IBM today announced the acquisition of Bowstreet. The portal-based tool company had been working with IBM for about three years and derived most of its revenue from this relationship, making the acquisition a very natural one.

Bowstreet’s product is interesting because it’s a perfect illustration of how challenging it can be to deal with complex systems. At its core, Bowstreet’s Portlet Factory uses parametric technology to help organizations develop highly-customizable portlets that can be dynamically reconfigured to support multiple channels, geographies, locales, or any other dimension that makes sense to a business analyst. Nevertheless, abstracting such complexity away from the code comes at a cost and Bowstreet’s tool turned out to be fairly complex to use, requiring specific skillsets that go beyond what your average business analyst can handle.

There lies the challenge in building tools that can extract business logic out of the application’s code and expose it to business analysts. Expose too little and the gap between business and IT remains. Expose too much and business analysts get pushed out of the picture.

Business rule engine vendors have dealt with this challenge over the years either by specializing their tools to certain verticals and targetting the most technically-oriented business analysts, or by decoupling rules from their parameters and providing simpler tools that allow business analysts to change the parameters of a rule without changing the rule itself.

Today, BPM vendors are going through the same learning process, but because a BPMS deals with so many more dimensions — flows, services, schemas, rules, user interfaces — this learning process is an order of magnitude steeper. This is why notations such as BPMN must be complemented with other diagrams in order to support complete enterprise modeling (organization modeling comes to mind), BPEL must be extended in order to support human workflow (BPEL4People) and BPDM must be developed in order to connect the two in an unambiguous manner. A lot of work remains to be done…