Jon Pyke, chairman of the Workflow Management Coalition
Jon Pyke, chairman of business process management standards body the Workflow Management Coalition (WfMC) believes that the rate of support and adoption of the BPMN 2.0 standard is "disappointing", CBR has learned.
Business Process Modelling Notation (BPMN) is a graphical representation for specifying business processes in a business process model. It’s meant to provide a simple means of communicating process information to business users, process implementers, customers, and suppliers.
It was developed by the Business Process Management Initiative (BPMI), and is now maintained by the Object Management Group since the two organisations merged in 2005.
The beta specification of BPMN 2.0 was approved by OMG’s board in September 2009. That means that process management tool vendors have had some time to try and ensure that their technologies fully supported BPMN 2.0 when it was due to be ratified as a standard, around the middle of last year. In fact it took a little longer and was ratified in January of this year.
"There are lots of people pontificating about BPMN 2.0 but full support and take up has to be a big disappointment," Jon Pyke told CBR.
Asked whether he was surprised that one vendor that we happened to speak to this week about the launch of a new process management suite – Progress Software – so far has partial support for BPMN 2.0, Pyke said: "I’m not surprised that they only have partial support for BPMN 2.0. It seems to me that this is more or less the position for most vendors – I recently assisted a company in selecting a solution and it was the same story throughout the process: partial support."
Jon Pyke, who is also CEO of cloud migration firm CIMtrek, was awarded the Marvin L. Manheim Award For Significant Contributions in the Field of Workflow in 2002 when he was CTO at Staffware (acquired by Tibco). He was subsequently chief strategy officer at Cordys before founding CIMtrek in January 2010.
Back in 2007 it was Pyke having to defend a standard, when some observers claimed that the WfMC’s XPDL standard was seeing slow adoption. Arguing then that over 50 vendors had committed to XPDL support, he said the three standards in BPM that really matter are BPMN, XPDL (XML process definition language) and BPEL (business process execution language).
After this article appeared the OMG refuted Pyke’s claims, saying BPMN 2.0 was a major upgrade that would take time for vendors to support.
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