Business-IT-Alignment with camunda fox

Everyone knows this cartoon: The requirements of the business department cannot be communicated to the IT developers in a way that avoids misunderstandings. The whole discipline called “Business-IT-Alignment” is about bridging this gap.

When it comes to BPM projects it is essential to understand that BPMN 2.0 alone is no silver bullet that can easily sort out this problem. While BPMN 2.0 – diagrams can indeed be directly interpreted by a process engine (the fox engine in our case), not every technically executable diagram is also suited for business users. Furthermore, regarding IT requirements, BPMN process models are just one piece of the whole puzzle. Often we additionally have use case descriptions, UI sketches, data definitions, business rules etc. etc.

And last but not least: BPMN is embedded in the overall discipline BPM, that encapsulates a lot more than just drawing flow chart diagrams, like strategic process development, setting up a complete process documentation for an ISO 9001-conformant certification or even establishing a lively, continuous process improvement cycle (KAIZEN). Camunda as the company and camunda fox as the BPM platform are therefore dedicated to realize a working business-IT-alignment that goes far beyond the simple creation of executable process models.

Advantages of a BPMN-Toolchain

The success of a software solution supporting Business-IT-Alignment mainly depends on one factor: human beings. Roughly summarized, in most projects there are:

• Stakeholders, who are the potential software solution users or affected by it in some other way.
• Analysts, who act as project managers or the like as the translator between stakeholders and developers.
• Developers, who will realize the process application in Java.

In the past, BPM software vendors often proposed that all those roles should work with the same “BPM-Suite” (well, some still propose it). Apparently, this should cultivate the intended Business-IT-Alignment, but the dirty real-word experience has been different: The result of this approach is often a “stuck in the middle”-problem, because those BPM-Suites became extremely complicated and therefore not suited for business users any more, even if – or actually just because – they tried to hide the programming behind fancy wizards, assistants or the like. This inavoidably leads to an extremely overloaded GUI that contains so many technical configuration options, that you have to solve a steep and even totally proprietary learning curve to cope with it. At the same time Java-developers just refuse to work with such a “pointy-clicky” environment, and they do so for a good reason: Their familiar IDE is (often) Eclipse IDE, and this is the environment they are most productive with, so let them use it for the enrichment of the process models and their embedding inside the technical project, so that your processes can easily be deployed and executed.

These are the reasons why there are two BPMN-tools inside the camunda fox stack: The camunda fox modeler for business analysts and stakeholders, and the camunda fox designer for developers. The link between the two of them is camunda fox cycle.