Category: conferences

Ginger Gatling on the Universal Worklist #sapphire09

I spent yesterday and this morning in the global communications center at the north end of the conference center, since SAP’s teams for managing social media (that’s us bloggers), press and analysts brings the SAP executives to us for meetings up there. They pipe in the keynote sessions, give us comfy tables with internet access, power and printers, and feed and water us; I’m guessing that some of the press/bloggers/analysts never venture out of the global communications center all week. I just can’t resist the call of the regular sessions, however, and I hiked through the extensive show floor to the south concourse for Ginger Gatling’s session on the Universal Worklist (UWL).

This session isn’t specifically about BPM, but the UWL is used as the common inbox portal for tasks from a variety of sources including BPM and business workflow. This session was for people who use UWL already, with Gatling’s top ten recommendation for configuring it for better usage.

Almost no one uses UWL out of the box – only one person in the audience claimed to be doing this, and even they have recently started to customize it – since there are a variety of ways to customize it: processing of multiple tasks in the list simultaneously, forcing comments/responses when specific actions are taken, override the default task launch mechanism, create custom action buttons, or just basic visual styling. UWL can also handle non-SAP tasks: a task from any application can be integrated by using the UWL Java API to create a UWL connector for that application. In fact, that’s how NetWeaver BPM tasks end up in the UWL. There were a couple of people in the audience interested in using UWL for non-SAP tasks, with one of them stating that they had 19 different workflow systems and want to use UWL as their “window to everything”.

Interestingly, although UWL can be personalized by users, almost everyone in the audience said that they hide that option because it makes it harder to support. This is pretty basic personalization, such as column order and sorting, but it’s amazing what people can get confused over, especially when they’re trying to explain it to a remote support person. Also, most of the audience disable substitution (that is, redirecting your tasks to someone else while you are away) at the UWL portal layer, since there could be several applications surfacing tasks into UWL, and you can’t apply the same substitution rules across all of them. Both of these – personalization and substitution – are examples of features created by developers who don’t really understand the business environment, but were likely designed and tested in an overly simplistic version of that environment: otherwise, who would assume that all of the tasks in a “universal” worklist could be delegated to the same person?

This is not something that I will ever have to do myself, but it’s an important glimpse at what sort of customization needs to happen for a BPM application that is going to use UWL as an inbox, in addition to the customization that is done for the task user interface itself within BPM.

Wolfgang Hilpert and Thomas Vollmering on NetWeaver BPM #sapphire09

I started to get paranoid yesterday when my meeting with Wolfgang Hilpert and Thomas Vollmering was scheduled at the same time as Ginger Gatling’s session on NetWeaver BPM, then they didn’t show for the meeting – was there something they didn’t want me to know? However, it was just a scheduling glitch, and eventually we met up so that they could brief me on the current release and what’s coming later this year.

When I last had an in-depth look at the product late last year, it was in late beta; since then, it’s been through the SAP ramp-up (early ship) process, and was released for unrestricted shipment on Monday. I’ll be finishing up my review of the current release in an upcoming post, and as soon as Thomas forwards on the material that he promised to send (hint, hint), I’ll be able to post a bit more on the future directions.

The newly released version is still lacking a lot of expected BPMS functionality, but has focused on the features that SAP’s customers said that they needed the most: human-centric BPM (since there are existing products in the SAP suite that cover lower-level orchestration) and a integrated composition environment that can eventually be used for process composition across all layers: human-facing tasks, web services, and core ERP processes. Due to their Yasu acquisition, they also did direct integration between the BPM and BRM environments, although there were some rough edges there and in some of the other areas, such as handling the user interface at process steps.

In spite of the shortcomings of the first release, SAP’s vision for BPM is far-reaching, especially around the integration of events and analytics. They are taking advantage of the innovation that’s happening within the BusinessObjects group, and there’s a potential for them to create a powerful platform not just for managing processes, but for handling events, including the results of analytics at a human-facing step as a decision-support tool, and for analyzing and optimizing processes.

Marge Breya on BusinessObjects Explorer #sapphire09

A small group of bloggers had the opportunity to sit around a table with Marge Breya to expand on what we saw during the press conference on BusinessObjects Explorer. She discussed how unstructured data has being elevated to first class status within SAP, with analytics and reporting tools that can lay over unstructured as well as structured data. Part of this involves parsing structure out of unstructured data through an appropriate semantic layer.

They’re also playing with things (that she couldn’t really talk about, although some customers have access) that provide much more of an hosted Web 2.0-type of experience. They’re working on Explorer On Demand, which allows you to upload spreadsheets and other file-oriented data, then do some analysis and visualization on your own data to get an idea of how valuable tools like this are. They handed out some test drive passes for this, so I may get a chance to play around with it some time soon. I expect that many organizations won’t want their data warehouse in the cloud, but this will at least give them a chance to try it out in a no-risk environment. They’re doing this with more of their BusinessObjects platform, where there’s a free version that allows for some starter functionality, then hope for it to go viral in terms of stepping up to paid on demand or on premise versions. That’s a pretty powerful model in the consumer space, although traditional enterprises may have a more difficult time adopting technology in this manner. Considering that the higher-end of Explorer is targeted at large organizations, this could be the biggest challenge.

Breya had some interesting background on product strategy as well, especially around how SAP had traditionally been doing OLAP-based business intelligence, and BusinessObjects didn’t have much in the way of OLAP, so the acquisition produced a minimum of overlap. Polestar, on the market for a couple of years as an ad hoc query tool, was retooled into Explorer for a million or so rows of data, and Explorer Accelerated, a software and hardware bundle, that can handle billions or rows.

She went on to talk about the ties between BI and BPM, and although she couldn’t talk about anything specific, there are some interesting things coming in terms of operational BI, monitoring and characterizing processes for the purposes of process improvement, as well as invoking analytics within processes for decision support.

In response to a question about the consumerization of SAP products, she promises us “an experience that will take decisioning to the next level, involving collaboration” in something that is just entering private beta now. I’m picturing a cross between Xbox Live and Vanilla Sky, which would be cool, but I still think that there are challenges to adoption of completely new user experience paradigms. Since SAP has a wide customer base in manufacturing and other industries with low margins and the requirement for constant product innovation, this may not be as much of a challenge as it would be verticals such as financial services and insurance.

We had a discussion about the cloud versus on premise as the location for data, with the underlying theme that it’s not an all or nothing proposition: while operational data may be behind the firewall, it makes much more sense to leave third-party benchmarking data in the cloud where it can be shared and frequently updated. The new generation of BI products from any vendor can’t be restrictive in their data sources, but have to be able to aggregate information from a variety of sources both inside and outside the firewall.

#sapphire09 press conference – Business Objects Explorer

Jon Schwarz, SAP Executive Board Member, gave the global press conference at SAPPHIRE this morning, with a focus on BusinessObjects Explorer (formerly known as Polestar) and how it helps their customers to become clear enterprises: seeing, thinking and acting clearly. As Prashanth Rai twittered, it’s more like a mini keynote than a press conference, or at least this part of it.

SAP is seeing a fundamental change in customer expectations, both from the buyers and the users. Buyers need to do more with less, which means reducing total cost of ownership, making it easy to deploy solutions, and getting to ROI faster. Users now want the same level of usability and sophistication of digital media as they see in consumer applications (surprise!), as well as wanting to integrate social and community aspects.

Their strategy:

  • Building on their core business process platform
  • Best foundation for an intelligence platform since the acquisition of Business Objects
  • Next-level BPM, presumably through NetWeaver BPM (although he didn’t state that explicitly)
  • On premise and on demand solutions
  • Web 2.0-like user experience
  • Non-disruptive evolution through timeless software

Marge Breya, EVP and GM of Business Objects and NetWeaver, took the stage to talk about how data is used within organizations, and pointed out a 2007 BusinessWeek research study that showed that most people don’t think that they have the right data (and granularity of data) to do their job, and poor decisions are being made due to lack of information. She then introduced BusinessObjects Explorer, a front-end tool for exploring and visualizing large data sets, both for casual and power users. It allows for searching and sorting, interactive drilldowns, and various types of dynamic graphical visualizations while navigating through the data. This can be done in the context of a SAP report screen, and she showed an experimental version running on an iPhone. In the next year, they’ll be opening up the data sources so that this can be used as an interactive analysis and visualization tool against data warehouses, flat files and other data sources. Currently, there’s a regular version, which good for up to about 1M records, and an accelerated version for much larger data sets. There are, of course, other data analysis and visualization tools in the BusinessObjects portfolio: Xcelsius, Crystal and WebI; the challenge will be a clear delineation of the usage of each of these products, or a consolidation of some of these to create a more compact portfolio.

She was then joined on stage by a panel of customers and partners: Vincent Vloemans from Sara Lee, Katrina Coyle from Molson Coors, Elke Reichart from HP and Alexander Yost from IBM. The two customers have been using Explorer and had lots of good things to say about the speed of analysis (2-3 seconds on data sets of 300M records), the fast learning curve for users with little or no training, and the short time to value. The partners discussed how their hardware optimizes the performance of this solution – apparently, a nice IBM or HP blade server will help things out considerably – and how they are shipping preconfigured and optimized systems.

Schwarz came back up to walk through a more traditional set of press announcements, including their acquisition of Clear Standards; you can read all of the news releases in the news room. We then had an audience Q&A, which ranged across a variety of subjects including the potential for appliances for products such as BusinessObjects Explorer (nothing to discuss yet, but apparently in the works), the role of business and IT in the creation and maintenance of data visualizations and other user-facing information (don’t fire your IT staff yet), sustainability (they’re for it), and the necessity for good data hygiene (seriously).

If you’re on Twitter, #sapphire09 is one of the top trends today. With 10,000 attendees on site and another 8,000 registered online for virtual participation, that’s not surprising.

Back to blogging

I’ve been absent from blogging for a while – with the exception of the links posts that are auto-generated from my Delicious bookmarks – due to a very heavy client workload and very few conferences to blog about. I have been twittering, but my Twitter stream tends to contain random thoughts and personal observations rather than BPM-related commentary.

The Twitterati may claim that blogging is dead, but there’s clearly a place for articles, reviews and opinion pieces that need more space to expand on a subject. There’s something about writing longer bits of prose (longer than 140 characters, that is) that helps my brain work around problems better, plus the comments and feedback from readers is a valuable part of the conversation. I plan to get back to more regular blogging, and to kick that off, I’ll be blogging from SAP’s SAPPHIRE conference this week in Orlando. I have a detailed review of NetWeaver BPM that has been in the works for a while, and I’ll be updating that with new information from this week and publishing that as well.

Stay tuned, and don’t delete me from your RSS reader yet.

Next week: Toronto, not San Diego

Yes, it’s true, I’m going to miss a North American Gartner BPM summit for the first time in, well, maybe forever. There’s two reasons for this: first and foremost, I’m 110% busy with time-critical client work right now, and a week in sunny San Diego just doesn’t fit into my calendar. Also, if you review my coverage of last fall’s summit, I’m not finding enough new material at each summit since they moved to the two/year format: I’m not learning much, and there’s not much new to write about. I believe that they’ve started to add some new material specific to BPM in a tight economy, and they had a pretty successful event in London a few weeks back, so I look forward to catching up with the material – and those of you attending – at the next one.

For all of you who have sent messages asking if we can meet up in San Diego next week, I’ll raise a glass to you from these chillier climes.

Lombardi’s user conference goes online

In an amazing reflection of the economic times, Lombardi announced today that their user conference, Driven, will not be taking place in Austin as originally planned, but will be an online conference. From their email update:

For the last few weeks, we have been talking to customers all over the world about Driven – our annual user conference. The feedback has been consistent – people want to come but many companies are under travel restrictions.

So, we have decided to change the format for Driven this year. Instead of you having to come to Austin, we are going to bring Driven to you. Think of it as Driven without the travel. Actually, we are calling it Driven Online.

I assume that this means that the attendance numbers just weren’t shaping up as expected, and they had to make a tough decision to cancel the onsite conference.

It’s still the week of April 20-24th, but the content is severely restricted: a single one-hour webinar each day at 11am Eastern. It’s live, so that there will be a Q&A session at the end of each webinar, but this amount of content doesn’t even begin to come close to what would be at a real conference.

It will be interesting to see what other conferences end up cancelled this year; I can’t believe that this will be the only casualty.

FASTforward09: David White, Kusiri

David White of Kusiri finished up the afternoon of breakout sessions with a presentation on using customer data to drive business results. He started with some statistics about just how much data flows through businesses: 85% of all data is managed by enterprises, and that’s 85% of a very large number. Businesses, however, need actionable information, not just data, so we start to apply technologies such as search and business intelligence to explore and make sense of the data.

Business intelligence, however, hasn’t delivered the goods, particularly in the area of unstructured content such as documents: BI typically relies on structured (database) data within the firewall, and that doesn’t provide a complete view of things. Traditional search – represented by the “search box” (I think that the presenters are not allowed to say the G-word) – provides too many irrelevant results, hence also not that useful. But just like Goldilocks, we have a solution that’s just right: search applications, that is, a search-powered application that searches across internal and external data, both structured and unstructured, and guides you to actionable information through navigation.

He showed us some screen snapshots from a search application that they have built, but difficult to see and not interactive so not very compelling, as demos go. Overall, it’s a portal-like dashboard application where the widgets in the portal are actually the results of searches. From here, you can click through on a line item to drill down into the information (again, which uses search behind the scenes) to see more detailed information from a variety of sources, as well as additional tools and functionality for taking action on the data or further analyzing it. There’s a lot of functionality here, presented in the sort of dashboard/drill-down visual analysis environment that you might expect to see from a BI system, but accessing information from sources that you’d never have access to in your BI system.

White’s prediction is that in five years, typing criteria into a search box will appear hopelessly outdated: search will just be implicit in the applications that we use to access information. Both the sources of data and the questions that you’re going to ask will change, and traditional BI and search methods can’t handle that; instead, you’ll be using a new generation of search applications that allow you to traverse the data universe.

FASTforward09: Auli Ellä, Orion

Time out for a video interview (which will appear on the FASTforward blog sometime today or tomorrow), then back to the business productivity track to hear Auli Ellä of Orion, a Finnish pharmaceutical, discuss their enterprise search implementation. As a research-based company, internal users need to be able to find information both internally – in a Documentum document management system, eRooms and the intranet – and externally.

As she put it, it’s not about searching, it’s about finding. Prior to implementing FAST, users didn’t know which system to look in or what metadata to use, and failed searches (where they didn’t find what they needed) took an average of an hour each, which tells you how them cost-justified their enterprise search project.

They started with a pilot enterprise search project that used a small selection of internal and external information sources accessed by a select group of R&D and business users, and used that to prove their business case and gain management acceptance.

She outlined two major benefits that they’re seeing from enterprise search: it supports decision-making, and supports innovation. It saves them a lot of time spent searching internal and external resources, but also adds value to search results through increased accuracy and reliability, and the ability to filter, categorize and drill-down into the results. Information is re-used in place, not copied between systems, using the existing metadata from the source systems both for indexing and for filtering results. This provided an easier and faster search that is at least as reliable as a single source search, and although search results are federated, the access rights of the original information source are respected such that a user can’t see search results for content that they would not have access to in the source system. Users could create and save searches, making it even faster to locate frequently-accessed information.

The user feedback was impressive: in fact, some users thought that it couldn’t be real because it was too fast.

She had some lessons learned for implementing enterprise search:

  • It’s essential to start with a pilot, doing a concrete proof of concept, then implementing iteratively
  • It’s important to have a diverse group of pilot users, not just highly-skilled knowledge workers
  • Keep it simple with the filters and navigation: too much sophisticated can just confuse things
  • Be prepared for resistance, and combat that by offering tips and tricks for using the system more effectively

Going back to the goal of supporting decision-making, it’s helping them by allowing users to see all relevant information available on one screen when, for example, gathering materials for a meeting. On the innovation side, they’re starting to have some unexpected results – which drive innovation – becoming visible more easily by using filters such as content authors.

They’re now adding more internal and external information sources, and improving functionality based on feedback from the users for things such as selecting a single information source when the user does know where the content is – which is an interesting request, when you consider that that means that the users would rather search in FAST than in the underlying system due to speed, ease of use and functionality. Reliability and speed are critical for search, of course: without both of those, the users will reject it.

In the future, they’ll be developing new filters and search profiles, adding structured content, and incorporating search behind the scenes in portals to display relevant information (like the company cafeteria menu, which is currently the top search in their system). As this happens, however, they are aware that this continuous development can make it easier for the user, but increases the amount of work in the background by the information management people.

Her conclusions: if done well, search can become a personalized desktop where discovering, re-using and refining information is business as usual. It’s all about turning information into knowledge and action.