Gartner BPM Day 1: Creating a Process-Rich Strategy

This analyst panel was moderated by Daryl Plummer, and included Shafqat Azim, Eric Deitert, Janelle Hill and Michael Smith. Azim is with the consulting arm of Gartner and focusses on IT process improvement, whereas the other three are from the research side, and Plummer asked them about three key issues:

  • What is the value of a process-rich strategy?
  • How hard is it to align a vision for process with a business strategy?
  • What are the important topics one needs to master when creating a process-rich strategy?

The first issue was defining “process-rich strategy” as the operationalization of a business strategy, such that the causes and effects of individual parts of the process are well-understood by the process participants. As the discussion continued, it became clear that “process-rich strategy” is just the current relabeling of having a process-centric view of your organization, with a strong focus on dissolving some of the boundaries between functional silos in order to perform end-to-end process optimization.

One value of a process-rich strategy is to put individual business users in the context of the overall business strategy so that, for example, a call centre operator understands his position as a key customer touchpoint and how his actions impact the end-to-end business process; this, in turn, encourages the individual workers to look for ways to improve the overall process. By putting individual functions in the larger context, and providing visibility into the end-to-end process, improvements tend to address the entire process rather than focus on local optimization. Hill pointed out that team sports are a great analogy for business process visibility: everyone on the playing field can see what everyone else is doing, and understand exactly how their actions contribute to the overall team success. Athletes are motivated by their own personal success, but are also strongly motivated by their team’s performance since it’s great from a career standpoint to be on the winning team and to be seen as team players, not just to score all the points themselves. In some sports, team play is rewarded explicitly, such as tracking assists for hockey players as well as goals, since the game just doesn’t work without it. Similarly, the key to motivating business users to look for ways to improve the overall business process is to provide some reward for them. Sometimes, that’s financial (bonuses and overall corporate profitability resulting in increased wages); sometimes, it’s merely public recognition of the contribution; sometimes, it’s recognition of an individual’s ability that improves their overall career path.

There was a big focus on agility in this panel, and how both management and technology agility must be embedded within the business strategy. Management agility is the facility to think about new ways to do something or even a completely new business function, whereas technology agility provides the ability to make those thoughts a reality. Cause and effect within processes must be well understood in order to remain agile.

Process metrics and how they contribute to visibility was also a major area of discussion: if you don’t identify specific metrics for your business processes and start capturing that data, then you can’t analyze that into the higher-level process measurements that are required to see how well the business processes are performing and therefore optimize the processes. Smith will be doing a session tomorrow on how performance metrics help to align business processes with strategy for more detail in this area.

At the end of it, it comes down to the ability to execute business strategy: a process-rich strategy combined with the appropriate technology are more likely to see success in making business strategy a reality.

Gartner BPM Day 1: Welcome and opening keynote

Scrambling down to the conference this morning — I arrived late last night and didn’t get enough sleep, much less a chance to register — I struck up a conversation in the elevator with someone who was already wearing a Gartner conference badge and asked him where the registration area was. He pointed me in the right direction, and said that he hoped that the process was faster than last night, saying that he didn’t know what they were running on their systems but that it was very slow. I tossed off my usual comment about systems that don’t work well — “probably Windows” — then turned to him and saw the Microsoft logo on his shirt. Great, I’m not even at the conference yet, and I’ve made my first enemy. 🙂

The conference kicked off with an welcome from Daryl Plummer, Bill Rosser and Pascal Winckel [all speakers that I reference at this conference are with Gartner unless otherwise noted]. Plummer started off with an audience vote that showed that there are way more business than technical people here, a great (and fairly unusual) thing for a BPM conference. Like most business-focussed conferences, however, the logistics are not blogging-friendly: there’s no wifi, only an internet area where I can plug into a physical cable, and there’s no power at the tables to keep my laptop juiced. In fact, when I ran into Jesper Joergensen from BEA at the break, the first thing that he said to me was “uh oh, no wifi — the conference is going to get a bad review!”

Plummer did tell the best BPM joke of the day so far (not a lot of competition there): What’s the lifecycle of a BPM project? About 2.5 CIOs.

After the preamble and logistics, the opening keynote was given by Janelle Hill. She started out with a great slide on the evolution of process improvement: from scientific management through computerized process flow to our current focus on flexible and adaptive BPM and the start of a focus on SOA (service oriented architecture), BAM (business activity monitoring) and EDA (event driven architecture).

She showed the results of some of their recent research showing that increasing BPM discipline as the second most important business trend affecting the ability to compete during the next five years, second only to better project/portfolio management.

She went on to talk about how software can contribute to business value, and I had to laugh at one of the conclusions that they draw: “The focus of software must shift to enabling business process innovation rather than hindering it.” In theory, that’s what the software is for; what she’s pointing out is that in reality, software — especially large ERP systems — actually hinders business agility and therefore process improvement because of the difficulties in changing the software to meet the current business needs. BPM software provides the opportunity to actually enable process innovation by allowing the business side to make frequent changes to the process to accommodate changing business processes and regulations. This is based on two fundamental bits of functionality that are part of any BPMS: first, the decoupling of the process flow, represented as a graphical process map, from the underlying technology; with a direct link from the process map to an executable flow, the business can now make changes in that graphical environment that can move into production with a minimum of IT involvement. Second, tools to provide a detailed visibility into processes in near real time so that the business can determine where changes need to be made in order to improve processes.

Interestingly, Gartner is bringing the focus back to the people in processes: putting the person-to-process interaction back at centre stage in terms of both process analysis and execution, rather than just seeing people as bots that execute granular tasks in a process. In other words, the SOA view of human-interrupted processes isn’t what’s going to drive the new wave of process improvement; the people in processes are. Maybe that’s an admission that much of the SOA level of improvement is well-understood, so that there’s unlikely to be quantum leaps in process improvement in that area that haven’t already been identified; on the other hand, we’re just starting to discover how some of the human-facing functionality such as collaboration will result in process improvements that we can’t even envision today as the emergent applications of the future. This is exactly what I’m seeing in the Enterprise 2.0 space, namely, that the new generation of technologies provides the tools that allow the business users and analysts to have more control over how their systems work and therefore the effectiveness of their business processes.

Hill discussed the three types of vendors in the BPM market today: traditional packaged application vendors, middleware vendors, and BPM specialists. The market trend, as she points out, is that the BPM pure-play vendors are increasingly being acquired by the first two types of vendors. In spite of the acquisitions, however, she points out that this is not a consolidating market, since the number of companies who claim to have something to do with process management is still increasing.

She finished up with some of the standard Gartner material on what it means to be a process-driven organization and some of the organizational and management issues that need to be addressed in order to enable this; this is very similar to what I’ve seen at previous Gartner conferences and in webinars. With the last BPM conference being only 7 months ago, it’s certainly expected that we’ll see some degree of reused material, but based on this first session, it looks like there will be enough new information to keep everyone happy.

Gartner BPM and Event Processing summits

I’m headed off to Orlando tomorrow for the Gartner BPM summit that’s happening during the first half of the week, so watch for my blogging from there under the Gartner BPM category, which also holds my coverage from their February event. They’re also running the Event Processing summit at the same location for the rest of the week; I’ll likely catch a few of the sessions before I leave on Wednesday.

I have interviews set up with many of the BPM vendors while I’m there to get their latest updates, and thought that it would be a good idea to add a disclosure page on this site rather than having to remember to note which of them are my customers each time that I mention them in a post.

Key Issues for BPM

BPM.com has a research paper from Gartner available for free on their site (registration required): Key Issues for Business Process Management, 2007. It’s from March (likely one of the last papers with Jim Sinur’s name on it) but has some timeless points on it such as “How will BPM respond to the disruption of traditional organizational boundaries, the increased complexity of business and other sources of strategic change?” Of course, you have to buy a bunch of Gartner reports to get the answers to all the questions and issues raised in this short paper, but it does pose some interesting questions.

Looking forward to covering Gartner’s BPM summit next week in Orlando. If you’re there, look me up.

Opening up access to information

One of the things that always bugs me is having to register to get information from a vendor’s website, particularly basic product information such as brochures or webinars. I know that Marketing wants to collect potential lead information so that Sales can follow up, but I’m not sure how good the hit rate is on a cold call resulting from a website visit. Furthermore, there have been many times when I’ve not bothered to download product information because of a registration requirement, and I’m sure that a lot of people have had the same experience.

It makes sense to gather information if you’re distributing, for example, a Gartner report where you have to pay per download, but for the rest of it, why not just open up the information and let people see a bit of what you have to offer before starting to try to sell them directly?

That’s exactly what Lombardi’s done with their newly-revamped online BPM resource center: check out the videos of product demos available without registration. However, if you scroll down the page and request a brochure, you’re back to having to register — definite points off for that, guys. C’mon, it’s a product brochure, not some state secret, just give it away without a hassle.

TIBCO webinar: Why and how to move ahead with BPM and SOA

I’ve missed a few of the TIBCO webinar series this summer, such as the one on BPMN, and wanted to tune into this one to look at the modelling-to-execution process as TIBCO presents it.

They’re using a different webinar provider this time — the webinars that I did with them were all done with Webex, and we had one live failure that was a bit inconvenient although not disastrous. Ironically, the one slide that was incorrectly rendered in today’s presentation was related to visibility:

Emily Burns starts out with some starting slides on why people are implementing BPM. Reason #1: peer pressure from all your competitors that you read about in the Forrester and Gartner reports. 🙂  She quoted some interesting recent Forrester research that showed that a little over half of the respondents have an SOA strategy, and about 2/3 of the respondents that have some level of BPM consider it critical for their SOA strategy.

Jason McMahon of AmeriCredit was up next to talk about how they used TIBCO in their automotive loan servicing: 25,000 new loans each month, and over a million active loans. They had to streamline their processes and provide greater visibility into the processes, as well as ensure that they’re meeting regulatory requirements as they expand into new geographic regions. They had a fairly fast deployment cycle: the project kicked off in Q106, design started in Q2, development in Q3, and they were rolling it out in January 07. Version 2 is almost ready to go live. They saw a number of benefits:

  • Optimized business process by doing the “deal-killer” due diligence checks up front and reducing hand-offs
  • Customized processing of contracts by state/country (AmeriCredit operates in Canada, despite their name) and type of loan
  • Business process visibility, including better resource management, and automated alerts and reporting
  • Reduced training time since the rules are embedded in the process
  • Outsourcing readiness so that they can add in an outsourcing vendor for contract data entry (which is available now from at least one provider but not in use at AmeriCredit) and data validation/verification processes

McMahon sees a strong need for BPM-driven SOA design, where BPM is the consumer of services and therefore defines a big part of the requirements for services. This includes discovering services by looking at the current EAI-type integration points in existing processes, as well as during the design of future processes. Outside the actual process, there’s also a number of services that are required to service the processes even though they’re not called directly from the BPMS, such as process triggering events, user/role management, and open/close/purge of cases.

He talked in detail about what AmeriCredit has done with web services, including wrapping business rules/logic in web services so that they can be called from both a non-BPM web interface and the BPMS — exactly the reason that I believe in the separation of BPM and BR. He stepped through a number of best practices for defining services, such as establishing the appropriate level of granularity and ensuring encapsulation of some systems, then continues with an example of looking at a process with its existing integration points and combining the appropriate ones into specific web services.

Since they started with BPM and drove towards SOA, they ended up with a very BPM-focussed SOA, much of it defined by the BPM integration points but also with consideration of other applications that might share the same services.

McMahon’s last words of wisdom: using the BPM tool is simple for redesigning the processes; the hard part is having business users buy in to what the future-state processes should be, and you need a good business analyst to be the mediator here.

They use TIBCO’s iProcess for BPM and BusinessWorks for SOA, in case you haven’t guessed that already. Other implementation points: they built the entire UI in .Net, and extract the process data to a data warehouse for BI rather than hitting the BPMS directly.

A recording of the presentation will be available over the next few days, watch the TIBCO site for details or maybe someone from TIBCO will post the link here as a comment (hint, hint). You can check out the slides here, but you’ll really want to hear the audio as well, especially the Q&A.

Why SaaS rocks

I hear a lot of opposition to software as a service from customers, ranging from an unformed mistrust of anything that crosses the firewall, to the feeling that anything that runs in a browser must be a toy, to a full-blown (and justified) concern of non-American companies about having their data stored on US-based servers where it is presumably accessible to US government agencies on demand. Keeping in mind that many of them are large, fairly conservative financial services organizations, I obviously have a long way to go in terms of convincing them otherwise, yet I still try.

Going back to Tim O’Reilly’s original treatise on Web 2.0, SaaS is baked right into the definition in two important ways:

  • the web as platform
  • the end of the software release cycle

The first of these is likely what sells most people originally: the idea that nothing needs to be installed at your own site, and all you need to do is pay $x per month per user (where x is about the cost of a couple of cappuccini at Starbucks) to have access to a fully-functional application. Think that this is only for small businesses? Salesforce.com announced yesterday that Dell is increasing their number of Salesforce.com subscriptions from 15,000 to 40,000 users. There’s all sorts of good reasons why to do this — lower TCO, small ongoing expense versus a large capital expenditure, no need to bring a new servers and applications into your data centre — but the somewhat unspoken reason is that it’s a way for the business to escape the tyranny of IT when it comes to purchasing applications. I’ve seen many cases of a smallish business unit within a large organization wanting to bring in new technology (BPM, BPA and BI are all ones that I’ve seen in this scenario), but IT adds on an unduly large burden of corporate standards and application vetting that kills the ROI, and the business goes back to their paper and spreadsheets. I’m not saying that IT shouldn’t be involved in these decisions, but when their time spent reviewing and “architecting” a packaged solution costs as much as the external costs, something’s wrong. If the business can get equivalent functionality from a SaaS offering with much less IT involvement and a small monthly bill rather than a large up-front capital expenditure, that’s going to look much more attractive.

The second driver for SaaS from O’Reilly’s definition is where the benefits will really accrue in the future, although that’s likely unrecognized by many people. The idea that you don’t have massive software releases that take the system down for hours or days, but that new features are gradually introduced with little or no fanfare, means that there’s much less disruption to the users, and that they’ll be pleasantly surprised by new functionality. I had exactly this experience of pleasant surprise this morning, when I noticed that Google Reader, which I’ve been using for a couple of months now, has gone from listing the number of unread items as “100+” to the actual number, a feature that I sorely missed from Bloglines since I almost always have more than 100 unread items and I really want to know how many more. They didn’t, to my knowledge, disrupt service in order to add this new functionality: it just appeared in my browser this morning (or maybe before, I’m not all that observant sometimes). I believe that there’s still the need for some major upgrades, such as a complete UI paradigm shift, but most of the enhancements to most business applications could be done incrementally and introduced as they’re ready, if the infrastructure is there to support it. That requires a browser-based application to avoid a download and install each time something changes, if not actually SaaS, but it also requires a new mindset for development teams about agile development and release: something that is much more prevalent in the SaaS vendors than in corporate IT groups.

If you read my post on Enterprise 2.0 updates recently, or the original Dion Hinchcliffe post that inspired it, it starts to become clear that Enterprise 2.0 will be dependent to some degree on SaaS, at least in the short term: many IT organizations are just not ready to start installing this new breed of application on their own servers, and the business groups will look outside to get their problems solved. This will lead to a further commoditization of IT, since once the business is using SaaS successfully, that genie’s not going back into the bottle.

Update: Google Reader also added search capabilities in this set of incremental upgrades, which I didn’t even notice (as enamoured as a I was with the accurate unread item count) until I read it on Mashable.

Summer’s over

My blogging has been very light for the past month: summer is short in Toronto, and we’ve had an amazing run of good weather in August, so I’ve barely kept up with my customer projects and have totally neglected blogging. Now that the days are getting noticeably shorter, the nights cooler and everyone with a real job seems to be back from vacation, I think that it’s time for me to get back to work.

I have several blog posts partially completed (James Taylor’s book review, a few product reviews, a couple of short articles) that really need to get done, and some preparation for the fall conference season:

  • September 17-19, I’ll be covering the Gartner BPM Summit in Orlando
  • September 25-26, I’m speaking at the Forrester IT Leadership Forum in Carlsbad
  • October 2, I’m most likely covering the Web 2.0 University session in New York
  • October 11, I’m back in New York to present at a TIBCO seminar
  • October 23-24, I’m speaking at the Business Rules Forum in Orlando

November doesn’t look much better: I think that there’s an OMG BPM/SOA workshop (I had a note in my calendar but can’t find any information on it, and no one has added it to the shared BPM events calendar), I’m speaking at the Shared Insights BPM conference in San Diego, then I’m off to Bangalore to speak at SOA India.

BPMG reincarnated

The past few months have seen strange happenings with BPMG. I wrote about the original hint of troubles, when Steve Towers and Terry Schurter jumped ship and Terry redirected the BPMG domain to his own competing website, then the follow-up a month later when BPMG appeared to have truly shut down. They’re not down for the count, however; this morning I received the following email:

Welcome to the BPTGroup website www.bptg.org

The following facilities and services are up and running or scheduled for the new site

  • a full range of training and development programmes for open course and in-house delivery
  • a comprehensive, degree-level programme for business change professionals designed to be  internalised by organisations to provide a future structure for developing change expertise
  • an accreditation process that is quick, efficient and authenticated
  • insight to the 8 Omega methodology and maturity assessment process
  • core sections dedicated to Strategy, People, Process and Enabling Technologies including articles, reviews, presentations and a comprehensive cross-referencing system
  • the introduction of the BPTG global partners
  • the International BPTG Chapters web facility
  • executive briefings, coaching and mentoring, process audit services are offered to organisations as they endeavour to move effectively through the cultural and other issues of change surrounding their transformation to process-focused operations.

The deliberate sabotage of the BPMG website impacted its members, staff and associates worldwide and raises many issues, ethical as well as legal, about the integrity of the organisation and the individuals involved.  The actions that created that situation are totally at variance with the core BPM principle that serving the customers best interests should inform all our actions. 

However, as you will see from our home page, many of the BPMG key people have expressed their opinion very clearly by readily joining the BPTGroup.  We also welcome new faces and expertise, and there are others on the way.

Website functionality will be enhanced in two further phases over the next few months ? we will be introducing new features, new courses and services to our fellow process professionals ? and we want you to help us in this development process. 

One final point before I leave you to explore the BPTGroup website. 

Why BPTGroup? After the BPMG debacle I am sure many of you would expect us to avoid any association with similar phrasing.  Quite the reverse.  The principal movers behind BPTGroup were proud of what we had created in the BPMG and the services we provided to our members.  Although in no way responsible or accountable for the destruction wrought, we want to help rectify the undoubted damage done to an ethical and principled global community and we invite you to join us in these endeavours. 

Please, express your opinion by your action ? help us to help you.

A number of delegates were seriously inconvenienced by the collapse of the BPMG and some lost their fee pre-payments.  We make this offer to those people ? when the BPTGroup next run a commercially viable programme in a location convenient to you we will invite you to join us and waive all professional fees for that course.  Please contact us now to enable our people to keep you informed of convenient courses.

Thank-you for your previous support and interest ? we look forward to the opportunity to work with you again.

Regards,

David Lyneham-Brown

CEO

They have some of the original people on board, including Mark McGregor and Jim Baird (who offered to provide BPMG courses for free to people who had paid for them). A lot of people are unlikely to trust Steve and Terry after the stunt that they pulled — I don’t know the whole story, but it appears to be pretty unprofessional behaviour — but they were two of the very visible faces of the old BPMG, and it’s difficult to see if BPTG will be able to regain the momentum. I don’t think that it’s necessary to have visible faces for an online community like this; certainly there’s others, like BPMInstitute, that are run by very competent people who choose not to put themselves in the spotlight, but to show off the content instead.

BPTG is offering a free membership right now, and I have no idea if they plan to go back to a two-tiered model that drew such criticism in the past. Personally, I don’t think that there’s any place in the market for a paid site for most of the content that they offer; there are a lot of other content sites related to BPM that get their revenue from advertising, vendor-sponsored content such as webinars and white papers, and live training and conferences.