Author: sandy

BPM independent becomes less so

eBizq announced today that Peter Fingar has joined Bluespring Software‘s advisory board to “provide advice, assistance and guidance on future releases of Bluespring’s BPM technology and contribute thought leadership towards the evolution of the company’s business model”.

We all have vendor biases, and I count a few vendors as my customers, but to join the advisory board of one company seems to be taking oneself firmly out of the ranks of the independents.

Integration stacks explained and compared

A good explanation of integration stacks (including EAI and BPM) by Greg Wdowiak. He makes a nice distinction between task flow management in the EAI layer and business process management in the BPM layer:

The Task Flow Management function of the broker coordinates relatively simple, short time activities amongst the integrated systems… The Task Flow Management function service translates the business task into a set of lower-level (often application specific) technical tasks.The Business Process Management function (BPM) coordinates long-running business processes. In many aspects, BPMS resembles Task Flow Management function. BPM differs from Task Flow Management in that:

  • It is geared towards managing tasks that may range from hours to months in duration. BPM persists its state in a database.
  • BPM focuses on business-level tasks, frequently tasks that are performed by humans. To support such tasks, BPM support sophisticates access control and authorization models, escalation procedures, task delegation, etc.

He goes on to compare the integration stacks of TIBCO and IBM, including the history of what was developed internally versus what was acquired, although he’s missing a few details about the BPM side of things since his expertise appears to lie at the EAI end of the spectrum (for example, the InConcert BPM product, now owned by TIBCO and probably soon to be discontinued, was originally developed by XSoft, a division of Xerox), but I think that this is a work in progress.

I really like that way that he overlays the five technology layers (connectivity, MOM, transformation & routing, task flow, and BPM) with the various products from both vendors so that you can see what’s what: something that most vendors don’t do, so it’s very hard to tell what portion of the stack that a product covers.

TIBCO and IBM definitely compete head-to-head technically at the MOM layer: I’ve seen a lot of holy wars about TIB/Rendezvous versus MQ Series in my financial services customers, and usually they end up with some of each, although MQ has a large enough market share to be considered a de facto standard. At the BPM layer, however, it’s hardly a fair fight: Staffware is recognized by Gartner as one of the top two or three pure-play BPM products, whereas MQ Workflow doesn’t even make it onto the chart. I wouldn’t be surprised to see IBM replacing MQ Workflow, or radically overhauling it, in the near future in order to remain competitive and get on Gartner’s pure-play BPM radar.

Greg’s impressions of the vendor smoke screens are bang-on:

IBM constantly re-brands products (most recently, pre-pending all names brands ‘WebSphere’) making it difficult to understand… Both [TIBCO and IBM] stacks include products with overlapping functionality. It is not clear from the vendor which product should be used under what circumstances; rather, both vendors attempt to create an impression of perfectly coexisting and augmenting each other components.

Some things never change.

Non-BPM interests

If you’ve ever checked out my Blogger profile from the sidebar of this blog, you may have noticed that not only was I born in the Year of the Rat, but I write another blog for my wine-tasting club. Because of that one, I’ve been invited to contribute to jZepp, a global group blog project that is building an international community of bloggers with a focus on food, drink, art, and culture.

Enjoy.

Intelligent Enterprise BPM cover

Today’s Intelligent Enterprise cover story “Business Process Management is Under Construction” is focussed specifically on modeling, analysis and reporting, business activity monitoring (BAM) and simulation features (since they cover integration and automation features in an earlier article).

Their assessment shows BPM as still at a relatively early adoption state:

BPM software is headed for mainstream adoption, but it’s still a relatively small, immature market… Plenty of organizations have yet to discover BPM… 36 percent said they were considering BPM and 29 percent said they had no plans to implement it, while only 24 percent said they were either piloting, rolling out, in production with or upgrading BPM.

That’s certainly what I’m seeing in many organizations, and why BPM evangelism is going to be required for some time still. Yes, there’s lots of successful BPM case studies to point at, but if you dig into the infrastructure at a large financial institution (for example), you’ll find a lot of EAI and not a lot of real BPM. Intelligent Enterprise states that even the basic automation and integration are still a challenge for many organizations, but I’m finding that the integration part has pushed forward because EAI is typically an IT initiative to integrate systems behind the scenes: the business benefits obliquely but their environment may not be impacted at all. On the other hand, automation requires true BPM (including human-facing workflow, modelling and simulation, and a whole raft of other features not typically found in EAI), plus full involvement of the business in order to achieve success, so gets hung up on the continuing disconnect between IT and the business that they serve.

Compliance is certainly going to push BPM forward, although that requires closed-loop process control throught the addition of analytics and simulation. There needs to be a bigger focus on making BPM performance monitoring and improvement a part of the larger corporate performance management framework, and showing how BPM fits into an organization’s enterprise architecture framework.

There are two more BPM articles in this issue of Intelligent Enterprise, “IT Detours on the Road to BPM” that discusses nine BPM suites’ closed-loop capabilities, and “Simple Process Management: Quick, Cheap and Easy” about Nsite, a hosted solution for a limited range of administrative-type workflows. I’d love to stay and blog all day about them, but it’s a holiday here and I’m going sailing.

SOA from a BPM perspective

Terry Schurter of BPMG has a great article yesterday on IT-Analysis.com about using a BPMS as the core of your SOA. His take on the current craze of SOA as a standalone big budget item:

Granted, I may be flying in the face of a storm of pundits, analysts, and technology gurus that endorse, promote and make great claims regarding the value SOA will deliver as I expose the seamy underside of this wolf in sheep’s clothing but hey — they’ve been wrong before — and the hard facts of the matter are that SOA expenditures will in many cases push important expenditures onto the backburner while they fiercely consume limited resources on a one way track to zero ROI.

I met Terry at the BPMG conference in London in May, and he definitely tells it like it is. I think that he’s just stirring the hornet nest here to see what happens, but he has some valid points about how a competent BPMS already does a lot of what you may be reinventing with your SOA initiative.

Interestingly, this post on Six Sigma Technologies’ site this week went through a checklist of SOA uses and benefits that sounds an awful lot like BPM…

Global 360 Active Compliance Framework

I watched a webinar earlier this week about BPM and compliance, a topic that I’ve been working on for a while, in which Global 360 announced their Active Compliance Framework (today’s Computer Business Review also reviewed their announcement). The speakers were from Doculabs and BWise, the latter of which has just partnered with Global 360 (and a bunch of other ECM/BPM vendors) for a compliance offering. Global 360 states the advantages of their compliance framework as follows:

Improved Compliance & Risk Management (i.e., do a better job of being compliant)

  • Standardized, structured approach
  • Focused on highest risk controls & processes
  • Centralized visibility and control

Reduced Compliance Costs (i.e., be compliant in a more cost-effective way)

  • Reduced project costs via control reduction based on risk
  • Reduced testing costs for remaining controls via automation
  • Eliminated testing costs for continuously compliant processes

Process Optimization & Control (i.e., provide an opportunity to optimize your business processes)

  • Optimize process performance while increasing control
  • Proactive compliance issue visibility, notification
  • Evolution from obligation to optimization

I liked the focus on the last of these sections, or what they called “from obligation to optimization”: changing the organization’s attitude from compliance being a chore that they’re forced to implement, to compliance being an opportunity to improve business processes through standardization and measurement.

If, like 1/3 of Doculabs’ current customers, compliance is one of your highest priorities for 2005, it’s worth your time to check out compliance solutions like this from ECM/BPM vendors. The whole compliance field is still chaotic; a Gartner report on compliance management software lists 26 vendors and clearly states that the compliance market is not mature:

A key finding of our research is that there is no comprehensive compliance management application. Whether buying from one or many vendors to get a solution, you will need significant services for implementation and integration.

Partnerships like the one between Global 360 and BWise start to address this problem, but there’s still a long way to go before we can even agree on what “compliance management software” is.

FileNet shaking the “content” label

When I was the eProcess (BPM) evangelist at FileNet back in 2000-2001, I fought a lot of battles — both internal and external — about FileNet’s focus on content versus process. FileNet came from a content background, but finally they’ve reached a milestone of having BPM in more than half of their current deals. Nice statistic, but given that this is current deals and not existing customers, I think that they still have a long way to go.

Swimming with Fuego

A few more random thoughts in my journey through trying out Fuego.

My first thought on playing with the process designer was that I really liked it because it shows the process activities in swimlanes. The activities are colour-coded (red for human interaction, blue for system-executed), and the shape of the activity icon tells you something about what it is, or you can define your own activity icons on a per-activity basis, which is kind of cool.

But wait… swimlanes are supposed to run parallel to the flow, not perpendicular to it: if the flow runs horizontally (as it does in Fuego and most other process modelling/design tools), the lanes should be horizontal (which they’re not in Fuego). This has the effect of projecting (in a mathematical sense) the two-dimensional orthogonal nature of a swimlane diagram (activities in time sequence versus role) into one dimension: time, with roles dependent on the time axis. This makes for some weird anomalies such as roles repeating along the time axis, and showing automated steps as part of a human role assignment.

Whether you use UML activity diagrams or BPMN or venerable old LOVEM diagrams, swimlanes are supposed to be, by their very nature, orthogonal to (and therefore independent of) the time-based flow of the process, so that you can see all the activities for a single role in a single band regardless of their position in the flow.