process – Page 64

Wolfgang Hilpert and Thomas Vollmering on NetWeaver BPM #sapphire09

I started to get paranoid yesterday when my meeting with Wolfgang Hilpert and Thomas Vollmering was scheduled at the same time as Ginger Gatling’s session on NetWeaver BPM, then they didn’t show for the meeting – was there something they didn’t want me to know? However, it was just a scheduling glitch, and eventually we met up so that they could brief me on the current release and what’s coming later this year.

When I last had an in-depth look at the product late last year, it was in late beta; since then, it’s been through the SAP ramp-up (early ship) process, and was released for unrestricted shipment on Monday. I’ll be finishing up my review of the current release in an upcoming post, and as soon as Thomas forwards on the material that he promised to send (hint, hint), I’ll be able to post a bit more on the future directions.

The newly released version is still lacking a lot of expected BPMS functionality, but has focused on the features that SAP’s customers said that they needed the most: human-centric BPM (since there are existing products in the SAP suite that cover lower-level orchestration) and a integrated composition environment that can eventually be used for process composition across all layers: human-facing tasks, web services, and core ERP processes. Due to their Yasu acquisition, they also did direct integration between the BPM and BRM environments, although there were some rough edges there and in some of the other areas, such as handling the user interface at process steps.

In spite of the shortcomings of the first release, SAP’s vision for BPM is far-reaching, especially around the integration of events and analytics. They are taking advantage of the innovation that’s happening within the BusinessObjects group, and there’s a potential for them to create a powerful platform not just for managing processes, but for handling events, including the results of analytics at a human-facing step as a decision-support tool, and for analyzing and optimizing processes.

Marge Breya on BusinessObjects Explorer #sapphire09

A small group of bloggers had the opportunity to sit around a table with Marge Breya to expand on what we saw during the press conference on BusinessObjects Explorer. She discussed how unstructured data has being elevated to first class status within SAP, with analytics and reporting tools that can lay over unstructured as well as structured data. Part of this involves parsing structure out of unstructured data through an appropriate semantic layer.

They’re also playing with things (that she couldn’t really talk about, although some customers have access) that provide much more of an hosted Web 2.0-type of experience. They’re working on Explorer On Demand, which allows you to upload spreadsheets and other file-oriented data, then do some analysis and visualization on your own data to get an idea of how valuable tools like this are. They handed out some test drive passes for this, so I may get a chance to play around with it some time soon. I expect that many organizations won’t want their data warehouse in the cloud, but this will at least give them a chance to try it out in a no-risk environment. They’re doing this with more of their BusinessObjects platform, where there’s a free version that allows for some starter functionality, then hope for it to go viral in terms of stepping up to paid on demand or on premise versions. That’s a pretty powerful model in the consumer space, although traditional enterprises may have a more difficult time adopting technology in this manner. Considering that the higher-end of Explorer is targeted at large organizations, this could be the biggest challenge.

Breya had some interesting background on product strategy as well, especially around how SAP had traditionally been doing OLAP-based business intelligence, and BusinessObjects didn’t have much in the way of OLAP, so the acquisition produced a minimum of overlap. Polestar, on the market for a couple of years as an ad hoc query tool, was retooled into Explorer for a million or so rows of data, and Explorer Accelerated, a software and hardware bundle, that can handle billions or rows.

She went on to talk about the ties between BI and BPM, and although she couldn’t talk about anything specific, there are some interesting things coming in terms of operational BI, monitoring and characterizing processes for the purposes of process improvement, as well as invoking analytics within processes for decision support.

In response to a question about the consumerization of SAP products, she promises us “an experience that will take decisioning to the next level, involving collaboration” in something that is just entering private beta now. I’m picturing a cross between Xbox Live and Vanilla Sky, which would be cool, but I still think that there are challenges to adoption of completely new user experience paradigms. Since SAP has a wide customer base in manufacturing and other industries with low margins and the requirement for constant product innovation, this may not be as much of a challenge as it would be verticals such as financial services and insurance.

We had a discussion about the cloud versus on premise as the location for data, with the underlying theme that it’s not an all or nothing proposition: while operational data may be behind the firewall, it makes much more sense to leave third-party benchmarking data in the cloud where it can be shared and frequently updated. The new generation of BI products from any vendor can’t be restrictive in their data sources, but have to be able to aggregate information from a variety of sources both inside and outside the firewall.

Pragmatic BPM and SOA webinar

The webinar that I recorded a couple of weeks back for SearchSOA has finally made it online, although I can only find it on the SearchCIO site. You have to register for the site in order to listen to it, although it’s free.

Webinar: Dynamic BPM platforms

Clay Richardson of Forrester and Keith Swenson of Fujitsu gave a webinar this afternoon on dynamic BPM platforms. There will be a replay available; I’ll update this post with the link when I get it, or someone can add it to the comments if they get it first.

Richardson started with some fairly generic research by Forrester on business problems such as cross-functional processes and process agility, then defined a dynamic business process as one that is built for change and adaptable to the business context. There’s also a significant collaboration/social software message, where dynamic BPM requires both a high degree of collaboration as well as a high degree of information support.

As he points out, most BPM only tackles the structured parts of a process, but doesn’t interface with things such as personal reminder lists, external email and instant messaging. The entire business process does include those things; it’s just that most organizations are using manual, ad hoc methods to integrate between structured systems (including most BPM) and unstructured activities and systems. He stratifies this into three parallel types of work: ad hoc human activities, structured human activities, and system-intensive processes. Although many BPM solutions can do the latter two, many organizations use very different tools for purely system-to-system interactions than they do for processes that contain human-facing steps.

He stated that dynamic BPM is able to handle ad hoc and collaboration scenarios in the context of a more structured business process: being able to blend structured and unstructured work. This allows knowledge workers to do work on their own terms using the tools that they choose, but by doing this in the context of dynamic BPM, visibility into these ad hoc processes is maintained. In the course of providing this visibility, it also feeds back information to IT on how the processes are executed, allowing for these to potentially be structured and standardized where appropriate.

He then turned it over to Keith Swenson, who reinforced the definition of dynamic BPM as empowering users to get work done their way, specifically in cases where there is no pre-defined “best way”to complete the work. The plan is elaborated while you work, not ahead of time; he used one example of emergency fire response units, and another of a movie rollout by a production studio. In both cases, there is not a fixed process or assembly-line plan for how things should be done; they need to be able to do unpredictable things in the context of completing the work, with decisions about what to do next made by multiple people. In many cases, portions of the work is sub-tasked to others, who use their own judgment to create and execute the plan on the fly.

The predominant way that ad hoc processes are handled now is email: people send messages to assign a task to someone, but there’s not a lot of tracking of what work has been assigned to whom, and the status of that work. From a modeling standpoint, consider that this could end up looking like nested subprocesses of ad hoc tasks, where these subprocesses and tasks (and the resources to whom they are assigned) need to be created as they are identified. What we need is smart email, which allows someone to just break out of the structured process, fire off an email to someone who may not have been predefined as a resource, and have that email communication (including the responses) be visible through the standard tracking mechanisms as part of the process.

I’m not left with any sense of how this might tie into Fujitsu products (or, in fact, any other BPM products), although Swenson is enough of an independent thinker that it may not have a direct link, but be more of an educational push. He did mention something pretty vague about how they did support dynamic BPM, but it’s not clear if this is current standard product offering, future product offering, or services. They are promoting a two-day workshop for visualizing your current dynamic business processes, so this may be more related to what they can offer from a services standpoint since they also have some innovative stuff in process discovery. When you think about it, some part of dynamic BPM is really just process discovery, aimed at finding the parts of the ad hoc processes that can be turned into structured processes for a standard BPM implementation. The rest of it is about creating the linkages between the ad hoc process handling methods – such as email and IM – so that these become first class participants in a business process.

There’s a few of the smaller vendors who are creating direct interfaces with Outlook/Exchange in order to provide this sort of management of email requests and responses, including HandySoft (where, coincidentally, Richardson used to work) and ActionBase (which I reviewed last month), but the larger vendors needs to start including this sort of functionality in their BPM products as well.

BPM Centers of Excellence webinar today

Today (March 18th) at noon Eastern, I’ll be doing a live webinar on BPM centers of excellence that will become part of the Appian-sponsored BPM Basics informational site. You can sign up for the webinar here if you want to listen to it live, which will include Q&A from the audience; the version without Q&A will be available for replay on the BPM Basics site.

Webinars and podcasts

This seems to be my month for webinars and podcasts. Here’s the line-up:

I recorded a webinar for SearchSOA a few weeks ago on a pragmatic approach to using SOA and BPM together, particularly in the area of service discovery and specification. Unfortunately, I can’t find it on their site, so not sure if it’s been published yet. Keep looking.
On March 18th, I’ll be doing a live webinar on BPM centers of excellence that will become part of the Appian-sponsored BPM Basics informational site. You can sign up for the webinar here if you want to listen to it live, which will include Q&A from the audience; the version without Q&A will be available for replay on the BPM Basics site.
That same week, I’ll be recording a podcast with Savvion’s Dr. Ketabchi on BPM in a down economy. There have been a few other webinars on this topic lately, but right now it’s a very popular message and there’s lots to talk about. This will be published on ITO America, which provides broad coverage of technology issues for higher-level technical management.

The fun part of these three is that not only are they three completely different topics, they’re targeted at three different audiences: the first for developers and other technical people, the second for business and mid-level project team members, and the third at CIOs. Although doing webinars and white papers is a small part of my business, the research, analysis and writing that goes into them really helps to hone my ideas for applicability with my enterprise clients who are implementing BPM.

IBM FileNet P8 BPM V4.5

I’ve had a couple of briefings on the 4.5 release of IBM/FileNet P8 BPM, which was released in November but is likely just starting to hit customer sites so I thought that it would be good timing for a review post. As a point of disclosure, I worked for FileNet in 2000-1 and have worked with their BPM software extensively in two of my own companies including my current consulting practice, but I don’t do any work for IBM, only for their customers. That means that I am probably more familiar with their system than with any other BPMS, but they are not compensating me in any way for this post (they don’t even cover analyst/bloggers expenses to attend their user conferences, so I don’t) nor do they have any editorial control, which means that I will likely manage to say something to annoy IBM management here, as I usually do.

I’ve blogged in the past about the IBM-FileNet acquisition, specifically my comments at the time that the acquisition was announced, at an analyst briefing just after that, then a follow-up last June comparing it to the Oracle-BEA acquisition: in brief, I noted the transition in product positioning from that of a full BPMS product to document-centric BPMS so as not to compete with WebSphere Process Server. I still think that both IBM and its customers would have been better served by ripping BPM out of the P8 product line and adding it to WebSphere to round out the human-facing capabilities, producing a single BPMS product at IBM. Instead, if a customer wants both human-centric functionality and services orchestration, IBM will be in there selling them two products – each with their own modeling, execution and monitoring environments – rather than one, which is going to be a bit of a hard sell in this economy. They’re working to bring some of that together, but fundamentally it’s still two products to do what many other vendors do with one. There are a few point of integration now — the WebSphere modeler can export FileNet-compliant XPDL, and the WebSphere monitoring tools can monitor the FileNet process engine – and they’ll be doing a bit more cosmetic integration to make it more palatable, but there’s no plan for a unified execution engine. Strangely, the recent Gartner report on BPMS doesn’t both to distinguish them: it bases its analysis on the combination of WebSphere Dynamic Process Edition and FileNet Active Content Edition, which is a bit bogus (in my opinion).

That being said, the current positioning of FileNet P8 BPM is around “agile ECM”, with active content being a key differentiator. Active content, in the FileNet world, is the ability to capture content events (such as creation and versioning) and trigger activities in response, either launching new process instances in BPM, or making external calls. If you’re proficient with the FileNet BPM design tools, that means that you can create a new process, link it via a workflow subscription to the events occurring on a class of content, and have that process automatically trigger when that event occurs for a document in that class. In my world of back-office transaction processing, where there is still a lot of paper, this could be the creation of a process instance in response to a new scanned document being added to the content repository, all without writing a line of code.

There’s more to their agile message than active content, however: IBM is also bundling in a new set of BPM widgets and the IBM (Lotus) Mashup Center to allow for the much easier creation of user interfaces. This has always been a problem in the past: although the Process Designer will auto-generate a user interface for each step that allows for view and update of the parameters exposed at that step, it’s not very pretty. The options were to use the FileNet e-forms product – which required some technical fiddling to integrate – or create custom interfaces using some other development tools. Although the widgets don’t provide a fully-customizable forms interface, they do provide a way to put together configurable user screens that work well for prototyping and for some lighter-weight/tactical production applications.

I liked what I saw with the widgets, despite the limitations, since I think that it’s a move in the right direction. They use the iWidget specification, which is an open standard created by IBM and used natively in the Mashup Center, and there’s also a wrapper to turn an iWidget widget into a JSR-168 compliant portlet, with the cross-widget wiring exposed, for use in other environments such as the WebSphere portal product. The BPM widgets are built using the new REST services that wrap around the process engine Java API; you can also call the REST services directly from other application development environments. Although the widgets are referred to as “ECM widgets” in the IBM documentation, they all (with the exception of a document viewer widget) provide BPM functionality. There’s a lot more that I saw about the widgets; I might do a separate post just on that for those who are evaluating this product.

Some partners are also creating widgets for the mashup framework; I can see this as a key way for partners to add value through providing interoperable components rather than monolithic applications, and I would hope to see some of these emerging for free as companies try out this new technology.

There’s no requirement for all-or-nothing with the mashups, either: each step in the process can invoke a different UI from a different source, so that one step might have a custom application, another an e-form and another a mashup. As far as the process is concerned, that’s just what is invoked at the step to manage the user interaction, not an integral part of the process.

One issue is that WebSphere Business Space will replace Mashup Center as the mashup environment included with P8 BPM, although it’s not clear what degree of functional overlap there is, or when to use one versus the other. The Mashup Center appears to be positioned as being for prototyping and tactical situational applications, whereas Business Space is more of an enterprise portal, but it’s not clear that you couldn’t build an enterprise-strength application using the Mashup Center (unless you’re afraid that IT will laugh at you for using the words “mashup” and “enterprise” in the same sentence). Business Space supports the ECM widgets, but would require a few “minor functional changes” (IBM’s words) to get things working.

On the process modeling side, the Process Designer now has two modes: diagram mode for business analysts, and design mode for technical analysts, with user access rights determining which that a specific user can access. In diagram mode, the user draws the process map, adds the description and instructions at each step, and a description for each route between steps. Design mode is the full “classic” view, with all parameters visible, where a developer can take the description entered by the business analyst and map that into parameters, rules, assignments, deadlines and web services calls. However, the Designer still is not BPMN compliant: if you want BPMN, you can do it in Visio with a BPMN template that they provide, then import the results into the Designer, but it’s a one-way trip. They do plan to leverage some of what’s been done with BPMN in the WebSphere process modeler to bring that into the P8 BPM designer, but there’s nothing concrete to talk about yet.

There’s also some new user roles functionality built in to the designer (and runtime, obviously) that is based on the Business Process Framework, an add-on product to BPM used for creating case management processes. I suspect that we’ll see more of the useful bits of BPF integrated into the core BPM product in the coming releases, to the point where it won’t exist as a separate product, although no one at IBM said that.

Simulation is now web-based and integrated within the process designer, rather than being a separate application: one of the tabs in the design view of a process is Simulation, which allows durations for steps and weights (%) for routes to be entered. Configuration and administration is also now done within the process designer rather than in a separate configuration console.

For business rules, ILOG (a recent IBM acquisition) is being integrated into the WebSphere suite; since it provides a web services interface, it can easily be called at a step in a BPM process for adding business rules more complex than can be handled by the built-in expression engine in BPM.

The BAM product integrated into the P8 BPM product line is also now IBM: originally it was Celequest, which was acquired by Cognos, which was in turn acquired by IBM; the branding on the last set of product slides that I saw is “Cognos Now”.

IBM is starting to push Lotus Forms with BPM, although it is not yet integrated to the same degree as FileNet eForms, which can replace the user interface at a step in a process. I can’t believe that IBM will maintain two e-forms products in the long run, but they can’t really cut off FileNet eForms until they complete that integration.

Overall, FileNet’s legacy of content and process together has grown into fully-featured document-centric BPM capability. Unfortunately, they positioned themselves as pure-play BPMS just long enough to get some customers on that bandwagon, leaving those customers with some uncomfortable migration decisions in their future.

ITIL webinar

Another webinar that I managed to miss last week: Metastorm on enabling IT service management excellence through BPM. You can download a playback of the webinar here (direct link to the .wmv file).

ActionBase adds structure to email-based processes

I had a chance to meet up with ActionBase at one of the Gartner conferences last year, and recently had an in-depth demo to take a look at their new version. ActionBase focuses on the unstructured, human-centric processes that exist primarily within email today, outside of the more rigid processes codified within enterprise applications, and provides tools for adding a bit of structure while staying in the MS-Office environment. The goal is to allow users to create their own ad hoc processes without IT involvement: similar to what people are doing in email today, but with some nice hooks for assigning action items, and full tracking capabilities for the processes.

There are three key components involved:

ActionMail aggregates all items/messages related to a process as a single line item in an ActionBase folder within Outlook. This acts as a single location where a user can see work in progress and completed processes, with common visual identifiers for overdue items (red) and items with new activities (bold). Each line item can correspond to multiple actions assigned to multiple people, plus their responses, which solves the problem of collecting together all of the emails related to a specific ad hoc process.
ActionDocs provides a templated document in Word for defining actions and follow-up items, with links to the Outlook address book for assigning activities. Processes are created and modified by editing the document.
Behind the scenes, the process information is kept in a MS SQL Server database, which is used for tracking and reporting.

The paradigm is interesting: a process that consists solely of human tasks (which is what ActionBase is addressing) is really just a big to-do list, where each item on the to-do list is assigned to one or more people, and may have a start and end (due) date assigned to it.

To create a process in ActionBase, you simply create a Word document based on the ActionBase template. By default, there are sections for a few tasks (work items), and new tasks can be added using the menu items on the template toolbar directly in the Word document. Since the process is unstructured, there is no process flow or order for the tasks, although start and end dates can be specified for each task. That means that you can’t, for example, specify that task B can only start when task A is complete, or do any sort of branching or conditional logic. You can assign the tasks to anyone in your Outlook/Exchange global address list – including external addresses — and add anyone on the GAL to the distribution list to allow them to track the item even if they don’t have any tasks assigned to them.

Once you’re done filling in the blanks in the document, you publish it, which saves everything to the backend database and kicks off the process. The document is sent to everyone on the distribution list, using a link for internal recipients and an attachment for external recipients; then, on the start date for each task, the assignees are sent a notification of the start of the task. Participants in the tasks can complete, forward, reject or respond to the task, and create addition items related to it. As their responses are added, anyone on the distribution list can see what’s happening by finding the process in the Outlook ActionBase folder, opening the process, then selecting the “Word Report” view to see the underlying document populated with the current state of each task from the database. If anyone has acted on a task in a process, the process will appear bold in everyone’s ActionBase folder in Outlook; if there are tasks past their due dates, it will turn red.

For external participants, ProcessBridge allows external people to be included in ActionBase activities via email: they receive an email that has links built in for Respond/Complete/Reject responses. Since there’s some automation around handling these responses from outside Exchange, this can also be used to trigger processes based on inbound email to a shared email inbox (e.g., [email protected]), or exchange tasks and messages with other internal systems triggered by an email from that systems.

They’re also using BackFlip’s infrastructure for responding to and delivering messages to mobile participants, allowing people to act on processes via SMS messages and through a simple WAP browser. Users can identify, by topic and priority, which events to receive via their mobile device.

A new version of ActionBase to be released this quarter with better Outlook and Word integration. For example, there’s no need to create an ActionDocs document based on one of their templates; an ActionBase tab in Word 2008 allows a new action item to be created directly within any document, and viewed as an collapsible action item. That’s a big deal for many companies that have their own document templates and wouldn’t consider using ActionBase’s templates for all of their documents. They’re also considering integration with other Office applications: I see Excel as a perfect candidate for this since many people use it to organize multi-person to-do lists like this.

One key issue that I see is the need for Office 2007: many large enterprises that I work with are still on 2003, with no driving need to migrate to 2007. Although mainstream support for Office 2003 ends this year, Microsoft won’t be pulling the plug on extended support for that version until 2014.

Whenever I visit a large enterprise and take a look at their business processes, I see email being used for ad hoc processes everywhere. Some companies create their own standards for how that email is used for managing these processes, and may do an adequate job with a fair amount of manual overhead, but most of them tend to “fire and forget”, hoping that the required activities for that process will magically happen. Even when business processes are partially automated in BPM, CRM and ERP systems, there are almost always exceptions that can’t be handled adequately, and end up with items parked in those systems while someone sends off emails to try and resolve the issue. As soon as that happens, you lose the tracking capabilities and audit trail for that process until a response makes its way back into the systems.

“Human process management” solutions like ActionBase have the potential to fill in the gaps between full BPM systems and the chaos of unmanaged email-based processes. There are other collaboration tools that could fill the same purpose but have quite different functionality – even SharePoint could do a lot of this type of collaborative human process management, just not email-based – so I think that their biggest challenge will be finding the right positioning.

Update: ActionBase held a webinar last week, which I missed because of some problem with the web conferencing software (apparently I wasn’t the only one with the issue). There’s a recording of it on their website.