BPM Think Tank Day 2: BPMN Technology Roundtable

Since I’m here in part to firm up my knowledge about BPM standards, I chose to attend four technology roundtables and none of the executive (business focussed) ones. The first one that I attended was on BPMN, led by Petko Chobantonov of Lombardi. Petko’s involved with the development of the BPMN standard and was really pushing us to find out what else should be added to the standard in the future. I was the scribe for that session so have a ton of notes, my problem is trimming them down and making them understandable in this post.

First of all, Petko made the statement that OMG is not recommending XPDL for serialization of BPMN (i.e., a file format in which to save BPMN), but recommends the use of BPDM (which isn’t released yet, although a very early draft is due next month). This sets up for an interesting showdown between XPDL, which is already in use by 30+ modelling and BPM vendors, and BPDM when it finally is released this year or next.

For the first time, I heard about BPRI, Busines Process Runtime Interface, which incorporates information gathered at runtime such as metrics and statistics about a process (I think). Petko has a bit more on his blog about it here, and I’ll be looking at this in more detail since I think that this is a necessary standard as well.

One of the participants from an end-user organization said that they have extended BPMN with 3-4 custom types in their internal use, one for applications and one for data elements. He also said that they have difficulties in publishing and communicating BPMN diagrams because of the complexity, and that there needs to be some easier ways to abstract a flow in order to present it to someone who is not intimately involved with the process, such as executive management. Although using just a linear set of milestones was suggested as an abstraction model, removing all of the split/merge and other flow information, I think that some of the flow information should be left in place even in a high-level diagram in order to provide sufficient value.

This was also one of the times during the day when I heard about the crossover between BPMN and enterprise architecture. We discussed different perspectives (similar to the perspectives in a Zachman diagram), and although Petko felt that the standard could be extended to become effectively a higher-level diagram from which you could invoke other EA perspectives, like organizational and motivational models, I think that BPMN holds a place as a standard for creating artifacts in one or two of the Zachman cells in column 2 (process), not as an overarching EA model.

We had a discussion about the standard organizational tree-type chart, and how the boxes in that correspond to swimlanes in a BPMN diagram. From that, we talked about how to represent information in the org chart based on which processes that a particular role participates in, and also discussed the stickier subject of assigning roles a bit more dynamically based on a collection of capabilities rather than a pre-determined role. That got me thinking about whether we’re asking the question the wrong way around: instead of the asking what capabilities exist in a role or person, should we be creating the roles or services based on what combinations of capabilities exist? Something to think about later.

We talked about a dependency diagram for subprocesses used in multiple processes, and whether this should be a standard view defined in BPMN, or if it’s informational rather than notational. If the audience for this information is primarily the business analysts who use BPMN, then perhaps a graphical standard is appropriate, although it’s a “report” of sorts, not a working model.

Petko finished up with some ideas about defining aspects of a process, such as security, escalation and exception handling, in order to simplify the primary representation. The aspects would be invoked whenever an activity is executed, but represented on separate diagrams. In that way, an aspect would effectively be a template for activities that could be overlaid on any of the activities in the main diagram and extend the meaning of the main diagram. Each activity in the main diagram would need a mechanism for passing some number of parameters to the instance of each aspect that may execute for that activity, for example, some measure of the time-criticality of an activity in order to trigger an escalation at the approriate time.

Tons of ideas came out here, as they did at the later roundtable that I attended on BPEL, and I’m looking forward to the roundtables today.

Time to head off to the conference (I’m already 5 minutes late and still have to finish packing and check out); more throughout the day as I get a chance.

BPM Think Tank Day 2: Roundtables

In the afternoon yesterday were the first two of four roundtables (the other two will be this afternoon). I really like this format, kudos to Dana Morris of OMG and his team for setting this up, and to Jeanne Baker for herding the cats so successfully when the time came.

When I signed up for the event, I was given a choice of 10 executive roundtables and 10 technology roundtables, and four time slots to choose from. Each of the 20 roundtables run simultaneously in each of the four time slots, with the same leader but a different group of up to eight attendees. The discussions are very dynamic, and there’s a scribe appointed for each session so that the ideas are captured and will eventually be distributed to the conference attendees.

Because the groups are small and the discussions interactive, it wasn’t the right environment for whipping out my laptop and blogging live, so I kept notes on paper which I’ve had to transcribe in order to report on the sessions. Posts on yesterday’s session follow this post; today’s will likely be delayed until tomorrow unless I get some wifi at the airport this evening.

BPM Think Tank Day 2: Panel on Business Value of Process Standards

We finished Wednesday morning with a panel on the business value of process standards, moderated by Connie Moore of Forrester, with panelists Richard Soley of OMG, Keith Swenson of Fujitsu and John Evdemon of Microsoft representing the BPMN-XPDL-BPEL value chain.

I’m now on the search for the Holy Grail of BPM standards: what’s going to survive the coming shake-out, and how exactly do XPDL, BPDM and BPEL overlap, compete and complement each other? Swenson started his intro with a statement about BPDM and XPDL: basically, there’s some great work happening on BPDM, but XPDL is here now and can be used in the interim. Was this an admission that XPDL is going to go away and be replaced by BPDM? I had a side conversation with Fred Cummins (who gave the BPDM workshop yesterday) before the panel, and he sees BPDM as providing a superset of functionality such that transforming to XPDL or BPEL doesn’t add any value unless the particular BPM execution engine requires the transformation. BPMN has clearly won the graphical representation skirmish; can BPDM take the rest of the field? [Note to Phil Gilbert, who dissed me yesterday for asking why use BPDM if you have XPDL: this is live blogging so pretty much stream of consciousness, I’m just blogging what I hear and think during the session and haven’t had time to formulate any real opinions or analysis of all this. So back off, buddy. 🙂 ]

Evdemon said that in his personal opinion, BPEL has a 3-out-of-5 importance rating for most organizations, mostly for checking off boxes on an RFP (in his position on the TC of the OASIS BPEL group, he said that it’s a 5/5, which makes me wonder why OASIS would choose to use him as a public speaker on the standard when his corporate affiliation and personal opinions aren’t really in line with the goals of the standards committee). He feels that BPEL got a lot of press unfairly, and that when he found out yesterday that XPDL can save a complete representation of all BPMN objects, he seemed to think that BPEL could become even less important and possibly even subsumed — recall from my post yesterday on his workshop that he sees BPEL as more useful as an abstract (modelling or exchange) language rather than an execution language.

Swenson came back to the issue of XPDL versus BPEL, which he doesn’t see as competing. XPDL is about process design, about serializing and saving what you drew in BPMN, and not so much about execution. He sees XPDL as a way of moving a process from one design/simulation/analysis tool to another (about 30 tools support it today), whereas BPEL is about the nuts and bolts of sending messages from one location/service/system to another. As Evdemon said, XPDL is like XMI for business processes. Swenson states that XPDL will continue to track and adjust to any changes to BPMN.

Interesting that the BPEL proponent thinks that BPEL is less important in the face of XPDL’s current functionality, whereas the XPDL proponent thinks that BPEL and XPDL should coexist.

Even more interesting is that the panel did not directly address the issue of the business value of standards, only the standards themselves. It would have been good to hear a bit more about how to promote the idea of BPM standards within an organization, although given the current somewhat confusing state of overlapping standards, it’s hard to know exactly what to recommend.

A last question was posed about BPDM that Soley addressed, namely, what is it and how does it compete/overlap with the others that we’re talking about here. He claims that it’s not intended to compete with any of these other standards, although that’s still not clear to me.

A really valuable and lively session, I just wish that I had recorded it since the opinions and comments were flying by and I’m sure that I’ve missed some key points. Hopefully, I’ll be able to explore these further in the roundtables this afternoon and tomorrow.

BPM Think Tank Day 1 wrapup

First, a major thumbs down to OMG for not providing free wifi in the conference rooms — this is an expected level of service at any computer-related conference these days. The Doubletree (where the conference is being held) has paid wifi throughout the hotel so I was able to get online, at a price. One of the conference speakers later made the comment in response to all the requests for wifi that we should just turn off our laptops since we were supposed to be paying attention to the conference rather than reading our email. Thanks, Mom, but I was actually taking notes and live blogging about the conference, not reading my email.

On a more serious note, every presenter who I heard speak today was an expert in their particular area, but knew almost nothing about competing standards. I heard the phrase “I’m not an expert in xxx” too many times today, and I think that anyone involved in standards like this who is speaking at such a workshop should be at least familiar with the other standards that they are inevitably going to be asked about. I’m still sorting through how all these standards and formats fit together, which are competitive versus complementary, and it doesn’t help when the speakers don’t have a vision of at least their part of the landscape.

My favourite presentation was John Evdemon’s: not only was he informative, he also has a lot of passion for his topic. We had a brief chat afterwards about how we can bring together process and Web 2.0 that I hope to continue later.

BPM Think Tank Day 1: BPEL

I’m now in the final session of the day, with John Evdemon talking about BPEL. He’s dealing with a number of interesting points, such as name (WS-BPEL versus BPEL versus BPEL4WS), pronunciation (he doesn’t care, as long as you use it), the lack of graphical notation, and orchestration versus choreography. I particularly like his description of orchestration versus choreography, which is crystal clear: orchestration has the concept of a controlling party, even if other external organizations are involved in a process, and is concerned with the process from the viewpoint of that party includes its internal activities; choreography is at a higher level and looks at a process as message-passing between peers, without delving into the processes internal to any of the participants. BPEL is an orchestration language, and you can think of choreographing between the BPELs at each organization (sort of).

The motivation behind BPEL was application integration both within and between organizations — EAI and B2B — where everything is described as a service. It covers both non-programmers implementing flows by assembling components with flow logic, and programmers implementing the granular services using function logic that will make up those processes. There’s also the idea of being able to model both executable processes and abstract processes using BPEL, although most of the excitement around BPEL has been due to the platform-independent nature of it as an execution language, that is, the logic for how messages actually get processed. Abstract BPEL, on the other hand, can be used to describe an organization’s services at a deeper level than can be done via WSDL, without concern for execution.

Evdemon showed a diagram of how BPEL fits together with the rest of the WS-* stack, and shows how business process models and choreography models need to still be layered on top of BPEL to provide full capabilities.

Something that I didn’t really think about before, but which came up in response to the questions “where does BPEL live?” is that Microsoft doesn’t run BPEL directly, but translates it into BizTalk (unlike a product like Oracle BPEL Process Manager, which executes BPEL directly).

BPEL 2.0 is scheduled to go out for public review next month. New since v1.1:

  • New activity types (if-then-else, repeatUntil, validate, forEach, extensionActivity)
  • Completion condition in forEach activity
  • Variable initialization
  • XSLT for variable transformations (new XPath extension function)
  • XPath access to variable data (XPath variable syntax)
  • XML schema variables in web service activities (usability enhancements for WS-I compliant doc/lit-style WS interactions)
  • Locally declared messageExchange
  • Abstract processes (common base/syntax and profiles/semantics)

Evdemon’s recommendation and predictions about BPEL shocked me: it’s still under development, so don’t use it yet in production and the portability of executable BPEL will be low to non-existent. He sees that many organizations implementing BPEL are using it like a programming language, which he implies is an inappropriate usage since it’s missing some core capabilities, but that it’s more of an orchestration modelling language. If that’s the case, and the vendors are going to just translate it into their own proprietary execution language, then there seems to be little advantage to adopting BPEL over something like XPDL that can capture everything that BPMN can model, except possibly for better WS handling.

BPM Think Tank Day 1: ebBP (aka BPSS)

I’m in the BPM Think Tank pre-conference workshop on ebXML BPSS (Business Process Specification Schema), relabelled no less cryptically as ebBP (eBusiness Business Process, with the “specification schema” implied), presented by Sally St. Amand of the OASIS ebBP Technical Committee. St. Amand is obviously very knowledgable on the subject matter, but is a less-than-engaging speaker — call it the bureaucratic style of presentation, full of long pauses and paper shuffling.

According to the TC’s site:

The ebBP is a technical business process specification. It defines a standard language so that business systems can be configured to support the execution of business collaborations between partners or collaborating parties rather than the processing accomplished from the perspective of one business partner. The formal designation has been eBusiness eXtensible Markup Language (ebXML) Business Process Specification Schema (BPSS). It is more commonly known as ebBP (after the OASIS ebXML Business Process Technical Committee).

In other words, ebBP is an execution language for business collaboration between peers, like most eBusiness (and EDI) specifications before it, although it also allows for non-first-class participants (such as others in the supply chain) who may wish to observe the state of the process at certain points. In its basic format, it’s very similar to other XML-based eBusiness specifications that I’ve seen, usually from vendors; these vendor-provided specifications will hopefully migrate towards the ebBP standard as V2.0.X is adopted. The benefit of including observer participants became really obvious in a diagram of an eBusiness exchange that includes an observer: the message flow can include messages to the observer at any time, rather than just between the two main participants, although only the first-class participants can initiate the signals.

ebBP specifies the XML format, but does not include any graphical representation or modelling. There is an open source ebBP editor, which I’ve downloaded but haven’t tried out yet.

Working this into the general standards landscapte, ebBP is a choreography language for collaboration between different organizations, whereas BPEL is an orchestration language for processes that are controlled by one organization (although may execute across organizations).

At BPM Think Tank

Yesterday was a holiday in Canada, and on this long weekend we headed for the cottage as many Canadians do. After a weekend of dealing with a tractor that wouldn’t start, a clogged septic tank and a phone line that wouldn’t work amid projects such as putting in the docks and launching the boat, it was almost a relief to get up at a ridiculous hour this morning and get on a plane for Washington.

Here in Washington (Arlington, actually), I’m about to head off to the BPM Think Tank — watch for posts under the BPMThinkTank category over the next three days while I’m here. I’m also trying to finish up the Short History of BPM series, since JC is fast translating the previous ones into French.

If you’re at the think tank, look me up or drop an email/comment to setup a meeting.

mesh conference, Day 1

Sort of a non-BPM few days lately, what with BarCampTdot on the weekend and the mesh conference today and tomorrow.

mesh kicked off this morning with an interview with Om Malik. During the Q&A, an audience member referenced a quote that he heard many years ago: “When information is free, the only thing of value is point of view”. Om countered that the thing of value is context, not necessarily point of view. I can certainly identify with this, since (I assume) the reason that a lot of you read this blog is for the context in which I place information, and my viewpoints on the content, rather than just the content itself.

The next session was a presentation by, then interview with, Michael Geist, a U of Ottawa law professor and a brilliant speaker on web 2.0 and society, and on digital rights issues. Definintely my favourite part of the day so far (although the bar hasn’t opened yet).

Today has an unduly heavy focus on media — for some reason, all the media and society sessions are today, and all the marketing and business sessions tomorrow — although there’s some interesting ones such as the one on “Are Bloggers Journalists?” that I’m in right now.

I am left with the uncomfortable question of where all the money from this conference is going, considering that the organizers are not professional organizers and presumably weren’t in this to make money from it; they all have “regular jobs” of sorts. It cost $350 to attend for the two days (not worth the price, in my estimate, and not very web 2.0 in spirit), and with the large number of big-name sponsors, it’s not clear that they needed to charge attendees that much to provide what they are providing. I know that Gartner conferences and the like are far more expensive, but they’re in the business to make money on conferences, and this is more of a low-key participatory conference (not an unconference, but borrowing a few of the networking concepts).

I have to give mesh the credit, however, for indirectly inspiring BlogHerNorth: back in April, Elisa Camahort (of BlogHer) pondered why mesh couldn’t find more than 6 women to speak when there were 50 speaking slots available (subtitled “Another example of why BlogHer won’t be passe in my lifetime”). Kate Trgovac picked up the ball and asked if it was time for BlogHerNorth, I added some comments and started a conversation with her and a few others, and the ball was rolling. So, thanks to some men who excluded (however unconsciously) women from their conference speaking roster, we’re inspired to create BlogHerNorth.

BlogHerNorth at BarCampTdot

On the weekend, I attended BarCampTdot (aka BarCampToronto aka TorCamp), where we semi-officially launched BlorHerNorth. We held a session to talk about the vision for BlogHerNorth and to gather ideas on what participants might want to see; lots of ideas, no decisions. We won’t be running a full-scale conference this year, possibly in the spring, but some meetups or smaller sessions likely during the rest of this year to get the ball rolling.

Although the presenters will all be women since one of the main purposes is to highlight women in technology and blogging, the attendance is not restricted and we’re happy to hear input from anyone on what you’d like to see at a BlogHerNorth session.

Posts of links

I used to ignore blog posts that just contained lists of links, until recently when it finally hit me that if I value that person’s opinions when they write a regular blog post, why wouldn’t I value their opinion about what links that they find valuable? Of course, a list of links is really only valuable if the person adds their opinion for each link, which is exactly what del.icio.us allows you to do.

Thanks to Stephen O’Grady’s post about an experimental feature on del.icio.us, my new links (with my notes about them) will be posted once each day, as you see in the post immediately before this one. I like this much better than the Link Splicer functionality on FeedBurner, since everyone reading the blog can see it (not just those subscribing to my FeedBurner feed), and it’s a regular post so that you can add comments to it if you wish. You can also see what tags that I’ve used for each of the links, and click through to my collection of links with the same tags.

I’ll use this method instead of the “link only” type of posts that I have used to refer to another site with very little of my own commentary. There will likely be lots of links in the next couple of days while I sort out all of the things that I’ve tagged in Bloglines and turn them into del.icio.us links.