Let's Get Real Guys ...

I came across this article in SOA World today:

Bridging the Gap between Business & IT with BPMN & BPEL
— Because the role of IT organizations is to enable business managers to run their businesses better, there has been a constant need for aligning IT closer to business. We often hear business managers complain that a software solution isn't what the business needed. We have personal experience with this problem - in a previous life one of us worked for a consulting company that built turnkey applications for large enterprises.

It basically talks about the approach and tooling from Oracle to allow business users and IT to jointly create business process models to, as the title says "bridge the gap between business and IT". While I have no major objections to the approach they're describing in the article--I think it's actually a pretty good solution to address the standards divide, i.e. BPMN vs. BPEL, in the business process space, I do object to how they envision this being used. They describe essentially a process where a business user uses the graphical BPMN-based modeling tool to design the business process and IT takes this as a blueprint to create the BPEL-based executable process.

I don't know what kind of business users they have come across (or are envisioning), but I've never met any business user who's able or willing to use any type of modeling tool to layout their business process for you. They're too busy actually trying to run the business. The best you can expect to get from them is some type of document that roughly describes the process and it's up to us IT shmucks to try create some type of process model out of that.

Oracle has one of the better suites for BPM out there since their acquisition of Collaxa several years ago, but let's get real guys, it's not the business users that are using that, no matter how graphical and friendly the tool is--it's still us IT guys that are the ones solely using that stuff. These guys need to know who their customers are and how they're using the product and not make up some nirvana-like scenario of business users modeling their business process and IT taking that to create the executable for alignment between the business and IT.