conferences – Page 23

NetWeaver BPM update #SAPTechEd09

Wolfgang Hilpert and Thomas Volmering gave us an update on NetWeaver BPM, since I was last updated at SAPPHIRE when they were releasing the product to full general availability. They’re readying the next wave of BPM – NetWeaver 7.2 – with beta customers now, for ramp-up near the beginning of the year and GA in spring of 2010.

There are a number of enhancements in this version, based on increasing productivity and incorporating feedback from customers:

Creating user interfaces: instead of just Web DynPro for manual creation of UI using code, they can auto-generate a UI for a human-facing task step.
New functions in notifications.
Handling intermediate events for asynchronous interfaces with other systems and services.
More complete coverage of BPMN in terms of looping, boundary events, exception handling and other constructs;
Allowing a process participant to invite other people on their team to participate in a task, even if not defined in the process model (ad hoc collaboration at a step).
The addition of a reporting activity to the process model in order to help merge the process instance data and the process flow data to make available for in-process analytics using a tool such as BusinessObjects – the reporting activity takes a snapshot of the process instance data to the reporting database at that point in the process without having to call APIs.
Deeper integration with other SAP business services, making it easier to discover and consume those services directly within the NetWeaver Process Composer even if the customer hasn’t upgraded to a version of SAP ERP that has SOA capabilities
Better integration of the rules management (the former Yasu product) to match the NetWeaver UI paradigms, expose more of the functionality in the Composer and allow better use of rules flow for defining rules as well as rules testing.
Business analyst perspective in process modeler so that the BA can sketch out a model, then allow a developer to do more of the technical underpinnings; this uses a shared model so that the BA can return to make modifications to the process model at a later time.

I’d like to see more about the ad hoc runtime collaboration at a task (being able to invite team members to participate in a task) as well as the BA perspective in the process modeler and the auto-generation of user interfaces; I’m sure that there’s a 7.2 demo in my future sometime soon.

They also talked briefly about plans for post-7.2:

Gravity and similar concepts for collaborative process modeling.
Common process model to allow for modeling of the touchpoints of ERP processes in BPM, in order to leverage their natural advantage of direct access to SAP business applications.
Push further into the business through more comprehensive business-focused modeling tools.
Goal-driven processes where the entire structure of the process model is not defined at design time, only the goals.

In the future, there will continue to be a focus on productivity with the BPM tools, greater evolution of the common process model, and better use of BI and analytics as the BusinessObjects assets are leveraged in the context of BPM.

SAP research overview: Gravity #SAPTechEd09

We had a blogger roundtable today with Soeren Balko, VP in the SAP NetWeaver BPM architecture and design group, and Marek Kowalkiewicz from the Brisbane section of SAP Research with an overview of the research and special projects going on at SAP. Innovations tend to emerge from the research centers – in conjunction with the universities with whom they collaborate and customers – then the product development groups become involved in order to determine how to productize the ideas.

The hot thing in their research right now is Gravity: the collaborative process modeling environment that they created within Google Wave. The process modeling is done purely with tools created in Google Web Toolkit; this is not SAP NetWeaver BPM embedded within Google Wave, it’s a BPMN modeler created with GWT. The process models can be exported to the BPMN 2.0 format for import into a BPMS (or another modeling tool). The Wave playback capability is especially nice for seeing how the process model was built, and different colored shadows on the model objects to denote which participant created the object.

There are bots that can be added to processes in order to check the process integrity, export process models, and to detect portions of the process flow that could potentially be collapsed into a subprocess. It makes sense that there will be other bots created in order to perform other automated checks and actions on the process model.

They’re not supporting the full BPMN 2.0 object set, but have a subset that can at least be used for simple models and as a proof of concept around the idea of a modeler within Wave.

James Taylor was at the table too, and we got into a discussion of modeling rules in a similar manner: although this is a BPMN modeler, so there’s no opportunity to model rules here, there may be an opportunity to take the NetWeaver BRM rules modeling paradigm and create a similar sort of prototype that allows for rules modeling within Wave.

We’ll be seeing more of Gravity tonight at the Process Design Slam, and if I ever get my freaking Wave account (2 invitations already on their way, but not arrived yet), then I can actually try it out for myself.

We also had a brief overview of Yowie, a project that we saw at DemoJam last night, that uses SAP text analytics to act as an intelligent agent either as a bot in Wave or when receiving emails regarding enterprise applications and assets; and BirdsEye, which receives the GPS signal sent from an iPhone (or any geopositioning RSS feed) to do near-real-time positional tracking for applications such as delivery optimization.

Process Design Slam preparation #SAPTechEd09 #BPXslam09

I was sitting in the blogger room this morning at SAP TechEd in Phoenix, and heard Marilyn Pratt mention my name over at another table: usually something that makes me perk up my ears, since Marilyn is a primo community builder, and I had the feeling that I was about to be recruited for something. 🙂 I’m already signed up as a judge/critic for the Process Design Slam event here tonight, which is the culmination (along with the TechEd events in Vienna and Bangalore) of a three-month virtual community collaboration for applying BPM tools and methodologies to solve a specific business challenge.

The selected process, from the design slam wiki:

Automating business processes related to forming virtual community-based power plant made up of resident’s personal solar wind generation.

The idea is to describe a process that allows a homeowner or business to come online as a micro generator within a township and the various steps (human and automated) that are required. Sustainability gets better over time, the more neighborhoods choose to generate power from green sources to supply the very power this neighborhood consumes – and in pretty much the same timeframe. This also reduces the losses of transporting power over longer distances. Thus, power companies will more and more become brokers, and less actual suppliers of power.

After a chat with Marilyn, we’ve decided that I’ll interview the winners (briefly, since it will be after midnight, which is 3am in my time zone) and write a short blog post about their winning contribution. This will definitely break my standard rule that everything is off the record once the bar opens.

The community has already done a lot of the work, including creating and agreeing upon a process map using NetWeaver BPM 7.1:

and rules in NetWeaver BRM 7.1:

Keep an eye on the #BPXslam09 hashtag on Twitter for up-to-date news as the day progresses.

NetWeaver update #SAPTechEd09

Marge Breya is responsible for a huge portfolio of SAP products, including SOA, BPM and the BusinessObjects BI unit – that is, pretty much all the SAP stuff that I’m interested in. 🙂 At an analyst/blogger roundtable this afternoon, she gave a quick overview of the high-level strategy for NetWeaver, and had Wolfgang Hilpert and Thomas Volmering there to talk more about the BPM side.

From a platform standpoint, they’re trying to do some major renovations to build the best possible platform for SAP to run on. In orchestration, there are new things in master data management as well as business process and the models within them; when I reviewed the NetWeaver BPM platform, I talked about the strong process instance data models that they include, which is critical for appropriate monitoring and management of processes. She also mentioned Gravity, the combination of Google Wave and some SAP process discovery/modeling to allow for collaborative process modeling by what one person at the table called “mere mortals”.

From the Business Objects side of the portfolio, she also mentioned the advances in analytics and end-user experience, and how ideas being generated there are pushing forward the related technologies in other areas of the portfolio. There was a discussion about in-memory analytics; this has obvious implications for complex event processing and BPM as well as just analytics. Creating methods for users to configure their own user interface allows the business to start creating their own experiences rather than waiting for IT to do it for them.

The message that every new user entering the workforce now is a digital native comes through clearly in more than one of the conversations that I’ve heard today. SAP must be feeling the pinch of having some pretty outdated user interfaces in some of their product lines, because they seem to be taking this as a serious threat and addressing it head on.

This was more of a discussion than a presentation, but some good ideas about what’s coming up.

This is my first post from SAP TechEd in Phoenix; SAP has paid my travel expenses to be here, but is not otherwise compensating me and has no editorial control over what I write (in fact, they look downright nervous as I type).

Untamed business processes #BTF09

You know that you’re getting near the end of a conference when the number of people on the panel is almost as many as the number in the audience. The last session of the day is a breakout, and I attended a panel with Craig Le Clair, Chip Gliedman and a third analyst (George) who was substituted in for Paul Hamerman, but for some reason they had not spent the necessary 10 seconds to update the title slide.

They classify processes into “tamed”, meaning those that are so structured, they’re embedded within packaged applications such as ERP and CRM; and “untamed”, including everything else, including all those processes that we implement in BPMS. I’m not sure that I agree that some of their untamed processes are not structured; rather, a packaged app doesn’t provide the right degree of flexibility, or the market for the process is small enough that there isn’t a packaged app to deal with that process.

Forrester has an interesting format for this type of panel, where each of the analysts takes on a persona and a set of opinions that I don’t think necessarily represents their own opinions: although I like the light-hearted back and forth conversational manner, this has too much of the air of a high school debate club where anyone can argue any side as required rather than analysts who actually hold opinions on this subjects. I found this one to be too distracting to focus on the content.

That’s it for the Forrester Business Technology Forum; all in all, a lot of great content in a fast-paced two days. There could have been more on Lean business process improvement rather than Lean software process improvement, especially considering that half of the vendors in the showcase were BPMS vendors, but I still gained a lot of value from the conference.

Social media and business activity monitoring #BTF09

James Kobielus and Natalie Petouhoff presented at a breakout session on social media as a method for gaining visibility into your customer service processes: customers will react on social media channels such as Twitter, Facebook, review and community sites, and blogs if they have either a good or bad customer service experience. I’m not sure that this fits into the classic definition of BAM, but it does provide insight into how well you’re working with your customers.

They referred to the “witness factor” that social media has on business transformation: if people within the company know that they are being watched and commented upon, they often change their behavior in order to make those comments more favorable. Social media provides one window for a company into their customers’ impressions of the company and products; since people are much more likely to comment if they have a bad experience than a good one, those are overwhelmingly negative, but still represent valid complaints.

One problem with many current BAM applications is that they’re trapped within a BPMS framework, and are focused primarily on the data and events generated by that BPMS. Instead, we need to move towards a more comprehensive monitoring environment that can accept information from a number of different sources, including social media channels. Just think of tweets as events that can feed into a monitoring dashboard, allowing a customer service representative to review and respond to those in the context of any other customer-related events and information. Kobielus mentioned that there is little integration of social media into traditional BAM tools, but I think that we’ll see this sort of functionality being offered by other tools, such as more forward-thinking CRM.

This seemed to be a bit of a disjointed presentation, with social media on one side and BAM on the other, but there are ways to bring this together: in advance of this session, I started a discussion with my fellow Enterprise Irregulars about Twitter being used for customer engagement (not just one-way PR blasts), which has resulted in a fascinating stream of messages that weave around these same issues. After I’ve had a chance to digest those a bit more, and think about how this impacts on business processes, I’ll bring some of those ideas forward.

Lean application development strategies #BTF09

Dan Carmel from SpringCM gave the second keynote today, focused on his premise that SaaS = Lean. Although I would agree that many SaaS applications are Lean from a customer’s standpoint, that’s not true with all of them. Yes, using SaaS applications potentially has a much leaner footprint for a customer since there is no hardware or software on their own site, but you also need to consider the efforts to integrate with other systems, including on-premise systems. If the SaaS app (or any on-premise app, for that matter) can be reconfigured and integrated with a minimal effort, then things continue to look Lean; if it’s closed and requires custom kludges to integrate, then not so much.

He went through some good examples of Lean and extensible SaaS environments, such as Salesforce.com and Webex Connect, then pointed out some areas where on-premise systems can be a big challenge, but SaaS can provide sufficient business value even at lower volumes: ECM, for example (no surprise, since that’s what SpringCM sells), where high initial costs tend to keep all but large companies from deploying internally.

He then introduced Joe Graves of Stratus Technologies (a SpringCM customer) about their journey with SaaS. They started using Salesforce.com about five years ago, deploying to 170 users worldwide in a matter of weeks from the start of the project. They use a number of applications integrated with Salesforce.com, and when they needed ECM for contract management, they selected SpringCM because it’s tightly integrated and because they were already sold on the value of SaaS. He outlined their benefits: lower upfront costs with no capital outlay, quicker implementation time, reduced operational issues such as storage management and disaster recovery, and allows IT to focus higher up in the value chain rather that fussing with operational issues that don’t improve competitive differentiation. Although many people have concerns about customization and integration, security, and uptime of SaaS apps, Graves pointed out that there are ways to deal with all of these when you’re working with a properly built app, and that as long as it meets your functional and operational requirements, there isn’t a problem. [As I like to point out to people who use the highly publicized downtime of SaaS apps such as Salesforce.com and Gmail as justification for not using SaaS: your internal systems go down too, it’s just not publicized across the internet; in fact, the level of transparency that a SaaS provider has around their failures can increase customer commitment.]

Forge your Lean process improvement game plan #BTF09

After an intro by Mike Gilpin, Clay Richardson gave the first keynote of the second day, focused on Lean process improvement. We were visited by the ghost of BPM past being Michael Hammer and business process reengineering, focused on mass production but forgetting the people; essentially, it became a euphemism for downsizing. The ghost of BPM present, although it has moved beyond that frightening past, is stuffed full of consultants, books, tools and certification programs, to the point of confusion. The ghost of BPM future, however, envisions an empowered front line and engaged customers.

There’s a greater demand for BPM than ever – 66% of those that Forrester surveyed want to do more with BPM – but almost no one has increased budget to implement it. ROI might still be used to sell BPM projects (necessary in these budgetary times), but the final metrics will be business value-based, since ROI doesn’t necessarily measure the actual business improvement.

Lean is shaping the new world of process improvement: processes are moving from standardized to flexible, and the focus is moving from ROI to value since the old IT-centric metrics just don’t work any more. From an implementation standpoint, Lean is about moving from waterfall to Agile, and shifting from on-premise to cloud computing environments.

In order to develop a process improvement game plan, it’s necessary to understand your approach (methodology, tools) and your strategic intent; he had an interesting Lean process improvement (LPI) measure where looking at the correlation between those two factors could diagnose whether an enterprise’s process improvement efforts are bloated, lean or anemic. From there, each of those ranges has a specific plan: if bloated, then you need to connect your process to strategy, and eliminate waste from the BPM technology portfolio (which could mean eliminating some of the tools that you use); if anemic, improve process governance and your process improvement talent pool.

Any process methodology needs to be customized to your specific environment and requirements, and you need to assess gaps in your skills (particularly process analysts) and work towards empowering the business. Process improvement has to be connected to your value drivers, including the center of excellence.

Interesting discussion following between Richardson and Gilpin, especially about BPM mashups (Richardson is just as hot about social BPM as I am): he says that the key to a successful mashup environment that will be used by business people is to make it look like Microsoft Office 2007. He also mentioned that closely pairing a process analyst with the developers can reduce bloat on the project since it reduces the amount of miscommunication across that critical boundary (this, of course, assumes that the process analysts comes from the business side and not part of the development team to begin with).

End of the day, on to the evening #BTF09

Jim Haney, CIO of Harley-Davidson, presented on how they’re taking the Lean principles that they already use in manufacturing, and applying to their IT operations. They’re obviously focused on their customers: he started with a picture of a grey-bearded biker in bandana and shades, and pointed out that they do everything for him. 🙂 However, it was the end of the day and I didn’t find the rest of the talk sufficiently compelling to blog about.

Today’s been a bit of a marathon, especially following on the heels of 2-1/2 days at Gartner in Orlando earlier this week, and it’s not over yet: I’m off to the reception on the vendor show floor, then to a special event for women executives to discuss building personal brand, sponsored by Lombardi. Although I’m typically not a big fan of women-only events because I think that they just emphasize the divide, this looks like it will be an interesting panel and I’m looking forward to add in my two cents worth.

Designing compelling customer-facing user experiences #BTF09

For the last breakout of the day before the final keynote, I attended Mike Gualtieri’s session on designing customer-facing user interfaces. He started with the idea that application developers have to be involved in user experience design, and not just leave it to the designers (which is, of course, exactly what we did in the bad old days of development when there was no such thing as a user experience designer). Forrester defines user experience as “users’ perceptions of the usefulness, usability, and desirability of a Web application based upon the sum of all their direct and indirect interactions with it”, and propose that a great UX is useful, usable and desirable.

User experience impacts how your customers feel about you, and it’s also not just about the interfaces that the customer works with directly: a second-hand interface can also impact the customer experience, as you know if you’ve ever waited ages while a hotel desk clerk clicks their way through a complex interface in order to check you in. A good UX can increase purchases, retain customers and attract more customers; leaving it to chance hurts your conversion rates, alienates customers and increases your development costs due to redesign and redevelopment.

Gualtieri argues that UX design is Lean (although you could argue that only good UX design is Lean), and sets out best practices for good UX design:

Become your users, by listening to their needs, observing them in their natural habitat, creating personas, and empathizing with them. Users typically don’t articulate their needs fully or accurately so it’s not sufficient to just listen to them, but they will demonstrate them if you watch how they do their work. This type of user research is not the same as gathering requirements from business stakeholders; remember the Henry Ford quote: “If I asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses”. Forrester uses personas in their own materials – for example, representing an application development manager, complete with picture and name – and I’m seeing some companies such as Global 360 use these for BPMS user interface design.
Design first, and understand constraints and potential areas of change as well as the different personas that you discovered in your user research. Keep in mind that you have to serve business goals by serving user goals. Create rough prototypes first, and don’t rush into development or lock into a design too soon. There is some amount of art UX design, so don’t assume that tools can do it for you. Keep the basic principles in mind: useful, usable and desirable.
Trust no one: test your designs. It doesn’t matter how many experts review the designs, there is no better review of some features than testing the UX with a range of intended users. Remember that this is not just about usability, it’s also about usefulness and desirability.
Inject UX design into your software development life cycle. Everyone on the team should understand why UX design is important, and be incented to help create great UX. UX design should be part of your development process, and requires someone on the team to own the UX design efforts. You still need to use the same techniques as discussed in the other best practices, not just do the design in isolation from the users, but having it integrated into the development team will improve the overall software design.

He finished with the ideas that your development efforts are essentially wasted if the user experience isn’t done right, but it doesn’t have to add a lot of time or money to your project. Good UX design is the mark of a great application development team.