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BPM Milan: Automating Knowledge Transfer

Michael Granitzer of Know-Centre Graz presented a paper on Automating Knowledge Transfer and Creation in Knowledge Intensive Business Processes, co-authored by Gisela Granitzer, Stefanie Lindstaedt, Andreas Rath also of Know-Center, Klaus Tochtermann of Graz Univeristy of Tecnology, and Wolfgang Groiss of m2n consulting (I know that I’m committing a big faux pas by rearranging the order of the authors, but it seems more logical for me to group them by organization).

The key issue is that the wealth of information about processes and best practices amongst users of systems is often never captured and used to feed back into process documentation or process improvement. Although it’s possible to use wikis and other social software to attempt to collect this information, the authors have devised automated mechanisms for gathering this information through detecting and documenting user interactions and tasks in a knowledge base, which can then be mined and analyzed by a process designer in order to feed back into the global process and its documentation.

The system captures the end-user’s activities (content and context) automatically by detecting events, grouping them into blocks, then into tasks. The task recognition itself is important, since it uses automated predictive classification techniques for recognizing tasks based on the events (now I’m in 1983 in a pattern recognition course 😉 ), and they’re achieving around 75% accuracy in their recognition rates. Note that these are not events and tasks executed in the context of a structured business process in a BPMS, but rather the use of any application available to the user in order to do their work: the web, MS-Office tools, etc. The classification methods were trained, in part, by a period of the users manually tagging their events as specific tasks.

On the mining and analysis side, they looked at process mining techniques such as the ProM framework, and explorative analysis techniques, but I have the sense that they haven’t been quite as successful in automating that side of things.

There are a number of concepts derived from this research, including that of tagging resources with tags, that is, being able to capture knowledge of which users perform which tasks.

They plan to continue on with the research, which will include fine tuning of task detection, and enhancing the classification methods to allow grouping of task groups into processes.

BPM Milan: Social Software for Modeling Business Processes

Agnes Koschmider of the Institute of Applied Informatics and Formal Description Methods (Universitat Karlsruhe) presented the next paper on Social Software for Modeling Business Processes, co-authored by Minseok Song and Hajo Reijers of Eindhoven University.

I’m transported back to 1981, sitting in a graph theory lecture in university: this is a graph theory approach to social networks in order to provide recommendations during process modeling. The technique is for recommending process fragments from a process repository to someone during modeling (where the differences between the process fragments are the people who perform them, not the structure of the process itself): suggesting the performers to assign to a specific process fragment based on the past interactions between those people and the ones already assigned to tasks in the model.

In order to do this, it’s first necessary to derive the social network (graph) between users: how they’re connected based on their past history in process instances, through transfer of work as part of a structure process flow, subcontracting (delegation) of work, and cooperation (how often two performers do the same activity in a process). It’s also possible to derive the social network based on recommendation history. Once the metrics of the social network connectivity are gathered, the distance between each set of performers can be measured using a measurement such as Hamming or Minkowski distance.

Although the underlying mathematics are complex, the idea is to reduce the complexity for the process modeler by providing recommendations on which process fragment in a repository would help to create the most effective process.

Aside from the setting and content, the humor at academic conferences is much different as well: when the use of Petri Nets as a modeling paradigm at one particular university was described as a “political issue”, it got the biggest laugh of the day. 🙂

BPM Milan: BPM with Social Software Systems

The first paper of the day was presented by Petia Wohed of the Department of Computer and Systems Sciences in Stockholm (a joint department between the University of Stockholm and the Royal Institute of Technology), also authored by Paul Johannesson and Birger Andersson, entitled “Business Process Management with Social Software Systems – a New Paradigm for Work Organisation”.

She covered some concepts of social software, and pointed out that a lot of social software allows for interaction and information gathering without specific goals, but that there’s also social software targeted at social production through voluntary contributions by peers in networks, where there are specific goals and artifacts. Although she uses the example of Wikipedia, I think that we need a different example for discussing social production in business: although it’s an accurate model of what we want to create within enterprises, many people don’t consider it a credible resource precisely because it is crowdsourced. Of course, we also need to get many organizations past the concept that knowledge creation has to be dictated from an authority rather than voluntary grass-roots participation; both management and front-line workers are complicit in maintaining this culture. I’m off on a tangent here — something that I probably shouldn’t do extemporaneously while I’m live-blogging a session — but I still see a major issue between capability and culture: social software tools exist to make all this possible, but corporate culture often hinders it.

She discussed the nature of management, and the activities involved in it, then how the mechanism of both BPMS and social software can be used to support management activities. She had a very interesting table showing this alignment, as a lead-in to discussing how social software can be used to complement BPMS (which include new design paradigms for BPM):

Design processes with a minimum of control flow: process flow becomes ad hoc, decided on by the knowledge worker responsible for a process instance
Embed processes in a social context: show the larger context of the process in terms of other participants and historical process instances
Design for low activity threshold: make process tasks fine-grained so that individuals are encouraged to complete them [this seems somewhat counter to the first point, however]
Use honor points for rewards: encourage voluntary participation

The whole point of this is moving from an assembly line view of BPM to a work station view, where a knowledge worker takes responsibility for a particular process instance, and decides if and when they need to bring someone else into the process in order to complete it. I believe that the key issues are identifying which processes — or tasks within processes — can most benefit from this new paradigm (some processes, especially those with many automated steps or specific compliance requirements, may be more suited to a more structured process flow), and whether many organizations are ready to adopt these methods.

BPM Milan: Workshop on BPM and Social Software

It’s a holiday weekend back home, and my birthday tomorrow, so some may consider it a bit weird that I’m spending this week away from my family in Milan at a BPM conference. However, I’ve been excited about attending this conference for months since it’s focused on the research that’s happening in the field of BPM, rather than the usual vendor and analyst conferences that I attend. As a prelude to the conference, today is a day of full-day workshops on various BPM topics, and I’m attending the session on BPM and Social Software. I’m still a bit jet-lagged so may not make it through the entire day, but I’ll do my best.

The workshop is chaired by Selmin Nurcan of the University of Paris and Rainer Schmidt of Aalen University, and will consist of discussion of the various research papers contributed by the attendees — in fact, I seem to be one of the few people in the (small) audience who has not contributed a paper.

Before we got into the individual papers, Rainer Schmidt gave an overview of the issues in BPM and social software. I gave a presentation two years ago at the BPMG conference in London on BPM and Web 2.0 (the terms Enterprise 2.0 and social software were just starting to be used back then) that covers some of the same subject matter.

One main concern in BPM today — which I definitely see in practical applications — is the divide between the abstract process models and lifecycles, and the actual executed processes and procedures: in many cases, the process participants ignore some or all of the process model and best practices, and do things as they have in the past. Another concern is that of process improvements not bubbling up from the process participants to the process designers, since there’s a barrier between those who do the work and those who design the work.

Many BPM implementations have been based on strong ties within the enterprise — command-and-control structures with pre-defined methods and channels of communication — and it is these that are hindering the communication between the abstract and the execution in BPM implementations. Weak ties, greatly supported by social software, create alternative methods and channels for these communications, allowing people to more easily exchange ideas; this promotes the “wisdom of the crowd” wherein ideas can come from anywhere in the organization, and small contributions from many people can provide significant value. The concepts of weak ties and the wisdom of the crowd are those upon which social software are built: in the consumer space, think of the weak ties created with your social graph on LinkedIn or Facebook, and the wisdom of the crowd that contributes to efforts such as Wikipedia.

Lots of Tapscott and McAfee references flying around; this is a bit of an intro to social software that’s likely not required for this particular audience, but serves to provide a standard set of definitions of social software. He covered the basic principles, which will be important for seeing how BPM and social software interact: egalitarian; bottom-up; self-organizing; the value of context via tags and links as well as content; continual information improvement and publication for review; the importance of output and practice over abstract models; and transparency regarding the relationship of the participants.

He then moved into how social software supports (or could support) BPM: first, collaboration in the design, implement, evaluation and improvement phases; and second, the extension of functionality for the operational BPM system. Collaboration in the non-operational phases could be through wikis for capturing requirements, planning projects, and so on; in my opinion, this can also be through the use of more collaborative process modeling tools that allow non-experts to be involved in process discovery, modeling and design. During the operational phase, this could be a wiki to capture new requirements and potential process innovation, as well as collaborative tools for managing and documenting the project. Personally, I think that there’s other potential applications: in my presentation two years ago, I suggested the concept of process tagging and folksonomies to allow process participants to tag instances of processes; user-created process-based mashups (although there’s some argument as to whether mashups are considered part of social software) also deserve some discussion here, which are now much more possible since many of the vendors have introduced end-user RSS feeds to their products.

A great introduction to the day, and I’m looking forward to the research papers and discussions.

*Personality Not Included

I’ve just finished reading *Personality Not Included by social marketing guru Rohit Bhargava. I don’t know a lot about marketing, but I know what works and doesn’t work when companies try it on me, and I’m increasingly interested in the crossover between social media and marketing.

Bhargava examines the concept of personality as it applies to organizations: why it’s important for an organization — or often a brand produced by that organization — to have a personality at all, and how to use that personality to strengthen customer relationships. The first two chapters are essential reading for any organization that’s still stuck in old-school marketing: first, why being faceless used to work but doesn’t any more, and second, how social media is fundamentally changing how organizations communicate. Much of the rest of the book is some solid advice on how to create and foster the necessary brand personality, but so many companies are still stuck back in the “why should we do this?” phase that the first two chapters are going to be a major eye-opener for them. Also brilliant are the short “sellevator pitches” at the end of each chapter, summarizing the main message.

With the first half of the book covering the theory of brand personality, the second half digs into tools and techniques for making it happen. The book lists 10 major personality-focused marketing techniques — curiosity, karmic, participation, un-whatever, sensory, antimarketer, fallibility, insider, incidental, and useful — then describes each in terms of what it is, why it works, when you should use it, who’s already doing it, and step-by-step instructions. There’s also guides for finding the accidental spokespeople inside or outside your organization, empowering your employees, creating a successful company blog, and hiring employees with personality.

If I can make one complaint about *Personality Not Included, it’s the overwhelming number of gratuitous analogies used in the writing, to the point where I started finding it annoying. I’m not talking about relevant examples, I’m talking about analogies, like the one where he spends half a page talking about Disney’s movie High School Musical — which has nothing to do with anything else in the book — in order to have us understand the concept of being pressured into sticking with the status quo. By the time that I read a number of these, it started to feel like filler. This is purely an issue of style, not content, and you may experience it differently.

Disclosure: this book was provided to me for free by the publisher, McGraw Hill, through a great program called Mini Book Expo for Bloggers, which allows bloggers to claim a book in order to receive a review copy, in exchange for writing a public review of the book. All books can be shipped for free to bloggers within Canada, and some now can be shipped to the US.

SAP SME Day: Business ByDesign deep dive

Up next is a deep dive on Business ByDesign, the SaaS offering for SMEs. The deep dives so far have been kind of shallow, and mostly centered on sales, marketing, pricing and packaging of the products rather than much to do with functionality. We’re also running 45 minutes late, and seem to be getting later with each session.

This session is particularly interesting because of the analogy to SaaS BPM: these are mission-critical business systems, responsible for the day-to-day business processes, and there’s some significant issues with customer acceptance of their core processes existing in the cloud.

I hadn’t seen Business ByDesign before — somehow I missed it at SAPPHIRE — so it was interesting to have Rainer Zinow, SVP SME Global Services, give us a demo.

The system is role based, so that functionality is exposed depending on the user’s role. Apparently, there’s some basic document management, but we didn’t see that.

The system is built on an in-memory architecture for both transactions and analytics, using a search engine rather than a database (similar to some ideas that I saw at FASTforward); transactions cause database writes, but client applications are always served from memory.

There are some pretty complete analytics available, where you can drill down into specific items of interest, and even link directly back to the transaction on the ERP side, something that you couldn’t easily do with non-integrated BI.

There’s some lightweight workflow, really just manual routing to a person’s inbox that also allows a work item to be forwarded to someone else.

One of the most interesting parts was exposed when he demonstrated saving the online reports to Excel: the Excel version can be converted to contain formulas that point back to the original data source, which are actually pointers to web services. The reporting implication is that you can save the Excel report, then come back later and update it with point-in-time data simply by refreshing the data source; even better is that this set of web services is available to any environment, not just Excel, allowing you to build mashups or other applications that access the core transactional data.

This sort of hybrid model for SaaS is nice, where you can do everything in the on-demand environment, but also be able to download some desktop tools or build mashups that link directly to the online data.

SAP SME Day: Prasad Akella with Business All-in-One deep dive

I missed the late-morning sessions, but I’m back here for Prasad Akella, Senior Director of SAP Business All-in-One Solution Marketing.

We heard about some of the new integrations with All-in-One: just announced last week, the CRM 2007 product is now tightly integrated with the All-in-One functionality, providing marketing, sales and service components. Also, the Business Objects Edge Series integrates to provide analytics and visibility. Other than that, there’s not a lot here that interests me: as with this morning, most people in the audience seem to be a lot more interested in pricing, packaging and system configuration than I am; I’m guessing that some of them make their living helping clients to wade through this sort of information.

SAP SME Day: Jeff Stiles with portfolio update

Jeff Stiles is back to give us an update on the SME product portfolio, and there’s an interesting tie-in to yesterday’s message at the Business Objects day: the portfolio includes both business management and business intelligence, with a pretty strong emphasis on how BI adds value to SAP’s traditional business management.

He went through the entire SME portfolio:

Business One, their small business on-premise solution, sold only through channel partners.
Business ByDesign, their new on-demand service that provides a single end-to-end business solution, targeted at fast-growing midsize companies that don’t want to built a large IT infrastructure, and typically have less than 100 users. There are a number of pre-configured processes built in, intended to support common business processes without requiring extensive customization. Business ByDesign is available only in US, UK, Germany, France, China and India; the restriction in geography for a SaaS solution seems to indicate that this still requires a significant amount of effort at the customer location in order to sell and service the customer.
All-in One, for midsize companies that need a more customizable solution.
Analytics with Business Objects.

As you can likely tell by the volume of notes, we spent most of the session with audience questions and comments on Business ByDesign. The sessions this morning have been pretty basic, and I’ve learned way more about SAP sales channels than I ever wanted to know; hopefully we’ll get more detailed product information as the day goes on.

There’s an online tool to help figure out which SME tool best fits the customer requirements, based on five factors: the way you do business, your budget and timelines, your IT expertise and perferences, the way that your employees work, and your future growth plans.

SAP SME Day: Glenn Wada with business update

After an intro by Jeff Stiles, SVP SME Solution Marketing, Glenn Wada, GM US Strategic Growth Enterprises Group, gave us a business update on SAP’s small and medium enterprise (SME) efforts.

75% of SAP customers are SME, although only about 30% of software sales (>1B Euro). SAP defines SME is anything under $1B in revenue, regardless of which product that they’re using, then further stratify that into “small” (under $50-60M), “medium” (up to $300M) and “upper middle” ($300M-$1B). This latter “UME” band is served by the standard SAP direct sales channel, whereas customers below $300M in revenue are served by Wada’s group, which uses a hybrid direct-channel sales model. SAP owns about 30% of the SME market, and continues to grow this market share through their focus on high-growth verticals: high technology, renewable energy, oil & gas, life sciences, services, and retail.

Taking look at the product suite, the SME offerings are Business One, Business ByDesign and Business All-in-One (although keep in mind that some of the UME’s are likely using the SAP enterprise products since the SME distinction is made by revenue, not by product). SAP believes that they can continue to service a company as it grows by shifting them from one product to another — although I’m sure that the transition is anything but painless, if they’re a competent incumbent, they have a good chance of keeping customers as they out-grow the lower-end products.

There will be more detail on the SAP SME product portfolio throughout the day, but here’s a summary:

Business One

Single business application
20k+ customers
Targeted at small businesses; these businesses are looking at moving to ByDesign or All-in-One by the time that they hit $50-60M in revenue

Business ByDesign

Complete, adaptable
On demand service
150 customer engagements
New business model
Focus on 6 key markets
5,500 registrations

Business All-in-One

Configurable and extensible
12,300 customers
New release based on business process platform, including CRM

I’m a newbie to the SAP SME space (and don’t really know all that much about SAP’s enterprise products either, except as I bump up against them in some of my large clients), and I definitely feel like the least-informed person in the room.

Business Objects Summit closing Q&A

Jonathan Becher hosted a wrap-up Q&A with Doug Merritt, Marge Breya and Sanjay Poonen. I’ve consolidated the responses rather than attributing them to the individuals:

On reasons for Business Objects’ continued growth: major contributors include having the SAP sales force also selling Business Objects products, and expansion of the product suite to include GRC and EPM. Also, synergy of two leaders in different markets coming together to create something bigger than the sum of the parts.
On portfolio roadmap for products being sunsetted or merged (a.k.a. the stuff that I wasn’t allowed to blog about earlier): it’s probably accurate to summarize that some of the SAP BI products will be discontinued but the customers will be migrated to appropriate Business Objects products, and there will be a few products that are merged.
On the growth of on-demand BI, expect to see some of the Business Objects applications (as opposed to just the platforms) offered using a SaaS model, although there’s nothing definite being discussed here.
On the link between BI and business rules, which hasn’t really been mentioned explicitly today: operational BI is part of their portfolio, and they’re working on ways to integrate more closely with BPM, BAM and decisioning.
On open source: they’re not seeing stress from open source products so are working on making their current successful OEM strategy work for them rather than considering releasing open source products.

After the panel, Becher did a summary about closing the gap between strategy and execution, and the trends that are driving innovation in business intelligence:

Unified information, moving from structured information generated within the four walls of the organization, to structured and unstructured and internal and external information
Collaborative decisions, moving from individual contributors within functional silos, to teams collaborating and communicating across boundaries
Business network optimization, from point relationships with customers and suppliers, to a dynamic network of partners

Business Objects’ goal: to transform the way the world works by connecting people, information and businesses. A bit ambitious, but they believe that bringing together BI, EPM and GRC is truly transformational.

That’s it for the Business Objects Influencer Summit; I’m staying on here tomorrow for the SAP SME day and will continue blogging then.