Als gemeinsame Initiative von camunda, Signavio und dem Hasso-Plattner-Institut richtet sich das neue bpmn.info an alle BPMN 2.0-Interessierten. Einsteiger können sich über spezielle Tutorials in BPMN einarbeiten. Außerdem können die Forums-Teilnehmer Fragen rund um die Verwendung von BPMN diskutieren.

Besonders an dem Forum ist, dass man direkt online Prozsesmodelle erstellen und in die Diskussionen einbinden kann. Dies ist möglich dank der Signavio-Technologie.

Zunächst wird es eine Closed-Beta-Phase geben, in der nur eine begrenzte Anzahl von Nutzern auf das Forum zugreifen kann. Wenn Sie daran teilnehmen möchten, schreiben Sie bitte eine kurze Email mit dem Stichwort “bpmn.info” an info@bpmn.info. Ab Mitte Juli kann sich jeder, der über einen bpm-netzwerk-Account verfügt, einloggen und mitdiskutieren. Die neuesten Diskussionen werden jeweils auf bpm-netzwerk eingeblendet.

It was created by the Berlin BPM initiative and can be downloaded free of charge in pdf format and in multiple languages: http://bpmb.de/poster.

If you are located in Germany, Austria or Switzerland, you can also have a copy in A1 format shipped to you – free of charge. This service is brought to you by camunda and Signavio, while stocks last.

Order your free copy here:
http://www.signavio.com/de/bpmn-poster.html.

Naturally, little public knowledge exists about the use of BPMN2.0 elements in diagrams. We’re here to change that! We just extended the tutorials section. Tutorials are designed to get modelers started with BPMN and they now also cover all new elements. Markus Guentert summarized the BPMN2.0 content in a forum post.

Go ahead and enjoy modeling at BPMN-Community.

To date, no tool vendor has presented a BPMN 2.0 solution to a broader audience. This is not surprising as the release date of the standard is still many months ahead of us. However, many development departments are busy producing code in this direction.

The two new diagram types, namely conversation diagrams and choreographies, are among the challenges of a BPMN 2.0 implementation. New diagram types means new constructs and connection rules. It can be expected that many vendor will refuse to implement it all and rather focus on extending the well known process/collaboration diagrams. An additional event symbol here – an additional attribute there. The standardization body behind BPMN 2.0 anticipated this: So called conformance classes define which parts of the spec must be implemented by a tool and which not.

Even more interesting than having two addition diagram types is another topic: Consistency between diagrams. While diagrams were often considered in isolation from each other in BPMN 1.x (except for process hierarchies that could be established through the subprocess mechanism), BPMN 2.0 follows a multi-perspective approach. For instance, the structure defined in a conversation diagram is refined through choreographies and collaboration diagrams. Therefore, the models are a lot more related than before. Tools that treat diagrams as isolated documents will have a serious problem here. If relationships between models cannot be maintained, then ensuring consistency will be left to the talented modeler.

There are good news for all those of you who can’t wait to experiment with BPMN 2.0. The tool vendor Signavio closely collaborates with the Hasso-Plattner-Institute regarding the implementation of BPMN 2.0. This new editor is released in the context of the BPM Academic Initiative and made available to the academic community (and of course to the BPMN 2.0 evangelization crowd). That way, people can evaluate it over the next months.

Realizing all modeling constructs, syntax rules and attributes in the editor – that’s the ambitious goal. Syntax checking will locate errors. As a next step, the standardized serialization format will be added. The lack of such an interchange format was one of the big weaknesses of BPMN 1.x. Let’s see how strictly the different vendors are going to respect it.

You can get a good first impression of the BPMN 2.0 editor using this screencast. It shows all three diagram types and how elements can be linked with each other using the glossary functionality. If you are interested in playing around with it yourself, you can log into the academic modeling platform. This initiative will be launched in the context of the BPM 2009 conference in Ulm on September 8. The two main developers behind the BPMN 2.0 editor, namely Sven Wagner-Boysen and Philipp Giese, are already looking forward to the feedback of the first users.

More details about the BPM Academic Initiative: At www.signavio.com/academic and in this blog entry:

BPMN 2.0 on YouTube

• John Hoogland – Change in Control (keynote)
  My favorite keynote. It was honest, humble, and enlightening. He contrasted the marketing blah of the BPM vendors with the reality he sees (and we all know). Most insightful, even with the most advanced customers they roll out 2-5 process updates per year. That’s process agility in 2009.
• Discovering Process Models from unlabelled event logs (Conference Talk)
  A fundamental assumption for process mining is that the event log contains case IDs. That means, you may log information in your system but only if the log entry refers to the process instance you can make sense of it. Diogo Ferriera showed a technique to overcome this limitation. Impressive scientific contribution and presentation-wise my favorite talk at BPM’09.
• Process Model comprehension: a human view (Tutorial)Hajo Reijers and Jan Mendling condensed their know-how in a 1.5h presentation (called tutorial) that was attracting even more people than the main conference track (in parallel). Increadibly valuable and well covered by Sandy. In short, read the Seven Process Modeling Guidelines (Table 2, page 19).

Summing up, BPM was a great event to learn, meet, discuss and find ground for collaboration. For example, we learned how people use our Oryx Editor in their research projects and how they would like to use it in future work. We are committed to support that. If you’d like to use, embedd or extend Oryx in your research project. Let us know, join the Google Group. You are invited to ask questions. Don’t wait until the next BPM.

We also have some stuff to throw into the discussion so stay tuned for the news to come or talk to us at BPM’09.

The fact that there are only few modeling experts in an organization often leads to a problem: Process models are not paid enough attention to, they are not integrated enough into the true process innovation cycle. In contrast to this, process modeling should ideally take place where process innovation happens. Team leaders and employees have good ideas. Customers and suppliers have improvement suggestions for the processes.

These sources of innovation, however, are not interested in or do not have the time for working themselves through ARIS or other complex modeling tools. They are not trained for process modeling. That is way they often would not even dare to edit process models – even if they could. They might write an email or fill a feedback form. As a worst (but typical) case, they simply remain silent.

Current BPM is too elitist: If you are not a BPMN-expert you are degraded in the process initiative. All you can do is serve as interview partner. This is where tools have to kick in. They must be easily accessible for all innovators. There needs to be a level between modeling and pure reading: Commenting and discussing.

As studies have shown, BPMN is intuitively readable, as long as a legend is given. I.e. you don’t need extensive training for understanding the most important aspects of a BPMN diagram. Now, if I am too shy to edit the model, I want at least be able to say: “Hey, why do we _always_ need to do this activitiy? Wouldn’t it sufficient to only do it for customer segment X?”, “Why do I need to create this document – it’s not used anyway downstream.” or “Here, we have a real problem. We need to wait for input from X and in the end we are always under pressure ourselves.”

A non-BPMN-expert is able to place such comments in a diagram. He/she can read the labels and understands the basics of the process flow. Once he/she has inserted the comments, a modeling expert can then edit the model in a second step.

Such a tool that allows for modeling and discussion and that is also easily accessible for non-experts does not exist on the market yet. This will change on 19 May 2009, the day of market entry of the Signavio Process Editor. This tool addresses this very problem. Collaboration, discussion and easy access have top priority. The Signavio Process Editor is a completely web-based tool allowing for modeling and dicussion through the web browser. That way, many people can get involved in process design and innovation. BPM 2.0.

The Signavio Process Editor is a Software as a Service offering, i.e. without download and installation. From 19 May this tool can be used in a free trial. You can collaboratively model BPMN with colleagues and partners in a secure workspace. Try it.

Homepage: http://www.signavio.com/

Just like wikipedia outperformed lexicons and changed the way we think about knowledge creation we want to create a community that is driven by the needs and the wisdom of the peers that use it, the process modelers.

Our students at the Business Process Technology Group have build an incredible solution that shows how well wiki-principles can integrate with process modeling. No more pictures but acutal models can be shared, discussed, rated, commented, and compared to find the best solution together.

We welcome everybody to discuss, create, and share their knowledge
at www.bpmn-community.org

Note: the content is mixed language for now (english/german).

IBM designed the game to complement classroom trainings for students and professionals. We all know that there are more people touched by BPM than usually sit in a classroom for BPM training. I think a game is a great idea and well suited to address those people as well.

The opening scene reminded me a lot of our first chapter in The Process. It’s this book on BPMN we recently published:) Like IBM we want to combine entertainment with knowledge transfer. We use the style of a scientific novel to teach process modeling and show it’s application.

We need more of this. To spread the word it’s not enough to put it down once for everybody. We need to create proper learning material to address all groups. I’m looking forward to try out the new Innov8 soon. You’re welcome to try out an excerpt from our book right now.