Category: process

business process management

BPTrends State of BPM survey

The BPTrends survey, The State of Business Process Management, has just been published and is available free (registration required). Half of the 348 respondents to the survey are process practitioners or business analysts, with the remainder split between business, IT and executive management.

The survey asked some interesting questions, such as the meaning of BPM (only 16% identify it as the BPMS software, whereas 40% see it as the methodology) and the current committment of their organization to BPM (split pretty evenly between “major/significant” and “limited/just looking/no interest”). And although reducing costs is still the biggest single driver, agility, compliance and customer satisfaction are gaining ground. There are also a number of interesting results on how consistently processes are performed within the organization.

Not surprisingly to me, although it may come as a bit of a smack to BPMS vendors, is that over half consider their most important BPM software tool to be a modeling tool, either a purely graphical tool such as Visio, a repository-based tool such as ProVision or an organizational modeling environment. In fact, BPMS only scored 12% of the votes on that question.

Unlike many of the other BPTrends reports, this appears to be vendor-neutral and not “pay for play”, so may carry more weight than some of their other reports that I’ve written about in the past.

Gartner BPMS Magic Quadrant 2006

I just saw the new Gartner Magic Quadrant for BPMS, published yesterday, and although I haven’t had time to review the entire 19-page report, here’s the MQ:

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p style=”text-align: center”>Graphic removed at the request of Gartner, who seem to be missing the point that I’m actually encouraging people to read the entire 19-page report in context, not just look at the single graphic that I excerpted.Good way to alienate the blogosphere by stomping all over the notion of fair use, guys.


The most recent point of comparison from Gartner is their June 2004 MQ for pure-play BPM, which included many of these same vendors. They see BPMS as the second generation of this market, and note that many of the former leaders no longer meet the requirements.

Some interesting notes:

  • Three of the four vendors in the leaders quadrant are new arrivals as I discussed in my History of BPM posts.
  • Fuego (now BEA) and Lombardi have moved from the visionaries quadrant to leaders, relative to the Pure-Play BPM quadrant that Gartner published in 2004. Interestingly, their relative “completeness of vision” dropped as their “ability to execute” increased.
  • Savvion and Pegasystems both retained their place in the leaders quadrant, but both also dropped in relative “completeness of vision”.
  • Two long-time players in this space, FileNet and TIBCO (Staffware) have been bumped out of the leaders quadrant: FileNet for less completeness of vision (a point that I readily agree with lately) and TIBCO for less ability to execute. As I said in the afore-mentioned BPM History post, many of the larger vendors are lagging badly in implementing new features, and look a little tired these days in comparison to the shiny bright newcomers.

Tons of good detailed information in the report, worth reading.

Bluespring does it in style

This is the foie gras of eating your own dogfood: I registered online for a product demo webinar with Bluespring today, and here’s what I saw after I filled in the form:

After a few minutes, I clicked the refresh button; the process status changed to “Temporarily Delayed” and the upper part of the process map changed:

The URL included the process ID so that I could bookmark the page and can go back at any time and see where my process is, in real time; the registration confirmation email also contained the URL back to my process plus a vCalendar file to add the webinar to my calendar. It would be even more cool if they customized the vCalendar file to include the URL of my registration process, so that I could toss the registration email after the item is on my calendar without having to add the URL to the calendar entry myself, but that’s a minor quibble.

All the BPM vendors say that they can do processes that cross the firewall and keep the external participants informed, but how many of them actually do it on their public website?

Savvion’s ProcessXChange

I had a chance late last week to talk to Shawn Price (CEO) and Pat Morrissey (SVP Marketing) of Savvion about the news that they’re releasing this week. It’s always flattering to hear the CEO of a BPM vendor start a sentence with “Having read your blog…”, and there’s some interesting things that they’re announcing that are aligned with what I write about, including their “Show us your models” contest announced shortly after I wrote “Show me your process models“. Their call to see your process models is their new ProcessXChange, a forum to share process models, discuss best practices and other topics related to process improvement: more ambitious than what I was suggesting, which was just a library of process models, but at the same time, more restrictive since it is limited to process models developed in the Savvion Process Modeler. I applaud their efforts to start a collaborative community around process improvement, but a vendor-specific walled garden isn’t going to cut it in the long run.

Savvion is also launching a new version of their BusinessManager product this week that attempts to increase the range of BPM participants within an organization in an effort to speed the deployment of process automation: Shawn’s comment was that an organization must deploy its first application within 90 days in order to be successful at BPM, and allow for ongoing changes to processes two more times every 90 days. I found that comment tremendously interesting, considering that many of my more conservative customers spend three or four times as long to deploy their first application, and end up being not all that succesful because the business has changed during that time and there’s been too much over-customization to make the solution agile enough to adapt. I always push for a simpler application deployed sooner, but many customers are sold (usually by a large SI) on the notion of an all-singing, all-dancing “solution” that takes a year to develop and deploy, and ends up solving nothing, in the end.

A cornerstone of Savvion’s plan to push BPM out into the organization is their free, downloadable Process Modeler, on the premise that if everyone has a process modeling tool on their desktop, they’re more likely to participate in the process improvement efforts. They’ve also added simulation capabilities to allow an application to be previewed before deployment and improved their BAM capabilities. I’ve never done an in-depth on their product so I’m not in a position to say how much of an improvement that these things are over previous versions.

One recommendation that I made to them, which I’ve made to other vendors as well, is the addition of a zero-footprint AJAX-based process modeler, if you’re really serious about having this used throughout an organization. Many companies lock down the user desktops so that software can’t be installed, and applications requiring installation may take weeks of testing by a central IT group before they are approved for use on a desktop. Move this completely to the web with no download, and the usage rate will shoot up. One thing that I do like about their modeler is that it models in BPMN directly, whereas many other vendors are relying on third-party modeling products such as the Zynium add-on to Visio that exports to XPDL, then imports into their process modeler.

One last thing that we discussed is the role of BPM as an enabler for BPO by allowing for collaboration between an organization and their outsourcer: if the “home office” can model their processes and have those process be implemented elsewhere without re-translation of the models between tools, then use the same set of tools to monitor processes or collaborate on changes to the processes, business process outsourcing would get a lot less painful. Also, the addition of automation to the outsourced processes is becoming a necessity in places such as India where the wages are creeping up and the all-manual methods are becoming less cost effective. Savvion is busy making deals with a number of Indian BPO firms with exactly these ends in mind.

A Short History of BPM, Part 8

Continued from Part 7.

Part 8 (the last): The Current State of BPM. Every analyst, vendor and customer defines BPM differently, because the current definition of BPM is very broad, and there are many vendors jostling for position within it. EAI/ESB-type vendors call their products BPM, but the products may contain only rudimentary human-facing functionality. Workflow-type vendors, also labelling themselves as BPM, lack the necessary infrastructure for integration, and often handle automated steps poorly. Some pure integration products call themselves workflow, just to confuse things further. There’s a lot of complementary products, such as process analytics and simulation, and business rules engines: BPM vendors will either tell you that a particular capability must be part of the base BPM product (if their product has it), or should never be part of the base BPM product (if their product doesn’t have it). And now there’s the whole SOA wild card thrown into the mix.

BPM is definitely a case where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. It’s not just workflow plus EAI plus B2Bi plus business rules, plus plus plus: it’s the near-seamless integration of all of these tools into a single suite that provides an organization with the ability to do things that they could never do before. That doesn’t mean that all the tools have to be from the same vendor, but it’s essential to deliver all of the BPM functionality in a single environment of closed-loop process improvement.

Smith and Fingar’s book Business Process Management, The Third Wave describes this “third wave” as providing the ability to create a single definition of a business process from which different views of that process can be rendered and new information systems can be built. This allows different people with different skills — business manager, business analyst, regular old user, programmer — to view and manipulate the same process in a representation suitable for them and derived from the same source. They make a great analogy with HTML, where a business user may use a high-level tool like FrontPage to view and edit HTML, whereas a developer may edit the HTML code directly, but they’re still working from the same source. Round-tripping between a business analyst’s modelling tool and a developer runtime environment is one way to do this, although it violates the “same source” in the purest sense, but we definitely have to get rid of the strictly one-way paths from business analysis to implementation that exist now in many organizations.

Furthermore, Smith and Fingar point out that in the world of BPM, the ability to change is far more prized than the ability to create in the first place, and that BPM has the potential to actually remove application development from the cycle — the “zero code” Holy Grail that gets a lot of press these days. They make an analogy with VisiCalc, which took customized data analysis out of the hands of the IT department and put it in the hands of the business users, thereby taking software development off the critical path for achieving results.

Getting back to the point of this post, what is the current state of BPM?

First of all, we have several companies from the pure-play BPM/BPM suites market: they provide excellent human-facing BPM and at least adequate integration capabilities, with some providing outstanding integration. At the Gartner BPM summit earlier this year, they listed three “major players” in this category who had revenues upwards of $100M — FileNet, Pegasystems and Global 360 — and five “up and comers” with revenues above $30M — Appian, Lombardi, Savvion, Metastorm and Ultimus — while ignoring anything smaller than that. All eight of these vendors hit into the right zones in the Gartner and Forrester charts, which means that they either have the necessary functionality or are partnered with someone to provide it.

Second, we have a couple of integration-focussed BPM vendors who have purchased pure-play BPM vendors to create the complete range of functionality. The two highest-profile examples are the TIBCO acquisition of Staffware in 2004, and the BEA acquisition of Fuego earlier this year. In both cases, there seems to be a reasonable fit, but my concern is that the human-facing BPM side is going to become weaker since the main focus of these companies is on integration.

Third, we have the large software companies that have developed (or acquired) a BPM product: IBM, Microsoft and Fujitsu all spring to mind. In many cases, such as IBM and Microsoft, their BPM products are primiarly integration-focussed without a lot of human-facing support, and likely started as a “would you like fries with that” sort of offering for customers who were already committed to their architecture. IBM’s MQ Series messaging is probably still the most commonly used piece of integration middleware in financial services, although I think that they call it (and everything else) “WebSphere” these days, and IBM rightly has it as a cornerstone of their BPM strategy. Fujitsu is the odd one out here, with what appears to be a fully-functional BPMS; unfortunately, they’ve been marketing it in stealth mode and most people are completely unaware of it: as I said in one of my posts about the Gartner BPM summit, “who knew that Fujitsu did BPM?”

We’ll continue to see most of the business functionality envelope being pushed by the vendors in the first category as they seek better ways to integrate business rules, analytics, performance management and other capabilities into BPM; in fact, the most innovation seems to be coming from the smaller vendors in this category because of the lack of baggage that I discussed in part 7.

Because of the current focus on process improvement in all organizations, I don’t think that there’s any great risk of any of the vendors that I’ve listed here going out of the BPM business any time soon. However, the integration vendors will acquire some of the smaller BPM suite vendors to round out their portfolios, and the large software companies will acquire some of everything, in a continuing Darwinian cycle.

Before you vendors start adding self-promoting comments to this post, keep in mind that this is not intended to be a comprehensive list or review of BPMS vendors, and I know that you’re all very special in your own way. 🙂

Show me your process models!

I had a couple of emails recently from people looking for public-domain process models, related but slightly different. The first was looking for generic process models for those processes that are the same in most businesses:

I am trying to convince [a small healthcare company] that their business is no different than many other service businesses providing service to customers. I am having a very hard time finding a reference model for just a generic enterprise, one that would include all of the standard functions such as Finance, Strategy and Planning.

The second was looking for some real-world examples of BPMN:

I’m looking for a good source for real examples of BPDs that are compliant with the BPMN spec. I’ve spent ~3 hours surfing for information on BPMN when I came across your blog and decided you might know what you’re talking about. I’ll admit to being uncompromising when it comes to adherence to the BPMN spec, but I don’t have a lot of support. So far, we’ve generated a whole bunch of examples of how not to draw models, do you know of any good sources?

Aside from not being sure whether to be flattered or not over the comment that I might know what I’m talking about, it’s really the same issue: the need for publicly available templates or samples of business processes. Think of it as design patterns for business processes, something that’s far more useful than the standard “employee expense approval” flow that seems to ship with every process modelling tool. The biggest problem, of course, is that many companies consider this to be part of their intellectual property, even if the particular process is not part of their competitive differentiation, and don’t allow those process models to be shared. What’s funny is that every customer I work with thinks that their processes are completely unique, but it usually boils down to something very similar to what I’ve seen at other customers in the same industry, or even across industries. I think that the attitude that “our business is unique” might be preventing more standardized modelling of business processes.

Anyone out there know of any libraries of real business process models available online, whether generic or industry-specific? Any that use BPMN? Does anyone have process models that they’d like to contribute to an “open source” library? Tim Vojta, the author of the first email above, has kicked things off by creating a Business Process Reference Model after our discussions and publishing it under a Creative Commons licence (yeah!), although it covers only a fairly high-level functional view of the enterprise.

BPM tough love

This story makes me want to drive out to Oakville (which is just east of Toronto) and buy Neil Montgomery a beer. In summary, Davis Controls, a 50-person manufacturing firm in Oakville headed by Montgomery, put in a BPMS from Exact back in 2001 to handle business processes ranging from sales orders to vacation requests. They now have 25% higher revenues with the same number of staff, and have reduced administrative headcount to 1/3 of its pre-BPM number.

That success was not without some rocks along the road. As with every BPMS installation that I’ve ever seen, there was some amount of push-back from the employees, who continued to circumvent the BPMS using email. Montgomery did everything possible to convince the team to use the system, to the point of having to mandate its use, but a half dozen empl0yees still used email instead. So he cut off their email accounts, which is pretty much the most drastic thing that I’ve heard of anyone doing to get people to use BPM, until I read on that two of the employees, including the CTO, still resisted (are they stupid, or what?), and he gave them the boot.

This man deserves a medal, although I’m sure that some of the people who work for him, or used to work for him, might disagree. BPM is one of those technologies that fundamentally changes the way that people do a lot of everyday tasks, and those people can put up a surprising amount of resistance to change, even though they accept logically that the new technology and methods make them more productive. As John Maynard Keynes said, the greatest difficulty lies not in persuading people to accept new ideas, but in persuading them to abandon old ones.

A Short History of BPM, Part 7

Continued from Part 6.

Part 7: The New Arrivals. In the years following the dot-com bust in 2000, a number of new BPM vendors came into being, mostly in the coveted pure-play space. (Funnily enough, “pure-play BPM” is now not the desirable place to be, having been replaced by the “BPM suites” space that, according to some large analysts’ research, seems to have nearly identical functionality to pure-play BPM.) In many cases, these were started by those who were bounced out of their previous positions during the bursting of the bubble, so there was a lot of experience being put to the task of starting this new generation of BPM vendors.

The big advantage that a new vendor has in any industry is the lack of baggage, and nowhere was this truer than in BPM: they could start designing the next generation of BPM without having to reuse their existing technology or support their installed base, because they had neither. The BPM market needed to be reinvented, and these upstart young companies were the only ones who could shake things up enough to do it. I’m not going to credit the new arrivals with all the innovation in BPM during that time, but they certainly lit a fire under the old guard. Suddenly, we had BPM calling web services, or being called as a web service, in order to speed integration (and eventually become part of the SOA ecosystem). We had BAM, or at least some half-decent process monitoring and analytics for a change. We had simulation and optimization. We had integration with third-party modelling tools. We had business rule integration.

The startup environment during that time wasn’t the best — not a lot of venture funding around for technology, the perception that this was just a rehashing of the well-established workflow market — but a few of the vendors have become successful and many others are still straggling in their wake.

Meanwhile, the established BPM vendors had a big challenge on their hands: although few of the upstarts were challenging them directly for sales, the new guys were changing the perception of what the BPM market should be, forcing the big guys to follow suit as Gartner and the other large analysts published lists of must-have features that included this new functionality. Many of the larger vendors lagged badly in implementing new features, and look a little tired these days in comparison to the shiny bright newcomers. In some very conservative industries, such as financial services and insurance where most of my clients are, this hasn’t been a problem because they’d rather pick a vendor with a longer track record and the proven ability to process hundreds of thousands of items per day. However, this is where many of the dinosaur-like CIOs are fighting the losing battle against the push for emerging technology, and eventually the new kids will prove themselves scalable and stable enough for even the most conservative industries.

Even if none of the post-2000 vendors survive the upcoming bout of acquisitions, they have to be credited with not just injecting new life into BPM, but helping to reinvent it.

Next: The Current State

The Eight — er, Four — Misperceptions of Outsourcing

I was catching up on some older Gartner podcasts recently — they’re not really time-sensitive, so fine to listen to them weeks or months later, and some of them do contain some good tidbits of information. There was one good one called The Eight Misperceptions of Outsourcing: Part I, in which Linda Cohen starts by listing these eight misperceptions:

  • the myth of sourcing independence;
  • the myth of service autonomy (this was particularly interesting since it touched on the subject of the interdependence of services due to SOA and BPM);
  • the myth of economies of scale;
  • the myth of service management as self-management;
  • the myth of the enemy;
  • the myth of procurement;
  • the myth of steady state; and
  • the myth of sourcing competency.

She then went on to discuss the first four in detail, whetting my appetite for Part II, which was to contain the second four. I checked my iPod: not there. I checked the iTunes directory: ditto. I checked the Gartner podcast page: Part II just doesn’t exist. Okay, it’s only been four months since Part I, maybe I’m being a bit impatient, but bring on the second four myths, already!

Of course, I’m not one to be throwing stones here: I posted the first six episodes of my Short History of BPM over a month ago, and haven’t completed the last two. Now that JC has caught up with translating them to French on his blog, however, I need to get moving on this.