process – Page 95

Savvion enters the brawl

Nothing like a good old-fashioned vendor smackdown. In response to the software-as-a-service announcements by Lombardi and Appian on Monday, Pat “Fighting Irish” Morrissey of Savvion threw in his two cents worth:

Yesterday’s announcements are a beautiful snapshot of on-demand’s reality and hype in practice. Appian’s solution is a good Web-only application – and we applaud their effort to focus on BPM for the small and medium market (SMBs). Lombardi, however, is trying to use SaaS as a way to divert attention from the fact that they now have a beta modeling tool with PowerPoint export – it’s not on-demand, it’s BPM modeler ‘light’.

Pat is right about one thing: Lombardi’s Blueprint is BPM Modeler Lite — but that’s exactly the intention. I had a chance to talk to Pat today, and I’m not sure that Savvion, and most likely other BPM vendors, are really understanding what Lombardi is doing, and how they’re pushing into a relatively new part of a very crowded BPA/BPM space. Although Lombardi talks up the easy-to-use high-level process “sketching” view in Blueprint, what I think is so hot about Blueprint is the collaboration functionality: presence and the shared whiteboard paradigm. Not “collaboration” by virtue of a shared repository where multiple people can serially access a process model, but a true interactive collaboration. You can be sure that there will be a lot of scouting around the vendor booths at the Gartner BPM conference in a couple of weeks as people try to figure out what this all means.

Morrissey went on to say (in his press statement yesterday):

Savvion has offered a full-featured process modeler as a free download on our website to help business and IT users get started with BPM for more than two years. 75,000 users have downloaded our modeler and we welcome Lombardi’s move to adopting our market leading strategy.

Interesting, but I think that this misses the point: regardless of functionality, what Appian and Lombardi are offering is zero-download software as a service, and what Savvion is offering is a downloadable desktop application. Apples, meet oranges.

In a post last April, I talked about the wave of free, downloadable modeling tools, and the big problem with them — the installation restrictions on many corporate desktops — that made this solution my least favourite of the ways to distribute process modeling to the masses. In short, a few vendors, such as Savvion (who pioneered the concept) provide a free downloadable version of their process design tool, which can be installed and run standalone on your desktop without connecting to a server. Although I like the idea of process design for the masses, and this type of solution enforces standards and provides some degree of process validation, it has a major flaw that I find to be a show-stopper in most of my customer’s corporate environments: it requires that the user be able to download and install an application on their desktop. If you are a business analyst at, say, a large bank, you almost certainly can’t do that because IT policies prevent it through some sort of desktop lockdown security. Even if you could, the process of downloading and installing software is not something that a lot of business analysts do regularly, so could be a bit of a barrier in itself, but that’s a moot point if the user doesn’t even have the ability to install software locally.

At that time of that post in April, I gave the edge to Visio together with an add-on like Zynium’s Byzio to model a process in Visio, optionally using a BPMN template, then export it as XPDL for import into a vendor’s BPM design tool. This alternative, used by Fujitsu among others, has the huge advantage of using a tool that is already on the desktop of virtually every business analyst, and easing the learning curve as the business analyst moves into process design and starts to learn BPMN. The disadvantage is that Visio is a general purpose tool that creates “dumb” process models: it doesn’t enforce standards such as BPMN, doesn’t prevent the analyst from adding all sort of nonsensical things to a process model, doesn’t provide any sort of validation against the process server, and doesn’t provide higher level functions that you’ll find in a BPM vendor’s process designer, such as direct hookups to rules engines or web services.

In the past several months, however, I’m leaning towards the browser-based approach, especially after seeing what’s possible in a full-featured process modeller from Appian, and Lombardi’s new process mapper.

As I’ve been predicting for a while, this will be the year of SaaS BPM, and the only way to accomplish that is with a fully browser-based solution like Appian Anywhere. And as I’ve also been predicting, this will be the year of Web 2.0 colliding with BPM, of which Lombardi is giving us a taste.

Appian also offering on-demand BPM

Late in the day today, likely after they saw my Lombardi Blueprint post, I received a message from Appian announcing that they had released an on-demand, subscription-based BPM service. This appears to be a SaaS version of their BPM suite, although it’s hard to tell since they only sent me the press release and a package of six screenshots in their email, most of which appear to show setup and admin screens (look! you can change colour schemes!).

The big difference between this and what Lombardi announced today is that this is the full BPM suite, not just a high-level process modeller. I’ve posted previously about Appian’s killer browser-based process designer, so it’s straightforward (although by no means trivial) for them to convert the whole shebang to a proper SaaS offering. Unlike Lombardi, it’s not clear whether they’ve added any Web 2.0/social software concepts such as collaboration, or whether this is just a straight-up deployment of their existing product. Since they didn’t brief me in advance, I don’t have a lot more information about it, but they’ve promised me a phone call sometime real soon. [Note to vendors: if you want analyst/bloggers to write about your stuff in any amount of detail on the day that it releases, it’s a good idea to do that briefing ahead of time.]

I’ve been saying for some time that SaaS is coming for BPM. There have been a few attempts at this in the past, such as the Global 360-funded Process Factory, but nothing has really made any impact in the marketplace, not like Salesforce.com has done for sales automation. Appian, as an established BPM brand, could be the first to see some success in this area.

Naked Process Modelling with Lombardi

“Naked blogging” is a term that’s applied to living your life transparently on the web through your blog and other social media, like Flickr, del.icio.us, Skype, LinkedIn, Library Thing and Facebook. Most of my friends around my age are appalled at the amount of information that I expose out there, although the younger crowd that I hang with at TorCamp see it as perfectly normal, and I truly believe that if you’re going to get benefit from the network effects of Web 2.0, you need to contribute every bit as much as you expect to get back.

Two weeks ago, when I had a chance for a preview of Lombardi’s new Blueprint Web 2.0-like, software-as-a-service process modeller, my first reaction was “Cool! Naked process modelling!” After all, if you could model your processes online and invite people from within or outside your organization to collaborate on the design of those processes, wouldn’t you expect to see some benefit from that collaboration?

Blueprint addresses some of the issues seen in current process modelling tools: too much complexity for the casual user, and too little ability to collaborate. They call it “process discovery” rather than process modelling, host it as software-as-a-service, and let you get started with a free version (limited to one process and two users) to try it out before you spring for the monthly subscription. Just go to the site, start sketching out your process, then invite others to participate in the design. Like a wiki, everyone who you invite to collaborate on your process can make edits, and you’ll see their edits right away — a true shared whiteboard paradigm. Last September, I used the term “process wiki” in a post and at a couple of conferences where I was speaking, and that’s pretty much what Lombardi has done here.

They’ve also integrated presence into the application using the Google Talk instant messaging client: you can see if your process collaborators are online (notice the “4 Other Users Viewing” indicator in the top right of the first screenshot below), and chat with them through Google Talk. You can also use your Google Talk buddy list to invite people to join the collaboration. As a big Skype user, I’m hoping that they add other IM clients eventually.

Given what I’ve been doing lately around Enterprise 2.0, and seeing how Web 2.0 impacts BPM, this is one of the most exciting things that I’ve seen in BPM for quite a while. I must disclose that Lombardi is a client of mine, but I’d be saying the same thing even if they weren’t.

The visual paradigm is that of outlining a process by specifying the main high-level activities, then the sub-activities within each activity. In fact, you see both the flow diagram and the outline view:

Notice anything weird about this screenshot? That’s right, it’s taken on a Mac. In fact, the Lombardi product manager who gave me the demo came into the meeting room toting his MacBook, which was not something that I was expecting to see. I’ve also seen it on Firefox on Windows. What better way to demonstrate platform independence? The Web 2.0 style interface is very slick, and there won’t be much of a learning curve for anyone who is comfortable with other web-based applications.

You can then specify a lot more detail for the process, including participants, inputs and outputs, impact analysis information such as potential failure points and likelihood of occurrence (very Six Sigma-like), and documentation.

You can also drill down into a more detailed BPMN view of the process for detailed workflow modelling:

You can generate a PowerPoint presentation from the process model, which includes all of the additional parameters specified, for presenting the business case of the process further up the management chain. The demo that I saw generated a 60-page PowerPoint presentation with every possible bit of detail; I think that the problem would be cutting it down to size rather than the usual problem of having to find information to add to the presentation.

Once the collaboration has gone as far as it can, the process model can be exported to Lombardi’s TeamWorks, using (soon-to-be-released) BPDM as the serialization format — with Lombardi’s CTO chairing the BPMI steering committee at OMG, which oversees the BPDM standards, this isn’t a big surprise. You can even round-trip the processes from TeamWorks back to Blueprint when they need another round of collaborative design.

I think that their pricing is too high — $500/month for 10 users, whereas Salesforce.com is around $165/month for a 10-user team, and is currently discounted to half of that — but that will sort itself out in the marketplace. I suggested that their free version be ad-supported, much like the freemium business models of other Web 2.0 applications like Flickr and LinkedIn; I got a few weird looks from around the table at that point, but who knows, I may have put a bug in someone’s ear.

They are almost certainly going to have requests from companies to host the application on internal servers rather than Lombardi’s software as a service, although the success of Salesforce.com (especially in maintaining privacy of data) means that there’s a lot of companies out there are that starting to trust the SaaS model. Looking in a completely different direction, I would love to see Lombardi make Blueprint open source, which would drive collaborative process modelling into places that they never imagined. Although it could negatively impact Blueprint revenue — it’s still possible to have revenue-generating open source, it just requires a bit more imagination — it could serve to drive more business to Lombardi’s core products.

In a year-end emerging trends article in December, I predicted both “modelling for the masses” and “Web 2.0 hits BPM”. Lombardi’s Blueprint delivers on both of these, and I look forward to seeing how they take it forward from here. If it’s like all other good Web 2.0 software, it will adhere to the principle of constant improvement rather than monolithic release cycles.

There’s a lot more to it than what I’ve discussed here, and if you’re interested, check out the webinar that I’m hosting tomorrow entitled Are You Ready for On-Demand BPM with Colin Teubner of Forrester Research and Jim Rudden of Lombardi, in which Jim talks a lot more about Blueprint. You can also sign up for the beta program if you want to try it out for yourself; as of the end of April, it will be available to everyone. I signed up this morning, but received the following email back from Lombardi a short while later:

Dear Sandy,

Thank you for your interest in Lombardi Blueprint. Unfortunately, due to the overwhelming number of requests for Blueprint accounts, we are unable to activate your account at this time.

We will keep your registration information in our database and will contact you when we can provide you with an account.

I’m hoping to be able to pull some strings and get in the beta program sometime soon. 🙂

For those of you who did manage to get a beta account, go on, get out there and expose your processes!

ProcessWorld Day 2: Services industry breakout with Leopoldo Feuntes of AxxiS Consulting

Unfortunately, I had to step away from the conference for a couple of hours for some unrelated business — a group podcast that you’ll see here shortly, and an upcoming webinar — but I was back in time to see Leopoldo Fuentes of AxxiS Consulting discuss a project at the Secreteria de la Funcion Publica de Mexico for implementing best practices within the federal government using ARIS.

One of the first things that they did was to create a knowledge repository for the results defined by their strategic planning process:

Organization charts, HR profiles, position descriptions, and knowledge maps
Compliance information
Activity analysis
Operational flows
A set of process models derived from all of the above

Once the repository was populated with this information, they could start to leverage it for a number of transformational purposes:

To professionalize human resources of the institution
To develop the talent of the institution
To supply the decision making
To transform the ministry into a world-class institution

Not surprisingly, it all came down to process: the process models ultimately allowed them to define the roles and skills of people that they required. However, it had a number of other process improvement type of benefits as well, such as being able to use process models in strategic planning activities, gain some process improvement through better understanding of the processes, and changes to the organization charts to better match the process models. Using custom scripting (rather than the report web publication capabilities of ARIS, which did not allow them the proper degree of change control on the website), they also publish this on their intranet and, selectively, on the public internet, thereby increasing transparency of the organization. You can see the public portions of this here, including the profiles and roles of individual public servants (my Spanish is really bad, so I now can’t find the right link to navigate to those sections, but go ahead and poke around). This type of transparency is becoming a critical factor in most government organizations these days.

ProcessWorld Day 2: Executive Customer Roundtable

The second session of the day was an executive customer roundtable with John Wheeler of Business Processes in Motion (he was formerly with Nova Chemicals, an ARIS customer, but now seems to be offering consulting services that he gently flogged during parts of the discussion), Deb Boykin of Molson Coors, Steve Tieman of Estée Lauder and Todd Lohr of Zurich (whose breakout session I blogged about yesterday), moderated by Jason Mausberg of IDS Scheer.

Conversations ranged around people, executive committment, ERP systems, ARIS as process-enabling tool, data standards and other topics. Most of them seem to be saying that they’re “not yet into the technical layer”, which means that there’s a lot of modelling going on, but there’s still a gap to the executable part — a trend that I’ve been seeing not just over the past few days, but over a much longer period. An audience question at the end of the talk asked that explicitly; the answers were “we’re at the start of it”, “we’re in the early stages”, “not that far along at all” and “it depends on how you define SOA” (which was a bit of a nonsense answer that included BPM as part of SOA so stated that if you had implemented BPM, then you had done some SOA — another way of saying the same thing as the others, I think).

Random thoughts from the various speakers:

using ARIS to link strategic to tactical goals, identify metrics and get a handle on costs (this was from Molson)
business architect plays a key role in achieving agility; a dissenting opinion said that their management didn’t see the benefit of agility (which I found amazing)
adherence to standards, both by customers and the software vendors who serve them, is critical
BPM isn’t a fad, it’s part of a long-term push to process innovation
use BPM to determine if people are behaving the way that we think that they’re behaving

There was an audience question about how the panel members got their senior management to embrace BPM. The consensus was to start at a tactical level, get some wins on smaller projects, then use those successes to engage the executives by showing them some real benefits. No surprises here: this is not a fundamentally different story from introducing any new concepts or technology within a company.

ProcessWorld Day 2: Keynote with Dr. Wolfram Jost

Dr. Jost started the day with a presentation on “The Basis for Linking BPM & SOA”. Someone may have been reading one of my posts from yesterday, because when he put up the obligatory slide of VW, he referred to them as “Volkswagen — of course, you know who they are”. 🙂

His talk was part ARIS product marketing and part generic material on BPM and SOA.

There was a lot on the separation of modelling and execution environments, or what he characterized as “business BPM” (business process strategy, design, implementation and controlling) and “technical BPM” (define, create, execute, monitor) — really, it’s like layers in a Zachman or other enterprise architecture diagram, although he didn’t really make that distinction. ARIS is used in the upper layer of functions/definitions, with links to the technical BPM functions in the lower layer.

He did have some nice slides and explanations of BPM and SOA: BPM as a management discipline involved in strategy, design, implementation and measurement of business processes, with the purpose of continuously improve the productivity and degree of innovation of business processes; SOA as an architectural style of business applications based on distributable, sharable and loosely coupled modules, with the purpose to improve the flexibility of business applications needed to support changes in business processes with less time and effort. He showed a 3-layer model of strategy (business model), BPM (business processes) and SOA (business applications), where there might be changes at any of these levels that would ripple through the others: strategy could change due to market forces; business processes could change due to organizational changes, and applications could change due to technology innovations.

Another point that he made, and one that I used in my response to Phil Gilbert‘s comment on one of my posts yesterday, there’s value in using modelling tools that are separate from the BPMS themselves, especially if you’re creating the business models in advance of technology acquisition, or if you have a variety of process execution environments and want a single modelling environment for your business analysts. Of course, when Jost talks about business models being technology-independent, he’s excluding their own technology from that definition.

On the product side, Jost discussed the six solutions that they offer, which appear to be combining/packaging of existing products to address specific markets: Enterprise BPM, Enterprise Architecture, Process-Driven SAP, Business-Driven SOA, Process Intelligence & Performance, and Governance, Risk & Compliance. He also spoke about the new ARIS SOA Architect product, used to translate their “business BPM” into “technical BPM”.

The review of their multi-vendor platform strategy showed up some of the weaknesses that Phil Gilbert had mentioned in his comments yesterday: although they use BPEL and UML to interface bi-directionally with Oracle, and BPEL for bi-directionality with TIBCO, they use a much more tightly integrated — and proprietary — interface to SAP. Other BPMS products, including IBM WebSphere, Microsoft BizTalk, BEA and Fujitsu only have uni-directional exports, which is pretty useless in practical usage.

Jost finished up his talk with a quick review of the ARIS 2007 product roadmap.

ProcessWorld Day 2: Breakfast

I don’t usually blog about breakfast, but I happened to end up sitting with Marc Kase of SAIC, whose presentation that I posted about yesterday.

We had a great discussion about how they organize their team of business architects and business analysts, training, collaboration within the team and to their internal customers; Marc obviously has a good handle on how to create and manage such a diverse team of skills.

My question of the week is about integration between ARIS (or any process modelling environment) and a business process execution environment, whether a full BPMS or something that fits more into the SOA layer, and Marc confirmed my suspicions that the unidirectional interfaces are problematic for a variety of reasons, and not used within their environment of ARIS and the BEA AquaLogic BPMS (Fuego). They only provide a high-level process view to the (separate and IT-focussed) BPMS team, who then redraw it in BEA and add a lot of detail required for execution. This creates the opportunity for translation errors between the model and the implementation, although their ultimate QA is against the process models in ARIS in order to reduce those effects. Marc expressed that the lack of round-tripping was a factor in them not using direct integration as well.

I also found out that Vince, the senior business architect who accompanied Marc in his presentation, is Vince Outlaw of AboutEA — a blogger with whom I have exchanged links and comments. We discovered Vince in the internet cafe (of course) for an introduction, thereby creating one more real-world link to strengthen the ties of bloggers.

ProcessWorld Day 1: Briefing with Trevor Naidoo of IDS Scheer

I skipped the last breakout session of the day for a discussion with Trevor Naidoo, IDS Scheer’s Director of ARIS Solution Engineering. He’s responsible for the pre-sales technical activities, and used to be an ARIS customer, so is very familiar with how customers use the product and how they want to use it.

We spoke first about integration between ARIS and the BPMS products that automate processes, which included some discussion about standards. He pointed out that integration using pure standards tends to degrade to the least common denominator — a point that I’m not sure that I agree with for all standards, although it makes sense if you picked BPEL as your standard — which led them to take a different approach with their most tightly integrated partners, SAP and Oracle: that of “standards-based” integration, where they extend BPEL (I believe) in order to provide increased functionality. I’m not sure at what point a “standards-based” approach becomes “proprietary”, although I can see the value of going this way. In any case, they’re using different approaches for different vendors: “standards-based” for SAP and Oracle, BPEL for Lombardi, and XPDL for Fujitsu.

This really came around to the issue of how to get those process models into an execution engine, or if anyone is really doing it at all. Naidoo said that what was moving from ARIS to the execution engine was a “process outline”, which then required some amount of work to hook it up to the BPMS engine (as expected), and that the main value is not in the transfer itself — which could be readily recreated in the BPMS designer directly — but in engaging the business in the entire process design cycle. This, then, is what I suspected: that most people really are redrawing the process models in the BPMS designer, adding who knows how many translation errors along the way, because there is insufficient value to bother with the direct integration. This is not unique to ARIS; I saw the same thing at the Proforma user conference last year.

We moved on to talk about the technology. I hadn’t done my homework in this area, and was really unaware of ARIS’ support for browser-based design (yes, I’m on my usual rant about browser-based process modelling); they have a Java applet client for design in a browser environment, which is a pretty heavy footprint by today’s AJAX standards. I’d love to hear more about their plans to put that client on a diet, which will greatly facilitate design collaboration with occasional users, both inside and outside the corporate firewall.

We finished with a discussion of how to move the process modelling story from what is usually a departmental beginning within a company up to the executive level and therefore out across the entire organization: internal evangelism, if you will, to leverage that initial 10-person ARIS project into making ARIS an enterprise-wide process modelling tool. This is addressed to some degree by one of their new “solutions” (which appear to be specific packaging and bundling of products and services), the Enterprise BPM solution which (based on information from their website) includes the ARIS Business Architect, ARIS Business Optimizer, ARIS Business Simulator and ARIS Business Publisher as the basis for implementing a company-wide BPM infrastructure. I still think that there’s a fundamental disconnect in language between the players: the average business analyst or architect is likely too mired in detail to be able to present a high-level plan to the executives of their organization on why to super-size their ARIS installation, but I’m sure that the IDS Scheer sales team would be happy to help out. With Trevor’s able assistance, of course.

ProcessWorld Day 1: Services industry breakout with Todd Lohr of Zurich North America

The second customer breakout session was Todd Lohr of Zurich North America, who discussed various process modelling initiatives within Zurich. They’ve expended a ton of effort on detailed as-is process mapping in order to drive process improvement, and it appears to have paid off even before implementing process automation.

They had some interesting discoveries: 4 out of 5 top activities (by time spent) did not add value to the underwriting process; many activities done by an underwriter could be done by an underwriting assistant; the start time of certain processes was causing unnecessary delays due to timing or unavailability of staff (underwriters work late, whereas the assistants work 7-3, so all assistant-level work after 3pm was done by an underwriter); and bad insurance applications (e.g., missing data) can be found and aborted earlier in the process through the appropriate triage. Having worked with a lot of insurance customers, I don’t find any of these surprising, but I was impressed by the thoroughness of their as-is modelling and how they were able to exploit it to improve processes, technology and organizational structure.

They use ARIS to create the future state models and help the transition from the as-is to the to-be processes. They see it as a tool for training, simulating and communicating, as well as determine staffing and economic value of processes.

Future plans include integration of business rules, and getting some of these processes automated in a BPMS.

ProcessWorld Day 1: Services industry breakout with Marc Kase of SAIC

After lunch, I attended a couple of ARIS customer breakouts, the first of which was Marc Kase of SAIC. I won’t give a lot of detail about their business processes, since I’m not sure how much that they really want to share outside the conference, but there were some great points and lessons learned that are more generic.

One of the first stats that hit me on the SAIC case is that they moved from 700 to 70 (it may have been 78 — I was in the back and the print on the slide was small) job roles as part of their process modelling efforts, which is an incredible success story.

They’ve focussed on building a business architecture, with process models created for projects stored in local repositories, then promoted to a central enterprise architecture repository at certain milestones. From this, they’ve been able to see a number of benefits:

Context, e.g., which systems use which data
Documentation that allows requirements and design to be traced back to business processes
Standards enforcement
Ability to cascade changes across models
Web publication of process and architecture content
Strengthened ties between IT and functional process owners

They also learned a few lessons, such as some of the difficulties in enforcing change control in moving from a single project to a portfolio of projects, and some practical issues around setting tightly-controlled standards in order to reduce the user learning curve; in fact, with the appropriate filters and standards in place, their users find ARIS “much easier to use than Visio”.

They have a number of plans for 2007, including simulation, integration with a number of other systems including their BPMS, building out the complete enterprise business architecture, and using “system of systems engineering” to track interdependencies between projects.