Category: conferences

Gartner BPM: Global 360/Citi Cards Imaging and Workflow

Global 360 has a bit of revolving door with analysts: first, they hire Jim Sinur from Gartner. Then, they hire Colin Teubner from Forrester. Then, Sinur leaves. And here today at the Gartner show, which he admits is his first-ever, Teubner presented on behalf of Global 360 about putting people first in BPM. He really only did the introduction, however, before turning over the presentation to one of their customers, Richard Van Hoever, SVP of Customer Service Paper at Citi Cards.

Citigroup uses a lot of Global 360: 10,000 users worth. They’ve implemented a pretty standard imaging and workflow transaction processing application, with work queues that push work to participants rather than allowing cherry-picking, work prioritization and routing, and load balancing across their domestic, nearshore and offshore workforces. The big challenges are the volume of work, tight integration between document management and BPM, and geographic routing.

They were able to get 75% of their required functionality out of the box with Global 360 (they were promised 90%, but that type of discrepancy is pretty common). Most of the customization was around the work filtering, sorting, assignment and presentation, as expected; Global 360, like other BPMS’, does most of the behind-the-scenes stuff out of the box.

What amazes me is that this is fundamentally not different from the types of imaging and workflow systems that I’ve been helping organizations to implement for about 15 years; the only thing that has changed is that the relative sophistication of today’s tools means much less custom code and greater process agility. However, the business process is the same inefficient, key-from-paper/image process that’s been happening the same way for years. Undoubtedly, the relative volume of some transaction types will have reduced due to online self-service, but it’s clear that many large financial services organizations have a long ways to go in terms of making it easier for their customers to do their data entry for them.

Gartner BPM: SaaS and BPM

Having bugged out of the Agile BPM session, I arrived late to Michele Cantera’s discussion of whether software as a service is a viable option for process improvement projects. She covered off some of the same material as the SaaS and BPM session in February, but there was some new information as well. I won’t repeat the material from that session on the topic of BPM SaaS delivery and multi-tenancy models, so you might want to go back to that post and check that out as background for this. Go ahead, I’ll wait.

One interesting bit, based on 2007 estimates, segmented the BPM SaaS adopters into four categories:

  • Pragmatists, forming 49% of the market, who are replacing departmental on-premise applications but don’t have an enterprise-wide scope.
  • Beginners, 40% of the market, who are replacing low-end software tools with simple utility applications. These are often small or medium businesses who don’t want to grow an IT department.
  • Masters, 10% of the market, who are weaving SaaS applications into their enterprise-wide application portfolio.
  • Visionaries, a mere 1%, who are actively replacing on-premise applications with SaaS wherever possible.

She showed these plotted out on two axes: comprehensive strategy versus IT ability to execute. Pragmatists are low on comprehensive strategy but high on IT ability to execute; beginners are low on both, masters are high on both, and visionaries are high on strategy but low on ability to execute (since they don’t need to have internal IT skills). I really like this segmentation, since I think that it provides a good way to characterize SaaS customers in general, not just SaaS BPM customers.

She went through the list of current BPMS SaaS vendors, split out into business process modeling, process-based applications, and BPMS as a service. The SaaS modeling vendors are Lombardi, Metastorm and Appian; BPMS as a service is offered by Appian and Fujitsu. Process-based applications are typically offered by companies who have taken a commercial BPMS and built a specific vertical application on top of it; the underlying BPMS is not necessarily offered as SaaS directly, and in most cases, the BPMS vendor is not the one providing the service (with the exception of DST, whose BPM product grew from their own mutual fund back-office application), since most of them are not in the vertical applications market. There are going to be more entrants into all of these spaces in the near future, as well as changes to the multi-tenancy models offered by the vendors; you’ll want to keep your eye on what’s happening in this space if you’re considering BPM via SaaS, and start to consider how you’re going to handle process governance when your business processes aren’t running on your own systems any more.

She also showed a chart of different SaaS services types (BPO, application outsourcing, hosting, traditional ASP/SaaS model, process-based applications using BPMS/SaaS, BPMS as a platform, BPMS as SaaS-enabling platform) mapped against operating characteristics (operational cost, degree of customization, process agility, cost of process agility, number of suppliers): for example, BPMS as a platform has high process agility, whereas a traditional ASP/SaaS application that likely doesn’t include a BPMS has low process agility.

There was a list of do’s and don’ts of using SaaS for process agility, such as using BPMS via SaaS for pilot projects in order to make the business case for on-premise systems. Of course, if you do that, you might just find that you like the SaaS model well enough to stick with it for the long run.

Gartner BPM: Agile BPM methods

In the spirit of discouraging conference organizers from scheduling sessions that start before 9am, I boycotted the 8:15 keynote session, but showed up for the session on Agile BPM methods. Unfortunately, it appears to be a complete rerun of David Norton’s session from February, so I’m heading out to find a different session.

Gartner BPM: Dynamic BPM

Daryl Plummer’s thing is SOA and dynamic applications, and he presented this afternoon on Dynamic BPM: the ability to support process change by any role, at any time, with very low latency. In other words, (m)any process participant can make changes to the process in order to suit their specific needs, just as Trefler was telling us at lunch. A big part of making this happen is splitting out monolithic systems into more agile components: orchestration engine, portal, rules engine and databases.

Considering the mostly business composition of the audience, he did a pretty deep technical dive into concepts such as dynamic recompilation, showing how the dynamic nature of lower level technical components help to create dynamic processes on the surface.

He went through a well-used diagram showing BPM adoption over the years and where SOA comes into the picture, and the inherent dynamism in models, which is the whole premise behind model-driven design. SOA is used to automate what machines do best, while BPM and the associated process models are used to empower what people do best. More automation actually means more capabilities for the human steps in the process.

He summarized the event capture-analysis-response chain (covered by Roy Schulte in a session this morning that I just couldn’t make myself write about): events triggering business processes, and also monitoring those processes, in order to provide better decision quality, faster response, reduce information overload and reduce cost.

Inevitably, we move on to Web 2.0 and the implications for collaborative, ad hoc and social processes, community evolution of a process, and adding presence and other types of social context to processes.

One of the keys to making processes dynamic is business rules management, since being able to change rules without changing the structure of the process gives us most of the agility that’s required in business while allowing those changes to be made by business users.

Gartner BPM: Customers say the darnedest things

At the lunch presentation today, Alan Trefler (CEO of Pegasystems) discussed how it’s necessary — and possible — to put BPM right in the hands of the business users, and let them do it themselves. There will be some IT architectural oversight and support, of course, but you just have to convince the users, Tom Sawyer-like, that they really want to paint this fence.

I was sitting beside the BPM architect from one of Pega’s customers, and at the end of the talk I turned to him and asked “Do your business users do this?” His response: “Oh, hell, no!”

We still have a ways to go on this issue…

Gartner BPM: Opening Keynote

I arrived a bit late, transferring from the Ritz out in Tysons Corner down to the Gaylord in National Harbor (which Google Maps still thinks is a construction site), but caught the last half of the opening keynote with Janelle Hill and Michelle Cantera.

They started with some of the forces affecting business, both business and technology. Technology forces of change include having to balance enterprise-class and global-class computing, by which it appears that they mean custom, heavy-duty, special-purpose applications versus mass consumer applications: she makes the analogy between a custom, craftsman-made desk for the Oval Office versus an Ikea desk for the rest of us. Business forces of change include globalization, regulatory oversight, the evolution of the workforce (this is sort of a rerun of Connie Moore’s message of yesterday), and the complex value chains created by collaborative enterprises.

Since we’re here to talk about BPM, the next part was on how BPM helps us to cope with these forces of change. Their current BPM definition includes management practices, a structured approach using the management practices and software tools, and a cultural transformation (this last one is new in their definition, and long overdue). Overall, BPM is a set of disciplines plus technologies; it both encourages and enables continuous change in response to external forces, with a focus on optimizing end-to-end processes rather than specific functions. A key part of the approach is iterative (not phased), time-boxed, agile delivery, which I agree is critical but rarely see in practice.

BPM is being used heavily by companies that need to cope with frequent process change, usually in their customer-facing processes: from changes several times a year down to weekly or even daily frequency, plus ad hoc changes to executing process instances. What you need to think about, then, is how BPM changes your planning practices: Gartner suggests planning on shorter cycles and making plans dynamic and more transparent, with explicit guidelines for business outcomes rather than an explicit path by which those outcomes are reached. BPM also changes your organization and leadership by empowering employees (that’s a bit of a tired expression) and encouraging more fluid, virtual teams. It’s not clear that BPM is the real contributor here, however: I have the sense that they could take this same slide and present it at a number of different technology conferences (e.g., Enterprise 2.0) without changing anything but the title.

To use BPM effectively, you have to take advantage of monitoring and optimization, which is hopefully built into your BPM solution. This allows for better alignment of goals, metrics and results.

They finished up with a discussion of the skills and competencies required to build a BPM center of excellence (or as Gartner calls it, a center of competence), and a flying tour of their business process adoption and maturity model. Surprisingly, this tag-team presentation went way over time, not a good start for the day.

Not much new and exciting here — pretty much what you expect from a keynote — but a good overview of BPM in the context of business for the newbies in the crowd.

Appian Forum: Wrap-up

Samir Gulati returned for a brief wrap-up of today’s event before we headed for cocktails and the technology showcase, with Malcolm Ross describing the technical sessions that will be held over at Appian headquarters tomorrow, and Matt Calkins thanking us all for being here.

There are sessions tomorrow targeted primarily at their customers, including one-on-one executive briefings, so I’ll be headed over to the Gartner BPM summit in the morning instead.

I was impressed with Appian’s first user conference, which had great content and was well-run. Kudos to the whole team.

Appian Forum: Mercer

Chris Gardner, VP of Development at Mercer (who provide HR consulting, HR outsourcing and investment management services), presented the last session of the day; Mercer Outsourcing, with which he is affiliated, provides HR benefits administration.

They rolled out their first 3 processes in April of this year, with the BPM projects involving IT, their operational effectiveness practice and the operational units. Their key drivers are to drive out costs through increased productivity, increase automation of process steps and integration between systems, and standardize processes. Previously, it was difficult for them to reuse or even standardized processes across clients, and many processes required that disparate systems be integrated through human effort. Although in many cases, they thought that they had standardized processes, forcing them onto a common platform exposed their process variability and allowed them to address it directly.

Their benefits from implementing BPM include reduced errors, reduced cycle time, increased SLA attainment (hence reduced penalties for violating SLAs), and greater user productivity (and therefore reduced staffing requirements per client, key since their business in expanding). Automating steps and standardizing processes also allows them to offshore some parts of their processes, reducing costs even further.

Unlike most of the other case studies today, which focused on the human workflow side, they make extensive use of web services for increased automation and, where possible, straight-through processing. One of their projects was an unattended data extraction and file transmission application, where data was extracted from their system via web services calls to an ETL tool, PGP encryption, and FTP of the resulting file to the appropriate third party. Now, the only time that a person is involved in this process is for exception handling, and they have it rolled out to 60 client teams transmitting more than 500 files per week, with 85% of the transmissions being completely hands-off. This creates very different process design challenges than with primarily human-facing processes, such as handling web service unavailability. Even for the hands-off processes, they generate various reports directly from Appian as input to their compliance requirements.

The second application that they’ve implemented manages inbound data files, where Appian acts as an orchestration engine coordinating tasks spreading across their own proprietary systems and other commercial systems. They surface many of the errors and exception handling through Appian, which is  exactly what you should be using an orchestration engine for.

He was very excited to hear about Appian’s earlier announcement about ShareBase, since he feels that they have a lot of intellectual property that they share without compromising their own proprietary methods and processes, and encouraged other clients to participate fully in this.

Appian Forum: Accelerating BPM Adoption Through An Integrated Business Framework

I skipped out on the breakout sessions this afternoon, but am back here for Michael Melenovsky — formerly with Gartner, now senior BPM leader at Satyam — discussing how to accelerate BPM adoption through an integrated business framework: more of a methodology framework than a code framework, however.

He listed the three ways in which BPM projects are initiated, and how that influences the approach to be taken:

  • Executive leadership, where an executive goes to seminar or reads an article on BPM, and says “hey, let’s get us some of that”. The objective is strategic alignment and increasing corporate performance; because it’s very top-down, it’s only possible to push down the ideas so far, and often they’re not implemented.
  • Middle management, with the goal of operational improvement and cross-departmental coordination, with the BPMS seen as a tool for modeling processes and standardizing work procedures.The key challenge here is getting buy-in from both the top and bottom.
  • Line of business management, with the objective of improving productivity, decreasing costs, increasing quality, and providing greater agility. The BPMS is seen as a development platform, and 80% of these projects are driven by the IT department. There is no comprehensive vision, and implementation can take a long time.

He points out that the process layer makes explicit the role that people and systems play at each step of the process. Instead of a world where the IT organization must interpret the process, there is little visibility beyond a department’s boundaries, and it takes a long time and technical resources to change a process, the addition of a process layer makes the process model explicit and allows the model to drive the process execution, with process changes made by non-technical people.

There are three different perceptions of BPM, between business people, IT people and process people in terms of what creates the competitive differentiation and the best way to approach BPM. Each of these has a bias, and it turns out that the process people are the best ones to own a process, not the business people as is commonly assumed. The process people can form a bridge between IT and business, and keep the focus on the process rather than either the people or the systems involved in those processes.

He presented some sample requirements that might be included in a BPM project:

  • Business analysts and IT can collaborate around a single executable process model
  • Business can simulate the performance of the process for optimization purposes
  • Real-time monitoring and analytics
  • Task analytics guide human resources in task prioritization
  • Automated human workflow with simple to use task routing
  • Search capabilities for operations to review standard work procedures
  • Task user interfaces that are built quickly using an integrated composite application framework
  • Business rules and policy management for non-technical users to manage and modify

BPM provides value to both business and IT: we usually focus on the business benefits, but IT benefits through reduced solution development time, a more comprehensive architecture (usually in conjunction with SOA initiatives), reduced application maintenance costs, and shifting attention to higher-value topics instead of always being down in the code trenches.

He listed six critical success factors for BPM:

  • strategic alignment
  • culture and leadership
  • people
  • governance
  • methods
  • information technology

These aren’t specific to BPM, of course: any project with a significant technology component will rely on the same factors.

He showed a pyramid with a strategy layer at the top, followed by processes, applications, transactional systems, and tools; most companies are missing the process layer, hence try to go directly from strategy to applications, with high-level business executives stating that they need a specific solution, rather than stating their requirements in terms of a business process.

He walked through the participants in a cross-functional BPM project team, and finished up with getting started with BPM:

  • identify key stakeholders
  • define BPM in the context of benefits
  • determine the phases of value that BPM will deliver
  • develop a 3-year BPM roadmap

Satyam, of course, offers strategy and solution frameworks for BPM projects.

Appian Forum: AGF

John Jarrett, director of BPM at AGF Trust, spoke next about their Appian implementation; they’re the trust subsidiary of AGF Management Limited, a mutual funds company in Canada — very familiar territory for me, since the system integration company that I used to run implemented about half of the mutual funds imaging and workflow systems in Toronto in the 1990’s.

AFG Trust initially leveraged the parent mutual fund organization’s back office imaging and workflow system (either Jewelstone or Unisen, I believe, which were owned by AGF), but license expiry required that they look for another solution and they decided to strike out on their own with respect to systems in order to get something that was more suited for their specific needs. Instead of the document-centric solution that they were used to, they decided to take the BPM approach and focus on visibility, flexibility, agility and excellence in their processes. Their goals were to gain a more complete understanding of their own business so that they could understand the bottlenecks and inefficiencies; they also had to deal with the issue of a huge temporary workforce hired for a couple of months during tax season when there is a large influx of transactions as consumers scramble to invest in their retirement accounts before the tax-year-end deadline.

They’ve seen a number of benefits, both hard and soft:

  • increased control over business processes
  • process change and improvement flexibility
  • improved risk management and compliance practices
  • support of continued business growth
  • control expense growth

They selected Appian because of the ease of use and human-centric collaborative approach, the flexibility of having the process designers within the business unit, and the fact that the Appian product included all of the functional components that they required. The project team was positioned as a BPM center of excellence between IT and the operations group where the system was used, with Jarrett and 5 business process designers drawing on some IT resources and some business subject matter experts, plus Appian professional services as required.

They used a less agile approach than some of the other customers that we heard from today, documenting the to-be processes and requirements in great detail before starting implementation. Although he didn’t specify the implementation time, I suspect that this waterfall-style development approach took longer than an agile approach. Their pilot launch was in January of this year, with 1 product and 25 users, then a second launch in April for 3 product lines and 250 people (almost their entire user base within their loan and mortgage business). A third launch is coming up in October, adding more specialized products and lesser numbers of users, and they’re planning for other lines of business. They launch about 250,000 processes per month, since many business processes spawn multiple executing processes in order to complete.