Long-time readers of BPMS Watch know I’ve learned the hard way that to most people who self-identify with an interest in BPM, the big leap is not executing the process and rules but simply documenting it, writing it down. Now that I’m waist-deep in that world myself with the new BPMN training, I decided to trek over to IDS Scheer’s user conference in Florida. It’s been an eye-opener for sure.
I missed Day 1 (see Sandy for details), and for me Day 2 has been mostly about the technology – keynote on BPM and SOA by IDS Scheer CTO Dr Wolfram Jost, Devesh Sharma on how ARIS (I mean Oracle BPA Suite) enables business-IT collaboration, a one-on-one with Dr Jost, and to provide a little balance, a user case study, in this case a Coca Cola bottler. The case study essentially confirmed my biases going in: “We documented our processes, made the documentation available online, and this saved us half a million dollars.” Not, “we did detailed modeling and simulation analysis”, and certainly not “we automated execution of the process and business rules.” Just “we documented how the current process works.” I didn’t go to any other case studies, but I think Sandy hints at this with the business about “we’re just getting started in BPM” etc.
So my one on one with Dr Jost was pretty interesting. Like, why couldn’t these users just write it down in Microsoft Word instead of ARIS, and save half a million dollars just as well? Essentially it comes down to consistency – through the enterprise repository, structure of the notation and metamodel, the ARIS Value Engineering methodology, etc. I’m sure that helps, but basically it’s about writing it down so that people can start the conversation about how messed up things really are.
In his keynote this morning, Dr Jost mentioned a piece of the ARIS platform that does something pretty amazing. You instrument the systems that perform pieces of the process, e.g. SAP, and the software not only measures the KPIs but automatically generates the model! Jost said something interesting in the keynote: Does it make sense to take 6 months to model your processes? No, they have changed by then. Autogenerate them instead.
Wow. webMethods and Lombardi talk about instrumenting the process activities and measuring KPIs before creating a model, but ARIS actually creates the model for you. I gotta see this. They’ve had it for 3 years, but nobody seems to know about it. Least of all their customers (who have taken 6 months to model their processes).
SOA is a big theme this year. Since IDS Scheer’s execution-level partners are guys like SAP, Oracle, Tibco, Fujitsu, and Microsoft, SOA is generally equated with the process execution layer, which is not what ARIS does. But there is a big gap between “business BPM” and process execution in SOA – essentially modeling the business services – that ARIS is moving to fill. To IDS Scheer, business BPM is “the process of business process” – I don’t know, maybe it gets lost in translation – essentially tying together process strategy with process design, implementation, and “controlling” (management), and ARIS is the platform that supports the process of process management. What they don’t do is “technical BPM”, i.e. process execution. That role is filled by their partners, i.e. middleware and enterprise app vendors, and to an extent, BPMS vendors.
The gap in between is the domain of the “business service”, which they define as an API accessed over the network to perform a business activity. The definition was carefully crafted to indicate business services require collaboration by business and IT. What is the right scope of a business service? Too coarse-grained and you lose flexibility, too fine-grained and you lose manageability. I agree, but not clear yet how ARIS provides the answer.
ARIS is entering the SOA domain by extending its modeling down into that gap. Below the business model, enterprise model, and business process model is the “EA/Business Service model” and below that the “pre-executable process model” using BPEL. That’s as far as ARIS goes. The next layer down, executable processes (in BPEL), is partner-specific. The new ARIS SOA Designer supports business service definition and design. It sounds more enterprise architect-oriented than business-oriented, but Jost insists it’s intended to encourage collaboration between business and IT.
Oracle’s Devesh Sharma plowed similar turf in his talk. We’ve written about this before, but now they’re almost ready to ship the product. Oracle’s BPA Suite is ARIS plus some Oracle SOA extensions that flesh out the mapping to the executable BPEL process – human tasks, business rules, stuff that BPEL leaves out. The thing they used to call Outliner is now called Oracle Business Process Blueprint. From what I could see in the demo, it’s really two things: 1) extensions to BPEL to hold info from the process model that standard BPEL doesn’t provide, what Oracle calls “shared metadata”; and 2) a new graphical notation to display/enter that metadata, which is essentially ARIS Event-driven Process Chains (EPC) with the shapes changed to look like BPMN shapes and the overall look similar to Oracle’s BPEL Process Designer. (EPC and BPMN are not all that different semantically, but a little.) Is adding a hybrid notation moving the ball forward? Not sure. I asked Dr Jost if they could envision supporting a future version of BPMN that merged it with EPC. The answer, very polite and diplomatic, was basically no.
Other notes of interest:
- the metadata Oracle uses to describe human workflow in Blueprint will be submitted for inclusion in the BPEL4People spec from OASIS.
- the business rule infrastructure supports any business rule engine and repository – Oracle, ILOG, Blaze, or Corticon. The tooling allows you to introspect the rule repository to map rules to model activities.
- Oracle is busy building reference models for Fusion apps, including business objects and high-level processes, detailed activity flows, and the activities themselves. Right now about 3 industry models, 22 high-level process models, and 200 detailed process models.
Hi Bruce,
It’s indeed suprising that the BPM industry is not yet very much aware of “business process mining”. Business process mining is a technology that allows one to automatically generate process models and other organizational models from event logs (e.g. SAP logs). If you wish to know more about this technology and how it can be applied to real-life scenarios, I very much recommend the following paper:
http://is.tm.tue.nl/staff/wvdaalst/publications/z7.pdf
IDS Scheer is one of the first vendors that has integrated this technology into its offering, but as we speak, there are other vendors following up this trail.
marlon
Hi Bruce,
Have I missed something? You wrote: “BPEL4People spec from OASIS” Since when is BPEL4People an OASIS spec or even an official proposal?
Nice article!
fabian
Let us forgive Bruce for this lapsus linguae.
On the other hand, this raises once again the question: Why on earth is someone standardising a language for defining so-called “business processes” that can not be used by people? Somehow, the standardization of task management should have occurred in parallel with that of BPEL rather than after the fact. Unavoidably, vendors have already defined their own task management interfaces and standardisation in this space now risks to be a long and painful process…
Hi Bruce,
when I first saw the presentation of ARIS Process Performance Manager, the tool that is supposed to automagicaly draw the processes, I got very exited too. On a second look it still is a very good a powerful product, but it can’t do magic. It can generate the diagrams of every single one instance of a process executed in the company, like for example: Show me how the order fulfilment process ran with this particular order! However it can generate these processes only after it knows how the individual activities are implemented in information systems. And this is the price one has to pay to get all the automagic functionality: bind ARIS PPM to every event that is related to the generated processes. So instead of designing the processes from scratch and in a top-down way, you design the process fragments bottom-up and bind it to the implementation in IS.
It is an interesting option to top-down modelling. Doing this for the whole company might be much harder (read more expensive) that the standard way. Doing it for a few critical processes, can be much faster than modelling with top-down approach and bring huge savings relatively fast.
DISCLAIMER: My opinion is based on presentation and papers, I don’t use PPM.
Re the BPEL4People remark… Perhaps I overstated Devesh’s remark. He described what Oracle was doing and commented they had submitted or possibly would be submitting this as part of the BPEL4People proposal. He did not say OASIS, but I just assumed that’s where, since that’s where the original white paper came from. I don’t doubt that no spec yet exists, but let’s get real… these things don’t pop up out of thin air. A lot of discussion among the vendors takes place before such things are unleashed on the public. Sorry for the confusion (if there really was any).
As to Marlon’s comment on this, I agree human workflow should have been taken up in BPEL 1.1 and shame on IBM for not doing so. But — again reading between the lines — what Oracle is doing, using a task management service in conjunction with standard BPEL Invoke — seems to me far better than IBM/SAP’s suggested new People activity, which would break ALL standard BPEL 1.1 or 2.0 engines. Standardizing the task management service is what I advocated all along, so I wish Oracle success in whatever negotiations they have going with IBM and SAP over this.
Hi Bruce,
Recently we have been testing thoroughly the IDS products. They are positioned on the old ERPs, they does not handle BPEL and they do not do SOA . They use the look and feel of BPMN on his owner EPC to deceive the rash ones. Definitely, IDS/ARIS is NOTHING about BPMN.
Bruce,
Good ‘cutting-edge’ observations on autogeneration of process models.
When I was on the buy side evaluating BPM vendors, some of them provided the capability to import Visio models. Their rationale was that most companies have significant (time) investment locked up in their Visio diagrams, so an automated import would be beneficial. I think that argument is sound. However, one thought leader advised against it (at least, hesaid you should revalidate the imported models).
The problem is that many of the Visio diagrams are very information poor or they may not follow a consistent diagramming standards. This can cause problems within the BPM platforms. This isn’t a knock against Visio; it just wasn’t designed from the ground up to capture rich process information.
This brings me to another point. When my team and I did process modeling workouts, all participants felt that they were coming away with a shared understanding of the business. As you suggest, no one should be modeling for six months. With the right tools and methodology, though, modeling of complex processes need only take a couple of days to one week (this assumes that all subject matter experts are fully dedicated and available).
My fear is that with autogeneration of models, these valuable insights would be lost. After all, it is not just documentation of these models, but analyzing them and coming up with process improvement ideas that is so important.
I’ve written more on my post at http://www.bpmenterprise.com/blog/archive/lizard_tails_and_autogeneration.html.
I’d love to hear thoughts from you and your readers.
Lizard tails and autogeneration…
I grew up in a part of the planet where lizards are kept as pets in homes (more accurately, the homeowners really have no choice). Occasionally, a cat would pounce on one. Then, something magical happened: the lizard would detach its ……
[…] This simple control flow aspect was what led me to ask Dr Jost yesterday if he could envision merging BPMN and EPC someday (he couldn’t). The difference seems to be not so much in the events as in all the other stuff – the who, what, which, why – hanging off of each activity in the EPC. The organizational responsibilities, the business objects, the products and services, the applications… most of that “stuff” is absent from BPMN, and most BPMN advocates would say “good” to that. That’s because BPMN is about detailed modeling of processes one at a time, simulating their performance, and possibly driving an executable implementation. Not what ARIS is trying to do at all. […]
[…] The coolest thing I saw at Process World was definitely ARIS Process Performance Manager (PPM), specifically its ability to autogenerate the as-is model from instrumenting the backend systems that perform its activities. IDS CTO Wolfram Jost mentioned this in his keynote, and there were a number of comments about it in my Almost Live… post on Thursday. If you missed the thread, Marlon Dumas pointed me to an excellent academic paper on this technology, called “process mining,” by Wil van der Aalst and colleagues. Others commented that it couldn’t do magic, and Kiran Garimella did a strange riff on it as well. I obviously didn’t explain it very well, because at that time I hadn’t seen it. But now I have. It’s not magic at all, and still I think very cool. And something Kiran might actually want to take a second look at for webMethods. […]