Knowledge worker productivity is the biggest of the 21st century management challenges. In the developed countries it is their first survival requirement. In no other way can the developed countries hope to maintain themselves, let alone to maintain their leadership and their standards of living.” – Peter F. Drucker

The facilitation of the knowledge workers and knowledge work, what is increasingly known as “Case Management,” represents the next imperative in office automation. The desire to facilitate work within the workplace is not new, yet recent advances in Information Technology make the management of unpredictable circumstances now a practical reality.

Over the course of the past few months there has been a groundswell of interest in a more flexible, dynamic approach to supporting work. Here are examples of what recognized experts have recently written on the topic:

“Advancing to support more knowledge work is the goal of many organizations, thus there is a new swell of activity around unstructured processes.” – Gartner VP of Research, Jim Sinur, Jan 2009

“I think a sea change is coming in the process world.” – Forrester Research Vice President, Connie Moore, July 2009

The sea of change Connie Moore refers to toward technology which is able to support knowledge workers. The work of a knowledge worker is by its nature unpredictable and can not be handled by more formalized process definition techniques.

For executives and managers of knowledge workers, Mastering the Unpredictable:

• Explains the need, and why previous trends don’t meet the need
• Explains the current technology gap, and the new technology that is coming to fill the gap
• Lays out the options have at their disposal to increase efficiency of their organization
• Equips them to best take advantage of this evolving trend

The book is a collaborative work of authors from industry which are process experts and thought leaders. The chapter I have written is titled “Improving Knowledge Work”. This is the chapter description:

Elsewhere in this book, the challenges facing an increasing number of knowledge workers are discussed. This book is about how information technology can leverage the abilities of individual knowledge workers. This is not about individual tools; it is about a holistic approach: Adaptive Case Management (ACM). But the approach will only work if individual knowledge workers draw immediate benefit from it. In this chapter, I argue that knowledge work will become easier, more fluent, if the right technology is provided. This is the basis for success within a network of knowledge workers, which in turn will yield the return on investment for the companies they work for. To accomplish this, the characteristics of knowledge work must be directly reflected within the information technology so that the use of such technology feels natural. I will discuss the technology needed to achieve this goal. In closing, I will sketch the full long-term potential for ACM.

It should be possible to pre-order soon at Amazon.

Nevertheless this is a conviction, that has grown over time and a goal to which I can even see the path to the solution already now.

My prediction is, that in the future there will not be Applications on the one side and Business Process Management on the other side. But Business Process Management enabled Applications.

My prediction is, that in the future, there will not be the decision “Should I implement it as an Application or model it in a Business Process Management Suite?” any more. Because with BPM enabled Applications this is the same thing.

Business Objects will be Process Objects and Processes will be Business Objects.

And it will solve many of the discontinuities we have today trying to unify the two worlds.

This is my prediction.

Models must have a meaning within a context in the end, otherwise they are useless. For example what does a model mean, where there are acitivies like “go to the shop” and “buy some milk” and “pay”? It is a modeled description of what a person sometimes does, if he needs milk. But nothing else. The process model is to be used as documentation only. This is the context of the model. Such a model can not be used as a workflow. There is no need to create a workitem “pay” for buying milk. This is done by the shop’s design anyway. Also it can not be a web service orchestration description, because there is no web service “go to the shop”.

Modeling a process makes sense, if the context is know, in which the process will be embedded. The context is what I call an architecture. An architecture is a set of rules that determine under which boundary conditions a software system is to be designed. As part of such a design the design of a process makes sense. For example the architecture could be to design a system that is capable of performing the functionality of a milk web shop, that milk order and milk delivery are business objects that expose web services like “order” and “pay”, that there will be a workflow system that is able to compose these services – for example. The architecture are the rules that describe the creation of the system, the business objects, the web services and the workflow. These first need to be professionally defined and confirmed. They need to be obligatory for the whole project.

Only after that it makes sense to create models, which then will have a meaning within the context of the defined architecture. And therefore it is of very limited merit to “just model” or to train or coach modeling of a modeling language without a reference to a defined architecture or without the preceding process of professionally defining the reference architecture before. On the contrary – if the architecture is defined, then it perfectly makes sense to coach and govern a modeling process, because then there are the rules, that are needed for coaching and governance.

This is my opinion.

It is inevitable in big organizations, that there are central processes that are supported by every part of the organization. But at the same time it is desirable, to support individual processes, that respect local specialties. In this case the local units must be given the possibility to plug into the global processes. This can only be done, if the behavior of the local and the central processes is known – and by this the interaction – the choreography between them – can be defined and described. Therefore it is important to have behavior modeling languages for processes of units and of the choreography. Furthermore sometimes it is necessary to allow a local unit to describe their own processes or aspects of their own processes in their own language – a DSL – and plug them into the central processes.

If this is achieved it is a controlled powerful local flexibility with the integration into centrally controlled processes.

All of these articles and also BPMN 2.0 can help to strife towards this goal.

1. Is BPM a business Discipline or software engineering?
2. Whose responsibility is it to implement (automate) a business process?
3. Should we aim to move from design to deployment with no programming?
4. Whose responsibility is it to maintain a business process?

I have some opinions on these questions.

Is BPM a business Discipline or software engineering?

In my opinion it is foremost a business discipline. It  is about managing business processes, as the term says. It is identifying processes, understand them (model them), define a roadmap for process changes, design new processes, implement and monitor then. This all can – theoretically – be done without IT. Actually most of our day to day processes (drive to work, go to the supermarket on saturdays) are without an electronic workflow (well – some might have . Also the people of old had very much the same principles when they organized their kingdoms and businesses – without IT. They weren’t sending XML messages back and forth – but herolds and messengers on a horse and the like. This of course were also business processes which were also managed and clearly defined. They did not call it BPM back then, but it was in it’s essence.

But is it a question of scale and speed. In practical today’s business life it is inevitable to use IT to reach the needed performance of the business process execution and the needed information pool for the monitoring of it. Therefore the question of how to transfer modeled business processes from the business discipline of BPM to IT is crucial.

Whose responsibility is it to implement (automate) a business process?

In my opinion it is the responsibility of the process owner. The process owner in my opionion is foremost a business person. He is responsible to design and implement the business process. Design – I don’t mean necessarily the modeling with BPMN for example. This of course can be delegated. But the process owner is in the end responsible for the performance of the process and the profit it yields.

If the process owner decides, that a particular part of the process or the whole process should be supported by automation, then of course this part can be delegated.

Should we aim to move from design to deployment with no programming?

This is in my opinion unrealistic. Also it is a question of definition. What is programming and what is not programming? Typically people associate programming with imperative programming (like in C#) or with character based input. Modeling is on the other side which is more declarative and more graphical. But what about rules for example? They are character based and declarative. Also they can usually call subroutines, which are imperative. In some sense a BPMN model is also imperative. So what does this question mean? Probably it is, that it must be made easier for business experts to express which process they have and which they want. Of course it is a big benefit, if these models can be used in runtime or transformed in some canonical way into runtime. The success depend on if it is possible to express the process in the languange of the domain of the business process owner. This is why I think that Domain Specific Languages must be desiged with the greatest care and intelligence. And I think that this area is much less expoited than it could be. In my opinion much more is possible that we have achieved on the great scale already.

Whose responsibility is it to maintain a business process?

In my opinion it is the Business Process owners responsibility, who is a business person. And he might delegate it to someone of IT. However the model is the common communication channel between the two. So the model must be accurate, understandable, detailed, summary, and optimally simulateable. Especially the part of  interactive simulation has been much underestimated in my opinion, because it is able to show the behavior of a system implementation of a business process before it is implemented.

It is a trend to offer tooling that supports BPMN modeling together with model syntax checking and model simulation. For example see BPMN simulation and syntax checking in ARIS.

Model syntax checking can make sure, that modeling rules, that are statically checkable are kept. It is definitely a help. Especially beginners do not know all of the syntax rules and are guided by the checks. Also experts might find this feature helpful.

Model simulation can be distiguished into

1. Interactive simulation of a single process instance and
2. Cumulative simulation, where many process instances are created and throughput and latency are determined

Especially the ineractive simulation of a single process instance can also be a great help in understanding the model and even the modeling elements and it’s semantics.

The cumulative modeling itself is more like a determination, if the underlying business process is optimal or not.

Another category is thinkable: The verification. While cumulative simulation or single model instance simulation can not ensure, that certain attributes for a process hold, like the absence of deadlocks, verification can. Here it is decisive to find the right attributes of a process that shall be tested.

All of this are technical means to achieve better model quality, and all of these are useful. But none of these is so useful as a governance process. Just because humans can without all of these means do the same thing and they can do even more. They find problems, that even the most sophisticated syntax checker, simulator or verification routine will never find. Also what all of these methods can only find is the consistency of the model in itself (or with another model), but never can test the correspondence of the model with the real world process. This will still be left for humans for all times.

Therefore while all of these means of checking and testing are useful, because they are comfortable, they can or should never substitute a governance process.

This may happen: The right means are used for the wrong purpose, and the result is a disaster.

I have already discussed, that the modeling purpose does determine the outcome of a modeling exercise.

So what happens, if you use the right modeling language for the wrong purpose? It ends up in spaghetti models.

If you try to use a BPMN model for the purpose of model driven development – as mentioned in the blog (i.e. to generate coding) – for a business process with many special cases, then the result can be a spaghetti model. But this is not because BPMN is not good, it is because the right means for the wrong purpose has been used.

What is the level of detail that should be modeled? By which modeling technique it should be modeled? These difficult questions are best solved within the scope of a model governance process. As soon as a model become a subsitute for coding only – i.e. it is not human readable any more – it misses it’s purpose. Then it would be better to code. A governance process makes sure, that it is still human readable.

Furthermore it needs to be considered, that BPMN is not the only modeling language in the world and should not be used for purposes, where other means are better. I will elaborate on this later.

In itself this is not sufficient to achieve a consistent model quality in designing BPMN models. More is needed. The missing element is a governance process.

What is a governance process in this context?

What you need to design high quality (BPMN) models is experience. It is always possible to solve a certain modeling problem is different ways. Which is the best way for which kind of modeling problem? Unter which circumstances is which solution better? Is a certain solution consistently applied across a large set of models, if the underlying modeling problem is the same? What are the modeling rules, what are the patterns?

Theoretically it is possible, that a single person has all the experience needed. But still then this single persons approach differs from an approach of another single person. Also it is not clear if this single person is always available. Furthermore we are humans and we err.

So the elements of a governance process, that produces consistently high quality in modeling are these:

1. A defined number of modeling experts with different background, which collaborate over a long period of time with some, but little fluctuation.
2. A defined review process with enought time to study a model for all reviewers (experts) and the possibility to accept or reject a model.
3. The possibility to raise issues, discuss pros and cons and find solutions.
4. A list of quality criteria, patterns and modeling guidelines which each model needs to fulfill. This grows over time by common action of the experts.

Each expert that takes part in such a governance expert council will learn from each new model review and the common expertise will rise. The quality level of models can be held consistently high. Futhermore is the feedback of such an governance expert council to the standard – in this case BPMN – invaluable, because they are those who find out even the subtle weaknesses of the standard over time. Each modeler, that commits to the governance process learns more than any theoretical class can ever teach him.

My answer would be, that the Pi Calculus is a Low Level desription calculus for processes that communicate with each other, messages and message channels. This serves the simulation and analysis. The choreography model and the collaboration model are more like a notation with metamodel covering the processes and the messages, but not the message channels. It is more for modeling than for analysis, although the model can be input to the analysis and the simulation.
Also every BPMN choreography model or collaboration model can be mapped to a Pi Calculus description, but not vice versa. Pi calculus is more general and has no notation. BPMN is guiding the modeling process and therefore easier to understand.

When one want to use the BPMN choreography model or collaboration model as input to a pi calculus conversion or a simulation and analysis, the quality of service contract needs to be specified before.

http://www.bpmnforum.net/blog/bpmn/bpmn-in-research/quality-of-service-contracts/
[ad]

Take for example

Activity.m

type Activity : DerivedItem
{
IsLoop : Logical = false;

}

The type Activity inherits from DerivedItem, which is nothing else than an artificial type which has nothing to do with the BPMN inheritance hierarchy.

Instead in BPMN Activity is a subclass of a FlowObject. So what has been done?

Activities : Activity* where
item.Id in FlowObjects.Id;

We have two extents, one for Activities, one for FlowObjects. The have hooked them up by id. Manually!!!!!

Is that a good idea? It makes all impressions of a workaround. Why aren’t they hokked up generically, if Olso had inheritance on the extent level – which is done anyway all over the model files.

It is no solution to merge every attribute of Activity into the extent Activities. There is no use of scattering the FlowObject Aspect (i.e. the fields, that belong to each and every FlowObject) across different extents. That would destroy polymorphy – i.e. getting all FlowObjects with one select.

So the solution ImhO chosen is somewhat smart. The only thing I complain about why there is the need to manually hook up the tables. This should be a built-in feature and there should exist a built-in member collection “super” for this kind of construction. Also there should be a built-in view to get all of an Activity (including the FlowObject aspect) at one select (if needed). (By the way today it is not even possible to construct a join view manually – I did not get it managed. So all the logic has to be in the client coding, which ImhO is bad design.)

I can’t think of a reason why this should not work. But for this M has to learn a little bit more. May be a solution is to better integrate the Entity Framework (EF) with Oslo.
[ad]