Jim SinurBPMN for business professionals is just not up to a business level of need. Some folks think that BPMN is good enough for IT and it should be good enough for business professionals. I think the former is true, but the latter is way off the mark.
![MPj04450140000[1]](http://blogs.gartner.com/jim_sinur/files/2010/08/WindowsLiveWriterBPMNforBusinessProfessionalsBurnBabyBurn_7D2DMPj044501400001_2.jpg)
BPMN really stands for “Business People May Not…understand”
IT professionals can’t really expect business folks to understand cryptic/standard formats when they really want to see a real representation of their processes with desirable icons; not engineering Icons. It’s kind of like someone saying “let them eat cake”. It is this IT arrogance that could sink BPM technologies.
Fortunately a number of BPM vendors are smart enough to support multiple representations, so that both audiences can we happy. I get the idea of standardization for engineers that are disciplined, but not for business folks. If we fully expect BPM to enter the “C suite” and become the business man’s best friend, it had better shape up its image. BPMN is just one issue that BPM needs to engage in making processes appealing to the business.
Category: BPM Business Process Improvement Social Tags: BPM, Social
28 responses so far ↓
1 Tweets that mention BPMN for Business Professionals: Burn Baby Burn -- Topsy.com August 30, 2010 at 12:23 pm
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by T.S. Li (李丹珊) and Greg Lambert Feed, Uptime Devices. Uptime Devices said: BPMN for Business Professionals: Burn Baby Burn http://bit.ly/btHYSR [...]
2 Process for the Enterprise » Blog Archive » Apparently BPMN is Too Hard August 31, 2010 at 7:49 am
[...] Sinur has thrown in the towel on BPMN in his latest post: BPMN for business professionals is just not up to a business level of need. [...]
3 Chris Adams August 31, 2010 at 8:04 pm
I have to agree with Jim here.
I recently returned from NYC where I had a conversation with a very frustrated CIO new to his company. One of his first challenges was to settle the internal havoc and chaos in the company regarding how their flagship process was to be executed. This is an enterprise process spanning multiple departments and included the company’s sales, marketing, professional services, and executive teams.
He thought he was doing the company a service by finally documenting the process visually….and he invested in the BPMN notation to do this. He presented the map to the company, stating proudly that the enterprise process was finally documented and in visual format. Unfortunately for him, all of the business people in his office simply took the BPMN representation as “pseudo-code”, and rather than the people argue over the actual flow of the process, they asked a million questions about the shape and icons used. He was resigned to having to go back to the drawing board and “simplify” the model.
This is a true example to me where the B in BPM must be respected….in fact, it is the first letter in BPM. Business people do not want to learn another application, much less a process notation. They want to either make more money, get their day-to-day job done faster, or make their own job easier….and they want to do this in the context in which they are already accustomed.
While BPM can ultimately lead the horses to water….it cannot make the people drink.
4 Scott Francis August 31, 2010 at 10:20 pm
Wait, so a single CIO doesn’t spend any time educating the business on BPMN, and we’re to throw out BPMN completely?
I get that “the business” wants to make $ and not focus on process. But guess what, sometimes that’s what you have to do to make money. Most people in most businesses are NOT in IT – they’re in the business. Its too easy to walk away and just keep doing Business As Usual but it isn’t the right thing to do. I’ve handled dozens if not hundreds of these conversations. It isn’t that hard with practice. and the rewards are well worth it (ROI).
“In the context in which they are already accustomed” – so should they keep running their processes from excel spreadsheets and continue to have no organizational agreement about what the core processes are? Look, not everyone in the business has to understand BPMN, just as not everyone in the business has to understand accounting. But the business still needs accounting to get done, and it needs process. A subset of people in the business have to be able to engage on this level. And if the CIO had to use a simpler set of icons from the BPMN set, to get his point across to those who have never been exposed to BPMN, that hardly seems like a problem. He just missed the target audience the first time.
http://www.bp-3.com/blogs/2010/08/apparently-bpmn-is-too-hard/
5 BPMN 2.0: no longer for Business Professionals | On Collaborative Planning September 1, 2010 at 3:11 am
[...] for Business Professionals Posted on September 1, 2010 by kswenson Jim Sinur in his post BPMN for Business Professionals: Burn Baby Burn points strongly to the conclusion that BPMN is simply not suitable for business users. I am not [...]
6 Jim Sinur September 1, 2010 at 9:49 am
Scott,
The point is that the business does care about process that’s why they deserve better than something that requires training. It should be more natural and intuitive. BPMN should be one way to look at processes, but there needs to be something better on top of it.
Jim
7 Robert Shapiro September 1, 2010 at 12:31 pm
I think Jim is reacting to the complexity of BPMN brought about by tool builders injecting complex and untried constructs, both at the graphical and execution details levels. By and large little attention was paid to the use of BPMN as a way of developing ‘high-level’ models to help understand how a business operates.
My efforts to provide simplified views based on ‘conformance subsets’ of BPMN resulted in a change to the specification that should encourage tool vendors to provide explicit support for simpler views.
Going beyond that, we need to provide tools for business users trying to learn something from the BPMN models. I believe that a different kind of simulator, I call it an ‘Analytics simulator’, could shed light on the behavioral structure of a BPMN model.
Such a simulator would make extensive use of spreadsheets, both for providing the statistical information for performing the simulation and for examining the results. This type of simulation would not focus on resource allocation or scheduling, but rather the inherent costs associated with the different execution patterns determined by input data and occurrence of events.
I have built a preliminary version of such a simulator, providing support for the constructs in BPMN1.2, BPMN2.0 and the XPDL serialization of these. Interested parties can contact me at rshapiro@capevisions.com.
8 On IT-business alignment and related things » BPMN 2.0: is it really “not for the business”? September 1, 2010 at 4:03 pm
[...] In a post today called BPMN 2.0: no longer for Business Professionals, Keith Swenson of Fujitsu (lead author of Mastering the Unpredictable) builds on a recent post on BPMN from Gartner’s Jim Sinur (BPMN for Business Professionals: Burn Baby Burn). [...]
9 links for 2010-09-01 « steinarcarlsen September 1, 2010 at 4:03 pm
[...] BPMN for Business Professionals: Burn Baby Burn (tags: bpmn bpmn-for-business) [...]
10 Chris Adams September 1, 2010 at 4:40 pm
Scott….I agree that not everyone in a company needs to know the in’s and out’s of Accounting, because other departments have other primary initiatives (distinct from Accounting).
But when you talk about processes in a company, which all departments have (and which many departments share), then it is the concern of everyone in the company. If not everyone in the company needs to understand BPMN (taking from your argument), then wouldn’t we be creating silos of understandable information?
While I am not stating BPMN has no relevance, I remain confident that if a visual process model takes education and training to comprehend it, a large percentage of people in the workspace will simply not take the time to put down what they are doing to learn it.
11 Jakob Freund September 1, 2010 at 5:40 pm
Er, consider this (the CIO example):
The problem has not been that the Buiness Managers should have learned the whole of BPMN, nor that BPMN is too complicated for “the Business”.
Is English to complicated for Business? Well, I am sure I can use English in a way that it is (and I am German! Ehm, maybe that’s why :-/ ). Meaning: It depends on the talker.
Your CIO needs a higher level of understanding on how to work with process models (does not matter whether EPC, BPMN, or what ever). There is a HUGE difference between detailed documentations and analysis of processes, and communicating them to people with other core competences than process modeling.
That’s the whole point, no need to blame BPMN for that. You cannot buy a child a dictionary and expect it to write a best seller.
cheers Jakob
12 Max J. Pucher - Chief Architect ISIS Papyrus September 2, 2010 at 2:26 am
Thanks Jim, for having the guts to say this out loud.
I wrote already in 2008 ‘Why flowcharts are wrong’ here http://isismjpucher.wordpress.com/2008/10/16/role-activity-diagrams/
In most of my posts I challenge the suitability of flowcharts for process design by business users. I see flowcharts as one of many perspectives that can be used to illustrate a process, including UML data entities, state/event diagrams, role-activity diagrams and a few more.
The business user must be able to create and modify a process without any of that! Those who focus on flowcharts do not have a focus on empowering people but just on cost reduction. Knowledge based processes can’t even be represented by flowcharts at all, not even by an IT expert. And he would have to spend months trying to analyze the knowledge that is already in the heads of the business users. So why don’t we focus on empowering those to use process management without trying to crack their head open?
13 Piotr Biernacki - MGX Infoservice September 2, 2010 at 3:42 am
I agree with Jakob. CIO must know BPMN but …
BPMN is like language.
Because of complicated grammatic form in English language should we exchange it for simply Pidgin? No.
I am using BPMN for communication with not IT advanced managers and with IT staff. But form of diagrams for this communication is other. This for managers are simplified (but still in common with BPMN). Then when I must explain them more sophisticated diagrams I can call theirs experience in reading of the these simplified. And it works. (But in most cases they are nit interested in implementation – implementation “must work”).
There is a lot of complicated constructions in BPMN 2.0 but nobody MUST use them all. If you want to get success in communication simply use this what lead you to the success in communication.
14 Matthew Whitcombe September 2, 2010 at 8:30 am
Jim – Ab-so-lutely – I could not agree more.
Any process notation that requires business people to understand a new language – even what icons mean – must surely be the perfect poison to introduce misundersanding.
And surely this really, really matters. I read somewhere (may even be your research Jim) that 82% of the cost of all IT rework comes from misunderstandings between the business and IT. I suspect that matters somewhat to most CIOs…
Thanks JIm, well said.
15 Jim Sinur September 2, 2010 at 9:11 am
Max,
I would not throw the baby out with the bath. I think process visualization is a fanstic way to represent a process. Yes, it needs to be augmented, however process representation that is closer to what people naturally understand is best. If processs maps are closer to being easily executed and visually measured during the execution, even better. BPMN is one way to represent the visualization, but it is not intuitive. BPMN needs to be augmented by something more intuitive.
Jim
16 Process for the Enterprise » Blog Archive » I See Business Professionals… Using BPMN September 3, 2010 at 1:12 am
[...] really opened a can of worms the other day with his missive on BPMN, literally calling for it to burn baby burn – nothing like a gentle start like that to initiate a moderate discussion of the finer points [...]
17 Paul Barrett September 3, 2010 at 10:52 am
Thank you Jim. Someone had to speak out and say that BPMN’s baby is ugly.
Jakob Freund made the point that as a German speaker he had to make some effort to learn and use the lingua franca of business, English, and that some effort should be expected in respect of BPMN.
Very useful analogy Jakob, do you mind if I take it a stage further?
Imagine IT turned up and said, ‘Great News! We have mapped the processes in a language we can ALL understand……….. and it’s Esperanto, we need you all to learn Esperanto.’
I am now a process professional (yes, OK, for a BPMN sceptic vendor) but I come from a business operations background. Even the simplest manifestation of process in BPMN is impenetrable to me, without constant reference to a wallchart of BPMN symbols. There’s a reason we are not all speaking Esperanto and it’s the same reason that business users will reject BPMN.
Of course if the person to whom they are speaking doesn’t understand Esperanto IT could always try the time honoured but ultimately unsuccessful principle of speaking it louder and slower, whilst bemoaning the ignorance of the listener. Or they could try learning the language of the person with whom they are trying to communicate. After all if I have an important topic to discuss with someone isn’t it up to me to do it in a way they can understand?
18 Dave Duggal September 3, 2010 at 12:41 pm
Amen Jim. Multi-view visualization to add process comprehension and collaboration on top of code design is a good thing. Adding visualization as a remedial layer on top of BPMN itself is questionable, as it doesn’t address BPMN’s underlying limitations.
19 BPMN Quotes of the week « Adam Deane September 5, 2010 at 8:12 am
[...] BPMN for Business Professionals – Jim Sinur IT professionals can’t really expect business folks to understand [...]
20 Jakob Freund September 5, 2010 at 6:26 pm
Hi Paul,
can’t you penetrate this BPMN diagram then either: http://bit.ly/9m7EnP
Just meaning: It really depends on how you use the standard. The learning curve is for the Business Analyst (or what ever you call him), not for the “pure” Business User, Manager or whatever. There is no “black” and “white” with “business” and “IT”.
Cheers Jakob
21 The Process Ninja September 6, 2010 at 1:35 am
If you look up Jan Recker’s study on the usage of BPMN the fact of the matter is that only about 10% of the BPMN notation is widely used – why? It’s too complicated! Keep it simple and talk the language of the business…
22 Column 2 : The Great BPMN Debate of 2010 September 6, 2010 at 12:54 pm
[...] BPMN for Business Professionals: Burn Baby Burn: Jim Sinur blogs about how BPMN is too hard for business people, touching off a storm of comments on this post, and several posts from others on the same subject. [...]
23 The Great BPMN Debate of 2010 September 6, 2010 at 7:58 pm
[...] BPMN for Business Professionals: Burn Baby Burn: Jim Sinur blogs about how BPMN is too hard for business people, touching off a storm of comments on this post, and several posts from others on the same subject. [...]
24 Fan Yi September 7, 2010 at 1:09 am
BPMN for business professionals? I’ve never thought about this but I was always wondering … has BPMN ever been for business professionals?
To answer the question I think we’ll have to answer another question firstly – Who are the business professionals? Are their foreheads marked with “I am a business professional”? I am sorry I’ve never met people with such foreheads but my clients – who never care about it is business or programming. Some of the questions I’ve been asked for hundreds times are like these, “Can the process be moudled and then automated?” “Is there any benifit?” and even “How many employees I can fair if the process is automated and improved?”
Besides the programmers (I’m a programmer) I think all others users of BPMN are the so called “business professionals.” These people are not lazy at all but working hard and thinking hard about benefit every second. They are benefit-minded not programming minded even not business minded.
To create a language that both fits the business people and the programmers is the major idea of BPMN but the OMG people (I guess they are mostly programming minded people) make the specification very complicated (this is not bad) and they forget one thing – that the business people understand the diagrams (many of them have the great MBA degrees, which I do not have) but not all the details.
So the BPMN 2.0 should be of different levels (which the OMG guys ignore), at the high level it is useful to both the business people and the programming people, at the detailed level (I call it the executable level) it is the programmers’ business, and between the two levels there should be the adapters. This way the BPMN would be closer to “perfect” but unfortunately we are still here talking about “no longer for people who need it.”
I do not know what I am saying and I’ve never been good at the great language (here I mean English not process modeling language) – I am sorry for that.
Fan Yi
Joinwork Software, Inc.
http://www.joinwork.com
25 Covering all sides of the BPMN Debate « Fujitsu Interstage Blog September 7, 2010 at 1:39 am
[...] BPMN for Business Professionals: Burn Baby Burn [...]
26 BPMN (and others): good … except exceptions? « Everything Decision Management, Technically Speaking September 8, 2010 at 4:26 pm
[...] post is a reaction to Jim Sinur’s post stating that BPMN is not suited for business users – a provocative short piece that was sure to create some [...]
27 Carole-Ann Matignon September 8, 2010 at 5:48 pm
Jim, once again you ignite the bloggosphere with a sensitive subject.
Many have already invested in BPMN and feel passionate about its use. I want to bring their attention to the fact that we are not condemning it because it is not usable by business people.
It would be a little narrow minded to assume that business users don’t care about their processes because they don’t embrace it. Visualization need to help get the esence fo the message across as you discussed in a previous post.
The videos that you posted from TED are quite telling on the power of a well-chosen graphical representation. I particularly loved McCandless’s (http://www.ted.com/talks/david_mccandless_the_beauty_of_data_visualization.html).
We learned quite early on on the BRMS side that graphical and technical interfaces needed to differ because the 2 audiences have different concerns and different skills. Please do not think I am advocating using the same mechanism to supplant BPMN. The solutions on the market are equally flawed if you ask me. We have failed so far in getting a representation that appeals to business users or, when we do, it was after humongous efforts… but I am diggressing…
What I am advocation though is that business users should not be bothered by superflous information – that may very well be relevant for the technical users, possibly critical. Jim is totally right when he talks about “desirable icons”. Not because they are shallow, but because they are struggling to see the content when the form is in the way.
Imagine that we could only experience music in the form of notes on sheet music… It would take enormous efforts to fully appreciate a concerto. Admit that the appropriate representation for the right audience make a hell of a difference (desperately trying to tie back to the “burn baby burn” theme)…
We might have called your baby ugly but take it as constructive feedback… Carlos Serrano-Morales put a few ideas together to substanciate what is not working besides the obscure representation. I think he got a point that BPMN or other graphical standards for that matter do have limitations especially as we deal with exceptions (http://bit.ly/9w89CR).
Carole-Ann
28 Garth Knudson September 10, 2010 at 2:18 pm
Great discussion. Like many of you I have sat down with customers to explain and review business requirements and tech specifications illustrated by BPMN. When a question is asked about a certain icon, I try my best to define it in business terms. If there is a misunderstanding, I feel it is my fault and not the fault of the icon. If for reason the customer gets hung up on the icon, we simply switch out the BPMN icon for something else, whatever the customer wants to see that best illustrates/captures her business. But overall, BPMN helps standardize the way we capture and talk about business processes.