Are you as sick as I am of so-called “architects” swiftboating BPM with phony strawman arguments? Here’s the latest, from blogger Nick Malik:
I like point out really nutty ideas, even when a lot of people have spent a lot of time investing in them….
[BPM] created pretty languages for describing business processes, and we started telling the business that once business processes are described using these languages, then you can push a button and “viola” the process becomes automated. According to the ‘true believers,’ we can give end users one of our pretty languages (BPMN or BPEL) and they will write their own software, and we can fire all the IT developers.Nick, your post is not so much nutty as scurrilous. It’s plain false, but it fits a recurring pattern in our culture: Repeat a charge long enough and people start to believe it. Please tell me, who in the BPM community is saying these things? I challenge you to do it. And don’t tell me some joker in the next cubicle. A BPM vendor, authoritative consultant or blogger, whatever. Let’s have the links. Put up or shut up.
Let’s hypothesize that Nick has some clue about what BPM is, even though BPMN can not by itself generate implementation (it’s just activity flow modeling) and BPEL is definitely a developer language, not for ‘end users’. (Maybe Nick thinks that only Java programmers are ‘real’ developers?) BPM Suites based on BPMN do provide a more agile implementation style in which business and developers collaborate on process automation. But not all BPM solutions are best implemented by BPM Suites, and not all business solutions are best handled by BPM. No one is saying those things. So stop the swiftboating. Please.
It does not sound like the author has spent time with BPEL or BPMN as I really do not think anyone who has directly used BPEL would ever describe it as “pretty”.
Besides, the article and author misses the real point. BPM is about enabling Business and IT to work better together. The newer languages allow for a common deployable model that both business and IT can work from and understand. Sometimes architects and developers forget that they only exist to better enable the business, but it would be good for them to remember that from time to time.
Well, you just keep cranking out the blogs… I just got here from your recent blast on BPM Institute… trying to keep up, but hey, I have a real job… anyway, while I understand both sides of this – I think, I have to interject here on behalf of the misguided (or perhaps just unimaginative) Mr. Malik… perhaps he isn’t intentionally promoting half-truths, but basically he is stating what a lot of people seem to hear when they don’t listen carefully… you ask for sources… re-read BPM the Third Wave and the blizzard of articles that followed on its heels… one representative quote, for example: “The third wave of BPM does more than facilitate process design. It provides
a direct path from vision to execution. It?s not so much a matter of ?rapid application development? as ?remove application development? from the business cycle. Show the BPM capability to any executive, at any level, and they?ll understand inside five minutes how to break through the IT logjam. Some may still want to prevent managers from defining business processes themselves, saying it?s too complex a job and should be left to specialists. That may be true right now, but?”
Now if that’s all you read, you might think, as Mr. Malik seems to, that this claims you can hand over process design and implementation to business people “right now”, but in context, what Fingar & Smith are presenting is a vision, a goal, a direction to be heading in… no you can’t do that right now and no, they are not suggesting that you can… but they are saying that this is the goal of BPM and where it is heading… so there’s one response to your challenge… and right behind Fingar & Smith there were a many others, myself included, who made similar statements – to set the vision – for the direction to be moving in. Heck, that was what BPML & BPMN and remember “BPQL”? They were supposed to be one of the steps toward that future.
However, too many times people heard that and felt threatened or just refused to believe that we would ever get to such a place. I know that it is possible and that we are not as far away as we thought we were in 2003-2004 when those kinds of goal statements were more common. So concentrate on real issues… admit it when you (we, whoever) slips in a little hyperbole and move on… swift-boating? I think not. Confused – yeah sure, but it’s easy to get confused by all the tons of stuff you have to wade through to find anything useful or interesting these days…
I remember when the same “controversy” went on in data management when “real DBAs” laughed at the idea that RDBMS and the design principles it brought with it was totally impractical – it’ll never work, too slow, and that SQL (& QBE) what a joke- first of all, it’s too weird, and users will never be able to write their own queries and even if we let them try, they’ll just screw things up… well, for a few years, they were kind of right, but it didn’t take very long at all until RDBMS was the dominant model and all that other stuff was a drag on progress and we got rid of it as quickly as we could. So let those who are “slow” (conservative, unchangeable, entrenched, whatever) alone. Be nice to them. Feel pity for them, because they will still be trying to figure out what happened long after the world has moved on and left them sitting there playing with their mud pies
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Brett,
Thanks for weighing in. I agree Third Wave made some of those claims back in 2002 (not 2003-4). But that’s ancient history. Whether as reality or vision, no reputable vendor or analyst is making such claims today, and Mr Malik was unable to point to any when challenged to do so. While the claim does not exist, the cheap strawman dismissals by a few, like Mr Malik, continue, as if repetition makes it more true. That’s why the term swift-boating is appropriate.
–Bruce