business agility insightsdocs.media.bitpipe.com/io_10x/io_103457/item_532909/bai... ·...

Agility April 2012, volume 1, no 2

business

insights

w 01 Editor’s Letter

w 02 BPMN 2.0: Assessing a Year of Change the updated process modeling standard continues

to evolve—as does the debate about its advantages and disadvantages.

w 03 BPEL Trends Update: We’ll Always Have Orchestration

bpel’s role as Web services orchestrator seems assured, but the broader spotlight has moved to bpmn 2.0.

w 04 Decision Management: Closing the ‘Insight-to-Action’ Gap

effective decision management can create serious competitive value—but only if those decisions lead to quantifiable business benefits.

Business Agility insights e-zine April 2012 2

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editor’s letter

BPmN 2.0: AssessiNg A YeAr

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BPel treNds UPdAte: We’ll AlWAYs hAve

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deCisioN mANAgemeNt:

ClosiNg the ‘iNsight-to- ACtioN’ gAP

EDITOr’s LETTEr

business process improvement: the pAce Quickens

Better Business process mAnAgement (BPM) is an imperative today. Organizations are looking for immediate return on investment on BPM development. At the same time, they don’t want to be saddled with hard-wired process-improvement “solutions.”

This issue of Business Agility Insights, a co-production of ebizQ and SearchSOA.com, looks at key standards and tools that can help business planners and system architects enhance process-improvement efforts while remaining flexible enough to adapt quickly to change.

Successful, on-time BPM implementations hinge largely on strategic use of key infra-structure design elements such as Business Process Model and Notation 2.0 (BPMN 2.0) and Business Process Execution Language (BPEL). As our first two stories describe, using these standards and their associated tools correctly can go a long way toward ensuring smoother BPM implementations—and help avoid making today’s process-management initiative tomorrow’s straitjacket.

Meanwhile, decision management can serve as another valuable tool in the quest for a faster, more responsive organization. By automating and optimizing key pieces of decision-making processes, the approach helps organizations react rapidly to both threats and opportunities.

But effective decision management comes with one big caveat: Making decisions is just the first step; it’s converting them to action that really counts. Our final story explores how to accomplish that goal.

—Anne Stuart, Site Editor, ebizQ

http://www.ebizq.net/

http://searchsoa.techtarget.com/


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BY ALAN EArLs

fEATUrE sTOrY

BPMN 2.0: AssessiNg A YeAr of ChANgethe updated process modeling standard continues to evolve—as does the debate about its advantages and disadvantages.

Business process model And notAtion 2.0 (BPMN 2.0) has been hailed for many features placing the standard above and beyond earlier versions. It seems that just about everyone from C-level executives to enterprise architects has an interest in how the standard can reshape modeling and the usefulness of leading industry tools.


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Brian Reale, founder and CEO of Colo-sa Inc., a developer of open source BPM products, isn’t among the standard’s detractors. But he definitely sees both negatives and positives.

In terms of usability, “it’s fair to say that BPMN 2.0 isn’t too easy, but it also isn’t too difficult,” he said. Many ven-dors, including his own company, offer easier ways to draw and implement pro-cesses than those proposed in the BPMN 2.0 specifications, he said. On the other hand, Reale said, there would be some major drawbacks to a proprietary world.

For starters, each vendor tradition-ally did process modeling different-ly—which, in fact, created the need for a standard that would keep users from being locked into a single vendor forever. Second, “most BPMN 2.0 vendors can’t deal with every use case under the sun,” he said. “The specification is more com-plete in its ability to describe all possible business processes than the noncompli-ant drawing tools of most vendors.”

If a company wants to maximize its return on investment from BPMN 2.0—or from any modeling language, tool or development environment—“easiness” isn’t the issue, said Jon Siegel, vice presi-dent for technology transfer and director of certification for Object Management Group, which oversees the development and maintenance of BPMN.

“An easy problem will be easy to solve regardless of the tool you use, or even if you work it without a tool,” he said. To take the true measure of a language or tool, you need to evaluate how it per-

forms when a problem becomes more difficult.

Siegel said that two relevant measures of a tool such as BPMN 2.0 would be the following:

rrHow practical it renders working out the solution to a moderately difficult problem

rrWhether it enables solving a business problem previously considered so challenging that no one would even attempt to address it

“Experience shows that BPMN mea-sures up well on both counts,” he said. “One vendor reports that their customers find the BPMN learning curve significant but, once they’re accustomed to the lan-guage, [they] find it easier to create good process models with BPMN than with alternative languages or methods.” He noted that the vendor’s report refers to the language as a whole, not just the ver-sion 2.0 additions.

Similarly, another vendor claims that its business customers seem to be able to read and understand BPMN diagrams without training, at least “if the one who created them has understood BPMN and is able to create ‘purpose-driven’ dia-grams,” Siegel said.

However, he said, becoming a modeler that capable requires two phases of train-ing: first, learning about the language and tools themselves, then, undertaking an extended phase of “learning by doing”

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Where Does BPMN 2.0 Adoption stand? the 2.0 version of Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN)—previously known as Business Process Modeling Notation—became available early last year. According to boosters, it’s rapidly gained traction ever since.

All major vendor tools now support BPMN 2.0, said Jon siegel of the Object Man-agement Group, which oversees the development and maintenance of BPMN. The list includes IBM, Oracle, NoMagic, sparx, Eclipse (both the BPMN2 Modeller Project and the jBPM BPMN2 engine)—and others.

But robert shapiro, chair of the Workflow Management Coalition’s Conformance Working Group, said real questions remain about how many people have actually moved from BPMN 1.2 to 2.0. “Most companies seem to be committed to migration, but I don’t know what their schedule is for changing,” said shapiro, a co-author of BPMN 2.0 Handbook.

In addition, some companies that are using BPMN as a component of some larger suite, meaning that it’s not sufficient for them to change the modeler—they must update the rest of the technology as well. finally, he said, there’s the Microsoft ques-tion. Microsoft’s Visio edition 2010 is BPMN-based, but it uses version 1.0. “Microsoft says they are committed [to updating the standard], but they won’t say more,” said shapiro. “They will decide when there’s enough pressure from customers.”

Given that the BPMN 2.0 specification was approved in August 2010, adoption has been relatively swift. “for design and diagramming tools in particular, it is relatively easy to implement the specification and even easier for those that had already imple-mented 1.2 to begin supporting 2.0,” said Brian reale of Colosa. for BPMs engine vendors, such as those siegel mentions, adoption may not be as swift or smooth.

Why? Because there are currently no comprehensive testing or certification proce-dures in place, although some have been proposed. Another issue: Many large BPM vendors have a substantial installed client bases, which makes it difficult to simply implement a new standard in their respective engines.

Meanwhile, siegel said some customers are slower to move to modeling of chore-ographies, primarily because they see it as a new concept, albeit one that maps close-ly to Internet commerce. But adoption is increasing as modelers discover how useful it can be, siegel said. “As one vendor puts it, choreography allows an organization to provide a service-neutral view of their architecture and ensure that their end-to-end process makes sense to their business users.” n


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on the modeler’s own project, preferably guided by an experienced coach.

Reale said BPMN 2.0 does a pretty good job of striking a balance between being easy enough to understand by nontechnical users and descriptive enough to be useful to technical users. “BPMN 2.0, in fact, was created for this very reason—to become a bridge lan-guage between process architects that design processes and IT specialists that need to think about how the process will work technically in a context of interact-ing with other systems,” he said.

In fact, when BPMN was originally created almost a decade ago, there were other process modeling notations, such as UML activity diagrams, state charts and use-case diagrams that were being pro-posed as the future standard, Reale said. These were rejected, however, because they were seen as being too IT-oriented. BPMN, on the other hand used the famil-iar notions such as the “swim-lane” dia-grams already being used in flowcharting tools up until that point.

Some notable improvements incor-porated into the current BPMN release include non-interrupting events and event sub-processes, new task types and data objects and changes to pools, lanes, and start and end events, Siegel said.

“One vendor reports that their cus-tomers find the new symbols [for exam-ple, for non-interrupting events] to be very important in their modeling, and [they] depend on the direct automation

capability,” he said. The new specification also makes formal the underlying meta-model and execution semantics, and defines a set of four conformance class-es that fit the needs and requirements of major user categories, he said.

On the other hand, Reale said, BPMN lacks a number of factors common-ly needed by business process manage-ment suites (BPMSes). For example, he said, BPMN doesn’t provide a common data model, doesn’t talk about users or authentication and doesn’t specify other elements that are used in BPMSes, such as forms and output documents.

So BPMN won’t resolve all the issues involved in BPM modeling, Reale said. But it’s headed in the right direction, and predicts that the standard may end up fragmenting the industry, he added. “There will be tools that support BPMN, and then there will be others that just move to another software category to compete on their non-standard laurels.”

For example, Reale said, there is now discussion regarding an adaptive case management standard, and some efforts have been undertaken in collaborative tools. “Some BPM vendors may find it more interesting to move in these direc-tions than feel like they have to be so confined by a standard such as BPMN,” he said. Additionally, whether or not the standard actually is complex, it is per-ceived as complex, he said. So for particu-lar market segments, some vendors may want to shed that association entirely. n

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BPM sTANDArDs

BY JACk VAUGHAN

As improved Business process mAnAgement (BPM) workflow tools have emerged, some underlying infrastructure tools have gained less attention. Notable among the latter is Business Process Execution Language (BPEL), which has often been used to convert business visions into things that run on computers. Where is BPEL now?

Today, BPEL faces an uphill battle against the new kid on the block: Business

BPeL TreNds UPdATe: We’LL ALWAYs hAve orChesTrATioNbpel’s role as Web services orchestrator seems assured, but the broader spotlight has moved to bpmn 2.0.


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Process Model and Notation 2.0 (BPMN 2.0). In fact, BPMN 2.0 may be the route to BPEL services infrastructure for some enterprise practitioners; BPMN 2.0 adds support for export to BPEL.

In many ways, BPMN 2.0 has grabbed the spotlight from BPEL. Still, BPEL appears to have found a steady role in the technical orchestration of software ser-vices underlying workflow integrations. Its importance for human-based BPM is less clear.

“BPEL is still alive and kicking. In its own space it is actually pretty success-ful as a standard modeling notation,” said Neil Ward-Dutton, research director at MWD Advisors, a process consulting firm. “Customers are using BPEL as a notation for modeling of application integrations.”

At the same time, “it has become understood by the broader community of practitioners that it is only suitable for certain classes of the modeling domain,” he continued.

In fact, BPEL’s native role today is very much as an orchestrator of Web services, albeit ones related to business processes.

WeB services orchestrAtor roleThe orchestrator role is a natural one. BPEL arose during the first era of Web services, when a slew of XML-based lan-guages came into being for different pur-poses. Its use was very much limited to machine-to-machine interactions. That is a shortcoming in most BPM applications, where humans are usually a very intrin-sic part of the process.

In most BPM systems, people are cen-tral players, and classic BPEL modeling did not speak to this need. An effort to create “BPEL4People” has sought to address that shortcoming. However, many of the same companies that drove BPEL have also put effort behind BPMN. Here, it is a broad-er approach—and a promise that it may support development by non-program-mers—that pique managers’ interest. To some, BPEL4People seems late to the par-ty. “Some things that you really want to do are really just not suitable for BPEL. But it has value for orchestration of Web ser-vices for workflow,” Ward-Dutton said.

“Today, the landscape of available notation [languages] has become more mature and a lot more vendor invest-ment has gone behind BPMN,” he add-ed. Before, this same landscape was a lot more fractured, led largely by infrastruc-ture vendors who were delivering tools to help people orchestrate Web services, he said.

primAry use cAses for BpelBPEL’s primary use is for Web service orchestrations rather than human-

bpel’s native role today is very much as an orchestrator of Web services, albeit ones related to business processes.


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facing activities, said Sandy Kemsley, a BPM architect and industry analyst. “BPEL is used as a serialization and interchange format primarily between systems that use BPEL as their core execution lan-guage,” she notes in a recent blog post reviewing the past five years in BPM.

This has led to some deprecation for BPEL. “BPMN 2.0 is now a ‘superset’ of BPEL,” according to Mariano Benitez, head of Ataway, a BPM consultancy. Is performance an issue? Not in his view: “You can model and execute any BPEL model in BPMN, and the performance of the business process management system should be somewhat similar to a BPEL engine,” he said.

Benitez points to BPMN 2.0’s nota-tion and its consideration of users in the model, as well as its execution semantics and XML format, as benefits. “I do not see a business reason to use BPEL, other than for true service orchestration with-out human intervention,” Benitez said.

poWer shortAge for Bpel4people?A few years ago, BPEL had more viv-id vendor backing and was seen to have broader potential use. That’s changed, and it forms a backdrop to the BPEL4Peo-ple effort, Ward-Dutton said.

The “machine bias” that BPEL4People enhancements sought to address may be somewhat moot now. The reasons may in part be political, Ward-Dutton said. “It’s all about which vendors put investment

into which standards,” he said. “Those same infrastructure vendors that were really so instrumental in driving BPEL have now put the vast majority of their effort into driving BPMN.”

Meanwhile, some viewers question the

depth of need for a standard execution language for business processes. While users do want assurance that they have lessened their vulnerability against code lock-in, actual reports of such migra-tions are hard to come by. Going back to a BPMN-level description may offer the same assurance as BPEL-level assurance.

BPMN 2.0 is still new, and its suitabil-ity for nontechnical team members—business-side non-programmers—is still a matter of controversy. Meanwhile, BPEL’s narrower role in orchestrating ser-vices integration seems intact. As BPM moves to encompass business activity monitoring and operational BI, this will be where the modeling pedal meets the runtime metal. n

bpmn 2.0 is still new,and its suitabil ity fornontechnical teammembers—business-side non-programmers—is still a matter of controversy.


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DECIsION MANAGEMENT

BY ANNE sTUArT

deCisioN MANAgeMeNT: CLosiNg The ‘iNsighT-To- ACTioN’ gAPeffective decision management can create serious competitive value—but only if those decisions lead to quantifiable business benefits.

mAking the right Business decisions at the right time has never been more criti-cal than it is in the current recovering—but still largely unforgiving—economic environment.

Not surprisingly, that need is driving strong interest in the methodology of, and technology for, decision management. How strong? In recent ebizQ research,


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DECIsION MANAGEMENT

three-quarters of the business and IT professionals surveyed were using, plan-ning to use or considering adopting decision management technology this year.

Of course, simply making the right decisions—and even automating and optimizing them for maximum effi-ciency—isn’t enough to guarantee suc-cess. Meeting today’s business mandates requires ensuring that decisions consis-tently result in real, measurable business results.

And experts warn that requirement doesn’t apply only to select high-profile strategic and tactical decisions, but also to thousands of lower-level, day-to-day operational decisions. That last catego-ry might include thousands of decisions made daily across a major enterprise—for instance, approving a loan at a bank, adjusting a claim at an insurance com-pany or rerouting an airline passenger’s itinerary.

Individually, such decisions don’t gen-erate enormous value. Collectively, their impact adds up—and, ultimately, it can provide enormous competitive advan-tage. That’s probably why, in ebizQ’s sur-vey, the desire to improve operational efficiency was by far the single driver for interest in decision management.

In addition, it’s increasingly impor-tant for business and IT professionals to be able to forecast the impact of key busi-ness activity before it occurs—a demand which, in turn, is prompting many to incorporate predictive analytics into their decision management programs.

from decision mAnAgement to decisive ActionAll those factors play into “the insight-to-action gap,” a term that consultants Neal Raden and James Taylor introduced in their book, Smart (Enough) Systems: How to Deliver Competitive Advantage by Automating Hid-den Decisions.

In other words, you can automate, analyze and gain insights to any num-ber of decisions—but those efforts won’t make a significant difference unless you ensure that they’re actually translating into real business activity.

That’s more challenging than ever in this era of “big data,” with ever more information being captured in every organization every day. How much more? IDC analysts John Gantz and David Rein-sel said the total amount of informa-tion created and duplicated this year will exceed 1.8 zettabytes, or 1.8 trillion gigabytes, in 500 quadrillion files. And, they said in their most recent annual report on what they dub the “digital uni-verse,” the amount of information gener-ated is doubling every two years.

“In an information society, informa-tion is money,” the analysts said. “The trick is to generate value by extracting the right information from the digital universe.”

But effective decision-making—whether it’s done manually, by humans, or automatically, by technology—involves more than even the most com-prehensive, most up-to-date information. “Giving people information without aid-ing them in decision-making is like


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getting them to the Jordan River, but not across,” said Raden, founder and CEO of the Hired Brains consulting firm.

“Decisions are a point in time where you have gathered and considered some data,” Taylor told an ebizQ conference last year. “You have a selection to make, you have a set of options, you have a set of choices from which you must select. And when you make that decision, you’re making a commitment to action.”

BArriers to Business ActionSo what keeps that decision from actually translating into business activity? In some cases, experts say, people don’t under-stand how to apply the analytic insights they’ve collected to the decisions they need to make. In others, they don’t fol-low through with widespread changes to how processes or systems behave.

Complicating matters is decision man-agement’s status as a cross-functional dis-cipline whose ownership varies from organization to organization. One illus-tration: Only about half the participants in ebizQ’s survey reported IT ownership of decision management in their compa-nies. For others, ownership ranged from finance to operations to the business-intelligence team to—for only about 2%—the business process management team.

“IT must be heavily involved, due to

the complexity of the technology and configuring integration with other sys-tems,” ebizQ research concluded. “But the business side must also be involved to determine business rules, business process flow and other critical success factors.”

Bottom line: An end-to-end approach, strong governance and clear ownership can all contribute to helping bridge the insight-to-action gap.

looking AheAdAt the moment, the industry is mov-ing toward “intelligent business opera-tions” (IBO), according to Gartner Inc. This next-generation approach to opera-tions goes beyond simply cutting costs and increasing efficiency, emphasizing improving an organization’s ability to adapt quickly to market and customer dynamics, according to Gartner.

IBO is “a style of work in which real-time analytic and decision management technologies are integrated into the transaction-executing and bookkeeping operational activities that run a business,” said Janelle B. Hill, a Gartner vice presi-dent and distinguished analyst. Integrat-ing analytics into such activities, as Gart-ner puts it, empower workers “to make better and faster contextualized deci-sions”—which, in turn, lead to those optimal business results. n


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ABOUT THE AUTHOrs

Alan Earls is a business and technology journalist based near Boston. Email him at [email protected].

Jack Vaughan, co-editor of Business Agility Insights, is editor in chief of Search-SOA.com. Email him at [email protected].

Anne Stuart, co-editor of Business Agility Insights, is site editor for ebizQ. Email her at [email protected].

Business Agility Insights is a joint e-publication of ebizQ/SearchSOA.com.

Hannah SmalltreeeditoriAl director

Jason SparapanimAnAging editor, e-publicAtions

Anne Stuarteditor, ebiZQ

[email protected]

Jack Vaughaneditor in chief, seArchsoA.com

Brein N. Matturogroup mAnAging editor

Jan Staffordexecutive editor

Linda Kourydirector of online design

Mike Bolducpublisher

[email protected]

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