ProcessModeling.info

I have for the most part been inactive in my blogging and writing, mostly due to life getting in the way.   But occasionally I take a look at where my ranking is at on Amazon when I type ‘BPMN’ or ‘Process Modeling’.   The ranking varies day to day.  But today, to my surprise, the book was in the number one spot.   Tom and I are amazed at how well the book is selling.   Thank you all for your support.   To me, this seems to be an indicator that Process Modeling is becoming more mainstream every day.  The book is ranking quite well in the management sciences category, which leads me to believe that Process Modeling in BPMN is not so much a niche market anymore.  Furthermore, trends of BPM product sales are on the rise.   But it’s not necessarily BPM automation systems (BPMS) that are on the rise.  Stand-alone and collaborative modeling tools are also becoming more popular as well.

For those of you who have not gotten your copy yet, we have a special price on the Kindle version right now at $9.90.

It’s with great pleasure that my writing partner Tom Debevoise  and I announce that the Microguide to Process Modeling in BPMN 2.0 has been released on Amazon.com this week.  You can purchase the book on Amazon.  This book is a culmination of many years of process modeling experience, and introduces new, modern trends of blended process, event, and decision modeling styles.  The book is jam packed with information in a concise, easy to read format. To our knowledge, there is nothing else on the market like it.

There is a special reduced introductory price, so be sure to get your copy before the price goes up.  Also note that the Kindle version will be released around the end of July 2011.  There are few process modeling / BPMN 2.0 books available for Kindle, and this is the one to own.

Description:

An updated guide to business process modeling covering a broad range of necessary topics for understanding the new era of process design. A must-have book for business analysts, IT architects, and anyone interested in driving process improvement with a more efficient means of communication. The concise materials in this book focus on modern process design. Developed from actual practices, these techniques are proven in many of the most advanced processes, in production today. More than BPMN 2.0, the book is about Process modeling 2.0 concepts which stress decision and event modeling.

• Most important topics related to business process modeling.
• Quick guide to OMG’s BPMN 2.0 notation.
• Common patterns based on proven design.
• Decision modeling and business rules patterns.
• Event processing patterns.
• Combined process, decision, and event modeling.
• Characteristics of various process types.
• Process Modeling Framework (PMF) for consistent, structured design
• Process Discovery through effective requirements gathering techniques.
• Considering the organization as part of process design.

A special thanks to Jessica Holbrook for the beautiful cover design, Robert Kern for the easy to read layout, and Dr. Richard Welke for the forward.

After many complications of changing the focus of the new book, and then changing employers half way through writing, we are done.  It’s only two years behind schedule.  But I can tell you that it’s probably worth the wait.  Tom D. and I have written a book that is not only about the BPMN specification.  It’s about process modeling, with BPMN as the means to express the concepts.   We are calling the book The Microguide to Process Modeling in BPMN 2.0, which is a combination of what we call Process Modeling 2.0 and the BPMN 2.0 specification in one.   The BPMN 2.0 content comprises about 40% of this book, and the rest is focused on process modeling technique.

In this new book we are  including some new groundbreaking material about merging business rules and complex event processing along with traditional process modeling.   According to most leading industry analysts (Gartner, Forrester, IDC, etc), we are at a point where techniques and technologies are merging.  This level of complexity and sophistication requires an overarching governance methodology to be successful.   For this reason I included 30+ paged dedicated to the Process Modeling Framework (PMF).   Thirty pages is not nearly enough on this topic, but at least it’s enough to get started with understanding layered process structures.  The Microguide book strategy is to give a jump-start on the topic of process modeling but yet provide enough details to use the content in the real-world.

I still have plans to publish the process patterns book and the more detailed PMF book.  But because of my fairly recent career path change, my perspective has greatly changed. And, the industry as a whole has changed since 2008.   We are now in the fourth wave.  Therefore the content I had previously created has to be updated.

Keep your eyes open for the new book.  It should be showing up on Amazon.com by mid June 2011.   And thanks again for everyone’s support on making the search term “BPMN” on Amazon.com list my previous book in the top three.

- Rick Geneva

Rick Geneva will making an appearance as a guest speaker at the Georgia State University Robinson College of Business on April 15th, 2010. This class is particularly interesting to me because it’s for business students, and they are learning BPMN as part of their curriculum. Not only are they learning BPMN, but also how to turn a diagram into an executable process. It’s wonderful to see such a program appearing at universities these days. Many thanks to professor Olsen for inviting me.

My guest appearance will include about an hour of lecture. I will be discussing multi-tier process design and the Process Modeling Framework (PMF). Up until this point the students have been mostly working in two dimensions. The PMF adds another dimension of detail which takes into consideration the organization where the process will be performed. Most process diagrams focus on who does what, and are divided into swimlanes. This is fine for simple diagrams, but in the real world it’s not that simple. There are politics involved, different owners of different parts of the diagram, and the need to change some parts independently of others. So my intent for this event at GSU is to inspire business students to look beyond the people who do the work, and start to look for the why it’s done, in the context of the larger organization.

Following the lecture presentation I’m going to do a Q&A session and a demonstration of the Process Modeling Framework in action.

- Rick Geneva

Process modeling has been going though an evolution.  If you haven’t noticed the evolution, you have either been living in a vacuum or you are still using flowcharts in Visio.   Everywhere I turn people are talking about processes and process improvement.  At least this is one good thing to come out of the economic recession.

The other trend we are seeing more of in this decade is the use of more events, and less tasks. A task that says that something happened is not a task at all; it’s an event.   To be a task it has to be something that is performed by a person, system, or process.  One could argue that everything is performed somehow, so everything is a task.  So let me ask you this:  Is it a task for the weather when it rains?  Is it a task for the highway that traffic is backed up?   Is it a task for the stock market when the NASDAQ drops by 100 points?    If I can’t put a performer to the task, it can’t be a task.
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More industry consolidation

In a previous post I wrote about IBM buying Lombardi, and noted that I expect to see more industry consolidation.  Well, we didn’t have to wait long to find out which merger is next.  They say things  occur in threes, so I wonder which BPM company is next….

The IBM acquisition of Lombardi was interesting because IBM needed to fill the department level workflow product need.  This is where Lombardi is being positioned, according to IBM.

Progress software’s move for Savvion was much more interesting because Progress did not have a BPM system, or history of workflow systems.  Instead, Progress has a wide range of SOA systems and tools, and a strong offering in the CEP (complex event processing) and BTA (business transaction assurance) space.   With these offerings, Progress would more likely be positioned to sell products and services to the IT architecture crowd more so than the business.  Now with a full  stack of BPM, CEP, transaction monitoring, ESB, and data services, Progress is very well positioned to be an aggressive competitor in the BPM market.

I’m very interested in this Progress and Savvion merger because it shows the BPM industry is evolving into more event oriented processes instead of people centric activity.   CEP (complex event processing) refers to the idea that things happen that are not necessarily all part of a process.  For example, I can correlate streaming data from traffic, weather, positions of my delivery vehicles (from GPS), and incoming orders from my order system.  In a BPM world these events would only come together when they are relevant to a given activity.  In an event driven world, these events could potentially affect each other at any time, regardless if there is an active process task or not.  Many of these might not even be part of the BPM system.  When the filtered events are correlated to something interesting, a process action can be signaled. Examples of process action include starting a new process for corrective action.  You could also interrupt, continue, or end a process that is in-flight.

The over-all strategy of CEP + BPM means that there is less integration time for systems. Instead of routing all event activity load through the BPM system, the CEP system handles complex correlations of events, and aggregates them down to things that a BPM system might be interested in.  Also, you can get a broader perspective of multiple process instances simultaneously, especially when activities are in-flight.  For example, a delivery truck is running late.  With BPM only, it’s likely that you would not know this fact until the truck is overdue.  With CEP, I can constantly monitor all trucks via their GPS signal, and report all positions to a dashboard. Furthermore, you can correlate to traffic data in-route, and determine exactly how late the truck will be.  This allows an organization to react to exceptional conditions in real-time.   Keeping in mind, most transport companies (and other industries) do this sort of monitoring anyway, but not automatically.  Without CEP + BPM capability, you would have to perform these correlations manually, which might require a huge workforce.  The key here is that the events are reported in real-time, and the event correlations are more accurate.

What’s new in BPMN 2.0: Part 5

Continuing coverage of the BPMN 2.0 specification, this post will focus on the new event types.   Prior to 2.0, BPMN had several problems when it came to escalating events and dealing with events in parallel.  Often I would end up using a pattern with multiple loops inside of loops to accomplish seemingly simple activities. Furthermore, it was difficult to distinguish between human centric and system centric activity for a mixed-mode diagram that includes both.

One goal of BPMN is to bring the SOA camp, the business analysts,  and the process modeling communities closer together.  A side effect of this has been that BPMN is very messaging intensive. For complex interactions, multiple pools are used, which requires lots of messaging lines to keep activity in sync between participants .  This is sometimes a problem for people who come from a flowchart/workflow backround using tools such as Visio, which essentially allows you to create a really bad BPMN diagram due to the lack of diagram validation.  Often I see messaging lines within a pool going between lanes, when what was really intended is to do a simple escalation.  Antoher common problem prior to BPMN 2.0 is showing enough detail without having to show the intricate patterns of looping and dealing with multiple events in parallel.

We are starting to see a shift from multiple pools and lanes to more of a style based on a single pool with no lanes, which means less explicit messaging notation. On the other hand, we are starting to see more capability in BPMN to document highly technical processes for the SOA community.

New Event Types

In this post I will cover the new BPMN escalation event and parallel multiple event. Read more »

This week IBM announced that they area acquiring Lombardi Software.   I suspect this will be the first of several industry consolidations in the coming months. The market is heating up in the BPM space, and it’s only natural that the major players are jockeying for position.  I wonder who’s next?   And I wonder how well my former colleagues at Lombardi are making out on those stock options (I parted ways with Lombardi in 2006).

Your thoughts?

I’m curious to see what some of you other BPM professionals think about this acquisition, and if anyone has any predictions for more consolidations.  Comments welcome.

What’s new in BPMN 2.0, part 4.

BPMN 2.0 adds a lot of new concepts.  Many of these are long overdue to be added to the spec.  Others are a totally new concept.  In this post we are going to take a look at one of the long-overdue fixes to the BPMN specification; the intermediate events on the subprocess border.

In previous versions of BPMN, placing an event on the subprocess border meant that when the event was triggered, the exceptional flow would become active.  Also, this means that normal flow stops.  In the diagram below, subprocess A ceases when the timer event is triggered.  Instead, the “handle timeout” subprocess is active at that point.  In other words, subprocess A has been interrupted.

Intermediate Interrupting Event

There is another use case that BPMN 1.2 did not cover.  What if the timer event isn’t supposed to interrupt subprocess A?   Just to clarify, in the BPMN 2.0 specification, Interrupt means that the parent subprocess will end.  This is similar to a cancel, but cancellation is another concept and another shape entirely.  So it’s called interruption.  There is another use case for non-interrupting events that has long been a challenge prior to 2.0.

Read more »

Event Based Gateways

This post is a continuation of the Highlights from BPMN 2.0 series.

At Last!  The long awaited changes to the numerous problems with the event based gateway.   First off, there was only one type of event based gateway in BPMN 1.0 – 1.2, and it is exclusive behavior.  Exclusive event behavior means that only one event can trigger the gateway.  Also, there was only one shape that served a dual role of start and intermediate event, yet the shape did not have any variations as the event shapes do (see Demystifying the Event Based Gateway from my previous post).

First, let’s take another look at the original Event Based Gateway from BPMN 1.0 – 1.2

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