Archive for May, 2006
Marrying BPMN and UML
Even though BPMN’s authoring organization BPMI.org merged within UML’s steward OMG last year, I do not expect BPMN to be merged within UML anytime soon. The two notations were developed by separate communities with different backgrounds, and getting these to recognize the value of each other’s work is no small task. Nevertheless, both are very complementary: one does for processes what the other does for objects, and marrying them would extend the scope of BPM 2.0’s idea for Zero Code and One Click Deploy from processes only to both processes and objects. In order to realize the vision, Intalio recently acquired the rights on some best-in-class UML technology. [Continue…]
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Enabling ITIL with BPM 2.0
From time to time, customers of BPM systems ask vendors for process templates, and the answer they get varies, depending on the vendor’s willingness to move away from remaining a pure platform provider, or the suitability of the suggested business scenario to be turned into a template that could be reused by multiple customers. One set of standard processes that would benefit from the development of such templates is ITIL, and requests for it have been expressed more and more frequently over the past six months. [Continue…]
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Why a Web 2.0 User Interface Matters
This is the twelfth edition of our weekly BPM 2.0 post. Today, I will try to explain why a web 2.0 user interface matters. Like with any other application, the most difficult part in deploying a business process powered by a BPMS of sorts is in getting active support from end users. For the deployment to succeed, the application has to be actually used by end users, and user interfaces play the most critical role in this. [Continue…]
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Too Many Gateways
When I heard about SocialMail — an RSS-to-SMTP gateway — the first thing that came to my mind was: “cool, a new application to play with”. Then, I started thinking about the consequences of having to install yet another gateway to bridge one protocol with another (RSS and SMTP), and translate one data format into another (blog post to email). After a while, I realized that yet another thing was broken with Office 2.0 and needed to be fixed. [Continue…]
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Exotic Office 2.0 Tools
Every now and then, someone comes up with an application that surprises you, either because the idea is so compeling that you wonder why nobody thought about it before, or because you never thought that it could have been built to being with, or both. This week brought more than its fair share of such applications, with the discovery of an Office 2.0 file compression tool, a voicemail translator, and a 3D printer. [Continue…]
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GTD and Office 2.0
My original post on Getting Things Done with Office 2.0 remains one of my most popular articles, but it’s more than five months old, and several new tools have become available in the meantime. Among them, Tracks and Wridea are definitely worth taking a look at. [Continue…]
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Reinventing Teamwork
The ‘Project’ family in the Office 2.0 Database now includes 10 entries. In reality, these could be broken down into sub-families, such as Groupware and Time Tracking. Problem is, Office 2.0 is blurring the boundaries between categories that had been clearly established in the past. This raises the following question: what should we call such applications? [Continue…]
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Internet Commodities
The network is made of four main commodities: bandwidth, CPU, RAM, and storage. Eventually, all four should be available for free and without limitations, assuming that you comply to standard terms of use. The real question is not so much IF, but WHEN, and HOW. [Continue…]
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Lucky Monday
Nobody likes Mondays, or at least I cannot fathom why anybody would. On such a day, a full week of work lies ahead of you, and it always seem like an extra day is needed to recover from the adventures of the weekend, whatever they might have been. Yesterday was a little different though, for it brought such as collection of good news that I found myself wishing that today would be Monday again, and the same would be true for the rest of the week. [Continue…]
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Why Native BPEL Execution Matters
This is the eleventh edition of our weekly BPM 2.0 post. Today, I will try to explain why interpreting BPEL code natively is important. When you are a software vendor and you have invested tens if not hundreds of man-years into the development of some proprietary process engine, it is very tempting to add a simple translation layer that would turn BPEL code into what your engine can digest. Customers should shy away from such solutions though, for they create more problems than they solve. [Continue…]
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Connecting Offline and Online Worlds
Last month, I wrote about the beauty of convergence, focusing on scanR and the ultra-cool TomTom NAVIGATOR 5. Today, another example of convergence at play crossed my radar screen, thanks to TechCrunch: Mytago. [Continue…]
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Getting There
When we released version 4.0 of Intalio|BPMS back in February, one major feature was missing: a graphical schema to schema mapper. We had such a feature in previous versions of the product, but switching from BPML to BPEL turned out to be trickier than we had originally thought, and carrying the feature forward meant re-implementing it from scratch. [Continue…]
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Duet is Nice but Duos are Better
SAPPHIRE is over, and the flight back home gave me the opportunity to think over what I have learned this week. One thing that I found particularly interesting in the stream of announcements that were made during the event was Duet, which came out of a partnership between Microsoft and SAP. [Continue…]
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Why SAP Should Open Source NetWeaver
SAPPHIRE 2006, Day Two — One problem with Open Source is that perfectly valid business motivations for adopting an Open Source development and licensing model often get occulted by counter-productive religious positions that bring no value to the debate whatsoever. When it comes to Open Source, I consider myself a true atheist. And if I ever come across as sounding too evangelical, it’s not because I adhere to any particular dogma, but rather because I find the business case for Open Source just too compeling for it to be dismissed, in very many instances. Today, I got a chance to spend some time with Frank Witte, Head of the Global Open Source Office at SAP. What came out of this meeting is further validation for an idea that was lingering in the back of my mind as of late: SAP should open source NetWeaver. [Continue…]
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It is all Part of the Process
SAPPHIRE 2006, Day One — Morcheeba’s last LP (Part of the Process) must have been playing on Henning Kagermann’s iPod lately, for his keynote was all about business processes today. I expect to learn more about SAP’s long-awaited Business Process Platform (BPP) when I meet Kaj Van de Loo tomorrow, but here is what Henning had to say about BPM, eventhough he made no mention of the acronym during his speech. [Continue…]
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SAP Gets It
SAPPHIRE 2006, Day Zero — I am in Orlando, Florida, joining a team of a dozen bloggers invited by SAP to cover the event. The deal is pretty simple: SAP provides flights, hotel rooms, meals, and conference passes. Bloggers contribute their time. We are free to write anything we want as long as we remain fair and balanced, and SAP gets a right to respond on our blogs if we write something that is critical of the company. Fair deal. [Continue…]
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Buy BPM 2.0, Get SOA Free
This is the tenth edition of our weekly BPM 2.0 post. Today, I will try to explain why generating web services on the fly is important. Unless you’re still living in the workflow-centric world of the 90’s, you know by now why BPEL matters. Problem is, the only thing BPEL understands is web services, and only one very narrow type of web service at that — WSDL. Here is the bad news: if you need to orchestrate transactions that are not yet exposed as web services, BPEL won’t help you. BEA suggested support for Java with the BPELJ specification, but I do not know any process analyst who likes to write Java code, so we’ll pass, thank you very much. Now the good news: a good BPM 2.0 product can give you web services for free out of pretty much anything out there. [Continue]
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Making BPM Sound Cool Again
To the trained eye, Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) looks awfully similar to the Common Object Request Architecture (CORBA) of the 90’s. Difference is, SOA deals with Web Services while CORBA dealt with stubs and skeletons. Web Services sound cool. Stubs and skeletons don’t. SOA will succeed where CORBA failed, and timing is not the only reason for it. Words are potent. The same is true for BPM, and the recent efforts by Dion Hinchcliffe or Sandy Kemsley to make it sound cool again should be praised. [Continue…]
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Nobody Cares About BPM
Last week, Google released one of the most amazing tools there is for marketers: Google Trends. The free service allows anyone to query Google Search’s query database and compare how many times a given keyword is used versus others. It also correlates search volume with news reference volume, and provides relevant news items in relation to major spikes in news reference volume. When I heard about the service, my first reaction was to check how popular the BPM acronym was. What I got from it is that nobody really cares about BPM anymore, or at least not as much as people care about SOA. [Continue…]
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Bug Bash
This week has seen a record level of activity in terms of fixing bugs for Office 2.0. First, the first backup service for blogs has been released. Second, AdventNet unveiled a really cool QA tool for online applications. Third, Charlie Wood responded to my request for iCal event publishing from Salesforce.com by adding support for it in the excellent Spanning Salesforce. [Continue…]
