Please believe me when I say, I am not trying to use $5.00 words just because I can.

But one I read recently in the paper that had me running for a dictionary– shibboleth — got me to thinking about one of the biggest, most often repeated fictions in BPM. What am I talking about? The idea that end users can, will and want to create their own executable process models.

Wiktionary defines shibboleth as “A common or longstanding belief, custom, or catchphrase associated with a particular group, especially one with little current meaning or truth.” WordNet at princeton.edu is even more blunt in defining shibboleth: “A favorite saying of a sect or political group.”

Both definitions capture the wishful thinking, IT-bashing and counter-organizational thinking inherent in the dogma that business process management suites (BPMS) will somehow “free” end users from the chains of IT and enable them to build enterprise-class, bet-your-entire-business processes by themselves. The WordNet definition, in particular, reminds me of the triumphalism one hears from some industry analysts who insist that this is really happening in the real world.

Uhhh, ’scuse us for interrupting the feedback loop, but we don’t think so.

We first debunked the BPMS-as-destroyer-of-IT-and-liberator-of-end-users idea with Sandy Kemsley in a webinar almost a year ago. Her “four myths,” stylized in the graphic in this post, remain the most perceptive distillation of what’s wrong with the idea. Her simple common sense (developing process applications is not in most end users’ skill sets) along with an understanding of what end users in business want to do (their jobs, not IT’s work) debunk the “world-as-we-want-it-to-be” thinkers who promote end user-driven BPM over collaboration with IT.

We think ActiveVOS BPMS has been growing rapidly because it strives to bring IT and the business together. We envision collaboration among an extended development team, using an architecturally-correct, standards-based BPM system. Yes, end users are involved. Yes, they “own” the process and the model. Yes, they use the BPMS. But, no, they don’t deploy, manage or operate the BPMS.

BPM has changed the way IT and business people work together. But it hasn’t — and won’t — replace IT.

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The BPMS shibboleth, or hope undisturbed by reality

We hope you enjoy this podcast. We’d love to hear your feedback on the series. Just email us or leave a comment here.

Remember: sign up for next week’s CTO Tuesdays here. We will be expanding on persistence to talk about BPMS support for long-running transactions.

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CTO Tuesdays #16: The state of BPMS state: persistence for process

If you haven’t been attending our CTO Tuesdays BPMS podcast, we’d like to invite you to become one of our “regulars” starting next week. We’re doing something a little different next week…more on that in a minute.

CTO Tuesdays is, we think, something unique for users of business process management technology. Every Tuesday at noon ET, 9am PT, 17:00 GMT, our CTO Michael Rowley, delivers a short talk on a broad range of topics spanning the BPMN diamond to complex event processing to an introduction to BPMN 2.0.

These talks are detailed and technical. (Come with the rubber band on your propeller-head hat wound up very tight.) These BPMS podcasts are not ActiveVOS commercials (though we do demonstrate the concepts Michael is discussing in ActiveVOS). Each week, we tackle a single topic and try to limit content to about 30 minutes. After, we have a panel Q&A with attendees to discuss the content Michael  — or our guest CTO — has presented. Personally, I can’t wait for the Q&A because I think it’s where I learn the most about BPM technology. The overall idea for the podcast is that in less than an hour, you can learn enough about some aspect of business process management and BPM technology to enable you to continue to explore BPM on your own.

So far, we’ve presented and recorded 15 episodes. And the response from the BPM community has been overwhelmingly positive. (Access replays at www.ctotuesdays.com and the feed at www.ctotuesdays.com/feed.)

Starting March 9 and continuing on March 16, we’re going to try something a little different. Michael will present, for the first time, two separate, but thematically related topics:

• On March 9: The state of BPMS state: persistence for process
• On March 16: How BPMSs support long-running transactions

The first topic is one I’ve nagged Michael to discuss: how does a BPMS persist long-running transaction state? The second takes this idea and builds on it by comparing a BPMS to a traditional transaction monitor (CICS, anyone?) and describing BPMS support for long-running business transactions.

No matter where you are in your thinking about BPM — a newbie, actively trying your first process project, a grizzled veteran — CTO Tuesdays is for you.

You can always register for the upcoming CTO Tuesdays at www.activevos.com/ctot. Registration is free.

Be sure to join us — and bring all your friends.

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CTO Tuesdays two-part mini-series

There are three formats of the webinar attached to this post. For iTunes and iPod touch/iPhone users, an .m4v is available. A Flash file that can be streamed from the blog and/or downloaded is attached and a Windows Media 9 .wmv is also available.

Please remember to register for next week’s CTO Tuesdays at http://www.activevos.com/ctot

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CTO Tuesdays #15: Using Java with business processes

Attached to this post are two PDFs. First, a press release announcing the results and, second, a copy of Ovum’s conclusions along with their “radar” (or detailed report) on ActiveVOS.

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Ovum BPMS report adds ActiveVOS to “consider” list

I came across an interesting discussion on LinkedIn which lead me to this post by Mark McGregor who asks, “…is BPMS now just becoming the next incarnation of application development”?

Our short answer is, “Yes…and the best way to get there is to minimize the disruption to application development.” In other words, BPMSs need to look and feel like previous-generation tools, all the while doing the right thing architecturally and automatically.

In short, it shouldn’t be necessary to teach old dogs new tricks. You simply swap in a new, improved dog in that looks and barks like the old dog…and the new dog’s “firmware” already knows about the new, modern tricks of app dev. (And I apologize for the tortured metaphor and to anyone horrified at the idea of swapping out Fido 1.0 for Fido 2.0.)

That’s what we are doing in ActiveVOS. Like your integrated development toolset for monolithic programs? We’ve got one that goes from modeling to deployment in a single tool. Holding on to that Turbo Pascal-like step/start/stop debugger? Ours works with services. Want to integrate with Java? REST calls? SOAP? Check, check and check.

Beyond just being familiar, for BPMS to become the next incarnation of application development, we believe there has to be a payoff for making the changes that using a BPMS requires. IOW, there are things that cannot be mapped to the previous experience — and which shouldn’t be. But a good BPMS still has to give application developers a reason to step up to the bar and change their habits.

For example, instead of coding, you model in a BPMS. Payoff? Learning BPMN 2.0. What else does an application developer get in return for allowing op codes to be pried from their cold, dead hands? How about automatic documentation plus resource simulation. The things that are new are really, really new and exciting…and worth the price of admission. That combo of familiar and enticingly new capabilities is what will attract developers and, ultimately, change the way apps are developed.

So, Mark has a really excellent point when he says that key BPMS players today include traditional app dev companies like IBM and Oracle. What Mark is hinting at is something we violently agree with: for BPM as a discipline to become the dominant way of creating apps, developers have to conclude that BPMSs are their primary development environments. Tools focused on end users won’t cut it for these developers. That’s why vendors like us have put so much effort and attention on app devs (how about we call them process developers?).

We (and they) know that until BPMS becomes the standard way in which new processes are created — companies that want the advantages of process thinking won’t get it.

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Teaching application developers new tricks…maybe

There are three formats attached to this post. First, an iPod touch/iPhone-formatted .m4v. We also have a Flash file that can be streamed from the blog and a Windows Media 9-encoded .wmv.

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VOSibilities podcast #45: An introduction to T-Impact

But you’d be missing a really interesting and, dare I say it, fun topic. Trust me.

This week Michael Rowley tackles bugs in BPMSs. Bugs are just a part of life when creating business applications. But what about when you are creating process applications using a model-based BPMS? What happens then? How does the BPMS help you identify — even prevent and eliminate — bugs? Watch this episode to find out how standards like BPMN 2.0 and BPEL work together to help make designing and executing process applications more error-free.

As always, we have three formats of the podcast posted. There’s an iPod touch/iPhone .m4v; a Flash file that can be streamed from the blog and a Windows Media 9 .wmv.

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CTO Tuesdays #14: Preventing problems through static analysis of business processes

But what is the state of BPMN 2.0 usage in the real world? This webinar, originally broadcast on February 18, 2010, offers some answers.

The bottom line? BPMN 2.0 usage is gaining traction — it’s becoming the modeling notation of choice for everything from documentation to creating executable process applications. If you are interested in what BPMN can do for you, you will want to watch this webinar replay to learn more about BPMN and how people are using it today. Watch Sandy Kemsley show you how not to create BPMN models as she parades models from the “BPMN modeling hall of shame.” And you can also watch as Michael Rowley shows you how to make BPMN executable with BPEL. At the end of the webinar is a very stimulating Q&A in which Kemsley and Rowley discuss the future of the BPMN specification and answer attendees’ questions.

A variety of formats are attached to this post, including a Flash format that can be streamed from the blog. Also, the slides Sandy and Michael presented are available in PDF form.

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VOSibilities podcast #44: The state of BPMN: an update from the real world

That’s how we feel about business process management systems (BPMS) and enterprise content management systems (ECM). These two important technologies are made for each other.

If you have an important business process you want to automate, it’s likely to have people, processes and documents that all need to work together. And, you are likely to want everything to work together based on open, industry-wide standards. We’d go so far as to say, it’s an absolute requirement that the BPMS and ECM be totally based on standards.

That’s what Alfresco and ActiveVOS offer together. The best capabilities; the most openness.

Watch the replay of this webinar — and the absolutely brilliant demo of ActiveVOS BPMS and Alfresco ECM working together — to see how you can quickly, easily and compatibly produce better process applications for your organization.

There are three formats attached to this post, along with a PDF of the slides presented in the webinar. First is an iPod touch/iPhone-formatted .m4v. Second, a Flash .flv file that can be downloaded or played from the blog. Third, a Windows Media 9-encoded .wmv is available.

We hope you enjoy this introduction to combining BPM and ECM technologies.

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VOSibilities podcast #43: Combining BPMS and ECM for better process applications

There are three versions of the podcast attached to this post. First, an iPod touch/iPhone-formatted .m4v file (also available in the iTunes Store; seach for “vosibilities”). Second, a Flash .flv file which can be viewed here on the blog and/or downloaded. Third, a Windows Media 9-encoded .wmv file.

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CTO Tuesdays #13: Viewing and fixing running processes

XPDL 2.1 is already supported by many tools, including ActiveVOS, so extending XPDL to support the new constructs in BPMN 2.0 will provide the fastest path for most vendors to achieve some level of interoperability of their BPMN 2.0 models.

Nonetheless, I’ve found that most people who have asked Active Endpoints about model import/export formats have been people who have the wrong idea of how to work with a BPMS. These are people who are trying to hold on to their old waterfall methodology for building software, where there are separate tools for building process models during analysis from the development tools that are later used to create the software. In that world, there is a constant need to translate back and forth between the tools as changes may occur on either side.

And there’s the rub. The roundtrip translation always loses so much information that the effort to keep the separate representations in sync and accurate outweighs the value of using the automatic export / import functionality. Eventually, changes made on the analysis side get redone on the implementation side by hand, and vice versa.

The right way to work is to let the BPMS own the model. Yes, you may want to allow early requirements gathering to use simpler modeling tools, but those tend to be fairly informal flow charts anyway. Once you get involved in real modeling you should use the modeling capabilities of your BPMS. By “real modeling”, I mean that you are at the stage where the precise semantics of the notation used is important, since it is going to drive the actual semantics of the resulting software.

In the early phases, the process models are diagrams where the labels on the diagram are what really matter. For example, the arrows coming out of an activity might formally imply that both directions can be followed at once, but the labels on the arrows have labels that imply that one one of them will happen. This is OK during the early stages of modeling, since it is another human who is going to be reading the model and they can guess what was really meant (or they can ask, if they aren’t sure).

Once you are ready to do real modeling, it is time to get the BPMS involved. That way the process model you create will go the rest of the way through the lifecycle of the project without need for translation, much less round-trip translation. How you get from the informal stage to the formal stage of process modeling isn’t really all that important. Yes, you can use XPDL 2.1, but it doesn’t really even matter if you have to redraw it from scratch. Drawing it is very fast in a capable designer like ActiveVOS, and the person doing the modeling is already going to have to be carefully considering each jot and tiddle of the original diagram to determine how to correctly model what the user really wanted to begin with.

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The BPMS owns the model

Three versions of the podcast are attached. An iPod touch/iPhone-formatted .m4v, a Flash file that can be downloaded and/or played from the blog and a Windows Media 9-formatted .wmv

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VOSibilities podcast #42: Where does BPM go now? A business and technology perspective

Everyone agrees: for BPM to succeed as a new approach to developing applications, BPMSs need to be based on fundamentally sound application architecture. Today, that means using SOA principles. Here’s a link to this important article.

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searchSOA.com: “This the moment for SOA-based BPMS to shine”

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Alfresco CTO to present on “CTO Tuesdays”

Three versions of the webinar are attached to this post: an iPod-formatted .m4v file, a Flash .flv file and a Windows Media 9-formatted .wmv.

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CTO Tuesdays #11: Structured and unstructured BPMN modeling

There are three formats available. First, an iPod-formatted .m4v. Second, a Flash .flv file which can be streamed directly from the blog or downloaded. Third, a Windows Media 9-encoded .wmv. The .wmv file is about 55MB in size; the other two are about 96MB.

Please feel free to request an evaluation of ActiveVOS to begin to apply what you see and learn in this webinar to your business processes.

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VOSibilities podcast #41: ActiveVOS 7 and IBM Rational Requirements Composer

We have posted three formats of the webinar replay. First is an iPod-formatted .m4v file. Also, a Flash file that can be played from the blog and/or downloaded. Finally, we have included a Windows Media 9-encoded .wmv file.

Please join us every week at noon ET, 9am PT and 17:00 GMT for CTO Tuesdays.

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CTO Tuesdays #10 Using requirements gathering tools with a BPMS

In our first episode of the new year, Active Endpoints CTO Michael Rowley covers some basic theory of how complex event processing (CEP) works and makes the case for integrating a CEP engine directly into the BPM engine. Topics covered include the Event Processing Language (EPL), time windows as a method of correlating disparate events and event streams. In short, a fascinating — and accessible — introduction to a hot technical topic.

We have attached several formats of the webinar replay to this post. First, for iTunes subscribers, we have a .m4v file, perfect for taking along on your iPod. RSS feed subscribers will automatically receive this file. Also, there’s a .flv file which can be played directly on the blog (click where it says “click here” to play it). Also, we have attached a Windows Media 9-encoded .wmv file. Finally, the slides Michael presented are attached as a .pdf.

Be sure to join us live every Tuesday at noon ET, 9am PT, 17:00 UTC for a new topic. You can always register for the upcoming CTO Tuesdays webinar at http://www.activevos.com/ctot. Replays are usually posted here on our blog within 48 hours.

We have an exciting agenda of upcoming episodes, and later in the first part of Q1, we hope to guest CTOs join us for their perspectives on technical topics. We hope you will join us live each week.

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CTO Tuesdays #9: BPM as an event source for CEP

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ActiveVOS Experiences Rapid Sales Growth in Q4 2009

In this episode, Active Endpoints CTO Michael Rowley gives what might be the most concise, “digestable” overview of BPMN 2.0 available on the Web. If you are new to BPMN and want to see what it can do for you and your organization, this content is for you. In this webinar, Rowley discusses basic BPMN notation, including activities, events and gateways. And, in an expansive Q&A following the presentation, Rowley answers questions about the use and capabilities of BPMN.

There are four attachments contained in this post. First, an iPod-formatted .m4v recording of the webinar. This is for subscribers to the podcast in iTunes (search on “vosibilities”). Next, is a Flash .flv file which is intended to stream from the blog, though at the small size I have to limit the player to on the blog (416×312), it’s not the best experience. The .flv file itself is at 640×480, so feel free to download it if you want to play it locally. Next we have the original-sized Windows Media 9-encoded .wmv file. Finally, a PDF of the slides Rowley presented are attached.

We hope you find this content useful. You can always access the replays of CTO Tuesdays here on our blog, www.vosibilities.com in the “CTO Tuesdays” category, in our podcast on iTunes and via www.ctotuesdays.com or, for an RSS feed, www.ctotuesdays.com/feed. We’re trying to make it easy to find and use this content, so if there’s a method you prefer we haven’t accounted for, please let us know.

CTO Tuesdays will return to our every-Tuesday-at-noon-ET schedule in early January, 2010.  Next year we have some exciting additions planned, including guest appearances of CTOs from other leading technology companies. Make sure you sign up to attend every week. You can always sign up for the next episode at www.activevos.com/ctot.

Finally, in answer to a question we had in the Q&A, here’s a link to the OMG specification for BPMN 2.0. In Annex A of this document, you can find the differences between BPMN 1.2 and BPMN 2.0.

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CTO Tuesdays #8: An Introduction to BPMN

As those of you who follow us know, we’re very proud of the fact that ActiveVOS is built from the ground up on standards. We strongly believe that standards support is the entry price for any BPMS that hopes to change the way process applications are built and deployed.

Now, I am pleased to report that OASIS has announced that the WS-BPEL Extension for People (also known by its alliterative shorthand name, BPEL4People) 1.1 specification is available for public review. In addition, the companion specification, WS-HumanTask 1.1, is also available for public review. ActiveVOS 7 implements both WS-HumanTask and BPEL4People.

In short, these two standards marry automated processing with a vastly updated and more intelligent approach to human workflow that (finally!) makes including people in complex processes as easy as including any system task.

Consider the graphic above. Prior to WS-HumanTask (and BPEL4People), creating human tasks usually required interaction with a proprietary workflow system that didn’t necessarily integrate easily with the rest of the application architecture:

One of the motivations of WS-HumanTask was an increasingly important need to support the ability to allow any application to create human tasks in a service-oriented manner. Human tasks had traditionally been created by tightly-coupled workflow management systems (WFMS). In such environments the workflow management system managed the entirety of a task’s lifecycle, an approach that did not allow the means to directly affect a task’s lifecycle outside of the workflow management environment (other than for a human to actually carry out the task). Particularly significant was an inability to allow applications to create a human task in such tightly coupled environments.

This graphic neatly shows how these new standards separate — and standardize — the work items from the processing of those items. All in all, a huge step forward for a new generation of process apps.

When you do take a look at the specs, I hope you’ll notice the level of commitment Active Endpoints has made to developing and finalizing these standards. Two of our technical leaders, Luc Clément and Michael Rowley, are listed as editors for the drafts. They are helping make a lasting contribution to BPM through their efforts to bring these standards to market, in partnership with the other members of the OASIS Technical Committee.

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BPEL4People and WS-HumanTask 1.1 reach public review

Today, we are very pleased to announce another customer success story for ActiveVOS. Details are in the press release attached to this post.

This story is of particular note because we are showing ActiveVOS 7 this week at the Gartner BPM Summit. In this morning’s opening keynote, I listened as Janelle Hill and Jim Sinur described the benefits of BPM: speed, flexibility, responsiveness, business-owner-driven change, competitive advantage.

I was all smiles. See, I had the pleasure of interviewing the customer for this press release. As Janelle and Jim  described the possibilities of BPM — how it can fundamentally change businesses — I remembered the interview with TheWatchery.Com and our excitement when they told us that ActiveVOS had allowed them to make millions of dollars overnight because they could change their processes so quickly. I think this story embodies much of what we are hearing about at the BPM Summit.

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Time is money for TheWatchery.Com using ActiveVOS

Building a smart grid means changing many of the core things a utility does that involve customers. It’s nitty-gritty operations like ordering new meters…getting them installed…making sure billing systems can handle customers who sell energy back to the grid and/or are interruptible.

We are very excited that ActiveVOS is BPMS has been chosen to help the global effort to become more energy-smart.

BTW, ActiveVOS 7 is now available for download.

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ActiveVOS supports smart grid deployment in Scandinavia

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Active Endpoints announces ActiveVOS 7.0

As most software companies do, we have been previewing the next release of our BPMS, ActiveVOS 7.0, to journalists, analysts and important bloggers. Last week, we had the pleasure of showing the new release to Dana Gardner, who has blogged about his impressions on zdnet.com.

Dana talks in his post about a “new Moore’s Law” in which the limits of silicon to deliver productivity have been reached. Instead, he envisions a wave of innovation in process applicaitons that, combined with continued advances in hardware, re-accelerate productivity:

This new…law declares that productivity today is better gained from improving business processes and the way human tasks and machines tasks are combined to rapidly improve results. Productivity needs to come from ongoing process innovation and refinement.

This is a very exciting idea…and we are pleased to be one of the ways to enable the next wave of process applications.

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Dana Gardner on ActiveVOS 7.0

As has become something of a tradition here at Active Endpoints, I recently sat down with CTO Michael Rowley and Sr. Director of Products Luc Clément to talk about ActiveVOS 7.0 from the perspective of two of the people who have been heavily involved in the design and development of this major release.

ActiveVOS 7.0 is a major release of the BPMS and contains many new innovative capabilities. In fact, our discussion of the new BPMN 2.0 design canvas and our new AJAX forms design capability which allows humans to become services in an orchestration was so interesting that we decided to cover other new features in an additional podcast so as to not run too long in this one.

Michael, Luc and I will record a part 2 covering those features soon. In the meantime, we hope you enjoy this introduction to ActiveVOS 7.0 BPMN 2.0 design with BPEL execution and the discussion of how WS-HumanTask was implemented in an AJAX forms designer.

Update: As promised, we have posted part 2 of this discussion here.

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VOSibilities podcast #37: ActiveVOS 7.0, part 1

Today, we are pleased to make available a new white paper by well-known industry analyst Sandra Rogers which offers additional insight into this very question.

Here’s an excerpt from the paper:

Organizations are discovering that the use of more visual and self-documenting solutions can better ensure that requirements are commonly understood and agreed upon, and measure if certain business goals met. Utilizing BPMSs like ActiveVOS that help individuals capture current and future state, that are easier to use and allow for multiple and concurrent cycles while designing and enhancing business processes, can greatly impact overall results. The use of such technology that provides deeper transparency into one’s processes, enables the sharing of best practices, and allows business stakeholders building degrees of freedom in adjust application and process parameters can help bring all parties into further alignment.

We hope you enjoy Sandy’s paper.

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New white paper on business and IT alignment

Joe McKendrick has revisited the debate about the relationship of BPM and SOA by commenting on JP Morgenthal’s assertion that SOA and BPM initiatives should be kept separate.

With all due respect to JP, we think he’s got it wrong. BPM and SOA do need to be reconciled.

JP seems to have fallen into a trap that confuses the need to achieve two complimentary goals with the need to combine the initiatives that strive for those goals.

So sure, the initiative to introduce a business process culture into an organization should be separate from an initiative that drives toward a service-oriented architecture, but both initiatives have to be able to succeed. Those that merely view BPM as the killer application that justifies purchasing stacks of “SOA” middleware are missing the key “BPM” value proposition. Conversely, pure-play BPMers risk building impenetrable fortresses of locked in process that can’t be shared/reused.

In JP’s world, the benefits of BPM will not materialize for either the business which is trying to rationalize work or by the architecture groups trying to rationalize infrastructure supporting that work. In order for them both to succeed, any application that is developed with a BPMS must introduce its new functionality as a collection of services.

Implementing “BPM” does not suddenly provide an excuse to intertwine business logic with presentation logic. Reusable services must be created in order for the long-term success of the enterprise and its BPM initiatives. BPM must be inclusive – not a fiefdom.

Workflow, human interaction, reports, event processing — all need to be incorporated in a service-based architecture if we’re ever to get to better business (i.e. BPM) and IT (i.e. infrastructure) alignment. In other words, BPM itself needs to be service-oriented.

Without a major course correction in current BPM-SOA approaches (with BPM as a consumer of services only) the respective visions of BPM and SOA stakeholders will not materialize. A service-oriented BPM has a much better chance of yielding an outcome where BPM and SOA can actually share and deliver on a common vision. Claiming, as JP does, that SOA and BPM “are not – repeat not – related” gives the incorrect impression that people who are creating business processes don’t need to care about SOA and that people creating services don’t need to care about BPM.

Neither is true.

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BPM and SOA belong together

As an enterprise architect, you have a tough job. Business people do not want to be “governed.” They see no need to use the infrastructure that you have carefully put in place. The more rigid you are, the more likely they will find a way to circumvent. Even if you find out they have ignored your policies, you are frequently not empowered to make them use the infrastructure. Further, while you know that building standards-based/service-oriented applications is clearly the best practice, SOA is probably not an “official” direction. Business users can still complain to their vice presidents that middleware is an impediment. Every day you are either awarded a medal or put in front of a firing squad.

The trend towards “the business” developing and running business process management systems is reflective of this destructive mindset of going around IT. We all know that they can be successful with “happy path” workflow modeling. But do we really want business users, with their own servers, managing and changing mission critical applications? Of course not. Islands of BPMS that exist outside of IT will eventually fail because of all the necessary exception handling, the effort required to get the data and deployment right, system-to-system integration and the lack of rigor around the software development life cycle.

The answer is a BPMS that lets the developer stay in their current tools, lifecycle, etc.  It is a given that, as vendors, we must lower the level of pre-requisites to allow non-programmers to do serious modeling, as well as build, test, deploy and optimize processes. Further, we must use collaboration diagrams to work with the more technical of business analysts so that they can sketch out requirements, modify/edit forms and storyboard. A portion of these analysts may even be able to adapt a process making quick changes to application templates.

As an enterprise architect, start thinking about creating a “federated” BPMS or orchestration layer in your architecture that facilitates the creation of business services. ESBs may be useful but are frequently not necessary and certainly should not be mandated. A BPMS should be able to run anywhere without infrastructure dependencies. The standards are there and becoming well established: BPMN for modeling, BPEL for executing business processes, WSDL for SOA services, WS-HumanTask for task management and XSD for data representation.

Business Process Management and SOA are not precise games. There will always be a balancing act to deliver the benefits. Don’t try to boil the ocean. Pragmatic adoption will allow you to both keep the business happy and support the long term goals of your CIO. ActiveVOS makes it easy. You can download a free, 30-day trial.  We have a rich set of content on our website that will quickly get you started but if you need help, our technical support people are standing by.

Don’t wake up a year or two from now only to find the company’s core applications running under desks in every fifth office.  You will never get them out!

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BPMS that an enterprise architect can embrace

This version is a draft of the What’s New in ActiveVOS 7.0 document. Please check back frequently for updated versions.

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What’s New in ActiveVOS 7.0

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Michael Rowley to present SCA at UCLA Java Users Group

A panel of industry experts discuss the impact of Software AG’s acquisition of IDS Sheer and what it might mean for BPM vendors, especially SAP.

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BriefingsDirect Analyst Insights Podcast #44: Big moves in BPM and SOA

Over the past year, we have invested heavily in ActiveVOS to turn it into the best BPMS for the development team. Why did we become a BPMS? Why not just remain a BPEL-based execution engine? After all, we have the best standards-based process execution engine on the planet. People loved it. And there’s clearly a need for execution engines.

The answer is that we have the skills and capabilities to do more for developers, business analysts and end users. Doing more means creating a complete, integrated, affordable and open BPM system that allows businesses to create the next generation of process applications. And while there are plenty of other BPMSs, we knew we could innovate in ways that speak directly and uniquely to the extended development team. (Just wait until you see what’s in ActiveVOS 7.0, slated for release in September. We think it’s going to blow you away.)

We also know that when application development technology is about to cycle to the “next thing,” it’s a big deal. It can mean upheaval. Developers are sometimes forced to leave their comfort zones, end users begin demanding more because they’ve heard about the next wave and the business expects newer technology to cost less and do more.

Everyone knows about the side-effects of changing technology. But what most people can’t tell you is when, exactly, change is about to happen. We can all look in the rear-view mirror and see when client-server replaced mainframe app dev. But what do you see right now out the front window of your car? Can you tell what’s next? Do you see it way far in the distance?

It’s a crucial question for us, because being a startup means we must out-innovate our competitors. We need to see what’s on the road because our competitors claim to own the road you are looking at through the front window of the car. So, we have to innovate in ways that minimize disruption and which don’t leave anyone behind.

What do we see when we look down that road? We’re convinced that business process management is the next technology cycle in application development. And that it’s happening now.

That’s why we were so gratified to read Forrester’s new TechRadar on BPMS (subscription to Forrester Research is required to read more than the abstract linked to here). Forrester’s report clearly documents that the shift to BPMS has begun. If you obtain the report, you will see that large percentages of companies that Forrester talked to are now actively using BPMS or thinking about how to begin. As Forrester says in the abstract, “Enterprises face increased demands for improvements in business agility; BPM tools can remove many of the barriers to success.”

We are excited that the BPM market has begun to accelerate. And we are also pleased to be acknowledged by Forrester’s analysts to be in that marketplace. Our message to the development and business analyst community echoes Forrester’s: BPMS is a huge opportunity to suceed at improving your business operations. We can recommend three things to you. Learn about BPMS (ideally, using ActiveVOS and our extensive, free educational materials in a free, supported trial).  Implement now on a project basis to gain experience. And, think very carefully about the costs of staying behind.

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Be sure to read the new Forrester TechRadar on BPMS

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Butler Group reports on ActiveVOS

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Naval Research Lab to present webinar on orchestration

Reference is made to a sample application that will be available for users to download and try. Please check back here frequently; we will post a link to that demo application as soon as it is available.

As is our custom, we have posted two versions of the replay. The first (which is also in our podcast feed) is an iPod-formatted .m4v file and is approximately 170MB is size. The second is a larger (365MB) DivX-encoded .avi.

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VOSibilities podcast #35: Breaking the IT bottleneck with ActiveVOS and rPath

Eine deutsche Version der Pressemitteilung ist auch beigefügt.

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ActiveVOS posts another record quarter of growth in Q2 2009

In this fascinating podcast, Luc Clément, senior director of products, and Michael Rowley, director of technology and strategy, discuss two very important topics in business process management systems (BPMS): workflow and rich internet applications (RIA). First, Michael overviews the progress that’s been made in the BPEL4People technical committee towards finalizing both the BPEL4People and WS-Human Task standards, hopefully by the end of this year. Then, he elaborates on how these standards change workflow forever and offer BPM development teams apabilities that make it easy to integrate human tasks into automated processes.

Then, Luc describes a a new SDK for ActiveVOS that permits Java developers to take advantage of the WS-Human Task worklist management capabilities. Luc and Michael point out that this Java SDK is just the beginning of what they are planning in ActiveVOS 7.0.

In a more detailed preview of ActiveVOS 7.0 than they have provided in previously, Michael and Luc discuss the architectural value of “eliminating” the presentation tier while coupling an AJAX-based, drag-and-drop UI generation capability directly to the ActiveVOS BPMS.

If you are interested in BPM, workflow, integrating human task and delivery of advanced processes to end users via portals and/or Web 2.0 and RIA technologies, you will find this podcast very informative.

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VOSibilities podcast #34: BPMS, workflow and rich internet applications (RIA)

A couple of minutes ago, Luc Clément, our product manager extraordinaire, finally found a couple of minutes away from work on our next (killer) release of ActiveVOS to stop in my office and show me something we’ve just posted to our website that I wanted to make sure readers of our blog heard about.

BPM systems are valued for their ability to combine both people and systems in a process. Further, we strongly believe that standards are the correct way to manage human tasks in extended human-machine process workflows. Therefore, ActiveVOS implements WS-Human Task and as part of that implementation, it includes a standard-compliant worklist UI.

Until now, developers could easily customize this worklist UI via XSLT. Now, we have extended that capability to developers working in Java via a Java SDK we call the ActiveVOS WS-Human Task and Identity Service Kit that permits Java developers to easily combine the power of ActiveVOS human task management with a UI of their choosing. Now, developers can use Java along with the UI framework of their choice to interface with the ActiveVOS WS-HT compliant server.

In the SDK, you’ll find everything you need to take advantage of the power of ActiveVOS’s BPMS combined with your favorite RIA framework. Very cool. We hope you enjoy this new capability. If you need a trial of ActiveVOS to test this new feature, please feel free to download it here.

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Java SDK permits direct access to WS-Human Task interface in ActiveVOS

A couple of weeks ago, the management team here met for a day to try to distill into a few words what we think is responsible for our recent successes. After all, customers have plenty of other apparent alternatives, from both behemoth software companies as well as smaller competitors.

After much discussion, we think we know what’s going on: ActiveVOS is winning new customers because, simply, it’s the BPMS that development teams love.

With that phrase, we think we have described why we succeed in a competitive market in tough economic times. ActiveVOS simply does a better job of what the extended development team — business analysts and software engineers collaborating with end users — needs to do to implement integrated, end-to-end processes that include both human workflows and automated systems. (For a revealing look at the relationship between end-users and development teams, watch a replay of Sandy Kemsley debunking the “four myths” of end user process development.)

OK, I know how this must sound to you. It’s what you’d expect from the marketing department: a cheery, upbeat, sunny view of our product devoid of any technical content. But the truth is that enthusiasm for your BPM system — how “cool” it is, how easily you can get your processes modeled and deployed — makes a huge difference in the results and the organization’s ultimate satisfaction with their BPM efforts.

So, ask yourself how emotionally attached you think you could get to the BPMS you are evaluating. Think about the level of effort the salespeople have to go to get you to overlook the challenges of ease of use, integration and features for collaboration their products present. Count the number of times they had to take you to lunch to develop that “personal touch”  – really just a way to get you to bond to them instead of their BPMS.

We recommend instead that you skip the high-calorie lunch, download a supported trial of ActiveVOS, start a proof-of-concept, and find out for yourself why ActiveVOS is generating such a positive reaction in the BPMS marketplace.

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Why we don’t have to buy ActiveVOS customers lunch to get them to love ActiveVOS

Selected from hundreds of entries, the five winners were chosen based on creativity and quality of work for their BPM applications and concepts. Congratulations to the winners!

Winners of the smart phone:

Kenneth Peeples, company undisclosed, Senior SOA Software Engineer

J.D. Baker, BAE Systems, Principal Systems Engineer

Winners of the music network player:

Susan Fox, company undisclosed, Product Manager

Michelle Crow, CMR – Complete Medical Record, Business Analyst

Denis Gagné, Trisotech

(photo unavailable)

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BPM in a bottle contest winners announced

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Active Endpoints Ships ActiveVOS 6.2 MultiSite BPMS

Read more about ActiveVOS 6.2 MultiSite in the PDF attached to this post.

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What’s New in ActiveVOS 6.2 BPMS

Long-time Active Endpoints follower and Forrester analyst Stefan Ried has written a post about us on the occasion of our new investment round that gives me a chance to address some points about our company and our product that we haven’t discussed very much on this blog.

Stefan writes, “It looks like the company is really heading to become a real BPM vendor. Coming out of the origin of a pure BPEL engine, their product evolved into a more and more comprehensive BPM product.” We are very grateful for this comment and so gratified that Stefan understands this about ActiveVOS.

Because Active Endpoints has been around for some time, we sometimes have trouble shaking a dismissive “just a BPEL engine” classification from analysts and bloggers who have not looked at ActiveVOS since we revised the product in March, 2008. Further, we suspect that some BPM advocates who’d rather not address issues raised by promoting model-based execution — the “pretty picture purists” — actually prefer to classify ActiveVOS as “just a BPEL engine.”

It’s as if they wish by doing so they could make BPEL irrelevant to BPM. In our ears, that sounds like denial. That’s because the nitty-gritty of how to actually get a business process executing on a real computer is one of those things you can hide behind a great demo…until the customer discovers that the promise of punching a button and having the process run in an integrated, end-to-end manner is a chimera. And an expensive one at that, since ignoring the execution issues early means great cost in consultants and IT people to get the process deployed. Just the thing model-based execution is designed to avoid.

Stefan goes on to issue two challenges to us at Active Endpoints. I’d like to address them both.

First, Stefan writes, that we need to create a “unique positioning.”

Done.

We have “declared for” IT developers. Our college major is making IT developers part of the collaboration necessary to design, model, develop, deploy and manage business processes. And we intend to make people love using ActiveVOS by making it easy. How would you make this ambition come true? You’d start just the way we have: create a single, integrated product that’s compatible, open and familiar.  With ActiveVOS, developers and business analysts can do what comes naturally — and ActiveVOS makes sure that what’s created is architecturally correct. Every time. No need to worry about “stacks.” ActiveVOS is the first real product that is “shrink-wrap middleware.” IBM, Oracle and SAP can’t get there — and aren’t trying. We assert — and increasing numbers of customers agree — that this is a very unique positioning for ActiveVOS. (And I was able to get it into a single paragraph, too.)

Second, Stefan advises that we “balance our ecosystem.” Active Endpoints’ success in the OEM marketplace allowed us to develop superior technology. After all, what’s harder: selling middleware to end users or selling it to other software companies? Combined with rigorous adherence to standards, that OEM experience has yielded a product with excellent reliability, performance, scalability and a widely deployed user base.

Today, just as we have innovated in BPM, we are innovating in our sales model. Now, we sell our ActiveVOS BPMS over the phone instead of via OEMers. We list our affordable prices on our website. How do we succeed at this? Simply,  it’s because ActiveVOS is a shrink-wrap BPMS. IBM, Oracle and SAP need fleets of expensive direct salespeople, planeloads of expensive consultants, months, and mountains of money to achieve anything useful. Mere mortals are successful with ActiveVOS, usually within a free trial period.

We think we have achieved the perfect balance in our ecosystem: an all-in-one product that is uniquely positioned in the marketplace. Combined with a novel go-to-market unlike anyone else in the BPMS business — one that works for customers — we have created an ecosystem that works for customers and gives us global reach.

Thanks, Stefan, for giving me the chance to put today’s Active Endpoints into sharper focus.

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Putting ActiveVOS BPMS into focus

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Fastenal Corp. uses ActiveVOS to implement SOA

Read all the details in the press release attached to this post. Enter at www.absolutebpm.com — and good luck!

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Active Endpoints announces “BPM in a Bottle Contest”

Ann Thomas Manes, vice president and research director for application platform strategies at Burton Group, has created quite a stir in her recent post where she says that although the term “SOA” is dead, the requirement for service-oriented architecture is stronger than ever. In this lively podcast, Dana Gardner interviews a panel of industry luminaries to help calibrate the life span of SOA and to expand on Ms. Manes’ position on SOA being under significant pressure, in particular due to today’s abysmal economic climate. Panelists include: Anne Thomas Manes; Tony Baer, senior analyst at Ovum; Jim Kobielus, senior analyst at Forrester Research; Joe McKendrick, independent analyst and prolific blogger on ZDNet and ebizQ; Dave Linthicum, founder of Linthicum Group and; JP Morgenthal, senior analyst at Burton Group.

Have a listen to this podcast and determine for yourself whether SOA is dead or alive. Whichever camp you belong to, we hope you’ll agree that ActiveVOS is truly an affordable, 100% standards-based, all-in-one BPMS that delivers “architecturally correct” SOA-based applications easily and quickly, empowering you to achieve your services goals today.

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BriefingsDirect Analyst Insights Podcast #36: SOA – dead or alive?

The press release and accompanying white paper are attachments to this post.

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Commodities Trader Trafigura Redesigns Core Systems with ActiveVOS

Details are in the press release attached below as well as in Luc’s previous pre-holiday post about the demo. Included in the press release are instructions on how you can download a customized version of the ActiveVOS demo to experiment with the application on your own machine.

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Active Endpoints Announces New Learning Tool for Java Developers