AntiAmba

Some days ago I took a ride in IBM's Lombardi Blueprint another on-line tool that let's you discover, design and document business processes and share process knowledge among your team and peers. Very aligned what today is called collaborative process management or social BPM. In this article I don't analyse Lombardi's tool regardless I liked the way data is structured, clear, specially for non bpm experts that need to participate in process mapping and analysis, allow simple documentation (yet sufficient) with some automation provided, there is also risk analysis - very basic, probably useless. Anyway, the core feature is the capability to introduce on-line collaboration that runs smoothly. The thing is the suite have a built in feature that can import Visio process diagrams designed using BPMN notation, meaning that you don't have to construct process diagrams all over again. Lombardi announce, or suggests, users to get rid of Visio and start using Blueprint...

Some interesting debate about Process Modeling : Doing by Design, from Gartner's Jim Sinur. My thoughts about it: I don't agree with Keith when he says that "BPM is synonymous with BPMN graphical notation". Many people continue not to understand what BPMN is all about. Geeks say it's mandatory to execute BPEL in order to authoring BPM processes inside a BPMS suite, but as I far my experience goes I never saw any BPM suite doing it magically without a lot of hard code work. On the other hand, I see BPMN as a door to process oblivion, once people start using it incorrectly, I mean with all the stuff,and complex symbols attached (please don't read 2.0 draft, because it is more and more complex). By the way, I tested IBM's Lombardy that can't import true BPMN diagrams. This means that BPMN never become a standard at all. When designing something new, I prefer to use storyboards. I assemble a team with process facilitators, process team and end user...

With the advent of BPMN and integration in BPM suites I’ve seen a lot of discussion about the best standard for process mapping. Vendors (except ARIS that supports EPC) have embed BPMN and BPEL for obvious reasons once it provides automatic process automation. BPMN was presented as the process standard of the future because for the first time it could represent the participants in the processes, tasks, events and information flow. However, and contrary to process management methods that converged to the same concepts (Discovery, Analysis, Implementation, Monitoring and Improvement), the business process representation reached near chaos. Companies that began their efforts in managing business processes in the last 10 years, used different trends, various notations and as result now is somewhat very mixed up. Process participants use process documentation or process representation pictured that tastes different. Some people understand task sequence and business rules that could cause ba...