Month: January 2008

It had to happen: someone is finally grabbing the “BPM for Dummies” (actually, “BPM Basics for Dummies”) title and are running with it.

Software AG is publishing this book very soon (in January, according to their site), and you can register for a free print copy here. According to the description:

Business Process Management (BPM) is useful, powerful and potentially very accessible. But, with so many analysts, consultants, publications and vendors weighing in with their own perspective and opinions, it can be very confusing. Business Process Management Basics For Dummies will help you understand what BPM is really all about. Whether you are a business manager or an Information Technology practitioner, this book will provide valuable information about what BPM can do for you—and how to apply it. This book includes:

• Core concepts and practical ideas.
• A primer for getting started with BPM.
• A step-by-step guide for implementing BPM successfully.
• A compilation of resources that you can go to for additional help or continued education.

I find it a bit ironic that they seem to be dissing the opinions of vendors (“But, with so many analysts, consultants, publications and vendors weighing in with their own perspective and opinions, it can be very confusing), yet this book is written by three Software AG employees.

I’m not sure that I understand all of the meaning in this graphic, but I love it! Posted by Marilyn Pratt of SAP’s BPX.

One of the things that Metastorm has released recently is a series of solution frameworks that they call “Process Pods”, which include prebuilt rules, dashboards, KPIs, and technical integrations in addition to prebuilt process models; however, they’re not truly productized in that they’re supported by the Professional Services group as if they were customized work.

The latest of these process pods is targeted at the financial services market, specifically new account opening: an area that often requires both electronic and paper-based data collection, background checks, new account creation, and updates to existing account and client records (Metastorm press release here). In addition to the process flows and rules of other process pods, this one also uses Metastorm Integration Manager product (which is, I believe, what the CommerceQuest acquisition turned into) to integrate the legacy applications (including CICS) that are typically used for client on-boarding tasks in financial services organizations. Although there will still need to be customization, the idea (as with most BPM frameworks) is that the time to deploy a productive, integrated solution will be greatly reduced.

I checked out their hour-long recorded demo of the New Account On-Boarding process pod (registration required, and didn’t seem to be Firefox-friendly). It’s pretty low-resolution and the audio is a bit sketchy, but you can get an idea of how a process would look as implemented with their NAO process pod, including the following features:

• CICS integration both for retrieving data and creating the new account on the legacy mainframe system.
• SharePoint portal integration, plus standard JSR168 portal integration into a Pluto portal; there are a number of portlets that can be embedded, such as a task to-do list, a watch list, a search form, and a form to create a new account (which presumably kicks off a new process instance).
• Email integration for alerting process participants.
• Data entry forms including links to data validation for things such as customer/account number, and enforcement of required fields.
• Checks for conditions such as specific countries of origin and amount of investment to trigger any anti-money laundering or other rules for further investigation.
• Identify verification to satisfy know-your-customer regulations, including checking against third-party blacklist checking services.
• Risk assessment checklist.
• Electronic signature and date-stamp at key points, such as completion of due diligence.
• Removing tabs from user interface at points in the process to limit access to information by certain user classes.
• Document attachments.
• After-the-fact batch reports.
• Dashboards with KPIs; these appear fairly rudimentary, but are actionable by allowing drill-down to the actual process instances.
• A third (!) separate business intelligence product that also produces reports and dashboards.
• Administrative functionality to allow control of many of the process parameters via table values, e.g., adding new questions to the risk questionnaire and indicating how each possible answer contributes to an overall score. There are some aspects of this with which I disagree, such as specifying parallel and serial process paths by creating table entries for each logical node in the process map, and assigning the order: this is the way that we used to do process maps before there were graphical process mapping tools.

One issue that I have with the demo is that it shows a finished product from a user point of view, without much of an indication (besides the administration table values) of how much effort is required to build this solution based on the NAO framework, or what is even customizable in the framework. For example, I suspect that some of the processes, rules and data fields in their standard process pod are US-specific, although they should be customizable with some additional help.

There are some things that they sell as features that look a bit clumsy, such as calling out to MS-Word for spell-checking within a note entered in a web form. Also, early in the demo, she shows the process model in ProVision, but not obvious that this maps directly to the Metastorm execution environment — I’ve seen some comments that indicate that it’s not so easy to pass models back and forth.

The demos a bit long, and an interactive demo is always better, but this does take you on a pretty thorough tour of what can be done with their process pod. And, I managed to get all the way through this blog post without a reference to pod people, invasion of the body snatchers, cocoon or many other great sci-fi usages of the word “pod”.

Lombardi held an analyst conference call last week in advance of today’s press releases — a relatively new format for them — to discuss their executive reorganization against the backdrop of their 2007 results and 2008 strategy. Rod Favaron, CEO (and, until last week, President) and Phil Gilbert, President (formerly CTO) gave us the update. The press releases are here and here.

In 2007, Lombardi had a revenue growth of over 60%, which is actually a drop from their previous growth of over 100%, but still pretty healthy; in 2008 they expect it to stay around 60%. Given the current climate of impending recession in the US, I’d be surprised if they achieve that, but I expect that they’ll still continue show strong growth based on their now-established track record of 7-figure sales. In fact, they think that hard economic times can actually drive sales of BPM.

They’re starting to expand internationally: 35% of their sales were outside North America, mostly Europe, likely helped along by the European office that they’ve expanded to assist their direct sales and resellers in the region. Not having to fly people back and forth from the US all the time would definitely be a big help both in terms of reducing the cost of sale and providing local support, and this marks a significant milestone for any growing US software company that is selling internationally or dealing with multi-national companies. Alan Godfrey, formerly EVP of Marketing, has moved to London to scale up the European operations, and their former European sales head has moved on to build out the Australian and southeast Asian market.

They claim that they started 2007 competing against the pure-plays (e.g., Savvion, Appian), and ended it competing against the stack vendors, with most of their competition now from IBM, Oracle/BEA, TIBCO and Pegasystems.

From a product and services standpoint, they’ve combined platforms (Teamworks and Blueprint), solutions and professional services all under Phil Gilbert as a Global Business Solutions group that builds product and packages combinations of product and services (such as process analysts and mentors) into solutions. Their major upgrade to Teamworks in 2007 included some new SLA and KPI monitoring to allow business people to understand the process in business terms, not technical terms, and the release of Teamworks for SharePoint to allow collaboration in SharePoint within the context of a structured Teamworks process.

They’ve had a good uptake with Blueprint, their SaaS process modeling tool. They expect to end 2008 with the best business-facing process modeler in the industry, by which I think that they mean Blueprint. A major update to Blueprint is due in April, and mid-year they’ll merge the Blueprint and Teamworks repositories, which I think is a significant step forward. A major release to Teamworks is due in the second half of the year; a pre-release version is already available to some customers, which bodes well for them actually making their release dates.

In April, they’ll be offering some joint product/services packaged offerings, including a focus on modeling, optimization and helping customers to establish an internal BPM center of excellence. Productizing a package of services is a logical step for Lombardi, but puts them in direct competition with their partners in regions where they sell through partners. Even if they’re using the partners as subcontractors in these packages, I’ve seen first-hand in the past with other BPM vendors how this can alienate the partner channel, which in turn impacts growth.

What is great to see is that Lombardi is promoting a lot from within: a few people who I know (in addition to Phil) have been moved up in the ranks to take on more responsibility, and all are well deserving. Nothing better for company morale than promoting someone who’s capable and well-liked rather than hiring in a big gun from outside.

I’m guessing that taking over as president is going to give Phil even less time to blog, but maybe that will encourage him to embrace Creative Commons and publish his book on there as a serial.