services – Page 11

BEAParticipate: Brian Abrahamson

Last up before the morning break was Brian Abrahamson, Director of Enterprise Architecture at PG&E; although I’ve been interested in the portal presentations prior to this, I was relieved to finally get some BPM/SOA content. They started on a huge business transformation strategy two years ago due to various factors such as deregulation and changing legislation that are impacting the competitive landscape in the utility industry, forcing them to become more competitive. Price is certainly a point of competition, but they also have customer service issues such as managing unexpected outages (e.g., what Abrahamson referred to as a “car-pole incident”), installing new residential service, and managing regular maintenance and work orders.

They made an explicit decision to create an SOA layer that would leverage their SAP and Oracle systems in order to provide a more agile development environment. They’ve been using EAI technologies for a number of years to create integration between enterprise applications, but most of the business processes were embedded in these applications rather than being explicitly defined and executed. Their current direction, therefore, is moving from application-centric to process-centric by allowing the construction of composite applications and business processes from the services provided by the enterprise applications. They consider BPM to be a strategic enabler of their future vision.

What they’ve done so far is to expose services from the enterprise applications, and used ALSB as an enterprise service bus. ALBPM then allows those services to be used, via the bus, to create executable business processes using those services. As soon as they started exposing BPM to their internal clients, however, there was an immediate demand for modelling, simulation and analytics; now, they’re planning for a business process modelling layer that allows their business analysts to do all of these with some type of more comprehensive BPA tool, with round-tripping as a key requirement. Above all of layers is a process architecture and governance layer that, like the modelling layer below it, is business-driven, whereas they see the BPM, ESB and SOA layers as being IT’s domain.

They have realized a couple of key points: from the IT side, SOA provides a service layer than greatly expedites BPM; from the business side, cross-departmental process optimization is key to future growth. They have a business process competency centre that does mainly paper-based and manual modelling and analysis, which is a big driver for getting the business process modelling layer in place in their BPM stack.

They learned some valuable lessons along the way: put SOA principles and practices in place early; get executive sponsorship of BPM initiatives; business process modelling, management and governance is more of a business issue than a technology tool issue; and lastly, the market is still maturing and requires partnering with some key technology partners.

TUCON: The Face of BPM

Thursday morning, and it seems like a few of us survived last night’s baseball game (and the after-parties) to make it here for the first session of the day. This will be my last session of the conference, since I have a noon flight in order to get back to Toronto tonight.

Tim Stephenson and Mark Elder from TIBCO talked about Business Studio, carrying on from Tim’s somewhat shortened bit on Business Studio on Tuesday when I took up too much of our joint presentation time. The vision for the new release coming this quarter is that one tool can be used by business analysts, graphical tools developers and operational administrators by allowing for different perspectives, or personas. There’s 9 key functions from business process analysis and modelling to WYSIWYG forms design to service implementation.

The idea of the personas within the product are similar to what I’ve seen in the modelling tool of other BPMS vendors: each has a different set of functions available and has some different views onto the process being modelled. Tim gave some great insight into how they considered the motivations and requirements of each of the types of people that might use the product in order to develop the personas, and showed how they mapped out the user experience flow with the personas overlaid to show the interfaces and overlaps in functionality. This shows very clearly the overlap between the business analyst and developer functionality, which is intentional: who does what in the overlap depends on the skills of the particular people involved.

As we heard in prior sessions, Business Studio provides process modelling using BPMN, plus concept modelling (business domain data modelling) using UML to complement the process model. There’s a strong focus on how BPM can consume web services and BusinessWorks services, because much of the audience is likely developers who use TIBCO’s other products like BusinessWorks to create service wrappers around legacy applications. At one point between sessions yesterday, I had an attendee approach me and thank me for the point that I made in my presentation on Tuesday about how BPM is the killer app for SOA (a point that I stole outright from Ismael Ghalimi — thanks, Ismael!), because it helped him to understand how BPM creates the ROI for SOA: without a consumer of services, the services themselves are difficult to justify.

We saw a (canned) demo of how to create a simple process flow that called a number of services that included a human-facing step, a database call to a stored procedure, a web service call based on introspecting the WSDL and performing some data mapping/transformation, a script task that uses JavaScript to perform some parameter manipulation, and an email task that allows the runtime process instance parameters to be mapped to the email fields. Then, the process definition is exported to XPDL, and imported into the iProcess Modeler in order to get it into the repository that’s shared with the execution engine. Once that’s done, the process is executable: it can be started using the standard interface (which is built in General Interface), and the human-facing steps have a basic form UI auto-generated.

It is possible to generate an HTML document that describes a process definition, including a graphical view of the process map and tabular representations of the process description.

As I mentioned in other posts, and in many posts that I’ve made about BPA tools, is that there’s no shared model between the process modeller, which is a serious issue for process agility and round-tripping unless you do absolutely nothing to the process in the iProcess Modeler except to use it as a portal to the execution repository. TIBCO has brought a lot (although not all) of the functionality of the Modeler into Studio, and are working towards a shared model between analysts and developers; they believe that they can remove the need for Modeler altogether over time. There’s no support at this time, however, to being able to deploy directly from Studio, that is, Studio won’t plug directly into the execution engine environment. Other vendors who have gone the route of a downloadable disconnected process modeller or a separate process discovery tool are dealing with the same issue; ultimately, they all need to make this new generation of modelling tools have the capability to be as integrated with the execution environment as those that they’re replacing in order to eliminate the requirement for round-tripping.

TUCON: Tom Laffey and Matt Quinn

Last in the morning’s general session was Tom Laffey, TIBCO’s EVP of products and technologies, and Matt Quinn, VP of product management and strategy. Like Ranadivé’s talk earlier, they’re talking about enterprise virtualization: positioning messaging, for example, as virtualizing the network layer, and BPM as enterprise process virtualization. I’m not completely clear if virtualization is just the current analyst-created buzzword in this context.

Laffey and Quinn tag-teamed quite a bit during the talk, so I won’t attribute specific comments to either. TIBCO products cover a much broader spectrum that I do, so I’ll focus just on the comments about BPM and SOA.

TIBCO’s been doing messaging and ESB for a long time, and some amount of the SOA talk is about incremental feature improvements such as easier use of adapters. Apparently, Quinn made a prediction some months ago that SOA would grow so fast that it would swallow up BPM, so that BPM would just be a subset of SOA. Now, he believes (and most of us from the BPM side agree 🙂 ) that BPM and SOA are separate but extremely synergistic practices/technologies, and both need to developed to a position of strength. To quote Ismael Ghalimi, BPM is SOA’s killer application, and SOA is BPM’s enabling infrastructure, a phrase that I’ve included in my presentation later today; like Ismael, I see BPM as a key consumer of what’s produced via SOA, but they’re not the same thing.

They touched on the new release of Business Studio, with its support for BPMN, XPDL and BPEL as well as UML for some types of data modelling. There’s some new intelligent workforce management features, and some advanced user interface creation functionality using intelligent forms, which I think ties in with their General Interface AJAX toolkit.

Laffey just defined “mashup” as a browser-based event bus, which is an interesting viewpoint, and likely one that resonates better with this audience than the trendier descriptions.

They discussed other functionality, including business rules management, dynamic virtual information spaces (the ability to tap into a real-time event message stream and extract just what you want), and the analytics that will be added with the acquisition of Spotfire. By the way, we now appear to be calling analytics “business insight”, which lets us keep the old BI acronym without the stigma of the business intelligence latency legacy. 🙂

They finished up with a 2-year roadmap of product releases, which I won’t reproduce here because I’d hate to have to embarrass them later, and some discussion of changes to their engineering and product development processes.

The New Software Industry: Bob Glushko and Shelley Evenson

Bob Glushko, a prof at UC Berkeley, and Shelley Evenson, a prof at CMU, discussed different views on bridging the front stage and back stage in service system design. As a side note, I have to say that it’s fun to be back (temporarily) in an academic environment: many of these presentations are much more like grad school lectures than standard conference presentations. And like university lectures, they cover way too much material in a very short time by speaking at light speed and flipping slides so fast that there’s no time to even read what’s on the slide, much less absorb or document it. If I had a nickel for every time that a presenter today said “I don’t have time to go into this but it’s an important concept” while flipping past an interesting-looking slide, I could probably buy myself the drink that I need to calm myself after the information overload. 🙂

Glushko posits that greater predictability produces a better experience, even if the average level of service is lower, using the example of a self-service hotel check-in versus the variability of dealing with a reception clerk. Although he doesn’t mention it, this is exactly the point of Six Sigma: reducing variability, not necessarily improving service quality.

He goes on to discuss the front stage of services, which is the interaction of the customer or other services with the services, and the back stage, which is the execution of the underlying services themselves. I love his examples: he uses an analogy of a restaurant, with the front stage being the dining room, and the back stage being the kitchen. Front stage designers focus on usability and other user interface factors, whereas the back stage designers focus on efficiency, standardization, data models and the like. This tends to create a tension between the two design perspectives, and begs the question if these are intrinsic or avoidable.

From a design standpoint, he feels that it’s essential to create information flow and process models that span both the back and front stages. The focus of back stage design is to design modular and configurable services that enable flexibility and customization in the front stage, and to determine which back stage services you will perform and which you will outsource/reuse from other service providers. Front stage design, on the other hand, is focussed on designing the level of service intensity (the intensity of information exchange between the customer and the service, whether the service is human or automated), and to implement model-based user interfaces and use these models to generate/configure/specify the APIs of user interfaces for the services. By exposing back stage information in front stage design, more back stage information can improve the immediate experience for a specific customer, and can improve subsequent experiences. Data mining and business intelligence can also improve service for future customers.

Evenson, who specializes in interaction design, has a very different perspective than Glushko, who focusses on the back stage design, but rather than being opposing views, they’re just different perspectives on the same issues of designing service systems.

She started out with a hilarious re-rendering of Glushko’s restaurant example by making the point that she applied colour to make the division of the co-production between front and back stage more visible.

Her slides really went by so fast that I was only able to capture a few snippets: sensors will improve the degree of interaction and usefulness of web-based services; technology influences our sense of self; services are activities or events that form a product through interaction with a customer; services are performances: choreographed interactions manufactured at the point of delivery; services are the visible front end of a process that co-produces value. A service system is a framework that connects service touchpoints so that they can sense, respond and reinforce one another. The system must be dynamic enough to be able to efficiently reflect the expectations people bring to the experience at any given moment. Service systems enable people to have experiences and achieve goals.

She discussed the difficulties of designing a service system, such as the difficulty of prototyping and the difficulty of representing the experience, and pointed out that it requires combining aspects of business, technology and experience. She feels that it’s helpful to create an integrated service design language: systems of elements with meanings (that designers use to communicate and users “read”) plus sets of organizing principles.

BrainStorm BPM Day 1: Bruce Silver track keynote

There’s an awful lot of keynotes in this conference: a couple of overall sessions this morning, now “track keynotes” for each of the four tracks within the BPM conference. I’m in Bruce Silver’s New Directions in BPM Tools and Technology session, where he started by taking a gentle poke at Gartner, saying that BPM is more than a management discipline (Gartner’s most recent definition of BPM).

He started out discussing process modelling, and how it’s inherently a business activity, not an IT activity, which speaks directly to the issue of the tools used for modelling: is there a handoff from a modelling-only tool to an execution environment at the point of business to IT handoff, or is the model actually just a business view of the actual implementation? With all of the vendor demos that I’ve done lately (I know, I have yet to document many of there here, but I’m getting to it), I’ve had quite a focus on the distinction between having a model shared between business and IT, and having a separate BPA tool that models much more than just the processes that will be implemented in a BPMS. Bruce positions this as “BPA versus BPMN” views towards describing process modelling, and doesn’t see them in conflict; in fact, he thinks that they’re ignoring each other, a viewpoint that I’d have to agree with given that BPA initiatives rarely result in any processes being transferred to some sort of execution engine.

Bruce, who often accuses me of being too nice, takes a stab a the vendors in a couple of areas. First is with their BPMN implementations, specifically that of events: he states that many of the execution engines just don’t support intermediate events, so that the vendors conveniently forget to include those events in their BPMN modelling tool. Second is with simulation, and looking at whether a vendor’s implementation is actually a useful tool, or a “fake” feature that’s there to enable it to be checked off on an RFP, but not functional enough to make it worth using.

He has a nice way of categorizing BPMS products: by vendor speciality (e.g., integration, human-centric), by process type/use case (e.g., production workflow) and by business/IT interaction method (collaborative shared model versus handoff). This was interesting, because I wrote almost identical words two days ago in my presentation for the Shared Insights Portals and Collaboration conference that I’ll be speaking at next month; great minds must think alike. 🙂 His point, like the one that I was making in my presentation, is that most BPM products have some strengths and some weaknesses that can make or break some process automation; for example, a product focussed on human-centric workflow probably doesn’t do some nice integration tricks like mapping and transformation, or complex data objects.

He also makes a good distinction between business rules (implemented in a BRE) and routing rules (implemented in a BPMS): business rules represent corporate or departmental policies that may need to be shared across business processes, whereas routing rules are the internal logic within a process that’s just required to get through the process but don’t represent policy in any way.

Bruce thinks that BPM and SOA together is still vapour-ware for the most part: it’s what the vendors are selling but not typically what they’re delivering. In particular, he thinks that if the BPMS and the ESB are not from the same vendor, then “all bets are off” in terms of whether a BPMS will work with any particular ESB or other services environment.

The session turned out to be too short and Bruce couldn’t even finish his materials, much less take questions: it was only 45 minutes to begin with, and shortened at the beginning while Bruce waited for stragglers for the previous session to make their way upstairs.

Software AG acquires webMethods

Consolidation in the industry keeps grinding on, with Software AG announcing that they will acquire webMethods for $546M. Last year, when I interviewed webMethods’ EVP of Product Development, I wrote that their new BPM launch placed them squarely in competition with IBM and TIBCO. Not surprisingly, today’s press release states:

The combined company will create a market leader in the software industry, specifically in the fast growing services oriented architecture, business process management and software application integration markets – just behind IBM and Tibco.

I guess we know who the competition is…

EAI -> BIJ -> BTI -> Align

Three months ago, I wrote about how the free BIJ (Business Integration Journal), formerly EAI Journal, was becoming Business Transformation and Innovation — available only as a paid subscription. I believe that my comment at the time about paying for mostly vendor-written and vendor-sponsored material was “hahahahaha”. And my comment on the new name was “it doesn’t actually mean anything”.

This week, I received an invitation for a free subscription to Align Journal (their tagline is “Aligning IT and Business Strategy”), and when I went to the site (and the online PDF version of the Jan-Feb issue), it looked familiar, so I dug into their About page:

Align Journal is the next step in the evolution of Business Integration Journal (BIJ). Over the past two years, the focus of BIJ was broadened to bring a business perspective to the use of technology for gaining such benefits as faster time to market, governance, increased agility to pursue new opportunities, improvements in managing business processes, and cost savings through the reuse of application components. Since the editorial focus of BIJ had evolved to no longer be strictly focused on integration topics, it was time to also evolve the magazine’s name to Align Journal.

No mention of BTI, although if you go to the BTI URL that was advertised back in December when I wrote my post about it, it redirects to Align Journal.

If this first issue is any indication, it’s definitely trending away from purely integration topics: the table of contents divides the articles into Business Strategy (3 articles), Leadership/Communication (3 articles), Technology (2 articles), Innovation (1 article), and Governance/Compliance (1 article). It’s not clear to me, however, why “Maximizing IT for Effective Inventory Management” falls under Business Strategy, while “Leverage SOA to Increase Your Revenues” falls under Technology.

The paid subscription model is gone, unless you want the print copy and you’re outside the U.S., and the digital copy is provided in a PDF that allows printing, but unfortunately not content extraction (so you won’t see me quoting from it here — I’m too lazy to retype what they’ve already published). And the name still doesn’t actually mean anything.

A Quick Peek at Cordys BPM

A month ago, I had a chance for a comprehensive demo of the Cordys BPMS via Webex, and I saw them briefly at the Gartner show last week. Their suite is of particular interest to me because the entire process life cycle of modelling, execution and monitoring is completely browser-based. I’ve been pushing browser-based process modelling/design for quite a while, since I think that this is the key to widespread collaboration in process modelling across all stakeholders of a process. I’ve reviewed a couple of browser-based process modellers — a full-featured version from Appian, and a front-end process mapping/sketch tool from Lombardi — and if it wasn’t already clear from what Appian has done, Cordys also proves that you can create a fully-functional process designer that runs in a browser and can have participants outside the corporate firewall. Like Appian, however, they currently only support Internet Explorer (and hence Windows), which will limit the collaboration capabilities at some point.

Cordys’ claim is that their modeller is BPMN compliant and supports the entire set of BPMN elements including all of the complex constructs such as transactions and compensation rollback, although I saw a few non-standard visual notations. They also support both XPDL 2.0 and BPEL for import and export, but no word on BPDM. Given this dedication to standards, I find it surprising that they can integrate only with their own ESB and business rules engine, although you could call third-party products via web services. They also have their own content repository (although you can integrate with any repository that allows object access via URL) and their own BAM. In general, I find that when a smaller vendor tries to build everything in a BPM suite themselves, some of the components are going to be lacking; furthermore, many organizations already have corporate standards for some or all of these, and you’d better integrate with the major players or you won’t get in the door.

Like most BPMS’, much of the Cordys process design environment is too complex for the average business user/analyst, and probably would be used by someone on the IT side with input from the business people; a business analyst might draw some of the process models, but as soon as you start clicking on objects and pulling up SOAP syntax, they’re going to be out of there. Like most BPMS vendors, Cordys claims that the process design environment is “targetted towards business people”, but vendors have been doing this for years now, and the business people have yet to be convinced. To be fair, I was given the demo by the very enthusiastic product architect who knew that I’m technical, so he pulled out every bell and whistle for a ride; likely business users see a very different version of the demo.

There’s a lot of functionality here, although nothing that I haven’t seen in some form in other products. There’s support for human-facing tasks either via browser-based inbox and search functions, or by forwarding the tasks to any email system via SMTP (like Outlook). There also appear to be shared worklists, but I didn’t get a sense of how automated work allocation could be performed, something that’s required to support high-volume transaction processing environments. There’s also support for web services orchestration to handle the system integration side of the BPM equation.

One thing that I like is the visual process debugger: although you have to hack a bit of XML to kick things off, you can step through a process, calling web services and popping up user interfaces as you hit the corresponding steps, and stepping over or into subprocesses (very reminiscent of a code debugger, but in a visual form).

They do a good job of an object repository as well, which helps increase reusability of objects, and allows you to search for processes and artifacts (such as forms or web services) to see where they’re used. Any process that’s built can also be exposed as a web service: just add inputs and outputs at the start and end points and the WSDL is auto-generated, allowing the process to be called as a service from any other application or service.

<geek>Another thing that I really liked is the AJAX-based framework and modelling layer for UI/forms design, which is an extension of Xforms. In addition to a nice graphical UI design environment, you can generate a working user interface directly from the WSDL of a web service — something that I’ve seen in other products such as webMethods, but I still think is cool — and run it immediately in the designer. In the demo that I saw, the architect found an external currency conversion web service, introspected it with the designer and generated a form representing the web service inputs and outputs that he popped directly onto the page, where he could then run it directly in debug mode, or rearrange and change the form objects. Any web service in the internal repository — including a process — can be dragged from the repository directly onto the page to auto-generate the UI. Linked data objects on a form communicate directly (when possible) without returning to the server in a true AJAX fashion, and you can easily create mashups such as the example that I saw with the external currency converter, a database table, and MSN Messenger. For the hardcore among us, you can also jump directly to the underlying scripting code.</geek>

Unfortunately, the AJAX framework is not available as a separate offering, only as part of the BPMS; I think that Cordys could easily spin this off as a pretty nice browser-based development environment, particularly for mashups.

Gartner Day 3: Microsoft session

I wanted to stop in on the Microsoft session, People-Ready Processes, in part because I’m a bit confused about what Microsoft is doing in this area, and in part because of the Business Process Alliance announcement from Monday. Microsoft sees themselves as a force for commoditizing (and in the subtext, dumbing down) technology so that it is accessible to a much wider audience, and this presentation was Burley Kawasaki’s take on how they’re doing that for BPM. He describes people-ready processes as a fusion of document-centric processes and system-centric processes, and I really with that he (and many other people in the industry) would stop equating human-centric with document-centric. Although human-facing BPM grew out of the workflow that started in document imaging systems, that was a long time ago, and there are many instances of human-facing BPM that don’t include documents — depending, of course, on how you define a document.

My previous view of Microsoft BizTalk was as a B2B message broker or an internal ESB. My view of SharePoint was as a collaboration and document management platform. I wanted to see how Microsoft was bringing together the technologies and concepts from both of these to create a seamless BPM solution.

Kawasaki showed a spectrum of BPM application types, from collaborative to transactional processes. Individual ad hoc processes (e.g., individual task lists), human semi-structured (e.g., vacation approval), system highly structured (e.g., expense reporting) and fixed process (e.g., supply chain). He then overlaid a split between a collaboration server and a process server, with some overlap in the middle of spectrum, and labelled these as SharePoint and BizTalk. My heart sank.

Okay, you can have a SharePoint collaboration or document kick off a BizTalk process, but that’s not the same as having a single end-to-end BPM solution. In the future, the Windows Workflow Foundation will be used as the underlying process infrastructure for both SharePoint and BizTalk, which might help to integrate them more closely.

He finished up with a light-speed overview of the Microsoft process platform roadmap, which includes Windows Workflow Foundation, the .Net framework, Office (including SharePoint) and BizTalk. He also made a big push for the benefits of a platform and partner ecosystem rather than a single vendor “close and proprietary” BPM stack. Not sure that I’m convinced.

Gartner Day 3: Yvonne Genovese keynote

We started the last day at the Gartner summit with a keynote by Yvonne Genovese, Business Applications Through 2010: Major Changes Will Affect Your Process Environment. Early in her presentation, she made an important statement: “the technology keeps breaking our processes”. Her focus is on business applications, not specifically BPM, but she’s looking at trends of what’s happening with enterprise applications like ERP and CRM systems. Her point is that these business applications have, in the past, forced businesses to use rigid business processes implemented within those systems.

However, the current trend is towards unbundling some of this functionality, exposing it through services, then consuming those services using a BPMS. This allows you to not only call specific functionality from your business applications at any point in a process that you now control, you can actually replace or augment the functionality of those applications by calling other services. This also provides an opportunity to more easily integrate between business applications if you have multiple ones in your environment. Although the business application vendors have been pushing suites for some time now, that packaging model will be less compelling to their customers as organizations start to slice and dice the atomic functionality of the business applications and compose their own processes using BPM rather than use the suite in its monolithic form.

Business applications aren’t going away: there’s still a huge amount of good functionality available in them, and as long as that commoditized functionality can be consumed as services, you’re not going to be writing a replacement yourself. What I think will happen, however, is that the amount of the functionality used from any given business application platform will begin to erode as other internal or external services replace some of that functionality. This frees organizations from the vendor lock-in that they’re subjected to now, and adds a new possibility for creating business applications: instead of just “buy” or “build”, you can now also “compose”. And if the megavendors in this field are going to stay competitive, they need to embrace and encourage an ecosystem that allows smaller vendors to provide services that can easily be integrated with their larger platform. This isn’t going to be the old model of the vendor controlling the ecosystem by anointing their favourite technology partners, however: the customer organizations are going to build their own ecosystem from their preferred vendors in a truly best-of-breed fashion.

At the end of the day, BPM is an essential part of all this, since it will be used as a composition framework for combining functionality from business applications, along with internal and external services, into the processes that the business really needs.