Category: process

business process management

Forrester Day 1: Automating Business Processes panel

Connie Moore moderated a panel on automating business processes, featuring David Knapp of Ford, Pamela Rucker of Philip Services and Theo van den Hurk of ABN AMRO. The room is considerably less crowded than this morning, so I’m guessing that there’s some golfing going on (probably all the CIOs whose golf games were rained out last week at the Gartner conference in Orlando). I really like how they use the big projection screens to show live video of the panelists; I’m sitting way over on the side to score some power for the laptop, so can’t see two of the presenters directly.

Moore talked about Forrester’s BPM maturity framework, which I’ve never seen before but it’s similar enough to BPMM and others that I’ve seen: moving from process knowledge to process efficiency to process consistency to business optimization to business transformation, where most companies are in the efficiency stage, moving towards consistency.

Each of them told a bit about what they’re doing with BPM:

  • Ford is another Lombardi customer that’s just getting their implementation started (it’s sort of ironic, considering that Ford pioneered the concept of the assembly line, that they’re only now getting around to business process automation). They’re a big Six Sigma shop, and are looking at getting some automation and metrics in place, then drive towards optimization using BPM. They’re using BPM in large part for orchestration of their existing legacy systems.
  • Philip Services has a mandate to innovate, but no extra budget to do so, which is a common problem in organizations; they don’t use BPM software but are effectively building their own in code or within the enterprise systems.
  • ABM AMRO is using SAP and Oracle as their enterprise systems, and as far as I could tell, they’re not using a BPM suite to orchestrate that but are relying on the processes within those enterprise applications.

Knapp showed an interesting slide if how BPM bridges the gap between end user computing and full-on IT application development; I think that there’s also an overlap between mashups and BPM at some part of that spectrum. Ford has an enterprise process committee that looks at process management across the organization, especially focussing on the discontinuities (hand-offs between functional silos), and decides which processes to implement. However, they’re still narrowing down and deciding which processes to implement.

Rucker said that two major issues for them was having the business take ownership for business process management, and getting away from siloed process optimization (like the accounting department) to look at end-to-end processes (like order to cash). They even got the CEO involved to drive home these points home to people.

van den Hurk talked about the complexities introduced by having several outsourced vendors involved in their systems as well as their own IT people; just getting all the stakeholders to sit down together was a challenge. ABN AMRO looked at heat maps for operational budget areas to figure out where the money was being spent, as well as what the business reported as the pain points.

There was a question about metrics, monitoring and dashboards: Ford is designing it into their systems; Philip put it in after the fact when they realized that processes weren’t improving and had no visibility into why; ABN AMRO also is building it in based on the business needs.

As panels go, this was pretty conversational rather than a series of mini-presentations: good to attend, but harder to blog about in a coherent fashion.

Forrester Day 1: Rich Phillips, Maritz Travel

Rich Phillips, the COO of Maritz Travel, was up next to talk about creating consistency and customer value through IT. Although not a part of his presentation, he opened with a great thought about the importance of people in the process: “If you don’t think about the people, you’re not going to get the change.”

His central topic is about BPM: he sees it not just as a different class of software or a different way to manage, but as a breakthrough tool for transforming a business. In a post-9/11 world, they found their business changed drastically, due to shifting customer requirements, supply and demand issues, and regulatory compliance. Instead of just logistics management, they need to expand their systems to cover a number of other key factors, such as compliance management and data management. They undertook some strategic analysis and value stream analysis, and chose Lombardi BPM as a way to achieve some of the benefits that they were targetting. Phillips feels that it provides benefits in the area of reuse of existing systems and processes (through end-to-end process orchestration of existing services) as well as permitting collaborative development involving business, IT and the customer, and enforcing business rules as part of the process. It’s also provided an easier-to-learn user interface, allowing for user training in days instead of months — critical when they need to quickly ramp up for a spike in business.

He talked about a key issue that I see in many companies: the business is motivated to provide what the customer used to want, not what they want now. They’ve expanded their focus on logistics management to provide a more complete suite of services to their customer.

Another issue is that the business tended to abdicate their responsibility for stating what they need to IT, so IT had to just make some guesses about it (which never works out all that well). Now, much like Connie Moore’s earlier comments on how business and IT need to be blended, not aligned, Phillips said much the same thing about breaking down the barriers between business and IT.

Critical success factors that he identified:

  • Business leadership commitment
  • Strategic roadmap: 2-3 years of future view, but with small-enough iterative steps
  • Process definition through mapping
  • Alignment to and support of value proposition
  • Measures of success, macro and micro
  • Iterative refinement
    • Continuous improvement
    • Agile development
  • Embedded process ownership throughout the business areas

He pointed out that they did their first BPM project in 90 days after signing the contract with Lombardi, in contrast to the 2- to 4-year development cycle that they used to have. I’ve seen equally fast implementations with other BPM vendors; in many cases, the key is not the specific BPMS, but the approach that’s taken to implementing it.

The results have been pretty amazing: reversals of their declining revenues, margins and productivity figures, and ability to fine-tune the business process control through the business rules embedded within the process (he didn’t mention another BRE, so I assume that he means the rules functionality within Lombardi). Obviously, a big part of this is the strategic and value chain planning that they’ve done, but BPM is definitely a contributor to their success. They’re now looking at correlating process results to the hard ROI numbers in their business results, such as cycle time, cost per transaction, etc.; this will help them to decide where to focus their efforts in the future.

He went on to discuss a transformation framework, first listing “big bang re-engineering” and “fixing pockets of processes” as flawed approaches. In the big bang approach, it’s mostly a problem in that people can’t make that degree of change without it being massively disruptive to the business; in the subprocesses approach, it’s not enough to make a significant difference. Like the story of the three bears, you have to find that middle approach that’s just right.

Now in their sights for future development is what he calls the real power of BPM: expanding the envelope of the process-managed domain to include revenue generation opportunities, not just cost reduction and productivity opportunities. Although productivity and ROI are important, the C-level executives are usually much more focussed on growth and revenue generation, so it’s critical to look at product development and product/solution delivery processes as well as risk and compliance processes.

Forrester Day 1: Connie Moore Keynote

Connie Moore gave the opening keynote on Design for People, Build for Change: Transforming the Nature of Work. Her focus is on how business and IT have to work together in order to achieve this, but she likes the term “blended business-IT” rather than “business-IT alignment” because she wants them to be seen as a single entity rather than two separate bodies that need to be aligned in some way. I’ve heard Moore speaking at other conferences and on webinars previously, usually on the topic of BPM, and it’s significant that Forrester puts a BPM analyst in the keynote position at this forum: it really drives home that the key focus here is on process.

She posed three questions about this sort of transformation: why now, what underpins this trend, and how will it unfold.

In the “why now” category, she discussed the evolution in design that’s underway in all sorts of consumer products, and asked us to envision what would happen if the leaders in consumer product design (e.g., Apple) came into organizations and set to redesigning enterprise systems. Interesting thought, and something that I’ve written about when discussing Enterprise 2.0, which brings consumer Web 2.0 functionality into enterprise applications. The new generation of workers, dubbed “millenials” by Moore, have grown up with completely different experiences and therefore have completely different expectations about what systems will look like as they enter the workforce, particularly around social networking. Added to all this is the evolution of process management as a discipline, and the dissolution of monolithic business applications into composite applications that use BPM, SOA, business rules, collaboration and other technologies, either on-premise or as SaaS.

As for what underpins this trend, Moore discussed the dichotomy between the detailed transactional type of work (which she characterizes as left-brained) and the big picture type of work (right-brained) that have to be supported simultaneously by our systems. She lays out four key principles for designing for people, and gave a detailed example of each (including a really interesting Second Life example for the 4th point):

  1. Business processes adapt to changing business conditions.
  2. Applications evolve continuously while preserving process integrity.
  3. Processes, tasks and the associated information always maintain context.
  4. Systems are unitary, information-rich and reflect the social needs of the business.

The first two of these are about build for change, and the last two are about design for people

This is all unfolding with the big vendors making some large investments in BPM-related technologies as well as newer things like Web 2.0 and mashups. Cisco’s TelePresence got a huge plug here (I’m guessing that they’re a big client of Forrester 🙂 ), including a clip from 24 that used it. This new focus will require some new skills as well: business analysts need to become process designers, and developers need to become (application) assemblers: this is how design for people and build for change come together. This is completely aligned with what I plan to discuss tomorrow in terms of putting the design of processes in the hands of the business and creating agile processes.

Moore finished up with how to get started on all this, from the viewpoint of IT management, business managers, process designers, application developers, enterprise architects, and the CIO.

Appian Anywhere update

I had a chance to hear an update of Appian Anywhere, Appian‘s SaaS BPM offering, while at the Gartner BPM conference this week. I’m very interested in BPM and Enterprise 2.0, and SaaS BPM fits nicely into that intersection.

Although they originally planned for GA in Q307, it looks like Q108 before they’re going to be available to their planned SMB target audience with payments by credit card and other functionality that you’d expect for a SaaS offering. The reason appears to be that they’ve had so much interest from large corporate customers that they’re offering a large-client configuration first to a small number of select customers, so have diverted resources from the SMB functionality to focus on the big fish first. It seems to me that that would tend to cannibalize their on-premise business, although I’m sure that there are large organizations who will use this as a way to try before they buy.

They’re really trying to create an ecosystem for partners to develop applications on their platform. To prime the pump, they’ve created 30+ applications of their own that they’ll offer out for free with the basic subscription; partners are developing other applications that will be offered on a subscription based in the Appian Anywhere marketplace. Encouraging this sort of application development is a web service-like integration capability (I don’t think that it is exactly web services, but similar in nature) to integrate between Appian Anywhere applications and behind-the-firewall applications, which makes it much more useful as a BPM platform, since I can’t think of any customer of mine who wouldn’t have to integrate with one of their on-premise systems at some point.

They’re also creating some video training to minimize the need for professional services to get you up and running on the platform.

There’s still a lot of resistance to SaaS for core business processes, although I think that this could catch on for the non-critical ones as a starting point. However, there’s some pure Enterprise 2.0 vendors such as LongJump who are going to creep into this space — from the other direction and with a very different sort of offering — and pick up some of the market.

Survey on selecting business processes to optimize

David LiRosi, an NYU graduate student, is conducting a survey on the factors involved in using a committee approach — meaning a committee of combined business and IT people — for the selection of the business processes to optimize. From the survey description online:

In the BPM field, it is commonplace for the organization to have one of three groups?the IT group, Business Unit group, or a combined committee?making the decisions on which business processes to optimize. Organizations have had success using the committee approach. The reasons behind the acceptance of the committee approach over other approaches would prove useful to organizations and the BPM field as a whole. In that respect, this survey seeks to find what factors affect the acceptance of a committee approach.

I didn’t take the survey since it’s targetted at end-user organizations, but it only takes about 10 minutes and (I assume) does not gather any information that could be used to identify you or your company. Think back to all those hours that you spent slogging over research papers at school, then click here to take the survey on surveymonkey.com.

Key Issues for BPM

BPM.com has a research paper from Gartner available for free on their site (registration required): Key Issues for Business Process Management, 2007. It’s from March (likely one of the last papers with Jim Sinur’s name on it) but has some timeless points on it such as “How will BPM respond to the disruption of traditional organizational boundaries, the increased complexity of business and other sources of strategic change?” Of course, you have to buy a bunch of Gartner reports to get the answers to all the questions and issues raised in this short paper, but it does pose some interesting questions.

Looking forward to covering Gartner’s BPM summit next week in Orlando. If you’re there, look me up.

TIBCO webinar: Why and how to move ahead with BPM and SOA

I’ve missed a few of the TIBCO webinar series this summer, such as the one on BPMN, and wanted to tune into this one to look at the modelling-to-execution process as TIBCO presents it.

They’re using a different webinar provider this time — the webinars that I did with them were all done with Webex, and we had one live failure that was a bit inconvenient although not disastrous. Ironically, the one slide that was incorrectly rendered in today’s presentation was related to visibility:

Emily Burns starts out with some starting slides on why people are implementing BPM. Reason #1: peer pressure from all your competitors that you read about in the Forrester and Gartner reports. 🙂  She quoted some interesting recent Forrester research that showed that a little over half of the respondents have an SOA strategy, and about 2/3 of the respondents that have some level of BPM consider it critical for their SOA strategy.

Jason McMahon of AmeriCredit was up next to talk about how they used TIBCO in their automotive loan servicing: 25,000 new loans each month, and over a million active loans. They had to streamline their processes and provide greater visibility into the processes, as well as ensure that they’re meeting regulatory requirements as they expand into new geographic regions. They had a fairly fast deployment cycle: the project kicked off in Q106, design started in Q2, development in Q3, and they were rolling it out in January 07. Version 2 is almost ready to go live. They saw a number of benefits:

  • Optimized business process by doing the “deal-killer” due diligence checks up front and reducing hand-offs
  • Customized processing of contracts by state/country (AmeriCredit operates in Canada, despite their name) and type of loan
  • Business process visibility, including better resource management, and automated alerts and reporting
  • Reduced training time since the rules are embedded in the process
  • Outsourcing readiness so that they can add in an outsourcing vendor for contract data entry (which is available now from at least one provider but not in use at AmeriCredit) and data validation/verification processes

McMahon sees a strong need for BPM-driven SOA design, where BPM is the consumer of services and therefore defines a big part of the requirements for services. This includes discovering services by looking at the current EAI-type integration points in existing processes, as well as during the design of future processes. Outside the actual process, there’s also a number of services that are required to service the processes even though they’re not called directly from the BPMS, such as process triggering events, user/role management, and open/close/purge of cases.

He talked in detail about what AmeriCredit has done with web services, including wrapping business rules/logic in web services so that they can be called from both a non-BPM web interface and the BPMS — exactly the reason that I believe in the separation of BPM and BR. He stepped through a number of best practices for defining services, such as establishing the appropriate level of granularity and ensuring encapsulation of some systems, then continues with an example of looking at a process with its existing integration points and combining the appropriate ones into specific web services.

Since they started with BPM and drove towards SOA, they ended up with a very BPM-focussed SOA, much of it defined by the BPM integration points but also with consideration of other applications that might share the same services.

McMahon’s last words of wisdom: using the BPM tool is simple for redesigning the processes; the hard part is having business users buy in to what the future-state processes should be, and you need a good business analyst to be the mediator here.

They use TIBCO’s iProcess for BPM and BusinessWorks for SOA, in case you haven’t guessed that already. Other implementation points: they built the entire UI in .Net, and extract the process data to a data warehouse for BI rather than hitting the BPMS directly.

A recording of the presentation will be available over the next few days, watch the TIBCO site for details or maybe someone from TIBCO will post the link here as a comment (hint, hint). You can check out the slides here, but you’ll really want to hear the audio as well, especially the Q&A.

BPMG reincarnated

The past few months have seen strange happenings with BPMG. I wrote about the original hint of troubles, when Steve Towers and Terry Schurter jumped ship and Terry redirected the BPMG domain to his own competing website, then the follow-up a month later when BPMG appeared to have truly shut down. They’re not down for the count, however; this morning I received the following email:

Welcome to the BPTGroup website www.bptg.org

The following facilities and services are up and running or scheduled for the new site

  • a full range of training and development programmes for open course and in-house delivery
  • a comprehensive, degree-level programme for business change professionals designed to be  internalised by organisations to provide a future structure for developing change expertise
  • an accreditation process that is quick, efficient and authenticated
  • insight to the 8 Omega methodology and maturity assessment process
  • core sections dedicated to Strategy, People, Process and Enabling Technologies including articles, reviews, presentations and a comprehensive cross-referencing system
  • the introduction of the BPTG global partners
  • the International BPTG Chapters web facility
  • executive briefings, coaching and mentoring, process audit services are offered to organisations as they endeavour to move effectively through the cultural and other issues of change surrounding their transformation to process-focused operations.

The deliberate sabotage of the BPMG website impacted its members, staff and associates worldwide and raises many issues, ethical as well as legal, about the integrity of the organisation and the individuals involved.  The actions that created that situation are totally at variance with the core BPM principle that serving the customers best interests should inform all our actions. 

However, as you will see from our home page, many of the BPMG key people have expressed their opinion very clearly by readily joining the BPTGroup.  We also welcome new faces and expertise, and there are others on the way.

Website functionality will be enhanced in two further phases over the next few months ? we will be introducing new features, new courses and services to our fellow process professionals ? and we want you to help us in this development process. 

One final point before I leave you to explore the BPTGroup website. 

Why BPTGroup? After the BPMG debacle I am sure many of you would expect us to avoid any association with similar phrasing.  Quite the reverse.  The principal movers behind BPTGroup were proud of what we had created in the BPMG and the services we provided to our members.  Although in no way responsible or accountable for the destruction wrought, we want to help rectify the undoubted damage done to an ethical and principled global community and we invite you to join us in these endeavours. 

Please, express your opinion by your action ? help us to help you.

A number of delegates were seriously inconvenienced by the collapse of the BPMG and some lost their fee pre-payments.  We make this offer to those people ? when the BPTGroup next run a commercially viable programme in a location convenient to you we will invite you to join us and waive all professional fees for that course.  Please contact us now to enable our people to keep you informed of convenient courses.

Thank-you for your previous support and interest ? we look forward to the opportunity to work with you again.

Regards,

David Lyneham-Brown

CEO

They have some of the original people on board, including Mark McGregor and Jim Baird (who offered to provide BPMG courses for free to people who had paid for them). A lot of people are unlikely to trust Steve and Terry after the stunt that they pulled — I don’t know the whole story, but it appears to be pretty unprofessional behaviour — but they were two of the very visible faces of the old BPMG, and it’s difficult to see if BPTG will be able to regain the momentum. I don’t think that it’s necessary to have visible faces for an online community like this; certainly there’s others, like BPMInstitute, that are run by very competent people who choose not to put themselves in the spotlight, but to show off the content instead.

BPTG is offering a free membership right now, and I have no idea if they plan to go back to a two-tiered model that drew such criticism in the past. Personally, I don’t think that there’s any place in the market for a paid site for most of the content that they offer; there are a lot of other content sites related to BPM that get their revenue from advertising, vendor-sponsored content such as webinars and white papers, and live training and conferences.

Generalists and specialists

Specialist or generalist?Great graphic by Dave Gray of XPLANE, showing the difference between generalists and specialists. Click through on the image to his Flickr page to see in full resolution, or view it directly on his blog, there’s a lot of other great material there.

His key point: generalists are best at defining the problem or goal, while specialists are best at solving the problem or executing the plan.

I met Dave at VizThink3 in Toronto this summer, where he led us through some exercises in visual thinking; I’m more of a written word sort of person, so these exercises were good at stretching my brain a bit; I even drew a visual representation of crowdsourcing. I think that my drawing skills need a bit of work.

BPM is one of those areas where a structured type of visual thinking is used: most often, people draw a process flow to represent their business process, and that visual representation (now standardized in BPMN) has become the primary way for specifying processes for automation. Although Dave’s work focusses in a great part on visuals for marketing and training communications, process visualization is part of what they do; check out their website for the Standard & Poor’s example, where the process map looks like a subway route map.