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.

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?

Tonia de Bruin at QUT Brisbane is tracking the pathways organizations are taking during the Business Process Improvement efforts. Do you start with technology first? Or do you instill a process culture in your organization right away? As part of her doctoral work, Tonia is conducting a survey of organizations that are engaged in (or have already completed) Business Process Management projects. It takes 10 minutes to fill out and the results will be made available to participants. You can find the survey here: http://www.bpm.fit.qut.edu.au/students/toniadebruin/survey/

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. 

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

I am attending the BPM Think Tank in Burlingame this week, and there are many insightful presentations around emerging standards in the BPM space, such as BPDM, BPMM, BMM, BPMN 2.0 and OSRM. But one thing makes me wonder - with every revision, every iteration, the standard specifications grow in size. The new BPMM specification has a whopping 505 pages in draft version. A participant asked what the effect would be if the BPMN 2.0 specification, which combines BPMN and BPDM, would be a 1,000 page document. Nobody knows… I had a look at some older and newer specifications, and this is what I came up with:

There are some interesting observations to make:

• Standard specifications seem to double between versions. The only exception is UML, which actually shrank 300 pages between versions 1.3 and 2.0
• Some organizations produce shorter specifications than others. For example, IETF specifications seem to be rather concise, compared to OMG or OASIS specifications.

Now, counting pages is not a very exact metric to gauge the complexity of a specification, but it is safe to assume that a 300 page specification is significantly more complex than a 60 page specification. I brought this up at the Think Tank, and it was suggested that specs grow because the working groups add clarifications and explanations. But it is also possible that as the standard specs grow, the effort to implement them and to prove conformance with all aspects of a specification increases significantly. If that is the case, do bigger standards keep the industry from advancing?