Another View on BPM 2.0
Thursday, February 2nd 2006 | Bruce Silver
Since Ismael gives me credit for coining the term BPM 2.0 two or three years back, I hope he doesn’t mind me adding my two cents now to the new version. First of all, I agree with most of the underlying premises: 1) BPM as a concept means something different to every vendor and as a result, users are confused. 2) BPM is not just modeling; without an integrated process design and runtime environment — a BPMS — you don’t get the benefits. 3) Building the implementation should not require real “coding skills,” as in Java, and ideally zero code; but it’s still an IT function, not business. And 4) The BPMS should be based on SOA and industry standards. The last is the hardest one for me to go for completely, since BPEL in its current form (even BPEL 2.0) is a major source of the problem. But we’re about drawing bright lines here, so let’s go with it.
Here’s where I differ a bit, and I hope Ismael will loosen up his definition of BPM 2.0 before it hardens completely. If his coinage is to have any traction — hopefully it will have more than mine did! — it can’t unfairly exclude all products that are not Intalio. So some of his criteria seem arbitrary and related more to product packaging than BPM concepts: Eclipse-based designer, “bundled” rule engine, “bundled” BAM (but nothing about integrating the modeling/simulation with the BAM metrics), Web 2.0 (I’m still trying to learn about what the heck that is), and especially the bit about zero charge/open source. All of those things might be great differentiators for Intalio, but they’re not fundamental. BPM 2.0 ultimately has to include more than one vendor if the world is going to care about it.
Several of these BPM 2.0 concepts have been put forth before — some are by now even conventional wisdom — although not packaged like this. The new idea that resonates most with me is revising how BPM supports business-IT collaboration and goal alignment. While Ismael puts the blame on traditional workflow vendors, the old idea most in need of revision — that business analysts can or even should author executable processes — really is the revolutionary thesis of the 2003 book BPM: The Third Wave by Smith and Fingar, for which Intalio was of course the model. The analogy then was the spreadsheet: It took a genius like Bricklin to invent the program, but even my mom can “design” a spreadsheet. So let’s confess, none of us are innocent in this particular crime. The idea that business people could, would, or should build process implementations was wrong. Not necessarily dumb, but certainly counterproductive. So the Third Wave is dead; long live BPM 2.0.
The one place where I think Ismael’s vision falls short is in identifying the role (and tool) for business users and business analysts in the BPM 2.0 paradigm. In his description, BPMN (described by OMG as a tool for business analysts) is used by “process analysts,” which I interpret as his term for the mass of XML-and-VB/Javascript/PHP/ABAP-but-not-Java-capable IT folks who are going to be orchestrating executable processes. As I understand it, BPMN somehow has morphed from an analytical modeling tool to a BPEL designer front end. But BPM still demands a clear role for the business side in order to succeed. I think that role is process and performance modeling, with optimization before implementation via simulation analysis. Consistency of data model and metrics between the process model and the BAM runtime is invaluable to completing the cycle of continuous improvement, which I think is central to BPM. It’s also the way to get the modeling community (users and vendors) to adopt a more favorable view of BPMS, instead of working at cross-purposes as they mostly do today. In fact, if it were my blog I’d add unifying the modeling/simulation/BAM environment (is Eclipse enough to do that?) to the BPM 2.0 requirement list.
Entry filed under: BPM 2.0
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I agree with most of your points, and Ismael’s, but I don’t think we can have BPM 2.0 without people… a standard way of integrating manual activities into business processes. Until something like BPEL4People gets real traction, WS-BPEL isn’t enough. We’re narrowing the areas where vendors have to provide proprietary solutions, but we’ve still got plenty of work to do. I look forward to the day when commercial BPM vendors earn their money by providing capabilities above and beyond the basics, building on a commodified base.
Your statement that BPEL needs to fix the human interaction problem in for BPM 2.0 to take off is right on. But right now BPEL4People is just a half-baked white paper, nowhere close to a spec, and its authors really never made the case for adding a new activity type. I’ve written a long list of questions to the BPEL4People team at IBM and SAP, to which they promised a response. But I’m still waiting. Expect a post on this topic in a week or so, whether they respond or not.
Bruce Silver says that he Third Wave is dead, on the basis that current BPMS products are not usable by business people, only process analysts. Firstly, he should read the book. The definition of the Third Wave is on page 18 (which also defines the first two waves), and page 118, where it is defined in terms of 15 attributes, and on pages 123 to 126, where 31 new rules of “third wave” BPM are described. In addition, the book was not tied to or based on Intalio, but on Computer Science Corporations work over 2 decades, including Business Process Reengineering (BPR). But of course, I do agree that Intalio, and other members of BPMI.org during the 2001 to 2003 period, contributed greatly to the vision of the Third Wave. I would also point out that waves, unlike points in time, take place over time. The wave has not yet played out. Take a look at Web 2.0 to see other aspects of the Wave (epitomized by AppExhange). The trend towards business people defining their own IT functionality is coming along quite nicely. In fact, the separation of software logic to editable and manipulatable content (the first terms we used for this in CSC in 1999), is growing apace.
Bruce, I do however agree with you that the definition of BPMS needs to be adjusted. BPM 2.0 as term, misses the point that a BPMS really is a quite radical architecture and computing paradigm. So the real issue is to define this new category more formally. It will be based around a virtual machine for concurrent execution and a design driven architecture (DDA) built around “process” as a new abstract computing entity (subsuming and syntheziing today’s separate paradigms of code, data, messages, rules, etc. I think the reality is, BPM 2.0 is really about the BPMS and what it really is, as opposed to incumbant distortions from existing product categories.
[…] The concept of BPM 2.0 was coined by Bruce Silver and first implemented by company called Intalio. From what I’ve read on their website and on the ITRedux blog there may be some very exciting opportunities here to leverage their open source (free) platform as an enabling technology for BSM and BAM (which they’ve embedded into their product!). The BPMS concept introduced here by Ismael Ghalimi, CEO of Intalio. […]
BPELephant…
The elephant in the BPM room is this: BPEL and BPMN won’t provide seamless round-trip engineering; BPEL is a wrong-headed distraction. “Please papa can I go Down to Richmond to the traveling show Please papa don’t say I can’t…
Phil,
BPEL is the standard for executing processes. Why fight against it?
Is BPEL really the standard?
Quote from the minutes of the joint BPMI-OMG Meeting (Washington, D.C.– November 2, 2004): “The WfMC has not developed a notation for XPDL. They may adopt BPMN. WfMC members are working with the BPMI Notation Working Group to build a mapping from BPMN to XPDL. WfMC sees XPDL as the transport mechanism (XML Schema) for BPMN.”
So there seems to be at least XPDL as a serious contender to BPEL. My impression is that BPMN is a de-facto standard and BPEL is one — perhaps even the most widely used one — ‘transport mechanism’ for BPMN, but not the only one. Also, as Bruce Silver has pointed out elsewhere, there is currently more XPDL than BPEL support among BPMS vendors.
The comments above center on 2 separate issues. BPEL vs XPDL is more about architecture and standards than the languages themselves. BPEL is really short for process designs based on a more-or-less-standard (common) process engine using service orchestration, while XPDL is really short for designs based on vendor-specific process engines all more-or-less-attuned to the WfMC (workflow) reference model. So they are not equivalent “standards.”
The larger issue is how Ismael’s BPM 2.0 differs from earlier conceptions of BPM, such as my original BPM 2.0 formulation (“process without programming”) based on my (perhaps faulty) understanding of Howard’s book BPM: The Third Wave. The promise then was that BPM, based on SOA standards, would give “the business” the tools to directly implement executable processes and change them quickly. In reality, however, the complexity of SOA has firmly established IT in the driver’s seat of BPEL implementations, and they don’t want “the business” anywhere close to implementing anything directly. I think this is why BPMS vendors that really do try to give implementation directly to “the business” — like Phil Gilbert — have such a visceral aversion to BPEL.
Ismael’s reformulation addresses this. In the new BPM 2.0, process implementations will done by IT “process analysts”, but require little or no code and only widely available skillsets, not J2EE programming. This is also consistent with IBM’s description of the target user of WebSphere Integration Developer, it’s BPEL tool. In response to some comments, Ismael has added a role for the business in process modeling and simulation analysis as a precursor to BPEL design. In this way, the “new” BPM 2.0 addresses the real elephant in the room, which is business-IT alignment and finding new ways to react quickly.
BPEL and XPDL are just different paradigms. BPEL allows for the construction of a BPMS that can reuse processes expressed in any other language. XPDL does not. XPDL is a much higher level language, in reality, an XML schema to describe workflows. Workflows are only one possible process. If you are a workflow vendor, and have been working in WfMC.org for some years, you may have implemented, or been influenced by XPDL. That’s to be expected. If you are a BPMS vendor, then you have to be in the BPEL space.
To the BPMS vendor, workflow is just a pattern deployed on the BPMS. That is, a BPMS can morph to be a workflow engine, just by adding the required process definition (in BPEL) that executes the way a workflow engine does. It can also morph to look like ERP, an SMTP server or any other kind of process. And of course, with swimlanes (utterly separate processes interacting only by communicating), it can combine all these processes into end to end distributed, concurrent, persistent, transactional or collaborative processes. Workflow products cannot do that. A workflow engine cannot be anything other than what it is, a workflow engine. It can execute any workflow, but it can only execute workflows.
Now, all that may be academic to some users of course. I expect BPMS to solve some big challenges that a WFMS cannot. I expect BPEL to solve some big challenges that XPDL cannot. The two paradigms may persist for quite a while. Here is a prediction for 2006:
We’ll see the first next generation workflow systems built on a BPMS. Why? Take a guess.
It is interesting to watch the technical debates on BPM. Here is my two-cent worth of observations culminating from over 40 years of business experience.
BPMN and BPMS in BPM 2.0 are the realization of “Application Development without Programmers” as envisioned by Dr. James Martin more than 20 years ago. Workflow engine was a natural extension of Xerox’s research and experimental workflow system entitled “Star†from which GUI and object-oriented programming (Smalltalk) originated.
The ‘we and them’ mindset is a die-hard species! In the early 50’s of 20th century, Rear Admiral, Dr. Grace Hopper (mother of COBOL) punched tapes to program the first-generation computer to compute entries for artillery ordinance tables. Nowadays, five years old children use computers to play and learn. Shouldn’t we erase the artificial line that separates an organization into business and IT communities? If we do, we don’t need any “strategic alignmentâ€!
Is there a big difference between BPMS and Workflow Engine from a business perspective? They are just two sides of the same coin. The one with the most extensibility, under the hood, for “plug and play†software and hardware components will win!
As BPM evolves, it is very likely that it will replace custom designed and built SCADA (Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition) system for real-time process control applications. Examples are production control, intelligent building, area traffic management, remote sensing, patient vital signs monitory instrumentation, and telecommunication network management.
BP (Business Process) is more than order fulfillment for the management of supply and demand chains. There is “information pollution†for many top executives who need in time and relevant data & information, which internal systems can never supply. They need external business intelligent data and information to make strategic decisions. In the 70’s, Operations Research community was asked by oil executives, “Why couldn’t you forecast the oil embargo by the OPEC?â€
UML has been a “de jure†standard, adopted by ISO, for extensible modelling language. One can find UML extensions in GIS (Geographic Information System), SysML for systems engineering, and STEP (another ISO standard) in product data description and exchange. Incorporating BPMN into UML to replace “Activity Diagram” is a real blessing!
Hi Bruce and Ismael. 1 Year afiter Bruce wrote in this article that
“the revolutionary thesis of the 2003 book BPM: The Third Wave by Smith and Fingar, for which Intalio was of course the model.”
Peter Fingar now comes up with new term in his column with the title of “The Greatest Innovation Since BPM” in his column at BPTrends at
http://www.bptrends.com/deliver_file.cfm?fileType=publication&fileName=SIX%2D03%2D07%2DCOL%2DTheGreatestInnovationSinceBPM%2DFingar%2DFinal1%2Epdf.
Referenced article on Inforamtion age calls “human interaction management system” as “fourth wave of business automation”. Looks like HIMS is another side of the coin of Office 2.0 with more scent of HUMAN-centered view of BPM2.0. Appreciate your comments in separate post if you think appropriate. Regards
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