The Leonardo Blog

In this interview with Stephen White, who was closely involved in the developed of the BPMN language, we discussed the myths that been swirling around the internet about BPMN. More specifically, we talk about some crowd-sourced myths and weaknesses that people had been discussing on the BPMN wikipedia page. Sandeep Johal: The first myth is that there is ambiguity and confusion in sharing BPMN models. Stephen White: To me this more of a tool vendor issue, perhaps. A lot of it just had to do with mobility or quality of the import export capabilities of the tool. I've soon tools that are very good at it, and other tools that are not as good at it. When you share a BPMN model, you might have issues importing it into a different tool. You might have to do some work after that, but I think that is a vendor issue. The specification itself gives the XML schema or metamodel behind it so that tools can do that. There were a couple of minor issues and I think that OMG has been addressing that. There's a committee that does interchange formats, and they've been working on that, and showing demonstrations at conferences. I think any of the technical issues are being solved, and I think it's mainly up to the tool vendors to support that .

Chances are, if you're watching this video, either you or somebody you know, is in the profession of business process management, or BPM. Business process management professionals have a very unique role to play in any organization. They get to see across processes, across the organization - not just siloed departments. This view can bring so much value across the organization. Not to mention that a lot of BPM professionals are fairly smart. Having said all that, why aren't people in the whole entire organization just absolutely raging at their door, wanting them to work at every single project, every single piece of work?

In this week’s Process Session, we talk about the importance of selling your process model benefits using best practice marketing tactics and approaches. The transcript below has been lightly edited. -- Sandeep: Selling the benefits of process modeling is difficult. In fact it’s one of the hardest things that any process modeling project undergoes. A lot of traditional ways of selling process models have been questioned before and some of them have not worked. Others may have but what we’re offering today is a fresh new way to look at how process models have been sold. More importantly the benefits of these process models. I’d like to introduce you to Daniel Weatherhead who’s our marketing manager in Leonardo Consulting. He is here today to answer some of our questions and provide some guidelines on how process modeling or models can benefit from a marketing perspective. Welcome to the show Daniel. Daniel: Thanks Sandeep. It’s great to be here today. Sandeep: So before we get into actually answering the question of how process modeling can leverage marketing, let’s get some of the basics correct first. So Dan in your point of view, what are some of the basic techniques the world of marketing can inform and can educate the people in the modeling world? Daniel: What we’re talking about is a shift - a shift away from what we would call the old outbound marketing tactics. These are the tactics of the previous generation - the generation before. Interruptive tactics that don’t necessarily look to inform and educate but were very much placed there interruptively into people’s lives. Now think about your television ads, your radio ads, your newspaper, advertisements. These are the sort of things that shout at you. They are one-way traffic. People didn’t necessarily go seeking those messages.

Have you been asked to do a process model and you just don't know the amount of detail that you need to do a successful process model? The level of granularity that you have in your process model will determine how useful it will be.