process – Page 96

ProcessWorld Day 1: BPM for SOA breakout with Bill Swanton of AMR Research

For the first breakout session today, I heard Bill Swanton, who’s VP Research at AMR Research. Although the topic was “BPM is the value in SOA”, Swanton talked a lot about SOA-ing your ERP. AMR has obviously done a lot of research in this area, and he had some good thoughts on the ERP long-term lifecycle. ERP systems are often monolithic, and therefore not so easily pushed aside or interfaced with services. What ends up happening is “SOA by evolution”, where an ERP system (he mentioned SAP ERP and Oracle Fusion in particular) is wrapped to create specific service interfaces, although the internal processes remain fixed.

He did discuss the use of technology is a catalyst for changes in business, and stated from their research that 66% of organizations implementing SOA are hoping to improve their business processes. I’m not sure that I agreed with his characterization of BPM and BAM as “key components of SOA”, but I loved the analogy of SOA as the corporate “patch panel”.

He had an interesting chart about how SOA needs vary with the complexity/enterprise spread of existing systems, and degree of customization. If different software is used in different business units and there’s a lot of customization, then the goal of SOA is usually to reduce development costs and reuse existing custom software; there will be a tendency to layer custom layers on top of the existing custom development. At the opposite corner of the chart, where an organization has an enterprise-wide ERP with little customization, they’re looking to compose unique business processes out of the ERP vendor’s provided services that can be a competitive differentiator for them.

Swanton sees a number of short-term challenges — and therefore slower ROI — as organizations transition from traditional applications through hybrid solutions to a true SOA, one of these being the showdown between ERP and SOA vendors for same space. He notes that the ERP vendors are not, in general, making radical changes, which seemed to imply that the SOA vendors might pull ahead on this front.

ProcessWorld Day 1: Gartner Keynote with Jim Sinur and Michael Blechar

Following the keynote by Prof. Scheer, we had the Gartner tag team of Jim Sinur (who covers BPM overall) and Michael Blechar (who covers modelling, information architecture, and model-driven architecture) on the subject of “What’s New With BPM?” They did a great back-and-forth presentation on stage, although they did end up with the inevitable plug for the upcoming Gartner BPM summit in San Diego.

The audience, on survey, were self-declared as more than 50% IT, which surprised me a bit, considering the earlier comments from IDS Scheer about how 80% of their users are now business people.

Blechar started off by talking about how the requirement for modelling comes from people looking for ways to rapidly prototype, design, assemble and orchestrate business processes; being able to compose business processes from services while maintaining a corporate context; moving away from high level of enterprise architecture to the reality of a business architecture that’s controlled by the business people. Sinur followed with Gartner’s definition of BPM as a management practice and structured approach, how the current focus on optimization/measurement goals are bringing modelling and execution closer together, and the business process maturity model.

There were a number of concepts that I’ve seen in other Gartner presentations, both at their BPM summit last year and in webinar, such as how responsibilities for BPM are assigned across the enterprise (business, IT, or shared), and their “gear” diagram of BPM suites with the process orchestration engine and business services repository in the centre and the 10 essential functionalities surrounding it. New to this diagram from previous versions is collaboration and inline optimization, which Sinur discussed at length. He made the point that this doesn’t all have to come from one vendor, saying “BPM is an architecture, not a technology, a BPM suite is one way to implement that architecture.”

There was also a discussion of BPM and SOA approaches and roles, looking at the key roles for both BPM and SOA, and (once again) how the work of design and modelling is divided between the business analysts and the IT folks. A process-centric view of an organization tends to favour business analysts for most of the process modelling and design, although many BPMS vendor modelling tools have realistically only been usable by IT, which opens the door for the use of business-focussed modelling tools like ARIS. By involving the business side in the modelling and design of processes, business will start to understand the value of services and SOA — something that’s still a pretty hard sell in a lot of organizations outside the IT department.

With the new focus on collaboration and inline optimization, Gartner believes that processes will become less deterministic: less focussed on a predetermined “happy path”, and more goal-oriented. As new pathways and process maps emerge to meet those goals, they become input to the next round of process discovery.

ProcessWorld Day 1: Keynote with Prof. Scheer

The opening keynote this morning was by Prof. August-Wilhelm Scheer, the founder and serious brain-trust behind IDS Scheer. You have to love this guy: not only is he brilliant and able to describe his ideas clearly, he opened and closed his session by playing sax in a jazz trio on stage.

He covered a lot of material in his talk, and I can’t begin to do it justice but will try to hit a few of the high points.

The goal of a modelling tool like ARIS is to support business processes from strategy to model to detailed description to implementation, including changes to any part of that chain and how the changes ripple through the other layers. The design-implementation-control life cycle of business processes, with a current strong focus on the optimization end of things, serves to bring together process modelling and execution like never before.

The business model at the top of any business process is the key competitive differentiator for an organization, requiring identification of the value proposition, supply chain, and target customer. This places the business model, and the surrounding business architecture, as part of an overall enterprise architecture. Looking at the business process architecture stack (think Zachman column 2), the business model leads to the business process, which requires/populates the business process repository. This, in turn, populates the IT-business process repository for the subset of the processes to be automated, through standardized modelling formats like BPMN and serialization formats like BPEL, which in turn connect to the enterprise service repository that documents the underlying services. Surrounding all this is the business process platform for service assembly/orchestration, portals, B2B, WFMS (wow, haven’t heard that term for a while: workflow management systems, for the youngsters in the crowd) and EAI.

IDS Scheer is involved with (or at least concerned with) a number of process-related standards, including ones such as BPMN and IDEF at the business process modelling level. I’m interested to see if they’re involved in the BPM Think Tank that OMG runs, such as the one coming up in July in San Francisco — an email exchange with someone from OMG a few minutes ago indicate that they’re not heavily involved in OMG standards. ARIS’ business model metamodel and their generally high level of innovation could almost certainly contribute to OMG standards development, if they’re not already.

One interesting point that Prof. Scheer finished with (well, before he started playing sax again) was that BPMS (i.e., process execution) vendor platforms will continue to be proprietary in spite of their “commitment” to standards (my quotation marks, since I agree with this thought), so products like ARIS are necessary in order to help facilitate the movement of models between execution systems. The business view needs to be open, while the implementation layer will remain proprietary.

ProcessWorld Day 1: Press/Analyst Briefing

I’m going to do as much live blogging as possible in order to give you a sense of what’s going on here, which means that I won’t be doing a lot of in-depth analysis in these posts, but will try to add more of that after a bit of introspection.

This is the first IDS Scheer user conference that I’ve attended, and one of the first conferences where I’ve attended a press/analyst briefing. I’ve spent the past 12 years implementing BPM systems, doing design and architecture, and this transition to “press/analyst” is still a bit weird for me, although I’m sure that I’ll get used to it 🙂 One nice thing about these conferences is getting to meet people who I’ve only ever “met” online, such as Gregg Rock from BPM Institute, and Jim Sinur from Gartner.

The briefing was hosted by Sinur, and included a panel of IDS Scheer executives: Thomas Volk (CEO), Dr. Wolfram Jost (CTO), Dr. Mathias Kirchmer (Chief Innovation and Marketing Officer), and Charlie Doucot (SVP of Sales for the Americas).

In Volk’s high-level update on IDS Scheer at the start of the briefing, I found that the BPM acronym is being used here to focus on the modelling end of the spectrum; not surprising, but likely causes some confusion still in the marketplace where BPMS vendors push BPM as an acronym for the execution end of the spectrum.

We heard from Jost about some of their new technology that we’ll see showcased here this week, and rolled out over the coming months:

As a result of their partnership with Corticon, an integration of the rules engine into modelling as a Business Rules Designer, which is being piloted at Barclays Bank now
A new SOA Designer (piloting within SAP, who is a user as well as an OEM partner) for modelling services and bringing business modelling to SOA
A new version of Business Optimizer
Six “solutions” that are pre-made combinations of their underlying products in order to offer specific vertical market solutions

Volk discussed some of the corporate expansion initiatives: although the bulk of their revenue is still in Europe, they are opening an office on the US west coast (I heard something about the Mountain View area, presumably to be close to Oracle) in addition to the current eastern US offices. They are also expanding in Asia from their strong base in Japan, including 100 people in China and further expansion plans in other Asian countries, through partnerships as well as regional offices. They will be announcing many more partnerships in the coming months, and see both OEM and SI partners as a crucial part of their growth.

I was particularly intrigued by the innovation relationships that they have with a number of universities around the world. Having graduated in Engineering from University of Waterloo, I’m very aware of the amazing things that can happen from the synergy between an innovation-minded technology company and a university, so I think that this is a great idea. I had to chuckle at one comment from Jost during the discussion of customers where they are helping to drive innovation and piloting their products: he mentioned VW/Audi, then qualified that with “they’re a big automotive company in Germany”, as if we might not have heard of them. I love the weird language and cultural mashups that occur when people from different countries get together (the Germans also say proh-cess instead of praw-cess, so I feel right at home), although I think that IDS Scheer needs to loosen up a bit in the press conference format to fit the more casual North American business environment.

There was a discussion based on a question from the floor about the involvement of business people both in the decision to purchase ARIS, and the general user population, and it appears that more and more non-technical people are using the product and attending the conference. 10 years ago, 80% of users were technical; now 80% have a business background or are in a business function. They’ve seen a definite change in mindset over recent years for business to drive IT rather than vice versa. Sinur expanded with what Gartner is seeing, in that as organizations migrate from functional excellence to end-to-end process excellence, it forces business and IT to work together across the organization and also facilitates a larger role for business.

We also heard about how they differentiate their product from the modelling capabilities within a BPMS, a topic that I’ve been looking at lately. They see ARIS as process modelling in a larger context, not just for execution but for the management of business processes and their performance. They see the modelling done in BPMS products as “technical” modelling, whereas ARIS is for “business” modelling, a distinction that I think is starting to get a bit fuzzy as the BPMS vendors introduce different views/personalities in their modelling tools for different roles. However, it is the case that you can’t use a BPMS modelling tool to model non-automated processes, only those things that will be executed/automated by the BPMS, so there is some value to IDS Scheer’s perspective on this. ARIS can integrate with a number of BPMS engines, including SAP NetWeaver, Oracle Fusion, IBM WebSphere, Microsoft BizTalk, BEA Weblogic, Fujitsu Interstate, and TIBCO; most of these vendors come from the ESB space so haven’t developed the same sophistication of modelling tools as the pure-play BPMS vendors or those from human-facing workflow origins, and most benefit from partnership with a serious modelling product like ARIS.

ARIS ProcessWorld

I’m at the IDS Scheer user conference this week, so expect to see a lot of blogging about that around here. Leaving Toronto in -15C for +15C in Jacksonville, Florida wasn’t my only reason for attending; I’m very interested in how people are modelling their processes more collaboratively, and a room full of real users is the best way to get a good cross-section. As I wrote yesterday, I’m also interested in how processes are moving from a model to an executable environment, since I think that there’s still a lot of people who are recreating those models in their BPMS after they’ve already been created once in a process modelling tool like ARIS or ProVision. I saw a press release early today how about IDS Scheer and Fujitsu will be showing off their integration at the conference this week, and I imagine that there will be a few other BPMS vendors there with the same story.

I had a great conversation at tonight’s reception with a couple of people from an end-user organization about the whole modelling-execution conundrum, and hope to have more of this over the next few days. I also want to see what customers are doing to advance modelling/design collaboration in their enterprises.

All related posts this week will be tagged with the category ARISProcessWorld.

Disclosure: IDS Scheer covered my expenses to attend. If you think that’s not fair, keep in mind that I’m an independent analyst/architect/blogger and I’m not paid for the blogging part (that’s right, I don’t work for ebizQ, they just host my blog), so 4 days down here means 4 lost days of real billable work for me.

The Modelling-to-BPM cycle

I attended a webinar last week about Proforma and Workpoint, and I have to say that the “for more information” slide at the end of the presentation is the best one that I’ve ever seen in all my years of corporate presentations. Dan, that may not be your picture on the slide, but kudos. Update: screenshot of the slide removed at the behest of Workpoint, who claim that the slide that I saw on the screen didn’t exist in their slide deck.

The topic of the webinar was Bringing BPM and BPA Together (replay available on Feb 7th), and it focussed on how you can do your complex modelling, analysis and simulation in Proforma’s ProVision, then export/import your way over to Workpoint’s BPMS for execution.

I found this particularly interesting because it highlights the divide between the BPMS vendors who (attempt to) provide everything to do with process under their own banner, and those that rely on partner relationships through a best-of-breed approach.

At the Proforma user conference last year, one of the speakers asked the audience how many of them were exporting their process models to a BPMS for execution. Out of about 150 people, only a couple of hands went up, which surprised me (as I discussed in my post about that presentation, Is Anyone Executing Those Processes?). ProVision doesn’t yet support XPDL, and many of the BPM vendors are just getting onboard with XPDL themselves so haven’t been ready to accept process models from a modelling tool, but there has been integration done between ProVision and some number of BPMS using their Proforma’s XML-based interchange format, CIF. Presuming that many of the companies using ProVision are also using a BPMS, this seems to imply that someone is taking the process models created in ProVision and recreating them manually in the BPMS. So why is this happening? Is it a technology disconnect (BPA and BPM can’t exchange models) or a human disconnect (modellers/architects and BPM jockeys don’t exchange models)?

Proforma and Workpoint are obviously trying to buck this trend by promoting how much better things can be when you use the strengths of both of their products. I’m a fan of this approach if you’re using a full enterprise architecture modeller like ProVision as opposed to a process-only modeller, since you can do all of your EA models in it and your process models become part of the larger picture. I’m headed off to the ARIS ProcessWorld conference later this week, so I may discover more of the advantages of a process-only modeller, too.

It makes sense for smaller BPMS vendors like Workpoint (whose product I am completely unfamiliar with, except for last week’s webinar) to leverage relationships with modelling vendors like Proforma to fill in the gaps in their product, although larger vendors who are side-slipping into the BPM space are also going that gap-filling route, such as we see with the Oracle–IDS Scheer relationship.

At the other end of the spectrum are the mainstream BPMS vendors, particularly those categorized as “suites” or “pure-play” (depending on which version of which analyst report that you read), which include modelling, simulation and all manner of process analysis as part of their product. Although you can’t escape having a process modeller (and likely simulation) in your BPMS in order to be considered a serious player, I’m still left with the feeling that there’s a lot to be gained by using a tool that is both more specialized in process modelling — in order to be able to capture non-automated steps, for example — and provides a broader enterprise architecture modelling scope.

BPM/SOA Primer

Great webinar on BPM Basics today, BPM & SOA, where John Lojek gave an "18-Minute BPM and SOA Primer". Definitely a good introduction to the subject, particularly around the differences between BPM and SOA, and how they fit together.

Phil Larson of Appian followed with some practical advice on using SOA and BPM together, such as enforcing SLAs and securing services, with very little blatant plugging of his product — not bad for a marketing guy! 🙂

Two disappointing BPM webinars

Maybe it’s the January blahs. Maybe I’ve seen too many of these things. Maybe they actually were as bad as I perceived. Maybe I’m just cranky because I’m missing Mashup Camp. In any case, I was not impressed by either of the two webinars that I sat in on today.

Making Your People More Effective Through Business Process Management (BPM) Technology

This was the 2-hour web marathon that included a keynote from Colin Teubner of Forrester, followed by several Microsoft partners who all have BPM technology that also ties into Microsoft in some way. I’ve enjoyed hearing Colin speak before, both on webinars and in person, but this time was definitely nothing special. The material seemed to be all retreaded stuff from past presentations by Colin or by Connie Moore: how human-centric BPM evolved from workflow, how integration-centric BPM evolved from EAI; I think I wrote that stuff already.

He did make a very cute analogy between between services and Lego for the (presumed) business-oriented audience. He also made the critical point “BPM doesn’t need SOA; SOA needs BPM” that really needs to be understood by everyone involved in both of these fields, especially as they start to merge into one (several years after Gartner called them all one when they actually weren’t).

Then he made an uncomfortable segue into using Microsoft Office applications as part of the whole BPM picture (I wasn’t convinced), as a prelude to what promised to be several vendor presentations; I lasted through part of the first one before I bailed out due to the double frustration of an over-large screen shared on the meeting (didn’t anyone tell the presenters to scale down to 1024×768?) and a fairly significant lack of content.

BPM 302: BPM and Six Sigma

This was one of the Appian webinars from the BPM Basics site. I’ve commented on these before: some good basic material if you’re just getting started with BPM, but today’s was an exception in that I would not recommend it due to the errors in definition around Six Sigma. If you can’t even define your subject matter accurately, then you shouldn’t be speaking about it.

It all started going downhill when the first speaker said “There are six levels of Sigma”, as if it were some sort of CMM-like certification. That shows such an incredibly fundamental misunderstanding of Six Sigma and statistical measures in general, I’m practically speechless. Not meaning to sound like too much of a techie snob, I should have figured that there could be a problem when she was introduced as having a arts degree, and I don’t think that statistics was her major or minor. She also said “sigma is the number of defects per million”, which isn’t at all correct either; sigma (for all of us who did suffer through stats class) represents standard deviation, and you can check any of number of other sources to find that Six Sigma’s goal is to have six standard deviations between the process mean and the specified limit. In other words, a higher value of sigma means that more of the data (whatever it is that you’re measuring) fits between the mean and the limit (beyond which things are classified as errors).

The second speaker was talking more about BPM technology and seemed to know what he was talking about, but was horribly unprepared and oscillated between overly-fast reading of a prepared script and pause-laden bits where he was either winging it or totally losing his concentration.

Microsoft-oriented BPM webinar this week

I received notice from Bluespring about a webinar this week that seems to be bringing together a number of Microsoft partners who are all doing BPM: Bluespring, Ascentn, K2.net and Metastorm. This looks like the marathon of webinars, 2 hours long and including a talk from Colin Teubner at Forrester.

It has the somewhat unwieldy title of Making Your People More Effective Through Business Process Management (BPM) Technology, and you can sign up here.