Category: process

business process management

ALBPM 6.0

I’m long overdue in reporting on BEA’s ALBPM 6.0 release; I heard the details during a technical deep dive session at BEAParticipate, but the information was embargoed at the time (in spite of being presented in front of a room full of customers). This post is a combination of my notes from that time, an interview with Jesper Joergensen at the time of the product release in August, and other bits of information gathered along the way such as Alex Toussaint’s post on ALBPM and ALSB.

Although they did add some end-user and business analyst features, most of the release has focused on improving the technical strength and enterprise scalability — not surprising when you consider that this is the first major release since BEA acquired Fuego in 2006, and some of that time was spent ensuring proper cross-pollination of the BEA and Fuego teams. The 2008 release will refocus on the usability side.

For the 6.0 release, there are some main themes:

Process intelligence:

  • They’re adding  through enhanced business rules capabilities built into ALBPM, allowing for reuse of rules across processes and some BRMS functionality such as versioning of rules independent of process versioning. For those who have outgrown the usual limited capabilities of a BPMS’ expression engine, this provides a good stepping stone before a full-on BRMS is required. I still, however, believe that it’s better to separate them so that business rules can be used by applications other than the BPMS.
  • They’re also adding some smarts to capture analytics on the manual decisions that are made by users in a process in order to provide feedback on the probability of any particular decision, and even trigger exception handling or further review if someone makes a decision that is different than the usual decision at that point. This also helps to identify decisions that can be automated.
  • Improved Flash graphics in the BAM functionality using FusionCharts. BAM will see some major enhancements in the Condor release as well.

Standards support:

  • XPDL 2.0 and BPEL 2.0 are natively supported in the process engine, although no mention of BPDM
  • Enhanced BPMN 1.0 support; the previous version does not do a full BPMN implementation
  • WS-Security for seamless identity propagation.
  • UDDI 3.0 Publishing for processes that are being exposed as web services

BEA integration:

  • WorkSpace extensions for JSF and ALUI. Since I’m not familiar with these products, I’m not sure of all the implications here, but it does provide things such as plug-and-play authentication, and easy deployment of processes within the portal environment.
  • They’re adding RSS feeds to ALBPM to be able to get a feed of a work list or a pre-defined query on process instances — this has huge implications not just for integration with BEA portals, but with any feed reader or other application that can consume feeds, on any platform. I’ve been pushing for this on this blog for over a year now, and finally starting to see it emerging from a couple of the BPM vendors.
  • Integration of ALBPM and ALSB (Service Bus) for enhanced services capabilities such as seamless publication and subscription, and WS-Security support for authentication. Although customers are already using BPM with the service bus, this integration is intended to make it easier; effectively, they plug together so that ALSB acts as a UDDI for ALBPM. And for services consumed by ALBPM from ALSB, they’re using RMI to boost the performance over the usual web services calls.

Usabilty and infrastructure enhancements:

  • Forms creation is improved with a simplified flow, and also have a CSS-based look and feel.
  • They’re moving to an Eclipse platform for the IDE by providing ALBPM plug-ins for Eclipse 3.2: the Designer/Studio will run in Eclipse, and there will be Studio Eclipse plug-ins for BEA Workshop, which provides more seamless integration with other BEA development environments. Like other products that I’ve seen go this route, they’ll have three different personas (including a new  business modelling persona), so that business analysts aren’t stranded in a developer-type environment, but developers have full access to the Eclipse functionality. Their goal was to provide full functionality in the Eclipse-based version so that there’s nothing that needs to be done in the old version; this will definitely help to encourage early migration from the old to new toolsets. By being in an Eclipse environment, that also means that development can be more easily shared with developers who are working in Eclipse but not familiar with ALBPM.
  • Improved web services support, with support for web service Doc Literal, and extended PAPI-WS.
  • Enhanced deployment methods, including simplified J2EE deployment and full JVM 1.5 support.
  • Simulation using historical production data.
  • Mobile device support.

The 2008 release, Condor, will be focused on the following themes:

  • Business and developer tool enhancements, including a web-based modeller (initially limited functionality), and enhancements to BAM.
  • Enhancements to the engine to allow it to be embedded as an OEM process engine.
  • Better integration with BPA tools (IDS Scheer and Proforma were mentioned) to support round-tripping.
  • Additional collaboration and social computing functionality via integration with other BEA tools.

Since this is forward-looking information, none of the Condor functionality listed above is guaranteed to be in the next release.

Overall, BEA is concentrating on three main areas: SOA, BPM and social computing. They’re seeing about 20% crossover between their SOA and BPM clients, and I’m sure that they’ll be pushing to increase those numbers.

The missing BPM podcast

Weird. Over the weekend, my feed reader picked up three instances of a feed of a podcast on Podtech (tagged with “BPM”) that doesn’t seem to actually exist. Imagine my frustration:

The Forrester Wave: Business Process Management for Document Processes – Interview with the Analyst

In this audio event we speak with Craig Le Clair of Forrester Research, co-author of The Forrester Wave: Business Process Management for Document Processes, Q3 2007 report. Craig discusses Forrester’s definition of Business Process Management and BPM Suites, document-intensive types of processes and their requirements, the type of functionality that is important within a BPM solution, and the strengths he discovered in his analysis of EMC’s Documentum Process Suite. Tags: Craig Le Clair, Forres…

There were two identical entries as above, then a third one with the same link but a slightly different description:

The Forrester Wave: Business Process Management for Document Processes – Interview with the Analyst [IMG MP3 Audio] Audio | 10:12 | Commissioned | Posted by editor | November 8th, 2007 7:04 pm In this audio event we speak with Craig Le Clair of Forrester Research, co-author of The Forrester Wave: Business Process Management for Document Processes, Q3 2007 report. Craig discusses Forrester’s definition of Business Process Management and BPM Suites, document-intensive types of processes and thei…

I browsed back to November 8th on their site, which appears to be the publication date, but no luck. Anyone hear this podcast?

Update: as of November 27th, the podcast is available at the link above. It seems to be a plug for EMC/Documentum; although there’s no explicit sponsorship noted on the podcast page, it is tagged as “commissioned”. A little more transparency, please.

IIR BPM: Michael zur Muehlen on integrating business processes and business rules

I finished the day listening to Michael zur Muehlen discuss business processes and rules, a topic that I spoke about a few weeks ago at the Business Rules Forum. Michael, who I know from the BPM Think Tanks, is responsible for BPM courses at Stevens Institute of Technology. You can see his presentation slides online here.

He started out with the bottom line on why you want to integrate process and rules:

  • Simpler processes
  • Higher agility
  • Better risk management

Who wouldn’t want this? However, he points out that users don’t like processes, since they find them abstract (or possibly requiring a more analytic view of the organization) and restrictive (that is, not able to capture all the actual business cases). He also points out the obvious problem with Eclipse-based process modelling tools: they’re not friendly to business types. Became of that, we end up with technical people maintaining business processes, which usually results in a lot of code and the next generation of legacy systems.

He went though an example of an insurance company with 12 process steps and 5000 business rules, and it became obvious why rules change faster than processes. He highlighted three places where rules and processes come together: control flow, work assignment, and cross-process policy enforcement. I still think that the key issue is the boundary: when is something done as a decision tree in a rules system, and when it is done as control flow directly in the BPMS. Michael suggests that you might want to first model the rules in the BPMS, then extract the rules, although I don’t think that the rules experts would consider that a best practice. The challenge, then, comes with the modelling that’s done by the business analysts: how much do they need to know about rules, and what does their modelling environment need to look like in order to support that?

He had some good suggestions about mining rule criteria from previously executed processes, determining what the automated rules should be based on prior manual processes. From an insurance standpoint, this can result in auto-underwriting on standard cases.

He talked about the links between process management, business rules and compliance: whereas BPMS can enforce process compliance, rules are used to enforce contextual compliance for all the things around the business processes that aren’t really part of process compliance.

Michael and a colleague did a fascinating study of which BPMN symbols are actually used, and found that there’s 6 or 7 symbols that are used in most of the diagrams — the rest are strictly long-tail usage. See page 39 of the slide deck that I link to above for the chart.

He had some practical advice on how business rules and business processes interact:

  • Business objectives (rules) govern and prioritize business activities (processes)
  • Process objectives (rules) govern and define core processes (processes)
  • Process objectives break down to business rules and core processes break down to business processes, where business rules govern the business processes, and bsiness processes use the business rules.
  • This can be taken to a further level of granularity with operational rules.

He also had a chart for classifying change, and showing where it made more sense to use business rules or business process for a particular decision/activity; for example, use rules if it’s rapidly changing, company-wide and less predictable.

My flight home leaves tomorrow mid-day, so this is likely the end of my IIR/Shared Insights BPM conference coverage. Next year, maybe they’ll spring for more than 2 nights of hotel…

IIR BPM: Pat Morrissey keynote

I attended Pat Morrissey’s (of Savvion) keynote session after lunch, but didn’t take a lot of notes since I’m up next. Pat’s a great speaker, very funny with lots of good real world examples, from nuclear weapons to Guitar Hero.

He pointed out four key requirements of a BPM solution which, not surprisingly, line up with their product offering:

  • Process modelling
  • Process repository for capture and reuse
  • A deployment and management suite, such as their BPM Studio, to enrich the model by connecting it up to data sources and web services, and manage processes
  • Optimization to manage change, particularly the optimization that happens after the system goes live

He also talked about a process adoption curve, which is a bit like a BPM maturity model, and covered some keys to process solution success:

  • Start with modeling process as it exists today
  • Business and IT involvement early
  • Optimization happens after you turn on the solution
  • BPM is for business, SOA is for IT
  • Plan for the end state

He finished up with some ways to use process to move business to the next level:

  • Demonstrate success first then get executive commitment
  • Start big, start small, just start
  • Everyone can be a model — it’s about the people
  • Winners share
  • Process in the voice of the customer

I’ll just ignore how he said that BPM standards don’t really matter: way to lead into my presentation, Pat!

IIR BPM: Roger Burlton keynote

Amazingly, there’s open (although weak) wifi in the Hotel Del Coronado’s conference hall, so I’ll be able to post as I write.

The day started with an opening keynote by the conference chair, Roger Burlton of the Process Renewal Consulting Group, on “BPM at the Tipping Point”. This was mostly a review of a few high-level generic BPM case studies, some of the reasons that companies adopt BPM (compliance, boomers about to retire, competition, agility), and a lengthy anecdote about a computer manufacturer’s broken RMA process that Roger ran into when he tried to get his laptop fixed a few years ago. He’s a good speaker, I’ve just heard variations on these same themes too many times at recent conferences. I’m assuming that most of the attendees don’t attend as many BPM conferences as I do. 🙂

He spent some time talking about the importance of considering your end-to-end supply chain processes, and how attempts to maximize internal efficiency (e.g., on time, on budget) can be in complete conflict with the overall effectiveness of the core processes (e.g., customer retention, revenue). He returned to this theme near the end of the presentation, stating that enterprise BPM requires full lifecycles and value chains, and highlighting some of the frameworks, such as SCOR, that can help get started with process management. He also pointed out that you need to focussing on improving the processes where you have most to gain from an end-to-end process view, not those that don’t impact the effectiveness of the core processes, no matter how broken they are.

He also had a great case study from a tomato packing plant that has no organizational chart, and the non-core-process workers believe that they report to the core process workers, that is, they’re only there to support the core processes. This is a brilliant concept: I’ve often railed against organizations where IT or purchasing or some other non-core functions loses sight of the fact that they’re only there to support the core business. This is more of an organizational maturity case study than anything to do with BPM, although obviously processes are managed as part of the whole. This obviously wouldn’t work in most organizations, but there’s some great lessons to be learned about focussing on the effectiveness of core processes rather than attempting to maximize local efficiencies within functional silos.

His conclusions:

  • Process is the only useful mechanism to translate strategic intent into capability — it’s what we do to get what we want
  • Process and other capabilities must be aligned — they all have to go in the same direction
  • We must put in place new strategic frameworks that use processes at the heart of the management system — we have to manage what we do

Watching him use his tablet computer does remind me, however, that it was he and a few others presenting on their tablets at the BPMG conference in London a few years ago that inspired me to buy one, which allows me to write on slides as I’m presenting and greatly enhances the experience (at least for me).

The roundtable idea that we’ve seen at the BPM Think Tank for a couple of years is starting to spread, and following this session are three “facilitated sessions”, which I assume are similar in format to the roundtables. I’m going to drop in on the one on standards, since I’m speaking on the same subject later today and will likely pick up some interesting thoughts. The unconference idea is gradually creeping into the mainstream, although I still don’t think that we’re ready for BPM Camp.

Getting Metastorm BPM and ProVision to work together

In response to a post that I wrote back in August about Metastorm acquiring Proforma, Jerome Pearce recently wrote the following comment:

I have just tried to convert a ProVision workflow model to a Metastorm BPM (e-work). I cannot see how it could produce a proper process in e-work. The concepts of the two packages do not map well.

Can anyone actually show me a design in ProVision that has been converted to Metastorm BPM using the provided Exchange tool? Nothing I have ever come up with in e-work could be properly represented in ProVision as the elements do not really match. There is no concept of ‘Stage’ in ProVision, and the use of Map Segments for sub-workflows makes the result very difficult to change (which is after all the whol point of e-work).

can anyone show us a real example?

I reproduce this here since I think that a lot of people don’t follow the comments feed so would miss a comment on an older post.

Any ideas on solving Jerome’s problem?

Integration World Day 2: Continuous Process Improvement, Continuous Business Transformation

Bruce Williams, SVP and GM of BPM Solutions for Software AG/webMethods talked about BPM and how it enables business transformation. Bruce, who I had a chance for an in-depth chat with yesterday, comes from a solid Six Sigma background — including writing books on Six Sigma and Lean — which makes his focus on process improvement a natural. He started with a timeline of quality management from the 1950’s PDCA through TQM, BPR and other trends to the current focus on Lean Six Sigma. There are a lot of tools and techniques that can be used to improve processes, including BPMS’ that can be used to handle the automation, monitoring and governance side of things.

He outlined three steps to process performance happiness:

  1. The “B” in BPM – this is about your business. Considering that I give a course called “Making BPM Mean Business”, I’m totally on board with this. Bruce’s points included knowing where value is created, measuring what’s happening in the business processes throughout all stages of improvement, ensuring that the voice of the customer is heard, and allowing the business to determine the goals and drive the agenda of process improvement.
  2. Build to an architecture. In addition to models, methodologies and leveraging existing systems and assets, this also includes developing expertise in process and integration. I find that the process improvement centre of excellence approach works well in a lot of organizations, which typically includes both architecture and the expertise around it.
  3. Implement incrementally, improve continuously. Incremental implementation is something that I always recommend: not only do you get benefits earlier, but the vision of what needs to be implemented will change as soon as your first project goes into production.

This was a pretty short presentation, and they moved on quickly to the customer innovation awards. The winners were Corporate Express in the productivity category, Motorola in the business agility category, Lenders First Choice in the innovation category, DSM in the ROI category, and Satyam in the partner innovation award.

Karl-Heinz Streibich gave a brief closing address; the remainder of the day is breakout sessions and the conference finishes at the end of today, so this was the last general session.

Integration World Day 1: Best Practices in Delivering Results with BPM

Bruce Beeco of Cox Communications told their story of how and why they implemented webMethods BPMS. Their goals:

  • Reusable processes independent of channel
  • Consistent experience independent of channel
  • Visibility into processes
  • Proactive on customer-facing problems
  • Automate manual tasks to reduce cost and errors
  • Improve time-to-market for new products and services

Overall, their goal is to move the processes out of the front-end applications using BPM, leverage existing services and provide monitoring and business health using BAM.

They started a number of BPMS initiatives, including monitoring and alerting around existing applications, modelling new processes, portal interfaces and others; some of these are in production, while others are just getting started. Being a Six Sigma shop, they took on business processes by creating a shadow process to an existing human process: they created a process model, collected data from the real world and correlated events to the model to provide some “visibility” into the process, particularly for the purposes of optimization.

He looked at the link between SOA and BPM, and said that you can’t do services without at least modelling the processes, since otherwise you just don’t create the right services: the models identify the service integration points and required functionality. He also addressed the issue of when to put functionality in a service versus a process in BPM:

  • Use BPM if it maintains state; services are stateless
  • Use BPM if you have variable complex outcomes; services outcomes are fixed and predetermined
  • Use BPM for composite process solutions; services are discrete entities
  • Use BPM for process visibility; services are black boxes

His key lesson learned was that BPM and SOA need to be done together in order to have a holistic view of your operations and business.

Integration World Day 1: BPMS 7.1

Pete Carlson (Product Development) and Matt Green (Product Marketing) gave some of the high points of the new 7.1 release of webMethods BPMS. Their first question to the audience was to determine who is already involved in a BPM project in their organization: almost no hands went up. As it turns out, most people are here to learn about BPM and what webMethods has to offer. Given that the audience at the conference is mostly IT and mostly work with the webMethods ESB product, this isn’t all that surprising; BPM is a relatively new concept to most of them even if they’ve been involved in the integration-centric end of the BPM spectrum. I think that the biggest challenge for the Software AG webMethods group is, in fact, to gain greater visibility in the business areas of customer organizations, which is where many of the other BPMS vendors already have much more visibility.

A few points about the product:

  • Eclipse-based modelling tool with multiple perspectives for business analysts and developers to share a common model.
  • There’s a process debugger built into the modelling environment, which allows you to step through a process to see how the variables change as the process flows
  • Simulation is new for their BPMS, so they’re pretty excited about this and it’s a big focus at this show
  • BAM is also highlighted as a major part of their suite, and has separate product sessions here at the conference. They do some interesting things using prediction models that I saw briefly in a demo last night, and do automatic baseline metric creation based on running processes.
  • Business calendar, so that you can schedule something for 3 business days versus 3 calendar days (this is definitely behind the BPM curve as a new feature)
  • Integration of Cognos for business intelligence to be able to drill down into data that you might see in a dashboard environment; this will be fully embedded within the webMethods product suite in next year’s version
  • Integration of Blaze Advisor for business rules management, although the rules management user interface won’t be fully integrated into the webMethods environment until next year
  • A new UI design environment that allows for codeless generation of portals and form-type interfaces.

Carlson gave a live demo, showing how they can call services from their ESB, services outside their ESB, business rules and human steps all in the course of a process. Interestingly, one thing that he showed was an executing process instance, including the information that it was in the state "Queued" — does this imply that an instance can only have one state at one time, hence can’t execute parallel paths? Or does that say something about the small number of states that can exist?

He showed their simulation, which has the requisite animated dials to show where work is piling up in the system; although you can take a snapshot of the conditions and the results of any particular simulation scenario in order to manually derive improvements, there’s no tools to suggest ways to improve processes, such as I’ve seen in some other products. Instead, it’s a matter of tweaking the parameters and watching the effect on the simulation, or exporting the results to Excel to perform some other analysis on them.

He showed how individual tasks in a process map are edited using the new version, which is a view that allows you to modify the roles, data values, events KPIs and user interfaces at this point in the process. In particular, the event capabilities seemed pretty powerful, although I’m not sure if it supports the full BPMN set, and it’s certainly not represented in the process map as BPMN events.

The presentation finished up with a very quick look at the design time and runtime architectures, then (for the 3rd time today) a look at Forrester’s two waves that show them as the top vendor in integration-centric BPMS as of Q406, and in the leader category (barely) in human-centric BPMS as of Q307. They’re obviously pretty pleased with being a leader in both categories, although they’re pretty neck-in-neck with TIBCO, with BEA and IBM trailing a bit behind but still having a strong showing in both waves.

Integration World Day 1: Peter Kurpick

Peter Kurpick, CPO (Chief Product Officer) of webMethods Business Division, gave an overview of the technology direction. He talked about the paradigm for SOA governance, with the layers of technical services, business services and policies being consumed by business processes: the addition of the policy layer (which is the SOA governance part) sets this apart from many of the visions of SOA that you see.

He brought along Susan Ganeshan, the SVP of Product Management and Product Marketing, to give a (canned) demo similar to one that we saw yesterday at the end of the analyst sessions. She showed the process map as modelled in their BPM layer, where the appropriate services were called and other points of integration using webMethods, then we saw the custom portal-type interfaces for customers, suppliers and internal workers. They have Fair Isaac’s Blaze Advisor integrated with the BPMS that allows them to change rules for in-flight processes, and their own monitoring and analytics as well as some new Cognos analytics integration. She also showed us the CentraSite integration, where information about services and their policies are stored; CentraSite can be used to dynamically select from multiple equivalent services based on policies, such as selecting from one of several suppliers. The idea of the demo is to show how all of the pieces can come together — people, web services, B2B services, legacy services, and policy governance — all using the webMethods suite.

The original core functionality provided by webMethods is the ESB (originally from the EAI space), but now that’s surrounded by BPM, composite applications, B2B integration and legacy modernization tools (from the Software AG side). Around that is BAM, which is being raised in importance from being just an adjunct to BPM to being an event-related technology in its own right. Around all of this is SOA governance, which is what CentraSite brings to this.

The next release, due sometime in 2008, will be a fully-integrated suite of the Software AG and webMethods products, although Kurpick didn’t provide a lot of information.