Agree totally about the commoditisation. If you already have a
significant investment in BPEL, and want to leverage it fully, you
should look at BPEL4People.
Re the HIM mindset, it is about dealing with all forms of H2H
interaction. In an organizational setting you can rarely divorce
individuals from the various groups with whom they are connected.
In particular, to help people work effectively, it is necessary to
understand the relationships between their personal goals and group
goals. Otherwise, human nature being what it is, you can analyse away
until you're blue in the face and the people who are supposed to be
implementing your wonderful new processes will either ignore them or
subvert them :-) I see this all the time.
Understanding such relationships means determining what responsibilities
exist, who is willing and able to take them on, what dependencies exist,
how these dependencies are to be mitigated (via a "really good PA", for
example), and so on. Further, there are generally complex issues
related to organizational control which must also be taken into
account. This cannot be done via any flowchart-related technique! HIM
provides a simple set of ideas, patterns and notational constructs with
which you can untangle this web.
--
All the best
Keith
http://keith.harrison-broninski.info
Steve Jones wrote:
100% agree, but at least this will commoditise the current space and
help us all move on to the real challenge (which is as you say the
actual human to human piece). The more we commoditise these older
areas the more chance there is to move on to the next thing.
Historically we've had real issues in going over the same ground over
and over again rather than moving on to the next problem set.
One question around HIM though is whether its mindset is still
individuals with individuals, which is hard enough, or dynamic ad-hoc
groups which is much harder. It would be nice to move on to the first
stage of that, but I've still not seen anything that really helps with
the later (except for a really good PA).
Steve
On 27/06/07, *Keith Harrison-Broninski* <[EMAIL PROTECTED]
<mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>> wrote:
Just to clarify.
When the BPEL folk say "human interactions" they mean between
interactions between humans and systems (H2S). This is what
BPEL4People sets out to deal with.
This is a separate matter from interactions between humans and
humans (H2H), the domain of Human Interaction Management
<http://human-interaction-management.info> (HIM). Such work is
collaborative, innovative, and adaptive - and cannot be supported
with a language such as BPEL, no matter how it is extended. All
mainstream BPM languages, including graphical notations like BPMN,
are based on carrying out steps in a pre-defined sequence, which
is not how humans work together.
--
All the best
Keith
http://keith.harrison-broninski.info <http://keith.harrison-broninski.info>
Gervas Douglas wrote:
A group of technology vendors that includes Active Endpoints, Adobe,
BEA Systems, IBM, Oracle and SAP, has published business process
execution language for people, or BPEL4People, as a set of
specifications to define human interactions in business processes.
