Much ado about nothing? — reconsidering IBM Blueworks Live

I’ve been quite excited at the announcement of IBM Blueworks Live by  Phil Gilbert at BPM 2010 last September, and the expectations kept growing until the last weekend.
The I read the blog post by Sandy Kemsley and I thought: all right, that’s a preview, let’s wait for the final site. Then I went through the official site in the weekend and I thought: all right, that’s a placeholder.
Other bloggers came out with their comments too (for instance, see Mike Gammage‘s one here).
But today it’s Monday again and here we are.  Is that it?

The demo shows you a pretty nice interface for:

• a twitter list on #bwlive and not much more
• a BPMS log in the shape of a twitter feed
• an old-fashioned shared project repository
• a form based editor just enabling trivial processes
• execution on the cloud
• .. what else? and in particular, what’s new?

I sincerely hope IBM has much better plans for the future than this. I wouldn’t dare call #bwlive Social BPM in any sense: no flexibility, no real social relationship exploitation.
Please contradict me, I really need it!

Praise to IBM for one thing though: they have enough courage for pushing the end user design of simple processes. Not a big product feature, but a big shift in how to approach problems. Btw, this is a bold attempt also considering the failures of several end-user oriented design approaches such as the visual mashup composition tools (ever heard about Microsoft PopFly, Google Mashup Builder, and so on? maybe not, they are all dead and buried, only Yahoo! Pipes survives:).