Category: process

business process management

Upcoming BPM conferences

I’ve been negligent in my blogging lately, in part because the weather in Toronto has been absolutely beautiful — our summers are short enough that you really have to get out there and enjoy it while you can — and in part because two important people in my life have been moving house (one of them in with me) so I’ve been spending much of the last two weeks packing and moving boxes. However, the sumac bushes are starting to change colour, indicating that fall is on the way and it’s time to get back to some serious work.

One project that I’m working on is my presentation on BPM and Web 2.0 for the upcoming BPMG conference in London on September 18-20th, which gives me a chance to spend a few days in one of my favourite cities. I attended the conference last year and it had a lot of great content; the agenda for this year looks to be shaping up well and I’m looking forward to sitting in on some of the sessions. If you’re at the conference, please drop by to say hi.

If you’re going to be in the US instead of the UK during that time, you can attend BrainStorm’s BPM conference in Washington DC on September 19-20th. In fact, if you’re interested in joining ABPMP, there’s a special deal available where you’ll get your ABPMP membership for free (a $100 value) if you register here by September 1st and specify the priority code ABPMPDCNON when registering.

We’re still planning to launch the ABPMP Toronto chapter with an event sometime this fall; if you’re interested in this chapter, please join our Yahoo group which acts as a mailing list.

Process 2006: BPMG’s annual conference

A follow-on to last May’s conference, BPM 2005, is Process 2006. I’ll be headed to London for the conference next month, but this year I’ll be speaking on the impact of Web 2.0 and social networking on BPM: mashups, tagging and more. From the abstract that I sent to Steve Towers, the conference organizer:

As Web 2.0 advances on the world, expectations for how software will behave are changing, and BPM is no exception. Although many of us from the technology side are working in the echo chamber of Web 2.0 hype, real applications are being deployed that are changing what people will accept with respect to software capabilities and usability. Flickr. Google Maps. Blogger. Del.icio.us. Newsgator. Gmail. Mashups. What do these have in common? More importantly, what can enterprise applications such as BPM learn from them, and what will they be forced to learn from them?

Specifically, I want to talk about some of the characteristics of Web 2.0 and how they will directly impact BPM within organizations: tagging, and the idea of a user-generated folksonomy for categorizing information; user-created content, including their own processes; collaboration; rich user interfaces for web-based applications; RSS feeds and similar subscription models; and lightweight integration models such as we’re starting to see with web mashups.

The conference agenda doesn’t have my session’s title (Steve suggested “Web 2.0 = BPMS 2.0 ?”) or description, but that will all get sorted eventually.

Should be fun, except for the fact that I may be unable to carry my laptop with me (and I’m unwilling to put it in checked baggage). I’m not afraid to fly, but I’m terrified of spending 7 hours on a flight with no laptop or iPod!

Comments on the IBM-FileNet acquisition

Questions and comments about the IBM-FileNet acquisition have been coming at me since last Thursday when it was announced, asking for my perspective — many people know that I was FileNet’s Director of eBusiness Evangelism in 2000-01, and that FileNet is still an occasional client of mine, and I also have a number of friends and colleagues who are current or past employees of FileNet. As a shareholder, I’m also monitoring the stories and stock price online to see if it looks like another suitor might jump in — with the current price running higher than the offer price, the market seems to be indicating that that’s a possibility, or at least a pipe dream.

To clarify my “speechless” state of last week when this news was announced, I wasn’t surprised that FileNet is being acquired, since rumours of acquisition were rampant even when I was at FileNet and before; I’m just surprised that it’s IBM, since I always figured that it would be Oracle. Phil Ayres has a thoughtful post on how all the IBM and FileNet pieces might fit together, but I’m not convinced that FileNet’s content management has much of a future within IBM. I found Connie Moore’s (Forrester) comment interesting (in this article, among others) that BPM is FileNet’s “crown jewel” — I agree with her sentiment, but think that’s it’s a bit of a hidden gem, unfortunately.

I listened to two of the conference calls on Thursday: a very brief one for investors (it was over before I got on it live, but listened to the replay later; for a conference call about the acquisition of a content management vendor, it was pretty content-free), and a longer press call. Ambuj Goyal, the GM of the Information Management unit that will be eating FileNet whole, delivered the usual blah-blah about how the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, how FileNet partners will benefit from an “enhanced ecosystem” and how IBM will preserve and enhance customer investments in both companies’ platforms. Yeah, right. He also referred to FileNet’s BPM as “content-centric”, which means that there’s some pretty fundamental misunderstandings by people how matter about the current state of the product.

Then Lee Roberts, CEO of FileNet, started with “we’re all very excited about this announcement”, and I swear that I could hear the rigging on his platinum parachute twanging in the background. During the Q&A, Roberts said that both he and Ron Ercanbrack (FileNet’s president, to whom I reported when I worked there) would be moving over to IBM — it’s worth noting that they’re both former IBM employees — and that “a vast majority [of FileNet’s workforce] will migrate over to IBM”. He also said that the cultures of the two companies are very similar, words that could only come from a former IBMer, I think. FileNet employees: resistance is futile! Prepare to be assimilated!

Bruce Silver also caught the conference call and had a few comments, and Cote from Redmonk did a mindmap of the calls.

Tons of interesting commentary all over the web:

  • IBM Acquisition Aimed at Microsoft?: “The purchase could be seen as an expensive play by IBM to compete head-to-head with Microsoft, which plans to integrate its own content management capabilities into Office SharePoint Server 2007.”
  • Why IBM bought FileNet (hint: it wasn’t for the technology): “Indeed the only feasible reason I can see – other than the fact that IBM just wanted to have to compete with one fewer vendor – is that FileNet deployments usually need a fair element of services, so FileNet brings in services partners including Unisys, EDS, Accenture, Capgemini, BearingPoint, Fujitsu and many more. Now that IBM owns FileNet, it will try to mop up most of that services business itself.”
  • IBM acquires FileNet – who really stands to gain?: “If IBM believes that the ECM/BPM market is set for a period of significant ongoing growth, it is highly plausible that buying FileNET is the most cost-effective way of making sure it takes a leading share in that market.”
  • BPM Market Changes: “This is a very interesting acquisition that addresses a gaping hole in IBM’s BPM strategy while signifying the importance of the BPM market to even the biggest players in the software industry.”
  • IBM Snaps up FileNet for $1.6B: “Despite FileNet’s worthy product developments over the past few years, the acquisition is hardly about technology. With the exception of some industry-specific applications built on the FileNet platform, IBM already has all the technology pieces. The motivation for the move is more likely acquiring customers and gaining a better competitive position relative to the ECM market and the enterprise IT market as a whole.”
  • IBM’s FileNet bid proof of ECM consolidation: “IBM Corp.’s intention to acquire FileNet Corp. points to a major shift underway in the ECM software market as systems infrastructure companies encroach on pure-play ECM vendors’ turf.”
  • Mr. Palmisano, this is American Express. We’ve noticed some unusual activity on your account …: “The acquisition will strengthen IBM’s position in a very lucrative market.”
  • FileNet to be acquired – first thoughts: “Lee Roberts CEO (and ex IBM’er) will also do very well – but I am not sure I would be too happy if I were a FileNet customer, or for that matter a member of FileNet’s staff.”
  • IBM acquires nice customer list: “This is what analysts call a “customer acquisition”.”
  • Morning news: Block, drop, gobble, charge, crunch: “IBM buys software company FileNet for $1.6 billion, and papers everywhere remark on the “recent trend” of big companies gobbling up small companies — which is like remarking on the recent trend of panthers gobbling up gazelle.”
  • IBM Embraces BPM 2.0 Model: “IBM moved on a fast track to adopt the BPM 2.0 model with its proposed acquisition of FileNet.”
  • And lastly, advice for other ECM vendors from A World without FileNet: “Those who used FileNet as their model and who are working in the thin air of the enterprise market had better find some breathing apparatus because being sandwiched in the top of the market pyramid between Oracle, IBM and EMC will suck the air right out of your lungs.”

I also received a hilarious comment from someone I know at FileNet: “Back in the liberal ‘70s of my youth, working for Big Blue was your worst nightmare! What a long, strange trip it’s been and now I am one of them — wake me up!!”

BPM 202: Knowledge Management & Collaboration

I checked in on today’s BPM webinars by Appian (through their BPM Basics site). Some good things in the webinar series if you’re relatively new to BPM, and a good amount of content that is not specific to Appian. This one is Fundamentals of Knowledge Management and Collaboration Functionality; they also have one on Fundamentals of Process Management Functionality (available now for replay) and Fundamentals of Analytics Functionality (upcoming on September 14th, but you can sign up at the link). There’s an earlier BPM Primer webinar, which I poked a bit of fun at in an earlier post because of some of their marketing hype. There’s a schedule for other ones in the future that you might want to check out as well.

IBM buys FileNet

I did not see this coming (thanks to Elizabeth at ebizQ for tipping me off). [Disclosure: FileNet is a customer, and I’m a shareholder. I still didn’t see it coming.]

Back in 2000-01, when I worked for FileNet as their BPM evangelist, there were always rumours swirling around about someone bigger buying them out. Usually Oracle was named as the potential suitor, but never IBM as they were too directly competitive, particularly on the content management side. From FileNet’s press release (IBM doesn’t have one out yet as of 9am Eastern), the plan is to:

  • Combine FileNet’s operations with IBM’s Content Management business in the Information Management unit. Since this is the area where they compete most directly, I suspect that this means that FileNet’s content management could eventually be subsumed into IBM’s Content Manager product.
  • Integrate IBM’s BPM and Service Oriented Architecture technologies with the FileNet platform. This is an area where FileNet provides a quite different and possibly complementary product to IBM, so I think that FileNet’s BPM product could actually survive, get properly integrated with the IBM integration substructure, and become the product that it should have been years ago.

These are only my speculations as an outsider; I have no inside information and knew nothing of the transaction before it hit the wires this morning.

All in all, I’m still totally speechless.

Today’s webinar: The Business Value of BPM

Great webinar on the business value of BPM and BPM standards today on ebizQ, and I’m not just saying that because I’m one of the speakers. 🙂 The full replay should be available tomorrow at the same link. If you attended the live seminar today, there was a technical glitch just before the Q&A where we had a bit of dead air, so if you dropped out at that point you can go back tomorrow and hear the full replay.

In listening to the replay, I realize that I talk WAY too fast — I was conscious of the short time that I had for my part of the presentation, but this has always been a criticism when I make presentations and I have to force myself to slow down, especially when introducing a lot of new information such as the alphabet soup of BPM standards. As weird as it might sound, I get excited talking about this stuff and tend to talk faster.

Independent BPM vendors navigating dangerous waters

A recent article in Intelligent Enterprise, Content and BPM Vendors Swim Among the “Whales”, talks about how the independent BPM vendors are faring amongst the big guys like Microsoft and Oracle.

Open Text‘s strategy of using the big guys’ products as infrastructure to build their own products on top of makes a lot of sense, although it will be difficult for some of the other independent vendors to follow suit. There’s always the chance, of course, that the big guy in question will just build their own version of what the independent is doing, but there’s always room in the market for a company that’s nimble and innovative.

The article also mentions the CentraSite community and some of the innovative things that Savvion is doing with their ProcessXchange, both of which I’ve blogged about previously.

Bifurcating BPM, Batman!

My reading is a bit behind due to my recent travel, and with my feed reader sitting at just under 3000 unread items, I tend to ignore the magazine feeds in favour of reading blogs. Today, I went back through the unread Intelligent Enterprise items and found The Bifurcation of Business Process Management, which has very little to do with bifurcation except for one sentence in the summary; probably the editor just likes the word. 😉

I don’t agree with everything in this short report from Ventana Research: they state that BPM is still in its infancy, but suggest creating a 3-year architectural blueprint for BPM; if the technology truly is immature, then a 3-year plan would change so quickly as to be obsolesced within a year, wouldn’t it? Also, the phrase in the recommendations, “BPM technology, by failing to maintain pace with Web services technologies, is not ready for prime-time enterprise SOA applications“ is a generalization that I just don’t believe to be true.

I’m left with the impression that the author is not all that knowledgable about BPM, which doesn’t leave a particularly good impression about Ventana.

Pega SmartBPM 5.1

Yesterday’s Intelligent Enterprise included a review by Derek Miers of the new Pegasystems release, which includes an AJAX-based portal for process “development” as well as runtime environments, although the actual process design appears to be done in Visio. Please, all you BPM vendors, just stop telling us that it’s too hard and give us zero-footprint, browser-based process designer!

There’s also a laughable understatement at one point: “Although a business user will probably be unnerved to see the underlying Java code exposed in the configuration dialog…” — no kidding!

Paul Harmon speaks at ABPMP San Francisco chapter meeting

 

Last night I attended the inaugural meeting of the San Francisco chapter of ABPMP, which included a presentation by Paul Harmon of BPTrends.

Paul had some interesting comments about a past attempt to start an ABPMP: a couple of years ago, he and a few others tried to get one started in San Francisco, and only vendors showed up. The challenge for this new attempt, as well as our starting chapter in Toronto, will be to create a critical mass of enough end-customer practitioner involvement to make it relevant.