A few weeks ago, Keith Swenson stumbled upon Process Wiki (http://wiki.process.io/), the brainchild of Paul van Erk and was amazed at what he discovered. He found that anyone can join to be a member, collaborate either by contributing more process examples, or by commenting on the existing ones. Processes can be uploaded & downloaded as XPDL files (a huge improvement over GIF files) and the site has a converter to visualize the processes as BPMN diagrams. Imagine the implications it has on the BPM movement!

Swenson then goes on to cite the case of Clay Richardson, an analyst for Forrester who recommends that all companies should have an internal “Process Wiki” which documents all their processes for employees to read and understand and makes the static “process manual” outdated!

At this point, Process Wiki has about 40 members, and more than 20 example processes on the site.

Tags: collaboration | Web 2.0 | process | XPDL | BPMN

Bruce Silver has come out with a new book: BPMN Method and Style. The crux of the book is that BPMN, especially BPMN 2.0 is more than a sum of its parts. Silver is developing a 2-day Level 1-only “live online” class based on Lombardi Blueprint, available through Lombardi University in June or July. Stay tuned.

Tags: BPMN

Tune in to Keith Swenson for the lowdown on the next two months BPM event calendar. The three milestones that he marks out are:

May 19: Industry Briefing: BPMN 2.0 Examined; June 18-19: The BPM in Government Event and June 22: Stevens BPM Day.

Tags: BPMN | Events

Keith Swenson is still stuck with his process diagrams. This week he has actually issued out a public appeal looking for any valid BPMN diagrams that cannot be represented as standard XPDL! Those who can provide him a handle to the problem, please do so! Isn’t that what collaboration is all about?

Tags: BPMN

Last month, Bruce Silver listed five things he loves about BPMN 2.0. This time, he gives us a lowdown on five things experts left out in BPMN 2.0!

The list makes for an interesting read, discussing among other things, ticklish issues related to model portability, graphic interchange, and simulation properties, in short grouses that other bloggers at other times have aired on their blogs.

Tags: BPMN

Sandy Kemsley links this great story about Joe “Plumber” and Patricia, his hypothetical BPM consultant. Log in to find out how Patricia helps Plumber improve his plumbing services simply by working on his complaint redressal mechanism. The example taps into Bruce Silver’s three levels of BPMN to drive home the usefulness of process orientation in everyday jobs.

Sandy Kemsley’s second link discusses why you would want to externalize decisions from processes, in the first place.

Her trackback to Eric Koch’s post that contends that BPM is actually the “next level of maturity from an application perspective” for SOA, after integration. In other words, all three are inter-linked concepts.

Surprise! Surprise!

Bruce Silver is surprised at the “code freeze” OMG’s BMI list that describes BPMN 2.0 from the perspective of a process orchestration engine. “I haven’t heard such feigned surprise and indignation since Congress “discovered” the AIG bonuses,” he snides, although as an after thought he agrees with the howlers that BPMN 2.0 ignores the needs of business-level modeling.

Tags: BPM | BPMN | SOA

WfMC announced last week the BPMN Model Portability Validation test. Keith Swenson explains that this test certifies that a BPM diagram, of a specified complexity is portable between tools that have passed the test. Tune in to his blog to learn more about this test.

Tags: BPMN

For a very informed critique of Keith Swenson’s nice post on human choice in BPMN scan Bruce Silver take on the subject. I absolutely agree with Silver where he says that BPMN has to constantly balance expressiveness with complexity, while maintaining some measure of consistency in the metamodel!

 

Tags: BPMN