conferences – Page 15

TIBCO Now Roadshow: Toronto Edition (Part 2)

We started after the break with Jeremy Westerman, head of BPM product marketing for TIBCO, presenting on AMX BPM. The crowd is a bit slow returning, which I suspect is due more to the availability of Wii Hockey down the hall than to the subject matter. Most telling, Westerman has the longest timeslot of the day, 45 minutes, which shows the importance that TIBCO is placing on marketing efforts for this new generation of their BPM platform. As I mentioned earlier, I’ve had 3+ hours of briefing on AMX BPM recently and think that they’ve done a good job of rearchitecting – not just refactoring – their BPM product to a modern architecture that puts them in a good competitive position, assuming that they can get the customer adoption. He started by talking about managing business processes as strategic assets, and the basics of what it means to move processes into a BPMS, then moved on to the TIBCO BPM products: Business Studio for modeling, the on-premise AMX BPM process execution environment, and the cloud-based Silver BPM process execution environment. This built well on their earlier messages about integration and SOA, since many business processes – especially for the financial-biased audience here today – are dependent on integrating data and messaging with other enterprise systems. Business-friendly is definitely important for any BPM system, but the processes also have to be able to punch at enterprise weight.

His explanation of work management also covered optimizing people within the process: maximizing utilization while still meeting business commitments through intelligent routing, unified work lists and process/work management visibility. A BPM system allows a geographically distributed group of resources to be treated as single pool for dynamic tunable work management, so that the actual organizational model can be used rather than an artificial model imposed by location or other factors. This led into a discussion of workflow patterns, such as separation of duties, which they are starting to build into AMX BPM as I noted in my recent review. He walked through other functionality such as UI creation, analytics and event processing; although I’ve seen most of this before, it was almost certainly new to everyone except the few people in the room who had attended TUCON back in May. The BPM booth was also the busiest one during the break, indicating a strong audience interest; I’m sure that most BPM vendors are seeing this same level of interest as organizations still recovering from the recession look to optimize their processes to cut costs and provide competitive advantage.

Ivan Casanova, director of cloud marketing for TIBCO, started with some pretty simple Cloud 101 stuff, then outlined their Silver line of cloud platforms: Silver CAP for developing cloud services, Silver Fabric for migrating existing applications, Silver BPM for process management, and Silver Spotfire for analytics. Some portion of the IT-heavy audience was probably thinking “not in my data centre, dude!”, but eventually every organization is going to have to think about what a cloud platform brings in terms of speed of deployment, scalability, cost and ability to collaborate outside the enterprise. Although he did talk about using Fabric for “private cloud” deployments that leverage cloud utility computing principles for on-premise systems, he didn’t mention the most likely baby step for organizations who are nervous about putting production data in the cloud, which is to use the cloud for development and testing, then deploy on premise. He finished with a valid point about how they have a lot of trust from their customers, and how they’ve built cloud services that suit their enterprise customers’ privacy needs; IBM uses much the same argument about why you want to use an large, established, trusted vendor for your cloud requirements rather than some young upstart.

We then heard from Greg Shevchik, a TIBCO MDM specialist, for a quick review of the discipline of master data management and TIBCO’s Collaborative Information Manager (CIM). CIM manages the master data repositories shared by multiple enterprise systems, and allows other systems – such as AMX BPM – to use data from that single source. It includes a central data repository; governance tools for validation and de-duplication; workflow for managing the data repository; synchronization of data between systems; and reporting on MDM.

Last up for the Toronto TIBCO Now was Al Harrington (who was the mystery man who opened the day), giving us a quick view of the new generation of TIBCO’s CEP product, BusinessEvents. There’s a lot to see here, and I probably need to get a real briefing to do it justice; events are at the heart of so many business processes that CEP and BPM are becoming ever more intertwined.

My battery just hit 7% and we’re after 5pm, so I’ll wrap up here. The TIBCO Now roadshow provides a good overview of their updated technology portfolio and the benefits for customers; check for one coming your way.

TIBCO Now Roadshow: Toronto Edition (Part 1)

TIBCO’s doing a roadshow called TIBCO Now, and because the Toronto one is practically in my backyard – and is at the Hockey Hall of Fame, which I’ve always wanted to visit – I’m here this afternoon to hear about what’s coming up product-wise, and also hear from some of their local customers.

We had a quick update from TIBCO (sorry, missed the name while I was looking for non-existent wifi and getting my tethering set up) on their direction: I love the “two-second advantage” message that I’ve been hearing since their TUCON conference in May, but really dislike the “Enterprise 3.0” nonsense. He had one slide in his presentation that really resonated: “Business is event-based. IT systems are transaction and query-based.” That sums up the difference between how things happen in the real world, and the nature of the systems designed to support those things.

Grant Geminiuc, former CEO of Shoppers Drug Mart (a large Canadian retail store), gave a presentation about the Canadian retail perspective on the two-second advantage. Given that we’re smack in the middle of the financial district, I’m imagining that most of these blue suits belong to the towers above us, but there are common themes about reducing operational costs and increasing revenues that apply to everyone. For Shoppers Drug Mart, the two-second advantage is about the window of opportunity when the customer is in the store or on the website, and having enough information about the customer and their buying history to position a cross-sell or up-sell that will resonate with them. For Canadian Tire, it’s about managing inventory to reduce out-of-stock situations, and expose inventory levels – and purchase capabilities – to customers on a website rather than by going to the store. For Rogers, it’s about back-office and channel integration to enable service bundling, consolidated billing and a single point of self-service provisioning. In short, leverage and integrate assets, and understand your customer.

Tom Laffey, TIBCO’s EVP of products, was up next to talk about their technology. He gave us a review during the analyst session at TUCON, summarized by Matt Quinn the next day; this was mostly a review of that. He outlined four critical requirements for businesses and their technology: handling events on a massive scale; universal application development lifecycle management providing freedom to innovate; integrating people; and deploying what you need, when and where you need it. He gave use the 50,000 foot view of their new and enhanced product suites:

ActiveSpaces Suite, including the DataGrid product for an in-memory data management, and the Transactions and Patterns products (both via acquired companies) providing data manipulation; on top of ActiveSpaces, you can run their event-driven architecture or service-oriented architecture
FTL, their next generation appliance for extreme low latency message handling (which I think has the coolest name but probably not well-liked by the marketing folks)
ActiveMatrix application development platform
ActiveMatrix BPM product that I recently reviewed
Formvine, a browser-based end-user application creation environment
Tibbr, a microblogging tool (think Twitter for the enterprise)
Silver Spotfire, a cloud-based data analysis and visualization tool based on their (acquired) Spotfire platform

Next was David Hickman, long-time TIBCO employee and currently in SOA Product Marketing, to cover their SOA strategy. He started with a couple of examples of how their customers have used TIBCO products to create shared services and components, and integrate systems, then moved on to a more detailed view of the ActiveMatrix platform. All AMX products share a single runtime engine, a single design-time interface (Business Studio) and a single administrative console; this reduces complexity for the IT users as well as reducing costs through shared components. He covered the somewhat large list of the AMX products, spending a short time on each one to note what it does, how it fits into the big picture, and the specific benefits of their product over the competition.

Last up before the break, we heard from HP, who is co-sponsoring this shindig as well as being a long-time partner of TIBCO’s, on application lifecycle management. There was no discussion, however, about the lifecycle of HP CEOs.

We’re taking a break now; but I’ll be sticking around because I’d never hear the end of it if I skip Jeremy Westerman’s talk on AMX BPM. Plus, there’s a cocktail reception afterwards.

BPM 2010 Coming Up Soon: Are You There?

My favorite BPM conference of the year, the 8th International Conference on Business Process Management, is coming up in less than three weeks, on September 13-16. In the past, this has primarily been an academic conference where BPM researchers present their ongoing research, and this year they are adding industry case studies, tutorials, keynotes and fireside chats with lots of big names in BPM, plus a follow-on day on September 17 on adaptive case management.

I’ve recommended this conference in the past for those involved in BPM product development because this is where your new product ideas are going to come from: although some of this research is a bit esoteric, much of it is practical and could be introduced as product functionality by forward-thinking BPM vendors in the near future. With the added non-academic tracks this year, those of you who shun eigenvectors still have a wealth of presentations by practitioners available to you, turning this into more of a multi-purpose BPM conference than it has been in the past.

This is also the first time that the conference is being held in North America, at Stevens Institute in Hoboken, NJ – don’t worry, that’s just a short ferry ride from Manhattan, so you don’t even have to admit to having visited New Jersey. 🙂 You can still register for the regular registration fee; after August 31, you’ll be paying a higher late/onsite fee to register.

I’ll be there from Monday to Thursday – unfortunately, I found out about the ACM day on Friday too late to change my plans – so feel free to look me up if you’re there. If you can’t make it, watch for my blog coverage of the sessions.

Planning the Fall BPM Conference Lineup

It’s been a quiet summer for travel – I haven’t been on a plane since June – but my fall travel schedule awaits:

September 13-16 is BPM 2010, the 8th International Conference on Business Process Management, which is the academic BPM conference that I’ve attended in Germany and Italy the past two years. This year, I get to go all the way to New Jersey, instead, for its first North American appearance. I’m not presenting, but will be blogging from there.
September 27-29 is IRM’s BPM conference in London, where I’m delivering a half-day workshop on the BPM technology landscape, presenting a session on collaboration and BPM and facilitating a roundtable discussion on transforming business process models into IT requirements.
October 17-21 is Building Business Capability 2010, which is Business Rules Forum plus the new Business Process Forum and Business Analysis Forum, in Washington DC. I’ll be doing the same three presentations as at the IRM BPM conference the previous month.
November 19 is a new one-day event, BPM World Convention, in London. I’ve agreed to keynote if it goes ahead as planned.

As of now, I don’t have any other definite conference plans for the fall, but there are lots of possibilities and tentative invitations:

Intalio|World, October 5-6 in San Francisco
Forrester’s Business Process and Application Delivery Forum, October 7-8 in Washington DC
SAP TechEd Berlin, October 12-14 and TechEd US, October 18-22 in Las Vegas
IBM Information On Demand, October 24-28 in Las Vegas
IBM CASCON, November 1-4 in Toronto – it’s not BPM-specific, but it’s a good conference and is local for me

I keep a calendar of all the BPM-related events that I hear about, mostly for my own reference but I have made it public:

If you have something that you’d like to add to the calendar, add a comment here or email me directly. I typically do not include webinars or other online-only events, since that would tend to crowd out the physical events.

Note that you can view this in Week, Month or Agenda view using the controls at the top right. If you’re a Google calendar user, you can add it to your list of calendars using the button at the bottom right, which will allow you to see it overlaid on your own calendar.

Speaking at Business Process Forum in October

A bit early for this, but maybe you’re already starting to organize your fall calendar. The business process track that was at the Business Rules Forum last year has grown, and become its own Business Process Forum. I believe that we need a good independent BPM conference – the ones run by the large analysts are too focused on their own viewpoints to be considered really independent – and this could be the start of something significant.

I’ll be speaking at the conference, which runs October 17-21 in Washington, DC. Look for me presenting a half-day tutorial on the BPM technology landscape, as well as the facilitator of a peer discussion session on transforming business process models into IT requirements.

Update: Forgot one, I’m also doing a presentation on Social BPM. The full conference agenda is here for all three tracks: business rules, business analysis and business process.

The super early bird registration ends tomorrow, and saves you $300.

Does The Enterprise 2.0 Emperor Have No Clothes?

It’s noon, the keynotes have been going on all morning, and I have only just been inspired to blog. I’m not saying that standalone Enterprise 2.0 initiatives have jumped the shark, but there’s only so much rah-rah about enterprise collaboration that I can take before I fall back on three thoughts:

Collaboration is already going on in enterprises, and always has: all that Enterprise 2.0 does is give us some nicer tools for doing what we’ve already been doing via word of mouth, email, and other methods.
Collaboration is just not that interesting if it doesn’t directly impact the core business processes.
The millennials are not going to save us.

People collaborate inside enterprises when they care about what they do. In other words, if you make someone’s job interesting and something that they have passion about, they will naturally collaborate using whatever tools are at hand in order to do it better. Andy McAfee’s keynote included a point about Enterprise 2.0 cargo cults, where organizations believe that deploying some tools will make the magic happen, without understanding all of the underlying things that need to be in place in order to make benefits happen: I strongly believe that you first have to make people care about their work before they will engage in creative collaboration, regardless of the shiny tools that you give them.

That brings me to the second point, that this has to be about the core business, or it’s just not very interesting at the end of the day. It’s not about providing a platform for some fun Facebook-for-the-enterprise; it’s about providing tools that people need in order to do their job better. In the 90’s, I was often involved in projects where people were using Windows for the first time in order to use the systems that we were creating for them. Some companies thought that the best way to train people on Windows was to have them play Solitaire (seriously); I always found it much more effective to train them on Windows using tools that were applicable to their job so that they could make that connection. We risk the same thing today by teaching people about enterprise social software by performing tasks that are, ultimately, meaningless: not only is there no benefit to the enterprise, but people know that what they’re doing is useless beyond a small amount of UI learning. I’m not saying that all non-core enterprise social functionality is useless: building an enterprise social network is important, but it’s ultimately important for purposes that benefit the enterprise, such as connecting people who might collaborate together on projects.

The millennial argument is, not to put too fine a point on it, bullshit, and I’m tired of hearing it spouted from the stage at conferences. You don’t have to be under 28 to know how to live and breathe social media, or to expect that you should be able to use better-quality consumer tools rather than what a company issues to you, or to find it natural to collaborate online. Many of us who are well north of that age manage it just fine, and I don’t believe that I’m an outlier based on age: I see a large number of under-28’ers who don’t do any of these things, and lots of old fogies like me who do them all the time. It’s more about your attitudes towards contribution and autonomy: I like to give back to the community, I’m an independent thinker, and I work for myself. All of these drive me to contribute widely in social media: here on my business blog (occasionally cross-posted to Intelligent Enterprise and Enterprise Irregulars), my personal blog, on Twitter, on Flickr, on Facebook, on YouTube, on FourSquare… wherever I can either connect with people who I want to be connected with, or where it amuses me to broadcast my thoughts and creations. For those of you who don’t do any of this, wake up! Social networking is your personal brand. You just need to accept that as truth, and take advantage of it. The ones who don’t, and use their age as an excuse for it, just don’t get it, and you shouldn’t be listening to anything that they say about social media.

To wrap it up: enterprise collaboration is good when it has a business purpose, and anyone can do it.

Pegasystems SmartBPM V6

I’m wrapping up my coverage of this month’s round of four back-to-back conferences with the product reviews, which typically come from multiple meetings before, during and after a vendor conference, as well as some time spent pondering my notes and screen snapshots.

I had a remote product demo of SmartBPM prior to PegaWORLD, then a briefing from Kerim Akgonul at the conference. A lot of the changes to the product over the past year and a half have been focused on making it easier to use, trying to fight the perception that it’s a great product but that the inherent complexity makes it hard to use. In fact, the two main themes that I saw for this version are that it’s easy to use, and easy to share through design and runtime collaboration.

They started to address the complexity issue and promote the business agility message in Version 5 more than a year ago with a number of new tools:

Application Profiler to link requirements directly to developed applications and processes, replacing written specifications; the Application Accelerator then generates an application from this profile, as well as documentation
Improved non-technical process mapping with a shared model between business analysts and developers, including having the BA create UI forms
Visual Case Manager for mapping data from other systems into a case management application via various shared keys and search terms
Internet Application Composer for creating mashups with their own portlets and web components, plus other internal or external web components

Version 6 continues this direction, focusing on deploying solutions faster: a number of new gadgets allow building out the user experience and providing better visibility into what’s happening within business processes, and direct feedback on changes required to processes from participants to developers/analysts puts more ability to change processes into the hands of the business.

They’ve also started to use their own agile-like methodology and tools for internal projects, since the tools provide frameworks for project management, test management and documentation. Not only has this resulted in more rapid development of their own products and better alignment with the product requirements, it has eliminated the monolithic product release cycle in favor of smaller incremental releases that deliver new functionality sooner: they’ve released Pega Chat and other new features as modules without doing a full product release. With 1,200 Pega employees and 200 new ones from their Chordiant acquisition, introducing ways to shorten their product release cycle is an encouraging sign that they’re not letting their increasing size weigh them down in product innovation.

Taking a look at the product, there’s a new Discovery Map view of a process, very similar to what you would see in the outline view other process discovery tools. The difference from other tools, however, is that this is a directly executable process: a shared model, rather than requiring a transfer to an execution environment (and the problems that come along with round-tripping). That ties in neatly with the “easy to use” theme, along with role-based views, reduced navigation complexity and case manager functionality.

The other theme, “easy to share” comes out in a number of ways. First of all, there’s a Facebook-style news feed of system-generated and team member alerts that shows who’s working with which processes and comments that participants have on them, including RSS feeds of the news feed and other sharing options to make it easy for people to consume that information in the format and tool that they choose; I’ve seen this in ARISalign and I suspect it will become standard functionality in most process discovery and design tools. With some of the sharing and bookmarking options, I don’t think that Pega even knows how (or if) customers are going to use them, but realizes that if you have to offer the functionality in order to start seeing the emergent usages.

The second collaboration win is direct feedback from the participant of an executing process to the process designer. This is the type of functionality that I commented on a couple of months ago when Google came out with a way to provide feedback direction on their services from within the service (my tweet at the time was please, please, please can enterprise apps add a feature like this?). In SmartBPM, a user within an executing process drags a pushpin icon to the location of the problem on the screen, types a note in a popup and adds a category; when they click “Send” on the note, the current state (including a screenshot) is captured, and an item is added to the process designer’s feedback list in their news feed. Hot.

We also reviewed process optimization: optimization criteria are selected from the process attributes, and calculated based on actual process execution. A decision tree/table can be directly generated from the optimization results and added as a rule to the process: effectively, this automates the discovery of business rules for currently manual steps such as assignment, allowing for more process automation.

The third collaboration-type functionality shown was the ability to spin off ad hoc subprocesses from any point in a structured process: just select “Build a Custom Process” from the action menu on a step to open up a new discovery map for creating the new subprocess, then add steps to create the flow. There’s only an outline view, not flow logic, and the step names are people to which the step is assigned: pretty simple, but little or no training required in order to use it for everyday users.

Later, all custom subprocesses created for a given process can be consolidated and summarized into suggested changes, and directed to a process designer for review; this may result in the original structured process being reworked to include some of the common patterns, or just have them left as ad hoc if they are not frequent enough to justify the changes.

Akgonul sees BPM and CRM converging; that’s certainly the direction that Pega has been taking recently, including (but not limited to) the Chordiant acquisition, and similar opinions are popping up elsewhere. As BPM products continue to turn into application development suites meant for building full enterprise applications, the boundaries start to blur.

One thing that I liked about the remote demo that has nothing to do with the product is that it was hosted on an Amazon EC2 instance: it’s only a short step from an EC2-based demo to providing a preloaded EC2 instance for those of us who like to get our hands on the products but don’t want to handle our own installation. For technical analysts like me, that’s a game-changer for doing product reviews.

As a matter of disclosure, Pega paid my travel expenses to attend their conference, and they are a client of mine for creating webinars, but I am not compensated for writing about them here on my blog.

Will Social Revive Interest In BPM? Will BPM Make Social Relevant?

Social BPM saw a flurry of activity last week in the BPM blogosphere for some reason; I’ve been writing and presenting on social BPM for about four years now, so most of this isn’t new to me, but it’s good to see the ideas starting to permeate.

Keith Swenson writes on who is socializing in social BPM, and how the major analysts’ view of social BPM is that the BPM application developers are socializing, not the end users; that misses the point, in Keith’s (and my) opinion, since it ignores the runtime social/collaborative aspects as well as the blurring of the boundary between designing and participating in processes. He writes:

The proper use of social software in the business will eliminate the need for process designers. Everyone will be a designer, in the way that everyone is a writer in the blogosphere.

This last part is not strictly true: everyone could be a writer in the blogosphere, but in reality, only a tiny fraction of those who read blogs actually write blogs, or even comment on blogs. The same will likely occur in runtime collaboration in BPM: only a fraction of users will design processes, even though all have the capability to do so, but all will benefit from it.

Then, at SAPPHIRE this week, I had a conversation with Enterprise 2.0 adoption expert Susan Scrupski, founder of the 2.0 Adoption Council, about her characterization of SAPPHIRE as 2.0 Reality Rehab, and her distressing discovery that 0 out of 20 SAP customers who she interviewed on the show floor had ever heard of Enterprise 2.0.

Distressing to her, but not so surprising to me: enterprise social software is not exactly mainstream with a lot of large companies that I work with, where wikis are used only by IT for tracking projects but not permitted into the user base at large, and blogs are viewed as disreputable sources of information. Imagine the reception that I get when I start talking to these companies about social BPM concepts: they don’t exactly warm up to the idea that users should design their own processes.

Before you jump all over me with examples of successful Enterprise 2.0 and social BPM adoption stories, I’m talking about mainstream adoption, not just in the echo chamber of those of us who think that this stuff is great, and root out the case studies like the rare and valuable gems that they are.

As a champion for Enterprise 2.0, and with only a few short weeks to go before the Enterprise 2.0 conference, Susan is keen to see more meaningful adoption within enterprises: not just more, but in applications that really make a difference for the core business of the company. This is, I believe, where social BPM can help: it’s an application that lends itself particularly well to collaboration and other social aspects, while providing a core critical function within enterprises. I’d love to see Enterprise 2.0 software vendors start to tackle core enterprise software, such as BPM, CRM and ERP, and stop building more enterprise wiki and blogging platforms. Think of it as 2.0 Reality Rehab for the whole Enterprise 2.0 industry.

SAPPHIRENOW Day 1 Wrapup

Not a lot of blogging yesterday; a couple of good keynotes (but I’m not going to blog about Richard Branson, Al Gore and Colin Powell), a press conference, the sustainability roundtable, a couple of other short meetings and networking at Blogger Central. Some links to items of interest:

The never-ending stream of #sapphirenow Twitter updates
The BPM starter kit, a collection of materials aligned with the ASAP methodology for SAP BPM implementations
Live streaming video of the keynotes and more content
Greg Chase’s pre-conference report on BPM, PI and process orchestration
Dennis Howlett’s video interviews (check further back for some from last week’s TUCON conference)
Marilyn Pratt’s wrapup of the day

Today, I’ll be getting a briefing on NetWeaver BPM, what’s happened in the last months and what’s coming up in future releases; I haven’t heard a peep since TechEd last fall.