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)

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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.

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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.

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:

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by Michael zur Muehlen (mzurmuehlen@stevens.edu) and Jan Recker (j.recker@qut.edu.au)

BPMN is the de facto standard for graphical process modeling. While there are other graphical languages to represent processes (EPCs, IDEF, Flowcharts, Petri Nets, among others), no other notation has seen such an uptake in such a short time as BPMN has. It is widely supported by both free and commercial process modeling tools, the WfMC has made XPDL 2.0 and 2.1 a de-facto persistency format for BPMN diagrams, and a large number of courses on modeling processes with BPMN are being offered.

Now, BPMN is a complex language. The current incarnation (BPMN 1.1) consists of 52 distinct graphical elements: 41 flow objects, 6 connecting objects, 2 grouping objects, and 3 artifacts. That’s a lot of vocabulary to learn, given that each graphical elements has meaning and rules associated with it. So what is the minimum subset of BPMN that a process modeler should know? The answer: Less than you think.

To answer this question we collected a large number of BPMN 1.0 diagrams (126 in total), from consultants, seminar participants, and online sources. We analyzed which BPMN symbols were actually used in these diagrams. The full version of our research, which we will present at the Conference on Advanced Information Systems Engineering in June, can be found here. But since this is an academic paper, here are the practical highlights of our study.

None of the diagrams we looked at used more than 15 different BPMN constructs, and none used less than 3. The models themselves contained considerably more elements, but a model with, e.g., 5 tasks connected by sequence flow was recorded as using the task symbol and the sequence flow symbol. The average subset of BPMN used in these models consisted of just 9 different symbols. That means that the average BPMN model uses less than 20% of the available vocabulary.

Figure 1 shows which construct we found across which percentage of the diagrams we collected.

Figure 1: Frequency distribution of BPMN construct usage

The results of our study are:

• Only five elements (normal flow, task, end event, start event, and pool) were used in more than 50% of the models we analyzed. These, plus the data-based XOR gateway form what we call the common core of BPMN (marked in yellow in fig. 1).
• Six additional elements were found in at least 25% of the models – gateways (parallel and unmarked XOR), lanes, text annotations, message flow, and start messages, we call these the extended core of BPMN (marked in green in fig. 1).
• 17 elements were used in less than 3 models – seven elements occurred in just two models, five in just one, and five elements were not used in any of the models we studied.

We then looked at the co-occurrence of BPMN symbols – i.e., are certain constructs used in combination, and how frequently? The combination of certain elements is mandated by the BPMN specification – you cannot use lanes without pools, or data objects without associations. But if there is a common subset used by many models, this would constitute a true “common core”. A detailed analysis revealed that BPMN elements fall into several well-defined groups. Figure 2 shows these groups as frames around the respective BPMN elements. The numbers within each frame represent the number of models (out of 126) that contain all elements within the frame.

Figure 2: Grouping of BPMN elements

Our findings are:

• The common core of BPMN is very small. The subset of BPMN across the different models varied considerably. While nearly all models contain tasks and sequence flow, adding symbols to this set leads to a near exponential drop in models that share the (bigger) set of symbols. For example, while 65 models contain tasks, sequence flow, start and end events, only 25 also contain parallel gateways, and just 10 contain parallel gateways and data-based XOR gateways.
• There are two types of BPMN modelers. While our sample is too small to explore this proposition in detail, we found anecdotal evidence that two groups of modelers use BPMN: Those who use pools and lanes to represent organizational responsibility for tasks, and those who use gateways to represent the control-flow rules of the process in detail. In other words, one group uses BPMN to specify inter-organizational settings (process choreography). Mostly, these users will be consultants or process analysts working on organizational (re-) engineering and process improvement. The other BPMN user group is leaning more towards workflow engineering (process orchestration). These users will likely be designers and analysts seeking to articulate precise flow conditions, for instance, in the context of workflow engineering or process simulation.

Implications

Our findings have implications for practitioners, software vendors, and standards makers alike.

• Practitioners can begin studying the use of BPMN by focusing on the most commonly used symbols first, leaving more specialized and lesser-used constructs for those who need more specialized BPMN training (e.g. systems analysts).
• Software vendors that are not supporting the entire BPMN vocabulary can assess what percentage of BPMN diagrams can be represented in their tool, and where enhancements should be made.
• Finally, Standards-makers should review whether a more complete, but also more complex language is a desirable result of the standardization process. Creating BPMN took six years. How much time was spent on defining those seventeen symbols that we found are hardly used? And will the extensions of BPMN 1.1 entice users to expand their commonly used vocabulary, or will they go unused?

If you would like to learn more about this research, we encourage you to read the full version of our paper:

• Michael zur Muehlen, Jan Recker. (Jun 16, 2008). “How Much Language is Enough? Theoretical and Practical Use of the Business Process Modeling Notation”, 20th International Conference on Advanced Information Systems Engineering (CAiSE 2008), Montpellier, France, June 16-20, 2008., Springer LNCS. Download (657 kb PDF)

You can find additional research on process modeling and process management in the publications section of this site, and in Jan’s QUT eprints directory.

As always, your questions or comments are much appreciated.

So, you’re charged with improving business operations. Maybe even deploy a BPM system. Defining Key Performance Indicators and assess the operational risk of your processes. What are the skills you need – and who needs them? For the past year and a half, I have been working on re-tooling Stevens Institute of Technology’s educational offerings around BPM, and I’m happy to report that we have just launched our Business Process Management & Service Innovation Program online (howe.stevens.edu/BPM).

This Advanced Graduate Certificate consists of four courses that cover the strategic, tactical, and operational aspects of managing and improving business processes. Our brand new BPM & Workflow Implementation course (MIS 712 WS) will start online January 28th with an information session, and online enrollment is available this week at www.stevens.edu/registrar and gradschool.stevens.edu, the Call Number is 11624. The course focuses on the documentation, improvement, and implementation of processes using state-of-the-art BPM technology. Topics include managing Business Processes and Business Rules, documenting and managing operational process risk, simulating processes, and more. We are partnering with TIBCO, IDS Scheer, Lombardi and SunGard to provide students with hands-on experience using the latest BPM tools. Classes are delivered using WebCampus, Stevens’ award winning distance learning program, iTunes University, live instructor sessions using InterWise, and our eLearn platform WebCT.

If you are charged with analyzing, designing, or improving business operation this program will provide you with the state-of-the-art skills necessary to understand, communicate, and align your business processes and the technology that supports them. If you have any questions or comments I look forward to discussing this with you in more detail. For more musings on the educational aspects of BPM be sure to check out my column on bptrends.com.