This book is for both business users and process modeling practitioners alike. Part I provides an easily understood introduction to the key components of BPMN (put forward in a user-friendly fashion). Starting off with simple models, it progresses into more sophisticated patterns. Exercises help cement comprehension and understanding (with answers available online). Part II provides a detailed and authoritative reference on the precise semantics and capabilities of the standard.
I wrote earlier this week about the just-released BPMN book by Tom Debevoise and Rick Geneva; this is obviously the year that BPMN goes mainstream, or at least makes the attempt. White and Miers’ book, although a bit longer than Debevoise and Geneva’s, is also more than twice the price, and also doesn’t seem to offer an e-book option: hard to become a staple of every process-oriented person in an organization at a $40 price point.
I’ll be very interested to read Bruce Silver’s review of these books. Unless, of course, he’s writing his own.
At the Gartner BPM summit in February, I met up with Dr. Ketabchi, the founder and CEO of Savvion. Shortly before that, Savvion had axed most of their marketing department, and I was eager for the bigger picture since I knew that a lot of those people were very good at their jobs. As he explained at the time and again in a recent briefing, the reason for this shift in team was a shift in direction, under wraps until now, towards much more of a solutions focus. They’ve done a pretty significant internal reorganization, and completely reset their strategy and goals.
Ketabchi believes that the potential for BPM is much larger than is now being achieved: many vendors have been focused only on the core BPM services of model/design, execute and monitor. The extended BPM space surrounding that includes additional tools such as process libraries and business rules — similar to the Gartner definition of a comprehensive BPM suite — and a still-larger ring of vertical applications built on that extended platform. The value to the customer with generic components is limited; domain knowledge is required to increase that value through the vertical applications.
To serve these needs, Savvion is extending their BPM platform both horizontally and vertically. First of all, version 7.5 (shipping in August) will include the following enhancements:
The new release will include the Business Process Center, where all process assets are managed: models, operational procedures, references and everything else needed to build and execute a business process.
There’s also some interesting project management-like visualizations, for bringing together the concepts of project portfolio management and BPM. This tabular view provides an alternative representation of the process that make it easier to pinpoint critical paths and areas requiring optimization.
Vertically, they’ll extend with on-demand and on-premise business applications:
This vertical expansion is more challenging than horizontal expansion, since Savvion doesn’t have the necessary domain knowledge, so that’s where their new Business Solutions Alliance Program comes in: they’re partnering with resellers, customers and other companies that do have domain knowledge in a sort of crowdsourcing development model. Savvion is building the application platforms, then vertical applications are built on top of the frameworks; since they applications share a common framework, they will be better integrated. But Savvion provides more than a technology framework: they’ll provide sales and marketing, support and a host of other services, while the partners develop the thin, uppermost application layer using their domain expertise, and provide an entry point into the vertical market through their existing customer contacts. This allows the Savvion-centered ecosystem to target a larger portion of the vertical market, since vertical applications can be developed more easily, while still providing a fairly consistent and well-integrated set of applications built on a common framework.
They visualize this application development ecosystem as a mindmap, with the foundation (first level from the root) being developed by Savvion, and the “leaf” applications being built by partners. The goal is to make the leaf-level development as much of a cookie-cutter process as possible, and Savvion is expecting — possibly optimistically — to bundle and integrate the applications within a branch into a cohesive suite, even if built by different partners. Since the new core engine will be multi-tenanted, these applications can be hosted either by Savvion or their partners.
When a vertical solution ecosystem works well, it’s a win-win all around: the vendor makes more sales of the underlying platform, the partners leverage their unique knowledge to build and sell reusable apps rather than just selling services, and the customers can buy mostly off-the-shelf solutions at a lower price point than custom solutions. It’s an interesting model for a partner program: leverage domain knowledge from partners, whether professional services firms or customers, without them having to be crack application development shops or have the capabilities to market and sell the solutions. It’s also a pretty big gamble for Savvion, who are now betting the whole farm on this vertical partner-assisted model instead of the more common horizontal model that we see in the BPMS marketplace.
Tagged ketabchi, savvionAppian, a self-funded company until now, is taking on $10M in venture from Novak Biddle, who primarily fund IT startups. Appian plans to use the funding in four areas:
I took part last week in an analyst call with Matt Calkins, Appian’s CEO, and Samir Gulati, VP Marketing, about the announcement. They’ve generated $140M in revenue over the 9 years that they’ve been in business, so the big question is why go for VC now?
Calkins sees this as a way for them to move up the food chain, not just competing with vendors their own size (he mentioned Lombardi and Savvion specifically), but taking on the BPM behemoths like IBM and Oracle. The marketing investment is a big part of this, since you can’t play with the big kids unless you look the part. They’ve doubled their marketing budget and added 15 people to their professional services team, and Calkins stated that “we now have the budget to be the company that we wanted to be”. When I asked if this was the first step on the road to an IPO, he confirmed that they were moving towards that goal.
The VCs that they spoke with were impressed by what they’ve done, coming a bit late to the BPM market but being opportunistic and building a leadership position while still generating significant revenue. $10M doesn’t sound like a lot these days, especially given the ambitious scope of their plans, but they have a reputation for doing good things on a shoestring and hopefully the influx of cash won’t turn their heads. Remember, this is the conservative east coast, not the excesses of the Valley.
In response to a question about the difficulty in moving from selling software licenses to selling on-demand software, Calkins responded that they’re creating a separate Appian Anywhere sales force and developing a sales model that will compensate them based on projected 3-year revenues, which makes it easier to compare the on-demand and enterprise sales teams. They plan to shift to a SaaS “metabolism” for Appian Anywhere, allowing for frequent code releases in the on-demand platform, while only occasionally freezing that code base for the Enterprise edition. This keeps the two versions in sync, but provides a functionality advantage to the Appian Anywhere customers, who will see the new features earlier.
From the product description on Amazon:
With over fifty implementations listed, Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) is an increasingly successful Object Management Group (OMG) standard. Whether you are in government, manufacturing or retailing you can accurately depict your processes in BPMN! Yet, OMG BPMN specification 1.1 is abstract, lengthy and complicated. So, learning to use BPMN can be daunting. So you will need the strait forward [sic] information in this book. This guide gathers all the ideas, design, and problem solving of BPMN into one simple, focused book, and offers concrete true-life examples that explain BPMN’s approach to process modeling.
I haven’t had a chance to read it yet so can’t compare it to the many other sources of BPMN instruction out there, such as the recently-released BPMN, the Business Process Modeling Notation Pocket Handbook
I was going to just link to Mike Kavis’ post on the Top 10 Reasons Why People Are Making SOA Fail, but I wanted to added some of my own comments. By the way, he’s talking primarily about IT people, not business people, in the fail part of the equation.
Number 1 reason: they fail to explain SOA’s business value. Kavis recommends (and I completely agree) starting with business problems first, specifically using BPM as the “killer app” to justify the existence of SOA.
He continues with a number of cultural and organizational issues, such as change management and executive sponsorship, then discusses a few of the flat-out IT failure points: not having the skills to actually do SOA (and not getting the outside help required), trying to do it on the cheap, thinking of SOA as a one-time implementation project rather than an ongoing architecture, and neglecting SOA governance.
His final reason for failure is allowing the vendors to drive the architecture:
[T]he vendors promise flawless integration if you purchase all of your tools within their stack. The reality is, they have purchased so many products from other companies that their stacks do not deliver any better integration than if you bought the tools from a variety of vendors.
In the face of recent acquisitions, this could not be more accurate.
In case you’ve been missing my Links posts since early June, here’s what I’ve posted since then:
Just noticed that my Links posts haven’t been auto-posting from my del.icio.us bookmarks since early June. I’ll try deleting and recreating the daily blog posting entry in del.icio.us to see if that helps. I checked my WordPress settings and remote publishing via XML-RPC is permitted — I’m also using Live Writer to write posts, which uses XML-RPC — not sure what else could go wrong here.
Want to improve your mood? Turn the sound up and watch this, preferably in high-quality mode:
Matt Harding traveled the world doing a goofy dance, and somehow it became an uplifting video, spotlighting both differences and similarities around the globe. Yes, it’s sponsored by a chewing gum company (who have only a small mention at the end of the credits), but it’s still amazing. Every time I watch it, I get a thrill when I see the places that I’ve visited, and hanker for many more of the ones that I haven’t.
The hauntingly beautiful music is available for purchase on iTunes.
Previously, I posted about the free BPMN 1.0 poster available for download from ITPoster.net, and now the Business Process Technology Group at the Hasso Plattner Institute has published one for BPMN 1.1. Both provide a good quick reference; the BPT version has just the graphical object notation, while the ITPoster version also includes some patterns and antipatterns.
Also, check out BPT’s BPMN Corner, which has a number of good BPMN links, including Oryx, a web-based BPMN editor, and BPMN stencils for Visio and OmniGraffle.
Tagged BPMNRecently, I wrote a white paper for Corticon Technologies on the synergy between BPM and BRM. From the introduction:
The mantra of today’s business environment is “build for change”, driving many process improvement initiatives. Businesses must realize, however, that the decisions within the business processes are at least as critical in the search for agility, since the decisions change more frequently than the processes. Combining business rules management and business process management provides that agility by allowing the decisions, and their underlying rules, to be changed independently from the processes, often in real-time by business managers.
This white paper examines the intersection of business rules management and business process management: what they are, how they interact, and why this is important to the agility, accuracy, cost and compliance of your business processes.
You can find the white paper on their site here (available as a link from their Solutions / Business Process Management page), no registration required.
Tagged corticonI really dislike that expression, but it’s commonly recognized to mean that a company is using its own products to run its own business. I believe that a lot of BPM vendors do use their own products in some way, but how much? Are they just playing around with expense approvals, or have they drunk the process Kool-Aid and embedded BPM within their critical business processes?
One company that does appear to be taking their own sales pitch to heart is Appian, who just published a case study about themselves (you can find it linked at the bottom of their About Us page, but it requires registration - tsk, tsk). They use it for departmental and enterprise-wide applications, and have 40-50,000 process instances running at any given time across Finance, HR, Sales, Support, Marketing, Product Management, IT and Employee Development. Furthermore, all of the business applications are developed by business people, not IT, and can be changed in flight by business people using the rules capability within Appian Enterprise.
By implementing BPM internally, which included moving some functionality out of Peoplesoft and into Appian, they’re saving about $500k in hard costs each year, primarily through reduced licensing and support costs for packaged applications. I’m sure that there’s also soft cost savings in terms of improved efficiency and productivity, although they haven’t stated those.
I’m curious to hear from other BPM vendors about their own internal case studies — add your comments with your experiences.
Tagged appianSnapLogic sponsored a webinar today featuring (Michael) Coté of Redmonk, entitled Enterprise Mashups, RIAs and Cloud Computing.
Coté started out talking about why we want to do all of this, namely, the goal of moving to a connected model, where value is increased through increased connectivity. Mashups bring together information from multiple sources, thereby connecting those systems and services in order to add value.
He considers three aspects of applications:
RIAs (rich internet applications) are user interfaces that mimic rich desktop user interfaces, but are the front-end for internet-connected applications, built using tools such as AJAX, Flex/AIR and Sliverlight. These are typically applications (business or leisure) rather than single-purpose functionality such as search.
Moving to the bottom of the stack, cloud computing offers a faster, cheaper and more scalable infrastructure, particularly for starting up a new service when the potential load is unknown.
One of the challenges is in integrating systems when you move to the cloud: cloud to cloud and cloud to on-premise, where the latter has the challenge of integrating across the firewall. Data integration is critical so that you don’t end up with silos of information locked into your applications’ data stores.
Chris Marino of SnapLogic followed up with a few slides about their view of application integration, moving from the bad old days of point-to-point custom systems integration to a utopia that uses SnapLogic as a hub to integrate applications using web standards (HTTP, REST, XML). SnapLogic connectors and servers can be combined for all sorts of data connectivity from cloud to cloud, cloud to client, and cloud to on-premise systems. They provide a graphical tool for designing a data flow between sources, including transformations, or for exposing an enterprise data source directly in a browser for mashing up using other tools. He moved on to a lightning-quick demo showing an interface to Salesforce.com data, allowing the data to be extracted to another system or even just to the browser as input to a mashup.
SnapLogic has both a free, open source community edition and a fully-supported enterprise edition available by paid subscription.
Tagged chris marino, cote, redmonk, snaplogicAnother company that is getting how marketing 2.0 works: Metastorm is publishing podcasts on iTunes (that is, you can get them without providing your personal information to Metastorm) as well as having a YouTube channel and customer success stories on their own site that don’t require registration.
I posted a while back about how Active Endpoints is publishing webinar replays (video) as well as audio podcasts and product release information (PDF) all in an RSS feed that I subscribe to in iTunes, no signup required. IDS Scheer has ARIS TV, also on YouTube. More companies are realizing that blogging is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to new ways to interact with their audience.
Examples of companies that don’t get it: one who sent me an unsolicited email with a 2MB product brochure attached, with the comment:
As I see from your blog that you don’t like registering for basic information (which we currently require you to do at the moment on our website – although it is currently up for discussion!) I have attached our corporate overview brochure for you and would be happy to send you any other info you would find useful.
The point is not that I don’t like registering on vendor websites, it’s that no one likes registering on vendor websites. I’m not looking for special treatment, I want companies to change the way that they interact with anyone looking for information: the easier to you make it for someone to get information about your company and product, the more likely that they are to return to your site.
Oh yeah, while you’re all at it, can you please publish full feeds for your company blogs? With over 250 subscriptions in my reader, the chance of me clicking through to a vendor blog to read the entire post is near nil.
Tagged active endpoints, aris, ids scheer, marketing 2.0, metastormNot only did Oracle schedule this briefing on Canada Day, the biggest holiday in Canada, but they forced me to download the Real Player plug-in in order to participate. The good part, however, is that it was full streaming audio and video alongside the slides.
Charles Phillips, Oracle President, kicked off with a welcome and some background on Oracle, including their focus on database, middleware and applications, and how middleware is the fastest-growing of these three product pillars. He described how Oracle Fusion middleware is used both by their own applications as well as ISVs and customers implementing their own SOA initiatives.
He outlined their rationale for acquiring BEA: complementary products and architecture, internal expertise, strategic markets such as Asia, and the partner and channel ecosystem. He stated that they will continue to support BEA products under the existing support lifetimes, with no forced migration policies to move off of BEA platforms. They now consider themselves #1 in the middleware market in terms of both size and technology leadership, and Phillips gave a gentle slam to IBM for over-inflating their middleware market size by including everything but the kitchen sink in what they consider to be middleware.
The BEA developer and architect online communities will be merged into the Oracle Technology Network: Dev2Dev will be merged into the Oracle Java Developer community, and Arch2Arch will be broadened to the Oracle community.
Retaining all the BEA development centers, they now have 4,500 middleware developers; most BEA sales, consulting and support staff were also retained and integrated into the the Fusion middleware teams.
Next up was Thomas Kurian, SVP of Product Development for Fusion Middleware and BEA product directions, with a more detailed view of the Oracle middleware products and strategy. Their basic philosophy for middleware is that it’s a unified suite rather than a collection of disjoint products, it’s modular from a purchasing and deployment standpoint, and it’s standards-based and open. He started to talk about applications enabled by their products, unifying SOA, process management, business intelligence, content management and Enterprise 2.0.
They’ve categorized middleware products into 3 categories on their product roadmap (which I have reproduced here directly from Kurian’s slide:
For the “continue and converge” category, that is, of course, a bit different than “no forced migration”, but this is to be expected. My issue is with the overlap between the “strategic” category, which can include a convergence of an Oracle and a BEA product, and the “continue and converge” category, which includes products that will be converged into another product: when is a converged product considered “strategic” rather than “continue and converge”, or is this just the spin they’re putting on things so as to not freak out BEA customers who have put huge investments into a BEA product that is going to be converged into an existing Oracle product?
He went on to discuss how each individual Oracle and BEA product would be handled under this categorization. I’ve skipped the parts on development tools, transaction processing, identity management, systems management and service delivery, and gone right to their plans for the Service-Oriented Architecture products:
Note that the Oracle Service Bus is in the “strategic” category, but is a convergence of AL-SB and Oracle ESB, which means that customers of one of those two products (or maybe both) are not going to be happy.
Kurian stated that Oracle sees four types of business processes — system-centric, human-centric, document-centric and decision-centric (which match the Forrester divisions) — but believes that a single product/engine that can handle all of these is the way to go, since few processes fall purely into one of these four categories. They support BPEL for service orchestration and BPMN for modeling, and their plan is to converge a single platform that supports both BPEL and BPMN (I assume that he means both service orchestration and human-facing workflow). Given that, here’s their strategy for Business Process Management products:
Similar to the ESB categorization, I find the classification of the converged Oracle BPM product (BEA AL-BPM and Oracle BPEL PM) as “strategic” to be at odds with his original definition: it should be in the “continue & converge” category since the products are being converged. This convergence is not, however, unexpected: having two separate BPM platforms would just be asking for trouble. In fact, I would say that having two process modelers is also a recipe for trouble: they should look at how to converge the Oracle BPA Designer and the BEA AL-BPM Designer
In the portals and Enterprise 2.0 product area, Kurian was a bit more up-front about how WebLogic Portal and AquaLogic UI are going to be merged into the corresponding Oracle products:
In SOA governance:
Kurian discussed the implications of this product strategy on Oracle Applications customers: much of this will be transparent to Oracle Applications, since many of these products form the framework on which the applications are built, but are isolated so that customizations don’t touch them. For those changes that will impact the applications, they’ll be introduced gradually. Of course, some Oracle Apps are already certified with BEA products that are now designated as strategic Oracle products.
Oracle has also simplified their middleware pricing and packaging, with products structured into 12 suites:
He summed up with their key messages:
The entire briefing will be available soon for replay on Oracle’s website if you’re interested in seeing the full hour and 45 minutes. There’s more information about the middleware products here, and you can sign up to attend an Oracle BEA welcome event in your city.
Tagged BPEL, BPMNI was off last week for a vacation in Iceland (photos), which explains why it was pretty quiet around here. It wasn’t my first trip there; I also visited in December 2003 (photos), at the complete opposite in terms of daylight hours, and loved it at both times of year for different reasons. I also had the opportunity to try a completely different way of information access while traveling: I turned off email forwarding to my Blackberry — my provider’s roaming rates are outrageous — and used my iPod Touch wherever I could get free open wifi, such as at our guesthouse or many of the cafes in Reykjavik. Although the iPod Touch interface is vastly inferior to the Blackberry when it comes to composing email for those of us who can touch-type with our thumbs, it’s fabulous for reading email as well as web browsing, which is all that I wanted to do while on vacation. Interestingly enough, after my friends became aware of the device’s capabilities, one of them asked me if I would use my “computer” to look up an address for her, showing that any device with a certain level of functionality will be perceived by the non-tech-savvy as a computer, regardless of form factor.
Today is Canada Day, a national holiday celebrating the country’s confederation in 1867, but Oracle conveniently scheduled their BEA strategy briefing at noon so I’ll be spending at least a couple of hours at my desk before heading out to enjoy a day of beautiful weather and some spectacular fireworks in the evening.
