12/11/09 :: [BPM] BPM: BPMN and BPEL [permalink]
Scott Francis answered my last post on his blog. I appreciate the dialog, thanks. He explains:
I think most BPMN folks feel that BPEL is neat stuff, it just has little to do with the business process per se because it is designed for a different use and audience.
Scott, we agree ! I, by no means, imply that BPEL has anything to do with "Business Process per se". It is indeed designed for a completely different use and audience. I have been fighting this idea since 2002 with people like Howard Smith or Assaf Arkin. I thought this debate was over until Michael and Frank reignited it. I am not surprised at what they say, it is unfortunate that some people in our industry seem to think that the more you say something, the more correct it becomes.
But I think you misunderstand where the “BPMN Camp” would draw the line around the process – indeed, those state changes would not be part of the “process” per se – triggering the state changes, but the actual management of the state changes will be via webservices, or other means. Those webservices are outside the BPMS for obvious encapsulation reasons.
I think this is where we start to diverge and this is where I stop supporting the BPMN community. This is where the articulation between BPMN and BPEL needs to happen. It is not enough to say the states are beyond the process, buried in the services. As Ksenia Whaler showed in her work processes must be compliant with the Business Entity Lifecycles they interact with. There is simply no way around it. Pretending that BELs are over the fence and processes can be designed in complete abstraction of the constraints the impose is pure fallacy. I apologize for the language, but there is simply no other word. This is documented, demonstrated and proven. It would be the same as saying that something is Turing complete without the concept of variable (storage).
It just seems to me to be that there’s a massive failure of communication.
I don't think so. I do think that the BPMN camp is massively going in the wrong direction. The BPMN camp is massively ignoring the completeness of "the" Business Process Metamodel and the underlying architecture. I do think that it is not until we all actively define the Business Process Metamodel that we will make progress. I do genuinely believe that the future of BPM can be bright(er) and this is all I am looking for.
you have so many vague buzzwords floating around that can be interpreted so many different ways
Yes, this is true, sadly true and you are very generous by saying "interpreted". It is not until we will all bring precision to this problem that we will eventually solve it.
I read a few of your articles and they seem to have a running theme of being brutally negative about everyone you’re quoting
Yes, I have met most of these people in person, sometime worked with them closely or in working groups. For 10 years the discussion has been impossible. Believe me, it has never been a problem of "interpretation". It has always been a problem of power and ego. Frank explained it correctly: "We built all these BPEL engines, you have no other choice than using them".
just because I don’t find BPEL useful as an implementation of BPMN, doesn’t mean that I think BPEL should be resigned to the 7th circle of Hell – it just means that it should be used for what it is good at – orchestrating webservice calls.
Scott, unfortunately you are part of the problem. You are just another "Mission Accomplished" guy. Congratulation on a job well done! You claim BPEL is not a good implementation of BPMN, hence use it for anything else, "don't bother me", "don't rock my little world". You assume that BPMN is complete, that BPMN accurately reflects the metamodel of Business Process Definition. So in my frame of reference you are not much better than Frank. You say "we have BPMN, I can do stuff with it, and I don't care about anything else".
I choose not to be sad, but rather to move forward creating value with BPM.
Everyone reacts as they wish to this stupid situation. We can all duck and claim a little corner of the BPM space, but what value does it provide to our industry? I worked at a bank until last year. There, two teams had been fired as they tried to introduce BPM and failed. When I say fired, I mean fired. When I talked about BPM in the context of SOA, my manager said, sorry, I won't be the 3rd team. Is that what you are so proud about? Is it just me? Did you read the last post from Rashid Khan? Just give me your estimate for the ratio of business processes implemented within a BPM engine, vs the ones that are hand coded: is it greater than 0.1%? Give me the number of packaged solutions (small or large) that implement a BPM engine to manage the processes they automate: could it be exactly zero? Personally I am extremely saddened by these statistics and the state of BPM and I can't just sell something that I think is foundationally wrong to my customers: "just to move forward" is not an option for me. Allow me to make an analogy to better illustrate my point. If you, Michael, Frank or Bruce were farmers you would be telling me that because you are able to feed yourself, family, friends and neighbors, world hunger is not your problem, even if you knew there were better ways to grow crops. I hope you would allow me to be saddened by such an approach.
BPM is complex, its taking longer to come to fruition.
Come on Scott, can you think of all the unrealized value for all business customers? can you even start to come up with a number just because a handful of people have an ego too big to create value? Just because they want to dominate a market that they are killing. Because it is complex we need the contribution of everyone, we don't need these stupid games that pundits like so much.
Whether you turn to SOA, BPM or MDE (which all require very different ways of growing crops), the same attitude prevails, from big and small vendors alike.
I say, enough is enough. You are either part of the fallacy or you are fighting it. After 10 years, there is no longer an "in between, just to move forward". BPM must make progress, we are currently nowhere in the path to progress. Sorry.