Category: process

Earlier this month was the second meeting of the Toronto BPMG chapter, following a successful turnout at the first meeting. Unfortunately, this one fell on a Friday after a large snowfall when the city had warned people not to travel unless necessary, which encouraged many people to take a snow day in spite of it turning out to be a sunny day with all of the snow melting. (For those of you who live in places where you don’t have snow days, try to imagine the pure delight of missing a day of school and spending it at the local park sledding down the hills, then apply that feeling to missing a day of work. Of course, everyone claims to be working at home…) The result: all the vendors and consultants struggled through the slush and made it to the meeting, and almost none of the “practitioners” (end-customers) did, resulting in an embarrassing total of three practitioners — including the speaker — out of about 25 people. It was funny to hear, however, that three people at the meeting said that they attended because they read about it on my blog.

As with the last meeting, Jim Baird talked about BPMG, then Ultimus (the meeting sponsor and the vendor to our speaker) gave a short overview of BPM without too much of a product plug. The main speaker was Jodi Starkman-Mendelsohn of West Park Assessment Centre, who I had heard speak earlier that same week at the Gartner conference in San Diego. Although I had heard some of the WPAC story, this was in much more detail:

• One key business line for them was to assess injuries from auto accidents, with patient referrals from both insurance companies and lawyers.
• The main driver for improved systems, including BPM, was 300% revenue growth over a 3-year period that basically broke their manual scheduling process. With increased numbers of double-booking and no shows, they were finding it hard to maintain their service levels and estimated that $3M/year in revenue was at risk.
• They defined a strategic plan in 2001 with the objective to improve productivity and operating efficiencies by integrating multiple web-based applications together seamlessly to address their scheduling and financial management needs. They set a target of a 3-year return on investment.
• In October 2002, they went live with a new scheduling system, a new financial system, a fax server, and Ultimus BPM for process management and to bind together the other components. Events in the scheduling system initiate processes, and there’s integration between BPM and scheduling throughout the processes. The fax server is kicked off at various points in the process to generate outbound documents. There are nightly uploads to the financial system (which is deemed adequate frequency), and occasional downloads of the master file.
• Currently, they have 79 different processes, 29 active users, and 6,000 active incidents/month. I was surprised at the large number of different processes: maintaining 79 business processes that may be only slight variations of each other would be a significant burden, although I don’t know how similar the individual processes are.
• They saw huge benefits: ROI in 3 years, reduced turnaround times, improved business efficiency, and reduced errors, allowing them to grow beyond their previous capabilities and meet market demands. They’re also adding value to customers by providing better visibility into processes, and have better agility of the business logic by externalizing it in the BPM rather than embedding it within financial or scheduling systems.

The big success story that Starkman-Mendelsohn talked about at Gartner and here was what happened to them when SARS hit Toronto in 2003. Although SARS didn’t affect most of us in Toronto all that much, it had a severe impact on health-care facilities, where all but critical services were cancelled. Although a private business, WPAC operates within a public healthcare facility, which meant that they were shut out of their own offices with very little warning. Prior to their new systems, this would have put them out of commission for the entire seven weeks of the lock-out, costing them $600K in direct revenue and untold damages in lost opportunity; with all of their applications available online via web interfaces, however, they were managing their business processes as usual by the next day, and two days later had outfitted space in a local hotel with examining tables and equipment to allow them to continue business as usual. Since they’re not capturing the patient files electronically, they still needed access to the paper files, but were allowed to send one person back into their offices once per day to fetch the necessary files.

I created a short course on business continuity planning last year, and I talked about exactly this issue: how having your business processes and other applications online can save your butt when disaster hits. If you have mostly manual processes, consider that that process is actually embodied within the worker’s heads, and likely in paper files on their desk or notes saved only to their local PC. Take away the physical desk, and they might have a hard time reconstructing a particular instance of a business process. Take away the specific worker as well, and you can forget about reconstructing that process instance until you can get access to either their desk or the person. If the business process is online, however, most of the notes and other instance-specific data is captured within the online process, making it possible to replace the original worker and/or remove them from their physical working environment with a minimal impact on their ability to complete the business processes, as long as they have access to the online systems.

Starkman-Mendelsohn talked about challenges that they are facing now due to recent deregulation in the auto insurance industry: first of all, one part of their business is likely to decrease because of changing rules around the use of assessment centres for resolving insurance disputes. Secondly, if someone is required to have an assessment, there is now a maximum distance that they’re required to travel. They were able to change their business processes to suit the new requirements and remain competitive — although the decreased business has resulted in reduced staff numbers — and set up four satellite locations, enabled by the ability to access the business applications remotely. In other words, the easy adaptability of the systems is providing them with the business agility that they require in a rapidly-changing business environment.

She finished up by noting that a BPM system needs to evolve over time, it’s not a one-time project — a big vote for not over-customizing your systems. She also said that involve their subject matter experts in process mapping and implementation was a big part of their success, and resulted in good staff buy-in.

And the final big win for them: the Infoworld 100 Awards named them as a winner in the health-care sector in November.

I don’t usually blog about someone getting a new job, but this one was interesting: webMethods has hired Bruce Williams (who, according to their press release, is a Renowned Process Improvement Expert, but I’d never heard of him prior to the Gartner conference) as VP and GM for BPM solutions:

Drawing upon all of the company’s global resources, including product engineering, marketing, industry solutions, professional services, and business development, Williams will direct webMethods’ go-to-market strategies, solution development and customer evangelism for the BPM market.

I saw Williams speak at the recent Gartner conference, and I didn’t find that he had much to say about BPM: he seems to be a Six Sigma expert rather than having any direct experience in BPM, which makes him (in my opinion) an odd choice for what is essentially a BPM product marketing leadership role.

Having finished moderating a BPM in Action webinar on business process platform strategy, I’m listening in on the panel moderated by Beth Gold-Bernstein that includes Bruce Silver, Jeffrey Sterllings (a character from Kiran Garimella’s book The Power of Process), Stephanie Wilkinson of IBM, and Steve McDonald of Global 360.

There were some interesting audience questions during the discussion; Beth structured it so that she’d ask an audience poll, then ask related questions of one or more of the panelists, then publish the audience results. I didn’t use any audience questions in my panel yesterday, and I found this an interesting technique.

For example, 63% of the listeners use modelling as the starting point for their BPM initiative, 26% state that process automation is their starting point, and 10% use monitoring. I was surprised that there weren’t more using monitoring as their starting point, since any organization that has Six Sigma or some other quality management initiative will be monitoring and measuring things before they ever start a BPM initiative. For those that aren’t using monitoring, how do you even know that you need BPM if you don’t have some sort of measurement of your current processes?

The audience was all over the place in terms of the type of processes that they need to support: although a third of them listed “human and automated” and another quarter listed “human and collaborative”. When you added up all the categories, 50% of them have collaborative processes, 58% have automated processes, and 66% have human-facing processes, with a great deal of overlap.

There’s still a split between who’s driving the BPM initiative, although 56% of the audience said that it’s the business side of their organization rather than IT.

I always have to laugh when you get competing vendors on a panel together. In some cases, like my panel yesterday, you get a verbal sparring match (or a brawl, if you have Phil Gilbert on the line). Even when things are more civilized, there’s always the competitive streak that makes them have to say things their own way, and not agreeing outright with their competitors. At one point in today’s panel, “Jeffrey Sterllings” (Kiran from webMethods) made a statement about BPM and SOA, and Stephanie Wilkinson said emphatically “Well, I absolutely can’t disagree with that”. Oh, is that the same as agreeing? 😉

By the way, am I the only one who noticed that these sessions were supposed to end at 45 minutes past the hour?

As with all of the other BPM in Action panels and webinars, you’ll be able to listen to the replay within a day or two at the same link.

I’m listening in on Janelle Hill’s keynote at the online BPM In Action conference: BPM Technology: From Best-of-Breed Tools to BPM Suites to Business Process Platforms. I heard her speak at the Gartner BPM summit last week; this is a completely different talk from what she gave there, but appears to be a nearly-identical slide set to that used in Marc Kerreman’s presentation.

She started off with a discussion of implicit versus explicit business process management: the implicit ones are buried within application silos, whereas the explicit ones are implemented within some sort of integration technology, such as BPM and its predecessors, workflow and EAI.

She’s now giving an explanation of Gartner’s shift in terminology from “pure-play BPM”, which she sees as “1st generation” (she named Savvion, Fuego, Metastorm, Ultimus and Lombardi as having started in this earlier category), to their current terminology, “BPM suites” or BPMS. Apparently, the suites are more well-balanced and can handle the system-to-system integration better than the pure-plays, although I think that this is much more of an evolution than an entire new category. The cynics in the crowd will say that Gartner just changes the name every few years to keep things fresh. 🙂

Hill is now talking about business process platforms, which is the topic of the webinar that I’m hosting at 1pm. Gartner’s definition:

The business process platform is a combined IT and business model that enables enterprises to accommodate rapid but controlled business process change through the use of integrated process composition technologies and the delivery of reusable business process components and their management.

It’s not clear to me how this differs from any other “roll your own” environment, although this has the blessing of somehow being an “architecture” as opposed to just a collection of services and tools. For example, Microsoft referred to their combination of SharePoint and BizTalk as a process platform at Gartner last week.

She makes a great point about how the best proof of concept is one that crosses physical boundaries: by crossing functional/people boundaries, the POC will almost certainly also cross information and system boundaries.

Unfortunately, Janelle was dropped off the line when the Q&A started, leaving us only with the IBM sponsors.

The replay of the webinar should be available soon if you missed it live.

At last year’s Gartner BPM summit in Nashville, they divided up the BPM marketplace into the “pure play” BPM vendors (those companies for whom BPM is their primary business, whose products provide excellent human-facing capabilities and at least adequate integration capabilities), integration-focussed vendors who have purchased a BPM company to round out their portfolio, and large software companies who have developed or acquired a BPM product. In the pure-play market, they listed three “major players” (revenues above $100M) — FileNet, Pegasystems and Global 360 — and five “up and comers” (revenues above $30M) — Appian, Lombardi, Metastorm, Savvion and Ultimus. Of course, since then, FileNet has been purchased by IBM, moving them from the pure-play to large software company categorization, which also includes companies like Microsoft, Fujitsu and even Oracle. A few of the integration-focussed vendors, such as TIBCO, BEA and webMethods, are starting to give the pure-plays a run for their money in the BPM space, and there are likely to be more to follow.

I didn’t see a Gartner presentation at this year’s summit that did the same sort of vendor shoot-out — unless that was in the Wednesday breakfast session that I missed (c’mon guys, 7:30 on the morning after the vendor hospitality suites?!) — but there’s a BPMS magic quadrant due out this year, and it will be interesting to see how the players continue to shift around.

I did have someone jokingly ask me if I was going to publish my own “magic quadrant” comparison of BPM vendors, but with that name and concept trademarked to Gartner, I’ll have to do a mystical hypercube instead.