Watch what you type

I missed this story on Friday, but the Globe & Mail (and I’m sure many other sources) reported that new federal litigation rules in the U.S. went into effect Friday whereby emails, instant messages and all other electronic “documents” must be maintained by corporations and available for legal discovery. This includes things such as the contents of removable memory cards, work-related pictures on your cell phone and pretty much anything else that you do on an electronic device. This isn’t hugely different than some of the existing compliance requirements, but apparently has a much broader scope in terms of content.

Compliance is one of those areas where content and process overlap significantly: the content is what has to be maintained for compliance purposes, but BPM is often used to route and track the content through the compliance process.

10 Things You Can Do To Improve Your Business with BPM Right Now

A bit of a wordy title, but it’s actually an article over on BPM Enterprise written by Jeff Mills, VP of Channel Development and Marketing for Bluespring Software. He discusses the following 10 points in detail, with ROI approximations for each:

  1. Eliminating mundane work
  2. Sustaining compliance
  3. Extending out enterprise applications
  4. Simplifying people’s jobs
  5. Reducing risk
  6. Knocking out process-related “pain points” or nits
  7. Establishing full visibility into how your business operates
  8. Building an agile infrastructure
  9. Reducing the burden on IT
  10. Building a process infrastructure

Some of these, such as eliminating mundane work, are the low-hanging fruit that may have already been plucked in any process improvement project, but others, such as compliance and risk, will serve to enhance the relatively new compliance procedures that may have been implemented within an organization. The last three are more forward-looking in terms of enhancing the infrastructure, although they don’t mention SOA, which would be a key part of any infrastructure rework these days.

BPMM tutorial

I’m in the online OMG tutorial on the Business Process Maturity Model (BPMM), which is a bit awkward because they’ve gone the really cheap route and done this with a conference call line with poor controls (everyone is in talk mode by default when they dial in, and a lot of people don’t realize that it’s good conference call etiquette to find the mute button on their phone so we heard a lot of background noise, beeps, coughing, breathing, etc.), and everyone needs to download the slides and follow along on their own. C’mon guys, GoToWebinar is pretty cheap, you could have sprung for that. 🙂

The BPMM acronym is problematic right from the beginning (aside from my gaffe last week when announcing the tutorial), when someone chimes in and says “but BPMN is in many shipping products now…”

Bill Curtis started with a history of maturity models; he and his partner have had a consulting practice around CMMI for a number of years, and obviously have a great deal of knowledge about maturity models in general. Apparently, one of their banking customers that had huge success with CMMI asked them for a business process maturity model a few years back, and so began BPMM.

Like CMMI, BPMM has five maturity models: initial, managed, standardized, predictable and optimizing (since the slides are marked as copyright of Capability Measurement, the consulting company that the two presenters run, I won’t reproduce the graphics here but you can download the full presentation here). At the initial level of process maturity, organizations tend to be undisciplined, individualistic and inconsistent, which makes them inefficient and stagnant. Funny, this put me in mind of Jon Pyke’s article yesterday where he spoke about how workflow systems “suck” because they don’t allow people to do their own thing in order to get things done; Pyke seems to be dissing workflow systems because they enforce repeatable processes.

Levels 2 and 3 of BPMM show the benefits of putting some business process maturity in place: managed, repeatable processes, integrated across the organization and adaptable to different circumstances. Roughly speaking, Level 2 involves putting some process automation and management in place for localized process improvement, and Level 3 involves organizational-level process improvement and reengineering by standardizing processes across the organization. My feeling, and that of the speakers, is that most organizations are at Level 1 in their process maturity, with some approaching Level 2 where organizations have implemented some process improvement initiatives, particularly those including a BPMS implementation.

Level 4 is taking a more statistical look at processes, reminiscent of Six Sigma: making processes less variable and more predictable, and gets into more performance management. BPMM is a roadmap, whereas Six Sigma is a set of tools that can be applied — probably starting around Level 3 or 4 — therefore can work together.

Level 5 is taking it to a proactive level, where an organization can recognize the difference between where they are and where they should be, and quickly take steps to achieve that. This is the level of continuous process improvement, where change management becomes just another standardized business process, focused on defect reduction and prevention.

There was a slide at the end about cultural transformation that I particularly liked: moving between Levels 1, 2 and 3 is about discipline, while moving to Levels 4 and 5 is about trust.

Although I can’t find the BPMM documents on the OMG site (which has the annoying habit of restricting access to standards in development), there is a BPMM information day in Washington DC next week where you can get more information.

On a related note, yesterday I attended the inaugural meeting of the Toronto BPMG chapter (more on that later), where Jim Baird talked about BPMG’s business process maturity model. Although I’m not familiar with it, I have to wonder if there’s room in the market for two business process maturity models.

Mark your calendar: BPM Think Tank 2007

I attended this year’s OMG BPM Think tank, blogged extensively about it, and generally concluded that it was a great conference with excellent opportunities both for learning and for participating. The dates for the 2007 BPM Think Tank have now been announced as July 23-25, with a general theme of “Developing Your BPM Success Factors Roadmap” (a buzzword-enabled conference title if I’ve ever heard one). No venue announced yet, although the last two were in the Washington DC area.

From the announcement email:

The Object Management Group™ (OMG™), in partnership with BPTrends, and OMG’s BPMI Steering Committee encourage you to “Save the Date” for BPM Think Tank 2007: Developing Your BPM Success Factors Roadmap. The event will be held July 23-25, 2007.

This popular annual event will once again feature presentations by leading experts and roundtable discussions actively involving attendees. BPM Think Tank 2007 will gather together experts and practitioners alike to discuss the practical application of BPM standards, technologies and practices to achieve successful business results. A unique format with roundtable discussions, as well as technology exhibits, case study presentations and expert panel sessions, will allow participants to gain uncommon insight into BPM in the real world, within the standards community, on the IT drawing board and in the process owner’s office.

This year’s theme, “Developing Your BPM Success Factors Roadmap” will focus on issues of interest to those who have recently started a BPM initiative or who are just now evaluating BPMS (Business Process Management Systems), as well as those experienced with BPM who want to get to the next level.

Conference Overview

BPM Think Tank 2007 will feature a full day of beginning tutorials and two days of advanced roundtable discussions with experienced “been there and done it” people, leveraging their knowledge to develop real-world roadmaps for delivering business value using BPM. At BPM Think Tank 2007, learning will be action-oriented around a success factors template.

For businesses, the case study approach will be used by presenters from businesses that have implemented BPM and have real “lessons learned” to share. Participants will discuss those lessons, the costs and the benefits with their peers, as well as gain an understanding of the practical value of BPM standards.

For vendors, participants will interact with other vendors who have implemented BPM technologies and competed in the market. Participants will discuss not only the “whats” of the main BPM standards, but also the “hows,” the “lessons learned” and the “shortcuts.”

The unique, highly interactive BPM Roundtables are small group sessions moderated by subject matter experts who will facilitate group discussion around specific topics as diverse as BPM Project Governance and A Roadmap for BPMN. Presenters will include technical specification authors, as well as senior process managers and individuals in charge of their company’s IT architecture and application development. These BPM Roundtables have been a highly acclaimed feature of the BPM Think Tank in the past and clearly differentiate this event from others in the BPM marketplace.

This year’s BPM Think Tank 2007 is being co-chaired by Phil Gilbert, Chair of the OMG’s BPMI Steering Committee and Paul Harmon, Founder and Executive Editor of BPTrends.

For more information, visit http://www.omg.org/e-tt/. BPM Think Tank 2007 is produced by the Object Management Group in partnership with BPTrends (www.bptrends.com). Exhibit space is available; for more information contact Kevin Loughry at [email protected], +1-781-444 0404. Sponsorship opportunities are available; contact Ken Berk at [email protected], +1-781-444 0404.

Podcasting the future of BPM

As the year draws to a close (okay, I admit it, I’m already in holiday mode), there are inevitably the articles and blog posts about “the future of [insert anything here]”, and BPM is no exception. TIBCO’s doing this with a podcast, where Jeff Kristick, their VP of product marketing, gets together with Peter Fingar, author of BPM: The Third Wave and Janelle Hill of Gartner.

Unfortunately, it’s not an interactive conversation, but rather a series of clips from interviews, so the moderator talks a bunch, then inserts a clip from Jeff, then talks some more, then a clip from Peter, and so on. Still, there’s a lot of interesting concepts in here for 15 minutes on the treadmill with your iPod, such as the notion that BPM implementations remain tactical in nature and departmental in size because the industry has failed to produce a standard BPMS based on an abstract BPMS data type, which would allow end-to-end process management. Janelle Hill has some good words to say about process agility, and how the shift to explicit process management allows organizations to perform constant incremental process improvement rather than a single big bang approach once every 10 years. She goes on to say that by building process models and creating process visibility, it raises the awareness of all the process stakeholders and sparks further improvements and better designs: in other words, get something in there to start, then let the process participants decide what should be done next, a strategy that I always try to use in BPM implementations.

You can find all the podcast landing page here, or a direct link to the MP3 for this podcast here.

OMG online tutorial on BPMM

Major correction: this tutorial is on BPMM (business process maturity model), not BPMN. Thanks to Phil Gilbert for emailing me a prompt correction.

If you’re interested in learning more about the business process maturity model (BPMM), tune in to a tutorial that OMG is running on November 30th at noon Eastern time. From their description:

Today, management has no standards-based framework by which to assess the maturity of business processes. As a result, managers have no method to assess the risk that immature processes pose to enterprise IT projects, or to identify the causes of weaknesses in their process workflows that, if addressed, could reduce cost and increase operating efficiency. The Business Process Maturity Model (BPMM) is a proposed standard for evaluating the capability and maturity of business processes. The intent of this model, if adopted by the OMG, would be to provide an open, standard roadmap for assessing process maturity and guiding business process improvement.

Presented by Bill Curtis and John Alden, this tutorial will introduce the concept of a Maturity Model and provide insight into its origin, market requirements and benefits. The tutorial will discuss why projects fail, leading to billions of dollars in reworking costs. Case studies, examples and a detailed overview of the structure of BPMM will also be covered. We invite all OMG members to listen in.

It’s not an online webinar, but more of a conference call with backup material: you download the slides in PowerPoint or PDF formation from their site, then dial in to listen to the live audio.

Now unrelated to this tutorial: If you want more in-depth information on BPMN (business process modeling notation), you can see the full version 1.0 specification on the OMG site, and check out some of the BPMN-related material on the Tyner Blain blog, which I’ve linked to in the past. I can’t find the BPMN 2.0 spec on the OMG site, although I thought that it was in public release by now.

SOA in Action Conference replays

If you missed the SOA in Action online conference last week, you can view replays of the presentations on the site.

There’s a presentation with Ken Vollmer from Forrester entitled “What is the relationship between BPM and SOA and why should you care?” that starts with the ever-present history of BPM, a topic that I’ve covered in some detail as well. At the BPM Think Tank in May, I wrote about his colleague at Forrester, Connie Moore, and how she showed a simplistic view of how BPM evolved from workflow, and talked about Vollmer’s equally simplistic view that BPM evolved from EAI. Now, at least, he seems to be singing the more comprehensive tune of how it evolved from both workflow and EAI (maybe they were reading my blog? 🙂 ). With the recent convergence of integration-focussed and human-centric BPM tools through corporate acquisitions, it’s hard to ignore this bigger picture.

He covers both business and IT drivers for BPM, including how many integration-focussed BPMS have SOA at their core. I have a bit of a problem with his slide #12 that shows a big “SOA” label around workflow, process modelling, BAM, business rules and a number of other things that clearly are not part of SOA, although they are certain to have services somewhere in their underpinnings — call it integration-focussed BPM, but not SOA. Aside from that, he gives a good overview of both BPM and SOA, and spends a bit of time talking about how SOA can help to facilitate development outsourcing. Of course, I also think that BPM can help to facilitate process outsourcing by removing location dependence at any particular step in a process, but he doesn’t mention that.

He then gets down to the meat of it — BPM and SOA together — and his key argument is that SOA provides a standards-based approach for implementing BPM. That true, but he totally misses what BPM does for SOA: SOA needs BPM to orchestrate the services into business processes that can include human-facing steps, and also to provide the more robust modelling, simulation and monitoring tools that are available in BPM suites. BPM is SOA’s “killer app”, the thing that will drive acceptance of SOA in the business areas and open up the business purse-strings needed to support this in the long term.

When it comes down to it, Vollmer is an SOA guy, and this was an SOA conference presentation. However, I think that if you’re going to talk about BPM and SOA, you shouldn’t just do it from an SOA perspective.