BPM Exchange Social Network

Few days after reviving this social community, I got multiple requests about BPM Exchange, its mission, target audience and what every member or subscriber should expect to get. Then, I realized that my post about Social Networking, BPM and SOA was not clear enough or simply was not read at all, which is a weak hypothesis, given the comments from AlignSpace members. Whatever the root cause, I decided to write a post that focuses on concrete deliverables to reasonably expect from this community.

Now, for the impatient who knows the basics of BPMN (boxes for activities, circles for events and diamonds for decisions), here is the roadmap of BPM Exchange, depicted as a descriptive BPMN diagram:

BPM Exchange Roadmap V 1.0 - The Happy Path

In terms of the OMG Business Motivation Model (BMM), the End (vision, goals and objectives) may be summarized by these points:

1. Provide the most advanced worldwide social hub between BPM practitioners and their prospective customers
2. Help BPM practitioners be more successful, bringing them easy social collaborative tools and good reputation through recognized certifications and peer recommendations
3. Encourage expertise exchange, business development and transactions between BPM independant consultants, consulting firms and BPMS implementation providers, for extended services to their customers
4. Improve the BPM ecosystem impact in times where process transformation is one key success factor

Now, in terms of BMM Means (strategy, tactic, course of action), we have chosen to use the following:

• A social networking platform (based on BuddyPress) to invite current and future BPM practitioners and experts to put in common knowledge, expertise and mutual support. Later, this social platform will also be customized to suit BPM and BPMS prospective consumers to join this worldwide effort, be able to select BPM experts for their next projects and maybe give their feedback on their work and involvement.
• An eLearning system (based on eFrontLearning) has to be added to the social platform. Indeed, we would like our BPM practitioners gain a high level of knowledge (and maybe wisdom) to raise the impact and positive change they can instigate within governments, corporations and even non-profits.
• An online process discovery and modeling space (based on the promising Oryx technology, which I will write on very soon). In this first version, we would like our subscribers to access comprehensive tools to model processes, forms and systems, then share them with their friends in the social network or publish process templates for public review or documentation. This is where the term “Exchange” gets another meaning here.
• Group collaboration and social computing workspaces, that will allow for a deeper project consulting and management capabilities for typical or exceptional BPM initiatives. These workspaces will cover basic needs in such cases: knowledge management, mind mapping, document management, secure online file storage, version control systems, validation workflows…etc.
• Ability to export and execute business processes, in your platform of choice. This will be the final step for version 1.0 of BPM Exchange as we envision it today. The export capabilities will be easier when BPMN 2.0 is ready and fully supported by platform vendors. Until then, we will encourage BPM practitioners to limit their BPMN modeling to the analytical level, as I wrote about a couple of days before. They will move to the next level of BPMN modeling (executable) when they decide which BPMS platform to use for designing, running and monitoring their business processes.

At the time of this post, we have implemented both the social networking platform and the eLearning solution. As a first use case, we set sail to promote the OMG OCEB certification, with free sample questions you would have in the exam. We also added self-paced learning modules, including a complete recorded webinar and full slides, with more than 200 test questions for the OCEB Fundamental Level. More material to come for the intermediate and the advanced levels.

Developing the first vendor independant social networking for the BPM ecosystem is our mission. And we are working very hard to make it a dream come true as soon as possible. It will be made possible by a combination of social networking, fair expertise exchange, and BPM practitioners self-empowerment. If this sounds like fun, join us for the ride!