BPM

Random notes from Gartner BPM Summit in Orlando.

I was thinking … We often think of Agile as a trend within development and software architecture. But some of the tenets of this movement appear in the discussions of BPM advocates, many of them residing in Operations. SOA teams had better talk and walk the Agile talk and walk just as well as anyone … Continued »

In BPM complexity, Active Endpoints finds a middle road

Business process management systems (BPMSs) can be criticized for being either too business user-centric and lightweight, or overly technical and not user-friendly. The culture of SOA, however, is a culture of collaboration between departments and that can be useful for a BPMS to emulate.

A SOA-based BPMS targeting development teams, Active Endpoints’ ActiveVOS seeks to take a middle road approach to this problem. The company just launched the ActiveVOS 7.0 release, where it updated core technologies and streamlined the user experience a bit.

“BPM suites that focus on business users, they don’t get technical enough,” said Alex Neihaus, VP of marketing at Active Endpoints. “They become islands of computing and sit off by themselves. And with BPMS for architects and developers, the level of cost and complexity is beyond the level of what most people are willing to undertake.”

The company’s approach is to offer drag-and-drop AJAX forms using Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) 2.0 to generate executable Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) 2.0 processes. When a step is dragged into a process, the flow is automatically mapped out and can then be altered.

There is also built in support for interfacing with human processes via the WS-HumanTask standard. The BPMS supports a host of standards

Michael Rowley, the company’s CTO, said the new version would also support mashups.

 “There is a new approach to enterprise mashups,” said Rowley. “Put all of the logic for presentation on the client and have the calls go right into the enterprises services layer.”

Rowley said it is too sluggish to have mashups put in calls to data providers. Rather, he favors having the calls talk directly to the services handling the data. This keeps the data on the mashup the same as the data used by the services.

Smart Jam from IBM and a side note

IBM is announcing a new set of professional services. They include IBM Smart Business Desktop on the IBM Cloud, IBM Mobile Enterprise Services for Managed Blackberry, and IBM Converged Communications Services.

As  part of the push, IBM will feature a Jam – a large-scale webcast that will include participation by James Surowiecki, author of “The Wisdom of the Crowds.” 

In the background, IBM is preparing another push on its Smarter Planet initiative, with a focus on the BPM and collaboration software fronts. ‘‘Collaboration’’ has been a watchword at the company’s Lotus group for a number of years but, increasingly, the collaboration is going to be posited within business processes.

There will be more handholding across the groups in IBM going forward, as the company goes to market with new vertical solutions.

Side note: Survey data disclosed by the company as part of the Smart Planet effort suggests that there is plenty of room for improvement in business processes. IBM estimates an average of 5.3 hours per employee per week is wasted because of inefficient processes. This figure somewhat dovetails with The Journal of Irreproducible Results data that suggests U.S. workers spent about 5 hours per week in recent months trying to figure out who would replace Paula Abdul on American Idol.

BPM ‘cloud’ vendor picks up Jetty application server

There has been more than some discussion about SOA vendors moving to cloud computing, but BPM vendors are going there too. Witness the path of Intalio, now positioned as ”the leading vendor of enterprise cloud computing platforms.”  Continued »

Recently noted: BPM and SOA; new products; new transactional architectures

by Jack Vaughan

Sometimes we have to remind ourselves about the obvious things. Business Process Management is about processes. SOA is about architecture. The two have been involved in a tango in recent months, as software architects work with their business-side brethren to make change happen in the organization. On one level, the dance of architecture and process is very familiar. Yet it plays out today in unique ways as you will find in our BPM tutorial.

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