camunda @bpmNEXT 2013

bpmNEXT has definetely been a Home Run, as Bruce Silver puts it. Bruce has impressively succeeded in creating a real think tank event for BPM thought leaders sharing their ideas, visions and quite a lot of crazy new stuff around BPM. For those of you who do not know him: Bruce Silver is the BPMN Guru in the US, and I really admire him for both his competence and all that he has done for the standard. Rest assured that a good deal of BPMN's amazing success is due to him.

That said, it should not be surprising how excited I was when discovering in his Review Post a comment about my presentation of camunda Cycle, one of the numerous components that we have open sourced when launching camunda BPM on Monday. Actually I cannot help but spending that quote the visual apperance it deserves:

"camunda showed true roundtripping between third-party business-oriented modeling tools and a BPMS, the first I’ve seen to do that well."

Maybe that quote is not a big deal for most of you, but for me it is. As someone who is quite passionate about "that whole Business IT Alignment - thing", I have a rather emotional connection with that part of our project. And to be honest: Since there has never been any tool like that before, it has been a long struggle to figure out how it should actually work, how it should look like and so on. If you look at it now, it's actually no rocket science at all, and I won't claim that it is a ground-breaking piece of code. But it's strapped to its absolute core use case, and that use case has been implemented very thoughtfully in terms of both usability and software quality. For me it's a great example of good software craftsmanship.

So is Cycle "feature complete"? Not at all! It's just a first step in a long journey towards a better Business-IT-Alignment, but it is a very good first step indeed, and it's already creating value. We have loads of ideas what features should come next, but it also depends on you which of these would actually be implemented, and how soon that would be. You can both just tell us what you're missing, or have look at the code and make your own contributions (e.g. if you are a BPMN tool vendor wanting to improve how Cycle interacts with your product).

But why should I need Cycle anyway? There is a nice BPMN modeler included with camunda BPM already, so why having a roundtrip with yet another BPMN tool? If you are really wondering about that, you have probably not yet made a lot of experience with BPM projects that actually deserve the "B" in the "BPM" acronym. I will try to answer your question as soon as possible, which means basically as soon as I have time for an other blog post.

But right now I am finally enjoying myself in San Francisco, after I got some very interesting insights in the startup scene of Silicon Valley. Have you ever realized that BPM is the perfect tool for IT-based startups that want to scale up their business model? Oh my, I am already having visions again...