Business Process Design webinar today

At noon Eastern time, I’ll be giving the last in the 3-part series of webinars sponsored by TIBCO, Business Process Design:

In this session Sandy will dive into the nitty gritty of process design, including:

  • BPM design patterns
  • Human-facing steps: structured versus collaborative
  • Data synchronization requirements
  • Process automation: invoking services and being invoked

The tactics discussed in this webinar will ensure that the models you create are more than just pretty pictures — that they are, in fact, viable, workable models that you can use to automate your business processes and realize significant ROI.

You can register here to attend.

The first two, on process discovery and modeling respectively, are available for replay although I can’t find the links right now.

BPM Think Tank Day 3: Roundtable wrapup

Last BPM Think Tank post, I’ll summarize the notes on the roundtables that I didn’t attend, based on the 3-5 minute summary that each facilitator presented.

Rules and Process (Paul Vincent):

  • Defined types of rules
  • Handling business decisions within processes
  • How to separate and model rules from process at design time

BPM and Microsoft Technologies (Burley Kawasaki):

  • My commentary on the notes from this session: seemed to be an ad for Microsoft technologies rather than much to do with BPM. Not sure why the Think Tank agreed to hold such a vendor-specific roundtable.

ERP and BPM (Dave Frankel):

  • Goal to break down silos in ERP to enable BPM
  • Orchestration of reusable services is not sufficient for processes; need event-driven layered process delegation
  • Need a common data exchange model for ERP system, and an accepted scope for that common model

Goals of BPM Standards (Bruce Silver):

  • Standards reduce risk but never seem to quite get there in terms of portability of process models and interoperability
  • What’s required for portability? The following were suggested, although not everyone agrees on the last two:
    • Identical business meaning
    • Identical graphical view
    • Identical at execution point
  • How standards gets created: a small group of people who are passionate about it and have employers who pay their salary (and usually expenses) to get involved

Metrics:

  • Types of metrics: time, quality, cost, value
  • Measures tend to be lagging but would be more effective if they were leading/real-time

BPM in the Federal Government (George Thomas):

  • [I assume that this means the US Federal Government…]
  • Much of the BPM work is to operationalize activity-based costing, and requires integrated BI
  • Horizontal interoperability required across government departments
  • Need to institutionalize knowledge before the boomers retire
  • Problems with immaturity of current tools and standards
  • BPM is today’s version of a monolithic application, and needs to decouple model from execution
  • Struggles with ongoing legacy modernization

Competencies/Skills for BPM:

  • Mapping target population (business, IT, process experts that span business-IT) to organizational results; use this to create training program
  • Top management needs to believe in a process-centric organization: must understand how jobs are accomplished, how IT Is used to achieve goals, and enough knowledge to understand IT decisions
  • Line management must become metric-driven and knowledgeable about the processes in which they participate, and collaborate across functional silos
  • Performers must be expert at process execution and be workflow-savvy

BPM and Business Frameworks:

  • Like some other groups, spent half of their time defining BPM
  • Lots of noise in the industry about BPM and frameworks
  • Need to understand how to engage the business

BPM Think Tank Day 3: Enterprise 2.0/BPM Mashups Roundtable

I facilitated one of the last roundtables of on the conference, about Enterprise 2.0 and BPM mashups.

Mashups (considered a part of Enterprise 2.0) are lightweight integration of web-based services and data, often in ways that the service providers never intended them to be used; personally, I think that as mashup techniques get easier, mashups will become the technology of choice for what’s referred to as “end-user computing”, that is, all the stuff that is created within business units (typically now using Excel or Access) because it’s either too small for IT to take on as a project or they can’t turn it around in a timely manner. I see software-as-a-service BPM and other services as having an impact on the ability to do mashups, since these platforms are often designed with a bit more openness in mind.

I’ve looked a lot in the past at Enterprise 2.0 and BPM, and the features that are (or should be) creeping into BPM under the influence of Enterprise 2.0: RSS, tagging, SaaS, mashups, collaboration, and all sorts of user-created content in general. There’s a lot of challenges around this, many of the cultural, since Enterprise 2.0 decentralizes control of IT assets and requires a certain level of user participation.

We spent most of the session talking about BPM mashups, not Enterprise 2.0 in general. At one level, a BPMS can be considered to be a mashup platform, given the right business services available for assembly.

BPM mashups can take several forms:

  • Lightweight assemblies of subprocesses and services
  • User-facing information at a step in the process, e.g., Google maps mashed up with BPM data and presented to a user in a form in order to complete a task
  • BPM as a component within a portal, possibly assembled by a user

Issues around mashup adoption include IT not trusting something that is user-created, and business analysts not understanding the concept of mashups as well as not yet having easy enough tools to do mashups. There are also issues around discoverability of services (as I discussed the previous week in a Mashup Camp session) and the use of internal versus external services, where both types require some sort of SLA to be included in any sort of production mashup.

By lowering the barrier to entry, mashups can play an important role as application prototypes, or emergent applications that IT wouldn’t have thought to build for the business; IT can learn from what the business creates for itself in order to create more structured applications and processes.This is similar to the concept of how a folksonomy is used to gradually become a taxonomy: allow the users to do it themselves, then observe and detect the patterns. My favourite phrase that someone used at this point was to “intelligently stumble upon the future” and the whole idea of unintended consequences of mashups, although there was some discussion as to whether is was closer to serendipity or Frankenstein. Along this line, we talked about how to keep bad things from happening in mashups, and agreed that the services and data to be mashed up had to be controlled in some way (by IT) so that, for example, someone couldn’t do an unindexed full text search on a multi-million record database.

Without a doubt, mashups enable agility in application development, and BPM stands to benefit from enabling all types of BPM mashups.

There was some discussion around whether business users/analysts were asking for this, and whether they really wanted a full mashup capability, or just some parameterized configuration. I think that they don’t even know what’s possible through mashups, and if they did, they’d want it.

BPM Think Tank Day 3: Colin Teubner

Colin Teubner of Forrester gave us a lunchtime presentation, hence my notes were on paper and it’s taken a bit of time to transcribe them. However, I’m on a roll to get all my Think Tank coverage wrapped up today so that I can take 4 days off for the holiday weekend.

Colin’s talk was on issues, challenges and trends in BPM, and the general opinion around my lunch table is that it was a bit lightweight, although a reasonable summary of the current state of affairs. I certainly don’t envy him the task of speaking over the clanking of cutlery and buzz of other conversations as people eat their lunch.

He sees that a maturing of tools and practitioners is pulling more tool types into BPM, particularly a convergence of BPM and BI, and a convergence of content management, collaboration and human-centric BPM. Seeing as how we’ve only just managed to pry content management and human-centric BPM apart, I’m not sure the latter is good news. As he pointed out, BPM is more than modelling and automation, although a lot of projects (and products) get stuck there and don’t do the monitor/manage/optimize parts very well.

He returned to the discussion on BI and BPM that came out of the previous day’s roundtable that he led:

  • BI on a process
  • BI triggering a process
  • BI affecting a process (e.g., event)
  • BI inside a process decision
  • BI inside a human task assignment (inform rather than automate decision)
  • BI to help humans with process work
  • BI to predict the future of process work

BI is positioned as making data actionable. Data-driven BI is bereft of process, and focussed on reports and presentation. Process-centric BI (mainly from BPM vendors) has awareness of BPM and the processes; there may be a tie-in with BPRI although there’s no standard linkage between process models and runtime data that could be consumed by a 3rd party BI product. No BI vendors are doing real BPM-aware BI yet.

He then discussed collaboration and information, showing that BPM is typically only used for the structured part of processes. Interestingly, he just redivided the BPM marketplace into ad hoc/collaborative, production and integration workflow, which is where we were 7 years ago before this all got lumped together as BPM. The future of BPM is a 360-degree view of business processes; the main barrier to that now is that there’s no collaboration in BPM products and no process management in collaboration products. Some BPM vendors are starting to pull in collaborative functions, such as discussion threads, process wikis, email notifications, embedded analytics, dynamic task support, and portal integration.

A few wrapup points on what all this means:

  • BPM vendors must partner to integrate with other functions, such as content management
  • Standards are essential to driving the integration partnerships
  • End users need to think about process, collaboration and ECM together, not as separate issues

BPM Think Tank Day 2: Roundtable wrapup

Here’s some assorted notes on all the other roundtables that I didn’t attend: each of the facilitators gave a 3-5 minute wrap up of their discussion. The notes from all of these sessions are supposed to end up on a wiki for the conference, so there should be more information around eventually as that fills in (unfortunately, the wiki seems to be closed to public viewing at this point, as well as being named after the creator’s company rather than the BPM Think Tank itself).

Barriers to process improvement (John Alden):

  • No acceptance of the need to change
  • Difficulty finding an executive sponsor
  • Resource constraints (time, people, money)
  • Community inaction

Business involvement in BPM (John Jeston):

  • Like many other groups, spend quite a bit of time defining BPM and associated terminology, e.g., “process owner”
  • Need to get CEO attention

Lean/Six Sigma in BPM (Lance Gibbs):

  • Not every project is or should be Lean/Six Sigma
  • Lean = waste removal, which is a good fit with BPM

Approaches to Effective Architecture (Bruce Douglas):

  • Definitions of architecture: layers of services; ecosystem
  • Complexity and effort required to model architecture
  • Differences between models and realization
  • What should be modelled
  • Lack of respect for architecture functions
  • Problems “between the seams” in architecture rather than with the pieces (artifacts)
  • Long-term strategic often displaced by short-term needs
  • Model and validate along the way to developing complete architecture

Innovation in BPM (Angel Diaz):

  • How to help customers innovate with BPM
  • How to start BPM projects
  • Centre of Excellence
  • How to measure innovation
  • The chasm between “define” and “do”: what doesn’t get done, and what’s not relevant once it’s done
  • Divide between BPM and SOA
  • Requires a person to span business and technology (like me šŸ™‚ )
  • Requires personal leadership

BPM and BI (Colin Teubner):

  • Use cases for BPM and BI:
    • BI about a process
    • BI triggering/changing a process (including triggers from dashboards)
    • BI inside a process to automate decisions
    • BI in work environment to provide information to a person for their decision
    • predictive BI driving process work
  • BPRI will assist in some gap closing but thee’s little understanding of BI by BPM vendors

Model-driven Organizations (Fred Cummins):

  • Dramatic changes in business in recent years requires models in order to understand how business works
  • Need management buy-in
  • Cultural change to manage business with models
  • Models can expose embarrassing faults, which causes some resistance to models and to change
  • SOX requires taking responsibility, increases risk if business not understood: drives need for models for decision support

BPM and GRC (Dennis Davidson):

  • GRC = Governance, Risk Management and Compliance (a new acronym for me), an emerging market segment that is adopting BPM technology
  • Involves SOA and BPM
  • Needs BPM to make SOA successful
  • Collaboration technologies, including Web 2.0 and 3.0

BPM Think Tank Day 2: BPEL Roundtable

The second roundtable that I attended on last Tuesday’s sessions was on BPEL, headed up by Ismael Ghalimi. It was great to finally meet Ismael in person: we’ve been corresponding by email and blog comments for quite a while, and have even done a webinar together, but this is the first time that we’ve been in the same place at the same time.

We started with a discussion of BPEL4People, and how it’s changed from the original specification (which proposed implementing human-facing tasks as web services rather than changing BPEL) to the current specification (which proposes extensions to BPEL for human-facing tasks).

The title of the roundtable was “is BPEL relevant”, and we covered several aspects of that. First, a few people around the table (which included a few vendors with a vested interest in BPEL) stated that BPEL is relevant in the same way that SQL is relevant: as a standardized language that allows a separation of the design/development environment from the execution environment. Based on the lively discussion, some of these guys have spent a lot of time thinking about the BPEL-SQL analogy. My argument (I have no vested interest, so could have easily argued the opposite way) was that maybe it *should* be relevant in that way, but really isn’t in the consolidated model-design-execute environments that we see in BPM today. The real question may be, at what level is BPEL relevant: model, design, code or execution? Everyone agreed that it’s not relevant to business users or analysts, but it’s not clear where the line of relevance lies.

We also discussed how native BPEL execution providing code monitoring during execution, such that any code faults will have more semantic information included without having to build a monitoring stack on top of it. What remains to be seen is if BPEL4People will provide some level of business-relevant monitoring, or if that still has to be built on top of the execution layer.

What we’re seeing is that for the most part, it’s the larger vendors that are adopting BPEL — possibly as a common language to glue together all the BPM pieces that they’re acquiring — whereas the smaller vendors provided a consolidated (and therefore closed) suite environment where the execution language doesn’t matter, and in fact, their engine may be a competitive differentiator.

More on the Metastorm-Proforma acquisition

Metastorm CEO Bob Farrell gave a briefing this morning about their acquisition of Proforma; not much that wasn’t covered in the press release except the following:

  • Their customers were demanding BPA functionality that obviously went beyond what they offered as part of their BPMS.
  • They’ll be using Proforma’s CIF as an interchange format — a major mistake for process models in my opinion. Although CIF does provide support for a number of other enterprise architecture model types, they’re really going to be using this for getting process models into the Metastorm BPMS execution environment. In a post that I did at the end of the Proforma user conference last year, I noted that in spite of their lip service to standards, they only support BPEL export via a CIF remapping, XPDL wasn’t on their roadmap yet, and I’m not sure that they had started to think about BPDM. Of course, if they abandon the hope of selling ProVision to users of other BPMS’, then this may not matter much since it will just be an internal interchange standard between their own tools.

Metastorm acquires Proforma

Metastorm announced today that they’ve acquired Proforma. Strangely,Ā the Proforma URL already remaps directly to the Metastorm site and the products are already relabelled as “Metastorm ProVision”; most acquired companies keep their own site and brand visible for a while so as to not freak out customers who haven’t heard about the acquisition yet.

I covered the Proforma user conference last year; I’ve always been impressed with their modelling tool since it goes beyond process modelling to full enterprise architecture modelling, and they seem to be moving in the right direction with increasing their browser-based modelling capabilities to allow this to be rolled out to a greater user base within an organization. They’re currently leaders in both the BPA space and the EA modelling space.

There’s still the round-tripping problem, however: I haven’t been briefed on this by either party, but based on my past conversations with Proforma, I’m suspecting that it’s a one-way trip from Proforma’s modelling environment to Metastorm’s process execution environment, since you likely have to tweak the modelled process significantly in order to make it run, and they likely aren’t supporting an extensible interchange format that would allow those changes to stay with the model if it were moved back to the modelling environment. I’m just guessing on this, of course, and would love to hear different. And, although Metastorm was one of the first vendors to offer a free downloadable process modelling tool, I can’t find that on their site any more, so they may be putting all of their process modelling eggs in the ProVision basket.

Metastorm bought CommerceQuest in late 2005 to improve their integration-centric BPMĀ capabilities, and this acquisition rounds out the front end of their product suite — Forrester gave them a black mark in last year’s report for relying too much on third-party software, and this directly addresses that concern. The trick, as with any acquisition, will be how seamlessly that they’re able to integrate Proforma’s products.