It is hard to call the Business Process Modeling Notation anything but a success. Stephen White and the other members of the BPMN standardization group have spent nearly 10 years developing and fine-tuning a common graphical representation for business processes, and both tool support and user uptake have been heartening. But BPMN never had one critical element – a stepwise path for users and vendors that allowed them to phase in the use of individual symbols while making sure that the resulting models could be moved between tools. The original BPMN specification had the distinction between a simple subset of the language and the full set, but nobody I know found the simple set sufficient to do any meaningful modeling. The new revision of BPMN, 2.0 has more than 50 symbols in its full set. For users and vendors alike, it is unlikely that we will see support for and use of every language element out of the gate (notwithstanding the BPMN 2.0 support in modeling tools like Signavio). So, vendors will phase in new symbols over time, and users will extend their models with these symbols as they become available (and are deemed useful). But if there are no milestones on the way from what is supported today to the full BPMN 2.0 symbol set, we will see varying subsets by vendors, which will make interoperability difficult to impossible. Conformance classes provide these important milestones – they are targets that vendors and users alike can rally around, with a reasonable expectation that a tool that supports the symbols of a conformance class will be interoperable with a tool supporting the same conformance class. Bruce Silver has spelled this problem out in a recent blog post and I couldn’t agree more with his sentiment. The BPMN 2.0 Finalization Task Force needs to see this through. A standard specification by itself is not sufficient to ensure that the standard will be usable – and who has more authority to put forward such guidelines than the BPMN standardization group itself?

Process Modeling Lecture

In 2010, as before, I’m teaching a series of BPM-related courses at Stevens Institute of Technology both on campus and online. Starting March 15th I’m offering the BPM & Workflow master class (formally MIS 712) using Stevens’ WebCampus environment. The course covers the full lifecycle of analyzing processes, designing processes for BPMS support, and deploying and managing a BPMS. We use tools by IBM, Signavio, SunGard and Tibco for the practical components of the course. Students are encouraged to document and develop their own process designs, as many of the students work in BPM projects in their own organizations. The course delivery is web-based and self-paced, with podcasts, screencams, videocasts, and WebEx-style meetings. You can take the course as a one-off

If you can’t travel to Stevens, why not have Stevens come to you? The course runs March 15 through June 12 and can be taken as part of a Graduate Certificate in BPM (4 courses), Masters in IS with a BPM concentration (12 courses), or as a one-off course (for non-matriculating students). You can register from this site: http://webcampus.stevens.edu/ and if you have any trouble registering for the course (e.g. due to prerequisites) email me at mzurmuehlen@stevens.edu.

Robert Shapiro gave a presentation on the state of BPMN 2.0 today and Sandy Kemsley is providing her usual, excellent coverage here. One of the new features in BPMN 2.0 are four different subclasses of BPMN that reduce the number of modeling constructs to cater for different modeling purposes and levels of sophistication. One of these four classes is dubbed the DoDAF conformance class. Which prompts Sandy to raise the question:

Also not sure why the US DoD’s enterprise architecture standard is impacting what is supposed to be an international standard

I want to give some background on the DoDAF conformance class, and how it came about, since I wrote most of the DoD document (the initial release is available here, if you are interested in a more recent version please email me).

Background

Large-scale system descriptions for government projects have to be delivered in views the follow either the DoD Architecture Framework or the Federal Enterprise Architecture Framework (FEAF).  The DoD Architecture Framework (DoDAF) in its original form didn’t even contain a view for modeling processes, because it was closely designed with UML views in mind. Recently people have taken to using the Event-Trace-Description view (called OV-6c technically) and populated it with process models. Process modeling is increasingly important in the government space, but there is a large variety of approaches that people employ, and frameworks like DoDAF are not prescriptive in terms of how their individual views should be populated, i.e. which methods people should use. That leads to the situation that people use IDEF, BPMN, FlowCharts, and all claim to be DoDAF-compliant.

The Primitives Project

In May 2008 a project was launched by the CTO and Chief Architect of the Business Mission Area to address three points

1. How can the DoD enforce a consistent representation of architecture descriptions (i.e. how can we ensure the diagrams created by different modelers will look similar)
2. How can the DoD leverage existing standards for architecture descriptions (i.e. we didn’t want to invent a new notation)
3. How can the DoD enforce that the resulting models are interchangeable between platforms (i.e. how do we create process model portability)

Read the rest of this entry »

BPM 2010

The 2010 International Conference on Business Process Management is coming to the United States for the first time. The 8th instance of the premier academic BPM conference will be held at Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken NJ between September 14-16 2010, with Workshops on Monday, September 13th.

The conference brings together researchers and practitioners focused on process analysis and design, workflow implementation, process mining, process innovation, and other related topics. For more information please refer to the official BPM 2010 web page.

BPM Day 2009

BPM Day is a vendor-neutral executive seminar on Business Process Management, Automation, and Innovation. It’s the third time I’m organizing this at Stevens Institute of Technology In Hoboken, NJ, and I’m really excited to have the backing of industry experts Keith Swenson, Robert Shapiro, and Nathaniel Palmer for this event. Hoboken is a 15 minute subway ride from Manhattan, the venue is our state-of-the-art center for technology management, and feedback from our last group of guests has been overwhelmingly positive. If you are in the tri-state-area and can spare a day to learn about BPM this is a great opportunity for you. Follow the link for the full announcement.

Read the rest of this entry »

Business Process Management can be complex topic, and building skills related to process analysis, implementation, management and governance requires guidance. I have written about the different skills required to master BPM in my January 08 BPTrends column. For illustration purposes, the image below shows a hierarchy of BPM skills following Bloom’s taxonomy of learning goals: At the most basic level a student should be able to recall facts and definitions. Being able to read process documentation is the next level up, followed by the ability to create such a documentation. Real value is added at the top three levels of the hierarchy, when students are able the critically evaluate BPM concepts, integrate and synthesize them, and develop new methodologies and approaches.

Business Process Management Skills

This is not just theory – I’m teaching a series of BPM-related courses at Stevens Institute of Technology both on campus and online. The capstone course of this program is BPM & Workflow Implementation. Students are encouraged to document and develop their own process designs using tools such as Lombardi Blueprint, TIBCO Business Studio, SunGard IPP and itp Commerce Process Modeler. We run process simulations, perform risk analyses, and evaluate process designs in light of desired performance metrics, governance mechanisms, organizational constraints and implementation considerations. Our WebCampus operations is readying this course for the Spring II semester – running from March 23 through June 27, 2009. Course delivery is web-based and self-paced, with podcasts, screencams, videocasts, and WebEx-style meetings. If you can’t travel to Stevens, why not have Stevens come to you?

Enroll here or find more information here.

For the past few weeks I’ve been heavily involved in the organization of a SOA symposium to be held at the FDIC building in Washington, D.C. on April 2nd and 3rd. The event brings together experts from industry, government, and academia – attendees will be able to hear about case studies of SOA in practice, leading research, and technology innovations. The agenda promises a great event – 27 speakers covering design, technology, governance and people issues in 2 days, book signings, and a seminar on the Speed of Thought by Stephen R.M. Covey. Keynotes include Dennis Wisnosky (U.S. Department of Defense), Thomas Erl (SOASchool.com), Sandy Carter (IBM), and Paul Strassman (Information Economics Press). The event is a great value at $250 for the 2 day event (for industry participants, government representatives have free access). Take a look at www.soasymposium.com for the details and registration, or download the flyer below for a one-page summary.

SOA Symposium 2009 Invitation

Business Process Analytics provides process participants and decision makers with insight about the efficiency and effectiveness of organizational processes.

There are three reasons why we might want to measure different aspects of business processes:

1. To evaluate what has happened in the past,
2. to understand what is happening currently, or
3. to build an understanding of what might happen in the future.

The first area focuses on the ex-post analysis of completed business processes, i.e., on Process Controlling. You can find several papers (and an e-book) on this site that explain this approach in detail. Process Controlling may or may not involve a preexisting formal representation of the business process in question. If no documented process model exists, or if the scope of the process extends across multiple systems and process domains such a model may be inductively generated through Process Mining. Leading research on this topic is being conducted by Wil van der Aalst’s research group at TU/Eindhoven – make sure to check out their ProM framework. The second area focuses on the real-time monitoring of currently active business processes, i.e., Business Activity Monitoring. The third area uses business process data to forecast the future behavior of the organization through techniques such as scenario planning and simulation and is known as Process Intelligence.

To date, the audit information produced by most Business Process Management systems is formatted in proprietary ways, and for historically good reasons – each system may implement the internal state model of a process instance and an activity instance differently. Most systems offer basic monitoring and reporting functionality out of the box, built on their own format. But what if you need to integrate the audit information of several BPMS? What if you need to correlate process instances that cross other applications in your IT infrastructure, such as imaging systems, messaging infrastructures, etc.? You will need some common format for these audit events.

In the mid-1990s the Workflow Management Coalition had attempted to standardize a format for these events, it was dubbed the Common Workflow Audit Format (CWAD), and it was utterly unsuccessful. First, it was developed just prior to the onset of XML. Second, it used variable headers and footers around a common body for different types of audit events (i.e. it was not very elegantly designed). Third, at the time most vendors treated audit information as a source of debugging information, but not as a source of business intelligence.

For quite a while now the WfMC has discussed a rework of this initial attempt and I am happy to announce that we have just released the first public review version of the Business Process Analytics Format (BPAF). BPAF is a tool-agnostic XML schema for events that occur over the lifecycle of a business process instance.

During the initialization and execution of a process instance, multiple events occur which may be of interest to a business, including events that relate to the instantiation and completion of process activities, internal process engine operations and other system and application functions. Using BPAF-based information, a business can determine what has occurred in the business operations managed by a business process management system. BPAF is designed as an implementation-independent data format that enables the aggregation and correlation of audit data across multiple platforms. While we anticipate that the major sources for BPAF data will be business process management systems, the use of the standard is not limited to these systems and other information systems may publish events following the BPAF data structure to allow for easier integration with other process-related audit data.

The schema is pretty straightforward, here is a graphical snapshot:

Business Process Audit Format XML Schema Snapshop

The key to BPAF is a classification of audit events that can occur over the life-cycle of a process instance. CWAD used three different state machines, resulting in three different event formats: One for processes, one for activities, and one for work items. We integrated everything into a single state model that incorporates what we learned from the Wf-XML state machine with the proposed activity states of BPEL4People and WS-HumanTask.

If you are interested in the details, here is the public review version of the specification: 2009-02-20-WfMC-TC-1015-Business-Process-Analytics-Format-R1

To learn more and to actively influence the standardization process, please, head over to the WfMC Wiki where you can download the BPAF XML schema and participate in the further development of this specification.

2008 is almost over, and maybe the quiet time is a good time to get started on that paper you always wanted to write… The 2009 BPM conference will be held in Ulm, Germany, and below you can find everything you need to know to submit to this highly rated event:

Call for Papers – BPM 2009
7th International Conference on Business Process Management
Ulm, Germany, 7-10 September 2009
http://www.bpm2009.org

BPM 2009 is the seventh conference in a series that provides the most distinguished specialized forum for researchers and practitioners in business process management (BPM). The conference has a record of attracting innovative research of highest quality related to all aspects of business process management including theory, frameworks, methods, techniques, architectures, and empirical findings.

Traditionally, the BPM conference attracts the outstanding researchers in the field and abides to the highest academic standards. BPM solicits original research papers that break new ground in or make significant novel contributions to the field. The acceptance rate in previous editions has been around 14%. The BPM conference also aims at bridging the viewpoints of leading research outcomes with practical demands and industrial experience.

In addition to the main research track, BPM 2009 will include an industrial papers track. Accordingly, the conference encourages practitioners to submit experience and application papers reporting on innovative industrial implementations and applications of business process management methods and techniques, with particular focus on their impact on information technology use or business practice. These papers have to go beyond mature prototypes and potentially applicable methods and techniques, and must be based on extensive industrial experience or empirical data.

Awards will be given to the best papers in different categories. In addition, authors of selected papers will be invited to submit an extended version of their paper to a special issue of Data and Knowledge Engineering (DKE, an Elsevier Science Journal).

BPM 2009 will be held in Ulm, Germany, and will be organized by the Institute of Databases and Information Systems, Faculty of Engineering and Computer Science of the University of Ulm. The event will be conducted at the university campus. Ulm is a lively, medium-sized city with a history of more than 1.150 years. It is located in the southern part of Germany and famous (among other things) for its cathedral with the world’s highest church tower and for being the birthplace of Albert Einstein.

Topics include, but are not limited to:

Read the rest of this entry »

As researchers, Jan Recker and I find it challenging to strike a balance between our efforts to meet the academic standards required by the wider research community and the demands regarding accessibility, relevance, timeliness and appropriateness instilled by the wider practitioner communities. We were happy to find that our blogging about research results inspires the BPM community to not only to take an interest in our research but also to critically assess this work and to post replies to it. We find this most welcome.

Our previous post on the frequency of BPMN construct usage has generated a passionate response by Bruce Silver who we know and respect as a very active contributor not only to BPM blogging in general but also to BPMN education and application specifically. Bruce makes many good points in his post and raises a number of interesting challenges. However, on some accounts we disagree with a number of the inferences he draws, so we want to clarify some aspects of our original post.

First of all, the paper and post are the result of a joint research effort between Jan Recker (QUT Brisbane) and myself (Stevens Institute of Technology), which we have stated. Jan and I started working together due to the complementary nature of our interests – standards in BPM (myself) and practical usage of modeling methods (Jan). Our study has been motivated by the fact that we know so very little about how standards such as BPMN are actually used – as opposed to what vendors, consultants and trainers think how they should be (or might be) used. – and this is what we try to explore and understand. The post and the related study are but one snapshot of our combined research. Agree with our results or not, but please give credit where credit is due. Jan is one of the most prolific researchers on BPMN; and it would be unfair to ignore his substantial contribution to this research.

We have outlined our research method in great detail in the full version of the BPMN paper, the PDF of which has been linked to from the original post. If you missed it, click here. Of course, we could have written a great deal more about the mode of analysis, but let’s be frank: how many blog readers would want to see this information in the post? (let us know if you do!) And for those of you taking an interest in research methods – both Jan and myself are more than happy to discuss the ways in which academic research is conducted. More than welcome.

We started with a simple question: BPMN is divided into a core and an extended set of constructs – does this separation hold in practice, or are there other common subsets (dialects or creoles) that can be found in practice? If there is such a common subset, we would expect a sizable number of models to share it. We found no evidence of a larger common core. Only 6 model pairs out of the 126 models used similar BPMN subsets (i.e. there were 6 subsets shared by 2 models).

We looked at the similarity among all subsets by coding the occurrence of symbols as a 50-bit string and computing the pairwise Hamming distance. On average 7 symbols differed between the BPMN subsets, and since the average model used only 9 symbols that makes the true common core very very small.

We performed a hierarchical cluster analysis on the models, trying to find the constructs that were used in groups. Indeed, several well-defined clusters emerged from this analysis: Basic Modeling Constructs, Annotations and Explanations (which include the blank XOR Gateway – not something we expected), Organization Modeling Constructs, and Control Flow Refinements. Users that move beyond these clusters seem to add individual constructs as needed, but in a rather random fashion.

Whether the 126 models we gathered are representative to all BPMN uses is a good question. Of course, we don’t claim this to be the case and we are in fact expanding our collection of models (hey Bruce, want to send us some of your seminar models?). However, so far our results have proven stable. We spend a great deal of our time with organizations using BPMN and we can assure you upfront – this is indeed indicative of how people use BPMN.

Bruce likens a frequency count of BPMN symbols to a character count in a document. We disagree – BPMN symbols are more like words, since they have semantics and are governed by formation rules. There are no formation rules at the character level in most languages. One could liken the frequency count to the frequency with which words in the English language are used – and that provides a much more useful metric than a character count. Linguists talk about the difference between an active and a passive vocabulary – words that we use versus words that we understand. It is possible that the use of BPMN is emerging along the same lines – a modeler might understand many of the symbols, but will frequently restrict him or herself to a more limited subset. To illustrate this: You may understand many entries in Merriam-Webster’s dictionary of the English language, but you do not use them frequently (or at all).

Do the models we collected have errors? Absolutely. Some of them we find useful in modeling courses – to show the types of errors usually made in practice. Our intention was not to analyze perfect BPMN models – we find those in every training course and in tool documentations, etc. The BPM reality looks different. Our intention was to analyze the current practice of BPMN modeling, not the indended application of the language. English speakers abuse their language – I know I do – but that does not mean that their sentences are meaningless.

Turning to some of the conclusions we draw from our research, we would like to clarify some aspects: What we call ‘the real core set of BPMN’ is what our analysis showed to be the most frequently used BPMN symbols found in the models considered. This does not mean we imply this set to be the core set of BPMN to be used by everyone. Rather, this is the minimal set of BPMN constructs actually used in practice so far. Is this set little more than flowcharting? Absolutely true. Absolutely.

But what does that tell us? People, and organizations, use BPMN for purposes similar to those organizations ten, twenty years ago that employed flowcharting – they want to describe their operations in simple, graphical terms. The process modeling efforts in most organizations at this stage are simply not advanced or mature enough to start specifying service-enable workflows with exception behavior in BPMN. No, most people use it simply for flowcharting.

What we conclude from this observation is that the ecosystem of vendors, consultants and trainers should be aware of this and should plan, manage and employ their efforts (be it tool development, BPMN training or modeling workshops) accordingly. We present a number of conjectures based on these observations, some of which appear to be troubling to Bruce. This is worrisome to us, we hope we can clarify this a bit more:

• First, we see a great deal of training programs introducing the full BPMN specification to large number of stakeholders. Our results show, however, that most of this training is in fact only applicable to a small number of BPMN application areas. So we have to ask: Are there any tailored BPMN training programs? What should the ‘BPMN beginner’ course look like and how this body of knowledge then be extended by specialist courses? One of the suggestions we raise is indeed to start with the set of BPMN symbols that in fact are widely used in practice. Why? Because this would allow the BPMN beginner to instantly be able grasp, understand and use the majority of models in practice. Sure, (s)he would not yet be an expert, sure (s)he would not yet have learned about the benefits and expressive power of advanced BPMN. But (s)he can go out and leverage the knowledge instantly and make contributions. Without having to digest the complexity of a full-blown course. We do not imply that business users do not understand the more refined BPMN symbols, we have just found little evidence that they use them frequently.

• Second, we suggest to tool vendors to rely more on empirical information about BPMN use when having to make trade-off decisions in BPMN support. Let’s face it – many BPMS do not support the full set of BPMN constructs. This makes sense, because if the system does not have the capability to execute the semantics of a specific construct (say, a transaction around a set of activities) then if would not make sense to allow a system analyst to draw this symbol. So which constructs can a vendor neglect initially and which need to be supported? We would argue that it is of best interest to vendors to focus on those constructs heavily used in practice. Why? Because this would give them access to the widest share of the market. Simple as that. This does not mean, that our suggestion is of a static nature. Of course not. Over time, full support should be given – and (relating to our previous conclusion) also BPMN users should learn the advanced features of BPMN. But organizations and tool vendors alike often face a need to achieve results very very fast. Which also means that releases are built and deployed that are far from finished.

• Third, we think that our last conclusion was misread. Our intention is not to discredit the sizable development effort that went into the BPMN specification. More than 120 people participated in more than 120 interactions, be they face to face or conference calls. That’s a lot of BPM expertise leading to the current specification. We do not discourage advancement. We actually like BPMN’s advanced vocabulary. But have you asked end users what they think? Well, we did. Not only in this study but also in Jan’s large-scale BPMN usability studies we did find that users are in fact very troubled by the sheer number of, for example, event constructs. Are they used at a large scale? No. Do users understand their full capacity? Typically not. Why is this not at all reflected in BPMN development? That is exactly our point. Sure, our argument is a somewhat provocative statement. But if it helps to channel some attention to end usage, that’s fair by our standards.

We know a great deal about what BPMN can do in theory, how it is implemented in tools, how training programs (like Bruce’s) look like and even how we generate code from the diagrams and how the semantics can be tested and vigorously verified. But what do we know about how organizations engaged in BPM initiatives use it? Very little. Again, we were motivated by exactly this dearth of knowledge about real-life BPMN practice. Why? Because our own experiences with BPMN and with those organizations using it gave us this hunch that the theoretical usage (what vendors and consultants and trainers tell us) often has little to do with what the end users think or do (the practical usage). And why is it important to know what the end users think and do? Because it can help the researchers, vendors, consultants and trainers of this world to channel their attention and efforts to those problems real users face. Instead of the problems we think exist in practice.

We try to feed our empirical research back to the BPMN community – in the form of blogs, practitioner papers, or even directly by knocking on the door of OMG. Whether we are heard, and whether our findings have the type of impact we hoped is a different story. But we are always open for debate.