Category: process

business process management

European BPM conferences

I went looking at last year’s BPMG conference webpage to find out about this year’s conference, and was surprised to see that not only have they moved their conference to September, but they’re headlining a European Gartner BPM summit in June on their conference page. I saw Steve Towers at the Gartner summit last week, so there’s obviously some cooperation going on between BPMG and Gartner, but is there really a market in London for two major BPM conferences within three months of each other? Or is this a case of Gartner just barging in, and BPMG scurrying around to try and salvage their mindshare?

Another process blogger

My evangelism has paid off again, and I’ve convinced Sharon Boyes-Schiller of SkyScape Solutions to start blogging. Sharon and I met at the BPMG conference in London last year and have had a few conversations via email and Skype since then, many of them about blogging as a type of online portfolio for our small businesses. Her business focusses on analysis and optimization of processes, and I look forward to more of her posts.

The Sins of Patrick Morrissey

With that title, you can just imagine the black-cassocked priest striding across the Irish moors to confront his personal demons… or maybe I have an overactive imagination from watching a rerun of The Thorn Birds last night.

Anyway, this isn’t about Father Pat‘s own sins, but the sins that we all commit during the act of BPM. As a follow-up to Bruce Silver‘s comment on my previous posts about the Seven Deadly Sins of BPM, here they are, hot off the Savvion press:

  • Don’t model your current process
  • Don’t understand people and system requirements
  • Treat BPM as an IT problem
  • Focus on “architecture” in SOA rather than “service”, which ensures that the business doesn’t care about the project
  • Commit unnatural acts with existing applications
  • Hardwire your BPM application
  • Implement automation [of low-value processes] only

I was going to highlight a couple of these as sins that I’ve seen committed, but have to admit that I’ve seen them all, although have rarely committed any of them myself. I can’t even single one out as being the key one: they’re all killers.

The true path to BPM is clear: repent of your sins!

Gartner BPM summit day 3 and wrap-up

The last day at the Gartner conference was a short one for me: I skipped the vendor sessions in the morning, so only attended Daryl Plummer’s session “BPM in the Service Oriented Architecture” and the Andrew Spanyi talk at lunch before I had to leave for the airport.

Plummer’s session description started with the phrase “Is BPM in my SOA or is SOA in my BPM?” — where have I heard that before — then asked the questions “Where do BPM and SOA cross paths? How can SOA be leveraged for the business process? How can BPM be leveraged for an SOA?” There was quite a bit of recycled material in here, or maybe I was just getting conferenced-out by that point, but he did introduce a new (to me) acronym: ISE, or integrated service environment, which is apparently the process developer view of composite applications as opposed to BPMS, which is the business view of composite applications. He made a strong point that ISE is not just an IDE plus BPM, but is the following:

  • A development environment that enables creation, assembly, orchestration, deployment, automation and maintenance of composite applications based on services from the perspective of a process-centric developer.
  • Automates and manages the productivity of developers through frameworks, process flow, page flow and service invocations.
  • Provides the development work environment for an application platform suite to assemble services into processes and composite applications.
  • Supports SOA principles and XML Web services standards, as well as traditional component and modular code mechanisms.

First of all, it’s not clear to me why this isn’t just BPM plus some array of development tools. Second, it’s also not clear to me that a BPMS is the business view of composite applications: that’s one aspect of a BPMS, but most of them also provide a huge part of the process developer’s view as well. Is ISE a valid distinction in this ever-changing SOA environment, or just the buzzword du jour?

Spanyi’s talk at lunch was a bit lost in the hub-bub of a room full of people eating and — in the case of two people at my table — carrying on completely unrelated conversations, but I did pick up a copy of his latest book so can presumably get the gist of it from that.

One last note to Matt, who I sat with at lunch on Monday: send me your contact info, I want to hear more about your open source workflow project and I want to connect you to someone who is doing something similar.

Gartner BPM summit day 2: Bill Rosser

I finished up Tuesday at the conference with Bill Rosser’s “Creating a Business Architecture”. I found his enterprise architecture models to be a bit inconsistent: at one point, he includes application architecture in information architecture; later, he splits them out as most of us would tend to do. He did make a great point about architecture up front: architecture is not creating the design, it’s creating the environment/boundary/envelope in which the design can be created. Since many people don’t make the distinction between architecture and design (or even, in some extreme cases, architecture and coding), this was valuable as an explicit statement.

What I did find about Rosser’s talk, like all the other non-BPM “special interest” sessions that I attended (Six Sigma, business rules), is that he failed to make an adequate linkage back to BPM in the presentation. I’ve given presentations on enterprise architecture and BPM in the past, (as well as ones that involve Six Sigma and business rules tied to BPM) and it’s very easy to make a strong link between them, so I consider the lack of tie-in to BPM a critical failing of Rosser’s presentation.

Gartner BPM summit day 2: Jim Sinur

Tuesday’s session by Jim Sinur, “When Will the Power Vendors Offer Credible BPM Solutions?”, was one of the most interesting that I attended all week. For one thing, it left me with the question “which BPM vendor will Oracle buy?”, which is certainly not something that Sinur said but I can see the writing on the wall.

Sinur defines a “power vendor” as a company that has more than $1 billion in annual revenue and is a known brand to the average person: in this case, Fujitsu, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle and SAP are included in the soon-to-be-released magic quadrant.

I really like Sinur’s presentation style: he started with the summary in order to ease the suspense somewhat, although he did add in a lot of new information throughout the presentation. His big message to the existing BPM vendors: look out, because the power vendors have the ability to crush you within three years if they do everything right and you aren’t sufficiently innovative and financial stable. He sees the power vendors as being 12-18 months away from competing successfully in the full BPM space (as opposed to the integration-focussed side of the space, where most of them started), and that they’ll continue to partner with and OEM other companies’ products (such as SAP OEMing IDS Scheer) to build up capabilities as they mature.

He went through a map of BPM capabilities for each of the vendors (I posted about an earlier version of the generic scoring diagram last August), and I imagine that you’ll be able to get the full scoring details from Gartner soon. Basically, the top part of the map shows human-facing capabilities, the bottom shows integration capabilities, the left indicates incremental improvement and optimization capabilities, and the right shows the ability to make BPM human-friendly (including portals and content management, for example). Interestingly, he shows both the inherent vendor capabilities and the capabilities when combined with their partners on each map, using solid and dotted lines.

There were some surprises in here for me, since I tend to focus on the BPM vendors and not the power vendors. First, who knew that Fujitsu is in the BPM market? Or that both Fujitsu and Oracle have strong support for human task processing? Turns out that Fujitsu is big in Asian markets, but has little presence in North America and Europe, so has more of a marketing than a technical problem. No surprises with IBM or Microsoft, both of whom have strong integration support typical of a platform vendor, but are still building the human-facing side. As for SAP, probably the less said, the better.

He showed charts of the five vendors with a ranking of poor, medium or strong for each of the 10 capabilities in the diagram: one chart with just the vendor product, and one when combined with partner products. In the combined chart, Fujitsu had the highest number of “strong” ratings, at 4/10, but when you add the medium and strong, three vendors tie for a score of 7/10: Fujitsu, IBM and Oracle.

Sinur’s conclusion: Oracle is the best contender to close the gap soonest, with IBM a strong second; Fujitsu needs some serious North American and European marketing push to be a viable contender. Which leads me back to my original question: which BPM vendor will Oracle buy in order to close the gap sooner?

He also went through a list of non-power vendors who could become power vendors if they do everything right — Pegasystems, FileNet and Global 360 — as well as other large vendors who could decide to enter the space, including such wild cards as Yahoo!, eBay and Google. My favourite quote from the presentation came from his somewhat offhand dismissal of JBoss, the open source BPMS: “If you can’t sue them, do you want to buy them?”

Gartner BPM summit day 2: Daryl Plummer

Daryl Plummer’s Tuesday keynote, “How Do You Measure and Justify Business Agility” made a few good points about the completely over-hyped notion of business agility:

  • Agility is a legitimate management practice. If you don’t have people focussed on agility, it’s unlikely to just happen by accident.
  • Agility is as important, or more important, than planning in order to be able to react to the unexpected. Remember “Built To Last“? That’s so last year; now it’s “Built To Change.”
  • Agility and speed are not synonymous. You can very quickly create another legacy environment (and probably already have).

My only major disagreement with what he said is that I see agility as a characteristic that can be measured at any point in an organization’s life, not an end goal to which an organization aspires. He also introduces the Agility Quotient, which is “…calculated by measuring the things that inhibit agility and examining how willing you are to overcome them”, which ultimately strikes me as a new age-y business measurement that does more to increase Gartner’s consulting revenues than their customers’ agility.

He finishes up with some comments on some of the technological components and ideas critical to business agility: decoupled business components related through event passing (“beyond SOA”), mobile access, identity management, and how to bring some of these things together. Although he’s not explicit about it, he seems to indicate that business agility isn’t a problem for the business so much as it is for the IT groups that support them, which is certainly something that I’ve seen playing out in practice.

Gartner BPM summit day 2 in review

Hey, I finally made it to blogging about Tuesday, and it’s only Friday.

Tuesday was a pretty full day at the summit: sessions all day and vendor hospitality suites in the evening, a true test of a marathon conference-goer. The day started out with Daryl Plummer’s keynote on “How Do You Measure and Justify Business Agility” — this guy should be an evangelical preacher, he’s so passionate about his subject (and I mean that in a good way.) That was followed by the Six Sigma keynote by Mikel Harry that I left due to a severe lack of interest, although as I noted earlier, I found it odd that he seems to be using Six Sigma as a “brand” of sorts and distancing himself from the original statistical meaning. Certainly there’s some positioning going on with Gartner, BPM and Six Sigma.

In the afternoon, I attended Jim Sinur’s “When Will the Power Vendors Offer Credible BPM Solutions?”, which was fascinating but left out some tantalizing details (which can presumably be purchased from Gartner), and finished up the day at Bill Rosser’s “Creating a Business Architecture”.

The vendor hospitality suites were fun, although I had to lodge a complaint that Lombardi’s Blue Pomegranate Martinis (BPM, get it?) weren’t really blue but some sort of murky purple, and I could never figure out how to turn off the flashing ice cube that I picked up at another vendor’s suite so discarded it before airport security decided that it was something questionable. Between the vendor booths and the hospitality suites, I scored an alarming amount of swag: three jazz CDs from Lombardi, t-shirts from K2 and TIBCO, a 3-d globe puzzle from Global 360 that I’m afraid to take apart, a USB-powered light (perfect for lighting up your keyboard on flights when the overhead light causes glare on the screen) from Singularity, and a flash-when-it-bounces ball from Fujitsu.

The best part was after all the customers bailed out, and the vendors started to visit each other’s suites. I found the smaller vendors more likely to do this, possibly because they don’t have the sort of “us versus them” mentality about their competitors that is encouraged in larger companies, or possibly because they realize (consciously or not) that by next year they could be working together through job changes or corporate acquisitions. A particular thumbs-up to Savvion, whose suite became the “Switzerland of hospitality suites” (according to Rob Risany in their product marketing group) by the end of the night.