Category: process

business process management

Steps to BPM Success

I just watched a webinar hosted by BPMinstitute called “Proven Steps to BPM Success”. By the time the webinar started, it was retitled as “Breakaway BPM — Leveraging Business Process Innovation for Strategic Advantage”, although there wasn’t really a lot of content that fit that description. Unfortunately the webinar started with a (short) presentation by the hosting vendor, Metastorm, then proceeded to a presentation by AMTI, one of their partners. Basically, vendor followed by vendor. Whatever happened to having customers talk about their experiences?

A couple of good ideas and graphics from the Metastorm CEO, including this one on the evolution of BPM as driven by complex process initiatives:

However, pretty tame stuff from the “featured speaker” from AMTI talking about their process improvement efforts, like “reward success” and “process should be integral to the way you work”. And he totally didn’t understand why a recent Gartner survey (summarized in InfoWorld) showed that CIOs’ top business priority is improving processes but their top technology priority is business intelligence. Um, BPM and BI are related, dude — that’s what business activity monitoring (BAM) and corporate performance management (CPM) are all about.

You’ll be able to find a replay of the webinar on the BPMinstitute site within a few days, listed under their Round Tables section.

Multi-tasking during the webinar did give me a chance to glance through an interesting article in a recent copy of the Economist, Thinking for a living (paid subscription required), the title of which is based on the book of the same name by Tom Davenport. The article has a great nugget of truth from a consultant at Boston Consulting Group:

Mr. Morieux concludes that companies should concentrate on designing the processes that knowledge workers carry out, rather than measuring their performance.

Rather a different view on the whole BAM/CPM issue.

Tips for vendor showdowns

Phil Gilbert (CTO of Lombardi) posts about how to evaluate vendors, and makes some comments that are likely to cause a few groans from people inside his own sales organization, like the 60-day money-back guarantee.

I’d like to add one more thing to his list: request that one of the references be from within the vendor itself; in other words, how are they using their own product? Every company has processes, and if a BPM vendor can’t show how they’re improving their own processes using their own product, you want to know why. And we’re not just talking their expense report approvals process here; ask to see something that’s critical to the revenue-generation side of their business.

Before you head out to evaluate vendor products, however, you need to have a good understanding of your own processes, or at least the general category and order of complexity; otherwise, the vendors will just show you what they want you to see, not what you need to see in order to evaluate how well the product will serve your needs. Think globally (across your entire organization) even if you’ll initially be acting locally (within a department).

Review a checklist such as the recent Gartner BPM Suite Selection Criteria report and think about which of those capabilities that you require before you start talking to vendors.

Talk to a variety of people inside your organization: not just business users, and not just IT, but a reasonable survey of both viewpoints. Some of the biggest BPM disasters that I’ve seen have been because the product was selected purely on the basis of one of those two viewpoints (business or IT), but not both.

The Vision Thing slowly says goodbye

One of the first BPM-related blogs to be added to my newsreader was The Vision Thing, and today Ethan announced that he’s shutting it down. I had the pleasure of being interviewed by Ethan for one of his Sound of Vision podcasts last May, then meeting him face-to-face at our own little bloggers dinner in Dallas in December.

There’s a few things that you should check out on his site: the flowchart article archive (anyone who can write five articles on the theme of “Visio is Evil” has to have something to say about process mapping!), the rest of the Sound of Vision podcast archive, and the snippets in Process for the People.

This month, Ethan launched Vision Monthly, an online magazine that covers a much wider range of business issues. The first issue included an article by Elisa Camahort (co-founder of BlogHer), one by Paul Gimbel of Razorleaf which led me to his blog on process analysis, and others.

Ethan, we’re sorry to see TVT go, and good luck with Vision Monthly.

BPM emerging from its niche

It’s a good sign when a niche technology starts getting a lot of coverage in mainstream IT press. I don’t consider BPM “niche” any more (okay, maybe “niche-ish”), but it’s still not as widespread as it could be. Judging by the popular press, however, we’re slowly creeping across the chasm.

Case in point: BPM is all over Intelligent Enterprise the past few months. An article by Bruce Silver discusses five reasons to invest in BPM: simplification, efficiency, compliance and control, agility, and continuous improvement (I think that his first two are actually the same, but no matter, the point is the same). Other articles discuss the incredible number of BPM vendors and the inevitable impending consolidation, the move to BPM suites (now that Gartner claims that “pure-play” BPM is dead), and the inclusion of BAM (business activity monitoring) in the BI (business intelligence) space.

As BPM, SOA, mashups and other integration technologies overlap more both from a technology and usage standpoint, it will drive all of them to greater recognition.

BPM for dummies

No, I don’t think any of you are dummies — the title (however appropriate) is in sympathy with a letter received by Jason Calacanis and a follow-up suggestion by Jeff Jarvis. Check for related posts with the fordummies tag on Technorati.

Back to the point of this post: an email that I received eariler this week from the BPM Academy, which is a thinly-veiled marketing site for Appian, although it does contain some interesting links. The email was directing me to a BPM Primer webinar that they’re holding next Wednesday, which probably holds some value for those just starting out with BPM or looking to learn the terminology and concepts. (You can probably find the same information poking around the links on my Squidoo BPM page, but some people prefer the webinar format). The really funny part, however, was the title of email that they sent promoting the event:

Go from BPM Beginner to BPM Brainiac in one short hour

I don’t know what’s funnier: the use of the word “brainiac”, or the idea that someone in their marketing department thinks that people are dumb enough to give credence to their claim. They don’t claim to be the definitive education on BPM, but I’m still laughing.

TIBCO seminar

On the heels of an announcement that TIBCO is supporting AJAX for developing interfaces to their BPM, I’m attending a TIBCO seminar next Thursday in Toronto, “Harness the Power of Process to Tip the Competitive Scales: What BPM Can Do for Your Organization”. It’s a freebie, but you have to pre-register. Also taking place in New York on the 14th and Denver on the 23rd.

If you’re at the Toronto seminar, track me down and say hi.

BPM and AJAX

Here’s an interesting tidbit from the very bottom of an article on TIBCO’s recent upgrades to its BPM platform (formerly the Staffware product):

The company [TIBCO] has upgraded the BPM user interface, as well, to include AJAX for the development of RIA (Rich Internet Applications).

Significant that a large BPM vendor acknowledges the existence of Web 2.0.

Considering that BPM products are, by their nature, typically both consumers and providers of web services (they are, after all, orchestration tools), how long until a mainstream BPM vendor jumps into the mashup fray? There’s already companies such as The Process Factory offering BPM in a software as a service (SaaS) model, we just need a BPM SaaS provider who also opens up the functionality via web services for integration into other applications, like Salesforce.com has done.

Or should BPM remain a part of an organization’s internal backbone?

Circular quotes on BPM and SOA

All of a sudden, there’s a lot of noise around enterprise mashups. Dennis Howlett posts about BPM and SOA, quoting a post by Jeff Clavier on the same topic. Dennis’ post also quotes a post by David Berlind which is actually a quote by me from an earlier quote that David quoted, and Jeff quotes David’s post that refers to me, so it all seems to come around in a circle to my earlier post on mashups and corporate SOA. Sometimes blogging is a bit like the telephone game.

Equally interesting is Jeff’s post about a TiE SIG Software event next week on Web 2.0 in the enterprise. I would SOOOO like to be there; if I had know about this earlier, I might have left for Mashup Camp a few days early.

What it comes down to is that Web 2.0 is, or will be, all about integration. David Linthicum posts about Salesforce.com becoming a web service provider (without yammering on about how they had another outage in the past week, as everyone else has been doing, ignoring the fact that outages occur all the time inside corporate IT but you just don’t hear about it) and links to Phil Wainewright’s interview with the Salesforce.com CEO, who has the grace to admit that he didn’t visualize the integration potential back when it all started.

Business rules out of the trough

Jim Sinur, who is THE name in BPM at Gartner, has a recent article about business rules. He believes that BRE is finally out of the trough of disillusionment (a part of the Gartner “hype cycle”, and not a good part as you might guess by the name) and finally has the functionality and ease of use for mainstream usage:

Today’s rule technologies run well on all mainstream technology platforms and are being included in hybrid business and infrastructure solutions running in high-volume situations. Because of this change, a number of technology sectors are embracing and embedding rule technology, including Business Process Management (BPM), application integration, simulation, and Business Activity Monitoring (BAM).

He goes through 12 reasons to embrace rules technology (the BRE 12-step program, if you like), split across beginner, intermediate and advanced uses of BRE. Pretty much everything that you would ever need to convince your organization to take a good look at BRE is there, ranging from agility to cost savings to understanding the business to complex problem-solving to dynamic policy compliance.

BRE is definitely a boon to business agility if it’s used properly and control is (at least partially) in the hands of the business. As I’ve pointed out in the past, however, acceptance is still a bit of an uphill battle in spite of the obvious benefits. In particular, I consider BRE to be essential as a component of (or tightly integrated with) BPM in order to handle the necessary complexity, to allow sharing of rules across applications, and most importantly because it enables changing in-flight processes. Having BRE in your BPM also helps with your compliance initiatives as well as agility. Remember that BPM focuses on how people and systems interact, whereas BRE focuses on how decisions are made, and you really need both in order to build good process management.

By the way, I welcome any comments from the business rules experts (which I’m not) on the proper acronym for business rules these days: BRE? BRM? BRMS? Help me out!

Gartner disses tactical BPM

In the findings from their Insurance Industry research meeting published this week, Gartner states the bleeding obvious:

Tactical BPM Approaches Will Cause Rule Management Nightmares for Healthcare Payers

It’s been pretty obvious for some time that BPM should not be a tactical, departmental decision, regardless of your industry. I’ve been working in this industry long enough to remember when BPM (workflow or EAI, before the Grand Consolidation) was sold as an application. Then, it was sold as a toolset. Then (again), it was sold as an application. Now it’s being sold as infrastructure, and I think the vendors finally have it right.

As soon as you start looking at your business processes, you’ll find something in your organization that could be helped out by the functionality provided by a BPMS: automation of manual steps, orchestration across disparate systems, process governance, whatever hits the hot buttons. And what you’ll find in almost all cases is that the actual business processes span several business departments, although the systems that support them don’t, leading to a lot of manual processes handling the interfaces between departments. So although you could make a tactical decision to buy a BPMS just for a specific business department’s urgent needs, if you don’t consider where the tendrils of that process reach, then you’ll still be stuck with those manual handoffs to areas outside the core of the process. The only path to a solution is to have BPM as part of the enterprise-wide infrastructure that supports all business departments, so that your business processes can extend their reach across the organization (and beyond) in the most effective way possible.

The same goes for business rules, which is part of what Gartner is saying: although they state that rules need to be integrated across applications and multiple rule engines, I’d go a step further and say that a common business rules engine (BRE, or BRMS) needs to be part of the enterprise-wide infrastructure as well. It’s critical that different departments have access to the same business rules: the same rule might be applied at a step in a back-office process, by call centre staff during a customer call, and by auditors when creating compliance documentation. The same rules need to be universally accessible by applications throughout the organization, without the propagation delay or lack of synchronization that could be caused by using multiple BRE.

Your business processes and business rules reach across your entire business. Your BPMS and BRE have to do the same.