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LucidEra on AppExchange

Back in March, I spoke with Ken Rudin of LucidEra about their product launch, and this week I followed up to what’s been going on since then.

The big news is that LucidEra is now available through Salesforce.com’s AppExchange. Although Salesforce.com’s reporting capabilities might be enough if you’re just reporting on the data that you have in their system, LucidEra lets you combine your Salesforce.com data with your corporate data for more of a full business intelligence solution. All of this is hosted, of course, which makes it much more accessible (financially and from an internal IT skills standpoint) for small and medium businesses who want the advantages of BI but can’t afford to play in the BI big leagues.

Rudin was previously with Salesforce.com; combine that with the fact that the first (and, so far, only) LucidEra vertical solution is forecast-to-billing, and that a half dozen of their customers are also Salesforce.com customers, and it’s no real surprise to see LucidEra appear on AppExchange. It’s a natural partnership, and should be of real benefit to some of the Salesforce.com customers who need a bit more in the way of reporting and analytics. Salesforce.com led the first wave of SaaS applications, with a focus on transactional applications that were capturing information; LucidEra is focussed on getting that data out through analytics.

A key feature of LucidEra, whether it’s used in the Salesforce.com context or not, is that you can combine data from a number of different sources, both other hosted data sources and your own on-premise systems. LucidEra becomes your data mart for reporting and analytics, and you just need to get the data in there. They provide automated extract-transform-load for a number of common financial systems, and have some customizable scripts that can be used for systems that they don’t support directly, which may use an Excel spreadsheet as an interim part of the ETL process.

SMBs have never really had the opportunity to do any advanced business intelligence before; companies like this are full of Excel spreadsheets hacked together to mimic a subset of BI functionality. In that situation, the CFO (or any senior management) is always 6 or 7 reports away from what they really need, and with data manually extracted and massaged in spreadsheets, it can take hours or days to do a drill-down into the existing data. In many cases, they could greatly benefit from having BI, but the strategic advantage is not in having that as an in-house solution, but in having the analysis capability and knowing what to do with it. LucidEra gives them a chance to experience better data integration, better data analysis, and all in a way that can be more easily shared amongst people in the organization. Furthermore, it can be done by the business managers themselves, without relying on IT once the data ETL process is set up into LucidEra’s forecast-to-billing solution.

Forecast-to-billing is still the only vertical solution available, although LucidEra obviously wants to create an environment that will encourage other companies to build solutions on their underlying platform. They will be working on other solution applications, and also plan to extend forecast-to-billing to cover everything from the beginning of the cycle (prospects) to the end (cash). They’re also working on some time-based analysis functionality, although Ken wouldn’t talk much about that.

Since our first conversation in March, they have their first customers up and running, with more on the way. Being on AppExchange should certainly help that along.

I believe that SaaS is the way to go for much of the IT infrastructure for SMBs. If I were running a 40-person company now, as I did 7 years ago, I’d be using hosted solutions as much as possible to reduce the internal IT footprint, and therefore reducing costs.

Even Smart Enough Systems get the blues

Scott Selhorst dropped me a note last night to point to his interview with James Taylor about James’ book released this week, hoping that I could build on that rather than having to cover a lot of the same ground when I interview him today. Since Scott published a 52-minute podcast, I haven’t had time to listen to it yet, and may not before I talk to James later today, so I may be repeating some material. However, I think that there’s a big divide between text and voice interviews, and the same people don’t necessarily consume both.

I did have a laugh when I imported the interview into iTunes for synching onto my iPod; I assume that Scott didn’t set a default genre on the mp3 file, and in iTunes it shows up as “Blues”.

Is there Web 2.0 in your organization?

Yesterday, when I presented at the IQPC BPM summit in Toronto, I did a quick survey of the audience. How many IT versus business? About a 50:50 split. How many know what Web 2.0 is? Two hands went up, tentatively. How many have used Wikipedia? About 75%. I used this to launch into the part of my presentation about how Web 2.0/social networking ideas are changing businesses and starting to impact some of the collaborative aspects of BPM. There was a lot of discussion generated from this:

Software-as-a-service, and whether companies want to entrust their corporate data and applications to third parties. I pointed out that most of them, if they work for large organizations, already outsource their data centres: they just do it with IBM (or whoever took over IBM’s data centre hosting business) instead of Salesforce.com. If you do your homework and select a SaaS vendor with the appropriate service level agreements, privacy and security, there’s really no difference.
Capturing the wisdom of the masses within an organization, mostly through the use of wikis for some level of internal documentation. I told them about Avenue A|Razorfish, who create their entire intranet using a wiki, where anyone in the company can edit any page. I could see the eyebrows go up around the room, but as we talked about the benefits — more open culture, faster updates to information — I could see the idea start to gain a bit of traction.
Encouraging collaboration and team-building through the use of internal blogs, such as what IBM is doing: they only have 1% of their employees blogging, but that’s about 3,000 blogs. IBM’ers use them to find people inside the organization with similar interests, or with skills that might be of use in other areas.

I also pointed out how favourable this can be to the bottom line, since SaaS is typically purchased on a monthly subscription basis that falls well within the budget of most business departments, and open source wiki and blog software are free to download and install internally. For the public sector people in the crowd, trying to do more on a shoestring budget, this can make a big difference.

After the presentation, I had someone approach me to see if I could do a bit of private consulting just to bring him up to speed on all of these social networking technologies, from portals to RSS feeds to wikis and blogs; this made me realize that there’s a big gap between those of us who have been drinking the Web 2.0 Koolaid for a couple of years, and those who are just doing their jobs in the other 99.9% of the companies out there. On the way home, I thought about how it would be useful to do a series of posts on Web 2.0 for businesses; I know that this has been covered in other places, but obviously there’s still a need.

Then, at the Girl Geek dinner last night, I was seated beside Sarah Pullman, who told me about a workshop that she’s helping to organize: Web 2.0 and Your Organization:

Have you heard the buzz about Facebook, MySpace, blogging, and other popular social web tools, and wondered whether they could be useful to your organization… but not known where to start, or how to sort the good stuff from the hype? Come and learn from two of Canada’s top experts on web strategy and participation design for the not-for-profit sector, this July in Toronto.

The latest generation of Web 2.0 (or “social web”) strategies and tools offer powerful opportunities for organizations to improve the way they work, communicate their messages, empower others, and serve the public. In this workshop you will learn how the latest tools for online collaboration and community building can make your organization smarter and more effective.

It’s targetted at communications types in the not-for-profit sector (and the “socially-responsible small business sector”, although I’m not sure what business would admit to being socially irresponsible), including communications strategists, marketing managers, webmasters and anyone else involved in online (outward-facing) strategy. This is only a small part of the whole Web 2.0 in business picture, but it’s an important one.

Business Rules Forum schedule

The schedule for the Business Rules Forum in October in Orlando has been posted, and I’m speaking on Tuesday, in the first breakout session following the opening keynote.

I’ll be talking about how business process management, business rules and business intelligence all come together to create both agility and visibility into business processes. Although they’ve listed my session as being for an IT audience, there will be plenty here for the business side as well.

IQPC BPM Summit: David Haigh

Last speaker of the day — and of the conference — was David Haigh, Global Director of Continuous Improvement at W.E.T. Automotive Systems, discussing Lean Product Development. It’s actually refreshing to be at a BPM conference where I’m the only person that I heard (since I missed Jodi Starkman-Mendelsohn’s talk this morning) that talked about the technology.

They previously tried out a lot of different quality programs, including ISO 9000, Six Sigma, Lean, BPR and other techniques, but these were always initiated by the subsidiaries and didn’t really catch on, so in 2006 they started on a global program that included the shop floor, logistics and product creation. Whereas they had always focused on the production/fulfillment value stream previously, they expanded the scope to include the entire order-to-cash cycle, particularly to include the design portion of the cycle that has the smallest cost element but the largest cost influence.

I loved his analogy for hand-offs in the business process: it’s like the telephone game that we played as kids, whispering a message from one person to the next to see how message changes by the time it reaches the end; any hand-off results in a reduction in information clarity, as well as being a big time-waster.

Since he’s in an engineering manufacturing environment, there’s some interesting ideas that at first seem unique, but have value in many other areas: set-based design, for example, where you spend the engineers’ time researching and pushing boundaries on the technology that underlies customer solutions, rather than spending the time building one-off customer solutions. The equivalent in the BPM world would likely be having them focus on building out the service layer, not assembling the services using a BPMS. He also spoke about Toyota’s practice of streaming engineers up to higher levels of engineering rather than “promoting” them to sales or management — I always tried to do that when I ran a company, since there’s always some people who just want to stay technical, and don’t want their career to suffer for it.

They’ve built a “workflow” and project planning tool in Excel that has some interesting concepts: no dependencies between tasks, just points of integration, and the team sets the deadlines (can you say “collaboration”?). This helped them by providing tools for visualizing waste in the process, and driving to reduce the waste, which is the main focus of Lean.

This has been an interesting conference, although the attendance is quite a bit less than I had expected, but that makes for a much better environment for asking questions and networking. And speaking of networking, I think that I just have time to run home before the Girl Geek Dinner tonight…

IQPC BPM Summit: Kirk Gould

Kirk Gould, a performance consultant with Pinnacle West Capital, talked about business processes and metrics. I like his definition of a metric: “A tool created to tie the performance of the organization to the business objectives”, and he had lots of great advice about how to — and how not to — develop metrics that work for your company.

I came right off of my presentation before this one, so I’m a bit too juiced up to focus as well on his presentation as it deserves. However, his slides are great and I’ll be reviewing them later. He also has a good handout that takes us through the 10 steps of metric development:

Plan
Perform
Capture
Analyze
Display
Level
Automate
Adjust
Manage
Achieve

He has a great deal more detail for each of these steps, both on the handout and in his presentation. He discussed critical success factors and performance indicators, and how they fit into a metrics framework, but the best parts were when he described the ways in which you can screw up your metrics programs: there were a lot of sheepish chuckles and head-shaking around the room, so I know that many of these hit home.

He went through the stages of metrics maturity, which I’ll definitely have to check out later since he flew through the too-dense slides pretty quickly. He quotes the oft-used (and very true) line that “what gets measured, gets managed”, a concept that is at the heart of metrics.

IQPC BPM Summit: me!

Here’s the presentation that I did for the IQPC BPM summit in Toronto this afternoon:

IQPC BPM Summit: Manish Mehta

Manish Mehta, a project manager at the government of the Region of Peel (which covers a huge chunk of the bedroom communities north and west of Toronto, about 1.2 million people in urban and rural areas), gave a presentation on implementing process management at Peel.

For them, process management was part of their quality management, which already included ISO and some other quality programs. They wanted to strengthen corporate thinking, reduce their silo departmental focus, increase alignment and connection, and measure employee and client satisfaction.

The steps in their process management project were as follows:

Phase 1: develop standard terms, definitions and symbols
Phase 2: provide process management training, and develop a process management framework
Phase 3: develop their service improvement initiative (SII) to apply process management

As with the previous OPG talk, this was not about a BPM implementation, but about putting standard, optimized processes into place in an organization in order to not only improve service delivery, but measure it as well. Specifically, their three goals were to implement process management across the organization, to implement a consistent approach to client satisfaction measurement and management, and to develop and monitor a corporate client satisfaction rating.

They first applied this to their TransHelp program, which provides transportation for those who are unable to use public transportation, then to their waste management program; in both cases, they found that doing client satisfaction surveys identified factors that clients found important that had not been considered by the inside workers: definitely a good reason to get out there and talk to people rather than sitting in the ivory tower and deciding the best process to implement. They are seeing some measurable improvements: with TransHelp, their no-show/cancel rate has dropped in half, and with waste management, their number of complaints has dropped. For process improvement work that they did with children’s services within their financial assistance area, the time to complete an application and assess eligibility dropped dramatically with the new process. Once they’d done these three pilots, they found that other areas started to come to them to ask for help in process improvement: you really need to show some successes in order to get started in a diverse organization such as a regional government. Measuring client satisfaction for regional governments is still in an early stage, and Mehta said that they were working with other government organizations to develop methods for doing this. He also showed a great public sector reference model that linked resources, processes, services and programs and how they interact with providers and clients.

They used outside facilitation for process redesign, but mostly created their own methodology and guidelines and do have some capacity for the process redesign internally. They’ve developed a fairly structured project management approach in terms of defining scope and schedules. They have discovered, not surprisingly, is that pulling subject matter experts away from their regular jobs for several days in order to do the process redesign is much more effective than trying to have people add this on to their real jobs, in spite of the grumbling that will inevitably occur when you try to get a group of people to a multi-day offsite meeting.

Something I really like about what they’ve done is to split their SII approach into three stages, depending on the state and complexity of the original process: repair (quick fixes to smaller broken processes through understanding customer needs), improvement (considering root cause analysis and piloting a solution), and design/redesign (similar to improvement but with best practices and benchmarks). They see both improvement and redesign projects as requiring a trained facilitator.

Mehta showed some private sector studies that showed that employee satisfaction leads to client satisfaction, which in turn provides even greater employee satisfaction, and client satisfaction also leads to greater profitability. Applied to the public sector, you can replace the profitability part of the equation with trust and confidence: greater customer satisfaction results in more trust in the government body and their ability to execute works on behalf of the citizens.

Off to lunch, then I’m up at the front of the room after that.

IQPC BPM Summit: Ron McGillis

I missed Day 1 of the IQPC BPM summit due to a road trip to Detroit, but I’m here this morning to hear the speakers, and this afternoon to give my own presentation. It’s a small group, probably less than 40 people, but I’ve already been hearing great things from the attendees about how much that they’ve learned from the two days so far.

I missed Jodi Starkman-Mendelsohn of West Park Assessment Centre speak first thing, but I’ve heard her speak twice this year already so just had a quick update from her at a break on what they’ve done since I last saw her.

Ron McGillis of Ontario Power Generation talked about their contractor management program, where they manage all contracts for everything that they do with power generation: everything for both construction and non-construction servicing of the 3 nuclear power generation plants, 4 fossil fuel plants, 64 hydroelectric and 3 wind power facilities in the province. This came out of their safety compliance programs, since McGillis stated that this was their greatest concern with their contractors (the WSIB people in the audience applauded at that point), and that it needed to be the same level of safety for contractors as for OPG employees.

In 2002, they did a safety audit that showed some serious problems — “systemic, cultural-based problems with the existing contractor safety management process” — and recommended some standardized processes around the safety standards for contractors. This resulted in OPG’s current policy statement that their contractors and subcontractors must maintain a level of safely equivalent to that of OPG employees while at OPG workplaces, and set out requirements that the contractors are accountable for the health and safety of their own employees while at OPG, including ensuring that they don’t harm OPG employees or the public.

They’ve come up with a contract management process that’s documented and freely available on their website. They have consistent pre-qualification processes (which would pre-qualify a contractor for working with any division of OPG), processes for awarding contracts, standard performance reporting, and training for anyone involved in the contract management process. Using the ISO standards as a guideline, they recreated a Plan – Do – Check – Act program for contract management, and defined roles and responsibilities for each contract: owner, administrator, monitor and buyer.

Every contract stipulates these roles explicitly, and also safety clauses in terms of reporting, inspections, procedures and rules. This trickles down to any subcontractors, too.

Their contract process has five steps: planning, procurement, post award (which ensures that all parties are ready to go to work on the execution), execution, and close-out.

The contract management manual is only 13 pages long, and is at a “contract management for dummies” level, with the following content:

The steps in each stage
Who is accountable for each step
Forms (mandatory)
Worksheets (mandatory)
Job aids (good practices)
Check lists
Notes and references

Training was a key part of their success, including contract administration and monitoring courses at various levels of detail, ranging from 4 hours to 4 days.

From an automation standpoint, this isn’t a BPM system implementation: this is BPM in the sense of “management discipline” as defined by Gartner, where there’s a structured business process that is providing a huge benefit to the organization, but none of this process is automated. They have database applications that provide some analysis — for example, a contractor database allows for input of various scoring factors and provides a pre-qualification rating — but most of this is about getting people to follow the correct business processes. Their contract management process is so successful that it’s been adopted by some large companies and other power generation companies.

Their lessons learned for any business process change:

Let the process “soak”, giving it some time for people to get used to it before making changes (since people will always chafe against a new process when they’re first getting used to it).
Listen to and engage the stakeholders.
Benchmark against other similar companies, and don’t reinvent the wheel (including using ideas from other successful organizations).
Ensure senior management is fully committed, or you will fail.
Ensure that you’re adequately resources for all stages of the project, including post-implementation.

At the end of the day, they’ve cleaned up all the problems identified by the 2002 audit, and has provided a consistent pre-qualification process for contractors that benefits the entire organization.

McGillis travels extensively both to make sure that the program is being implemented consistently within OPG, and as an evangelist with external companies and by speaking at conferences.

Could parts of this process be automated to some benefit? Possibly, although they’ve likely gained so much of their ROI already in terms of cleaning up the process and capturing the relevant data in their database application. Process automation might provide them with some additional visibility into the processes, although likely not much more efficiency.

Fujitsu Interstage BPM

A few months back, I had a demo of Fujitsu’s Interstage BPM (unfortunately prefaced by 25 minutes of business strategy presentation). Interstage really has three components: the BPM product which I saw in this demo, the CentraSite BPM and SOA registry and repository, and the Service Orchestration ESB.

One thing to keep in mind is that Interstage BPM has primarily been used as an OEM BPM engine embedded within other products, so there’s a lot of stuff missing that you would find in other BPM suites; however, they integrate and partner with a number of other vendors to fill in some of the gaps. They also haven’t focussed as much on the North American market, so have much less of a marketing presence here.

Although they partner with Zynium, they now have a moderately functional process designer and see Zynium as a conversion utility rather than a ongoing process modelling tool. They also partner with IDS Scheer for a more full-featured process analysis environment, although with no round-tripping. Their claim is that Interstage BPM can “map all BPMN concepts”, but it doesn’t support all the notation explicitly: there’s no transaction wrapper, no intermediate events handling, and no swimlanes.

It can extract WSDL from CentraSite, any UDDI directory or directly from a web service, and can call remote subprocesses from another BPM system (although technically that’s possible to/from any two BPM systems that expose subprocesses as web services).

They partner with both Fair Isaac and ILOG for business rules management, and can use IDS Scheer PPM and other 3rd party products for BI/BAM. Simulation is done using an Eclipse plug-in, or IDS Scheer’s PPM can be used for historical actual data simulation.

They demonstrated a browser-based end-user interface, with an inbox, item data and attachment, and the process map and progress, but this was a custom demo solution; it’s not clear if they have much of this available out of the box. You can create JSP forms with third-party tools and integrate them as the user interface using the underlying Java API, or can use (their?) QuickForms, which provides a simple HTML form that can be edited to suit.

As I mentioned earlier, it’s difficult to compare Interstage BPM with other BPMS because it’s really just emerging into the full-on BPMS market from its previous strength as an OEM product, and just starting a North American marketing push. Gartner’s 2006 BPMS Magic Quadrant put them in the “Challengers” category — good ability to execute, but less completeness of vision — along with other large BPM vendors FileNet and Global360; “ability to execute” is based in part on strong corporate financials and sales execution, so you’d expect to see this quadrant dominated by larger vendors. Forrester’s 2006 Wave for Human-Centric BPM puts them on the low end of the “Strong Performers” category, and characterizes them as “leads in OEM deals and standards but requires coding to build out advanced functionality”, which pretty much sums it up.

Fujitsu’s been in the workflow, and now BPM, market for a long time; it will be interesting to watch how the product develops over the next months to see if it can start to meet the functionality and vision of some of the market leaders.