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Focus

Classroom and Community Intersect in Workflow Management

4/30/2008


Zhao began offering his course, now titled Enterprise Workflow Management, in 2001. He said he believes he was one of the first, if not the first, in the country to offer a course with an exclusive focus on workflow management.

Zhao has taught the course using a range of BPM products, including those from Oracle, IBM, and BEA early on, then later, Microsoft, Ultimus, and an open source workflow management product based on J2EE called jBPM. He has watched the number of vendors offering stand-alone workflow management software shrink from a couple hundred in 1995 or so, to just a handful today. Major vendors like Microsoft, Oracle, IBM and SAP now include BPM software as a core component of their business software offerings, often in their eBusiness Suite.

Zhao favors the Adaptive Business Process Management Suite from Ultimus because its user-friendly interface makes it easy for students to master relatively quickly. He also includes Microsoft Windows Workflow Foundation, another BPM product. The usability factor of the Ultimus package enables students to move on to the substance of the course more quickly. "When you teach, you... don't want to scare students," Zhao pointed out. "You want to quickly get them into learning." Ultimus fits the bill because the brunt of the software runs on a remote server and is accessed through the Web. Students need only install a desktop component called Ultimus Process Designer to use the process modeling elements of the software.

"Ultimus is the most user-friendly software," Zhao said. "It's a little bit less flexible, maybe, but among BPM software, Ultimus is the only one I know with which you can develop a reasonable sophisticated business workflow [system] without writing a single line of code."

On the other hand, a limitation of Ultimus is that it is a Microsoft Window-based platform, he added. In the last several years, however, the company has added a Web services interface, meaning Ultimus can access other platforms if the database it is accessing has a web service handle.

At 20 to 30 students per class, Zhao estimated that he has trained some 300 students over the years in workflow management--including the community participation aspect.