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Do BPM vendors eat their own dogfood?

I really dislike that expression, but it’s commonly recognized to mean that a company is using its own products to run its own business. I believe that a lot of BPM vendors do use their own products in some way, but how much? Are they just playing around with expense approvals, or have they drunk the process Kool-Aid and embedded BPM within their critical business processes?

One company that does appear to be taking their own sales pitch to heart is Appian, who just published a case study about themselves (you can find it linked at the bottom of their About Us page, but it requires registration – tsk, tsk). They use it for departmental and enterprise-wide applications, and have 40-50,000 process instances running at any given time across Finance, HR, Sales, Support, Marketing, Product Management, IT and Employee Development. Furthermore, all of the business applications are developed by business people, not IT, and can be changed in flight by business people using the rules capability within Appian Enterprise.

By implementing BPM internally, which included moving some functionality out of Peoplesoft and into Appian, they’re saving about $500k in hard costs each year, primarily through reduced licensing and support costs for packaged applications. I’m sure that there’s also soft cost savings in terms of improved efficiency and productivity, although they haven’t stated those.

I’m curious to hear from other BPM vendors about their own internal case studies — add your comments with your experiences.

Enterprise Mashups webinar

SnapLogic sponsored a webinar today featuring (Michael) Coté of Redmonk, entitled Enterprise Mashups, RIAs and Cloud Computing.

Coté started out talking about why we want to do all of this, namely, the goal of moving to a connected model, where value is increased through increased connectivity. Mashups bring together information from multiple sources, thereby connecting those systems and services in order to add value.

He considers three aspects of applications:

User interface, either a web app or an RIA
Business logic in the application code
Infrastructure, either on-premise or in the cloud

RIAs (rich internet applications) are user interfaces that mimic rich desktop user interfaces, but are the front-end for internet-connected applications, built using tools such as AJAX, Flex/AIR and Sliverlight. These are typically applications (business or leisure) rather than single-purpose functionality such as search.

Moving to the bottom of the stack, cloud computing offers a faster, cheaper and more scalable infrastructure, particularly for starting up a new service when the potential load is unknown.

One of the challenges is in integrating systems when you move to the cloud: cloud to cloud and cloud to on-premise, where the latter has the challenge of integrating across the firewall. Data integration is critical so that you don’t end up with silos of information locked into your applications’ data stores.

Chris Marino of SnapLogic followed up with a few slides about their view of application integration, moving from the bad old days of point-to-point custom systems integration to a utopia that uses SnapLogic as a hub to integrate applications using web standards (HTTP, REST, XML). SnapLogic connectors and servers can be combined for all sorts of data connectivity from cloud to cloud, cloud to client, and cloud to on-premise systems. They provide a graphical tool for designing a data flow between sources, including transformations, or for exposing an enterprise data source directly in a browser for mashing up using other tools. He moved on to a lightning-quick demo showing an interface to Salesforce.com data, allowing the data to be extracted to another system or even just to the browser as input to a mashup.

SnapLogic has both a free, open source community edition and a fully-supported enterprise edition available by paid subscription.

Companies that get it

Another company that is getting how marketing 2.0 works: Metastorm is publishing podcasts on iTunes (that is, you can get them without providing your personal information to Metastorm) as well as having a YouTube channel and customer success stories on their own site that don’t require registration.

I posted a while back about how Active Endpoints is publishing webinar replays (video) as well as audio podcasts and product release information (PDF) all in an RSS feed that I subscribe to in iTunes, no signup required. IDS Scheer has ARIS TV, also on YouTube. More companies are realizing that blogging is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to new ways to interact with their audience.

Examples of companies that don’t get it: one who sent me an unsolicited email with a 2MB product brochure attached, with the comment:

As I see from your blog that you don’t like registering for basic information (which we currently require you to do at the moment on our website – although it is currently up for discussion!) I have attached our corporate overview brochure for you and would be happy to send you any other info you would find useful.

The point is not that I don’t like registering on vendor websites, it’s that no one likes registering on vendor websites. I’m not looking for special treatment, I want companies to change the way that they interact with anyone looking for information: the easier to you make it for someone to get information about your company and product, the more likely that they are to return to your site.

Oh yeah, while you’re all at it, can you please publish full feeds for your company blogs? With over 250 subscriptions in my reader, the chance of me clicking through to a vendor blog to read the entire post is near nil.

Oracle BEA Strategy Briefing

Not only did Oracle schedule this briefing on Canada Day, the biggest holiday in Canada, but they forced me to download the Real Player plug-in in order to participate. The good part, however, is that it was full streaming audio and video alongside the slides.

Charles Phillips, Oracle President, kicked off with a welcome and some background on Oracle, including their focus on database, middleware and applications, and how middleware is the fastest-growing of these three product pillars. He described how Oracle Fusion middleware is used both by their own applications as well as ISVs and customers implementing their own SOA initiatives.

He outlined their rationale for acquiring BEA: complementary products and architecture, internal expertise, strategic markets such as Asia, and the partner and channel ecosystem. He stated that they will continue to support BEA products under the existing support lifetimes, with no forced migration policies to move off of BEA platforms. They now consider themselves #1 in the middleware market in terms of both size and technology leadership, and Phillips gave a gentle slam to IBM for over-inflating their middleware market size by including everything but the kitchen sink in what they consider to be middleware.

The BEA developer and architect online communities will be merged into the Oracle Technology Network: Dev2Dev will be merged into the Oracle Java Developer community, and Arch2Arch will be broadened to the Oracle community.

Retaining all the BEA development centers, they now have 4,500 middleware developers; most BEA sales, consulting and support staff were also retained and integrated into the the Fusion middleware teams.

Next up was Thomas Kurian, SVP of Product Development for Fusion Middleware and BEA product directions, with a more detailed view of the Oracle middleware products and strategy. Their basic philosophy for middleware is that it’s a unified suite rather than a collection of disjoint products, it’s modular from a purchasing and deployment standpoint, and it’s standards-based and open. He started to talk about applications enabled by their products, unifying SOA, process management, business intelligence, content management and Enterprise 2.0.

They’ve categorized middleware products into 3 categories on their product roadmap (which I have reproduced here directly from Kurian’s slide:

Strategic products

BEA products being adopted immediately with limited re-design into Oracle Fusion middleware
No corresponding Oracle products exist in majority of cases
Corresponding Oracle products converge with BEA products with rapid integration over 12-18 months

Continue and converge products

BEA products being incrementally re-designed to integrate with Oracle Fusion middleware
Gradual integration with existing Oracle Fusion middleware technology to broaden features with automated upgrades
Continue development and maintenance for at least 9 years

Maintenance products

BEA had end-of-life’d due to limited adoption prior to Oracle M&A
Continued maintenance with appropriate fixes for 5 years

For the “continue and converge” category, that is, of course, a bit different than “no forced migration”, but this is to be expected. My issue is with the overlap between the “strategic” category, which can include a convergence of an Oracle and a BEA product, and the “continue and converge” category, which includes products that will be converged into another product: when is a converged product considered “strategic” rather than “continue and converge”, or is this just the spin they’re putting on things so as to not freak out BEA customers who have put huge investments into a BEA product that is going to be converged into an existing Oracle product?

He went on to discuss how each individual Oracle and BEA product would be handled under this categorization. I’ve skipped the parts on development tools, transaction processing, identity management, systems management and service delivery, and gone right to their plans for the Service-Oriented Architecture products:

Strategic:

Oracle Data Integrator for data integration and batch ETL
Oracle Service Bus, which unifies AquaLogic Service Bus and Oracle Enterprise Service Bus
Oracle BPEL Process Manager for service orchestration and composite application infrastructure
Oracle Complex Event Processor for in-memory event computation, integrated with WebLogic Event Server
Oracle Business Activity Monitoring for dashboards to monitor business events and business process KPIs

Continue and converge:

BEA WL-Integration will be converged with the Oracle BPEL Process Manager

Maintenance:

BEA Cyclone
BEA RFID Server

Note that the Oracle Service Bus is in the “strategic” category, but is a convergence of AL-SB and Oracle ESB, which means that customers of one of those two products (or maybe both) are not going to be happy.

Kurian stated that Oracle sees four types of business processes — system-centric, human-centric, document-centric and decision-centric (which match the Forrester divisions) — but believes that a single product/engine that can handle all of these is the way to go, since few processes fall purely into one of these four categories. They support BPEL for service orchestration and BPMN for modeling, and their plan is to converge a single platform that supports both BPEL and BPMN (I assume that he means both service orchestration and human-facing workflow). Given that, here’s their strategy for Business Process Management products:

Strategic:

Oracle BPA Designer for process modeling and simulation
BEA AL-BPM Designer for iterative process modeling
Oracle BPM, which will be the convergence of BEA AquaLogic BPM and Oracle BPEL Process Manager in a single runtime engine
Oracle Document Capture & Imaging for document capture, imaging and document workflow with ERP integration [emphasis mine]
Oracle Business Rules as a declarative rules engine
Oracle Business Activity Monitoring [same as in SOA section]
Oracle WebCenter as a process portal interface to visualize composite processes

Similar to the ESB categorization, I find the classification of the converged Oracle BPM product (BEA AL-BPM and Oracle BPEL PM) as “strategic” to be at odds with his original definition: it should be in the “continue & converge” category since the products are being converged. This convergence is not, however, unexpected: having two separate BPM platforms would just be asking for trouble. In fact, I would say that having two process modelers is also a recipe for trouble: they should look at how to converge the Oracle BPA Designer and the BEA AL-BPM Designer

In the portals and Enterprise 2.0 product area, Kurian was a bit more up-front about how WebLogic Portal and AquaLogic UI are going to be merged into the corresponding Oracle products:

Strategic:

Oracle Universal Content Management for content management repository, security, publishing, imaging, records and archival
Oracle WebCenter Framework for portal development and Enterprise 2.0 services
Oracle WebCenter Spaces & Suite as a packaged self-service portal environment with social computing services
BEA Ensemble for lightweight REST-based portal assembly
BEA Pathways for social interaction analytics

Continue and converge:

BEA WebLogic Portal will be integrated into the WebCenter framework
BEA AquaLogic User Interaction (AL-UI) will be integrated into WebCenter Spaces & Suite

Maintenance:

BEA Commerce Services
BEA Collabra

In SOA governance:

Strategic:

BEA AquaLogic Enterprise Repository to capture, share and manage the change of SOA artifacts throughout their lifecycle
Oracle Service Registry for UDDI
Oracle Web Services Manager for security and QOS policy management on services
EM Service Level Management Pack as a management console for service level response time and availability
EM SOA Management Pack as a management console for monitoring, tracing and change managing SOA

Maintenance:

BEA AquaLogic Services Manager

Kurian discussed the implications of this product strategy on Oracle Applications customers: much of this will be transparent to Oracle Applications, since many of these products form the framework on which the applications are built, but are isolated so that customizations don’t touch them. For those changes that will impact the applications, they’ll be introduced gradually. Of course, some Oracle Apps are already certified with BEA products that are now designated as strategic Oracle products.

Oracle has also simplified their middleware pricing and packaging, with products structured into 12 suites:

He summed up with their key messages:

They have a clear, well-defined, integrated product strategy
They are protecting and enhancing existing customer investments
They are broadening Oracle and BEA investment in middleware
There is a broad range of choice for customer

The entire briefing will be available soon for replay on Oracle’s website if you’re interested in seeing the full hour and 45 minutes. There’s more information about the middleware products here, and you can sign up to attend an Oracle BEA welcome event in your city.

I’m back!

I was off last week for a vacation in Iceland, which explains why it was pretty quiet around here. It wasn’t my first trip there; I also visited in December 2003, at the complete opposite in terms of daylight hours, and loved it at both times of year for different reasons. I also had the opportunity to try a completely different way of information access while traveling: I turned off email forwarding to my Blackberry — my provider’s roaming rates are outrageous — and used my iPod Touch wherever I could get free open wifi, such as at our guesthouse or many of the cafes in Reykjavik. Although the iPod Touch interface is vastly inferior to the Blackberry when it comes to composing email for those of us who can touch-type with our thumbs, it’s fabulous for reading email as well as web browsing, which is all that I wanted to do while on vacation. Interestingly enough, after my friends became aware of the device’s capabilities, one of them asked me if I would use my “computer” to look up an address for her, showing that any device with a certain level of functionality will be perceived by the non-tech-savvy as a computer, regardless of form factor.

Today is Canada Day, a national holiday celebrating the country’s confederation in 1867, but Oracle conveniently scheduled their BEA strategy briefing at noon so I’ll be spending at least a couple of hours at my desk before heading out to enjoy a day of beautiful weather and some spectacular fireworks in the evening.

Canadian Copyright — or is that Copywrong?

Off topic for Column 2, but hey, it’s Friday.

For those of you who have never seen Canadian government at work, it can be pretty entertaining sometimes, and never more than when there’s a lively debate going on during Question Period. Our big debate now is the newly-introduced copyright bill, which blatantly panders to the U.S. media industry; not surprisingly, a lot of us have pretty serious problems with it, and have been talking to our government representatives. Jim Prentice, the Industry Minister who presented the bill, either doesn’t really understand it or just isn’t very good at speaking about it:

The best source for information about what’s happening with the bill is Michael Geist’s site, a law professor who has analyzed the proposed bill in great detail and blogs about what it would mean to the average person, but you’ll also find a lot by Cory Doctorow on Boing Boing, who is Canadian and very vocal against any government interfering in its citizens rights. We’re also starting to see independent artists speak out against this, who feel that this prevents people from easily discovering them, and know that most of the money collected from lawsuits just goes to the lawyers anyway.

If you’re Canadian and care about this issue, join the Fair Copyright for Canada Facebook group and take the time to send your MP a letter, using the Copyright for Canadians template if you can’t think of what to write yourself. This isn’t just a techie issue, as both Geist and Doctorow explain: it criminalizes day-to-day activities of anyone who makes a backup copy of their DVDs as a guard against damage, or scan and email their kids’ class photo to their relatives, or rip your music CDs for your iPod if the CD has any sort of copy protection on it.

Lombardi Driven: Lessons Learned

Toby Cappello, Lombardi’s VP of Professional Services, led a breakout session on lessons learned in implementing BPM. He breaks them down into three categories: project/delivery, training/mentoring and program/enterprise.

Project/delivery:

BPM is about productivity and visibility

Metrics, KPIs and SLAs should be part of the define phase
Don’t scope out metrics [i.e., don’t remove metrics from the scope]
Remember visibility drives improvement

Integrations, integrations, integrations

Don’t underestimate and start early
Don’t forget the focus should be on business value
Be willing to make a trade-off for the first release

“One and Done”

Iterative approach…continuous process improvement
Phase is NOT a 4-letter word
Trade-offs, but don’t always trade-off the reports

Requirements documents are not process analysis

Consider all options for capturing requirements
Don’t over-do the requirements (define) phase
Include process analysis skills on your team early

A project longer than 90 days is not a failure

Self-sufficiency can extend project timelines
Some projects are more complex
Timelines can be dependent upon the sophistication of the process

Training/mentoring:

Java (.Net) developers aren’t all you need

Have the right mix of resources on the team
Understand the value of face-to-face engagement
Identify good pools of talent for developers (BPMC’s)

Self-sufficiency requires dedication and commitment

Don’t allocate partial FTE’s to the core project team
Make sure all of the right skills are represented
Don’t mix self-sufficiency with tight deadlines

Program/enterprise:

Fund to value, not first release

BPM is about CPI
BPM should be programmatic
Funding model should contemplate projects and the program

Collaboration between business and IT is critical

Consider carefully for the first project
Do not maintain the “wall”, i.e., the physical and/or cultural separation between business and IT team members
Leverage the playbacks

Ownership (BPM BPMS, process)

Processes are business-owned
BPM is the discipline/program
BPMS is the enabling technology

Cappello had lots of great anecdotes and examples of how these lessons have been applied at their customers, but they’re all generic enough for any BPM project; in fact, most can be applied to any sort of business-IT project.

Some audience discussion raised the point that integration is the single biggest point of risk in any BPM initiative; I’ve seen this a lot, especially in cases when you could trade off by continuing to do part of a process manually for a while instead of undertaking a time-consuming and expensive integration in the first phase. “Broad, then deep” is the way to go in terms of implementing processes.

That’s my last session for Driven, and my last conference (I hope) until September. Now I’ll have a chance to catch up on my real work (the stuff that pays the bills) as well as the partially-written product reviews that I have sitting in Live Writer.

Lombardi Driven: Cross-Organizational BPM panel

I attended a panel with two Lombardi customers, Kim Hearn of PHH Arval and Gene Rawls of Wells Fargo, speaking about their experiences with building a cross-functional BPM capability. As it turned out, it wasn’t really a panel, it was two mini-presentations on the same topic with a joint Q&A.

Hearn started out with a list of critical success factors for BPM projects which were not fundamentally different from any project, e.g., strategic alignment, getting the team right, culture, governance. Her slides were dense with text and moved very quickly, so a bit hard to capture many of the specifics while following along, but much of this wasn’t particularly innovative in terms of best practices. By following good practices, however, they were able to reduce their cycle time of their core business process from several days to under a day, redeploy 15% of their headcount, reduce penalties and have a better workforce utilization.

Rawls was up next to discuss Wells Fargo’s experiences. I spoke to some of the Wells Fargo team yesterday, although haven’t had time to document our discussions, but this promises to be a higher-level view of how they’ve worked with BPM. They had a long time frame from their original process improvement initiatives to the acquisition of Teamworks, but eventually developed a set of roles involved in BPM projects: process leader, SWAT (their acronym for BPM initiatives) developer, BI developer, and business process owner. He walked through their process, starting with with the business identifying the need and defining the opportunity. They use an iterative lifecycle and the agile playback technique to engage the end users in the development process, building collaboration and producing new processes faster.

There was a question about production support; Hearn said that they rotate people out of the agile development team into production support in order to train the support people. Someone in the audience said that they pulled in their support people during testing, then cycled back to support when the system deploys, which sounds like it would work well, too.

Like the other sessions, there was a lot of great audience participation: everyone realizes that they’re amongst friends and talks quite openly about their issues and solutions.

Lombardi Driven: Rich Phillips keynote

The second part of the keynote was by Rich Phillips of Maritz Loyalty Programs — I saw him speak last year at the Forrester Technology Leadership conference — talking about business strategy, technology strategy and how those impact market differentiation. Maritz Loyalty Programs runs affinity programs such as credit card points programs, and hence is involved both in establishing long-term relationships with their customers, as well as providing incentives to the end consumers who belong to these programs.

He had some comments about competition and markets in their business, such as the need for speed and agility in offering incentives to consumers, collecting better information in order to make better decisions, and creating more transparency and engaging with customers in social media; he sees BPM as having a role in all of these.

Lombardi Driven: Phil Gilbert keynote

Phil kicked off the second day of the conference talking more about moving from a project focus to a program focus, and reinforced that we need to reach out and engage the business people. Yesterday, when I wrote that the keynotes appeared to indicate that having IT-led BPM projects was a good thing, Phil took the time to comment on one of my posts to say that it wasn’t a good thing, but it was the current reality.

He showed us some of the UI changes to Teamworks 7, including an iTunes-like (his analogy, but quite apt) repository view in the left sidebar that’s much easier to navigate. He showed some other navigation improvements, including snapshots of processes as they are deployed in your environment, and made the point that although this is still in Eclipse, it may be unrecognizable as such: instead of just using the standard Eclipse interfaces as most design tools do, they’ve used it as a platform to build a much easier to use interface.

Teamworks is positioned as a platform for BPM execution:

Multiple authors working together on dozens of simultaneous process applications
A new paradigm for source control and deployment
Built for the implications of massive asset re-use

Blueprint is positioned as a platform for BPM communication:

Creating a culture of process information

Rich analysis and diagramming for experts
Rich documentation for authors and readers alike

I’ve committed to Dave Marquard (and now publicly in front of all of you) to actually spend some time with Blueprint this summer, since I have no travel until September, so watch for my results from my test drive.

Phil went on to discuss the skills that Lombardi’s services team brings to customers, and the BPM roles that they provide: program management, BPM analysis, BPM consultant, and technical consultant. They also have some new roles in their engagement team: a “client partner”, who is a non-billable resource that interfaces with the services group, in addition to the account executive. As mentioned yesterday, they have four fixed-price, fixed-outcome offerings: inventory, assessment, analysis, and playback one (which includes the transition into Teamworks).

This three-part formula — platform for execution, platform for communication, and know-how to make it all work — is the key message coming out of Lombardi at this conference.