process – Page 115

BPM en français

Although schooled in Canada where we all have to learn some degree of French, my French is dodgy at best (although, in my opinion, it tends to improve when I’ve been drinking). However, I noticed that my blog appeared on the blogroll of a French BPM blog that just started up, and I’ve been struggling through the language barrier to check it out. There’s no information on the author, but I was instantly endeared to him (?) when I read the following in his reasons for starting the blog:

le marketing bullshit est omniprésent

Isn’t that just too true in any language?

More on vendor blogs

I ususally don’t put too much stock in BPM vendor blogs. First of all, there’s not a lot of them (or at least, not a lot that I’ve seen), since I imagine that getting official sanction for writing a blog about your product or company is exponentially more difficult as your company gets larger. Secondly, they can disappear rather suddenly in this era of mergers and acquisitions. Thirdly, anybody who works for a vendor and has something interesting to say is probably too busy doing other things, like building the product, to spend much time blogging. And lastly, they’re always a bit self-promotional, even when they’re not a blatant PR/marketing soapbox. (Yes, I know, my blog is self-promotional, but I am my own PR and marketing department, so I’m required to do that, or I’d have to fire myself.)

I’ve been keeping an eye on Phil Gilbert’s blog — he’s the CTO at Lombardi. I don’t know him personally, although I’ve been seeing and hearing a lot about their product lately. He wrote a post last week about “BPM as a platform” that every BPM vendor and customer should read, because it tells it like it is: the days of departmental workflow/BPM systems are past, and it’s time to grow up and think about this as part of your infrastructure. In his words:

Further, while it is a platform, it is built to handle and give visibility to processes of all sizes – from human workflows to complex integration and event processing. Choosing to start down the “process excellence” path may very well start with a simple process – therefore it’s not a “sledgehammer for a nail.” It’s a “properly sized hammer for the nail” built on a solid foundation that allows many people to be building (hammering) at once. And because of this, it scales very well from an administrative perspective. You can build one process, or you can build twenty. Sequentially, or all at once. Guess what? The maintenance of the platform is identical!

He also talks about how the real value of BPM isn’t process automation, it’s the data that the BPMS captures about the process along the way, which can then feed back into the process/performance improvement cycle and provide far more improvement than the original process automation.

He takes an unnecessary jab at Pegasystems (“the best BPM platforms aren’t some rules-engine based thing”) which probably indicates where Lombardi is getting hit from a competitive standpoint, and the writings a bit stilted, but that shows that it’s really coming from him, not being polished by a handler before it’s released. And the fact that the blog’s on Typepad rather than hosted on the Lombardi site is also interesting: it makes at least a token statement of independence on his part.

Worth checking out.

Planning for Disaster

I just bought a new pair of winter boots, guaranteed waterproof and warm to -20C; I stood in the store and swore to the sales clerk that I was not going to have cold, wet feet this year (I probably sounded a bit melodramatic, like Scarlett O’Hara declaring that she’d never be hungry again). For those of you who have never been to Toronto, you may not realize that some people make it through the winter without proper boots, just by avoiding the great outdoors on the few days when it is really cold or snowy. We only have a few weeks each winter as cold as -20; we only get a few big snowstorms; most of the snow usually melts within a day or two; and many days hover around the freezing mark so the bigger danger is cold slush leaking into your boots rather than the frigid air. However, every few years we have a colder-than-usual winter, or mounds of snow — like a few years back when a metre of the white stuff fell in two days, closing the city and causing sightings of cross-country skiers in the downtown financial district — and many people (including myself) aren’t properly prepared for it.

In my case, business still has to go on: being self-employed, I can’t just stay inside when the weather is foul, but have to get out there and continue with my day-to-day business of seeing clients and whatever other activities are on my schedule. In other words, the “weather event” occurs, and my business continues, although in a somewhat uncomfortable and restricted manner. There are many natural disasters that are a much greater challenge to business continuity, like the tsunamis, hurricanes and earthquakes that we’ve seen all over the world in the past year, in addition to manmade disasters and even biological events like a flu pandemic: a recent article in the Economist (subscription required) states that Gartner has advised their clients to consider the effect of 30% of their staff not showing up for work due to the flu, which would certainly fall into the “disaster” category for many businesses.

I spoke briefly about business continuity and BPM at a conference last week, and am doing a more comprehensive analysis for a client in the upcoming months. For me, it comes back to thinking about one of Tom Davenport’s nine steps to process innovation: geographical, or more specifically, location independence. BPM is one of the key technologies that may allow a process, or part of a process, to be located anywhere in the world, as long as the communications infrastructure and trained local staff exist. This has been a large driver behind the move to business process outsourcing, a controversial trend that is rejected outright by many organizations, but many people miss the fact that outsourcing also provides some level of business continuity: if you can move some of your business processes to a remote location, then you can just as easily have them at two locations so that there’s a fallback plan in the event of unforeseen events. I’m not talking about replicating systems here — that part’s relatively straightforward, although expensive — I’m talking about what is often forgotten by the IT disaster recovery team: people. If you have a single site where your human-facing business processes take place and something happens at that site, what’s your plan? Where do your people work in the advent of a physical site disaster? How do you reach them to coordinate them? Can you easily reroute client communications (phone, email, postal mail) to the new location? Are people trained at all locations to handle all processes? Can you reroute only part of the process if you have a partial failure at your main site?

Earthquakes are going to happen on the Pacific Rim; hurricanes are going to happen in the southern US, and it’s going to snow in Toronto. I’ve got my boots, are you ready?

One last session

I’m cutting out early for my flight home, so I’m finishing the FileNet user conference with another BPM technical session, this one on process orchestration. This is a relatively new area for FileNet in terms of out-of-the-box functionality, and a bit behind the competitive curve but they appear to be charging into the fray with strong functionality. Mike Marin, BPM product architect extraordinaire, walked us through the current state: the ability of a process to consume web services, and the ability to launch and control a process as a web service. Mike sits on a couple of standards boards and is pretty up-to-date on what’s happening with the competition and future directions. Nothing here that I wasn’t already aware of, although he provided some good technical insights into how it all works under the covers as well as an excellent distinction between choreography and orchestration. He also talked about using web services as a method for federating process engine services, that is, allowing a process to span servers, which I think is absolutely brilliant. The same thing holds for invoking and being invoked by a process on a BPEL engine (like Oracle’s), because it’s just a web service interface.

Time to grab some lunch and head for the airport. Regular (non-UserNet) blogging resumes later this week.

BPM SIG

I’m in the BPM special interest group session, which is much more sparsely attended than I expected, but it’s just after lunch and people are still trickling in. The conversation is starting out a bit granular, questions about some very specific functionality although I suppose that’s part of the goal.

Chris Preston just made a statement that the clear direction for interoperability is BPEL, which is definitely the right answer although there’s still a lot of issues around handling the human-facing steps in a process. Unfortunately, in the absence of any questions from the audience, he’s off on a long rant about “re-engineering” using FileNet tools for process modelling, execution, analysis and simulation, which is a little too sales-y althoguh he’s doing his best to be consultative. He needs to encourage much more give-and-take with the audience rather than going into full oratory mode.

Minutes go by, and I’m really starting to wish that I sat closer to an escape route…

Wrapping up Monday

I did my breakout presentation at the end of day yesterday — after the two solid days on the weekend, an hour-long presentation is a piece of cake, and in fact I had to cut out material on the fly because I enthused overly long about enterprise architecture. Some great feedback from that: many people who attended are starting to think about the bigger picture of enterprise architecture and corporate performance management when they think about BPM, which means that more and more of these systems are actually going to start making a difference for the companies that install them.

The surprise hit of the conference is my business card: I now have people asking me for my card because they want to see the graphic on the back. Just last week, my cards with Hugh‘s “read my blog” cartoon arrived, and I’ve been using those as my standard business card here at the conference. A few people tried to hand them back, thinking that I had given them a card that I had doodled on; a few read it and don’t get it, but very many have a good laugh over it and (I hope) come here to check out what I have to say. When it comes down to it, this blog really is my primary marketing activity, if you can call it that, and I’m totally sold on many of Hugh’s ideas about how blogging is changing the face of PR and advertising, especially for small companies.

Lots of interesting contacts: I’m talking to Cognos about what they’re doing in corporate performance management (which is very interesting) and, in the context of this conference, how that can be integrated into BPM. Also spending a bit of time with BWise, who does a compliance solution built on top of FileNet. Since most of my customers are in financial services, both of these topics are of great interest to them.

Expecting some good sessions today: a hands-on session is scheduled for the business process framework (which is being productized), and some detailed sessions on the new BAM releases.

Blogging by email is a bit hit-and-miss. Since Blogger has to publish via ftp to my own domain, sometimes it doesn’t succeed in the unattended process and the posts don’t appear, requiring me to get onto one of the public terminals available in the conference centre and give it a whack on the side of the head. Because of that, posts can be a bit delayed.

High-level product info

Dave McCann, FileNet’s SVP of Products, is talking in some very broad strokes about product directions, and I’m yearning for more details on all the new announcements. I suppose that will come mostly in the breakout sessions, I just need to be patient. He’s also talking a lot about content, which is not my focus (in case you haven’t noticed already) — I consider content to be like the air we breathe: it’s always there, I just don’t think about it.

A few interesting factoids that he’s dropped into his talk based on his conversations with customers: a large insurance company who sits on the FileNet technical advisory board stated that the largest cost in their IT budget is integration between all of the vendor products that they own. Yikes! A European customer told him that 82% of their IT budget is committed to maintaining what’s already in place, with only the remaining 18% to spend on new technology. These two facts taken together point out the need for easier ways to integrate all the things that are there, which will free up part of the budget for new technology that will help companies maintain a competitive advantage. The need for consistent architectures and reusability has never been greater.

He’s finally onto the process stuff, and is talking about the recent and upcoming enhancements to the BPM product suite:

– Productization of the Business Process Framework, which is a BPM application development framework developed by FileNet’s Professional Services for use in their own customer engagements, including things like case management and skills/roles management. They’re being very careful about positioning this so that it’s not perceived as being too competitive with partner solutions, although I’m sure that there will be a few partners who are going to be a bit put out by this.

– Business Activity Monitoring as a new product, replacing the rudimentary Process Analyzer that has been holding the fort in the BAM area for the past few years. Shipping in December. I’ll definitely be going to the lab on this later this week, since this is something that I constantly talk to customers about.

– Enhanced integration with business intelligence, especially through their recent cozying up with Cognos. I’ll be talking about corporate performance management, and mentioning Cognos specifically, in my breakout session this afternoon, since I feel that this is a critical step for most organizations.

– eForms enhancements, which are always interesting but a bit peripheral to what I usually do.

– A business rules connectivity framework that integrates to Fair Isac, Corticon and Resolution in addition to the longer-standing integration with ILOG. BRE is another functionality that I feel is essential to BPM, as I discussed in my course on the weekend.

He’s also talking about the FileNet Enterprise Reference Architecture, which fits nicely as a technical architecture for ECM against a full EA context.

The most exciting thing about the features that will be released next year is full BPMN support, which further validates my personal preference for BPMN over UML for process modelling.

All-in-all, I’m quite pleased with what they’ve announced in the BPM area, since it’s addressing some key weaknesses (like BAM) that have existed in the product suite to date.

Survey Says…

Martyn Christian, FileNet’s CMO, is up on stage right now giving the usual rah-rah speech about how great FileNet is doing with their customers, but with a very cool twist: all the customers in the audience (more than 700 of them) have a handheld voting device and can respond to questions that Martyn is asking, with the responses shown live on the screen.

So far (I’m paraphrasing the questions slightly since I couldn’t write them down quickly enough):

Question 1: What % of your projects are using BPM?

25% responded “none”, 49% said that less than a third of their projects used BPM, 13% said about half, 9% said about two-thirds, and 4% said all. Martyn also quoted Gartner (I believe) in stating that 95% of BPM projects are successful these days, which is an amazing number.

Question 2: What’s the primary driver for ECM solutions in your organization?

“Content” scored 27%, “Process” scored 45%, and “Compliance” scored 28%. Interesting results, considering the relatively low usage of BPM indicated in the responses to question 1, and the fact that compliance was a non-issue only two or so years ago.

Question 3: How do you select a FileNet partner to work with on your implementations?

18% already have selected a partner and 30% don’t use one, but the breakdown of the remaining votes was interesting: 32% make their choice based on the partner’s technical knowledge of FileNet and their own environment, whereas 20% select based on industry knowledge. I can certainly validate that from my experiences: although I specialize in financial services and insurance, I end up doing work in other industry verticals because of the value placed on my BPM knowledge. I would guess that this holds true for many products, not just FileNet.

Question 4: Are content and process management part of a larger information management architecture in your organization?

28% said that this is true today, 39% responded that it will be happening in the next 12 months, 28% said that it will be happening but beyond 12 months, and 5% said that it’s just never going to happen. My breakout session this afternoon is on enterprise architecture and BPM, so I’m very encouraged by the fact that about two-thirds of this audience is considering content and process management in the larger EA context.

By the way, please excuse any typos and the lack of links in these posts from the FileNet user conference: there’s no WiFi in the meeting rooms so I’m blogging live from my Blackberry.

Instructional Overload

I’ve just finished two days of teaching “Making BPM Mean Business” to about a dozen FileNet customers at their North American user conference — the first time that I’ve done it in the two-day live format. It’s been a long time since I’ve spent that length of time in front of a classroom, and I had forgotten how exhilerating that it is, and also how exhausting. I had a great group of people in the course who shared their BPM experiences and some of the issues that they have with their business processes, and based on their feedback, the course was useful to them so I’m feeling good about the content that I decided to include as well as the experience of actually teaching it. I especially liked the comment on one evaluation form: “Sandy is great!” (thanks, Mark), since comments like this validate all the work that I put into the course.

Now that the course is over, I can focus on the rest of the conference, although I do have a one-hour breakout session to present this afternoon. It’s a bit like old home week for me, since many of the FileNet sales and marketing people are here, people who I worked with back in 2000-2001 when I was FileNet’s Director of eBusiness Evangelism, as well as a lot of customers who I visited when I was in that capacity. I’m also amazed at the number of other ex-FileNet’ers here who have retained close ties with FileNet, most of them closer than my occasional FileNet-related work as part of my larger BPM practice.

I’m currently sitting in the morning main tent session and have a lot of interesting breakouts to attend over the next three days. Stay posted.

BPTrends BPM Suites Report V1.1

BPTrends has released a new version of their BPM Suites report (free, signup required). I haven’t had time to review it in detail yet, although I’ve noted that it does include information on several new BPMS vendors: Clear Technology, Graham Technology, Handysoft, Oracle and Singularity (some of which prompt the questions “who?” and “why?”). The first 38 pages (which I identified in my post on the V1.0 report as the part that’s really worthwhile) appear identical in the two reports, so unless you’re interested specifically in the new vendors, no need to rush for the new version.