social – Page 4

Elmer Sotto of Facebook Canada at DemoCamp Toronto 30

Unbelievably, the 30th edition of DemoCamp happened in Toronto a couple of weeks ago, and I was there to hear the keynote from Elmer Sotto of Facebook Canada, as well as see the short, live demos from four local startups. I’ll post my notes on the demo in a subsequent post, but I’ve been thinking about Sotto’s exploration of the question of what is social: although he was focused on the consumer market, I saw a lot of parallels with social business. He saw three basic drivers for a social environment:

You are proud of what you do and want to share it
Others want to see what you have to share
You specifically share with your social network

He spoke about having a social platform that is optimized for telling stories, where those stories are for the purpose of building identity, sparking conversation or deepening relationships. Or, as we might say in the social enterprise world: stories for reputation, collaboration or building our social graph.

To be truly social, a platform must be social by design, not just have share/like buttons tacked on after completion. Software that has social in its very DNA must be shared to be fully functional; can you imagine Facebook if you were the only one on it? It must also mimic real social norms in order to be successful: amplifying existing social or cultural activities, not trying to create new ones, and extending an existing social graph rather than creating a new one.

It’s interesting that Facebook is taking on the challenge of replacing the mostly unstructured data of notes with more structured semantic data to allow the surfacing of that data to parts of your social graph: instead of just “liking” something, they are allowing applications to create the structure of user/action/object for users to interact with that application.

The latter part of his presentation turned into a bit of a Facebook ad, including video from the F8 conference about the new Timeline feature, but I found some of his points were surprisingly useful in an enterprise context.

Hey, Look! I Wrote A Book!

Well, okay, I only wrote a chapter in it, but I didn’t realize until today that my name was on the front cover, too. I’m looking forward to getting my hands on a copy of it to read all the other contributions, it looks like a good lineup of social BPM papers. My chapter is on leveraging social BPM for enterprise transformation; I originally wrote it as a white paper for IBM, and they encouraged me to submit it here as well, so extra thanks to them, especially Mihnea Galeteanu for going through three rounds of revisions with me. From my introduction:

Social BPM is gaining recognition as a driver of knowledge worker productivity. But what is social BPM, and how does it compare with the more general classes of social business applications? How can social BPM be used as part of an overall enterprise transformation initiative? This white paper explores the drivers behind social BPM, and provides insights into its four main manifestations: collaborative process discovery, runtime collaboration, process event streams, and BPM communities. It also discusses the network effects that fuel the expansion of social BPM, acting as a catalyst for transformation of an enterprise’s processes, performance and work culture, and finishes with a number of best practices for adopting social BPM within your organization.

The book will be launched at the Social Business Forum in Milan on June 8th which, unfortunately, I can’t attend because I’m giving a workshop at the BPM conference in London the same day. You can pre-order the book here and get a 20% discount, or it will be on Amazon at some point. No, I don’t get a cut.

I often have people tell me that I should write a book, but I tell them that writing 700,000 words on a blog over six years isn’t really the same as writing the equivalent number of words in a book (or 10). I count myself lucky that I manage to get a chapter in a book completed once in a while.

Knowledge Management, Social Media, Social BPM and Control

The term “knowledge management” has been used – and misused – in many different ways over the years, but I agree with Jonathan Reichental’s definition of it as the identification, retention, effective use and retirement of institutional insight. I really, really agree with his further insights about knowledge management in the age of social media:

The days of the single, authoritative voice are coming to an end. The community has prevailed.

I’m writing a white paper right now on social BPM for enterprise transformation (not the same white paper that I referred to in yesterday’s post on a spectrum of process functionality), and I’ve been reviewing some of my research and presentations on social BPM from the past five years as well as those of others. One thing that jumps out at me, and was reinforced by a comment made by my client, is that there is a paradigm shift happening in the way that organizations understand control. Control no longer means that management dictates every action that every employee takes, but rather that appropriate levels of control are given to everyone so that they can control their environment and make it most effective for their tasks at hand.

The other thing that comes to mind, prompted by the quote above, is that harnessing collective intelligence is fast becoming the most important feature from O’Reilly’s original Web 2.0 definition as it applies to organizational knowledge management, as well as community efforts like the PKBoK. In social BPM, features such as collaborative process discovery and modeling are allowing the community within an organization to define the business processes, rather than relying on a much smaller group of “expert” process designers. That’s not to say that you don’t want some of those expert process designers involved – after all, they are likely trained and experienced and spotting inconsistencies and inefficiencies that others might miss – but you’ll ultimately see better quality of processes by allowing the community to participate in their definition.

What Price Integrity?

As an interesting follow on to the previous session on blog monetization, I attended a panel on maintaining integrity on blogs when you do advertising or promotions on your site, featuring Danny Brown, Gini Dietrich and Eden Spodek. A lot of this is about transparency and disclosure; one audience member said that she writes paid reviews on her blog but that although you can buy her review, you can’t buy her opinion: there’s a fine line here. This is particularly an issue for lifestyle bloggers, since they often receive offers of free product in exchange for a review; this might be seen as being less of a “payment” than cash, although it still constitutes payment.

When I write a product review here, I am never compensated for that, although arguably it can impact my relationship with the vendor and can lead to other things, including paid engagements and conference trips. That’s quite different from being paid to blog about something, which I don’t do; I’ve had offers of payment from vendors to blog about them, and they don’t really understand when I tell them that I just don’t do that. Of course, you might say that when I’m at a vendor’s conference where they paid my travel expenses and I’m blogging about it, that’s paid blogging, but if you’ve ever spent much time at these conferences, you know that’s not much of a perq after a while. In fact, I’m giving up potential paid time in order to spend my time unpaid at the conference, so it ends up costing me in order to stay up to date on the products and customer experiences.

By the way, my “no compensation for blogging” doesn’t go for book reviews: it is almost 100% guaranteed that if I write a book review, the author or publisher sent me a free copy (either paper or electronic) since I just don’t buy a lot of books. I currently have a backlog of books to be read and reviewed since that’s not my main focus, so this isn’t such a great deal for either party.

The key advice of the panel is that if you do accept free product or some other payment in exchange for a product review, make sure that you remain authentic with your review, and disclose your relationship with the product vendor. In some countries, such as the US and the UK, this is now required; in places where it isn’t, it’s just good practice.

I was going to stay on for a session on webinars but the speaker seems to be a no-show, so this may be it for me and PodCamp Toronto 2011. Glad that I stopped by for the afternoon, definitely some worthwhile material and some food for thought on monetization and integrity.

Blog Monetization

The next session that I attended was Andrea Tomkins talking about how to make money through advertising on your blog. She started with ways that blogs can pay off without direct monetization, such as driving other sorts of business (just as this blog often drives first contacts for my consulting business) and leveraging free trips to conferences, but her main focus was on how she sells ads on her blog.

She believes that selling your own ad space results in higher quality advertising by allowing you to select the advertisers who you want on your site and control many of the design aspects. Plus, you get to keep all the cash. She believes in charging a flat monthly rate rather than by impressions or clicks, and to set the rates, she looked at the rates for local newspapers; however, newspapers are very broad-based whereas blog audiences are much more narrowly focused, meaning that the people reading your blog come from a specific demographic that certain advertisers would really like to have access to. Andrea’s blog is a “parenting lifestyle” blog – a.k.a. “mommyblogger” – and she has 1,300-1,400 daily views, many of whom are local to her Ottawa area.

She started out charging $50/month/ad, and bumped it for new clients as well as an annual increase until she reached a sweet spot in the pricing (which she didn’t disclose). She doesn’t sell anything less than a 3-month term, and some advertisers have signed up for a 12-month spot. Her first advertiser, who is still with her, is a local candy store that she and her family frequented weekly – she felt that if she loved it so much, then her readers would probably enjoy it as well. She approached the store directly to solicit the ad, although now many of her new advertisers come to her when they see her blog and how it might reach their potential audience.

She controls the overall ad design: the ad space is a 140×140 image with a link to their website, with the images being updated as often as the advertisers wish. New ads are added to the bottom of the list, so advertisers are incented to maintain their relationship with her in order to maintain their placement on the site.

She also writes a welcome post for each advertiser; she writes this as her authentic opinion, and doesn’t just publish some PR from the advertiser since she doesn’t want to alienate her readers. Each advertiser has the opportunity to host a giveaway or contest for each 3-month term, although she doesn’t want to turn her blog into a giveaway blog because that doesn’t match her blogging style. She also uses her social network to promote her advertisers in various ways, whether through personal recommendations, on her Facebook page or Twitter; because she only takes advertisers that she believes in, she can really give a personal recommendation for any of them.

Before you call a potential advertiser, she recommends understanding your traffic, figuring out an ad design and placement, and coming up with a rate sheet. Don’t inflate your traffic numbers: you’ll be found out and look like an idiot, and most advertisers are more interested in quality engagement than raw numbers anyway. Everyone pays the same rate on Andrea’s blog; she doesn’t charge more for “above the fold” ads or use a placement randomizer, so sometimes has some new advertisers (who are added to the bottom) complain about placement.

A rate sheet should be presented as a professionally-prepared piece of collateral coordinated with your business cards, blog style and other marketing pieces. It needs to include something about you, the deal you’re offering, your blog, your audience and traffic, and optionally some testimonials from other advertisers.

Handling your own ads does create work. You need to handle contacts regarding ads (she doesn’t publish her rates), invoice and accept payments, track which ads need to run when, set up contracts, and provide some reporting to the advertisers. Obviously, there has to be a better way to manage this without resorting to giving away some big percentage to an ad network. She also writes personal notes to advertisers about when their ad might have been noticed in something that Andrea did (like a TV appearance) or when she is speaking and hence might have their ads be more noticed. She does not publish ads in her feed, but publishes partial feeds so readers are driven to her site to read the full posts, and therefore see the ads. She has started sending out a newsletter and may be selling advertising separately for that.

This started a lot of ideas in my head about advertising. I used to have Google ads in my sidebar, which pretty much just paid my hosting fees, but I took them out when it started to feel a bit…petty. As long as I get a good part of my revenue from end-customer organizations to help them with their BPM implementations, it would be difficult to accept ads here and maintain the appearance of independence. Although I do work for vendors as an analyst and keep those parts of my business completely separate, with appropriate disclosure to clients, it is just as important to have the public appearance of impartiality as well as actually be impartial. An ongoing dilemma.

Appian Tempo

I had a chance for an advance briefing of Appian’s Tempo release last week; this is a new part of the Appian product suite that focuses on mobility, cloud and social aspects of BPM for social collaboration. This isn’t a standalone social collaboration platform, but includes deep links into the Appian BPM platform through events, alerts, tasks and more. They’ve included Twitter-like status updates and RSS feeds so that you can publish and consume the information in a variety of other forms, offering a fresh new alternative to the usual sort of process monitoring that we see in a BPMS. The free app for the iPhone and iPad requires an account on Appian Forum (the Appian user community site) or access to an Appian BPM installation (not sure if this is both an on-premise system and the cloud-based offering) in order to do anything so I wasn’t really able to check it out, but saw it on an emulator in the demo.

Their goal for Tempo is to provide a zero-training interface that allows people to track and participate in processes either from a browser or from a mobile device. You can think of it as a new user interface for their BPM and information management systems: in some cases to provide an alternative view to the portal for occasional/less-skilled users, and in some cases as the only interface for more collaborative or monitoring applications. It doesn’t replace the information- and feature-rich portal interface used by heads-down workers, but provides a simpler view for interacting with processes by executives or mobile workers. Users can interact with tasks that are assigned to them in a structured process within BPM, such as approving a purchase request, but can also create a new case from any event, whether that original event was related to BPM or not. For example, I had a view of the internal Appian instance of Tempo (I’ve redacted everything from this screenshot except this event, since some of the other events included internal information) where a “Marketing” stream included RSS feeds from a number of BPM news and blog sources. Swiping on any given event in the iPhone/iPad app – say an external blog post – allowed a new case to be opened that linked to that external event. At this point, the case opening functionality is pretty rudimentary, only allowing for a single process type to be created, which would then be manually reassigned to a specific person or subprocess, you can see the future value of this when the case/process type can be selected.

As this scenario highlights, Tempo can include process and information from a variety of other sources, internal and external, that may have nothing to do with Appian BPM, in addition to providing visibility into core business processes. Anything with an RSS feed can be added; I saw Salesforce.com notifications, although not sure if they were just from an RSS feed or if there is some sort of more direct integration. Considering the wide adoption of RSS as a publication method for events, this is likely not an issue, but there are also some more direct system connections: an SAP event appearing in Tempo can be expanded to retrieve data directly from the corresponding SAP item, such as invoice details. This turns Tempo into a sort of generalized business dashboard for monitoring tasks and events from many different business sources: collaboration within a business information context.

The browser interface will be familiar if you’ve ever used Facebook: it has a big panel in the center for events, with the event filters in a panel on the left, and the event actions in a panel on the right. Users can subscribe to specific event types, which automatically creates filters, or can explicitly filter by logical business groupings such as departments. Individual events can be “starred” for easy retrieval, as you would with messages in Gmail. The user’s BPM inbox is exposed in the filter panel as “My Tasks”, so that their interaction with structured business processes is seen in the same context as other information and events with which they interact. The action panel on the right allows for the user to initiate new processes, depending on their role; this is more comprehensive than the “Open a case” functionality that we saw on the iPad: this is a full BPM process instantiation based on a user input form, such as creating a new IT change request. The actions available to a user are based on their role and permissions.

Access to certain event classes can be restricted based on user and role permissions, but a user can comment on any event that they can see in their event stream. This form of collaboration is very similar to the Facebook model: you comment on someone an item that someone else posts, then are notified when anyone else adds a comment to the same event.

There’s been some nice optimization for the iPhone and iPad apps, such as one-click approvals without having to open the item, and rendering of Appian forms natively in the app. Although I’ve seen many iPad demos in the past year – it seems impossible to visit a vendor or go to a conference without seeing at least one – this offers significant value because of the deep integration to business processes and information. It’s easy to envision a mobile worker, for example, using the app to update information while at their client site, rather than filling out paper forms that need to be transcribed later. The app can directly access documents from the Appian content management system, or link to anything in a browser via a URL. It also allows for multiple user logins from the same device, which makes it good for testing but also useful in cases where a mobile device might be passed from worker to worker, such as for healthcare workers where a single device would support rotating shifts of users.

This certainly isn’t the first mobile app for BPM – you can see a few more listed at David Moser’s blog post on process apps – and the expected demand for mobile BPM will continue to drive more into this marketplace. This is, however, a very competent offering by a mainstream BPM vendor, which helps to validate the mobile BPM market in general.

This also isn’t the first BPM vendor to come out with a social media-style collaborative event stream interface (for lack of a better term), but this is a good indication of what we can expect to see as standard BPM functionality in the future.

HandySoft Process Intelligence and User Experience

Wow, has it really been a month since I last blogged? A couple of weeks vacation, general year-end busyness and a few non-work side projects have kept me quiet, but it’s time to get back at it. I have a few partially-finished product briefings sitting around, and thought it best to get them out before the vendors come out with their next versions and completely obsolesce these posts. 🙂

I had a chat with Garth Knudson of HandySoft in late November about the latest version of their BizFlow product, specifically around the new reporting capabilities and their WebMaker RIA development environment. Although these don’t show off the core BPM capabilities in their product suite (which I reviewed in late 2009), these are two well-integrated tools that allow for easy building of reports and applications within a BizFlow BPM environment. I always enjoy talking with Garth because he says good things about his competitors’ products, which means that not only does he have good manners, but he takes enough care to learn something about the competition rather than just tarring them all with the same brush.

We first looked at their user-driven reporting – available from the My AdHoc Reports option on the BizFlow menu – which is driven by OEM versions of the Jaspersoft open source BI server components; by next year, they’ll have the entire Jaspersoft suite integrated for more complete process analytics capabilities. Although you can already monitor the current processes from the core BizFlow capability, the ad hoc reporting add-on allows users (or more likely, business analysts) to define their own reports, which can then be run on demand or on a schedule.

If you’ve seen Jaspersoft (or most other ad hoc reporting tools) at work, there isn’t much new here: you can select the data domain from the list of data marts set up by an administrator, then select the type of report/graph, the fields, filtering criteria and layout. It’s a bit too techie for the average user to actually create a new report definition, since it provides a little much close contact with the database, such as displaying the actual SQL field names instead of aliases, but once the definition is created, it’s easy enough to run from the BizFlow interface. Regular report runs can be scheduled to output to a specific folder in a specific format (PDF, Excel, etc.), based on the underlying Jaspersoft functionality.

The key integration points with BizFlow BPM, then, are the ability of an administrator to include process instance data in the data marts as well as any other corporate data, allowing for composite reporting across sources; and access to the report definitions in the My AdHoc Reports tab.

The second part of the demo was on their WebMaker application development environment. Most BPM suites these days have some sort of RIA development tool, allowing you to build user forms, screens, portals and dashboards without using a third-party tool. This is driven in part by the former lack of good tools for doing this, and in part by the major analyst reports that state that a BPMS has to have some sort of application development built in to it. Personally, I’m torn on that: most BPMS vendors are not necessarily experts at creating application development tools, and making the BPMS capabilities available for consumption by more generic application development environments through standard component wrappers fits better with a best-of-breed approach that I tend to favor. However, many organizations that buy a BPMS don’t have modern application development tools at all, so the inclusion of at least an adequate one is usually a help.

HandySoft’s WebMaker is loosely coupled with BizFlow, so it can be used for any web application development, not just BPM-related applications. It does integrate natively with BizFlow, but can also connect with any web service or JDBC-compliant database (as you would expect) and uses the Model-View-Controller (MVC) paradigm. For a process-based application, you define the process map first, then create a new WebMaker project, define a page (form), and connect the page to the process definition. Once that’s done, you can then drag the process variables directly onto the form to create the user interface objects. There’s a full array of on-form objects available, including AJAX partial pages, maps, charts, etc., as well as the usual data entry fields, drop-downs and buttons. Since the process parameters are all available to the form, the form can change its appearance and behavior depending on the process variables, for example, to allow a partial page group to be enabled or disabled based on the specific step in the process or the value of the process instances variables at that step. This allows a single form to be used for multiple steps in a process that require a similar but not identical look and feel, such as a data entry screen and a QA screen; alternatively, multiple forms can be defined and assigned to different steps in the same process.

To be clear, WebMaker is not a tool for non-technical people: although a trained business analyst could probably get through the initial screen designs, there is far too much technical detail exposed if you want to do anything except very vanilla static forms; the fact that you can easily expose the MVC execution stack is a clue that this is really a developer tool. It is, however, well-integrated with BizFlow BPM, allowing the process instance variables to be used in WebMaker, and the WebMaker forms to be assigned to each activity using the Process Studio.

HandySoft is one of the small players in the BPMS market, and has focused on ad hoc and dynamic processes from the start. Now that all of the BPMS vendors have jumped into the dynamic BPM fray, it will be interesting to see if these new BizFlow tools round out their suite sufficiently to compete with the bigger players.

IBM Blueworks Live Sneak Peak

When I wrote a post yesterday about the slow convergence between BPM and social software, I had forgotten about the analyst briefing that I had scheduled with IBM later in the day for a sneak peak of the new Blueworks Live site. Lombardi has always been at the forefront of the integration of social and BPM, although previously focused purely on the process discovery/design phase, and the IBM acquisition has allowed Lombardi’s social process discovery to be combined with IBM’s online BPM community to create something greater than the sum of the parts. For all my criticism of IBM, they have some incredible pockets of innovation that sometimes burst out into actual product.

Yesterday’s session was hosted by Phil Gilbert; apparently this was the first public viewing of the site, which will be officially unveiled this Saturday, November 20th. Phil, who I’ve known for a number of years through his time at Lombardi, explained some of the motivation for Blueworks Live, and in a weird echo of the post that I wrote just hours before, he said “BPM is ready to meet social networking”. They are trying to reinvent the public BPM community, while avoiding the problems that they perceive with other vendors’ community sites:

They are mainly product support sites
They have high membership numbers, but low participation
A majority of the information is from the sponsor company
The customer perception is that these sites are proprietary and biased, and that there’s already too many sources of information on BPM

Blueworks Live Community

In their search for a truly public BPM community, they turned to that universal public community: Twitter. They are taking the public BPM-focused Twitter stream, based on both BPM-focused users (including everyone on the analyst call, said Phil) and the #bwlive hashtag, to create a public stream that will be displayed alongside a user’s private activity stream in Blueworks Live. The private activity stream is based on processes and projects in which the user is a participant, or that the user has selected to follow.

Blueworks Live is a combination of the previous BPM BlueWorks Beta community and the (Lombardi) BPM Blueprint process discovery tool; although BPM BlueWorks Beta had some process modeling tools, they were not of the sophistication of Blueprint. However, it’s more than just community and process modeling: Blueworks Live also includes process automation for the long tail of low-volume administrative processes, that is, those simple human-based processes that can’t warrant a BPM implementation that involves IT. IBM estimates that 75% of all business processes fall into this category – including processes from HR, IT, accounting, marketing and a number of other areas – and most end up being done in email.

We moved on to a product demo by Cliff Vars, a product manager, who started with the view of the site by unregistered (that is, unpaid) users. Without signing in, you can view:

Under the Community section, the afore-mentioned public BPM Twitter stream, made up of specific Twitter users and tweets containing the #bwlive hashtag. Although the pricing chart indicated that free users could see both public and private communities, we only saw the public BPM Twitter stream before logging in.
Under the Library section, blog posts migrated from the old BPM BlueWorks Beta site. I believe that a lot of the content from the old site was written by IBM employees and was moderated, so can’t exactly be considered public community content.
Also in the Library section, a number of process templates that appear to be in the (Lombardi) Blueprint format – not clear how useful that would be if you weren’t a paid user, since you couldn’t use the Blueprint modeler to open them.

Creating a Process Automation

We then logged on to take a look at how simple process automation works. In the logged-in view, the “Getting Started” section is replaced by the “Work” section, which contains all of the tasks assigned to the user, the process instances that they’ve launched, the ability to launch a new process instance, plus links to create a Blueprint process design or a new automated process. It’s important to recognize that there’s two distinct types of processes here: complex processes modeled in Blueprint (the former Lombardi tool), which may eventually be transferred to an on-premised IBM Lombardi process engine for execution; and simple processes, which are modeled using a completely different tool and executed directly within the Blueworks Live site. When we look at process automation, it’s the latter that we’re seeing.

To automate a process, then, you click the big green “Automate a Process button” to get started, then specify the following:

A process application name.
The process type, either “Simple Workflow” or “Checklist”. In the demo, we saw a simple workflow type, which is a linear sequence of tasks assigned to users; we didn’t get a look at the checklist type so not sure of the different functionality. These are the only types available for automated processes in Blueworks Live, although they plan to add more in the future.
Select the space for the process definition, which might be a personal sandbox or a department such as Marketing.
Add instructions to be provided when an instance of the process is launched.
Configure some of the labels that will appear in the running process to make them more specific to the process.
Add one or more tasks, which will be executed sequentially in each process instance. For each task, specify the description, who the task is assigned to (or leave it blank to have it assigned at runtime), and whether the task is an approval step.
Share the process definition with participants of that space, who will then have it available as a process type to instantiate from their Work section.

The whole process creation took only a couple of minutes, and when we returned to the user’s Work section where we had started, the new process template was available in the sidebar.

Launching and Participating in a Process

We then logged on as a different user to create a process instance from that template. Since this user presumably has access to the space in which the process designer saved the process template, it appears in the sidebar of our Work section. Clicking that link kicks off a process instance:

The instructions specified by the process designer are displayed.
Fill in the name and details fields.
Add a desktop document as an attachment; this is uploaded and shared with all the participants.
Select a due date for each of the tasks.
For the task that wasn’t pre-assigned to a user, assign the user.
Launch it to kick off the first task.

Returning to the main Work section, we can now see that process instance in the “Work I’ve launched” tab, and can open and track its progress from there.

When we move over to the Community section, we can now see our private activity stream, which includes two new events: first, that we launched the workflow, and second, that the first task in that workflow was received by the user to which it was assigned. By default, all of the events for every process that we’ve launched will appear in our activity stream.

We then switched back to the original user, who was also the user to whom the first task in the process was assigned, to see what it looks like to participate in a process. An email was already waiting to tell us that we had a new task, complete with a link to the task, or we could have found the task directly in the Work section of Blueworks Live under the “Tasks assigned to me” tab. Regardless of how it was opened, we can then complete the task:

View the process name and details provided by the process originator.
View the attached document. It appears that we could also have added more documents at this point, although we didn’t see that.
Add a comment, which appears in a comments timeline on the side of the process information.
View the tasks to be completed. Since the first one is assigned to us, and it was an approval task, there are Approve and Reject buttons on the task.
Click the Approve button to mark the task as completed. I assume that tasks that are not approval tasks have a simple Complete button or something similar so that the participant can mark the task as complete, although we didn’t look at that.

There are a number of other options that appear to be available at this point, although we didn’t explore them, such as reassigning the remaining tasks to different users, but essentially this user is done with their task and the process. If we move to the Community area and look at the private activity stream for this user, we can see that in addition to creating and sharing the process template, the approval task also appears there.

Overall, although there’s nothing really new about this sort of easy sequential workflow design and execution, the user interface is clean and uncluttered, and pop-up tips on the fields assist the user on what to enter. Assuming that you can wrench your users away from using email for these processes, there won’t be much of a learning curve for them to create new processes on their own, and even less to use processes created by others. If you want to see this in action, there’s a Blueworks Live YouTube channel with a couple of videos on creating and participating in a process.

A user with administrative privileges can view some basic aggregate reports on these processes, including some graphical views of process template usage, user participation and on-time completion; this is generated as an Excel spreadsheet that is downloaded and viewed on the desktop, not as an integrated reporting or dashboard view. It’s very rudimentary, but may be sufficient for the types of processes that are likely to be automated using this tool.

To finish up, we also looked at the Library section again; as a logged-in user, we could now see some additional content areas, including links to Blueprint process models, which could then launch the familiar Blueprint environment within Blueworks Live for complex process discovery and modeling. As I mentioned earlier, this is a completely different modeling environment than the “process automation” that I described above; these processes will be exported to an on-premise IBM Lombardi process engine for execution.

There are three levels of Blueworks Live users:

Community, free, which allows you to view the public and private communities, although it’s not clear what the private community is in the case of a free user.
Contributor, $10/month, which adds all the functionality of creating and running the simple process applications that I’ve described above, plus the ability to review and comment on Blueprint process models.
Editor, $50/month, which adds the full Blueprint modeling capability.

Although the paid users now have more than former (paid) Blueprint users with the addition of the simple process automation, free users of the old BPM BlueWorks Beta site have lost a whole bunch of capabilities, unless we just skipped that part of the demo.

The Verdict

In a nutshell, Blueworks Live provides some private and public community functionality, allows you to create (Lombardi) Blueprint process designs, and automate simple processes. But these are two very different tools: the online mini processes with the Blueworks Live automation engine (based on two basic templates, workflow and checklist), and the Blueprint processes, some of which will be moved to an on-premise Lombardi system. Different interfaces, different engines, different everything except that they’re contained within the same portal.

The Twitter stuff is pretty useless for those of us who are already competent at monitoring Twitter using a tool such as Tweetdeck. I’m never going to go to Blueworks Live to look at the public Twitter stream; I probably already follow the same list of people in my BPM Twitter list, and if I want to see what’s happening with #bwlive, I’ll just add it as a search column. It’s probably good for the Twitter newbies, since they haven’t figured out groups, hashtags or Tweetdeck yet; maybe that’s more representative of the expected user base.

Except for the Twitter stream, the only community content appears to be the current BlueWorks blog content, written mostly by IBM. The online execution isn’t really community, it’s process execution in a semi-collaborative space, which is different. The forums (mostly product/site help) and media library (including webinars, white papers and the various modeling tools such as strategy and capability maps) from the old BPM BlueWorks Beta site are missing, or at least not displayed in the version that we saw. Although Blueworks Live definitely has some improved functionality such as process execution, this is really a collection of non-integrated tools, and it’s not clear that they’ve reached their goals regarding a public BPM community.

They’re not the first to have cloud-based process execution, but they are IBM, and that lends some credibility to the whole notion of running your business processes outside the firewall. Like the entry of other large players into the cloud BPM marketplace, I believe that this will be a benefit to all cloud BPM providers since it will validate and enlarge the market. This validation of cloud-based BPM is a real game-changer, if not Blueworks Live itself.