Year: 2007

Forrester Day 1: Rob Koplowitz

Lots of choice in the breakout sessions, but I’ve decided on Rob Koplowitz (who works with Connie Moore) on Web 2.0 and Social Computing in the Enterprise. The official statement:

Enterprise Web 2.0 can drive new efficiencies, but it needs to be approached like any new technology coming into the enterprise.

He had a good slide on how Web 2.0 changes group dynamics, from reviewed repository (predefined contributors and reviewers with a central point of communication) to facilitated community (clusters of communications with a facilitator in each cluster) to social networks (unstructured peer-to-peer communications).

He made a distinction of four types of social networking technologies: “listen to me” (blogs), “listen to us” (wikis), “find people like me” (tagging, profiles, social networks, virtual worlds) and “find stuff I need” (tagging, RSS feeds). He then went on to discuss which of these adds the most value within an enterprise based on research that they’ve done; after instant messaging, which was really just added in as a benchmark, RSS feeds came in as next most useful, which doesn’t really surprise me give what I’ve been seeing in the past months in the Enterprise 2.0 space. What happens, then, is a combined environment of a corporate information workplace with external sources of information, mashed up using various tools to provide value to users.

He referred to RSS as a lightweight integration fabric within organizations, which is a great characterization, and showed it on a spectrum of enablers that also included mashups, SOA and BPM.

Koplowitz then looked at the risks of Web 2.0 technologies within the enterprise, such as privacy and security; note that he’s talking about using consumer Web 2.0 technologies that are available via SaaS on the public internet, whereas there’s a ton of new Enterprise 2.0 solutions that are sold as on-premise, inside-the-firewall solutions rather than risk an improperly-hosted solution. There’s also many reputable Web 2.0 vendors who don’t do risky things with your data, or not any more risky than your own data center does now. He gave a scary-sounding example using Quechup, a recently social networking disaster that decided to spam your entire address book without permission and was quickly outed and shamed on the internet; this information came out with a few short days of this starting, and if the person involved had just been a bit more careful about watching the internet buzz on Quechup rather than jumping right in with their corporate address book exposed, then this would have been a non-story.

His recommendation is not to stop people from using social networking site, but to be cautious and appropriate about what they put out there, and to audit their behavior to ensure that they’re not violating corporate confidentiality. As he points out, Gen Y’s (18-26 years old) are the target hiring market for many companies these days, and they’re using these tools as creators of content as well as participants. However, the higher-level management in most companies, smack in the middle of the boomer years, are much less likely to participate and hence less likely to fund any related efforts.

Forrester will be publishing some research very shortly about vendors in the Enterprise Web 2.0 space, although he didn’t give us much of a sneak preview except to name a few vendors both in the Web 2.0 space and the enterprise space (BEA, Microsoft, SAP, IBM, Oracle), and predicting a collision. Traditional vendors are following the old-style release and adoption cycles, which may not play very well with the faster iterations that will come from the SaaS offerings from the Web 2.0 space; however, those traditional vendors are also in the position to just start bundling their Enterprise 2.0 offerings into their standard offerings (WebSphere Portal as a mashup platform, anyone?) to encourage adoption with their existing customers. There’s a new breed of vendors, however, that have deep enterprise roots and the agility of the hair-on-fire Web 2.0 vendors, that are likely to give the big guys a run for their money. Most likely, any organization is going to use a combination of vendors, both traditional enterprise vendors (who will be favored in the long run, based on history) and the new vendors (who are likely to be acquired by the big vendors). You’ll also see a combination of technologies, for example, ad hoc processes in a wiki with more structured processes in a BPM system linked to that.

His summary:

  • Enterprise Web 2.0 is part of the Information Workplace fabric
  • Corporations are getting value today from Enterprise Web 2.0
  • Users are getting social without appropriate guidance
  • Process and content need to be managed
  • The investment decision includes change management.
  • The vendors are colliding in this space.

There was an interesting discussion during the Q&A on the place of Google in the environment (Koplowitz thinks they have to solve their security issues first, such as not transmitting data to and from Google spreadsheets in clear text).

He points out that for many organizations that have a significant portion of younger workers, especially in technology-heavy industries, there is no way to put this genie back in the bottle; organizations have to deal with this, and “just say no” isn’t an alternative.

Forrester Day 1: Robert Wiseman, Sabre

The last session before lunch was by Robert Wiseman, CTO of Sabre Holdings — interesting that the two customer keynotes this morning were both by travel-related companies. They have the same problems as many other organizations, in that they have to deal with large numbers of transactions and compete on pricing, but they’re doing it at a much higher volume and with a much greater abandonment rate than most other companies: think about how many times that you use Travelocity (one of their companies) to search for prices versus how often you actually book the travel.

Wiseman talked about how it’s necessary to focus on the differentiators: their business is differentiated by the quality and quantity of content that they provide to their customers, and the level of efficiency that enables the customers to locate and consume the content that’s right for them. Everything else, as he says, is just plumbing. In that plumbing, they push towards a “cookie cutter architecture”, where technology is commoditized which in turn makes for easier build and test cycles, and improves time to market as well as TCO.

They design for technology obsolescence by staying as vendor agnostic as possible, and abstracting the technology layers.

They also design for failure: since they run 20,000 transactions per second, 24×7, all technology will eventually fail, and the fail-overs must be obvious to the operational support staff but transparent to users. The goal, in the case of failure, is to continue limping along in some fashion rather than a total meltdown.

They design for flexibility, using XML-based APIs and web services against some rather ancient mainframe technology; however, they’re now redesigning some of their web services to be less granular (so as to not invoke 30 million web service calls per day) based on tracking consumer behaviour on the website. This is an interesting concept for designing the right granularity of web services: implement your best guess, tending to be more granular, then watch the behaviour and rebuild them into less granular services.

As you might imagine given their transaction volumes, they’re very focussed on performance testing, and designing for the purposes of facilitating performance testing by standardizing hardware (e.g., blade servers) and software (e.g., DBMS) so that it’s possible to test a full range of situations. He stressed how important it is to consider performance testing at design time, not just as an afterthought.

In the Q&A, he talked more about their standardization and reuse efforts: pretty thorough at the infrastructure and even the middleware layers, but not so easy at the application layers. They’ve standardized on Linux, which an audience question referred to as “open source shareware”, which was a bit funny — they’re using a supported version of Linux, so it’s not like they’re pirating software from the internet or something. He also made an interesting comment about how the best strategy for staying vendor independent when you have a single source is to have a really good exit strategy for that vendor’s products: don’t stay with it just because it’s too hard to migrate away from it.

Forrester Day 1: Sandy Carter, IBM

I saw Sandy Carter speak a week ago at the Gartner BPM conference, and as expected, there’s some amount of overlap from what I heard there in the first section on what’s driving business today and the nature of globally-integrated enterprises. Less talk about BPM (since this isn’t a BPM conference) and much more on SOA and how it contributes to these types of enterprises.

She covers off four distinct styles or paths of SOA:

  • Foundational, which is focussed on proven, high-ROI projects; typically there’s only 5% of functions as services, and less than 10% reuse of these services.
  • Extend end-to-end, with optimization and innovation across the entire value chain using BPM, with up to 40% of functions expressed as services, and up to 20% of services reused.
  • Transform, where the business model is being transformed and IT provides a strategic advantage; up to 50% of functions are expressed as services, and up to 80% reusable.
  • Adapt dynamically, where the technology becomes invisible and predictive business functions drive process innovation; more than 80% of functions are expressed as services, and more than 50% are reusable.

She went through each of these in detail, with examples, and talked about how and why each of the approaches are typically selected from both the business and technology standpoint.

There was a booklet distributed to each of us when the session started written by Carter, entitled “The New Language of Business: SOA & Web 2.0”, and she used it as a launch point to discuss enterprise mashups and how they can be used to extend the use of SOA. There’s been lots written about mashups as the global SOA; like BPM, mashups are a primary consumer of services that help to increase reusability and therefore cost-justify SOA in the first place. She showed us some nice services-based mashups that IBM has built for their own internal use; as usual, I wish that IBM would move the internal stuff out to the real world a lot sooner since it seems that they’re doing some really interesting stuff internally that takes years to reach the market.

She then introduced Mohammed Farooz, CTO of the state of Texas, to talk about their Health and Human Services department and the transformational work that they’ve done. They’ve moved from a single channel client interaction model (where each program had its own client interaction) to a multi-channel client interaction where all programs were available to citizens through a common interface, whether they were doing web self-service or calling in to the call center. They accomplished this with an agile business framework (business modeling, capability management, performance management and governance) on top of a flexible SOA stack (Rational, WebSphere and a few other IBM bits).

Carter wrapped up with some comments on end-to-end process integrity — interaction, transactional and information — and how IBM is focussing on this. She showed the same video about Second Life “BPM Flight Simulator” as we saw last week. When they talk about simulating business processes within a simulated environment, I still just have to shake my head, although apparently there’s a greater retention rate for people using this for training versus traditional methods.

Forrester Day 1: Rich Phillips, Maritz Travel

Rich Phillips, the COO of Maritz Travel, was up next to talk about creating consistency and customer value through IT. Although not a part of his presentation, he opened with a great thought about the importance of people in the process: “If you don’t think about the people, you’re not going to get the change.”

His central topic is about BPM: he sees it not just as a different class of software or a different way to manage, but as a breakthrough tool for transforming a business. In a post-9/11 world, they found their business changed drastically, due to shifting customer requirements, supply and demand issues, and regulatory compliance. Instead of just logistics management, they need to expand their systems to cover a number of other key factors, such as compliance management and data management. They undertook some strategic analysis and value stream analysis, and chose Lombardi BPM as a way to achieve some of the benefits that they were targetting. Phillips feels that it provides benefits in the area of reuse of existing systems and processes (through end-to-end process orchestration of existing services) as well as permitting collaborative development involving business, IT and the customer, and enforcing business rules as part of the process. It’s also provided an easier-to-learn user interface, allowing for user training in days instead of months — critical when they need to quickly ramp up for a spike in business.

He talked about a key issue that I see in many companies: the business is motivated to provide what the customer used to want, not what they want now. They’ve expanded their focus on logistics management to provide a more complete suite of services to their customer.

Another issue is that the business tended to abdicate their responsibility for stating what they need to IT, so IT had to just make some guesses about it (which never works out all that well). Now, much like Connie Moore’s earlier comments on how business and IT need to be blended, not aligned, Phillips said much the same thing about breaking down the barriers between business and IT.

Critical success factors that he identified:

  • Business leadership commitment
  • Strategic roadmap: 2-3 years of future view, but with small-enough iterative steps
  • Process definition through mapping
  • Alignment to and support of value proposition
  • Measures of success, macro and micro
  • Iterative refinement
    • Continuous improvement
    • Agile development
  • Embedded process ownership throughout the business areas

He pointed out that they did their first BPM project in 90 days after signing the contract with Lombardi, in contrast to the 2- to 4-year development cycle that they used to have. I’ve seen equally fast implementations with other BPM vendors; in many cases, the key is not the specific BPMS, but the approach that’s taken to implementing it.

The results have been pretty amazing: reversals of their declining revenues, margins and productivity figures, and ability to fine-tune the business process control through the business rules embedded within the process (he didn’t mention another BRE, so I assume that he means the rules functionality within Lombardi). Obviously, a big part of this is the strategic and value chain planning that they’ve done, but BPM is definitely a contributor to their success. They’re now looking at correlating process results to the hard ROI numbers in their business results, such as cycle time, cost per transaction, etc.; this will help them to decide where to focus their efforts in the future.

He went on to discuss a transformation framework, first listing “big bang re-engineering” and “fixing pockets of processes” as flawed approaches. In the big bang approach, it’s mostly a problem in that people can’t make that degree of change without it being massively disruptive to the business; in the subprocesses approach, it’s not enough to make a significant difference. Like the story of the three bears, you have to find that middle approach that’s just right.

Now in their sights for future development is what he calls the real power of BPM: expanding the envelope of the process-managed domain to include revenue generation opportunities, not just cost reduction and productivity opportunities. Although productivity and ROI are important, the C-level executives are usually much more focussed on growth and revenue generation, so it’s critical to look at product development and product/solution delivery processes as well as risk and compliance processes.

Forrester Day 1: Connie Moore Keynote

Connie Moore gave the opening keynote on Design for People, Build for Change: Transforming the Nature of Work. Her focus is on how business and IT have to work together in order to achieve this, but she likes the term “blended business-IT” rather than “business-IT alignment” because she wants them to be seen as a single entity rather than two separate bodies that need to be aligned in some way. I’ve heard Moore speaking at other conferences and on webinars previously, usually on the topic of BPM, and it’s significant that Forrester puts a BPM analyst in the keynote position at this forum: it really drives home that the key focus here is on process.

She posed three questions about this sort of transformation: why now, what underpins this trend, and how will it unfold.

In the “why now” category, she discussed the evolution in design that’s underway in all sorts of consumer products, and asked us to envision what would happen if the leaders in consumer product design (e.g., Apple) came into organizations and set to redesigning enterprise systems. Interesting thought, and something that I’ve written about when discussing Enterprise 2.0, which brings consumer Web 2.0 functionality into enterprise applications. The new generation of workers, dubbed “millenials” by Moore, have grown up with completely different experiences and therefore have completely different expectations about what systems will look like as they enter the workforce, particularly around social networking. Added to all this is the evolution of process management as a discipline, and the dissolution of monolithic business applications into composite applications that use BPM, SOA, business rules, collaboration and other technologies, either on-premise or as SaaS.

As for what underpins this trend, Moore discussed the dichotomy between the detailed transactional type of work (which she characterizes as left-brained) and the big picture type of work (right-brained) that have to be supported simultaneously by our systems. She lays out four key principles for designing for people, and gave a detailed example of each (including a really interesting Second Life example for the 4th point):

  1. Business processes adapt to changing business conditions.
  2. Applications evolve continuously while preserving process integrity.
  3. Processes, tasks and the associated information always maintain context.
  4. Systems are unitary, information-rich and reflect the social needs of the business.

The first two of these are about build for change, and the last two are about design for people

This is all unfolding with the big vendors making some large investments in BPM-related technologies as well as newer things like Web 2.0 and mashups. Cisco’s TelePresence got a huge plug here (I’m guessing that they’re a big client of Forrester 🙂 ), including a clip from 24 that used it. This new focus will require some new skills as well: business analysts need to become process designers, and developers need to become (application) assemblers: this is how design for people and build for change come together. This is completely aligned with what I plan to discuss tomorrow in terms of putting the design of processes in the hands of the business and creating agile processes.

Moore finished up with how to get started on all this, from the viewpoint of IT management, business managers, process designers, application developers, enterprise architects, and the CIO.

Forrester Day 1: Tom Pohlmann Opening Remarks

Tom Pohlmann opened up the Forrester Technology Leadership Forum that I’m attending today and tomorrow, and it’s such an interesting contrast with the Gartner conference of last week. I’ve never been to a Forrester conference before, and the entire feeling is different than Gartner: more fun somehow; they seem to take themselves a bit less seriously while still presenting a professional program. Maybe because this is primarily an IT conference, although there are some people from the business side of process management. There also seem to actually be wifi here, although I have to go to the registration desk to get a login.

The theme of the forum is “design for people, build for change”, with the idea that we all need to start focussing on the people, not the systems — a very similar message that I heard at Gartner last week, where the people in the process gained a lot more airtime than ever before. Pohlmann started right in talking about processes, how then need to change, and how the software that supports these processes need to change in order to support the necessary degree of agility. Interesting that this is not specifically a BPM or process-specific forum, it’s a technology leadership forum, but process is the key issue. The attendees are mostly at the upper management and executive level, and when I look through the attendee list, I find several of my customers and vendors that I work with, as well as many other high-level people from name-brand companies.

Presenters are mostly Forrester analysts, including a few who I know personally and a lot more who I know on the internet; there’s also a few speakers put in by the sponsoring vendors, such as myself: I’m speaking tomorrow, sponsored by TIBCO, although I’m speaking on the more general topic of discovering and modeling agile processes rather than anything TIBCO-specific. I have to confess that I haven’t completely finished my presentation for tomorrow, because I’m really expecting to be inspired by the content today to do a little bit of fine-tuning before then.

Appian Anywhere update

I had a chance to hear an update of Appian Anywhere, Appian‘s SaaS BPM offering, while at the Gartner BPM conference this week. I’m very interested in BPM and Enterprise 2.0, and SaaS BPM fits nicely into that intersection.

Although they originally planned for GA in Q307, it looks like Q108 before they’re going to be available to their planned SMB target audience with payments by credit card and other functionality that you’d expect for a SaaS offering. The reason appears to be that they’ve had so much interest from large corporate customers that they’re offering a large-client configuration first to a small number of select customers, so have diverted resources from the SMB functionality to focus on the big fish first. It seems to me that that would tend to cannibalize their on-premise business, although I’m sure that there are large organizations who will use this as a way to try before they buy.

They’re really trying to create an ecosystem for partners to develop applications on their platform. To prime the pump, they’ve created 30+ applications of their own that they’ll offer out for free with the basic subscription; partners are developing other applications that will be offered on a subscription based in the Appian Anywhere marketplace. Encouraging this sort of application development is a web service-like integration capability (I don’t think that it is exactly web services, but similar in nature) to integrate between Appian Anywhere applications and behind-the-firewall applications, which makes it much more useful as a BPM platform, since I can’t think of any customer of mine who wouldn’t have to integrate with one of their on-premise systems at some point.

They’re also creating some video training to minimize the need for professional services to get you up and running on the platform.

There’s still a lot of resistance to SaaS for core business processes, although I think that this could catch on for the non-critical ones as a starting point. However, there’s some pure Enterprise 2.0 vendors such as LongJump who are going to creep into this space — from the other direction and with a very different sort of offering — and pick up some of the market.

Survey on selecting business processes to optimize

David LiRosi, an NYU graduate student, is conducting a survey on the factors involved in using a committee approach — meaning a committee of combined business and IT people — for the selection of the business processes to optimize. From the survey description online:

In the BPM field, it is commonplace for the organization to have one of three groups?the IT group, Business Unit group, or a combined committee?making the decisions on which business processes to optimize. Organizations have had success using the committee approach. The reasons behind the acceptance of the committee approach over other approaches would prove useful to organizations and the BPM field as a whole. In that respect, this survey seeks to find what factors affect the acceptance of a committee approach.

I didn’t take the survey since it’s targetted at end-user organizations, but it only takes about 10 minutes and (I assume) does not gather any information that could be used to identify you or your company. Think back to all those hours that you spent slogging over research papers at school, then click here to take the survey on surveymonkey.com.

Trolling for vendors

What does the IP addresses 137.69.117.21 mean to you? How about if you look it up through Network Solutions to see who owns it? Strangely enough, this is the IP address of a comment troll who has been attempting to add offensive comments here for the last several weeks, using a variety of anonymous email address and fake names.

I’m not surprised that I occasionally get comment trolls. I am surprised that they would come from inside the corporate network of a subsidiary of a large BPM vendor.

Gartner Day 3: Open Research Meeting

At the last BPM summit, I had to duck out before the open research meeting at the end, so I was looking forward to this panel moderated by Daryl Plummer and including a number of the Gartner analysts here this week, primarily Diane Morello, Yvonne Genovese and Michele Cantara.

The format is that they put forward three strategic planning assumptions from the list of six put forward on Monday, then open them up for discussion amongst the analysts and with the audience:

Business people will become adept more quickly at business-IT alignment than will IT professionals, causing many It professionals to be shut out of BPM leadership. This is based on the assumption that business professionals speak the language of business, risk and money, whereas the overly technical perspective of IT reduces their credibility; Gartner thinks that job opportunities for IT professionals lacking business expertise will shrink by 30%. There were completely different reactions from different members of the audience: some felt that IT people are essential because of the complexity of the projects and the culture within organizations; others are seeing business people already taking ownership of BPM leadership; and one forward-thinking person said that there’s convergence between business and IT, and it will be necessary for people to have both business experience and IT skills, not one or the other, in order to be successful (based on the reaction from the Gartner analysts to this last comment, expect to see this on their predictions by next year, with 80% probability. 🙂 )

Through 2010, SOA, SaaS, BPO, open source, business application implementation projects that don?t make process integrity an integral part of the implementation will fail. Genovese went through some slides here rather than the less structured (and more interesting) conversation on the previous prediction. Funnily, she asked for the audience opinion on one point (if you place an order online, can you easily cancel it), then disagreed with our opinion since she felt that she needed us to agree with her in order to prove a point about lack of process integrity — not a great presentation tactic. She believes that process integrity comprises interaction integrity, transaction integrity and data/information integrity, but it’s not clear what is implied by the process integrity wrapper around the other three. As the argument between she and Plummer continued about how hard or easy it was to cancel an order online, the audience started to trickle out. Including me.

By 2009, less than 10% of BPM project revenue will flow to offshore services vendors. I ended up having to leave for a meeting before the discussion on this point started, but I would have been very interested to hear the justification for this. This is, of course, a very American perspective; those of us who live in other countries and work internationally have a different definition of what “offshore” means.

That’s it for this conference, except for a few meetings with vendors that I’ll blog about separately. Although there was likely quite a bit of overlap in the session material from the BPM summit back in February, there were enough concurrent sessions that I was able to attend many that were new to me. A few people — mostly vendors — commented to me that the content was a bit lightweight from a technical standpoint, but that might be a reaction to the higher proportion of business people in attendance.