Category: conferences

Introduction to BPM Workshop at Progress Revolution

I gave a workshop on Introduction to BPM at the pre-conference day yesterday for Progress Software’s user conference, Revolution:

The room was full, well over 120 people, and I’ve had a lot of good feedback from the session. As always, I could have talked all day about this stuff, but had to limit myself to about 2.5 hours, with another hour hanging around talking to attendees afterwards. It was great to get my presentation out of the way early in the conference; now I can relax and focus on (and blog about) other people’s presentations.

The Changing Nature of Work

I’ve been completely remiss with my blogging this week at the academic/research conference on BPM this week in Clermont-Ferrand, France. This isn’t for lack of good material from the workshops and presentations, but I’ve been a bit busy preparing for the keynote that I gave this morning:

The Changing Nature of Work

I really enjoyed the discussion afterwards, both in the Q&A and at the break later. There is quite a bit of research already happening in the areas that I list as “unsolved problems” (by which I mean, generally unsolved in commercial products), and I gained some good insights on removing the boundary between what we now thing of as structured and unstructured processes.

There is a bit of Twitter action going on at the conference, using both the hashtags #BPM2011 and #BPM11, with Michael zur Muehlen leading the pack on live-tweeting my presentation.

2011 BPM Conference Season, Part 2

The fall conference season is about to kick off. Although I’ve turned down a few invitations because of the heavy client travel schedule (where I’m actually implementing the stuff I talk about, but don’t talk about directly, hence the lack of blogging lately), you can catch me at a few places this fall:

bpmlogoBPM 2011, the 9th annual academic research conference on BPM in Clermont-Ferrand. where I will be keynoting the industry track. I have attended this conference for the past few years and am hugely honored to be asked to keynote. I love this conference because it gives me a peek into the academic research going on in BPM – although I barely remember what an eigenvector is, I can always see some good ideas emerging here that will undoubtedly become some software vendor’s killer feature in a few years. This conference was in the US last year for the first time (it is usually in Europe, where a great deal of the research goes on) and I encouraged a lot of US BPM vendors to attend; hopefully, they will have seen the value in the conference and will get themselves on an international flight this time.

progresstriumph_logoProgress Software’s Revolution user conference in Boston, where I will be delivering an Introduction to BPM workshop. As Progress continues to integrate the Savvion acquisition, they are dedicated to educating their user community and channel partners on BPM, and this workshop forms part of those efforts.

bbc_125_isfBuilding Business Capability (formerly Business Rules Forum and Business Process Forum) in Fort Lauderdale, where I am reprising an updated version of my Aligning BPM and Enterprise Architecture tutorial that I gave at the IRM BPM conference in London in June. I’m also sitting on and/or moderating three panels: one on the Process Knowledge Initiative, one on Business  Architecture versus Technical Architecture, and a BPM vendor panel.

I may be attending a few other conferences, but with my Air Canada gold status already in the bag for next year, there’s no pressure. 🙂

Strategic Synergies Between BPM, EA and SOA

I just had to attend Claus Jensen’s presentation on actionable architecture with synergies between BPM, EA and SOA since I read two of his white papers in preparing the workshop that I delivered here on Wednesday on BPM in an EA context. I also found out that he’s co-authored a new red book on EA and BPM.

Lots of great ideas here – I recommend that you read at least the first of the two white papers that I link to above, which is the short intro – about how planning (architecture) and solution delivery (BPM) are fundamentally different, and you can’t necessarily transform statements and goals from architecture into functions in BPM, but there is information that is passed in both directions between the two different lifecycles.

He went through descriptions of scenarios for aligning and interconnecting EA and BPM, also covered in the white papers, which are quite “build a (IBM-based) solution”-focused, but still some good nuggets of information.

Workshop: BPM In An EA Context

Here’s my presentation slides from the workshop that I gave on Wednesday here at the IRM BPM conference in London, entitled Architecting A Business Process Environment:

Architecting a Business Process Environment

As always, some slides may not make much sense without my commentary (otherwise, why would I be there live?), but feel free to ask any questions here in the comments.

BPM Rapid Development Methodology

Today at the IRM BPM conference, I started with a session by Chris Ryan of Jardine Lloyd Thompson on a rapid development methodology with BPMS in their employee benefits products area.

They’ve been a HandySoft customer since 2004, using BizFlow both for internal applications, and for external-facing solutions that their customers use directly; they switched off a Pega project that was going on (and struggling) in one of their acquisitions and replaced it with BizFlow in about 4 months. However, they were starting to become a victim of their own success, with many parts of the organization wanting their process applications developed by the same small development team.

They weren’t doing their BPM solutions in a consistent and efficient fashion, and were using a waterfall methodology; they decided to move to an Agile development methodology, where the requirements, process definition and application/form design are all done pretty much simultaneously with full testing happening near the end but still overlapping with ongoing development. They’ve also starting thinking about their processes in a more service-oriented way that allows them to design (sub)processes for specific discrete functions, so that different people can be working on the subprocesses that will make up part of a higher-level process. This has tracking implications as well: users viewing a process in flight can look at the top level process, or drill down into the individual functions/subprocesses as required.

They’ve established best practices and templates for their user interface design, greatly reducing the time required and improving consistency. They’ve built in a number of usability measures, such as reducing navigation and presenting only the information required at a specific step. I think that this type of standardization is something rarely done in the user interface end of BPMS development, and I can see how it would accelerate their development efforts. It’s also interesting that they moved away from cowboy-style development into a more disciplined approach, even while implementing Agile: the two are definitely not mutually exclusive.

This new methodology and best practices – resulting in a lean BPM team of analysts, PMs, developers, testers and report writers – have  allowed them to complete five large projects incorporating 127 different processes in the past year. Their business analysts actually design the processes, involving the developers only for the technical bindings; this means that the BAs do about 50% of the “development”, which is what all of the BPMS vendors will tell you should be happening, but rarely actually happens in practice.

From an ROI standpoint, they’ve provided the infrastructure that has allowed the company to grow its net profit by 46%, in part through headcount reduction of as much as 50% in some areas, and also in the elimination of redundant systems (e.g., Pega).

They’ve built a business process competency center, and he listed the specific competencies that they’ve been developing in their project managers, analysts, developers and “talent development” (training, best practices and standards). Interestingly, he pointed out that their developers don’t need to have really serious technical skills because the BizFlow developer really doesn’t get that technical.

He finished up with their key success factors: business involvement and user engagement, constant clear communications amongst stakeholders, and good vendor support. They found that remote teams can work well, as long as the communication methods support the user engagement throughout the process, since Agile requires constant review by users and retuning of the application under development throughout the lifecycle, not just during a final testing stage.

Great success story, both for JLT and for HandySoft.

Building a Business Architecture Capability and Practice Within Shell

For the first breakout of the day, I attended Dan Jeavon’s session on Shell’s business architecture practice. For such a massive company – 93,000 employees in 90 countries – this was a big undertaking, and they’ve been at this for five years.

He defines business architecture as the business strategy, governance, organization and key business process information, as well as the interaction between these concepts, which is taken directly from the TOGAF 9 definition. Basically, this involves design, must be implemented and not just conceptual, and requires flexibility based on business agility requirements. They started on their business architecture journey because of factors that affect many other companies: globalization, competition, regulatory requirements, realization of current inefficiencies, and emergence of a single governance board for the multi-national company.

Their early efforts were centered on a huge new ERP system, especially with the problems due to local variations from the global standard process models. “Process” (and ERP) became naughty words to many people, with connotations of bloated, not-quite-successful projects. Following on from some of the success points, their central business architecture initiative actually started with process modeling/design: standard processes across the different business areas with global best practices. This was used to create and roll out a standard set of financial processes, with a small core team doing the process redesign, and coordinating with IT to create a common metamodel and architectural standards. As they found out, many other parts of the company had similar process issues – HR, IT and others – so they branched out to start building a business architecture for other areas as well.

They had a number of challenges in creating a process design center of excellence:

  • Degree of experience with the tool and the methodology; initial projects weren’t sufficiently structured, reducing benefits.
  • Perceived value to the business, especially near-term versus long-term ROI.
  • Impact of new projects, and ensuring that they follow the methodology.
  • Governance and high-level sponsorship.

They also found a number of key steps to implementing their CoE and process architecture:

  • Sponsorship
  • Standard methodology, embedded within standard project delivery framework
  • Communication of success stories

Then, they migrated their process architecture initiative to a full business architecture by looking at the relationships to other elements of business architecture; this led to them do business architecture (mostly) as part of process design initiatives. Recent data quality/management initiatives have also brought a renewed focus on architecture, and Jeavons feels that although the past five years have been about process, the next several years will be more about data.

He showed a simplified version of their standard metamodel, including aspects of process hierarchy models, process flow models, strategy models and organization models. He also showed a high-level view of their enterprise process model in a value stream format, with core processes surrounded by governing and supporting processes. From there, he showed how they link the enterprise process model to their enterprise data catalogue, which links to the “city plan” of their IT architecture and portfolio investment cycle; this allows for traceability as well as transparency. They’ve also been linking processes to strategy – this is one of the key points of synergy between EA and BPM – so that business goals can be driven down into process performance measures.

The EA and process design CoE have been combined (interesting idea) into a single EA CoE, including process architects and business architects, among other architect positions; I’m not sure that you could include an entire BPM CoE within an EA CoE due to BPM’s operational implementation focus, but there are certainly a lot of overlapping activities and functions, and should have overlapping roles and resources.

He shared lots of great lessons learned, as well as some frank assessment of the problems that they ran into. I particularly found it interesting how they morphed a process design effort into an entire business architecture, based on their experience that the business really is driven by its processes.

Designing a Breakout Business Strategy

The keynote this morning was A Strategic Toolkit for Designing and Delivering A Breakout Strategy by Professor Thomas Lawton of EMYLON Business School. This was about business strategy, starting with a view of how different companies responded to the recent/ongoing recession: panic, protect, cloak or conquer, where the first three are reactive but with different results (negative, neutral, positive) and the last of which is proactive. He had examples of each; for example, how Sony used a “cloak” response to take business cutback measures that would have been difficult during good times, improving the business overall. He challenged the audience to consider which of the four responses that our organizations have adopted, and some strategies for dealing with the current economic conditions. Although it’s not easy to think about success when you’re fighting for survival, you need to be proactively preparing for the inevitable upturn so as to be able to seize the market when it starts improving. I definitely started thinking about BPM at this point; organizations that implement BPM during a down market in order to control costs often find themselves well-positioned to improve their market share during the upswing because they are more efficient and more agile to respond to customer needs.

He introduced a few different tools that form a strategy system:

  • Identify your route to breakout and market success. He showed a quadrant comparing breakout styles, “taking by storm” and “laggard to leader” (often an ailing company that is turned around), against emergent and established markets; all of these indicate significant opportunities for growth. Again, he had great examples for each of these, and discussed issues of adapting these strategies to different corporate cultures and geographic/regulatory environments. He presented a second quadrant for those organizations who are staying out in front of their market, with the breakout styles “expanding horizons” and “shifting shape”, also against emergent and established markets. For each of the squares in each of these quadrants, he has an evocative moniker, such as “boundary breakers” or “conquistadors”, to describe the companies that fit that growth strategy profile.
  • Identify your corporate vision, providing a sense of purpose, and considering the viewpoints of all stakeholders. The vision wheel is his technique for finding the corporate vision by breaking down the organization, culture, markets and relationships into their constituent parts, considering both current and future state, ending up with four worksheets across which you will see some common threads to guide the future strategy. Vision can be a bit of a fuzzy concept, but is a guiding star that is critical for direction setting and strategic coordination.
  • Align your value proposition with the needs of your customers. Aspire to create a “magnet company”, one that excites markets, attracts and retains customers, repels new entrants, and renders competitors unable to respond. This doesn’t mean you have to be the best in all aspects of what you do, but you have to be top in the features of what your customers care about, from the general areas of price, features, quality, support, availability and reputation.
  • Assemble an IT-enabled business model that is both efficient and effective; think about your business model as a vehicle for delivering your value proposition, and focus on alignment between those two. He discussed the six pillars of a business model: cost, innovation, reliability, relationships, channels and brand (which are just the other side of the six features discussed in the value proposition); some of these will emerge as your core competencies and become the source of competitive advantage.
  • Every business is both a techno and socio system: you need to consider both hard and soft aspects. He pointed out that it’s necessary to embed IT in strategy implementation, since almost all businesses these days are highly dependent on technology; technology can be used to realize an energized and productive socio-system (e.g., inspiring trust and loyalty) as well as an efficient and productive techno-system.

The breakout strategy system that he lays out has strategic leadership at the center, with products and programs, vision, value proposition, and business model surrounding it.

He finished up with the interaction between business and IT strategy:

  • Breakout strategies are enabled by IT
  • IT contributes to improve financial performance
  • IT supports strategy implementation

Unfortunately, only 19% of companies involve IT in the early strategy phase of growth initiatives; in other words, executives are not really considering how IT can help them with strategy. The impact of IT on business strategies, corporate structure and culture should be better understood. In particular, EA should be involved in strategy at this level, and BPM can be an important enabler of breakout strategies if that is understood early enough in the strategy development cycle.

Really great presentation, and I’ll definitely be tracking down some of his books for more reading on the topic.

By the way, some great tweets are starting to flow at the conference; you can find them at the hashtags #IRMBPM and #IRMEAC.

IRM BPM and EA Conferences Kickoff

Sally Bean and Roger Burlton opened the dual IRM’s colocated BPM and EA conferences in London this morning with a tag-team presentation on the synergies between EA and BPM – fitting nicely with 3-hour workshop that I gave yesterday on BPM in an EA context.

EA provides a framework to structure for transiting from strategy to implementation. BPM – from architecture through implementation – is a process-centric slice that intersects EA at points, but also includes process-specific operational activities. They present EA and BPM as collaborative, synergistic disciplines:

  • Common, explicit view of business drivers and business strategy
  • Shared understanding of business design
  • Disciplined approach to change prioritization and road maps
  • Coherent view of the enterprise through shared models
  • Monitoring fit between current performance and business environment

They briefly introduced John Zachman to the stage, but wouldn’t actually let him speak more than a minute, because we’d never get to the keynote Winking smile. I had the pleasure of having a conversation with John yesterday evening while having a drink with Roger and a few others (which was a bit weird because I had just been talking about his framework in my workshop, and this blog is named after the process column therein); during that time, I helped him get his iPhone onto the hotel wifi, which probably says something about the differences between EA and BPM…

Progress Analyst Day: Industry and Product View

Rick Reidy, Progress CEO, opened their one-day analyst event in New York by talking about operational responsiveness: how your enterprise needs to be able to respond to events that happen that are outside your control. You can’t control crises, but you can control your organization’s response to those crises. Supporting operational responsiveness are four technology trends – cloud, mobile, social media and collaboration – with the key being to extend the use of technology to the business user. If you remember Progress’ roots in 4GL development, this isn’t exactly a new idea to them; 4GLs were supposed to be for business users, although it didn’t really work out that way. Today’s tools have a better chance at achieving that goal.

Today, they’re announcing the upcoming releases of Responsive Process Management Suite 2.0 and Control Tower 2.0, plus their cloud platform, Arcade. Interestingly, much like IBM’s Lombardi acquisition turned BPM into the biggest story at this year’s Impact conference, Progress’ Savvion acquisition is having the same effect here: RPM is the top-line story, albeit supported by event processing. It’s not that the entire product suite is the former Savvion BPMS, but rather than BPM is providing the face for the product.

Reidy turned the stage over to “the two Johns” (his words, not mine): Dr. John Bates, CTO, and John Goodson, Chief Product Officer. Bates dug further into the ideas of operational responsiveness, and how the combination of analytics, event sense and respond, and process management help to achieve that. As he put it, BPM alone won’t achieve the responsive business; businesses are event-driven. They’re really trying to define a new “responsive process management” (RPM) market, at the overlap between BPM, business event processing, business transaction management, and business intelligence and analytics. Cue Venn diagram, with RPM at the intersection, then fade to another Venn diagram between custom applications and packaged applications, again with RPM at the intersection. Their estimates put the current market at $2.5B, with a rise to $6.5B by 2014.

Bates talked about the value of BPM, and how that’s often not enough because businesses are very event-driven: events flow in and out of your business every day – from applications, devices and external feeds – and how you respond to them can define your competitive advantage. Patterns in the relationships between events can identify threats and opportunities, and are especially important when those events are traditionally held in separate silos that typically don’t interact. He gave a great example around the FAA fines for airlines who hold passengers captive on planes on the ground for more than 3 hours: by looking at the events related to crew, maintenance, weather and flight operations, it’s possible to anticipate and avoid those situations, and therefore the fines (and bad press) that go along with them. You don’t need to rework existing legacy systems in order to have this sort of operational responsiveness: automated agents trap the events generated by existing systems, which can then be analyzed and correlated, and processes kicked off in a BPMS to respond to specific patterns.

Progress presents all this through their Control Tower, which brings together a business view of analytics and visualization, event sense and respond, and process management. I’m sure that I’ve written about this previously and would love to link to it, but the wifi in here is so crap that I can’t get a solid connection, so can’t look up what I’ve written previously on my own blog. #fail

Goodson took over to discuss the product in more detail, showing how Savvion, Actional, Apama and other components make up their RPM suite and the event management layer below that. Control Tower is new product (or was new in 1.0, last year) that overlays all of this, and puts a consistent business-facing interface on all of this, and providing collaborative process design and other social media features. We saw a pre-recorded demo of Control Tower, showing how a dashboard can be created quickly by dragging analytics widgets onto the canvas. The key thing is that the widgets are pre-wired to specific analytics and processes, allowing drill-downs into the details and even into the process models. Process changes and simulations can be done interactively.

As the wifi flickers to life occasionally, it’s interesting to see the Twitter stream for the event (obviously being updated by people with their own connectivity solutions): Anne Thomas Manes says “Claims to be unique in the ‘responsiveness’ market, but the marketing story sounds very much like Tibco’s story”. Mike Gualtieri thinks that “Control Tower…looks good, but it would be cool to hold up an iPad and pass it into the audience”. Personally, I’m pretty much over the iPad gee-whiz demo phase.

We came back after the morning break to a continuation of the John and John show, with Bates initially responding to some of the tweets that had happened during the earlier session, then discussing their solution accelerators that include business processes, rules, analytics, alerts, interceptors and adapters. They have created accelerators for several verticals including capital markets front office, and communications and media order management, in part because of their history with those verticals and in part because of the suitability of RPM to those applications. Savvion had been going down this road long before the acquisition, and this makes a lot of sense for Progress in terms of competitive differentiation: a combination of industry-specific foundation services and adapters that are mostly productized (hence supported and maintained like product), and customizable solution accelerators that rest on top of that foundation. This makes them far more useful than the type of templates that are offered by other vendors, which are not upgradable after they’re customized; although not confirmed from the stage, my assumption is that the customization (and hence forking from the Progress-maintained code base) all happens in a thin layer at the top, not in the bulk of the foundation services.

They’re currently shipping six different accelerators, and are adding several more this year. These range across industry verticals including banking, capital markets, communications and media, insurance, supply chain, and travel and leisure. They’ve worked with partners and customers to develop these, as well as creating some internal industry experience. We saw a couple of canned demos, although it’s impossible to tell from this just how much effort is required to fit this to any particular company’s business. As part of the demos, there were some bits where a business user updated the event handling and created a new rule; I don’t think that this will be done by business users, although certainly a trained business analyst could handle it.

The solution accelerators form a big part of their go-to-market strategy, and see these as taking share away from packaged applications. They see solution accelerators as a differentiator for Progress, as well as their focus on responsive process management. They haven’t forgotten their OpenEdge agile development environment however: they’re announcing OpenEdge BPM to bring that development platform to BPM applications. I don’t know enough about OpenEdge to understand the implications here, but will be interesting to see what synergies are possible as they bring together the entire Progress product suite.

To finish the industry and product section of the day, we heard about their cloud strategy, focused on applications in the cloud (rather than just infrastructure or a platform): creating vertical ecosystems for their various industry foci, incorporating both Progress solutions and partners to create composite solutions based on RPM, with Control Tower for end-to-end visibility and improvement. Progress Arcade is their cloud application platform for allowing these vertical ecosystems to be easily created and deployed across a variety of public and private cloud environments. It reminds me a bit of TIBCO’s Silver BPM environment, where you can do all the provisioning and setup right from their environment rather than having to hop around between different configuration tools. They stated that this is targeted at small and medium businesses who want to be able to leverage technology to be competitive: this is definitely an echo of a conversation that I had about BPM in the cloud with Neil Ward-Dutton earlier this morning, where I stated that most of the growth would be in SMB since this is the only way that most of them can afford to consider this technology.

Progress does a combo analyst day for both industry and financial analysts; this morning was more for the industry analysts while this afternoon is more for the financial analysts, although we’re all invited to be here all day. Since I don’t cover a lot of the financial side, I likely won’t be writing a lot about it, although I may be tweeting since the wifi seems to be a bit better behaved now.