2007 – Page 2 – Column 2

Fun with feeds

For those of you who subscribe to my feed instead of reading this directly, you’ll notice the new copyright notice and link to the post that’s included at the top of each post in the feed. Although I haven’t had a full-on feed theft of the scale that I experienced back in March, I do see occasional unauthorized reposts of my material on various ad sites. If they’re automatically farming from my feed, this way I’ll at least get a link back.

If you’re using WordPress and interested in doing the same, you can find the FeedEntryHeader plugin here.

Agent Logic’s RulePoint and RTAM

This post has been a long time coming: I missed talking to Agent Logic at the Gartner BPM event in Orlando in September since I didn’t stick around for the CEP part of the week, they persisted and we had both an intro phone call and a longer demo session in the weeks following. Then I had a crazy period of travel, came home to a backlog of client work and a major laptop upgrade, and seemed to lose my blogging mojo for a month.

If you’re not yet familiar with the relatively new field of CEP (complex event processing), there are many references online, including a recent ebizQ white paper based on their event processing survey which determined that a majority of the survey respondents believe that event-driven architecture comprises all three of the following:

Real-time event notification – A business event occurs and those individuals or systems who are interested in that event are notified, and potentially act on the event.
Event stream processing – Many instances of an event occur, such as a stock trade, and a process filters the event stream and notifies individuals or systems only about the occurrences of interest, such as a stock price reaching a certain level.
Complex event processing – Different types of events, from unrelated transactions, correlated together to identify opportunities, trends, anomalies or threats.

And although the survey shows that the CEP market is dominated by IBM, BEA and TIBCO, there are a number of other significant smaller players, including Agent Logic.

In my discussions with Agent Logic, I had the chance to speak with Mike Appelbaum (CEO), Chris Bradley (EVP of Marketing) and Chris Carlson (Director of Product Management). My initial interest was to gain a better understanding of how BPM and CEP come together as well as how their product worked; I was more than a bit amused when they referred to BPM as an “event generator”. I was someone mollified when they also pointed out that business rules engines are event generators: both types of systems (and many others) generate thousands of events to their history logs as they operate, most of which are of no importance whatsoever; CEP helps to find the few unique combinations of events from multiple data feeds that are actually meaningful to the business, such as detecting credit card fraud based on geographic data, spending patterns, and historical account information.

Agent Logic has been around since 1999, and employs about 50 people. Although they initially targeted defence and intelligence industries, they’re now working with financial services and manufacturing as well. Their focus is on providing an end-user-driven CEP tool for non-technical users to write rules, rather than developers — something that distinguishes them from the big three players in the market. After taking a look at the product, I think that they got their definition of “non-technical user” from the same place as the BPM vendors: the prime target audience for their product would be a technically-minded business analyst. This definitely pushes down the control and enforcement of policies and procedures closer to the business user.

They also seem to be more focused on allowing people to respond to events in real-time (rather than, for example, spawning automated processes to react to events, although the product is certainly capable of that). As with other CEP tools, they allow multiple data feeds to be combined and analyzed, and rules set for alerts and actions to fire based on specific business events corresponding to combinations of events in the data feeds.

Agent Logic has two separate user environments (both browser-based): RulePoint, where the rules are built that will trigger alerts, and RTAM, where the alerts are monitored.

RulePoint is structured to allow more technical users work together with less technical users. Not only can users share rules, but a more technical user can create “topics”, which are aggregated, filtered data sources, then expose these to the less technical to be used as input for their rules. Rules can be further combined to create higher-level rules.

RulePoint has three modes for creating rules: templates, wizards and advanced. In all cases, you’re applying conditions to a data source (topic) and creating a response, but they vary widely in terms of ease of use and flexibility.

Templates can be used by non-technical users, who can only set parameter values for controlling filtering and responses, and save their newly-created rule for immediate use.
The wizard creation tool allows for much more complex conditions and responses to be created. As I mentioned previously, this is not really end-user friendly — more like business analyst friendly — but not bad.
The advanced creation mode allows you to write DRQL (detect and response query language) directly, for example, ‘when 1 “Stock Quote” s with s.symbol = “MSFT” and s.price > 90 then “Instant Message” with to=”[email protected]”,body=’MSFT is at ${s.price}”‘. Not for everyone, but the interesting thing is that by using template variables within the DRQL statements, you can converted rules created in advanced mode into templates for use by non-technical users: another example of how different levels of users can work together.

Watchlists are lists that can be used as parameter sets, such as a list of approved airlines for rules related to travel expenses, which then become drop-down selection lists when used in templates. Watchlists can be dynamically updated by rules, such as adding a company to a list of high-risk companies if a SWIFT message is received that references both that company and a high-risk country.

RulePoint includes a large number of predefined services that can be used as data sources or responders, including SQL, web services and RSS feeds. You can also create your own services. By providing access to web services both as a data source and as a method of responding to an alert, this allows Agent Logic to do things like kick off a new fraud review process in a BPMS when a set of events occur across a range of systems that indicate a potential for fraud.

Lastly, in terms of rule creation, there are both standard and custom responses that can be attached to a rule, ranging from sending an alert to a specific user in RTAM to sending an email message to writing a database record.

Although most of the power of Agent Logic shows up in RulePoint, we spent a bit of time looking at RTAM, the browser-based real-time alert manager. Some Agent Logic customers don’t use RTAM at all, or only for high-priority alerts, preferring to use RulePoint to send responses to other systems. However, compared to a typical BAM environment, RTAM provides pretty rich functionality: it can link to underlying data sources, for example, by linking to an external web site with criminal record data on receiving an alert that a job candidate has a record, and allows for mashups with external services such as Google maps.

It’s also more of an alert management system rather than just monitoring: you can filter alerts by the various rules that trigger them, and perform other actions such as acknowledging the alert or forwarding it to another user.

Admittedly, I haven’t seen a lot of other CEP products to this depth to provide any fair comparison, but there were a couple of things that I really liked about Agent Logic. First of all, RulePoint provides a high degree of functionality with three different levels of interfaces for three different skill levels, allowing more technical users to create aggregated, easier-to-use data sources and services for less technical users to include in their rules. Rule creation ranges from dead simple (but inflexible) with templates to roll-your-own in advanced mode.

Secondly, the separation of RulePoint and RTAM allows the use of any BI/BAM tool instead of RTAM, or just feeding the alerts out as RSS feeds or to a portal such as Google Gadgets or Pageflakes. I saw a case study of how Bank of America is using RSS for company-wide alerts at the Enterprise 2.0 conference earlier this year, and see a natural fit between CEP and this sort of RSS usage.

Update: Agent Logic contacted me and requested that I remove a few of the screenshots that they don’t want published. Given that I always ask vendors during a demo if there is anything that I can’t blog about, I’m not sure how that misunderstanding occurred, but I’ve complied with their request.

Trouble with tracking

Why is that most of the time these days when I try to track a comment with co.mments, it doesn’t work at least 50% of the time? I just see the endless “Loading…” message as the script tries to load, and the same when I visit the website. With no access to the website, it’s also impossible to report the problem.

I’ve had to revert to using cocomment, which I don’t like as much, and now seems to be timing out occasionally as well.

I like the idea of being able to track comments on any post on someone else’s blog, whether I’ve commented on it or not, and have them feed to my reader so that I can see if anyone else has contributed to the conversation.

The missing BPM podcast

Weird. Over the weekend, my feed reader picked up three instances of a feed of a podcast on Podtech (tagged with “BPM”) that doesn’t seem to actually exist. Imagine my frustration:

The Forrester Wave: Business Process Management for Document Processes – Interview with the Analyst

In this audio event we speak with Craig Le Clair of Forrester Research, co-author of The Forrester Wave: Business Process Management for Document Processes, Q3 2007 report. Craig discusses Forrester’s definition of Business Process Management and BPM Suites, document-intensive types of processes and their requirements, the type of functionality that is important within a BPM solution, and the strengths he discovered in his analysis of EMC’s Documentum Process Suite. Tags: Craig Le Clair, Forres…

There were two identical entries as above, then a third one with the same link but a slightly different description:

The Forrester Wave: Business Process Management for Document Processes – Interview with the Analyst [IMG MP3 Audio] Audio | 10:12 | Commissioned | Posted by editor | November 8th, 2007 7:04 pm In this audio event we speak with Craig Le Clair of Forrester Research, co-author of The Forrester Wave: Business Process Management for Document Processes, Q3 2007 report. Craig discusses Forrester’s definition of Business Process Management and BPM Suites, document-intensive types of processes and thei…

I browsed back to November 8th on their site, which appears to be the publication date, but no luck. Anyone hear this podcast?

Update: as of November 27th, the podcast is available at the link above. It seems to be a plug for EMC/Documentum; although there’s no explicit sponsorship noted on the podcast page, it is tagged as “commissioned”. A little more transparency, please.

IIR BPM: Michael zur Muehlen on integrating business processes and business rules

I finished the day listening to Michael zur Muehlen discuss business processes and rules, a topic that I spoke about a few weeks ago at the Business Rules Forum. Michael, who I know from the BPM Think Tanks, is responsible for BPM courses at Stevens Institute of Technology. You can see his presentation slides online here.

He started out with the bottom line on why you want to integrate process and rules:

Simpler processes
Higher agility
Better risk management

Who wouldn’t want this? However, he points out that users don’t like processes, since they find them abstract (or possibly requiring a more analytic view of the organization) and restrictive (that is, not able to capture all the actual business cases). He also points out the obvious problem with Eclipse-based process modelling tools: they’re not friendly to business types. Became of that, we end up with technical people maintaining business processes, which usually results in a lot of code and the next generation of legacy systems.

He went though an example of an insurance company with 12 process steps and 5000 business rules, and it became obvious why rules change faster than processes. He highlighted three places where rules and processes come together: control flow, work assignment, and cross-process policy enforcement. I still think that the key issue is the boundary: when is something done as a decision tree in a rules system, and when it is done as control flow directly in the BPMS. Michael suggests that you might want to first model the rules in the BPMS, then extract the rules, although I don’t think that the rules experts would consider that a best practice. The challenge, then, comes with the modelling that’s done by the business analysts: how much do they need to know about rules, and what does their modelling environment need to look like in order to support that?

He had some good suggestions about mining rule criteria from previously executed processes, determining what the automated rules should be based on prior manual processes. From an insurance standpoint, this can result in auto-underwriting on standard cases.

He talked about the links between process management, business rules and compliance: whereas BPMS can enforce process compliance, rules are used to enforce contextual compliance for all the things around the business processes that aren’t really part of process compliance.

Michael and a colleague did a fascinating study of which BPMN symbols are actually used, and found that there’s 6 or 7 symbols that are used in most of the diagrams — the rest are strictly long-tail usage. See page 39 of the slide deck that I link to above for the chart.

He had some practical advice on how business rules and business processes interact:

Business objectives (rules) govern and prioritize business activities (processes)
Process objectives (rules) govern and define core processes (processes)
Process objectives break down to business rules and core processes break down to business processes, where business rules govern the business processes, and bsiness processes use the business rules.
This can be taken to a further level of granularity with operational rules.

He also had a chart for classifying change, and showing where it made more sense to use business rules or business process for a particular decision/activity; for example, use rules if it’s rapidly changing, company-wide and less predictable.

My flight home leaves tomorrow mid-day, so this is likely the end of my IIR/Shared Insights BPM conference coverage. Next year, maybe they’ll spring for more than 2 nights of hotel…

IIR BPM: Me and the role of standards in BPM

I’m up now, and here’s what I’ll be presenting:

I know, it’s long, but I’ll breeze past a number of the slides that I put in there just for reference. If this isn’t enough on standards for you, I highly recommend Michael zur Muehlen’s BPM standards tutorial. I liked it so much, I stole a couple of his slides, although he’ll probably sit in on my session to keep me honest.

IIR BPM: Pat Morrissey keynote

I attended Pat Morrissey’s (of Savvion) keynote session after lunch, but didn’t take a lot of notes since I’m up next. Pat’s a great speaker, very funny with lots of good real world examples, from nuclear weapons to Guitar Hero.

He pointed out four key requirements of a BPM solution which, not surprisingly, line up with their product offering:

Process modelling
Process repository for capture and reuse
A deployment and management suite, such as their BPM Studio, to enrich the model by connecting it up to data sources and web services, and manage processes
Optimization to manage change, particularly the optimization that happens after the system goes live

He also talked about a process adoption curve, which is a bit like a BPM maturity model, and covered some keys to process solution success:

Start with modeling process as it exists today
Business and IT involvement early
Optimization happens after you turn on the solution
BPM is for business, SOA is for IT
Plan for the end state

He finished up with some ways to use process to move business to the next level:

Demonstrate success first then get executive commitment
Start big, start small, just start
Everyone can be a model — it’s about the people
Winners share
Process in the voice of the customer

I’ll just ignore how he said that BPM standards don’t really matter: way to lead into my presentation, Pat!

IIR BPM: Facilitated session on standards

Alec Sharp led a facilitated session on standards that we love, hate, or wish were there (or don’t care about). This is a bit similar to the BPM Think Tank roundtables, but we’re at about six small tables so had a chance for some mini-break-out sessions to discuss ideas, then gather them together.

The notes that came out of this:

One group had some general comments about standards, stating that a common language can simplify, but that the alphabet soup of standards is too complicated and IT driven.
Another group hates BPMN because they feel that a 200-page specification isn’t understandable by business users, and that BPMN is really for specifying automated process execution but is not for business consumption. It’s stifling and constrains what can be modelled.
Standards aren’t written in plain English. There are two sets of standards: methodology standards and tool standards, and we often confuse the two. Once is focussed on human-driven processes, and the other on technology-driven processes. A great analogy: the people coming up with the tools have never baked the cake, or even eaten one.
Standards are often misunderstood, both in terms of who they’re for and what they’re for: they’re misinterpreted by marketing types. [I see this a lot with BPEL having become a standard “check box” on BPM RFPs rather than a real requirement.]
Standards can seem inflexible.
Interchange standards are either insufficient or improperly used by the tools, making it near-impossible to do round-tripping between different tools. They’re intended to use for translation between business and technology domains, but notational standards are possibly becoming less understandable because they are targetted at flowing into interchange standards. [I’m not sure that I agree with this: IT may require that business model in specific forms rather than just allow business to use BPMN in the way that they best fits the organization.]
Standards should be discovered, not invented [Vint Cerf, via Michael zur Muehlen], and BPM standards have been mostly invented.
In defense of standards, one person noted that the form of a sonnet is one of the most constrained/standardized forms of writing, but that Shakespeare wrote some of his most beautiful works as sonnets.
I got in a few comments about the importance of interchange standards, and how round-tripping is one of the primary problems with these standards — or rather their implementation within the BPA and BPM tools.
There’s an issue with the priority when adopting standards: is it to empower the business users, or to support IT implementation? If the former, then it will likely work out, but if it’s for the latter, then the business is not going to totally buy in to the standards.
The relationship with the business has changed: it used to be treated as a black box, but now has to be more integrated with IT, which means that they have to bite the bullet and start using some of these standards rather than abdicate responsibility for process modelling.

I don’t necessarily agree with all of these points, since this turned into mostly a standards-bashing session, but it was an interesting debate.

IIR BPM: Roger Burlton keynote

Amazingly, there’s open (although weak) wifi in the Hotel Del Coronado’s conference hall, so I’ll be able to post as I write.

The day started with an opening keynote by the conference chair, Roger Burlton of the Process Renewal Consulting Group, on “BPM at the Tipping Point”. This was mostly a review of a few high-level generic BPM case studies, some of the reasons that companies adopt BPM (compliance, boomers about to retire, competition, agility), and a lengthy anecdote about a computer manufacturer’s broken RMA process that Roger ran into when he tried to get his laptop fixed a few years ago. He’s a good speaker, I’ve just heard variations on these same themes too many times at recent conferences. I’m assuming that most of the attendees don’t attend as many BPM conferences as I do. 🙂

He spent some time talking about the importance of considering your end-to-end supply chain processes, and how attempts to maximize internal efficiency (e.g., on time, on budget) can be in complete conflict with the overall effectiveness of the core processes (e.g., customer retention, revenue). He returned to this theme near the end of the presentation, stating that enterprise BPM requires full lifecycles and value chains, and highlighting some of the frameworks, such as SCOR, that can help get started with process management. He also pointed out that you need to focussing on improving the processes where you have most to gain from an end-to-end process view, not those that don’t impact the effectiveness of the core processes, no matter how broken they are.

He also had a great case study from a tomato packing plant that has no organizational chart, and the non-core-process workers believe that they report to the core process workers, that is, they’re only there to support the core processes. This is a brilliant concept: I’ve often railed against organizations where IT or purchasing or some other non-core functions loses sight of the fact that they’re only there to support the core business. This is more of an organizational maturity case study than anything to do with BPM, although obviously processes are managed as part of the whole. This obviously wouldn’t work in most organizations, but there’s some great lessons to be learned about focussing on the effectiveness of core processes rather than attempting to maximize local efficiencies within functional silos.

His conclusions:

Process is the only useful mechanism to translate strategic intent into capability — it’s what we do to get what we want
Process and other capabilities must be aligned — they all have to go in the same direction
We must put in place new strategic frameworks that use processes at the heart of the management system — we have to manage what we do

Watching him use his tablet computer does remind me, however, that it was he and a few others presenting on their tablets at the BPMG conference in London a few years ago that inspired me to buy one, which allows me to write on slides as I’m presenting and greatly enhances the experience (at least for me).

The roundtable idea that we’ve seen at the BPM Think Tank for a couple of years is starting to spread, and following this session are three “facilitated sessions”, which I assume are similar in format to the roundtables. I’m going to drop in on the one on standards, since I’m speaking on the same subject later today and will likely pick up some interesting thoughts. The unconference idea is gradually creeping into the mainstream, although I still don’t think that we’re ready for BPM Camp.

Forgotten posts

I was in Windows Live Writer this morning (the offline tool that I use for writing blog posts) and noticed that I had totally forgotten to post the last two from Integration World last week. I’ve published them on the dates that they were written, and you can find Tata’s short presentation on next-generation SOA here, and Bruce Williams’ presentation on process improvement here.

Sorry about the slip; I’m definitely getting conference fatigue, and am currently at what I hope to be the last one for the year (since I have to skip SOA India).