Year: 2007

Info on XPDL 2.1

I received an email last week from Nathaniel Palmer of WfMC on the upcoming XPDL 2.1 specification:

We are now in the process of developing the specification for XPDL 2.1 with the final list of changes to be completed by the next WfMC meeting on October 11-12, 2007.

It is expected that XPDL 2.1 will incorporate changes coming out of XPDL 2.0 as well as those required for BPMN 1.1 compatibility.  In addition, however, we are soliciting further input, particularly from those with experience working with XPDL 2.0 or earlier.

Interested parties are asked to please respond directly to XPDL Working Group Chair Robert Shapiro with one or both of the following:

1) Proposed Changes for XPDL 2.1 Specification – please be as specific as possible providing details about what to change in the existing specification;

2) Volunteer to Help Re-Write the Spec and Update the Schema – please  
be willing commit two or more days over the next three months to assist in this endeavor.

Please contact Robert Shapiro directly via email at [email protected]

The time for the release of XPDL 2.1 is as follow:

  • October 12 – Finalize List of Proposed Changes
  • November 15 – Finalize Details for Identified Changes in BPMN 1.1
  • December 15 – Draft Specification for Internal Review
  • January 15 – Updated Specification For Public Review
  • February 20 – Vote on Adoption of Final XPDL 2.1 Specification

XPDL will continue to be an important standard for the serialization of business processes (i.e., the file format that you use to save it, once you’ve modelled it in BPMN) for some years to come, and it still remains to be seen what impact that the new BPDM format will have on the use of XPDL.

BPM Chapter meeting in Toronto, October 12

On the morning of October 12th, the BPT Group — which rose from the ashes of the BPMG — is having a general-purpose BPM chapter meeting in Toronto open to anyone interested in BPM. Although the agenda is heavily weighted in favour of a demonstration by Metastorm, who are hosting the event, it will be an opportunity to meet other people interested in BPM. Jim Baird, who is organizing this, is actively looking for BPM practitioners to speak at future chapter meetings, so please let him know if you’re willing to talk about your BPM project or know of someone else who might.

Here’s the details for the meeting on October 12th:

Location:

O Beirao Restaurant, 5468 Dundas St. West (side banquet hall entrance). If you’re on public transit, you can walk west from the Kipling station in 10-15 minutes or catch a westbound bus out of the station (such as the 111 East Mall). I’m not sure of the parking situation but there’s sure to be some around.

Agenda:

  • 8:30 – 9:00 Registration and Continental Breakfast
  • 9:00 – 9:10 Welcome and Introduction, James Baird – BPTG North America and Australia
  • 9:10 – 9:15 Welcome from Metastorm (session host), Michael Szczerba – Account Executive – Americas
  • 9:15 – 9:45 BPM or Requirements Analysis – Where to Start?, James Baird
    • The links between BPM and gathering business and system requirements
    • Different approaches to documenting processes
    • How organizations are implementing BPM
    • Measuring BPM success
    • The importance of Business and IT involvement
    • Choosing your first BPM project
  • 9:45 – 10:00 Question and Answer / Discussion period
  • 10:00 – 10:15 Coffee Break
  • 10:15 – 11:00 Demonstration of ProVision BPM by Metastorm, Michael Szczerba
  • 11:00 – 11:45 Networking opportunity and discussion of future topics

You’ll need to RSVP Tuesday, October 9th if you want to attend, to Judith Baird at 416-252-8405 or Judith.Baird@BPM3inc.

BPMG held a couple of chapter meetings here before the big blow-up earlier this year; one of them was very well attended, the other (due to bad weather) was much less so. In any case, I think that these meetings are a good way to get more of a BPM community going in Toronto, although we definitely need to get some practitioners speaking at them.

Forrester Day 2: Colin Teubner

The last session of the last day, and a significant portion of the audience (especially those headed east) have bailed out but there’s still a few of us hanging around to hear Colin Teubner talk about optimizing business with BPM. I think that he drew the short straw as the junior guy, presenting in the last two sessions back-to-back. 🙂  I think that the two-day format is just the right length; the 2-1/2 days of Gartner last week was just a bit long. Also, starting on Tuesday so that people can travel on Monday rather than having to burn up half their weekend is nice, too.

The central theme is that the ultimate goal of BPM initiatives should be transformation, not just efficiency. As he points out, many companies focus purely on efficiency, trying to trim costs for small wins rather than looking to make a transformative change that can drastically improve the organization’s competitive differentiation and revenue. BPMS is more than just modeling and automation; it includes the whole cycle of monitoring and optimization feeding back to the modeling stage. He showed a slightly different version of the BPM maturity/adoption chart that Connie Moore showed yesterday; I’m still unsure why this is a two-dimensional graph, since it is really a projection on the diagonal axis, but I suppose a one-dimensional representation just doesn’t look as nice.

He then mapped BPM onto the “design for people, build for change” theme of the conference: UI creation and process mindset belong to the design for people side of things, whereas agile processes, SOA connections, business-friendly tools and comprehensive monitoring map to building for change. Different from, but compatible with, the view of BPM in the D4PB4C theme that I covered on slide 26 of my presentation this morning. He talked about why simulation tools are not used as widely as the BPM vendors would have you believe: they’re too hypothetical and require a certain amount of guesswork (although using detailed execution data to populate your simulation can help with this). I also think that they’re a bit too complex and analytical for many of the business analysts who are targeted to use them.

Tuebner covered a number of use cases for BPM integrated with other technologies — forms technology to integrate data from other sources, content, BI and more — and the ways in which BPM enables an improved customer experience both through direct interaction or by informing the environment of an internal employee who is dealing with the customer.

He showed (for about 10 seconds) their Q3 Wave for BPM vendors; I think that this is the human-centric BPM wave, although it really went by so fast that I didn’t catch it, much less any of the vendors’ positions on it.

He had some interesting words about end-to-end organizational visibility and how it allows executives to understand processes and systems by making the link from strategy goals down through other layers; not surprisingly, he discussed this in the context of enterprise architecture.

His final recommendations:

  • Don’t just make processes run faster, make them better and pay special attention to users’ work environments.
  • Use BPM for business improvement, not process improvement, and focus on customer experience.
  • Take an end-to-end view of process and plan BPM as a management discipline (by which he means a business initiative).

That’s it for the Forrester Technology Leadership Forum. I’ve enjoyed it, found the content solid, and the culture a refreshing change from some other large analyst conferences.

Forrester Day 2: The three B’s

I ended up skipping the session after mine at the end of the morning, but had some great hallway conversations with some of the business rules vendors who indicated that they think that I’m on track with what I’m saying about BPM and BR.

For the first of the afternoon sessions, I’m attending a panel discussion on the convergence of the three B’s — BI, BPM and BR — featuring Mike Gilpin (EA and application development), Boris Evelson (BI) and Colin Teubner (BPM). I covered a tiny bit of this topic in slides 22-24 of my presentation this morning, and will be doing a full-length presentation on this same topic at the Business Rules Forum next month in Orlando, so I’m interested to see if the Forrester analysts have the same thoughts on this subject as I do.

They start with the statement that “design for people, build for change” will drive the convergence of the three B’s. Interestingly, although a few people in the room stated that they use BPM and BI together, almost no one raised their hand to the combination of BPM and BR — a combination that I feel is critical to process agility. Gilpin went through a few introductory slides, pointing out that almost no business rules are explicitly defined, but are instead buried within processes and enterprise applications. He sees BI as driving effectiveness in businesses, and the combination of BPM and BR as driving efficiency.

Forrester will be publishing some reports about the convergence of the three B’s, and although there are some two-way combinations in vendor products now, there are no vendors that combine all three in a single product. I’m not sure that this is a bad thing: I don’t think that we necessarily want to see BR or BI become a part of BPM because it ultimately limits the usefulness of BR and BI. Instead, I see BR and BI as services to be consumed by BPM, with BI having the additional role of combining process execution statistics generated by the BPMS with other business data. An explicit question was asked about when to use the BR and BI included in the BPMS versus when to use a third-party best-of-breed BR or BI system; Teubner and Gilpin offered some guidelines for this as well as some examples of each situation, but it’s not completely clear if there’s a distinct boundary between when to use the BPMS’ in-built functionality versus the third-party specialist product.

My message on this topic is that BR is the key to process agility, and BI is the key to process visibility as well as feeding back into BR in order to further increase agility. By using the BR and BI functionality within your BPMS, however, you’re typically not getting full BR or BI functionality, but some limited subset that the BPMS vendor has selected to implement. Furthermore, you can’t reuse that functionality outside the BPMS, and in the case of business rules, a change to the BPMS’ rules often requires retesting and redeploying the process models, and does not apply to in-flight processes. However, if you’re not sure if you need BI or BR (hint: you do), then using the in-built functionality in the BPMS gives you an easy-to-integrate and lower cost way to get started. Moving to a separate third-party business rules system gives you a couple of key advantages: you can reuse the same rules across different processes and across other applications in your enterprise, and changes to the rule impacts in-flight processes since the rule is not executed from the BRE until that point in the process is reached. Moving to a separate third-party business intelligence system also provides the advantage of being able to analyze the process data in the context of other business data, and potentially feed back the results of complex analytics to inform the business rules, that in turn drive the business processes. The bottom line: BR and BI are used for many applications in the enterprise that are not explicitly process-related, or combine data from many systems of which the BPMS is just one source. For example, although there are processes embedded within your ERP system, your BPMS may not have direct access to all the information that’s in those processes and hence the BI that’s part of your BPMS can’t (easily) include that data in its analytics and reporting; a general-purpose BI platform may be much more suited to combining your BPMS statistics with your ERP statistics.

A lot of the conversation in this session, which was very interactive with the audience members, was around whether to use converged products versus separate products. It’s not a completely simple answer, and I’ll definitely be thinking about the use case boundaries between converged and separate products before I show up at the Business Rules Forum to continue this discussion.

Evelson and Teubner will be publishing an initial paper in this area in the next few weeks, using the concepts that they’ve presented here today, but see it as a springboard for more discussion in this area rather than an end-point.

Forrester Day 2: Skipping class

I skipped the opening keynote by Shantanu Nayaren of Adobe and the talk by cognitive scientist Don Norman; my presentation is at 11am, and although I’m not a particularly nervous presenter, I felt that my time was better spent reviewing my notes, especially considering that I’ve crammed material from the three one-hour webinars that I did for TIBCO and my upcoming presentation at the Business Rules Forum into a single 30-minute blast. You can see my slides here:

My only regret is missing Forrester’s opening short video of movie clips illustrating the “design for people, build for change” message; the ones yesterday were very funny, and I hope that they post them all on YouTube.

Forrester Day 1: Packaged Applications panel

We finished up the day with a panel of Forrester analysts addressing the issue of whether packaged applications (i.e., ERP software) will ever be designed for people and built for change — that is, can these apps ever be agile. This was structured as a debate monitored by Merv Adrian, pitting Sharyn Leaver on the business side against John Rymer on the IT development side.

Adrian started by repeating the four principles of dynamic business applications that Connie Moore discussed this morning, then framed some questions for the packaged application version:

  • Will packaged applications contextualize work using unitary but dynamic workplaces?
  • Will packaged applications enable up-front customization to meet unique customer needs? (The feeling is that apps will be customizable “at the edges” only in order to allow for future upgrades/agility)
  • Will packaged applications enable ongoing adaptation for continuous business evolution? (Yeah, right)
  • Will packaged applications allow development and change by business people and IT professionals in cooperation?

Leaver and Rymer duked it out over each question, providing some really interesting viewpoints. It wasn’t exactly impromptu; each question had at least one backup presentation slide from one of them to make their point. They ended up with a slide comparing the four application biggies: Oracle, SAP, Microsoft and IBM.

From my standpoint, this was the least interesting presentation of the day, since I don’t focus on packaged applications, although it was an interesting “he said, she said” debate format. The general agreement is that the gap is narrowing between build and buy+customize, but that most customers will still require customization for competitive differentiation.

Tom Pohlmann popped back up at the end of the day with some closing remarks, then directed us off to the vendor showcase reception and the pool party. Given that it’s only 21C here in Carlsbad — compared to a balmy 28C back in Toronto (even though it’s already after dark there) — I don’t think that anyone’s going swimming tonight. Since I’m still on Eastern time, I’ll probably be asleep by 9pm again tonight.

Forrester Day 1: Automating Business Processes panel

Connie Moore moderated a panel on automating business processes, featuring David Knapp of Ford, Pamela Rucker of Philip Services and Theo van den Hurk of ABN AMRO. The room is considerably less crowded than this morning, so I’m guessing that there’s some golfing going on (probably all the CIOs whose golf games were rained out last week at the Gartner conference in Orlando). I really like how they use the big projection screens to show live video of the panelists; I’m sitting way over on the side to score some power for the laptop, so can’t see two of the presenters directly.

Moore talked about Forrester’s BPM maturity framework, which I’ve never seen before but it’s similar enough to BPMM and others that I’ve seen: moving from process knowledge to process efficiency to process consistency to business optimization to business transformation, where most companies are in the efficiency stage, moving towards consistency.

Each of them told a bit about what they’re doing with BPM:

  • Ford is another Lombardi customer that’s just getting their implementation started (it’s sort of ironic, considering that Ford pioneered the concept of the assembly line, that they’re only now getting around to business process automation). They’re a big Six Sigma shop, and are looking at getting some automation and metrics in place, then drive towards optimization using BPM. They’re using BPM in large part for orchestration of their existing legacy systems.
  • Philip Services has a mandate to innovate, but no extra budget to do so, which is a common problem in organizations; they don’t use BPM software but are effectively building their own in code or within the enterprise systems.
  • ABM AMRO is using SAP and Oracle as their enterprise systems, and as far as I could tell, they’re not using a BPM suite to orchestrate that but are relying on the processes within those enterprise applications.

Knapp showed an interesting slide if how BPM bridges the gap between end user computing and full-on IT application development; I think that there’s also an overlap between mashups and BPM at some part of that spectrum. Ford has an enterprise process committee that looks at process management across the organization, especially focussing on the discontinuities (hand-offs between functional silos), and decides which processes to implement. However, they’re still narrowing down and deciding which processes to implement.

Rucker said that two major issues for them was having the business take ownership for business process management, and getting away from siloed process optimization (like the accounting department) to look at end-to-end processes (like order to cash). They even got the CEO involved to drive home these points home to people.

van den Hurk talked about the complexities introduced by having several outsourced vendors involved in their systems as well as their own IT people; just getting all the stakeholders to sit down together was a challenge. ABN AMRO looked at heat maps for operational budget areas to figure out where the money was being spent, as well as what the business reported as the pain points.

There was a question about metrics, monitoring and dashboards: Ford is designing it into their systems; Philip put it in after the fact when they realized that processes weren’t improving and had no visibility into why; ABN AMRO also is building it in based on the business needs.

As panels go, this was pretty conversational rather than a series of mini-presentations: good to attend, but harder to blog about in a coherent fashion.

LongJump revisited

I had an interview with Pankaj Malviya, CEO of LongJump, back in July, and another a few days ago to bring me up date for this week’s launch of their SaaS platform and applications. There hasn’t been a lot of new functionality since then, but they’ve accelerated their launch date: in July, they said that they’d be in an open beta by the end of the year (which I said was longish), and now they’ve done a full (non-beta) launch instead in a shorter time frame, so they must have felt the heat of the competition to get things going. They’ll be starting to offer training in about a week, and will eventually have some videos available online to allow you to preview applications.

Their focus remains on the small and medium business market, with the idea to prove to those companies that LongJump is sufficiently reliable to trust with their business data. Since they’re part of Relationals, they have a track record at providing hosted CRM for a couple of years now, which is certainly a good start over many of the other SaaS providers.

Although LongJump is a platform, they’re focussed on applications, not the platform itself. The basic package contains two applications: OfficeSpace, a group calendaring and collaboration application to manage documents, projects and discussions; and Customer Manager, a starter CRM application that integrates with Outlook. There will be other CRM applications available as well, such as Deal Manager for creating and tracking quotes, and non-sales management applications such as the IT asset tracking one that I discussed in my first post about them.

360 Customer Manager app

In fact in their press release, they list 12 applications that they say that they are initially introducing, although it’s not clear if all 12 are available now.

I am, of course, interested in what else that they’re doing with workflow after seeing it in the initial demo; they’re not releasing that until October, but they’re moving from a list-based set of states to a graphical process designer and there will be five applications released at the same time to take advantage of the workflow capabilities.

All of the applications will be free for the next three months in order to encourage people to try out LongJump, then it will move to regular pricing. Although the regular pricing was given to me verbally, it wasn’t confirmed so I don’t want to quote it here, but suffice it to say that the price point may give them an advantage over Salesforce.com for CRM, although you’d have to dig in and do a full functionality review (which I haven’t) to know how comparable that they really are.

You can read their full press release here.

Forrester Day 1: John Rymer

John Rymer, who I’ve read before on business rules topics, talked to us about why we should care about business rules software; Forrester’s position is that business rules are a key enabler of design for people, build for change.

He started with definitions of business rules and a business rules platform, then went on to state that business rules are an alternative to conventional programming: with business rules you don’t have to translate business terms into geek speak, and you don’t have to specify every possible combination of rules works. The implications are that business people are most likely to get what they need since they can actually understand the “language” in which the rules are written, and more complex problems can be more easily solved with much less time required to change systems. Software can even adapt based on the results of the rules; BPM is just one example of this, but business rules can be applied in the same way in other types of software.

Rymer showed how business rules can be applied in the areas of the “perfect storm” that Connie Moore mentioned this morning as causing the transformation that’s underway now: design evolution (rules add adaptation to context and design), process evolution (rules enable decisioning, auto processes, closed loops), workforce evolution (business people contribute to rules) and software evolution (rules enable global policies for SOA, service selection). He went on with a great list of how organizations benefit from business rules:

  • Create applications that adapt; automate decision in response to business conditions
  • Create applications that change quickly; one set of business rules for all applications rather than having the rules spread through a number of different applications and code sets
  • Tackle the next automation frontier, decisions; capture the wisdom of the experts in rules where possible
  • Put analysis to work through automation: take action using business rules and BPM

He gave some good examples from financial services, showing how business rules have been applied to core tasks such as credit scoring and underwriting, then expanded to areas such as fraud detection and call center programs.

He highlighted that business rules allow organizations to divide change management responsibilities, where business people take responsibility for maintaining the more volatile rules and processes, whereas IT remains responsible for maintaining the core rules and processes.

He ended up addressing the issues of why business rules haven’t really caught on; I see so little acceptance of this with many of my financial services customers and I’m not surprised, although it seems strange that a technology that can offer so much benefit is being ignored by so many companies. The top reason for not implementing business rules? “We don’t do things that way”, that is, they like to write their rules in Java code instead. He also cited lack of standards, high product cost (which I still don’t think is more than writing and maintaining that Java code), lack of participation from the big vendors, and a still-shifting landscape as other reasons for resistance to business rules.

Like Rymer, I believe that business rules will be a significant part of any agile organization. In some cases, organizations already have business rules software but it’s hidden away in one department, but you need to pull it out of the closet and put it to work. Forrester has a Wave (product comparison) for business rules, but he admitted that it’s a bit out of date; it sounds like a new one might be coming out shortly.