Tibco Hu Great Wall in China: workflow application of Chinese Enterprises

According to a friend from infoq in China, Hu Great Wall was a technical expert in Enterprise Workflow Management. Hu Changcheng is a senior software engineer at tibco China R & D center. Through chatting with Hu Great Wall, I feel that although EAI and BPM are only vertical segments in the domestic software field, they reflect some of the current situation in the Chinese enterprise software market. This article is a full record of interviews.I am particularly grateful to Hu Great Wall for using his precious time to answer this interview via email.

 

1. Hello, Could you briefly introduce yourself to our netizens?
My network name is "Silver Fox 999". I am currently working at tibco China R & D center, responsible for the maintenance of the underlying components of tibco administrator server.
My work experience is simple and complex. Simply because I have been developing around workflow-related technologies in the past five years, the complexity is that I have replaced several companies and have been engaged in e-government, data integration, basic business software platform, and collaborative office platform.
I am a very open person, thanks to the partners on the early javaunion Forum. Their selfless dedication makes me understand that open technical exchanges can help us learn more, learn more. So over the past few years, I have been insisting on Writing technical experiences, writing workflow research experiences, and posting them on my homepage and blog.

2. When talking about enterprise process management, key words such as EAI, WF, and BPM often appear. As an expert in this field, could you please explain the relationships and differences between them?
I think EAI is easier to understand and differentiate, and its full name is enterprise application integration ). At present, EAI is more based on the message middleware Service (Enterprise message bus information bus), using a variety of Adaptation devices to complete the integration of distributed applications. Currently, the concept of ESB is quite popular and has some integration with EAI. However, ESB is more about business process services, not just messages or applications.

The difference between workflow and BPM is vague. Therefore, in foreign countries, workflow is generally not used to represent workflow applications. Workflow is only used to represent "workflow technology" and the scope of this field, and "process" is used to represent the process.
The well-known Workflow Management Alliance Organization (WfMC), which currently barely mentions bpm, has always adopted the process description language xpdl.

The above statement seems to be too professional. So let's review the concept of "Process Reengineering" was born in the 1990s S. At that time, it was just a storm of wind, because the technology could not keep up, so most of them only stayed at the management level. In 1990s, the technology and application of workflow were booming.
Around 2000, the workflow technology application has been very mature, and data integration and application integration have also developed rapidly. It also promotes application requirements in business process management, integration, statistics, and optimization. In such a market demand, a more extensive, more management-oriented and applied concept is required to serve customers. This leads to the concept of "BPM.
If workflow is an application technology and solution that people created in the early days to solve "office automation" and "Process Automation", BPM aims to "analyze and integrate global services ", it is also an application technology and solution that provides support for upper-layer management decisions based on these analyses.

In fact, how to describe the "Business Process" of the business process remains an endless topic, so there are several standards. It is mainly the xpdl represented by WfMC, The BPEL represented by Oasis, And the BPMN and bpdm represented by OMG.
Although the process description standards are not the same, the BPM solution focuses on process definition, process simulation, process execution, process monitoring, process analysis, and process optimization, in this regard, almost all of them are the same, but the implementation technology is different.

3. What problems does workflow management mainly help enterprises solve?
It helps enterprises manage business processes more clearly and flexibly.
 
4. What are the characteristics of the domestic enterprise workflow management application environment?
Currently, workflow applications in China focus mainly on e-government and collaborative office approval processes. Of course, there are also some commercial business processes, such as the warehousing management process in the logistics field that has been booming over the past two years.

5. From a personal perspective, what are their respective characteristics of domestic workflow management products?
In China, workflow applications are closely related to organizational management. In many cases, we can say that they serve organizational management. Because the management in China tends to be "people"-based, there is a serious "Human Impact" in the domestic process ", for example, features such as "rollback", "signing", "rolling back", "getting back", "free stream", and "hosting.
Because of this, the application requirements of domestic customers are very different. It is difficult to meet the needs of different fields and customers simply and fixed workflow products, therefore, more workflow Products in China have to rely on projects to survive. It is also difficult to develop one or more very large products in a short time.

You asked me to talk about my views on the starting software. Some of them are unfair. I used to spend time thinking acceleration (the predecessor of the startup software.
Startup software is a typical provider of software products and application services that conquer customers with technologies and products. In the past two years, the transition from an early pure business technology software platform product provider to a multi-business product and service provider (of course, mainly in the collaborative field) was a very successful transformation. The product architecture and ideas that they positioned as "model-driven" many years ago are even more advanced, thanks to the advanced vision of their general manager Mr. Ma, song xinglie, their chief engineer, also benefited from his perseverance and tenacity.
Of course, there are already a lot of products on the application development platform in China, such as X3, loushang, AWS, and EOS of panyuan.
 
6. Many international software giants such as BEA, IBM, and tibco are involved in this field. What are the advantages and disadvantages of our products in China?
For these foreign giants, I would like to use an idiom to describe "Mountains and mountains ". This means that, in the BPM, EAI, and ESB fields, the strength of our domestic manufacturers is too different from that of them. Of course, there are still such products in China, such as the message products of Dongfang Tong and the ESB products of Xi'an cooperation.
I am in tibco, So I should take tibco for example. Tibco was initially developed as a messaging service product and is currently a service provider that provides EAI, BPM, and related solution products. The underlying information trading system of the Nasdaq Stock Exchange (NASDAQ) is supported by tibco message products. In the field of message service alone, it is insurmountable for domestic products in a short time.
Let's take a look at the BPM field. tibco's BPM product acquired from staffware, and staffware had been developing in the workflow field as early as 85 years ago.
 
I am not exaggerating the strength of foreign vendors in this field. One of my colleagues in the PSG department, after each POC at the customer's site, always felt: "I am not happy every time after I successfully bids for tibco products, it is a deep sense of the backwardness of domestic products and the near blank space in this field ". But I can only say that we are far behind in basic and core technologies.
 
Compared with these international giants, the poor quality of domestic manufacturers is mainly manifested in:
(1) Insufficient R & D funds.
(2) Theoretical accumulation, technical accumulation, and accumulation insufficiency. The stability of the R & D team is also a problem
(3) domestic customer requirements and workflow applications are still at the basic application level, so it is difficult to promote domestic manufacturers to invest manpower and material resources to provide product positioning and application layers, such as process monitoring and analysis.

Domestic manufacturers have advantages in "business" and "Implementation of customer projects ". From the perspective of process alone, I think there are two main advantages of domestic products:
1. "localization process characteristics of customer Applications", such as the "rollback", "signing", "rolling back", "retrieving", "free flow", and "hosting" features;
2. "localized organization model and permissions". The domestic organization model is hard to understand and surpass for foreign products. This is why the domestic workflow application market is, almost all of them are still one of the main reasons for being dominated by domestic manufacturers.
 
7. enterprises need to be personalized. How can they meet their individual needs?
In China, workflow products mainly rely on Flexible Modeling Tools, form tools, external program interfaces (APIS), plug-ins, extended applications, and interface implementations to meet the personalized needs of enterprises.

8. is the biggest difficulty for an enterprise to deploy a workflow management system from technical aspects? What do you think is the greatest difficulty? How to overcome it?
I have always said that technology is not the main problem. Domestic application developers are very powerful. Basically, in the project implementation process, technical developers can always find a solution as long as the customer can put forward basic requirements.

The greatest difficulty for domestic enterprises to implement workflows comes from two aspects:
(1) requirement. The customer's requirements for process applications are hard to be clear and accurate. On the one hand, the customer is not clear about the basic concepts of workflow technology, so it is difficult to accurately describe the application requirements. On the other hand, the application developers do not have a complete understanding of the Process application and are not systematic enough, therefore, it is difficult to guide customers to analyze process applications and requirements correctly.
(2) suitable process products. There are many external similarities between products in China, but there are many differences between internal details. However, the difference between this intensity is difficult for application developers to understand through a simple demonstration.