Category: conferences

ProcessWorld Day 2: Keynote with Dr. Wolfram Jost

Dr. Jost started the day with a presentation on “The Basis for Linking BPM & SOA”. Someone may have been reading one of my posts from yesterday, because when he put up the obligatory slide of VW, he referred to them as “Volkswagen — of course, you know who they are”. 🙂

His talk was part ARIS product marketing and part generic material on BPM and SOA.

There was a lot on the separation of modelling and execution environments, or what he characterized as “business BPM” (business process strategy, design, implementation and controlling) and “technical BPM” (define, create, execute, monitor) — really, it’s like layers in a Zachman or other enterprise architecture diagram, although he didn’t really make that distinction. ARIS is used in the upper layer of functions/definitions, with links to the technical BPM functions in the lower layer.

He did have some nice slides and explanations of BPM and SOA: BPM as a management discipline involved in strategy, design, implementation and measurement of business processes, with the purpose of continuously improve the productivity and degree of innovation of business processes; SOA as an architectural style of business applications based on distributable, sharable and loosely coupled modules, with the purpose to improve the flexibility of business applications needed to support changes in business processes with less time and effort. He showed a 3-layer model of strategy (business model), BPM (business processes) and SOA (business applications), where there might be changes at any of these levels that would ripple through the others: strategy could change due to market forces; business processes could change due to organizational changes, and applications could change due to technology innovations.

Another point that he made, and one that I used in my response to Phil Gilbert‘s comment on one of my posts yesterday, there’s value in using modelling tools that are separate from the BPMS themselves, especially if you’re creating the business models in advance of technology acquisition, or if you have a variety of process execution environments and want a single modelling environment for your business analysts. Of course, when Jost talks about business models being technology-independent, he’s excluding their own technology from that definition.

On the product side, Jost discussed the six solutions that they offer, which appear to be combining/packaging of existing products to address specific markets: Enterprise BPM, Enterprise Architecture, Process-Driven SAP, Business-Driven SOA, Process Intelligence & Performance, and Governance, Risk & Compliance. He also spoke about the new ARIS SOA Architect product, used to translate their “business BPM” into “technical BPM”.

The review of their multi-vendor platform strategy showed up some of the weaknesses that Phil Gilbert had mentioned in his comments yesterday: although they use BPEL and UML to interface bi-directionally with Oracle, and BPEL for bi-directionality with TIBCO, they use a much more tightly integrated — and proprietary — interface to SAP. Other BPMS products, including IBM WebSphere, Microsoft BizTalk, BEA and Fujitsu only have uni-directional exports, which is pretty useless in practical usage.

Jost finished up his talk with a quick review of the ARIS 2007 product roadmap.

ProcessWorld Day 2: Breakfast

I don’t usually blog about breakfast, but I happened to end up sitting with Marc Kase of SAIC, whose presentation that I posted about yesterday.

We had a great discussion about how they organize their team of business architects and business analysts, training, collaboration within the team and to their internal customers; Marc obviously has a good handle on how to create and manage such a diverse team of skills.

My question of the week is about integration between ARIS (or any process modelling environment) and a business process execution environment, whether a full BPMS or something that fits more into the SOA layer, and Marc confirmed my suspicions that the unidirectional interfaces are problematic for a variety of reasons, and not used within their environment of ARIS and the BEA AquaLogic BPMS (Fuego). They only provide a high-level process view to the (separate and IT-focussed) BPMS team, who then redraw it in BEA and add a lot of detail required for execution. This creates the opportunity for translation errors between the model and the implementation, although their ultimate QA is against the process models in ARIS in order to reduce those effects. Marc expressed that the lack of round-tripping was a factor in them not using direct integration as well.

I also found out that Vince, the senior business architect who accompanied Marc in his presentation, is Vince Outlaw of AboutEA — a blogger with whom I have exchanged links and comments. We discovered Vince in the internet cafe (of course) for an introduction, thereby creating one more real-world link to strengthen the ties of bloggers.

ProcessWorld Day 1 wrapup

Great hotel? Check. Good food? Check. Wifi in the conference rooms? Check. Green tea available at the breaks? Check. M&M’s in the press room? Check. Oh yeah, the conference content is good, too. 🙂

I have to admit, I didn’t pay a lot of attention during Dr. Mathias Kirchmer’s last presentation of the day on “open BPM”: I’ve been in meetings since 7am, and I was pretty much conferenced out by the time that I finished my interview with Trevor Naidoo. Kirchmer finished his talk with the IDS Scheer annual BPE Verve awards for their customers and one partner:

I’m really enjoying my time here, as I do at most user conferences. I’m meeting a ton of new people: other press and analysts whose names I know but have never met face-to-face, IDS Scheer customers, as well as the IDS Scheer folks themselves. I have to give a big shout out to the people at Springboard PR, especially Mark Tordik who has been my main liaison, for helping to make this happen.

The theme party tonight is Havana Nights, which promises a Cuban buffet, mojitos, casino tables, mojitos, a Latin band, and mojitos. Can you tell where my mind goes at the end of a long day?

ProcessWorld Day 1: Briefing with Trevor Naidoo of IDS Scheer

I skipped the last breakout session of the day for a discussion with Trevor Naidoo, IDS Scheer’s Director of ARIS Solution Engineering. He’s responsible for the pre-sales technical activities, and used to be an ARIS customer, so is very familiar with how customers use the product and how they want to use it.

We spoke first about integration between ARIS and the BPMS products that automate processes, which included some discussion about standards. He pointed out that integration using pure standards tends to degrade to the least common denominator — a point that I’m not sure that I agree with for all standards, although it makes sense if you picked BPEL as your standard — which led them to take a different approach with their most tightly integrated partners, SAP and Oracle: that of “standards-based” integration, where they extend BPEL (I believe) in order to provide increased functionality. I’m not sure at what point a “standards-based” approach becomes “proprietary”, although I can see the value of going this way. In any case, they’re using different approaches for different vendors: “standards-based” for SAP and Oracle, BPEL for Lombardi, and XPDL for Fujitsu.

This really came around to the issue of how to get those process models into an execution engine, or if anyone is really doing it at all. Naidoo said that what was moving from ARIS to the execution engine was a “process outline”, which then required some amount of work to hook it up to the BPMS engine (as expected), and that the main value is not in the transfer itself — which could be readily recreated in the BPMS designer directly — but in engaging the business in the entire process design cycle. This, then, is what I suspected: that most people really are redrawing the process models in the BPMS designer, adding who knows how many translation errors along the way, because there is insufficient value to bother with the direct integration. This is not unique to ARIS; I saw the same thing at the Proforma user conference last year.

We moved on to talk about the technology. I hadn’t done my homework in this area, and was really unaware of ARIS’ support for browser-based design (yes, I’m on my usual rant about browser-based process modelling); they have a Java applet client for design in a browser environment, which is a pretty heavy footprint by today’s AJAX standards. I’d love to hear more about their plans to put that client on a diet, which will greatly facilitate design collaboration with occasional users, both inside and outside the corporate firewall.

We finished with a discussion of how to move the process modelling story from what is usually a departmental beginning within a company up to the executive level and therefore out across the entire organization: internal evangelism, if you will, to leverage that initial 10-person ARIS project into making ARIS an enterprise-wide process modelling tool. This is addressed to some degree by one of their new “solutions” (which appear to be specific packaging and bundling of products and services), the Enterprise BPM solution which (based on information from their website) includes the ARIS Business Architect, ARIS Business Optimizer, ARIS Business Simulator and ARIS Business Publisher as the basis for implementing a company-wide BPM infrastructure. I still think that there’s a fundamental disconnect in language between the players: the average business analyst or architect is likely too mired in detail to be able to present a high-level plan to the executives of their organization on why to super-size their ARIS installation, but I’m sure that the IDS Scheer sales team would be happy to help out. With Trevor’s able assistance, of course.

ProcessWorld Day 1: Services industry breakout with Todd Lohr of Zurich North America

The second customer breakout session was Todd Lohr of Zurich North America, who discussed various process modelling initiatives within Zurich. They’ve expended a ton of effort on detailed as-is process mapping in order to drive process improvement, and it appears to have paid off even before implementing process automation.

They had some interesting discoveries: 4 out of 5 top activities (by time spent) did not add value to the underwriting process; many activities done by an underwriter could be done by an underwriting assistant; the start time of certain processes was causing unnecessary delays due to timing or unavailability of staff (underwriters work late, whereas the assistants work 7-3, so all assistant-level work after 3pm was done by an underwriter); and bad insurance applications (e.g., missing data) can be found and aborted earlier in the process through the appropriate triage. Having worked with a lot of insurance customers, I don’t find any of these surprising, but I was impressed by the thoroughness of their as-is modelling and how they were able to exploit it to improve processes, technology and organizational structure.

They use ARIS to create the future state models and help the transition from the as-is to the to-be processes. They see it as a tool for training, simulating and communicating, as well as determine staffing and economic value of processes.

Future plans include integration of business rules, and getting some of these processes automated in a BPMS.

ProcessWorld Day 1: Services industry breakout with Marc Kase of SAIC

After lunch, I attended a couple of ARIS customer breakouts, the first of which was Marc Kase of SAIC. I won’t give a lot of detail about their business processes, since I’m not sure how much that they really want to share outside the conference, but there were some great points and lessons learned that are more generic.

One of the first stats that hit me on the SAIC case is that they moved from 700 to 70 (it may have been 78 — I was in the back and the print on the slide was small) job roles as part of their process modelling efforts, which is an incredible success story.

They’ve focussed on building a business architecture, with process models created for projects stored in local repositories, then promoted to a central enterprise architecture repository at certain milestones. From this, they’ve been able to see a number of benefits:

  • Context, e.g., which systems use which data
  • Documentation that allows requirements and design to be traced back to business processes
  • Standards enforcement
  • Ability to cascade changes across models
  • Web publication of process and architecture content
  • Strengthened ties between IT and functional process owners

They also learned a few lessons, such as some of the difficulties in enforcing change control in moving from a single project to a portfolio of projects, and some practical issues around setting tightly-controlled standards in order to reduce the user learning curve; in fact, with the appropriate filters and standards in place, their users find ARIS “much easier to use than Visio”.

They have a number of plans for 2007, including simulation, integration with a number of other systems including their BPMS, building out the complete enterprise business architecture, and using “system of systems engineering” to track interdependencies between projects.

ProcessWorld Day 1: BPM for SOA breakout with Bill Swanton of AMR Research

For the first breakout session today, I heard Bill Swanton, who’s VP Research at AMR Research. Although the topic was “BPM is the value in SOA”, Swanton talked a lot about SOA-ing your ERP. AMR has obviously done a lot of research in this area, and he had some good thoughts on the ERP long-term lifecycle. ERP systems are often monolithic, and therefore not so easily pushed aside or interfaced with services. What ends up happening is “SOA by evolution”, where an ERP system (he mentioned SAP ERP and Oracle Fusion in particular) is wrapped to create specific service interfaces, although the  internal processes remain fixed.

He did discuss the use of technology is a catalyst for changes in business, and stated from their research that 66% of organizations implementing SOA are hoping to improve their business processes. I’m not sure that I agreed with his characterization of BPM and BAM as “key components of SOA”, but I loved the analogy of SOA as the corporate “patch panel”.

He had an interesting chart about how SOA needs vary with the complexity/enterprise spread of existing systems, and degree of customization. If different software is used in different business units and there’s a lot of customization, then the goal of SOA is usually to reduce development costs and reuse existing custom software; there will be a tendency to layer custom layers on top of the existing custom development. At the opposite corner of the chart, where an organization has an enterprise-wide ERP with little customization, they’re looking to compose unique business processes out of the ERP vendor’s provided services that can be a competitive differentiator for them.

Swanton sees a number of short-term challenges — and therefore slower ROI — as organizations transition from traditional applications through hybrid solutions to a true SOA, one of these being the showdown between ERP and SOA vendors for same space. He notes that the ERP vendors are not, in general, making radical changes, which seemed to imply that the SOA vendors might pull ahead on this front.

ProcessWorld Day 1: Gartner Keynote with Jim Sinur and Michael Blechar

Following the keynote by Prof. Scheer, we had the Gartner tag team of Jim Sinur (who covers BPM overall) and Michael Blechar (who covers modelling, information architecture, and model-driven architecture) on the subject of “What’s New With BPM?” They did a great back-and-forth presentation on stage, although they did end up with the inevitable plug for the upcoming Gartner BPM summit in San Diego.

The audience, on survey, were self-declared as more than 50% IT, which surprised me a bit, considering the earlier comments from IDS Scheer about how 80% of their users are now business people.

Blechar started off by talking about how the requirement for modelling comes from people looking for ways to rapidly prototype, design, assemble and orchestrate business processes; being able to compose business processes from services while maintaining a corporate context; moving away from high level of enterprise architecture to the reality of a business architecture that’s controlled by the business people. Sinur followed with Gartner’s definition of BPM as a management practice and structured approach, how the current focus on optimization/measurement goals are bringing modelling and execution closer together, and the business process maturity model.

There were a number of concepts that I’ve seen in other Gartner presentations, both at their BPM summit last year and in webinar, such as how responsibilities for BPM are assigned across the enterprise (business, IT, or shared), and their “gear” diagram of BPM suites with the process orchestration engine and business services repository in the centre and the 10 essential functionalities surrounding it. New to this diagram from previous versions is collaboration and inline optimization, which Sinur discussed at length. He made the point that this doesn’t all have to come from one vendor, saying “BPM is an architecture, not a technology, a BPM suite is one way to implement that architecture.”

There was also a discussion of BPM and SOA approaches and roles, looking at the key roles for both BPM and SOA, and (once again) how the work of design and modelling is divided between the business analysts and the IT folks. A process-centric view of an organization tends to favour business analysts for most of the process modelling and design, although many BPMS vendor modelling tools have realistically only been usable by IT, which opens the door for the use of business-focussed modelling tools like ARIS. By involving the business side in the modelling and design of processes, business will start to understand the value of services and SOA — something that’s still a pretty hard sell in a lot of organizations outside the IT department.

With the new focus on collaboration and inline optimization, Gartner believes that processes will become less deterministic: less focussed on a predetermined “happy path”, and more goal-oriented. As new pathways and process maps emerge to meet those goals, they become input to the next round of process discovery.

ProcessWorld Day 1: Keynote with Prof. Scheer

The opening keynote this morning was by Prof. August-Wilhelm Scheer, the founder and serious brain-trust behind IDS Scheer. You have to love this guy: not only is he brilliant and able to describe his ideas clearly, he opened and closed his session by playing sax in a jazz trio on stage.

He covered a lot of material in his talk, and I can’t begin to do it justice but will try to hit a few of the high points.

The goal of a modelling tool like ARIS is to support business processes from strategy to model to detailed description to implementation, including changes to any part of that chain and how the changes ripple through the other layers. The design-implementation-control life cycle of business processes, with a current strong focus on the optimization end of things, serves to bring together process modelling and execution like never before.

The business model at the top of any business process is the key competitive differentiator for an organization, requiring identification of the value proposition, supply chain, and target customer. This places the business model, and the surrounding business architecture, as part of an overall enterprise architecture. Looking at the business process architecture stack (think Zachman column 2), the business model leads to the business process, which requires/populates the business process repository. This, in turn, populates the IT-business process repository for the subset of the processes to be automated, through standardized modelling formats like BPMN and serialization formats like BPEL, which in turn connect to the enterprise service repository that documents the underlying services. Surrounding all this is the business process platform for service assembly/orchestration, portals, B2B, WFMS (wow, haven’t heard that term for a while: workflow management systems, for the youngsters in the crowd) and EAI.

IDS Scheer is involved with (or at least concerned with) a number of process-related standards, including ones such as BPMN and IDEF at the business process modelling level. I’m interested to see if they’re involved in the BPM Think Tank that OMG runs, such as the one coming up in July in San Francisco — an email exchange with someone from OMG a few minutes ago indicate that they’re not heavily involved in OMG standards. ARIS’ business model metamodel and their generally high level of innovation could almost certainly contribute to OMG standards development, if they’re not already.

One interesting point that Prof. Scheer finished with (well, before he started playing sax again) was that BPMS (i.e., process execution) vendor platforms will continue to be proprietary in spite of their “commitment” to standards (my quotation marks, since I agree with this thought), so products like ARIS are necessary in order to help facilitate the movement of models between execution systems. The business view needs to be open, while the implementation layer will remain proprietary.

ProcessWorld Day 1: Press/Analyst Briefing

I’m going to do as much live blogging as possible in order to give you a sense of what’s going on here, which means that I won’t be doing a lot of in-depth analysis in these posts, but will try to add more of that after a bit of introspection.

This is the first IDS Scheer user conference that I’ve attended, and one of the first conferences where I’ve attended a press/analyst briefing. I’ve spent the past 12 years implementing BPM systems, doing design and architecture, and this transition to “press/analyst” is still a bit weird for me, although I’m sure that I’ll get used to it 🙂 One nice thing about these conferences is getting to meet people who I’ve only ever “met” online, such as Gregg Rock from BPM Institute, and Jim Sinur from Gartner.

The briefing was hosted by Sinur, and included a panel of IDS Scheer executives: Thomas Volk (CEO), Dr. Wolfram Jost (CTO), Dr. Mathias Kirchmer (Chief Innovation and Marketing Officer), and Charlie Doucot (SVP of Sales for the Americas).

In Volk’s high-level update on IDS Scheer at the start of the briefing, I found that the BPM acronym is being used here to focus on the modelling end of the spectrum; not surprising, but likely causes some confusion still in the marketplace where BPMS vendors push BPM as an acronym for the execution end of the spectrum.

We heard from Jost about some of their new technology that we’ll see showcased here this week, and rolled out over the coming months:

  • As a result of their partnership with Corticon, an integration of the rules engine into modelling as a Business Rules Designer, which is being piloted at Barclays Bank now
  • A new SOA Designer (piloting within SAP, who is a user as well as an OEM partner) for modelling services and bringing business modelling to SOA
  • A new version of Business Optimizer
  • Six “solutions” that are pre-made combinations of their underlying products in order to offer specific vertical market solutions

Volk discussed some of the corporate expansion initiatives: although the bulk of their revenue is still in Europe, they are opening an office on the US west coast (I heard something about the Mountain View area, presumably to be close to Oracle) in addition to the current eastern US offices. They are also expanding in Asia from their strong base in Japan, including 100 people in China and further expansion plans in other Asian countries, through partnerships as well as regional offices. They will be announcing many more partnerships in the coming months, and see both OEM and SI partners as a crucial part of their growth.

I was particularly intrigued by the innovation relationships that they have with a number of universities around the world. Having graduated in Engineering from University of Waterloo, I’m very aware of the amazing things that can happen from the synergy between an innovation-minded technology company and a university, so I think that this is a great idea. I had to chuckle at one comment from Jost during the discussion of customers where they are helping to drive innovation and piloting their products: he mentioned VW/Audi, then qualified that with “they’re a big automotive company in Germany”, as if we might not have heard of them. I love the weird language and cultural mashups that occur when people from different countries get together (the Germans also say proh-cess instead of praw-cess, so I feel right at home), although I think that IDS Scheer needs to loosen up a bit in the press conference format to fit the more casual North American business environment.

There was a discussion based on a question from the floor about the involvement of business people both in the decision to purchase ARIS, and the general user population, and it appears that more and more non-technical people are using the product and attending the conference. 10 years ago, 80% of users were technical; now 80% have a business background or are in a business function. They’ve seen a definite change in mindset over recent years for business to drive IT rather than vice versa. Sinur expanded with what Gartner is seeing, in that as organizations migrate from functional excellence to end-to-end process excellence, it forces business and IT to work together across the organization and also facilitates a larger role for business.

We also heard about how they differentiate their product from the modelling capabilities within a BPMS, a topic that I’ve been looking at lately. They see ARIS as process modelling in a larger context, not just for execution but for the management of business processes and their performance. They see the modelling done in BPMS products as “technical” modelling, whereas ARIS is for “business” modelling, a distinction that I think is starting to get a bit fuzzy as the BPMS vendors introduce different views/personalities in their modelling tools for different roles. However, it is the case that you can’t use a BPMS modelling tool to model non-automated processes, only those things that will be executed/automated by the BPMS, so there is some value to IDS Scheer’s perspective on this. ARIS can integrate with a number of BPMS engines, including SAP NetWeaver, Oracle Fusion, IBM WebSphere, Microsoft BizTalk, BEA Weblogic, Fujitsu Interstate, and TIBCO; most of these vendors come from the ESB space so haven’t developed the same sophistication of modelling tools as the pure-play BPMS vendors or those from human-facing workflow origins, and most benefit from partnership with a serious modelling product like ARIS.