process – Page 63

Lombardi Blueprint update

I recently had a chance for an in-depth update on Lombardi’s Blueprint – a cloud-based process modeling tool – to see a number of the new features in the latest version. I haven’t had a chance to look at it in detail for over a year, and am impressed by the social networking tools that are built in now: huge advances in the short two years since Lombardi first launched Blueprint. The social networking tools make this more than just a Visio replacement: it’s a networking hub for people to collaborate on process discovery and design, complete with a home page that shows a feed of everything that has changed on processes that you are involved in. There’s also a place for you to bookmark your favorite processes so that you can easily jump to them or see who has modified them recently.

At a high level, creating processes hasn’t changed all that much: you can create a process using the outline view by just typing in a list of the main process activities or milestones; this creates the discovery map simultaneously on the screen, which then allows you to drag steps under the main milestone blocks to hierarchically indicate all the steps that make up that milestone. There have been a number of enhancements in specifying the details for each step however: you can assign roles or specific people as the participant, business owner or expert for that step; document the business problems that occur at that step to allow for some process analysis at later stages; create documentation for that step; and attach any documents or files to make available as reference materials for this step. Once the details are specified, the discovery map view (with the outline on the left and the block view on the right) shows the participants aligned below each milestone, and clicking on a participant shows not only where it is used in this process, but where it is used in all other processes in the repository.

At this point, we haven’t yet seen a bit of BPMN or anything vaguely resembling a flowchart: just a list of the major activities and the steps to be done in each one, along with some details about each step. It would be pretty straightforward for most business users to learn how to use this notation to do an initial sketch of a process during discovery, even if they don’t move on to the BPMN view.

Switching to the process diagram view, we see the BPMN process map corresponding to the outline view created in the discovery map view, and you can switch back and forth between them at any time. The milestones are shown as time bands, and if participants were identified for any of the steps, swimlanes are created corresponding to the participants. Each of the steps is placed in a simple sequential flow to start; you can then create gateways and any other elements directly in the process map in this view. The placement of each element is enforced by Blueprint, as well as maintaining a valid BPMN process map.

There’s also a documentation view of the process, showing all of the documentation entered in the details for any step.

Not everyone will have access to Blueprint, however, so you can also generate a PowerPoint file with all of the process details, including analysis of problem areas identified in the step details; a PDF of the process map; a Word document containing the step documentation; an Excel spreadsheet containing the process data; and a BPDM or XPDL output of the process definition. It will also soon support BPMN 2.0 exports. Process maps can also be imported from Visio; Blueprint analyzes the Visio file to identify the process maps within it, then allows the user to select the mapping to use from the Visio shapes into Blueprint element types.

There are other shared process modeling environments that do many of the same things, but the place where Blueprint really shines is in collaboration. It’s a shared whiteboard concept, so that users in different locations can work together and see the changes that each other makes interactively without waiting for one person to check the final result into a repository: an idea that is going to take hold more with the advent of technologies such as Google Wave that raise the bar for expectations of interactive content sharing. This level of interactivity will undoubtedly reduce the need for face-to-face sessions: if multiple people can view and interact simultaneously on a process design, there probably needs to be less time spent in a room together doing this on a whiteboard.There’s a (typed) chat functionality built right into the product, although most customers apparently still use conference calls while they are working together rather than the chat feature: hard to drag and drop things around on the process map while typing in chat at the same time, I suppose. Blueprint maintains a proper history of the changes to processes, and allows viewing of or reverting to previous versions.

Newly added is the ability to share processes in reviewer mode to a larger audience for review and feedback: users with review permissions (participants as opposed to authors) can view the entire process definition but can’t make modifications; they can, however, add comments on steps which are then visible to the other participants and authors. Like authors, reviewers can switch between discovery map, process diagram and documentation views, although their views are read-only, and add comments to steps in either of the first two views. Since Blueprint is hosted in the cloud, both authors and reviewers can be external to your company; however, user logins aren’t shared between Blueprint accounts but have to be created by each company in their account. It would be great if Blueprint provided authentication outside the context of each company’s account so that, for example, if I were participating in two project with different clients who were both Blueprint customer and I was also a Blueprint customer, they wouldn’t both have to create a login for me, but could reuse my existing login. Something like this is being done by Freshbooks, an online time tracking and invoicing applications, so that Freshbooks customers can easily more interact. Blueprint is providing the ability to limit access in order to meet some security standards: access to a company’s account can be limited to their own network (by IP address), and external participants can be restricted to be from specific domains.

One issue that I have with Blueprint, and have been vocal about in the past, is the lack of a non-US hosting option. Many organizations, including all of my Canadian banking customers, will not host anything on US-based servers due to the differences in privacy laws; even though, arguably, Blueprint doesn’t contain any customer information since it’s just the process models, not the executable processes, most of them are pretty conservative. I know that many European organizations have the same issues, and I think that Lombardi needs to address this issue if they want to break into non-US markets in a significant way. Understandably, Lombardi has resisted allowing Blueprint to be installed inside corporate firewalls since they lose control of the upgrade cycle, but many companies will accept hosting within their own country (or group of countries, in the case of the EU) even if it’s not on their own gear.

Using a cloud-based solution for process modeling makes a lot of sense in many situations: nothing to install on your own systems and low-cost subscription pricing, plus the ability to collaborate with people outside your organization. However, as easy as it is to export from Blueprint into a BPMS, there’s still the issue of round-tripping if you’re trying to model mostly automated processes.

Gartner webinar on using BPM to survive, thrive and capitalize

Michele Cantara and Janelle Hill hosted a webinar this morning, which will be repeated at 11am ET (I was on the 8am ET version) – not sure if that will be just the recording of this morning’s session, or if they’ll do it all over again.

Cantara started talking about the sorry state of the economy, complete with a picture of an ax-wielding executioner, and how many companies are laying off staff to attempt to balance their budgets. Their premise is that BPM can turn the ax-man into a surgeon: you’ll still have cuts, but they’re more precise and less likely to damage the core of your organization. Pretty grim start, regardless.

They show some quotes from customers, such as “the current economic climate is BPM nirvana” and “BPM is not a luxury”, pointing out that companies are recognizing that BPM can provide the means to do business more efficiently to survive the downturn, and even to grow and transform the organization by being able to outperform their competition. In other words, if a bear (market) is chasing you, you don’t have to outrun the bear, you only have to outrun the person running beside you.

Hill then took over to discuss some of the case studies of companies using BPM to avoid costs and increase the bottom line in order to survive the downturn. These are typical of the types of business cases used to justify implementing a BPMS within conservative organizations in terms of visibility and control over processes, although I found one interesting: a financial services company used process modelling in order to prove business cases, with the result that 33% of projects were not funded since they couldn’t prove their business case. Effectively, this provided a more data-driven approach to setting priorities on project funding, rather than the more common emotional and political decision-making that occurs, but through process modelling rather than automation using a BPMS.

There can be challenges to implementing BPM (as we all know so well), so she recommends a few things to ensure that your BPM efforts are successful: internal communication and education to address the cultural and political issues; establishing a center of excellence; and implementing some quick wins to give some street cred to BPM within your organization.

Cantara came back to discuss growth opportunities, rather than just survival: for organizations that are in reasonably good shape in spite of the economy, BPM can allow them to grow and gain relative market share if their competition is not able to do the same. One example was a hospital that increased surgical capacity by 20%, simply by manually modelling their processes and fixing the gaps and redundancies – like the earlier case of using modelling to set funding priorities, this project wasn’t about deploying a BPMS and automating processes, but just having a better understanding of their current processes so that they can optimize them.

In some cases, cost savings and growth opportunities are just two sides of the same coin, like a pharmaceutical company that used a BPMS to optimize their clinical trials process and grant payments process: this lowered costs per process by reducing the resources required for each, but this in turn increased capacity also allowed them to handle 2.5x more projects than before. A weaker company would have just used the cost saving opportunity to cut headcount and resource usage, but if in a stable financial position, these cost savings allow for revenue growth without headcount increases instead.

In fact, rather than two sides of a coin, cost savings and growth opportunities could be considered two points on a spectrum of benefits. If you push further along the spectrum, as Hill returned to tell us about, you start to approach business transformation, where companies gain market share by offering completely new processes that were identified or facilitated by BPM, such as a rail transport company that leveraged RFID-driven BPM to avoid derailments through early detection of overheating problems on the rail cars.

Hill finished up by reinforcing that BPM is a management discipline, not just technology, as shown by a few of their case studies that had nothing to do with automating processes with a BPMS, but really were about process modelling and optimization – the key is to tie it to corporate performance and continuous improvement, not view BPM as a one-off project. A center of excellence (or competency center, as Gartner calls it) is a necessity, as are explicit process models and metrics that can be shared between business and IT.

If you miss the later broadcast today, Gartner provides their webinars for replay. Worth the time to watch it.

Social processes #e2open

For the last session of the day – and what will be the last session of the Enterprise 2.0 conference for me – I shifted over to the Enterprise2Open unconference for a discussion on social processes with Mark Masterson. As part of his job developing software for insurance companies, he put together a mockup of a social front end for an insurance claims adjuster’s workplace. The home page is dominated by the activity stream, which includes links to tasks, blog posts, documents and other systems that are relevant to this person’s work. It’s not just the usual social network stuff; it also includes information from enterprise systems such as ECM and BPM systems. There would be rules to set priorities on what’s in any given user’s activity stream.

There’s also more purely social features, such as a personal profile with the ability to provide status updates and indicate presence.

When the user clicks on an item in the activity stream representing an enterprise BPM task, the information from the task and its process is pulled into this environment, rather than launching the BPM system’s user interface; this becomes a unified desktop for the user, rather than just a launchpad. Information about a claim could include external data that is mashed up into the interface, such as Google maps. The right panel of the interface changes so that it always shows information to support what is happening in the main pane; when a BPM work item is open, for example, the right panel includes links to people and content that might be related to that specific case. It also includes a tag cloud that can be used to click through to information across the enterprise about that subject; for example, clicking on the “fraudulent injury” tag showed a list of people who are related in some way (that is, they are a resource with some experience) to fraudulent injury claims, and what their role in the process might be.

Masterson presents this as a vision for what he thinks is the best type of interface to present to all the participants in the claims process: no jumping around between multiple applications, no green screens, and the relationships between information from multiple systems combined in ways that make sense relative to the adjuster’s work. I see some of this type of functionality being built into some of the more modern BPM systems, but that’s not what a lot of insurance companies are using: they’re using out-of-date versions of FileNet and other more traditional BPM systems.

As with most unconference sessions, this is a small bit of presentation and a lot of audience discussion. Some in the group made a distinction between collaboration and social, and didn’t see the sort of collaboration within business processes that happens within organizations as social. Masterson (and I) disagree: whenever you deviate from the structured business process in a process such as claims adjudication, it’s an inherently social activity since people are relying on their tacit knowledge about what other people can bring to the process, and using (often) ad hoc methods for bringing them into the flow. I think that they are confusing “social” with “public”, and have been drinking too much of the E2.0 Kool-Aid that’s being passed around at this conference.

The real unique thing here is not putting a pretty front end on enterprise systems (although that’s a nice feature, it’s just a relatively well-understood integration issue); it’s the home page as a unified view of a user’s work environment – I hesitate to call it a unified inbox since it’s not just about delivering tasks or messages to be acted upon – and the information relationships that allow the right panel to be populated with relevant information and links for the specific work context. As opposed to tagging of process instances to use as future templates for exception cases, an idea that I’ve been knocking about for a while, this goes beyond that to collect information that might be related to a process instance from a variety of sources including blogs and wikis. Consider that the claims adjuster is handling a specific exception case, and someone else did a very similar case previously and documented their actions in a procedures wiki: this sort of environment could bring in information about the previous case when the user is processing the current case. The information in the right panel is replacing the user’s memory and the line of sticky notes that they have on the edge of their screen.

There’s some cool ideas in here, and I hope that it develops into a working prototype so that they can get this in front of actual users and refine the ideas. There’s a lot that’s broken in how enterprise processes work, even those that have been analyzed and automated with BPM, and bringing in contextual information to help with a specific work step (especially case management steps such as claims adjudication) is going to improve things at least a little bit.

Webinar on expanding a BPM project to an enterprise program

I’m presenting a webinar today at noon Eastern on how to expand a BPM project into an enterprise BPM project, as part of the BPM Basics series.

You can register here, or check the BPM Basics site later for a replay.

Intelligent BPM for the Enterprise

I listened in on a webinar today that included six different BPM vendors discussing intelligent BPM for the enterprise. It’s a bit unusual to have several different vendors on the same presentation; here’s who was there:

Jeremy Westerman, TIBCO
Brandon Baxter, Lombardi
Russell Keziere, Pegasystems
Miko Matsumura, Software AG
Simon Clephan, IBM
Ryan Licari, IDS Scheer

Not surprisingly, this was structured as six separate mini-presentations on a similar theme.

Westerman started with an overview of TIBCO’s product suite, then drilled in on their BPMS and its functionality. Unfortunately, except for a brief look at one of their well-publicized case studies, nothing more interesting than a product brochure, although it is good to see them playing up the role of their Spotfire acquisition as a much more capable tool than standard business activity monitoring. It was also 21.5 minutes into the webinar by the time that he finished, then they took Q&A on his presentation for another 11 minutes. The whole thing has a “canned” air to it, and I suspect that it was all pre-recorded including the Q&A, without the vendors ever being on the line together.

Baxter’s presentation was better, since it focused more on what you want to do with a BPMS rather than just listing the capabilities of their product, but each of the important features that he highlighted are well-served by Lombardi – no big surprise. 🙂

At 45 minutes into the presentation, we’re still on the 2nd of six vendor presentations, and so far the whole thing has been fairly content-free if you strip out the part where they just talk about what their product does. I viewed the slides for the remaining presentations and saw more of the same, so I bailed.

It’s probably pretty clear that I don’t recommend watching this webinar unless you want to hear a sales pitch on six different products. Since I was writing this as I went along, however, you get to hear about it. I really hope that the vendors didn’t pay a lot to be on this webinar, because I can’t believe that it will bring a lot of value to them.

Webinar on business-IT collaboration in BPM

I’ll be speaking on a webinar this Wednesday at noon Eastern time about how business and IT really need to work together in order to make BPM projects happen: this isn’t truly end-user computing in anything more than simple human-centric workflows. It’s sponsored by Active Endpoints, and their product manager will also be talking a bit about their ActiveVOS product.

You can register here.

Beyond model-driven development in BPM

Neil Ward-Dutton gave a webinar this morning about delivering on the promise of BPM: how we have to get past the vision of BPM as model-driven development for rapid application delivery, and focus on the bigger picture of enabling continuous process improvement through technology use. There are a lot of challenges when you move past departmental solutions and start rolling out BPM company-wide: you need to scale communication, collaboration, change management and governance to match your deployment.

He started with the key drivers for large-scale business process improvement: globalization, such that your customers, partners and competition can come from anywhere; transparency in terms of regulations and open competition; and smart, connected markets where you need to engage your customers in the online world. Both business and IT recognize the need for flexibility, innovation, value and differentiation in order to exist in this changing world. BPM is important to this because it’s not just about model-driven development, and about building applications faster: it’s about creating a better way to manage your business and its key processes.

It’s this combination of management philosophy, efficiency optimization methods and technology that makes it powerful, and allows you to improve operational efficiency, support innovation, and enjoy flexibility in your business model. Process also creates a common language for business and IT to collaborate, and we’re seeing that reflected in the BPM tools that allow business and IT to each have their own perspective on a shared process model. He made an excellent point that just using a process-focused toolset doesn’t give you a true agile process improvement environment: it just gives you a fast waterfall method. You really need to have model-driven process management in order to have that unbroken cycle of exploring/measuring, defining and executing/monitoring your processes.

I loved the phrase on one of his slides on scaling communication and collaboration – “You can’t scale a BPM initiative if you rely on a small ‘priesthood’ to carry out Six Sigma ceremonies” – with his point being that you have to have the culture of process innovation exist throughout your organization. He also pointed out that you have to be able to manage process model assets effectively in order to be able to locate and reuse models as required: something that requires a proper model repository, not a collection of files out on a shared network drive somewhere.

We also heard from Brandon Baxter of Lombardi (who sponsored the webinar) about how they address model-driven development in Teamworks, where all authors work in a single shared environment. In addition to providing tools for both business analysts and IT, they provide the ability to have “playbacks” to show the current state of the process to people who aren’t involved directly in the process modeling. He described a situation where they took a huge requirements document and a tsunami of Visio diagrams from a client, did an initial version in Teamworks, then did a playback to the group that provided the requirements: not surprisingly, the process wasn’t at all what they wanted, even though it was what they asked for. I see this all the time with clients, and push for an early prototype/playback as soon as possible in order to validate the requirements and process flows, but sometimes it’s hard for them to believe that all those requirements that they spent time gathering, writing and approving aren’t really the best way to go about developing their processes.

He also spent some time talking about their asset repository; although I haven’t done an in-depth review of Teamworks for a while, I recall that it’s very robust. Maybe I’m so steeped in the concepts of the value of content management that management of process assets seems like a no-brainer to me: any business content (including process models) that has any value should be in some sort of controlled environment that allows it to be secured (if necessary), versioned, and easily found and reused.

There was a good Q&A at the end, including some on executable versus non-executable models, and the value of importing non-executable models into a BPMS. Interchange formats for exchanging models between pure modeling tools and executable BPM tools are necessary, but there a whole lot of the process that will likely not be imported since it’s not executable, as well as a lot of enrichment that needs to be done to the processes once they’re in the BPMS. Due to both of these factors, round-tripping often is not possible between the modeling and execution environments. I had a conversation with a customer on exactly this issue yesterday; to those who haven’t worked with these systems, it’s hard to grasp why you can’t just round-trip the models (answer: the modeling environment may not support the execution enrichment) or why you would ever need to change a model in the execution environment rather than do it in the modeling environment and re-import (answer: agility).

The webinar was at a fairly basic level, but provided some great information for those who are still new to BPM. In a survey taken during the webinar, it looked as if a majority of the people were either gathering information or just getting started. Baxter’s part was mostly unique to Lombardi’s product, although many of the other BPM products out there have a similar set of features.

I accessed the live version of the webinar here, but I’m not sure if the replay will be there as well.

BPM Acronyms

I had a request from a reader for a list explaining the various acronyms that I use in these blog posts, and around BPM in general. I’m sure that there are several lists like this, but I’ve pulled together a starting list and have opened it up by creating it in a Google spreadsheet that anyone can edit.

Please go ahead and edit the Google spreadsheet to add your own here, or to make any corrections to the list. I reserve the right to edit or delete any inappropriate entries.

Workflow and BPM Open Forum #sapphire09

It’s the last session of the day – and for me, for the conference – and I’m attending the open forum on workflow and BPM hosted by a number of people from inside and outside SAP with experience in different workflow and BPM areas. The format was 100% audience Q&A, and the focus was really on the SAP Business Workflow within the core ERP system, not NetWeaver BPM; this isn’t completely surprising considering that BPM just went into unrestricted release this week, so there’s probably not enough of it in the wild to generate much of a discussion on it.

There was an interesting discussion on what types of processes and applications lend themselves to being “workflowed” – time-sensitive (deadline monitoring), review and approval, audit and control requirements – which was not specific to the workflow/BPM platform.

Unfortunately, not enough content for me, since BW is too buried within the ERP to be of interest to me, and I ducked out early.