conferences – Page 76

BrainStorm BPM Day 1: Tom Dwyer closing keynote

Tom Dwyer of BPMInstitute.org/BrainStorm Group finished up today’s formal sessions with Enabling Business Process Innovation.

As he pointed out, innovation is what drives company growth, and he listed the types of innovation that can be seen in organizations:

Business model, e.g., use of shared services centres
Process and services and markets, e.g., electronic channels
Operations, e.g., self-service

He covered a number of good examples of some strategic industry initiatives in a number of different industries, and discussed innovation concepts in general before drilling down to process innovation specifics.

He spent some time discussing process-driven companies, which is a topic that everyone seems to be talking about lately: not just analysts and vendors, but customers are starting to ask about this as they see the advantage of managing end-to-end processes rather than chopping them up into functional silos.

He moved on to redefine the acronym “BPO” — universally recognized to mean “business process outsourcing” — to mean “business process organization”. Yikes. There were some great points here for process-driven companies, but the BPO acronym was completely distracting. He had a graph that charted the course to business process excellence, which was a sort of maturity model: “just get by”, “look for efficiencies”, “drive business agility” and “leverage process capital for market leadership”. He also listed some of the artifacts and results of becoming process-driven, from documented process flows, a rules repository and process metrics to customer satisfaction measures. As the scheduled end-time passed, the presentation dove into a discussion of SOA and attendees started to bail out, but Tom wrapped it up with some useful summary points on how innovation helps to create a competitive edge.

The presentation was much too dense with text and statistics for any time of the day, but especially for the last timeslot of the day — the energy level in the room was pretty low. It’s too bad, because Tom had a lot of great information here.

BrainStorm BPM Day 1: Neal McWhorter

I switched streams to the business rules symposium for the last breakout session of the day, The End of Requirements, because the description sounded too good to miss:

Business wants control of the business back. For years we’ve lived with a process where the business creates “requirements” and IT creates a business solution. While business processes are the lifeblood of an organization, rules are where the volume of business changes are. If the business is going to take back control of its own fate it all starts with making sure that the business rules they own are really under their control after they go into production. The current requirements process simply can’t handle that. It’s time to embrace a Business Engineering-based approach and move beyond the requirement-centric approach that we’ve love to hate.

He makes the distinction between knowledge and behaviour: rules is about (reusable) knowledge, and processes are about behaviour. For example, you might have a rule that would allow you to determine if a customer was a “good” customer, and you might use that knowledge in a process to provide a discount. He discussed different views of rules and how they integrate with processes:

Rules as structural knowledge about business entities
Rules as business judgements
Rules that trigger events

Unfortunately, McWhorter didn’t ultimately talk about how the business is going to get control of the business rules, or how it’s going to work once they do, which is what I was expecting from the session description. He did finish up with a call to arms to bring a design function back into the business side — sort of like what business analysts are supposed to do, but don’t because they don’t have any design training — which would allow proper designs to be created before things are ever passed on to IT.

BrainStorm BPM Day 1: Peter Gilbertson

Peter Gilbertson is a senior business analyst at CUNA Mutual, and his session was on Talking Process to Executives: Process, Tools and Techniques to Sell your BPM Project, which is about how to “sell” your BPM project to the people who write the cheques. Although he’s looking at it as an internal person selling to his own executives, I’m often in the position of helping people like him create exactly this sort of rationale to carry up the food chain and thought that it would be worthwhile to hear what they did.

He started by talking about their business review process, which is not really specific to BPM projects:

Build the business model, especially important for communication and education because they had a whole crop of new executives from the insurance industry, whereas CUNA deals with both insurance and investment products.
Determine industry benchmarks, by identifying key “success levers” and comparing themselves with their competitors.
Document core processes, which is where a lot of people start; Gilbertson felt that if they hadn’t done the first two steps, then the core processes wouldn’t have made sense to the executives.
Develop performance measures, but took the usual tabular data views of things such as customer service metrics and converted them to graphs to make the business health and trends more obvious.
Determine gaps, which they did using a pipe analogy: there were spots where the pipe leaked, or wasn’t big enough, or didn’t fit with other pipes. I liked the analogy, and Gilbertson said that it was immediately obvious to the executives and allowed them to move easily into process improvement specifics.
Develop strategy, again using an analogy: “shoot the moon” with a space shuttle and booster rocket visual. In order to show how the decisions were derived, they also created a decision tree to show the path to the strategy recommendations.
Create plan, which is the detailed execution plan and timelines.

He summed it up in his top 10 tips:

Start at 10,000 feet and parachute down
Show “industry standard” business models
Focus on (and show how) the customer gets served
Explain how you make money
Walk through high level processes
Pinpoint areas for improvements
Use visual (e.g., graphs, charts, pictures, etc.)
Use consultants or industry experts to build credibility [I liked this one 🙂 ]
Create a detailed plan to execute project
Continually communicate, educate and position the project

This was really about how to present the material to executives, with very little on how to create the material, but there were some good points: use visual analogies where appropriate, feed them small bits of information at a time, and show why and how that the decisions are being made.

BrainStorm BPM Day 1: BPMS vendor panel

Bruce and I changed between the same two sessions, although he was leading both sessions and I was sitting back blogging. This one is a panel of four BPMS vendors, Global 360, IBM, Savvion and BEA, to discuss What’s Next for BPM Suites. I arrived a few minutes late and didn’t catch all the names, although I recognized Pat Morrissey of Savvion. This was my first tough decision of the day, since I also wanted to attend the Business Process versus Business Rules panel, especially considering that the panel that I’m in could turn out to be just regurgitation of the vendors’ marketing materials. There’s always the chance, however, that one of them will blurt out something unexpected.

The word “mashups” just came out of the IBM person’s mouth, in response to a question about collaboration; this has nothing to do with their BPM offering of course, which doesn’t really have any collaborative aspects (if you discount the FileNet Team Collaboration Manager product, which she likely hasn’t even heard of) but they are offering a mashup tool so I suppose that triggered when she heard “collaboration”. She’s not the only vendor to drag the conversation off topic and down the rathole of their own product’s functionality, but she’s definitely the most effective at it.

There was a bit of a discussion about Web 2.0 at the end of the session, with the BEA person making a key point that one of the big issues is that Web 2.0 consumer applications are changing user expectations, which in turn drives the inclusion of social networking features into BPMS’ — a point that I’ve made here before and will be discussing at the Shared Insights conference next month.

Bruce finished up by asking each vendor to summarize what they thought was the next thing in BPMS:

Global 360: “process intelligence”, which appears to be their latest marketing buzzphrase
IBM: “frameworks for implementing BPMS”, since they like to sell frameworks plus lots and lots of professional services to make them work
Savvion: “process management that actually works” (on a global scale, as opposed to always being the next big idea or in a pilot stage)
BEA: “convergence of BPM and SOA” and “better collaboration”

All-in-all, I didn’t learn much in this session about what’s next for BPM suites, and it was much too polite: the vendors only very gently disputed each other’s opinions, and in fact rarely even directly addressed each other. It did give me a chance to get my queued blog posts published, and now I’m all caught up and ready for lunch.

BrainStorm BPM Day 1: Bruce Silver track keynote

There’s an awful lot of keynotes in this conference: a couple of overall sessions this morning, now “track keynotes” for each of the four tracks within the BPM conference. I’m in Bruce Silver’s New Directions in BPM Tools and Technology session, where he started by taking a gentle poke at Gartner, saying that BPM is more than a management discipline (Gartner’s most recent definition of BPM).

He started out discussing process modelling, and how it’s inherently a business activity, not an IT activity, which speaks directly to the issue of the tools used for modelling: is there a handoff from a modelling-only tool to an execution environment at the point of business to IT handoff, or is the model actually just a business view of the actual implementation? With all of the vendor demos that I’ve done lately (I know, I have yet to document many of there here, but I’m getting to it), I’ve had quite a focus on the distinction between having a model shared between business and IT, and having a separate BPA tool that models much more than just the processes that will be implemented in a BPMS. Bruce positions this as “BPA versus BPMN” views towards describing process modelling, and doesn’t see them in conflict; in fact, he thinks that they’re ignoring each other, a viewpoint that I’d have to agree with given that BPA initiatives rarely result in any processes being transferred to some sort of execution engine.

Bruce, who often accuses me of being too nice, takes a stab a the vendors in a couple of areas. First is with their BPMN implementations, specifically that of events: he states that many of the execution engines just don’t support intermediate events, so that the vendors conveniently forget to include those events in their BPMN modelling tool. Second is with simulation, and looking at whether a vendor’s implementation is actually a useful tool, or a “fake” feature that’s there to enable it to be checked off on an RFP, but not functional enough to make it worth using.

He has a nice way of categorizing BPMS products: by vendor speciality (e.g., integration, human-centric), by process type/use case (e.g., production workflow) and by business/IT interaction method (collaborative shared model versus handoff). This was interesting, because I wrote almost identical words two days ago in my presentation for the Shared Insights Portals and Collaboration conference that I’ll be speaking at next month; great minds must think alike. 🙂 His point, like the one that I was making in my presentation, is that most BPM products have some strengths and some weaknesses that can make or break some process automation; for example, a product focussed on human-centric workflow probably doesn’t do some nice integration tricks like mapping and transformation, or complex data objects.

He also makes a good distinction between business rules (implemented in a BRE) and routing rules (implemented in a BPMS): business rules represent corporate or departmental policies that may need to be shared across business processes, whereas routing rules are the internal logic within a process that’s just required to get through the process but don’t represent policy in any way.

Bruce thinks that BPM and SOA together is still vapour-ware for the most part: it’s what the vendors are selling but not typically what they’re delivering. In particular, he thinks that if the BPMS and the ESB are not from the same vendor, then “all bets are off” in terms of whether a BPMS will work with any particular ESB or other services environment.

The session turned out to be too short and Bruce couldn’t even finish his materials, much less take questions: it was only 45 minutes to begin with, and shortened at the beginning while Bruce waited for stragglers for the previous session to make their way upstairs.

BrainStorm BPM Day 1: Brett Champlin keynote

Since I arrived late, my day started with Brett Champlin’s keynote, BPM Triage — A Health and Wellness Model for Enterprise Business Processes. I know Brett through ABPMP, but he’s also

Brett uses a healthcare analogy for applying process management to your business, and I found that the analogy stretched a bit thin, although it had some interesting points. The fact that he came out dressed in a white lab coat with a stethoscope around his neck made it a bit hokey, too.

He had a couple of interesting diagrams, one in particular of a business process architecture, but it went by too quickly to sketch out and I can’t seem to find the presentations in any of the handout materials.

In general, however, I’d have to say that if you have to do your presentation in costume, it could be that it’s lacking in some other way.

Blogging from BrainStorm BPM

The hotel wifi just kicked in, so I have a couple of posts queued up. I’m at the BrainStorm BPM conference in Chicago, and just flew in this morning so missed the initial keynotes (Enabling the Process-Centric Agile Enterprise and Engineering the Process-Centric Enterprise) but will be here the rest of today and most of tomorrow. One of the complaints that I have about this conference is that there’s just too many tracks: they’re running six sessions simultaneously: two of them forming the BPM conference (BPM for business professionals and BPM for technology professionals) an organizational performance symposium, a business rules symposium), an SOA conference, and a business architecture conference. At any given time, there are at least two of the sessions that I want to attend, sometimes three, and the choices are going to be difficult. Unfortunately, the conference program doesn’t help since it splits the session descriptions into five sections (the two BPM tracks are combined in the program) so that I have to flip around all over the program to compare concurrent sessions. There’s also some organizational issues, and I’m not just talking about the fact that they didn’t have a name badge for me when I showed up: the sessions are spread out over two floors of meeting rooms at the Drake Hotel, and there is zero time in the schedule between many of the sessions. Teleportation was not included.

BrainStorm BPM conference

I’ve just booked my flight to Chicago for BPMInstitute.org’s BrainStorm BPM conference on April 10-11, so you’ll see me live blogging from there (wifi permitting) under the BrainStorm2007 category.