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BPM in Action panel: Automated, Human-Centric and Collaborative Processes

Having finished moderating a BPM in Action webinar on business process platform strategy, I’m listening in on the panel moderated by Beth Gold-Bernstein that includes Bruce Silver, Jeffrey Sterllings (a character from Kiran Garimella’s book The Power of Process), Stephanie Wilkinson of IBM, and Steve McDonald of Global 360.

There were some interesting audience questions during the discussion; Beth structured it so that she’d ask an audience poll, then ask related questions of one or more of the panelists, then publish the audience results. I didn’t use any audience questions in my panel yesterday, and I found this an interesting technique.

For example, 63% of the listeners use modelling as the starting point for their BPM initiative, 26% state that process automation is their starting point, and 10% use monitoring. I was surprised that there weren’t more using monitoring as their starting point, since any organization that has Six Sigma or some other quality management initiative will be monitoring and measuring things before they ever start a BPM initiative. For those that aren’t using monitoring, how do you even know that you need BPM if you don’t have some sort of measurement of your current processes?

The audience was all over the place in terms of the type of processes that they need to support: although a third of them listed “human and automated” and another quarter listed “human and collaborative”. When you added up all the categories, 50% of them have collaborative processes, 58% have automated processes, and 66% have human-facing processes, with a great deal of overlap.

There’s still a split between who’s driving the BPM initiative, although 56% of the audience said that it’s the business side of their organization rather than IT.

I always have to laugh when you get competing vendors on a panel together. In some cases, like my panel yesterday, you get a verbal sparring match (or a brawl, if you have Phil Gilbert on the line). Even when things are more civilized, there’s always the competitive streak that makes them have to say things their own way, and not agreeing outright with their competitors. At one point in today’s panel, “Jeffrey Sterllings” (Kiran from webMethods) made a statement about BPM and SOA, and Stephanie Wilkinson said emphatically “Well, I absolutely can’t disagree with that”. Oh, is that the same as agreeing? 😉

By the way, am I the only one who noticed that these sessions were supposed to end at 45 minutes past the hour?

As with all of the other BPM in Action panels and webinars, you’ll be able to listen to the replay within a day or two at the same link.

BPM in Action: Janelle Hill keynote

I’m listening in on Janelle Hill’s keynote at the online BPM In Action conference: BPM Technology: From Best-of-Breed Tools to BPM Suites to Business Process Platforms. I heard her speak at the Gartner BPM summit last week; this is a completely different talk from what she gave there, but appears to be a nearly-identical slide set to that used in Marc Kerreman’s presentation.

She started off with a discussion of implicit versus explicit business process management: the implicit ones are buried within application silos, whereas the explicit ones are implemented within some sort of integration technology, such as BPM and its predecessors, workflow and EAI.

She’s now giving an explanation of Gartner’s shift in terminology from “pure-play BPM”, which she sees as “1st generation” (she named Savvion, Fuego, Metastorm, Ultimus and Lombardi as having started in this earlier category), to their current terminology, “BPM suites” or BPMS. Apparently, the suites are more well-balanced and can handle the system-to-system integration better than the pure-plays, although I think that this is much more of an evolution than an entire new category. The cynics in the crowd will say that Gartner just changes the name every few years to keep things fresh. 🙂

Hill is now talking about business process platforms, which is the topic of the webinar that I’m hosting at 1pm. Gartner’s definition:

The business process platform is a combined IT and business model that enables enterprises to accommodate rapid but controlled business process change through the use of integrated process composition technologies and the delivery of reusable business process components and their management.

It’s not clear to me how this differs from any other “roll your own” environment, although this has the blessing of somehow being an “architecture” as opposed to just a collection of services and tools. For example, Microsoft referred to their combination of SharePoint and BizTalk as a process platform at Gartner last week.

She makes a great point about how the best proof of concept is one that crosses physical boundaries: by crossing functional/people boundaries, the POC will almost certainly also cross information and system boundaries.

Unfortunately, Janelle was dropped off the line when the Q&A started, leaving us only with the IBM sponsors.

The replay of the webinar should be available soon if you missed it live.

Five things that you don’t know about Sandy Kemsley

This meme has been floating around for a few months on the web, and it’s time for it to die. I was tagged by Neil Ward-Dutton, and I promised to respond although I’m not passing it on from here. Time for a new meme!

So here goes, five things that you (probably) don’t know about me:

I hold a private pilot’s licence, although I’ve only flown once in the last five years. I remember my first solo flight like it was yesterday, and regret not keeping it up.
My favourite TV shows are Desperate Housewives and Battlestar Galactica. Don’t even try to psychoanalyze that one.
I love to cook, and most times would rather cook for friends than go out to a restaurant. In particular, I will cook just about anything on a barbeque regardless of weather, which seems less weird if you consider that my family traditionally cooks a 30-lb Christmas turkey on the barbeque. In the snow. My favourite vacation ever was cooking school in Tuscany.
My first programming language was FORTRAN, and I never learned COBOL. I started my career writing Fourier analysis pattern recognition applications for satellite images, although I’d be hard-pressed to remember what an eigenvalue is these days.
I learned to read at age 4, and it’s been my most common leisure activity since that time. In spite of that (or maybe because of the number of books that I read), I rarely keep books for very long: I either borrow them from the public library, or buy them and pass them on to friends/family when I’ve read them. My only “permanent” collections are cookbooks and travel guides.

LucidEra launches today

I had the chance last week for a chat with Ken Rudin and Alex Moissis of LucidEra, and a preview of their SaaS business intelligence offering aimed at the SMB marketplace that is being released in general availability today. Rudin, LucidEra’s CEO, was previously with Salesforce.com, Oracle and Siebel CRM OnDemand, so you have to assume that he knows something about both BI and SaaS; Moissis, VP of Marketing, had a long run at Business Objects in product marketing and product strategy.

In most BI projects that I’ve seen, ROI comes quickly — usually less than a year, sometimes less than six months — since it allows analysis of costs, revenues and risks in ways that just aren’t possible using spreadsheets and paper reports. Once the patterns in the data are made visible, companies can act on these trends to cut costs and increase revenues, either in a manual or automated fashion. This is great if you have hundreds of thousands of dollars to spend on a big BI solution, and an IT team to put it in place and get the initial reports up and running, but not so great if you’re smaller, with less money to spend and little or no IT support for a BI project.

What LucidEra showed me will help to address that issue for SMBs: a very Web 2.0-looking hosted BI application, supporting multiple data sources, and easy enough to use by anyone familiar with a spreadsheet. In short, they’re trying to simplify BI enough that a smaller company with little IT infrastructure can adopt it and start to reap the benefits. There’s a basic BI platform with pre-built solutions on top of the platform; some of the solutions, like their initial forecast-to-billing one, are included in the base price, whereas others may be at an additional cost, especially those created by third parties. The base price will be around $3,000 per month, which includes 100 users, 3 different data connections, and the aforementioned forecast-to-billing application. It seems like a lot of money, but think about it: the per-user price is about halfway between Salesforce.com and Blueprint. Welcome to the world of paying for your “enterprise” software monthly on your American Express card, and stopping it at any time that you’re not happy with it.

Setting up a new company in LucidEra is a self-service activity, and LucidEra doesn’t even offer professional services to assist with this, although they do provide telephone and online support. Typically for their beta customers (of which there are about a dozen, ranging in size from less than 50 to several hundred employees), this takes up to five person-days spread over as much as three weeks, and is mostly about getting the data sources properly hooked up and doing some data cleansing on the results. Although I didn’t review this process, it sounds as if you’re not going to need professional help for this one, just someone internally who understands your data sources already.

We spent quite a bit of time looking at the forecast-to-billing application, doing some slicing and dicing on the data. In the sample that we looked at, the customer data (expected revenue) came from Salesforce.com, the financials (booked revenue) came from NetSuite, and the quota information came from an Excel spreadsheet. These are just three of the data sources that LucidEra can support in any combination: for example, the financials could have come from Oracle Financials instead.

The really cool thing is that there is no distinction between the design and view environment: if you’re viewing a report, you can change it interactively. We added fields to the report, filtered it, grouped by fields (creating the equivalent to an Excel pivot table) and viewed it as a graph, all through dragging things around on the screen. If we didn’t like our changes, we could undo them one at a time, or revert back to the original report.

A few technical notes: the client is purely browser-based, and will run in IE or Firefox on Windows. Ken was going to confirm whether it ran on other platforms (Mac and Linux) but I haven’t heard back yet. They developed their own back-end database based on the Broadbase data warehouse source code and some open-source technology, then rebuilt for multi-tenancy, ease-of-use and to optimize for the SaaS environment. All of this was put together in about 15 months, a timeline that they could not have accomplished except by using the code bases that they started with.

The press release isn’t up on their site yet, but you should be able to find it, and all the other information, there later today.

BI isn’t a field that I usually cover in depth, but keep in mind last week’s themes at the Gartner conference: visibility and agility. BI combined with BPM is one of the ways that visibility into business processes is being realized.

Re-examining the BPM marketplace

At last year’s Gartner BPM summit in Nashville, they divided up the BPM marketplace into the “pure play” BPM vendors (those companies for whom BPM is their primary business, whose products provide excellent human-facing capabilities and at least adequate integration capabilities), integration-focussed vendors who have purchased a BPM company to round out their portfolio, and large software companies who have developed or acquired a BPM product. In the pure-play market, they listed three “major players” (revenues above $100M) — FileNet, Pegasystems and Global 360 — and five “up and comers” (revenues above $30M) — Appian, Lombardi, Metastorm, Savvion and Ultimus. Of course, since then, FileNet has been purchased by IBM, moving them from the pure-play to large software company categorization, which also includes companies like Microsoft, Fujitsu and even Oracle. A few of the integration-focussed vendors, such as TIBCO, BEA and webMethods, are starting to give the pure-plays a run for their money in the BPM space, and there are likely to be more to follow.

I didn’t see a Gartner presentation at this year’s summit that did the same sort of vendor shoot-out — unless that was in the Wednesday breakfast session that I missed (c’mon guys, 7:30 on the morning after the vendor hospitality suites?!) — but there’s a BPMS magic quadrant due out this year, and it will be interesting to see how the players continue to shift around.

I did have someone jokingly ask me if I was going to publish my own “magic quadrant” comparison of BPM vendors, but with that name and concept trademarked to Gartner, I’ll have to do a mystical hypercube instead.

A Quick Peek at Cordys BPM

A month ago, I had a chance for a comprehensive demo of the Cordys BPMS via Webex, and I saw them briefly at the Gartner show last week. Their suite is of particular interest to me because the entire process life cycle of modelling, execution and monitoring is completely browser-based. I’ve been pushing browser-based process modelling/design for quite a while, since I think that this is the key to widespread collaboration in process modelling across all stakeholders of a process. I’ve reviewed a couple of browser-based process modellers — a full-featured version from Appian, and a front-end process mapping/sketch tool from Lombardi — and if it wasn’t already clear from what Appian has done, Cordys also proves that you can create a fully-functional process designer that runs in a browser and can have participants outside the corporate firewall. Like Appian, however, they currently only support Internet Explorer (and hence Windows), which will limit the collaboration capabilities at some point.

Cordys’ claim is that their modeller is BPMN compliant and supports the entire set of BPMN elements including all of the complex constructs such as transactions and compensation rollback, although I saw a few non-standard visual notations. They also support both XPDL 2.0 and BPEL for import and export, but no word on BPDM. Given this dedication to standards, I find it surprising that they can integrate only with their own ESB and business rules engine, although you could call third-party products via web services. They also have their own content repository (although you can integrate with any repository that allows object access via URL) and their own BAM. In general, I find that when a smaller vendor tries to build everything in a BPM suite themselves, some of the components are going to be lacking; furthermore, many organizations already have corporate standards for some or all of these, and you’d better integrate with the major players or you won’t get in the door.

Like most BPMS’, much of the Cordys process design environment is too complex for the average business user/analyst, and probably would be used by someone on the IT side with input from the business people; a business analyst might draw some of the process models, but as soon as you start clicking on objects and pulling up SOAP syntax, they’re going to be out of there. Like most BPMS vendors, Cordys claims that the process design environment is “targetted towards business people”, but vendors have been doing this for years now, and the business people have yet to be convinced. To be fair, I was given the demo by the very enthusiastic product architect who knew that I’m technical, so he pulled out every bell and whistle for a ride; likely business users see a very different version of the demo.

There’s a lot of functionality here, although nothing that I haven’t seen in some form in other products. There’s support for human-facing tasks either via browser-based inbox and search functions, or by forwarding the tasks to any email system via SMTP (like Outlook). There also appear to be shared worklists, but I didn’t get a sense of how automated work allocation could be performed, something that’s required to support high-volume transaction processing environments. There’s also support for web services orchestration to handle the system integration side of the BPM equation.

One thing that I like is the visual process debugger: although you have to hack a bit of XML to kick things off, you can step through a process, calling web services and popping up user interfaces as you hit the corresponding steps, and stepping over or into subprocesses (very reminiscent of a code debugger, but in a visual form).

They do a good job of an object repository as well, which helps increase reusability of objects, and allows you to search for processes and artifacts (such as forms or web services) to see where they’re used. Any process that’s built can also be exposed as a web service: just add inputs and outputs at the start and end points and the WSDL is auto-generated, allowing the process to be called as a service from any other application or service.

<geek>Another thing that I really liked is the AJAX-based framework and modelling layer for UI/forms design, which is an extension of Xforms. In addition to a nice graphical UI design environment, you can generate a working user interface directly from the WSDL of a web service — something that I’ve seen in other products such as webMethods, but I still think is cool — and run it immediately in the designer. In the demo that I saw, the architect found an external currency conversion web service, introspected it with the designer and generated a form representing the web service inputs and outputs that he popped directly onto the page, where he could then run it directly in debug mode, or rearrange and change the form objects. Any web service in the internal repository — including a process — can be dragged from the repository directly onto the page to auto-generate the UI. Linked data objects on a form communicate directly (when possible) without returning to the server in a true AJAX fashion, and you can easily create mashups such as the example that I saw with the external currency converter, a database table, and MSN Messenger. For the hardcore among us, you can also jump directly to the underlying scripting code.</geek>

Unfortunately, the AJAX framework is not available as a separate offering, only as part of the BPMS; I think that Cordys could easily spin this off as a pretty nice browser-based development environment, particularly for mashups.

CMU Masters in Software Management

Often, when I receive a request for a meeting on something that’s far outside of my usual BPM/Enterprise 2.0 interests, I’ll turn it down. However, when the meeting is with various deans and professors at Carnegie Mellon University West about their new Masters in Software Management program (press release here), I’m happy to make an exception. I graduated as an engineer over 20 years ago, and programs like this just weren’t available then; I was curious to see how engineering education has advanced. I had a call with Dr. Jim Morris, dean of the CMU west coast campus, Dr. Martin Griss, associate dean for education and director of the software engineering program, and Tony Wasserman, executive director of the Center for Open Source Investigation. Of course, they’re all professors at CMU as well, at the relatively new campus in Silicon Valley.

The Masters in Software Management is like a software engineering equivalent to an executive MBA: it’s intended for people who are already experienced practitioners but want to improve their management skills in a big way, and do so part-time while they continue to work so that they can start to see immediate application and benefit. It grew out of the high level of interest in the management courses offered as part of the Masters in Software Engineering program that’s been running since 2002, as well as interest from employers in the marketplace for the skills that they plan to teach. The Masters in Software Management is less technical than the Masters in Software Engineering, but offers some amazing courses that I think should work their way into any senior software engineering or computer science curriculum: open source, enterprise architecture, managing distributed teams, outsourcing, and many others. Since these are presented in a current business context, using long-running teams and simulating a small company experience, the goal is to produce the next generation of software leaders.

The program doesn’t kick off until later this year, so they don’t know the demographics of the student population yet, but are expecting that most will have a technical computer science/software engineering background, and that there will be a mix of those from small companies who want to improve their skills and build the next Google, and some from large companies who are either closet entrepreneurs or are serious about software management within their organization. About 1/3 of the Masters in Software Engineering program attendees are women, and they expect the percentage to be higher in the Software Management program. As in the Software Engineering program (where about 30% of the students are offsite), they’ll allow remote students, although they need to be onsite for the 4-day kickoff and a few more times during the 2-year program.