OMG has opened up registration for their BPM Think Tank to be held this July in San Francisco. I attended this last year and found it extremely valuable — you can find my coverage of the 2006 Think Tank here.
This time, I’ll be leading the technical track roundtable discussion on Enterprise 2.0 and BPM mashups, which promises to be interesting.
I just had a great time hosting the BPM and Enterprise 2.0 panel with Phil, Phil and Ismael. These three have some radically different viewpoints, which made for a lively discussion (insert graphic of me dressed as a lion tamer, complete with whip and chair).
My favourite quote from the panel, from Phil Larson when speaking about mashing up BPM data: “BPM is a mashup”.
And from Phil Gilbert, in an email note afterwards: “Awesome… most fun I’ve ever had on a webinar. OK, OK, that’s a low bar, I guess… BUT it was fun.”
The replay should be available soon at the same link if you missed the live version.
ebizQ’s BPM in Action online conference is today and tomorrow, and you have a chance to listen to me both days, if you can stand the excitement. 🙂
Today at 1pm Eastern, I’m hosting a panel on BPM and Enterprise 2.0, with Phil Gilbert of Lombardi, Phil Larson of Appian, and Ismael Ghalimi of Intalio. We are doing this live on the air with no script and no slides, and the speakers only have a rough idea of the topics that I want to cover, so tune in for some spontaneous talk about where BPM is headed in this strange new world of Enterprise 2.0.
Tomorrow at 1pm Eastern (I think — the time on the agenda and the event page differ, but my schedule says 1pm), I’m moderating a webinar on business process platform strategy, with Josh Greenbaum of Enterprise Applications Consulting and Rich Sides of Preferred Meal Systems, sponsored by Ramco. This is more of the usual webinar gig, where I do the introductions, then moderate the questions at the end.
Update: The BPM in Action site has been corrected to show the time of 1pm on all pages for the Wednesday webinar.
Lots of other great sessions: the whole thing kicks off with a keynote by Ken Vollmer of Forrester today, and one by Janelle Hill of Gartner tomorrow (who I heard speak at the Gartner BPM conference last week). It’s structured to run midday on the east coast (11-2 today, 11-3 tomorrow), which is late afternoon/early evening for those of you in Europe and morning for those on the west coast. If you’re in Asia, you can check out the replays if you don’t have insomnia.
I’m now confirmed to head to Boston in June for the Enterprise 2.0 conference, where I’ll be doing my usual live-blogging coverage under this tag. More on this as we get closer to the event.
If you enjoyed the free-for-all discussion at the end of the webinar that I moderated with Colin Teubner and Jim Rudden a few weeks back, you’re going to love the panel that I’m hosting next week on BPM and Enterprise 2.0 as part of the BPM in Action series. It’s not sponsored by a vendor, so I was able to pick whoever I wanted on the panel, and there will be no vendor product pitches or slides — just an interactive discussion between the four of us. Get over there and sign up.
Here’s the description that I wrote for it:
As Web 2.0 technologies and concepts advance in the consumer world, they are also impacting enterprise software as users change their expectations of how software should behave. This “Enterprise 2.0” movement is impacting BPM software in a variety of ways ranging from platforms to user functionality to integration. This panel will explore the following:
- How Web 2.0 is becoming Enterprise 2.0
- BPM platform changes: the impact of browser-based tools and software as a service
- New tools and techniques for improving user participation in process design and execution
- New ways of “mashing up” BPM data with internal and external data
I picked three people to join me whose opinions I value and who I think will be interesting in this format: Phil Gilbert of Lombardi, Phil Larson of Appian, and Ismael Ghalimi of Intalio. They’re all very opinionated and all have a stake in the Web 2.0/Enterprise 2.0 space: Lombardi’s very cool Web 2.0 Blueprint release for widespread collaboration, Appian’s kick-butt browser-based process designer for serious Enterprise 2.0 work in a browser, and Ismael’s involvement in radical office 2.0 and BPM 2.0 ideas.
We only have 45 minutes so I’m going to have to keep a tight rein on the conversation to cover off our proposed subject areas, which could be difficult because I inadvertently invited two Phils to the panel (“Phil, pipe down! No, not you Phil, the other Phil!”). No “call me Ishmael” jokes, I’ve heard them already.
By the way, congratulations to Ismael and his wife on their new arrival. No wonder he wasn’t at the Gartner conference.
In the world of Web 2.0, there’s always some hot new service that you have to be invited to join, then you get on a waiting list, then (after a while) you finally get an account. Remember when Gmail was launched, for example? This is a brilliant idea from a marketing standpoint, because it creates a lot of buzz around the service, with everyone who gets an account bragging about it, and everyone who doesn’t, wishing that they did. From a support standpoint, it also makes sense: you can’t just put 10 million people on your service the first day of beta, because it will crash, and you’ll look bad.
The current hot Web 2.0 account to have is Joost, an interactive online TV service brought to you by the two wunderkids who created Skype — I see requests for Joost invitations, which apparently only come from those already on Joost, flying around the Toronto tech community.
The second hottest new Web 2.0 account to have is Lombardi’s Blueprint (okay, maybe I’m exaggerating slightly), and I’m still in that unhappy “waiting list” phase. However, their bot still remembers my name, because it sent me an email this morning to tell me that it expects to complete my account setup soon…
CMP’s Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston on June 18-21 has opened up for registration. Topics include the changing role of IT (presumably as it becomes more commoditized and outsourced), creating a culture of collaboration, consumerization of the enterprise and others. Andrew McAfee (inventor of the term “Enterprise 2.0”), David Weinberger (co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto) and Don Tapscott (co-author of Wikinomics) are all keynote speakers.
I’m very interested to see how Web 2.0 extensions to enterprise applications (like Blueprint) are covered in the conference, as opposed to the use of social software such as blogs and wikis within the enterprise: the two faces of Enterprise 2.0.
“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!
I’m just poking around the new Yahoo! Pipes service (think UNIX pipes and “small pieces loosely joined”), which is an interactive feed aggregator and manipulator: a.k.a., a tool for creating data mashups. I first saw it mentioned on Global Nerdy, which links through to a number of other interesting posts about it on other blogs. TechCrunch describes it as a “visual procedural programming language”, and it goes a long way towards providing mashup capabilities to regular everyday users, not just programmers, using RSS feeds as inputs and outputs. I’ve been talking about how the idea of publishing process instance (execution) data via an RSS feed would allow for really each consumption/mashing up of the data to increase process visibility, and this appears to be the type of environment that would allow a semi-technical business user to create their own dashboard of mashed-up data.
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.
