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

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.



Events can basically do two things: start activity or interrupt activity.  The weather changed, so what are you going to do about it?  The traffic is bad, so maybe try another route?   The stock market is down, so maybe you should buy stocks (unlike the herds of people who sell every time there is a jitter in the market).

Condition or event?

You could also argue that the bad weather is a condition, not an event, and you might be right. But what caused the weather to be bad?   It was likely an event.  And when the condition exists, is that not an event?  The BPMN specification says that a condition is a category of event.   There are two types of condition events; start and intermediate.   As stated above, an event can either initiate activity, or interrupt activity.  Also in the BPMN 2.0 specification we have the new non-interrupting start and intermediate variations of the condition event.  These shapes still serve the same purpose, but also add context to where they can be used.   For example, an intermediate non-interrupting shape is essentially a means to start an activity or flow that is relevant to the subprocess the event is attached to.

In the world of event processing you have essentially two things; events and conditions.  Conditions describe a combination of one or more events.  For example, it’s raining outside and the traffic is terrible.  This is a condition that possibly the weather caused the terrible traffic.  Although, one could argue that all of the cars are causing the weather to get worse (global warming). But that’s another topic entirely.   The two conditions combined of traffic and weather cause an event of something I was looking for, and the conditions are correlated as an event in time.  Weather can be bad on its own, and so can traffic.  The two are not necessarily connected until a stream of events (which we could also call facts) are correlated. For example, a weather report in combination with an emergency dispatch of a car hydroplaning due to excessive water on the road.   With respect to both of these events occurring within a window of time, a condition is born.

Conditions act as a filter of events.  Billions of trillions of events occur every millisecond.  But obviously we are not interested in all events; only the ones that are relevant to our business process activity.  When I figure out a way to filter the events down to something interesting then I have a “condition event”.  In other words, the billions of events have been aggregated down to just one single event that is important to my process.

BPM: meet CEP.  CEP: meet BPM.

Now that introductions are made, let’s talk about what they are and why they are both BPM and CEP are very important and relevant in this decade.


BPM was not designed to handle billions of events.  The BPMN notation is far too simple to handle the sophistication of monitoring millions of stock ticker streams, or monitoring millions of cars per day travelling on a highway.  The individual events are so insignificant that they go largely unnoticed by the larger business processes that everyone is familiar with.  Up until last decade we’ve simply called this an application and didn’t bother modeling it.  But now that Complex Event Processing (CEP) is coming of age, there is a new approach emerging in process modeling that efficiently handles complex events.
Up until recently I honestly couldn’t figure out how to use the condition event in a real-world process model.  The difference is that lately I’ve been experimenting with complex event processing concepts.  Suddenly I realized that a condition is the result of a complex event, then it was easy to put conditional events everywhere.

The job of the complex event system is filter through millions or even billions of events per second and find something interesting that I might want to act upon.  Once captured, this event causes a so-called complex event.  So is it an event or a condition?  Why not a condition event?    This led to my new nickname for the CEP acronym.  Instead of calling it “complex” I call it “conditional event processing”.  I wonder if this will catch on?   Probably not, but at least this might help you make sense of all this.


When CEP generates an event, BPM decides what to do with it.  There are two basic use cases here; you can send the event to a process participant, or the BPM system can further aggregate the condition into a decision of whether or not to take action.  For example, a condition event is detected, which causes a flow into a rule, which determines that either no action is required, or an activity should be routed to a participant.   However, if either one of these paths are taken too often, this is yet again another condition that could be used.  For example, too many condition events are causing too many people tasks, and the organization is overloaded with activity.  This overload condition can cause a feedback to the CEP system to relax the thresholds in which it triggers its complex events.   This is an environment where BPM and CEP help each other do what they do best.

Even Olympic size pools only have a limited number of lanes.

I know that if I suggest that swimlanes will be a thing of the past I’ll never hear the end of it.  So go ahead and start your comments now because yes, I’m about to go there.  I’m not saying we’ll see our friend the swimlane disappear anytime soon.  But I am saying that swimlanes are becoming less relevant.  In an event based world, we don’t necessarily have a performer of a task until runtime.  I don’t know who is going to do what.  So why would I model my process in a way that assumes a particular person is doing something?


Swimlanes have their place.  I stand by my advice that if you have more than five lanes in a pool you seriously need to stop and think about what you are doing.  Also, if you have more than five pools in a diagram, a problem should leap off the page and smack you in the face.  Organizations are not flat like this, and in practice, more than 5 roles would be unmanageable.  Instead, a hierarchy exists to manage the complexity.  So what I’m suggesting here is to select process participants that are more in line with how the organization works.


If you have too much activity happening in one place (a diagram) it could be best described as chaos.   Chaos is complex, and there are likely to be way too many events to process with BPM, or draw with BPMN.  You cannot possibly draw all of the events and conditions that might occur in a diagram that has more than 5 or 6 participants.  Likewise, for a single participant, if you are subdividing the role into many lanes there are likely way too many events to handle (too much participation for one participant).  So why not try the event approach instead?

Understanding complexity, events, conditions, and process activity

For better understanding, let’s take a look at a complexity analogy.  Imagine a large, crowded room full of people having a formal dinner evening.   The attendees (participants) walk around the room introducing themselves to others, and conversations begin. As the conversations increase, the noise increases, and you can no longer hear a conversation more than a meter or two from where you are standing.  A simple task such as getting to the dinner buffet is interrupted by hundreds of events; people bumping into you and trying to cut line ahead of you.  As a participant in this dinner process, if you happen to notice it’s getting quiet in the room, it might be a good idea to stop shouting at the top of your voice because someone probably has an announcement to make.  Or, if you happen to notice everyone running to the exit, maybe you should go too.  There might be a fire.

The point to this analogy is that most of the dinner evening was not planned.  Instead, it was a series of events triggering micro processes.  The overall objective of socializing, rubbing elbows with the important people in the room, and having a good time was achieved.  Everything else was random occurrence.  But even in the randomness there is order and process. For example, everyone got in line when it was time for the dinner buffet, and the other agenda items occurred according to schedule.

The basics of management theory state that the more people are involved in a meeting or gathering, the less productive the outcome.   The same can be said for processes.  By keeping the number of swimlanes down to just the important participants, you can actually show more relevant detail.  The other participants are involved, but there is no point in showing detail of what they do; it’s out of scope.  In the dinner evening process above, it only makes sense to make a process of the over-all agenda.  There might be hundreds of participants in the ceremony, but only a few are important.

At the same time, it’s important that all of the guests are having a good time.  For example, the host detects a high percentage of people complaining about the food or getting sick.  This might be a problem that could be fixed before the party is a disaster.  But the only way to know about this condition is to mingle with the crowd and ask everyone if they are having a good time.  Too many people not having a good time (individual events) is a condition that can be brought to the attention of the organization (the process context).

Event driven business processes

The same can be said for many processes in the business world today.  There is the general high-level process and all of the subprocesses that support the main objective.  In addition, there should be some sort of feedback mechanism to govern the process flow.  Otherwise, the highest level objectives will likely fail.   For example, if I have a manufacturing business and I don’t watch the market for signs of growth or slowing, how do I know how many units to make?  And when I slow down production, do I simply cut back on my labor force, or will that negatively affect my ability to operate?   These are questions that cannot be solved in the process modeling realm; it’s an event problem.  However, these events, filtered into conditions, are something that can be modeled.  I can set up market indicator monitors that create condition events, which tell me when to speed up or slow down production.  I can also set up a means to collect information on bottlenecks in my production line, and correlate this data with employee morale data from the HR department.   Too few people on staff can cost me just as much as too many (overtime, employee retention and training, product quality issues, etc).

The old approach to process modeling was to go about business  as usual and hope that everything works out.  The new approach with the event-enabled process is to provide a way to enable the process to self-optimize.  This is not to say that everything can be automated.  But the information needs to get back to the people who make the decisions, at the right time, and filtered to what is relevant.  As organizations become larger, the events become more important.  This is because the lines of communication are long, and much information is lost in the chain of command.  We cannot model the entire process in one big picture, but we can model the events and conditions that affect related processes.

-    Rick Geneva

Recently I spent some time in Singapore teaching an advanced process modeling class.   I was pleasantly surprised at how well Singapore is adopting process oriented strategies, and how well the students learned from this event.  But I also realized something about BPM and process modeling.  There is a general lack of knowledge world-wide of how to actually execute on process management.  Some countries are doing better than others, but in the ten years that BPM has been mainstream, we still haven’t gained much ground in terms of getting the word out.


OMG has done a fabulous job at giving the world a specification for a modeling notation that far exceeds the potential of flowcharts.  The problem is, we are still at a point where we have a specification, but no practical knowledge on how to apply it to a real-world business process.   There are still only a handful of us in the BPM space that understand the BPMN specification fully.   If this BPM industry is to take off, there has to be more visibility on the benefits of getting away from the old flowchart approach.   Instead of trying to sell a BPM system (that’s the easy sell to make a some quick money) we should be teaching BPM practice.  You cannot buy BPM.  You have to practice it every day.


I started doing these advanced process modeling events because I believe it’s time that process modeling matures.  I believe we are finally at a point where the industry is starting to accept that BPMN is not just another fancy way of doing flowcharts.  There is something very special about BPMN, and sadly, we as BPM professionals, have not done a very good job getting the message out.  Most business analysts I talk to believe that a Flowcharts, are good enough, process are completely linear, and it’s okay to create a spaghetti diagram (lines going every which way).


Teaching the better way….

We have to start educating people that flowcharts are not good enough.   A flowchart still has its place, but in today’s high-paced business world where technology is embedded into our daily lives, we need something that can handle the complexity.  The real challenge is that BPMN isn’t enough either.  BPM (the process management practice) made many promises and in some cases delivered, but only to those who sought to manage processes.  Those who bought a fancy, expensive system, hoping it would solve their problems often ended up with more of a mess than they started with.  The BPM system is only designed to automate processes that you define, not to fix your organization.  In other words, you have to learn how to model processes if you want to get anywhere with an automation system (or any application used in processes, for that matter).


There is a relationship between process management and the technology we employ to make our organizations more efficient.  This is the real message that needs to be taught to the business community, otherwise I fear we will get nowhere, and the concepts of BPM will die.    I’m already seeing signs of this happening.  There’s talk about complex events and the data model being king, while the process model is increasingly neglected.  After all, the BPM system has not delivered on all of its promises, so let’s go get some other technology to “fix our problem”, right?  (if you haven’t realized it yet, technology makes things more complex, not simpler).  But from my perspective, I can still model every one of these problems in BPMN, while showing more cross-organizational details than any other methodology.   So before embracing the next technology that promises to fix everything, consider this: process modeling has been around since the late 1700′s and it’s not going anywhere.  We have even more of a need today than ever, for good process models.


What’s next?

So from this point onward, I ‘m on a mission.  I’m already quite far along with PMF (Process Modeling Framework) which is a governance methodology for the entire BPM practice.  But I decided that this is not enough.   I’m going to tackle the bigger problem, which is how to make process modeling consumable for the average business person (and not just the analysts).


Look for a new book in late Q1 of  2010. I started this project over two years ago, and just a few months ago I realized that BPMN is not enough, and neither is PMF. So I’ve started over, with an entirely new vision on process modeling that I have yet to see anywhere else in the world. Progress is going well. If you would like a sneak peek at the content, come to one of my advanced process modeling training events. I promise you won’t be disappointed.

- Rick Geneva

Application or Process?

A business process exists whether or not you automate it through a BPM system or a workflow tool.  Many organizations choose not to use a formal BPM approach to process.  Instead they use the traditional vertical market application that helps automate some of the process based on rules and logic provided by the software vendor.  Some degree of process management exists with this approach.  However the logic (the business know-how) is essentially outsourced to the software vendor.  Often this requires the organization to undergo a massive customization effort in order to make the vertical market solution fully effective in the organization.  

The application acts as a participant to the process.  Without there being a business process there would be no need for the application.  So you could say that what you use the application for is the process, and the application is the tool that helps you be more efficient at doing your part of the process. 

Why BPM is a constant

Everything about business involves a process.  Presenting a product to a customer, ordering supplies, and collecting money are all examples of processes.  In a more simple term you could all each of these activities a workflow.  The real benefit of BPM comes into play when you start to analyze the complex interaction between many of these individual workflows.  Most likely the simple workflow evolves to include computer systems, probably just simple applications at first, gradually becoming more complex.  These systems become participants of the process as well.  Eventually the computer systems become an integral part of the process, often automating parts of the original process as well as enabling more efficiency as more people and systems are involved.

Let’s not forget that BPM is a management technique more than it is about technology.  With BPM we are not talking about managing specifically people, systems, vendors, customers, or money.  Instead we are talking about managing people, systems, vendors, customers, and money, as well as the complex interactions between them.  The more complexity exists in a process the more efficient your organization becomes with proper business process management methodology and technique.

The next trend in IT

Enough about defending the need for BPM.  Here’s what I see as the next emerging trend in information technology: Could Computing. 

So what does cloud computing have to do with BPM?  A lot, actually.  Earlier in this post I contrasted the difference between applications and process.  But we are now at a point in history where this line becomes even more blurred.

At the core of cloud computing is hardware; a lot of it. But instead of 4 or 5 servers to run one application we start to see a trend where 10 servers run 40 or 50 applications.  The hardware virtualization means that CPUs, memory, and storage capacity is combined over multiple systems.  The old days of redundant systems for maximum fault tolerance are coming to an end because the basic architecture of a cloud system is 3 and 4 times redundant in every way.  In fact I’ve seen demonstrations where the plug is literally pulled out of the wall and the system keeps running.  This is because there are dozens of power supplies with dozens of plugs, and often multiple complete systems in different data centers, all acting as one gigantic supercomputer. 

The could computing design is more reliable, and it’s cheaper to operate.  Moore’s law states that computer power doubles about every two years.  The problem in data centers is that in most cases 95% of the CPU power is wasted sitting idle because it’s only utilized when someone is using that specific system.  When people happen to be using another system, the CPU simply burns up kilowatts of power from the electric company as it remains idle, waiting to process the next request from a user; as quickly as possible.   But with cloud computing, a cluster of computers are all operating as one.  A peak load on one application can easily be absorbed across the entire system while the less frequently used applications.

The idea of cloud computing is undoubtedly inspired by the way the Internet works.  At any specific point on the backbone of the Internet, if a failure occurs, there might be a localized disruption. But nobody has ever heard of the entire Internet going offline.  It’s designed to be fault tolerant to a point where even nuclear war won’t take it offline.

Now back to my point about where BPM is involved in all of this.  Prior to the cloud computing trend, systems were isolated in various localized data centers with virtually no way to communicate with each other besides for the system interfaces (API) that were designed to perform a specific function.  Cloud computing brings systems previously separated by physical hardware together on one hardware platform.   When you add service oriented architecture (SOA) to this combination, there starts to be less objections to using web services.  Many software engineers and architects believe that a native interface (such as Java to Java or .NET to .NET) is better than web services for performance reasons.  But in a Cloud environment when an application needs to talk to another system, often the other system is in the same virtual memory space on the same hardware cluster.   

No longer do we have to worry about databases exceeding 50 terabytes. The cloud system can handle exabytes or even petabytes without even a flinch.  So the notion of storing data once in a “normalized” database becomes too much effort to make it worth the effort of doing proper data modeling.  Store it 1000′s of times in 100′s of formats to service dozens of applications because you can transform the data just as fast as you can store it.

Again, BPM is about management.  If I can connect everything, nobody objects to connecting, and I have a virtually unlimited amount of computing power, imagine the complexity we can create!    So what are you going to do with it?  Burn up megawatts of power instead of the kilowatts of previous generations?  Instead, how about getting smart about what you do with your computing power.  All of the computing power in the world will not do anything for your organization if you don’t manage the processes that you are attempting to automate. 

The trend as I see it will be for applications to be more process aware, and BPM systems to become more like applications.  Many early attempts at BPM systems were nothing more than task state management for workflows.  System to system integration was added, but this is still very task centric.

There are several categories of applications.  Some examples include:

• Tools such as a calculator, disk defragmenter, backup utility, etc.
• Data origination tools such as a word processor, spreadsheet
• Information sharing tools such as email, screen sharing, etc.
• Collaboration tools such as groupware, and BPM automation systems.

The problem is that we still need one application for one job, and another application to do something else.  For example, my word processor program is good for writing documents but doesn’t do so well at adding 2 + 2.  My spreadsheet crunches numbers well but doesn’t manage people well (although some people insist that a spreadsheet is actually a database).

History hints at what’s next

If there is anything that history tells us about technology, it’s that consolidation of multiple systems is inevitable.  Back in the 1970′s a CB radio or walkie talkie was all the rage in business communications.  Then someone got the idea to combine a radio with a telephone and the cellular telephone was born.  While we are at it, why not put a camera on it.  Personally I couldn’t figure out this marriage of technologies  out when it first emerged, but now I find myself sending pictures of my daughter to my friends and family on a regular basis.   Oh, and while we are at it, why not hook the phone to the internet.  For that matter, why not hook your refrigerator and toaster oven to the internet too?   That way you can call up your appliances and tell them and make you breakfast before you get out of bed.     Or better yet, as I sit here stretched out in business class on my favorite airline, I’m writing a blog post while connected to the Internet, powered by cellular phone technology.

In the above example there are a few major enablers of the merging technology.  First there is a reliable cellular telephone network that is available virtually anywhere on earth people are found in mass.  Next there is the Internet; always on; always ready to serve.   This is the infrastructure.  The telephone and the camera are the tools.  The collaboration is when I hit the send button from 30,000 feet (9500 meters) above sea level, telling my wife how wonderful the remote control for the powered lay-flat seats are on this airliner, and she replies saying “that’s nice honey, enjoy. I have to put the little one to bed”.   I’m constantly in touch with the world, powered by so much complexity that I never have to know about, or even know that the complexity exists.  

The cloud , simply put, creates an enabling infrastructure that I never have to worry about.  It’s there, it’s always on, and it would take a full-blown nuclear war or an asteroid hitting the earth to take it offline (in which case we’d all be dead anyway, so why worry about it).  Data exists somewhere, but I no longer care where it is.   Someone just added 5 more terabytes of RAM to the cloud and I didn’t even know it (yes, I said terabytes of RAM, not hard drives).  My software got updated with a click of the button, and if I don’t like it I can click a button to switch back to the previous version without the tedious process of uninstall, reinstall.

So I’m on the internet writing on my blog page (the cloud enabled application) writing about the cloud, while I’m looking down at the clouds.   Sorry to mention it, but I couldn’t resist pointing out the irony.

The green screen effect

It’s been said many times that we are coming full circle back to the days of the green screen.  Ironically ‘green’ means something else today, which is causing the push to go back to the concept of the terminal attached to the mainframe.  For those of you reading this who are too young to remember, the terminal was a green CRT screen.  Remember the CRT?  You know, that huge clunky tube screen.   Before they CRTs were colored they displayed characters either green or yellow.  Green today means using less power and being friendly to the environment.  One of the most compelling arguments for moving to cloud computing is because it’s more environmentally friendly as well as easier to manage.   It also means distributing computing power everywhere like a grid, and hosting applications online instead of installing them on your local machine. 

Recently Google announced that they are releasing an operating system that is not much more than a window to the Internet.  Anyone see where this is going yet?   If you think about my example of how the cell phone enabled me to make toast in the morning without getting out of bed, what happens when the Internet meets cloud computing and both applications and processes are so intertwined that you can’t tell where one stops and the other begins?   Applications?  Process?  Don’t know, don’t care.  I have work to do so stop bothering me with such trivial things.   

I don’t have to install applications anymore.  I simply have to cache the data locally incase by odd occurrence that I cannot connect to the Internet.   Even the green screen terminals of the 1960′s had this concept.  They “buffered” the data in an 8 kilobyte local microchip in case the connection to the mainframe was severed momentarily.  Well, the numbers certainly got bigger, but the concept is coming full circle.  Want a word processor or spreadsheet?  Try Google Docs.  Want an image editor?  Yep, you can do this online too.   Why keep it local?  Local storage is a single point of failure that packrats like me who never delete anything cannot afford to risk.    Even this blog post is auto-saved out to the cloud somewhere and I don’t have to worry losing anything even if this plane I’m sitting on crashes.   Google’s applications automatically store a temporary copy locally until the data is sent to the cloud for permanent storage.  I bet some of you didn’t even know it works this way.  That’s the point.  It’s fault tolerant, it’s green, it’s empowering, and it’s transparent.  At least to me, this sounds like a trend that is here to stay.

Person, system, or process?  They are all process, out in the cloud.  It won’t be long and I’ll be having a conversation with your virtual presence or avatar while you are out of the office.   I’m hoping people will finally realize that sending spreadsheets over email is not process management – it’s completely wasteful.  While we are at it, let’s get rid of email too and think of something more efficient because I’m tired of sifting through 200+ emails per day trying to follow a conversation.  And this way I can ensure I never get another spreadsheet emailed to me. Please link it, don’t send it. This way I can actually find the correct version when I need it instead of sifting through 5 or 6 outdated versions.

Getting to the point

In case you don’t see where I’m going at this point with this post, let me spell it out very clear and concise.   Show people they can things done without worrying about the technology that powers it and you will start to see things getting done.  Take the complexity away from the worker and give them what they need, when they need it.  Make it convenient and available wherever, whenever.   Don’t bog them down with the complexity of technology. Likewise, don’t bog down the workforce of your organization with the complexity of business processes.  They don’t need to know how it works, just that it does.  Make it simple, seamless, and bullet-proof reliable.  Don’t make them worry about whether or not the data is accurate and up to date.

So the trend I see for the future of BPM is that a new wave of process management will emerge that is not bogged down by legacy fears and horror stories of integration challenges.    Applications that you install so support the business process will become merely windows to the data produced by the instances of processes. Synchronizing data to the local machine in a “buffer” will become a standard feature for all BPM systems, and local data storage will likely become the backup copy rather than permanent storage.  The permanent storage is somewhere on the cloud but it will be nearly impossible to determine the precise physical location where it exists.   In many ways, the technology world as we’ve known it for the past decade is taking a full reversal and going back to the concepts of the 1960′s.   But Moore’s law of computing power will actually accelerate.  And along with this, I believe BPM will become hundreds of times more effective when practiced religiously throughout the organization.  Before this can happen I think that BPMN will have to evolve to deal with more complex event processing needs because the complexity will certainly be there, even if most of us no longer have to know the complexity exists.

You might have noticed that I haven’t written any posts in a while.  The reason is because I had an epiphany.  A light bulb turned on in my head (and yes, it was a compact florescent, because I’m on the green trend too).  It was such an crazy thought that I started to wonder if my passion for BPM is going somewhere.  Then just at my most critical moment, a dear friend asks me if I’m still doing “that process stuff”.    I stand by my words.  Yes, I do BPM.  And I do it because there is more of a need for it now in the cloud computing age than ever before.   Those of us who specialize in process management need to realize that we have invented a profession.  We are not IT specialists, business analysts, efficiency experts, or project managers.  We are a bit of all of these things in one.  This is how I got the job title Process Expert, and I’m looking forward to a time in the not-so-distant future that this will be a job title I can find on the job search sites on a regular basis.

I see that this post is getting rather long so it’s time to wrap it up and open it for discussion.  I’m looking forward to getting comments from my readers so that I can write more on this topic.  But for now It’s time for me to do a video conference with my 11 month old child from 37,000 feet up in the air (camera + laptop + internet + airborne internet was a wonderful marriage of gadgets).  I wonder what she’ll be doing when she’s my age?   One thing is for sure, she’ll be online.  Someone will probably have found a way to remove the thunderous background jet noise from the airborne video call.  But I doubt by that time the FAA (Federal Aviation Administration for those of you outside the USA) will allow her to stay online during takeoff and landing.   Until then, there is a lesson to be learned.  Never forget to model the exceptional conditions into your processes, no matter how reliable the underlying technology becomes.

My wife and I have a baby girl who is now 5 months old.  Between family life and traveling all the time it’s hard to keep up with a blog site.   This and the fact that most of my “creative juices” have been reserved for my upcoming BPMN patterns book.

Recent travels:

• Quito, Ecuador -  March 2009
• Washington D.C., USA – February 2009
• San Luis Obispo, California, USA – February 2009
• Chicago, Illinois, USA – January 2009
• San Francisco, California, USA – January 2009
• New York City, USA – December 2008
• San Francisco, California, USA – December 2008
• Brisbane, Australia – November 2008

So anyway, keeping very busy.  Keep an eye out for a new series of posts on BPMN basics.

WordPress is such a wonderful system.

It was about 10 years ago that I had this wonderful idea that I could create a content management system that would allow you to do basically exactly what WordPress does today.  I have a habit of being ahead of my time. The thing is, if I would have stuck with it, just think of where I would be today?   Probably pretty upset that I put in all that work and someone else would have done the same thing and then gave it away for free.   But since I’m a consumer I’m not complaining.

Anyway, I recently had the idea that I can run the entire website from WordPress.  So I’m going to phase out the main page at rickgeneva.com, which will point to the WP site.  I noticed this is a common thing to do these days. It’s just not worth writing HTML pages anymore.   As you know I’m all about efficiency.  Gotta love code generation and content management systems.

It’s very exciting for me to be teaching BPMN here in Ecuador. This is my first experience working with a professional translator. I speak some Spanish, but not enough to conduct a process modeling class. Sometimes it’s hard enough to teach in my native English language, so translation to Spanish I left to a professional.

In two weeks I trained 24 people from Ecuador on process modeling.  It was divided by into three classes, ranging from basic to advanced levels.  I’m very proud of students in the advanced classes. The students have learned well, and have made the paradigm shift from flowcharts to process modeling.   It gives me a wonderful feeling to see people discover a newer, more efficient way to view business processes.  

The photo below was taken from an altitud of 4100 meters (about 13,500 feet) above sea level.  The city in the background is Quito.

On the left:  Me.  ( I ate too much that week)
Right - Raul Rivis from Latinis, a consulting firm in Ecuador.  
Bottom:  Paula, Raul's cute little 3 year old daughter.

Muchos Gracias to Raul Rivis of Latinis for having me come to Ecuador to train his customers.  It was a wonderful experience, a ‘highlight’ in my career, and the beginning of a new friendship.  

Surprisingly I’m finding more and more that developing nations are more open to adopting the process development methodologies than what I see in the USA.   Maybe it’s because we’re so used to the old ways of business and it’s hard to change?   Anyway, I’m enjoying teaching people that are so eager to learn, even if they can’t understand a word I’m saying