And The Winner Is...Yes, It's The BPMN Awards

A Friday Column

We've all done it. In an industry like ours - scientists calculate that a small town could be warmed all winter if the hot air generated in the world of BPM could be captured -  we've all written something that we later regret.  Gone over the top. Looked back and cringed.

So it's in this spirit of joint culpability that this blog is inaugurating the BPM Nonsense (BPMN) awards.  It's an occasional feature, a time to laugh at ourselves (once we're sure it's not our own purple prose).  And it's from snippets sent in by readers.

In Third place in these inaugural Awards is this gem, forwarded by a reader who spotted it on Appian's website after being invited to attend a webinar featuring Appian's 'extreme ease of use for business users':

"Typical SOA objects such as web services and EJBs can be abstracted into a drag-and-drop configuration, making it easy for business users to understand and incorporate into their process models."

Mmm. Not the business users most of us deal with perhaps.

The award for Second place goes to a BPTrends Discussion on Linkedin that seems particularly inane.  

The discussion - "What is the most popular software used for process discovery and mapping?" - was kicked off, and I'm not making this up, by a VP at SmartDraw Software, vendor of a process discovery and mapping tool.  Most of the seven responses have a commercial ax to grind though it's not necessarily explicit. One of the 'independent' responses is actually from the CEO of a process tool vendor; another is from the author of a 740-page reference guide on a particular tool.

For those of us who feel like they've already wasted too much of our lives looking for intelligent life on Linkedin discussions, this might be the one that finally clicks the Unsubscribe button.

But the weekend beckons and so on to happier things... because the worthy winner of these inaugural BPMNonsense Awards has to be a gushing piece this week from Metastorm on 'the power of crowds in the cloud', an image which many of us might have been struggling to envision anyway, before the writer's enthusiasm finally went beserk:  

"Within our customer base, we have found that our Cloud modeling tool (Metastorm M3) is enabling business people who have not been engaged in enterprise modeling in the past to create, reference, maintain, and share all kinds of models – strategy, rule, organization, process, etc. – with no technology installation and virtually no training. We are seeing spontaneously formed crowds of business people capturing models, sharing them with their colleagues, and then using the resulting models to communicate issues, changes, and recommendations to management, business architects, and even IT."

Oh, to be able to work at Metastorm and see 'spontaneously formed crowds of business people capturing models'.  And to see that this buzz of communication about change includes 'even IT'.  Now there's an idea... 

Keep them coming! We'll have another BPMN Awards ceremony in the summer.

Comments

[Marco Brambilla]

Let me add another strong candidate here:
question and discussion "How big is a process?" on eBizQ.

http://www.ebizq.net/blogs/ebizq_forum/2011/02/how-big-is-a-process.php?utm_source=feedburner

Useful as aking "How long is a piece of string?" as someone pointed out :-).

[Bruce Silver]

Mike,
If the global climate were indeed impacted by BPM blogger hot air, you would probably be under UN sanctions yourself. Your second "award" about self-serving comments by tool vendors is particularly nervy, as you do not disclose the fact that you are tool vendor that uses a proprietary notation rather than the BPMN standard.
Bruce Silver

[Mike Gammage]

@Bruce - LOL.

But I must clarify, just in case others reading your comment don't realise: the Nimbus UPN notation (freely available to download from the Nimbus website) is simply what we've learned, from more than a decade of experience with many thousands of clients, about how best to describe processes in a way that the whole business can understand and embrace in day-to-day operations, and yet has the rigor required for compliance and governance purposes.

Again, as you know but others may not - Nimbus Control supports BPMN 1.1 and offers the possibility of a hybrid enterprise process model. It's a complete and integrated process perspective. The higher levels use UPN (or any other means of describing process that the organization chooses) but the lower levels, where automation comes into play, and the audience may be primarily IT, can be in BPMN.

Mike