Roger van de Kimmenade Blog

Trends in BPM

2013-06-14T11:56:00.000+02:00

On Friday morning I left Geldrop for the Conference "Trends in BPM" in the picturesque town Hoevelaken. The theme this year was "Samenwerken in de keten: mens, methodes en impact" (Collaboration within the chain: people, methods and impact). It was held in the Koninginnestraat 1 at Intres. It was a very long street and each traffic sign said "1 straight ahead", but in the end the street ended and no nr 1 was found. Also not Intres. When I drove the whoel street for the third time and asked three people for Intres and nr 1, i finally parked my car at Euretco. I went inside to the reception and asked where i could find Intres. It appeared that the name Intres was renamed to Euretco, so in fact i was at the correct place! Maybe a hint to write the correct name on the invitations !?

So I went inside and soon noticed that i was a little bit underdressed. This was my own fault, because most of the times these conferences are packed with suits. But nevertheless I went into the first session hoping to hear which direction BPM is going ...

Pascal Ravesteijn opened the event with a survey of an investigation that was held under >100 people, on the maturity of BPM within organisations. The conclusion was that the maturity was decreased in comparison with 2010. Due to crisis or more focus on BPM maturity of organisations? He could not tell, but this was the fact. After this the sessions began ...

Optimalisatie door diversiteit in standaardisatie
(Optimization through diversity within standardization)

The first session was a case in which Ton Arrachart (CIO of Oord Dredging & Marne) told about the challenges he faces within the world of Dredging. The story was about standards used within the processes especially when it comes to the security of his employees. Furthermore the standardization of the ships, because this way ships can be build faster and employees can change between ships, because of procedures and processes on the ships are the same.

Gezamenlijk sturen op gedeelde informatie, simpel toch?
(Steering together by using shared information, easy right?)

This session held by Bas van der Raadt (Senior ICT Architect at Schiphol Group), was about a CDM system build by EuroControl. CDM stands for Collaborative Decision Making. The system helps in coordinating the planes within the European air. The process looks fairly simple, but there were a lot of challenges, for example:

The interpretation or definition of the terms used within the field are not always the same within companies. For example: A flight. For KLM this meant the whole route from beginning to the end (with stops in between). Within the context of Schiphol it is just the incoming and outgoing of the plane.
Political issues
Involving the right people

Within the process there are milestones defined, which are important for the process on which is steered.

Hoe blijf je in controle over je process?
(How to stay in control of your process)

This session (held by Tom Kastelein) was about a new banking concept (knab). It is a new bank build from the ground and with the client in the lead. He told about the process of vision towards real implementation of the concept. By selecting the right people, with the right mindset and innovation, they managed to build up a new banking company with a different approach. Within lies a BPM architecture that makes it possible to automate a lot of client processes. For example they claim to register a new customer within 3 minutes, by the use of this BPM platform.

After this session we had a break with the usual coffee and soda's. After the break we started off with an enthusiastic session.

In control met regelbeheersing
(In control with business rules)

This session was held by Mark Mastop (Chief Innovation Officer, Aquima). Aquima was one of the sponsors of this event (thanks !). The talk was about how organizations can be flexible by centralizing its business rules, so that these rules are made traceable. This way the business rules become far more transparent and can be easily changed, so that the company can be flexible.

He talked about Decision Modeling Notation, a standard for describing business rules.

Furthermore in the new produkt version of Aquima, they are going to work together with James Taylor who is a known figure within the DMN field. See also on the LinkedIn group to follow discussions on this subject.

Software is Eating the World

Software is anywhere. That was the statement of Marco van Heerde en Wilbert Baan. They had an inspiring session that software is eating the world. They also states that we are living in a network society. Joi Ito has written down 9 principles for this new way of living.

These principles look like the Agile Manifesto :-)

They showed some very interesting websites like:

Kickstarter (A crowd funding site on which you can place an idea that can be funded by the crowd)
Scanadu (You own personal house dokter)
23andme (where you can investigate your own DNA)
Nike's Fuelband (keeps track of walking/running information)

This presentation (again) showed that we as people/client are becoming in control.

After this presentation I left the building and went for a nice diner at De Foep.

In this nice setting I thought about the conference and this is what I thought:

Some nice customer cases were presented using BPM
Not many new insides into the direction of BPM
Very inspiring session about Software is everything
Curious to see how BPM will fit within the new 21rst century, in which people are more and more in control in which (i think), standard processes will disappear and social collaboration, and internet of things is the future. These internet of things will be available anytime and anywhere.

Installed Cordys BOP4.2 CU1

2013-06-07T08:38:00.000+02:00

When i installed Cordys Bop4.2 CU1 i ran into two problems which i wanted to share with you.
My environment: Windows Server 8 R2, MySql 5.5, Java 1.7

I followed the installation documentation of Cordys: https://wiki.cordys.com/display/bop42/Cordys+BOP+4.2+Documentation

I was able to install CARS without any problems. The I installed BOP with default configurations. I had a clean database, so I let Cordys create the database, but then the installation failed with a "Could not execute database scripts". I contacted Cordys and this appeared to be a known bug. You have to create the database schema first:

CREATE DATABASE %CordysDatabase% DEFAULT CHARACTER SET utf8 DEFAULT COLLATE utf8_general_ci;
GRANT ALL ON Cordys.* TO root IDENTIFIED BY '%password%';

So happy that this worked, I installed it again and it went fine. Until the base packages had to be installed. It failed with a NULL pointer exception with an error message I did not understand.

It turned out that the Cordys Monitor could not be started. So I contacted Cordys again and this appeared another issue.
Today I saw this on the Cordys Wiki: https://wiki.cordys.com/display/PI/2013/06/06/Issue+with+Java+Update+21

Kabisa ESB

2013-05-30T09:12:00.001+02:00

Today i came accross an ESB of Kabisa ICT. They have a produkt called Kabisa ESB.
This is a short blog item just to write down what i came to know about this ESB.

Well first of all it is based on Apache Camel (for routing and mediation) and Apache Service Mix.
Service Mix is an implementation of JBI (Java Business Integration) standard.

On top of that Kabisa has made a graphical designer (FlowDesigner) to integrate your systems and to setup complex workflows and data streams.

No more information on the site w.r.t FlowDesigner, so i asked for documentation. Hope to blog on this tool more soon ....

Cordys BPMS Certification in da house !

2013-05-20T17:00:00.000+02:00

Friday i received my official Cordys BPMS Certification.
With proud i present you:

Next goal is the Cordys Solution Architect Certification ....

Cordys Solution Architect Certification

2013-05-13T09:20:00.002+02:00

Tomorrow i have my first theoretical exam of the Cordys Solution Architect Certification.
For this theoretical part you have to know:

SOA
CAF
CWS
Security parts

I did not have much time to prepare the exam, so i am curious tomorrow....

The next part of this certification is a handson that takes 15 calendar days.

The third part is that you give a presentation of a business case where you took part of as a Solution Architect.

The fourth part is that you publish a new article, solution pattern, or best practice on the community.

So a lot to go for, ....

TweetDeck

2013-05-09T21:29:00.001+02:00

Introduction

One of my favorite tools is TweetDeck, so in fact Twitter.
I use TweetDeck to tweet what i am doing and thinking. But most of all i use it to see what is going on within the field. This blog item describes the way i use TweetDeck.

Tips and Tricks

Of course you need a TwitterAccount to tweet.

1 - Use Lists

I follow a lot of people and therefore my stream is very large. So how can you filter your stream?

You can create as much List as you like and assign twitter accounts to Lists.

I use the Lists as follows.

* I use list for Interesting tweets

* People i know: Know

You can add Twitter Accounts to Lists:

Click on the Account

2 - Use Columns

You can add Columns in which you can show all type of Tweets. I use it to show Lists i currently interested in or i use it for topics i currently interesting in. For example on Cordys.

You select Add Column
Select the Search and type Cordys

Now you will see all tweets related to Cordys:

You can choose to add a lot of other Column types. Try them.

I find TweetDeck a very usefull tool !

Oracle BPM 11.1.1.7 Case Management compared to Cordys Case Management

2013-04-04T10:30:00.000+02:00

Introduction

Oracle announced its new BPM 11.1.1.7 produkt.

I found it interested that also (Adaptive) Case Management was added and i was curious what the difference is between the Oracle and Cordys approach w.r.t. Case Management. In this Blog item i will discuss some of the the differences and resemblance.

Adapative Case Management

Both Cordys and Oracle agree on the fact that there are processes that are not defined ahead and a knowledge worker can define the path as the case progresses. So that's good news.

Also both in Oracle and Cordys the case management and normal BPMN processes can be mixed.

Case Modelling

Oracle
Users can define a Case and associate it with a set of Case Activities. In addition to Case activities, the Case definition consists of case data, case documents, case rules, case events, case milestones, case stakeholders, and case outcomes. The progression of a case is indicated via case milestones. A case milestone signifies completion of a stage in a case and is useful as it provides high-level snapshots for management to validate the progress of a case. A case is said to be complete when a case outcome is reached.

The case activities could be BPMN based processes or human workflow tasks or notifications or could be
even an automated system step. These activities could be mandatory or optional and become available
to the case worker at various points as the case progresses. The activation of a case activity can be
manual or automatic based on case rules or case events or reaching of a case milestone. In addition to
pre-defined case activities, the platform also supports creation of case activities by a case worker.

After creation of a Case Management Component in Oracle BPM two components of the implementation are created: a Case object and a Case related rules set.

The true engine behind the case management is Oracle's Rule Engine. Their you can define what should be happen when an event occurs.

(Asynchronous) processes can be used within Cases and the rule engine when promoted to case activity.

Cordys

Cordys takes a more modelling approach. It uses Functional States to model the possible states within the case (i.s.o. Milestones). The activities can also be human tasks, processes or automated steps. The case model is visualized.

The following activity within the case can be defined using Automatic, Free or Intermediate. The Free follow-up activities can be selected by the Knowledge worker within that particular functional state. Automatic activities are executed automatically when the previous activity is finished. Intermediate activity is an activity that can be selected by the knowledge worker as a kind of side step.

Events or when activities are completed within a functional state are used to define transitions between states.

Cases and BPMN processes can be mixed within Cordys as well.

Documents

Oracle

Oracle integrates with its Oracle Web Center Content product component. Oracle BPM 11.1.1.7 also supports integration with 3rd party content management systems via CMIS (Content Management Interoperability Services) interfaces.

Cordys

Cordys integrates default with JackRabbit. Also custom CMS integration is possible when adhered to JSR 170 compliant interface.

Conclusions

Oracle an entity modeler to define the case data.

Cordys uses an XML editor to define the case data.

Oracle uses a rule engine table to define the case using events, activities and milestones.

Cordys takes the modeling approach using functional states, events and activities.

Oracle has good integration with its document store system.

Cordys takes the open source Jack Rabbit as its default document store system.

Of course both products have a lot of more features, but this gives you already some overview.

More can be found:

Oracle: http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/middleware/bpm/overview/index.html

Cordys: http://www.cordys.com/

Some BPM Misunderstandings

2013-04-04T09:13:00.000+02:00

Like to pose some misunderstandings about BPM.
Maybe some BPM tool vendors will disagree and also some BPM consultancy firms, but then again this is my own humble opinion. Feel free to react, add your own, discuss.

Lets begin with a delicate one.

BPM makes my organisation flexible

A lot of people will say that BPM makes your organization flexible. It can be the case but then there must hold a couple of pre-conditions:

You must know where you want flexibility
In this case you have to know the future and you do not know it.
You must have a good IT SOA architecture
This is needed to be flexible to define your processes. Using Services will enable reuse and consistency throughout the architecture
It is only design time flexibility
The statement that the business can change the process on the fly is mostly false. I have not seen it yet and is probably only a couple of configurations that can be changed so that parameters within the process are changed. This way you can steer the process but the process itself remains the same.

BPM is about tooling

It is a classic mistake that BPM is a IT party
It should be an enterprise wide initiative because BPM is most of the time stretched horizontally concerning multiple business units. It should help the business in doing its business. The implementation of BPM should not be taken lightly, because it concerns a lot of implementation time. The visual BPMN diagrams can be drawn quickly but making it executable will take some time. Especially when a good SOA infrastructure has not yet been setup.

BPM is a visual programming tool

With the BPMN diagrams it looks like the BPM implementation is finished, but this is not the case. The model must be made executable so needs actual service implementation. Also it is sometimes used as implementation tool to implement services. I would not recommend this, because that is not where BPMN was originally designed for. It should orchestrate your business processes using services and business rules. Also BPMN does not perform well when using for big loops.

BPM lets the business change their own processes

The business can and must help defining the processes, but the processes itself can not be changed runtime (or on the fly). At least i have not seen such a BPMS suite yet. What mostly will happen is that business rules or parameters of the processes can be adapted by the business. Of course these kind of tools must be build in within the process implementations at design time.

Cordys monitoring using Hyperic

2013-03-28T15:11:00.000+01:00

Introduction

Cordys servers are a very complicated environment including lot of different JVM's (java virtual machines) and lot of connections to databases and other external systems, and in a Cordys cluster, different Cordys instances.

Therefore Cordys servers can run in trouble for many reasons, for example:

Maximum heap memory exceeded
Broken connections
Load too high
Lack of memory
Slow database

It is the task of Cordys administrators to maintain and monitor Cordys servers in production environments in order to meet the SLA requirements of customers. For every Cordys Service Container the administrator must do the following:

Check if heap memory usage is not exceeding maximum memory
Check if it is available and restart it if necessary
Check the performance of its webservices
Check the performance of the databases used by the service container

Another task of the Cordys administrator is to optimize performance by adding more resources. For this the administrator needs to know the bottlenecks and the peak loads. So he needs lot of data accumulated over large periods and visualized in clear graphs.

So Cordys administrators needs a monitoring tool helping him to detect problems fast and to analyze trends of resource usages. This monitoring tool must be able to do the following:

Send alerts (mail and sms) when a critical threshold is exceeded
Data accumulated over large periods of time
Show clear graphs
Provide a dashboard summarizing the health of the Cordys server
The graphs must support drilldown: after the problem is found it must be possible to get more details about the problem by clicking on the graphs

Unfortunately Cordys does not provide such a monitoring tool. But Cordys supports JMX offering lot of information about the performance of the service containers. These JMX counters can be monitored in a tool supporting JMX.

Most customers only use JConsole of JVisualVM for monitoring these counters. However these tools have important limitations:

No data aggregation over large periods of time
Very limited dashboard en graph options
Lot of knowledge required for addressing the right counters and visualizing them

Hyperic User Interface

Dashboard

The dashboard is an overall view of the server's health and has a menu for looking up and creating monitored resources and their alerts. The dashboard is implemented as a portal with portlets showing different aspects of the resources.

Auto discovery

The Auto-Discovery portlet shows all resources found on the server. The administrator can select them and add them to the set of resources monitored by Hyperic. Thanks to the Cordys plugin the auto discovery is also able to locate the Cordys Service Containers, see the screenshot below for an example:

Note: This autodiscovery plugin has been written by Ciber

Recent Alerts

The Recent Alerts portlets shows all spawned alerts. After solving the cause of these alerts the administrator can mark them here as fixed.

Alerts can be triggered, for example, when a service container is not available or when the heap memory exceeded a critical threshold. The application administrator will receive an email or an sms so that he can fix the problem fast.

Resources, Groups and Graphs

Hyperic shows graphs for every available metric for both groups and individual resources. The graphs of the groups are an aggregation of its members. This group view enables for a quick analysis of bottlenecks and drilldowns.

First analyze the metrics on group level:

Conclusion

Hyperic together with the Ciber plugin is a perfect tool to monitor the Cordys resources and can proactively warn administrators that something is (going) wrong, before the system is down, or that business processes are halted.

Cordys BOP4: Use of Functional Roles

2013-03-22T15:20:00.000+01:00

Introduction

Within your Cordys projects you have functional- and technical roles. These Roles can be used on services and in user interfaces to define ACLs (= Access Control Lists).

This small blog describes a best practice of how to set up the Roles. Currently i always use it like this within my projects and it works fine.

Roles

In my opinion there is a big difference between a functional role and a technical role within Cordys. You can define both.

"Is Functional Role" can be checked for a functional role.

Functional Roles should be used for Roles that are known by the business. These are the Roles that are used within Business Processes. These are the Roles that are used to assign Tasks to.

It is best practice to define functional roles within a separate Cordys project.

Within the Functional Roles you can define the UIs that are allowed to be used by that Role.

This has the consequence that there is a dependency from the Organisation project to the project where the UI is defined.

Furthermore within the Sub Roles you put other Functional Roles or Technical Roles that are to be defined within the projects itself. This way you can define what services can be used by the Functional Roles.

Cordys BPMS Certification

2013-03-22T09:22:00.001+01:00

This month i started the BPMS Certification of Cordys. I already have my Fundamentals Certification.
My final goal is to get the Solution Architect Certification.

The certification has three parts:

Theoretical exam
Handson exam
Interview

Within the theoretical exam you are supposed to answer 60 questions within 1 hour. The questions can be made online and are quite detailed. You really have to know your stuff. In fact in my first attempt i only got 71% and you have to get 75%. So i took it too lightly.

The handson is one big case that you have to work out. It is also bigger (of course) than the exercises you get with the Fundamentals. You have 10 working days for the handson.

After the handson you get an interview. In this interview you have to explain your solution and you get answers about the handson.

Some tips:

Really dive into the learning path. You do not really have to follow a training course, you can do it self paced.
Also install the Cordys VM and practice
Especially focus on the themes you do not often use in practice (especially BAM in my case)

More can be found: https://wiki.cordys.com/display/cordyscert/Home

I have my interview on the 8th of April, so looking forward to it and up to the Solution Architect exam ! ....

To be continued ....

Chain integration with Cordys?

2013-02-21T12:11:00.000+01:00

Introduction

In several projects I have been using Cordys BOP4 platform. I really like the multi-tenancy possibilities within the project. Also the Provisioning Component of the produkt is highly appreciated and used.
However there is one thing that i sometimes run into.

Chain integration

Within the projects we have several Organisations that participate in the process of chain integration. They work with each other and they handover tasks to each other.

However currently the modelling of such "inter Organisation processes" is not possible. You can sent tasks to other Organizations but you can not model this with BPMN models.
This is a pitty because you loose the control and monitoring of the total process. Maybe you can customize this and implement it, but it is not present (yet??) in the Cordys project.

Last week in this Cordys project

2012-12-21T09:39:00.000+01:00

This is my last week in a Cordys project I did.. It was a high pressure Cordys Case Management project with an Agile approach. The things I learned (again) and in random order:

You need Cordys consultants
Introspection after each iteration
Invest in automatic testing
Invest in setting up your Services
Invest in the Domain Model
Requirement management (user stories)
Consult a scrum master
Assign responsibilities

Cordys consultants

The Cordys (BOP4.1) still contains bugs and this is not remarkable given the young produkt. However this means that you need to know if it is a programming error or a Cordys bug. For this you really need a Cordys consultant who really knows the core produkt.

Introspection

Within each (Agile) project you will have difficulties with the development process. This is not a problem as long as you are open for introspection. This will help the project in what goes wrong and what goes well. If you do not do this then the process will not approve.

Automatic testing

Because we had to implement a lot of requirements in a few iterations, it was advised to invest in automatic testing that could be used for regression testing. However this was acknowledged by the customer too late. This way it was very risky to refactor code. In the beginning it takes some effort but in the end it is very much worth the effort.

Services

Within Cordys you can use WS-AppServer to implement abstraction to your databases and also to implement the Domain Objects. On these Objects you can generate (web)services. The ws-appserver generates a lot of generic services on top of your database and it is easy to use them. However it is not recommended. Please take some time to think about the service architecture so that you put the right business logic at the right place and that you can reuse the services. Think about the granularity of the services because they have direct impact on the performance of your application.

Domain Model

Before you can Model your BPMs, Case Management Models and UIs, it is good to model the Domain Model. This is not the technical database model, but the Common Data Model that is used within the BPMs. In fact these are the business objects that the business knows.
It also important to model your database good, of course because this can have direct performance consequences.

Requirement Management

What the customer wants is not always (actually almost always) clear. In the beginning the high level requirements are clear and they are planned within the iterations. Then these requirements must be detailed out (and User Stories can be used to describe it). Also it is good practice to group these requirements so that they can be used for testing. This is a big job but must be done especially for large projects. Otherwise it will not be clear what is tested and what is actually finished.

Scrum Master

Sometime a customer has no experience with Agile way of working. In this case it is advised to consult a Scrum Master that can explain and guide the process.

Responsibilities

When responsibilities with its duties and rights are not clear, it is difficult to work. It must be clear who is responsble for architecture, quality, etc. Otherwise no one takes responsibilities and the project is doomed for failure.

I could also have mentioned risk management, but all these practices seem so evident, but are not in practice.

CDATA within the BPM ??

2012-11-15T09:42:00.000+01:00

Today i saw a CDATA text within the BPM i used with the file poller.

With the file poller you can trigger a webservice. In this case i triggered a executeProcess. Below a small part of the configuration of this polling mechanism.

As can be seen from the configuration, the content of the file is text based UTF-8.
When you look at the message map of the BPM and at the input message you will see a CDATA tag around the text, like this:


    <![CDATA[ ... text ... ]]>

When i wanted to replace something within the input (so i used substring function) and i got CDATA content which i did not expect. The BPM and string functions should handle this.

The solution is to copy the input to a local variable with Replace Content With message map construction.

Cordys UI title caption

2012-11-01T09:57:00.000+01:00

Today I wanted to change the title of a UI, but could not find where the current title was set. I looked into the properties and settings of the XForms, but no succes.
In the runtime the title I saw was: "Aanvraag Documenten" but the fields i saw were not:

Name
Description
Caption

I also looked at the corresponding JScript of the XForms and searched for setCaption. But also no success.

Finally thanks to a tip of a colleague i found it. It was at the calling XForm that used the following construction:

I would recommend to use the Caption field of the XForm itself, so that the title is always the same and in one place, unless of course you want the caption to be dynamic.

Creating KPI with Cordys BAM

2012-10-29T19:21:00.000+01:00

Introduction

In a previous Blog I showed how to create a Dashboard from a Business Measure. In this Blog I will show how to create a KPI (Key Performance Indicator). As can be seen from the picture, a KPI is based on a Business Measure. A Business Measure measures parts of a process or data and a KPI monitors whether the measured part reaches a particular value. So:
KPI helps to monitor and capture critical information pertaining to Business Process or Activity.

Step 1 - Create Business Measure for KPI

First you have to create a Business Measure on which the KPI will be based. In this example we take a Webservice as the source for the business measure.

Create Business Measure
Fill in the following details, and choose the correct Webservice

Click Next and Select New to create a new webservice
Click Finish

The Business Measure and its corresponding webservice is generated.

The UnitsinstocksMeasure can be used in a Dashboard.

Step 2 - Create KPI

Create a KPI

Fill in the details of the KPI:
Name - The name of the KPI
Description - The description of the KPI
Goal - Describe the goal of the KPI, in this case the units in stock may not be too low
Unit of measure - This is the unit in which the value is measured
Target Value - The value for the enterprise against which is measured
Ranges - Here you can define several ranges for the KPI
Select source type - The source of the KPI. In this case it is a webservice, which can not be selected yet in BOP4.0 and must be left empty.

Click Next
Now you select the Business Measure on which the KPI is based (Select '+') and fill in the parameters

Click Next

Now you have to select the value (XPath expression) on which you want to build your KPI. Do not forget to check "Define Schedule". The schedule is used to call the measure within the defined timeframe within the schedule.

Click Next
In this screen you can enter the schedule times. DO not forget to check "Define Actions". These actions are triggered when the KPI is reached.

Click Next
In this screen you can define the Actions, For each action you have the following possibilities:
- Notification
- Invoke BPM
- Call Webservice

Note that the Condition is the Range you have defined in the KPI definition previously.

This concludes the definition of this KPI. The Schedule can be activated by going to the Schedule Manager and execute the schedule for this KPI.

Your first Cordys Dashboard

2012-10-26T16:39:00.000+02:00

Monitoring

Within an enterprise and on your processes you want monitoring. Monitoring is used to for example:

View the number of ongoing processes and its status
If certain KPI's are met
Triggering other processes when a certain event takes place

Cordys supports this in the form of BAM and uses certain constructs for this. In this Blog i will describe a small example on how to set up BAM and how to create Dashboards. It gives an idea on how this can be done in Cordys. I use the following picture in which the created Cordys artifacts are displayed.

Step 1 - Create a webservice

This step is not described here, but a webservice can be generated from a BPM, database or an external service can be used for example. Next i will use this webservice to create a Business Measure artifact.

Step 2 - Create a Business Measure

A Business Measure helps in measuring a particular aspect of a business process or any external data. The Business Measure provides a view on the selected attributes, contained in a Process Monitoring Object, a webservice or the external data source. In this case we use a webservice as the basis.

Create a new Business Measure
Fill in name and description
Select Graph because we will use it to show on a dashboard.
Create Measure From: Web Service
Select Object Source: GetProductsObjects
In this case we will show the products and ho much is in stock

Click Next
Select New and click Finish

A webservice is generated and a component is generated that can be used within a dashboard.

Step 3 - Create a dashboard

Now we are creating an interface for the monitoring of the produkts in stock.

Create an XForm artifact
Drag-and-drop the Producktsinstock component (as shown in the previous step) on the UI
Click on Properties of this component

In the properties you can choose how the data should be displayed.

View - The type of dashboard used. In this case i choose for Bar Chart. There are a couple more possibilities

Business Object - Here you select the data that is to be used from the webservice. In this case the Old tuples contain the products.

X-Axis fields - Here you select the attribute that is used for the X-axis. In this case the ProductName.

Y-Axis - Here we choose the UnitsInStock attribute.

Because the webservice requires two input parameters, these are given in the Input Parameters properties.

Select Preview and you will see you first Dashboard with Cordys BAM

Next time i will show how to create a KPI (Key Performance Indicator) that triggers another process.

Cordys Fundamentals Certification

2012-10-23T08:52:00.001+02:00

Previous week I got my Cordys Fundamentals Certification and I will explain how to prepare for this exam.
Of course it depends on the number of years/months experience you already have with the produkt. In my case i have done several projects already and i have almost three years experience.

The certification has three parts:

Multiple choice questions
Handson
Interview

The most difficult part is the Multiple choice questions. This requires some study and this can be found on the Wiki. This gives a good overview of the questions you can expect.

In the handson part you get a couple of questions which you must make. You have 5 days for the questions and these are relatively easy. I suggest you do the Fundamentals training online which is available on the Wiki. In case you already have project experience then even this is not needed.

Within the interview you need to explain your solution of the handson and this is also easy if you made the questions yourself of course. The only problem i had was that the Indian persons were hard to understand. The interview is done with WebEx so I used the chat to repeat the questions.

More information can be found on the Cordys Wiki: https://wiki.cordys.com/display/cordyscert/Home

Cordys IE9 problems?

2012-10-11T16:13:00.002+02:00

When i use IE9 to run Cordys 4.1 i run into a white screen. This can be avoided by running the explorer in IE8 mode. This can be done in the following way.

Start IE9
Press F12
Go to Menu Document Mode and select the IE8 mode
Close the window again and reload the Cordys page

Cordial 2012

2012-10-11T13:41:00.000+02:00

This year's Cordial was held on the 9th and 10th October in Putten. The yearly event is getting more popular because it was packed. Some of the highlights for me:

A couple of very entertaining presentations with content. Must see:
Freek Vermeulen on why organisations find it so difficult to change.
Magnus Lindkvist on the present and future trends
Meeting a lot of interesting people in the BPM field
Partner dinner with excellent food
Nice to hear that integration and BPM skills are still very much needed in the future :-)
See the CEO of Cordys in person
Presentation of CIZ of a project with Cordys Case Management. With Ciber i also participated within that project. So it was nice to hear of the succes
The partnership of Cordys and Aquima. A business rule engine that can be used seeming less with Cordys

And of course more can be found on http://www.cordys.com/resources

Looking forward to it again next year!

Packt publishes its 1000th and wants to celebrate with you

2012-09-20T09:36:00.004+02:00

Packt Publishing reaches 1000IT titles and celebrates with an open invitation

Birmingham-based IT publisher Packt Publishing is about to publish its 1000^th title. Packt books are renowned among developers for being uniquely practical and focused. Packt books cover highly specific tools and technologies which IT professionals might not expect to see a high quality book on.

Packt would like you to join them in celebrating this milestone with a surprise gift – to get involved you just need to have already registered, or sign up for a free Packt account before 30^th September 2012.

Packt published their first book in April 2004. One of the most prolific and fastest growing tech book publishers in the world, they now have books on everything from web development to web graphics, e-learning to e-commerce, IT architecture to games, and app development.

Packt supports many of the Open Source projects covered by its books through a project royalty donation, which has contributed over £300,000 to Open Source projects up to now. As part of the celebration Packt is allocating $30,000 to share between projects and authors in a genuinely unique way, soon to be disclosed on their website.

Dave Maclean, founder of Packt Publishing explains, “At Packt we set out 8 years ago to bring practical, up to date and easy to use technical books to the specialist tools and technologies that had been largely overlooked by IT publishers. Today, I am really proud that with our authors and partners we have been able to make useful books available on over 1000 topics and make our contribution to the development community.”

For more information about Packt, the kind of books they publish, and to sign-up for a free account before the 30th of September, 2012, please visit their website: www.PacktPub.com.

Enjoy !!

Book: Oracle SOA Suite 11g Administrators's handbook

2012-09-17T11:08:00.000+02:00

My next project is probably a Oracle SOA Suite 11g project, so start reading the following book. A review of the book will follow (http://www.packtpub.com/oracle-soa-suite-11g-administrators-handbook/book)

I hope to read useful information about

How to set up Oracle SOA Suite projects
How to unit test
How to deploy to DTAP
How to monitor
How to error log
How to govern

Business Process Management

2012-09-05T16:26:00.000+02:00

Business process management (BPM) is a management approach focused on aligning all aspects of an organization with the wants and needs of clients. It is a holistic management approach that promotes business effectiveness and efficiency while striving for innovation, flexibility, and integration with technology. Business process management attempts to improve processes continuously. It could therefore be described as a “process optimization process.” It is argued that BPM enables organizations to be more efficient, more effective and more capable of change than a functionally focused, traditional hierarchical management approach.

Overview

A business process is a “series or network of value-added activities, performed by their relevant roles or collaborators, to purposefully achieve the common business goal.” These processes are critical to any organization as they generate revenue and often represent a significant proportion of costs. As amanagerial approach, (BPM) considers processes to be strategic assets of an organization that must be understood, managed, and improved to deliver value added products and services to clients. This foundation is very similar to other Total Quality Management or Continuous Improvement Process methodologies or approaches. BPM goes a step further by stating that this approach can be supported, or enabled, through technology to ensure the viability of the managerial approach in times of stress and change. In fact, BPM is an approach to integrate a “change capability” to an organization – both human and technological. As such, many BPM articles and pundits often discuss BPM from one of two viewpoints: people and/or technology.

Roughly speaking, the idea of (business) process is as traditional as concepts of tasks, department, production, outputs. The current management and improvement approach, with formal definitions and technical modeling, has been around since the early 1990s (see business process modeling). Note that in the IT community, the term ‘business process’ is often used as synonymous of management of middleware processes; or integrating application software tasks. This viewpoint may be overly restrictive. This should be kept in mind when reading software engineering papers that refer to ‘business processes’ or ‘business process modeling.’

Although the initial focus of BPM was on the automation of mechanistic business processes, it has since been extended to integrate human-driven processes in which human interaction takes place in series or parallel with the mechanistic processes. For example (in workflow systems), when individual steps in the business process require human intuition or judgment to be performed, these steps are assigned to appropriate members within the organization.

More advanced forms such as human interaction management are in the complex interaction between human workers in performing a workgroup task. In this case, many people and systems interact in structured, ad-hoc, and sometimes completely dynamic ways to complete one to many transactions.

BPM can be used to understand organizations through expanded views that would not otherwise be available to organize and present. These views include the relationships of processes to each other which, when included in the process model, provide for advanced reporting and analysis that would not otherwise be available. BPM is regarded by some as the backbone of enterprise content management.

Because BPM allows organizations to abstract business process from technology infrastructure, it goes far beyond automating business processes (software) or solving business problems (suite). BPM enables business to respond to changing consumer, market, and regulatory demands faster than competitors – creating competitive advantage.

Most recently, technology has allowed the coupling of BPM to other methodologies, such as Six Sigma. BPM tools now allow the user to:

* Define - baseline the process or the process improvement
* Measure - Simulate the change to the process.
* Analyze - Compare the various simulations to determine an optimal improvement
* Improve - Select and implement the improvement
* Control - Deploy this implementation and by use of User defined dashboards monitor the improvement in real time and feed the performance information back into the simulation model in preparation for the next improvement iteration.

This brings with it the benefit of being able to simulate changes to your business process based on real life data (not assumed knowledge) and also the coupling of BPM to industry methodologies allow the users to continually streamline and optimise the process to ensure it is tuned to its market need.

You can read more on this blog item here

Still some misunderstanding about User Stories

2012-09-01T19:37:00.002+02:00

In projects i often see that there is still a lot of confusion about User Stories and planning. This article of the famous Scott Ambler describes the way you should plan and use User Stories within Agile projects. One common mistake is that a User Story is much smaller than a Use Case.

Introduction to User Stories

A good way to think about a user story is that it is a reminder to have a conversation with your customer (in XP, project stakeholders are called customers), which is another way to say it's a reminder to do some just-in-time analysis. In short, user stories are very slim and high-level requirements artifacts.

Initial User Stories (Informal)

As you can see in Figure 1 user stories are small, much smaller than other usage requirement artifacts such as use cases or usage scenarios. It's important to recognize that each of the statements in Figure 1 represents a single user story.
Figure 1. Example user stories.

Students can purchase monthly parking passes online.
Parking passes can be paid via credit cards.
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Professors can input student marks.
Students can obtain their current seminar schedule.
Students can order official transcripts.
Students can only enroll in seminars for which they have prerequisites.
Transcripts will be available online via a standard browser.

Important considerations for writing user stories:

Stakeholders write user stories. An important concept is that your project stakeholders write the user stories, not the developers. User stories are simple enough that people can learn to write them in a few minutes, so it makes sense that the domain experts (the stakeholders) write them.
Use the simplest tool. User stories are often written on index cards as you see in Figure 2 (at least when your project team is co-located). Index cards are very easy to work with and are therefore an inclusive modeling technique.
Remember non-functional requirements. Stories can be used to describe a wide variety of requirements types. For example in Figure 1 the Students can purchase parking passes online user story is a usage requirement similar to a use case whereas the Transcripts will be available online via a standard browser is closer to a technical requirement.
Indicate the estimated size. You can see in Figure 2 that it includes an estimate for the effort to implement the user story. One way to estimate is to assign user story points to each card, a relative indication of how long it will take a pair of programmers to implement the story. The team then knows that if it currently takes them on average 2.5 hours per point; therefore the user story in Figure 2 will take around 10 hours to implement.
Indicate the priority. Requirements, including defects identified as part of your independent parallel testing activities or by your operations and support efforts, are prioritized by your project stakeholders (or representatives thereof such as product owners) and added to the stack in the appropriate place. You can easily maintain a stack of prioritized requirements by moving the cards around in the stack as appropriate. You can see that the user story card includes an indication of the priority; I often use a scale of one to ten with one being the highest priority. Other prioritization approaches are possible – priorities of High/Medium/Low are often used instead of numbers and some people will even assign each card it’s own unique priority order number (e.g. 344, 345, …). You want to indicate the priority somehow in case you drop the deck of cards, or if you're using more sophisticated electronic tooling. Pick a strategy that works well for your team. You also see that the priority changed at some point in the past, this is a normal thing, motivating the team to move the card to another point in the stack. The implication is that your prioritization strategy needs to support this sort of activity. My advice is to keep it simple.
Optionally include a unique identifier. The card also includes a unique identifier for the user story, in this case 173. The only reason to do this would be to do this is if you need to maintain some sort of traceability between the user story and other artifacts, in particular acceptance tests.

You can read the full article here

Write good unit tests

2012-09-01T15:59:00.000+02:00

It is not enough for today’s software developers to know their programming language well. There are further skills, that more and more companies are expecting from there employees. One of the most important is Test Driven Development (TDD). This is not an introduction to TDD. If you want to learn it, I recommend Uncle Bob’s awesome Clean Code Videos (Episode 6 - TDD) or simply ask Google for it. But many developers are writing bad code and applying TDD does not make them writing good code. Instead it makes them also writing bad tests. So this is about writing better test code.

Applying simple rules

To understand why test code can be bad, you should understand, what it should do. It should work as the parachute, that keeps you alive, when refactoring your code. Tests may help you to be sure nothing breaks, when adding new features to your code. But tests may also work as sample code, that documents your APIs better than any other documentaion except the code itself.

But how can you make your tests better? It might help to follow some simple rules, that could be easily applied to every language or test style like BDD or Junit-style.

Tests should be a state machine

Many people do not like BDD at all, but there is a pretty nice idea in it - the given-when-then style some frameworks promote. This style forces you into a way of thinking about tests, that you should adapt. Even if you do not use a BDD framework.

Writing a test this way means there is a start state, something happens and than an end state is reached. If your test is broken, the state machine in it is broken. In BDD frameworks the first part of your test is the given block, where all the setup stuff is done. The second part is the when block, where an action is applied on the test object, created in the given block. At least you have a thenblock, where you assert, that the correct end state is reached.

It is very helpful to have this in mind while writing a new test. Keep these three parts seperated and do not mix them in some way. Do not write code in your test, where an if appears, or even more complex logic. In a test you should only do the above three steps. Do some simple setup, call a method on your test object or invoke the test function and assert the result is correct.

This might also make your code better. If you write messy code, tests written this way are harder to create and maintain. If you have to much of inheritance, dependencies on other objects or resources like IO, you will have to set it up in every test you write and that is no fun. But you should write your tests first and hopefully it makes writing messy code harder, if you have written a well structured tests first.

More on this great article can be read here.

Roger van de Kimmenade Blog

Trends in BPM

Optimalisatie door diversiteit in standaardisatie(Optimization through diversity within standardization)

Gezamenlijk sturen op gedeelde informatie, simpel toch?(Steering together by using shared information, easy right?)

Hoe blijf je in controle over je process?(How to stay in control of your process)

In control met regelbeheersing(In control with business rules)

Software is Eating the World

Installed Cordys BOP4.2 CU1

Kabisa ESB

Cordys BPMS Certification in da house !

Cordys Solution Architect Certification

TweetDeck

Introduction

Tips and Tricks

1 - Use Lists

2 - Use Columns

Oracle BPM 11.1.1.7 Case Management compared to Cordys Case Management

Introduction

Adapative Case Management

Conclusions

Some BPM Misunderstandings

BPM makes my organisation flexible

BPM is about tooling

BPM is a visual programming tool

BPM lets the business change their own processes

Cordys monitoring using Hyperic

Introduction

Hyperic User Interface

Dashboard

Auto discovery

Recent Alerts

Resources, Groups and Graphs

Conclusion

Cordys BOP4: Use of Functional Roles

Introduction

Roles

Cordys BPMS Certification

Chain integration with Cordys?

Introduction

Chain integration

Last week in this Cordys project

Cordys consultants

Introspection

Automatic testing

Services

Domain Model

Requirement Management

Scrum Master

Responsibilities

CDATA within the BPM ??

Cordys UI title caption

Creating KPI with Cordys BAM

Introduction

Step 1 - Create Business Measure for KPI

Step 2 - Create KPI

Your first Cordys Dashboard

Monitoring

Step 1 - Create a webservice

Step 2 - Create a Business Measure

Step 3 - Create a dashboard

Cordys Fundamentals Certification

Cordys IE9 problems?

Cordial 2012

Packt publishes its 1000th and wants to celebrate with you

Packt Publishing reaches 1000 IT titles and celebrates with an open invitation

Book: Oracle SOA Suite 11g Administrators's handbook

Business Process Management

Overview

Still some misunderstanding about User Stories

Introduction to User Stories

Initial User Stories (Informal)

Write good unit tests

Applying simple rules

Tests should be a state machine

Optimalisatie door diversiteit in standaardisatie
(Optimization through diversity within standardization)

Gezamenlijk sturen op gedeelde informatie, simpel toch?
(Steering together by using shared information, easy right?)

Hoe blijf je in controle over je process?
(How to stay in control of your process)

In control met regelbeheersing
(In control with business rules)

Packt Publishing reaches 1000IT titles and celebrates with an open invitation