Author: sandy

BPM Leaders?!

I know that I’m going crazy with posts today, but there seems to be so much interesting stuff out there after two weeks of dreck.

After my earlier post about BPM and SOA, I had to link to Bruce Silver’s article in Intelligent Enterprise called Sizing Up the BPM Leaders, wherein he quotes a survey that shows that more than 1,600 participants believe that IBM, Microsoft and Oracle are the leaders in BPM, in spite of the fact that they’re offering only agile development environments for their SOA middleware rather than true BPM; in fact, they’re missing most of the functionality that the analysts believe to be essential in order to even call your product “BPM”. His summary:

BPM is much more than Web services orchestration: It must also integrate business modeling, simulation, business rules, analytics and BAM. BPM connects business analysts and process owners more directly to IT solutions rather than leaving them as frustrated bystanders. BPM pureplay vendors have largely implemented this vision but aren’t getting the recognition for it. The blissfully ignorant big platform players are nevertheless perceived as BPM leaders.

Egad.

Hey, you’ve got SOA in my BPM! No, you’ve got BPM in my SOA!

BPTrends has a newly-published article by a new author, Mike Rosen, on BPM and SOA. He makes the distinction between BPM and SOA, then wraps up with why they’re so complementary:

Together, BPM and SOA provide a perfect combination for enterprise computing. BPM provides the higher-level abstraction for defining businesses processes, as well as other important capabilities of monitoring and managing those processes. Services provide the functions that support those processes. SOA provides the capabilities for services to be combined together and to support and create an agile, flexible enterprise. BPM without SOA is useful for building applications, but difficult to extend to the enterprise. SOA without BPM is useful for creating reusable and consistent services, but lacks the ability to turn those services into an agile, competitive enterprise.

In other words, SOA provides the design philosophy and enterprise context for building services, and BPM orchestrates those services. Two great tastes, together at last.

He also discusses the practice of creating relevant services based on the required functionality of the enterprise, rather than just putting lipstick on the pig by developing a pass-through wrapper around each legacy application. There’s a good diagram in the article (it’s a PDF, so I can’t link to it directly) showing the layers and linkages involved.

Changing business models = changing business processes

I read this post by Alex Osterwalder on the external forces that impact an organization’s business model — technological change, competitive forces, customer demand, social environment, and legal environment — which in turn has me thinking about how these business model changes impact business processes.

This is precisely why I look at issues of enterprise architecture and BPM together, even when a client has specifically engaged me for a BPM initiative. In a perfect world, the following occurs:

  1. A business model changes based on internal or external factors
  2. One or more business processes have to change to respond to the changing business model
  3. The business processes are implemented using a BPMS
  4. EA provides the linkages between the business model and the information systems (including the BPMS) so that the right changes can be made to the process in order to respond to the changing business model

Unfortunately, there’s a lot of roadblocks to establishing what I feel is a fairly obvious requirement for remaining competitive in the face of changing business models:

  • Impact analysis: many organizations don’t document their business models (by this, I mean their high-level company business models, not their departmental business processes and procedures), or don’t make adequate links from their “strategic planning” sessions to all the layers below that have to implement those models and plans. Because of this, there is no clear link between the change to a business model, the change to an underlying business process, and the change to the supporting information systems.
  • Automation: many organizations are still using manual processes and decision-making for well-understood business processes. For example, some insurance companies process all of their claims manually; others have greatly improved productivity by using automated adjudication systems that pass only the more complex claims to a human claims adjudicator. Although the former may understand that a BPMS can help their business, they see it primarily as a way of paving the cowpaths so as to provide faster movement of information between the same old human decision-making processes, rather than a tool for automating some of the steps and — with the addition of business rules — removing some of the human decision-making.
  • Agility: some organizations that implement a BPMS end up with automated business processes that are frozen in time due to an excessive amount of customization around the implementation. Although they’ve achieved automation (albeit, optimized for a point in time usually about a year prior to implementation), they’ve completely lost agility due to the complexity of changing the BPMS by creating a legacy business process.

These issues, which I often uncover during a client assignment, require more than just a few tweaks to their BPMS: they require that both EA and business rules be brought into consideration in order to provide the business agility that the client is expecting.

To begin with, EA can help to create the necessary models and the linkages between the layers to allow the impact of a business model change to be reflected in the business processes and the supporting information systems. If you can’t do impact analysis, then you don’t have any type of reliable business agility since you won’t understand all of the impacts that a change to any part of the organization might have on other parts.

BRMS are an essential facilitator to business agility. First, because they put the business rules in the hands of the business (or at least in a form that’s understood by the business), so that there’s much less latency in the process of changing business rules. Secondly, if a shared repository of business rules is implemented across the organization, then a change to a business rule can be immediately be reflected in every process and system that accesses it, from the next call handled by a call centre operator accessing a CRM, to work in progress in a BPMS.

Of course, I see BPMS as a given for business agility: it lets you automate business processes while still involving human intelligence at the points required in the process; integrate business rules for decision-making; and more easily make changes to the business process with less user retraining. There are good and bad ways to implement a BPMS (as with any system), and care must be taken to integrate other tools (such as BRMS or BI) where appropriate, rather than go down the path of excessive customization which can hinder agility.

The bottom line is that although a BPMS can be a huge contributor to business agility, it can’t do it alone: you need some amount of EA in order to understand what you’re supposed to be doing with that BPMS (that’s the business-IT alignment that everyone talks about), and you need some other tools like BRMS to keep things agile through a minimum of customization.

Software development methodology

An excellent article by Matthew Heusser about the tradeoffs in designing a software development methodology. I’ve been involved in software development for over 20 years as a developer, designer and architect, both within software product companies and as a systems integrator or consultant to large organizations’ IT departments, and I’ve seen a wide range of software development methodologies from rigidly-imposed waterfall to much more agile techniques. Many of my customers are large and conservative, and tend towards the more rigidly structured methodologies that fit into the larger corporate budgetary process. Heusser nails the problem with that:

For example, if the organization wants accountability and predictability, it may require documented requirements with various levels of review and signoff, and create a change-control board with the power to line-item veto changes in requirements that may affect schedule. Everything sounds good so far…until about six months later, when the VP of New Product Development can’t get the feature set changed in order to respond to a market demand. Some ninny down in software engineering is holding up the company’s ability to deliver products to customers, all in the name of “process improvement”!

He also examines the tradeoffs between estimates and code, delivery date or features, control or productivity, and organic decision making versus mechanic. He’s obviously a fan of agile development, preferring (like me) to get a simple working system in place first, then let the customer set priorities on what features to implement next.

(via Managing Knowledge Processes)

Business blogging in 2006

Nothing like starting off the new year with some new corporate attitudes: an article in today’s Globe and Mail (which in turn, reviews a Business Week article that I couldn’t locate) talks about business trends for 2006. One of these with which I completely agree is blogging as a marketing tool; it became painfully obvious with a mid-year Business Week cover on blogs that blogs have become mainstream. I’ve mentioned previously that this blog is my main marketing channel: I don’t do any sort of traditional advertising, and rely primarily on personal contact and word of mouth for new business. This blog is a way of extending that word of mouth (or “word of blog”) by putting my ideas and opinions online; not exactly an online portfolio, but a way for anyone out there who’s interested in working with me to learn a bit more about how I think.

I had a funny experience in a meeting a month ago with two people from a large systems integrator: the sales guy asked me how, as a one-person firm, I do sales and marketing, and I told him that this blog was my key marketing tool. His expression was something between distaste and derision, while his project manager colleague asked me what a blog was. Knowing what I already know about blogs and other types of viral marketing, and reinforced by the opinions that I’m seeing everywhere (including the G&M/BW article quoted above), I can see that these guys — and likely a large part of their organization — are on the wrong side of the digital divide, and they don’t even know it: in fact, they would describe themselves as being on the cutting edge of technology. It put me in mind of an older gapingvoid post about smarter conversations: I especially like point #5: “Ruthlessly avoid working for companies that ‘don’t get it'”. Many of my customers embrace the smarter conversations concepts, even if they don’t know what a blog is (yet), so I’m not ready to fire any of them yet; however, I can do my best to avoid partnering with SI’s who don’t get it, since that usually results in an experience akin to a steamroller running over me.

Over the past few months, I’ve bookmarked a number of posts about business blogging, and this has been a good opportunity to review them. I’m not a “professional blogger”, that is, I don’t get paid to blog (and the ad revenue isn’t enough to even cover my ISP charges), but I see blogging as an essential part of my business because of the global microbrand potential: I am a tiny brand but have the potential to provide my services anywhere in the world, and this blog is part of what gets me out of my own backyard. I provide some niche services out in the long tail, so I’m marketing to a few customers spread over a large geographic area.

The Content Factor’s To Blog or Not to Blog states a key point, although their message is targeted at larger companies: “Companies don’t blog; people blog.” This blog contains my personal opinions, not some groomed marketing-speak that I think will sell my services. My premise is that if you read my opinions (and even agree with them sometimes), then we’re more likely to do business together sometime in the future.

Mike McLaughlin on Guerrilla Marketing asked Should Consultants Blog?, and stated that you don’t really need to blog if you work in an industry where blogs are “still an oddity, not a fixture”. I couldn’t disagree more: I work almost exclusively with financial services and insurance clients, typically with their back-office operations, where blogs are definitely an oddity. However, I’m starting to hear many comments from people within my clients’ organizations about how they’re reading my blog (which they found because it’s right there in my email signature) and are learning something from it. Presumably, that adds value to their business day, reinforces their good opinion of me and my skills as they applies to their business, and therefore improves our business relationship. Don’t assume that just because your clients are in a “traditional” industry that they aren’t interested in expanding their horizons by reading some blogs of value. Especially yours.

Gadget week #5: Video iPod

I received one of the new video iPods as an early Christmas present, and I’m loving it. Although I loaded up a bunch of music that I’d ripped for my previous MP3 player, I mostly use it to listen to podcasts and audio books. There are a few video podcasts that I’m watching on it; although the screen resolution is great, I’m unlikely to watch anything as lengthy as a TV program. I’m starting to like the iTunes interface; I was using the much simpler iPodder (now Juice) for podcast subscriptions previously, but this has the advantage of easily synching them up with the iPod and doing a whole lot more than iPodder does. Earilier this week, on the subway coming home from a client, I watched the daily 5-minute video podcast from Rocketboom, then listened to a chapter of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. Cool.

The down side: the control to scroll through the menu lists is a bit jumpy sometimes, making it hard to land on the right item. More importantly, however, there is a weird interaction with my new Blackberry: when I have them tucked side-by-side in my handbag, the iPod volume changes (usually increases) when the Blackberry transmits or receives data. I originally thought that there was a fault in the iPod, but noticed that it was actually a device interaction one day when on the subway: as soon as we hit an above-ground spot on the line where the Blackberry could send/receive, the iPod volume changed. I’m guessing that the Apple engineers never tested for that. And one last complaint: why can’t they use a standard USB cable instead of one with a proprietary connector at the device end? Even the Blackberry uses a standard USB cable with the mini-port at the device end, but Apple has created one more piece of cable on my desk.

That’s it for gadget week — see you in the new year!

Gadget week #4: HP dvd640 DVD recorder

This was a birthday present (well, at least he doesn’t buy me kitchen appliances), and it’s great to have a super-fast CD and DVD reader and recorder that — in theory — burns the DL (double-layer) 8.5GB disks. Ripping an entire music CD using iTunes takes less than four minutes; writing a 4GB data backup to DVD is faster than I ever imagined possible. Although I bought a lightweight external CD writer/DVD reader with the tc4200 (which has no internal CD drive), I keep that for travel and use this racehorse for everyday use.

The down side: the “in theory” bit about the 8.5GB disks. I bought a pack of TDK DVD+R DL disks, which appear to meet the specifications, but had no luck burning. After several back-and-forth emails with HP support, they admitted that “DL discs that are manufactured using the ‘2P’ process will not be compatible with the dvd640 series”, and recommended that I buy HP (of course) or Verbatim disks. It would have been nice if they had mentioned this in any of the product documentation or on the product website before I spent $30 on a pack of 5 disks, or even if they explained what the dreaded “2P” process is and how I can tell whether disks were manufactured with that process from the packaging. Apparently HP is working on a firmware upgrade to try and fix the problem, but I’m not holding my breath. In the meantime, I bought a 100-pack of 4GB disks for under $50 at Costco, so I’m quite happy with $0.50 per disk instead, even if they are only half the capacity of the $6 ones.

Gadget week #3: Blackberry 7290

I admit it, I’m a Crackberry addict. I have been for years, since I bought my old 957 and started having access to my email wherever I went in North America (well, almost everywhere: since it ran over the digital pager networks, there were some large holes in rural areas). After more than four years, I decided that there wasn’t room in my handbag for my old Nokia phone and my 957 — and they were both starting to be an embarrassment in front of my geeky friends — so I combined functionality and went for the Blackberry 7290. It’s a GSM/GPRS phone/email/PDA all-in-one device that is supposed to work almost anywhere, although I haven’t travelled outside of North America since I bought it, but it’s certainly worked everywhere that I’ve been, including many places where the older technology didn’t work. I really like how everything is integrated: I get an email from someone, and as long as they’re in my address book (which I synch with my Outlook address book), I can call them directly from the email. Or email them back. Or SMS them. All without looking them up in the address book as a separate operation.

The down side: the screen is smaller than the old 957, although the good resolution and colour makes up for that somewhat. However, I did have to bump the font size in order to hold off the bifocals for another year. There are a few functions that I’d like to be more convenient, for example, call forwarding (which I do whenever I’m in my office) requires way too much navigation.

Gadget week #2: Crumpler “Luncheon” computer bag

Buying a new computer naturally made me think about buying a new computer bag to put it in, even though I don’t do the amount of travel that I used to do. My old Kensington backpack-style bag has travelled a few hundred thousand miles with me and is showing its age; plus, I wanted to lend out my (still usable) older laptop and it was more convenient to put everthing in the old bag.

Originally designed and made in Australia, although now manufactured in China, I’ve heard good things about Crumpler bags and liked what I saw on their website so went searching for their computer bags in Toronto. I thought that my new laptop would fit in the smaller “Breakfast Buffet” bag, but it was just a bit too tight due to the thickness of the machine, and didn’t leave enough room for the paperwork that I inevitably end up carrying along: the Luncheon bag is a few inches larger and gave me the room that I needed for everything. The bag appears to be pretty much indestructible, although time will tell, and definitely fashionable. I bought the olive green one with an electric orange interior (I figured that the orange exterior wasn’t quite corporate enough), and I can’t imagine that I’ll see very many the same in my travels, which means that no one is going to pick up my bag by mistake. I had to venture into foreign territory to find it: Carbon Computing, a store that caters to those of the Apple persuasion. A very different experience from the usual PC store, where the (invariably male) sales clerk wants to talk about bus speeds regardless of what you’re buying; I was helped by a waif-like young woman whose regular job is in the arts, and she waxed poetic about the bags and how much she loves hers, even though she puts an iMac in it.

The down side: there’s no outside pocket for holding boarding passes and the like while dashing through airports, requiring me to open the front flap completely and dig inside for things that won’t fit in my tiny handbag. That front flap has the stickiest Velcro on it that I have ever seen — I think that you could stick yourself to the ceiling with a small patch of this stuff — so opening the bag is a noisy and slightly energetic activity.

Also on the down side: that Velcro is quite rough, and I managed to abrade one knuckle while digging into an inside pocket that also fastens shut with Velcro.

Gadget week #1: HP/Compaq tc4200 convertible laptop/tablet

I adore this machine. I come from the good old days of presentations done on overhead projectors with transparencies, and there was never a time when my transparencies weren’t covered with ink by the time that I finished a presentation. Then, along came PowerPoint and I was forced to gesture wildly at the screen instead, which is amazingly unsatisfactory. The tc4200 works like a regular laptop, but the screen swivels around and folds down flat, covering the keyboard, allowing me to write directly on the screen with the provided stylus. Now, I do my presentations on the tablet and am able to write and highlight all over the slides again. I’ve used this for several days of training plus some casual presentations that I’ve done in the past few months, and it works like a charm. I’ve had several favourable comments and envious glances about it from the attendees, as well. It’s also great for curling up in an easy chair and poking through my feeds in the web version of Bloglines, which is mostly a point-and-click activity that can easily be done with the stylus. The handwriting recognition is quite good, although my typing speed is fast enough that I don’t use that a lot — I’d rather convert back to keyboard mode and do 60 wpm.

The down side: it runs XP, which is a pig compared to Windows 2000, my previous operating system. On my old machine, which was less than half the speed, the same amount of memory (0.5GB) was plenty for Windows 2000, but I had to drop another 1GB into this for a total of 1.5GB before XP started behaving tolerably when I’m running multiple applications simultaneously. As far as I know, Windows 2000 doesn’t support tablets so I’m stuck with XP, and now I’m mostly used to the user interface, so I guess that I’ll just have to live with the crappy multitasking.

Also on the down side is the lack of a firewire port, and I haven’t been able to get my PCMCIA firewire card working properly with it: my Canon Elura 50 digital camcorder is not recognized, although the same card and camcorder work fine together on other machines. HP support claims that no one has tested a firewire card on this machine, so can’t even recommend a different card to buy. I’m suspecting that it has something to do with power to the PCMCIA slot, and that an externally-powered card might do the trick, which will require making a trip to a computer store with my laptop and camera to try said card before I buy. Troubleshooting three devices from different manufacturers is always a hassle, since none of the vendors will provide anything that resembles technical support.