Keith Swenson has a nice post on the representation of human choice in BPMN. He objects to the use of a gateway to represent a human decision at the end of a task, like clicking either Approve or Reject. Instead he proposes a new boundary event for this purpose (he suggests the None boundary event, currently [...]
Keith Swenson's Go Flow blog continues to produce thought-provoking discussions of BPM issues. Check it out if you are not a subscriber. His latest concerns simulation, one of my hot buttons. A couple years ago I wrote that simulation was a "fake feature" - one of those things vendors put in the tool to tick [...]
In IBM's BPM Suite, the default or foundational offering on the WebSphere side is something called WebSphere Dynamic Process Edition. Here the term 'dynamic process' isn't just the usual marketing doublespeak, but a fundamentally different way of modeling and executing processes, particularly customer-facing ones. It refers to the myriad of process variations that result from differences [...]
SAP is probably the world's leading supplier of process automation software. Over half of the world?s business transactions, involving 12 Million users in 120 countries, touch one of 140,000 SAP systems. But the company is only now entering the "BPM market" with the launch of NetWeaver BPM, part of the NetWeaver middleware platform. You would not [...]
[My November column on BPMInstitute.org] Nobody really cares about standards? until suddenly they do. When a standard reaches some threshold of adoption, a tipping point is reached. Then, if you?re not on the standard you?re proprietary. Legacy. A dinosaur. Not where you want to be. By this time next year we may see that tipping [...]
Anyone interested in the history of BPM technology (brief as it is) should not miss Ismael Ghalimi's recounting of it, "Why All This Matters." As a seminal figure in that history, his discussion of the relationship between BPMN and BPEL, the two important standards in BPM, is especially notable. Neither standard is perfect. But while BPMN has [...]
I will be chairing an all new BPMS Track at BPMInstitute.org's upcoming BPM Conference in New York City at The Roosevelt Hotel (November 5-6). This track analyzes the latest generation of BPM Suites, and features an extended panel on November 5 in which leading vendors show how their offerings address key topics such as business-IT alignment, [...]
They would say they never left it, but from a marketing perspective Savvion is suddenly re-emerging from a quiet period with the introduction of version 7.5 and related vertical application initiatives. Since the beginning of the year they have been able to right the ship financially - reporting 6% net profit for the fiscal year, and 16% [...]
At Oracle Open World yesterday, industry analysts got a good look at Oracle's BPM strategy and roadmap in the wake of the BEA acquisition. Overall, my conclusion is Oracle is showing the rest of the world the right way to do software acquisitions. BPM is progressing along the path of "interoperate, integrate, unify" that Oracle claims it [...]
In addition to my 2-day class on Process Modeling with BPMN, I will be chairing an all new BPMS Track at BPMInstitute.org's upcoming BPM Conference in San Francisco (September 30-October 1). This new track is dedicated to matching BPM technology to your specific requirements and features, and features in-depth comparison of BPM Suite offerings. As [...]