The State of BPM: Perspectives of an Industry Insider By Kevin Spurway

Oct 11

“The BPM industry is awash in hype” declares Kevin Spurway, warning that vendor hype has created market confusion about the proper role of IT with respect to BPM.

I could not help but smile sadly and nod my head at this… IT unfortunately perceive BPM as a threat rather than the powerful tool that it is can be.

What’s beyond the hype, and how is the industry addressing this dangerous situation, and help clear the smoke? Kevin identifies 3 intersting developments – “Standards“, “Free Modelers“ & “Communities and Social Network-based Approaches“.

BPMN clearly stands out from amongst the various standards that mushroomed; however Kevin warns that “BPMN notation has to date gained little traction outside the relatively small BPM community” and observes that “Business users are highly unlikely to spontaneously adopt BPMN notation the way they spontaneously adopted the spreadsheet almost thirty years ago”.

Free modelers are a relatively new concept. this allows the organization to take Process Modeling for a test drive.. without shelling out the $$$$s. Lombardi and Savvion seem to have it.. whereas the others are playing a wait and watch. The developer in me is definitely excited at the prospect of a test spin… however the process modeler in me argues that I already have M$ Visio installed with BPMN stencils- do I need more?

Communities and Social Network-based Approaches – again a new concept; Pega launched Pega Exchange recently to enable “customers and partners to create and exchange PegaRULES Process Commander (PRPC) content, from application frameworks, to plug-ins for common enterprise technologies, to utilities that make development easier”, in order to “Leverage the community” and not “reinvent the wheel”.ProcessXChange – however, according to Kevin was a “stillborn”.

Savvion has their

What I would like to see is an open exchange market place where I could pick up a process modeled in one platform and use it with another seamlessly. Sort of like a sourceforge or a codehaus or component source for process models. For this to happen though, the standards such as XPDL or BPDM (the serialization standards in which you save the process models that you model in BPMN) must be widely adopted strictly adhered to (thanks for the correction Sandy).

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Comments

Sandy Kemsley

October 12th, 2007 at 10:26 AM

Lombardi doesn’t have a free modeller, although they do have a fairly low-cost software-as-a-service discovery/modelling tool called Blueprint. TIBCO has a free downloadable modeller in addition to Savvion.

There are reasons for using a modelling tool instead of Visio with a BPMN stencil. First of all, a modelling tool enforces BPMN rather than just enabling it. It also (typically) provides additional functionality such as simulation, and the ability to define more of the model in terms of web services parameters to be called from a step or participant roles. The modellers also provide a way to import the model directly into the BPM execution environment, although in the case of Savvion and TIBCO, you can only import to their own BPMS. There is a Visio add-on from Zynium that does provide an XPDL export for import into a wider range of BPMS, but that’s a more complex (and more expensive) add-on than a simple stencil.

I agree with Kevin that there needs to be a vendor-independent community for exchanging process patterns (I suggested that a walled garden approach was going to work at the time that Savvion launched their ProcessXchange), but it’s not BPMN that will be critical, it’s either XPDL or BPDM — these are the serialization standards in which you save the process models that you model in BPMN, whereas BPMN is just the graphical representation.
Sabarish

October 19th, 2007 at 12:03 PM

Lombardi provides free personal account on Blueprint: http://www.lombardisoftware.com/lombardi-blueprint-accounts.php. However, it is pretty limited in what you can do with it. (< wink> ‘ineffectual toy’ said someone</wink>)

Thanks for correcting me on the standards: it’s not the pretty pictures, but the way the process flows are saved – the serialization that needs to be standardized

E

The State of BPM: Perspectives of an Industry Insider By Kevin Spurway

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