Category: process

business process management

Gartner BPM: Getting Started with BPM – Elise Olding

I saw Elise Olding speak at the September conference together with Bill Rosser, and I wasn’t completely impressed, but I think that she was fairly new to Gartner so wanted to take a second look. She’s focusing on three issues in this presentation:

  • How should users assess organizational readiness?
  • How should you initiate BPM and what does a plan for getting started look like?
  • What are the critical success factors to long-term success with BPM?

She breezed pretty quickly past the business process maturity model — again, I thought that Gartner would be focusing more on this — but covered some great points on the importance of corporate culture and change management when implementing BPM: exactly the things that many companies ignore, especially if BPM is being pushed by IT rather than pulled by the business. She makes the point that many factors required for BPM success don’t come naturally to many organizations, and discussed three enterprise personality profiles that determine the approach and goals:

  • Aggressives have an imperative to stay ahead of the pack; they’re trying to seize advantage.
  • Moderates have an imperative to get leverage over their direct competitors; they’re seeking parity in the marketplace.
  • Conservatives have an imperative to catch up with the bulk of the competitive pack; they’re trying to reduce pain and (although she didn’t state this explicitly) probably just stay alive.

She went through the different project roles and the skills associated with those roles: executive sponsor, business process improvement director, business process improvement project lead, design team, subject matter experts, and business process analyst. She drilled in specifically on the executive sponsor role and how important it is to have the right fit: an involved decision-maker with the right motivation and influence across the enterprise.

Next up were the steps for initiating a BPM  project: determining objectives (e.g., agility, compliance), understanding and defining critical processes (e.g., delivering products and services), determining the initial organizational model (e.g., reporting structure for process-specific functions), implementing a “getting started” checklist (14 key project activities that she identifies, e.g., develop business case), and documenting and using the BPM plan (actually just normal project plan/management). She spent quite a bit of time on these five points, and provided a lot of valuable detail and examples; this isn’t rocket science, but it’s good planning strategy that doesn’t add a lot of overhead.

She stressed some key points that apply to any type of IT project, not just BPM:

  • Focus on the right methodology first before selecting even the technology class, much less a particular vendor or tool
  • Projects must be compelling and tied to business strategy, and be prepared to go back at the end and see if the promised benefits were actually achieved
  • Pick the first project carefully: a success here will pave the way for later projects
  • Assign the right resources at the right time, including maintaining continuity of key resources throughout the project
  • Establish governance, but start out with a light touch and add more rigor later

As I mentioned in my review of her previous presentation, her background seems to be focused on strategic IT planning, so that many of her comments are applicable to other technologies, but she’s done a good job of moving from a generic IT strategy to a mostly BPM-focused strategy. She’s really talking about business architecture in this presentation, where BPM is just one of the methodologies and tools that might be used as part of business architecture — she stated explicitly that enterprise architecture is the context for BPM, a view that I’ve been discussing with my clients for some time. Unfortunately, many EA efforts are really more information architecture groups within IT, and they mostly ignore business architecture and other “soft” parts of the architecture.

There was a question about how to reconcile business analysts in both business and IT reporting areas; unfortunately, I think that she misunderstood this as how to reconcile business analysts in business and system analysts in IT, which is a communication issue rather than an organizational issue. I often see the business analyst title used for people in both IT and business, and my feeling is that business analysts belong in the business, although business process analysts should have at least dotted-line reporting to a BPM center of excellence if one exists. I’d love to hear any comments from readers on what they’ve experienced here with where business (process) analysts report and what works best.

Another question was about the role of the executive sponsor, and she had some good comments on how to manage your executive sponsor: establish a service level agreement with them, where they agree to four hours each week of effort, and agree to a specific timeline for responding to requests for decisions. A recommendation of hers, which would be difficult for a lot of people, is to document in the project reports if the executive sponsor is not meeting their obligations.

Gartner BPM opening keynote: Janelle Hill

I’m here in Vegas for the Gartner’s 5th BPM summit, and I have absolutely no complaints about the wifi. 🙂 They’re reporting about 1000 attendees here (I’m not sure if that includes Gartner and vendors), and I’m sure that those of us who attend these religiously are hoping that this is not a complete replay of the September show in Orlando.

After a brief introduction by Michele Cantera, Janelle Hill gave us Gartner’s big picture view of BPM, which will be covered in detail in other sessions throughout the conference.  Hill seems to be hitting her stride as Gartner’s face of BPM since Jim Sinur left almost a year ago. She started with the now-familiar view of process improvement over the ages, from Deming and Taylorism through TQM, BPR, Six Sigma and a variety of other methodologies and tools since the 1920’s. This has changed from a focus on scientific management, to computerized process flow, to package applications as best practice, to flexible and adaptive process.

Her view of how BPM might change with any coming recession is the same as most that I’ve heard (and agree with): BPM is likely to increase, not decrease, in tough economic times since it helps organizations to run their businesses more effectively and efficiently.

This talk is definitely a rework of her keynote from the last show (even the last two shows); check that out in case I miss anything. As she did then, she focuses on how BPM — both the management discipline and the technology — can support and encourage innovation within an organization. There is a focus on people within the processes, and how to enhance people’s efforts within a process, not just look for ways to automate the human activities: what Gartner is referring to as “the process of me” (seriously). This is key to innovation in business processes; although she doesn’t use the term “emergent applications”, that’s really what she’s talking about: providing process participants with the experience and tools that allows them to express some creativity about how to get the job done better.

She also discussed the impact of compliance and regulations on processes, requiring greater agility and greater visibility, particularly when dealing with regulatory bodies in multiple countries.

We saw a familiar chart showing how although productivity and efficiency is typically the greatest perceived value of BPM today, that will shift to visibility being the most important benefit by 2012, and innovation being the most important benefit by 2017. That doesn’t mean that productivity and efficiency become less useful, but a baseline expectation will be established for these benefits and they will no longer become the most important thing that organizations get from their process management.

Hill changed tack to talk about why BPM technology matters, and the decoupling of process models from the underlying technology into a model-driven architecture. These explicit process models allow business professionals (usually a trained business analyst, but still someone on the business side) to make changes to the process, providing improved immediacy in linking needs to the executing processes, and providing better visibility into the process to see if the changes to the process are actually improving it. This is the driver for a complete paradigm shift, where the business team now owns the process modelling part of the implementation, and IT adds to those models to provide the necessary technical linkages but doesn’t redo the processes in some other tool: the process that the business modelled is what actually runs. By establishing KPIs on the processes, further process improvements can be tracked against those KPIs, and services can be developed to help meet those KPIs within the process context.

Driving to a model-driven architecture means that processes have to be pulled out of the packaged enterprise applications, where processes have been implicit within the applications themselves. The packaged application vendors are starting to expose their functionality as services, and some are even rolling their own BPM as well as allowing other BPM suites to call their services as part of a larger process orchestration. These enterprise vendors, plus the middleware vendors and the BPM pure plays, are all fighting for turf in the current BPMS space.

BPM involves more than just technology: it takes leaders with vision, disciplined culture, BPM expertise and standards as well as the tools. She focused on how technology leaders (e.g., CIOs) need to contribute to the BPM vision and efforts in order to make it strategic, but I also feel that the business leaders need to make the same level of contribution: bringing the B back into BPM.

Gartner has some standard material that they’ve been using for a year or more on what it means to move from a functionally-driven organization to a process-centric one: align roles and responsibilities to the business processes, not by the functional area; business leaders have end-to-end visibility of the business processes; business rules and processes are changed by the business; and there’s more explicit views of handoffs within the process and other points contributing to process optimization. One key point made here is that cost accounting needs to move from being aligned with the functional area to being aligned with the process steps — I’ve seen first-hand how not doing this can cause tremendous problems within an organization attempting to implement enterprise-wide processes.

There are a number of organization issues when dealing with BPM, not just the technology part. In addition to business leadership from a high level, there will need to be process ownership and support from mid-level management, and explicit change management. As mentioned previously, individual process participants also need to be encouraged to look for ways to improve the process, much like the Lean tenet that allows anyone to stop a broken process and offer an improvement.

Hill talked about the type of people that you need for a process-centric organization: people who “think process”. However, I think that we need to have a greater focus on how to take current teams and imbue them with that process orientation.

She also discussed management actions such as creating a governance framework and BPM competency center, appointing specific business process analysts focused on end-to-end processes rather than by functional area, and creating a real-time management culture that is focused more on a view of what is happening in their operations right now rather than through the rear view mirror of historical reporting. There are some specific actions for IT management as well, starting with recognizing that IT should be enabling BPM, not leading it. There’s a lot of groundwork that can be done even if the business is just starting (or hasn’t yet started) BPM initiatives, such as SOA and service definitions.

Her wrapup was on the value of BPM, looking at specifics of cost/efficiency, time/adaptability, risk/compliance and revenue/innovation — a lot of great points here on where the benefits can be expected.

She also mentioned a good fundamental principle for process improvement that came from a customer during a session that she held yesterday: when considering a process change, be driven by how that change will impact the end customer. Excellent words to live by.

Upcoming conferences

I’ll be attending three conferences in the next three weeks (after a hiatus of over two months, it’s going to be strange to get back on a plane), and live-blogging from each conference, wifi permitting.

Next week is the Gartner BPM summit in Las Vegas: one of the key BPM conferences of the year (at least, until Gartner watered it down by running a second one in September last year). The presentations are typically a mix of Gartner analysts discussing BPM, SOA and related subjects, and customers discussing their implementations. The trade show includes every BPM vendor who wants to be taken seriously in this market. Expect to see some of my posts from this week syndicated over on Intelligent Enterprise, plus I’ll be doing a wrap-up article at the end of the week exclusively on their site.

February 13-15 is ARIS ProcessWorld in Orlando, IDS Scheer’s user conference. I attended this last year and enjoyed it; last year was only the second time that I’d been to any sort of process modelling user conference (having attended Proforma’s conference in 2006), and it’s really valuable to see how the front-end modelling tools fit together with the BPMS that automate those processes. IDS Scheer is paying my travel expenses to attend.

February 18-20 I’m back in Orlando for FASTforward, which is sort of a user conference for FAST enterprise search (which is being acquired by Microsoft), but really goes beyond that cover a lot of Enterprise 2.0 territory. Featured speakers include Andrew McAfee, Tom Davenport and Don Tapscott, all of whom I’ve written about in the past couple of week. You can register for FASTforward here, and put my name (Sandy Kemsley) in the reference field so that they know where you came from. FAST is paying my travel expenses to attend. All of my live-blogging posts will be cross-posted to the FASTforward blog, and I’ll do a daily wrap-up post exclusive to their site.

As an aside, I’ve consolidated all posts for all Gartner BPM coverage under one category regardless of year, and all for ProcessWorld under their own category.

If you’re going to be at any of these events, look me up.

BPM, now for dummies

It had to happen: someone is finally grabbing the “BPM for Dummies” (actually, “BPM Basics for Dummies”) title and are running with it.

Software AG is publishing this book very soon (in January, according to their site), and you can register for a free print copy here. According to the description:

Business Process Management (BPM) is useful, powerful and potentially very accessible. But, with so many analysts, consultants, publications and vendors weighing in with their own perspective and opinions, it can be very confusing. Business Process Management Basics For Dummies will help you understand what BPM is really all about. Whether you are a business manager or an Information Technology practitioner, this book will provide valuable information about what BPM can do for you—and how to apply it. This book includes:

  • Core concepts and practical ideas.
  • A primer for getting started with BPM.
  • A step-by-step guide for implementing BPM successfully.
  • A compilation of resources that you can go to for additional help or continued education.

I find it a bit ironic that they seem to be dissing the opinions of vendors (“But, with so many analysts, consultants, publications and vendors weighing in with their own perspective and opinions, it can be very confusing), yet this book is written by three Software AG employees.

Mapping BPM Events

Coincidentally on the same day that Todd Biske and I start collaborating on the BPM, SOA and EA calendar that you can find on both our sites, I saw this amazing post (linked from the Google Operating System blog) showing how to map a Google calendar’s events on a Google map, with a bit of help from a simple Yahoo Pipe. The results, showing our events calendar, can be found immediately beneath the calendar.

The theory is that this should refresh from the pipe (and hence the calendar itself) every time that you visit the page — or, if you prefer, a link to a larger version of the map directly in Google Maps — although I haven’t tested that out.

If you’re an author on the BPM Google calendar, be sure to fill out the location field so that your event is displayed on the map.

Definitely the most fun that I had all day.

BPM Events calendar gains a new audience

Todd Biske, whose blog I read regularly, announced last week that he was going to publish a Google calendar of BPM, SOA and EA events, I invited him to join the one that I’ve been running for a few months. During the time that I’ve had the calendar active, I’ve added about 10 other authors to the calendar who can add events; these are typically people very active in the industry and have events to contribute. If you want to add an event, you can email to either Todd or me; if you think that you can make an ongoing contribution, then let us know and we’ll add you as an author.

You can view the calendar on my site here, or on Todd’s site here. If you have a blog on a related subject, feel free to embed it on your site as well. Good place to check first if you’re organizing an event and want to make sure that it won’t conflict with competing events.

Metastorm’s New Account On-Boarding process pod for financial services

One of the things that Metastorm has released recently is a series of solution frameworks that they call “Process Pods”, which include prebuilt rules, dashboards, KPIs, and technical integrations in addition to prebuilt process models; however, they’re not truly productized in that they’re supported by the Professional Services group as if they were customized work.

The latest of these process pods is targeted at the financial services market, specifically new account opening: an area that often requires both electronic and paper-based data collection, background checks, new account creation, and updates to existing account and client records (Metastorm press release here). In addition to the process flows and rules of other process pods, this one also uses Metastorm Integration Manager product (which is, I believe, what the CommerceQuest acquisition turned into) to integrate the legacy applications (including CICS) that are typically used for client on-boarding tasks in financial services organizations. Although there will still need to be customization, the idea (as with most BPM frameworks) is that the time to deploy a productive, integrated solution will be greatly reduced.

I checked out their hour-long recorded demo of the New Account On-Boarding process pod (registration required, and didn’t seem to be Firefox-friendly). It’s pretty low-resolution and the audio is a bit sketchy, but you can get an idea of how a process would look as implemented with their NAO process pod, including the following features:

  • CICS integration both for retrieving data and creating the new account on the legacy mainframe system.
  • SharePoint portal integration, plus standard JSR168 portal integration into a Pluto portal; there are a number of portlets that can be embedded, such as a task to-do list, a watch list, a search form, and a form to create a new account (which presumably kicks off a new process instance).
  • Email integration for alerting process participants.
  • Data entry forms including links to data validation for things such as customer/account number, and enforcement of required fields.
  • Checks for conditions such as specific countries of origin and amount of investment to trigger any anti-money laundering or other rules for further investigation.
  • Identify verification to satisfy know-your-customer regulations, including checking against third-party blacklist checking services.
  • Risk assessment checklist.
  • Electronic signature and date-stamp at key points, such as completion of due diligence.
  • Removing tabs from user interface at points in the process to limit access to information by certain user classes.
  • Document attachments.
  • After-the-fact batch reports.
  • Dashboards with KPIs; these appear fairly rudimentary, but are actionable by allowing drill-down to the actual process instances.
  • A third (!) separate business intelligence product that also produces reports and dashboards.
  • Administrative functionality to allow control of many of the process parameters via table values, e.g., adding new questions to the risk questionnaire and indicating how each possible answer contributes to an overall score. There are some aspects of this with which I disagree, such as specifying parallel and serial process paths by creating table entries for each logical node in the process map, and assigning the order: this is the way that we used to do process maps before there were graphical process mapping tools.

One issue that I have with the demo is that it shows a finished product from a user point of view, without much of an indication (besides the administration table values) of how much effort is required to build this solution based on the NAO framework, or what is even customizable in the framework. For example, I suspect that some of the processes, rules and data fields in their standard process pod are US-specific, although they should be customizable with some additional help.

There are some things that they sell as features that look a bit clumsy, such as calling out to MS-Word for spell-checking within a note entered in a web form. Also, early in the demo, she shows the process model in ProVision, but not obvious that this maps directly to the Metastorm execution environment — I’ve seen some comments that indicate that it’s not so easy to pass models back and forth.

The demos a bit long, and an interactive demo is always better, but this does take you on a pretty thorough tour of what can be done with their process pod. And, I managed to get all the way through this blog post without a reference to pod people, invasion of the body snatchers, cocoon or many other great sci-fi usages of the word “pod”.

Lombardi analyst call: executive re-org and 2007 results

Lombardi held an analyst conference call last week in advance of today’s press releases — a relatively new format for them — to discuss their executive reorganization against the backdrop of their 2007 results and 2008 strategy. Rod Favaron, CEO (and, until last week, President) and Phil Gilbert, President (formerly CTO) gave us the update. The press releases are here and here.

In 2007, Lombardi had a revenue growth of over 60%, which is actually a drop from their previous growth of over 100%, but still pretty healthy; in 2008 they expect it to stay around 60%. Given the current climate of impending recession in the US, I’d be surprised if they achieve that, but I expect that they’ll still continue show strong growth based on their now-established track record of 7-figure sales. In fact, they think that hard economic times can actually drive sales of BPM.

They’re starting to expand internationally: 35% of their sales were outside North America, mostly Europe, likely helped along by the European office that they’ve expanded to assist their direct sales and resellers in the region. Not having to fly people back and forth from the US all the time would definitely be a big help both in terms of reducing the cost of sale and providing local support, and this marks a significant milestone for any growing US software company that is selling internationally or dealing with multi-national companies. Alan Godfrey, formerly EVP of Marketing, has moved to London to scale up the European operations, and their former European sales head has moved on to build out the Australian and southeast Asian market.

They claim that they started 2007 competing against the pure-plays (e.g., Savvion, Appian), and ended it competing against the stack vendors, with most of their competition now from IBM, Oracle/BEA, TIBCO and Pegasystems.

From a product and services standpoint, they’ve combined platforms (Teamworks and Blueprint), solutions and professional services all under Phil Gilbert as a Global Business Solutions group that builds product and packages combinations of product and services (such as process analysts and mentors) into solutions. Their major upgrade to Teamworks in 2007 included some new SLA and KPI monitoring to allow business people to understand the process in business terms, not technical terms, and the release of Teamworks for SharePoint to allow collaboration in SharePoint within the context of a structured Teamworks process.

They’ve had a good uptake with Blueprint, their SaaS process modeling tool. They expect to end 2008 with the best business-facing process modeler in the industry, by which I think that they mean Blueprint. A major update to Blueprint is due in April, and mid-year they’ll merge the Blueprint and Teamworks repositories, which I think is a significant step forward. A major release to Teamworks is due in the second half of the year; a pre-release version is already available to some customers, which bodes well for them actually making their release dates.

In April, they’ll be offering some joint product/services packaged offerings, including a focus on modeling, optimization and helping customers to establish an internal BPM center of excellence. Productizing a package of services is a logical step for Lombardi, but puts them in direct competition with their partners in regions where they sell through partners. Even if they’re using the partners as subcontractors in these packages, I’ve seen first-hand in the past with other BPM vendors how this can alienate the partner channel, which in turn impacts growth.

What is great to see is that Lombardi is promoting a lot from within: a few people who I know (in addition to Phil) have been moved up in the ranks to take on more responsibility, and all are well deserving. Nothing better for company morale than promoting someone who’s capable and well-liked rather than hiring in a big gun from outside.

I’m guessing that taking over as president is going to give Phil even less time to blog, but maybe that will encourage him to embrace Creative Commons and publish his book on there as a serial.