Pegasystems BPM job offer

This was of some interest as I have been working with BPM rather intensively for about a year now and my first targeted BPM job offer has popped up. The mail contact went like this:

Your name has been recommended to me with regard to a position I am recruiting for currently.

I am currently looking for a Senior System Architect to work for my client who is a leader in the BPM field. They are looking for people with a good technical understanding and the attitude to be able to communicate with customers and turn business requirements into technical solutions. Having looked at your profile you look like a good match for the role and I would like to discuss this in more depth with you if possible.

Would you be kind enough to get in touch? My contact details are below. I am happy to give you a call if you can reply with a mobile contact number. 

 I generally do not reply to this sort of head-hunting, but curiosity got the better of me and I wanted to know who was behind this. Turns out it is one of the larger BPM tooling organization in the business, Pegasystems Inc. based in the USA. The job offer was for a Senior System Architect, which means:
 
"As lead member of a project team ensures that the business and technical architecture of the delivered solution matches customer requirements. Responsible for providing high quality consulting services on all project assignments. Demonstrates a broad knowledge of either a target vertical industry or functional area (e.g., CRM, deployment, etc.). Travel Requirements: more than 75% travel."


Ouch on the travel... but I am not really looking anyway, I am having too much fun at my current job to want to move off into some other corner of the world!

jBPM process rework in progress

My current project has provide me with the chance to rework a rather a monolithic jBPM process implementation. It is my third time working through this same process flow and I want to do something about it before it gets any worse. It consists over over 59 nodes (decisions, task-nodes, nodes, but not a single state) and has all business logic intertwined within the individual nodes. Even some of the transitions have handlers that are providing business logic functionality which mystifies me to no end.

When the applications business logic is not placed in a service layer then I would expect that it would be kept as visible and above water as you could make it. The idea being to facilitate maintenance and future development within/upon the process flow. I was wrong. I won't get into the long story about how we got to the point that we can rework this process flow, it is not very interesting and I imagine it is par for the course in most large software development organizations.

All in all, it has provided a very interesting first step in my current project to start working on this problem. I am currently migrating as much logic possible from the transitions back into the process steps or even creating new process steps to bring this functionality into the light. Visibility is the key here. My plans:

• Business logic is being encapsulated into services and pushed down into the SOA layer.
• Transitional actions are being brought up into process steps
• Core process steps are being black-boxed so that you can fill them with any eventual project specific sub-flow definitions as needed.
• Migrating almost all process nodes to state nodes to facilitate a proxy between the process instance node and the service layer (calls)
• Looking to add a custom jBPM class loader with maven like functionality to facilitate multiple projects running with different service versions (why we need this is an infrastructural problem)
  

This should keep me busy for the rest of the year as it is not a small task. More on this migration should any interesting experiences arise and feel free to provide input should you have some thoughts on these points.

Blog hit rate climbing out of the basement

Back on the 1st of August I lost my long running domain name (.com). I then was forced to run about and setup this new domain and migrate my site over. I documented the resulting plunge of site traffic a month ago with a graphic and a promise to report back the results over time.

Well here we are a month later and things have slowly started picking up:

 

 Google picked up my new location and the search hits turned up the .org links pretty fast. I was surprised. You can see the daily hits are slowly getting back up towards an average of around 35-40 per day, nothing like the 100 I was pulling previously but better than I personally was expecting inside of a month. I am slowly climbing out of the basement...

JFall 2008 - Full Scale STP with jBPM

I sent in a paper for the JFall 2008 Dutch Java conference and have been accepted. I will be presenting an Industrial track talk on my first attempted BPM paper at SNS Bank.

My talk will be a bit more focused on the Java aspects of course, but it remains a practical experience that is now over 9 months in production. I will be hinting at the effects of the 'credit crisis' that we have all been reading about and should be able to provide up to date empirical evidence of the success of our implementation. My talk details as submitted are partially in Dutch, but will put them here for reference.

Abstract:

As one of the larger Dutch financial institutions, SNS Bank in the Netherlands has made a strategic decision to empower her customers on-line by automating her business processes. The ability to facilitate the customer is achieved by applying BPM techniques in her existing selling channels. Both the publicly available and internal processes are being revamped to provide the customer with full scale Straight Through Processing (STP). This paper takes a tour of the latest BPM project at SNS Bank, provides empirical evidence that this move has already allowed SNS Bank to reap the benefits of BPM, and discusses the remaining challenges for both business and IT.

Overzicht:

Deze presentatie is een praktijkverhaal van de SOA/BPM implementatie bij SNS Bank. Deze implementatie loopt al een jaar in productie. Ik zal onze ervaringen toelichten en onderbouwen met verzamelde metrics van de afgelopen jaar.

Ik begin met een introductie van de Open Source invalshoek van SNS Bank die naar Java/STP/JBPM heeft geleid. Daarna komt het marketingverhaal dat 'Straight Through Processing' toelicht en waarom dat van belang is bij SNS Bank. De implementatiearchitectuur zal kort toegelicht worden met focus op onze eerste ervaringen met het implementeren van SOA/JBPM bij SNS Bank. Daarna presenteer ik onze samenwerking met Atos Origin om een BPM-referentieproject neer te zetten. Als laatste stap, kijken wij naar de lessen die wij uit de laatste jaar kunnen halen en wat de toekomst zal brengen voor SNS Bank op het gebied van SOA/BPM.

This talk is related to my session at Linux World 2008.

UPDATE: you can get the PDF presentation here.

Finding return values from chained pipe commands in the system function

I have already discussed some hints for the usage of the Ruby system method, but encountered another facet of using this system function while passing a bash command using pipes. The problem is that one gets the standard exitcode status back from bash via the $? variable. But when you use pipe to chain more than one command you only get the last command results back from the $? variable.

Enter the PIPEARRAY from bash, which allows you access to the each commands return value in the entire chain. The problem with Ruby is that this is not available after the system function ends. Again, using some  smart Bash you can exit your command chain with the contents of the PIPEARRAY like this:

# a system call that exits with the value of the first command 'make'.
system("make | tee output.log; exit ${PIPESTATUS[0]}")

# examine the returned value of the command 'make'
puts $?.exitstatus

Invitation to influence Linux World 2008 talk at Jaarbeurs Utrecht

A bit of an update on the talk I will be giving in November at the Dutch Linux World 2008 in the Jaarbeurs Utrecht.

I am going to make you a unique offer. You can influence my talk by leaving a comment on this page up to the date of my presentation. I will do my best to answer any of your questions, discuss anything related to the topic of my talk, and mention any interesting comments I get live at Linux World 2008. You can't beat that for Open Source collaboration!

If you want to stop by and say hi or discuss something interesting with me at Linux World 2008 then just follow the linked banner in the top of this post or the one in the sidebar to register for free.

Hope to see you there.

UPDATE: you can get the PDF of the presentation here.

Endorsing Seth Alan Woolley for Secretary of State

Imagine my surprise when I opened my overseas ballot for the coming US Presidential election and saw this guy here in the picture on the ballot for Secretary of State for Oregon!

I have known Seth Alan Woolley for quit some time now through my work on an Open Source project called Sourcemage GNU/Linux. I even had the chance to meet up with him in Portland on one of my trips home.

I would be remiss if I did not mention that I am not a registered Pacific Green Party voter. I will of course be voting for Seth as I am more than sure he is sincere in his promises and commitments. He has been active in the Pacific Green Party and politics in general as long as I can remember.

Though our ideas on life and politics sometimes differ, he always stood for what he truly believes in. Take some time to look at the site linked through the picture, it outlines some of his plans. I wish him lots of luck and will be watching this part of the elections closely this year!

I fully endorse Seth Alan Woolley for the office of Oregon Secretary of State.

Lance Armstrong announces coming back to Astana