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!

What started as a discussion has now turned to a complete post, reanimating in fact an old debate about using BPMN as a standard notation suitable for aligning business needs and IT capabilities. Although few BPM software vendors still resist the adoption of BPMN today, I will not spend time to justify why they should seriously consider BPMN, as this has been discussed and reviewed so many times in the BPM community, three years ago by Dr Bruce Silver. One should understand that today, industry giants, including IBM, SAP, Oracle and Microsoft, have already adopted BPMN. To people who still doubt BPMN as a minimum requirement to participate in a BPM project with an implementation in mind, I tell you this: if you can’t beat them, follow them!

There are other drivers to BPMN wide adoption that preceeded its support by software giants. And we actually decided more than 3 years ago to adopt it and recently enforce it on BPM Exchange, as a minimum required to drive BPM projects to success.

Now, the main point of this post is how to use BPMN effectively, at different levels, in a typical BPM project, while involving both technical and non-technical people. Through this little story, I will illustrate the power of this standard notation from OMG – the organization responsible for BPMN and other BPM standards. The story I’m about to tell you is inspired by a recent case I worked on. You will find here a typical scenario where BPMN can really help, at least for expressing business needs. For the sake of confidentiality, the character names have been changed.

So the story is about Joe “Plumber”, a small business owner, who recently hired management consultants to help him move to the next level in his company development. The consultants highly recommended he put a new complaints management program, to allow him stay closer to his customers, retain them and maybe improve his skills as a plumber!

Joe has multiple customers and he knows he will probably need IT support to handle this new need (Customer Complaints Process). Joe has implemented a CRM system, say SugarCRM, the Open Source clone of Salesforce.com. So Joe asked Bill “Geek”, an external IT consultant who takes care of the CRM system, to help him out and see if he can help:

Bill: Joe, great, do you have a specification document or RFQ so I can assess what is to be done in our information system?

Joe: Not really and you know, I don’t have much time to write a spec and nobody in our company has that time now.

Bill: Not a problem, I know a friend of mine, Patricia “Facilitator” that can help. She is a business analyst and she has good reputation in RFQ writing. It won’t take much of you time and she may help specify your needs in a day or two.

Joe: Ok, bring her in to see what she has in store.

So, before getting further, allow me to remind that with BPMN, we often consider three levels (or depths) of modeling:

• Business Level (Level 1): this is the first level for the process description, where Joe and Patricia will try to sketch a high-level overview of the process. They will capture the “happy path” of the process.
• Functional Level (Level 2): at this point, Patricia will interview further Joe about some details regarding special events or exceptions that need to be handled. She will also capture people or system activities, specific decision criteria, business rules, and maybe paper forms used in the process.
• Technical Level (Level 3):  at this level, Patricia will work with Bill to see how the current IT portfolio of services can support the new process, including its exceptions and “unhappy paths”.

These are similar to the 3 levels Dr. B Silver explained in his blog (descriptive, analytical and executable) and revisited lately, although there may be some differences of course. Will this be a specification for the OMG OCEB exams?

Now, back to our story. Two days later, Patricia was on the phone with Joe, asking him general questions so she can grab his requirements. After a 30 minutes conversation, she could come up with a BPMN diagram that looks like this:

Customer Complaint - Business Level

DIAGRAM1 : Descriptive BPMN

The day after, she interviewed Joe again about specific business rules, exception paths and key performance indicators. Joe expressed the need to be able to track 3 performance indicators:

1. Nature of complaint categories: product capabilities, installation service, billing, warranty.
2. Root cause of complaints, depending on their nature
3. Minimum, average and maximum time between complaint initiation until resolution
4. Percentage of unhappy resolutions
5. Cost of complaints management process

At the end of the interview, Patricia was able to evolve form a descriptive to an analytical BPMN diagram, to end up with the following first iteration:

Customer Complaint - Functional Level

DIAGRAM2 : Analytical BPMN (in progress)

In this second diagram, Patricia added relevant forms, data and events to help tracking the KPI that Joe wants. This is not the final draft, but this can already be submitted to Bill for review. In fact, and if there one single idea I would like you to keep from this post, it would be: the anaytical diagram is the RFQ!

Now, Patricia has what Joe needs from Bill to implement and what Bill knows better what to implement as new functionality in the IT system to handle this requirement. Bill and Patricia will probably go to a third round if they want to implement the new process in a BPMS. But this is another story (a subject for another post?).

So, this is one of the powerful points BPMN brings to the table, it saves so much time to business people, while being far more precise than a traditionnal RFQ. Again, images worth a thousand words.

In human history, there are many examples of inventions or discoveries from people on different locations and with different backgrounds. In any period, ideas are discovered at the same time. Even big ideas. This is true for the past, present, and in different cultures. As Gladwell writes:

«They found a hundred and forty-eight major scientific discoveries that fit the multiple pattern. Newton and Leibniz both discovered calculus. Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace both discovered evolution. Three mathematicians “invented” decimal fractions. Oxygen was discovered by Joseph Priestley, in Wiltshire, in 1774, and by Carl Wilhelm Scheele, in Uppsala, a year earlier. Color photography was invented at the same time by Charles Cros and by Louis Ducos du Hauron, in France…»

I’m talking about this subject because few days after I started this community, I got an announcement from Software AG about AlignSpace.com, a new community for SOA and BPM, leveraging the new social networking paradigms. Miko Matsumura has been eloquent in describing why social networking makes sense in the context of SOA projects. In deed, just like BPM projects, SOA focused projects are of collaborative nature, and then need “social” support from key stakeholders.

Knowing about simultaneous inventions history, you can easily imagine how this announcement from Software AG made me feel comfortable with pursuing the idea of bringing together a community of BPM experts to share ideas, interact on projects and gain more traction in the market, all within a social networking portal like BPM-Exchange.com.

On my side, I’m currently inviting business process experts and prospective BPM consumers to join this network, which is driven by similar objectives to AlignSpace. For now, I would say there are slight differences in terms of ways and means between AlignSpace and BPM Exchange:

1. BPM Exchange is for people with minimal skills requiremed to participate in a real world BPM project. Typically, we are addressing business analysts, process analysts or experts, process owners, IT specialists. Ideally, experts here will have the OMG  OCEB certifications at a suitable level (fundamental, intermediate or advanced). This is may seem like a harsh condition, but in real life, only few people participate full time on a BPM project, needless to admit that skilled people dramatically increase project success chances.
2. As a consequence of the target people, we have chosen to rely on BPMN for process discovery and modeling. As prominant BPM consultant Bruce Silver notes, « BPMN is the clear defacto standard for business process modeling, especially when the ultimate goal is a process implementation solution. BPM Suites from Oracle, SAP, Tibco, Intalio, Lombardi and Savvion are BPMN-based, and more are moving to the standard ». BPM Exchange is really for people who have decided to use BPM suites to conduct a first pilot project or an “enterprise-grade” implementation.
3. BPM Exchange encourages Open Source stacks. The social networking platform (based on BuddyPress), the eLearning system (based on eFrontLearning) and the collaborative BPM workspace (based on bxModeller), because I love Open Source

So, I’m really excited about the timing of this initiative, and I will do anything to make it work. Let’s see what happens next.