Category: process

business process management

Architecture & Process: Robert Shapiro

I met Robert Shapiro years ago, when I worked for FileNet and he was part of the impressive brain trust at Meta Software, but now he’s with Global 360 and here to talk to us about BPM and workforce management, which focuses on using analytics, simulation tools and optimization techniques together with a workforce scheduler.

He started with a quick overview of simulation in a BPMS environment, where a discrete event simulation is run based on scenarios that include the following:

  • A set of processes to be simulated
  • Incoming work (arrivals), both actual (from a BPMS or other operational system) and forecast
  • Resources, roles and shifts, including human, equipment and technology resources
  • Activity details, including the duration of each activity (likely a distribution) and the probability of each decision path.

The output of the simulation will show the staff requirements by role and time period, staff and equipment utilization, cycle times and SLAs, unprocessed work and bottlenecks, work arrival profile, and an activity summary.

He then went on to discuss workforce management schedulers, which is used to assign detailed schedules to staff within an organization based on the work load and the resource characteristics (usually from an HR management system). Note that I’m not talking about assigning work within a BPMS here; this is more general scheduling technology for creating a schedule for each resource while trying to precisely match the work load. Factors such as holidays, vacation, union rules and other factors that determine who may do what are all taken into account.

One of the key inputs into a workforce scheduler, however, is exactly what’s output from a process simulator: workload demand on a time basis. By working with these technologies together, it’s possible to come up an optimal workforce size and schedule as follows:

  • Gather analytics from a BPMS on work arrival patterns, resource utilization, work in progress and activity loads in order to extract workload demand (staff requirements by role and time period) for input to the scheduler.
  • Using the actual workload demand data and other data on individual staff characteristics, generate a best-fit schedule in the scheduler that matches workload and staff, minimizing under and overstaffing.
  • Feed the best-fit resource schedule back into the process simulator, and create a scenario based on this schedule and the actual analytics from the BPMS. The simulation can create an updated version of the workload demand and the effect of the new workforce assignment.
  • The workload demand generated by the simulator is fed back into the scheduler, which generates a new best-fit resource schedule.
  • Rinse and repeat (or rather, simulate and schedule) until no further optimization is possible.

This approach is most suited to well-structured business processes with repeatable patterns in work item arrivals, and a large total resource pool — Shapiro has seen 10-20% reduction in staff costs when these techniques are applied. A bit of scary old-style BPR fears here about cutting jobs, but that’s the reality in many industries.

Architecture & Process: Michael zur Muehlen

I always like hearing Michael zur Muehlen presenting: he’s both knowledgeable and amusing, and I’m sure that his students at Stevens Institute of Technology must learn a lot from him. Today, he discussed what every enterprise architect needs to know about BPM, much of which was focused on process discovery because of the link between architecture and developing models.

He looked at two of the common problems problems in process discovery:

  • Process confabulation, where a person being interviewed about the existing business process “makes up” how the process works, not through any bad intentions but because they don’t understand parts of it and are a bit intimidated by the presence of a consultant or business analyst asking the questions. (This, by the way, is why I almost always use job shadowing for current process discovery, rather than interviews)
  • Paper bias, where the automated process ends up mimicking the paper process since it’s difficult for the participants to envision how a process could change if paper were no longer a constraint.

There are a couple of different philosophies about process modeling, from only modeling processes that include 80% or more of the work in a department, to modeling everything in an enterprise process architecture. There are enterprise process architecture frameworks (what Michael calls an enterprise process map, or EPM) used by some organizations, where they have a template of the major processes within their company that can be easily applied to subsidiaries and departments. Not only does an EPM layout the major categories of processes, it highlights the integration points with external processes. There are also some industry-specific process reference models that can be used in some cases, rather than developing one specifically for an organization.

Within a process architecture, there are multiple levels of granularity or abstraction, just as in any more generalized enterprise architecture. One organization uses 6 levels: business activities, process groupings, core processes, business process flows, operational process flows, and detailed process flows. The top three levels are focused on “what”, whereas the lower three levels are focused on “how”, and there are defined techniques for refining models from one level to another. Hence an enterprise process architecture includes the enterprise process map (defining the major process categories) and the set of process levels (created for each major process).

As with any other type of enterprise architecture, an enterprise process architecture allows for easier collaboration between business and IT because it provides a common framework and syntax for discussions, and becomes a decision-making framework particularly at the lower levels that discuss specific technology implementations.

He went on to talk about SOA and some of the obstacles that we’re seeing. He made a very funny analogy with today’s complex home theater systems: the back of the device (with all the input/output interfaces) is like what the developer sees; the front of the device (with input selection functions) is like what the architect sees; and the remote control with single-button control to set all of the appropriate settings to watch TiVO is what the end user actually needs.

Keep in mind that customers don’t care about your processes, they care about the value that those processes provide to them. Having processes streamlined, automated, agile and encapsulated as services allows you to offer innovative services quickly, since processes can be mashed up with other services in a variety of ways to provide value to customers. The final takeaway points:

  • Technology enables process change
  • Processes define services
  • Core processes become commodities
  • Efficient process management crease room for problem solving
  • Industrialized processes enable innovation

As always, you’ll be able to find Michael’s slides on SlideShare.

TIBCO seminar slides

If you were interested in the TIBCO seminar that I attended last week, you can download Paul Brown’s slides (PDF, no registration required). I particularly like his graphics showing the current model for today’s business processes with EAI and ETL tying things together (slides 6-7), then the slides showing how SOA and BPM refine that structure (slides 8, 12,13, 14 and 15).

BPM/SOA events calendar reminder

As you can guess from my previous post, we’re in the middle of prime conference season, as everyone tries to get these in before the summer. That results in a lot of potential scheduling conflicts: today, I had a request to speak at a conference during a time that I’m already committed to another conference, which unfortunately I had to decline.

Although not a perfect solution, I created a public Google calendar last year in response to a very similar set of circumstances, and several other people are authors on the calendar including Todd Biske, who adds most of the SOA events. It’s already being used by some event organizers to check for potential conflicts, as well as serving as a resource for attendees to locate event information. I have it embedded on this page, but you can also access it directly, add it to your Google Calendars, or subscribe to the RSS feed.

This is not, of course, my personal calendar: if I attended every event on here, I would be both superhuman and divorced.

If you’re organizing an event, you might want to check the calendar for conflicts before selecting the date, then get your event posted on here by contacting me with the details or a request to become an author on the calendar.

If you’re looking for an event, subscribe to the calendar in Google Calendar, then use the "Search My Calendars" function there to locate a specific event.

BPM and business rules webinar

This fall, I’ll be back at the Business Rules Forum to make a presentation on business rules and BPM, but next week you can catch me online on a Business Rules Forum webinar speaking on the same subject:

Process improvement is a top priority for executives today, but business process management (BPM) alone doesn’t provide the whole answer. Although BPM does enable process improvement, it often doesn’t provide sufficient agility for today’s business processes.

To build for change, it is necessary to integrate business rules with BPM. This integration allows you to manage the decisions within your business processes, and easily modify those rules without recoding or changing the business processes.

In this webinar, you’ll learn about the business process management lifecycle, and how business rules can be integrated within it to greatly improve process agility. It also discusses how you can apply business rules consistently across multiple business processes and other applications.

Regular readers know that I’m a big fan of mixing business rules and BPM for maximum agility in your processes, and this webinar is an introduction to why you would want to do that, and how it works.

links for 2008-04-11

  • Rick Steves’ Europe: Audio Walking Tours
    Free audio tours and maps for Rome, Florence and Venice. Also available through iTunes.
    (tags: travel)
  • Labour movement | Economist.com
    Free article from the Economist about working nomadically, as many of us do, without a specific place of business. Great look at the advantages and techniques as well as the drawbacks.
    (tags: productivity)

TIBCO seminar: Achieving Success with BPM and SOA

TIBCO is holding a series of seminars in various cities, and today they’re in Toronto, where I happen to be at home for a few weeks. Amazingly, there’s free wifi in the Park Hyatt meeting rooms, something that I never expected

We had a welcome from the regional VP, Craig Byar, and an overview by Rourke McNamara of SOA product marketing, but the key speaker was Paul Brown from the Global Architecture group. Actually, McNamara made a great point in his short presentation: organizations with an identified BPM center of excellence (CoE) reported five times greater ROI over those with no CoE or dedicated process team.

Today’s business processes involve many systems, and we’ve used EAI and ETL in the past in order to tie these systems together, but we’ve created a fragile mess of our systems and lost the focus on the business process. It’s hard to . SOA and BPM refine the traditional 3-tier layer of presentation, business logic and data by splitting the business logic layer into processes and services: effectively, BPM and SOA. The service layer can further be split into service operations (the actual functionality of the service) and service access mediation (finding the right service and authenticating access). He also splits the process layer can be split into hard-wired processes (the processes in legacy systems that can’t be changed, or unchangeable high-volume processes such as credit card processing), orchestrated processes (integration-centric processes facilitated by BPEL) and managed processes (BPM), although I’m not sure that I agree on the distinction between the latter two.

We need to separate processes from presentation; too often in the past we’ve embedded processes right in the presentation layer, and since we deliver functionality now through multiple presentation channels (web, desktop application, mobile, web service), the process needs to be in the layer below presentation so that a consistent business process is executed regardless of the presentation channel.

We have a disconnect between business and IT when it comes to developing new systems, and we need to first focus on business processes — the source of business value — to see how they bind together people and systems. There’s an expectation that systems will be developed faster, and this type of splitting of presentation, processes and services helps to facilitate that. However, there needs to be overall architectural guidance and governance for any development project so that things fit together: an architectural review of bot the business process and the systems somewhere between initial requirements and development. The challenge that I see in this model, however, is not to fall back into old-style waterfall development: instituting a requirements-architectural review-development cycle can tend to make the development process less iterative and agile.

There are three key leadership roles in any BPM project, immediately below the business executive sponsor: the project manager, the business process analyst/architect, and the systems architect. I have to say this is true of any business-facing development project, although the business process analyst/architect will be replaced with the particular application-specific analyst/architect role. Brown equates the CoE for a specific technology or application such as BPM, and an overall enterprise architecture team in terms of the mentoring and governance role that they provide. He had a number of case studies of BPM and SOA projects that showed significant ROI, with a BPM/SOA CoE being a key part of each of them.

We all ended up with a copy of Brown’s first book, Succeeding with SOA, and apparently I’ll be getting a copy of his hot-off-the-press second book, Implementing SOA, at TUCON later this month.

We had a quick demo of TIBCO’s process modeling environment, showing the different usages by a business analyst versus IT.

Lombardi analyst update

On April 2nd, Lombardi held their second analyst update by teleconference; I found the first one back in January to be informative, and obviously Lombardi had sufficient positive feedback from it to continue. Strangely enough, we were instructed to embargo information about the new Blueprint until today, although the Blueprint team blogged about it on the weekend.

Phil Gilbert started out with a high-level corporate update, including their growth — both new hires and through their channel — and some of the new sales where they continue to compete successfully against larger vendors. However, most of the information was about their products and services.

Blueprint, their SaaS process discovery tool, now has 2,400 customer accounts (averaging 5 users per account) in 88 countries. A major update was just released, where they’ve moved on from just business mapping to a more complete BPMN modeler. Later this year, they’ll be improving the wiki-style documentation capabilities in the process repository, and at the end of this year or early next year, they’ll be moving some of Teamworks’ performance analysis tools — process simulation and executive dashboards — into Blueprint. Phil tried to counter the fears of companies not wanting to keep key business information in a hosted environment outside the firewall, but I know that until Blueprint can be hosted outside the US, where privacy laws are not well-aligned with many other countries such as Canada, a lot of my customers wouldn’t even consider it. I asked Phil if they planned to host outside of the US, and he said “probably in 2009” but indicated that it would be based on customer demand. The only other analyst on the call who seemed concerned about this — especially when it includes passing back operational data to the modeling environment for simulation — was Neil Ward-Dutton, who was the only other person who wasn’t US-based.

blueprint-link-to-external-subprocess_2398636604_o

We had a demo of the new version of Blueprint, which includes the ability to reuse processes across Blueprint projects as linked subprocesses: a significant architectural improvement. The new diagramming capabilities include in-line embedded subprocesses that can be expanded and collapsed in place (nice!), the ability to easily convert a single step to a subprocess, and backward looping. It also includes a Visio importer, although not in the free version. In other words, this has clearly moved beyond the “toy” label that many other vendors have been applying to Blueprint, and appears to be a fairly full-featured process modeling tool now.

blueprint-inline-expanded-subprocess_2397806393_o

They’ll continue with their current Blueprint pricing model that has a free version for a single user and a limited number of processes in order to try it out, then subscription pricing of $50/user/month for the professional version, which includes the Visio importer and Teamworks integration.

The other major announcement is about three packages of services that Lombardi will be offering, all of which involve working closely with the customer and using Blueprint to document the processes:

  • Process inventory, a 3-week engagement that includes a full inventory of level 1 “as-is” processes within an organization, identification of 30+ key business KPIs and SLAs, and a report of process improvement opportunities and roadmap. Expected price is $40k.
  • Process assessment, a 2-day engagement to assess a single process: ranking the problems and opportunities, level 1 and 2 “as-is” process maps, and identification of 5-10 key process KPIs and SLAs. Expected price is $15k.
  • Process analysis, a 2-week engagement that follows on from the process assessment with a full analysis of a process by adding detailed ranking of process problems and opportunities, level 1 and 2 “as-is” and “to-be” process maps, the identification of 10-20 key process KPIs and SLAs, and an estimated potential ROI analysis. Expected price is $40k.

The idea is that a customer would have the process inventory done to take a look at all of their business processes and select one or two critical ones, then have the assessment and analysis done for each of those critical processes.

These service packages are available now worldwide, and are working to train their partners to provide these services, although they don’t yet have any partners who can deliver the entire set of packages.

State of the BPM Market webinar

A tough decision on webinars today: AIIM was running one on Enterprise 2.0 (which I hope will be available for replay), but ebizQ was having one at the same time discussing the State of the BPM Market, featuring Maureen Fleming of IDC and Carilu Dietrich of BEA. I worked with Carilu to author their recently released State of the Market report on BPM, and it’s great to see some of that research and analysis presented, as well as the results of their customer survey last year and some examples from their customer base.