Author: sandy

Gartner BPM summit day 1: Janelle Hill

I know, it’s already the third (and last) day of the Gartner BPM conference and I’m still blogging about day 1 — consider that to be a good reflection on the sessions that I don’t have lots of time to blog about them because I’m too busy listening to them. I’m comfortably ensconced in my “Nashville office”, a.k.a., the women’s restroom right beside the main conference rooms. You men may not realize it, but the women’s facilities in most large hotels include a lounge with comfy chairs, a few side tables, a box of tissues (in case a presentation brings you to tears, I suppose) and sometimes even flowers. This one also happens to have power for my laptop and a full-strength wifi connection — sometimes gender discrimination works in our favour. 🙂

One of my favourite sessions on Monday was by Janelle Hill: “Leveraging Existing IT Assets in BPM Initiatives.” For an analyst, Hill has a very practical view on BPM implementations, and her session was focussed on changing the behaviour of systems by putting a services face on some of those old legacy applications to allow them to participate in BPM. She discussed three basic strategies:

  • Surrond strategy, where the legacy system is wrapped with a services layer and BPM is used to streamline the exceptions that are triggered by the legacy applications. I’ve done an implementation of exactly this strategy in many cases; one example is the claims processing functionality in an insurance company, where exceptions that are raised in their mainframe-based auto-adjudication system are picked up by a BPM system and routed to the appropriate people (and services) for manual adjudication or data repair-and-resubmit.
  • Extend strategy, where the previously unautomated steps are automated — often paper-based steps such as data collection forms, or ad hoc human processes such as collaboration. Case management, something that I work on with all of my insurance customers, as well as other financial services falls into both of those categories: it’s often a loosely structured process that is tracked on paper, since older systems didn’t lend themselves well to enabling this type of functionality.
  • Leverage-what-you-have strategy, where the legacy databases are integrated directly (usually for read-only operations), or the legacy functions are called via EAI-type adapter technology. I see direct access of legacy databases quite commonly for consolidated reporting, for example.

I’m not sure that the lines are so clearly drawn between each of these three strategies: the distinction between the type of functions that would constitute surrond versus extend is fuzzy in a lot of areas, and the technologies used for surrond and leverage-what-you-have can overlap significantly. However, it’s a useful categorization to start looking at how to start eating the legacy system integration elephant.

I also like Hill’s definition of SOA — an architectural style that is modular, distributable and loosely coupled — because it (rightly) takes the focus away from specific products or technologies. She goes on to define a service, or component, as a software process that acts in response to a request, and a web service as a special case that uses specific protocols and standards. Again, this takes the focus away from web services specifically in favour of just services, something that is essential if you want to maintain flexibility in how you create and consume services both inside and outside your organization. Consider that mashups typically consume services that use lighter-weight protocols than web services, for example.

One of the lessons to take away from this is that SOA and BPM can be done independently, but when combined, the whole is much greater than the sum of the parts. SOA provides the framework for creating services that will be consumed (assembled and orchestrated) by BPM; in turn, BPM puts a human face on SOA which makes it easier for the business to understand.

I’m off to the airport, so this conference is over for me. The blogging, however, goes on…

Gartner BPM summit day 1: Simon Hayward

After Sinur and Melenovsky’s welcome, Simon Hayward gave a great opening keynote yesterday, “Living in a process-centric world”. To quote the session description on the agenda:

Process is now gaining importance as an organizing concept for dealing with change at all levels. We live in a world of processes, becoming conscious of those processes and taking control of them can be the key to personal and corporate effectiveness.

As one attendee mentioned later, everything sounds more intelligent when it’s said with a British accent, and I have to admit to having a soft spot for anyone that says process with an “oh” rather than an “aw”. However, Hayward had some good content for us as well.

He started with the question of why we’re all thinking about process now, and linked it back to the fact that leaders in the industry became that way in part because of their focus on process — especially processes that touch their trading partners and customers. There are challenges around maintaining control over and having visibility into outsourced processes, as well as determining intellectual property rights in cases where the process itself may be a competitive differentiator.

Along the way, he floated the notion that agility (the ability to react to unexpected change) is becoming as, or more, important than innovation, and as I mentioned in a previous post, I interpret this to mean that reacting to market forces can actually be considered innovation if it’s done in the right way.

Another key point was compliance = explicit process management (taken from their 2005 Planning Guidance for Compliance report), which shows how process forms an integral part of compliance. I created a course on compliance for a customer last year, and process was a surprisingly large part of it: I found that if you can’t understand, control and report on your processes, you’re going to have a hard time getting compliant and proving it.

Then something came up for the second time that morning: Six Sigma. It appears that Gartner is making a strong link between Six Sigma and BPM at this conference (and likely in other research of theirs), although I found the Mikel Harry keynote this morning out of place, somehow, especially when he appeared to be using Six Sigma as a “brand” of sorts and distancing himself from the original statistical meaning. BPM certainly helps to provide a “closed loop” environment for Six Sigma’s Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, Control (DMAIC) continuous process improvement cycle through the inclusion of process analytics and simulation, but I think that it’s a bit dangerous to downplay the statistical significance and rigor of Six Sigma to somehow make it friendly to the BPM crowd. Hayward later showed a graph of overlaid hype cycles that showed BPM as the current incarnation of trends that start with quality (process improvement) and migrate through process reengineering to BPM. I don’t disagree, but that doesn’t mean that BPM is the next “version” of Six Sigma somehow.

Getting back to Hayward’s talk, he had a good list of the IT disciplines needed for a process-centric environment, with a necessary focus on impact analysis and selective regression testing: if we’re putting all that emphasis on agility, we’d better be able to understand the ripple effects of changes and be able to test scenarios before deploying them. He talked about how to assess both IT and business for their current state of process centricity, and showed a chart of how to approach the various scenarios:

I like the “Reflect” quadrant, where the business is ready and IT isn’t: that’s when the business needs to do some serious prioritization due to the limited capacity of IT, or find some other ways to do things.

He finished up with a list of great recommendations including having less respect for silos and getting rid of baronial hostility that really point to one of the key issues in a process-centric organization: process is part of the infrastructure, not just embedded in some departmental systems.

Gartner BPM summit day 1: Sinur and Melenovsky

The conference opened with the two key faces of Gartner’s BPM vision — Jim Sinur and Michael Melenovsky — giving a brief welcome talk that focussed on a BPM maturity model, or what they are calling BPM3. There was only one slide for their presentation (if you don’t count the cover slide) and it hasn’t been published for the conference attendees, so I’ll rely on my sketchy notes and somewhat imperfect memory to give an overview of the model:

  • Level 0: Acknowledge operational inefficiences, with potential for the use of some business intelligence technology to measure and monitor business activities. I maintain that there is something lower than this, or maybe a redefinition of level 0 is required, wherein the organization is in complete denial about their operational inefficiences. In CMM (the Capability Maturity Model for software development processes), for example, level 0 is equivalent to having no maturity around the processes; level 1 is the “initial” stage where an organization realizes that they’re really in a lot of trouble and need to do something about it.
  • Level 1: Process aware, using business process analysis techniques and tools to model and analyze business processes. Think Visio with some human intelligence behind it, or a more robust tool such as those from Proforma, iGrafx or IDS Scheer.
  • Level 2: Process control, the domain of BPMS, where process models and rules can now be executed, and some optimization can be done on the processes. They admitted that this is the level on which the conference focusses, since few organizations have moved very far beyond this point. Indeed, almost every customer that I have that uses BPM is somewhere in this range, although many of them are (foolishly) neglecting the optimization potential that this brings.
  • Level 3: Enterprise process management, where BPM moves beyond departmental systems and becomes part of the corporate infrastructure, which typically also opens up the potential for processes that include trading partners and customers. This is a concept that I’ve been discussing extensively with my customers lately, namely, the importance of having BPM (and BRE and BI) as infrastructure components, not just embedded within departmental applications, because it’s going to be nearly impossible to realize any sort of SOA vision without these basic building blocks available.
  • Level 4: Enterprise performance management, which starts to look at the bigger picture of corporate performance management (which is what Gartner used to call this — are they changing CPM to EPM??) and how processes tie into that. I think that this is a critical step that organizations have to be considering now: CPM is a great early warning indicator for performance issues, but also provides a huge leap forward in issues such as maintaining compliance. I just don’t understand why Cognos or other vendors in this space aren’t at this conference talking about this.
  • Level 5: Competitive differentiation, where the business is sufficiently agile due to control over the processes that new products and services can be easily created and deployed. Personally, I believe that competitive differentiation is a measure of how well that you’re doing right from level 1 on up, rather than a separate level itself: it’s an indicator, not a goal per se.

That’s it for now, I’m off to lunch. At this rate, I’ll catch up on all the sessions by sometime next week. 🙂

Gartner BPM summit day 1 in review

I know, I should have posted all this yesterday, but I didn’t realize that there was wifi at the conference until late in the day so left my laptop at the hotel, and Movable Type doesn’t allow me to blog by email from my Blackberry. Today, however, I have my trusty tablet in hand and hope to blog throughout the day when I get a chance. I’ll post all these entries under the category Gartner BPM so that you can more easily find them by clicking on the category in the right sidebar.

Some great sessions at the conference, although I think that it would be greatly improved by opening up the speaking slots a bit. Right now, it’s mostly Gartner analysts, a few select Gartner customers, a few vendors (who apparently pay for the privilege so it’s really just an extension of their booth marketing presence), and a few odd selections such as the keynote by Mikel Harry of the Six Sigma Management Institute (probably a good management consultant but not an inspiring speaker) that I just left early. Gartner has sufficient pull to be able to do a limited call for papers that would result in some really excellent presentations to complement their own analysts’ views without diluting the value of the conference. Maybe another year.

A key theme that I’ve heard in a couple of talks: agility (the ability to react to unexpected change) is becoming as, or more, important than innovation: you don’t need to define and implement everything up front if you have confidence in your ability to react to change. The way that I interpret that is that reacting to market forces is the new innovation. Think about it.

I’ll summarize some of the more interesting sessions in separate posts following this, but suffice it to say that my favourites yesterday were Simon Hayward who delivered the keynote “Living in a Process-Centric World”, Janelle Hill with “Leveraging Existing IT Assets in BPM Initiatives”, and a short but very dynamic presentation by Patrick Morrissey from Savvion on “The Seven Deadly Sins of BPM”.

Today, I’m looking forward to this afternoon’s session by Jim Sinur on “When Will the Power Vendors Offer Credible BPM Solutions?”, which promises:

The power vendors have been lagging behind some of the more technically advanced and assertive BPM vendors, but recently each has made moves on the right direction. We expect the “Giants” to try to out stride some of the more advanced and nimble BPMS players in the long run and become a viable options for more than those who buy in a “best of brand” fashion. This session will outline the progress to date of the power vendors, the expected time lines, and where the best-of-breed vendors will try to widen the gap.

  • Where are the power vendors in relationship with more advanced BPMS players?
  • Who is in the best position to close the gap?
  • What differentiators are likely to keep the power vendors at bay?

 

I’ve been asking the same questions.

On hockey stick projections

Last night, I was having dinner with some friends, one of whom works for a large BPM vendor. He commented that the BPM market had not taken off as predicted, and I said that it certainly wasn’t meeting the hockey stick projections that the industry experts predict for BPM.

“Hockey stick projections?!”, he exclaimed, “We’re not even finished the first period yet!”

Business-IT collaboration in rules and process

A great post by James Taylor on business and IT collaboration as it applies to business rules:

This might lead one to suppose that business users should just be given tools that let them right the rules themselves in some unconstrained way. Like the healthcare folks I was talking with, I don’t think so. The reality is that the rules must be deployed in a real system with performance and scalability needs. The rules must execute against data stored and managed in other information systems. Business users are not as used to the discipline of QA and testing that most organizations would want to see before new rules are rolled out.

He goes on to discuss how to create the right environment for business and IT to collaborate on business rules management.

Now, just take his post and replace the word “rules” with “process”, and you’ve made my case as well.

BPM and automation

A couple of weeks ago, I posted a letter from a reader who asked the question “Is Automation BPM?” Peter Dawson and David Chassels both chimed in with their comments, and I want to add my thoughts. Excepts from the original letter:

I have a hard time referring to it as BPM when a person simply automates a business process. To me that is workflow. Granted, we have powerful stand-alone workflow engines now that allow a workflow to route work between more people and systems than ever before, but it is still workflow.

If you have a workflow process that is less focused on automating work and more focused on gathering data about a process for later analysis, then you have entered the realm of BPM.

I disagree. I started in the old workflow world: for the past 18 years, I’ve been focussed on processes that usually have a large human-facing component. I started with traditional workflow products that only provided person-to-person routing of scanned documents, which is about as old fashioned as it gets in the workflow world. Since I worked for most of that time providing services to the customers of these systems, I did a lot of automation and integration work from scratch because that functionality just didn’t exist in the workflow systems. Want an automated function in your 1993 IBM ImagePlus system to escalate items that have been sitting in a queue too long? No problem, we’d write a daemon that would cycle through the work in a queue and push specific items to an exception queue. Want to integrate your 1991 Keyfile system with an Oracle database application? Give us a few weeks, we’d write a front-end application that integrated the two systems at the presentation layer by making API calls to each system. Want to have some process reports from your 1994 FileNet Visual WorkFlo system? Okay, we’d write a batch process to interrogate the database history logs each night, extract the process-related data and print some reports.

The point is, the systems as provided by the vendors had no automation and no integration: they were concerned only with the flow of work from one queue to another. Work. Flow. Workflow. Everything else — integration, automation, process monitoring and governance — was custom built. I could, in fact, make the argument that what we did as services firms was to turn vendors’ workflow products into business process management systems.

From a semantic standpoint, the term “workflow” has been absorbed into most definitions of “BPM” (except, perhaps, those definitions created by ESB vendors who prefer an integration-focussed definition). Even the old-style workflow that I describe above — just routing from one person to another — is a part of BPM, even though a system that only provides that level of functionality would not compete very well in the broad BPM marketplace. The fact is, however, that almost every product in the BPM space has a set of functions that doesn’t quite overlap with anyone others, and doesn’t overlap at all with some other products that are also called BPM. Gartner published a report on BPMS selection criteria a few months back that listed 10 major areas of functionality, but there are many products in the BPM space that don’t have one or more of those functions covered. The problem, as I’ve written about before, is that the term is too broad, and was a bit of an artificial creation on the part of the analysts, who took workflow, EAI, and anything else remotely related to process and called it all BPM.

To get back to my rebuttal, then, I believe that as soon as you add integration and automation capabilities to human-facing workflow, you’ve got BPM (as opposed to just being able to call it BPM because workflow is now defined as a subset of BPM). From the other side of the house, the same can be said about adding human-facing functionality to EAI to create BPM.

SOA webinars this week

Two worthwhile SOA webinars from ebizQ in the past two days. Yesterday, it was Developing an SOA Ecosystem with Steve Craggs from the Integration Consortium. Craggs, who also runs a U.K.-based consulting company, Saint Consulting, spoke for a solid 40 minutes, starting with a quick but thorough definition of SOA, moving on to the concept and components of an SOA ecosystem as it should exist in your organization, and finishing up with some tips for success for building an ecosystem that can support 100’s of services. And, I loved two of his quotes near the end: “SOA is not just about technology — it’s a transformation of the business” and “SOA ecosystems ensure sustainable advantage”, very business-oriented views of SOA benefits that are often lost in the more-frequent technical discussions about SOA.

He talked about how SOA has changed from a focus purely on web services (the little blue bit in the diagram below) to a focus on all the other things that need to exist in order to make SOA successful:

My only argument with his taxonomy of the ecosystem is that he puts orchestration as part of the mediation services, and BPM floating somewhere out there as a consumer of the SOA ecosystem, almost as part of the application layer. However, I consider orchestration to be part of the larger definition of BPM, hence believe that BPM belongs as part of the SOA ecosystem itself and in fact includes most of the mediation services that he lists.

My favourite bit was where he referred to web services as “an answer looking for a problem”, and went on to list why just using web services over HTTP is problematic in building an SOA, and why it led to the development of the SOA ecosystem concept. He also gave some compelling reasons why the “best of breed” approach is still the best route in assembling your SOA ecosystem today, and the value of an enterprise service bus and the service registry. None of this is rocket science — in fact, his bit on the importance of correct granularity for services is really just an SOA twist on the age-old programmers’ dilemma of granularity — but it is a nicely packaged talk, delivered in a way that’s understandable to an SOA newbie. Definitely worth a listen.

Today, Frank Kenney from Gartner gave a short but impassioned talk on Policy-Driven SOA, followed by a fairly informative session from Sean Fitts, chief architect at Amberpoint, the webinar sponsor.

Under the heading “SOA does not come for free”, Kenney talked about everything that’s required to get SOA in place: infrastructure, methodology, services creation, testing, etc., but states that it’s worth the price — an argument that I seem to be making to customers over and over again.

He feels that you need to have a certain type of infrastructure that allows you to govern what’s going on in SOA. It’s a different view than Cragg’s SOA ecosystem shown above — kind of a slice across the lower half of Cragg’s diagram, or maybe a third dimension.

Kenney talks about services, processes and policies as assets that can be used for competitive differentiation, which really lines up with Cragg’s statement about ensuring sustainable advantage. What they’re both saying is that the old cowboy web services methods aren’t enough any more: if you really expect to reap the potential benefits of SOA, you need to start putting some discipline in place.

He finished up by stating that governance is a business issue, and that no one vendor can sell governance, but they can help you to achieve governance.

Replays are available at the links. I’d love to see these available as downloadable video for my iPod, by the way.