process – Page 46

Gartner Keynote at Appian World: From Operational Excellence To Operational Resilience

The analysts are on the move this week: earlier in the week, we were all in Las Vegas for IBM Impact, now we’re all in DC for Appian World. I presented a BPM 101 session yesterday in the workshop day, and this morning Janelle Hill of Gartner is giving the opening keynote. I’ll be at the Gartner BPM Summit in Baltimore in a few weeks, so I might be seeing this talk again soon.

She’s talking about an upcoming BPM revolution (although it seems more evolutionary than revolutionary, but the R word allowed her to invoke some nice Egypt images) where we move towards resilient processes. By 2020, we’ll see more and more of unstructured processes, dynamic BPM, social BPM, context-aware processes and intelligent operations.

BPM is raising the bar for operational excellence; their basic definition “BPM is a management discipline that treats processes as assets that directly contribute to enterprise performance by driving operational excellence and agility” points to the required attributes of visibility, accountability and adaptability. Gartner predicts that by 2014, business process defects will topple 10 Global 2000 companies; these seems a bit too much like end-of-time predictions, but if you cast the net wide enough, there will sure to be some business failures that can be attributed in part to defective processes. What I do whole-heartedly agree with is that the biggest opportunity for improvements and differentiation are in unstructured processes: these are the ones currently live in email and spreadsheets, and contribute to non-compliance.

There are a number of factors that contribute to operational resilience:

Visibility into the pipeline of work allows a front-line worker to dynamically reroute work in order to achieve service goals. I would argue that some of this could be done with automated load balancing, not just manual rerouting, although the concept of visibility would cover that as well.
Dynamic BPM allows workers to change or create the process required in order to achieve a goal in a manner that was not envisioned by the process designer. This allows us to consider eliminating requirements (I could so get on board with that) since the creation, prototyping and productionizing of processes can happen so quickly; if this approach scares you, consider that the requirements and design can be a much more collaborative process that allows for continuous change. In fact, she characterizes the requirements-less approach as “fantasy”, whereas I characterize it as “Agile”. I don’t think that Gartner goes far enough here: fully dynamic BPM is possible in some scenarios (excuse me while I dig out my “Process for the People” t-shirt); Phil Gilbert of IBM/Lombardi has stated that we should just put process design in everyone’s hands. Obviously, this is going to be dependent on the types of processes and your corporate culture.
Social BPM, including both design-time and runtime, which is something that I’ve been writing and presenting on for 5 years now, brings enterprise social software concepts to BPM – good to see Gartner finally recognizing these ideas front and center. I think that they formerly had a lot of social collaboration ideas tied up in dynamic BPM, which are adjacent but slightly different concepts, but now seem to have split this out.

Her focus is really on challenging the audience on how they define BPM, and how they use it within their own organizations. This means building in resiliency, embracing dynamic processes, figuring out cloud strategy, and harnessing the social interaction that is already going on between people. To quote her closing point, “acceptance of the collective will determine your future”.

Six Steps To Understanding BPM

I recently wrote a series of articles for Global 360 on getting started with BPM; since this was paid content, I didn’t publish them here, but it’s available over on bpm.com (to find the whole series, go here and add a title filter of “getting started with bpm”).

These are now being republished on the EndUserSharePoint site, and will be rolled up into an e-book, which you can register to receive when it’s ready.

Knowledge Management, Social Media, Social BPM and Control

The term “knowledge management” has been used – and misused – in many different ways over the years, but I agree with Jonathan Reichental’s definition of it as the identification, retention, effective use and retirement of institutional insight. I really, really agree with his further insights about knowledge management in the age of social media:

The days of the single, authoritative voice are coming to an end. The community has prevailed.

I’m writing a white paper right now on social BPM for enterprise transformation (not the same white paper that I referred to in yesterday’s post on a spectrum of process functionality), and I’ve been reviewing some of my research and presentations on social BPM from the past five years as well as those of others. One thing that jumps out at me, and was reinforced by a comment made by my client, is that there is a paradigm shift happening in the way that organizations understand control. Control no longer means that management dictates every action that every employee takes, but rather that appropriate levels of control are given to everyone so that they can control their environment and make it most effective for their tasks at hand.

The other thing that comes to mind, prompted by the quote above, is that harnessing collective intelligence is fast becoming the most important feature from O’Reilly’s original Web 2.0 definition as it applies to organizational knowledge management, as well as community efforts like the PKBoK. In social BPM, features such as collaborative process discovery and modeling are allowing the community within an organization to define the business processes, rather than relying on a much smaller group of “expert” process designers. That’s not to say that you don’t want some of those expert process designers involved – after all, they are likely trained and experienced and spotting inconsistencies and inefficiencies that others might miss – but you’ll ultimately see better quality of processes by allowing the community to participate in their definition.

It’s Not About BPM vs. ACM, It’s About A Spectrum Of Process Functionality

From a white paper that I’m working on now:

I think that the whole “BPM versus ACM” debate has completely blown out of all sensible proportion, when we’re really talking about a spectrum of functionality that ranges from structured process management (or what some people think of as BPM) to completely dynamic process management.

The key, to me, is that it’s not an either-or situation: almost every business process that I’ve ever seen lies somewhere in the middle, with both structured and dynamic aspects: in some cases, different workers may perform either highly structured or highly dynamic functions, depending on their role. We need both end of the spectrum – and everything in between – to manage our processes, and we need them to work together in a cohesive environment.

I’ll publish the link to the white paper, which explains this concept in a lot more detail, when it’s complete.

Litigating Your Way To BPM Notoriety

I’m a firm believer in free and open information exchange – not always a popular view amongst independents like myself who make our living selling our knowledge and experience to organizations – and that principle is why I became involved in the Process Knowledge Initiative and its creation of an open-source body of knowledge for process information. The idea of the PKI’s BoK (or PKBoK as we’ve come to call it, much to the amusement of pedants who love to point out that two of the five letters in the acronym stand for “Knowledge”) is that the BPM community needs a body of knowledge that is freely available to all, and where everyone in the community can contribute. To that end, we’ve launched a public wiki that contains some starting framework pieces for the BoK, and are starting to accept community contributions in the form of public comments. Soon, I hope, we will have enough in place to open this up for community editing; in order to do that, we need to have some safeguards in place to make sure that special interests don’t hijack the conversation.

The idea for this was first launched in September 2010, based on a paper by Wasana Bandara, Paul Harmon and Michael Rosemann on the need for an open, comprehensive process body of knowledge in order to further professionalize BPM. In that paper, the authors discussed the ABPMP BPM CBOK as “the closest BPM BoK the discipline has to date” in terms of completeness, extendibility, understandability, application and utility, and identified a number of core limitations that need to be addressed:

First, the process of deriving and maintaining the BoK should be more systematic and transparent. This will assist the perceived validity and adoption of it. Secondly, the content that forms the BoK needs to be defined and scoped, and most of all, checked for completeness, correctness and relevance to the field. Also, consensus definition of the content of a BoK is needed for it to be accepted as industry standard. Thirdly, the structure of the BoK should be carefully thought about and documented; this will assist in the correct interpretation of the BoK by its adapters and will also support sustainability and growth of the BoK.

They categorized the ABPMP CBOK as “a good starting point”, and proposed initiatives for an ontology-based approach to developing more comprehensive content, and a community approach to populating and maintaining the content.

The ABPMP, however, doesn’t like the idea of an open and freely-available process BoK, since they make money from selling the content ($49.95 from their store, although Amazon discounts it to $39.17) as well as offering certification programs. Attempts by PKI members, many of whom have long-time memberships with the ABPMP, to involve the ABPMP in the PKI were generally rebuffed. In short, for all of you wondering why we aren’t just working with the ABPMP on their BoK: we think the content should be free and community-created, and they don’t.

I’ve been an ABPMP member in the past, and rejoined last year when I was invited to be on the executive of the fledgling ABPMP Toronto chapter. I don’t see that as being in conflict with my PKI involvement: they’re both helping to educate people on BPM, and that’s a good thing for the industry. At PKI, we could even envision a day when ABPMP offered certification courses and exams for the content in the PKI BoK, either in addition to or as a replacement for their own BoK. Imagine my disappointment, then, at two recent developments:

The ABPMP “Presidents Annual Report 2010” provided a financial and legal update that included the statement “Due to the increase in trademark filings, our legal costs will be an ongoing fixed cost of doing business going forward and will be budgeted on an annual basis to align our trademark filings with our growth strategies outside the US.” In other words, they’re using my membership fees to pay their lawyers to sue others who attempt to create bodies of knowledge in the BPM space where the name might possibly be confused with the ABPMP BPM CBOK. Tony Benedict, president of ABPMP International, already fired a warning shot at the PKI with an email stating “You cannot use BPM BOK in any of your publications, digital or otherwise as it violates our trademark. Please refrain from doing so or ABPMP will take legal action.” This is not how I want my ABPMP membership fees spent. Also, we never used the term “BPM BoK”.
The president of the Toronto ABPMP chapter was told by ABPMP International that they can’t help us with our chapter startup costs (which are mostly just incorporation and initial marketing to draw in members), and that we would need to obtain money from sponsors, or incorporate as a for-profit organization and take capital contributions from the shareholders – in spite of the fact that less than 15% of the local members’ fees actually flow to the local chapter. Considering that our startup costs are likely worth about 1 hour of ABPMP International’s trademark lawyers’ fees, I would rather that a bit of that money be directed here so that we can get a local chapter started to promote BPM in Toronto, rather than focusing on suing other people.

I’m just not okay with the idea that you can litigate your way to fame and fortune when you’re trying to create something like the body of knowledge. I know it’s the American way, but I’m Canadian, eh?

Pega Case Management

I had an update from Pegasystems on their case management offering a while ago, and with the publication of the new Forrester Wave on Dynamic Case Management, the time is right for a quick summary. After last year’s PegaWorld, I published a review of their SmartBPM V6, which was already shipping with Visual Case Manager, but they’ve stepped up the case management functionality since then and have scored a top spot in Forrester’s report (you can see the wave graphic at Pega’s site, and download the report for free after registration).

They have a new portal for case workers and managers, and have improved the ad hoc process design that I saw in last review. There are a number of other enhancements, including some vertical applications, but we focused on the case management core functionality. The Case Designer is used to create the hierarchy of subcases and tasks, including attributes such as which are required versus optional, automatic versus manual start, or have attachments. These Case Type Definitions in the Case Designer are really the heart of defining a case management application: you define the case structure as a hierarchy of subcases, tasks and rules. You can add a new task, and apply rules to the tasks to limit choices or pre-fill information. Creating a new task also creates an empty process associated with it; this can be left completely empty to allow ad hoc process definition at runtime, or a process flow can be defined, which in turn can apply rules at any point in the process. You can specify goals and deadlines at any point in the hierarchy, so SLAs can be nested.

In the insurance claims example that we saw, there was a hierarchy of subcases and tasks: at the top level, a FNOL (first notice of loss) case had subcases for Vehicle Damage and Injury, each of which could be created manually by the user; within the Vehicle Damage subcase, an Adjust task was started automatically when the parent case was created, but an Adjudicate task could be started by the user as required. Case and task definitions can be reused – in the demo, the Adjust and Adjudicate tasks appear in both the Vehicle Damage and Injury cases – which potentially reduces the amount of effort to create similar case types. I’m not really clear on the distinction between (sub)cases and tasks: they both are containers for work and appear to have the same technical functionality, just a different representation on the screen. The terminology is unclear on whether a task is an atomic bit of work done by one user, or if it can have child objects as well. Leaving the subcase/task semantics aside, this definition screen allows you to define all of the activities that might need to be done in the course of a case, and some of their attributes. Although intended for business users/analysts, I think that there’s enough technical information exposed in this environment to make it unsuitable to any but the more technically-minded BAs. Ease of use has long been an issue – or, at least, a perceived issue – for Pega; they’ve made a lot of UI improvements to their modeling suite, but it’s still going to take some technical know-how to get things working. This is true for most BPMS products, in spite of what the vendors might tell you in the demo, and I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing for setting up frameworks and more complex processes, although it can inhibit agility if required for any change to a process or case structure. The Pega case designer environment might be better served by presenting a perspective for less technical users and a perspective with all the gory technical details so that the non-techies aren’t intimidated by it.

Moving on to the end-user experience, the newly-designed portal has four tabs/views: Cases, Tasks, Events and Reports. The Cases view shows a list of all cases that the user owns (i.e., that this user instantiated) or has an interest in (i.e., where this user has a task or subcase assigned to them). In the demo example, the cases are all claims; over in the Tasks view, we see the list of tasks assigned to this user, although it’s not clear (to me) if this is a combination of subcases and tasks, or just tasks – back to my earlier discussion on the distinction between the two. In both views, you see the start date, urgency, deadline and status of the case or task. In the Cases view, there is also a button to create a new case; this prompts for the required information for the case, such as claimant and vehicles, and creates the case. The Events view shows a snapshot of activity on all cases, including the user and case identifier, plus a calendar of upcoming deadlines for the cases.

Viewing a case/task, the default view shows the case details and the subject details, although this can be customized since each widget on the screen has user-customizable parameters. Most of what we saw was out of the box, with the exception of the data fields in the Details widget, and the meaning of “Subject” (in this case, client and policy) for linking cases to subjects. The case details shows all of this information, plus attachments , subcases and tasks. In the subject details, which will be specific to the case type, information is shown about the subject – in our example, subjects were clients that were claimants on the case – and links provided to any related cases. This view also provides the option to start a new process associated with the open case/task. Information can be aggregated across subcases and tasks within a case, e.g., calculating a total indemnity amount on a claim as an aggregate of damage, injury and other subcases within the claim.

Users aren’t limited to just executing pre-defined case definitions, however; they can also add subcases and tasks manually to a case from the Cases view, which shows them a hierarchy similar to what they would see in the Case Designer, but without a lot of the technical underpinnings exposed. They can select a known task from a list on the main case windows, or define a completely new one; parameters for the new task allow them to specify assigned resources, a workbasket, start and end dates, whether this task requires manager approval, and whether to suspend the parent case until this task completes. Once the case has been modified, the resulting case can then be saved as a template, providing a “design by doing” approach that allows business users to create their own versions of case definitions, which can be useful for capturing exceptions that may need to be rolled into the main case definition.

The Reports view of the end-user portal shows some basic case statistics such as average duration and throughput per user; some standard reports are provided, and the user can create new reports and share them with others.

Taking a look at the Forrester report on Dynamic Case Management (DCM, or what is known in some circles as adaptive case management, or ACM) from last month, in which Pega scores a top spot, they see this still-volatile market as emerging from the human-centric BPM vendors as well as the ECM vendors, but list a number of key features that DCM requires over BPM:

Placing the case at the center of the focus, rather than a particular process, and therefore be able to run multiple processes against a single case. In other words, instead of the usual BPM paradigm of having content (such as a case folder) being an attachment to a single process, the case folder itself is primary, and can have multiple processes and tasks associated with it simultaneously.
Associating different types of objects with a case, including documents and other content, but also including structured data and the aforementioned processes.
Allow users to handle variations, which allows knowledge workers to decide how a case is managed rather than having to follow a pre-defined process. This may include deciding which of a set of pre-defined tasks may be executed, as well as the ability to create completely new tasks and processes that were not envisioned by the original case designer.
Selective restriction of changes to processes, which can manifest in a variety of ways in different DCM products. Basically, this is about compliance, and making sure that some processes and rules are always followed, even though many of the other tasks may be defined and decided by the knowledge worker. This is where structured BPM, BRM and DCM tend to overlap (and where many of the arguments about the distinction between BPM and DCM originate): in practice, many line-of-business processes have some things that just have to be done a certain way, but need to also allow for a lot of flexibility in other areas.

Shhhh… PKI Wiki Is Up

I’ve been a bit quiet on the Process Knowledge Initiative front lately due to other commitments, and lack of much public-facing progress in spite of the progress that we’d been making internally.

That’s about to change, because we have a public wiki up and running for the draft Body of Knowledge, and will officially be announcing it soon, along with our initial sponsors. Right now, it only contains the basic knowledge areas that are going to be expanded out into the BoK, but we felt that it was time to open it up for public commentary.

There are currently three levels of access:

Anyone can view all of the BoK content without logging in.
If you want to add comments, you will need to sign up using the link at the top right of the page. Please use your real name. If you use your email address as your username, it will be visible to others via the people directory, so don’t use that for your username if you don’t want it exposed.
Content editing is currently restricted only to those on the content teams. At some point, we’d like to open this up, but we want to get through some of the first editing rounds first and see how it works out.

Once you have an account on the wiki, you can set a watch on individual pages (from the Tools dropdown) or set a watch on the entire space (in the Advanced options under the Browse menu). Setting a watch will send you an email when anything changes. You can also subscribe to an RSS feed of the site changes (also in the Advanced options), although it doesn’t work with Google Reader since the feed requires authentication – anyone with a solution to this, please add it in the comments below.

The wiki platform is Atlassian Confluence, using a free community license based on PKI’s not-for-profit status. Martin Cleaver of Blended Perspectives has been our Confluence guru, getting everything set up and helping us to become mostly self-sufficient. Martin and Confluence both rock.

All of the BoK content is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0, meaning that you are free to copy it in its entirety and edit it for your own purposes, but you are required to state that it is based on the BoK and provide a link back to the BoK. That also means that any content you contribute to the BoK will assume the same copyright, so make sure that you don’t include anything that has a more restrictive copyright.

Appian Tempo

I had a chance for an advance briefing of Appian’s Tempo release last week; this is a new part of the Appian product suite that focuses on mobility, cloud and social aspects of BPM for social collaboration. This isn’t a standalone social collaboration platform, but includes deep links into the Appian BPM platform through events, alerts, tasks and more. They’ve included Twitter-like status updates and RSS feeds so that you can publish and consume the information in a variety of other forms, offering a fresh new alternative to the usual sort of process monitoring that we see in a BPMS. The free app for the iPhone and iPad requires an account on Appian Forum (the Appian user community site) or access to an Appian BPM installation (not sure if this is both an on-premise system and the cloud-based offering) in order to do anything so I wasn’t really able to check it out, but saw it on an emulator in the demo.

Their goal for Tempo is to provide a zero-training interface that allows people to track and participate in processes either from a browser or from a mobile device. You can think of it as a new user interface for their BPM and information management systems: in some cases to provide an alternative view to the portal for occasional/less-skilled users, and in some cases as the only interface for more collaborative or monitoring applications. It doesn’t replace the information- and feature-rich portal interface used by heads-down workers, but provides a simpler view for interacting with processes by executives or mobile workers. Users can interact with tasks that are assigned to them in a structured process within BPM, such as approving a purchase request, but can also create a new case from any event, whether that original event was related to BPM or not. For example, I had a view of the internal Appian instance of Tempo (I’ve redacted everything from this screenshot except this event, since some of the other events included internal information) where a “Marketing” stream included RSS feeds from a number of BPM news and blog sources. Swiping on any given event in the iPhone/iPad app – say an external blog post – allowed a new case to be opened that linked to that external event. At this point, the case opening functionality is pretty rudimentary, only allowing for a single process type to be created, which would then be manually reassigned to a specific person or subprocess, you can see the future value of this when the case/process type can be selected.

As this scenario highlights, Tempo can include process and information from a variety of other sources, internal and external, that may have nothing to do with Appian BPM, in addition to providing visibility into core business processes. Anything with an RSS feed can be added; I saw Salesforce.com notifications, although not sure if they were just from an RSS feed or if there is some sort of more direct integration. Considering the wide adoption of RSS as a publication method for events, this is likely not an issue, but there are also some more direct system connections: an SAP event appearing in Tempo can be expanded to retrieve data directly from the corresponding SAP item, such as invoice details. This turns Tempo into a sort of generalized business dashboard for monitoring tasks and events from many different business sources: collaboration within a business information context.

The browser interface will be familiar if you’ve ever used Facebook: it has a big panel in the center for events, with the event filters in a panel on the left, and the event actions in a panel on the right. Users can subscribe to specific event types, which automatically creates filters, or can explicitly filter by logical business groupings such as departments. Individual events can be “starred” for easy retrieval, as you would with messages in Gmail. The user’s BPM inbox is exposed in the filter panel as “My Tasks”, so that their interaction with structured business processes is seen in the same context as other information and events with which they interact. The action panel on the right allows for the user to initiate new processes, depending on their role; this is more comprehensive than the “Open a case” functionality that we saw on the iPad: this is a full BPM process instantiation based on a user input form, such as creating a new IT change request. The actions available to a user are based on their role and permissions.

Access to certain event classes can be restricted based on user and role permissions, but a user can comment on any event that they can see in their event stream. This form of collaboration is very similar to the Facebook model: you comment on someone an item that someone else posts, then are notified when anyone else adds a comment to the same event.

There’s been some nice optimization for the iPhone and iPad apps, such as one-click approvals without having to open the item, and rendering of Appian forms natively in the app. Although I’ve seen many iPad demos in the past year – it seems impossible to visit a vendor or go to a conference without seeing at least one – this offers significant value because of the deep integration to business processes and information. It’s easy to envision a mobile worker, for example, using the app to update information while at their client site, rather than filling out paper forms that need to be transcribed later. The app can directly access documents from the Appian content management system, or link to anything in a browser via a URL. It also allows for multiple user logins from the same device, which makes it good for testing but also useful in cases where a mobile device might be passed from worker to worker, such as for healthcare workers where a single device would support rotating shifts of users.

This certainly isn’t the first mobile app for BPM – you can see a few more listed at David Moser’s blog post on process apps – and the expected demand for mobile BPM will continue to drive more into this marketplace. This is, however, a very competent offering by a mainstream BPM vendor, which helps to validate the mobile BPM market in general.

This also isn’t the first BPM vendor to come out with a social media-style collaborative event stream interface (for lack of a better term), but this is a good indication of what we can expect to see as standard BPM functionality in the future.

Reprise of the Four Myths of BPM Projects

Back in June of 2009, I gave a webinar with Active Endpoints called “IT-Business Collaboration on BPM” that included some myths about BPM projects, particularly the level of involvement that can be expected from business users during the design cycle. Don’t get me wrong – there are a lot of great process discovery tools out there, and many cases where business people (really business analysts rather than end users) can design their own processes, but I’m typically involved in the sort of heavy-lifting complex business processes that just aren’t, in practice, designed by non-technical business people, and vendors aren’t really helping by insisting that IT just doesn’t have to be involved in any sort of BPM projects. This webinar, dubbed the “Four Myths” webinar became one of the most popular ones that I did with Active Endpoints

We’re updating and re-presenting this webinar tomorrow, covering the myths and some practical solutions, plus the usual live Q&A. You can sign up for tomorrow’s webinar here, or catch the replay (no registration required) on their VOSibilities blog or their iTunes podcast channel. There will also be a white paper that summarizes the topic, although I don’t think that Active Endpoints has it online yet.