I agree with you.

Intalio|Designer supports this way of modeling processes.

Best regards
 -Ismael

I couldn’t agree more with your opinion that autonomous services should be modeled and coded the same as human powered services.

Ismael, I’d love to hear your response to this.

I certainly respect your viewpoint, but I still have one nagging concern about BPEL — Human Powered Services seem to be the exception rather than the norm.

As I have naively blogged many times, I think that it’s silly at the choreography level to differentiate between an autonomous service and a human powered service. The latter should simply look like an asynchonous service to the process engine (in my opinion). With this approach, if you are able to automate an activity at some point in the future your process definition doesn’t really change.

BPEL4people seems to be going out of its way to promote the opposite… if it’s autonomous you code it one way, if human powered you code it differently — at least that’s my understanding.

That said… I do agree that BPEL was instrumental in getting BPM off the ground. I just think we should go back and retool now that we have a better idea of what works (and what doesn’t).

Regardless — keep up the great work at Intalio. It keeps the rest of us on our toes.

-John

BPM: The Third Wave is always a good read.

-Ismael

Thanks in advance.

I have a similar recollection as well, but the idea for a standard notation and its name were originated a bit earlier, and reflected in a few papers and web pages published by BPMI.org at the time. It was part of a trio of specifications that BPMI.org intended to develop — BPML, BPMN, and BPQL. Once the idea had been proposed, Casewise, Popkin (and a few others) were instrumental in making it happen. We all agreed that Stephen White would be the best person to develop the first specification, and I’m very grateful that he accepted our invitation.

Thanks a lot for the clarification and the words of encouragement.

Best regards
 -Ismael

Good as ever to see someone laying out the facts. I do however have a different take on the origins of BPMN. My own recollection was that two people, one from Casewise and one from Popkin were sitting in a bar in London after a CSC event. The discussion was around how Rational had managed to own the UML market as a result of creating the standard and then putting it into the OMG. The discussion continued that no similar approach existed for process, as you might expect a few more beers followed and then the idea came about that if Casewise and Popkin were to create some such notation (based upon the CSC Catalyst method which they both supported), then perhaps they could create the same first to market effect as Rational. So the two of them started to work on this, at which point CSC suggested that if this was the way they were going then they should bring their work into BPMI.org and marry it to the BPEL work going on there, and thus these guys joined with your own good efforts and got the initial BPMN work underway. I know that it has grown a long way since then, even within your guidance and under the auspices of BPMI, long before the OMG got involved.

Of course I could be wrong, as I was not one of those people, just someone having a drink with them at the time.

Keep up the message of purity.
 -Mark

Thank you for your kind words.

See you in Japan soon.

Best regards
 -Ismael

This articles is superb. I have been reading your blog with my eye and ears wide open in order for me to understand why you are so passionate about the BPMN+BPEL combination. Now I see what you mean. I am sure that such an historical perspective will be very persuasive in convincing readers. Thanks for your time and energy.