Year: 2007

The lunchtime address is always a tough one: the speaker has to talk over the sound of clashing cutlery, and half of the audience has to twist around in their chairs to see the speaker and slides, but Gartner tends to keep these short and painless, and features entertaining speakers such as Alan Trefler of Pegasystems.

I was chatting with the others at my lunch table before the talk began, and the person beside me asked my views on some of the vendors. We talked about the pros and cons of product convergence, and I used business rules as an example of something that is sometimes baked right into a BPM product — as with Pega, which is based on a rules engine — but may be more versatile if available as a separate platform. I made a comment along the lines of “just wait, Trefler will tell us why it’s necessary to have rules as part of your BPM”.

Trefler’s focus was on the rhythm of business, the things that can kill that rhythm, and how to fix them:

• Rhythm killer #1: the specification gap, where there’s a huge gap in time and understanding between the business developing requirements, IT developing specifications, then the business signing off on these specifications with the full knowledge that any changes are going to require an equally arduous change order process. The solution: directly capture objectives in the execution environment, that is, use tools that allow the business to create their own models, and have those translate directly to execution.
• Rhythm killer #2: exporting models, which causes the models to be ripped out of the hands of the business and tossed over to IT to import into the execution environment, with no round-tripping. The solution: automate the programming, that is, use a zero-code environment that generates the executable model from that created by the business, either in a shared model environment or in a fully round-trippable environment.
• Rhythm killer #3: no reuse of components or models. The solution: think about enterprise sharing and reuse upfront and design it into the system from the start. Trefler considers the secret of this to be using a declarative rules-based paradigm, of course, proving my earlier comment in his final sentence.

The usual Gartner format is to allocate some sessions for vendors (read: sponsors) and their customers to make short presentations, and I sat in on Sandy Carter talking about IBM’s view of SOA and BPM.

She started with some thoughts on what’s driving business today and the changing business landscape in the global economy, from new technology and business models to new customers and global integration, and how this is driving companies to both innovation and optimization. She talked about some interesting examples of this: McDonald’s is handling their drive-through orders by routing them to operators in the Philippines who interact verbally with the customer to take the order, then key the order into a system that results your burger popping out of the window when you drive up; a perfect example of outsourcing a specific task in a process as opposed to the entire process.

Carter comes from the SOA side and stated up front that BPM must be implemented with SOA; while I certainly agree that SOA makes the implementation of BPM much more efficient, there are plenty of successful BPM implementations that don’t rely on SOA. She showed an enterprise architecture type of view of BPM (although she didn’t call it that), calling out the business view, the process view and the IT view as independent yet interconnected layers.

In looking at their strategy, she covered enhancements to the WebSphere Business Modeler, including improved integration with FileNet and Workplace eForms (by which I assume that she means the FileNet eForms product), which is good news: ever since the acquisition of FileNet by IBM was announced over a year ago, I’ve been wondering how they’re going to properly integrate the FileNet functionality into the WebSphere suite. As an aside, I’ve always felt that the BPM part of the FileNet line should have been moved over to the WebSphere suite from at least a product marketing/product management standpoint, although there would have been technical challenges due to the integrated nature of the FileNet platform: there’s a huge gaping hole where there should be human-facing BPM in the WebSphere line, and FileNet’s BPM would fill that gap.

She also discussed the WebSphere Business Monitor; I’m not sure if this BAM dashboard is the same as the Celequest (now Cognos) BAM capability that’s OEM’d into FileNet’s product line, or if they have a separate BAM offering.

Since IBM is really in the services business these days rather than the software business, she also talked about their new BPM methodology services offering. She showed a video of a very Second Life-ish “interactive management game” in which you run around the game and optimize a business process using BPM and SOA: a “first person shooter” game for business. This is supposed to appeal to the new generation of management that is coming through the universities now; I’d really like to hear the reactions of the students to this and whether they see it as a valid learning mode or just a lame attempt by a large corporation to jump on the Gen-Y bandwagon.

This analyst panel was moderated by Daryl Plummer, and included Shafqat Azim, Eric Deitert, Janelle Hill and Michael Smith. Azim is with the consulting arm of Gartner and focusses on IT process improvement, whereas the other three are from the research side, and Plummer asked them about three key issues:

• What is the value of a process-rich strategy?
• How hard is it to align a vision for process with a business strategy?
• What are the important topics one needs to master when creating a process-rich strategy?

The first issue was defining “process-rich strategy” as the operationalization of a business strategy, such that the causes and effects of individual parts of the process are well-understood by the process participants. As the discussion continued, it became clear that “process-rich strategy” is just the current relabeling of having a process-centric view of your organization, with a strong focus on dissolving some of the boundaries between functional silos in order to perform end-to-end process optimization.

One value of a process-rich strategy is to put individual business users in the context of the overall business strategy so that, for example, a call centre operator understands his position as a key customer touchpoint and how his actions impact the end-to-end business process; this, in turn, encourages the individual workers to look for ways to improve the overall process. By putting individual functions in the larger context, and providing visibility into the end-to-end process, improvements tend to address the entire process rather than focus on local optimization. Hill pointed out that team sports are a great analogy for business process visibility: everyone on the playing field can see what everyone else is doing, and understand exactly how their actions contribute to the overall team success. Athletes are motivated by their own personal success, but are also strongly motivated by their team’s performance since it’s great from a career standpoint to be on the winning team and to be seen as team players, not just to score all the points themselves. In some sports, team play is rewarded explicitly, such as tracking assists for hockey players as well as goals, since the game just doesn’t work without it. Similarly, the key to motivating business users to look for ways to improve the overall business process is to provide some reward for them. Sometimes, that’s financial (bonuses and overall corporate profitability resulting in increased wages); sometimes, it’s merely public recognition of the contribution; sometimes, it’s recognition of an individual’s ability that improves their overall career path.

There was a big focus on agility in this panel, and how both management and technology agility must be embedded within the business strategy. Management agility is the facility to think about new ways to do something or even a completely new business function, whereas technology agility provides the ability to make those thoughts a reality. Cause and effect within processes must be well understood in order to remain agile.

Process metrics and how they contribute to visibility was also a major area of discussion: if you don’t identify specific metrics for your business processes and start capturing that data, then you can’t analyze that into the higher-level process measurements that are required to see how well the business processes are performing and therefore optimize the processes. Smith will be doing a session tomorrow on how performance metrics help to align business processes with strategy for more detail in this area.

At the end of it, it comes down to the ability to execute business strategy: a process-rich strategy combined with the appropriate technology are more likely to see success in making business strategy a reality.

Scrambling down to the conference this morning — I arrived late last night and didn’t get enough sleep, much less a chance to register — I struck up a conversation in the elevator with someone who was already wearing a Gartner conference badge and asked him where the registration area was. He pointed me in the right direction, and said that he hoped that the process was faster than last night, saying that he didn’t know what they were running on their systems but that it was very slow. I tossed off my usual comment about systems that don’t work well — “probably Windows” — then turned to him and saw the Microsoft logo on his shirt. Great, I’m not even at the conference yet, and I’ve made my first enemy. 🙂

The conference kicked off with an welcome from Daryl Plummer, Bill Rosser and Pascal Winckel [all speakers that I reference at this conference are with Gartner unless otherwise noted]. Plummer started off with an audience vote that showed that there are way more business than technical people here, a great (and fairly unusual) thing for a BPM conference. Like most business-focussed conferences, however, the logistics are not blogging-friendly: there’s no wifi, only an internet area where I can plug into a physical cable, and there’s no power at the tables to keep my laptop juiced. In fact, when I ran into Jesper Joergensen from BEA at the break, the first thing that he said to me was “uh oh, no wifi — the conference is going to get a bad review!”

Plummer did tell the best BPM joke of the day so far (not a lot of competition there): What’s the lifecycle of a BPM project? About 2.5 CIOs.

After the preamble and logistics, the opening keynote was given by Janelle Hill. She started out with a great slide on the evolution of process improvement: from scientific management through computerized process flow to our current focus on flexible and adaptive BPM and the start of a focus on SOA (service oriented architecture), BAM (business activity monitoring) and EDA (event driven architecture).

She showed the results of some of their recent research showing that increasing BPM discipline as the second most important business trend affecting the ability to compete during the next five years, second only to better project/portfolio management.

She went on to talk about how software can contribute to business value, and I had to laugh at one of the conclusions that they draw: “The focus of software must shift to enabling business process innovation rather than hindering it.” In theory, that’s what the software is for; what she’s pointing out is that in reality, software — especially large ERP systems — actually hinders business agility and therefore process improvement because of the difficulties in changing the software to meet the current business needs. BPM software provides the opportunity to actually enable process innovation by allowing the business side to make frequent changes to the process to accommodate changing business processes and regulations. This is based on two fundamental bits of functionality that are part of any BPMS: first, the decoupling of the process flow, represented as a graphical process map, from the underlying technology; with a direct link from the process map to an executable flow, the business can now make changes in that graphical environment that can move into production with a minimum of IT involvement. Second, tools to provide a detailed visibility into processes in near real time so that the business can determine where changes need to be made in order to improve processes.

Interestingly, Gartner is bringing the focus back to the people in processes: putting the person-to-process interaction back at centre stage in terms of both process analysis and execution, rather than just seeing people as bots that execute granular tasks in a process. In other words, the SOA view of human-interrupted processes isn’t what’s going to drive the new wave of process improvement; the people in processes are. Maybe that’s an admission that much of the SOA level of improvement is well-understood, so that there’s unlikely to be quantum leaps in process improvement in that area that haven’t already been identified; on the other hand, we’re just starting to discover how some of the human-facing functionality such as collaboration will result in process improvements that we can’t even envision today as the emergent applications of the future. This is exactly what I’m seeing in the Enterprise 2.0 space, namely, that the new generation of technologies provides the tools that allow the business users and analysts to have more control over how their systems work and therefore the effectiveness of their business processes.

Hill discussed the three types of vendors in the BPM market today: traditional packaged application vendors, middleware vendors, and BPM specialists. The market trend, as she points out, is that the BPM pure-play vendors are increasingly being acquired by the first two types of vendors. In spite of the acquisitions, however, she points out that this is not a consolidating market, since the number of companies who claim to have something to do with process management is still increasing.

She finished up with some of the standard Gartner material on what it means to be a process-driven organization and some of the organizational and management issues that need to be addressed in order to enable this; this is very similar to what I’ve seen at previous Gartner conferences and in webinars. With the last BPM conference being only 7 months ago, it’s certainly expected that we’ll see some degree of reused material, but based on this first session, it looks like there will be enough new information to keep everyone happy.