Integration

You've asked a good question, but the current BPMN 2.0 specification from August 2009 is 496 pages. Someone like Mariano Benitez who is a co-chair on the BPMN standards committee and knows Oracle BPM intimately might have a list of how Oracle BPM 11g supports BPMN 2.0, but I doubt this is the case even for him.

As you pointed out, there are gaps in Oracle BPM 11g's support for BPMN 2.0 (e.g. Conversation diagrams and the support for pools) just as there are gaps in every vendor's current support for BPMN 2.0. As you mentioned the specification is not yet finalized (heard it will be next month). I could be wrong (frequently am), but from what I've read they are making tweaks in the way the different vendors store their process models. Similar to the AD/Cycle specification for CASE tools in the early 1990's, the goal is to make the way the different vendors store their XML models compliant between one another.

I've been lucky to have been able to work on BPM projects for the last decade. What I like about the 1.0, 1.1 and 2.0 BPMN specifications is that I can walk into a customer's building on Monday morning and we're all speaking the same language immediately because we model using an easy to understand role based activity flow diagram that has been around for years. The BPMN activity icons look basically the same whether they're using a BPA tool like iGrafx or a BPM tool like Appian, Oracle BPM 10 or 11, or IBM's Lombardi. I spend hundreds of hours interviewing subject matter experts (SME) to create as-is and to-be process models. My point is that once the BPMN activity model icons and patterns are internalized. it takes comparitively little time to model and document a process understood by executives, managers, developers, SMEs and business analysts inside a tool. It has been incredibly rewarding to help solve a company's immediate and strategic business problems by helping them design and improve their processes . What I've found most rewarding has been to add the implementation details (e.g. user interfaces, integration to systems and databases) necessary to activate the business processes for end users using a powerful tool like Oracle BPM.

Here's my bottom line. I should probably care about the way the process models are stored by the various BPA and BPM vendors as defined by the BPMN 2.0 specification but I just don't. I've written utilities that convert models from one tool into another for customers and found it to be a frustrating way to make a living. I applaud the BPMN 2.0 specification for trying to enable the compatibility of the way vendors store their process models for execution, but I see it as AD/Cycle history repeating itself. Not to sound cynical but I believe that the implementation details the different BPM tools add will always be vendor specific. I'm focused much more on the benefits that the modeling notation BPMN provides us. There are few differences between the BPMN 1.1 and 2.0 notation standards. It has been stable for years and the notation won't likely change much over the next month.

Hope this helps,
Dan

Try with Enterprise Architect and the bmpn profile extension.
Sadly Oracle BPMN is a tool in developed stage, I wish some fay become a serious product with great productive performance, but at this day all implementation are made by brute force of the consultants. You will find big gaps between Oracle BPM and BPMN because the standard is slowler than the product developing.
more CASE Tools for bpm here: http://case-tools.org/

Edited by: m8r-qbkka9 on May 9, 2010 10:47 AM

I am working on getting a clear picture of what BPMN 2.0 support Oracle has and what is lacking. This is fairly critical in my mind as I now need to make a choice between BPEL and BPMN process engines. Using Oracle BPM I am use BPMN for model to execution. For BPEL, I can use BPA Suite for BPMN modeling an then convert to BPEL for runtime. Kind of odd we have to make a choice like this but the product capabilities are what the product capabilities are. I will say it seems odd that Oracle appears to be favoring BPMN 2.0 over BPEL with the Oracle BPM Suite release.

Hi Rich,

u work for IBM and you're think Oracle is solution

Oracle must be happy

Did you know IBM is Oracle's largest partner?