2007 – Page 19 – Column 2

IQPC BPM Summit: Ron McGillis

I missed Day 1 of the IQPC BPM summit due to a road trip to Detroit, but I’m here this morning to hear the speakers, and this afternoon to give my own presentation. It’s a small group, probably less than 40 people, but I’ve already been hearing great things from the attendees about how much that they’ve learned from the two days so far.

I missed Jodi Starkman-Mendelsohn of West Park Assessment Centre speak first thing, but I’ve heard her speak twice this year already so just had a quick update from her at a break on what they’ve done since I last saw her.

Ron McGillis of Ontario Power Generation talked about their contractor management program, where they manage all contracts for everything that they do with power generation: everything for both construction and non-construction servicing of the 3 nuclear power generation plants, 4 fossil fuel plants, 64 hydroelectric and 3 wind power facilities in the province. This came out of their safety compliance programs, since McGillis stated that this was their greatest concern with their contractors (the WSIB people in the audience applauded at that point), and that it needed to be the same level of safety for contractors as for OPG employees.

In 2002, they did a safety audit that showed some serious problems — “systemic, cultural-based problems with the existing contractor safety management process” — and recommended some standardized processes around the safety standards for contractors. This resulted in OPG’s current policy statement that their contractors and subcontractors must maintain a level of safely equivalent to that of OPG employees while at OPG workplaces, and set out requirements that the contractors are accountable for the health and safety of their own employees while at OPG, including ensuring that they don’t harm OPG employees or the public.

They’ve come up with a contract management process that’s documented and freely available on their website. They have consistent pre-qualification processes (which would pre-qualify a contractor for working with any division of OPG), processes for awarding contracts, standard performance reporting, and training for anyone involved in the contract management process. Using the ISO standards as a guideline, they recreated a Plan – Do – Check – Act program for contract management, and defined roles and responsibilities for each contract: owner, administrator, monitor and buyer.

Every contract stipulates these roles explicitly, and also safety clauses in terms of reporting, inspections, procedures and rules. This trickles down to any subcontractors, too.

Their contract process has five steps: planning, procurement, post award (which ensures that all parties are ready to go to work on the execution), execution, and close-out.

The contract management manual is only 13 pages long, and is at a “contract management for dummies” level, with the following content:

The steps in each stage
Who is accountable for each step
Forms (mandatory)
Worksheets (mandatory)
Job aids (good practices)
Check lists
Notes and references

Training was a key part of their success, including contract administration and monitoring courses at various levels of detail, ranging from 4 hours to 4 days.

From an automation standpoint, this isn’t a BPM system implementation: this is BPM in the sense of “management discipline” as defined by Gartner, where there’s a structured business process that is providing a huge benefit to the organization, but none of this process is automated. They have database applications that provide some analysis — for example, a contractor database allows for input of various scoring factors and provides a pre-qualification rating — but most of this is about getting people to follow the correct business processes. Their contract management process is so successful that it’s been adopted by some large companies and other power generation companies.

Their lessons learned for any business process change:

Let the process “soak”, giving it some time for people to get used to it before making changes (since people will always chafe against a new process when they’re first getting used to it).
Listen to and engage the stakeholders.
Benchmark against other similar companies, and don’t reinvent the wheel (including using ideas from other successful organizations).
Ensure senior management is fully committed, or you will fail.
Ensure that you’re adequately resources for all stages of the project, including post-implementation.

At the end of the day, they’ve cleaned up all the problems identified by the 2002 audit, and has provided a consistent pre-qualification process for contractors that benefits the entire organization.

McGillis travels extensively both to make sure that the program is being implemented consistently within OPG, and as an evangelist with external companies and by speaking at conferences.

Could parts of this process be automated to some benefit? Possibly, although they’ve likely gained so much of their ROI already in terms of cleaning up the process and capturing the relevant data in their database application. Process automation might provide them with some additional visibility into the processes, although likely not much more efficiency.

Fujitsu Interstage BPM

A few months back, I had a demo of Fujitsu’s Interstage BPM (unfortunately prefaced by 25 minutes of business strategy presentation). Interstage really has three components: the BPM product which I saw in this demo, the CentraSite BPM and SOA registry and repository, and the Service Orchestration ESB.

One thing to keep in mind is that Interstage BPM has primarily been used as an OEM BPM engine embedded within other products, so there’s a lot of stuff missing that you would find in other BPM suites; however, they integrate and partner with a number of other vendors to fill in some of the gaps. They also haven’t focussed as much on the North American market, so have much less of a marketing presence here.

Although they partner with Zynium, they now have a moderately functional process designer and see Zynium as a conversion utility rather than a ongoing process modelling tool. They also partner with IDS Scheer for a more full-featured process analysis environment, although with no round-tripping. Their claim is that Interstage BPM can “map all BPMN concepts”, but it doesn’t support all the notation explicitly: there’s no transaction wrapper, no intermediate events handling, and no swimlanes.

It can extract WSDL from CentraSite, any UDDI directory or directly from a web service, and can call remote subprocesses from another BPM system (although technically that’s possible to/from any two BPM systems that expose subprocesses as web services).

They partner with both Fair Isaac and ILOG for business rules management, and can use IDS Scheer PPM and other 3rd party products for BI/BAM. Simulation is done using an Eclipse plug-in, or IDS Scheer’s PPM can be used for historical actual data simulation.

They demonstrated a browser-based end-user interface, with an inbox, item data and attachment, and the process map and progress, but this was a custom demo solution; it’s not clear if they have much of this available out of the box. You can create JSP forms with third-party tools and integrate them as the user interface using the underlying Java API, or can use (their?) QuickForms, which provides a simple HTML form that can be edited to suit.

As I mentioned earlier, it’s difficult to compare Interstage BPM with other BPMS because it’s really just emerging into the full-on BPMS market from its previous strength as an OEM product, and just starting a North American marketing push. Gartner’s 2006 BPMS Magic Quadrant put them in the “Challengers” category — good ability to execute, but less completeness of vision — along with other large BPM vendors FileNet and Global360; “ability to execute” is based in part on strong corporate financials and sales execution, so you’d expect to see this quadrant dominated by larger vendors. Forrester’s 2006 Wave for Human-Centric BPM puts them on the low end of the “Strong Performers” category, and characterizes them as “leads in OEM deals and standards but requires coding to build out advanced functionality”, which pretty much sums it up.

Fujitsu’s been in the workflow, and now BPM, market for a long time; it will be interesting to watch how the product develops over the next months to see if it can start to meet the functionality and vision of some of the market leaders.

IQPC BPM Summit and Girl Geeks

The IQPC BPM Summit starts today in Toronto; unfortunately, I’m in Detroit and won’t make it to the conference until tomorrow, where I’m speaking in the afternoon on “Enabling BPM Through Technology”:

The differences between BPM and SOA (Service Oriented Architecture)
How BPM and SOA work together
Emerging BPM standards such as BPMN, BPEL, XPDL and BPDM
The impact of social networking (Web 2.0) on enterprise software such as BPM
Expected social networking features to appear in BPM software in the near future

I think that it’s kind of funny that they have me listed as a “Blog Editor”; I think that “blogger” still created a weird image in a lot of people’s minds.

I’m also speaking tomorrow night at the first Toronto Girl Geek Dinner, modelled after the ones in London. They’ve asked me to speak on the challenges that I’ve had a woman in technology and running my own business(es); not sure how I’m going to keep that to 30 minutes. 🙂 As with all Girl Geek dinners, men are welcome but must be accompanied by a woman so that we keep the ratio to at least 50:50.

Smart (Enough) Systems

James Taylor of Fair Isaac has co-written a book with Neil Raden called Smart (Enough) Systems, and it releases this week. I had the pleasure of receiving an advance copy a couple of months back, and wrote a brief review that might be included somewhere buried in all that small text at the beginning of the book that no one ever reads. 🙂

The subtitle of the book is “how to deliver competitive advantage by automating hidden decisions”, and it highlights how it’s critical to embody more intelligence in today’s business decision-making and have consistent, automated decisioning built into business processes in order to remain agile and competitive in today’s fast-moving market. They take you through the core concepts of enterprise decision management (EDM), dive into the underlying technologies, then address how to integrate EDM into your business processes to create your own Smart (Enough) Systems.

I thoroughly enjoyed reading it, and James and I are trying to set up a time to have a more in-depth chat about it; stay tuned for that.

All webinars, all the time

Two weeks ago was my week for webinars, I did one with TIBCO and another with Savvion in the same week.

The Savvion webinar topic was Ignite the Spark! How to Stop Talking and Start Doing BPM Today, and we created an interesting format that I really enjoyed: I did a short presentation, then Rob Risany (their director of product marketing) did a short presentation, then we just opened it up for a “fireside chat” (keeping on the spark theme) before diving into the Q&A.

Rob and I have met at several events in the past and the conversation has always been lively, so I felt that this would be a good way to get some ideas out there in an open discussion. I was more or less leading the conversation, but we ranged far and wide, and mostly agreed on some of the ways to just get started in BPM without a ton of IT support and without a huge budget.

The replay of the webinar is at the link above, and I wrote a white paper to accompany it, although I’m not sure where Savvion has that for distribution (can someone add the link in the comments to this post?).

Q&A

Also on a TIBCO theme, I had some questions passed on to me that we didn’t have time for on the Q&A during my recent Process Discovery webinar, and I’ll address them here in case you were on the webinar and had the same question. If you were there, you’ll recall that we had a little technology glitch: Webex went down about 10 minutes in, which left the attendees with no visual of my slides (which were pretty minimal) but also left us with no Q&A chat window, so we had to handle Q&A live on the phone. If you want to see the entire presentation with the slides and audio together, the link is above.

Q: I was interested in the point you made concerning the need to document current state. I have found that I have always focused on ideal future state. This is for a number of reasons:

(1) It helps people think outside their silos – current state tends to be a manual on how applications work and how users integrate them. (2) You get a pure business model that does not necessarily have any resemblance to the system architecture. You can then implement this (partially of course) and end up with a more “appropriate” solution than you could have from iterating forward from current state.

(3) Current state is very important from an application architecture point of view to understand your capability when it comes to implementation of fine grained services. Ideal state enables you to create the real value add course grained services.

I am not sure this is a question actually but I was interested in your thoughts/experiences with this.

A: I agree that the focus should be on the future state, but we can’t make the mistakes of the 1990’s-style business process reengineering that completely disregarded the current state and started from scratch; generally this led to major chaos and an unduly long implementation cycle due to the lack of identification of any potentially reusable processes. My usual technique with clients is to do a lightweight review and documentation of the current state in order to drive out the higher-level business goals and metrics, then start a future-state process modeling exercising with a relatively clean slate. The key forbidden phrase in these sessions is “because we’ve always done it that way”.

Q: Can Sandy give examples of a hidden processes within e-mails?

A: I see examples of this every day. On the administrative side, it’s very common to see processes like approval for travel and expense reimbursement to be handled completely in email in an ad hoc fashion, which relies on someone in Accounting to make sure that it went through all the proper approvals rather than having a BPM system enforce that. I’ve seen cases of daily reports being sent to large customers manually by email, even though the same report is sent every day. For a very specific but common example, in many of the mutual fund back office transaction processing customers that I’ve worked with, registered transfers (when you transfer your 401k/RRSP to another financial institution) are almost always handled by ad hoc email processes, even though a complex set of steps must be executed in a particular order. In most cases, these email-based processes started as purely paper-based processes, then the participants decided to move them to email since it was easier than using the paper methods.

Q: My question for Sandy would have been about the “validation” process that she might recommend where BPM is just the first rocky step to integration (of systems, people, authority etc). BPM “discovery” can be the activity that innocently and unintentionally identifies exactly why different departments and systems are not optimized. I have found myself in the situation where multiple BP options exist and I have always tried to maintain a helpful, neutral, facilitative role, but lately have been wondering if the Analyst doing the BPM can act as an advocate for their preferred process? This seems to lead to alienation of (some of) the people you depended on to map and design in the first place…

A: I always find it hard not to “take sides” when I’m doing the analyst role, since as an outsider, it’s sometimes easier for me to see a better solution without corporate politics or organizational inertia getting in my way. Usually I’ll present what I see as a potentially optimal process as a straw man, and force people to tell me why it won’t work. Even though we rarely end up with exactly what I’ve specified, it has the advantage of challenging their attachment to the current processes and having them look at some new ways to do things. After a day or two of beating it up and coming to agreement on what that future state process should look like, I usually like to run it by a larger number of the people who actually participate in the business process on a daily basis to see if they can identify any problems that might occur. As a facilitator, it’s important to keep an open mind since what you think might be the optimal process may not turn out to be that, yet balance that with providing some gentle guidance towards a solution.

Q: Are there any case studies that show how to break down silos to allow process management to occur in an organization? Can I have some sent to me?

A: I don’t have any particular case studies that I can share right now, but it’s possible that TIBCO (the webinar sponsor) may have some. What I’m seeing with my customers is that the ones that are willing to disregard the current departmental boundaries in their company when looking at ways to improve the business processes have the greatest amount success. In terms of how to break down the silos, here’s a few tips:

It’s critical to start with high-level executive support, since you will definitely be ruffling some feathers about who is responsible for what.
Look for processes that are common to different areas, and see if that process can be consolidated.
Map the business processes from end-to-end (at least at a high level), not just the part where they pass through one department.
Focus specifically on points in the process where it touches the customer or trading partners, since these are most often the things that drive the performance metrics for the process.
Look at the hand-offs between departments, since these are the most likely points of inefficiency in the process.
Involve people from all of the functional areas in the high-level process modeling exercise, ideally at the same time in order to capture the interactions between the groups.

The next webinar that I’m doing in this series, Process Modeling, is coming up on July 11th.

TIBCO arranges a marriage

This Wednesday, TIBCO is holding a webinar A Convenient Marriage: Uniting BPM and SOA with Business Studio 2.0 as part of their “Succeeding with BPM” series. Unlike the non-product-specific webinar series that I’m doing for them — Process Discovery on June 13th, Process Modeling on July 11th, and Process Design on August 8th — this one is focussed on their product specifically, and features the lovely and talented product marketing manager duo of Emily Burns and Mala Ramakrishnan.

Bloglines has broken my feed

I’ve always been a big fan of Bloglines, but I’ve had a few minor problems in the past when subscribing to my own FeedBurner feeds (FeedBurner takes the source feed from my site, adds on statistics tracking and a few helpful links at the end of each feed item, and produces a new feed): if the source feed location changes, and I update FeedBurner, Bloglines somehow doesn’t get the updated feed location. I think that they’re mishandling FeedBurner feeds, and mapping through to the original feed instead.

Without going into the gory details, suffice it to say that Bloglines is not handling my FeedBurner feed correctly; in fact, after I contacted their support and asked them to refresh their cache to fix the original problem of not getting the new source feed, they’re now picking up an old test version of a FeedBurner feed that I created back in March, but no longer exists.

If you’re a Bloglines user, I recommend moving to a competent feed reader (as I will soon be doing), or subscribe to the source feed directly at https://column2.com/feed/ (comments feed at https://column2.com/comments/feed/).

How not to give a demo

I’m on the receiving end of a lot of demos, and they range (as you might expect) from “can’t tear myself away” to “let me put you on mute while I clip my toenails”. Over the past months, I’ve been compiling a list of things not to do when you’re giving me a demo.

Don’t come into the demo without knowing (in general) what I write about, particularly what I write about vendors. Snorting derisively about the fact that I write a blog is not going to score points for you, either.
Don’t patronize me, for example by using the phrase “and now I’m going to tell you a bit about something called simulation“. Assume that I know at least as much about BPM as you do. Probably more.
Don’t spend 40 minutes showing me PowerPoint slides before you get to the demo. I’m here for the demo, and if you ignore that fact, then I just switch screens and read blogs while you’re talking.
Don’t (try to) bullshit me. If you don’t have X in your product and I say “hey, it looks like you don’t have X”, admit it and discuss what you’re doing to address that (if anything) rather than trying to distract me with something shiny.
Don’t make me pay for the phone call. If you don’t want to spring for a toll-free dial-in number, then offer to call me directly: after all, you’re probably going to get some free publicity out of this in the end.

Having been on the vendor side as well (although not in Sales), I know that’s not always a picnic either; I’d love to hear the flip-side of this list.

Rebranding

In early 2006, I was invited by ebizQ to move my blog to their site for hosting: a non-financial but symbiotic relationship that increased readership for both of us. Since then, I’ve broadened my interests considerably beyond the integration space that is covered by ebizQ, and I’ve decided to resume blogging here on my own domain instead.

There’s also been some amount of confusion over branding, with some readers assuming that I work for ebizQ rather than reading the fine print and realizing that I’m an independent systems architect, analyst and blogger.

If you were reaching this site using the native domain name, you’re here already. I’m getting the feed sorted out so that if you’re reading it using my FeedBurner feed, then you shouldn’t require any change either.

I’ll likely be playing around with the theme a bit over the next few weeks until I get settled back here, any suggestions are welcome.