Year: 2007

Summer’s over

My blogging has been very light for the past month: summer is short in Toronto, and we’ve had an amazing run of good weather in August, so I’ve barely kept up with my customer projects and have totally neglected blogging. Now that the days are getting noticeably shorter, the nights cooler and everyone with a real job seems to be back from vacation, I think that it’s time for me to get back to work.

I have several blog posts partially completed (James Taylor’s book review, a few product reviews, a couple of short articles) that really need to get done, and some preparation for the fall conference season:

  • September 17-19, I’ll be covering the Gartner BPM Summit in Orlando
  • September 25-26, I’m speaking at the Forrester IT Leadership Forum in Carlsbad
  • October 2, I’m most likely covering the Web 2.0 University session in New York
  • October 11, I’m back in New York to present at a TIBCO seminar
  • October 23-24, I’m speaking at the Business Rules Forum in Orlando

November doesn’t look much better: I think that there’s an OMG BPM/SOA workshop (I had a note in my calendar but can’t find any information on it, and no one has added it to the shared BPM events calendar), I’m speaking at the Shared Insights BPM conference in San Diego, then I’m off to Bangalore to speak at SOA India.

BPMG reincarnated

The past few months have seen strange happenings with BPMG. I wrote about the original hint of troubles, when Steve Towers and Terry Schurter jumped ship and Terry redirected the BPMG domain to his own competing website, then the follow-up a month later when BPMG appeared to have truly shut down. They’re not down for the count, however; this morning I received the following email:

Welcome to the BPTGroup website www.bptg.org

The following facilities and services are up and running or scheduled for the new site

  • a full range of training and development programmes for open course and in-house delivery
  • a comprehensive, degree-level programme for business change professionals designed to be  internalised by organisations to provide a future structure for developing change expertise
  • an accreditation process that is quick, efficient and authenticated
  • insight to the 8 Omega methodology and maturity assessment process
  • core sections dedicated to Strategy, People, Process and Enabling Technologies including articles, reviews, presentations and a comprehensive cross-referencing system
  • the introduction of the BPTG global partners
  • the International BPTG Chapters web facility
  • executive briefings, coaching and mentoring, process audit services are offered to organisations as they endeavour to move effectively through the cultural and other issues of change surrounding their transformation to process-focused operations.

The deliberate sabotage of the BPMG website impacted its members, staff and associates worldwide and raises many issues, ethical as well as legal, about the integrity of the organisation and the individuals involved.  The actions that created that situation are totally at variance with the core BPM principle that serving the customers best interests should inform all our actions. 

However, as you will see from our home page, many of the BPMG key people have expressed their opinion very clearly by readily joining the BPTGroup.  We also welcome new faces and expertise, and there are others on the way.

Website functionality will be enhanced in two further phases over the next few months ? we will be introducing new features, new courses and services to our fellow process professionals ? and we want you to help us in this development process. 

One final point before I leave you to explore the BPTGroup website. 

Why BPTGroup? After the BPMG debacle I am sure many of you would expect us to avoid any association with similar phrasing.  Quite the reverse.  The principal movers behind BPTGroup were proud of what we had created in the BPMG and the services we provided to our members.  Although in no way responsible or accountable for the destruction wrought, we want to help rectify the undoubted damage done to an ethical and principled global community and we invite you to join us in these endeavours. 

Please, express your opinion by your action ? help us to help you.

A number of delegates were seriously inconvenienced by the collapse of the BPMG and some lost their fee pre-payments.  We make this offer to those people ? when the BPTGroup next run a commercially viable programme in a location convenient to you we will invite you to join us and waive all professional fees for that course.  Please contact us now to enable our people to keep you informed of convenient courses.

Thank-you for your previous support and interest ? we look forward to the opportunity to work with you again.

Regards,

David Lyneham-Brown

CEO

They have some of the original people on board, including Mark McGregor and Jim Baird (who offered to provide BPMG courses for free to people who had paid for them). A lot of people are unlikely to trust Steve and Terry after the stunt that they pulled — I don’t know the whole story, but it appears to be pretty unprofessional behaviour — but they were two of the very visible faces of the old BPMG, and it’s difficult to see if BPTG will be able to regain the momentum. I don’t think that it’s necessary to have visible faces for an online community like this; certainly there’s others, like BPMInstitute, that are run by very competent people who choose not to put themselves in the spotlight, but to show off the content instead.

BPTG is offering a free membership right now, and I have no idea if they plan to go back to a two-tiered model that drew such criticism in the past. Personally, I don’t think that there’s any place in the market for a paid site for most of the content that they offer; there are a lot of other content sites related to BPM that get their revenue from advertising, vendor-sponsored content such as webinars and white papers, and live training and conferences.

Email woes

Sometime after 7pm Eastern tonight, Google decided to do some maintenance on my kemsleydesign.com email account, which is hosted on Google. Some notice would have been nice, instead of getting errors through Outlook, then attempting to access the webmail to see a notice that Google Mail is unavailable for “up to” 24 hours.

24 hours?? I guess this is how they get us to move from the free Google mail accounts for our domains to the paid ones.

I’ve reconfigured to reroute my email elsewhere, but if you sent me something between 7-8:30pm Eastern, it may be sitting in a bit bucket at Google.

Generalists and specialists

Specialist or generalist?Great graphic by Dave Gray of XPLANE, showing the difference between generalists and specialists. Click through on the image to his Flickr page to see in full resolution, or view it directly on his blog, there’s a lot of other great material there.

His key point: generalists are best at defining the problem or goal, while specialists are best at solving the problem or executing the plan.

I met Dave at VizThink3 in Toronto this summer, where he led us through some exercises in visual thinking; I’m more of a written word sort of person, so these exercises were good at stretching my brain a bit; I even drew a visual representation of crowdsourcing. I think that my drawing skills need a bit of work.

BPM is one of those areas where a structured type of visual thinking is used: most often, people draw a process flow to represent their business process, and that visual representation (now standardized in BPMN) has become the primary way for specifying processes for automation. Although Dave’s work focusses in a great part on visuals for marketing and training communications, process visualization is part of what they do; check out their website for the Standard & Poor’s example, where the process map looks like a subway route map.

Enterprise 2.0: an update

A checkpoint on Web 2.0 in the enterprise circa mid-2007Dion Hinchcliffe wrote a great post a couple of weeks ago giving a checkpoint on Web 2.0 in the enterprise. I was going to just tag it in my del.icio.us links, which would have had it come up in my daily links post, but I wanted to take the time to comment on it since I think that he has a great way of capturing the essential information about the subject. Also, I’ve been waiting for Part 2, which was promised in advance of his Web 2.0 for the Enterprise webinar on July 31st, but I haven’t seen it yet.

His graphic, which you can see in small form on the right (click through to his Flickr page for the larger version, or see it in situ in the linked article above), divides Web 2.0 in the enterprise into four quadrants based on two factors: social versus technical, and internally versus externally-facing. In this first part, he walks through each of the aspects shown on the right, or internally-facing, part.

My thoughts on some of his notes, especially as they relate to BPM:

  • Wikis are now something that I discuss with every end-customer organization that I visit, even though I’m almost always there to do BPM-related work, not talk to them about Enterprise 2.0. I’m seeing uses in a number of line-of-business areas, such as sharing vendor pricing information across different company locations, and collaborating on updates to operational procedures manuals. Dion points out their importance for internal collaboration as well as a platform for user-built web pages, which ties in with his later comments about collective intelligence.
  • Collaboration 2.0 is like a wiki with a bit more structure, and an important class of applications/functionality that lies between unstructured collaboration and the highly-structured end of the spectrum that we see in BPM. As this space becomes more defined, I expect to see BPM vendors expand in this direction.
  • His comments on emergent structure are completely bang on: “The underlying concept of emergent structure is that we guess far too much up front about the features of the software we need or the way the data should be organized.” This speaks to a number of problems in current enterprise software development practices, most importantly that of the massive over-design of software that tends to take too long to deploy, ends up not being what the users need anyway, and being custom-coded hence not very agile. I’m a strong proponent of the “give the users the out of the box tools and see what they come up with” school of customization when it comes to BPM products (as well as many other software products) since the tools provided by the vendors are, for the most part, fairly usable by a trained user or business analyst.
  • Data aggregation is critical for reuse, but visibility/availability is really the key issue here. In my Enterprise 2.0 conference coverage, I mentioned a few times that I see RSS (or rather, the ability to subscribe to events and data) as a key functionality that’s going to sweep through enterprises. He covers syndication as a separate point later, but these are really two sides of the same issue.
  • Enterprise mashups are also going to be critical — and make use of that aggregated data via feeds — as the next generation of end-user computing platforms. Instead of Excel and Access, semi-technical users within business departments are going to be using mashup platforms to build the simple applications that they can never get IT to build for them.
  • Rich user experiences are already throughout organizations for end-user functionality, but that usage needs to continue to expand to include tools such as (in the BPM space) process modellers/designers so that they can be run anywhere by anyone, given the appropriate user authentication. FileNet has long had a Java applet for their process designer; the download is a bit clunky and it looks quite outdated now, but it still doesn’t require the software to be explicitly installed/upgraded at each workstation. Other more modern (Ajax-based) process designers are appearing from BPM vendors such as Appian and Cordys, and this trend is not going to reverse.

He covers a number of other aspects that I haven’t mentioned here; definitely worth a read. I look forward to Part 2 of this article.

Update: Part 2 of Dion’s article published here.

Process optimization webinar

Next Wednesday, I’m presenting a webinar on Process Optimization for the Real World, along with Rob Risany of Savvion (who are sponsoring the webinar). This is the same format as when Rob and I last did a webinar together: we both give a short presentation, then have a “fireside chat” discussion where we have a mostly unstructured conversation, which is a lot of fun for us and was pretty popular with the audience last time.

My part of the presentation is on how process optimization works — or doesn’t work — in reality, and some of the factors that impact it. In my experience, I find that most of the reasons that it doesn’t work are cultural, not technological, and can lie with both business and IT. Tune in next week to hear the whole thing.

BPM and SOA webinar

I’m listening in on a webinar with the rather grandiose title of “BPM and SOA: State of the Nation”, sponsored by webMethods. Paul Harmon of BPTrends kicked it off, and talked for some time about some general BPM and SOA definitions before diving into the results of a survey that they did earlier this year.

He had a great slide on how the maturity models for BPM and SOA intersect, with SOA MM level 5 (requires that companies know and track process measures) overlapping BPMM level 4 (processes are measured and managed systematically).

I found some of the survey questions odd; one of them offered four mutually exclusive responses:

  • You should not approach BPM without SOA
  • SOA cannot, ultimately, be successful without a BPM overlay
  • BPM is more successful and drives more benefits when deployed in an SOA environment
  • SOA is more successful and has more business relevance when tied to BPM

Not surprisingly, 74% of the responses were split between the last two; however, I think that most people would have selected both of those if they were able. That’s the whole point, right? BPM makes SOA more relevant, and SOA makes BPM easier to deploy. Interestingly, 19% chose the second option, that is, that SOA can’t succeed without BPM; I’d certainly agree that BPM makes it a lot easier to justify your SOA program, although I think that there’s other (non-BPM) business applications that also consume services and therefore help to justify it, so I wouldn’t make such a definitive statement.

He finished up with some good summary points:

  • BPMS and SOA are coming together. If you don’t know about either, you should learn about both.
  • If you are considering a BPMS tool, you’ll want to know how well it supports SOA.
  • Processes and services to automate BPMS and SOA will need to be carefully managed. You’ll especially want to know how any BPMS product supports SOA governance.

You can download the entire survey at BPTrends.com, and I’m sure that the webinar will be available for replay although it’s not at the original URL that I linked to yesterday; likely webMethods will have a link on their site.

Ex-BPMG contractor makes good

Jim Baird, who had organized the Toronto BPMG chapter meetings that I attended previously, also was a contractor to BPMG for delivering courses. With the recent demise of BPMG, Jim has stepped up to the plate and offered to provide courses for free to those who got stiffed by BPMG. From his recent comment on my original post about BPMG’s closure:

Hi folks. I would like to confirm what you have seen in this blog and thank Kevin and Sandy for bringing it to my attention. In the next couple of weeks we will be announcing the formation of the Business Process Transformation Group which will be available at www.BPTG.org. A new course schedule will be posted and anyone who has paid for training at BPMG will be offered the course that they have paid for at no charge. Please keep in mind that I was as surprised as everyone else with the demise of BPMG as I was contracted to train for them and was not a shareholder of the organization. Although we did not receive any of those funds that were paid to BPMG we find that the situation is deplorable and feel that this is the honourable thing to do. If you have any further questions please do not hesitate to contact me at [email protected].

Jim also contacted me to see about organizing a non-partisan BPM interest group meeting in Toronto, tentatively scheduled for September 21st. Stay tuned for more details.

BPM Think Tank wiki

The wiki for the recent BPM Think Tank has been opened up for public viewing, and Derek Miers has pre-loaded it with links to some of the related documents as well as links to my coverage of the sessions.

If you attended, you should have received an editing password for the wiki, which allows you to add your own notes on any of the pages — please do, since it enriches the experience for all readers.