Bpms

What BPMS Can Learn From Business Rule Management

[Here is my latest BPMS Watch column going up today on BPM Institute]

One of the core promises of BPMS is that it lets process owners on the business side model, monitor, and maintain their own process implementations. While chronically backlogged IT is hypersensitive to the charge that they take too long to respond to the changing demands of business, it still resists ceding to the business the power to maintain business process solutions themselves, much less build them from scratch. In fact, for many architects and developers the mere suggestion of business-driven implementation taints the whole BPMS concept. Yet business rule management systems (BRMS), facing similar issues, seem to have achieved a win-win for business-IT collaboration. How they?ve done it provides three valuable lessons for BPMS vendors.

BEA's Take on BPM-SOA

While all BPMS vendors today mumble something about SOA, BEA Systems is one of very few that are making sense. They acknowledge that you can do BPM either with or without SOA, and that doing it without SOA is quicker and easier, but go on to say that as BPM deployments proliferate in the enterprise, doing it with SOA is ultimately better. And they provide software to do it either way. Quoting from CEO Alfred Chuang's August newsletter,

Today, as we work with customers moving to SOA and learn from their practical experience, it is becoming clear that although BPM can be effectively deployed without SOA, there is a strong synergistic benefit in combining BPM?s set of coordinated activities with the architectural benefits of SOA. ...

BPM on SOA: What Would It Look Like? - Part 1

BPMS vendors love to throw a bone to SOA, and if you weren't paying attention you might even think that BPM on SOA was real. I've written at length about how BPM and SOA aren't enemies but natural allies, but they are allies with distinctly different goals and aspirations and mental models of the world. Kind of like America and France.

Following his post on the subject, I've been having a side conversation with Jesper Joergensen of BEA about what real BPM on SOA would look like. I admit I'm still trying to figure it out. Here's where I am so far.

Can Your BPMS Give Advice?

Even though the meat-and-potatoes of BPM 2.0 -- business-oriented, top-down model-driven process implementation (without code), based on some form of SOA -- hasn't yet been finished, BPMS vendors want to skip ahead to dessert, with system-generated recommendations on how to optimize the process design. Lombardi was the first out with this, but now both BEA and Savvion are planning to offer a similar concept in their next major releases.

BPEL Bashing Redux: Seeking a Middle Ground

Human-centric BPMers' lack of love for BPEL is today taken for granted, but who knew there were BPEL-haters out there in the SOA world as well? After taking a look at the BPEL 2.0 spec, Dave Linthicum tries to reignite the bashing, based mostly on the facts that 1) processes still aren't portable and 2) BPEL 2.0 is not backward-compatible with BPEL 1.1. Active Endpoints' Fred Holahan counters with a spirited defense of BPEL. He says yes, BPEL is not 100% runtime-portable, but it is "knowledge-portable" -- I guess sort of a process modeling language for programmers?

While I don't think of myself as a BPEL-lover, I actually come down more on Fred's side here than Daves's. And I've moved to a more nuanced view that might provide a middle ground.

Home Stretch for BPEL 2.0

BPEL 2.0, the long-awaited love-child of the OASIS WS-BPEL TC, is at last in its final public comment phase. See John Evdemon's blog for all the links. Sure, conventional wisdom says two years is a long time to change Switch to If-then, but if Assaf's comments are correct, fixing BPEL 1.1's primitive data manipulation syntax may prove to be a far more significant change. Once the thing is finally approved we can anticipate a ripple effect on BPMSes, and a round of new questions.

Almost Live from Process World

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.

G360 Update

I had a briefing recently with Global 360's CEO Michael Crosno, and it's interesting to see how far that organization has come since the management buyout last year. Although G360 is one of the largest BPM vendors from a total software revenue perspective - Gartner/DQ had them #2 to DST in 2005, but... well, let's let Gartner defend their own numbers - they don't get a lot of respect, or even recognition, outside of their base of 1900+ customers.

Ken Orr on Case Management

[Submitted via email re my What is Case Management? column on bpminstitute.org. Posted with Ken's permission.] I enjoyed your article on BPM and CASE management. It is a sticky subject. The BPM folks don't understand CASE management very well, and unfortunately, the CASE management folks don't understand BPM any better. At the heart of the problem is that "CASE Management" is a catchall phrase that is often simply a glorified electronic filing system.

Lombardi Blueprint Eases the Path to BPM

While I've been shouting from the rooftops that process modeling (in BPMN, ARIS, or whatever) is not that hard, Lombardi Software has been hearing from its customers that it's not that easy, either. The tools are complex, expensive, and only a small fraction of their features are used. Collaborating on models - while they're being developed - is near impossible. Making the models understandable to executives or business users means reducing them to a simple Powerpoint diagram or Visio flowchart. So process modeling - step #1 in the process of BPM - is already a barrier.

That barrier is what Lombardi aims to blow away with Blueprint, launched officially today. I've seen a lot of tools that the vendor insists is cool and different, but Blueprint really is cool and different.