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.

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)

Pretty much from the get-go we determined that BPMN was the graphical standard for process modeling that the DoD would settle on. It was already in use in different projects, there is a broad base of tool-support, and an increasing knowledge base of modelers that are conversant in BPMN. Moreover, BPMN provides excellent support for cross-organizational process modeling and the handling of events, making it preferable to using IDEF0 or UML Activity Diagrams.

Not all BPMN models are created equal

Even if modelers all use the same notation (BPMN), there are different ways to express the same semantics. One particular example is the conditional sequence flow element in BPMN – you can model a split using an exclusive or inclusive OR gateway, or you can express the same semantics using conditional sequence flow elements. The example below shows two process fragments that are semantically equivalent, but the casual reader would have to read the transition conditions for the conditional sequence flow example on the right to determine whether this is an exclusive or inclusive OR split. The gateway on the left signals this semantic through the use of the X symbol.

Implicit and Explicit Gateways in BPMN

In previous research Jan Recker and I had looked at the uptake of BPMN in practice, and found that there were some language elements that were rarely used in the models we analyzed. Thus we started to tailor the set of BPMN constructs that we thought were sufficient to model processes at the requirements engineering level (the DoDAF OV-6c), and the systems engineering level (the DoDAF SvcV-10c and SV-10c). This led us to a first cut of “BPMN primitives”, but we needed to validate it. So we used the BPMN subset in the documentation of various processes within the Department of Defense, from the Business side (hiring people, paying suppliers, managing property etc.) to the Warfighter side (performing close air support missions). We also sent the specification to a number of individuals outside the DoD that provided feedback, and we presented it to a number of BPM vendors for their input.

BPMN meets patterns

It quickly became clear that if you want to ensure consistent modeling practices you need more than just a restricted set of the BPMN syntax – you need to provide guidance on how to apply the modeling elements in practice. Thankfully, Artur ter Hofstede and Wil van der Aalst provided a great foundation for this in form of their workflow patterns work. We adopted as many of these patterns as we thought feasible, and they became a mandatory part of the BPMN primitives specification. But beyond the elementary patterns (e.g., how do I model a process split?) we found that there were recurring situations with specific semantics – reviewing and approving a document, collaboration between two parties, voting on an issue etc. These were captured in a high-level pattern catalog that is meant to be extensible, work that is currently ongoing.

Beyond Modeling – Model Execution and Exchange

The final question we are after relates to the exchange of models between platforms (e.g. to take a model from an architecture tool to an execution platform). It is clear that not every vendor will support the full set of BPMN 2.0 constructs. The most frequent explanation from execution-level vendors (i.e. BPMS vendors) is that they don’t want you to model what they can’t execute. So if an execution engine cannot interpret a non-aborting attached timer event then its development environment will most likely not contain that symbol. But that doesn’t mean we are not pushing the vendors to extend their systems in this direction, and since the US federal government is a rather significant technology buyer having the BPMN primitives as a guide in terms of what BPMN support is expected should provide clarity for vendors that are working on their development roadmaps.

BPMN Primitives and the BPMN 2.0 Standardization Effort

A vendor that currently supports just a subset of BPMN has little guidance which elements should be supported in the future – in BPMN 1.0 through 1.2 there was just a core set and the full set of the language, and a big gap in the middle. In BPMN 2.0 there will be more milestones that a vendor can target: Simple, Descriptive, DoDAF and Full. There still is a big gap between the Descriptive and the Full subclasses, and there was debate within the OMG and with interested parties on the outside how a suitable subclass could be introduced between Descriptive and Full. That’s where the DoDAF BPMN Subset (i.e. the primitives) comes in – it is a user-driven, practically validated subset of BPMN that ensures a high level of expressiveness, while leaving out many of the constructs that can either lead to inconsistent representations for the same semantics or that are so technical that the vast majority of IS and systems engineers will not miss them. It is a yardstick for vendors that may still have gaps in their own coverage of BPMN constructs and it gives members of the training community a target set for higher-level BPMN certifications.

So there you have it – history and rationale for the DoDAF subclass in the draft BPMN 2.0 spec. Whether the DoDAF name is a wise choice for the standard spec I don’t know, Sandy certainly raises a valid question. But in terms of content I am very confident that its applicability goes way beyond the confines of the Pentagon.

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.

BPM Day 2009 at Stevens Institute of Technology

Monday, June 22nd, 2009, 9:00-5:00 PM
Babbio Center, 6th & River St, Hoboken, NJ 07030
View Babbio Center in a larger map

Download Registration Form

Download BPM Day Brochure

To see the program and sign up: http://howe.stevens.edu/bpmday

BPM = Performance, Compliance, Risk Management

When times are tough, organizations need to focus on their core competencies, improve their value proposition and do more with less. Business Process Management helps organizations understand their operational strengths and weaknesses, creates a documentation for compliance purposes, and allows for effective operational risk management. For the fifth year in a row, the Gartner Group has identified improving Business Processes as the number one priority of CIOs. Stevens’ BPM Day series combines speakers from industry and academia to deliver attendees a full-day of in-depth sessions on current and emerging topics around BPM. In 2009 the third instance of BPM Day is presented by leaders from Stevens and the Workflow Management Coalition, a global standardization body for BPM technology. Their popular seminars have been delivered in more than 8 countries over the last two years, covering the core business impact and IT benefits of process improvement and workflow automation.

Attendees of this year’s seminar have the choice between two in-depth breakout sessions: One on analyzing processes with BPMN, the other on building a workflow automation infrastructure using standards-based tools and technologies.

Participants will receive a WfMC certificate to document the successful completion of the seminar.

Who Should Attend?

– Business and System Analysts Involved in Process Modeling and Discovery
– CIO and CTO charged with implementing BPM Centers of Excellence
– Process Architects Evaluating or Already Engaged in BPM
– Consultants Seeking Strategies for Risk Management
– System and Application Architects engaged in BPMS implementation
– Enterprise Architects looking to understand the integration of BPM and SOA

Topics Covered

– The Business Case for BPM
– Process Modeling with BPMN 2.0
– Case Study: Managing Rules and Processes
– BPM and SOA: The New Enterprise Architecture
– An Overview of Workflow Standards
– Process Analytics and Optimization
– Case Study: Modeling Standards in Government
–  and much more…

Presenters

– Dr. Michael zur Muehlen, Director, Center of Excellence in Process Innovation, Stevens Institute of Technology
– Nathaniel G. Palmer, Executive Director, Workflow Management Coalition
– Keith D. Swenson, VP Research & Development, Fujitsu
– Robert M. Shapiro, Founder and Manager, Process Analytica

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.

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.

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:

PROCESS MODELING AND ANALYSIS
- Process modeling languages, notations and methods
- Reference process models
- Variability and configuration of process models
- Process simulation and static analysis
- Process metadata and semantic reasoning
- Process patterns, repositories, and standards
- Process quality
- Process improvement and optimization

PROCESS ARCHITECTURES AND PLATFORMS
- Process-oriented software architectures
- Service-oriented architectures for BPM
- Workflow management systems
- Security aspects of business process execution
- Automated planning for business process execution
- Resource management in business process execution

MANAGEMENT OF PROCESS EXECUTION DATA
- Process tracing and monitoring
- Process performance measurement
- Process mining and learning
- Process data warehousing
- Data streaming in business processes
- Process management dashboards
- Process data visualization

PROCESS EVOLUTION AND FLEXIBILITY
- Process exception handling
- Process change management
- Adaptive and context-aware processes
- Case handling
- Process-enhanced groupware
- Sustainable and self-healing processes

MANAGEMENT ISSUES AND EMPIRICAL STUDIES
- Business process lifecycle management
- Requirements modeling and process design
- Success factors and measures in BPM
- BPM governance and compliance management
- BPM maturity
- Adoption and practice of BPM
- Case Studies and Experience Reports in BPM

NON-TRADITIONAL BPM SCENARIOS
- Knowledge-intensive processes
- Data-driven processes
- Distributed and mobile processes
- Inter-process planning and coordination
- Grid and scientific workflows
- Process management in life science

Conference Paper Submission

BPM 2009 invites research submissions on all topics related to business process management, including but not limited to those listed above. Research papers should be submitted electronically via the BPM 2009 web site by uploading a self-contained PDF file. All submissions must be received no later than 15 March 2009.

Research papers must be in English. They must be original research contributions that have not been published previously, nor already submitted to other conferences or journals in parallel with this conference. The length of the paper should not exceed 16 pages. Papers should be formatted in LNCS format (for details see http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html). The title page must contain a short abstract and a classification of the topics covered, preferably using the list of topics above. The paper must clearly state the research problem being addressed, the goal of the work, the results achieved, and the relation to other work. Submissions received too late, in a format other than PDF, or sent by fax or post will be rejected. The same will happen with papers which are not in English or exceed the page limit. Each submission is reviewed by at least three reviewers, in terms of originality, validity, significance of contribution and quality of the presentation.

Industrial papers must follow the same format requirements and length constraints as research papers. They too are rigorously reviewed by at least 3 reviewers. The focus here, however, is not on academic ingenuity, but extensive evaluation of the findings in industrial experience and empirical evidence.

All accepted papers will be contained in the conference proceedings published by Springer-Verlag. For each accepted paper, at least one author is required to register for the conference and should plan to present the paper.

Workshops

The conference will be complemented by workshops. Workshops are meant to facilitate the exchange of ideas and experiences between active researchers and practitioners, and stimulate discussions on new and emerging issues in line with the conference topics. Workshops may concentrate in-depth on research topics, or may also be devoted to application and/or standardization issues.

Demonstrations

Submissions are invited for demos to be included in the BPM 2009 Demonstration Track. The demo track is intended to showcase innovative business process management tools and applications, and will provide an opportunity to show and discuss emerging technologies with researchers and practitioners in the BPM field.

Demonstration proposals should consist of two parts. The first part (maximum four pages) should contain a short description of the system, a summary of its novel characteristics, a statement on the scope and limitations of the system and its significance to the field of BPM, and the list of functions and features to be demonstrated. This part will be included in the proceedings in case of acceptance. The second part is an appendix of no longer than six pages explaining the demonstrated scenario and illustrating how the presentation will be conducted (i.e. the demo script) and possibly some screenshots. This part will not be included in the proceedings but is valuable input for the review process. Authors are encouraged to include in their submissions links to mockups, videos, or animations of the proposed demonstration. Submissions must adhere to the conference paper submission formatting guidelines and are limited to four pages for the first part and six for the appendix. Demo proposals should be submitted through the BPM conference submission system.

Demo proposals will undergo a strict review process in line with that of the main conference. Demo proposals will be assessed on the basis of their innovation, technical advances and challenges, overall practical attractiveness, relevance and presentation. All accepted demo proposals (without appendix) will be included in the conference proceedings published by Springer-Verlag. There will be a best demo award based on the demo proposal and the presentation at the conference.

Tutorials and Panel Discussions

Tutorials and panel discussions will complement the core of the BPM 2009 conference. Tutorials will provide the opportunity to introduce one selected topic and to discuss related trends and challenges. Panel discussions will allow the open conversation of BPM-related topics. The local organizers are able to facilitate contacts to local industry representatives, if this is of interest for an organizer of a panel.

Proposals for tutorials and panel discussions should include: the title; name and brief biography of each participant; and an outline of the theme, goals, planned activities and intended audience. Proposals should be submitted in electronic form (plain text or PDF) by email to the
Tutorial/Panel Chairs.

Conference Dates
Paper submission deadline (strict): 14 March 2009
Notification of acceptance: 15 May 2009
Camera-ready papers deadline: 7 June 2009
Conference: 8-10 September 2009

Workshop Dates
Deadline for workshop paper submissions:  7 May 2009
Notification of Acceptance: 2 June 2009
Camera-ready papers deadline: 17 June 2009
Workshops: 7 September 2009

Demo Dates
Deadline for demo submissions: 14 March 2009
Notification of Acceptance: 12 May 2009
Camera-ready papers deadline: 7 June 2009
Demos: 8-10 September 2009

Tutorial / Panel Dates
Deadline for submissions: 16 May 2009
Notification of Acceptance: 16 June 2009
Tutorials: 8-10 September 2009
Panels: 8-9 September 2009

Chairs

General Chairs:

Peter Dadam
University of Ulm, Germany

Manfred Reichert
University of Ulm, Germany

Organization Chairs:

Jens Kolb
University of Ulm, Germany

Rüdiger Pryss
University of Ulm, Germany

Program Chairs:

Johann Eder
University of Klagenfurt, Austria

Umeshwar Dayal
HP Labs Palo Alto, USA

Hajo Reijers
Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands

Industry Chair:

Jana Koehler
IBM Zürich Research Center,
Switzerland

Workshop Chairs:

Frank Leymann
University of Stuttgart, Germany

Stefanie Rinderle-Ma
University of Ulm, Germany

Shazia Sadiq
University of Queensland, Australia

Demo Chairs:

Ana Karla Alves de Medeiros
Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands
Barbara Weber
University of Innsbruck, Austria

Tutorial/Panel Chairs:

Joachim Herbst
Daimler Research, Germany

Gerti Kappel
Technische Universitaet Wien, Austria

Steering Committee:

Wil van der Aalst (chair)
Eindhoven University of Technology

Boualem Benatallah
University of New South Wales

Fabio Casati
University of Trento

Peter Dadam
University of Ulm

Joerg Desel
Catholic University Eichstätt

Schahram Dustdar
Vienna University of Technology

Arthur ter Hofstede
Queensland Univ. of Technology

Barbara Pernici
Politecnico di Milano

Matthias Weske
Hasso-Plattner-Institut, Univ. of Potsdam

Senior Program Committee Members:

Wil van der Aalst, The Netherlands
Gustavo Alonso, Switzerland
Boualem Benatallah, Australia
Fabio Casati, Italy
Peter Dadam, Germany
Joerg Desel, Germany
Marlon Dumas, Estonia
Schahram Dustdar, Austria
Gregor Engels, Germany
Claude Godart, France
Stefan Jablonski, Germany
Frank Leymann, Germany
Manfred Reichert, Germany
Michael Rosemann, Australia
Amit Sheth, USA
Jianwen Su, USA
Arthur ter Hofstede, Australia
Kees van Hee, The Netherlands
Mathias    Weske, Germany

Program Committee Members:

Ana Karla Alves De Medeiros, The Netherlands
Pedro Antunes, Portugal
Joonsoo Bae, South-Korea
Hyerim Bae, South-Korea
Alistair Barros, Australia
Catriel Beeri, Israel
Djamal Benslimane, France
M. Brian Blake, USA
Christoph Bussler, USA
Jorge Cardoso, Germany
Malu Castellanos, USA
Valeria De Antonellis, Italy
Jan Dietz, The Netherlands
Maria Grazia Fugini, Italy
Avigdor Gal, Israel
Dimitrios Georgakopoulos, USA
Peter Green, Australia
Paul Grefen, The Netherlands
Daniela Grigori, France
Thomas Gschwind, Switzerland
Manfred Hauswirth, Ireland
Marta Indulska, Australia
Leonid Kalinichenko, Russia
Gerti Kappel, Austria
Ekkart Kindler, Denmark
Jana Koehler, Switzerland
Agnes Koschmider, Germany
John Krogstie, Norway
Jochen Kuester, Switzerland
Akhil Kumar, USA
Lea Kutvonen, Finland
Selma Limam Mansar, Qatar
Chengfei Liu, Australia
Ling Liu, USA
Bertram Ludäscher, USA
Heiko Ludwig, USA
Zongwei Luo, Hongkong
Axel Martens, USA
Jan Mendling, Australia
Bela Mutschler, Germany
John Mylopoulos, Canada
Andreas Oberweis, Germany
Aris Ouksel, USA
Cesare Pautasso, Switzerland
Barbara Pernici, Italy
Olivier Perrin, France
Calton Pu, USA
Frank Puhlmann, Germany
Krithivasan Ramamritham, India
Jan Recker, Australia
Berthold Reinwald, USA
Wolfgang Reisig, Germany
Stefanie Rinderle, Germany
Shazia Sadiq, Australia
Mohand Said-Hacid, France
Heiko Schuldt, Switzerland
Karsten  Schultz, Australia
Timos Sellis, Greece
Juliane    Siegeris, Germany
Stefan Tai, USA
Farouk Toumani, France
Aphrodite Tsalgatidou, Greece
Jan Vanthienen, Belgium
Hagen Voelzer, Switzerland
Barbara Weber, Austria
Petia Wohed, Sweden
Andreas Wombacher, The Netherlands
Xiaohui Zhao, Australia

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.

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.

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.