Swimming with Fuego

A few more random thoughts in my journey through trying out Fuego.

My first thought on playing with the process designer was that I really liked it because it shows the process activities in swimlanes. The activities are colour-coded (red for human interaction, blue for system-executed), and the shape of the activity icon tells you something about what it is, or you can define your own activity icons on a per-activity basis, which is kind of cool.

But wait… swimlanes are supposed to run parallel to the flow, not perpendicular to it: if the flow runs horizontally (as it does in Fuego and most other process modelling/design tools), the lanes should be horizontal (which they’re not in Fuego). This has the effect of projecting (in a mathematical sense) the two-dimensional orthogonal nature of a swimlane diagram (activities in time sequence versus role) into one dimension: time, with roles dependent on the time axis. This makes for some weird anomalies such as roles repeating along the time axis, and showing automated steps as part of a human role assignment.

Whether you use UML activity diagrams or BPMN or venerable old LOVEM diagrams, swimlanes are supposed to be, by their very nature, orthogonal to (and therefore independent of) the time-based flow of the process, so that you can see all the activities for a single role in a single band regardless of their position in the flow.

EA in the past

This was pretty funny… I received this email yesterday:

Looked interesting, so I clicked to read the abstract:

Butler Group believes that now is the time for organisations to start considering and deploying Enterprise Architecture based around a balanced business process and information view of operations. It is crucial that business and information requirements drive the creation of IT services. In many instances a rudderless IT department adopts a technology push approach due to the absence of any easily understood corporate direction and poorly articulated strategy.

To remain competitive organisations must urgently address the growing dislocation between the business requirements and IT deliverables. This issue is directly impacting the enterprise’s ability to make quick, accurate decisions and causing the slow implementation of the determined course of action. The gap between IT capability and business needs cannot be allowed to continue. Adoption of an end-to-end Enterprise Architecture approach will help to re-align IT developments with business objectives.

Excellent stuff, I completely agree with all that. Then I glanced at the report publication date: February 2004. 2004??!! February 2005 would have been bad enough, but eBizq is hyping an enterprise architecture report that’s 18 months old? Maybe they should have edited the abstract to begin “A year and a half ago, Butler Group believed that it was then the time for organisations to start considering and deploying Enterprise Architecture…”

To be fair, however, so few companies are taking EA seriously that there is probably still a lot of timely information in the report, but I’m not sure who would shell out the big bucks to look at last year’s news.

Blogroll, revisited

I was cruising blogs today and noticed a few people using Bloglines for their blogroll, so decided to do the same as “Blogroll” in the sidebar (the “Other Links” section following that is for non-blog links, created using Blogrolling). I like using Bloglines for linking to blogs because it keeps up to date with what I’m actually reading on blogs, and it uses the folders within Bloglines to create subheadings on the list. Right now, I have exposed my folders on BPM-EA-BI and Other IT, which are the only ones that are remotely related to what I blog about.

Integration 101 webinar

If you’re new to the world of integration, EAI, SOA and all those other good things, you can tune into the ebizQ webinar Integration 101 – From Application Integration to SOA on Tuesday at noon Eastern:

In this webinar, Roy Schulte, Vice President and Research Fellow in Gartner Inc., joins Lance Hill, webMethods Vice President Solutions Marketing, to make some sense of all the acronyms (BAM, BPM, SOA, EDA, CEP) and to describe at a fundamental level the different integration technologies that can be leveraged to integrate and enhance business systems and processes.

Roy Schulte is pretty smart about these technologies, and webMethods has just won the ebizQ EAI Buyer’s Choice award. Should be an interesting discussion.

More small business networking

I posted back in April about how I had started to use LinkedIn, and since then I’ve been actively working at building and using my LinkedIn professional network. I regularly review my connections to see if there is anyone who I should be following up with, and I sometimes browse my connections’ connections to see if there is anyone that I should be networking with. I started following that trail tonight, and a couple of hours later, here I am at 1:30am still poking around.

Christian Mayaud, a second-degree connection who has almost 8,000 connections of his own, lists his Sacred Cow Dung blog in his LinkedIn profile, on which I found his “Cheaters’ Guide to LinkedIn” (most of which I don’t see as “cheating” but as best practices for making the most of the network). That pointed me to two Yahoo! groups, MyLinkedinPowerForum and LinkedInnovators, which in turn contain a ton of other information about using LinkedIn for professional networking (plus a lot of the usual crap). Just when I was almost caught up on my reading…

Update: I saw this link this morning that describes to newbies how to get started with LinkedIn without being overwhelmed. I think that I’ll send it to all those people who accepted my invitation but still only have one contact (me) a month later.

More on ancient engineering

Good to see that I’m not the only blogger slacking off by taking European vacations these days, and trying to compensate by blogging about ancient engineering feats: John Reynolds ponders Pisa’s leaning tower by exploring the bond between Renaissance engineers and all of us implementing IT systems these days:

  • Renaissance engineers were asked (or forced) to build on foundations that they knew were flawed
  • Renaissance engineers had to deal with “legacy systems”
  • Renaissance engineers had to implement “quick-fixes” that made the original problem worse
  • Renaissance engineers had to expend great effort over many years to patch and maintain defective projects (instead of starting over)

He echoes my sentiment somewhat by hoping that something of his will become as significant as Pisa’s tower someday.

Thoughts on BPM and blogging from Provence

It’s a bit hard to think about the real world when I’m wandering around a market in small-town Provence, but I did see something yesterday that gave me pause. While hiking around the Pont du Gard (a really spectacular piece of Roman acqueduct to the west of Avignon), I was struck by the notion that this is engineering — what could we build today that would still be around in 2000 years? Certainly not our software…

Also had a nice mention of Column 2 on the ebizQ Blog Watch — check it out for other BPM and related blogs.