This is my BPMN 2.0 Overview Map.

It shows a Choreography model in the middle, Orchestration with public Processes and private Processes, that belong to the public Processes.

Systems integration is the realization of the underlying business processes. This sounds so simple. But in reality there is often a misalignment between the business process design and the systems design. It is the wrong way to just implement business processes, that are as they are today or that are designed without discretion of the principles of loose coupling.

Often system designers need knowledge about how business processes work, but on the other hand business process designers need knowledge about how system integration works. As long as both sides are willing to learn and willing to share the knowledge, it is possible to come up with common principles of modeling, that avoid the most common mistakes, that lead to project cost overrun or failure.  I say it clearly what I mean: using BPMN 2.0 choreography modeling language in itself is no gurantee for success. But: It is a VERY useful tool for the communication between the business and system experts, which is a necessary condition of success.

So in other words, it is necessary, that the process design follows the principles of loose coupling of business processes. That is no design task, that can be solved by system designers alone, if the business process is modeled in a tightly coupled way. In other words: If the business process is designed in the right way – in the loosely coupled way – then the system design is without a hitch. If the business process is designed in the wrong way – there is no way to save the project on the system design level.

So are business experts forced to design business processes different, just to make the job of system designers easier? No. If it is designed that way, it is a better business process. It would work even better even if there was no system, but just paper and phone. It is more tolerant to errors. It gives the individual more freedom to decide. It makes it easier to reach the goal. Yes, it requires a little bit more brain power than just modeling the sunny day case. But in the end it pays off abundantly.

And in my eyes this is good news. It is NOT the system programming that dominates the design and dictates the constraints. It can be the business process needs again, that prescribe the way to go. And that is why BPMN 2.0 is so helpful, because it starts with the business process model.

If you are german speaking, you might like this short video explaning the new possibilities of BPMN 2.0.

Neue Möglichkeiten mit BPMN 2.0 from AdaPro GmbH on Vimeo.

I found the collaboration between the companies very productive. Often some have a hidden agenda or have prejudices. In this case I can testify, that I personally did not perceive such a thing.

Of yourse every company has it’s worldview. I found IBM had the strength in workflow technology and metamodeling. I found, that Oracle had an especially deep knowledge in message exchange. And SAP had extensibe experience in business processes and their modeling.

There were strong contrary positions, due to the fact, that there were two different consortiums that prepared a submission.

• Adaptive, Axway Software, Hewlett-Packard, Lombardi Software, MEGA International, Troux, Unisys.
• IBM, Oracle, SAP AG, and Unisys.

There was a collaboration of project management level and the assessment of a common submission. On the concept level there was the discussion of BPDM (Business Process Definition Metamodel) should be the unterlying meta model or not, a 2007 OMG standard for a general exchange format for processes.For IBM, Oracle, SAP a native BPMN metamodel with possible mapping to BPDM was the course we chose.

But there was a very productive part in this controversy. Because members of the other submission team joined also our discussion, our discussion was much enriched. Especially the contributions of the NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology of the US) revealed many special cases that can happen during message exchange, that were not previously in the discussion. I found that especially inspiring, because I had encountered many of these special cases previously in my architecture projects. That was about the same time that I joined the discussion in more detail. However within the BPDM approach I found some pre-determinations that I definitely could not follow. For example I could not agree, that temporal relations (i.e. that message has to be earlier/later than that messate) should be the main way to describe relations, because in my opinion mere temporal relations do not sufficiently describe cause/effect relationship or constraints between exchanged messages. However there was a significant openness in the discussion that allowed us to find compromises that could achieve very good advances to adress use cases. I personally had significant objections to the choreography modeling. However they could also be resolved – not so elegantly as I had wished – but resolved.

However this was a very interesting discussion, that was not fully completed within the scope of BPMN 2.0 and that I hope I can follow up in the near future.

In the next blog post I will go into details of the my view on BPMN 2.0 and the new modeling possibilities that it offers.

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

It was rightly stated in the presentation, that UML sequence diagrams are insufficient to model behavior and that a new kind of modeling method is needed. Also the lack of a modeling method for operations of a class was obvious – nobody knows in which sequence they have to be called – if not prose does describe it. Therefore a new modeling method was proposed, that displays classes as swim lanes containing the operation definitions of the class as nested activities containing actions. In this “action language” sequences can be expressed by arrows between actions of one swim lane and other swim lanes.

In my opinion this idea points into the right direction. Actions / operations must be set into relation with regards to their mutual constraints and a simple graphical notation for this is needed.

I did not understand however why it is necessary to distinguish between operations and actions, because in my opinion the actions in this method reveals details of the inner structure of the operations, which is in my opinion not relevant. Furthermore in my opinion the flow based modeling (arrows) leads into a model explosion, if big examples (business use cases) are modeled.

In my opinion the suggestion of (Engels, 2009) was more appropriate to the task in this aspect.

References

Engels, G. (2009). Keynote: Automatic generation of behavioral code – too ambitious or even unwanted? In M. Aksit, E. Kindler, A. McNeile, & E. Roubtsova (Hrsg.), First European Workshop on Behaviour Modelling in Model Driven Architecture (BM-MDA). Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Centre for Telematics and Information Technology Workshop Proceedings.

Kalnis, A., Celms, E., Kalnina, E., & Sostaks, A. (2009). Behaviour Modelling Notation for Information Systems Design. In M. Aksit, E. Kindler, A. McNeile, & E. Roubtsova (Ed.), First European Workshop on Behaviour Modelling in Model Driven Architecture (BM-MDA) (pp. 29-40). Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Centre for Telematics and Information Technology Workshop Proceedings.

The second Presentation was about Weaving Executeability into UML Class Diagrams from Elvinia Riccobene of the Universtià degli Studi di Milano, Italy.

The introductory criticue about describing object contracts with a constraint language only (like OCL – or pre- and postconditions of methods / operations as mentioned before) was, that it was not possible to change the state of an object or a system by a postcondition. It was said, that it was better to describe this in an Abstract State Machine (ASM).

An ASM does not only describe preconditions for the execution of a function, but also the transition of the state – i.e. it is directly executable – platform independently (and thereby simulateable).

My personal opinion about this is, that in modelling the behavior of a business object a certain kind of nondeterminism is needed. For example if there would be a function “check credit limit” for a customer – this can be quite complex in terms of business functionality. So in an ASM you have the choice to model all the complexity of this decision, but then it is not a model any more, but it is the system implementation itself. So there is no other way than to do an abstraction and only model that ther outcome can be (granted, denied) or (granted, denied, manual decision needed) or whatever decision result needs to be modeled. If that is true, even in the ASM some nondeterminism is needed, which leads to limited executeability (i.e. a user must decide or chance or some simplified algorithm or the formalism is used for state space search).

But then the difference to modelling postconditions is not so big, because, the postcondition only states as well, that the result of the operation can be (granted, denied) or (granted, denied, manual decision needed). If the result is unary, then also the postcondition modelling can be used for execution.

In the succeeding part of the presentation it was explained in detail how ASM and UML class diagrams (as one example of any metamodel) can be weaved together to form new classes which are able to model the behavior in this language. But in my opinion first a common understanding on the more fundamental questions should be tried to reached, which I mentioned, before too much specific should deviate us from the discussion.

• 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.