Comments on: The Border Between EA and BPMS Tools

By: Anatoly Belychook

Anatoly Belychook — Fri, 10 Jun 2011 05:06:29 +0000

Most of them do, please refer to http://www.wfmc.org/xpdl-implementations.html. The list isn’t complete e.g. it misses BizAgi which does support XPDL.

The quality of the implementations is another story though: generally speaking, a model exported from one tool may look awful in another.

By: arafique

arafique — Fri, 10 Jun 2011 04:31:39 +0000

Can you please suggest me any BPMS which is capable of importing / exporting XPDL 2.X files.

Thanks

By: Александр Чередниченко

Александр Чередниченко — Sun, 28 Nov 2010 08:55:27 +0000

Спасибо Автору за великолепный блог!

Небольшой комментарий по поводу “водораздела в обозримом будущем”.
Единый репозиторий EA и BPMS - уже есть (ARIS - WebMethod), демонстрацию показывали еще в июле: http://www.bps.org.ua/pub/webcast.pdf

На рынке появится в Q1.2011

By: Bruce Silver

Bruce Silver — Fri, 28 May 2010 20:59:32 +0000

Anatoly,
Great piece (sorry I am just reading it today). I have been trying to get BPMS vendors who have good BPMN tools to add more BPA-like functionality - notably a business-oriented repository of modeling artifacts: organizations/roles, goals and metrics, rules, data, etc… with no success, largely for the reasons you state. And one you don’t state… That is, BPA vendors are in the tools business. They know how to sell software to an elite few for $5000 per seat. BPMS vendors are in the runtime business. If you can buy the tools at all without the runtime, they are essentially free. I think BPMS vendors know how to make a good BPA tool worth $1000 per seat (with excellent roundtripping to the BPMS)… but they don’t know how to make a business out of it.
–Bruce

By: igor Fiodorov

igor Fiodorov — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 14:57:06 +0000

Dear Anatoly,

Thank you, wery good writing.
Let me share some comments to prove your main message.
1. Import-export to-from BPA-BPM is not working. Not because it is technically impossible (I tried it works fine) but because most of BPA diagrams can not be executed in BPM without reengineering. One of our mutual colleague said that it is easier to redraw a diagram in BPMN then to refurbish it in BPA to be executable. So I think that such option is useless. Funny IDS-Scheer first announced the option to export EPC to BPMN via XPDL in 2005. Nowadays they try to sell it again for WebMethods.
2. It is a pity that BPM tools support only BPMN. I feel a strong need for multilayered modeling tool for BPM. It should allow modeling:
a. Conceptual models
b. Process logic
c. Execution details of activities
3 The first one who did a step in this direction is Lombardi Blueprint. They added a conceptual modeling to BPM. Great. May be I did not investigate Blueprint deep enough and I see a lot of things to be improved, but they are on the right track.
Summing up:
I do not expect that BPA vendors will make a step to integrate BPA and BPM. SAG having both BPA and BPM can really benefit out of this integration but I do not see any indication from their side.
Big BPM players are busy to integrate BPM in to a huge product stack. First they have to buy BPA expertise.
I more rely on pure BPM players. Unfortunately only few survived after acquisition wave.

Regards,
Igor

By: Максим Смирнов

Максим Смирнов — Sun, 18 Apr 2010 09:59:01 +0000

Желание провести такую границу абсолютно уместно. Невыполненных обещаний архитектуры предприятия, BPM сообщество просто не потянет. С другой стороны, накопленный Enterprise architecture опыт реальной деятельности в компаниях тоже не стоит сбрасывать со счетов. Тем более что ошибки у корпоративных архитекторов и специалистов по управлению бизнес процессов одинаковы:
1. Top-down approach преобладает над bottom-up.
2. Учет и моделирование остается уделом отдельной группы. Основной слой менеджеров, осуществляющих реальное управление, с моделями не работают.
3. Графический инструментарий существенно затрудняет работу с данными.

By: Anatoly Belychook

Anatoly Belychook — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 17:36:04 +0000

Thanks Scott, without your and other bloggers’ support I wouldn’t dare to make such bold statements.

But I prefer “comrade” if you don’t mind

By: Scott

Scott — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 17:12:24 +0000

This is a fantastic write-up, sir, and captures exactly why the divide exists and why it is unlikely to go away, regardless of what we’re promised