process – Page 32

Activiti Update 2013: New Functionality And New Partners

I had a briefing on the latest version of Alfresco’s Activiti BPM a couple of months back, but decided to wait until the news about their new partners – BP3 and Edorasware – was released before I posted. This strong showing of enterprise support partners is crucial for them following the defection of camunda from the Activiti fold, since many large enterprises won’t deploy an open source product without some level of support from the open source vendor directly or via their partner channel.

Alfresco’s interest in Activiti is as a part of their open source enterprise content management suite: they don’t offer Activiti as a standalone commercial open source product, only bundled within their ECM. Activiti exists as an Apache-licensed open source project with about 1/3 of its main developers – likely representing more than 1/3 of the actual development effort – being Alfresco employees, making Alfresco the main project sponsor. Obviously, Alfresco’s document-centric interests are going to be represented within the Activiti project, but that doesn’t make it unsuitable as a general purpose BPMS; rather, Alfresco makes use of the BPM platform functionality for the purpose of document flow and tasks, but doesn’t force content concepts into Activiti or require Alfresco in any way to use Activiti. Activiti is continuing to develop functionality that has nothing to do with ECM, such as integration with MuleESB.

Activiti was one of the first BPMS platforms to execute BPMN 2.0 natively, and provides full support for the standard. It’s not a “zero-code” approach, but intended as a developer tool for adding high-performance, small-footprint BPM functionality to applications. You can read more about full Activiti functionality on the main project site and some nuances of usage on the blog of core developer Joram Barrez; in this post, I just want to cover the new functionality that I saw in this briefing.

Like all of the other BPMS out there, Activiti is jumping on the ad hoc collaborative task bandwagon, allowing any user to create a task on the fly, add participants to the task and transfer ownership of the task to another participant. The task definition can include a due date and priority, and have subtasks and attached content. Events for the task are showing in an activity feed sidebar, including an audit trail of the actions such as adding people or content to the task, plus the ability to just post a comment directly into the activity feed. The Activiti Explorer UI shows tasks that you create in the My Tasks tab of the Tasks page, although they do not appear in the Inbox tab unless (I think) the task is actually assigned to you. If someone includes you as a participant (“involves” you) in a task, then it shows in the Involved tab. This is pretty basic case management functionality, but provides quite a bit of utility, at least in part because of the ability to post directly to the activity feed: instead of having to build data structures specific to the task, you can just post any information in the feed as a running comments section. Mostly unconstrained, but at least it’s in a collaborative environment.

The other big new thing is a table-driven process definition as an alternative to the full BPMN modeler, providing a simpler modeling interface for business users to create models without having to know BPMN, or for fast process outlining. This allows you to create a process definition, then add any number of tasks, the order of which implies the sequence flow. Each task has a name, assignee, group (which I believe is a role rather than a direct assignment to a person) and description; you can also set the task to start concurrently with the previous task, which implies a parallel branch in the flow. Optionally, you can define the form that will be displayed for this task by adding a list of the properties to display, including name, type and whether each is mandatory; this causes an implicit definition of the process instance variables. The value of these properties can then be referenced in the description or other fields using a simple ${PropertyName} syntax. You can preview the BPMN diagram at any time, although you can’t edit in diagram mode. You can deploy and run the process in the Activiti Explorer environment; each task in the process will show up in the Queued tab of the Tasks page if not assigned, or in the Inbox tab if assigned to you. The same task interface as seen in the ad hoc task creation is shown at each step, with the addition of the properties fields if a form was defined for a task. The progress of the process instance can be viewed against the model diagram or in a tabular form. Indeed, for very simple processes without a lot of UI requirements, an entire process could be defined and deployed this way by a non-technical user within the Explorer. Typically, however, this will be used for business people to prototype a process or create a starting point; the model will then make a one-way trip into the Eclipse modeling environment (or, since it can be exported in BPMN, into any other BPMN-compliant tool) for the developers to complete the process application. Once the simple table-driven process is moved over to the Eclipse-based Activiti Modeler, it can be enhanced with BPMN attributes that can’t be represented in the table-driven definition, such as events and subprocesses.

There were a few other things, such as enhanced process definition and instance management functions, including the ability to suspend a process definition (and optionally, all instances based on that definition) either immediately or at a scheduled time in the future; some end-user reporting with configurable parameters; and integration of an SMS notification functionality that sent me a text telling me that my order for 2 iPads was shipped. Sadly, the iPads never arrived. Winking smile

We finished with a brief description of their roadmap for the future:

Hybrid workflow that allows on-premise and cloud (including instant deployment on CloudBees) for different tasks in same flow, solving the issue of exposing part of process to external participants without putting the entire process off premise.
Project KickStart, which builds on the table-driven process definition that I saw in the demo to provide better UI form display (making a real contender as a runtime environment, rather than just for prototyping) and the ability to make changes to the process definition on the fly.
Polyglot BPM, allowing Activiti to be called from other (non-Java) languages via an expanded REST API and language-specific libraries for Ruby, C#, Javascript and others.

It’s great to see Activiti continue to innovate after so much change (losing both the original product architect and their main partner) within a short period of time; it certainly speaks to their resiliency as an organization, as you would expect from a robust open source project.

I also talked with Scott Francis of BP3 about their new Activiti partnership; apparently the agreement was unrelated to the camunda departure, but definitely well-timed. I was curious about their decision to take on another BPM product, given their deep relationship with IBM (and formerly with Lombardi), but they see IBM BPM and Activiti as appealing to different markets due to organizational cultural choices. Certainly to begin with, most of their new Activiti customers will be existing Activiti customers looking for an enterprise support partner, just as many of their new IBM BPM customers are already IBM BPM customers; however, I’ve been in a couple of consulting engagements recently where organizations had both commercial and open source solutions under evaluation, so I’m anticipating a bit of channel conflict here. BP3 has no existing Activiti customers (or any other BPM other than IBM), and has no significant open source contribution experience, but plans to contribute to the Activiti open source community, possibly with hybrid/HTML mobile front-ends, REST APIs architecture and other areas where they have some expertise from building add-ons to IBM BPM. Interestingly, they do not plan to build/certify WAS support for Activiti; although they didn’t see this as a big market, I’m wondering whether this also just cuts a bit too close to the IBM relationship.

Aside from the obvious potential for awkwardness in their IBM relationship, I see a couple of challenges for BP3: first, getting the people with the right skills to work on the Activiti projects. Since the IBM BPM skills are pretty hard to come by, they won’t be redeploying those people, so presumably have to train up other team members or make some new hires. The other challenge is around production support, which is not something that BP3 does a lot of now: typically, IBM would be the main production support for any IBM BPM installation even if BP3 was involved, although BP3 would support their own custom code and may act as triage for IBM’s support. With Activiti, they will have to decide whether they will offer full production support (and if not them, then who?) or just provide developer support during business hours.

SAPPHIRENOW Day 2 Keynote

This morning, our opening keynote was from SAP’s other co-CEO, Jim Snabe. He started with a bit about competitive advantage and adaptation to changing conditions, illustrated with the fact that Sumatran tigers have evolved webbed feet so that they can chase their prey into water: evolution and even extinction in business is not much different from that in the natural world, it just happens at a much faster pace. In business, we have both gradual evolution through continuous improvement, and quantum leaps caused primarily by the introduction of disruptive technology. Snabe positions HANA as being one of those disruptive technologies.

Ron Dennis, chairman of McLaren Group, joined Snabe to talk about how they’re using HANA to gather, analyze and visualize data from their cars during Formula 1 races: 6.5 billion data points per car per race. We saw a prototype dashboard for visualizing that data, and heard how the data is used to make predictions and optimize performance during the race. Your processes probably don’t generate 6.5B events per instance, but in-flight optimization is something that’s beyond the capabilities of many organizations unless they use big data and predictive analytics. Integrating this functionality into process management may well be what allows the large vendors such as SAP and IBM to regain the BPM innovation advantage over some of the smaller and more nimble vendors. Survival of the fittest, indeed.

Snabe talked about other applications for HANA, such as in healthcare, where big data allows for comprehensive individual DNA analysis and disease prevention, before returning to the idea of using it for realtime business optimization that allows organizations to adapt and thrive. SAP is pushing all of their products onto HANA as the database platform, first providing data warehousing capabilities, SuccessFactors and now their Business Suite on HANA for greatly improved performance due to in-memory processing. They’ve opened up the platform so that other companies can develop applications on HANA, which will help to drive it into vertical industries. Interestingly, Snabe made the point that having realtime in-memory processing not only makes things faster, it also makes applications less complex, since some of the complexity in code is due to disk and processing latency. They have 1,500 customers on HANA now, and that number is growing fast.

HANA and in-memory processing was just one of the three “quantum leaps” that SAP has been effecting during the last three years; the second is having everything available in the cloud. Just as in-memory processing is about increasing speed and reducing complexity, so is cloud, except that it is about increasing speed and reducing complexity of IT implementations. In the three years that they’ve been at it, and including their SuccessFactors and Ariba acquisitions, they’ve gained 29 million users in the cloud. He was joined by executives from PepsiCo, Timken and Nespresso to talk about their transition to cloud, which included SuccessFactors for cloud-based performance management and HR across their global operations, and CRM in the cloud.

Combining their HANA and cloud initiatives, SAP launched HANA Enterprise Cloud last week, with HANA running on SAP’s infrastructure, which will allow organizations to run all of their SAP applications in the cloud, with the resulting benefits of elasticity and availability. I have a more detailed briefing on HANA Enterprise Cloud this afternoon

Their third quantum leap in the past three years is user experience, culminating in today’s launch of Fiori, a new user interface that brings the aesthetic of consumer UI — including mobile interfaces — to enterprise software. We’ll be hearing more about this in tomorrow’s keynote with Vishal Sikka.

By the way, you can watch the keynotes live and replays of many sessions here; I confess to have watched this morning’s keynote online from my hotel room in order to have reliable wifi to research while I watched and wrote this post.

Process Intelligence With @alanrick

I met up with the NetWeaver BPM product management team and sat in on a session given by Alan Rickayzen of SAP and their customer King Tantivejkul of Colgate-Palmolive on putting intelligence into processes. This wasn’t about process automation — it was assumed that you have some sort of process automation in some system already, which constitutes the instrumentation on the processes — but rather taking all of the process events from a heterogeneous collection of systems and analyzing them in the aggregate in order to drive and support decision-making.

Colgate brings funnels all of their data from their global operations through a master data hub to their SAP back-end, including financials, materials, customer and reference data. SAP’s business suite ERP software is great for crunching data, but not so great at visualizing it — Colgate is using some hard-coded monthly reports that showed some metrics, but little about the process itself — so Colgate signed up for the operational process intelligence (OPINT) ramp-up (first customer release) to help them identify potential issues and bottlenecks in the process. They don’t have anything to show yet, but seem pretty excited about what they can get out of it.

OPINT, built on HANA, provides a more responsive and flexible view of process metrics. Without writing any Java or ABAP code, you can put together a dashboard that shows metrics from multiple systems, since HANA is acting as a process event warehouse for Business Workflow and NetWeaver BPM process events as well as custom processes made visible via Process Observer. In the future, they’ll be adding in other data sources, so you can pull in process models and event data from other systems. The HANA studio design environment allows these processes to be imported from the back-end systems and represents them as BPMN; events in these processes can then be mapped to different phases of a business scenario in order to generate the dashboard.

Predictive analytics are built in, as you might expect given the capabilities of HANA, allow for forecasting of missing specific KPIs and milestones. As we saw at IBM Impact a couple of weeks ago, predictive process analytics are becoming big for high-value process instances: it’s not enough to know if you’re meeting a specific KPI right now, you need to know how the process is going to roll out through its entire lifecycle.

The dashboard widgets that we saw in a short video clip look completely adequate: different data visualizations, colors to denote states, KPIs and drilldowns. No big UI innovations, but the real gold here is in the HANA analytics going on behind the scenes, and the ease with which a solution developer can create a dashboard view of the HANA data. Furthermore, this runs completely on HANA: HANA is the database, the analytics engine and the app server, making it a bit easier to deploy than some other analytics solutions. This is big data applied to process, and it’s fair to say that this combination is going to be significant for the future of BPM.

Back At SAPPHIRENOW – Day 1 Keynote

It’s been a couple of years since I last attended SAP’s huge SAPPHIRE NOW conference, but this week I’m here with my 20,000 closest friends at the Orlando Convention Center (plus another 80,000 watching online) to get caught up. The conference kicked off with a keynote from Bill McDermott, SAP’s co-CEO, and it’s all about HANA and cloud: everything from SAP now runs on HANA, and combined with their cloud platforms realize the dream of realtime, predictive supply chains. HANA is also at the heart of how SAP is addressing social enterprise functionality, allowing a company to analyze a flood of consumer social data to find what’s relevant.

They highlighted some of their sports-related customers’ applications — which definitely allowed for some good lead-in video — with executives from Under Armour, the San Francisco 49’ers and the NBA. In part, sports applications are about helping teams play better and manage their talent through play/player data analysis (think Moneyball), but are also about customer engagement online and in the stadium. The most traditional usage of SAP on the panel is with Under Armour, which manufactures sportswear and sports-related biometrics devices, but their incredible growth means that they needed enterprise systems that they won’t outgrow. An interesting new industry vertical focus for SAP.

The keynote finished with Bob Calderoni, CEO of Ariba (recently acquired by SAP) talking about how cloud — in the form of private business networks, of course — drives productivity. Good focus, since too often the current technology buzzwords (social, mobile, cloud) are discussed purely as the end, not the means, and we can lose sight of how these can make us more productive and efficient, as well as fully buzzword-enabled.

As usual, wifi in the keynote area is impossible, and since I’m tablet-only, I couldn’t even plug into the hard-wired internet that they provided for we guests of Global Communications – I’m not the only one in this section with a tablet rather than a laptop, so imagine that they’ll have to do something in the future to allow the media to consume and publish during the keynote. T-Mobile’s iPhone coverage is resolutely stuck at EDGE in this area, so I can’t even reliably set up a hotspot, although that would just contribute to the wifi problems. The WordPress Android app works fine offline, however, so I was able to take notes and publish later.

OpenText EIMDay Toronto, Financial Services Session

After lunch at the Toronto OpenText EIM Day, Catharine MacKenzie of the Mutual Fund Dealers Association talked about how they’re using OpenText MBPM (from the Metastorm acquisition). She spoke on an OpenText webinar last year, and I was interested in how they’ve progressed since then.

The MFDA is very process-based, since they’re a regulatory body, and although their policies don’t change that often, the processes used to deal with members and policies are constantly being improved. There was no packaged solution for their regulatory processes, and the need to have process flexibility without a full-on custom solution (which was beyond their budget and IT capabilities) led them to BPM. As I described in the post about the webinar (linked above), they started with four processes including compliance and enforcement, and sped through the implementation of several other processes through 2012. Although during the webinar, she stated that they would be implementing five new processes in 2012, most of that has been pushed to 2013, in part (it appears) because of a platform upgrade to MBPM 9.

She pointed out that everyone in MFDA is using BPM for internal administrative processes, such as booking time off, as well as for the member-facing processes; for many of these processes, the users don’t even know that they’re using BPM. They’re also an OpenText eDocs customer, so can present content within processes, although apparently they have had to do a lot of that integration work themselves.

As for benefits, they’re seeing a huge decrease in development and deployment time compared to custom applications that they build in Visual Studio, with process versioning and auditing built in. They’ve had challenges around having the business own the processes, rather than IT, while maintaining good process design and disciplined testing; the MBPM upgrade and migration is also taking longer than expected, hence is delaying some of their planned process implementations. This is an interesting result, against the backdrop of this morning’s customer keynote talking about major system upgrades: an upgrade that requires data migration and custom application refactoring is almost always going to cause delays in a previously-defined schedule of roll-outs, but very necessary for setting the stage for future functionality.

I’m skipping out for the rest of the afternoon to get back to my desk, but this has been a good opportunity to get caught up on the entire OpenText product suite and talk to some of their local customers.

Disclosure: OpenText is a customer, for whom I recently did a webinar and related white paper, but I am not paid to be here today, nor for writing any of these blog posts.

OpenText EIM Day Toronto, Company/Product Keynotes

I always try to drop in on vendor events that happen in my own backyard, so today I’m at OpenText’s EIM Day in Toronto. OpenText is a success story in the Canadian software space, focused on enterprise information management, which includes content and process management. They have grown significantly through acquisitions, acquiring (somewhat controversially) two different BPM vendors (Metastorm and Global 360) to add to their home-grown content management capabilities.

Following a welcome from Jim McIntyre, the regional VP of sales, we heard a keynote from Mark Barrenechea, CEO. Barrenechea was with ~~SAP~~ Oracle in the past, and obviously has continued to leverage those strong ties into the ERP market by integrating and partnering with SAP and other ERP vendors. He sees information-based strategies as the direction of business-technology transformation today, providing support for all of the unstructured information that lives alongside the structured information in ERP and other line of business systems. He outlined several transformations going on in the information enterprise: paper to digital; hierarchical to social; on premise to hybrid cloud; fragmented to managed, secured and governed; products to platforms; and ERP to EIM. He claimed that they will be able to replace multiple different products with a single platform from OpenText covering everything from capture to archive — capture, content management, process management, customer experience management (CEM) — although it appears that’s not yet released, and not clear if this will be a product branding exercise rather than a fully integrated platform.

This appeared to be a fairly conservative audience in terms of product adoption — I sat with someone who was just in the process of converting their LiveLink installation to Content Server, which I think is a bit overdue — so I’m not sure how well the message about their Tempo social collaboration platform went down, but OpenText will be pushing it later this year by using it for customer support and service interactions. What did go over well was Barrenechea’s scare tactic about Dropbox and Google Docs licensing — “did you know that they have the right to use your content for whatever purposes that they want?” — as a lead-in to the need for content security.

Barrenechea wrapped up with a product overview in their four main categories:

ECM, with Content Server, Tempo Box (an enterprise Dropbox-like product) and Archive (storage management)
CEM, with Tempo Social, DAM (digital asset management), WEM (web experience management) and CCM (customer communication management) making up the social suite
BPM, with Assure, MBPM and targeted apps making up their Smart Process Apps
iX (information exchange), with Secure iX, EDI and MFT (managed file transfer) providing secure transactions
DX (discovery), with InfoFusion and Semantic Navigation, indicating OpenText’s reentry into enterprise search; keep in mind that OpenText was a spin-off from a University of Waterloo project for indexing and searching the Oxford English Dictionary, making search part of their DNA

This still seems like a lot of products to me, many of which came through acquisitions hence may have quite different internal architecture. Although Barrenechea made claims that these are integrated, I did hear the qualifier “…on some level”. Hopefully they are integrated in more than his slide deck.

We had a deeper product view with Lynn Elwood, VP of product marketing, walking us through a (fictional) customer use case for a tablet manufacturer:

Creating and publishing product web pages using WEM (this functionality originated with the Vignette acquisition), including a review/approval cycle for the content before publication, plus cross-platform publication to update Facebook and Twitter with the newly published information, as well as mobile-optimized sites. This also gathers metrics and KPIs about the published information, including user actions, sentiment, ratings and comments.
Customer communications using StreamServe for customizing any customer communications, including adding customer-specific messages to invoices and letters.
Dynamic case management for help desk and product complaints/returns, which can include scanned documents with content captured automatically and added as case metadata. Mobile device support and Tempo Box allows a customer to take a photo of damaged goods and upload for the CSR to review.
Process analytics with ProVision (previously acquired by Metastorm, which was then acquired by OpenText) to model and simulate processes for improvement.
Records management within their Content Server product. This includes direct integration with Microsoft Outlook, so that emails can be manually dragged (or automatically moved) into folders that are managed by Content Server, hence can be part of a case and controlled by records management. There’s a lot of automated classification built in, so that content can be automatically found, classified and managed according to policies and usage.
Content storage management using their Archive product, which includes media staging and access control (including geographic constraints) based on policies.

A good overview of the product suite, but I’m still left with the feeling that this is a huge grab-bag of partially integrated components based on a variety of acquisitions over the years. They are definitely making progress in bringing them together, and the sort of use cases that Elwood showed us will help customers to understand the range of capabilities that OpenText can provide. As long as the products are individually capable and moving towards a common vision in terms of architecture, integration and user experience, there is an advantage to dealing with a single vendor for an array of related information management functionality: after all, that’s the same reason that many enterprises buy IBM products, in spite of an equally fragmented product acquisition and development strategy.

Smarter Process At IBM Impact 2013

Day 1 at IBM Impact 2013, following a keynote full of loud drums, rotating cars and a cat video, David Millen and Kramer Reeves gave a presentation on IBM’s vision for Smarter Process, which focuses on improving process effectiveness with BPM, case management and decision management. There are a number of drivers that they mentioned here that we’ll address in our panel this afternoon on “What’s Next For BPM” — the big four of mobile, social, cloud and big data — with the point that the potential for these is best seen when tied to mission-critical business processes. Not surprisingly, their research shows that 99% of CIOs looking to transform their business realize that they have to change their processes to do so.

Processes are not just about internal operations, but extend beyond the walls of the organization to take the customers’ actions into consideration, binding the systems of record to the systems of engagement. Therefore, it’s not just about process efficiency any more: we’re being forced to move beyond automation and optimization by the aforementioned disruptive forces, and directly address customer-centricity. In a customer-centric world, processes need to be responsive, seamless and relevant in order to engage customers and keep them engaged and well-served, while still maintaining efficiencies that we learned from all those years of process automation.

This isn’t new, of course; analysts (including me) and vendors have been talking about this sort of transformation for some time. What is new (-ish) is that IBM has a sufficiently robust set of product functionality to now have some solid case studies that show how BPM, CM and/or DM are being used with some configuration of mobile, social, cloud and big data. They’re also emphasizing the cross-functional approach required for this, with involvement of operations as well as IT and line of business teams.

Their key platforms for Smarter Process are BPM, Case Manager and ODM, and we had a summary of the relevant new features in each of these. BPM and ODM v8.5 are announced today and will be available in the next month or so. Here’s some of the key enhancements that I caught from the torrent of information.

BPM v8.5:

Dashboards that allow you to click through directly to take action on the process. The dashboards provide a much better view of the process context, both for instance information such as the process timeline and activity stream, and for insights into team performance. This is now a more seamless integration with their “Coach” UI framework that is used for task UI, including presence, collaboration and social activity. I think that this is pretty significant, since it blurs the line between the inbox/task UI and the report/dashboard UI: analytics are context for actionable information. The process timeline provides a Gantt chart view — similar to what we’ve seen for some time in products such as BP Logix — and includes the beginnings of their predictive process analytics capabilities to predict if a specific instance will miss its milestones. There’s so much more than can be done here, such as what-if simulation scenarios for a high-value instance that is in danger of violating an SLA, but it’s a start. The team performance view provides real-time management of a team’s open tasks, and some enhanced views of the team members and their work.
Mobile enhancements with some new mobile widgets and sample apps, plus a non-production Worklight license bundled in for jumpstarting an organization’s mobile application development. You would need to buy full Worklight licenses before production deployment, but so many organizations are still at the tire-kicking stage so this will help move them along, especially if they can just modify the sample app for their first version. The design environment allows you to playback the mobile UI so that you can see what it’s going to look like on different form factors before deploying to those devices. As expected, you can take advantage of device capabilities, such as the camera and GPS, within mobile apps.
Social/collaboration enhancements, including presence indicators.
Integration into IBM Connections and IBM Notes, allowing for task completion in situ.
Blueworks Live integration, providing a link back to BWL from a BPM application that was originally imported from BWL. This is not round-tripping; in fact, it’s not even forward-tripping since any changes to the process in BWL require manual updates in BPM, but at least there’s an indication of what’s connected and that the changes have occurred.
Integration with the internal BPM content repository now uses the CMIS standard, so that there is a single consistent way to access content regardless of the repository platform.
A new BPM on SmartCloud offering, providing a full IBM BPM platform including design and runtime tools in IBM’s cloud. This can be used for production as well as development/test scenarios, and is priced on a monthly subscription basis. No official word on the pricing or minimums; other BPM vendors who go this route often put the pricing and/or minimum license numbers prohibitively high for a starter package, so hoping that they do this right. Applications can be moved between cloud and on-premise BPM installations by networking the Process Centers.

ODM v8.5:

MobileFirst for business rules on the go, with RESTful API adapters inside the Worklight environment for building mobile apps that invoke business rules.
Decision governance framework for better reusability and control of rules, allowing business users to participate in rule creation, review, management and release. Considering that rules are supposed to be the manifestation of business policies, it’s about time that the business is given the tools to work with the rules directly. There’s a full audit trail so that you can see who worked on and approved rules, and when they were promoted into production, and the ability to compare rule and decision table versions.

Blueworks Live, for the enhancements already released into production a couple of weeks ago:

Decision discovery through graphical models, using the emerging decision modeling notation (DMN) from OMG. Decisions can now be documented as first-class artifacts in BWL, so that the rules are modeled and linked with processes. Although the rules can be exported to Excel, there’s no way to get them into IBM ODM right now, but I’m sure we can expect to see this in the future. The graphical representation starts with a root decision/question, and breaks that down to the component decisions to end up with a decision table. Metadata about the decisions is captured, just as it is for processes, leveraging the glossary capability for consistency and reuse.
Natural language translation, allowing each user to specify their language of choice; this allows for multi-language collaboration (although the created artifacts are not translated, just the standard UI).
Process modeling and discovery

Case Manager v5.1.1:

Enhanced knowledge worker control and document handling, bringing better decision management control into the case environment.
Modeling complex cases.
Two solutions built on top of Case Manager: intelligent (fraud) investigation management, and patient care and insight.

Integration Bus v9.0:

Decision services built in so that decisions can be applied to in-flight data.
Policy-driven workload management to manage traffic flow on the ESB based on events.
Mobile enablement to allow push notifications to mobile devices.

The Case Manager stuff went by pretty quickly, and wasn’t included in my pre-conference briefing last week, but I think that it’s significant that we’re (finally) seeing the FileNet-based Case Manager here at Impact and on the same marketecture chart as BPM and ODM. I’m looking forward to hearing more about the level of integration that they’re going to achieve, and whether the products actually combine.

Underlying the main product platforms, they’re leveraging Business Monitor and ODM to develop operational intelligence capabilities, including predictive analytics. This can gather events from a variety of sources, not just BPM, and perform continuous analysis in real-time to aid decision-making.

They are also including their services offerings as part of the Smarter Process package, supporting an organization’s journey from pilot to project to program. They offer industry solution accelerators — I assume that these are non-productized templates — and can assist with the development of methodologies and a BPM COE.

There are a number of breakout sessions on the different products and related topics over the next couple of days, but I’m not sure how much I’ll be able to see given the hectic schedule that they’ve given me as part of the analyst program.

Apologies for those who saw (briefly) an earlier version of this post; the new version of the WordPress Android app has a new button, and I went ahead and clicked it.

IBMImpact Next Week

I’m off to IBM Impact next week, where I’m speaking on a panel on Monday afternoon about “What’s Next For BPM”, along with Neil Ward-Dutton, Bruce Silver, Eric Herness and Pierre Haren, hosted by Irene Lyakovetsky. I’ll also be attending the analyst briefings and will post about what’s new with IBM BPM, Blueworks Live and related products. Annoyingly, there doesn’t appear to be any way to see the agenda unless you’re signed up for the conference, meaning that I can’t link directly to session descriptions, but will blog about whatever I attend if I have time.

It will be a pretty crammed few days, but if you’re going to be there and want to say hi, let me know and we can try to connect. And speaking of connecting, get yourself invited to the BP3 Connect cocktail hour on Tuesday evening (I’m sure that Scott Francis can help you with that), I’ll be there for sure [and everything will be off the record, if you know what I mean 🙂 ].

Smart Process Apps with Kofax and Forrester

Kofax sponsored a webinar this week (replay here) featuring Andy Bartels of Forrester Research speaking about Smart Process Applications (SPA): a term introduced by Forrester to describe collaborative, process-based packaged applications for human-centric work. In their terms: “a new generation of applications to help make human-centric, collaborative business activities be more effective”, with the goal to “help people be smarter in executing critical business activities”. You can check out their report on this from last year; the name is still struggling to gain acceptance, but vendors such as Kofax and OpenText (for whom I did a webinar and white paper on this topic last month) are helping to push it as a slice of the ECM/BPM/CM market where they have product offerings [by CM, I mean case management, including advanced CM (ACM), adaptive CM (also ACM), production CM (PCM) and dynamic CM (DCM), the latter term preferred by Forrester].

Forrester makes the distinction between transactional process apps and SPAs: transactional process apps tend to have standardized processes and little collaboration, whereas SPAs have a greater degree of collaboration as well as decision-making by the participants. If that was all, then this would just fall into the case management category – probably production case management – but an important focus of SPAs is that they are packaged applications for a specific activity: contract lifecycle management, customer support, procurement and the like. Bartels described them as filling in the gaps between the transactional apps, rather than using email and spreadsheets to bridge those gaps. He kept referring to these apps as “making people smarter”, which I think is a slightly awkward way of saying that they provide informational context for human decision-making, providing the right information to people at the right time to do their work.

He pointed out that BPM/DCM platforms provide an application development environment for companies to build their own SPAs, and that companies can then keep that app to themselves as a competitive differentiator, give it back to the vendor to incorporate into the base product, or sell it themselves (possibly in conjunction with the vendor). I think that a lot of these apps will come from the vendors directly, possibly via code developed for customer projects.

Martyn Christian of Kofax took the second part of the webinar to talk about Kofax solutions that fit into the Smart Process Apps envelope: capture of content as it moves from systems to engagement to systems of record is definitely their sweet spot. He overlaid their technology portfolio on Forrester’s “jigsaw” graphic to show that they offer something in all five pieces, although they are really pushing a platform for building SPAs, not the fully packaged SPAs that we’re seeing from some other vendors that are starting from a more comprehensive platform. That being said, Kofax is offering a customer onboarding SPA for capturing information at the point of origination, automating NIGO (not in good order) resolution and integrating with line of business and ECM systems; this sort of capture-focused SPA, or what they call “First Mile Solutions” is what we’re likely to see from Kofax in the future, especially as they continue to integrate the functionality of the Singularity (BPM/CM) and Altasoft (BI/analytics) acquisitions.

Forrester has a brand new Wave for SPAs; you can get this from the Kofax site here (registration required), plus a copy of a Forrester market analysis of multichannel capture, BPM and SPA, commissioned by Kofax. I’m sure that many of the other vendors in the Wave will have the report available as well, and it’s an interesting group of vendors: some horizontal BPM/ECM vendors, Salesforce, and a supply chain software vendor. This category is still such a mixed bag, and it does have the feeling of Forrester running a clustering algorithm on characteristics of existing solutions to see what they had in common, then “creating” the SPA category to describe them. Whether this is a true market category or just a speed bump on the way to a new age of applications and their development platforms remains to be seen.

Can BPM Save Lives? Siemens Thinks So

My last session at Gartner BPM 2013 is a discussion between Ian Gotts of TIBCO and their customer Tommy Richardson, CTO of Siemens Medical Solutions. I spoke with Siemens last year at Gartner and TUCON and was very interested in their transition from the old iProcess BPM platform (which originally came from TIBCO’s Staffware acquisition) to the newly-engineered AMX platform, which includes BPM and several other stack components such as CEP. Siemens isn’t an end-user, however: they OEM the TIBCO products into their own Soarian software, which is then sold to medical organizations for what Richardson refers to as “ERP for hospitals”. If you go to a hospital that uses their software, a case (process instance) is created for you at check-in, and is maintained for the length of your stay, tracking all of the activity that happens while you’re there.

With about 150 customers around the world, Seimens offers both hosted and on-premise versions of their software. Standard processes are built into the platform, and the hospitals can use the process modeler to create or modify the models to match their own business processes. These processes can then guide the healthcare professionals as they administer treatment (without forcing them to follow a flow), and capture the actions that did occur so that analytics can determine how to refine the processes to better support patient diagnosis and treatment. This is especially important for complex treatment regimes such as when an unusual infectious disease is diagnosed, which requires both treatment and isolation actions that may not be completely familiar to the hospital staff. Data is fed to and from other hospital systems as part of the processes, so the processes are not executing in isolation from all of the other information about the patient and their care.

For Siemens, BPM is a silver bullet for software development: they can make changes quickly since little is hard-coded, allowing treatment processes to be modified as research and clinical results indicate new treatment methods. In fact, the people who maintain the flows (both at Siemens and their customers) are not developers: they have clinical backgrounds so that they are actually subject matter experts, although are trained on the tools and in a process analyst role rather than medical practitioner role. If more technical integration is required, then developers do get involved, but not for process model changes.

The Siemens product does a significant amount of integration between the executing processes and other systems, such as waiting for and responding to test results, and monitoring when medications are administered or the patient is moved to another location in the hospital. This is where the move to AMX is helping them, since there’s a more direct link to data modeling, organizational models, analytics, event handling from other systems via the ESB, and other functionality in the TIBCO stack, replacing some amount of custom software that they had developed as part of the previous generations of the system. As I’ve mentioned previously, there is no true upgrade from iProcess to AMX/BPM since it’s a completely new platform, so Siemens actually did a vendor evaluation to see if this was an opportunity to switch which product OEMed into their product, and decided to stay with TIBCO. When they roll out the AMX-based version in the months ahead, they will keep the existing iProcess-based system in place for each existing client for a year, with new patient cases being entered on the new system while allowing the existing cases to be worked in place on the old system. Since a case completes when a patient is discharged, there will be very few cases remaining on the iProcess system after a year, which can then be transferred manually to the new system. This migration strategy is far beyond what most companies do when switching BPM platforms, but necessary for Siemens because of the potentially life-threatening (or life-saving) nature of their customers’ processes. This also highlights how the BPMS is used for managing the processes, but not as a final repository for the persistent patient case information: once a case/process instance completes on patient check-out, the necessary information has been pushed to other systems that maintain the permanent record.

Modernizing the healthcare information systems such as what Siemens is doing also opens up the potential for better sharing of medical information (subject to privacy regulations, of course): the existence of an ESB as a basic component means that trusted systems can exchange information, regardless of whether they’re in the same or different organizations. With their hosted software, there’s also the potential to use the Siemens platform as a way for organizations to collaborate; although this isn’t happening now (as far as I can tell), it may be only a matter of time before Siemens is hosting end-to-end healthcare processes with participants from hospitals, speciality clinics and even independent healthcare professionals in a single case to provide the best possible care for a patient.