CamundaCon 2023 Day 2: Process and Decision Standards

Falko Menge and Marco Lopes from Camunda gave a presentation on the involvement of Camunda with the development of OMG’s core process and decision standards, BPMN and DMN. Camunda (and Falko in particular) has been involved in OMG standards for a long time, and embrace these two standards in their products. Sadly, at least to me, they gave up support for the case management standard, CMMN, due to a lackluster market adoption; other vendors such as Flowable support all three of the standards in their products and have viable use cases for CMMN.

Falko and Marco gave a shout out to universities and the BPM academic research conference that I attended recently as promoters of both the concepts of standards and future research into the standards. Camunda has not only participated in the standards efforts, but the co-founders wrote a book on Real-Life BPMN as they discovered the ways that it can best be used.

They gave a good history of the development of the BPMN standard and also of Camunda’s implementation of it, from the early days of the Eclipse-based BPMN modeler to the modern web-based modelers. Camunda became involved in the BPMN Model Interchange Working Group (MIWG) to be able to exchange models between different modeling platforms, because they recognized that a lot of organizations do much broader business modeling in tools aimed at business analysts, then want to transfer the models to a process execution platform like Camunda. Different vendors choose to participate in the BPMN MWIG tests, and the results are published so that the level of interoperability is understood.

DMN is another critical standard, allowing modelers to create standardized decision models and also supports the Friendly-Enough Expression Language (FEEL) for scripting within the models. The DMN Technolgy Compatibility Kit (TCK) is a set of decision models and expected results that provides test results similar to that of the BPMN MIWG tests: information about the vendors’ products test coverage are published so that their implementation of DMN can be assessed by potential customers.

Although standards are sometimes decried as being too difficult for business people to understand and use (they’re really not), they create an environment where common executable models of processes and decisions can be created and exchanged across many different vendor platforms. Although there are many other parts of a technology stack that can create vendor lock-in, process and decision models don’t need to be part of that. Also, someone working at a company that uses BPMN and DMN modeling tools can easily move to a different organization that uses different tools without having to relearn a proprietary modeling language. From a model richness standpoint, many vendors and researchers working together towards a common goal can create a much better and more extensive standard (as long as they’re not squabbling over details).

They went on to discuss some of the upcoming new standards: BPM+ Harmonization Model and Notation (BHMN), Shared Data Model and Notation (SDMN), and Knowledge Package Model and Notation (KPMN), all of which are in some way involved in integrating BPMN and DMN due to the high degree of overlap between these standards in many organizations. Since these standards aren’t close enough to release, they’re not planned for a near-future version of Camunda, but they’ll be added to the product management roadmap as the standards evolve and the customer requirements for the standards becomes clear.

Happy birthday to BPMN 2.0

Bruce Silver points out that it’s been 10 years since the finalization of BPMN 2.0, the standard notation that we use for modeling (and sometimes executing) business processes. The standard wasn’t published until some time after that, and there have been revisions over the years, but BPMN 2.0 was the start of a wave of standardization in the BPMS market since it included the notation (a serialization file format) that made model interchange between products possible. There’s always been some amount of controversy swirling around BPMN: some consider it too difficult for non-technical people to understand, some consider it too restrictive for technical implementations, and more. I believe that a subset of BPMN is a good tool for process modeling by business people, and that it’s a powerful process implementation tool for developers, but I agree that it’s not the only tool you should have in your toolbox.

Bruce’s post takes us back to some basic definitions of a process, and why BPMN is a better fit for modeling processes. He also covers some of the things that are not great about the standard:

The ability to understand the process behavior in detail simply by inspecting the diagram, unfortunately, was not top of mind in the BPMN 2.0 task force in 2010. They were solely focused on making the diagrams executable on an automation engine. But to most BPMN users today, precise description based on the diagram alone is much more important.

To help with the adoption of the standard, Bruce developed conventions for the use of the standard, publishing his BPMN Method & Style books and training. Some modeling vendors have even incorporated this into their product, so that you can validate your models against his conventions.

Regardless of whether you love or hate BPMN, it’s impossible to deny the impact that it has had on the BPMS market.

My writing on the Trisotech blog: better analysis and design of processes

I’ve been writing some guest posts over on the Trisotech blog, but haven’t mentioned them here for a while. Here’s a recap of what I’ve posted over there the past few months:

In May, I wrote about designing loosely-coupled processes to reduce fragility. I had previously written about Conway’s Law and the problems of functional silos within an organization, but then the pandemic disruption hit and I wanted to highlight how we can avoid the sorts of cascading supply chain process failures that we saw early on. A big part of this is not having tightly-coupled end-to-end processes, but separating out different parts of the process so that they can be changed and scaled independently of each other, but still form part of an overall process.

In July, I helped to organize the DecisionCAMP conference, and wrote about the BPMN-CMMN-DMN “triple crown”: not just the mechanics of how the three standards work together, but why you would choose one over the other in a specific design situation. There are some particular challenges with the skill sets of business analysts who are expected to model organizations using these standards, since they will end up using more of the one that they’re most familiar with regardless of its suitability to the task at hand, as well as challenges for the understandability of multi-model representations that require a business operations reader of the models to be able to see how this BPMN diagram, that CMMN model and this other DMN definition all fit together.

In August, I focused on better process analysis using analytical techniques, namely process mining, and gave a quick intro to process mining for those who haven’t seen it in action. For several months now, we haven’t been able to do a lot of business “as is” analysis through job shadowing and interviews, and I put forward the idea that this is the time for business analysts to start learning about process mining as another tool in their kit of analysis techniques.

In early September, I wrote about another problem that can arise due to the current trend towards distributed (work from home) processes: business email compromise fraud, and how to foil it with better processes. I don’t usually write about cybersecurity topics, but I have my own in-home specialist, and this topic overlapped nicely with my process focus and the need for different types of compliance checks to be built in.

Then, at the end of September, I finished up the latest run of posts with one about the process mining research that I had seen at the (virtual) academic BPM 2020 conference: mining processes out of unstructured emails, and queue mining to see the impact of queue congestion on processes.

Recently, I gave a keynote on aligning intelligent automation with incentives and business outcomes at the Bizagi Catalyst virtual conference, and I’ve been putting together some more detailed thoughts on that topic for this months’ post. Stay tuned.

Disclosure: Trisotech is my customer, and I am compensated for writing posts for publication on their site. However, they have no editorial control or input into the topics that I wrote about, and no input into what I write here on my own blog.

Take Mike Marin’s CMMN survey: learn something and help CMMN research

CMMN diagram from OMG CMMN 1.0 specification document
CMMN diagram from OMG CMMN 1.0 specification document

Mike Marin, who had a hand in creating FileNet’s ECM platform and continued the work at IBM as chief architect on their Case Manager product, is taking a bit of time away from IBM to complete his PhD. He’s doing research into complexity metrics for the Case Management Model and Notation standard, and he really needs people to complete a survey in order to complete his empirical research. The entire thing will take 45-60 minutes, and can be completed in multiple sessions; 30-40 minutes of that is an optional tutorial, which you can skip if you’re already familiar with CMMN.

Here’s his invitation to participate (feel free to share with your process and case modeling friends):

We are conducting research on the Case Management Modeling and Notation (CMMN) specification and need your help. You don’t need to be familiar with CMMN to participate, but you should have some basic understanding of process technology or graphical modeling (for example: software modeling, data modeling, object modeling, process modeling, etc.), as CMMN is a new modeling notation. Participation is voluntary and no identifiable personal information will be collected.

You will learn more about CMMN with the tutorial; and you will gain some experience and appreciation for CMMN by evaluating two models in the survey. This exercise should take about 45 to 60 minutes to complete; but it can be done in multiple sessions. The tutorial is optional and it should take 30 to 40 minutes. The survey should take 15 to 20 minutes. You can consider the survey a quiz on the tutorial.

As an appreciation for your collaboration, we will donate $6 (six dollars) to a charity of your choice and we will provide you with early results of the survey.

You can use the following URL to take the tutorial and survey. The first page provides more information on the project.

http://cmmn.limequery.org/index.php/338792?lang=en

He wrote a more detailed description of the research over on BPTrends.

Mike’s a former colleague and a friend, but I’m not asking just because of that: he’s also a Distinguished Engineer at IBM and a contributor to standards and technology that make a huge impact in our field. Help him out, take the survey, and it will help us all out in the long run.

bpmNEXT 2014: BPMN MIWG Demo

The BPMN Model Interchange Working Group is all about (as you might guess from the name) interchanging BPMN models between different vendors’ products: something that OMG promised with the BPMN standard, but which never actually worked out of the box due to contradictions in the standard and misinterpretations by some vendors. To finish off Wednesday morning at bpmNEXT, we have a live demo involving 12 different tools with participants in different locations, with Denis Gagne of Trisotech (who chairs the working group) and Falko Menge of camunda (who heads up the test automation subgroup) on the stage, a few others here on the sidelines, some at the OMG meeting in Reston, and some in their offices in France and Poland.

To start, different lanes of the process were designed by four different people on IBM Blueworks Live, Activiti, camunda and W4; each then exported their process models and saved to Dropbox. Denis switched back and forth between the different screens (they were all on a Google Hangout) to show us what was happening as the proceeded, and we could see the notifications from Dropbox as the different files were added. In the second stage, Bonitasoft was used to augment the Blueworks Live model, itp-commerce edited the Activiti model, and Signavio edited the camunda model. In the third stage, ADONIS was used to merge together the lanes created in several of the models (I lost track of which ones) into a single process model, and Yaoqiang used to merge the Signavio and camunda models. Then, the Trisiotech Visio BPMN modeler was used to assemble the ADONIS and Yaoqiang models into the final model with multiple pools. At the end, the final model was imported into a number of different tools: the Trisotech web modeler, the Oracle BPM modeler, the bpmn.io environment from camunda, and directly into to the W4 execution engine (without passing through a modeling environment). Wow.

The files exchanged were BPMN XML files, and the only limitations of which tool to use when was that some only support a single pool so had to be used at the earlier stages where each tool was only modeling a single lane or pool. This is how BPMN was supposed to work, but the MIWG has found some number of inconsistencies with the standard and also some issues with the vendors’ tools that had to be corrected.

They have developed a number of test cases that cover the descriptive and analytic classes within BPMN, and automated tools to test the outcome of different vendors’ modelers. Over 20 BPMN modelers have been tested for import, export and roundtrip capabilities; if you’re a BPMS vendor supporting BPMN 2.0 (or claiming to), you should be on this list because there are a lot of us who just aren’t going to write our own XSLT to translate your models into something that can be read by another tool. If you’re a process designer using a BPMS, shame your vendor into participating because it creates a more flexible and inclusive environment for your design and modeling efforts.

This is hugely valuable work that they’re doing in the working group; note that you don’t have to be an OMG member to get involved, and the BPMN MIWG would love to have others join in to help make this work even better.

We’re off for lunch and a break now, then back for six more sessions this afternoon. Did I mention how awesome bpmNEXT is?

BPM2012: Stephen White Keynote on BPMN

It’s the last day at BPM 2012, and the morning keynote is by Steve White of IBM, a.k.a. “the father of BPMN”, discussing the Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) standard and its future. He went through a quick history of the development of the standard from its beginnings in BPMI (now part of OMG) in 2001, through the release of the 1.0 specification in 2004, the official adoption as an OMG standard in 2006, 1.1 and 1.2 revisions in 2008 and 2009, then BPMN 2.0 in 2011. Although there’s no official plan for BPMN 3.0, he said that he imagined that it might be in the future.

The original drivers for BPMN were to be usable by the business community for process modeling, and be able to generate executable processes, but these turned out to be somewhat conflicting requirements since the full syntax required to support execution ended up making BPMN too complex for non-technical modelers if considered in its entirety. To complicate things further, the business modelers want a simple notation, yet complain when certain behaviors can’t be modeled, meaning that there’s some amount of conflict even within the first of the two requirements. The approach was to use familiar flowchart structures and shapes, have a small set of core elements for simple modeling, then provide variations of the core elements to support the complexity required for execution.

BPMN, as White states, is not equivalent to BPM: it’s a language to define process behavior, but a number of other languages and technologies are also required to implement BPM, such as data, rules, resources and user interfaces. Hence, it’s one tool in the BPM toolbox, to be used at design time or runtime as required. The case management modeling notation (CMMN) is under development, and there are currently mechanisms for a CMMN model to invoke BPMN. Personally, I think that it might make sense to combine the two modeling standards, since I believe that a majority of business processes contain elements of each.

He walked through the diagram types, elements, and the innovations that we’ve seen in modeling through BPMN such as boundary intermediate events, pools/lanes and message flows, and the separation of process and data flows. He also described the conformance levels – descriptive, analytic, common executable, and full – and their role in modeling tools.

He laid out a bit of the vision for BPMN’s future, which is to extend further into uncontrolled and descriptive processes (case management), but also further into controlled and prescriptive processes (service level modeling). He also mentioned the potential to support for element substitution at different levels in order to better support shared models between IT and business – I find this especially interesting, since it would allow different views of the same process model to have some elements hidden or exposed, or even changed to different element types suitable to the viewer.

When BPMN 1.0 was defined, ad hoc processes (really, one in which the activities can occur in any order or frequency) were included but not really well developed, since the BPM systems at the time mostly only supported prescriptive model execution. In considering case management modeling in general, a case may be fairly prescriptive with some runtime variations, or may be completely free form and descriptive; BPMN is known for prescriptive process modeling, but does support descriptive processes via ad hoc subprocesses. Additional process types and behaviors are required to fully support case management such as milestones, new event types and the ability to modify a process at runtime, and he showed some suggestions for what these might look like in an extension BPMN.

Service level modeling, on the other hand, is even more prescriptive than what we see in BPMN today: it’s lower level, more like a screen flow that happens all within a single BPMN task: no lanes, since it’s all within a single task, with gateways allowed but no parallel paths. Think of it as visual pseudo-code, probably not exposed to a business viewer but modeled by IT to effect the actual implementation. I’m seeing these sorts of screen flow models in BPMS products already such as TIBCO’s AMX BPM, as well as similar functionality from Active Endpoints as an add-in to Salesforce, so this isn’t a complete surprise. I saw an paper on client-side service composition at CASCON that could impact on this sort of service level modeling, and it will be interesting to see how this functionality evolves in BPMN and its impact on BPMS products.

This is my last post from BPM 2012: although I would like to attend a few of the other morning sessions, I’ll probably spend the time doing some last minute reviews of the three-hour tutorial on social BPM that I’ll be giving this afternoon.

Process Modeling With BPMN

I’m sitting in on Bruce Silver’s online BPMN course this week: this is the same as his onsite course, just using remote classroom tools to allow him to present and demonstrate to us, then get our feedback using typed chat. It’s a combination of lecture and hands-on, using a 60-day license for the business edition of the itp-commerce BPMN Visio add-in that is included with the course. The course runs 11am-3:30pm (Eastern) for three straight days, which took a bit of schedule juggling to be able to attend most of it; not sure if he is recording this for us to access after the course, which would be a nice benefit especially for those doing the certification exam. I use a lot of BPMN with my customers in my role as a process architect, but Bruce’s knowledge of the standard and its usage far outweigh mine, and I’m sure that I will learn a lot in addition to providing a review of the course for my readers.

He’s using the itp-commerce Visio tool, in spite of the hefty price tag ($975 for the Business Edition, $1,535 for the Professional Edition that also includes serialization; the free edition does not include full BPMN 2.0 support), because it natively supports Bruce’s methodology and style validation, which he covers in his book BPMN Method and Style and uses in this course. There are other Visio add-ons for BPMN 2.0 modeling, including one from Trisotech on the Business Process Incubator site that I’ve been using lately since it has a full-featured (but branded) version that customers can use for free, or the full non-branded version for the price of a BPI premium membership. Visio 2010 supports BPMN natively, but not the 2.0 version – if you’re a big Microsoft Visio customer, you might want to start agitating with Microsoft to include that via a service pack, since their current line seems to be that there isn’t sufficient demand for it yet. Bruce and I both believe that BPMN 2.0 support will become a significant differentiator for modeling products by the end of 2011, and Microsoft really needs to get on board with this if they’re going to be a player in the BPMN 2.0 market. There are some nice features in the itp-commerce tool that we didn’t cover in the course, such as simulation and BPMN 2.0 interchange, but many of those are available in lower-cost alternatives: I think that this is a race to the bottom price-wise, since Microsoft will eventually just include all of this in Visio natively.

He started with some basic definitions of BPMN and how it differs from flowcharts – especially in the area of collaboration, extra-process events and exception handling – highlighting the notions of standardization and of the hierarchical view that allows for inclusion of expandable subprocesses, rather than trying to put everything on one enormous top-level process model. He also covered how BPMN creates a bridge between business analysts who are creating these models, and developers who are making them executable, including the BPM systems that make the models directly executable without a lot of coding. He also discussed what’s not in the BPMN standard, such as user interface for human steps, data models, dynamic work assignments, rules, KPIs and anything to do with the higher-level strategy and goals. Although you may see some of these implemented in a BPMS, those will be done in a proprietary manner, and learning how to do that in that particular tool won’t be transferrable to other tools.

As I often do when I’m presenting a quick look at BPMN in a client presentation, he talked about the full BPMN 2.0 standard, with its new support for choreography and conversation diagrams, execution semantics and an XML schema for model interchange between tools, and highlighted that it’s possible to use the descriptive and analytic subclasses (subsets) of the standard if you don’t need to learn all 100 elements of the standard: the descriptive is for business analysts to be able to model processes as documentation, and the analytic is a minimum subset required to model executable processes.

Bruce keeps bringing it back to the value and benefits of BPMN: why it’s important both in terms of its modeling capabilities, and in the role as a standard for widespread understanding. There are a lot of BPMN detractors, but I don’t see the problem if you don’t try to shove the entire standard down the throats of business people: using the descriptive subclass (plus a few more elements), I’m able to have non-technical business people understand the notation in about 5 minutes, although it would take them a little bit longer to be able to create their own diagrams.

After an hour or so of initial presentation to provide the necessary background, Bruce shared his screen and had us all start up Visio with the itp-commerce add-in, and we started modeling some BPMN. As those of you familiar with BPMN know, there are only three main objects in a BPMN diagram: activities, gateways and events. The fun stuff comes with all the adornments that you can add to those three basic objects to indicate a huge variety of functionality.  We started off with a high-level straight-through order process, then added gateways for the exception paths. We started to learn some of the guidelines from Bruce’s style guide, such as using a gateway not to indicate work but only as a question testing the output state of the previous activity (which I always do), and using a separate end event for each distinct end state (which I rarely do but probably will start, since you can label the end events with the states). I also learned a standard Visio trick for moving the placement of the text on a connector using the Text Block tool, which allows you to snug labels of flows leaving a gateway right up to the gateway regardless of the connector length – cool! There were some great questions from the attendees, such as whether you can eliminate the gateway symbol and just have the labeled flows leaving the preceding activity, as you might in traditional flowcharting; in BPMN, that would denote have all of the paths be executed in parallel, not have one path or the other executed, so that’s not a legal representation of an exclusive OR gateway. Gateways can create a lot of confusion, because in spite of how they are often referred to as “decisions”, the decision is actually made in the previous activity, and the gateway just tests the result of that decision.

A great deal of day 1 alternated between some short presentations (a couple of slides each) on concepts, then exercises that allowed us to model those in diagrams ourselves, reinforcing the concepts immediately. While we were doing the modeling, Bruce would talk about other information about the concept, such as explaining some of the benefits and rules of pools while we were adding pools and lanes to our diagram, or the same for subprocess syntax. We saw some of the less-used but essential constructs such as ad hoc subprocesses, in which the contained activities don’t have a flow, and may be completed in any order (or not at all): this is how BPMN represents case management-style processes, for example, where the possible tasks are known but the order and applicability of any given task is not known. He also pointed out (and quizzed us on) common errors, such as having the same activity within a subprocesses and also in the process that calls it.

By the end of the first day, we had learned all of the Level 1 elements (effectively the BPMN 2.0 descriptive subclass), quite a bit of Bruce’s style guidelines around the use of those elements, and we were creating our own BPMN diagrams using those elements. At the start of day 2, after a recap, Bruce talked about having a BPMN method and style – whether it is his or not – so that there are standardized ways of using BPMN: in spite of it being a standard, it is possible to create diagrams that mean the same thing but look different, and having some standard usage makes it a more powerful communication tool within your organization. His method works toward four basic goals:

  • Structural consistency: a variety of the style points that he’s been covering, such as explicit end states and hierarchical composition
  • Readability: top-down traceability through levels of the process and subprocesses
  • Model completeness: diagram doesn’t require additional documentation to describe the process
  • Shareability with IT: models created by business analysts are aligned with the level 2 models used for executable processes

He then took us through the steps of his method for modeling processes that meets these goals; this was part of the essential intellectual property that he had to pass on to us (as opposed to the most standard BPMN on day 1), but too dense with slides and lecture rather than hands-on. Following that, he went through his BPMN style guides, which were also all lecture, but went much more quickly since these tended to be quick rules rather than larger concepts that we saw in the method section, and also we had covered a lot of these already in the exercises and the method. He did a blog post with a first cut of the rules and style of BPMN, both the standard BPMN rules and his style guidelines, plus a later post showing an example of reworking a process model to meet his style guidelines. The first is a great reference if you decide not to cough up for the itp-commerce product that will do the style validations for you; in reality, once you start using these for a while, they’ll become second nature and you won’t need to have them validated. He provided an updated list of the rules as part of the course, and has given me permission to republish, which I will do in a following post.

For the second half of day 2, we moved on to Level 2 BPMN elements (Analytic subclass) with more of the hands-on exercises on events: one of my favorite topics, since events are the most powerful yet the least understood of all BPMN elements. As Bruce pointed out, no one (not even him, and certainly not me) memorizes the table of 50 or so possible event permutations: for level 1 (descriptive subclass used by business analysts), you only need to know six of them (all start and end events), although I usually teach business analysts a couple of the intermediate events from level 2 as well. He suggests focusing on message, timer and error events, adding another nine to the six we’ve already seen; if you master these 15, then have to look up the others as required, you’re way ahead of most people using BPMN today.

Day 3 saw us still covering events via a combination of lecture and exercises; after timers on day 2, we moved on to message events and had a ton of great discussions on some of the finer points of BPMN usage (e.g., a script task that executes purely within the BPMS versus a service task that calls an external service). Message events are critical if you want to start modeling executable processes; intermediate message events are essential for automated messaging outside the process or organization, and boundary message events manage external events that modify or interrupt processes while in flight.  We also covered error events, and Bruce provided some supplementary information on other event types. Interestingly, Bruce is constantly reevaluating how BPMN can and should be used, with some changes over what he published in his book. He was a bit short on time for the last part of day 3 – the course timing definitely needs a bit of work – but we branched into splits and joins, went around iterations, and waded through multi-participant pools (which had an unfortunate effect on my brain).

He finished up with model validation using the itp-commerce add-in to Visio, which optionally validates against his style guide as well as the standard BPMN rules. As he puts it, any modeling tool that doesn’t provide validation against the BPMN specification is a toy, suitable only for drawing nice pictures. I suppose you could argue that after Bruce’s course, you will be able to validate automatically as you model so don’t need a tool to do it, but think of it as being like a spell-checker for process models: we all need a little help once in a while. 😉

He invited us all to go ahead and do the certification exam (no extra fee if done in the next 60 days), and showed one of the example multiple choice questions that had four possible answers, and received votes for all four of the answers from the class, showing that this is not quite as simple as it seems (yes, I got the right answer). If we pass that part, then we have to create a process model from one of our own processes of a specific level of complexity, following his method and style, and submit it for his review. Suffice it to say that certification via his BPMessentials exam will actually mean that you have mad BPMN skillz, it’s not just a certificate for showing up for the course.

Some potential improvements for the course:

  • It’s a bit hard to demo and talk at the same time, and Bruce could have captured screencams of some parts of the Visio demos to playback for us while he was discussing what we needed to do next, then just gone to Visio live for the finer points of demonstration; that would have made it easier for him to focus on describing what was happening rather than focusing on the actual drawing activity.
  • Some of the finer lecture points (such as going through the method and concepts) were a bit slow-moving, since Bruce would talk to one very dense slide for a number of minutes rather than having multiple slides with less information to absorb. Some restructuring of the slides would improve this, especially to show model snippets on the same page as the concept points, or possibly a much quicker summary to start, then return to the concepts later to reinforce.
  • The non-modeling exercises (e.g., defining the process scope given a specific scenario) didn’t work very well online, since there’s no fluid interaction with the participants, just the chat window with Bruce responding to the chat questions verbally when he sees them. In a regular classroom environment, he could ask for verbal solutions and write it out on a chart as they developed more collaboratively; here, all he could do was walk through the exercise and his solution. I’m not sure that a more interactive online collaboration tool would make a big dent in this problem; some things are just made for face-to-face (or at least audio) interaction. These sections could be enhanced by showing the process model solution at the same time as the exercise description – or better yet, a screencam – so that as he walks through it, he could point out how it manifests in the process.
  • It would be great to see a summary of the redundant elements in BPMN 2.0, with the preferred one (if one is preferred) indicated. For example, send/receive tasks are the same as intermediate throwing/catching message events except if you want to put boundary events (e.g., for error handling or timeouts) on the tasks in an executable process; a gateway is implied to be XOR if it has no marker; parallel split gateways and exclusive merge gateways are implied without showing the gateway. Although some of these are reflected in Bruce’s style guidelines, we just stumbled across some of them throughout the course.

I definitely learned some of the finer points of BPMN that I didn’t already know, and I will be going back to some BPMN diagrams that I’m working on with clients and clean up the style a bit with what I’ve learned. With this being an online course, I could multitask with other activities during the parts that were review for me; for a BPMN newbie (the target audience), the pace would have been just about right.

There are few people who have this depth of BPMN knowledge, and Bruce is the only one who I know who is doing this as a professional trainer: his is the only BPMN course that I recommend to my clients. He needs to work out a few bumps in how the online course works, but in general, I thought this was a great course, perfect for a business analyst who is already doing some process modeling but doesn’t know any BPMN, but also informative for those of us with some prior knowledge of BPMN.

Learning to Love BPMN 2.0

The last presentation of the IRM BPM London conference before the final panel, and Chris Bradley and Tim Franklin of IPL are presenting on BPMN 2.0. Bradley started with a brief history of BPMN from its 1.0 release in 2004 by BPMI to the present day 2.0 release, now under OMG. It was interesting to see their list of what BPMN does not do: state transitions, functional decomposition, organizational hierarchies and data modelling, which explains why some BPMS products are starting to build those functions into their integrated development environment to be defined along with the process models. [Note that although I normally use US spelling due to the geographic location of most of my audience, I’m using “modelling” here after Bradley point out that the US spelling, “modeling” should rhyme with “yodeling” 🙂 ]

Franklin took over to get into the details of the notation, particularly the differences between the 1.x and 2.0 versions and the new elements and diagram types in 2.0. I’m not going to review all of that; there’s a lot of existing material both on this blog and in other locations, including a webinar that Robert Shapiro gave earlier this year on BPMN 2.0.

Bradley took the stage again to discuss all the other things that have to happen after you get started on BPMN 2.0, particularly modelling data and aligning that with the process models, whether that’s being done in an integrated tool or two different modelling tools. I agree with him that it’s critical for process, data and organizational modelling efforts to be linked, although I think that’s more likely to have happen via MDM rather than by having a single integrated modelling tool.

His summary said it all: BPMN is simple (if you can read a flowchart, you can understand BPMN); BPMN is robust (can be used for both high-level design/architecture and detailed process model execution/implementation); and most importantly, BPMN and process models are only part of the big picture, and need to be linked to other information assets such as data and organizational models.

You may not have come out of this session actually loving BPMN 2.0, but at least you’ll respect it in the morning.

The Great BPMN Debate of 2010

I go off on vacation for a week, and a firestorm erupts around BPMN usage by business people. It’s taken me the weekend to comb through all the posts and comments; there’s a lot of reading here, and I recommend checking out the discussions in the comments on each of these posts as well as the posts themselves.

Where it all started

BPMN for Business Professionals: Burn Baby Burn: Jim Sinur blogs about how BPMN is too hard for business people, touching off a storm of comments on this post, and several posts from others on the same subject.

The responses

Process for the Enterprise » Blog Archive » Apparently BPMN is Too Hard: Scott Francis responds to Jim Sinur’s post, saying that if you’re already flowcharting processes, then BPMN (at least the basic set) really isn’t much different from that, and provides the benefit of standardization. He doesn’t want to let the business off the hook of learning a new skill when it’s really not that hard, and provides some benefit to the business (not just to IT).

Dave Thinking Aloud: BPMN only part of the solution: Dave French agrees with Scott’s post and offers a great quote: “It would be really scary if those responsible for the operation of multimillion dollar enterprises can’t take on the meaning of a set of symbols that can be put on a small wallchart”. My thoughts are pretty much aligned with Scott and Dave’s.

BPMN 2.0: no longer for Business Professionals | On Collaborative Planning: Keith Swenson points out that most of the enhancements to the new version of BPMN are for developers, not business people, turning it into a graphical programming language for processes. He questions whether vendors will move from BPMN 1.2 to 2.0 if their focus is on modeling rather than execution. I think that Keith is throwing the baby out with the bathwater here: although a lot of new constructs have been added that make BPMN more useful for developers, that doesn’t make the basic subset inappropriate for business people who are already mapping their business processes with flowcharts. In the absence of any specific direction, I most often see business people (and business analysts) use flowcharts to represent their business processes; introducing them to the simplest BPMN subset will at least put some standardization around those flowcharts so that there’s no confusion over the shapes used on the diagram, and to reduce some of the spaghetti around flowcharting events.

On IT-business alignment and related things » BPMN “not for the business”? Let’s lose the hype: Neil Ward-Dutton takes a similar middle ground to mine: “there’s significant evidence to suggest that a core subset of BPMN symbols are absolutely usable by business analysts with experience in high-level analysis and design and provide great results in terms of delivering a common language across multi-disciplinary teams”. BPMN is not useful to everyone. And business people are never going to learn more than a subset of BPMN. That’s not justification for stating that BPMN has no value for business.

Chris Adams Responds to: “BPMN for Business Professionals: Burn Baby Burn” by Jim Sinur (Gartner): Chris Adams relates a conversation with a CIO who had BPMN representations created for business processes that were too complex for the business to understand. Sounds like these weren’t modeled by the business, or at the right level.

The wrap-ups

Process for the Enterprise » Blog Archive » I See Business Professionals… Using BPMN: Scott Francis wraps up a lot of the discussions, finishing with the statement “Regardless of what the theory says, the practical reality is our customers’ businesses are using this stuff”. I find that this is true for me as well: my customers are using flowcharting extensively for modeling business processes, and with a small amount of guidance, they are using the simplest subset of BPMN. I know that’s right up there with the theory that it’s aerodynamically impossible for bumblebees to fly, and yet they persist in doing so.

BPMN Quotes of the week « Adam Deane: Adam Deane wraps up the week of BPMN blog posts with the best quotes drawn from several of them.

My take

BPMN | How to explain BPMN to Business Users | VOSibilities: The replay of a webinar that I did in June on BPMN and business users. I make the points that the subset is all that’s needed for business, and that there’s a difference between knowing enough BPMN to create models and knowing enough BPMN to understand models. Here’s just the slides:

In short: BPMN isn’t for all uses, but if your business people are already flowcharting their business processes, then teaching them a few BPMN symbols in order to standardize those flowcharts has benefits.

BPM Summer Camp: Business Users and BPMN

I presented today on the second part of Active Endpoints’ BPM Summer Camp, discussing just how much BPMN your business users and analysts need to know. Michael Rowley, CTO of Active Endpoints, gave a demo of BPMN using their system, including illustrating a number of the concepts that I introduced in my presentation.

You can view and download my slides here:

A few other references based on the questions at the end of the presentation:

We have the third and last part of BPM Summer Camp, “Five Things You Should Never, Ever Try in Process Development”, on July 22nd; head over to the landing page to sign up for that, as well as see a replay of the first two parts.