Frank Michael Kraft's Blog

Some reflections about the WfMC Thought Leadership Summit that I was invited to attend.

Suddenly I felt like in a lively discussion about what I thought for some time about the inflexibility of BPM models (what if the approver is on leave?), the ad-hoc nature of real processes (like in a court trial) and the small amount of system support for these.

Yes, Business Process Modeling to a degree rests on the assumption, that there are repetitive procedures that are triggered by a business transaction, and which is described in terms of which steps to execute as a result of it. Like a machine.

Did you ever wonder why there is so little standard software for startups – or business process models? If it where a standard process, it were not a startup. The driver in the seat hopefully is the founder of the startup, not a process.
I agree to the observation, that there are much more processes like this all over the place. And maybe there should be even more again, reverting the feeling to be but a cogwheel in the engine, but a responsible contributor – even for the benefit of the whole.

Still, what we need to work effective is system support for

• our information
• Collaboration and Communication over the information
• a clear status of all of the process and all parts of it
• Decide about next steps as you go
• Decide about required information as you go
• Decide about groups and access policies as you go
• Decide about information structure as you go.
• Overview and Tracking

Only to mention the most important ones.

This is not what you can to with BPM . Therefore we need a new breed of software which is not BPM, even if it is related to it.

I want to mention two things, that were not or not deeply discussed in the meeting as an additional contribution and defence of what I said.

First: Even with all the ad-hoc type of processes it is clear that over time some of them evolve in standard processes, which is a good thing. Because that is the time to earn money for the process owner. So there must be ways to

• pick best practices and develop them into standard processes
• re-design a bunch of local best practices into a global standard process.
• impose constraints of a standard process on the business

All of that as you go – i.e. without interfering the running processes.
Which is easily said – sounds a little like marketing buzz – but certainly challenging in terms of technology. But I wouldn’t say it, if I didn’t think it’s possible.

In Process design and re-design I disagree here with Max J. Poucher’s more philosophical statements about evolution. I do not believe as much in evolution as an unguided process as he seemingly does. I believe that redesigning processes as a whole makes them more effective, and more rewarding to everybody if done right.

Second, I think that we need is a seamless integration (A word that you first learn in marketing) with structured processes – be they classical workflows or classical ERP processes. In my opinion there is much ROI to be found.

Related Blog Posts

Adaptive Case Management by Max J. Pucher

Complex Adaptive Business Process by Max J. Pucher

Ad-Hoc Processes by me

Intelligence in Business Processes by me

If there is an architecture with a Business Process Platform, then there is the question, which role do the process instances play in such a system.

The business processes are reflected by business objects themselves, which are linked with each other. Events are correlated to the business objects. This makes sense, because the business objects are clearly identifiable, because they are related to a concrete business transaction. There are concrete customers related with it, suppliers, products, dates – the things that make them easy to identify and find.

In contrast, if there are process instances, which have only an anonymous ID, like a Globally Unique Identifier (GUID), then the relationship to a concrete business transaction is rather loosely. Therefore it is hard to manage them. Furthermore if there are business attributes inside of the process instance, typically they are in generic containers (not always) and therefore difficult to use in queries.

So which process instances are needed within a Business Process Platform beside the business objects themselves? Probably some for approval. Some for ad-hoc processes. Not much more comes to my mind.

Monitoring a business process itself is a different story. For this not process instances are needed, but chains of business objects that are actually process objects and some process instances – that I already mentioned.

Unstructured, Semi-Structured and Structured Processes makes a distinction between

• structured,
• unstructured and
• semi-structured

processes, that I like. It is interesting, that in the definition of process the emphasis on the post is less on the sequence of activities, but more on the business goal to reach. That was, what I proposed earlier. And it makes sense. In the end it is more important, what the result of a process is, than what has been done or should be done in which order to try to (!) achieve it. I said “try to” because sometimes just doing a thing can not guarantee that the desired result is achieved. That’s why I say that the result is more important than the doing of an activity or task itself.
Of course it is inevitable that when a business process is implemented in an business process platform, that it is structured. Otherwise it is impossible to implement the business functionality that transforms the business objects that are part of the business process from one state to another. That is said modulo that there may be some generic functionality like a process engine for workflow or generally for execution of modeled process parts of course.
BPMN supports some Ad-Hoc modeling cababilities. There are Ad-Hoc tasks where the sequence is not defined or where it is not defined if none, one or all of them are executed. However one would expect, that any task that can be executed is modeled – at least if it is not, it can not be system supported. Also it is a difference, if the Ad-Hoc cababilities are on the process type level, or on the instance level, meaning that a concrete process instance can be adapted to a new, unexpected flow, sequence or even new Ad-Hoc Tasks.
However the more the tasks become Ad-Hoc the more they become an empty shell. What do I mean by this?
Create an Ad-Hoc task “Calculate stock losses based on financial crisis”. Of course if this is done the first time, there is no busines logic implementation for this. Even if there is a SOA service offering the solution, there needs to be some implementation of calling the service, which means gathering and providing the needed parameters and using the result in other processes.
So – as soon as a process is implemented in a business process platform it has at least some constraints.
Which is ok – because it has been formalized, because it’s execution is more repetitive.
On the other hand especially in times of crisis the importance of Ad-Hoc processes grows to account for the need to compensate unforeseen difficulties in the daily “business as usual”.
The important thing is, that the structured, the unstructured and the semi-structured processes can be integrated as seamless as possible. This is only possible, if there is a common notion of result of a process or of an activity in the process. Furthermore it is an interesting question – especially in semi-structured processes – how much constraints are desribed.

• None Constraints: Unstructured.
• Some Constraints: Semi-Structured.
• All Constraints: Structured.