweight process definitions that could represent more than one of these processes.  The key outcomes they were looking for were tracking (for visibility), standardization, and governance.  By implementing lightweight processes that could act more generically, they gave themselves a lot more data about each process before investing in building something more technically demanding.

The Lincoln Trust approach reminds me quite a lot of the Banco Espirito (BES) approach.  At this point, the team dove into technical details behind their implementation (great content).

We had dinner with a fellow BPM practitioner and long-time colleague, and then headed over to iTKO’s party at Tao Beach, where we were able to catch up with friends at their company and IBMers who also joined in.  iTKO was a Diamond sponsor of Impact – quite a step up from last year.  They made a big splash and they’ve had a great year.  Kudos to the iTKO team for a big contribution to the quality of the conference.

At the end of Day 1, I was motivated and exhausted. It was time to rest up for Day 2.

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)

Bruce Silver has been teaching the Process Modeling with BPMN class for years in cooperation with the BPM Institute, but this year:

If you were thinking of taking my 2-day class Process Modeling with BPMN at a BPM Institute event in Chicago, San Francisco, DC, or New York… well think again.  Rather than pay me for the classes I did last year, [...] Brainstorm/ BPMInstitute have just now swapped in their own instructor and are trying to pass it off as the same class I have been giving for the past four years.

Bruce Silver is well-known for his writing, reviews, advocacy, and training in BPM circles.  In particular, he is sought after for his training classes.  This strikes me as poor form by the BPM Institute.  Clearly Bruce isn’t pleased.

The good news?  You can get Bruce Silver’s training, directly from Bruce, online in April.  Details here.

I recall not long ago -oh wait, two years ago (June 2009) -  poking fun at SAP’s BPM strategy:

Your last point about the definition of BPM reminds me of a press release SAP did about 2 years ago about BPM… which, if you read their definition, was merely EAI (integration services), and a “totally new groundbreaking category of software” that they called Collaborative Application Frameworks (CAF)… which would be available in … you guessed it… 2 years… and if you read the definition slowly, you realize that CAF was describing a BPMS. Curiously, I haven’t seen a press release about CAF being released into the wild. And their attempt to rebrand EAI as BPM hasn’t taken with the market…

Well.  Based on Bruce’s blog, it looks like 2 years after my comment, and 4 years after SAP’s strategic statement on BPM and CAF, SAP has finally delivered something that approximates what some people would call BPM:

Yesterday I got a look at SAP’s BPM v7.3, now in “ramp-up” (extended beta).  I hadn’t heard much lately about SAP in the BPM area, so I was really surprised to see how far they have come.  The new offering, called the “Process Orchestration Solution”, combines NetWeaver BPM, focused on human tasks, and NetWeaver Process Integration, which provides SOA, ESB, adapters, and Enterprise Service Repository (ESR).

Sorry, I should have said that they’ve delivered it into Beta, not GA.  Bruce’s review is positive, and, I think, reflects his low expectations going into the review.  Based on his review, SAP may finally be getting their BPM act together, and if the other vendors in the space sit still or get comfortable, they’ll get lapped in capability in some areas.

However, SAP is still focused on BPM as a way to add value to their existing application suites, rather than a standalone technology/application offering.  It should be something they can sell into their install base of SAP customers (which is quite large), but I doubt it would get traction out side of that audience as some of the differentiating features are SAP-ERP specific.

Even if I were an SAP customer, I’d still be tempted to use a third-party BPMS because there are processes that simply don’t touch SAP, and if you just want one BPMS, it seems to give you more flexibility.  But for tactical SAP-focused process improvement, or simply as a cheaper way to customize SAP to your needs, this could be a big time saver.

Architects are discovering BPMN, and Bruce Silver has explained how business architecture relates to BPMN or BPM more broadly:

When business process architecture enumerates processes that are not really processes, or activities that are not really activities, usually the problem is that what is enumerated are actually functions or capabilities, not specific actions (or sequences of actions) performed repeatedly in the course of business, with each instance having a well-defined start and end.  Even when labeled VERB-NOUN to suggest an action, they may be things performed continuously rather than repeatedly. Activity names starting with “Manage”, “Monitor”, or “Maintain” typically fall into this category.

I’m glad to hear that Bruce observes that architects are increasingly discovering BPMN – we’re seeing the same thing at BP3, though we’re not as involved in BPMN training.  Good to see that market validation.  I think it is also a symptom of more organizations looking to extend BPM implementations beyond the project.

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…

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.

Bruce Silver has periodic updates on his training offerings, and when we pick up on them I’ll reference them here, because I think his courses offer a good opportunity for people to get a better sense of BPM. The latest update is a bit of an F.A.Q. for BPMN Training, and includes information about certification, standards, etc.:

I provide BPMN training through a variety of channels.  Right now, the only one that offers certification is BPMessentials, which is a joint venture of Bruce Silver Associates and itp commerce, maker of the Process Modeler for Visio BPMN tool.  The standard BPMessentials online training (wtc.01), private on-site 2-day classes, and the 2-day public classes offered four times a year through Brainstorm/BPMInstitute all include certification.  An abridged BPMessentials Level 1-only class (wtc.l1.01) and classes based on Microsoft Visio Premium 2010 do not come with certification.

Bruce Silver reminds us that he has helped IBM to produce free training videos for Blueworks Live:

With the recent launch of Blueworks Live, IBM has posted an updated version of a set of training videos called Process Mapping 101.  Together with colleague Shelley Sweet of I4 Process, I created the original set for Lombardi back in 2008 , and the new version updates it to Blueworks Live.

There is a registration form to get started, but not a bad price for 2 hours of content!

Missed this when it first ran on Bruce’s site, but he now has a review out for DST’s AWD:

One of the oldest BPMS’s around is one you may not have heard of: AWD from DST Technologies.  If you send in a check to fund your retirement account or pay an insurance premium, chances are good that AWD is running the process to handle that transaction and the customer service surrounding it. [...] They call it a BPMS-enabled application rather than a platform.  The basic structure of the app is prebuilt, along with key data objects needed in operations that capture customer transactions and handle customer service.  That means business can build and maintain the solutions themselves… something many still insist cannot be done.

Bruce has a white paper available that goes into more detail.

Bruce Silver’s blog billed this review as a way to determine which IBM product to use, but really it is a very in-depth review of the Dynamic Edition product offering.  Still, well worth reading if you’re an IBM shop or considering this product offering.

Bruce Silver is the gold standard for BPMN modeling training.  He also often gets the last word on subjects relating to BPMN:

All of the recent to-do from Jim Sinur and others about how business people don’t want to be constrained by no stinkin’ rules is just one side of the story.  The people who come to me for training have a different view.  They say, “We have lots of groups in the company doing process modeling.  But everyone does it their own way, and the models can’t be shared or integrated with each other.  So a lot of our investment in process modeling so far can’t really be leveraged.”

Bruce goes on to describe, quite eloquently, what I believe is one of the chief attractions of BPMN:

The value of the hierarchical style is that you can visually understand the end-to-end process (and its touchpoints with the global environment) on one page, and zoom in and out to see detail at any level… all within the confines of a single semantic model. It reflects what could be called an “architectural” approach to process modeling, the way business architects and enterprise architects like to think about it. In contrast, the traditional approach, creating separate high-level and detailed models, requires continual manual synchronization as the model(s) evolve over time.

Not everyone sees the value in the single semantic model.

I’ve also seen value in building process models for several related processes (a process cluster, if you will), and then rationalizing these individual processes with a larger conceptual process that contains and incorporates them all.  The rationalizing often uncovers interesting corner cases and use cases that weren’t previously well thought-out- and also uncovers serious opportunities for re-use at the implementation level.  This approach more frequently happens in BPM projects that evolve into programs, but can also happen within the context of a program that explicitly decides not to try to tackle the (admittedly) harder problem of having all the processes within a cluster participate in the larger process and so they get their feet wet with processes in isolation at first.