Re BPMN for People and Robots

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BPMN for People and Robots
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Anatoly,

I would compare your shock with a shock of a person who looked first time at a human’s internal organs in live (I saw a beating heart once - not nice). Personally, I want to say huge thanks to Intalio for making a lot of BPM internals FREE, EXECUTABLE and EXPLICIT. Of course, some poor-man solutions are used so far. For example, all data messages are synchronous – an extra exchange is required to implement asynchronous communications, use of two languages (BPMN and BPEL), etc. Sure, Intalio is not perfect and they had some strange ideas (e.g. zero-code). Fortunately, they consider some critics with Business Edition and Developer Edition.

Returning to the diagram – it can be done by an analyst in the following way:



Also, the current Intalio implementation of human tasks is not a “fault” of BPMN, but the result of the usage of BPEL. At the same time, Oracle SOA Fusion invented some macros to hide this complexity in their BPEL. WebSphere (not IBM Designer) has a very comprehensive human task manager and a human task is a single “block” in their BPEL (because Websphere uses extra SCA/SDO layer).

Concerning Sandy’s “...consider people as first-class process citizens.” – it is an old story (after some problems in some industries) about automation of human work. “It does not mean that the goal is to replace humans by programs. On the contrary, the human is in command as he/she is responsible for the outcome. Any automation is to help the humans to carry out their work.”

Finally, all depends how you organise the work between business analyst and other people within the team - who should produce which artefacts. With Intalio you may have more choices.

Thanks,
AS