Category: process

business process management

Business Architecture Bridging Strategic Vision And Operational Excellence

I made it to the Gartner BPM Summit 2013 in Washington DC today just in time for the 11am session that Betsy Burton gave on bridging the gap between strategic vision and operational excellence with business architecture (BA). I like her view on this: strategic vision really isn’t much good unless you have a plan (or at least a direction) for how you’re going to do it. She points out that most organizations don’t execute on their vision — only about 10% if you believe the studies by Hammer and others — and you’re not going to get there unless along with vision, you also define implications, constraints, risks and interdependencies. Business strategy, which is a big part of business architecture, requires a diagnosis, guiding policy, coherent actions and target outcomes. I also like her distinction between “deliberate strategy” (that which is foreseen and planned) and “emergent strategy” (that which happens in response to actual conditions, a.k.a., “how we get stuff done”), although I’m not sure that I’d consider the emergent part to be strategy, strictly speaking.

She showed a good example of a business capability model that had been developed for a financial services firm, where capabilities are “things the business does”, not processes or departments. Overlaid with that was color coding showing the level of investment to each capability, and bolding to show the capabilities with strategic importance, plus physical grouping of capabilities related to a specific business goal. This gives a view, on one chart, of how the business vision is aligned with capabilities and spending. For example, in the group “Self and Service Products” were six capabilities. Once of those was “Onboard Customers”, which was bolded to indicate that it’s of strategic importance, but is white to indicate that it is getting only a minimal amount of investment. Then, overlaid on that, she showed how processes intersect with capabilities by adding numbered bubbles to indicate which process impacts each capability. Keep in mind that a process can span multiple capabilities, and a capability may require multiple processes. So that Onboard Customers capability intersects with A1, an account management process, as do 10 other capabilities. Next, she overlaid information sources and consumers and their linkages, that is, which capabilities create or consume information from other capabilities. As you add in the application portfolio, the inconsistencies in the architecture start to emerge, and low-risk, non-strategic capabilities are exposed as targets for cloud or outsourcing.

Gartner provides a classification for applications (their Pace Layering): they’re there for innovation, differentiation. or for record (commodity). Extending this to the capability map allows the processes and capabilities to also be categorized this way. To quote her presentation notes, “processes associated with innovative business capabilities will be more likely to change, will be more complex and potentially high value.” This identifies processes that really drive the business growth and goal achievement. Making the link between capabilities, processes and applications, the impact on people and processes of changing capabilities and swapping out applications becomes obvious.

Since this is a BPM conference, she has to make links to what this means for BP professionals, and ended up with some specific recommendations for BP directors, starting with “work with your EA team to understand the role of business architecture”, and understanding the link between BA and BPM. I’m impressed with the level of integration that she’s made between BPM and BA, and provided some good ideas on how to connect these up as part of the business strategy.

Thinking Beyond Traditional BPM Webinar Replay And Slides

The webinar that I did on Smart Process Applications (a Forrester term, but one that is being adopted by a number of case management/application development vendors) was broadcast today, sponsored by OpenText, and is available for replay here.

You can also check out my slides below:

AWD Product Madness With @lw927

I finished up my day at AWD ADVANCE in the product roadmap session held by Lisa Williams and Mike Lovell. It’s March Madness here in the US (that’s some college basketball thing) so they kept with that theme with mini basketballs and some yearbook pics of Lisa on the court.

Like any vendor’s product management group, they need to consider (and anticipate) the market for their products, and spend their resources most wisely to add capabilities that will be of most value to their customers while supporting or deprecating existing features. Here’s what’s coming:

  • Dynamic case management in v10.7, expected at the end of May; we heard about this in detail from Judith Morley this morning and will include mobile capabilities in a future version
  • Seamless installation process (this tweet from the hands-on labs here says that’s probably true)
  • Overall usability including people/roles administration in v10.9; they have a lot of new plans for user portals
  • Enhance monitoring capabilities and deprecate the existing BI client
  • Process design and orchestration
  • Communications service for multi-channel correspondence management

There was a laundry list of features coming up, and some audible approval in the room for things that sound small but I know can be huge for reusability, such as variable timers and support for localized business day calendars.

Dates beyond v10.7 are not announced, although likely they will not meet their past targets of two releases per year with some of the major changes in progress now. I think that they’re also challenged somewhat by a customer base that is dragging their feet moving off the legacy platform – still about 1/3 on it – and then start to take advantage of the new functionality once they’re on the new platform. It’s hard to be completely forward-thinking when there are still active instances of your software that are old enough to vote.

Looking to the 3-5 year horizon, it’s about creating products that allow their customers to adapt to changing business environments: primarily, shifting from “imaging and workflow” (which is how many of their customers categorize what AWD does for them) to “customer event management”. They talked about some of the areas where this innovation is likely to happen: capture, moving from paper to direct data entry by the customer, and mobile check capture; predictive analytics and simulation; adaptive case management, as opposed to the production case management that’s launching soon; work allocation to support collaborative/team work; user experience; and more. Nothing specific here, and also nothing that’s groundbreaking from a market perspective, but will likely shake things up for their conservative customer base.

That’s it for me at AWD ADVANCE for 2013, it’s been a great day of presentations following a fun customer advisory board dinner last night that included discussions of my cat on Twitter. I’m on a plane again next week – third week in a row – to the Gartner BPM show in DC.

Crowdsourcing And Microwork With DST

In the afternoon, after my BPM COE presentation, I moved over to the AWD ADVANCE technical track to hear Roy Brackett and Mike Hudgins talk about crowdsourcing and microwork. DST and some of their partners/siblings/subsidiaries are business process outsourcers, and always looking at ways to make that outsourcing more efficient. They use the term crowdsourcing to mean the use of a global, elastic workforce, such as Amazon Mechanical Turk; the concept of microwork is breaking work down into small tasks that can be done with little or no training.

There are some basic requirements for allocating microwork, especially in a financial services environment:

  • Quality, which is typically managed by dual entry (assigning the same piece of work to different workers, then comparing the results) or by validating against another data source (e.g., comparing the values entered independently for name and account number against a customer database).
  • Security, which is typically managed by feeding the tasks in such small tasks that there are few privacy issues since the workers rarely see more than a one or two pieces of data related to any given transaction, and have no way to link the data.
  • Priority, which is typically managed by serving up the tasks to workers only at the point that they are prepared to do the work so that the highest priority task is executed first; also, since the work is divided into tasks, many of those tasks may be executed in parallel.

Looking at common work activities, they typically break down to transcribe (e.g., data entry from scanned form), remediate (e.g., data entry from unstructured content where information may need to be looked up in other systems based on the content), business knowledge, and system knowledge, only the first two of which are appropriate for microwork.

DST is doing some research into microwork, so what they talked about does not represent a product or even, necessarily, a product direction. They started with transcription tasks – not that they want to compete with OCR/ICR vendors, but those tools are not perfect especially on images with subpar capture quality – using dual entry, with a remediation step if the two entries disagreed. This could be used for post-OCR repair, or for older scanned documents where the quality would not support adequate OCR rates. DST did a test using CrowdFlower for transcribing 1,000 dummy forms containing both machine-printed and handwritten content on a structured form: single entry gave 99% accuracy, while dual entry increased that to 99.6%.

They then did a pilot using one of their own business processes and real-world data from an outsourcing customer, transcribing fund and account information from inbound paper correspondence. Since only 25% of the documents were forms, they used fingerprinting and other recognition technologies to identify where these two fields might be on the page, then provide image slices for data entry. With the automated fingerprinting that they have developed, they were getting 98% classification, with zero misclassifications (the remainder were rejected as unclassified rather that being misclassified). For the microwork participants, they used new offshore hires and US-based part-time employees, so still used DST employees but with almost no training and relatively low skill levels; using single entry, they reduced data entry errors by 50% from their old-style “one-and-done” data entry technique (and presumably reduced the costs). They then rolled this out to handle all transaction types for that customer in a production environment.

They’re piloting other data entry processes for other customers now based on that success, starting with one that is driven purely by standard forms and has highly variable volumes, which is a perfect match for crowdsourced microwork because of the ease of segmenting forms for data entry and the elasticy of the workforce. There are optimizations on the basic methods, such as sending one person only (for example) tax ID fields to transcribe, since it’s faster to do data entry on a single field type due to no context switching.

The result: quality is improved, with more errors caught earlier; and better productivity (and hence cost) using less-skilled workers and a workforce that can increase and decrease in size to match the volume. There was a great question from the audience about what employees feel about this; the responses included both “we’re using this on the training path for higher-skilled workers” and “this separates out transcription and remediation as services (presumably done by someone whose careers are not of concern to the organization, either outsourced or offshore employees) and leaves the high-value knowledge work”: it’s fair to say that most companies don’t expect to be doing low level data entry in a very few number of years, but will have their customers do it for them on the web.

Everything’s New At DST

John Vaughn opened AWD ADVANCE 2013 talking about a new focus for DST: a new CEO (following the retirement of their very first one), a new organizational structure (bringing together product and hosting groups into a single business process solutions group), 66% of customers either on or moving to the new platform, new case management functionality, new visibility with analysts and in the market (woo hoo! I’m listed on the slide with the “big guys”), new social media engagement (Vaughn’s activity on Twitter has probably moved that along), and new ways of dealing with customers. Great vision for moving forward, although those comfortable with DST’s conservative pace in the past may be a bit nervous, especially when he used the term “sunsetting” about their legacy platform.

He highlighted a number of sessions that will be going on here today and tomorrow, and challenged the companies in the room to start thinking differently since AWD now supports new ways of working. As he put it, “a lot of your workflows are older than my kids”; he pointed out that the business world is changing and customer expectations are changing. Social and mobile are not going away, and they are driving customer channels and interactions. Crowdsourcing and microwork (outsourcing on a task level) are changing how work gets done inside organizations. The old way of doing things is just too expensive, and doesn’t meet customer needs; change or die (the last being my words, but his implication). On the big data front – every vendor keynote has to hit all the hot industry topics – Vaughn noted that since most of their customers don’t ever delete their scanned images, it’s time to start mining those for better informational context about customers. This is potentially a huge deal: I have many customers with millions of images, and if some recognition could be applied (even at relatively poor recognition rates), the benefits for big data and analytics would be incredible. Or scary, if you prefer.

On a slight tangent, next month DST will be releasing TreeSwing: a completely mobile investment platform for those with less than $10k to invest, providing a link from the investor’s checking account to a curated set of mutual fund investments for micro-investments (DST is a registered financial broker/dealer, so can do this legally as well as having the industry knowledge to do so). It includes a number of social features, including location aware coupons (e.g., save $1 at Starbucks and invest it instead), gamification  and more. Interestingly, DST launched it at SXSW, which is not how most large software companies roll. Certainly gives them some street cred in the mobile and social markets.

Teeing Up For DST’s AWD ADVANCE

Last year, I think that I was the first industry analyst to ever be invited by DST to the somewhat secret society that is their AWD ADVANCE conference. That must have worked out for them, because this year I’m back to speak, as well as Neil Ward-Dutton and Clay Richardson. That’s not the only change: instead of DST’s home town of Kansas City, we’re at the Omni at ChampionsGate in Orlando, where golf trumps Disney as the main pastime.

I won’t be blogging as much as last year, and definitely not as much as last week’s 6,800 word marathon at bpmNEXT: I’m only here for today, headed home tomorrow before the sessions start, since I’m in the middle of three weeks of conference travel. If you check out this week’s agenda, you’ll see a lot of case management, highlighting some of DST’s recent push in this direction, and I’ll be interested to see how that’s covered in the opening keynote as well as the product roadmap session.

bpmNEXT Wrapup: The Good, The Bad And The Best In Show

The first bpmNEXT conference has finished, and it was a great experience for me. I’m still on the west coast, enjoying a half-day in San Francisco before flying home, and having a bit of time to reflect on what I liked — and the few things I didn’t like — about this week’s event.

First and foremost, this was primarily a meeting of peers to discuss BPM innovation in an open fashion. It was not targeted at customers, so there was little of the peacock-like preening and posturing that you get when vendors parade in front of them. It was also not attended by the major analyst firms, so ditto. Since the format required that presenters give a demo, there was a much heavier bias towards technical attendees, although many of them were in product management/marketing or company founder roles, so not code monkeys. For me, that’s the perfect group for networking: people who are technical and articulate, but want to talk about more than just the technology. The atmosphere was collegial and friendly, even (for the most part) between competitors, and I had the feeling that many of the presenters just wanted to show off their cool new stuff because they knew that this was the audience that would most appreciate it. I really think that Bruce and Nathaniel achieved their goal of making this “like DEMO for BPM”. For the vendors that didn’t attend, or who attended but didn’t participate because they didn’t want to show all their cool new stuff to their competitors: you are totally missing the point, and you missed a great opportunity. Ideas need a bit of exposure to the light in order to grow properly, and this is the place for that.

Second, cool and awesome demos! The “Best in Show” awards that we all voted on at the end (to Fluxicon, Whitestein and Fujitsu) were well-deserved, although many others were equally deserving. I loved the bleeding edge demos — Gero Decker of Signavio accidentally showed us how to do process modeling with head gestures — and the skunkworks projects that may never see the light of day but represent some different thinking — Keith Swenson of Fujitsu with his Cognoscenti demo really brought advanced case management to life. Anne Rozinat and Christian Gunther were in the first demo slot, which could have been tough, but they set the bar extremely high (they won first prize, after all) and wowed a lot of the North Americans there who had never had the chance to see their Disco process mining product, born out of their work at Eindhoven University. The demos that didn’t work as well were those that spent too much time on slides instead of the demo, those that were customer-facing rather than optimized for peer review, and those that tried to cover too much ground in a 20-minute demo. If I can give a word of advice to those vendors who have given me briefings in the past, treat this like that: no slides, no bullshit, no distractions.

Third, nice location, although there were some minuses as well as pluses here. Asilomar is beautiful, but we had no spare time to do more than take a quick walk to the beach on a break. I don’t propose lengthening the calendar or reducing the number of demos, but rather rearranging the first day: take a nice long break in the middle of the day after lunch for people to explore around, then go a bit later or even have some evening demos after dinner. Since pretty much everyone arrived by Tuesday dinner, there could have been demos on that evening, too. It’s a fairly remote location, people mostly didn’t do much after dinner anyway (except, for those of us from time zones further east, go to bed early), and evening demos could have been fun sessions with some libations involved — maybe a BPM buzzword drinking game? The remote location may have deterred some, it’s a 2-1/2 hour drive south of San Francisco, but it did mean that we mostly hung out with groups of other attendees, making for better networking.

Fourth, this was an unparalleled networking experience. As an extroverted introvert (really, just check my Myers-Briggs), I usually dislike networking events, but this felt less like an uncomfortable meet-and-greet and more like chatting with old friends. Which, for the most part, it was: I knew a lot of people there, both face-to-face and online. I had the chance to meet several people who I knew only online in the past but already felt like I knew, such as Anatoly Belaychuk and Ashish Bhagwat. About 1/3 of the 80 attendees were international (including three Canadians), meaning that there was a significant European contingent here, showing off some of the outstanding BPM innovation that is less often seen in North America, and possibly creating some trans-Atlantic relationships that might bloom into partnerships in the future.

Lastly, a few healthier, lower-carb snacks would not have gone amiss: I think that I ate my own weight in chocolate. Only the health benefits of the red wine offset all that. 🙂

bpmNEXT – Trisotech, EnterpriseWeb, Computas, Fujitsu

Full bpmNEXT program here. The format is 30 minutes per speaker: 20 minutes of demo, 10 minutes of Q&A.

Day 2, third session – last of the conference: dynamic processes and case management

Performing Collections of Activities as Means to Business Ends, Denis Gagne, Trisotech

Recorded demo of gathering requirements in the Discovery Accelerator on Business Process Incubator and gradually structure the data elements collected into a data model, using a pinboard paradigm. Can switch to a text view where a text description is added and key terms extracted for use in the board representation. The result is a structured set of activities that have been identified from requirements sessions and documents. This coordinated collection of activities is used to guide BPMN or CMMN modeling, creating the activities within the model as a starting point for further modeling. Their Visio add-on provides BPMN and CMMN modeling support, including model validation. There are also web-based modelers for BPMN and CMMN that can access and edit models from the same repository as the Visio-based modelers, providing the same user experience on multiple versions of Visio and any browser platform.

Event-Driven Rules-based Business Processes for the Real-Time Enterprise, Dave Duggal, EnterpriseWeb

Automated agents connects people, data and services on the fly (late binding) based on interpretation of models, context and available data. Every executing process may be different, and can be correlated with other instances. Brief demo showing searches and relationships between objects, e.g., between people and projects. Allows for creation of dynamic processes by the user as required.

Malleable Tasks and ACM, Helle Frisak Sem, Computas AS

Demo of MATS system developed for Norwegian Food Safety, winner of 2012 ACM Award for public sector. Knowledge workers involved in food safety inspections and audits of farms, fisheries, food industry and restaurants, requiring thousands of rules from Norway and harmonized across the EU. A case represents an entity subject to inspection — a person or business — with the case folder containing all information and documentation related to that entity, from which a knowledge worker can launch any of a number of tasks to be performed on that entity. The rules provide guidance to the user on which tasks are required from the general template for that task type, since the users are food safety subject matter experts, but the specific tasks to be applied are often a legal issue and based on the context. The tasks may be executed in any order unless there are specific dependencies. The data in the case folder is central, with the transitory tasks/process fragments acting on that data. Control objects are modeled declaratively, significantly reducing coding. Demo showed system use in response to a telephone call regarding a potential health safety violation; the task template is selected that most closely matches the caller report, and the required steps are added or removed based on the parameters selected. Provides support to ensure that workers are performing legally-required activities, but flexibility for them to control their work order and environment.

Antifragile Systems for Innovation and Learning Organizations, Keith Swenson, Fujitsu America

From the antifragile concepts in Nicholas Taleb’s latest book, business systems that are highly adaptive due to exposure to variable and adverse conditions can be significantly stronger than those that are protected. Creative, innovative organizations that thrive in an unpredictable world have to rely less on predefined processes, rules and predictions, and more on adapting to the current context and information. Demo of Interstage Cognoscenti (unreleased Fujitsu product Fujitsu research prototype) that allows users to create a case, referred to as a project, that is completely empty. The case owner can add documents, including sending an email to external participants with a URL for uploading documents without having an explicit login, and write notes. A project can be used as a template, and its characteristics merged into an existing project. Goals (tasks) can be created and assigned, and turned into subprojects for more complex activities. Other users may have the project in their watch list, and have goals assigned to them. In order to link projects together, a project can generate a streaming link that is linked into another project; the projects can then be set up to synchronize goals and documents between the linked projects. The system is intended for non-technical knowledge workers to create cases on the fly; there is no “design time” environment or more technical requirements.

That’s it for the bpmNEXT sessions — it’s been an awesome conference in terms on content, participants and atmosphere. We’re going to vote on Best in Show and wrap up, and I’ll likely post some final thoughts in a day or two after I’ve had some time to digest everything. Next week, I’ll be at DST’s AWD ADVANCE conference, although my volume of blogging will be lower since I’m giving a presentation there rather than just an observer.

bpmNEXT – Kofax, Knowledge Partners/Sapiens, Bosch

Full bpmNEXT program here. The format is 30 minutes per speaker: 20 minutes of demo, 10 minutes of Q&A.

Day 2, second session.

Fully Exploiting the Potential of BPM in the Cloud, Carl Hillier, Kofax

A prime motivator for cloud is instant provisioning; demo showed the live provisioning of a Kofax TotalAgility cloud instance (based on Microsoft Azure). Instances must be provisioned by Kofax, not directly by the customer. Each customer gets their own SQL database and data storage, but the (stateless) web application and presentation layers are multi-tenant. After entry of the instance attributes, the instance was generated within 3 minutes and the TotalAgility designer was available for immediate use in the new instance for creating and executing process models. Identical functionality is provided on public cloud, private cloud and on premise. Software updates are applied automatically in the public cloud, but can be controlled by the customer in the private cloud and on premise environments.

The Decision Model, Michael Grohs, Knowledge Partners International

Business-friendly decision models can compress the months that it normally takes for IT to encode business rules into enterprise systems down to a few weeks; the goal is to eventually be able to directly author business policies and the underlying rules in a business-understandable and machine-readable form, allowing for near-instant deployment of new business rules. The Decision Model is a methodology and book, manifested in the DECISION product from Sapiens, for representing business logic as a separate component within an architecture. Any decisions that can be defined declaratively are extracted from the process model and stored in the decision model, which can then be referenced within the process model. The decision model notation is a goal-driven hierarchical representation of rules and rule families, along with the data that is acted upon by those rules. The elements in the decision model are linked to the implementation methods, forming the hand-off point between business and IT. The decision model connects the process model, rule models, use cases and business motivation models. Very brief demo of DECISION showing graphical representation of a decision model as well as the tabular structure of the rule families associated with the model. When creating a new model, import a text document of the policy wording, system can detect synonyms and other vocabulary analysis to identify inconsistencies in policies and assist with creation of the decision model.

BPM for the Internet of Things, Tom Debevoise and Troy Foster, Bosch

In the internet of things, there are potentially billions of devices out there generating data and requiring instructions. These are typically organized as massive distributed systems of systems, such as Smart Home or Smart Grid, to organize and control collections of devices. Localized rules can monitor collections of sensors/devices, and report up the chain to higher-level controllers when certain events occur, allowing information to be aggregated and actions to be taken, including launching BPM processes. Rules are present at the device level and at the higher collector level, as well as potentially within the BPM process. Demo of their monitor dashboard (from inubit acquisition) can show status of specific machines as well as aggregate statistics, e.g., how many machines are in a critical state requiring maintenance or replacement. Rules (from VisualRules acquisition) allow rules to be created for different machine types, e.g., to display an alert when a vibration sensor indicates that the machine requires preventive maintenance to avoid failure; this, in turn, could instantiate a BPM process to dispatch a field maintenance worker to the machine.

Break for lunch. One more session after lunch, then Best of Show voting and wrap-up.