John Everhard, technical director at Pegasystems has joined the chorus of voices claiming that “BPMN is too hard for business.”

He said:

“BPMN has some deficiencies. The UI is represented as a service call. It is not tightly integrated with the model unlike Pega’s screenflows and flow actions. There is no concept of Case Management which forms an increasingly important component of enterprise BPM suites. There is no concept of business rules, other than a small expression language, and linkage to invoke a rule from a separate technology.”

While I agree that the full BPMN 2.0 symbol set is not well suited to business users, this is not really the argument made by Everhard.  The main point seems to be the same one that Jim Sinur made last summer (and which I talked about in my CTO Tuesday episode #54).

What Everhard and Sinur are complaining about is that there isn’t a different symbol that reflects the type of work that is being done, for example resolving a case in a case management system or paying an invoice in an accounts payable system.  They don’t like the choice of icon at the top left of a service task. Service tasks are used to represent most kinds of work done automatically (i.e. services), and there is just one symbol that looks like this:

The problem with this criticism is that it doesn’t account for the extensibility built into BPMN 2.0.  The standard says that you can create your own icons if you want. The actual text is section 10.2.3, under “Task Types” subsection, and it says…

“The list of Task types may be extended along with any corresponding indicators”.

So go ahead. Feel free to create your own icons for the different kinds of tasks you have!

Does that remove the value of using the standard? Of course not. The icon sits that sits in the top left of a rounded rectangle, just represents a standard task. Tasks have important semantics that are irrespective of their type and which differentiate them from gateways, events, artifacts and other modeling constructs. So why not just stick with the standard, but extend it with icons that match your different task types?

However, I feel that the real argument with BPMN isn’t about the pictorial representation, but how well suited is the full icon set to business users. In my opinion, the only way for BPMN to be effective for a business user is to reduce the complexity and use a very small subset of BPMN (even smaller than the “core”).

Take a look at Socrates. This is a product that is designed for use by business users that uses a tiny fraction of the BPMN standard and ALSO uses custom icons for different types of tasks. The combination results in an environment that is natural to business users, but produces diagrams that are easy to understand and very pleasant to read.

Active Endpoints CTO Dr. Michael Rowley presented a brand new technology called Socrates, which allows IT to safely provide their business users with the ability to capture domain expertise into a process that can be embedded into other applications. Dr. Rowley also explained that these “guided” applications allow users to become much more consistent in the way that they do their work and as a result much more productive.

What should be on your application development wish list? Find out by watching this webinar replay where guest speaker Mike Gualtieri, Senior Analyst with Forrester Research Inc., and Dr. Michael Rowley, CTO of Active Endpoints, explore how to dramatically increase development productivity and create better process applications by focusing on design. Mike covers the three items on the wish list:

1.      Dramatically increase development productivity

2.      Designed to help developers achieve seven qualities of great software

3.      Empower “business developers”

Mike also explains why a combination of tools and platforms is necessary when it comes to building some applications and advises how to fill your toolbox wisely. Michael presents how the ActiveVOS process automation platform easily enables IT project teams to design and deploy business process applications rapidly, dramatically increasing productivity.

Neil-Ward Dutton, Research Director of MWD Advisors, and Dr. Michael Rowley, CTO, Active Endpoints, presented a practical webinar on the theory and practice of BPM and process automation. Neil explained the history of applications development and how the old way of developing requirements and then “throwing them over the wall” is no longer viable. Agile development is what’s needed, and breaking down the barriers between stakeholders – business users, business analysts, developers and operations personnel – must use now Agile development methods to be successful. Michael described how ActiveVOS, Active Endpoints’ BPMS, and its process automation capabilities, easily define the workflow required and immediate runtime using BPMN, BPEL and other web services open standards.

In this week’s CTO Tuesday’s webcast, I argued (and demonstrated) that any web service that is created using calls to other web services, even when the service being created is entirely synchronous, is best created using a BPEL-based BPMS (preferably with BPMN 2.0 notation). I also briefly talked about the additional advantages that occur when the process isn’t synchronous or when it involves human workflow.

Government agencies – federal, state and local – have an enormous opportunity now, in an era of shrinking budgets, to develop “smart applications”  that will improve service delivery and efficiency.

Join featured speakers Thom Rubel of IDC Government Insights and Michel Rowley of Active Endpoints, along with Application Development Trends magazine for this complimentary LIVE webcast.  Learn the benefits of “smart application” to government agencies and how a standards-based Business Process Management System (BPMS) can provide the technology to enable this kind of innovation.

• When: Thursday, September 30, 2010 12:00 EST / 16:00 GMT
• What: Complimentary webinar
• Topic:  BPM for Government Agencies: How “Smart” Can IT Be?
• Speakers: Analyst – IDC Government Insights’ VP of Research, Thom Rubel and Active Endpoints’, CTO, Dr. Michael Rowley
• To Register:  http://bit.ly/GovBPM

Discover more details about this complimentary webcast by downloading the .PDF file below.

In this CTO Tuesday episode, I describe BPMN’s concept of swimlanes for representing who performs the activities shown in a business process.  Typically, the label on the activities only describes what is done by the activity, rather than who does it. In this talk, I describe how the general concept of a “swimlane” is represented in BPMN by two different concepts: pools and lanes.  I describe the differences between these two concepts, the best practices for their use, and show you how to work with them in version 8.0 of the ActiveVOS process designer tool.

Customer Demand for Broader Enterprise Adoption Drives New Capabilities

Today we are happy to announce ActiveVOS 8.0, the latest release of the company’s flagship product. Highlights of the release include support for Business Process Management Notation (BPMN) swimlanes and support for BPMN 2.0 boundary events, new data access integration capabilities, improved deployment management, and expanded task management. The combination of these new capabilities improves the ability for all stakeholders – project managers, application architects, solutions architects, and developers– to utilize ActiveVOS for designing, developing and deploying mission-critical, custom process applications even more effectively.

Learn more about the new and improved BPMS capabilities in ActiveVOS 8.0 by downloading the full release details in the .pdf below.

itfc, the London-based provider of content management services to broadcasters and content owners, is the first media company in the UK to invest in an ActiveVOS business process engine. The system will allow itfc to remotely interact with and update third-party systems, as well as its own internal technology, to help clients benefit from better workflow efficiencies.

The new solution will sit alongside the company’s current media asset management system Mediaflex, and archiving system Front Porch Digital. Together they will enable itfc to seamlessly integrate workflows across many different, and previously incompatible, broadcast systems.

Learn more by downloading the .pdf below

This talk describes BPMN’s concept of boundary events, how they should be used, and how they are related to events that are in the normal sequence flow and to event subprocesses. I also describe the difference between interrupting and non-interrupting boundary events and how processes that use boundary events are mapped to BPEL.

A number of standards efforts related to BPM are nearing completion of major milestones. This includes 4 standards efforts in 3 different standards development organizations:

• OASIS: BPEL4People 1.1 and WS-HumanTask 1.1
• OMG: BPMN 2.0
• WfMC: XPDL 2.2
• OASIS: SCA 1.1

In this week’s CTO Tuesdays, I describe the current state of each of these efforts along with a brief description of the history and main goals of these standards. Here is a recording of the presentation and a copy of the slides.

This summer, Active Endpoints CTO Michael Rowley and industry analyst, blogger and BPM expert Sandy Kemsley presented a series of webinars focusing on the “human aspects” of BPM.

On Thursday, July 22nd, in the final episode of the series, Sandy presented Five Things You Should Never Ever Try in Process Development. Rather than concentrating on best practices, which often devolve into motherhood-and-apple-pie statements, Sandy was able to compile a succinct list of process development practices that she has seen in real organizations, but which should never ever be done. Michael Rowley then demonstrated how those bad practices can be avoided and good ones followed in a live demonstration of the ActiveVOS BPMN process designer. The audience asked questions of both Sandy and Michael, which prompted some excellent discussions. A replay of the presentation is attached to this post below.

In this recording of CTO Tuesdays, I describe the history of the key standards that are important for SOA, such as XML (starting back with SGML), XML Schema, SOAP, WSDL and BPEL. I also describe some of the key architectural characteristics of SOA that drove the standards, as well as some of the standards-making politics that was peculiar to service-oriented standards. If you are curious about the history of SOA and its related standards, you may find this talk to be interesting.

In this recording of CTO Tuesdays, the BPMS podcast, Michael Rowley describes how we got here — taking a special look at previous attempts to solve some core development problems. Whatever your interest: SOA, BPM, application development, even just a passing historical curiosity, you will want to watch this (and future) episodes.

We are very pleased to announce that, once again, ActiveVOS BPMS grew substantially in Q2 2010. BPM users around the world are looking for a new kind of BPMS — one that is easier to master and use. And they are finding it in ActiveVOS. The attached press release has the details of the BPMS’s growing momentum.