Sorry, this entry is only available in Русский.

Sorry, this entry is only available in Русский.

BPMN became popular. Customers demand BPMN because in their view it’s modern and hence a priori more advanced process notation.

But I also understand process specialists experienced in other notations e.g. IDEF or EPC that refuse to follow the fade blindly and ask to explain why BPMN is better. I understand their skepticism - a new notation must be essentially, radically better to justify the transition, not just look nicer.

So what is BPMN -

Another Notation or The Notation?

» read the rest

Sorry, this entry is only available in Русский.

Texts about BPMS tend to focus at first hand on business process notations and diagrams. User interfaces to process tasks and web portal functionality are usually next topics, followed by business rules and integration. Such topics as data modeling at the design phase and data manipulation during the process execution are often out of sight.

Yet process model and data model are the key aspects of any process application architecture. Therefore, process modeling and data modeling are equally important core competencies of a process engineer. » read the rest

Gartner, Pega and IBM are pushing new acronyms:

• IBO = Intelligent Business Operations
• iBPMS = Intelligent Business Process Management Suite

According to the experts, the concepts behind the acronyms aren’t exceptionally new - it’s evolutionary integration of related technologies: BPMS, BAM, BRE, CEP, ACM… Looks like someone decided it’s time to put new labels over the old BPM/BPMS.

I’m not personally convinced that the market will accept this labeling game. Attempts to announce the “post-BPM” solution was made in the past (Intalio) and are made today (Metasonic) without much success. This time the heavyweights are in play however.

I would like to see the breakthroughs in technology and methodology, not acronyms. From this perspective the bpmNEXT initiative looks more interesting. Quoting the memorandum by Bruce Silver and Nathaniel Palmer:

We both do not agree with the fact that BPM is dead… or that BPM is tired. In fact, innovations associated with the clouds, event-driven analytics, case management, mobile applications and social networks fed by innovations in the field of BPM with an intensity that we have not seen for years.

By contrast, 10 years ago the process management discipline has undergone radical changes both in methodology and technology:

• continuous improvement instead of one-time reengineering
• integrated BPM Suites instead of separate modeling tools and workflow engines
• agile development instead of “waterfall”

This time it’s about “in addition”, not “instead” hence the talk about “the death of BPM” is either speculation or provocation.

And this is very good actually - let’s not start it from scratch once again: TQM, reeingineering, BPM… It destroys the market as potential customers feel uncertain. What’s the point of implementing a new acronym if the previous one - pushed by the same consultants - was declared obsolete so easily?

Now when we position the post-BPM as an extension, it makes the late majority customers realize that the “basic BPM” is a task of yesterday, not tomorrow. Plus, tomorrow promises many fascinating and useful things.

Let’s consider a fairly typical business process:

1. Сustomer requests a proposal.
2. We prepare and send the proposal.
3. Customer makes a decision.
4. In a positive case a contract is concluded.

The first version of the process diagram: » read the rest

Sorry, this entry is only available in Русский.

A recent ebizQ question «What is the most important question to ask when starting a BPM project?» collected a record number of responses. Peter did not specify the role - which side asks the question? Since the majority of active participants (writers) are BPM vendors or consultants, they proposed the question as if they were asking a potential clients. The majority agreed that the most important questions are about the context, objectives and metrics of success of the BPM project and I totally agree with this.

But let us turned back to ourselves: what is the toughest question a potential customer can ask a BPM vendor?

For me, the most difficult question is “Where is the money?”

» read the rest

It was stated in the previous article that from BPMN perspective the top level process analysis deals with process families rather than processes.

Unfortunately BPMN doesn’t provide tools for modeling such things. Analysts resort to IDEF0 most often, I prefer DFD - but anyway it’s no good that we have to use two notations.

So I draw DFD diagrams with BPMN palette. It looks like this:

» read the rest