Monday, October 06, 2008

More on Variants

Lets understand the use case correctly - you / your customer has created processes e.g "MyProcess".
May be you want to create geography / nation specific variants of this base process, or your customers in turn are changing these processes and now you wants to import them into the same DB. I am assuming you have more than one such variations.

Steps1. Create a variant(s) of the original process (MyProcess) that customer is sharing with outside world. This will create a model "(MyProcessModel(1)")

2. Rename the variant to a more meaningful name "(MyProcessModelForX")
3. Now provide the outside world with an export of the variant MyProcessModelForX.

Wednesday, October 01, 2008

Panel - Future of BPMN - Technology and Industry @ BPM 2008

I hosted a panel at BPM 2008 early in September. Here is the abstract / outline.
BPMN has seen huge adoption over the past four years. It has become very popular with business analysts, tool vendors, practitioners and end users. BPMN brings business and IT together in a collabrative environment where as designed and as implemented are the same. In this panel, we discuss the two major forces that will shape up the future of BPMN. On the one side are technology trends like Web 2.0, SaaS, Semantic web and Cloud Computing which will impact the way people define and execute their business processes, and at the same time there are the needs identified by industry practitioners to facilitate meaningful adoption like closer alignment with organizational models, facilitating process discovery and monitoring. We believe that these two forces will define the future of the BPM industry and therefore we have invited a slew of BPMN and technology practitioners to this panel to discuss the future path for BPMN.


The panelists:
Marlon Dumas, University of Tartu, Estonia
Paul Harmon, Business Process Trends, USA
Jana Koehler, IBM Switzerland
Sebastian Stein, IDS Scheer, Germany
Alexander Grosskopf, Hasso-Plattner-Institute, Potsdam, Germany


We were lucky to have Peter Dadam and Professor Wil van der Aalst in the audience and they took on the panel. we delved into the current state of BPMN adoption thanks to wonderful insights from Paul Harmon. There was a quick tour of the history thanks to Jana. Sebastian gave his thoughts on how they see BPMN requests from time to time. Alex gave a few updates on the current work he is doing around BPMN at HPI. There was also a discussion on the execution semantics of BPMN and how close / different it is from BPEL execution semantics. An interesting discussion overall. Although I wish we had more time to look at the future trends of technology impacting BPMN. Nevertheless, next time!

BPM 2008

Friends - Sincere apologies for not being active on my blog in the past few weeks. There was the BPM 2008 conference and the Oracle open world - more about it in the next post. This one is about BPM 2008!

* BPM community is abuzz with innovation and very active in coordinating efforts across geographies and locations. Most of the research represented at the conference is around process modeling in some way — patterns, modularity, tree structures, process mining — but there were quite a few, interesting ones, focused on process simulation and execution issues as well. Some very intriguing choreo research from friends in Australia. Peter Dadam in his keynote gave a demo of ARISTASoft, a BPM software built by Univ of Ulm and is very dynamic and flexible even at runtime. You can change instances and even percolate that change to definition - very interesting. BPMN Boundary analysis - my personal favorite subject, paper won the best paper award. BPMN process differentiation and merge was another interesting presentation, we do this for BPEL processes. Managing Process Variability and Compliance in the Enterprise was another discussion and the conclusion was "it depends". Instantiation Semantics for Process Models - this is a very important technique of how to start the process instance.

My panel - Future of BPMN - Technology and Industry - a separate blog post for that tonight.