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Size does matter: travelling light with netbook and iPhone

I love technology more as it gets smaller. I haven’t been travelling much this year, but the next two months will change that. For the first time in years, however, I’ll be carrying only my suitcase (a roll-aboard that fits in the overhead bin) and my handbag: no computer bag. That’s because I am the proud owner of an HP Mini netbook, which slides right into the back compartment of my smallish purse with room to spare. The screen is a bit small, but adequate – in fact for widescreen video viewing, it’s great – and the keyboard is large enough for comfortable touch typing. Battery life is 6 hours, which rocks. Disk is 160GB, leaving space for me to load it up with e-books and video to entertain me while away from home.

It runs XP, and I’ve loaded the following software:

Chrome as my primary browser – much cleaner and takes up less screen real estate, so good for the smaller screen.
Google mail/calendar with offline synchronization, since my email accounts are all Gmail or Google Apps; this means that my mail and calendar will stay synchronized between this computer, my office computer (which uses Outlook and Google Apps Sync), my iPhone and the web.
It has a trial version of MS-Office included, but I’ve also loaded Open Office and will see if that works for the relatively light editing needs that I’ll have on the road. If so, then I won’t bother to buy the license for Office when the trial expires.
Live Writer for blogging, since I do a lot of that while at conferences.
Dropbox for synchronizing working files to the web for backup, and back to my home machine (use this link to sign up for Dropbox if you’re interested, and we’ll both get an extra 250MB storage).
Tweetdeck for Twittering.
Flickr Uploader for uploading photos.
iTunes, since it’s required in order to use my iPhone for USB cable-based internet tethering.

I’ve been using the netbook instead of my usual computer off and on for the past two weeks, and I’m quite convinced that I’ll be fine for days at a time with this on the road. I’m missing my financial software and a whole raft of utilities, but nothing that I can’t do without for a while.

I also finally broke down and bought an iPhone 3GS, so if you saw me earlier in the year with my iPod Touch and a Nokia flip phone, those two gadgets have now been replaced by one: more room in my purse. There will probably be some short trips where I can make do with just the iPhone, and leave the netbook at home, since it has everything on there, including Dropbox to access documents. It’s not a great blogging platform, however; as a former Blackberry addict, I can authoritatively state that the iPhone keyboard sucks for any large amount of typing.

With my new technology in tow, I leave on Friday for Germany to attend BPM2009 in Ulm next week – watch for the live blogging from there – then spend another week having a bit of a vacation in locations yet to be determined, but likely a couple of days in Zurich and a trip through western Germany back up to Dusseldorf for my flight home. [For those of you who think giving this sort of information provides an opportunity for someone to break into my home and steal all my worldly belongings, rest assured that I leave behind my black belt hubby – and I don’t mean a Six Sigma black belt – and a pretty mean cat.]

Social media for community projects

If you ever wonder what BPM analyst/architect/bloggers do in their spare time, wonder no more:

Ignite Toronto: Sandy Kemsley -The Hungry Geek from Ignite Toronto on Vimeo.

I was invited to give a presentation at Ignite! Toronto this week, and decided to discuss how I’ve been using social media – Twitter, Flickr, Facebook, blogging – and some integration technologies including RSS and Python scripting to promote a new farmers’ market in my community. I’m on the local volunteer committee that acts as the marketing team for the market. Here’s the presentation, it’s not too clear on the video:

If you’re not familiar with Ignite, it’s a type of speed presentation: 20 slides, 5 minutes, and your slides auto-advance every 15 seconds. For a marathon presenter like me, keeping it down to 5 minutes is a serious challenge, but this was a lot of fun.

For a technology view, check out slide 17 in the slide deck, which shows a sort of context diagram of the components involved. Twitter is central to this “market message delivery framework”, displaying content from a number of sources on the market Twitter account:

I manually tweet when I see something of interest related to the market or food. Also, I monitor and retweet some of our followers, and reply to anyone asking a question via Twitter.
When I publish a post on my personal blog that is in the category “market”, Twitterfeed picks it up through the RSS feed and posts the title and link on Twitter. These are posted to both the market account and my own Twitter account, so you may have seen them if you’re following me there.
Each week, I save up a list of interesting links and other tweet-worthy info, and put them in a text file. My talented other half wrote a Python script that tweets one message from that file each hour for the two days prior to each Saturday market day.
I connected my Flickr account with Twitter, and can either manually tweet a link to a photo directly from Flickr, or email a photo from my iPhone to a private Flickr email address that will cause the link to be tweeted. I could have used Twitpic for the latter functionality, but Flickr gives me better control over my photo archive.

The whole exercise has been a great case study on using social media for community projects with no budget, using some small bits of technology to tie things together so that it doesn’t take much of my time now that it’s up and running. I’d be doing most of the activities anyway: taking pictures of the market, cooking and blogging about it, and reading articles on local food and markets online. This just takes all of that and pushes it out to the market’s online community with very little additional effort on my part.

The Open Group’s Service Integration Maturity Model and SOA Governance Framework

I had a chance last week for a pre-release briefing from The Open Group’s Chris Harding, Forum Director for SOA and Semantic Interoperability, on two new standards that they are releasing today: the Service Integration Maturity Model (OSIMM) and the SOA Governance Framework. These are both vendor-neutral (although several large vendors were involved in their creation), and are available for free on The Open Group’s site. In their words:

OSIMM will provide an industry recognized maturity model for advancing the continuing adoption of SOA and Cloud Computing within and across businesses. The SOA Governance Framework is a free guide for organizations to apply proven governance standards that will accelerate service-oriented architecture success rates.

OSIMM is a strategic planning tool: it is used to assess where you are in your SOA initiatives relative to a standard, vendor-neutral maturity model, and help create a roadmap for how to move on to the higher levels of maturity. At the heart of it is the OSIMM matrix, with maturity levels as columns progressing from left to right, and the different organizational dimensions being measured as rows: business view, governance and organization, methods, applications, architecture, information, and infrastructure and management.

Within each cell of the matrix are the indicators for that dimension and maturity level: for example, if you’re using object oriented modeling methods, that indicates that your methods are at level 2, whereas using service oriented modeling would move you up to level 4 or 5 in the methods dimension. Behind this matrix, OSIMM includes a full set of maturity indicators and attributes, plus assessment questions that organizations can use to determine where they are in terms of maturity: each dimension can be (and likely will be) at a different level of maturity.

This has the potential to be an incredibly useful self-assessment tool for organizations: rather than the very product-specific measurements that you see from vendors (“Not using our product? Oh, you’re not at all advanced in your SOA efforts…”), this is independent of whatever products that you’re using: it’s more about the type of products, and the methods and governance that you’re using to apply them. You’ll be able to use it to understand services and SOA, assess the maturity of your organization, and develop a roadmap to reach your goals.

The first version of the OSIMM Technical Standard will be available here for free download, although that link was still not working at the time that I wrote this. Other industry-specific standards organizations are free to use OSIMM directly, or extend it with their own dimensions and indicators as required.

The other major announcement today is about the SOA governance framework, which helps an organization to define their governance processes and methods. This is more of a practical framework for defining policies aligned between business and IT, aiding communication and capturing vendor-neutral best practices. This includes best practices around both lifecycle management and portfolio management, for both services and service-based solutions.

Lifecycle and portfolio management are quite different: for example, a service lifecycle would include the idea or motivator for the service, the service definition, service creation, putting the service into operation, modifying and maintaining the service, and eventually retiring the service from operation. Service portfolio management is more concerned with reusability, and the practice of looking in the portfolio in the early stages of service lifecycle to see if there is an existing service that suits the requirements. The same applies to solution lifecycle and portfolio management; this differs from any other type of solution governance since there may be service-specific issues such as composition to be considered.

This generic reference model for SOA governance is provided as a standard, to be used by companies to create (and constantly monitor and update) their own specific governance model and best practices. The SOA governance framework may be used in the context of another governance framework, such as COBIT or ITIL; the SOA working group did a mapping of COBIT to this framework as part of the framework development process, and plan to do more in the future in order to help organizations preserve their investment in COBIT/ITIL training and implementation.

The SOA Governance Framework will be available here for free download.

SAP NetWeaver BPM

This post is both long, and long overdue. It’s based on several online sessions with Donka Dimitrova and Jie Deng of the SAP NetWeaver BPM product management team, then an update with Wolfgang Hilpert and Thomas Volmering at SAPPHIRE in May when the product entered unrestricted release. In the past few weeks, there’s been a series of “Introduction to SAP NetWeaver BPM” posts by Arafat Farooqui of Wipro on the SAP SDN site (part 1, part 2, part 3 and part 4, which are really about how to hook up a Web Dynpro UI to a human task in BPM, then invoke a process instance using web services from a portal), and I’m inspired to finally gather up all my notes and impressions.

The driver for BPM with SAP is pretty obvious: Business Workflow within the SAP ERP suite just isn’t agile or functional enough to compete with what’s been happening in BPM now, and SAP customers have been bringing in other BPM suites for years to complement their SAP systems. I had to laugh at one of Dimitrova’s comments on the justification for BPM during our discussion – "process changes in an ERP are difficult and require many hours from developers" – oh, the irony of this coming from an SAP employee!

The Eclipse-based Process Composer is part of the NetWeaver Developers’ Studio, and is used to create processes in the context of other development tools, such as the Yasu rules engine (which they bought) and user interfaces. Like most modern BPMS’, what you draw in the Process Composer (in BPMN) is directly executed, although user interfaces must be created in other development tools such as Web Dynpro or Adobe Interactive forms, then linked to the process steps. There are future plans to generate a UI from the process context data or provide some sort of graphics forms designer in place, but that’s not there yet.

As with most Eclipse-based process modelers that I’ve seen, Process Composer has multiple perspectives for different types of process design participants, with a shared process model. Initially, there is only a process architect (technical) perspective in the modeler, and the business analyst view will be released this year. Future releases will include a line-of-business manager view to see task sequences and parallelism, but no details of gateways; and an executive view of major phases with analytics and KPI dashboards.

There is no link between ARIS-based modeling (SAP Enterprise Modeling Applications by IDS Scheer) and the NetWeaver BPM in this version; integration is planned for later version, although it will be interesting to see how that plays out now that IDS Scheer has been purchased by Software AG, which competes with SAP in (at least) the BPM arena.

Although all you can do now is create your BPM processes in this environment, in the future, there’s plans to have a common modeler and composition environment provide visibility into ERP processes, too, which will be a huge selling point for existing SAP customers who need more agility in their ERP processes. This common process layer will provide not just a unified design experience, but common runtime services, such as monitoring and performance management.

One huge issue from an orchestration standpoint is the lack of support for asynchronous web services calls, meaning that you have to use the existing NetWeaver Process Integrator (PI) environment to create system-centric processes, then invoke those (as synchronous web services) from NetWeaver BPM as required. I didn’t get a clear answer on future plans to merge the two process management platforms; keeping them separate will definitely cause some customer pushback, since most organizations don’t want to buy two different products to manage system-centric and human-centric processes, as they are encouraged to do by stack vendors such as IBM and Oracle.

Taking a look at the Process Composer environment, this is a fairly standard Eclipse-based BPMN process modeling environment: you create a process, add pools, add steps and link them together. For human-facing tasks, you use the properties of the step to connect it to a UI for that step, which must already be built by a developer using something like Web Dynpro. As I mentioned previously, the first version only has the “process architect” perspective, and is targeted at creating human-centric processes without full orchestration capabilities, since that’s what SAP’s customers who were involved in the product development cycle said that they most wanted. The environment is fairly technical, and I wouldn’t put it in front of any but the most technical of business analysts.

Roles can be set by lanes and overridden by task role assignment, which allows using the lanes for a department (for example) and overriding manager-specific tasks without moving them to another lane. Also, expressions can be used to assign roles, such as manager of the user that started the process. User IDs, roles and groups are pulled from the NetWeaver user management engine (UME).

Each step can have other properties, including deadlines (and the events that occur when they are exceeded) and user texts that appear for this step in the user worklist, which can include parameters from the process instance. These are all maintained (I think) in a task object, which is then associated with a step on the process map; that allows the same task to be easily reused within the same process or across processes.

There are a number of things that I like about Process Composer:

Some nice UI pop-ups on the process map to make specifying the next step easier.
An explicit process data model, called the process context, driven by master data management concepts; this is used for expressions and conditions in gateways, and to map to the inputs and outputs of the UI of human steps or the service interface of automated steps. It can be imported as an XSD file if you already have the schema elsewhere.
The visuals used to map and transform from the process context to a human or web service step make it obvious what’s getting mapped where, while allowing for sophisticated transformations as part of the mapping. Furthermore, a mapping – including transformation functions – can be saved and reused in other processes that have the same process context parameters.
Lots of fairly obvious drag-and-drop functionality: drag a task to create a step on a process map, drag a role to assign to a pool, or drag a WSDL service definition to create a system task.
Nice integration of the Yasu rules engine, which can be purely within the context of the process with rules appearing as functions available when selecting gateway conditions, or as a more loosely-coupled full rules engine.

Process Composer is just one tab within the whole NetWeaver Project Explorer environment: you can open other tabs for UI design, rules and other types of components. This allows the process to be visible while rules are being modeled, for example: handy for those of us with a short attention span. Rules are created using decision tables, or by writing in a Java-based rules language; Dimitrova referred to the latter as being “a bit complicated for business people”, which is a bit of an understatement, although decision tables are readily usable by business analysts. Future releases will have a business perspective in the rules modeler.

The Rules Composer is a full rules modeling environment, including debugging for incomplete or over-constrained rules in a decision table, and rules versioning. Parameters from a process context can be passed in to rules. Rules can be exposed as web services and called just like any other web service; in fact, although there is tight integration between the rules and process environment allowing for easy creation of a rule directly from within the Process Composer perspective, the rules management system is a separate entity and can be used independent of BPM: really the best of both worlds.

Having spent about 3 sessions going through the design environments, we moved on to process execution. Processes can be initiated using a web services call, from an Adobe form, or manually by an administrator. Since process models are versioned, all of the versions available on the server can be seen and instantiated.

Human tasks can be seen in the SAP Universal Worklist (UWL) through a connector that I heard about at SAPPHIRE, appearing along with any other tasks that are surfaced there including SAP ERP tasks or other systems that have developed a connector into the UWL. I like the unified inbox approach that they’re presenting: other BPM systems could, in fact, add their own human tasks in here, and it provides a common inbox that is focused on human workflow. Although an email inbox could be used for the same purpose, it doesn’t provide adequate management of tasks from a BPMS. The UWL is fairly independent from NetWeaver BPM; this is just one way to provide a worklist of BPM tasks that is provided by SAP in a portal environment, but it doesn’t have to be done that way.

Once a task is selected and opened, there is a frame across the top with standard task information that will be common across all tasks: information such as start date, deadline and status; common task functions of Close, Delegate and Revoke; and notes and attachments to the task. Below that is the Web Dynpro UI form that was connected to that task in the Process Composer, which contains the instance data that is specific to the process context for this process. The user can interact with that form in whatever manner specified by the Web Dynpro developer, which might involve accessing data from databases or ERP systems; that part is completely independent of NetWeaver BPM.

The user can also click through to a process view showing where they are in the context of the entire process map, plus runtime task parameters such as priority and start date.

Considering the all-important areas of monitoring and management of work in progress, that’s a bit weak in the first version. In the next version, there will be a dashboard showing process status and cycle time, with drill-down to process instances, combining exported BI data and realtime work in progress statistics. There is no way to update the process design of work in progress; there are actually only a few BPMS that do this very well, and most either don’t do it at all or require manual modification of each instance. Wherever possible, things that might change should be put into business rules, so that the correct rule is invoked at the point in time that it is required, not when the process instance was created.

At the end of all the demos, I was impressed with what SAP has released for a version 1.0, especially some of the nice handling of data and rules, yet aware of the many things that are still missing:

task UI generation
simulation
KPI measurement
asynchronous web services calls
links to/from ARIS
common process composition environment across BPM and ERP processes
BPEL translation
business analyst perspective in process and rules modelers
BPMN 2.0 support
strategy for merging or coexisting with NetWeaver process orchestration platform

In the briefing at SAPPHIRE, I did see a bit of the roadmap for what’s coming in the next year or two. In 2009, the focus will be on releasing the common process layer to allow for discovery, design and management of processes that include core (ERP) processes, human tasks in BPM, and service orchestration. This, in my opinion, is the make-or-break feature for NetWeaver BPM: if they can’t show much deeper integration with their ERP suite than any other BPMS vendor can offer, then they’re just another behind-the-curve BPMS struggling for market share. If they do this right, they will be positioned to win deals against other BPMS vendors that target SAP customers, as well as having a pre-existing relationship with SAP customers who may not yet have considered BPM.

Also in 2009, expect to see convergence of their BPM and BI, which is badly needed in order to provide dashboard/monitoring capabilities for BPM.

Further out, they’re planning to introduce a UI generator that will create a simple forms-based UI for tasks based on the process context (data model), as well as reports generated from the process definition and point-and-click integration of analytics at process steps. There will be more robust event provisioning tied to the existing event structure in the ERP layer, allowing events to be propagated to external applications such as BPM, and intermediate message events integrated with Business Suite. As mentioned previously, there will be new perspectives in the Process Composer, initially a business analyst perspective with a different focus than the existing technical perspective, not just a dumbed-down version as I’ve seen in other tools, and eventually they’ll use the Eclipse rich client platform (RCP) for an even lighter weight (and less geeky) Eclipse interface. There are plans for allowing ad hoc collaboration at a process step – necessary for case management functionality – as well as allowing operation managers to have control over interactive rule thresholds, providing greater business control over processes once they are in operation.

There’s a lot still missing in this first version; : simulation, KPIs, asynchronous web services calls just to name a few. That doesn’t mean, however, that it’s not usable – I know many customers using BPMS’ that do support those functions, but the customers never use them: great demo and sales tools, but not always used in reality.

NetWeaver BPM is not the best BPMS on the market. However, they don’t need to be the best BPMS on the market: they need to be the best BPMS for SAP customers. They’re not quite there yet, but it’s an achievable goal.

My fall BPM conference schedule

This year has been extremely light for conferences, due to some conference cancellations (or conversion to online-only conferences), and reduced PR budgets that meant that vendors didn’t have the means to offer me travel expenses to attend their conference. According to TripIt, I’ve only been to FASTforward, SAPPHIRE and Enterprise 2.0 so far this year, although I also attended the Open Group EA conference here in Toronto for a total of four. Last year by this time, I had attended 10 conferences, and ended up with a total of 19 for the year.

I will have a bit of conference travel this fall, however:

September 7-10, BPM 2009, Ulm, Germany. This is an academic/research BPM conference that draws the best research minds in BPM from all over the world, mostly from universities and corporate research institutes. I attended last year in Milan, and was overwhelmed with the quality and forward-thinking nature of the presentations. This conference gives a glimpse into the future of BPM, and I urge every BPMS vendor to get someone from their architecture/design/engineering group there to absorb some of this.
October 5-7, Gartner BPM summit, Orlando. I skipped the spring BPM summit, but am looking forward to the new material that is on the agenda since last fall.
October 8-9, Forrester Business Technology Forum, Chicago. I haven’t been to a Forrester conference ever since I spoke at the IT Leadership Forum in Carlsbad in 2007, but this one seems to be really focused on lean processes and process improvement.
October 27-28, Appian Forum user conference, Washington DC. I’ll be giving a presentation on BPM centers of excellence, based in part on the webinar series and white paper that I did for Appian’s BPM Basics site.
November 2-5, Business Rules Forum, Las Vegas. I’ll be giving a presentation on BPM, collaboration and social networking, plus facilitating a peer-to-peer workshop on BPM as a service. I’m very excited that BRF now has a separate BPM track, since there’s a lot of overlap both in vendors and in applications. Unfortunately, I have to miss CASCON which is going on in Toronto at the same time.

There are one or two other possibilities, although this is already starting to look pretty busy. If you’re at any of these events, look me up.

Leveraging process improvements depends on events

I was on a(nother) Gartner webinar today and this slide particularly resonated:

The key point is that although there’s a lot to be gained from automating and supporting business processes with BPMS, if you want to leverage productivity improvements, you need to be doing something with the events that are generated from the business processes. Without this, you’ll be blind to many of the delayed effects and unintended consequences of process decisions.

Gartner’s 2009 Hype Cycle

Gartner’s hype cycle for 2009 was released this week, and there was a webinar today with Jackie Fenn to walk through it. The actual diagrams are not working on their press release right now, but ReadWriteWeb is hosting their own copy of the emerging technologies hype cycle (which was in the press release originally) if you want to take a look.

Gartner has 79 different hype cycles focused on individual technologies, rolled up in this special report that is free but doesn’t contain the meat: for that, you need to click through to the hype cycle for the technology in which you’re interested and purchase that report.

Fenn explained the concept of the hype cycle: technologies move from an innovation trigger up a steep slope of positive hype to the peak of inflated expectations, then down an equally steep slope of negative hype to the trough of disillusionment before increasing gradually along the slope of enlightenment to the plateau of productivity. She explained some of the specific indicators for each part of the cycle – which is what Gartner is analyzing to tell where on the hype cycle that a particular technology lies, along with the analysts’ subjective opinions – such as when certain rounds of venture funding kick in, and when best practices emerge. Different types of companies adopt technologies at different points in the hype cycle, depending on how conservative that they are, and how critical the particular technology is to their competitive differentiation.

By bisecting the curve at the local minimum in the trough of disillusionment, companies can ask themselves “what’s here that we could be using” for technologies to the left (considered new/cutting edge), and “what’s here that we’re not using” for those to the right (considered mainstream). There are some anomalies, such as corporate blogging and wikis already climbing the slope of enlightenment, whereas social software suites – which would likely include both of those – are just past the peak of inflated expectations.

She did a quick poll to see what technologies (from a very select subset of emerging technologies) that the attendees think will generate the most value for their organizations during the next two years, then linked the responses to where those technologies lie on the curve: not surprisingly, cloud computing topped the poll at 42%, and it’s at the peak of inflated expectations right now, where there is a proliferation of suppliers and activity beyond early adopters. Social software suites, just past the peak with negative press beginning and supplier consolidation approaching, was second at 29%.

There are several new hype cycles this year, including cloud computing, data center power and cooling, and virtualization; there are also several new technologies listed in the emerging technologies hype cycle that Fenn focused on in the webinar, such as wireless power.

Every technology on the emerging technologies hype cycle is also on a priority matrix that serves as a rough risk-benefit measure, showing the expected years to mainstream adoption (based on Gartner’s analysis of how fast that each is moving through the hype cycle) mapped against the level of expected benefits (low-moderate-high-transformational).

Gartner produced their first hype cycle in 1995, and Fenn showed the original one from back then with a few of the technologies mapped on it; some of those are still poking along, such as speech recognition that hasn’t moved much in 10 years; others, such as Bluetooth, moved through the cycle at a brisk pace and reached mainstream adoption quickly.

Gartner has published a book on Mastering the Hype Cycle: How to Choose the Right Innovation at the Right Time (Gartner), which provides a framework for understanding the hype cycle and adoption patterns that new technologies will move through, and understanding the danger zones.

AlignSpace social BPM community

A couple of months ago, Software AG launched AlignSpace, a social BPM community, and gave a webinar to explain what it’s about (replay here). AlignSpace is intended to be a vendor-neutral place where people doing process discovery can share ideas and collaborate on process discovery. Gartner estimates that over 40% of BPM project time is spent on process discovery, which is inherently a collaborative activity including everyone from process participants through developers and a BPM center of excellence, but there aren’t a lot of great tools out there to do this.

Software AG looked at a lot of social media sites to understand the key features that people want when working together online, and created a cloud-based platform where people can capture process requirements and model processes. This is intended to be beyond what Lombardi is already doing with Blueprint, where people can collaborate on create a specific organization’s process models, and create the potential for a marketplace as well as a collaboration platform. That being said, their initial process outline view has a lot in common with Blueprint, with stages/milestones comprising activities, and the way that can be also visualized as a process map. You can import a model from Visio or XPDL for sharing in AlignSpace, then export it back out again. They also have a home page that shows what’s happening in processes in which you’re involved, and links to your contacts on other social sites.

The AlignSpace Marketplace is intended to be able to find or document BPM resources, whether people or products/models, then allow participants to rank those resources for others to see.

They’re still in a closed beta, but you can go there and sign up to participate. AlignSpace will be free to use, and although vendor-independent, it will be launched with a library and community of resources (some of which will, necessarily, have particular vendor expertise). There’s some lightweight Software AG branding on it, but it’s not their intention to block anyone from it: it’s really intended to be an open BPM community. I give them a lot of credit for this, since most of the other BPM communities launched by vendors are very much specific to their own products, which is going to stifle a lot of good discussion. Software AG seems to recognize, even in these economic times, is that a rising tide floats all boats: if more people are interested in BPM, and AlignSpace helps to get them over the initial barriers of adoption, then all BPM vendors will benefit. Outside the BPM vendor-specific offerings, there are definitely other collaborative workspaces and social networks around, but few with a BPM focus.

Security is obviously going to be a serious consideration: even though most companies don’t put customer data in their process models (as opposed to the executing processes), the processes may represent intellectual property that provide them with a competitive advantage. They are looking at corporate-restricted versions, such that only users from within your domain can access it; the same sorts of security measures have already been put in place in Blueprint, and you can be sure that other cloud solutions are going to have to solve the same problem.

They have ambitions to move this beyond BPM and provide a collaborative space for discovery/requirements for other sorts of IT projects: a bit like ConceptShare, but with more of a focus on technology implementations rather than media and design.

I had a chance to talk to Miko Matsumura of Software AG around the time of the initial AlignSpace announcement; he admitted (which is what I love about Miko) that initially AlignSpace is a lot of big ideas but not much delivered. Like Google with its betas, the idea is to get something out there for people to use, then use their early feedback in order to decide what gets added in next. Although they’re trying to focus on “data format promiscuity” in order to allow customers from many BPMS vendors to participate, the process models are publish and subscribe rather than an interactive whiteboard model in their BPM sketchpad. The big focus is on creating fertile ground for the concept of collaborative process improvement, pulling together innovators from across multiple organizations and infecting companies with process innovation. Data formats are only one issue, as he points out: there is as much tribalism and heterogeneity in the people issues as in the systems that they use, and we need to get the tribes to disband, or at least come to a neutral territory.

From a social media standpoint, the AlignSpace presence doesn’t get full marks: their blog hasn’t been updated since June, their Twitter stream is mostly links to other BPM resources rather than any original material or updates on AlignSpace, and on Facebook they have both a group and a page, without a clear distinction between how each is used.

This all sounds great, but as yet, I haven’t seen the beta. Yes, that’s a hint.

BPM and Twitter (and other social destinations)

Professor Michael Rosemann of the BPM Research Group of Queensland University of Technology has published a short paper on BPM and Twitter on the ARIS Community site, where he lists three possible uses of Twitter with BPM:

Use Twitter to update you whenever there are changes to a process that you’re following. In this case, he’s talking about following processes, not process instances, so that you receive notifications for things such as changes to the process maps/roles, or new aggregate monitoring statistics.
Have a process follow you on Twitter (or an automated stream that knows when you’re scheduled to be unavailable), so that it knows when you’re away and assigns substitutes for your role.
Have a process instance tweet, either for milestone notification or with a link to the process instance, acting as a BPM inbox.

I’m not so sure about the second one, but the first and last are really just a matter of capturing the events as they occur, and sending them off to Twitter. Most BPMS can generate events for some or all of these activities, potentially available through an RSS feed or by posting them onto an ESB; as Rosemann points out in his article, there are a number of different ways to then get them onto Twitter.

My other half did a series of experiments several months ago on process events, including output to Twitter; he used a GPS as input (I wanted him to use a BPMS, but he was keen on the location events) and simple Python scripts to send the messages to Twitter. He tested out a number of other interfaces, including Coral8 for event stream processing, two blogging platforms, Gtalk, email, Google’s App Engine and Amazon’s Simple Queue Service; the idea is that with some simple event processing in the middle, you can take the relevant events from your BPMS (or any system that generates events) and send them pretty much wherever you want without a lot of customization.

I think that using Twitter to monitor process instances is the most interesting concept of the three that Rosemann presents, since you can potentially send tweets to people inside or outside your organization about process milestones that interest them. If you’re nervous about using Twitter, either for security reasons or fear of the fail whale, you can run your own microblogging service using an open source platform such as laconi.ca or a commercial solution such as Socialtext’s Signals.

I’ll be attending the workshop on BPM and social software at the upcoming BPM research conference in Ulm, Germany; I haven’t seen the papers to be delivered at the workshop (or the rest of the conference), but I’d be very surprised if there isn’t a lot of discussion about how to incorporate Twitter and other social tools into our more enterprise-y BPM existence.

Enterprise Architects in the cloud

A couple of weeks ago, I attended the Open Group’s Enterprise Architecture conference in Toronto (my coverage here), and ended up being invited to speak on Dana Gardner’s panel on how the cloud is pushing the enterprise architects’ role beyond IT into business process optimization.

You can now find the podcast here, subscribe to the Briefings Direct podcast series on iTunes here, and read the transcript here.