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

SOA Symposium 2009 Invitation

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.

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.

]]> http://www.bpm-research.com/2007/10/10/what-every-enterprise-architect-should-know-about-bpm-and-workflow/feed/ 4 http://www.bpm-research.com/2007/09/27/bpm-standards-tutorial/ http://www.bpm-research.com/2007/09/27/bpm-standards-tutorial/#comments Thu, 27 Sep 2007 13:55:32 +0000 Michael zur Muehlen http://www.bpm-research.com/2007/09/27/bpm-standards-tutorial/ I had the opportunity to spend a week in sunny Brisbane, Australia, to attend the 5th International Conference on Business Process Management, the largest academic conference in the BPM space. Hajo A. Reijers and I presented a paper on the use of biological mechanisms for task allocation, which are particularly useful in the emergency response domain (you can download the paper in the publications section here).Today I gave a two hour tutorial on the state of BPM standards, which was very well attended. The emerging landscape of integration, choreography, notation, and interchange standards in the BPM field are both confusing for practitioners and a fertile research field for researchers. Thankfully there are some efforts from standards groups to clarify the scope of their efforts and the impact of their specifications. I had a chance to talk to Karsten Ploesser of SAP, one of the co-authors of the BPEL4People draft specification, which is emerging as a very focused document, which will probably make it easier to understand and implement in practice – one key aspect that affects the adoption and diffusion of standards.Since I received a large number of requests for the presentation slides I made them available on slideshare. You can download the PDF of the presentation here and an audio recording is available here. 

| View | Upload your own

Update: All slides from the BPM 2007 conference are available for download here: http://bpm07.fit.qut.edu.au/program/index.jsp 

Click here to view the embedded video.

• You can download of the PDF of our presentation [here].
• Join the discussion on standards [here].