Author: sandy

AIIM Expo registration now open

Registration for the AIIM Expo 2006, to be held May 16-18 in Philadelphia, is now available online. I haven’t attended AIIM in a few years, but I’m thinking about attending the exhibits. So far, however, the list of BPM vendors and BI vendors look pretty sparse — I think that most of these vendors tend to hit industry-related shows rather than general (and somewhat outdated) shows like AIIM, or hold public webinars. The advantage of attending a trade show, in theory, is that you see the new/little vendors/products that might not otherwise hit your radar screen, but I’m not sure that many of them are coming to AIIM.

And, if I want a really good product demo, there’s better ways to do that than at a trade show: I’ve had two private demos directly from vendors via Webex in the past two weeks, with another coming up soon. Not that I don’t want to visit Philly, but Webex is definitely the way to go for demos.

Gartner on BPA for 2006

Gartner has released their Magic Quadrant for business process analysis, and the first big news is that they’ve updated the style of the graphics: rounded corners, one-sided arrows and –wait for it — orange dots!

Seriously, though, this is a good report and comparision of the primary tools used for modelling and analyzing your business processes, whether or not you’re going to automate some of those processes using BPM. However, it’s the linkage between BPA and BPM that is really driving the BPA marketplace, including the whole round-tripping process that allows BAM results to be fed back into the BPA tool for further analysis and optimization.

Many of the BPM vendors have BPA included in their product; in fact, Gartner makes a note that they dropped FileNet from this report since their BPA is so deeply embedded that it’s not sold as a separate product, but they’ve added other BPM vendors such as Fuego (now BEA) and Savvion, although they languish in the lower left corner. In other words, you’d use their BPA if you were using their BPM, but you’re not going to buy it as a standalone BPA tool, as I’ve discussed previously. For that, you look to the big guns in the top right of the quadrant, such as IDS Scheer and Proforma. Although IDS Scheer focusses purely on process modelling, Proforma, Telelogic (formerly Popkin) and a few others go far beyond that to full enterprise architecture modelling, of which process modelling is an important but small part. I haven’t written much about EA lately, but it’s definitely a topic very near and dear to my heart.

I find it interesting that Gartner has chosen the vendors for this MQ in such a way that they are only in the “leaders” or “niche players” quadrants: not a one in the “visionaries” or “challengers” quadrants. They give an explanation for why this happened in the full report, but I feel that the comparison chart is less useful for tracking future trends without the visionaries and challengers. Personally, I would have put Microsoft (Visio in the BPA product under review) a bit more to the left into the challengers’ quadrant, since it’s not clear to me that their vision for making Visio a full BPA offering is particularly complete.

Last year, I posted about BPTrends‘ report on enterprise architecture, process modelling and simulation tools, which includes many of those in Gartner’s upper right quadrant. The vendors paid to be part of the BPTrends report, so it’s not exactly indepedent analysis, but it includes some good background material on the market (and it’s free).

Read my blog

Several months ago, I ordered some of Hugh MacLeod‘s Blogcards, which I hand out regularly in place of my regular corporate-looking business card to people who I meet in more casual situations. In particular, I ordered the “Read My Blog” card, because I often find myself referring people to my blog for more information on something that we’re discussing.

What I really need to do, however, is start handing them to people that I have known for years.

Yesterday, I had the occasion to meet or telephone three friends. All of them work in technology. At one point, we used to all work for the same BPM technology company (during my brief hiatus in corporate-land). Two of them (both very technical) still work there, and the third works for a company that provides aggregated business analysis content through RSS feeds, among other methods.

None of them read my blog, although the two who still work for the BPM technology company could undoubtedly learn something about their market, their customers, or even their own company by reading it. In fact, all three of them don’t read any blogs on a regular basis, and don’t know how to use an RSS reader — even the one who now sells content via RSS to businesses.

I only have one thing to say: read my blog.

Passion in entrepreneurship

I went to a literary reading last night that paid tribute to author Barbara Gowdy, who read from her novel in progress after we heard readings from five other great authors about their views and experiences of Gowdy. Catherine Graham, one of the other authors who spoke, made the most amazing statement in her short piece “It Chooses You”: she said that if you write, you should write about what obsesses you. I’m a huge believer in being passionate about my work, and definitely do my best work when it’s something that I just can’t put down, so that really resonated with me.

This morning, I saw these entrepreneurial proverbs (for geeks) by Marc Hedlund on O’Reilly Radar (via Boing Boing), which included basically the same advice as Graham offers: “pay attention to the idea that won’t leave you alone”.

James Taylor reporting from Gartner BI

James Taylor‘s been at the Gartner Business Intelligence Summit this week. On Monday, he posted some great thoughts on process, rules, BI and agility:

You can use business rules to automate decisions in business processes and then use analytics to optimize these decisions and hence the processes…

You must be able to change a process that you are monitoring when your monitoring tells you that something is wrong. Real-time measurement should not be combined with systems that take weeks or months to change.

Although there are caveats to that last sentence — for example, some real-time measurement is intended to allow the human elements in a process to change rather than the system, such as work re-allocation — I’d still like to have it tattooed on my forehead for every client to read. Making measurements with the intention of enabling agility is useless in many of the BPM installations today, not because the underlying BPMS isn’t agile, but because the customer chooses (or is coerced) to undertake a huge degree of customization that effectively pours concrete over the system.

Then later that day, he posts more on how BPM, BRE and analytics go together like chocolate and peanut butter (that’s my characterization, but I’m sure James would agree) — that seems to be a popular theme at the summit. He also posts about the Tuesday and Wednesday sessions, although less BPM-related than the Monday sessions.

Maybe because I come from the BPM side of the house, I don’t really see why the big fuss to rename parts of the BI space: BI seems to be an outdated term now, referring only to reporting on historical information from a data warehouse or operational data store. Other terms like CPM (corporate performance management), BAM (business activity monitoring), CEP (complex event processing) and EDM (enterprise decision management, which also involves BRE) have sprung up to cover the near-real-time space that I still think of as BI — after all, there’s much of the data aggregation, analytics and other common technology at the core. Many of these newer terms are touted as “[something more fabulous] BI”, such as James’ reference to EDM as “deployable BI”, but it feels a bit like the emperor’s new clothes. Maybe they’re all just BI 2.0.

Eventful mashup hits Boing Boing

Before I went to Mashup Camp, I exchanged emails with Chris Radcliff of EVDB/Eventful, and it was great to meet him face-to-face at camp. EVDB makes an API for managing event, venue, and calendar data, and Eventful uses that API in an events/calendaring/social networking mashup of events submitted directly to Eventful plus those grabbed from other event sites.

Today, I see that Eventful was covered on Boing Boing, which should bring it a huge amount of well-deserved attention. Congrats!

Is Automation BPM?

I received the following opinion by email from a Column 2 reader who makes a distinction between automation/workflow and BPM. I invite discussion, and I’ll be adding in my $0.02.

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. Just because the workflow engines now call themselves BPM does not mean that a person is doing BPM when they use them.

When a website or an article about BPM touts the benefits of BPM as being the ability to speed up or automate a business process, reduce the time work is in transit, pinpoint where work is real-time, gather all relevant data on one screen for the worker, increase accountability or allow for the automation of exceptions, I feel that that author just does not ‘get it’. Getting the right thing to the right person (or system) at the right time is workflow; its benefits have long been established (i.e. http://e-workflow.org).

Workflow is powerful and generally has very high payback. One of the weaknesses of workflow is that the process you just automated may not be the best or most efficient process. That is where BPM comes in. 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. If there are places in the BPM process that can be automated while still keeping the focus on gathering the metrics, that is and added bonus. In my mind that constitutes the incorporation of workflow capabilities and benefits into your BPM effort.

I envision a BPM flow initially being only human steps where a person reports back that they have done certain things. In the beginning it would just be additional overhead. As more information is gathered and analyzed this human process is rearranged quickly to remove bottlenecks and inefficiencies. Over time automation of redundant or time consuming steps are added. When automation is added we must be very careful not to make the flow inflexible since the primary goal is to gather data and be flexible, not to automate. If a point of automation is identified but it will add inflexibility, then maybe a tactical workflow application is created and the BPM flow just consumes it as a service. You get the automation but keep the BPM flow as flexible as possible.

Workflow is workflow and BPM is BPM. The trend is to use the workflow engines to do BPM, but they are still distinct entities and are implemented in distinctly different ways. I think this distinction is important because you are not going to get all the benefits promised by the BPM crowed if you spend all your time automating. Automation is good, but BPM + Strategic Automation is better.

Toronto bloggers dinner wrapup

I attended the bloggers’ dinner in Toronto on Monday (photographic evidence here), and had the chance to meet Shel Israel, Alec Saunders (who helped to arrange the event and blogged about it here) and his business partner Howard Thaw, and a lot of other bloggers who I have previously met only via RSS. Something that I found interesting: every one of the people with whom I exchanged cards also uses LinkedIn (the professional networking site), although a couple of them have a dismally small number of connections. My usual practice is to check for each new contact on LinkedIn and invite them to connect immediately, before we both forget why our conversation was important.

I had a lengthy chat with Peter Flaschner and Lucia Mancuso from The Blog Studio about how they design and consult on corporate blogging for small businesses, which I found interesting considering all of my friends with small businesses who I’ve been nagging to start blogging. I use my blog as my primary marketing vehicle, and Peter and Lucia are trying to bring that same sensibility to other small businesses.

Also had interesting conversations with Mike Bowler from Gargoyle Software, who helps companies to improve their (web) software development procesess through the introduction of XP/Agile concepts; Shelley McKay and Michael Bodalski from Cricket Marketing and PR, whose home page of their corporate site is actually in blog format (!); and Peter Dawson, with whom I discussed the relative merits of using the term “landscaping” versus “architecture” as applied to business, IT and enterprise architecture.

I also met Timothy Li, an eager young engineering student at University of Waterloo who, when I told him that I graduated Waterloo engineering in 1984, rather untactfully pointed out that that was the year that he was born (he also said that he didn’t realize that the Systems Design Engineering program was “that old”). Tim followed up our exchange by posting a comment to my blog, so I checked out his blog and almost fell off my chair laughing at his retelling of a conversation where I was present. I passed it on to Rick Segal (coincidentally, the only person at the event who I actually knew face-to-face), although I’m not sure he laughed as much of the description of him as “mid aged” and obviously striking terror in the heart of younger men. 🙂

Although dinner never materialized, it was a great get-together for Toronto bloggers. Coming from a closet introvert who cringes at the thought of business networking events, that’s high praise.

Very personal banking

Almost a year ago, I wrote about a borrowing and lending exchange called Zopa that had just launched in the U.K. — a sort of peer-to-peer lending service where individuals participate directly with each other rather than through a bank or other financial institution. Since most of my clients are financial institutions, I found this an interesting bit of disintermediation, except for once it was the big guys (the banks) being disintermediated out of the supply chain.

The Economist just published news of a similar exchange (paid subscription required to read article) opening in the U.S.: Prosper. There are a few differences in how they operate (Zopa always spreads a loan across at least 50 lenders, whereas Prosper allows the higher-risk scenario of one lender to assume an entire loan), but they both take on much of the administration work around the loan — credit scoring, collection agencies in the case of a borrower defaulting — for a fee of 1% of the loan amount taken from the borrower. Prosper also allows borrowers to form social networking-type groups, such as alumni from a particular university, where the loan repayment track record of the group can have a positive reflection on the members, and therefore lower the expected interest rate. In addition to reduced interest rates, the Economist also discusses the warm-and-fuzzy part of the equation:

There is a psychic pay-off, too. Users on Zopa have said that they like lending and borrowing within a community of ““real”” people, rather than through a faceless bank. Mr Duvall [Zopa’s CEO] notes that affinity credit cards (ie, those linked to an activity or membership) tend to have lower default rates than traditional credit cards. “The sense of community matters,”” he says.

It will be interesting to see if this technique that’s proving successful in the British marketplace can make inroads with Americans.