Terry Lee, MEGA’s VP of North American operations, gave us an overview of MEGA, both in terms of their business process analysis and enterprise architecture capabilities. He stated the real reason for using a BPA tool, rather than just the modeling environment within the BPMS, is the ability to analyze the processes within a larger context: relative to risk analysis, enterprise architecture, and corporate performance management.
A process is analyzed and some level of design is completed in MEGA, then the process is handed off to Appian through a manual export/import for further work in their process designer — no mention of round-tripping, although I happened to be sitting beside Dan Hebda (MEGA’s VP of technology) and passed him a note asking about this. He replied that round-tripping would be supported, but isn’t in the current prototype that they’re demonstrating here at the conference. I have a meeting with Dan tomorrow at Gartner, where I’m sure to get a lot more information on this, and Terry summed at the end of his presentation by mentioning that the future integration would include round-tripping.
Metrics for the executing process are captured using the MEGA Advisor and fed back to the models in MEGA to allow for process analysis and optimization.
I believe that there’s a lot of benefit for many organizations in using a BPA tool such as MEGA for modeling processes — especially the portions of processes that are not automated, hence may not be represented in the process models within a BPMS — and the larger enterprise architecture context. For success, however, this requires two key areas of integration: a seamless bidirectional exchange of process models, and the ability to load executing process logging data back into the BPA. It appears that Appian and MEGA are working hard to achieve both of these.