The rise and fall of CMMN

Around 8 years ago, the business process community (BPM) was very excited about a new initiative: Case Management, which would later become an OMG standard (Spanish version ).

A Case is a procedure involving actions taken for a subject in a particular situation to achieve a desired outcome.

This is derived from the concept of Case management used, for example, in the legal and medical world. ( Wikipedia )

Case management and the CMMN standard (Case Management Model and Notation) emerged as a graphical representation of processes based on "cases," unstructured and unpredictable in their execution.?

It seemed a great idea, given the widespread BPM Suites around were much more oriented to structured processes. Furthermore, the BPMN standard (for process modeling) was, and still is, much better for well-defined processes than ad-hoc processes.?

The critical point for the rise of Case management and the CMMN Standard was when it became a standard promulgated by the?OMG . CMMN?version 1.0 ?was released in May 2014 and was revised by?version 1.1 ?in December 2016. ( CMMN specification )

In 2019, three years after the release of version 1.1 of the CMMN standard, it was perceived as not generating the expected traction in the market. Nevertheless, several tools supported it, it was being discussed at conferences, and the process expert community was well aware of CMMN.?

Currently, in 2022, many BPMN practitioners have stepped away from CMMN. In addition, several BPM Suites deprecated or announced that they wouldn't evolve the CMMN support. Widespread #NoCode BPM Suites like Flokzu never supported it.?

One of the major weaknesses of CMMN: it's complex to learn and use. People had already learned BPMN; would they be willing to learn another notation? That is not very likely.?Below is just one example of several elements that are part of the 126-page standard :

The other key point is that most real-life processes can be modeled with standard BPMN, even with ad-hoc and unstructured parts. This significantly weakens CMMN as a more specific alternative.?(What is BPMN? )

This is not new. It has happened many times before with other notices and possible standards (remember BPML?), which didn't get traction and died out. From my point of view, while BPMN continues to grow in adoption worldwide, CMMN is going in the exact opposite direction.?

#CMMN #CaseManagement ?#BPM #processmanagement #processautomation #digitalworld