Thu 2 Oct 2008
Sandy Kimsley’s had a post on the topic of BPM certification and in the ensuing comments pre-heckled my Business Rules Forum discussion of the OCEB exam.
I want to share my response to her heckle. I like to quote Robert Beer, the great English Tibetian artist: “The difference between the accumulation of knowledge and wisdom may be enormous, ‘There are Learners and there are the learned; memory maketh one, philosophy the other‘. Knowledge is communicable, wisdom is not.”
I believe Dumas was responsible for the inner quotation.
I often work in the Federal Government and the Project Management certification exam (http://www.pmi.org) has proliferated and become a standard requirement for project manager roles. Yet, certification does not assure good project management. Neither will OCEB certification assure good business process management or good business process modeling. Ergo: the warning in my quotation.
The real value of BPM certification is that it will offer the best comprehensive review of the Business Process Management and Modeling literature and practices available today. To prepare for exam students will need to read study and retain an enormously valuable body of knowledge.
The gap between learning and wisdom is not an excuse to forsake learning by any means. (Imagine a wise practioner that is not learned.) The idea that OCEB certification will not lead to good Business Process Management is specious.
Tom, I am running a German company which also offers BPMN Trainings. Right now, I am not really happy with the OCEB Certificate, for a simple reason: You have to pass a multiple choice test to get the cert, but the questions you are confronted with are only known by the OCEB authors, as far as I know. Since there are training providers among the authors, those companies have a big advantage over the rest of us, especially because there is no central “Body of Knowledge” for BPM created by OMG, where you can look up all the stuff you have to know for passing the test. That’s why I actually do not consider OCEB a vendor-independant certificate. What is your opinion about that? An alternative to OCEB is the cert based on the BPM BoK created by ABPMP: http://www.abpmp.org
Certainly, a BOK would be helpful. What is the origin of the abpm’s BOK? Every question in the OMG exam must be referenced with a credible source and all these are listed on the exam site. I do not have access to the BOK. Does it cover business motivation modeling, process frameworks (i.e. SCOR), governance standards (BASEL, SOX), and other standards such as ITIL, COBIT? Is there a referenced section on Business Process Maturity?
Our team included software vendors, some of the top academic and consultants in the industry today. The list is available here (http://www.omg.org/oceb/oceb-authors.htm). I know that comprehensive study guides will be emerging.
Another point to consider is the exam itself. OMG’s exam is adminstered by Pearson/VUE and has been properly developed with Psychometrics. The process is expensive, intense and time consuming. This means that the SME’s must develop many more questions than those on the exam. The questions are ‘Beta-tested’ and the exam is edited. Moreover there must be two exams so students can retest. Unless ABMP (or any others for that matter) has invested in this level of quality in their certification exam it will not be accepted by industry or government.
I guess I’d also point out that all the effort that people are putting into the exams is pro bono. So if those trainers have an advantage, even if only a short-term one, I think it is well-earned by the sweat equity they put into the exam and certification and review of references.
Tom, good point re: learning vs. wisdom and that just because learning isn’t wisdom doesn’t mean that it is wise to forsake learning