In client engagements, I am seeing growing interest in what Trisotech calls Business Automation as a Service. I am seeing it particularly in financial services, but I expect it applies in health care and other verticals as well. Financial services, for so long reliant on legacy applications, is now racing to create new cloud-based apps built on modern architecture, where business automation services built with BPMN and DMN are a great fit.
BPMN has a way to say an activity should be performed more than once. In fact, it has multiple ways, and students in my BPMN Method and Style training sometimes get them confused. This post will clear things up. A Loop activity is like a Do-While loop in programming. It means perform the activity once - it could be either a task or subprocess - and then test the loop exit condition, a Boolean expression of process data.
In BPMN, the most common way information is provided to a process from an external source is via a message. Incoming messages are indicated in the diagram by a dashed arrow connector called a message flow, with its tail on a black-box pool or a message node in another process pool and its arrow on a message node in the receiving process, either an activity or message event. In our BPMN Method and Style training, which focuses on non-executable processes, we discuss at length the semantics and usage patterns of messages and message events.
BPMN's advocates - myself included - like to proclaim that the language allows non-programmers to define executable processes themselves. But that's only one-third true. Yes, in BPMN 2.0 the executable process steps through the shapes of the diagram as drawn by the modeler. That in itself was a monumental achievement a decade ago. "What you model is what you execute," we liked to say. But it left out two key ingredients that still required programming.
It's now 10 years since finalization of BPMN 2.0, the acknowledged standard business process description language. BPMN has been widely adopted, by tool vendors and end users alike, but there are still some folks just discovering it for the first time. Because of BPMN's outward similarity to traditional swimlane flowcharts, many of those users think they understand BPMN but are making some fundamental mistakes. This month's post attempts to set things straight by explaining the basic concepts of BPMN.
Last time I talked about how information is passed to a BPMN process from outside. All modelers need to understand that. This month I'm going to talk about data inside a BPMN process. If you are a typical process modeler, this is something you can usually safely ignore, because it pertains only to executable models. But recently it came up in a question from a former student, and I see there was also some recent discussion of it on LinkedIn, where my name was invoked.
One aspect of BPMN that usually surprises newbies is attention to what entities or actors are inside the process vs outside. In traditional flowcharting, for example, the Customer is often represented as a swimlane in the Seller's process, but not so in BPMN. A BPMN process represents one participant's view of the steps, that of the process automation engine... no matter that few BPMN models are intended for automation. The Seller typically has no knowledge of the Customer's process.
Fannie Mae is one of two major Government Sponsored Entities (GSEs) underpinning the residential mortgage market in the USA. They supply liquidity to the system by purchasing mortgages from lenders and repackaging them as interest-paying securities sold to investors. Without them, we wouldn't have the low-rate long-term fixed rate loans that so many home buyers depend on. Recently Fannie published a white paper titled "Without Data Standards, the Mortgage Industry Doesn't Go Digital.
When BPMN 2.0 was developed a decade ago, the task force’s primary goal was making BPMN models directly executable on an automation engine, something that wasn’t exactly possible with BPMN 1.x. Consequently, the rules of the BPMN spec focused almost exclusively on “operational semantics.” In doing so, they lost sight of what the majority of BPMN users cared about much more, which is making the process logic clearly understandable from the diagrams.
Over the summer I have been hard at work on a new kind of BPMN training, an app completely based on gamification. Today it's ready and open to the public. Called bpmnPRO, it covers the same material as my BPMessentials BPMN Method and Style training, but in a complementary way. In addition to explaining how to use the important BPMN shapes and symbols, the BPMessentials training is long on explanation of concepts and context: how is BPMN similar to and different from traditional flowcharting?