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The fall schedule

I have my fall schedule mostly sorted out, and here’s my confirmed lineup so far:

OMG BPM Think Tank, October 6-7, Chicago. I’m on the program committee, and will be leading a roundtable on achieving collaboration between business and IT in BPM on the first day.
PegaWorld, the Pegasystems user conference, October 19-21, Washington DC. I’m just there as an observer and analyst/blogger.
Ultimus user conference, October 22-24, San Antonio. I’ll be giving a keynote on the afternoon of the first day. And yes, I know that you can’t get from DC to San Antonio.
Business Rules Forum, October 26-30, Orlando. I’ll be giving a presentation on mixing rules and process on the 28th.
SAP BPM, November 17-19, Las Vegas. I’m giving a Jumpstart pre-conference session, an introduction to BPM, on the 16th.

Look me up if you’re at any of these events.

Disclosure: with the exception of the OMG event, my travel expenses are paid for by the conference organizers; in the case of the SAP conference, I’m also being paid to deliver this half-day training session.

Comparing BPM conferences

The fall conference season has kicked off, and I’ve already had the pleasure of attending 3 BPM conferences: the International BPM conference (academic), Appian’s first user conference (vendor), and the Gartner BPM summit (analyst). It’s rare to have 3 such different conferences crammed into 2 weeks, so I’ll sum up some of the differences that I saw.

The International BPM conference (my coverage) features the presentation of papers by academics and large corporate research labs covering various areas of BPM research. Most of the research represented at the conference is around process modeling in some way — patterns, modularity, tree structures, process mining — but there were a few focused on process simulation and execution issues as well. The topics presented here are the future of BPM, but not necessarily the near future: some of these ideas will likely trickle into mainstream BPM products over the next 5 years. It’s also a very technical conference, and you may want to arm yourself with a computer science or engineering background before you wade into the graph theory, calculus and statistics included in many of these papers. This conference is targeted at academics and researchers, but many of the smaller BPM vendors (the ones who don’t have a big BPM research lab like IBM or SAP) could benefit by sending someone from their architecture or engineering group along to pick up cool ideas for the future. They might also find a few BPM-focused graduate students who will be looking for jobs soon.

Appian’s user conference (my coverage) was an impressive small conference, especially for their first time out. Only a day long, plus another day for in-depth sessions at their own offices (which I did not attend), it included the obligatory big-name analyst keynote followed by a lot of solid content. The only Appian product information that we saw from the stage was a product update and some information on their new partnership with MEGA; the remainder of the sessions was their customers talking about what they’ve done with Appian. They took advantage of the Gartner BPM summit being in their backyard, and scheduled their user conference for earlier the same week so that Appian customers already attending Gartner could easily add on a day to their trip and attend Appian’s conference as well. Well run, good content, and worth the trip for Appian customers and partners.

Gartner’s BPM summit (my coverage), on the other hand, felt bloated by comparison. Maybe I’ve just attended too many of these, especially since they started going to two conferences per year last year, but there’s not a lot of new information in what they’re presenting, and there seems to be a lot of filler: quasi-related topics that they throw in to beef up the agenda. There was a bit of new material on SaaS and BPM, but not much else that caught my interest. Two Gartner BPM summits per year is (at least) one too many; I know that they claim to be doing it in order to cover the east-west geography, but the real impact is that the vendors are having to pony up for two of these expensive events each year, which will kill some of the other BPM events due to lack of sponsorship. Although I still think that the Gartner BPM summit is a good place for newbies to get a grounding in BPM and related technologies, having a more diverse set of BPM events available would help the market overall.

If you’re a customer and have to choose one conference per year, I’d recommend the user conference put on by your BPM vendor — you’ll get enough of the general information similar to Gartner, plus specific information about the product that you’ve purchased and case studies by other customers. If you haven’t made a purchasing decision yet and/or are really new to BPM, then the Gartner BPM summit is probably a better choice, although there are other non-vendor BPM events out there as well. For those of you involved in the technical side of architecting and developing BPM products at vendors or highly sophisticated customers, I recommend attending the International BPM conference.

Business Process Driven SOA using BPMN and BPEL

I just received a review copy of Matjaz Juric and Kapil Pant’s new book, Business Process Driven SOA using BPMN and BPEL. It’s on my list of recent books that I’ve received to review, and I hope to get to it soon.

According to the authors’ description, you’ll learn the following from this book:

Modeling business processes in an SOA-compliant way
A detailed understanding of BPMN standard for business process modeling and analysis
Automatically translating BPMN into BPEL Executing business processes on SOA platforms
Overcome the semantic gap between process models and their execution, and follow the closed-loop business process management life cycle
Understand technologies complementary to BPM and SOA such as Business Rules Management and Business Activity monitoring Approach

I’ll let you know if I learned all of that once I’ve had a chance to read it.

My continuing Feedburner story

As I mentioned previously, my feed subscribers dropped by 20% when Google switched me from Feedburner to the Google-branded feeds that are replacing them, and a couple of people have told me directly that the feed just stopped working, requiring them to unsubscribe and resubscribe to the new address. I subscribe to my own feed in Google Reader, and haven’t had a problem — it just switched transparently — so I’m suspecting that it’s some combination of specific readers and whatever Google is doing to remap the feed to the new location. Regardless, I’m not happy about it.

Coincidentally, I missed the Toronto Girl Geek Dinner this week, but saw this followup post about a TGGD blog feed created using RSS Mixer. Off I went to check it out, and to see if they had included my blog in the feed, and below the list of feeds that are in the mix, I saw a Feedproxy error message.

I Googled around, and found this thread on the FeedBurner help group that indicates that Google is doing something different with the feedproxy.google.com feeds than was done with the feeds.feedburner.com equivalents, which is the likely culprit for having broken many of my readers’ subscription (depending on their feed reader) as well as the RSS Mixer feed (which would act sort of like a reader).

Gartner BPM: Global 360/Carlson Marketing

Robert Lang of Global 360 to talk about an implementation at Carlson Marketing, a travel, meeting and event planning company. They had a lot of paper-based processes that included hand-offs between departments with complex approval processes; not only was the basic process difficult to manage, but changes to a customer proposal were difficult to execute efficiently.

They used Global 360, SharePoint (as a portal), InfoPath (for complex forms UI) and SQL Server to implement their travel proposal request process, including automating the routing of work requests related to the proposal process. They automated some operations, and made other operations considerably more efficient by maintaining a common folder for the proposal that could be accessed by any relevant participants. They allowed for spawning related but independently-executing processes.

Their benefits:

Faster processing of proposal requests
Better accuracy in data collection
Less rekeying of data
Consolidation of data into a centralized database for historical analytics
Improved turnaround time by 30%
Reduced number of personnel required to process a proposal request by 19%
Ability to identify and address bottlenecks in the business process
Dynamically reconfigure and reassign staff to optimize work

They plan to use Global 360 for other projects, including A/P, HR and their call center.

That’s it for me for this Gartner BPM summit: after spending most of the last 2 weeks traveling to 3 conferences, I’m skipping the vendors’ parties tonight and the last half-day of content tomorrow morning. I’ve been thinking about a wrap-up post comparing the 3 very different conferences — one academic, one vendor and one analyst — so watch for that over the next few days.

Gartner BPM: Global 360/Citi Cards Imaging and Workflow

Global 360 has a bit of revolving door with analysts: first, they hire Jim Sinur from Gartner. Then, they hire Colin Teubner from Forrester. Then, Sinur leaves. And here today at the Gartner show, which he admits is his first-ever, Teubner presented on behalf of Global 360 about putting people first in BPM. He really only did the introduction, however, before turning over the presentation to one of their customers, Richard Van Hoever, SVP of Customer Service Paper at Citi Cards.

Citigroup uses a lot of Global 360: 10,000 users worth. They’ve implemented a pretty standard imaging and workflow transaction processing application, with work queues that push work to participants rather than allowing cherry-picking, work prioritization and routing, and load balancing across their domestic, nearshore and offshore workforces. The big challenges are the volume of work, tight integration between document management and BPM, and geographic routing.

They were able to get 75% of their required functionality out of the box with Global 360 (they were promised 90%, but that type of discrepancy is pretty common). Most of the customization was around the work filtering, sorting, assignment and presentation, as expected; Global 360, like other BPMS’, does most of the behind-the-scenes stuff out of the box.

What amazes me is that this is fundamentally not different from the types of imaging and workflow systems that I’ve been helping organizations to implement for about 15 years; the only thing that has changed is that the relative sophistication of today’s tools means much less custom code and greater process agility. However, the business process is the same inefficient, key-from-paper/image process that’s been happening the same way for years. Undoubtedly, the relative volume of some transaction types will have reduced due to online self-service, but it’s clear that many large financial services organizations have a long ways to go in terms of making it easier for their customers to do their data entry for them.

Gartner BPM: SaaS and BPM

Having bugged out of the Agile BPM session, I arrived late to Michele Cantera’s discussion of whether software as a service is a viable option for process improvement projects. She covered off some of the same material as the SaaS and BPM session in February, but there was some new information as well. I won’t repeat the material from that session on the topic of BPM SaaS delivery and multi-tenancy models, so you might want to go back to that post and check that out as background for this. Go ahead, I’ll wait.

One interesting bit, based on 2007 estimates, segmented the BPM SaaS adopters into four categories:

Pragmatists, forming 49% of the market, who are replacing departmental on-premise applications but don’t have an enterprise-wide scope.
Beginners, 40% of the market, who are replacing low-end software tools with simple utility applications. These are often small or medium businesses who don’t want to grow an IT department.
Masters, 10% of the market, who are weaving SaaS applications into their enterprise-wide application portfolio.
Visionaries, a mere 1%, who are actively replacing on-premise applications with SaaS wherever possible.

She showed these plotted out on two axes: comprehensive strategy versus IT ability to execute. Pragmatists are low on comprehensive strategy but high on IT ability to execute; beginners are low on both, masters are high on both, and visionaries are high on strategy but low on ability to execute (since they don’t need to have internal IT skills). I really like this segmentation, since I think that it provides a good way to characterize SaaS customers in general, not just SaaS BPM customers.

She went through the list of current BPMS SaaS vendors, split out into business process modeling, process-based applications, and BPMS as a service. The SaaS modeling vendors are Lombardi, Metastorm and Appian; BPMS as a service is offered by Appian and Fujitsu. Process-based applications are typically offered by companies who have taken a commercial BPMS and built a specific vertical application on top of it; the underlying BPMS is not necessarily offered as SaaS directly, and in most cases, the BPMS vendor is not the one providing the service (with the exception of DST, whose BPM product grew from their own mutual fund back-office application), since most of them are not in the vertical applications market. There are going to be more entrants into all of these spaces in the near future, as well as changes to the multi-tenancy models offered by the vendors; you’ll want to keep your eye on what’s happening in this space if you’re considering BPM via SaaS, and start to consider how you’re going to handle process governance when your business processes aren’t running on your own systems any more.

She also showed a chart of different SaaS services types (BPO, application outsourcing, hosting, traditional ASP/SaaS model, process-based applications using BPMS/SaaS, BPMS as a platform, BPMS as SaaS-enabling platform) mapped against operating characteristics (operational cost, degree of customization, process agility, cost of process agility, number of suppliers): for example, BPMS as a platform has high process agility, whereas a traditional ASP/SaaS application that likely doesn’t include a BPMS has low process agility.

There was a list of do’s and don’ts of using SaaS for process agility, such as using BPMS via SaaS for pilot projects in order to make the business case for on-premise systems. Of course, if you do that, you might just find that you like the SaaS model well enough to stick with it for the long run.

Gartner BPM: Agile BPM methods

In the spirit of discouraging conference organizers from scheduling sessions that start before 9am, I boycotted the 8:15 keynote session, but showed up for the session on Agile BPM methods. Unfortunately, it appears to be a complete rerun of David Norton’s session from February, so I’m heading out to find a different session.

Gartner BPM: Dynamic BPM

Daryl Plummer’s thing is SOA and dynamic applications, and he presented this afternoon on Dynamic BPM: the ability to support process change by any role, at any time, with very low latency. In other words, (m)any process participant can make changes to the process in order to suit their specific needs, just as Trefler was telling us at lunch. A big part of making this happen is splitting out monolithic systems into more agile components: orchestration engine, portal, rules engine and databases.

Considering the mostly business composition of the audience, he did a pretty deep technical dive into concepts such as dynamic recompilation, showing how the dynamic nature of lower level technical components help to create dynamic processes on the surface.

He went through a well-used diagram showing BPM adoption over the years and where SOA comes into the picture, and the inherent dynamism in models, which is the whole premise behind model-driven design. SOA is used to automate what machines do best, while BPM and the associated process models are used to empower what people do best. More automation actually means more capabilities for the human steps in the process.

He summarized the event capture-analysis-response chain (covered by Roy Schulte in a session this morning that I just couldn’t make myself write about): events triggering business processes, and also monitoring those processes, in order to provide better decision quality, faster response, reduce information overload and reduce cost.

Inevitably, we move on to Web 2.0 and the implications for collaborative, ad hoc and social processes, community evolution of a process, and adding presence and other types of social context to processes.

One of the keys to making processes dynamic is business rules management, since being able to change rules without changing the structure of the process gives us most of the agility that’s required in business while allowing those changes to be made by business users.

Fix my feed!

It’s official: Google screwed up my feed when I switched from the feeds.feedburner.com URL to feedproxy.google.com, even though it was supposed to remap seamlessly. Nice going, guys. I’ve had it confirmed by at least two people that the feed just stopped working, and they had to remove and add it again to their feed reader. I suspect that this doesn’t happen in Google Reader — at least, it didn’t for me, where I monitor my own feed to make sure that it’s working properly — and in fact, this may be specific to certain readers.

If you haven’t seen any updates on my feed for a couple of weeks, remove and add it again using the new URL: this one for posts, and this one for comments. Of course, if you only ever read Column 2 through your feed reader, you’ll never see this post, and just assume that I’ve retired or something. Sigh.