Uniting Lombardi’s business-empowered process tooling with WPS horsepower and integration was a brilliant move by IBM, one that makes them, in my view, the clear BPMS thought leader (in addition to #1 in market share).  But I am willing to bet that if you took IBM’s top 20 BPM customers and had a way of identifying the most important BPM initiatives in those organizations, only a small percentage of them would be focused on a BPMS solution.  Most projects aimed at process improvement, redesign, optimization, innovation, re-engineering — whatever you call it – do not center on a BPMS solution.  They do, however, rely on business process modeling and analysis. It’s the part of BPM that most of the business architects, business analysts, and Lean/SixSigma people in those companies – let’s call them professional process modelers –  are involved with.  It’s the part of BPM that the business side of those enterprises calls “strategic.”  Unfortunately, it’s the part of BPM that IBM – or at least the Software Group – does not seem to care about.

IBM says that few models created by the professional process analysts ever convert to runtime  BPMS licenses, and I have no doubt that’s true.  But partly that’s because conversion in the past has been so hard, and modeling for analysis and modeling for execution have used completely different languages.  And that’s precisely the part that got fixed by the move to BPMN in v7.5!

They say they have a tool for the pure process modeler: BlueWorks Live.  That’s true, but it’s not a tool for the professional process modeler.  In fact, it’s intentionally a tool for the amateur process modeler, the pure business user as opposed to business process analyst or architect.  The palette of shapes is just too small to do anything serious.  It’s fine for high-level diagrams, and it would probably make a cool iPad app.  But for that fraction of BPM projects that do make it over the hump to BPMS implementation, it’s just a requirements-sketcher.  It can’t roundtrip process models with the BPMS.  The real tool for professional process modelers, going forward, is Process Designer.  But, you say, that’s not standalone, it’s part of the BPMS.  So you need to commit to the BPMS before you can begin process modeling.  Blueworks Live and Process Designer both have a place, but there is a giant donut hole in the middle.

You may recall that IBM had (technically still has) a standalone process modeling/analysis tool, called WebSphere Business Modeler (WBM), that could share artifacts with the BPMS… sort of.  I was never a huge fan.  It was conceptually tied to data flows (“business items”) that didn’t fit well with BPMN, and it didn’t support events, and it didn’t use the same process language as the BPMS… so roundtripping was never very good.  The irony is that a year ago they introduced a bolt-on to WBM called Compass.  It had a real BPMN editor, browser-based, and there was also a free cloud-based version, called BlueWorks.  It was much more of a tool for professional modelers, but nowhere near as complex and heavyweight as architect tools like ARIS or MEGA.  Now I am probably the only person on the planet who would say that Blueworks/Compass was a better tool than Lombardi Blueprint.  It was, but when Blueprint became Blueworks Live, Blueworks became Blueworks Dead.  And from my conversations with them at Impact, the deciders at IBM seems pretty set that the go-forward investments will be Blueworks Live and Process Designer.  Period.  Donut hole or not.

For the past year, many students in my BPMN training have been asking when IBM – their default provider – would be supporting BPMN in their modeling tool.  Now the answer is more complicated than I thought it would be.