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Lombardi Driven: Day 1 Wrapup

The last session of the day was a short one with the two platinum sponsors of the conference, Michael Melenovsky of Satyam Consulting and Hub Vandervoort of Progress Software, with a quick plug for their products and services. I realize that these guys pay a lot to be here, so I’m not going to fault them for taking advantage of this opportunity.

Something that I discovered partway through the day: the wifi in the conference area is sponsored by Capability Measurement, one of the conference’s gold sponsors. Kudos to Lombardi for coming up with the idea of hitting up one of their sponsors for this essential service. I know that hotels and conference centers charge outrageous rates for wifi, given the tiny actual cost to them to run a wifi network, and having it as a sponsored part of the conference just like the breaks and receptions is a great idea.

All in all, I’m finding the conference well-organized and useful for customers. I think that they underestimated the interest in one of the sessions, which was held in the small of the breakout rooms to an over-capacity crowd, but otherwise the logistics worked well. More importantly, there’s lots of time left in each session for audience Q&A, and the audience is participating in full. This is a small conference — about 200 customer attendees — and that size is great for encouraging people to ask questions. There’s also lots of time between sessions to allow for informal discussions without eating into the session time. The small number of attendees and the relatively narrow focus of the audience does mean that there are only two concurrent sessions so not a lot of choice, although the schedule shows a couple of tomorrow’s sessions with three concurrent sessions.

Lombardi Driven: BPM Project Delivery Panel

It’s another episode of The Dating Game, with three customers who mostly don’t want to be named, although I’m sure that you already know about the detailed breakout session agenda. The topic here is how different companies structure their BPM teams.

Bachelor #1 (from a large US-based automotive company) discussed how their BPM team is a split of business and IT working collaboratively. Bachelor #2 (from a global, Fortune 500 heavy equipment manufacturer) is part of a process center of excellence, also made up of business and IT working together. In both cases, they stressed how having the business and IT people on the BPM team collocated is important in ensuring that there’s the right degree of collaboration: if you’re right beside each other, it’s much easier to take advantage of the casual interactions that can occur.

Bachelor #2’s company is starting to push the creation of processes further into the business side of the team; he said that they have some processes now that are not touched by IT at all until final review and deployment, which is the rarely-realized vision of every BPM vendor and customer.

Bachelorette #3 (from a global semi-conductor company) is using the playback session technique for working with their users in order to float new ideas and get early feedback, which they have found to be a key to success. This is similar to Agile methodologies where users are involved early and often in order to fine-tune the development to meet changing user needs and wants, set priorities on customizations, and avoid any huge surprises when the system deploys.

The issues that they have include insufficient internal resources, trying to standardize processes across business units (especially in different countries), and the division of labor between the different team members, although none of these appeared insurmountable. There was a discussion around the problem with upgrades and changes to the business process, and seem to have found that they have to flush out their process before upgrading the process; this is expected to be addressed better in future versions of Teamworks, but this is a difficult problem that not many BPM vendors do well.

Lombardi Driven: Blueprinting Business Processes

Dave Marquard and Kalvin Stollznow of Lombardi gave a presentation on using Blueprint; Dave, who I’ve met previously, is the product manager of Blueprint, and Kalvin is a principal BPM analyst in the services group. We had a quick demo of Blueprint, with Kalvin talking through the business scenario while Dave drove; I suspect that there’s a lot of Teamworks customers in the room who haven’t had time to do much with Blueprint yet, and this is their first real introduction to it.

The context for the demo was in discussing their “2 x 6 workshop” engagement for process discovery, and how a tool like Blueprint can help to facilitate this. The new services offering are an obvious focus for Lombardi these days, so it’s not surprising to see a couple of the sessions on what they’re offering in these front-end discovery, analysis and design packages. They finished up with a description of the packaged process definition service offerings: inventory, assessment, analysis and playback one. The playback one package is an addition to the first three, which were announced back in April, and it’s focused on showing the users what the new process will look like.

The presenters are being asked to keep to a 30-minute presentation in a 45-minute time slot in order to allow for lots of time for audience questions, making the presentations a bit lightweight; even so, I found this a bit too sales-y, although the Q&A dug into some good points about functionality and availability of new features.

Lombardi Driven: Executive Roundtable

We had a short session just before the morning break with He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named from a large US-based automotive company discussing their BPM projects. They’re implementing multiple BPM projects, including an engineering resource change management system, and are even using BPM to run the program of BPM projects.

Next up was a panel with Rod Favaron, Phil Gilbert and three customer executives. One of the panelists made a crack that this was either like the Dating Game or Oprah, so I’ll just refer to them as Bachelor #1 (from the afore-mentioned automotive company), Bachelor #2 (from a global, Fortune 500 logistics and relocation company) and Bachelor #3 (from a mid-western US travel company). Instead of prepared presentations, this was structured as an audience Q&A session.

Bachelor #3 responded to a question about the teams required for BPM by stating that you don’t need your “best” developers (by which I think that he means the hard-core Java developers) to do BPM development, since the development is lightweight compared to other development projects that you might have going on. Interestingly, I had a conversation with a customer at the break who has found that they have had to do a lot of custom UI work not because the Lombardi tool lacks functionality, but because their user community is accustomed to having a specific look and feel for certain applications, and is willing to pay more and wait longer to have custom interfaces developed that will eventually result in longer and more expensive maintenance cycles. I’m not at all surprised by this, since I see it all the time at my customers; although I always try to put forward the “take it out of the box and use it naked” philosophy, some companies don’t consider the trade off between the one-time hit of having employees learn a new system versus the ongoing costs of custom systems.

In response to a question about using a BPMS versus off-the-shelf software versus custom build, Bachelor #2 talked about how they use the BPMS to manage change and manage risk better, since there’s little off-the-shelf software that addresses their core business needs. They had 23 different processes across 3 legacy applications plus manual procedures, and are gradually replacing the processes in the legacy systems. #3 added that BPM also gives them connectivity across the enterprise, that is, connecting up the siloed packaged applications within different functional areas. #1 said that there are many areas where BPM should be a part of a complete solution that will combine custom-built services and packaged applications in more of a hybrid solution.

An audience member asked what to you do when the BPM projects start to move from being a business-led process improvement project to an IT development tool. This was interesting, because of Rod and Phil’s earlier statements that we’re in an era of IT-led BPM programs, and they seemed to think that this was a good thing. The customers, however, still think that business should be driving this: #3 feels that bringing together business and IT and eliminating the boundaries between them is the key to pushing this to a collaborative effort, and #2 concurred and stated that both the business and IT parts of the BPM projects report up to him, the CIO. Phil chimed in that there’s a need to break the usual application development mentality; the key thing is that if IT sees BPM as just another application development tool, it will fall into the domain of IT, but if business and IT both see BPM as a tool for collaborating on process implementation, then it will remain a cross-functional responsibility.

There was a question about failures and lessons learned during their Lombardi implementation. #2 said that they were too ambitious in terms of project scope, trying to take on too much in their first projects. #1 agreed with this, saying that the minor exceptions during those initial implementations slowed them down and forced them to reduce scope. #3 said (pointing out that this was more of a lesson learned than a failure) was that they should have started the process instrumentation earlier.

The final question was about using the BPMS as a system of record: #1 said that it’s their philosophy not to use the BPMS in that way, but to push all permanent data back to the core systems, although transient data may be persisted in the BPMS until a process instance completes. I agree completely with this, and am always uneasy when a lot of data is unnecessarily replicated into a BPMS and not synchronized back to the core operational systems.

Lombardi Driven: Rod Favaron and Phil Gilbert Keynote

I’m not sure what possessed Lombardi to hold their user conference in Austin in June — it’s going to 39C here today — but a couple of hundred customers have gathered for a couple of days about Lombardi’s products and the customers using them. There’s the usual difficulty in figuring out how to deal with new media, and I’ve been somewhat muzzled on giving the names of customers who are speaking here, although if you had half a brain, you could check the agenda and figure out who I’m referring to when I use the approved verbiage “a large US-based automotive company”. Of course, if there’s customers here who blog (or comment on blogs) or Twitter, then likely they haven’t been given the same explicit instructions, so no restrictions for them. 🙂

After a few opening remarks from Jim Rudden (who was kind enough to ask for my suggestions on what makes a conference great several months ago, and appears to have actually implemented several of them), Rod Favaron kicked things off with a discussion of the evolution of BPM over the past 6 years. Lombardi has a new focus on BPM programs within organizations, and sees the evolution of business-led projects to today’s IT-led programs to a jointly-led culture of process in the future.

Phil Gilbert then took the stage to talk about how to deal with the period of transition that most businesses find themselves in now. He reinforced this new Lombardi message of moving from projects to programs: in 2006, everyone was doing projects, and are now trying to take a few discrete projects and move it to a larger scale in order to achieve economies of scale and shared resources. This isn’t about making the projects bigger, it’s about how to roll out many small (90-day) projects efficiently so that BPM can become part of the enterprise’s DNA. A part of this is having people understand cross-functional issues, since most are still focused on their own department’s processes, and don’t think about the end-to-end process; Phil feels that IT has a better perspective on cross-functional business processes than the business does, which I don’t completely agree with. I think that IT has the potential to have a better perspective on the cross-functional business processes, but doesn’t reach that potential in most organizations.

He had an interesting quote from a customer: “I used to think that BPM is the glue around my applications. Now I know that the applications revolve around BPM.” This indicates the shift that is happening in how people see BPM, from EAI-type infrastructure to the portal through which people manage their work. Another customer stated that BPM is challenging their fundamental business model, allowing for less-costly decentralized processing — including home-based work — while maintaining a high degree of visibility and control over the processes.

He reinforced Rod’s earlier message that we’ve moved from business-led projects to IT-led projects and programs today: it appears that Lombardi thinks that this is a good thing, although I think that we still need a stronger business pull for BPM rather than an IT push. He talked briefly about the upcoming release of Teamworks, how Blueprint fosters BPM collaboration, and Lombardi’s service packages building on the service offerings that they announced a few months ago; I’m sure that there will be a lot more about this over the next two days.

Phil’s going to be posting a series of charters for BPM governance on his blog, starting today, which he hopes to open source in order to get involvement from the larger BPM community:

Charter for BPM platform sharing (rules for access among projects, entities)
Charter for BPM democracy (access, visibility, dialog)
Charter for BPM budget transparency: top down, bottom up, peer review – ex ante, ex post
Charter for BPM “conflict situations” (BPM and SOA, interface definition)
Charter for BPM investment (maintaining the infrastructure, upgrading, maintenance)

He believes that these charters for governance are necessary in order to figure out how to run many BPM projects simultaneously as part of a cohesive program. I look forward to participating in the development of these ideas.

The usual logistics: there’s wifi, which is some combination of the hotel’s paid wifi and what appears to be some free access in the conference area. However, there’s no power near the tables so I’m offline most of the time to preserve battery. I’ll scout around for a seat near a plug for the later sessions.

Fujitsu Interstage BPM Version 10

Fujitsu is releasing version 10 of their Interstage BPM, and I had a chance for an in-depth demo a few weeks ago in advance of today’s announcement. On the design side, their new version of Studio now allows business analysts and IT to work together, and includes forms development. In terms of end-user functionality, there’s some improvements to workflow to enable collaboration, and new dashboard functionality. Most exciting (I think) is full support for multi-tenanting in order to allow for shared services and SaaS.

Key new features in Studio V10:

Full application development rather than just process modeling in Studio: create AJAX forms (rich user interfaces) to be attached at a point in the process, BAM designer, and simulation.
BPMN compliance, including annotation capabilities for inline documentation, plus some extensions to the notation in order to show things such as the presence of a form attached at a step. I explicitly asked which BPMN objects are not supported, and got a sort of fuzzy answer, that is, that they support all the BPMN objects required for their modeling paradigm. There are two other BPMN views besides the baseline standard: one showing the role at each step — which assumes that you’re not using swimlanes for roles — and one version with coloured swimlanes.
WYSIWYG forms designer allows widgets to be dragged and dropped from the palette, including complex widgets such as Google maps, breadcrumbs, and file uploaders: this is almost a mashup builder rather than just basic forms. There’s also BPM-specific widgets to allow you to easily add controls both for a work item’s metadata as well as functionality. You can add validation rules to fields.
Once a form is created in the forms designer, it can be dragged onto a workflow step to assign the form to that step.
The analytics designer is a separate perspective in Studio that allows creation of alert rules that will fire based on conditions in a workflow, then take an action: open an alert window to a user, generate a chart, or trigger another action. Charts are defined as independent objects, then a presentation dashboard can be built including a selection of charts, including role-based security.
There’s a built-in decision tables functionality that separates rules from processes, so that process-related rules can be changed independently and will affect work in progress. I still don’t like this approach as much as an external rules system, but this is much better than using just a simple expression engine with “rules” embedded at points in the process. Interstage can, of course, also support third-party rules engines plugged in for more comprehensive rules capabilities.
Simulation based on predefined values or historical values, plus the specification of resource costs. No tools for automatically identifying areas requiring improvement, although they hinted that this was in the works.

End-user interface updates:

The user interface is now created primarily using the forms created in the new form designer. In the sample that I saw in the demo, there was a multi-page form to represent a process instance, where the first page was text fields, and second page was a Google Map with the property location related to the process instance tagged on it: a nice example of the actual use of a Google Maps mashup in a business application. The form provides access to the instance metadata and any attachments, then allows the user to fill out additional form data and complete the task.
Depending on the user’s privileges, there’s an administrator’s view of the process, and a browser-based (Flash) process designer to allow either complete process modeling or (more likely) to modify a process in flight. Changes made to a single process in this environment can be migrated to all process in flight.

Interstage BPM enforces stringent J2EE compliance, such that any process model, rule, etc. built automatically become a web service that can be exposed.

Application partitioning capabilities to allow for SaaS: support for multiple applications on a single BPM instance with fully partitioned data, security and administration so that it appears as a private BPM instance, and utilization can be tracked by application. This is great for large enterprises that want to run virtual independent BPM environments for different divisions or applications, as well as companies that might want to use Interstage as a foundation for a SaaS BPM offering.

Enterprise 2.0: Town Hall Wrap-up

A short closing session for the conference, primarily to gather ideas and feedback from the attendees. Yes, we all thought that the wifi sucked, it was too cold in the conference areas and the vendor dog-and-pony shows have to be cut, but lots of kudos on the sessions. I didn’t attend any of the unconference sessions this week, but one person in this wrap-up commented that the regular sessions are a bit of a vendor-fest and a bit lightweight, and that the unconference sessions offered an alternative for more in-depth discussion on a topic. If you want to see some other discussions on the conference and content, check the Twitter stream (or at least the part of it where people used hashtags) here.

For many of us, the face-to-face networking and hallway meetings at the conference is a big part of it: there are many people here who I have known online for some time, and am meeting “in carbon” for the first time this week, plus many who I’m happy to be seeing again.

I still have to write up my excellent interviews/demos with Serena Software and Bungee Labs, which both had innovative (and very different) mashup goodies to show me; watch for those over the next day or so.

Enterprise 2.0: Micro-blogging Panel

Dennis Howlett hosted a panel on micro-blogging (with a strong focus on Twitter, but not exclusively) that also included Chris Brogan of CrossTechMedia, Loren Feldman of 1938 Media, Rachel Happe of IDC and Laura Fitton of Pistachio Consulting. Although not explicitly stated in the session description, the focus was on the adoption of micro-blogging in the enterprise.

Fitton and Happe feel that micro-blogging allows us to exploit the power of weak ties. It changes the velocity of when we get to the value, or “a-ha”, moment. It’s like a gateway drug to social media, demonstrating the value of social media quickly. It allows for serendipity in business relationships, where people who you might not think of including in a project will see what you’re twittering about it and self-select themselves into it, or leverage your ideas in their own work. Fitton also live-tweeted her ideas on the advantages of micro-blogging in the enterprise (these are copied directly from her Twitter stream, hence are in reverse chrono order):

Instant field reports from remote sites, conferences, meetings…
(You may not know the answer, but you know someone who does.)
Fast, powerful way to query your own experts/source unique solutions by getting the question to the right niche expert quickly
Flatten hierarchies
Cultivate mentoring opportunities
Foster camraderie and esprit de corps
Share ideas
Create versatile mobile communications networks around sales teams, events, global projects and other geographically dispersed teams/groups
Create opportunities for collaboration, contextualization and spreading ideas fast
Tap into and create a powerful network of loose ties within your organization

Feldman took the opposite tack, saying that he thinks that micro-blogging will never take hold in the enterprise because of the openness and the brevity of the medium — the very things that people love micro-blogging — and Brogan mostly agreed that it would likely only be used for internal technical communications. In fact, Feldman referred to Twitter as “dopey” (he’s a video guy) and thinks that text, particularly 140 characters at a time, isn’t rich enough for the sort of immediate communication that Twitter is trying to provide. As someone who drives thought processes through writing, I don’t agree: I consume (but rarely create) audio and video at times, but text is a much more useful medium for me.

There was a lengthy discussion, including both the panelists and the audience, on whether enterprises would do this on a purely internal system, or on a public system like Twitter, and the relative advantages. There is no suggestion that micro-blogging would entirely replace other methods of enterprise communication, but it can augment them for cases when you want asynchronous but nearly-instant communication to a very broad audience in a public manner, with the capability for interaction between a large number of participants. It can change the velocity of business, critical in today’s market. It can also be a distraction, if people are micro-blogging (or IM’ing or Blackberry’ing) during a meeting or conversation, but that’s a matter of protocol and culture. I don’t even take interview notes on my computer because I think that it gets in the way between me and the interviewee in a face-to-face situation, so I’m very unlikely to ever micro-blog while in a small group, but others are more comfortable with that. If you’re micro-blogging in the context of real-life conversation, then it’s really no different than taking notes on paper in terms of attention.

Enterprise users are using social networks, whether their enterprise masters like it or not. If their work environment gets locked down so that they can’t use them there, they’ll use them from their mobile device (hence the popularity of platforms like Twitter, which is easily consumable on a mobile browser or purely through SMS). Enterprise computing policies will never go away, but it’s time for enterprises to realize that they might actually gain an advantage through their employees participating in social applications like micro-blogging. At the end of the day, I’m not convinced about the value of micro-blogging to me, but I’m not ready to write it off: I likely just haven’t had my a-ha moment yet. That being said, this week is the first time that I met someone who, on hearing my name, told me that they just started following me on Twitter.

Enterprise 2.0: Enterprise Mashups Technical Deep-Dive

Nicole Carrier of IBM, who was on the enterprise mashups panel yesterday, returned this morning to dig into more of the details behind mashups, particularly as implemented on their platform, Lotus Mashups (which I believe started life as QEDwiki). She started by defining mashups and widgets, then outlined what makes a mashup unique in terms of scope, process, users and technology. There are some key differences between mashups on the consumer internet and within the enterprise, however: enterprise mashups typically need to access enterprise systems, which might need to be unlocked/wrapped for accessibility (e.g., create widgets and feeds to access that data or functionality), and enterprise assets available for mashup need to be cataloged in some way.

She walked us through building a mashup with Lotus Mashups, pulling in widgets and feeds from various data sources as well as Google gadgets and arranging them on a page. More than just a portal interface, this environment allows you to create “wiring” between the objects on the page in order to allow data or selections in one widget to impact or filter another one. Once created, pages can be shared with others by publishing in a catalog, and other users can be given read-only or edit permissions on pages.

Joel Farrell, the chief architect of IBM’s InfoSphere MashupHub, joined Carrier to show how some of the data sources are discovered and/or created for use in mashups, and how they’re shared with others.

This quickly turned into an in-depth review of how to use the IBM mashup products, and a lot of the audience started to bail out. Including me.

Enterprise 2.0: RSS and Business Processes at Wallem

For the last breakout today, I went to the session featuring of Patrick Slesinger of Wallem (a shipping company). I don’t know anything about shipping, but their requirements aren’t different from a lot of other organizations: involvement and transparency to customers into business processes, internal decision support, long-term accessibility to event data. They needed to make their processes mobile and make the right information available anywhere, without using email.

Their solution, using K2 for BPM, Attensa for RSS and SharePoint as a content repository, integrates process-driven applications with managed RSS. The solution uses K2 to manage processes, then pushes the process event log (or some filtered version of it) over to the Attensa feed server, where it can be served up to a web interface or delivered by email. The advantage of using a feed server for this is that it provides complete device/platform independence for consuming the event feed, as well as providing multiple formats for consumption. An enterprise RSS feed server provides things such as integrating your LDAP database for defining users and groups, and allows for easy assignment of specific feeds to users and groups. Users can have feeds assigned to them, which they can’t unassign, but they can use the same tool for reading other feeds as well. They can read a specific feed item on one platform, and it’s marked as read everywhere (as you would expect). The system also tracks who reads which feeds, when and for how long, making it possible to track what information is actually being used, and ensure that users are accessing the relevant information before making decisions.

Slesinger showed a demo of the system, showing how tasks that are assigned to a user show up in their feed reader; clicking on the details in the feed item pulls them into a web form to complete the task. There are many BPM products now that allow a feed to be created for any user’s inbox or other queues; his earlier architecture diagram led me to believe that they’re not doing that (if K2 is even capable of it), but extracting events from the K2 event log instead. In the example shown, the captain of a ship was actually participating in a workflow where he received task notification through a feed reader rather than in email or directly through the BPM product’s inbox.

The results:

Increased visibility into systems and information sources
Mobile connected process and feedback loops
Alignment of information and process creating knowledge and value
Email clutter reduced
Understanding what information is required: who, what, when, where, why

Their customers — the ships’ owners — saw huge savings as well: using timely information and appropriate processes for deciding where ships take on fuel and oil, the annual customer savings are about $400M. They’re looking to do more with this in terms of analytics, search, and expanding the mobile RSS capabilities.

I’ve been blogging for a couple of years about how RSS and BPM could work together, and many of the vendors have integrated in the functionality, but this is the first real case study that I’ve seen of the two working together on this scale.