Big data analytics is a bigger topic today and use cases are arising in many areas of business. These range from the traditional CEP areas of financial trading to new customer engagement models such as geo-located coupons. In an Internet of Things (IoT) world, machine to machine (M2M) solutions can produce big data requirements.  These, ‘edge devices’ can post vast volumes of data into the cloud applications that service them. Manufacturing is an area, under-served by BPM and there certainly are numerous industrial M2M and big data use cases. At Bosch, we believe one of the most important and fruitful areas are predictive maintenance (PrM).

Factory floors frequently have expensive and complicated machinery that is critical to their manufacturing competitiveness. The unplanned loss of even a few Hours can result in a great financial loss. . Many companies are turning to the big data, analytics topic of predictive maintenance to optimize these resources. These methods analyze the condition of in-service equipment to project optimal maintenance measures. Analytics for this fields encompasses a broad range of mathematical disciplines, for instance vibrational analysis can use the occurrence of even a small 'out of round' sensor reading to predict the failure of a machine. When we start to aggregate a number of machines, one can apply data heuristics discover even more predictive factors. Even minor irregularities and latent failure patterns are uncovered and aligned across the resource pool.

It is not enough to have the mathematical, material science and engineering capability to create a predictive maintenance solution—— there needs digital infrastructure to support this. That infrastructure must also be capable of hosting M2M solutions. Bosch software already has an example of this in the Service Portal.

The service portal uses A combination of BPM+ and the output of predictive analytics to generate the appropriate response.

On June 6, 2013 Bosch Software will hold a webinar on their approach to PrM.

 http://www.bosch-si.com/company/news-events/events/events-16896.html .

I will be speaking along with my colleagues Karsten Koenigstein and Christina Gruen.

The goal of process management is to improve process.  Let’s say you are successful at putting in place a process improvement practice.  Can there be too much of a good thing?  Experts are saying that it can be.

The past twenty years has brought a focus on business as a process.  We measure it as a process.  What is the total effort needed to accomplish one unit of business?  How can we reduce the cost?  Can we increase the quality?  Practices such as Six Sigma, Lean, TQM, and others give a clear method to measure and improved a process.

Sometimes, when you put your focus on the “process of business” you take the focus off of the business itself.  When you measure finely detailed metrics of production — e.g. how many units per day, how many minutes of labor per unit of output — then those metrics drive decisions.  It can be very satisfying/motivating to make incremental improvements in these measures.  If you go too far, the excessive focus on this tends to exclude more expensive, yet equally vital, activities like innovation.  This is best summed up with this quote from a PricewaterhouseCoopers study:

“Those in middle management… found innovation disruptive to their day-to-day activities and felt it got in the way of running an efficient operation–which is what they were paid to do.”

Doing things precisely the same say makes an organizations fragile (as I have mentioned in earlier posts) because it prevents anyone from experimenting to find a better way.  Enforcing a best practice is a two edged sword: you prevent random variations, but you also prevent purposeful small scale improvement.  This occurred to me:

Innovation is thinking outside the box;
Automation is the box

Innovation can be disruptive.  This means for a short period of time, your efficiency metrics will go down!  A company that wants to adopt a disruptive improvement will need to endure a period of reduced performance, in order to “retool” for the new way of working.  Ask yourself this question: can a small team escalate the need for a retooling to upper management which is only following the numbers?  How much effort will that be, and how much bandwidth does the executive team have to listen to all the explanations from lots of small teams.  The metrics can cause the worst kind of centralized control where the numbers are not telling the complete story.

Lisa Bodell posted an excellent piece today: “5 Ways Process Is Killing Your Productivity“.  She says:

Why do we love process so much? It offers a way to measure progress and productivity, which makes people feel more efficient and accountable. When used correctly, processes should standardize and simplify the necessary tasks that keep business running smoothly.

She points to a slightly different problem, that your task lists may be so efficient at presenting low grade work to employees, that they may not have the time to attend to higher grade, longer term activities:

[Process is] not a good thing when there are so many processes in place that they restrain the people they’re supposed to help. If your team spends its days asking for permission before executing, taking an hour to complete expense reports or time sheets, attending redundant meetings, or answering irrelevant emails, you’ve got a problem. Exactly when are employees supposed to find the time to innovate when every task or topic is labeled “urgent” and every deadline is ASAP?

She cites 5 ways that process can kill productivity, summarized here:

• Unreasonable number of sign-offs and approvals.
• Focus on process instead of people
• Over-dependence on meetings
• Lack of clear, long term vision beyond efficiency
• Antagonism to change that is not efficiency driven

Daniel Lock writes a post: “How too much process is killing innovation.“  He says:

Examples abound where companies have taken on top down, methodology driven approaches to improving their company and come off second best.

Both of these articles cite a couple of well known cases:

• 3M started to use Six Sigma from 2001 to 2005 in order to cut costs and increase efficiency.  It worked!  They cut costs some 21%.  However, at the same time they noticed that innovation in new products dropped as well. (See ZDNet: Six Sigma ‘killed’ innovation in 3M)
• Home Depot found that a focus on efficiency decreased moral and satisfaction.  Another 2007 Business Week article put it bluntly: “Profitability soared, but worker morale dropped, and so did consumer sentiment. Home Depot fell from first to last among major retailers on the American Customer Satisfaction Index in 2005.”
• A 2011 Harvard Business Review article by Yves Morieux says “Today companies, on average, set themselves six times as many performance requirements as they did in 1955, the year the Fortune 500 list was created. Back then, CEOs committed to four to seven performance imperatives; today they commit to 25 to 40.”
• A Boston Consulting Group survey of more than 100 U.S. and European that found “the amount of procedures, vertical layers, interface structures, coordination bodies, and decision approvals needed in each of those firms has increased by anywhere from 50% to 350%.”

The ability to enforce process has had the effect of enforcing the process.  Imagine that!  Your process has become too good.

Ryan Huang (Six Sigma ‘killed’ innovation in 3M) quotes Geoff Nicholson of 3M saying that you should avoid the following things that tend to kill innovation:

• Asking for a 5-year plan
• Insisting people go through all levels with a new idea
• Being control-conscious
• Expressing criticism and withholding praise
• Being suspicious of every idea that originates below you
• Making a decision to reorganize in secret and maximize surprise

Most of those are fundamental to what is generally known as good process management, or at least traditional scientific management.    Daniel Lock suggests three keys to avoid killing innovation completely:

• Understand that innovation and problem solving require discrete approaches and thinking.
• When considering problems to be solved, emphasize and look for opportunities to raise standards instead.
• Don’t wait for problems to arise to raise standards, continually seek opportunities to improve and innovate.

Innovation is messy.  Experimentation is inefficient.  But you have to do those things if you want to remain in the business in the long term.  You have to take a balanced approach:  some amount of time on efficiency of existing work, and some other amount of time on less efficient, adaptive work.  Whether it is 90/10, 89/20, or 66/34 depends upon the kind of organization you want to have.

Net-Net

Process optimization approach such as Six Sigma, Lean, TQM are not dead.  They work well.  But like any tool, you need to be careful how you apply them.  Too narrow a focus on efficiency will make an organization fragile.  At the end of the day, satisfied sustainable customers is the only metric you should care about.

Zum zweiten Mal lädt die BPinPM.net-Initiative, die sich mit Best Practices im Prozessmanagement beschäftigt, am 10. und 11.9. zu einer Konferenz nach Frankfurt. Dort werden die Ergebnisse verschiedener Best Practice-Workshops einer breiteren Öffentlichkeit vorgestellt. Zu den Themen gehören organisationsweite Prozessmodelle, Prozesskennzahlen, BPM Governance, prozessorientiertes Qualitätsmanagement, Risikomanagement und Prozessstandardisierung. Zahlreiche Praxisbeiträge runden das Programm ab, u. a. aus der Luftfahrt, der Chemie-Industrie und der öffentlichen Verwaltung.

Weitere Informationen finden sich auf der Konferenz-Homepage.

Am 18.03.2013 haben wir das Open Source Projekt camunda BPM gestartet, ein vollständiges BPMS inkl. embeddable BPMN 2.0 Engine, Modeler und Monitoring Komponenten, das heute bereits von zahlreichen namhaften Kunden eingesetzt wird. Es kann sowohl in Plain-Java, Spring oder Tomcat Umgebungen als auch in Java EE Containern wie JBoss, Glassfish, Websphere oder Weblogic eingesetzt werden.

In diesem Webinar wird die camunda BPM Plattform aus technischer Sicht vorgestellt, wobei ein lauffähiges Beispiel live demonstriert und im Quellcode auseinandergenommen wird. Anschließend wird die Vision und Roadmap des Projektes erläutert – dabei sollte auch klar werden wie es sich gegen vergleichbare Projekte (wie z.B. Activiti oder JBoss jBPM) abgrenzt.

Die Fakten in Kürze:

• Titel: camunda BPM – Eine Einführung in BPM + Java
• Zielgruppe: Java Entwickler und Architekten
• Wann: Dienstag, 18.06.2013, 10.30 – 11.30
• Sprache: Deutsch
• Anmeldung: Bitte melden Sie sich an. Sie bekommen dann rechtzeitig vor dem Termin noch eine Bestätigungsmail mit Teilnahme-Link zugeschickt.

Das Webinar wird aufgezeichnet – der Link zur Aufzeichnung wird hinterher an alle angemeldeten Personen verteilt.
–
Activiti ist ein eingetragenes Warenzeichen der Alfresco Software, Inc.

We have common definitions for process, business rules, operational decisions, business events and other things that are important to process modeling. And, I have mentioned my favorite ones (here). But we frequently ignore one of the very important aspects of process modeling: interactions. Fingar and Smith mentions in ‘Business Process Management, the Third Wave' that an interaction is the use of process desktops that allows people or participants to interact with the process. This includes workflow emphasizing assignment, task management and form-based data entry.  So, interactions gave rise to the idea of task oriented process instances that are started by a form. We see this in today’s process monitor and task list in most BPM suites. A form is a completed interaction that spawns an instance. This was, arguably, a new concept in 2002.

The BPMN 2.0 specification (here) also delves into the concept of interactions. Section 10.1 says that a public process represents the interaction between a private business processes and another processes or participants. The interaction is the glue. In the specification, human interactions are a type of task with human involvement. Manual and human tasks have particular icons in BPMN that indicate that human involvement is required to complete the task. See the two figures below.

 

The Human Task &  Manual Task

Remember: a manual task is a task that is expected to be performed without the aid of any digitized business process. An example might be the nurse delivering medication to a patient. This is contrasted with a user task which is performed with the assistance of a software application or is scheduled through a task list manager. An example would be the approval of a request or deciding a proposition.

Interactions are critical to the concept of choreography. A key characteristic of choreography is that it is an activity representing an interaction between two parties rather than a unit of work. According to Dumas, "The Fundamentals of Business Process Management”, the interaction can be one-way, where a message is exchanged or two-way, where messages exchanged bring a return message. Each message has an initiator and a recipient. Indeed, the BPMN spec states that "choreographies formalize way business participants coordinate interactions. This gives rise to the 'conversation' shape center defined in the spec.

In Wikipedia the interaction is defined as ‘a kind of action that occurs as two or more objects have effects upon one another’. This is fundamental in the concept of the business process.

Vishal Sikka, who leads technology and innovation at SAP, followed Hasso Platner onto the keynote stage; I decided to break the post and publish just Plattner’s portion since my commentary was...

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It’s the last day of SAP’s enormous SAPPHIRE NOW 2013 conference here in Orlando, and the day opens with Hasso Plattner, one of the founders of SAP who still holds a role in defining...

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Alberto Manuel pushed the boundaries of business process support in his new conference in Lisbon Portugal on April 18, 2013.  It was not the typical rehashing of “this standard, that formalism, see the life-cycle, marvel at the sophisticated architecture diagrams”. Instead, he set out to challenge the audience to think not about where we are today, but where this is all taking us, and what might it become.

In his own summary, BPM Conference Portugal 2013, he cites the three top themes of the conference:

• Cybernetics, or the ability to deal with diversity;
• Adaptation, how companies sense, innovate and change the way operations are performed;
• Socialization, how managers can change the way people get engaged out of the organization charts and use other approaches to achieve the intended results.

Decidedly not your normal BPM conference topics.  He invited an eclectic set of speakers to deliver this challenge to the audience.  I was certainly honored to be included as a keynote speaker.  I gave a talk that expanded on the ideas I presented at BPMNext about Antifragility, adaptive systems, and how there is a danger of making an organization fragile if you try to force it into a single best practice model.

Denis Gagne – was there to present on simulation and process mining, including coverage of the new BPSim standard that he led the workgroup in forming.

Ivo Velitchkov – gave a really interesting talk on “taskless” BPM diagrams.  Yes, that is right, he proposed eliminating the activity node from BPMN diagrams.  How does that work?  Don’t tell people what to do, but instead tell them the context within which to do the work.  I am intrigued by this idea that specifying the tasks unnecessarily restricts the actions at run time, because of the limitations of design time.  Really enjoyed the discussion about how complexity is a problem in system design.

Tom Graves – unfortunately schedule conflicts prevented my seeing his talk about the roll of narrative in system design/architecture.  However, in the hallway conversations I cam to appreciate Tom’s sense of how to handle complexity, something that is very central to my own talk.  See his summary of the conference, At BPM Portugal 2013.  He includes a nice quote in his slides (my paraphrasing from Chris Potts):

we should not think about customers appearing in our processes, but how we appear in the customer’s experience.

Michael Poulin – We have debated on line before, but this was my first chance to see him in person.  Michael concept of Purpose Case Management is that you might have a case management system that blends different styles of case management together: more structured (like Production Case Management), freeform (Social Business Software) and adaptive (ACM).  I think he is on to something here, however I still question the idea that someone will have to choose which approach to take before doing the work.  Talked about “service oriented enterprise” which reminds me very much of my concept of “large scale process federation” as well as the idea of case-2-case information exchange discussed with John Reynolds at the BPMNext conference.

Robert M. Shapiro – Robert has been showing the potential for process analytics for a long time.  There is a goldmine in being able to actually know what is going on in an organization, and feed that into management in near real time.

Vitor Santos – unfortunately missed this talk as well, but apparently it covered elasticity and incremental adoption, which is a key to getting system buy-in.

The entire conference was video taped, and I am very much looking forward to when those appear, and I can see the talks I had to miss due to schedule conflicts.

This was Alberto’s first chance to host a conference, and by all accounts he rose the the occasion.  Add on top of that, Lisbon’s museum that allows you to taste a wide variety of different port wines!  All in all, the conference included a surprisingly refreshing collection of topics all around the future of BPM.

Ingrid Van Den Hoogen and Kevin Ichhpurani gave a press briefing on what’s coming for HANA Enterprise Cloud following the launch last week. Now that the cloud offering is available,  existing...

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This morning, our opening keynote was from SAP’s other co-CEO, Jim Snabe. He started with a bit about competitive advantage and adaptation to changing conditions, illustrated with the fact that...

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I met up with the NetWeaver BPM product management team and sat in on a session given by Alan Rickayzen of SAP and their customer King Tantivejkul of Colgate-Palmolive on putting intelligence into...

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Why?

If you’re reading this, you probably already have a “why” to redefine the persistence scheme that drools uses, but it’s good to go over some good reasons to do something like this. The most important thing is that you might consider the JPA persistence scheme designed for drools doesn’t meet your needs for one or more reasons. Some of the most common I’ve found are these:

The given model is not enough for my design: Current objects created to persist the drools components (sessions, process instances, work items and so on) currently are as small as possible to allow the best performance on the database, and most of the operational data is stored in byte arrays mapped to blob objects. This scheme is enough for the drools and jBPM runtime to function, but it might not be enough for your domain. You might want to keep the runtime information in a scheme that is easier to query from outside tools, and to do that you would need to enrich the data model, and even create one of your own.

The persistence I’m using is not compatible with JPA: There are a lot of persistence implementations out there that no longer use databases as we once knew (distributed caches, key value storages, NoSQL databases) and the model usually needs extra mappings and special treatment when persisting in such storages. To do so, sometimes JPA is not our cup of tea

I need to load special entities from different sources every time a drools component is loaded: When we have complex objects and/or external databases, sometimes we want new models to relate in a special way to the objects we have. Maybe we want to make sure our sessions are binded to our model in a special way because it makes sense to our business model. To do so we would have to alter the model

How?

In order to make our own persistence scheme for our sessions, we need to understand clearly how the JPA scheme is built, to use it as a template to build our own. This class diagram shows how the JPA persistence scheme for the knowledge session is implemented:

Looks complicated, right? Don’t worry. We’ll go step by step to understand how it works.

First of all, you can see that we have two implementations of the StatefulKnowledgeSession (or KieSession, if you’re using Drools 6). The one that does all the “drools magic” is StatefulKnoweldgeSessionImpl, and the one we will be using is CommandBasedStatefulKnowledgeSession. It has nothing to do with persistence, but it helps a lot with it by surrounding every method call with a command object and deriving its execution to a command service. So, for example, if you call the fireAllRules method to this type of session, it will create a FireAllRulesCommand object and give it to another class to execute.

This command based implementation allows us to do exactly the thing we need to implement persistence on a drools environment: It lets us implement actions before and after every method call done to the session. That’s where the SingleSessionCommandService class comes in handy: This command service contains a StatefulKnowledgeSessionImpl and a PersistenceContextManager. Every time a command has to be executed, this class creates or loads a SessionInfo object and tells the persistence context to save it with all the state of the StatefulKnowledgeSessionImpl.

That’s the most complicated part: the one that implements the session persistence. Persistence of pretty much everything else is done easily through a set of given interfaces that provide methods to implement how to load everything else related to a session (process instances, work items and signals). As long as you create a proper manager and its factory, you can delegate on them to store anything to anywhere (or do anything you want, for that matter).

So, after seeing all the components, it’s a good time to start thinking of how to create our own implementation. For this example, we’ve created an Infinispan based persistence scheme and we will show you all the steps we took to do it.

Step 1: (re)define the model

Most of the time when we want to persist drools objects in our way, we might want to do it with a gist of your own. Even if we don’t wish to change the model, we might need to add special annotations to the model to work with your storage framework. Another reason might be that you want to store all facts in a special way to cross-query them with some other legacy system. You can literally do this redefinition any way you want, as long as you understand that whatever model you create, the persistence scheme will serialize and deserialize it every time you call a method on the knowledge session, so always try to keep it simple.

Here’s the model we created for this case:

Nothing too fancy, just a flattened model for all things drools related. We weren’t too imaginative with this model, because we just wanted to show you that you can change it if you want to.

One thing to notice in this model is that we are still saving all the internal data of these objects pretty much the same way as it is stored for the JPA persistence. The only difference is that  JPA stores it in a Blob, and we store it in a Base64 encrypted string. If you wish to change the way that byte array is generated and read, you have to create your own implementations of these interfaces:

• org.kie.api.marshalling.Marshaller for knowledge sessions
• org.jbpm.marshalling.impl.ProcessInstanceMarshaller for process instances

But providing an example of that would take way too much time and perhaps even a whole book to explain, so we’ll skip it :)

Step 2: Implementing the PersistenceContext

For some cases, redefining the PersistenceContext and the PersistenceContextManager would be enough to implement all your persistence requirements. The PersistenceContext is an object in charge of persisting work items and session objects by implementing methods to persist them, query them by ID and removing them from a particular storage implementation. The PersistenceContextManager is in charge of creating the PersistenceContext, either once for all the application or on a per-command basis. The comand service will use it to persist the session and its objects when needed.

In our case we implemented a PersistenceContext and a PersistenceContextManager using an Infinispan cache as storage. The different PersistenceContextManager instances will have access to all configuration objects through the Environment variable. We’ve used the already defined keys in Environment to store our Infinispan related objects:

• EnvironmentName.ENTITY_MANAGER_FACTORY is used to store an Infinispan based CacheManager
• EnvironmentName.APP_SCOPED_ENTITY_MANAGER and EnvironmentName.CMD_SCOPED_ENTITY_MANAGER will point to an Infinispan Cache object.

You can see that code here:

At this point we have some very important steps to redefining our drools persistence. Now we need to know how to configure our knowledge sessions to work with this components.

Step 3: Creating managers for our work items, process instances and signals

Now that we have our persistence contexts, we need to teach the session how to use them properly. The knowledge session has a few managers that can be configured that allow you to modify or alter the default behaviour. These managers are:

org.kie.api.runtime.process.WorkItemManager: It manages when a work item is executed, connects it with the proper handler, and notifies the process instance when the work item is completed.

org.jbpm.process.instance.event.SignalManager: It manages when a signal is sent to or from a process. Since process instances might be passivated, it needs to

org.jbpm.process.instance.ProcessInstanceManager: It manages the actions to be taken when a process instance is created, started, modified or completed.

JPA implementation of these interfaces already work with a persistence context manager, so most of the times you won’t need to extend them. However, with Infinispan, we have to make sure the process instance is persisted more often than with JPA, so we had to implement them differently.

Once you have these instances, you will need to create a factory for each type of manager.The interface names are the same, except with the suffix “Factory”. Each receives a knowledge session as parameter, from which you can get the Environment object and all other configurations.

Step 4: Configuring the knowledge session

Now that we have our different managers created, we will need to tell our knowledge sessions to use them. To do so you need to create a CommandBasedStatefulKnowledgeSession instance with a SingleSessionCommandService instance. The SingleSessionCommandService, as its name describes, is a class to execute commands against one session at a time. SingleSessionCommandService’s constructor receives all parameters needed to create a proper session and execute commands against it in a way that it becomes persistent. Those parameters are:

• KieBase: the knowledge base with the knowledge definitions for our session runtime.
• KieSessionConfiguration: Where we configure the manager factories to create and dispose of work items, process instances and signals.
• Environment: A bag of variables for any other purpose, where we will configure our persistence context mananager objects.
• sessionId (optional): If present, this parameter looks for an already existing session in the storage. Otherwise, it creates a new one.

Also, in our example, we’re using Infinispan, which is not a reference based storage, but a value based storage. This means that once you say to infinispan to store a value, it will store a copy of it and not the actual object. Some things in drools persistence are managed to be stored through reference based storages, meaning you can tell the framework to persist an object, change its attributes, and see those changes stored in the database after committing the transaction. With infinispan, this wouldn’t happen, so you have to implement an update of the cache values after the command execution is finished. Luckily for us, the SingleSessionCommandService allows us to do this by implementing an Interceptor.

Interceptors are basically your own command service to wrap the default one. You can tell each command to add more behaviour before or after each execution. Here’s a couple of diagrams to explain how it works:

As you can see, the SingleSessionCommandService allows for a command service instance to actually invoke the command’s execute method. And thanks to the interceptor extension of the command service, we can add as many as we want in chain, allowing us to have something like the next sequence diagram executing every time a command needs execution:

In our case, we created a couple of these interceptors and added them to the SingleSessionCommandService. One makes sure any changes done to a session object are stored after finishing the command. The other one allows us to do the same with process instance objects.

Overall, this is how we need to create our knowledge sessions at this point to actually use infinispan as a persistence scheme:

Complicated, right? Don’t worry. There’s yet another couple of classes to make it easier to configure.

Step 4: Creating our own initiation service

Yes, we could write that ton of code every time we want to create our own customized persistent knowledge sessions. It’s a free world (for the most part). But you can also wrap this implementation in a single class with two exposed methods:

• One to create a new session
• One to load a previously existing session

And creates all the configuration internally, merging it whenever you wish to change one or more things. Drools provides an interface to serve as a contract for this called org.kie.api.persistence.jpa.KieStoreServices

We created our own implementation of this interface and also a static class to access it, called InfinispanKnowledgeService. This allows us to be able to create the session like this:

Conclusion

Drools persistence can seem complicated to understand and to get working, let alone to implement it in your own way. However, I hope this shows a bit of demystification to those who need to implement drools persistence in a special way, or were even wondering if it is possible to do so in any other way than JPA.

Also, if you wish to see the modifications done to make it work, see these three pull requests:

• https://github.com/droolsjbpm/droolsjbpm-build-bootstrap/pull/38
• https://github.com/droolsjbpm/drools/pull/198
• https://github.com/droolsjbpm/jbpm/pull/166

A feature request to add this features to Drools is specified in this JIRA ticket. Feel free to upvote it if you wish to have it as part of the core drools project!

It’s been a couple of years since I last attended SAP’s huge SAPPHIRE NOW conference, but this week I’m here with my 20,000 closest friends at the Orlando Convention Center (plus...

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Last year, the data produced in the world would fill DVD stack reaching from the Earth to moon and back. And it's growing exponentially. What does that mean for the enterprise? Piles of data do not always result in more information. On the contrary.

Especially for people performing knowledge work, it means it becomes harder to sift through vast amounts of information sources and share the right information with the appropriate people. It's not only time consuming, it's also risky. Tweets, Google+, Facebook, Blogs and Press articles are abundant and have typically a low signal-to-noise ratio. On top of that employees have to keep track of what's happening in their CRM, document management and many other enterprise systems. This means a greater exposure to loads of data that becomes on average less relevant. Procrastination never had an easier job looking for susceptible victims.

A case management solution is a fancy word for a system to share and discuss important topics in an business environment.  It's function is to bring people together on topics like eg introducing a new sales strategy or an important customer that may cancel a big order.  A case is the most efficient instrument to share related documents, links and tasks for topics like that.  In other words, a case is a social collaboration space for a specific topic.

To some extend, the scope of a case could be compared with an email discussion thread.  Before you bring it on, let me explain why that is a problem.  Email is ubiquitous and serves its purpose as the least common denominator for communication.  But using email has major drawbacks when used as the tool of collaboration.  First, you have to assume that people always hit Reply-All.  Reading a conversation where some people answer inline, some answer on top and some at the bottom is a challenge to say the least.  Searching the latest version of an attachment in a conversation is hard and error prone.  Involving someone later in an email discussion is hopeless as not everyone includes the whole discussion thread.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying cases should replace email threads.  People will continue to leverage email as a unified inbox for the foreseeable future.  But cases provide a much better structure for information that is currently buried in the emails themselves.  I think we will see a shift towards email being the unified notification inbox and the content will be stored in dedicated systems like case management systems.

For organizations larger then 10 people, it's a matter of professionalism to equip employees with a case management system.  It's the way to share relevant information in chaotic world with loads of noise and only a bit of signal.  People will be better informed and collaborating becomes simpler.  These improvements in the internal organization already justify adopting a case management system.  The bonus comes from collaborations with external business partners like prospects, clients and suppliers.  The advantages are just the same in this situation, and on top you show a professional approach to doing business.
Regrettably, not all solutions use the term case for this concept.  Some solutions call it a task and others invent a new name.  But it should be clear that every organization deserves a solution for social collaboration and case management is a crucial aspect of that.

Nachdem wir schon eine Roadshow mit Oracle zusammen machen, dachte ich mir: “Höchste Zeit auch mal camunda BPM auf Oracle WebLogic 12c – dem Java EE 6 Application Server von Oracle, früher BEA – laufen zu haben”. Naja – und wir führen ein Pilotprojekt bei einem Enterprise Kunden durch Langer Rede kurzer Sinn habe ich mich am Sonntag mal hingesetzt und es läuft. Alle Details und Downloads finden sich in unserem camunda BPM Team-Blog: http://camundabpm.blogspot.de/2013/05/camunda-bpm-70-on-weblogic-12c.html – viel Spaß dabei und wir freuen uns immer über Feedback – vor allem wenn ihr selbst auch WebLogic einsetzen wollt.

Tools für das Enterprise Architecture Management (EAM) ermöglichen es, Informationen über die Informationssystemlandschaft eines Unternehmens zu erfassen, zu modellieren und in einem Repository abzulegen. Zunehmend gewinnt auch die Abbildung der Business Architecture an Bedeutung, die u. a. die Unternehmensstrategie und die Geschäftsprozesse umfasst. Doch was fängt man konkret mit den ganzen gesammelten Informationen an? Heutige EAM-Suiten bieten laut Forresters aktueller Studie wesentlich mehr als die reine Modellierung. Viele Tools haben sich zwischenzeitlich zu umfangreichen Management-Plattformen gemausert.

Sie unterstützen Planung, Portfolio Management und Governance, und bieten umfassende Visualisierungsmöglichkeiten. Damit werden auch neue Zielgruppen angesprochen. Rollenbasierte Dashboards, verbesserte Benutzbarkeit und einfachere Navigationsmöglichkeiten erleichtern auch solchen Nutzern den Zugang, die sich nicht hauptsächlich mit der Enterprise Architecture beschäftigen und nur gelegentlich Informationen benötigen. Cloud-basierte Angebote, Best Practices und vorgefertigte Lösungen, z. B. für den Mittelstand, erleichtern den Einstieg.

Manche der auf dem Markt verfügbaren Tools bringen eine fertige, erprobte Methodik mit. Hierdurch kann man schnell einsteigen und von der Erfahrung des Anbieters profitieren, die in die Methodik eingeflossen ist. Andere Tools wiederum erlauben ein umfangreiches Customizing und ermöglichen es, eine eigene Methodik zu definieren. Insbesondere größere Firmen, die ihre eigenen EAM-Methoden entwickelt haben, dürften diese Art von Tools bevorzugen.

Laut Forrester haben Unternehmen unterschiedliche Einsatzschwerpunkte beim Thema EAM. Bei manchen stehen Business-Fragen im Vordergrund, während andere eher technologiegetrieben an das Thema herangehen. Ebenso fokussieren einige eher auf strategische Fragen, andere auf Projekte. Entsprechend gibt es vier verschiedene “Archetypen”: Der “Business-Strategie”-Archetyp benötigt vor allem Funktionen für die strategische Planung und das Business IT-Alignment, wohingegen etwa ein Tool für den “Technologie-Projekt”-Archetypen vor allem die Auswahl und Verwaltung von Infrastruktur und Anwendungsplattformen unterstützen sollte. Der jeweilige Archetyp bestimmt also, welche Anforderungen für die Auswahl eines EAM-Tools wichtig sind. Andererseits sollte man dabei nicht vergessen, dass sich der Einsatzbereich im Laufe der Zeit durchaus erweitern könnte.

Für die Studie “The Forrester Wave: EA Management Suites, Q 2013″ wurden 10 EAM-Tools bewertet, die neben der reinen Modellierung auch Management, Governance und Analyse und eine größere Zahl von EA-Zielen unterstützen und dabei informative und verständliche Views für EA-Daten bieten. Vertreten sind die Hersteller alfabet, Avolution, BOC, Casewise, EAS, IBM, Mega, OpenText, Software AG und Troux.

Die Studie kann bei einigen dieser Anbieter heruntergeladen werden, z. B. auf der Troux-Website (Registrierung erforderlich).

After lunch at the Toronto OpenText EIM Day, Catharine MacKenzie of the Mutual Fund Dealers Association talked about how they’re using OpenText MBPM (from the Metastorm acquisition). She spoke...

[Content summary only, click through for full article and links]

Following the company/product keynotes, we heard from two OpenText customers. First up was Tara Drover from Hatch Engineering, a Canadian engineering firm with 11,000 employees worldwide. They have...

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I always try to drop in on vendor events that happen in my own backyard, so today I’m at OpenText’s EIM Day in Toronto. OpenText is a success story in the Canadian software space, focused...

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High Noon in BPM City: not a soul walks the dusty main road and the sun glares mercilessly onto El Camundo and his opponent – the Oracle of the Desert. The wireless mouse still rests in his holster, his hand hovers above it – only the slightest quiver reveals Camundo’s tension. Pearly beads of sweat are glistening on Oracle’s face. Who will be the first to shoot off his token?

This is close to what you can expect from our Shootout Roadshow, that we will run together with Oracle and Opitz Consulting (the latter as a neutral presenter). The idea is to set camunda’s and Oracle’s BPM systems against each other and get a direct comparison. On the one hand the well-established and powerful infrastructure, on the other hand Oracle’s tool. Just kidding, I just can’t help myself. Seriously though: obviously Oracle as well as camunda offer serious and high-quality BPM solutions. What then are the similarities, what the differences? Which solutions is eligible for my specific project? This is less a question about which tool is the better, but more about which approach is the most suitable for a specific problem or business situation.

Dates:
10.06.2013 | Berlin
11.06.2013 | Hamburg
25.06.2013 | Cologne
26.06.2013 | Bad Homburg
27.06.2013 | Munich

Further information and registration: www.opitz-consulting.com/bpm_roadshow_2013.php

We are pleased that Oracle is prepared to participate in this event and will be present with some of its qualified representatives. I do believe that it will be an exciting few days without one side belittling the other, but where real BPM enthusiasts will describe why they love their product and which of its strengths they believe to be especially relevant and during which the Optiz team can report from their experiences with these products and enough time will be given for your questions (feel free to be critical). Definitely a marketing event (hey, free coffee!), but not the typical empty yes-we-are-great-stuff that one usually has to endure. It’ll be cool.

The post IBM Impact: BPM Makes Way for Smarter Process appeared first on BPMS Watch.

Driven by the awesome feedback of last year’s conference, we performed additional Best Practice workshops and gave our best to set up an attractive agenda for a second BPinPM.net Process Management Conference for German-speaking process management experts.

The agenda is designed to share the workshop results, to present best practice examples from companies such as Infraserv Höchst, Cassidian / Systemunterstützungszentrum Eurofighter, SAP, and Lufthansa Technik, as well as to facilitate know-how exchange by process management experts.

The conference will take place on Sep 10 and 11, 2013 at Lufthansa Training & Conference Center Seeheim in the area of Frankfurt.

Please visit the conference site to get more details and to register!

 

 

Again, this will be a local conference in Germany, but if enough non-German-speaking experts are interested, we will think about ways to share the know-how with the international BPinPM.net community as well. Please feel free to contact the team.

 

 

According to the Specification (here), BPMN is constrained to support only the concepts of modeling that are applicable to Business Processes. This means that other types of modeling done by organizations for business purposes is out of scope  for BPMN. Therefore, the following are out of the scope of the BPMN specification:

• Definition of organizational models and resources
• Modeling of functional breakdowns
• Data and information models
• Modeling of strategy
• Business rules models

Since these subjects are critical to Business Processes, the relationships BPMN is supposed to be evolving. We also know that operational decisions need data to decide, so at this point BPMN is incomplete with respect to creating executable business processes. An executable BPMN diagram might be more complex — it is inadequate to create an executable specification.

BPMN has a data shape, the data object. A data object is a rectangle with the upper right corner folded over, as shown here:

The text label for a data object can be found underneath the shape.  Often the current state of the data object is shown as an attribute shown in brackets under the text label.  As the diagram progresses, the state of the data object can easily be read, as displayed in the Figure below.

Figure: Use of data artifact shapes.

As with the text annotation, the association line attaches the data artifact to another shape. Data Class shapes can be associated with tasks, gateways, events, sequence lines, or message lines.  In message flow, data objects portray the “payload” or content of messages.  

The use of data objects is optional.  Some diagrams may concentrate on flow, while others show the complete details Data artifacts do not directly affect the sequence flow or message flows.  Data objects provide additional information, some of it reflected in the XML schema, without changing the basic behavior of the process.  For instance, the Data Object elements can optionally reference a DataState element, which is the state of the data contained in the Data Object. The data object can detail the metamodel’s XML particularly with a ‘callableElement’. Uses the following additional elements:

• ioSpecification,
• inputSet,  
• Data Input,

The data input and output are detailed in the purchase order approval example above. When a BPMN editor draws a Data Association to an Activity or Event it should generate this supporting invisible substructure.

As mentioned, the specifications are naive with respect to the origin mutation and alteration of data attributes. I've always maintained that this is the realm of business rules (mostly). That business rules through examination of data in order to decide Bolivian conditions controls specific aspects of operational decisions. Some of that data exploration includes analytics such as regressions, projections, and other techniques.

I believe the BPM industry needs to progress on standards with respect to business rules: the representation how they use things like Business Objects expressed in UM, and other expressions of the operational aspects of the business process. The BPMN specification pretty much admits weakness in this. So, even with the data input and output elements of BPMN, more needs to be done in order to specify a business process in a way that does not very important code aspects. The OMG spec on business rules (PRR) seems to be moving very slowly and it doesn't offer a clear connection to the process modeled by BPMN.

Das neue englischsprachige Lehrbuch Fundamentals of Business Process Management ist ein internationales Gemeinschaftswerk. Die Autoren lehren an den Universitäten in Tartu (Estland), Brisbane (Australien), Wien (Österreich) und Eindhoven (Niederlande). Sie alle sind renommierte Mitglieder der wissenschaftlichen BPM-Community. Insofern gibt das Buch ganz gut den akzeptierten Stand der Wissenschaft wieder, wobei die Forschung in diesem Zusammenhang bekanntermaßen recht stark IT- und modellierungslastig ist. Insofern konzentriert sich auch das Buch vor allem auf die modellgestützte Darstellung, Analyse, Steuerung und Automatisierung von Prozessen. Strategische, organisatorische und mitarbeiterbezogene Aspekte werden zwar nicht ignoriert, spielen aber im Vergleich eine untergeordnete Rolle.

Das einführende Kapitel beschreibt zunächst die Herkunft und Entwicklung des Themas Business Process Management. Der zur Strukturierung des Buchs verwendete BPM-Lebenszyklus umfasst die folgenden Phasen:

• Process Identification: In dieser vorbereitenden Phase werden die im Unternehmen vorhandenen Prozesse ermittelt und in eine Prozessarchitektur eingeordnet. Die identifizierten Prozesse werden hinsichtlich verschiedener Kriterien, wie ihrer Bedeutung und ihrem Verbesserungsbedarf klassifiziert. Hier können u. a. auch Reifegradmodelle eingesetzt werden. Es soll festgestellt werden, welche Prozesse im Rahmen von BPM-Initiativen vordringlich zu behandeln sind. Zur Strukturierung der Prozessarchitektur wird eine Matrix aus Funktionen und unterschiedlichen Fällen (z. B. Produkttypen, Verkaufskanäle) verwendet. Ein Prozess kann dann ein oder mehrere verbundene Felder der Matrix überspannen. Es werden Richtlinien vorgestellt, die dabei helfen, die Prozesse geeignet zu schneiden.
Weitere Bücher zum Thema BPM
• Process Discovery: Als Voraussetzung für Prozesserhebung wird zunächst die BPMN (Business Process Model and Notation) ausführlich vorgestellt. Zur Erhebung der Ist-Prozesse ist ein geeignetes Team aus Prozessanalysten und Fachexperten erforderlich. Informationen über die Prozesse können auf verschiedene Weise gewonnen werden, z. B. durch die Analyse von Dokumenten und Beobachtungen (u. U. auch die automatisierte Auswertung von Daten aus Informationssystemen), aber auch durch Interviews oder Workshops. Anschließend werden die Prozesse modelliert. Schließlich ist die Qualität der erstellten Modelle zu prüfen – nicht nur auf syntaktische und inhaltliche Korrektheit, sondern beispielsweise auch hinsichtlich Verständlichkeit. Ein wichtiges Hilfsmittel stellen Modellierungsrichtlinien und -konventionen dar.
• Process Analysis: Es werden qualitative und quantitative Analyseverfahren vorgestellt. Zu den qualitativen Verfahren gehören die Untersuchung der Wertschöpfung eines Prozesses, Ansätze zur Reduktion von Verschwendung und Ursachen-Wirkungsanalysen. Für die quantitativen Verfahren müssen zunächst geeignete Prozesskennzahlen festgelegt werden. In der Regel beziehen sich diese Kennzahlen auf die Dimensionen Zeit, Kosten, Qualität oder Flexibilität. In einfachen Fällen lassen sich Durchlaufzeiten mit Hilfe von Fluss-Analysen ermitteln. Die Warteschlangentheorie kann genutzt werden um Ressourcenauslastungen ermitteln. Die vorgestellten mathematischen Verfahren stoßen jedoch in den meisten praktischen Fällen an ihre Grenzen. Als Alternative können dynamische Simulationen von Prozessmodellen eingesetzt werden. Um sicherzustellen, dass die verwendeten Simulationsmodelle und -daten die Dynamik des realen Prozess korrekt abbilden, wird die Überprüfung mit Hilfe von Vergangenheitswerten und eine Plausibilitätsprüfung durch Prozessbeteiligte dringend angeraten.
• Process Redesign: Für den Entwurf neuer, verbesserter Prozesse kann man einerseits dem “grünen Wiese”-Ansatz folgen, bei dem ohne Berücksichtigung der Ist-Prozesse völlig neue, ideale Prozesse entworfen werden. Meist erfolgt jedoch eine Betrachtung und Verbesserung der Ist-Prozesse. Für manche Branchen und Anwendungsbereiche existieren Blueprints oder Referenzmodelle, wie z. B. ITIL für das IT-Management. Sie enthalten bewährte Prozesse und Strukturen und können als Ausgangspunkt für die Entwicklung der eigenen Prozesse verwendet werden. Die Autoren stellen zwei sehr unterschiedliche Ansätze für das Process Redesign vor. Der eine basierte auf einer Reihe von Heuristiken zur Verbesserung existierender Prozesse. Der andere Ansatz entwickelt ausgehend von den zu erstellenden Produkten komplett neue Idealprozesse. Es wird eine umfassende Liste von Heuristiken vorgestellt, die sich u. a. auf die Rolle des Kunden, die Prozessabwicklung, die Organisation, die verwendeten Informationen und Technologien beziehen. Beispielsweise kann man die Rolle des Kunden ändern, indem man Kontrollaufgaben an den Kunden überträgt, die Zahl der Kundenkontakte im Prozess reduziert oder die eigenen Prozesse enger mit den Kundenprozessen integriert. Die Anwendung des Heuristik-basierten Ansatzes wird am Fallbeispiel der Patientenaufnahme in einem Krankenhaus demonstriert. Beim Produkt-basierten Ansatz wird zunächst Top-down ein Modell der zu erbringenden Produkte oder Dienstleistungen mit den benötigten Informationen und ihren Abhängigkeiten aufgestellt. Anschließend werden die Prozesse und Prozessschritte festgelegt, die nötig sind um die einzelnen Elemente des Produktmodells zu erstellen.
• Process Implementation: In dieser Phase geht es einerseits um die organisatorische Umsetzung der notwendigen Veränderungen, andererseits um die IT-Untersützung. Das Buch beschränkt sich hier auf die IT-Unterstützung, und zwar ausschließlich auf die Prozessautomatisierung mit Hilfe von Business Process Management-Systemen (BPMS). Es werden die Architektur von BPMS, ihre Vorteile und Herausforderungen bei der Einführung beschrieben. Schließlich wird die Umsetzung eines Prozessmodells in eine ausführbare Prozessdefinition dargestellt.
• Process Monitoring and Controlling: Hierzu findet sich ein Kapitel über “Process Intelligence”, also vor allem die Auswertung von Ereignis-Protokollen aus Process Engines und anderen Informationssystemen zur Ermittlung von Kennzahlen, aber auch zur Überprüfung, ob Compliance-Regeln eingehalten werden – und außerdem zur automatisierten Identifizierung von tatsächlich abgelaufenen Prozessen.

Besonders nützlich für die Vertiefung des Stoffs sind die zahlreichen Beispiele, Kontrollfragen und Übungsaufgaben. Am Ende jedes Kapitels werden Lösungsvorschläge zu den Übungsaufgaben vorgestellt und Hinweise auf weiterführende Literatur gegeben. Zwar deckt das Buch nicht alle Aspekte des Themas Geschäftsprozessmanagement ab, und einige der vorgestellten Analyse-Algorithmen haben für künftige BPM-Spezialisten vielleicht weniger praktische Relevanz. Dennoch kann das Werk uneingeschränkt als aktuelles Lehrbuch empfohlen werden. Insbesondere fortgeschrittene Studierende, z. B. in einem Masterstudium der Informatik oder Wirtschaftsinformatik, dürften davon profitieren.

---

Dumas, La Rosa, Mendling, Reijers:
Fundamentals of Business Process Management
Springer 2013
Das Buch bei amazon.

This tidbit of advice (in a list among others) was sent around to managers at my company recently:

Stop micromanaging. Micromanagement is a sign of mistrust. You hired them for a reason. If you don’t trust they will get the job done then by all means, either find people who you think will, or leave them alone to do their jobs.

This is good advice for almost all teams, and certainly for knowledge workers.  But isn’t micromanagement exactly what BPM is all about?  Maybe, maybe not.

What is Micromanagement?

• to manage or control with excessive attention to minor details. – Dictionary.com
• to manage especially with excessive control or attention to details – Merriam Webster

The key to understanding lies in the term “excessive”.  If you know a person who habitually micromanages people, you know that they will always insist that they were not micromanaging, because the level of detail was necessary.  Most micromanagers don’t know that they are doing it. They simply keep specifying exact behaviors to more and more detail, generally in the name of professionalism and doing a good job.

Good BPM is all about detail and lots of it.  Well implemented, a BPM diagram is supposed to be as complete as possible, that is, as detailed as possible.  Have you ever heard someone ask to remove some of the detail from a process?  There seems to be no limit to the amount of detail that one should try to include.

The Need to Avoid Detail

How much detail you want depends upon the context.  A routine job like bolting seats into a car on an assembly line might warrant a high amount of detail.  A straight through process such as check “clearing” might also need a lot of detail.  But in a knowledge worker situation, such a deciding a new product strategy, inventing a new advertisement theme, or a merger of two companies, needs a lot of space.  The most successful people work opportunistically: for example a new company came out with a new product which complimentary to yours, and you offer to do co-marketing to benefit both products.  It is likely that a micromanager will eliminate opportunistic possibilities.

When a manager specifies an activity in too much detail there are two problems.  The first, and more common, is that it is insulting to the workers.  Stating the work in tremendous detail implies at some level that those people would not know these actions which because they are so detailed are sometimes rather trivial.  The second problem is that over-constraining the possible actions can put the worker in an ethical dilemma having to choose between the right course of action for the situation, and the course that the boss has laid out in detail.  It is important to leave some things vague so that the worker does not have to violate an agreement to get the right thing done.

The helpful advice to management mentioned at the top warns that too much specification of detail may drive valuable people to leave.  It also talks about trust, another area that it is not clear fit into traditional BPM.

Where are the Guidelines?

My real goal today is to simply reflect on how the conventional wisdom to avoid micro management is diametrically opposed to the conventional wisdom of traditional human-oriented and server-oriented BPM.  Everyone “knows” that you should not micromanage.  At the same time, everyone “knows” that a BPM process should be as detailed as possible.  How can it be that there are no well defined guidelines to avoid too much detail in a Human BPM process?  When do you stop adding detail, and when do you remove detail from a BPM aplication?  I know of no such guidelines, and I challenge readers to post comments if you know of any.

An ACM Differentiator

I would put forward that this is yet one more differentiator between traditional Human BPM / Server Integration and Adaptive Case Management (ACM).  The former categories are about automation, and as such being as complete as possible is a benefit.  It is possible that there are no guidelines because automation of routine work is somehow distinctly different from knowledge work done by professionals.

However, the latter category, ACM, is not about automation, and instead about facilitation.  For ACM, you want to include enough guidance to be helpful (like a good mentor) but never so much that it gets to be overly controlling.  A well designed ACM template will eliminate as much detail as possible, and include only the parts that are absolutely necessary.

The amount of detail will naturally vary from person to person (depending upon their skill and experience).  This makes it a big challenge to make everyone happy, but remember, since knowledge workers construct their own work environments, they can do as much as they want, or as little as they want, for their own tastes.

Letzte Woche war viel los. Am Dienstag war ich zuerst kurz auf dem Mule Summit in Frankfurt, bin dann direkt weiter zur JAX in Mainz und war am Freitag noch auf der Software Engineering Live am Achensee. Herausgekommen sind jede Menge Gedanken, viele spannende Kontakte aber auch Vortragsfolien, ein Interview und ein kompletter Talk auf Youtube.

Mule Summit
Aber von Anfang an. Auf dem Mule Summit war ich eigentlich nur ganz kurz am Vormittag, vor allem um mich mit Ross (Gründer von Mulesoft) zu unterhalten. Aber in der Keynote habe ich doch noch etwas mitgenommen – die Konzentration von Mule auf Schnittstellen oder API’s, dazu haben sie zum Beispiel APIhub ins Leben gerufen. Ich glaube das ist der Versuch eines ESB-Herstellers den verbrannten SOA-Begriff etwas loszuwerden und sich stattdessen auf benutzbare Schnittstellen zu konzentrieren. Das finde ich auf jeden Fall eine gute Richtung. Es gab dazu auch noch eine gute Geschichte – nämlich The Google Rant – wo sich ein Google Mitarbeiter aufregt dass ausgerechnet Google nämlich keine API-Orientierung hat – Amazon im Gegensatz dazu aber schon. Interessant zu lesen. Aber von der Gedankenwelt passt das alles ziemlich gut zu camunda und auch camunda BPM – puh

JAX

Auf der JAX hatten wir auch dieses Jahr wieder einen Stand. Und es hat viel Spaß gemacht – auch wenn ich eigentlich ununterbrochen geredet habe. Aber das Interesse an camunda BPM war einfach überwältigend – und das Feedback insgesamt sehr positiv. Auch wenn es natürlich Fragen und Gespräche rund um den Activiti-Fork gab. Dienstag und Mittwoch habe ich dann den Stand erst gegen 22.00 dicht gemacht – das will schon was heißen – denn es regierte ja parallel König Fußball.

In meinem (technischen) Talk zu camunda BPM und warum BPMN in den Werkzeugkasten jedes Java Entwicklers gehört waren dann auch weit über 100 Teilnehmer (leider habe ich keine exakte Zahl) – von denen 90% BPMN schon kennen und gut die Hälfte Activiti. Wow – cool – wir kommen mit dem Thema “BPM+Java” eindeutig voran – das hat mich wirklich sehr gefreut. Die Folien findet ihr wie immer auf Slideshare – allerdings war wie so oft viele live und ist damit nicht auf den Folien. Nächstes Mal vorbeikommen! Jakob hat in seinem BPMN Vortrag übrigens auch ganze Massen mit zu uns an den Stand gezogen. Und auch sonst war der BPM Day gut besucht. Alles in allem also eine gelungene Sache.

Leider habe ich selbst sonst wenig Vorträge besuchen können. Mein Highlight war dann die Keynote von Mirko Novakovic (Codecentric) – er hat anhand von heute schon erfolgreichen und sehr bekannten Unternehmungen plastisch vor Augen geführt, wie Cloud – aber auch überhaupt die technischen Möglichkeiten heute – zu ganz neuen Firmen im Sinne des Lean Startup führen. Sehr gut – vielen Dank!

Last but not least gab es noch das von Jakob bereits gepostete Interview. Am dritten JAX-Tag nachmittags aufgenommen – um die Zeit war ich eigentlich schon mehr als reif fürs Feierabendbier Naja – gut über die Bühne bekommen – also auf weiter an den Achensee (mit dem Zug eine Weltreise)…

SE-Live

Die kleine Konferenz SE-LIVE hatte eher Netzwerk-Charakter und wohl spannende Diskussionen am Donnerstagabend. Leider konnte ich wegen der JAX erst am Freitag dazustoßen. In unglaublichen Panorama (siehe links) startete es für mich dann mit einer lebhaften Podiumsdiskussion zu (weltweit) verteiltem Arbeiten vs. lokalen Teams vor Ort gab. Der Konsens war in etwa “wir würden lieber lokale Teams haben aber kommen heute gar nicht mehr daran vorbei global zu verteilen – die Frage ist eher wie man das effizient organisiert”. Ob das sogar gut oder wünschenswert ist, darüber waren sich die Teilnehmer nicht einig.

Naja – und nach dem Mittagessen durfte ich erzählen warum embeddable BPMN 2.0 Engines ein MUSS für die Softwareentwicklung ist. Diesmal mit mehr Architektur und Anforderungsmanagement-Fokus – also nicht ganz so technisch. Der Vortrag wurde dankenswerterweise aufgezeichnet (Der Dank gebührt Gerhard Müller von TNG Technology Consulting!) – here we go (ach so – die Folien gibt es auch wieder bei Slideshare):

Introduction

Working with the Source Code

• JDK 6
• Maven 3.x
• Git
• Any IDE (Eclipse, IntelliJ, Netbeans) with the maven plugin installed
• JBoss Application Server 7.1.1 (optional)

git clone https://github.com/droolsjbpm/jbpm-console-ng.git

mvn clean install

mvn clean install -PfullProfile

Running the application in Hosted Mode

cd jbpm-console-ng-showcase/

mvn gwt:run

Running the application in JBoss AS  7

<security-domain name="jbpm-console-ng" cache-type="default">
 <authentication>
   <login-module code="UsersRoles" flag="required">
     <module-option name="usersProperties"   value="${jboss.server.config.dir}/users.properties"/>
     <module-option name="rolesProperties" value="${jboss.server.config.dir}/roles.properties"/>
     </login-module>
   </authentication>
</security-domain>

maciek=Merck
salaboy=salaboy
katy=katy
john=john

maciek=jbpm-console-user,kie-user,analyst,HR,PM,Reviewer
salaboy=jbpm-console-user,user,analyst,PM,IT,Reviewer
katy=jbpm-console-user,HR
john=jbpm-console-user,Accounting

cd <jboss-as>/bin/

./standalone.sh

On Openshift

.openshift/config

<system-properties>
  <property name="org.kie.nio.git.dir" value="~/jbossas-7/tmp/data"/>
</system-properties>

The Application

Contributions

Day 1 at IBM Impact 2013, following a keynote full of loud drums, rotating cars and a cat video, David Millen and Kramer Reeves gave a presentation on IBM’s vision for Smarter Process, which...

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Sorry about the lack of embedded links below - I blogged this on a tablet from notepad. Can anyone recommend a good mobile blogging app? I spent a few minutes this morning reviewing the OASIS MQTT spec (see https://www.oasis-open.org/committees/tc_home.php?wg_abbrev=mqtt ). MQTT hopes to become the standard for communication on the "Internet of things". (I use the term "Internet" instead of "web" here because it uses ip, not http. ) Given the long legacy of proprietary sensor networks (medical...(read more)

Am 18.03. ist die camunda services GmbH fünf Jahre alt geworden. Schon vor der offiziellen Gründung waren Bernd und ich auf der führenden Java-Konferenz im deutschsprachigen Raum, der (W-)Jax, das erste Mal als Sprecher eingeladen, und sind seitdem konstant dabei geblieben.

Grund genug für Mirko Schrempp, Bernd und mich zur bisherigen Entwicklung unserer Firma und unseren aktuellen Aktivitäten und Perspektiven zu interviewen. Für mich ist eines klar: Die ersten fünf Jahre waren eine tolle Zeit, und wir alle bei camunda können stolz darauf sein, was wir gemeinsam aufgebaut haben. Mit camunda BPM schlagen wir jetzt ein neues Kapitel auf, in dem wir unsere marktführende Kompetenz zu BPM(N) in einen Open Source verfügbaren und nicht weniger marktführenden Technologie-Stack verwandeln.

Puh, das klingt aber auch ganz schön angeberisch. Ich wünsche mir, dass wir dabei sympathisch bleiben und nicht nur an “Marktführerschaft”, “Wachstum” und all diese Dinge denken, an die der Hamster in seinem Hamsterrad halt so denkt. Aber wenn ich mir unseren Haufen so angucke, habe ich da keine Sorgen

I’m off to IBM Impact next week, where I’m speaking on a panel on Monday afternoon about “What’s Next For BPM”, along with Neil Ward-Dutton, Bruce Silver, Eric Herness and Pierre Haren, hosted by...

[Content summary only, click through for full article and links]

Kofax sponsored a webinar this week (replay here) featuring Andy Bartels of Forrester Research speaking about Smart Process Applications (SPA): a term introduced by Forrester to describe...

[Content summary only, click through for full article and links]

A while ago I was asked to do a simple comparison between Service Bus for Windows Server (SBWS) and Azure Service Bus (ASB) so I thought I’d share this with you all. Most of this stuff is probably obvious. A more detailed comparison is available here and is well worth a read. Installation and support ASB: Since ASB is a cloud-based service there is no software to install and support is provided by Microsoft. OS and application patching and updating is also handled by Microsoft. Storage...(read more)

During the next weeks, we are going to publish a series of articles to share the results of our Best Practice in Process Management workshops which we’ve performed within Q1/2013. Overall, participants from eleven organizations representing industry sectors such as transportation, infrastructure, commerce, and aviation participated in the workshops and we enjoyed lively and fruitful discussions with regards to several process management topics.

Today, I would like to introduce the results of the “Process Standardization / Global Processes” workshop which were recorded by our colleague Lasse Härtel. – Thank you, Lasse!

Questions we discussed in the workshop were:
- What is the objective of standardization?
- What is the right level of standardization?
- How to analyze and choose processes for standardization?
- How to get to standardization?

As a first and very important result we found out that before talking about standardization it has to be defined what is meant by “standardization”. Standardization can be achieved on many different levels reaching from a uniform and integrated business management system over similar and harmonized process flows to totally standardized processes regarding tools, systems, and management roles.

Thus, we differentiated between harmonization and standardization. Harmonization means the creation of a basis for a uniform and integrated process management system (e.g. replacement or integration of legacy documents). Similar or equal process flows at different locations are also part of harmonization. When harmonizing process flows, it has to be avoided to create pseudo-harmonization which means a harmonized process documentation not depicting reality at all.

Once an organization has established a harmonized and company-wide process management system and a defined process model, it can start to really standardize processes by defining standard process flows for each division and location using same tools and management roles for all processes. So harmonization is a preliminary stage of standardization which would, in perfection, allow to exchange employees between different locations and process instances without additional training.

During workshop discussions it became very obvious that the right level of standardization varies depending on the organizational structure, individual framework conditions, process management maturity, and the objectives of process standardization. So, for example, there might be organizations producing extremely specialized and unique products bounded to strict costumer requirements, what makes generalized standard processes difficult to establish. But even for those organizations standardization is possible, but on a different level. According to the workshop results, processes in general can be standardized for a whole organization with different sites in different countries, for single divisions, for product lines, or certain clients.

As a promising practice for standardization of highly specialized processes the establishment and definition of “guide rails” was identified. These “guide rails” allow specific process variants within a standardized framework leaving space for creativity.

For organizations producing standardized products in different locations, process standardization could be a way to guarantee the objective “one face to the costumer”. Besides, standardized processes facilitate organization-wide know-how exchange resulting in continuous process improvement.

To reach this high level of process standardization a promising practice seems to be to divide each standardization project in three different project phases following an initial prioritization pre-phase. Within the first project phase, the project is communicated to all relevant departments and locations, the project team (representative process experts from affected locations or departments) is defined and the future process owner is appointed. Within the second project phase the standard process design is being developed by the project team considering best practices of former process variants before standard process implementation follows in project phase three. The whole project is centrally coordinated and moderated by skilled moderators providing methodical support whereas the actual process design is developed by process experts. To ensure and maintain standardized and centrally coordinated process operations in complex international organizations, an adapted operational concept, clearly defined responsibilities as well as communication and escalation procedures are needed.

By the way, the process standardization approach of Lufthansa Technik was already described in an earlier post last year: JoinIN! – Process Standardization at Lufthansa Technik Group

We are going to present the workshop findings at our BPinPM.net Conference in September. Registration process will be opened in a few days. For more information, please visit the conference site.

If you’ve developed other promising practices in the area of process standardization, please feel free to comment on this post.

Thanks for reading this article!

Best regards,
Mirko

 

Nach dem erfolgreichen Start in der Schweiz wird der neue, zweitägige BPMN-Expertenkurs ab Sommer auch in Deutschland angeboten. Der Kurs, den ich zusammen mit erfahrenen BPMN-Modellierern der Firma Soreco entwickelt habe, behandelt ein Basis-Set an BPMN-Elementen für die deskriptive Modellierung und ein erweitertes Set zur Erstellung von Analysemodellen. Die Teilnehmer sind anschließend in der Lage, auch komplexere Prozesse mit BPMN zu modellieren und die Notation korrekt anzuwenden. Das können sie sich auch zertifizieren lassen.

Was ist das besondere an diesem Kurs?

• Der didaktische Aufbau führt schrittweise von ganz einfachen Ablaufdiagrammen zu anspruchsvollen Prozessmodellen. Zahlreiche praktische Übungen mit einem führenden Modellierungswerkzeug ermöglichen die direkte Anwendung des behandelten Stoffs.
• Im Anschluss an das Seminar besteht für die Teilnehmer die Möglichkeit, ein Zertifikat zu erlangen, mit dem sie ihre erworbenen Fähigkeiten nachweisen können. Hierzu  muss man eine Reihe von Aufgaben bearbeiten, wie z. B. Fragen zur korrekten Anwendung bestimmter Konstrukte, Auffinden von Fehlern in einem Diagramm und konstruktive Modellierungsaufgaben. Zusätzlich muss ein konkreter Prozess aus dem eigenen Unternehmen oder Umfeld modelliert werden. Damit erwerben die Teilnehmer nicht nur das Zertifikat, sondern sie wenden das Gelernte nach dem Seminar konkret an und vertiefen somit ihre erworbenen Modellierungskenntnisse. Jeder erhält ein individuelles Feedback vom Trainer.
• Da es unterschiedliche Empfehlungen zur “guten” Modellierung mit BPMN gibt, und verschiedene Anwendungsszenarien auch individuelle Stile und Modellierungskonventionen erfordern, fokussiert der Kurs nicht auf einen speziellen Ansatz. Es steht die Beherrschung der Notation selbst im Vordergrund. Dennoch wird eine ganze Reihe von Empfehlungen für bewährte Modellierungsmuster und Best Practices vorgestellt.
• Die Prozessmodellierung steht meist nicht allein. Sie muss vielmehr mit anderen Aspekten verknüpft werden, wie z. B. Organisation und Rollen, Daten und Dokumenten, der Anwendungssystemlandschaft, usw. Daher wird auch vermittelt, wie BPMN-Diagramme sinnvoll in eine umfassende Unternehmensmodellierung eingebettet werden können.
• Prozessmodellierung ist kein Selbstzweck, ihren Nutzen erhält sie durch ihren Einsatz als Werkzeug für das Management und die Weiterentwicklung der Geschäftsprozesse. Es wird daher aufgezeigt, wie die Prozessmodellierung als Teil des Prozessmanagements sinnvoll und zielführend organisiert werden kann.
• Der Fokus des Kurses liegt zwar auf der fachlichen, analytischen Modellierung, doch wird zumindest ein kurzer Überblick über den gesamten Umfang der Notation gegeben, und es werden der Übergang von fachlichen zu ausführbaren Modellen und die anschließende Umsetzung mit Hilfe eines Business Process Management-Systems (BPMS) demonstriert.
• Der Kurs bündelt die Kompetenz in Sachen BPMN, die ich als Trainer bei führenden Unternehmen, durch zahlreiche Fachvorträge und als Autor der ersten deutschsprachigen BPMN-Einführung gewonnen habe, die zwischenzeitlich auch auf Englisch und Koreanisch erschienen ist.

Das Feedback aus den ersten Kursen war durchwegs positiv. In Deutschland wird der BPMN-Expertenkurs zusammen mit der Firma GBTEC durchgeführt. Der erste Kurs, den ich selbst leite, findet am 27. und 28. August 2013 in Bochum statt. Weitere Termine sind in Vorbereitung. Es ist auch möglich, den Kurs als Inhouse-Schulung durchzuführen.

Weitere Informationen und eine Anmeldeformular finden sich hier.

 

The post Updated Blueworks Live BPM Training Video appeared first on BPMS Watch.

John Hagel wrote a good review of Nassim Taleb’s book “Antifragile“.    Hagel’s book “The Power of Pull” describes a shift in the world from push systems to pull systems.  The push system is the epitome of formalize, automated systems.  The kind of system that was designed by someone with what I call “enlightenment bias”.  They attempt to anticipate everything that might happen, and provide well considered options for it.

Push systems are falling into exactly the same trap that Taleb is worried about: attempting to model system around what we know, means that what we don’t know hits us harder.  An IT system designed to compensate for the problems we can anticipate, makes us more vulnerable to the unexpected “black swans”.

Pull Systems on the other hand are not centrally planned.  They can be adapted by the people on the edge.  This is allow people using the system to use their intelligence, and it allows the system as a whole (IT and humans) to respond effectively to change.  So pull systems have the quality of antifragility.  I completely agree, and think that an ACM system is one example of a pull system.

Hagel lists a set of 7 system design principles that we might follow to help avoid making systems that are fragile:

• Stick to Simple Rules – don’t attempt to model complexity, but rather let humans fill the gap with real intelligence.
• Decentralize
• Develop layered systems
• Build in redundancy – avoid the tempation to reduce action to the minimum necessary to do the job, in a misguided attempt to reduce costs.
• Resist urge to suppress randomness – uniformity is not the goal.
• Ensure everyone has skin in the game – it is about shared responsibility, not elimination of any need to know who is responsible.
• Give higher status to practitioners rather than theoreticians – the theories are mostly wrong, but the practitioners are the ones who know it.

He also lists 12 strategies for antifragility:

• Pursue barbell approaches
• Focus on options
• Be curious
• Get out of your comfort zone
• Focus on the edge
• Conduct lots of experiments and tinker
• Don’t get consumed by data
• Focus on building/accessing tacit knowledge rather than rationality and explicit knowledge
• Focus on subtractive knowledge
• collaborate and trade
• respect the old
• beware of wealth, debt, and reputation

Hagel’s review is highly thoughtful, and helps explain how Taleb’s ideas relate to Push and Pull system, and the Big Shift.

A collection of notes of presentations from bpmNEXT.

Overview

Well done!   An excellent show put together by Bruce Silver and Nathaniel Palmer at the Asilomar conference center just south of Monterey California.  It was a meeting of minds in the process space the likes of which has not been seen for many years, if ever.  A place to discuss the latest ideas along with plenty of really excellent local wines.  The location is stunning.

Talks are very short and focused: 10 minutes to cover the subject and 10 minutes to demo.  It turns out, if you have something important to say, the kernel of it can be presented in 10 minutes.  Bruce’s mantra was: “don’t just tell me about something, show it to me!”  The ten minute demo gives a concrete example for the subject of the talk.

The videos of each talk are now available, and I have linked where possible.  Because the talks were constrained in time, the resulting videos are generally quite watchable with each subject covered in about 20 minutes.

This conference was, without a doubt, the best “meeting of minds” for discussing the advanced direction that work support systems are going.  If you want a ‘look over the horizon’ then watch the videos below.

Other Reviews

Starting with a list of other resources because, quite frankly, my notes are very rough.

• Neal Ward-Dutton: bpmNEXT – mojo in Monterey
• Sandy Kemsley: bpmNEXT Wrapup: The Good, The Bad And The Best In Show, and  10 posts about BPM Next.
• Anatoly Belychook - #bpmNEXT 2013 – The Asilomar Score of BPM
• Bruce Silver: bpmNEXT Review
• Paul Harmon: Trends in BPMS
• Scott Francis: BpmNEXT Flashbacks And Highlights, Antifragile Or Reactive?
• Tim Stephenson – Reflections on BPMNext
• Joel Garcia – Cloud based BPM for the masses – TidalWave at bpmNEXT

Rough Notes

0. Keynote Paul Harmon (Video)

Paul talked about the roots of BPM going back to the management practice before technology that was designed specifically to support it.  He started with the going to avoid going into the technical side, but in fact I thought he did a fairly reasonable job of bridging the gap.

See Paul’s own summary of the conference in: Trends in BPMS.

1. Process Mining: Discovering Process Maps from Data, Anne Rozinat and Christian W. Gunther, Fluxicon (Video)

This is a really good talk that won an award for best in the show.  If you have not seen it, it is worth watching.  They gave a very similar one at the BPMN 2012 conference, and so I didn’t take notes…  I hope Christian and Anne will forgive me for that.

2. Managing Process Roles and Relationships, Roy Altman, PeopleServ (Video)

The reporting relationship is the only real relationship that is encoded into an organization diagram.  Reporting is the only relationship that can be used in BPM.  Sometimes people put special relationships into it, but they get out of date and broken.  Special applications have to be maintained.  Peopleserv models this information in the cloud.

3. Lowering the Barriers to BPMN, Gero Decker, Signavio (Video)

BPMN for everyone.  It is a process management system hosted in the cloud.  Ease of use is a driving goal.  Inviting colleagues, getting them involved by passing on a link, which lowers the barrier for people to contribute.  This is based on two things: first is getting information into the system, and the real trick is how to get the first draft.  Once you have the first draft in the system, you have won the battle.  Supported by a smart modeling environment.  Graphical modeling, but also spreadsheet style modeling.  The second area is understanding, reviewing and refining the process model, which is all about collaboration iteration, simulation, step-through.

Demo: you can organize a repository of process models.  The spreadsheet style input has a column for task name and assignee.  As you enters rows it creates a BPMN diagram on the fly.   Voice input is integrated.  Have built in validation rules to conform to various style guideline, for example Bruce Silver’s BPMN style guidelines.  The diagram will be annotated with indications of possible violations.

4. Automated Assessment of BPMN 2.0 Model Quality, Stephan Fischli and Antonio Palumbo, ITP-Commerce (Video)

BPMN modeling in Visio.  Continual validation and indication of non-conforming patterns.  Generates HTML versions of the diagrams for sharing.  Round trip to and from various external tools.  There are various measures of quality, particularly four quality models, and techniques to ensure quality.  Pick a process, and get an overall quality score, and then a list of specific quality measures.  In terms of process maturity, the hardest jump is from level 2 to level 3, and their goal is to provide tools to help people jump this gap.

5. Data-Centric BPM, John Reynolds, IBM (Video)

Think of a process like a live production of a play. There are aspects that the author put in, but there are also unscripted things that happen while the play is being performed. There is additional work that has to be done, but it is invisible. Knowledge workers come in to deal with the problem. Those people generally deal with the business entities to deal with the unexpected things and get back on the script.

Business entities have a life cycle, and it matters which one it is. Data needs to be a first class part of the process. Managed data can have an many phases, and audit and validation rules for each phase. Rule can also depend upon the role of the person interacting. Ad-hoc activity: example move something back to a previous phase. But BPM is not the system of record. Working on the “Managed Data Interface” which is a façade to the system of record. Data that a person can see in a role, and actions that I can take in a role. May have to collaborate with a lot of people. Someone else will see a different screen based on their role, and this keeps the collaboration safe. And you can only do things that are “authorized”.

Solutions today are by and large brittle. Even though we create systems as flexible as possible, there will always be unanticipated events and occurrences. If they cannot do what they need within the system, the stop using the system.

Bruce asks: There is not a lot of information about this kind of data modeling.

Paul asks: are you actually expecting people to do modeling on their exceptional steps in BPMN? Seems like a different notation is needed? A: incredibly important to have a single consistent model at all areas, but not all parts of the model are appropriate for everyone. I do think we need some help with notation. BPMN is good to start, but not perfect for everyone.

Max: what about mobile access? a: Important tie in between process and rules. The example was that you may want to do an activity, but the screen resolution is not sufficient. Should be able to record the rule about screen resolution in the diagram. IBM acquired WorkLite and working to bringing that in, and the mobile-first philosophy is the right way to go.

Q: Contradiction that authorization can be specified in advance, when the activity is unpredicted. Improvisation cannot be safe. A: Yes, but some organizations need to be able to enforce those controls.  This means that they are limited in what they can respond to, but in some cases the laws require this and the organization has no choice.

6. Extreme BPMN: Semantic Web Leveraging BPMN XML Serialization, Lloyd Dugan and Mohamed Keshk, IMSC US (Video)

BPMN 2.0 finally makes BPM modeling useful, but the there was also a tremendous jump in the complexity.  That makes it challenging to use in other forms.  Instead, take the BPMN logic, and represent it using a semantic representation such as OWL.  Have worked out the mapping between the BPMN metamodel and the DoDAF metamodel.   Capability, Activity, Resource, Performer.

BPMN is being expanded in two important directions: service modeling and adaptive case management modeling.  BPMN is transformed into OWL.  Then you can make queries on the results, like identifying services used in a model.  Important in a SOA framework. Another example is to search and test for proper gateway use.  This is tool independent.

Q: would vendors be reluctant to use this kind of tools?  A: Probably yes.  Tool vendors have been slow to adopt these kinds of things.  The rendering in diagramming still has to be done.

Q: James Heldler noted the limitations of OWL and RDF.  What is your take?  A: The amount of inferencing that is required to do this is pretty small, and while there are limitations, they don’t really effect what we are trying to do.

7. Model-BPMS Roundtripping, Jakob Freund, Camunda Services GmbH (Video)

Two typical BPM users have two things in common: business model depends upon IT as a core competence. And the business model must be scalable. How to make business models scalable. The problem with BPMS market is that “zero coding” implies that you can make process models without any programmer, but this is tempting but deceptive. Have you ever seen an accountant setting up a web service call in BPMN? Wizards are good, but you always reach the point where the wizard does not offer the right check-box or pull down to support what is needed. And here is the problem, that when you bring the developer in, they are restricted by the zero coding capability. The proprietary interface has limited support; few programmers know it.

Different approach: alignment is not about eliminating one party, but getting them to work together. Need short cycles with quick turn around that the process model can be passed back and forth like an agile approach. Developer continues to use their Eclipse development environment, and the business users continues to use BPMN modeler. There is a model connector to connect the model parts to the coding. Signavio can be used for the modeling part. The other side is called “Camunda Modeler” which is an Eclipse plug-in. He then makes a step that calls a java class (what in Interstage BPM is called a Java Action) and he synchronizes the model back to Signavio. This is essentially the same thing that has been available in Interstage BPM for many years using XPDL, and the XPDL model extensions. We actually demonstrated this kind of exchange between IDS Scheer ARIS as the business modeler, and the Interstage BPM as the developer side, and round trip preserved all the elements. The difference is that this is based on the BPMN file format, which is newer than XPDL, but conceptually there is no difference.

Q: How does this compare to Activiti? A: We are contributing to Activiti. We announced on Monday that we are going to fork Activiti, and will be working with others to integrate this further in that branch.

8. BPM for Mobile, Mobile for BPM, Scott Francis, BP3 Global, Inc. (Video)

(I had notes on this interesting talk, but my Android phone ate them.  Actually this is the truth, although I had not realized how ironic it is for my notes on a talk about mobile to be eaten by my phone.  As an experiment I wrote the notes up as email messages, but due to lack of connection they did not get sent.  Later, when I thought I had a connection, I tried to send again, and for some strange reason on that attempt the entire composed email disappeared — not in the ‘sent email’ list, nor in the ‘inbox’.  I managed to save the others by copying the contents into a new email message, but unfortunately this one was lost — more due to my inexperience with the software than any fundamental problem.)

9. Social and Mobile Computing for BPM and Case Management, Rhonda Gray, OpenText (Video)

This talk is about trying to engage new parts of the market. They found that workers were becoming more mobile. There are a variety of special issues around mobility and social interaction. In normal work there will be cases where you need to reach out and us a social metaphor.

Social is the style. Work is the subject. Mobile UI is familiar to newer workers. The main coordination system is in house, behind the firewall. The “Touch” system is hosted in the cloud and serves to bridge from the in-house to the mobile workers. “Touch” makes everything available to phones and tablets.

Demo scenario: Someone asks a question. Respond with answer and share with someone else. It looks and acts a bit like twitter. Use “follow” to allow a person to bring themselves into your stream. Favorite a tweet and it is easier to follow by others.  They seem to do a good job of handling the problem of bringing people into the conversation later, because you can’t know everyone who needs to be involved at the start.

Dealing with work which involves bursty interactions as well as focused on small form factor. A lot of sharing and commenting.  For example consider a request for PTO (personal time off). Such a process can be used both to inform people that you are going to be out, and also make the accounting entries for payroll.

Q: what indication is there of the kind of sharing that an input will get when I put it in.  For example, a PTO request, particularly for medical reasons, can be quite personal.  In other cases, say a longer regular vacation I would really like many others to be informed.  Seems like it would be hard for the system to guess this, and is there any indication to the user about whether this will be broadcast widely or not?  A: A PTO request will be kept private because that is the nature of a PTO request.  There is no particularly indication of this, you just have to know based on the type of process you are starting.

10. Connecting BPM to Social Feeds Improves User Adoption, BonitaSoft (Video)

Bpm is social by nature.  In coincidence with the previous talk, the example was a PTO request. The notification appears via Salesforce’s chatter service. in the message is a link to the approval form. Second example is to pull an event from twitter. Based on a search filter, found tweets start a help desk process where the noted problem is handled or escalated. The main idea is about adoption; anything that can make adoption easier is a better.

Stated that the big benefit is that people “stay in chatter” but honestly this just a matter of using the notification mechanism that the user prefers.  Every example mentioned was just notification of a link to then access the application.  However no indication that this is user configurable.  The notification channel appears to be hard-coded into the process.  It would seem to me that some users would prefer email, some Chatter, some Twitter, etc.  Furthermore there was no indication that other more social aspects, (e.g. friends, groups, liking) were used to any extent.  I guess my expectation was a little high on this, but to be fair, the original speaker was called away suddenly, and one should go easy on the stand-in presenter.

Q: Do people like things in chatter? A: chatter has not been as successful in general as the designers expected.  However, if the user does use Chatter then it is a benefit.

Q: Authentication prompts pops up after clicking on the link. Thought about eliminating that? A: I am probably not the right person to answer that.

11. Model-Driven Generation of Social BPM Applications, Emanuele Molteni, WebRatio (Video)

12. Social Process in the Cloud with Facebook, Joel Garcia, TidalWave Interactive (Video)

Cloud based BPM for the masses.  Built an application builder to build canned solutions.  Going to build a customer service solution.  Log in with Facebook, and that creates a BPM context.  Create an app.  A number of types of apps.  Looks like a form builder.  Choosing the type include a basic layout and set of fields.  Fields can be required.  The form is saved and the deployed to a Facebook page.  Makes a button on the facebook page, click on it, presents the form.  All the users are Facebook users.  Notification comes through email, but this links to a BPM portal with standard BPM execution.  Task is forwarded to another support person with a comment.  It appears that this was pretty fleshed out stock example, but the key is that this is a reusable template.  Gave another example of a guest list application that is used to capture interested people and get them to an event.  People are using BPM without even knowing it is BPM.

Uses OAuth to authorize.  Can build custom profiles of the customers.  Fan profile, how many times has a person come into the club.

Q: can the client look at the data model or process model.  A: yes, it can be exported as a process XML file, and loaded into the development environment.  Then they validate, and then they deploy.

Q: capacity to integrate to back-end systems?  A: yes, APIs are available in REST and “hessian proxy” which is a binary interface.

Q: Can mobile users use this?    A: you can create a canvas app.  The Facebook example was a canvas, but to support mobile you have to use a “canvas mobile” so that it behaves better.

Q: create one process, can you use it for enterprise app scenarios as well.  A: yes.  Deploy to Facebook is one, and could deploy to iFrame.

Q: how do you sell?  A: don’t sell the tool.  Pure self-service.  Deployed apps cost per use.

13. Goals in the Process Continuum: from BPM to ACM and Beyond, Dominic Greenwood, Whitestein Technologies. (Video)

There is no strong distinction between BPM as one thing and ACM another.  Instead it is just a continuum if you combine goals with process.  Goals provide guiding and governance.  The processes are structured, but with flexible extensions. Customer onboarding for UBS.  Showed how goal can bring flexibility and reordering.  As they implemented this project, the customer realized there was not as much structure as they thought.

Target is a coherent approach to provide governance.  BPMN is not designed to manage governance, particularly when that governance crosses multiple processes across a value chain.  Need to deal with multiple levels of abstraction.  Need constrained process mutability.  They call their approach “executable goal oriented BPMN”.

Goals define everything, tasks have goals, projects have goals, organizations have goals.  Conclusion is that processes should have goals.  Rules driven processes tend to be reactive. Goal driven processes can be proactive.  Two kinds of goals: milestone goal describes the objective of a process by aligning intent with action.  Governance goals is the mandate of a process to obtain or maintain a strategic performance target.  Makes the process more aware of the context it is in.  Three layers: process layer, tactical governance above that, and strategic governance above that.  Little snippets of BPMN that can be selected and executed on demand.

True process engineering requires IT engineering, so the design tool is in Eclipse without any pretense to make it business user friendly.  The processes are seen as “methods” for achieving a goal.  Drill down through several levels of abstraction.  There are higher level goals that look across the aggregate, and if a condition (on 80% of cases) is not met, it can then manipulate selection rules at lower level.  There are even corporate level goals like process all X within 15 days.  It is the context of these higher level goals that drive the lower level decisions, and are normally lost in the traditional process definition approach.

Q: a great deal of IT involvement.  Have you looked at decision modeler to make this more friendly?  A: Started trying to make a business tool, but later we found that we really needed an IT oriented tool.

Q: Can you see the analytics? A: there is capability in there, but no time to demo.

Q: What about conflicting goals?  A: The agent manager deals with this.  If you have a goal “reduce cost” and “reduce plan” you have to decide between them.  The intelligent controller can make a weighted decision between them.  Mechanisms for escalation.

Q: Can costs be attached to goals?  A: Yes, if you understand the costs.

Q: Can you deal with ad-hoc goals?  A: Yes, there is a concept of “hot update”.  Can introduce a new task, activity, goal, and deploy that on a running system.

Q: Example did a shift to other paths, like fast-track.  How do you know that other path works?  A: This is the customer’s actual process.  They send out more materials to prospects.  Different bank work different ways, but you might be surprised how simple processes can be.

14. KPI Risk Assessment, Manoj Das, Oracle (Video)

What does business want? More than just pretty pictures. Many of our users are using BAM dashboard. Guess that only 30% of BPM customers do BAM today. Requirements: insight is personal, every executive needs to be able to specify exactly what they want. Executives don’t have the time to sit and watch a dashboard, but instead manage by exception by alerting. Not sufficient to just know what has happened.

Demo: BAM Composer. Real time KPIs or scheduled KPIs. Defined a KPI, set threasholds as set amounts, or standard deviations against historical measures.

Started with notion of complex event processing (how do we come up with these names). Now call it “Event processing”. Even that is not right. Really want to talk about “Trends, Moving Averages, Missing Events” Business value comes from BAM, Pattern and Trend Detection, and Business Intelligence.

Q: Executives don’t build dashboards, so who builds them? A: Right. Executives want custom dashboards, but probably the board will be created by assistants.

15. Operational Process Intelligence for Real-Time Business Process Visibility, Thomas Volmering and Patrick Schmidt, SAP (Video)

16. Fully Exploiting the Potential of BPM in the Cloud, Carl Hillier, Kofax (Video)

Very good talk summarizing cloud and applications in the cloud.  He provisioned a host system in the cloud in a minute or so, and then proceeded to demonstrate use of that provisioned system.

17. The Decision Model, Tomer Srulevich, Sapiens (Video)

It used to take 26 weeks to make a rule/decision change. After Superstorm Sandy, it took three weeks to respond. In the future they want to compress that to one day. To accomplish this, the original rules, instead of writing in a narrative form, would be written in a machine readable way.

The “decision model” is a book, it is also a methodology. There is a subject matter expert who talks to some business analysts. Then this goes to programmers and then rule sets. But how often would two different paths (BA -> programmers -> rules set) would produce the same results? Never. The audience agreed.

Barbara von Halle and Larry Goldberg developed the decision model, a model of business logic. Sapiens Decision made this into enterprise grade software, and a technology partner. This has been proposed to OMG, and there are some parallels to BPMN.

Big ball of mud was when everything was encoded into the program logic. Then things began to be separated. Business logic separate from the other software components. Often a process is a huge mess because the rules are built directly in the process logic. Should separate it out. Simplify the process, but reference to business decision logic, and it becomes a “decision aware process”. The decision structures start at a very high level, and is broken down into smaller parts, until you reach the level that you are testing actual persistent data, so you don’t have to go any further. At that point to go to a table structure. The natural output of the decision model is a set of rules that can be used by a rules execution engine. You have successfully translated the rules of the world and business, into machine readable rules.

If sequence does not matter, it should not be in the process. Things that can be done or decided in any order should be pull out into the decision engine. Not replacing anything, but augmenting.

The tool takes in the text of a description of rules. It then looks for synonyms, which it links up with specific definitions. One can then take a new phrase and make a new synonym from it.

Q: Have you considered SVBR from OMG? A: it is a completely different thing.

18. BPM for the Internet of Things, Troy Foster and Tom Debevoise, Bosch (Video)

Software Innovation Visual Rules, and Inubit BPM product. Talk is about the internet of things. Bosch makes a lot of things, and they are increasingly becoming connected. Low cost computers are giving control. Micro-grid: that a building or group of buildings can be separated from the rest of the power grid. Tele-medicine for example where patients in the home can help monitor. Billions of devices.

Sensors are deployed into the field, literally. On the device are a set of rules to monitor. If something meets the criteria, then it alerts the next level, which is a monitoring process. This also has rules for detecting situations, which is escalated to the processing engine.  What was presented was an architecture for lots of small devices to monitor and be controlled in a radically decentralized way.

19. Performing Collections of Activities as Means to Business Ends, Denis Gagne, Trisotech (Video)

(For the last four, I do not have notes.  My laptop was up on the podium wired in for my talk, which was the last talk.  It is a bit of a shame as I think the last three before my talk were in many ways the most interesting.)

Denis talked about some unique mechanisms his company has developed for capturing processes through a web interface quickly and easily.

20. Event-Driven Rules-based Business Processes for the Real-Time Enterprise, Dave Duggal, EnterpriseWeb (Video)

Dave’s talk is about their ultra flexible approach to supporting work.  (Again, my laptop was sequestered so I was not able to take notes…)

21. Malleable Tasks and ACM, Helle Frisak Sem, Computas AS (Video)

One of the best real-life examples of ACM I have seen. (Again, my laptop was sequestered so I was not able to take notes…)

22. Antifragile Systems for Innovation and Learning Organizations, Keith Swenson, Fujitsu America Inc. (Video)

My talk … I will do a slide share soon….

The post BPMN Black-Box Pools in Multi-Pool Models appeared first on BPMS Watch.

Process management is not a bureaucratic evil but can be a key instrument for scalable business models.

But to do so we need to get rid of our old ways of thinking. Need an example? The whole Zero Code BPM – Illusion, is one of many errors that have dominated process management in the past.

On 18th March we released our BPM platform under an open source license as Business Process Management is impossible without IT (not everyone likes this, but it’s just the way it is). But of course BPM requires a lot more than purely a technical platform. That’s why we are also, bit by bit, providing our knowledge that we have acquired over the years. You can find both software and knowledge on www.camunda.org.

But that’s not enough.

We know first-hand that BPM works and what is important. We helped more than 500 companies and public organisations to apply BPM selectively or openly. A lot of it worked well, but some didn’t. We need to bring these people together so as to not reinvent the wheel and to realise in time which paradigms do not work (Need an example? The “refinement” of modeled processes via partial- or subprocesses, from the process landscape to the executable technical workflow, is rubbish. It doesn’t work that way but unfortunately it’s being tried again and again).

Therefore, we call the camunda BPM community to life. We will start with evening workshops, preferably hosted by specific BPM-users. The first dates are planned and are taking place at the dwpBank in Frankfurt (Germany), LVM insurance in Münster (Germany) and plexiti in Vienna (Austria). If you want to register for one of these events or stay informed about future events please register here:

http://www.camunda.org/community/meetings.html

The first meeting’s subject will be the introduction of our new open source platform, but further subjects will follow. If you have specific subjects you want to be discussed please contact Nastasja Johnston who will be managing the community via community@camunda.org.

The same applies to BPM-users who are hosting events. If you have specific ideas how the community can support and join fellow BPM enthusiasts feel free to let us know!
Are we doing this without self-interest? Not quite. camunda will profit as this community grows and prospers. But we are also talking about a win-win situation for all involved!

Therefore: let’s do it

As a reaction to Scott Francis recommendable blog post “The Zero Code Hypothesis“, I published my own two cents about that topic.

Heads up: With our new camunda BPM Team Blog, we will publish a good part of our upcoming blog posts only there, without always mentioning that here at BPM-Guide.de. If you want to stay tuned, you should subscribe for the camunda BPM Blog RSS Feed, or add camunda BPM to one of your circles at Google+ . If you still want to be notified via email when a new blog post has been published, please let us know. If enough people opt for a newsletter, we will set that up and directly subscribe you for it.

For OptaPlanner (= Drools Planner) 6.0.0.Beta1, I 've replaced the ConstraintOccurrence with the much more elegant ConstraintMatch system. The result is that your score DRL files are:

• much faster
• easier to read and write
• far less error-prone, because they make it a lot harder to cause score corruption

Let's look at the results first, before we look at the code readability improvements.

Faster

"Show me the benchmarks!"

The average calculate count - which is the number of scores OptaPlanner calculates per second - has risen dramatically.

• N queens: +39% calc count for 256 queens
• Cloud balance: +27% calc count on average
• Vehicle routing: +40% calc count on average
• Course scheduling: +20% calc count on average
• Exam scheduling: +23% calc count on average
• Nurse rostering: +7% calc count on average

However, this doesn't necessarily imply a dramatic improvement in result, especially if the old result is already (near) optimal. It means you can get the exact same result in far less time. But - as with all other performance improvements - gives no promise for significantly better results in the same time. It does helps when scaling out.

• Cloud balance: +0.58% feasible soft score on average in 5 minutes
• Vehicle routing: +0.14% feasible soft score on average in 5 minutes
• Course scheduling: +2.28% feasible soft score on average in 7 minutes
• Exam scheduling: +0.53% feasible soft score on average in 7 minutes

Several of the 30 Vehicle routing datasets were already solved optimally in 5 minutes, so these drag the average down, despite the high vehicle routing speedup.

All benchmarks use the exact same Drools and OptaPlanner version, so these numbers show only the improvements of the ConstraintMatch change. There are several other improvements in 6.0.

How does the average calculate count scale?

Here are a some charts comparing the old ConstraintOccurrence with new ConstraintMatch. The new ConstraintMatch's current implementation hasn't been fully optimized, so it's sometimes referred to being in "slow" mode (even though it's faster).

CloudBalance:

Vehicle routing:

Course scheduling:

Exam rostering:

Easier

"Show me the code!"

For starters, the accumulateHardScore and accumulateSoftScore rules are removed. Less boilerplate :) Next, each of the score rule's RHS (= then side) is simpler:

Before:
    rule "conflictingLecturesSameCourseInSamePeriod"
        when
            ...
        then
            insertLogical(new IntConstraintOccurrence("conflictingLecturesSameCourseInSamePeriod", ConstraintType.HARD,
                    -1,
                    $leftLecture, $rightLecture));
    end

After:
    rule "conflictingLecturesSameCourseInSamePeriod"
        when
            ...
        then
            scoreHolder.addHardConstraintMatch(kcontext, -1);
    end

Notice that you don't need to repeat the ruleName or the causes (the lectures) no more. OptaPlanner figures out it itself through the kcontext variable. Drools automatically exposes the kcontext variable in the RHS, so you don't need any extra code for it. Also, the limited ConstraintType enum has been replaced by a Score type specific method, to allow OptaPlanner to better support multilevel score types, for example HardMediumSoftScore and BendableScore.

You also no longer need to hack the API's to get a list of all ConstraintOcurrence's: the ConstraintMatch objects (and their totals per constraint) are available directly on the ScoreDirector API.

In The Zero Code Hypothesis, Scott Francis observes the contrast between 2 trends in BPM right now.  On the one hand there is Camunda explicitly saying the zero coding ambition is broken.  Scott comments:

It is kind of a fascinating counter-point to the movement to make BPM “more accessible” to the business, and I think it represents a pretty sizable chunk of the open source market that is in strong agreement.

On the other hand, there is the trend to further simplify process design for non-technical people.  Several BPM vendors concluded that BPMN is too complex for simple processes and started experimenting with process builders for people that don’t know BPMN.

Key passages from their presentation included “Enabling people who normally couldn’t do BPM or BPMN”.  BPMN was described as the invisible hand surrounded by UI.

Scott concludes that this is a contrast:

And to think that these sessions were all on day 1 of the same conference – totally different hypotheses on how to approach BPM and BPMN.

It’s a contrast, but I don’t think these two trends are contradictory. To me this is a sign that the BPM sector starts to realize that it’s dealing with two very distinct stakeholders.

BPM always has been about automating people tasks and combining those with technical system integration steps.  As such, BPM serves 1) non-technical business people that work out concrete steps how the organization should accomplish larger goals.  And 2) technical people weaving in the automatic steps and integration with other systems.

At Effektif, we take those two stakeholders as the starting point, and both types of users must get a tailored user experience.

In my opinion, it only takes a well-aimed Fruit Ninja move from the vendors to slice BPM so that both stakeholders are served well.  Meaning, with the right approach both business people and technical people can be served properly.

Slicing BPM becomes obvious if you consider all people related aspects separate from the technical aspects.  All people aspects in a process can be configured by non-technical business people.  Things like sending simple notification emails and filling out a form to complete a task don’t require technical knowledge. By default, all processes should have the ability to attach documents, links and have a discussion.  With these capabilities, non technical people can already build a broad range of useful processes that don't require technical integrations.


Fruit Ninja precision is required to resist the temptation of adding small technical aspects that enable the next interesting feature.  I believe that is where traditional BPM vendors fail miserably. In order to keep simplicity, a BPM system must cut out rigorous any technical aspect from business person’s user experience.

That slicing between technical and non-technical aspects is applied rigorously throughout the Effektif product.  It ensures a superior user experience for the non technical managers automating people processes.

My last session at Gartner BPM 2013 is a discussion between Ian Gotts of TIBCO and their customer Tommy Richardson, CTO of Siemens Medical Solutions. I spoke with Siemens last year at Gartner and...

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We wrapped up day 2 of Gartner BPM 2013 with David Rock, author of Your Brain at Work: Strategies for Overcoming Distraction, Regaining Focus, and Working Smarter All Day Long, on neuroleadership and...

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It’s the end of day 2 at Gartner BPM 2013, and I’m in my first session with Janelle Hill — hard to believe, because usually I gravitate to her topics since she’s such an...

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Barbara Fackelman and Regina DeGennaro of Pershing (a BNY Mellon subsidiary providing outsourced financial transaction services) presented at Gartner BPM 2013 about their BPM initiative, as it grew...

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Andrew White presented a session at Gartner BPM 2013 on how process, applications and data work together, from his perspective as an analyst focused on master data management (MDM). He was quick to...

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Jean Lastowka of Electrolux and Dave Brooks of SoftwareAG presented at Gartner BPM 2013 on process intelligence and visibility; apparently, SoftwareAG chose to include a white paper that I wrote for...

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It’s day 2 at Gartner BPM 2013, and after a fun night out at a Pegasystems customer dinner, then breakfast hearing about Oracle’s new BPM release, I’m in Bruce Robertson‘s...

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In the last session of day 1 at Gartner BPM 2013, I sat in on a case study by the Argentina-based Banco Supervielle, who won a Gartner excellence award for best business outcomes driven by BPM. They...

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Samantha Searle presented some of Gartner’s research on how to set up effective process governance and ownership. She started with the definition of a process owner, and reinforced that...

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At Gartner BPM, there are always a few sessions given over to the sponsors and their clients to present case studies; since it’s been a while since I looked at what SAP is doing with BPM, I...

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In her presentation at Gartner BPM 2013, Elise Olding addressed an issue that ties in with my presentation last week on BPM maturity and centers of excellence: BPM’s real value is in becoming...

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I made it to the Gartner BPM Summit 2013 in Washington DC today just in time for the 11am session that Betsy Burton gave on bridging the gap between strategic vision and operational excellence with...

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Every once in a while, someone suggests that vendors pay me for coverage. The latest accusation actually used the term “pay-for-play”, which is a derogatory term for industry analysts who require...

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