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.
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?
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:
To evaluate what has happened in the past,
to understand what is happening currently, or
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.
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.
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)
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.
The topic-du-jour in BPM circles is the handling of human and automated decision making in processes. Two major areas that intersect here are the management of business rules (such as “customers with more than 100,000 frequent flier miles receive priority treatment when flights are oversold“) and business processes (such as “rebook voluntary denied boarding customer“). There has been plenty of work done in both domains, but until very recently they did not talk to each other very much.
That has changed quite rapidly, as the business rules community realized that it needed some ways to represent the structured order of long-running decision-making activities (as typically found in workflows), and as the process community realized that modeling decisions and rules using activity networks, BPMN, or Petri Nets results in rather bloated and complex diagrams.
On the research side, my colleague Marta Indulska from the University of Queensland and I have studied the expressiveness of process and rule modeling languages using representational analysis (i.e. we used a formal ontology as a benchmark) and found that the combination of process modeling and rule modeling languages generally offers higher expressive power than either of these languages by itself. We found the combination of BPMN and SRML particularly useful, but since SRML is an abandoned effort we would recommend the combination of BPMN and SBVR. Our paper on this topic was presented at the VORTE’07 workshop and can be downloaded here.
In practice, you can do some process management with a rules engine. Natalie Glance and colleagues have written some intriguing papers on Generalized Process Structure Grammars in the mid-1990s that essentially allow the modeling of processes using a constraint language (saying things such as “the start of activity B must occur after the start of activity A”, which are difficult to express using languages such as BPMN).
In the same vein, you can handle quite a bit of decision making using graphical process modeling techniques, by building gateways into your processes. This way, your process diagram becomes (partially) a decision tree, with alternative pathways for different cases.
Coming from the process side of things, I found the formal logic and languages used in rules management standards such as RuleML rather intimidating. So when I was offered the opportunity to speak on the integration of rules and processes at the IIR BPM conference a few weeks ago, I tried to approach this topic from a pragmatic perspective:
Say you are a process modeler: How do you approach the topic of rules?
Most process models I’ve dealt with contain at least some aspects of decision making, typically found in splits (decision gateways). In particular two general types of decisions can be distinguished:
Decisions that affect the activities to be performed (Control Flow Decision). These types of decisions determine which process steps are appropriate for a given case (workflow instance). For instance, if you are dealing with a new customer and a large order you may want to perform a credit check, whereas you would skip this step if the customer is known to you. The decision in this case has an impact on the routing of the workflow instance.
We can distinguish some sub-cases in this scenario:
Single-criteria decisions where we only need to review one parameter
Multi-criteria decisions where we use decision tables or similar mechanisms to determine the case type
Similarly we can distinguish between:
Manual decisions, made by a human (e.g. when judgement is required)
Automated decisions that can be formalized
Decisions that affect the assignment of activities to performers (Assignment Decisions). These types of decisions determine who gets to perform a particular activity. For instance, a customer service representative may review an order up to $5,000, but above that value we want a manager to review the order. The review activity in both cases is identical, the difference lies in who gets to perform the work. The decision in this case has an impact on the assignment of the workflow instance.
So what is my point here? Whether you model these types of rules in your process modeling environment or not depends on your context, the availability of a separate rules management environment, and most critically, the frequency with which these rules change. There is no universally right or wrong way to manage the intersection of rules and processes. If your decision rules are as stable as your process, great, leave them in your BPM development environment. But if your business users want to manipulate the parameters, separate them from the process and handle them in a separate rules management environment. You’ll be glad you did.
My presentation from the IIR conference is available on slideshare.net (see embedded presentation below). And for some well-informed outside opinion you can refer to Sandy Kemsley’s timely blog post on the presentation.
Business Process Management has the potential to transform organizations into more nimble, agile entities, that leverage both human and technology capital effectively. But very often BPM efforts are marred by an emphasis on technology, drawing diagrams, or creating the 57th architectural framework within the enterprise. I was given the opportunity to talk about some issues that Enterprise Architects should keep in mind when approaching the topic of Business Process Management.
Some of the key points are:
BPM is not primarily about technology, modeling, or architecture, its purpose is to improve business. If you cannot demonstrate the business value of a BPM effort, go back to the drawing board.
Processes are a perspective on organizations, but by virtue of representing a particular view of organizations they abstract from reality and do not cover all aspects of a complex socio-technical system. Don’t confuse the map with the territory.
BPM efforts need structure and methodology. You need a structure to guide efforts at different levels of abstraction (separating the what from the how), i.e. a level framework. You need a structure to navigate among the processes of your organization, i.e. a process architecture. And you need a methodology to retain and leverage what you have learned about managing and conducting BPM projects (which is different from just saying “we use BPMN”).
To mature BPM efforts you can focus on Governance structure, Culture, or Tools & Methodology. Don’t try to improve everything at once, but review the most important aspect for your organization before you branch out.
I have given several variations of this talk in the past, and it has evolved into a fairly comprehensive overview of the organizational, technical, and governance issues surrounding BPM. The presentation below was given at the Forum des Acteurs du Numérique in Paris, France. I’d love to hear your feedback.
Having an unusual name comes with its own set of challenges. For example, airlines never know whether I’m filed under Muehlen, Zur, or zur Muehlen. My phonebook entry in Germany was listed under M, in the US it is Z. Banks think that I have a middle initial (I don’t). The New Jersey MVS is unable to issue a drivers license that has a space in the last name, and so on. So, when my daughter was born and I went to fill out the birth certificate request form I knew I might be in for trouble. What I didn’t know was how right I would be…
A few weeks later my wife and I received the birth certificate, and alas, my daughter’s last name was spelled Zur Muehlen instead of zur Muehlen. Not a big deal, but being German I wanted it corrected, of course. So I went to the website of the New York Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (NYHMH) to figure out the change process. There was a form (8 pages) and instructions, thankfully as a form-enabled PDF. No electronic submission, though, because additional documentation was required. Fine. We filled out the form, copied and notarized the additional documentation, found a legal sized return envelope, added $30 for additional certificates and mailed it off.
Four weeks later we received a thick letter from NYHMH - our application was returned because the ID for the mother was insufficient. No problem - we added a copy of her passport and green card, found another legal size return envelope, and mailed it back.
Four weeks later we received another thick letter from NYHMH - our application was returned because the ID with the signature for the mother did not show an expiration date. Hmmmm - her passport signature page (no expiration date) and green card (expiration date) were copied on the same page. You would expect a reasonable human being to mentally combine these to meet the requirements. But no. No problem - we added a copy of her passport and green card, found another legal size return envelope, and mailed it back.
Three weeks later (you guessed it) we received yet another thick letter from NYHMH - our application was returned because the marriage certificate we had added was “only” a notarized copy - they want the original (which was issued by the City of New York itself…). And, of course, the legal size return envelope (with postage) was missing from the returned application again (why? I don’t know. The return mail did not use the provided envelope…).
Lessons for Business Process Design
Involving the customer in your processes (in particular during early data capture stages) makes sense for many organizations. After all, you avoid re-keying of data, and can make sure that all necessary information has been provided before you initiate potentially expensive back-office operations. New York City is one of the better municipalities in terms of its e-government initiatives, much information and many forms is available online. But simply providing forms and instructions may not be enough to ensure a smooth integration of outside parties in your processes.
NYHMH’s change process fails at the first step - the application is received, and checked for completeness. If the application is incomplete, it is marked as such and sent back to the applicant. Now, that makes sense, because you want to make sure that you can actually finish processing the new case. But the crucial element is, how you check, and how you notify.
Being ignorant of the process details, I can only assume that the receiving clerk at NYHMH goes through a checklist of items that must be sent with an application. If one item is missing, or insufficient, the application is returned. But the effort required for finishing the list and marking ALL insufficiencies on the incoming case is much smaller than the cumulative effort for re-opening and re-processing the same case multiple times, as happened in our case. If you tell a client that a process cannot start, give ALL reasons why, not just the initial failure. Our application is in the fourth round of review, and I’m mentally preparing for another missing item or insufficient document notice.
The back-and-forth is aggravated by the time it takes to get the documents to NYHMH and back. Processing probably takes 5 minutes, but postal mail takes 2 days each way, add to that the wait time in the inbox of NYHMH and you get to 3 weeks cycle time for each iteration. The net processing time for this process is only a small fraction of the overall transaction time. We started this endeavor on July 1st, now in October we still don’t have a corrected birth certificate. I estimate the overall processing time that went into the application to be between 2 and 3 hours (time it took us to fill out the form, gather and notarize the documents, and for NYHMH to send them back). The overall process is 100 days old today - that’s 2400 hours of cycle time, with 0.1% actual work time - probably the worst productivity ratio I have ever encountered. To put this in perspective: It took only two weeks to receive a passport.
Bottom Line
When involving Customers in your processes:
Give them the information and resources necessary to perform their activities.
Design your interface activities to identify all reasons why a customer request will fail
Enable your customers to fix possible transaction errors within a reasonable processing time to transaction time ratio
Provide your customers with visibility into your process, so they understand how their input will be processed
Final Words
The best process design is not worth anything if the people involved in the process execution don’t care about the outcome of the process. You need to align incentives (both financial and other) with the objectives of the process
Your customers care about your processes. So should you.
Postscript (October 14th, 2007)
As you may have guessed, the third attempt was returned as well. The reason? I’ve requested a wholesale change of all last names, and I didn’t realize that my wife’s maiden name is on the birth certificate, which doesn’t need changing. So - the whole stack of documents was returned (this time including the prepaid return envelope) with a request to fill out a blank form and omit the request to change the mother’s last name (a simple cross-out on the original form would have done the same). Welcome to Absurdistan…
During the recent BPM Conference I took part in a panel on Business Process Intelligence, organized by Jan Mendling of QUT Brisbane. During the panel, Roger Tregear of Leonardo Consulting brought up the issue that BPM in its current incarnation really puts an emphasis on the wrong thing: The process as a manged entity. We want to improve our organizations, and improving our processes is one way to achieve that.
I have yet to see an organization whose processes cannot be improved by an order of magnitude. But the term Business Process Management sounds as if we wanted to spend time and effort to bureaucratize the artificial concept that processes represent. After all, we are already managing customer relations, human resources, finances, and supply chains. Managing processes sounds like one more chore that keeps us from actually doing stuff.
Roger suggested a better term: Process-based Management. Processes are the engine of value creation in organizations. Using them as a centerpiece of our management strategy allows us to visualize operations, collect performance metrics that link these operations to goals and outcomes, and have an entry point for improvement efforts. And, come to think of it, process-based management can lead to process-based improvement initiatives, and process-based leadership. It is a shift of perspective. We should no longer focus on the process as the artifact that has to be managed. Rather, the process is the foundation for the management of the organization. Now, what would be a good acronym for that?
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