Year: 2007

BPMN-XPDL-BPEL value chain revisited

Right after I dissed the new for-pay incarnation of Business Integration Journal Business Transformation and Innovation, it turns out that I’m mentioned in an article in the November/December issue.

For the past 12 to 18 months, there has been growing interest and discussion surrounding BPMN, XPDL and BPEL. What has begun to take form is the recognition of the BPMN-XPDL-BPEL Value Chain, a concept first credited to analyst Sandy Kemsley by XPDL expert Keith Swenson.

I normally don’t read this publication cover to cover, but I was checking my email subscriptions folder and saw a message with the title “The BPMN-XPDL-BPEL Value Chain”. Having coined the phrase “BPMN-XPDL-BPEL value chain” in a blog post covering the BPM Think Tank last May, I tend to notice when it crops up elsewhere 🙂

The BIJ article, written by Nathaniel Palmer of WfMC, discusses the three process standards and their interrelationship, particularly around how XPDL and BPEL are complementary, not competitive. Nothing here that I haven’t written before, but it’s a good overview/summary article on the subject.

Of course, being from WfMC, which authors the XPDL standard, he doesn’t mention OMG’s BPDM, which could prove eventually to be XPDL’s nemesis.

Two disappointing BPM webinars

Maybe it’s the January blahs. Maybe I’ve seen too many of these things. Maybe they actually were as bad as I perceived. Maybe I’m just cranky because I’m missing Mashup Camp. In any case, I was not impressed by either of the two webinars that I sat in on today.

Making Your People More Effective Through Business Process Management (BPM) Technology

This was the 2-hour web marathon that included a keynote from Colin Teubner of Forrester, followed by several Microsoft partners who all have BPM technology that also ties into Microsoft in some way. I’ve enjoyed hearing Colin speak before, both on webinars and in person, but this time was definitely nothing special. The material seemed to be all retreaded stuff from past presentations by Colin or by Connie Moore: how human-centric BPM evolved from workflow, how integration-centric BPM evolved from EAI; I think I wrote that stuff already.

He did make a very cute analogy between between services and Lego for the (presumed) business-oriented audience. He also made the critical point “BPM doesn’t need SOA; SOA needs BPM” that really needs to be understood by everyone involved in both of these fields, especially as they start to merge into one (several years after Gartner called them all one when they actually weren’t).

Then he made an uncomfortable segue into using Microsoft Office applications as part of the whole BPM picture (I wasn’t convinced), as a prelude to what promised to be several vendor presentations; I lasted through part of the first one before I bailed out due to the double frustration of an over-large screen shared on the meeting (didn’t anyone tell the presenters to scale down to 1024×768?) and a fairly significant lack of content.

BPM 302: BPM and Six Sigma

This was one of the Appian webinars from the BPM Basics site. I’ve commented on these before: some good basic material if you’re just getting started with BPM, but today’s was an exception in that I would not recommend it due to the errors in definition around Six Sigma. If you can’t even define your subject matter accurately, then you shouldn’t be speaking about it.

It all started going downhill when the first speaker said “There are six levels of Sigma”, as if it were some sort of CMM-like certification. That shows such an incredibly fundamental misunderstanding of Six Sigma and statistical measures in general, I’m practically speechless. Not meaning to sound like too much of a techie snob, I should have figured that there could be a problem when she was introduced as having a arts degree, and I don’t think that statistics was her major or minor. She also said “sigma is the number of defects per million”, which isn’t at all correct either; sigma (for all of us who did suffer through stats class) represents standard deviation, and you can check any of number of other sources to find that Six Sigma’s goal is to have six standard deviations between the process mean and the specified limit. In other words, a higher value of sigma means that more of the data (whatever it is that you’re measuring) fits between the mean and the limit (beyond which things are classified as errors).

The second speaker was talking more about BPM technology and seemed to know what he was talking about, but was horribly unprepared and oscillated between overly-fast reading of a prepared script and pause-laden bits where he was either winging it or totally losing his concentration.

Microsoft-oriented BPM webinar this week

I received notice from Bluespring about a webinar this week that seems to be bringing together a number of Microsoft partners who are all doing BPM: Bluespring, Ascentn, K2.net and Metastorm. This looks like the marathon of webinars, 2 hours long and including a talk from Colin Teubner at Forrester.

It has the somewhat unwieldy title of Making Your People More Effective Through Business Process Management (BPM) Technology, and you can sign up here.

EnterpriseCamp (the unconference edition)

I’m not sure why Bryce Johnson thought that he’d have full turnout at 9:30am on a Saturday, even for something as exciting as EnterpriseCamp, but a few of us managed to make it on time. Of course, my brain is still in a time zone some where east of here and I’m waking up at 5am so it’s easier for me this week.

We kicked off a bit late and the attendance was lower than the signups, but there were some great sessions (and I’m not just talking about mine). Like other unconferences, there was no set agenda, just a blank grid of time slots for sessions and a pad of Post-It notes; those of us interested in leading a talk outlined our topic verbally to the group, then posted it in an open time slot. The schedule was pretty fluid all day long, which fit well with the mood of the group and the small number of simultaneous sessions (3 at most, I think), but we still managed to fit in all the proposed sessions and finish up on time.

One cool thing that the organizers did was create icon stickers that we could put on our nametags to designate our interests: people tagging, if you will. They also provided great food (breakfast and lunch), a huge variety of herbal teas (important for us non-coffee types) and a notebook containing some Enterprise 2.0 articles and the all-important key to the people-tagging icons.

The first session that I attended was Carsten Knoch talking about bringing Web 2.0 features into the enterprise, which was a perfect lead-in to my session on a specific example of this, namely, integrating Web 2.0 functionality into BPM software. Carsten talked more in general terms about what features and techniques could be introduced, techniques for building applications, and why all of this Web 2.0 stuff is scary to the enterprise. He had a pretty comprehensive presentation, a bit unusual for an unconference, and I hope to see it posted somewhere.

I followed immediately after Carsten, and although I had the best intentions to prepare a little presentation the night before (but ended up out for dinner with friends) or at least a few notes on the subway on the way to EnterpriseCamp (but ended up chatting with a South African backpacker on his way around the world), I took the floor with a blank flip-chart and wrote four lines:

  • tagging
  • RSS
  • zero footprint
  • mashups

I then riffed on each of these, with lots of great input from the audience, with my focus on how they apply in the world of BPM but some expansion into other types of enterprise software. Great discussion: I love it when I can learn something while giving a presentation. I could have gone on for hours, except for the smell of pizza wafting in from the lunch area.

In the afternoon, I sat in on Tom Purves and Jevon MacDonald discussing adoption of Web 2.0 technology (specifically their product, for the most part) within the enterprise. That evolved into a discussion about Consulting 2.0 and a variety of other topics.

I also attended Bryce’s session on tagging, taxonomies and folksonomies, which generated some really interesting discussion. The idea of creating tag relationships rather than tag pruning as applicable to Enterprise 2.0 tagging applications: you want people to be able to add tags that are meaningful to them, but if others are using different tags that mean the same thing, find some way to relate the tags.

Definitely a worthwhile way to spend my Saturday. Many thanks to Navantis and Microsoft for their sponsorship of EnterpriseCamp.

Skipping Mashup Camp 3

I’ve decided not to attend Mashup Camp 3 in Boston next week, in part because I just got back from a month vacation and have a ton of things to do (like this weekend’s Enterprise Camp here in Toronto), and in part because I missed the window for cheap flights and I’m not willing to pay $900 to fly from Toronto to Boston — the problem with being an independent is that you really scrutinize that extra $600 in airfare when it comes out of your own pocket!

Have fun without me this time.