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Contents : BPTrends May 2008 BPMN Modeling--Who Where How and Why BPMN Modeling Who Where How and Why Jan Recker Abstract The Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) is an increasingly important standard for process modeling and has enjoyed high levels of attention and uptake in BPM practice. This paper reports on a global survey of BPMN process modelers conducted during May to August 2007. Five hundred and ninety BPMN modelers responded and provided insights into the who where how and why of BPMN process modeling as well as into some of the problems users experience when modeling with BPMN. BPMN and its Users Friends or Foes Finally we have it. An industry standard for process modeling. Something for everyone. Something with widespread support. The one-for-all solution to all our problems. To be frank we are happy. BPMN is indeed a rich language and allows us to define a multitude of business scenarios ranging from internal process choreographies to inter-organizational process orchestrations service interactions and workflow exceptions. Not bad at all. Not surprisingly BPMN has enjoyed widespread adoption in practice for example by tool vendors (e.g. Pega Sparx Systems Telelogic Intalio itp-commerce) education providers (e.g. Widener University Queensland University of Technology and Howe School of Technology Management) or modeling coaches and consultants (e.g. Object Training BPM-Training.com and BPMInstitute.org). BPMN was developed by a consortium comprising representatives from most of exactly those players in the global BPM market. And yes they have done a good job. Yet the only missing puzzle piece in this enjoyable picture of BPM success is the user! We know a lot about what BPMN can do how it is implemented and even how we can (finally...) build BPEL code from our BPMN models 1 . The one aspect however we still don't quite understand is how BPMN is actually used by those envisaged to use it process architects system managers business analysts and consultants. The Survey It is only fair to say that so far organizations seeking to adopt BPMN were a little shorthanded in terms of experience reports available. Only few cases are reported about how BPMN is actually used in practice notable exceptions include 2 and 3 . Our research group at Queensland University of Technology was thus interested in finding out about the real' use of BPMN in practice on a large global scale. We designed and administered a world-wide survey with BPMN modelers. Over four months during 2007 590 BPMN users responded from all over the globe. In conducting the survey our effort was generously supported by the wider BPM community. We received sponsorship and help not only from community forums (such as ABPMP BPTrends BPM-Roundtable.com BPM-Netzwerk XING Tibco Community Eclipse Newsgroup but as can be seen from Figures 1 also from tool vendors and training providers as well as universities (e.g. Howe School of Technology Management) and blogs including BPMS Watch (http://69.36.189.101/wordpress/) BPM Research (http://bpm-research.com) Phil Gilbert's blog (http://blog.lombardicto.com/) ITRedux (http://weblog.itredux.com/) Go Flow (http://kswenson.wordpress.com/) or Column2 (http://www.column2.com). It seemed that Copyright 2008 Jan Recker. All Rights Reserved. www.bptrends.com 1 BPTrends May 2008 BPMN Modeling--Who Where How and Why everyone had a profound interest in the study and its outcomes. At this stage we would like to thank all those who helped us in disseminating and advertising the survey. Figure 1. BPMN survey supporters Who's Using BPMN and Where In total data was collected from BPMN modelers from over thirty countries world-wide. The geographic distribution of these respondents mirrors the general distribution of BPM practitioners world-wide. Not surprisingly Europe North America and Oceania account for almost three quarters of all responses (see Figure 2). Almost 60% of respondents work for private sector companies. More than 40% of respondents work in large organizations with more than 1000 employees while 22.7% and 26.8% of respondents work for middle- and small-sized organizations respectively. The size of the process modeling team in which respondents work as process modelers ranges from less than 10 members (64.4% of respondents) to more than 50 members (3.8% of respondents). It would appear that even in large corporations the team of employees dedicated to BPMN modeling is small. It further appears that BPMN is popular both in business and IT communities. 51% of respondents stated to be using BPMN for business purposes (process documentation improvement business analysis stakeholder communication and the like) while the remaining 49% used BPMN for more technical purposes (such as process simulation service analysis and workflow engineering). The popularity of BPMN in both camps can further be seen by looking at which BPMN sets are being used in practice: 36% of respondents rely on the core BPMN set to develop their (rather basic) process models. 37% use an extended set of BPMN symbols and the remaining 27% use all the functionality BPMN has to offer. Copyright 2008 Jan Recker. All Rights Reserved. www.bptrends.com 2 BPTrends May 2008 BPMN Modeling--Who Where How and Why Country of origin 60 122 111 Australia United States 106 Germany Canada Switzerland France Poland Brazil Spain Denmark New Zealand Other Unspecified 10 10 1012 12 14 14 15 16 Chile India 18 26 34 United Kingdom 40 60 14 36 175 Continent of origin Africa Asia Europe North America Oceania 132 133 South America Unspecified Figure 2. Participant country and continent of origin Respondents were also asked to comment on the type of training received. Only 13.6% of respondents received formal training in process modeling with BPMN (e.g. by means of a licensed professional training provider or as part of university studies in business process management-related courses). Of those that were trained certified courses through vendors and training providers are the most popular options (9.5%) followed by in-house training (5.1%). In contrast roughly 70% of respondents learned BPMN process modeling through self-education or working on the job. What does this tell us We are not very well educated in process modeling with BPMN. Yet BPMN is arguably complex and not easy to learn. Just read some of Bruce Silver's blogs on BPMN training (http://69.36.189.101/wordpress/) and you will agree (even if you don't believe me here and now). Process modeling success very simply depends on qualified people doing a good job. So people go back to school! In other words to fully leverage the opportunities and chances offered by an advanced language such as BPMN formal education is needed and users need to attend to theses classes. And since we know that there is simply no substitute for modeling expertise it's paramount to spend some time and effort on BPM education (how this could work is explained here: 4 ). Regarding tool support for BPMN Table 1 lists the most popular tools in use and also the type of functionality that users expect in a BPMN tool. As can be seen Microsoft Visio with the freely available BPMN stencils (http://www.bpm-research.com/downloads/bpmn-stencils/) denotes by far the most popular way to model BPMN. But let me stress this point again 5 : Microsoft Visio is a nice drawing tool not a BPM workstation let alone engine. There is no user management www.bptrends.com Copyright 2008 Jan Recker. All Rights Reserved. 3 BPTrends May 2008 BPMN Modeling--Who Where How and Why attribute management let alone model repository. It may well help users to familiarize themselves with the basic idea of process modeling and BPMN but that's about it. And there are other options available: Itp-Commerce's solution surely profits from being a Visio plug-in that extends the modeling capacities of Visio with a BPMN simulation engine additional attributes and analysis options. Aside from these small-scaled solutions a number of familiar names appear in the upper half of Table 1 e.g. Sparx Systems Telelogic Intalio IDS Scheer and Casewise. These vendors provide advanced BPM solutions that stretch well beyond pure modeling capabilities. Type of tool used Microsoft Visio itp-Commerce Process Modeler Sparx Systems Enterprise Architect Visual Paradigm Visual Architect Telelogic System Architect Intalio BPMS ILOG Jviews IDS Scheer ARIS Casewise Corporate Modeler Holocentric Modeler iGrafx FlowCharter MagicDraw Inhouse solution Savvion Process Modeler Tibco BusinessStudio Appian BPM Suite Other Various Tool functionality used Integrated repository for all process models Navigation between process models on different levels Additional attribute fields for symbols Access to other notations and modeling techniques Access to new symbols in addition to BPMN symbols Access or hyperlinks to other documentation from within the process models Method filter for restricting and specifying the set of symbols to be used Table 1. BPMN tool support Usage 18.2% 7.8% 6.9% 6.2% 5.7% 5.0% 3.8% 3.3% 3.3% 2.8% 2.4% 1.9% 1.9% 1.4% 1.4% 1.4% 15.6% 10.9% Usage 46.4% 56.2% 42.6% 31.7% 26.4% 41.9% 21.1% Copyright 2008 Jan Recker. All Rights Reserved. www.bptrends.com 4 BPTrends May 2008 BPMN Modeling--Who Where How and Why As per tool functionality it would appear that BPMN users often use model repositories model browsers and similar functionality implemented in modeling tools to support the navigation between large numbers of BPMN models functionality Visio cannot deliver by the way. Also quite often are BPMN models extended with additional symbols (e.g. to articulate process-related risks organizational information performance indicators and the like) or even other models (e.g. organizational charts business rule specifications data information or service descriptions). This refers back to BPMN being a process modeling language that does exactly this model processes. A lot of organizational tasks however require additional information be it for workflow specification (resources data objects etc.) or compliance management (risks mitigation strategies process owners etc.) User Problems with BPMN Room for Improvement So what do the end users think about BPMN Sure they do use it a lot. They may not yet be overly familiar or mature with the language but BPMN is in fact quite popular. Users like BPMN because of its instrumentality it simply performs well in process modeling projects. Users are also satisfied when it is easy to model BPMN diagrams which of course is not always the case. As with any other language some things are easier to say (or model for that matter) than others. And BPMN let's face it is rich which also means that it is not the easiest language to work with. Have you tried to digest the list of the twenty or so event types to find the one that is most suitable Or (from my own experience) have you tried to explain the messaging concept to a group of process modeling newbies Quite hard indeed. But of course that doesn't mean that BPMN cannot be changed or improved in a way that would make it easier for us. Being an Object Management Group (www.omg.org) standard BPMN is constantly undergoing revisions and extensions. Some of you may have already heard of BPMN 1.1 which is about to be released and some of you may have also heard rumors about BPMN 2.0 which will come out some years into the future. Our endeavor was accordingly to gather some feedback from end users not necessarily on the strengths of BPMN but instead on its weaknesses where future releases of BPMN can be improved. The following loose collection of bullet points is a consolidated list of the user responses we gathered about the problems of modeling with BPMN. Hopefully these user issues serve as a starting point not only for the BPMN developers but also for tool vendors consultants modeling coaches and all those who want to identify and avoid obstacles when using BPMN for process modeling. 1) Support for Business Rule Specification Most notably our study highlighted a deficit of BPMN in supporting the articulation of business rules (like the scenario shown in Figure 3). Process modeling and rule modeling languages are both used in organizations to document organizational policies and procedures. However little effort has been made to understand let alone leverage their synergies and overlap. Rule specification is in fact an essential task in understanding business processes and it would be good to see that process modeling solutions acknowledge this a bit better and provide better (or more integrated) support for these tasks. Better support could as one respondent put it be as simple as an additional graphical symbol: ... A symbol that says something specifically is a business rule so that you know in future to look at it mightn't be bad. Copyright 2008 Jan Recker. All Rights Reserved. www.bptrends.com 5

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