Can anyone help me understand how (or if) ESB fits in a BPMS? In the mountains of blather you can Google on either topic I can't find anything that makes sense about how the work together! In fact, the more I try to understand ESB the confuseder I get. For clarity, let's just consider BPEL-based BPMSs like IBM, Oracle, Intalio... Is ESB an inherent/invisible capability of these offerings (I think not) or something that can be added on in some implementations (I think so, but not sure)? What do you get with the ESB version that you don't with the non-ESB version?
There seems to be redundancy between what the BPMS provides and what the ESB provides, including integration adapters, data transformation tools and engines, and of course a BPEL tool and engine. So are they sort of the same thing (except for BPMS's "business-oriented" things like process modeling, performance management, and business rules that no self-respecting SOA Architect would be caught dead worrying about)? I don't think so.
It's good to see Workflow Management Coalition's Keith Swenson blogging now. Keith, whose actual livelihood is as chief architect of Fujitsu's BPMS, has done heroic service over the years in advancing BPM standards consistent with the WfMC reference model, such as XPDL, ASAP, and others. His recent post "Workflow is Back" reflects the irritation of many who are continually forced to watch BPM startups tout their "invention" of functionality that has existed in workflow products for over a decade, followed by lavish praise from industry analysts too young to know better. He also notes that all major workflow offerings have long provided application integration in addition to human tasks -- how could they solve real problems if they didn't? His major beef, though, is over vendors' wholesale abandonment of the term workflow in favor of BPM, when there is in fact little or no distinction between them -- implicitly validating the contention that "workflow failed" as a software technology. Being an engineer, naturally he blames it on "marketing fluff."
BPM is about empowering people. It was co-opted by integration vendors, who took it down an IT-centric path. ? Connie Moore, Forrester. [Note: Forrester has separate analysts and ?waves? for human-centric and integration-centric BPM. Guess which is Connie?s?] The ultimate goal of BPM is self-aware processes that can recommend changes to process owners. ? Connie again. [Yeah, I hear businesses asking for that all the time.] Portability of process templates was never a goal of BPEL, just interoperability [i.
If it were anyone else but Ismael Ghalimi, I would have simply muttered "idiotic" and moved on without a second thought. But when a guy at the top of my BPM hero list declares that "nobody cares about BPM" any more, my actual reaction was dismay and mild depression. The apparent basis for Ismael's loss of faith: the fact that Google Trends shows searches on "bpm" have declined since 2004, while searches on "soa" have gone up!
OK, to me that reasoning does seem idiotic, while to those who have moved to a more Googlicious orbit it probably carries the aura of Delphic certainty. And, to be honest, I'd probably be heartened myself if searches on "bpm" were on the upswing, even though, as Lombardi's Jim Rudden points out, to most of the world bpm still means "beats per minute" - I searched just now and the number one listing is about "DJ culture and the electronic music lifestyle."
In a followup piece, Ismael tries to put on a happier face by saying BPM is probably still tainted by 1980s Hammer-Champy baggage, but could be made "cooler" if, following the suggestions of Dion Hinchcliffe and Sandy Kemsley, it took on the personality of an "enterprise mashup." Dion's article is kind of interesting, but it's not about processes I recognize from today's BPM mainstream. If I were an entrepreneur or VC looking at new opportunities, I'm sure I'd see mashup-style BPM as a more attractive idea than conventional BPMS today, but not because nobody cares about BPM. (Actually, if you're reading this and have no idea what an enterprise mashup is, you're far more likely to be a potential BPM buyer than someone who does!)
[my latest BPMS Watch column on BPMInstitute.org]
The annual BPM Think Tank, now in its second iteration, is an event I?ve been looking forward to all year. Unlike most BPM conferences, which are generally aimed at helping newbies get started, Think Tank is a forum where experienced BPM vendors, analysts, academics, and user organizations come to discuss what needs to come next in terms of technical standards, software capabilities, and overall business value from business process technology. The event is hosted by OMG, the standards organization that last year absorbed BPMI.org, the original creator of the Business Process Modeling Notation -- the emerging standard for process modeling and, increasingly, for business-driven process design.
This evening, before the event got underway, a number of Think Tank leaders gathered in an informal dinner meeting to discuss a new proposal not even on the official agenda: a way to query running BPM systems about process performance, from the state of an individual process instance to aggregated metrics displayable in a management dashboard. The idea, variously called the Business Process Performance Management Interface or the Business Process Runtime Interface, would complement BPMN?s focus on process modeling and design.
For me, the most troubling part of the BPM Think Tank event was my roundtable on The Business Value of BPMS. The roundtable format was an open-ended discussion with 10-12 attendees on a specific topic, formulating a problem statement and then a proposed ideal future state. I expected a discussion about which of BPMS's putative benefits -- business/IT alignment, process efficiency, compliance, agility, and performance visibility -- was most valuable to the business or had some issue blocking full realization.
Don't ask me how, but Ismael turned the hubbub over BPM vs SOA into a discussion of top-down vs "middle-out." Both threads (including comments) are semi-instructive, but somehow in the course of things he challenged me to come up with proof that top-down (i.e. BPM implementation driven from the business model) has ever worked. The challenge came in the form of a double-dog dare, with the promise of a trip to Hawaii tacked on if I could come up with 3 top-down implementations that met his "
The following is my latest column for BPM Institute:
You can?t attend a BPM conference or webcast nowadays without hearing how SOA provides the critical technology underpinnings of BPM software. And there is even a grain of truth in that statement. For example, most BPM Suites provide integration adapters that can introspect backend systems and turn them into process components that are, in an important sense, service-oriented: Regardless of the internal platform, programming API, or data model of the backend system, integration adapters can expose functions of those systems via XML parameters, perhaps even an actual WSDL, and allow the process engine to orchestrate them without code. That?s huge, really the key to making application integration more agile and enabling point-and-click composition of end-to-end process implementations.
But in the SOA world, that?s not really SOA.
Yesterday Gartner unveiled their magic quadrant for BPM Suites. For those unfamiliar with the format, it's a square in which the horizontal dimension represents "completeness of vision" and the vertical represents "ability to execute". Only BPMS products meeting Gartner's feature/capability checklist are eligible to compete. The evaluation is generally via a questionnaire and interviews and the result is a dot somewhere in the square, which is divided into 4 quadrants. The upper right "
One of the trends I detected at the Brainstorm BPM Conference in San Francisco this week is an effort to make BPM more engaging to users via Web 2.0 and Ajax. This dovetails with Ismael's suggestions about how to make BPM cool again. Adobe is now all over Flex and Flash technology to turn what we used to call "forms" into animated, engaging end user experiences (online or off) for, say, the applicant for a loan or potential purchaser of some good or service.