Category: process

business process management

Citrix Productivity Panel – the future of work

I had a random request from Citrix to come out to a panel event that they were holding in downtown Toronto — not sure what media lists I’m on, but fun to check out to events I wouldn’t normally attend.

The premise is that it was a panel of one millennial, one gen X and one boomer discussing how their attitudes towards work and technology:

  • Anna Fitzpatrick, Senior Millennial Correspondent
  • Dr. Mary Donohue, Founder & CEO Donohue Learning Technologies
  • Charles Harnick, Mediator & Arbitrator

This was moderated by Michael Murphy, VP & Country Manager, Citrix Canada.

Donohue is a social scientist, and she started with the definitions of these age divisions (I fall on the cusp of boomer and gen X, although I act like a millennial).

The focus is really on how technology enables different business models (Citrix is, after all, a technology company), and we heard from the panelists about how Twitter, mobile phones and other technologies have levelled the playing field for small businesses regardless of age, gender, race, location and other factors: it’s now possible for your services to compete with bigger companies.

Harnick (a former Ontario Attorney General and politician) commented on how it’s necessary to invest in the education of the workforce: training people to be able to do the work required, mentoring, and taking advantage of the different skills that a non-traditional degree can bring to a traditional workplace.

Donohue talked about the necessity for developing soft skills, since “everything else can be replaced by AI”, which might be a somewhat naive view of AI capabilities. Harnick agreed that although STEM education is critical, there has to be more than just the technological skills for success — entry-level jobs are disappearing in the face of automation in many different industries.

Fitzpatrick talked about the gig lifestyle for work, and admitted that although it’s more easily enabled by technology, a lot of millennials don’t really want to be working several precarious gigs, but would prefer to have full-time regular employment.

Donohue had some really interesting comments on how you have to understand someone’s generation and their abilities with different communication media in order to really understand how to communicate with them and what they are getting out of things that you communicate with them. I don’t agree with her characterization purely along generational lines, since in my experience, older generations who are disrupted from their status quo will adapt quickly to newer communication modes.

There was a discussion on internet security and privacy, and different views that different generations have about the issues and practices. Again, I don’t think that security practices are necessarily generational, but much more about an individual’s experience; privacy is a different story, with a bigger intentional digital footprint being left (in general) by younger generations, although the unintentional footprint of everyone who uses social media is fast catching up. An audience member commented on how security and privacy education needs to start in high school or earlier; I suspect that while the younger generation needs some lessons on privacy, the older needs to hone their security skills.

This was pretty lightweight on both the social science and technology, although Donohue had some points worth considering and I’ll be checking out her TEDx talk.

OpenText Process Suite Roadmap

Usually I live-blog sessions at conferences, publishing my notes at the end of each, but here at OpenText Enterprise World 2017, I realized that I haven’t taken a look at OpenText Process Suite (formerly Cordys, from the 2013 acquisition) for a while, and needed to chew over a couple of sessions to get the whole picture. There’s some significant repositioning happening with Process Suite becoming rebranded as part of their low-code development environment AppWorks, or possibly it’s better to say that Process Suite is becoming the AppWorks developer platform: something that follows naturally from the Cordys history.

Cordys has been on my radar since 2006 when I linked to a post that Bruce Silver wrote about them, then a couple of months later I had a chance to get a more in-depth briefing. At that time, I commented on how they had a pretty complete process application development environment for creating what we were still calling mashups; now this just falls under low-code app dev. By 2008, Forrester had them classified as integration-centric BPM, although many saw that their strong human-centric capabilities defied this categorization. I had another look at Cordys in 2010 at a conference in Oslo, at which time it was positioned as a SaaS-only offering that was tightly integrated with the Google Apps Marketplace; this was possibly due to the injection of the Process Factory DNA when Jon Pyke (formerly of Staffware) joined Cordys after his time starting up Process Factory. By 2013, when OpenText acquired Cordys, it was positioned as a cloud-based platform for creating process-centric applications, although at the time I raised the issue (as did others) of having multiple competing BPM platforms within OpenText. It appears that OpenText would really like their customers to move off the old Metastorm and Global 360 implementations and onto Process Suite, but like most large enterprise vendors with a broad portfolio, they are not sunsetting any of these other products, just not spending a lot of time enhancing them.

OpenText is now using the term Process Automation rather than BPM, with the message shifting to process innovation as part of digital transformation. Process automation needs to be easier (low/no-code, templates, reusability, pre-built apps), smarter (data-driven, IoT, social, sentiment, RPA, AI) and engaging (integrate as part of ecosystem, focus on customer experience). And, as I mentioned earlier, they are repositioning BPM as just part of the larger low-code application development platform, a move that we’ve been seeing from most other BPM vendors over the past few years. This is a move seen as essential for citizen developers and long-tail applications, but is often the bane of more technical developers who want to just write code that can call BPM functionality, not have a monolithic and opaque proprietary development environment. OpenText is providing both options, allowing citizen developers to use low-code methods, while technical developers can use more traditional coding techniques as required.

This week at Enterprise Week, I had the chance to sit in on a few sessions, including the BPM roadmap, low-code application development, the process automation customer market landscape, and integrating analytics with process; I also had the chance to get a couple of excellent demos on People Center (an HR app built on Process Suite) as well as using Process Suite to create other case management applications.

The release later in 2017 will expand the use cases of AppWorks from simple, isolated applications to more comprehensive apps that take advantage of the newly-integrated case and process platform. More advanced analytics will be integrated, with better dashboards and reports, and the foundations laid for IoT and predicitive analytics. By next year, there will be more pre-built applications (similar to People Center) and an applications marketplace, plus more intelligence such as sentiment analysis, cognitive input and RPA. They will also have rolled out support for the complete set of developer personas, from novice citizen developer to technical ninja. Content services are already integrated using Extended ECM for Process Server, the same type of connector that they used to add content to external applications such as SAP.

They’re working at a development style that allows for pre-built applications to be configured and extended by customers while maintaining upgradability; this is pretty critical for applications such as People Center, where you want the customers to create their own checklists and integrate to their own HRIS, but still be able to install the latest version of People Center without breaking that, and requires that guardrails be established and followed. They are also creating templates such as the current dynamic case management, which is really just sample/starter code that can be used by a partner or developer as a starting point but is not intended to be maintained by OpenText.

I ended Wednesday at a session on connecting analytics to process, which rounds out the capabilities. The OpenText Analytics Suite (from the Actuate acquisition, and including the new Magellan offering/branding) is separate from the Process Suite, but there are obvious connections between analytics and process in general: extracting insights from process data, and automating processes based on the results of analytics. The Analytics Suite includes business intelligence services (iHub) that provide enterprise-level analytics and visualization, with the optional addition of data discovery (Big Data Analytics) and text analysis (InfoFusion). The robust API capabilities in iHub allow analytics to be tied in directly to Process Suite or any other application; like process, analytics are ubiquitous and need to be easily integrated across other products and applications. Magellan, as we heard, is a pre-wired set of capabilities from the Analytics Suite that is focused around machine learning, combining data discovery, reporting and dashboarding, text analysis, large-scale data processing, and predictive analytics. This is built on Apache Spark, leveraging Hadoop, and is packaged and supported by OpenText.

We saw a demo of the general capabilities of the Analytics Suite — looked pretty nice, although I’m not the analytics geek in the family — then saw some examples of how process can be integrated with analytics. In one scenario, a low rating provided by a customer on a taxi app causes a customer service process to be kicked off to follow up on the problem with the customer, which is amazingly similar (although much more automated) as a Zipcar experience that I still talk about as an example of customer experience.

I’ll be back at Enterprise World for the last day tomorrow to see a few of the remaining BPM sessions. There’s still a lot that isn’t completely clear about high-level strategy for the complete portfolio of OpenText process-related products — such as how the document-centric workflow in Documentum are going to fit into the mix — but at least I feel like I’m starting to scratch the surface.

Twelve years – and a million words – of Column 2

In January, I read Paul Harmon’s post at BPTrends on predictions for 2017, and he mentioned that it was the 15th anniversary of BPTrends. This site hasn’t been around quite that long, but today marks 12 years of blogging here on Column 2. Coincidentally, my first post was on the BP Trends 2005 report on BPM suites!

In that time, I’ve written more than a million words in about 2,600 posts – haven’t quite got around to writing that book yet – documenting many conferences and products, as well as emerging trends and standards in BPM. I’ve collected over 3,000 comments from many of you, which I consider a measure of success: I write here to engage people and discuss ideas. Many of you have become clients, colleagues and friends over the years, and it’s always a thrill to meet someone for the first time and hear them say “I read your blog”. I know that I’ve inspired others to pick up that keyboard and start blogging, and my RSS reader is still the first place that I go for news about the industry (hint: I’m more likely to read your site if you publish a full RSS feed; I only get to the partial ones every week or so).

In the early days, I blogged more frequently, every couple of days; now I seem to be caught up in projects that consume a lot of my time and have less hours to spend focused on writing. Also, I’ve cut back on my business conference travel in the past year or so, attending only the ones where I’m presenting or where I feel that there is value for me, which gives me far fewer opportunities to blog about conference sessions. I’m not going to make any predictions about whether I’ll blog more or less in the next 12 years; I’m just happy to have a soapbox to stand on.

BPM skills in 2017–ask the experts!

Zbigniew Misiak over at BPM Tips decided to herd the cats, and asked a number of BPM experts on the skills that are required – and not relevant any more – as we move into 2017 and beyond. I was happy to be included in that group, and my contribution is here.

In a nutshell, I had advice for both the process improvement/engineering groups, and the IT groups that are involved in BPM implementations. Basically, the former needs to learn more about the potential power of automation as a process improvement tool and how BPMS can help with that; while the latter needs to stop using agile low-code BPMS tools to do monolithic, waterfall-driven implementations. I also addressed the need for citizen developers – usually semi-technical business analysts that build “end user computing” solutions directly within business units – to start using low-code BPMS tools to do this instead of spreadsheets.

On the side of skills that are no longer relevant, I’m seeing less need for Lean/Six Sigma efforts that focus on incremental process improvements rather than innovation. There are definitely industries with material assets and processes that benefit greatly from LSS methodologies, but its use in knowledge-based service organizations in waning.

Check out the entire post at the link above for the views of several others in the industry.

BPM books for your reading list

I noticed that Zbigniew’s reading list of BPM books for 2017 included both of the books where I have author credit on Amazon: Social BPM, and Best Practices for Knowledge Workers.

You can find the ebooks on Amazon for about $10 each:

 

I’ve also been published in a couple of academic books and journals, but somehow it’s a more exciting to see my name on Amazon, since I don’t really think of myself as an author. After writing almost a million words on this blog (968,978 prior to this post), maybe I should reconsider!

RPA just wants to be free: @WorkFusion RPA Express

Last week, WorkFusion announced that their robotic process automation product, RPA Express, will be released in 2017 as a free product; they published a blog post as well as the press release, and today they hosted a webinar to talk more about it. They are taking requests to join the beta program now, with a plan to launch publicly at the end of Q1 2017.

WorkFusion has a lot of interesting features in their RPA Express and Smart Process Automation (SPA) products, but today’s webinar was really about their business model for RPA Express. This is not a limited-time trial, it’s a free enterprise-ready product that can generate business benefit. Free to purchase and no annual maintenance fees, although you obviously have infrastructure costs for the servers/desktops on which RPA Express runs. Their goal in making it free is to bypass the whole RFP-POC-ROI dance that goes on in most organizations, where a decision to implement RPA – which typically can show a pretty good ROI within a matter of weeks – can take months. With a free product, one major barrier to implementation has been removed.

So what’s the catch? WorkFusion has a more intelligent automation tool, SPA, and they’re hoping that by seeing the benefits of using RPA Express, organizations will want to try out SPA on their more complex automation needs. RPA Express uses deterministic, rules-based automation, which requires explicit training or specification of each action to be taken; SPA uses machine learning to learn from user actions in order to perform automation of tasks that would typically require human intervention, such as handling unstructured and dynamic data. WorkFusion envisions a “stairway to digital operations” that starts with RPA, then steps up the intelligence with cognitive processing, chatbots and crowdsourcing to a full set of cognitive services in SPA.

This doesn’t mean that RPA Express is just a “starter edition” for SPA: there are entire classes of processes that can be handled with deterministic automation, such as synchronizing data between systems that may not talk to each other, such as SAP and Salesforce. This replaces having a worker copy and paste information between screens, or (horrors!) re-type the information in two or more systems; it can result in a huge reduction in cost and time, and remove the tedious work from people to free them up for more complex decision-making or direct customer interaction.

RPA Express bots can also be called from other orchestration and automation tools, including a BPMS, and can run on a server or on individual desktops. We didn’t get a rundown of the technology, so more to come on that as they get closer to the release. We did see one or two screens, and it’s based on modeling processes using a subset of BPMN (start and end events, activities, XOR gateways) that can be easily handled by a business user/analyst to create the automation flows, plus using recorder bots to capture actions while users are running through the processes to be automated. There was a mention of coding on the platform as well, although it was clear that this was not required in many cases, hence development skills are not essential.

Removing the cost of software changes the game, allowing more organizations to get started with this technology without having to do an internal cost justification for the licensing costs. There’s still training and implementation costs, but WorkFusion plans to provide some of this through online video courses, as well as having the large SIs and other partners trained to have this in their toolkit when they are working with organizations. More daunting is the architectural review that most new software needs to go through before being installed within a larger organization: this can still block the implementation even if the software is free.

I’m looking forward to seeing a more complete technical when the product is closer to launch date. I’m also looking forward to see how this changes the price point of RPA from other vendors.

What’s on your agenda for 2017? Some BPM conferences to consider

I just saw a call for papers for a conference for next October, and went through to do a quick update of my BPM Event Calendar. I certainly don’t attend all of these events, but like to keep track of who’s doing what, when and where. Here’s what I have in there so far; if you have others, send me a note or add them as a comment to this post and I’ll add to the calendar. I’m posting just the major conferences here, not every regional seminar.

Many vendors are eschewing a single large annual conference in favor of several regional conferences, easing the travel concerns of attendees; since these are usually just one day long, they aren’t announced this far in advance. It will be interesting to see if more vendors decide to go this way, or do more livestreaming to allow people to participate in more of the conference content remotely.

At this point, I don’t have confirmed attendance or speaking spots at any of these, although I will almost certainly be attending bpmNEXT and a few of the vendor conferences, either as a speaker or as an analyst/blogger. If you’re interested in having me attend your conference, let me know; I require that my travel expenses are covered (otherwise they come out of my own pocket in addition to the billable days that I’m giving up to attend), and a speaking fee if you want me to do a keynote or other presentation.

Keynoting at @ABBYY_USA Technology Summit

I’ve been in the BPM field since long before it was called BPM, starting with imaging and workflow projects back in the early 1990s. Although my main focus is on process now (hence the name of my blog), almost every project that I’m involved in has some element of content and capture, although not necessarily from paper documents. Basically, content capture is the onramp to many business processes: either the capture of a piece of content is what triggers a process (e.g., an application form) or it adds information to a process to move it along. Capture can mean traditional document scanning with intelligent recognition in the form of OCR, ICR, barcode and mark sense recognition, or can also be capture of information already in electronic form but not in a structured format (e.g., emails).

To get to the point, this is why I’m excited to be keynoting at the ABBYY Technology Summit coming up on November 16-18, in a presentation entitled How Digital Transformation is Increasing the Value of Capture and Text Analytics:

As the business world has been wrestling with the challenge of Digital transformation, the last few years have seen the shift away from BPM and Case Management technology platforms towards the more solutions-orientated approach offered by Smart Process Applications and Case Management Frameworks. A critical component of these business solutions is capability to capture the key business information at the point of origin.

This information is often buried inside forms and other business documents. Capturing this data through recognition technologies and automatic document classification transforms streams of documents of any structure and complexity into business-ready data.

This enables organizations of any size to streamline their existing business processes, increasing efficiency and reducing costs; it also enables real-time customer self-service processes triggered by mobile document capture.

I’ll be covering trends and benefits of intelligent capture, providing ABBYY’s customers and partners in attendance with solid advice on how to best start integrating these technologies to make their business processes run better. I’m also writing a paper covering these topics, sponsored by ABBYY, which will be available in time for the conference.

If you’re at the conference, please stop by and say hi, I’ll be hanging out there for the rest of the day after my keynote.

Strategy to execution – and back: it’s all about alignment

I recently wrote a paper sponsored by Software AG called Strategy To Execution – And Back, which you can find here (registration required). From the introduction:

When planning for business success, corporate management sets business strategy and specifies goals in terms of critical success factors and key performance indicators (KPIs). Although senior management is not concerned with the technical details of how business operations are implemented, they must have confidence that the operations are aligned with the strategy, and be able to monitor performance relative to the goals in real time.

In order to achieve operational alignment, there must be a clear path that maps strategy to execution: a direct link from the strategic goals in the high-level business model, through IT development and management practices, to the systems, activities and roles that make the business work. However, that’s only half the story: there must also be a path back from execution to strategy, allowing operational performance to be measured against the objectives in order to guide future strategy. Without both directions of traceability, there’s a disconnect between strategy and operations that can allow a business to drift off course without any indication until it’s far too late.

I cover how you need to have links from your corporate strategy through various levels of architecture to implementation, then be able to capture the operational metrics from running processes and roll those up relative to the corporate goals. If you don’t do that, then your operations could just be merrily going along their own path rather than working towards corporate objectives.

Another rift in the open source BPM market: @FlowableBPM forks from @Alfresco Activiti

Photo of Berries On Forks by my talented friend Pat Anderson (digiteyes)In early 2013, Camunda – at the time, a value-added Activiti consulting partner as well as a significant contributor to the open source project – created a fork from Activiti to form what is now the Camunda open source BPM platform as well as their commercial version based on the open source core. As I wrote at the time:

At the end of 2012, I had a few hints that things at Alfresco’s Activiti BPM group was undergoing some amount of transition: Tom Baeyens, the original architect and developer of Activiti (now CEO of the Effektif cloud BPM startup announced last week), was no longer leading the Activiti project and had decided to leave Alfresco after less than three years; and camunda, one of the biggest Activiti contributors (besides Alfresco) as well as a major implementation consulting partner, was making noises that Activiti might be too tightly tied to Alfresco’s requirements for document-centric workflow rather than the more general BPM platform that Activiti started as.

Since then, Effektif became Signavio Workflow and Camunda decided to use a capital letter in their name; what didn’t change, however, is that as the main sponsor of Activiti, Alfresco obviously has a need to make Activiti work for document-centric BPM and skewed the product in that direction. That’s not bad if you’re an Alfresco ECM customer, but likely was not the direction that the original Activiti BPM team wanted to go.

Last month, I heard that key Activiti people had left Alfresco but had no word about where they were heading; last week, former Activiti project lead Tijs Rademakers and Activiti co-founder and core developer Joram Barrez announced that they were creating an Activiti fork to form Flowable with a team including former Alfresco Activiti people and other contributors.

To be clear to those who don’t dabble in open source, forking is a completely normal activity (no pun intended…well, maybe only a little) wherein a copy of the source code is take at a point in time to create a new open source project with its own name and developer community. This may be done because of a disagreement in product direction – as appears was the case here – or because someone wants to take it in a radically different direction to address a different need or market.

I heard about all of this from Jeff Potts, who has been involved in the Alfresco open source community for a decade, via his blog. He wrote about the Activiti leads leaving Alfresco back in September, although he reported it as three people leaving independently that just happened to occur at the same time. Possibly not completely accurate, in hindsight, but that was the word at the time. He then saw the Flowable announcement (linked above) and wrote about that,  which is where I first saw it. Potts has been involved in the Alfresco open source community for a decade.

Alfresco’s founder and CTO, John Newton, posted about the team departure and the fork:

Unfortunately, some of my early friends on the Activiti project have disagreed with our direction and have taken the step of forking the Activiti code. This is disappointing because the work that they have done is very good and has generally been in the spirit of open source. However, the one thing that we could not continue to give them was exclusive control of the project. I truly wish that we could have found a way to work with them within a community framework.

This seemed to confirm my suspicion that this was a disagreement in product direction as well as a philosophical divide; with Alfresco now a much bigger company than it was at the time that they took Activiti under their wing, it’s not surprising that the corporate mindset wouldn’t always agree with open source direction. Having to spend much more effort on the enterprise edition than the open source project and seeing BPM subsumed under ECM would not sit well with the original Activiti BPM team.

Newton’s comments are also an interesting echo of Barrez’ post at the time of the Camunda fork. In both situations, a sense of disappointment – and maybe a bit of betrayal? – although now Barrez is on the other side of the equation.

Flowable was quick to offer a guide on how to move from Activiti to Flowable – trivial at this point since the code base is still the same – and Camunda jumped in with a guide on moving from Activiti to Camunda, an update on what they’ve done to the engine since their fork in 2013, and reasons why you should make the switch.

If you’re using Activiti right now, you have to be a bit nervous about this news, but don’t be.

  • If you’re using it primarily for document workflow with your Alfresco ECM, you’re probably best to stay put in the long run: undoubtedly, Activiti will be restaffed with a good team and will continue to integrate tightly with Alfresco; it’s possible that some of the capabilities might find their way from the Activiti project to the Alfresco project over time. There’s obviously going to be a bit of a gap in the team for a while: the project shows no new commits for a month, and questions on the forum are going unanswered.
  • If you use Activiti without Alfresco ECM (or with very little of it), you still don’t need to do anything right now: as Camunda showed in their post, a migration path from Activiti to Flowable or Camunda or any other fork will still exist in the future because of the shared heritage. It will get more complex over time, but not impossible. Sit tight for 6-12 months, and reassess your options then.
  • If you’re considering Activiti as a new installation, consider your use cases. If you’re a heavy Alfresco ECM user and want it tightly integrated, Activiti is the way to go. For other cases, it’s not so clear. We need to hear a bit more from Alfresco on their plans, but it’s telling that Newton’s post said “Business Process Management is one of those critical components of any content management system” which seems to place ECM as the primary focus and BPM as a component. He also said that they would be more explicit in their roadmap, and I recommend that you wait for that if you’re in the evaluation stage for a pure (non-ECM) BPM platform.

In the meantime, Flowable has released their initial 5.22.0 engine, and have plans for version 6 by the end of November. They haven’t published a product roadmap yet, but I’m expecting significant diversions from Activiti to happen quickly to incorporate new technologies that bring the focus back to BPM.

Note: the photo accompanying this post was taken by my talented photographer friend, Pat Anderson, with whom I have eaten many delicious and photogenic meals.