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Why Automated BPM will never live up to its hype

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I like point out really nutty ideas, even when a lot of people have spent a lot of time investing in them.  This one is about expectations.

About 15-20 years ago, a great many companies starting investing in "Business Process Management" because of the opportunities to remove some really inefficient behavior.  Along came the nerds, and we created pretty languages for describing business processes, and we started telling the business that once business processes are described using these languages, then you can push a button and "viola" the process becomes automated.

According to the 'true believers,' we can give end users one of our pretty languages (BPMN or BPEL) and they will write their own software, and we can fire all the IT developers.

Why do we say such things?

Perhaps because we know what a bad idea it is for software developers to write so much crappy code? 

Yes, we want to get rid of expensive IT developers and replace them with something less expensive.  Yes, we want to speed up the development of software that is custom to the business.  Yes, we want business software to reflect the unique processes of the business.

But we cannot do it with visual business process modeling languages.

The reason is that BPM languages model HUMAN behavior.  The things that "become code" are indicative of COMPUTER behavior.  We have to be 1,000 times more explicit with computers than with humans.  So we need to develop 1,000 times as much code for computers as we do for humans.

There are times when it makes sense to use BPEL for automation.  But it is not a long list, because we have an abstraction that is a very long way from the code.  We can automate a small number of situations where coherent activities, in sequence, are performed entirely by computer.  Certainly, we want these situations to increase.  But the overall impact on the cost and quality of IT-developed software is minimal. 

And if we are not addressing the cost and quality of IT software... why even discuss BPM automation?

Comments

  • Anonymous
    July 07, 2008
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    July 07, 2008
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    July 09, 2008
    Nick Malik пишет , что автоматизации бизнес-процессов мешает ориентированность языков их описания на

  • Anonymous
    July 10, 2008
    Our comment on this post is at: http://tinyurl.com/vosibilities-071008.

  • Anonymous
    July 11, 2008
    Apparently, I ticked off Bruce Silver .  In case you haven't heard of the fellow, as I had not,

  • Anonymous
    July 17, 2008
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    July 18, 2008
    It sounds, Bruce, like you pretty much agree with me.  I wasn't aware of that particular effort, but I'm not surprised by it.  My timeline was referring to COTS products, but many large companies invested in interesting ideas, and it sounds like you had a great opportunity to work with a legend.  I'm green with envy. What I am hearing you say is this: the stuff that you can automate with tools is well-defined stuff, because automation requires a great deal of detail.   The point that I was trying to make, and that I've been fairly roundly attacked for in other blogs, is that the stuff in a business process model, in BPMN especially, is not greatly detailed, and that is INTENTIONAL, GOOD, and USEFUL. I've come up with all kinds of analogies to explain why there are different things here: process descriptions intended for human beings, and visual languages intended for computers... and that bundling them together in a single software product sets untenable expectations.  They don't appear to be working, alas. It's good to hear from someone who's 'been there.'  Thank you for contributing. --- Nick

  • Anonymous
    July 30, 2008
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    September 12, 2008
    Kudos to Andrea Westernein on her blog about the disjoint between the work that people do and business