BPM Think Tank Day 3: BPM & SOA panel

We’re starting to wind down a bit, and many of the east coast people have taken off already to avoid the red-eye flight home so the audience is getting a bit sparse. Those of us with presentations this afternoon, however, are still here.

First after lunch is a panel on BPM & SOA, and how they complement each other, with Tony  Baer of onStrategies and Brenda Michelson of the SOA Consortium. This is more of the mini-presentation format rather than a true panel, but I promised Brenda that I wouldn’t blame the presenters for that. 🙂

Tony started out with the “BPM is from Venus, SOA is from Mars” phrase, which we’ve all been bandying about for a while, although he really meant ‘business is from Venus and IT is from Mars). Considering, however, that Venus is the goddess of love (collaboration in its most basic form, perhaps?) and Mars is the god of war (technology shoot-outs and other battle language), that may not be far from the truth.

He addressed the culture issues: both business and IT talk about business processes, but business tends to take a top-down approach versus IT’s bottom-up approach, and business is using BPM to rationalize the business whereas IT is using SOA as the next great way to integrate applications. He sees a process orchestration battleground between BPM and SOA about where to do integration in a process. He also pointed out that BPEL is still at the “checklist” level (that is, it’s on the RFP checklist but not actually used) for most BPM applications, an opinion that I stated here a couple of weeks ago.

Brenda was up next talking about business-driven SOA and the SOA Consortium, and looked at the correlation between an Economist survey of late last year with her personal findings in touring around talking to CIOs and CTOs: the top thing that they state is critical for both revenue generation and cost cutting is the creation of services. One CTO saw BPM, SOA, Lean and Six Sigma all as the same basic thing, namely business strategy and structure, and they need to work together without artificial divisions between them in order to enable a platform for business agility.

Before SOA, business and IT strategy weren’t well aligned and were often developed independently, and the business process became an output of an IT solution rather than driven directly by business requirements. Business and IT need to collaborate on both strategy and architecture, which in turn drives out portfolio planning and delivery of the business solutions. She pointed out that also “enterprise architecture” is currently mostly technology architecture with a bit of business architecture on the side (if you’re lucky), in the future it will become more balanced with equal contributions from business and technical architecture.

Part of what the SOA Consortium is doing is providing guidelines for how the too-technical technology architects can become more valuable enterprise architects, and to break the artificial divide between business and IT. Part of this, I think, is similar to something I posted a year and a half ago, where enterprise architecture is not an IT function, but something that is in a strategic position between business and IT.

We’re off to do the last of the roundtables now, where I’ll be leading one on Enterprise 2.0 and BPM mashups. My notes will be on paper, and I’ll summarize them over here sometime on that overnight flight home tonight.

BPM Think Tank Day 3: Randy Heffner

Day 3 opened with a keynote from Randy Heffner of Forrester on BPM in the world of digital business architecture.

He spoke about the old model of enterprise applications, which was that of functional silos with point-to-point integration between them, and how that’s changing to a process-centric model: not just using BPM to connect up the functional silos, but breaking down the functional silos so that the technology becomes a better reflection of the essential business processes. He envisions a number of portals for different worker roles — sales process portal, executive portal, fulfillment portal, etc. — with a layer of business-oriented services that support those portals by accessing virtualized enterprise data sources (which, of course, may still come from those old enterprise applications).

He seems focussed on SOA and business services rather than BPM and the orchestration of those services; he models the enterprise as portals consuming the services where presumably BPM is implicit in the portal in some way rather than discussing BPM directly. That becomes a bit more clear in a layered diagram of the new “programming” model, with various user interaction channels at the top, then a layer of interaction services, then human-centric process flow, then business services, then integration-centric process flow, then the underlying systems and data sources. Along the side spanning the layers are both business metadata (across interaction services and human-centric process flow) and technical metadata (across business services and integration-centric process flow), and business measurement and optimization across all the layers.

In his slide on the future of key technology platforms, there’s this big fuzzy bit in the middle called “business metadata core / business design platform”, which he admits is poorly defined and states that BPM provides a start to some of that functionality. The surrounding technologies, including the SOA sweet spot of business services, are otherwise pretty well defined in his view.

He finishes with a list of core competencies for the future of IT:

  • Deep integration of business and technology savvy: cross-functional focus on business design
  • Architecture visioning and strategy: vision + implementation = street-level strategy; multilevel investment strategy (strategic, soft dollar, hard dollar)
  • Portfolio management: road map for your business to position and justify investments
  • Project-level architecture governance: incremental build-out against architecture strategy

Forrester seems to have a distinct division between SOA and BPM in its analysts: they either know one domain or the other, but don’t seem all that comfortable talking about the other side. Heffner is definitely an SOA guy.

BPM Think Tank Day 2: Jim Rudden

Jim Rudden of Lombardi gave the first presentation after lunch. Like the BEA presentation yesterday, Lombardi gets this short timeslot since they’re a platinum sponsor of the event, and Jim’s topic was on modelling your business, not just your process. I’ve seen a similar presentation, likely in a Lombardi webinar, with the three key areas of focus for modelling business: setting direction, controlling processes and work, and improving performance.

Challenges in setting direction:

  • Accessibility: can everyone participate easily?
  • Audience: can we involve business teams?
  • Standardization: is everyone gathering the same information?
  • Consensus: does everyone agree with the model?
  • Prioritization: is it clear where to start improvement?
  • Leverage: can you move quickly to implementation?

He then went into a brief (pre-recorded) demo of Blueprint, Lombardi’s SaaS process discovery product, to show how it can address the issues of setting direction. I need to get back and give this another in-depth review, since it’s obviously had a lot of changes since I saw it back at product launch time. They’ve done some nice things with the different views, providing a map/outline view, a diagram (BPMN) view and a documentation view, plus metadata such as goals, problems and impacts in a sort of structured wiki-like environment.

The remainder of the day is the roundtables, where I’ll take notes on paper so they won’t be posted until later tonight or tomorrow. I’m first attending the session on BPMN and BPDM with Antoine Lonjon and Stephen White, then the one on BPEL with Ismael Ghalimi.

BPM Think Tank Day 2: Business Process Frameworks

Next was a panel on business process frameworks with representative from various framework standards

Tom Mercer (VRM from the Value Chain Group), Lloyd Chumbley (ACORD), Philippe de Smedt (OMG Finance Domain) and Paul Harmon (covering SCOR and eTOM, and also moderating).

Each panelist spoke briefly about the mission of their organization and framework:

  • VRM (Value Reference Model) is an analytical framework that establishes a classification scheme for business processes using a hierarchy of levels and relationships through inputs/outputs. Unlike many other frameworks, it doesn’t appear to be specific to any industry vertical, which makes it more like a methodology than a framework. Mercer said that they’re working on a relationship/mapping between VRM and BPMM. With 38 slides for a 10-minute presentation, I’m sure that I missed something along the way…
  • ACORD is an insurance standards organization, and all of their standards are focussed on that vertical. They started with (paper) insurance forms, then moved on to EDI and XML for exchanging data. More recently, they’ve started standardizing terminology/vocabulary and high-level process components (e.g., “determine coverage”, “indicate beneficiary”), which has some pretty exciting potential both for improving insurance companies internally as well as the cross-organization processes. Chumbley gave the benefits of a framework: save time, reduce risks, enable business agility, reduce costs, and enable incremental development. Many insurance companies were already using their own proprietary frameworks, and ACORD is working to have them come together in an industry-standard framework in order to facilitate the integration of third parties — reinsurers, contractors, geographically-diverse divisions, outsourcers, agencies, etc. — into a company’s process. They identify the three key components of the framework as a common glossary and data structures (standardized terms and relationships); business capabilities and process definitions (library of standard process building blocks); and a business messaging library. Their goal is consumability of those standards, and they see the necessity of working with OMG, OASIS and W3C to come into line on these.
  • OMG creates domain-specific specifications and standards like reference models of business processes for financial services, which has been issued in RFP format. They focus on two key use cases — funds transfer (including payment authorization, clearing and settlement) and account opening (including loan origination, subscription, applications and enrollment) — with a goal to reduce the risk of sensitive data exposure by reducing the amount of data that has to be transmitted in order to execute a specific type of process. The reference models will include data models, service models, process models and trust models, and it’s their goal to create a metamodel that can be applied to a wide range of financial services.
  • SCOR was developed in order to facilitate supply chains that cross company boundaries, as well as to standardize and improve supply chain internal processes. This started as a common vocabulary, then a standard set of measures for the purpose of establishing industry benchmarks. Harmon gave an example of what happened during the HP-Compaq merger, where the supply chain groups (both using SCOR) were able to model their processes and select the software that supported the more efficient version of process — no arguments over whose process or software was better, since they had industry-standard benchmarks against which to measure.
  • eTOM is a framework specifically for telecommunications organizations, and models the value chains and processes across the company. They take these down to explicit process models in UML, and show where ITIL fits in.

In general, the domain-specific frameworks tend to drill down to deeper levels of detail, which appears to me to have the potential to provide greater value.

BPM Think Tank Day 2: John Alden

Replacing the scheduled Bill Curtis (who had to cancel due to a family emergency), Chief Process Officer at McAfee, John Alden of Capability Measurement (which he co-founded with Curtis) gave the second day keynote on the role of the Chief Process Officer in business process improvement.

Responsibilities of the CPO:

  • Champion enterprise process discipline: quantify the need, articulate the vision, and infiltrate the mindset. It’s important for the CPO to be an internal evangelist for process improvement. Low process maturity organizations are spending 30-40% of their total time doing rework due to errors earlier in the process. In mid-maturity organizations, processes are stabilized but not standardized. In mature organizations, processes are standardized to reduce variability.
  • Drive process measurement: quantify business cases, support local management needs first, and mature the measures with the process over time. Derive the measurements, or KPIs, from strategic goals. Measures in immature organizations are unreliable, inconsistent and inaccurate; in mid-level maturity organizations, they become more standardized; and in mature organizations, they become strategic.
  • Coordinate enterprise process integration: represent cross-functional interests, establish enterprise process capability, and coordinate enterprise improvement projects. This requires optimizing the workflow rather than the functional performance of any given group, that is, focussing on the end-to-end process rather than silos: moving from siloed improvements, to coordinating functions through cross-functional processes, to enterprise processes that draw on functions as roles. There needs to be some sort of enterprise infrastructure to support these efforts, possibly through a centre of excellence.
  • Develop local process improvement capabilities: build business unit BPI capability, support local BPI activities, and establish enterprise improvement assets.

Alden talked a bit about BPMM, and how it needs to start at the local level and have the right type of leadership from the local managers, and finished up with a brief look at the CPO function and the related process improvement structures that are in place at McAfee.

I would have love to hear Curtis talk about this himself, since I’m sure that he’d bring more passion and hands-on knowledge about his role at McAfee to it, but Alden is very knowledgeable in this area and was a reasonable substitute.

BPM Think Tank Day 1: BPM Standards Panel

The final session of the day was a panel with representatives from four standards organizations: Fred Cummins of OMG (BPMN, BPDM), Charlton Barreto of W3C, Keith Swenson of WfMC (XPDL) and John Evdemon of OASIS (BPEL), moderated by Fred Waskiewicz of OMG.

The first question was on the focus or mission of each organization:

  • OMG has a focus on modelling business processes by business people through specifications such as BPMN and BPDM.
  • The W3C’s focus is on “keeping the web from fragmenting”, which seems a somewhat lofty goal. Relative to BPM, it’s about providing a testable architecture.
  • WfMC’s mission is to help the process design ecosystem work together better by providing process-specific standards such as XPDL. XPDL stills reigns as the de facto interchange standard for process models, with over 60 different systems and open source projects supporting it, and I can’t imagine that WfMC is going to back away from that for quite a while.
  • OASIS is involved in both orchestration, through BPEL, and choreography, through BPSS. Evdemon acknowledged some of the shortcomings with BPEL, such as the lack of support for human-facing tasks, looping and subprocesses, and discussed how they are addressing those with upcoming extensions.

So far, so polite. Everyone seems to be acknowledging everyone else’s position, and it seems like one big happy standards family. The question is, of course, is there room in the landscape for all of these? If so, how do they fit together? Is there One Language To Rule Them All?

Barroto called for more workshops to bring together the standards bodies to work out the issues of overlap and compatibility, and Evdemon agreed; I understood that that was part of the reason for the BPM Think Tanks in the first place, but they seem to be suggesting something different, like a technical skunkworks of some sort where the engineers just get together and hack it out. Since they come from the two organizations that produce much more technical standards, that’s not a surprising view, but I’m not sure that it is sufficiently sensitive to the nature of all of the types of people (including business people) who might need to be involved in the development of BPM standards.

Great question from Phil Larson of Appian: since BPMN is the only thing that everyone can agree on, why is OMG messing things up by including BPDM into BPMN, when there is still an active competition (on some level) between BPDM, XPDL and BPEL (when it’s used as an interchange standard rather than an execution language)? Phil Gilbert responded that BPMN wasn’t right in the first place since it was missing the representation part, and the inclusion of BPDM fixes that somehow. I’m not sure that answers Larson’s question, and he came back to ask if WfMC and OASIS see BPDM as a threat, and if not, why not? Swenson reinforced the big happy standards family idea that all of these can exist together, but mentioned something about migrating from XPDL to BPDM; Evdemon also said that if something better than BPEL comes along, then you should be looking at it. To me, it sounds like both WfMC and OASIS are in a wait-and-see mode to see what BPDM will turn out to be in reality, and both seem to be making noises about how if a superior standard emerges that handles all the use cases, then it would make sense to consider moving in that direction. As if they could say anything else.

That’s it for day 1. We’re all headed for the bar to see which vendors buys the first round.

BPM Think Tank Day 1: Organizational Modelling

I switched over to the business stream for the discussion on OSM and BMM by Lance Gibbs of BP-3.

BMM (Business Motivational Metamodel) establishes a common structure for business planning, including business strategy and execution. It aligns the defined goals to the influencers that help or hinder achieving these goals, and considers business rules to be a major governance instrument that needs to be employed. The last point was a bit surprising, until Gibbs pointed out that this specification comes from the Business Rules Group to OMG. In retrospect, however, I can see that BMM is addressing some essential bits of enterprise architecture that have long been ignored: In Zachman terms, the top 2 or 3 rows of column 6 (remember, I’m Column 2, so rarely go this far to the right) covering business goals/strategies, business objectives, and business rules. It’s all about the ends and the means, terms that repeat in each cell of that Motivation column in EA models. It’s interesting to point out, however, that this upper right corner of the Zachman framework are often ignored because the concepts of motivation are a bit fuzzy; since EA is often owned by IT (even though it should be more cross-functional), it would be their natural preference to deal with the left-most columns and the lower rows.

OSM (Organizational Structure Metamodel) helps to manage work resources that don’t fall into the old hierarchical models. This includes business rules, roles and responsibilities, formal organizational relationships, effective dates, authority chains, qualification definitions and all of the concepts around the extended enterprise in this highly-distributed world. As I mentioned in one of today’s earlier posts, OSM ties into business processes as the resources that service those processes.

I’m completely new to BMM and OSM, having never heard of the specific acronyms before this morning, but the value is immediately apparent. These two are covered together because they represent part of the spectrum from strategy to the operational processes that can help to achieve that strategy. This directly addresses the issue of becoming a process-centric organization, since both of these span functional areas to manage processes end to end, and more importantly, decouple work management from the organizational hierarchy.

Lombardi is one of the contributor to OSM, and they’ve started to introduce some of these concepts into the resources definition functionality within their TeamWorks product: Gibbs showed a few screenshots from this to illustrate concepts such as task routing relative to the current organization chart (parent/child) rather than to a specific role or person, and dynamic task assignment based on business rules. Consider also the impact of including organizational models like this on simulation and what-if analysis, such as the ability to find weaknesses and bottlenecks in the organizational structure as well as the business processes.

BPM Think Tank Day 1: Modeling Notations/Metamodels

For the next two sessions, we’ve split into two tracks, business and technical, and I’m in the technical track where Stephen White of IBM (the “father of BPMN”) is talking about modeling notations and metamodels, namely, BPMN, BPDM and UML.

White started out by listing all of the process-related standards both within OMG, and those external to OMG, such as BPEL, XDL, ebXML BPSS (ebBP) and WS-CDL. I’m starting to think that they missed a great opportunity at lunch with the vegetable soup: a few letter-shaped noodles and we would have had alphabet soup for lunch as well as the dose of it that we’re having now. 🙂

He then focussed specifically on the three key process standards within OMG: UML, BPMN and BPDM.

UML’s been around quite a while; I know it primarily as a way to model software development concepts, and have never been happy with the attempts to shoehorn it into business analyst usages since it is difficult to explain the visual syntax of some UML diagrams to business users when they need to review them. UML activity models were added as a variation of state diagrams, and were beefed up with some business semantics to allow for use by business analysis to model business processes, but they’re not as functional as BPMN diagrams for business process models and have pretty much been replaced in that area by BPMN; I expect that they’re used mostly for modelling flows within software (by developers) than for business processes these days.

BPMI first developed BPML (an XML process execution language) which was later replaced by BPEL, and realized that a graphical notation standard was required, leading to the development of BPMN. BPMN was developed to be usable by the business community, and to be able to generate executable processes (through mapping to a language such as BPEL) by providing not just graphical elements, but the attributes for those elements. BPMN is intended to be methodology-agnostic, and to allow a business analyst to model a process in as simple or as complex an amount of detail that they deem suitable for the application.

White covered the basics of BPMN: the four core elements of activities, events, gateways and connectors represented as shapes, then variations on each of those such as the border type and thickness of an event to indicate if it is a start, intermediate or end event. I covered some of this in my recent webinar on business process modelling, or there’s tons of more detailed BPMN references around the web including Bruce Silver’s BPMN course.

This is turning into a bit too much of a BPMN primer, but I’m hanging on for the BPDM part. Also, I’m in the middle of the second row and can’t exactly sneak out unnoticed.

There seems to be a huge point of confusion with some of the audience members over pools and lanes in the swimlane elements of BPMN, and when to use a pool versus a lane; this seems like one of the most obvious things in the standard, so I’m not sure why this is a problem. Pools, in general, represent separate spheres of control; a business process starts, ends and has all of its elements within a single pool. Pools are often used to represent separate organizations in a B2B process representation. Lanes are sub-partitions of pools, usually used to indicate an organizational role or department, or even specific systems that participate in the process in some way; elements of a business process will be in different lanes of the same pools to indicate where (or by whom) that element is executed. Only message flows pass between elements in different pools, which implies a level of asynchronicity; whereas sequence flows are used to connect activities, gateways and events within the same pool, whether in the same lane or not.

BPMN 1.1 was just completed, with a few notational changes:

  • Signal, a new event type, denoted by a black triangle within the event circle shape. A signal is used to broadcast a specific state to other processes outside the immediate scope.
  • Reduction in scope for link events, because of the inclusion of the signal event; these are now basically goto events within a process.
  • Visual distinction between events that throw and catch, indicated by whether the internal icon is filled or an outline.
  • Rule event is now called “conditional”.
  • Icon for multiple events is a pentagon rather than a 6-pointed star.

Nine minutes after the session was supposed to end, we finally start on BPDM, so I think that this is going to be quick. I’m starting to understand by standards are never released on schedule…

BPDM was started in 2003 as a metamodel of business processes, initially without a notation and later aligned with BPMN. It’s intended to support the specification of multi-party choreography (think of message flows between pools) as well as process orchestration: basically, orchestration is what goes on inside a pool, that is, internal business processes; choreography is what happens between pools, that is, B2B interactions. BPMN 2.0, which will include BPDM, will update how choreography processes are modelled.

BPDM, as the metamodel, defines the meaning of the notation and provides the standardized structure behind it that allows for translation between different modelling languages. In BPMN 2.0, the meaning of BPMN will be changed to Business Process Model and Notation to indicate the inclusion of the BPDM metamodel into BPMN 2.0.

BPM Think Tank Day 1: Derek Miers

Derek Miers started the afternoon with an overview of OMG’s BPM standards.

Adopted specifications

  • BPM (Business Motivation Metamodel)
  • BPMN (Business Process Modeling Notation)
  • BPDM (Business Process Definition Metamodel)
  • SBVR (Semantics of Business Vocabulary & Rules)
  • BPMM (Business Process Maturity Model)

Specifications in progress:

  • OSM (Organizational Structure Metamodel)
  • BPRI (Business Process Runtime Interfaces)
  • BPMN 2.0 (Merged notation and metamodel)
  • PRR (Production Rules Representation)

BPMM is concerned with the evolutionary improvement path that organizations take from immature, inconsistent processes to a more mature set of business processes, and is targetted for use by the business side within organizations.

BMM is an integrated approach for deciding, documenting, communicating and managing key elements in business design, intended for use by business managers.

SVBR is more of a vendor-focussed standard for business rules: like other serialization and interchange standards, this is something that is built into products but isn’t much seen by business managers/analysts.

BPDM is an interchange format for moving between process model types: a metamodel that allows, for example, XPDL to be translated to BPDM and on to BPEL. Interesting to note that OMG puts XPDL in the same layer as BPEL, WS-CDL and ebBP, that is, execution models, with BPMN and BPDM being up in the business models layer. I’m not sure how much of this representation is political in nature, to allow BPEL and XPDL to be included in a BPDM world; since BPDM does serialization for the purposes of interchange, XPDL would only be used for interfacing with systems that don’t support BPDM, and BPEL would be used only when it was required as an execution language. This is a technical standard: business analysts won’t really care except that it provides them with interchange between tools as required.

BPMN we all pretty much know about: a graphical process notation standard, used by business analysts and others who need to create or understand process models. Version 1.1 will be released within the next few weeks, and 2.0 (which rolls in BPDM to provide notation, metamodel and interchange in a single standard) is targetted for the end of 2008.

OSM is a standard for modelling (essentially) the organizational chart: organizational units, position, authority, responsibility, relationships, contact information, organization rules, and matrix structures. A current de facto standard that covers part of this is LDAP, for example. OSM is targetted at business managers, but will need adoption by the modelling tools and BPMS vendors. There was a decision made to separate the process (BPMN/BPDM) and resource (OSM) architecture, although they are closely related: OSM will tie into BPMN concepts such as swimlanes.

BPRI is a standard providing an interface to process execution artifacts in order to extract information for monitoring and analysis. I think that this is a prime target for RSS feeds as a standard way of extracting runtime data from executing systems; that would at least provide a standard transport, leaving still the development of the standard for the payload. Derek indicated that this is one working group that is having trouble getting participation and traction in the industry, so if you’re interested in participating in this (or in any of the other OMG BPM standards), contact OMG.

On his summary slide, he has one line that says “Don’t leave it to the vendors to control your destiny”, yet the room is full of vendors with a sprinkling of independent like Bruce, Brenda and I, and I’m not sure that the end-user organizations that this is obviously targetted at are even in attendance.

OMG specification documents are freely available to the public, although I’ve always found it difficult to find them on their website. Apparently there’s a link from the OMG home page to the specifications catalog, and all of the specifications are linked from there.