The value of OCEB Certification

• Posted by Ed Walters
• on 21 February 2012

Like most Business Analysts I’ve become involved with process modelling at various junctures in my working life, using a variety of notations, even, I recall, inventing my own notation on one memorable occasion! But questions inevitably arise at some point like ‘how do I know if I’m doing it right?’ and even ‘I wonder what else there is to know about all this?’

I've just taken (and passed!) OMG's*  OCEB Fundamental Examination, so I thought perhaps others might be interested in knowing something about this certification path.

OCEB stands for OMG Certified Expert in Business Process Management. There are 3 levels of certification, Fundamental, Intermediate and Advanced, along 2 development paths, Business and Technical. Fundamental is common to both paths.

If you want to get some sort of accreditation to underpin your process modelling activities this certification is a good option to consider. The certification is based around the Business Process Modelling Notation (BPMN) specification, which the OMG owns and manages.
However only about 40% of the certification is about process modelling directly, the rest of the syllabus includes a range of topics around business process management (BPM), which is a much wider subject area.
Fundamental Topics include:

Business Goals, Objectives: general business administration topics such as might be encountered in an MBA or basic Business Studies course.
Business Process Concepts and Fundamentals: some of the basics of process architecture and different levels of modelling processes, for different audiences.
Business Process Management Concepts and Fundamentals: basic notions of Business Process Management (BPM) as a management topic. BPM is concerned with planning, developing and monitoring business processes and trying to balance the process and functional tensions that always exist in any organisation.
Business Modeling: Here OMG brings in its own Business Motivation Model (BMM) as the principle basis for modelling fundamental business concepts like Mission, Vision etc.
Business Process Modeling Concepts and Skills: These sections examine the syntax and semantics of the BPMN modelling language.
Process Quality, Governance, and Metrics Frameworks: The final section overviews some famous process related frameworks, including 6 Sigma, and some governance frameworks, like CobiT.

I must say I found it hard to prepare for the examination adequately - there is quite an extensive reading list attached to the syllabus. It was certainly a benefit to have already studied and used BPMN extensively, so at least I had that part well covered already.
There is a textbook, published by OMG, that purports to cover the Fundamental exam syllabus, but to be honest I didn't find it as useful as I had hoped - for one thing the use of English is quite bizarre in places (well it is only the first edition, I'm sure it will improve!). I found it necessary to resort to the original texts for most of the research work, and even then found a number of links to resources that didn't work or were broken.

That said, there aren't many places to go to acquire a rounded, and non-proprietary, education in Process Management and Process Modelling, so I'm inclined to recommend folk to take a serious look in the OCEB direction. Given the evident importance of this topic to the field of process improvement, and to the deployment of IT in support of processes, it is odd that there isn't more general support available for practitioners such as Process Analysts, Business Analysts, Quality Improvement Specialists and so on; and not forgetting of course the needs of their associated Management and Executive functions.

* Object Management Group