VOSibilities

This summer, Active Endpoints CTO Michael Rowley and industry analyst, blogger and BPM expert Sandy Kemsley are presenting a series of webinars focusing on the “human aspects” of BPM.

On Wednesday, June 9, we presented How to Explain BPMN to Business Users, which featured an overview of proposed subsets of BPMN 2.0 designed for specific roles, a demonstration of the ActiveVOS BPMN modeler and an interesting discussion of the future of BPMN. A replay of this fascinating presentation is attached to this post below.

Our third and final session of BPM Summer Camp is titled Five Things You Should Never, Ever Try in Process Development and will be presented on Thursday, July 22, 2010 at 12pm EDT / 9am PDT / 16:00 UTC. Please register for this free webinar here.

You can also watch a replay of the first session here.

 BPM Summer Camp session 2: BPMN [72:01m]: Download (378)

 

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Episode 26 of CTO Tuesdays, the BPM podcast, is a must see.

Michael Rowley discusses how WS-HumanTask, coupled with capabilities provided by JSON and AJAX make it possible to eliminate presentation tier services on application servers for worklist management and process initiation in BPMSs.

It’s a look into how the browser, courtesy of AJAX techniques, has become so powerful for presentation logic that it has obviated the need for extra server-side work. While that may not be the latest news, what is fascinating is the application of these capabilities to BPM — and the inside look at the protocol enabled by the move of presentation logic to the client.

A note: I had a problem with the recoding of this podcast. The bad news is for the first couple of minutes, you’ll hear me give my welcome and introduction to the webinar, but you won’t see my PowerPoint slides. The good news is, once Michael begins his talk, you will see everything perfectly.

Update: During the Q&A in this episode, a user asks about parsing JSON on the server side. One of our engineers, PJ, heard that question and offers this answer:

Here’s a link to the JSON specs and libs and links to for parsing in Java, C, C++, ASP, PHP, etc.: http://json.org/

In ActiveVOS, you do not need to parse JSON because it is automatically converted to XML by the ActiveVOS engine and passed into the Receive (or onEvent) activity in your process. So, in ActiveVOS, one works with XML using XQuery & XPath.

For those using REST based services and want to parse JSON or respond with JSON, they can use the following extension functions:abx:jsonToXml(jsonStr) -> returns XML element
abx:xmlToJson(xmlElement) -> return JSON string

For more information, in ActiveVOS’s Expression dialog picklist, see Functions->BPEL->ActiveVOS->JSON

PJ also notes that we have documentation on using JSON in ActiveVOS at http://www.activevos.com/dev/sdks/XML-JSON-Binding/docs/Part1-ActiveVOS-XML-JSON-API.html and sample code in our SDKs at http://www.activevos.com/developers-sdks.php.

Thanks, PJ.

 

 CTO Tuesdays #26: Eliminating the presentation tier [44:00m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (244)

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We are pleased that our pals at Activiti BPM have responded to our comments (here and here) about their launch. We appreciate interesting and passionate discussion of the BPM world. And the ripostes between us and them are, we hope, enlightening for you no matter what your position is.

Michael Rowley will be responding shortly to Tom Baeyens’s technical comments about process virtual machines and their unfortunate similarity to the failed concept of microkernel operating systems.

So, it falls to me to respond to Baeyens’s comments that appear to argue that a) a large number of downloads equals “success” for a BPMS and b) Activiti will be successful on that basis alone.

Reading the statement that jBPM has “25,000 downloads per month,” I am reminded of some of the lyrics to the famous Talking Heads song Crosseyed and Painless:

Facts are simple and facts are straight
Facts are lazy and facts are late
Facts all come with points of view
Facts don’t do what I want them to
Facts just twist the truth around
Facts are living turned inside out
Facts are getting the best of them

Let’s start with one of the open source world’s favorite shibboleths: you are your number of downloads. Drinking this Kool-Aid has funded companies and made for a lot of great PowerPoint presentations about “traction” at trade shows. But it ignores a simple truth: BPM ain’t an FTP client…or a browser…a database…or even an OS. Unlike these technologies, BPM isn’t a commodity.

It’s something that requires a change in the way processes are developed and the engagement of an entire team. These challenges are less about BPM technology than they are about how the organization decides to respond to them. In the end, a download statistic doesn’t measure whether or not a team is developing a new process app or their willingness to change their whole approach to process applications. It measures…downloads.

And downloaders can be anyone: developers in cubes with absolutely no juice whatsoever preparing for their next job…someone with good intentions and no time at all to master a BPMS on their own…the person who downloads the BPMS to find fault with it in order to kill a nascent process application…or even the hairdresser from the Foxy Lady hair salon who is “interested in computers” and responded to a Google pay-per-click ad (true story).

Second, Baeyens has argued that a BPMS belongs embedded in other applications and that stand-alone BPMS is a dead end. We, of course, disagree, not least because what people really want is a business process that involves all of their systems. If it’s a document management system that’s “on top,” you will create processes that are centered around document management. If workflow is contained in your PLM system, every process app will have the flavor of a product development cycle. In exchange for one-time convenience, development teams have to commit to a fixed design metaphor. And they will work harder on the next app to get the containing platform out of the way in processes that don’t match that metaphor.

However, embedded BPM does lend itself to the hype of an open-source download model. Why? You can count every download of the containing technology as a BPMS download. You get the free ride of your container. And, if you embed in multiple containers…well, you get the picture.

By trotting out downloads as an important measure, you can already see how Activiti will measure its BPMS’s success. Unfortunately, to borrow a line from the song, “facts don’t do what [they] want them to.”

The fact is, downloads don’t matter.

On CTO Tuesdays #25, Active Endpoints CTO Michael Rowley discusses BPMS alert monitors and services which can be used when the BPMS detects issues in running processes.

 

 CTO Tuesdays #25: BPM 911 - how a BPMS calls for help [33:28m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (269)

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This summer, Active Endpoints CTO Michael Rowley and industry analyst, blogger and BPM expert Sandy Kemsley are presenting a series of webinars focusing on the “human aspects” of BPM.

Sign up for Sessions 2 and 3 here. Watch the replay of Session 1, Team Dynamics in BPM Projects, below. You can watch the replay of Session 2, How to Explain BPMN to Business Users here.

 

 BPM Summer Camp session 1 [80:35m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (546)

 

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On episode #24 of CTO Tuesdays, the BPM podcast, Michael Rowley delivers a very interesting talk on how to manage services that might be unavailable when your process is running. A modern BPMS consists of web services running “all over the place” — which might make you think given the vicissitudes of networks and applications, building a robust BPM process application would be difficult, if not impossible.

But in this BPM podcast, you’ll see how well-thought-out BPMSs tackle this very fundamental problem — and how easy it can be to manage “problem” services. In fact, there’s so much choice in both design and deployment of BPM applications, next week’s CTO Tuesdays will expand on the ideas presented in this episode.

Be sure to watch this episode if you are working with a BPMS — and join us for part 2 next week. Register at http://www.activevos.com/ctot.

 

 CTO Tuesdays #24: How to be prepared for services that might go down [45:41m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (288)

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Today, Alfresco announced that it had digested the former developers of the jBPM project from JBoss. jBPM had never really made much of an impact as a BPMS because its real purpose in life was to cater to a core Java developer community. Much as hard-core coders might hate it, BPM is about collaboration among an extended development team that includes business users, analysts, developers and operations staff. jBPM was limited to developers and too proprietary to get much traction across the extended development team.

Let me be clear…we’ve got no issue with the jBPM team moving to greener pastures to try and rescue a moribund open source project. We do, however, have a very strong reaction to the transparently re-thought propaganda surrounding their new strategy. It feels like the jBPM architects have something to get off their chest about BPM in general… something they couldn’t get across inside JBoss and they’ve picked what is a rather run-of-the-mill addition of process capability to a document management system to proclaim a completely new metaphor for BPMSs.

It’s one thing for jilted developers to find a new home, even one of convenience. It’s another to declare a whole new BPM religion that claims that the only right way to achieve BPM is inside of some point product, down where developers (the real targeted users of jBPM) can get at it.

Above all, BPM is a management discipline. As our CTO Michael Rowley is fond of saying, BPM can be done with pens, whiteboards and Post-It notes. That means that not every process ends up being automated. Of those that do (and of course, we believe that many processes do end up being automated), it makes no sense — none whatsoever — for those to be automated inside another type of product.

Instead, the real opportunity for BPMSs is to allow the extended development team to break down the design barriers of ECM, CRM, ERP, PLM and other application types to focus on the core business process. The desired process model is, literally, “above” the constraints and assumptions of the containing systems.

This isn’t to say that document management doesn’t need a BPMS — in fact, we’ve been among the first to demonstrate integration with Alfresco via CMIS to make precisely this point (here and here). But I don’t think anyone would stipulate that an assembly-line quality control process, branch bank customer marketing process, production of feature films or managing agricultural improvement are all fundamentally, inherently and exclusively document management processes (these are all examples of real customer processes deployed in ActiveVOS). But that’s what jBPM architect Tom Baeyens asserts when he argues that “standalone BPM products that don’t offer BPM where it’s [sic] used are…a dead end…”

Of course, we argue the precise opposite: that the problem with embedded workflow is that it’s too limited by its container.

The other big issue we have with the new Activiti BPMS recasting of jBPM is its apparent confusion about who will use it. On the one hand, Activiti says, “It’s easy to understand that the future of BPM is BPMN 2.0.” (We agree.) On the other, just a few lines away in their FAQ, this plum: “Is BPMN 2.0 readable enough for developers?”

This is code (sorry) for the fact that while it’s not possible today to introduce a BPMS without genuflecting at the BPMN 2.0 altar, there are precious few who have stepped up to the challenge of making BPMN 2.0 work for both developers and end users. That is, BPMSs that offer no other visualization of the process model. That’s what we believe: that BPMN 2.0 is the notation of process (and BPEL is its execution engine). The goal is to make the BPMN 2.0 modeler so complete — yet so simple to use — that anyone on the extended team can instantly “get it.” You can already tell from Activiti BPM’s ambivalence about BPMN 2.0 that their BPMS will suffer from a common affliction: devolution into either an end-user “pretty picture” tool or (much more likely in this case) a tool for developers only.

So, we welcome the debate about the future of BPM. But we think the real debate is about a single, external BPM system that everyone can use…not some “off” combination buried inside another product which is neither fish nor fowl.

This episode of CTO Tuesdays details with how escalation works in a BPMS. In particular, the discussion and demonstration tackle how to use process-leveland task-level escalation, including deadlines, in the design and deployment of processes.

As always, you can join us live for CTO Tuesdays by signing up at http://www.activevos.com/ctot.

We hope you will join us.

 

 CTO Tuesdays #23: Escalation [45:07m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (280)

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Tomorrow on CTO Tuesdays #23, we will explore how a business process management system (BPMS) handles escalation. Register for this episode at http://www.activevos.com/ctot.

We hope you can join us at noon EDT, 9am PDT, 16:00 GMT for our discussion of this important topic. When you consider the kinds of core processes that BPM systems are used for — processes which almost always include human tasks — being able to escalate work when something doesn’t happen is an important capability.

As always, Michael Rowley, Active Endpoints’ CTO, will present an educational overview of escalation followed by a panel discussion to answer your questions.

OASIS has announced that the Content Management Interoperability Standard (CMIS) 1.0 has been approved. As true believers in the value of standards for customers, we believe that ECM and BPMS have a natural, but not overlapping, affinity in companies that are developing a new generation of process applications. Now, users can rely on standards to protect them from “losing” their business logic to a proprietary integration.

In February, we demonstrated how CMIS can be used to integrate ActiveVOS BPMS with Alfresco ECM to create processes that combine content, people and systems in an open, standards-compliant way. It’s a very compelling demonstration of the value of CMIS. We are pleased that CMIS has been approved and look forward to a world in which business processes can simply and compatibly integrate sophisticated content management capabilities.

Tomorrow on CTO Tuesdays #21 for April 27, 2010, we are pleased to present a topic that is on everyone’s lips: how to integrate mainframe systems like CICS, IMS and 3270 apps into a the new world of process applications.

Our guests tomorrow are Rob Morris and Dusty Rivers of GT Software who will show how web services can quickly and easily integrate these two worlds.

Register for the live webinar here.

IT Wire has written an article about AAPT’s use of ActiveVOS which includes an interview with AAPT COO David Yuile who said, “The ethernet [sic] and IP VPN products are just the first ones out of the box. There will be lots of others to follow. Because of what we have done these will be much quicker. We have dramatically compressed the product development cycle…One product that would have taken us nine months to develop we were able to do in three.”

Neil Ward-Dutton has written an interesting article about the “mainstreaming” of BPM in which he details his reasoning for why BPM is now, “suddenly,” being more widely deployed.

Neil mentions ActiveVOS as the BPMS that is making it possible for development teams to take advantage of new-style BPM. We appreciate the mention and, no surprise, believe Neil is on to a big idea.

What is that idea? Simply that for BPM to become mainstream, it needs to be the mainstream development style. Thus, the market requires a BPMS like ActiveVOS, which is  designed specifically to be architecturally “correct” and to allow IT to change its development style by welcoming business analysts and developers into the “bazaar.”

Attached to this post are the recordings and a PDF of the slides presented on CTO Tuesdays #20 for 13 April 2010.

Completing a “trilogy” of sorts that started with CTOT #18 and continued in CTOT #19, Michael Rowley covers the concepts — and politics — behind REST, the representational state transfer protocol.

This episode is a must-see for anyone interested in protocols and comparing and contrasting REST with SOAP.

We promised to include this link to the WS-* standards that was shown in the discussion: http://www.innoq.com/soa/ws-standards/poster/innoQ%20WS-Standards%20Poster%202007-02.pdf

 

 CTO Tuesdays #20 : Using REST for business processes [56:38m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (447)

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Today, Active Endpoints announced that Australian telecom AAPT has gone into production with ActiveVOS to support the launch of many of its updated services.

Details of how AAPT has used BPM to change the way it develops applications are in the press release attached to this post.

 Australian Telecom AAPT goes live with ActiveVOS applications: Download (334)