Maintaining Consistency Across BPM Initiatives’ Content(November 3, Enterprise Irregulars)

In response to a writeup by Sandy Kemsley on a user experince on MDD+BPM at Bank of America.
Dear Sandy,
Thank you so much for sharing this writeup and comment.
Being a researcher on MDD and BPM, I’m glad to see that this recipe is getting more and more attention in the industry.
Being also a (software) analyst and a partner in a tool vendor company (WebRatio) I agree with you that pushing this combination of methodologies to the customers can be painful, because customers are rather conservative in terms of innovation and do not trust tools and approaches that are not in the orthodox mainstream.
However, we also had some really good success stories in making big customers adopt these approaches (see for instance our experiences we shared at BPM 2010 in Hoboken and that will also be published in an upcoming book edited by M. Rosemann and M. zur Muehlen. Presentation here: http://www.slideshare.net/mbrambil/web-ratio-bpmindustrialcasesbpm2010 ).
I share with you the concern about setting up weird combinations of tools for addressing BPM with a MDD approach.
In WebRatio, it took us 10 years to come up with a coherent suite of modeling, transformation, and code generation facilities that integrate in a seamless way BPM, data modeling, application modeling, quick prototyping, and code generation for production applications.
Since MDD is a very neat and conceptual approach, I think appropriate toolsuites that correctly deal with the models and their relationship is crucial for granting full benefits of a virtuous model-driven lifecycle.

Enabling Smarter BPM through Business Entities with Lifecycles (November 3, Column2 blog by Sandy Kemsley)

In response to a writeup by Sandy Kemsley on Rick Hull work on integrated  BP and data modeling at IBM T.J. Watson.
Thanks for this overview on Rick’s work. I think this is a crucial change of paradigm that companies will embrace sooner or later.
It doesn’t make any sense to consider data and processes as separate realms, with different kings and armies fighting at their borders.
I also have been doing integrated modeling of different aspects of applications for a while, not limited to BP and data models, but comprising also other aspects like user role modeling, application logic modeling, user interaction modeling, and so on. In our approach we envision an integrated model driven development (MDD) approach covering all these aspects and providing automatic alignment and quick prototyping.
I strongly believe that model integration, alignment and continuous cross-validation down to the implementation is the only response to the complex needs of today’s enterprises.
Here is an overview of what we do:
http://www.slideshare.net/stefano_butti/webratio-a-mdd-approach-to-bpm-4872510
And a summary of MDD responses to current BPM trends (including MDM integration):
http://www.slideshare.net/mbrambil/webratio-bpm-trends-and-challenges
I would be glad to get feedback on this.

Iterative Development in BPM Applications Using Traceability (November 3,Column2 blog by Sandy Kemsley)

Dear Sandy,
thanks for this post too. I appreciate your work, I think it’s big value for the BPM community.
I think traceability is crucial, but may not be enough. What we really need is coherency and alignment of models. The complexity of modern enterprise applications requires several models to describe all the relevant aspects. Design tools should be aware of this and *grant* alignment by construction.
This could be fairly easy for models that deal with the same level of abstraction, while it could be much more difficult when alignment is needed between business and IT models of course.
Furthermore (maybe even more crucial), alignment should be granted between models and implementation.
In my experience, all this can be achieved only through well engineered model-driven development (MDD) approaches.