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Nachdem wir nun die meisten Tücken der Sachmittelbeschaffung (an der Uni Potsdam) aus dem EXIST-Budget herausgefunden haben, habe ich den dazugehörigen Prozess aus Sicht der Fördermittelempfänger (Stipendiaten) einmal mit dem Signavio Process Editor modelliert.

Auf den ersten Blick erscheint das gar nicht so kompliziert. Bis man das aber alles erst einmal herausgefunden hat, vergehen schmerzhafte Wochen. Ich hoffe, mit dem erworbenen Prozesswissen kann ich anderen Gründern weiterhelfen…

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February 2008: The OMG releases version 1.1 of the Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN). Almost nobody really took notice of it, though. There wasn’t even a news entry on one of the relevant news tickers – not even on the news of OMG itself!

Anyway, despite the bad marketing the BPMN community seems to have noticed the finalization of this revision of BPMN by now.

But seriously, what’s this new version all about? An official changelog is nowhere to be found. So, who is keen on screening a 318 pp. specification for differences to the old version? We did it for you and compiled it into a compacted whitepaper summarizing the delta between the new and the old version.

Please feel free to leave a comment if you would like to add your thoughts about the new version and/or the whitepaper.

I’m more than pleased to announce the link to my freshly published Master’s thesis in the field of Business Process Management. It was written in cooperation with SAP Research, Brisbane Australia.

If you are interested in a thorough look at semantics of data flow, message flow and process instantiation in the context of an executable version of BPMN you should definitely check out this thesis (or parts of it).

Please also take a look at the abstract:

The Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) has recently become very popular amongst business analysts as an easy-to-use yet powerful modeling notation for business processes. However, BPMN is not able to capture all the details necessary for automated execution by an engine.
The Business Process Execution Language (BPEL), on the other hand, is directly executable by business process engines but lacks an intuitive graphical notation.

In order to extend BPMN 1.0 towards direct executability, the thesis presented enriches the revised control flow concepts of xBPMN (by Alexander Grosskopf) with an orthogonal data flow perspective. Sophisticated and carefully defined data flow semantics are essential to enable orchestration on execution level.
In the course of this thesis we describe use cases and introduce formal definitions of the following concepts: data object lifecycle, data scoping, data assignment, mediation and transformation, streaming/buffering, correlation, and process instantiation for xBPMN++.

You can download the thesis from here or from the publications page.