Microsoft-oriented BPM webinar this week

I received notice from Bluespring about a webinar this week that seems to be bringing together a number of Microsoft partners who are all doing BPM: Bluespring, Ascentn, K2.net and Metastorm. This looks like the marathon of webinars, 2 hours long and including a talk from Colin Teubner at Forrester.

It has the somewhat unwieldy title of Making Your People More Effective Through Business Process Management (BPM) Technology, and you can sign up here.

EnterpriseCamp (the unconference edition)

I’m not sure why Bryce Johnson thought that he’d have full turnout at 9:30am on a Saturday, even for something as exciting as EnterpriseCamp, but a few of us managed to make it on time. Of course, my brain is still in a time zone some where east of here and I’m waking up at 5am so it’s easier for me this week.

We kicked off a bit late and the attendance was lower than the signups, but there were some great sessions (and I’m not just talking about mine). Like other unconferences, there was no set agenda, just a blank grid of time slots for sessions and a pad of Post-It notes; those of us interested in leading a talk outlined our topic verbally to the group, then posted it in an open time slot. The schedule was pretty fluid all day long, which fit well with the mood of the group and the small number of simultaneous sessions (3 at most, I think), but we still managed to fit in all the proposed sessions and finish up on time.

One cool thing that the organizers did was create icon stickers that we could put on our nametags to designate our interests: people tagging, if you will. They also provided great food (breakfast and lunch), a huge variety of herbal teas (important for us non-coffee types) and a notebook containing some Enterprise 2.0 articles and the all-important key to the people-tagging icons.

The first session that I attended was Carsten Knoch talking about bringing Web 2.0 features into the enterprise, which was a perfect lead-in to my session on a specific example of this, namely, integrating Web 2.0 functionality into BPM software. Carsten talked more in general terms about what features and techniques could be introduced, techniques for building applications, and why all of this Web 2.0 stuff is scary to the enterprise. He had a pretty comprehensive presentation, a bit unusual for an unconference, and I hope to see it posted somewhere.

I followed immediately after Carsten, and although I had the best intentions to prepare a little presentation the night before (but ended up out for dinner with friends) or at least a few notes on the subway on the way to EnterpriseCamp (but ended up chatting with a South African backpacker on his way around the world), I took the floor with a blank flip-chart and wrote four lines:

  • tagging
  • RSS
  • zero footprint
  • mashups

I then riffed on each of these, with lots of great input from the audience, with my focus on how they apply in the world of BPM but some expansion into other types of enterprise software. Great discussion: I love it when I can learn something while giving a presentation. I could have gone on for hours, except for the smell of pizza wafting in from the lunch area.

In the afternoon, I sat in on Tom Purves and Jevon MacDonald discussing adoption of Web 2.0 technology (specifically their product, for the most part) within the enterprise. That evolved into a discussion about Consulting 2.0 and a variety of other topics.

I also attended Bryce’s session on tagging, taxonomies and folksonomies, which generated some really interesting discussion. The idea of creating tag relationships rather than tag pruning as applicable to Enterprise 2.0 tagging applications: you want people to be able to add tags that are meaningful to them, but if others are using different tags that mean the same thing, find some way to relate the tags.

Definitely a worthwhile way to spend my Saturday. Many thanks to Navantis and Microsoft for their sponsorship of EnterpriseCamp.

Skipping Mashup Camp 3

I’ve decided not to attend Mashup Camp 3 in Boston next week, in part because I just got back from a month vacation and have a ton of things to do (like this weekend’s Enterprise Camp here in Toronto), and in part because I missed the window for cheap flights and I’m not willing to pay $900 to fly from Toronto to Boston — the problem with being an independent is that you really scrutinize that extra $600 in airfare when it comes out of your own pocket!

Have fun without me this time.

EnterpriseCamp, the unconference edition

Assuming that the logistics can be worked out, we’ll be having an unconference edition of EnterpriseCamp in Toronto on Saturday, January 13th. You can find out more about it, and sign up to attend, here. From Bryce Johnson‘s description:

This is going to be a different focus then our regular events. This event focuses on enterprise software infrastructure, solutions and development. Topics could include Enterprise 2.0, Business Intelligence Applications, ECM, Collaboration, Employee Self-Service, Enterprise Search, Technology Infrastructure, Workflow Automation.

I’ve put my name down to attend, and will come up with something that I want to talk about soon, likely along the lines of how Web 2.0 concepts and technologies are impacting BPM. If you’re in Toronto, or close enough, consider signing up and dropping in.

We’ve had smaller Enterprise 2.0 Camp type events in July and November, and there’s obviously a lot of interest in the subject.

Blogging slowdown

Between travel, vacation and the Christmas holidays, blog entries will be pretty thin on the ground until about the second week of January. Things should get pretty exciting after that however: Mashup Camp 3 in Boston in mid-January, some in-depth vendor reviews in late January (based on the blog stats, I know that everyone likes those), the ARIS ProcessWorld conference in February, and I’m speaking at ASMI’s BPM Summit in March.

EAI Journal…no, BIJ…no, BTI

A couple of years ago, EAI Journal — a vendor-supported but generally useful free publication — cast off an overly-constraining name and became the Business Integration Journal (BIJ) (I’m not sure of the exact date, but it was recent enough that if you go to the old EAI Journal URL, it still takes you to the BIJ site). Now, they feel that another name change is in order, and are becoming Business Transformation and Innovation.

I totally understand the switch from EAI Journal to BIJ, since EAI was fast becoming a term that defined only a narrow part of the market, and the publication really addressed the entire range of integration technologies, but my problem with the new name is that it doesn’t actually mean anything.

I would publish a brief excerpt of the editor’s explanation of the new name and mandate, but they don’t allow copying from their PDFs, so you’ll just have to read it for yourself. Basically, it’s along the lines of "first magazine of its kind", "Senior Executives", "working together to quickly adapt to changing business needs", and "maintain competitive advantage". Yeah, yeah. And, they want you to go to the new site and subscribe again, even if you’re already a subscriber, since it’s a "brand new magazine", although when I went to the site, I realized that it’s because they want you to –wait for it — PAY! Even for the digital version! Hahahahaha.

There’s a ton of free information on the web of the same calibre as EAI/BIJ/BTI, including what you’ll find here on ebizQ, on BPM Institute, and even on direct vendor sites such as BPM Basics: short articles, typically written or sponsored by vendors or consultants, that can help to supplement other sources of information such as analyst reports or personalized research. I’m not saying that articles written by vendors or consultants don’t have value, but I am saying that they are fundamentally a form of marketing for the company in question, and I have the same aversion to paying for them as I do to paying for a t-shirt with a vendor logo on it.

BPMG Toronto: Implementing Pega

A couple of weeks ago, I was at the first BPMG Toronto chapter meeting, along with 25-30 others: pretty good attendance for an initial meeting, although I think that 3 of them were from the host, webMethods, 2 were the speakers, and 1 from BPMG. Based on some later conversations, the split between vendors and practitioners was around 50:50, and the split between business and technical people was around the same.

Jim Baird, who is organizing the North American chapters, gave a brief introduction to BPMG; as usual, this left me with the burning question “Is 8 Omega just a silly pun on Six Sigma?” as well as wondering how the BPMG process maturity model differs from BPMM and others. There was also a weird bit taken from the Australian chapters that states that presentations from vendors and consultants can’t be more than 5 minutes; since I get slotted into that “consultant” category, that implies that there’s no perceived value in what I might talk about, and that it would just be a sales pitch. As a fairly regular conference presenter, I beg to differ.

The main event, however, was a presentation by TD Bank on their BPM projects. Like any other large financial organization, TD has 100’s of systems, a ton of manual processes and procedures, and an expectation from management that they must “do more with less”. A few years ago, this wouldn’t have been a problem, since there was plenty of low-hanging fruit for implementing some degree of automation and gaining some benefit; that fruit, however, is long since plucked, and the benefits were used to pay for point solutions (like tactical uses of Visual Basic and Adobe Acrobat) that can’t grow with the business. What they were left with were ad hoc existing systems that were “good enough” for the job at hand, and no easy business case to replace those with systems that provided both agility or reusability.

They did have one big thing on their side: an executive-level vision of continuous process improvement, which led to the establishment of a corporate competency centre in business process modelling, an enterprise licence for Pega BPM, and a workflow team within the IT group. The CIO had the insight to provide the time, money and air cover for a production proof of concept within 4 months, and it was the workflow team’s challenge to find the right first project and get something from the drawing board to production in that time frame. By applying some agile programming techniques, which I found pretty remarkable for a large financial services organization, they were able to go from concept to production in 4 months, including a month of QA, and have only had 1 defect reported to date: amazing on all counts.

Of course, there were challenges. First, a problem that I often see in projects, was the business users’ desire to include everything in phase 1 of a project, which makes it difficult to select a project and also to control scope creep. Part of the problem is that the users can have a hard time envisioning how they could do their job with only part of the functionality that they think that they require, but a big part of it is a (historically supported) dread that this is their only chance, and that the workflow team is never coming back again after phase 1. Second, they had to shift from data-centric thinking to a process-centric view in order to get the focus on process improvement rather than data processing, and found out that not everyone “gets” process thinking. Third, they didn’t fully understand the capabilities of the Pega product before they started, so likely did things less effectively — and possibly with less reusability — than they will in future projects. In particular, they’re not using the rules engine that lies at the heart of Pega for anything other than basic validations, but they recognize the need to take a closer look at that for future implementation.

Some great lessons learned:

  • Define and publish common terminology (“process”, “workflow”, “agile”, etc.) for use in all project communication. It doesn’t really matter if you use definitions put forward by a standards group or by your BPMS vendor, it only matters that you’re all communicating consistently.
  • Understand the capabilities and limitations of the selected BPMS, so that you don’t end up building something that you can’t grow with. I’ve seen many, many cases of over-customization of BPMS because the core capabilities of the product were poorly understood, which can lead to un-agile and non-reusable systems as well as masking many of the key functionalities of the BPMS. I’ve written (ranted) about the dangers of over-customization many times before.
  • Start small but deliver value. They didn’t try to do a complete process rework, but settled for some incremental process improvement that could show some benefit.
  • Understand corporate culture and how it impacts team dynamics and development approach, then pick an approach that can be blended into your culture. You’ll want to check out a couple of different approaches to see what fits best.
  • Accept that you’re going to make mistakes; this requires team members to live with some degree of uncertainty, which is difficult for many people within large, conservative organizations.
  • Choose team members who have a commitment to doing what’s right for the organization. I find this one to be particularly important, since it drives the decision-making on a project, but also difficult, since you need to find people who are not necessarily influenced by popular opinion or corporate politics.

A couple of odd comments along the way: it was stated that BPM is “new in Canada”, yet the project that I heard described is not different in nature from what I was implementing at Canadian financial institutions in 1994 (although the tools are much, much better now 🙂 ). Also, when I asked if the process modelling at TD was being done as part of a larger enterprise architecture modelling effort, EA was positioned as being “under workflow”, which implies that they actually mean IT architecture and don’t have a sense of enterprise architecture at this level. Because they’re using Visio for process modelling, which has a direct link to Pega, they’re not using more rigorous modelling tools that might tie in with EA modelling efforts.