process – Page 31

Still More Conference Within A Conference: ARIS World

The irrepressible Joerg Klueckmann, Director of Product Marketing for ARIS, hosted the ARIS World session, third in the sub-conferences that I’ve attended here at Innovation World.

Georg Simon, SVP of Product Marketing, discussed some of the drivers for ARIS 9: involving occasional users in processes through social collaboration, shortening the learning curve with a redesigned UI, modernizing the look and feel of the UI with new colors and shapes, lowering the TCO with centralized user and license management, and speeding content retrieval with visual and ad hoc search capabilities. There are new role-specific UI perspectives, allowing users to decide what capabilities that they want to see on their interface (based on what they have been allocated by an administrator). There’s a new flexible metamodel, allowing you to create new object types beyond what is provided in the standard metamodel.

He also briefly mentioned Process Live, which moves this newly re-architected ARIS into the public cloud, and went live yesterday, and discussed their plans to release a mobile ARIS framework, allowing some functionality to be exposed on mobile devices: consuming, collaborating and designing on tablets, and approvals on smartphones as well.

Their recent acquisition, Alfabet, is being integrated with ARIS so that its repository of IT systems can be synchronized with the ARIS process repository for a more complete enterprise architecture view. This allows for handoffs in the UI between activities in an ARIS process model and systems in an Alfabet object model, with direct navigation between them.

Klueckmann gave us a demo of Process Live and how it provides social process improvement in the cloud. This is hardly a market leader – cloud-based process discovery/modeling collaboration started with Lombardi Blueprint (now IBM’s Blueworks Live) around 2007 – but it is definitely significant that a leading BPA player like ARIS is moving into the cloud. They’re also offering a reasonable price point: about $140/month for designers, and less than $6/month for viewers, which you can buy directly on their site with a credit card – and there’s a one-month free trial available. Contrast this with Blueworks Live, where an editor is $50/month, a contributor (who can comment) is $10/month, and a viewer is $2/month (but has to be purchased in multiples of 1,000): considerably more expensive for the designer, but likely much more functionality since it brings much of the ARIS functionality to the cloud.

Process Live offers three templates for create new project databases, ranging from a simple one with four model types, to the full-on professional one with 74 model types. Process Live doesn’t provide the full functionality of ARIS 9: it lacks direct support from Software AG, instead relying on community support; it is missing a number of advanced modeling and analysis features; and can’t be customized since it’s multi-tenanted cloud. You can check out some of their video tutorials for more information on how it works. Data is stored on the Amazon public cloud, which might offer challenges for those who don’t want to include the NSA as a collaborator.

We heard from Fabian Erbach of Litmus Group, a large consulting organization using Process Live with their customers. For them, the cloud aspect is key since it reduces the setup time by eliminating installation and providing pre-defined templates for initiating projects; furthermore, the social aspects promote engagement with business users, especially occasional ones. Since it’s accessible on mobile (although not officially supported), it is becoming ubiquitous rather than just a tool for BPM specialists. The price point and self-provisioning makes it attractive for companies to try it out without having to go through a software purchasing cycle.

ARIS World ended with a panel of three ARIS customers plus audience participation, mostly discussing future features that customers would like to have in ARIS as well as Process Live. This took on the feel of a user group meeting, which offered a great forum for feedback from actual users, although I missed a lot of the nuances since I’m not a regular ARIS user. Key topics included the redesigned ARIS 9 UI, and the distinction between ARIS and Process Live capabilities.

Managing The Process Of Process Change at Coca-Cola

Petra Burgstaller, who leads the BPM efforts at Coca-Cola, presented on how they are using BPM in the context of an SAP ERP system used at their 250 franchised bottling partner companies worldwide. There are 1.8 billion servings of Coca-Cola beverages consumed each day, in every country except Cuba and North Korea, so having local bottling companies is key to their distribution. The challenge, however, is to establish process best practices, push those best practices out to the independent bottling companies, and continue to innovate on the processes.

They built a “Coke One” template for the core business processes, basically an SAP template with some bolt-ons, and are working to have it adopted by 50% of their worldwide partners to support their 2020 vision of doubling their market. They’re using ARIS to define and document the business processes, then SharePoint for their portal as well as documentation of their SDLC. BPM (or BPA, if you prefer) is used during planning and requirements analysis, then to guide the design and build. They’re using process models – over 1,000 over them – plus a variety of other ARIS capabilities including release cycle management, KPs and performance measures, and publishing that cover the full cycle of process strategy, process design, process implementation and process controlling. Some of the ARIS-SAP synchronization is done manually but they are able to publish some information from ARIS to SAP Solution Manager, effectively isolating the business information and design in ARIS, and the technical design and implementation in SAP.

One key thing is the ability for bottlers in different countries to adopt the processes and the Coke One template for local regulations, although they prefer to keep it as close to the standard as possible to allow changes to processes to flow out from the company to the bottlers. Because Coca-Cola is hosting this for all of their bottlers, it makes it a bit easier to synchronize updates to the standardized processes: if a bottler has made changes, a comparison is done on the models and must be manually reconciled before updating, so that a bottler’s specific changes aren’t lost. They’ve even created a BPM community for sharing ideas and answering questions, allowing them to continue to develop best practices.

Conference Within A Conference: webMethods World

For a company that focuses on model-to-execute from end to end, it’s a bit strange that Software AG chose to have several sub-conferences within Innovation World, corresponding to some of their products, or at least product categories. Today, I’m checking out webMethods World and Big Fast Data World (seriously, it’s called that); tomorrow, it will be ARIS World. First up: webMethods World.

Peter Carlson, VP Product Development for BPM and mobile solutions, gave us a detailed look at their new BPM mobile apps: first, a mobile process monitoring app, including a list view, a detailed instance view, and even a process model view; this replicates much of the functionality of the current web portal view. The searching features are nice: searching by many of the instance metadata values, including state and dates, then administrator actions available on the process instances.

He showed the creation of a mobile inbox (for a business participant) using SAG Designer. Basically, a mobile project is created from an existing task definition using a wizard, including selecting the handsets to support; this generates code and drops it into the development package, which the developer can then augment with specific functionality. It’s not a “write once, deploy everywhere” development such as we are starting to see from some vendors, but it’s a fairly easy port. I’ll likely drop by the mobile booth later to see some of the demos, including the intriguingly named Mainframe to Mobile. Carlson ended up with a short bit about their social BPM capabilities, including tagging of both tasks and people to support social recommendations and similar functionality.

Rob Tiberio, VP and chief architect, took the stage to talk about their event driven architecture, starting with their EDA goals of extensibility, standardization, integration and ease of use. Events and EDA aren’t new; the publish/subscribe paradigm has been around a long time, but it isn’t yet mainstream in a lot of enterprises’ technology stacks. Basically, producers publish events onto a transport layer, and a consumer subscribes to the events that it’s interested in. We used to do this all within the data center on an ESB, but as soon as every application around – not to mention the internet of things – started generating a bazillion events an hour, that just wasn’t good enough. It required a different sort of architecture: an event bus rather than a message bus, and the ability to scoop up the data included in those events and analyze it on the fly. The result: a BPM process or integration flow can be triggered from an event, and a process or integration can emit events in turn. Events can be used to create real-time dashboards, particularly around the correlation and analysis of those events, and trigger actions so that systems react in real time to events. This isn’t new from a vendor product standpoint, but the more vendors who push EDA, the sooner this is going to make its way into actual customer implementations.

Chistoph Rohland, SVP of R&D was up next to talk about intelligent business operations (IBO), and how it can accelerate the observe-decide-act decision process within businesses. IBO, of course, is enabled by EDA: if you can’t handle the flood of events in real time, then you can’t really do IBO effectively.

IBO increases visibility and transparency, as any good analytics will do, but also improves the response time and therefore the quality (and impact) of decisions.

<p>Subhash Ramachandran, SVP of Product Management, provided a webMethods roadmap including the 9.5 release and some future directions. They’re moving to two full suite releases per year enabled by their own Agile product development methods, timed around Innovation World and CeBIT, in order to push innovation faster. If I were a customer, my concern would be how seamless that they can make this for the customers: they don’t want to have some customers sticking with older versions while webMethods speeds off into the future. He addresses this issue head-on, stating that customers can choose how often they want to upgrade: they can choose to upgrade to take advantage of new features that are relevant to them, but they’re not forced to upgrade too soon.</p>    <p><a title="Software AG webMethods 9.5" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/74648938@N00/10177232474/"><img style="float: right; margin: 0px 0px 5px 5px; display: inline" border="0" alt="Software AG webMethods 9.5" align="right" src="https://static.flickr.com/7454/10177232474_295fddaea4_m.jpg" /></a>The webMethods 9.5 release includes a number of new features:</p>  <ul>   <li>In the integration backbone, security enhancements and universal messaging adoption (Nirvana)</li>    <li>In BPM, monitoring and archiving performance enhancements, plus rules improvements including rule chaining</li>    <li>In UI, visual development and mobile testing support</li>    <li>In SOA governance, business UI and API management enhancements</li>    <li>In applications and partners, certificate and usability enhancements</li>    <li>In IBO, unified user experience and integrated products</li>    <li>Automated migrations between versions</li> </ul>  <p>Beyond 9.5, Ramachandran touched on a number of other areas that they’re working on:</p>  <ul>   <li>IBO is really being positioned as not just a set of integrated products, but a unified single solution for business visibility and control.</li>    <li>Social BPM is becoming a big focus for them. A bit late, but at last.</li>    <li>Based on CentraSite, an API developer portal that is customizable and deployable to public or private cloud</li>    <li>Integration Live, which we heard about in this morning’s keynote, allowing for integration between systems regardless of where they are: public, private, cloud, on premise</li> </ul>  <p>We ended up with a webMethods customer panel including <a href="http://corporate.discovery.com/">Discovery Communications</a>, Avnet, <a href="http://www.alcatel-lucent.com/">Alcatel Lucent</a> and <a href="http://www.standardchartered.com">Standard Chartered Bank</a>. They took good advantage of the Innovation World app to do some audience polling to add in to the customer discussion, such as which webMethods products that attendees are using, and whether they are adopting a mobile-first strategy for new application development.

Transforming Healthcare At Maccabi With webMethods And ARIS

Israel has a mandatory but mostly privatized healthcare system, and Maccabi Healthcare Services is the country’s second largest and fastest growing health maintenance organization (HMO), with about 1.9 million members using the services of 5,000 physicians. Maccabi’s chief enterprise architect, Irena Kurman, gave a presentation in the Integration and Automation breakout track at Innovation World on how they are putting the model-to-execution message into practice to improve their processes and integrate their legacy systems better.

She talked about three case studies – medical referral follow-up, doctor visit management, and pregnancy tracking – that highlighted the challenges that they had with multiple systems and data sources, as well as uncontrolled and non-standardized processes. For example, their x-ray results process had point-to-point links between 14 different systems, making it very little to understand what was happening, much less consider modifications to the process. When something went wrong, there was no single process owner, and no visibility into the end-to-end process.

They started with webMethods for integration and SOA governance, then have more recently started to model their processes using ARIS and automate some of these processes using webMethods BPMS. That original spaghetti x-ray process still has those same source systems, but now uses an ESB middleware layer, with the BPMS (as well as external partners) accessing the legacy systems via services: changes to the process are made in the BPMS, not by rewiring the legacy systems.

The results in the case studies are pretty striking. In the medical referral follow-up process, they now have the ability to capture life-threatening cases in near real time, and since the entire process is linked and monitored, test samples can’t go missing without notice. For doctor visit management, payments to doctors are more accurate and are calculated in a transparent manner, improving relationships between Maccabi and their physicians. And for pregnancy tracking, a mobile application provides the patient with access to information relevant to her pregnancy stage, as well as view results such as recorded ultrasound video from anywhere.

Along the way, they’ve developed a model for approaching process and integration projects:

Start by modeling the business processes with ARIS
Integrate systems with webMethods Integration Platform
Execute and monitor processes with webMethods BPMS
Enable flexibility with the rules engine
Manage software services with CentraSite and Insight

Kurman feels that they’ve just started on their journey to process excellence, but it looks like they have a good roadmap on how they’re going to get there.

The Digital Agility Layer: Time To Get Intentionally Digital

Wolfram Jost, CTO of Software AG, started us off on the first full day of Innovation World with a keynote on innovations for the digital enterprise. As I mentioned yesterday, the use of the term “digital enterprise” (and even more, “digitization”) is a bit strange, since pretty much everything is digital these days, it’s just not necessarily the right type of digital. We still need to think about integration between systems to make automation seamless, but more importantly, we need to think about interaction patterns that put control in the hands of customers, and mobile and social platforms that make the digital forms ubiquitous. So maybe the right phrase is that we have to start being intentionally digital enterprises, rather than let it happen accidentally.

I definitely agree with Jost’s key point: it’s all about the process. We need end-to-end processes at the business/customer layer, but have to interact with a plethora of silos down below, both on premise and in the cloud, some of which are decades old. Software AG, naturally, provides tools to help that happen: in-memory data management, integration/SOA, BPM, EA and intelligent business operations (IBO, including event processing and analytics). This is made up of a number of acquisitions – Apama, alfabet, LongJump, Nirvana, JackBe – plus the pre-existing portfolio including ARIS and webMethods. Now, we’re seeing some of that on their Software AG Live PaaS vision for a unified cloud offering: Process Live for modeling and process publishing; Portfolio Live for IT portfolio management; AgileApps Live for application development and case management; and Integration Live for cloud-to-cloud and cloud-to-on premise integration. Integration Live is coming next year, but the rest of the platform is available as of today.

We had a demo of Process Live, which provides cloud-based BPMN process modeling including collaboration; and Portfolios Live to see the systems with which the modeled processes may interact, including a wide variety of portfolio management functions such as assessing the usage and future development potential of any given system or application. We also saw an AgileApps Live application, including an analytics dashboard plus forms data entry and task/case management; interestingly, this is still sporting a longjump.com URL. I last reviewed LongJump in 2007 in conjunction with the Enterprise 2.0 conference, and obviously there have been some advances since then: it’s still an application development tool for web-based apps, but includes a lot of ad hoc task/case management functionality that allows the knowledge worker to create their own multi-step tasks (subprocesses, in effect) as well as perform other case-type functionality such as gathering artifacts and completing tasks related to a case resolution/completion.

Although Integration Live isn’t there yet, we did hear about the different deployment styles that will be supported: development and/or operations can be in the cloud; there can be an on premise ESB or direct connections to systems.

Jost drilled down into several of the specific products, starting out with the overarching premise that Software AG is moving from a more traditional multi-tier architecture into an event-driven architecture (EDA), where everything is based around the event bus. Product highlights included:

ARIS positioning and use cases from process modeling to governance, and the radical UI redesign in ARIS 9 that matches the Process Live UI
Mobile and social BPM UI
Elastic ESB using virtual private cloud as well as public and private cloud
API management, representing an extension to the Centrasite concepts
Intelligent business operations architecture including in-memory analytics and event processing
Terracotta strategy for in-memory data management
Integration of Apama, big memory (Terracotta) and messaging for big data/event correlation

I’m sure that we’ll see a lot more about these over the next two days so I’m not trying to cover everything here.

We had a brief demo from John Bates on audience sentiment analysis for price level setting using Apama, then wrapped up with a presentation from Edy Liongosari, Managing Director at Accenture on how to bring some of this into practice. One thing that Liongosari said really resonated: next year, none of us are going to be talking about cloud, because it will be so ubiquitous. Same is true, I believe, of the terms social and mobile. Not to mention digital.

Kicking Off @SoftwareAG @InnovationWorld

For the first time in a few years, I’m at Software AG’s Innovation World conference in San Francisco (I think that the last time I was here, it was still the webMethods Integration World), and the focus is on the Digital Enterprise. At the press panel that I attended just prior to this evening’s opening keynote, one journalist made the point that “digital enterprise” is kind of a dumb term (I paraphrase here) because everything is digital now: we need a more specific term to mean what Software AG is getting at with this. Clay Richardson of Forrester, who I dragged along to the press session, said that his colleagues are talking about the post-digital age, which I take to mean is based on the assumption that all business is digital so that term is a bit meaningless, although “post-digital” isn’t exactly descriptive either.

Terminology aside, Software AG’s heart is in the right place: CEO Karl-Heinz Streibich took the stage at the opening keynote to talk about how enterprises need to leverage this digital footprint by integrating systems in ways that enable transformation through alignment and agility. You can still detect the schisms in the Software AG product portfolio, however: many of the customer case studies were single-product (e.g., ARIS or webMethods), although we did hear about the growing synergy between Apama (CEP and analytics) and webMethods for operational visibility, as well as Apama and Terracotta (in-memory big data number crunching). As with many of the other large vendors that grow through acquisitions,

We heard briefly from Ivo Totev, Software AG’s CMO; saw presentations of two of their customer innovation awards; then had a lengthier talk on the power of mobile and social from Erik Qualman, author of Socialnomics and Digital Leader. Unlike the usual pop culture keynote speaker, Qualman’s stuff is right on for this audience: looking at how successful companies are leveraging online social relationships, data and influence to further their success through engagement: listening, interacting and reacting (and then selling). He points out that trying to sell first before engaging doesn’t work online because it doesn’t work offline; the methods of engagement are different online and offline, but the principles from a sales lead standpoint are the same. You can’t start the conversation by saying “hey, I’m great, buy this thing that I’m selling” (something that a lot of people/companies just starting with Twitter and/or blogging haven’t learned yet).

Qualman took the popular Dave Carroll’s “United Breaks Guitars” example from a couple of years ago, and talked about not just how United changed their policies on damage as a result of this, but the other people who leveraged the situation into increased sales: Taylor Guitars; a company that created a “Dave Carroll” travelling guitar case; and Carroll himself through sales of the song and his subsequent book on the power of one voice in the age of social media. He looked at companies that have transformed their customer experience through mobile (e.g., Starbucks mobile app, which has personally changed my café loyalty) by giving the customer a way to do what they want to do – which hopefully involves buying your product – in the easiest possible way; and how a fast and slightly cheeky social media presence can give you an incredible boost for very little investment (e.g., Oreo’s “dunk in the dark” tweet when the lights went out during the Superbowl). I gave a presentation last year on creating your own process revolution that talked about some of these issues and the new business models that are emerging because of it.

Great to see John Bates here, who I know from his tenure at Progress Software and came on at Software AG with the Apama acquisition, as well as finally meet Theo Priestley face to face after years of tweeting at each other.

Disclosure: Software AG is a customer (I’m in the middle of creating some white papers and webinars for them), and they paid my travel expenses to be at this conference. However, what I write here is my own opinion and I have not been financially compensated for it.

Oracle BPM 11g – The View From Afar

You know where I’m not this week? Oracle OpenWorld. You know why? Because after an email conversation where I said that I could attend if my travel expenses were covered, and having them register me for the conference, I was informed that “PR doesn’t cover any hotel rooms or air travel”. Whatever.

However, I did have an in-depth briefing and demo recently on the latest release of Oracle BPM 11g, covering their Business Process Composer modeling tool and the integrated WebCenter Portal for end-user experience, and this seemed like a timely week to publish it.

Front and center is the new release of the Business Process Composer, targeted at business/process analysts, used for modeling and collaborating around business processes. As with many other BPMS, Oracle BPM has one (web-based) tool for the semi-technical analysts to do process discovery and modeling, then another (~~Eclipse~~desktop) environment for the technical developer to complete the design and implementation of the process application. In previous versions, the process could be modeled in the Composer, but the UI could only be created in the JDeveloper IDE; with this release, the analyst can now create the UI directly in the Composer, and play it back as a prototype to show to users and other stakeholders. The Composer functionality doesn’t include complex data transformations or integration requirements, or creating web services, which must still be done in JDeveloper, but it moves the bar considerably for what can be done before developers are (inevitably) engaged in an Oracle BPM project. The Composer also includes simulation based on manual scenarios or runtime data, although it doesn’t show the animations as in the IDE.

We went through a travel request process application to demonstrate some of the UI and modeling capabilities of the Composer:

Portal view of projects, with links for favorites, projects owned by me, and projects shared with me. From within an open project, there is a presence indicator for other active viewers on the project.
Supports most of the BPMN 2.0 standard, except for some of the less-common activities, such as conversation handler and escalation handler. What the analyst uses is not fully standard BPMN, however: there are some obvious extensions in the “Interactive” (human) tasks, and in fact, the human task management is very reminiscent of their BPEL4People implementation heritage although they claimed that they are executing BPMN natively.
The properties available for any given task can be quite technical, although there appear to be some logical defaults if the analyst doesn’t want to (or can’t) specify all of the details in the Composer.
A UI form can be created for a human task, and can either be based on the payload (process instance parameters) or completely freeform. Although eventually many of the form parameters have to be attached to instance variables, business analysts often think about UI before data, so it’s good not to have to keep jumping out to define an instance variable just to put a field on a form.
The UI form composer is pretty standard: drag and drop controls, including a wide variety of formatted controls such as email addresses and telephone numbers; dropdowns can be populated with values entered at design time, or called from a database or REST service.
The process and forms can be played back within the Composer, making it a good tool for prototyping and reviewing with end users: it animates the path through the process, provides the option to launch the form at each human task as a specific user, and can discover and invoke services .

The general idea, as with many other BPMS, is that the business analysis will create the initial forms and processes, then a technical developer will add rules, invoke services, and generally make the application executable. The Composer and IDE can share process models via a common repository, but if I understood it correctly, there’s a bit of a kludge: the IDE must manually move models back to the repository since it uses a different format.

The second major enhancement in this release of Oracle BPM 11g is production case management functionality, enabled through greater integration of ECM capabilities into the BPM product. We went through a demo of the end-user case management functionality within the WebCenter Portal (a restricted-use license of the portal is provided with BPM), which has several panels of information:

Case information, with tabs for the audit trail (events and comments), data, attached documents (WebCenter Content based on Stellent acquisition, restricted license included with BPM, or any CMIS-compliant ECM), and discussion (forums/wikis).
Milestones and status; these can be marked complete or reopened based on user permissions.
Stakeholders, for access control to this class of cases. Permissions are defined in the context of case design, not predefined for entire system.
Activities, which can be filtered by status, where “Available” means activities that the current user is permitted to start.
Linked and referred cases; cases can be linked automatically by a model-driven parameter (e.g., account number), or by the user searching and creating a manual connection at runtime.

The JDeveloper IDE is used for modeling cases: defining milestones, outcomes, instance variables, user events and stakeholders, then defining rulesets (either in decision tables, or if-then code) and enabling each rule for different milestones within the case definition. Rules can be self-contained, or can invoke services or trigger processes. Case activities can be manually or automatically activated, and may be human tasks, BPMN processes, or exit to Java. Unfortunately, the case definition environment is still pretty technical, so unlikely to be done by a non-technical analyst.

Oracle is allied with the CMMN case modeling notation standards efforts, which puts them at about the right time in the CM standards wave, although I think that we may eventually see this merge with the BPMN standard.

It feels like Oracle is doing a bit of catching up with the competition: analyst tools for form-based UI design as part of a process application have been available in other BPMS for some time, and the technical nature of the case management designer is behind the times. However, these significant improvements in the Business Process Composer now allow for a complete prototype model to be created and approved by the business before developer involvement.

I haven’t heard any updates on the BPM product coming out of OpenWorld this week, but if you’re there in person, you’ll hear about it before I do. 🙂

Fall 2013 Conferences: Where I’ll Be

I’ve had a summer of tending to my enterprise customers, but October and November are when I kiss the hubby (and cat) goodbye and head for the vendor conferences. In some cases, I’m giving a presentation; in others, just checking things out and possibly blogging about what I see and hear there.

Here’s where I’ll be this fall:

IBM’s BPM and ODM Analyst Summit
Software AG’s Innovation World #IW13
TIBCO’s TUCON (speaking) #TUCON2013
SAP’s TechEd #SAPTechEd
APQC’s Process Conference (speaking) #apqcpc
ELO Group’s BPM Global Trends (speaking)
Business Business Capability (speaking) #BBCCon13
IBM’s CASCON #cascon2013

If you’re going to be at one of these events, ping me so that we can meet up, or drop by my presentation.

That looks a bit crazy (especially the part about three trips to Vegas in a month), but there are others that I’ll be missing out due to conflicts: iBPMS Expo and IBM’s IOD, to name two. Also, a couple of local Toronto events that I’ll miss because I’m travelling, including AIIM’s Information Governance seminar and IBM’s Smarter Content Summit.

Disclosure: As I discuss on my Legal page, if I attend a vendor conference to watch and blog, I am not paid but my travel expenses are covered by the vendor unless it’s in the Toronto area; if I give a presentation, it’s a pretty safe bet that I’m being paid a fee to do so. In either case, I am not compensated for anything that I write here on my blog (which the exception of the publication of my presentation slides), although it’s fair to say that vendors who host me at their conferences get more coverage simply because I have greater exposure to their products and customers. If you’re interesting in having me attend or present at one of your events in the future, drop me a line.

Looking For Process Improvement? Follow The Useless Paper Trail

I’m often called upon by clients to help them find areas for process improvement in their organizations, and I typically start by digging out two types of artifacts in their existing processes: spreadsheets, and “useless” paper documents. I’ve covered the topic of using spreadsheets and email as a stopgap in business processes in the past, but today I was struck by all of the useless paper that organizations deal with on a daily basis.

There are still many legitimate paper documents in business processes – for external communications with customers who are not comfortable with electronic communications, or where laws and regulations haven’t caught up with technology – but I see many situations of companies that create paper documents internally that are used internally, then destroyed (or worse, photocopied and/or filed). These range from routing slips to cheque requisitions to contracts to printed copies of emails and more, and you really need to relentlessly hunt them down and exterminate them if you’re going to lift your processes out of the paper sludge.

I was reminded of this today because of a business process of my own, where I just transferred money by writing a paper cheque on my corporate bank account, scanning it into the banking app to deposit it into my personal bank account, then shredding the cheque, all without getting up from my desk. The reasons why it has to happen this way aren’t important (except to me), but it made me think about all of the similar situations in organizations where I walk through their operations and challenge why they are creating, routing and filing paper documents that are not required for any external or regulatory reason.

My route to BPM is via ECM – the first systems that I implemented in this field were document imaging and workflow systems in the late 1980’s – and I continue to see the lessons about paper reduction as a key leverage point for process improvement in many situations. Two rules to live by:

If you can get something in electronic form rather than paper, do so. If it never exists on paper, then it is much easier to change the processes around it, including filing and retention.
If you get something in paper form, convert it to electronic form as early in the process as possible, and stop the paper trail either by immediate filing (if required) or destruction (preferred).

There are a lot of processes that exist without any shred of paper, but in the back offices of financial institutions, where I do a lot of my work, paper-based processes are still rampant, including many instances of internal-only paper documents that have no real reason for existing. Earlier this year, I wrote about my own paperless office and how to get there for small businesses, but as I pointed out at the time, the same principles are at the core of any large-scale ECM initiative. And don’t kid yourself: any ECM initiative is actually a process improvement initiative, although sometimes in disguise.

OpenText Acquires Cordys And Assure Platform For Cloud-Based Smart Process Apps

I had a briefing two weeks ago with OpenText about their acquisition of Cordys, an interesting move considering their acquisition just a few weeks before that of ICCM, a partner company that created the Assure platform on top of OpenText’s MBPM (hat tip to Neil Ward-Dutton for tying together these two acquisitions). This provides them with two important pillars in their strategy:

A robust cloud platform. Although OpenText Cloud existed, it wasn’t what you’d call industrial strength and it was more of an infrastructure platform: it wasn’t fully multi-tenant, and it’s not clear that they had the skills internally to build out the functionality into a competitive solution-oriented platform as a service (PaaS). Cordys, in spite of being a relative unknown, has a strong cloud and PaaS heritage. They also bring other parts of the infrastructure that are missing or deficient in OpenText – including a rapid application development framework, ESB, rules, analytics and MDM – which should accelerate their time to market for a full cloud offering, as well as benefit the on-premise platform.
A “Smart Process Application factory” for creating vertical process-centric applications. OpenText first announced Assure almost a year ago as a development platform, plus their initial Assure HR application built on the platform, and have since released (or at least announced on their product pages) customer service, ITSM and insurance client management apps on Assure as well. Now, presumably, they own all of the underlying intellectual property so are free to port it to other platforms.

They have immediate plans (for release near the beginning of 2014) for bringing things together, at least on the surface: they are porting Assure to Cordys so that the same development platform and vertical applications are available there as on MBPM, which gives them greatly improved cloud functionality, and will create additional smart process applications along the way. Effectively, they are using Assure as a technology abstraction layer: not only will the user experience be the same regardless of the underlying BPM platform, the Assure application developer experience will also be the same across platforms, although obviously there’s completely different technology under the covers.

There are some obvious issues with this. In spite of OpenText CEO’s claim that this is a “single platform”, it’s not. OpenText was still working out the Metastorm/Global360 picture from earlier acquisitions, and now have the Cordys platform thrown into the mix. In 2011, when IBM pulled Lombardi, WPS and a few other bits and pieces into IBM BPM, some of us called them out for the fact that although it was presented as a single platform, there were still multiple engines with some degree of overlapping functionality. IBM’s response, and I’m sure OpenText would line up behind this, is that it doesn’t matter as long as it’s integrated “at the glass”, that is, there’s a common user interface for business users and potentially some more technical functions. As someone who has designed and written a lot of code in the past, I see a fundamental flaw with that logic: in general, more engines means more code, which means more maintenance, which means less innovation. Hence, I consider refactoring redundant engines into a single back-end as well as a common UI to be critical for growth. Getting Assure in place quickly as a technology abstraction layer will definitely help OpenText along this route, although primarily for existing Assure customers and new customers for whom Assure will be the primary OpenText application development environment; existing MBPM and OpenText customers will likely need to consider porting their applications to the Assure platform at some point in order to get on the main upgrade bandwagon.

Following the Cordys announcement, Gartner released their analysis that casts doubts on whether OpenText can bring together the acquisitions into a coherently unified strategy. Aside from the stunningly obvious point in the summary, “If OpenText’s BPM suites do not fully meet your needs, evaluate other providers” (when is that not true for any vendor/product?), they see that this just makes the OpenText landscape more complex, and goes so far as to wave off prospective customers. As one person who passed on this link said: ouch.

Disclosure: OpenText has been a customer in the past for which I have created white papers, the most recent of which was “Thinking Beyond Traditional BPM” (and a related webinar). I was not compensated in any way for my recent briefing nor for writing this blog post.