Category: business

BPMG reincarnated

The past few months have seen strange happenings with BPMG. I wrote about the original hint of troubles, when Steve Towers and Terry Schurter jumped ship and Terry redirected the BPMG domain to his own competing website, then the follow-up a month later when BPMG appeared to have truly shut down. They’re not down for the count, however; this morning I received the following email:

Welcome to the BPTGroup website www.bptg.org

The following facilities and services are up and running or scheduled for the new site

  • a full range of training and development programmes for open course and in-house delivery
  • a comprehensive, degree-level programme for business change professionals designed to be  internalised by organisations to provide a future structure for developing change expertise
  • an accreditation process that is quick, efficient and authenticated
  • insight to the 8 Omega methodology and maturity assessment process
  • core sections dedicated to Strategy, People, Process and Enabling Technologies including articles, reviews, presentations and a comprehensive cross-referencing system
  • the introduction of the BPTG global partners
  • the International BPTG Chapters web facility
  • executive briefings, coaching and mentoring, process audit services are offered to organisations as they endeavour to move effectively through the cultural and other issues of change surrounding their transformation to process-focused operations.

The deliberate sabotage of the BPMG website impacted its members, staff and associates worldwide and raises many issues, ethical as well as legal, about the integrity of the organisation and the individuals involved.  The actions that created that situation are totally at variance with the core BPM principle that serving the customers best interests should inform all our actions. 

However, as you will see from our home page, many of the BPMG key people have expressed their opinion very clearly by readily joining the BPTGroup.  We also welcome new faces and expertise, and there are others on the way.

Website functionality will be enhanced in two further phases over the next few months ? we will be introducing new features, new courses and services to our fellow process professionals ? and we want you to help us in this development process. 

One final point before I leave you to explore the BPTGroup website. 

Why BPTGroup? After the BPMG debacle I am sure many of you would expect us to avoid any association with similar phrasing.  Quite the reverse.  The principal movers behind BPTGroup were proud of what we had created in the BPMG and the services we provided to our members.  Although in no way responsible or accountable for the destruction wrought, we want to help rectify the undoubted damage done to an ethical and principled global community and we invite you to join us in these endeavours. 

Please, express your opinion by your action ? help us to help you.

A number of delegates were seriously inconvenienced by the collapse of the BPMG and some lost their fee pre-payments.  We make this offer to those people ? when the BPTGroup next run a commercially viable programme in a location convenient to you we will invite you to join us and waive all professional fees for that course.  Please contact us now to enable our people to keep you informed of convenient courses.

Thank-you for your previous support and interest ? we look forward to the opportunity to work with you again.

Regards,

David Lyneham-Brown

CEO

They have some of the original people on board, including Mark McGregor and Jim Baird (who offered to provide BPMG courses for free to people who had paid for them). A lot of people are unlikely to trust Steve and Terry after the stunt that they pulled — I don’t know the whole story, but it appears to be pretty unprofessional behaviour — but they were two of the very visible faces of the old BPMG, and it’s difficult to see if BPTG will be able to regain the momentum. I don’t think that it’s necessary to have visible faces for an online community like this; certainly there’s others, like BPMInstitute, that are run by very competent people who choose not to put themselves in the spotlight, but to show off the content instead.

BPTG is offering a free membership right now, and I have no idea if they plan to go back to a two-tiered model that drew such criticism in the past. Personally, I don’t think that there’s any place in the market for a paid site for most of the content that they offer; there are a lot of other content sites related to BPM that get their revenue from advertising, vendor-sponsored content such as webinars and white papers, and live training and conferences.

Ex-BPMG contractor makes good

Jim Baird, who had organized the Toronto BPMG chapter meetings that I attended previously, also was a contractor to BPMG for delivering courses. With the recent demise of BPMG, Jim has stepped up to the plate and offered to provide courses for free to those who got stiffed by BPMG. From his recent comment on my original post about BPMG’s closure:

Hi folks. I would like to confirm what you have seen in this blog and thank Kevin and Sandy for bringing it to my attention. In the next couple of weeks we will be announcing the formation of the Business Process Transformation Group which will be available at www.BPTG.org. A new course schedule will be posted and anyone who has paid for training at BPMG will be offered the course that they have paid for at no charge. Please keep in mind that I was as surprised as everyone else with the demise of BPMG as I was contracted to train for them and was not a shareholder of the organization. Although we did not receive any of those funds that were paid to BPMG we find that the situation is deplorable and feel that this is the honourable thing to do. If you have any further questions please do not hesitate to contact me at [email protected].

Jim also contacted me to see about organizing a non-partisan BPM interest group meeting in Toronto, tentatively scheduled for September 21st. Stay tuned for more details.

BPMG goes boom

Received this afternoon from an email address at processperformance.com, unfortunately substantiating my prediction of a couple of weeks ago:

Subject: BPMG / BPMV Ltd Chairman’s Final Statement

I communicated with as many of the BPMG members as I could a short while ago about the unfortunate position with regard to the company. As I said in that e-mail I took over the running of the company in an attempt to resolve matters.

I must unfortunately report that I have been unable to resolve these matters and Bennu Group LLC continue in their refusal to reinstate our websites or release any information that would give BPMG access to those sites. According to public record information Steve Towers is a director and officer of Bennu Group LLC. At no time did Mr Towers declare his Bennu status to his fellow directors on the board of BPM Ventures Limited or BPM Group.

The report that I have presented on June 29th 2007 is confidential to the board and shareholders of BPM Ventures Limited but I can indicate that it identifies certain matters that may well become the subject of legal claims in the future. My task in this matter was to try to resolve the matters as quickly as possible in the interest of the members and clients of BPMG. Having provided my report to the board and not being able to resolve the position I have no desire to continue in this role and I have therefore resigned my directorship in the company although I remain a shareholder.

At the same time our Administration and Finance Manager Rose Butler has also resigned. She will no longer be able to answer BPMG members or clients queries. In addition, David Lyneham-Brown has also resigned his roles and directorships of BPMG. With David being the prime technical developer of the BPMG training and development approach this is regretful. Imre Hegedus has stepped down as our Global Director of Chapters and the principal organiser of our autumn conference having done a sterling job in both these areas to date. We have already advised people that we cannot run the conference because like our other web sites Process2007 has been entirely under the control of Bennu Group LLC and we have had no access to it. As of June 30th 2007 Stephen Bernard Towers is the sole remaining director of BPM Ventures Limited and the BPM Group and all enquiries should be directed to him.

I would like to wish Imre, David and Rose the best for the future and I am sure they will continue with their very effective contributions to international BPM training, development and practise. I would also like to thank the many members and clients of BPMG who have contacted me with information and best wishes over the last few weeks. I can only regret that we have been unable to resolve matters in their best interests.

I would expect to see some commentary on all of these things on the BPMG and Bennu web site as I feel it is likely that the BPMG web site will be quickly reactivated. I will have to leave it to your own discretion as to your belief in any commentary in relation to my actions.

Kind Regards

Stewart Ashton

Is BPMG imploding?

I’ve attended and spoken at a couple of BPMG conferences, as well as attending the new chapter meetings here in Toronto. I’ve never really understood the organization; some people refer to it as a “buyer’s club”, where membership just gets you discounted on their proprietary training and methods, and I since I’m not interested in their 8 Omega methodology (the name of which still makes me laugh), I haven’t found any reason to pay for a membership since my first time around. The quality of their output can be a bit uneven, and most of it appears to be driven by Steve Towers and Terry Schurter, both of whom I have met at the conferences (in fact, I wrote a review for Terry’s recent book).

This week, some weird things started happening. First, the usual weekly BPM email arrived from Steve Towers, but with a statement “I can’t point you at any articles on the bpmg.org site as it has been down for several days (more on that very soon)” — with no explanation, although the email came from Steve Towers’ address rather than BPMG.

Then, an email from Terry Schurter announcing that he has resigned BPMG, lengthy but no more informative:

Today ends almost 3 years of work with the BPM Group for me and I have many fond memories that I will cherish over the years.

I feel it is important and necessary to share with you a few things about my resignation to help you understand why this change has occurred.

I leave the BPM Group under duress. I will simply say that things have come to the point where what I get from the BPM Group won’t buy any “bread” and I’m not an “open-source” thought leader/CIO.

I retain my positive relationship with Steve Towers and will continue to work with him on the latest hot BPM concepts including CEM, the CEM Method (CEMM), Outside-In, SCOs, etc. CEM, CEMM and much of the other latest insights into the customer focus in BPM are the intellectual property of Bennu Group LLC, Terry Schurter and/or Steve Towers. These resources will no longer be available through the BPM Group but they will remain available…

Because I am not “going away” in fact; I see this as the trigger to take the best concepts forward without the chains of “inside-out” thinking placed on me by some of the directors in the BPM Group (not including Steve Towers of course). The place to visit me and have access to these resources is www.bennugroup.net. I hope you have the chance to stop by and visit.

Of course, I’ll be out there speaking at conferences (visit www.terryschurter.com for more on that) and I will be doing lots of other things as well. Whatever I am up to, you’ll find more about it at the sites listed above.

I hope that during my stay at the BPM Group I have helped to enrich some of your lives in some small way and I hope to have the opportunity to stay in touch with as many of you as possible.

Finally, in closing I wish to apologize for anything that the BPM Group may have promised you that they have failed to deliver on. If I could have left the BPM Group without duress my departure would have been carefully structured to help ensure an orderly exit from the business. Unfortunately that has not turned out to be the case.

As we say on the internet, WTF?

Then yesterday, a missive from BPMG (or what’s left of it):

I am writing to you to inform you of the official company position regarding issues with regard to BPMG and its web site.

I have been a non-executive director, director and shareholder of BPM Ventures Ltd the holding company of BPMG for some years. Recently a dispute has arisen in the company about some invoices and payments that have been claimed to be improper. A board meeting was called to consider the best action for the company until such disputes had been resolved. I have have been appointed managing director and the executive authority of David Lyneham-Brown and Steve Towers have been suspended whilst due enquiries can be made. I must emphasis that there is no implication of wrong doing at this stage by any party but it is normal in these circumstances to suspend individuals until due enquires have been made.

One of the disputes involves a company called Bennu, run by a Mr Terry Schurter. This company had the responsibility, amongst others, of running and maintaining the BPMG web site. One of their invoices has been claimed to be improperly submitted and is in dispute. A matter that I intend to resolve as quickly as possible. However Bennu have taken it upon themselves to re-direct the BPMG web site to their own website. We would like all parties to know that they are improperly doing this and have no grounds or authority for this redirection. We will of course be taking appropriate action but that will take time.

The training that BPMG have so successfully delivered over the past few years has not changed and we intend to continue to honour all training course and responsibilities. To this end David Lyneham-Brown remains involved in the day to day activities of the company and along with our colleague Rose Butler, will remain available for any questions you might have regarding the delivery of BPMG services. In addition both he and Rose will be your contact points for any new bookings. All training materials and IP remain the property of BPMG but customers need to be aware of possible improper use of materials in the future.

It is most regretful that a subcontractor to BPMG has seen fit to take such actions over a minor invoice that has been questioned in its validity and will be resolved in a short time if the submitted invoice is genuine. We apologise to our customers for any inconvenience that this may have caused and we will take all and any actions necessary to protect our customers position and ensure that all services are delivered to the usual high levels of standard that we have always delivered.

Finally, I wish to assure you that the company is solvent (as agreed by the board yesterday) and remains in a position to honor any proper financial commitments made by the company. We will be doing our very best to get normal service resumed as soon as possible.

We will be setting up a web site in the near future where further information will be available.

Stewart Ashton

As a temporary measure you will find us at www.processperformance.com along with details of how to contact us.

The BPMG site is still redirected to Terry Schurter’s Bennu Group website, and Ashton’s letter and the BPMG logos are on the site that Ashton mentions at the end of his letter. The BPMG.org domain registration is private, but presumably Terry has control over it if he was able to redirect to his own site — an action that appears to be in tremendously bad faith, even if not illegal, since I assume that BPMG owns its own trade name and domain name, even if Terry was managing the website and domain records.

Given that the two key visible people at BPMG are no longer on active duty — Terry has resigned and Steve has been suspended by the board — it’s not clear how BPMG can continue to do business.

How things go ’round and ’round

I had an email yesterday from my friend Robb, which I have his permission to publish here. Robb used to work for me — in fact, I think that I hired him a total of three times — and whenever a company seeking to hire him calls me for a reference, I always tell them that the only negative thing about hiring him is that when I’m ready to start another company, I’ll be hiring Robb away from them. Robb has four essential qualities when it comes to working: he’s smart, he’ll do anything to get the job done for the customer, he always has my back, and he’s funny. His email yesterday, as usual, showed off the smart and funny bits:

Below is a newly formed company called Miria Systems. I give a history how this company came into being. Imagine how some things never actually die off:

  • 1998 – A company named Application Partners was founded around an insurance/finance product and named it Sequis– because apparently the English language is short of meaningful words
  • 2000 – FileNet bought Application Partners and renamed it PeBA (standing for Panagon eBusiness Application) shortly after that they got bored with the name PeBA and renamed the product Acenza
  • 2003 – After some successes the Acenza FileNet stalled the product program (to make way for BrightSpire) and effectively sold Acenza to a company called Endymion
  • 2004 – Endymion changed the name from Acenza to (drumroll) Acenza for Payables
  • 2003/2004 – Not satisfied with a simple named change Endymion completely re-wrote Acenza for Payables and changed the name to ManagedPay
  • 2004 – Endymion apparently used up a lot of their budget on the name changes (and even more on re-write) because they were forced into a merger with Software Consulting Group (SCG) — the two companies formed Soluziona USA
  • 2005 – Not satisfied with a single re-write was good enough to keep their engineers happy Soluziona USA again decided to re-write ManagedPay but decided that the name should stay the same
  • 2006 – Soluziona USA sold their ManagedPay product to a group of investors who formed a new company around this three-times-rewritten-and-five-times renamed product, keeping with tradition they gave the company a name with equally little English meaning as anything else in this brief history — Miria Systems, below is the link

www.miriasystems.com

The interesting thing here to me here, besides the obvious snide comments around product/company naming exercises, is that the functionality of this product lives on despite name changes, rewrites, etc etc. That the market still has the (relatively) same problems almost ten years later makes me think that there is a disruptive or revolutionary solution waiting to happen.

No doubt you will recognize all of those companies and product names, most of which (except for Miria) I have been either directly or indirectly involved with.

Just some thoughts….

/rr

What Robb didn’t mention is that PricewaterhouseCoopers also took the Acenza code base and rewrote it in J2EE around the time that they were purchased by IBM, to create a case-based application framework targeted at insurance customers. Once part of IBM Global Services, it was further rewritten to make it “vendor independent”, meaning that the underlying content and process management could be either IBM or FileNet products, hence serving up the least common denominator of functionality and completely obviating proper use of the underlying product. I had the unhappy job of doing a review of an installation of this on behalf of the customer, and it’s unbelievable how little of the FileNet product capability was actually exposed or used.

Although I agree with Robb that the market need for systems like this remains, I’m not sure at all that Sequis/PeBA/Acenza/ManagedPay/Miria product remains a viable solution. I haven’t seen it in a while, but last time that I did look at it, it was too heavy and rigid, too old-school, and had the same problem as the IBM version that I mentioned above in that it completely hid the underlying capability of the BPM system below it: you might as well be using records in a database table for queue entries rather than a BPM system like FileNet.

I’ve talked about this problem of hiding the very nature and capabilities of a BPM product behind a rigidly-structured custom system in the past, and discussed it briefly on my Web 2.0 and BPM podcast, and I feel that it’s a significant contributor to the lack of acceptance of BPM in many organizations.

I believe that the new world of enterprise software is less customization and more customizability: give the users the raw product and let them do what they need with it.

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”.

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.

Choosing “same old same old” over “new and exciting”

I met with a friend today who works for a large bank (a former client of mine). That is, he used to work for the bank until his division, which provides institutional financial services through some pretty amazing application of technology, was spun off in a joint venture between the bank and an equally deep-pocketed European firm, in order to provide these services more effectively around the world. We spent much of our time talking about how exciting the new environment is: the head of the new joint venture is doing the whole rock-star/entrepreneur launch thing, with a fancy launch party for the staff, T-shirts and other swag, and various other bits of team-building and corporate culture enhancements. I know, for those of us who lived in technology through the boom, that doesn’t seem like much, but we’re talking about a bunch of conservative banking types here.

Being spun off as a new, smaller company, they can create systems and services in a much more agile way than when they were part of the bank, in part because they don’t need to conform to the bank’s corporate standards any more; from my experience there as a contract architect several days a week for about a year, I can vouch for the fact that these standards were sometimes oppressive since they didn’t account for the needs of this relatively small division.

As our conversation neared a close, I idly asked him if anyone had been spooked by the idea of working for a smaller, more agile company (there are a lot of veterans of 15+ years there), and was shocked to hear that several people had opted to move from this division back to the bank proper before the spin-off. A new company, backed by some very pockets? An agile business and technology environment unchained from irrelevent (to them) corporate IT standards? In other words, new and interesting work with no financial risk? I realize that I’m a bit of an outlier, having worked for only one company larger than 50 people since I graduated from university (and that chafed so bad that I had to leave after 18 months), but I have to ask, what were those people thinking?