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How things go ’round and ’round

I had an email yesterday from my friend Robb, which I have his permission to publish here. Robb used to work for me — in fact, I think that I hired him a total of three times — and whenever a company seeking to hire him calls me for a reference, I always tell them that the only negative thing about hiring him is that when I’m ready to start another company, I’ll be hiring Robb away from them. Robb has four essential qualities when it comes to working: he’s smart, he’ll do anything to get the job done for the customer, he always has my back, and he’s funny. His email yesterday, as usual, showed off the smart and funny bits:

Below is a newly formed company called Miria Systems. I give a history how this company came into being. Imagine how some things never actually die off:

1998 – A company named Application Partners was founded around an insurance/finance product and named it Sequis– because apparently the English language is short of meaningful words

2000 – FileNet bought Application Partners and renamed it PeBA (standing for Panagon eBusiness Application) shortly after that they got bored with the name PeBA and renamed the product Acenza

2003 – After some successes the Acenza FileNet stalled the product program (to make way for BrightSpire) and effectively sold Acenza to a company called Endymion

2004 – Endymion changed the name from Acenza to (drumroll) Acenza for Payables

2003/2004 – Not satisfied with a simple named change Endymion completely re-wrote Acenza for Payables and changed the name to ManagedPay

2004 – Endymion apparently used up a lot of their budget on the name changes (and even more on re-write) because they were forced into a merger with Software Consulting Group (SCG) — the two companies formed Soluziona USA

2005 – Not satisfied with a single re-write was good enough to keep their engineers happy Soluziona USA again decided to re-write ManagedPay but decided that the name should stay the same

2006 – Soluziona USA sold their ManagedPay product to a group of investors who formed a new company around this three-times-rewritten-and-five-times renamed product, keeping with tradition they gave the company a name with equally little English meaning as anything else in this brief history — Miria Systems, below is the link

www.miriasystems.com

The interesting thing here to me here, besides the obvious snide comments around product/company naming exercises, is that the functionality of this product lives on despite name changes, rewrites, etc etc. That the market still has the (relatively) same problems almost ten years later makes me think that there is a disruptive or revolutionary solution waiting to happen.

No doubt you will recognize all of those companies and product names, most of which (except for Miria) I have been either directly or indirectly involved with.

Just some thoughts….

/rr

What Robb didn’t mention is that PricewaterhouseCoopers also took the Acenza code base and rewrote it in J2EE around the time that they were purchased by IBM, to create a case-based application framework targeted at insurance customers. Once part of IBM Global Services, it was further rewritten to make it “vendor independent”, meaning that the underlying content and process management could be either IBM or FileNet products, hence serving up the least common denominator of functionality and completely obviating proper use of the underlying product. I had the unhappy job of doing a review of an installation of this on behalf of the customer, and it’s unbelievable how little of the FileNet product capability was actually exposed or used.

Although I agree with Robb that the market need for systems like this remains, I’m not sure at all that Sequis/PeBA/Acenza/ManagedPay/Miria product remains a viable solution. I haven’t seen it in a while, but last time that I did look at it, it was too heavy and rigid, too old-school, and had the same problem as the IBM version that I mentioned above in that it completely hid the underlying capability of the BPM system below it: you might as well be using records in a database table for queue entries rather than a BPM system like FileNet.

I’ve talked about this problem of hiding the very nature and capabilities of a BPM product behind a rigidly-structured custom system in the past, and discussed it briefly on my Web 2.0 and BPM podcast, and I feel that it’s a significant contributor to the lack of acceptance of BPM in many organizations.

I believe that the new world of enterprise software is less customization and more customizability: give the users the raw product and let them do what they need with it.

Enterprise 2.0 Camp

Last week, we held a second Enterprise 2.0 Camp here in Toronto. Tom Purves was the organizer and also the first presenter; he has posted his notes and presentation slides and promises to post some follow-ups in the days ahead. (btw, Tom introduced me to slideshare, which I’ve just started using for embedding presentations in my blog posts; it’s like YouTube for presentation slides. Thanks, Tom!)

I enjoyed the three presentations, which I’ll cover in some detail below, but find that many people talking about Enterprise 2.0 are addressing the use of social networking software like blogs and wikis within enterprises, whereas I’m more interested in taking those concepts and integrating them into enterprise software, like BPM. As consumers become exposed to Web 2.0 applications in the wild, and the MySpace generation moves into the workforce, the expectations of enterprise workers will be raised with respect to what they expect from their software. AJAX interfaces for end-users are becoming relatively common in BPM products, but what about user-created content? A cornerstone of Web 2.0 is harnessing collective intelligence, and if you don’t give people a way to do this in enterprise software, they’re going to find ad hoc ways to do it that won’t be captured as part of the corporate memory. I know of one BPM vendor that allows users to tag process instances as favourites, but none are allowing for a more comprehensive public tagging strategy where users can not only build their own folksonomies of tags, but also share them with their colleagues. User-created processes or at least involving more business users in a collaboration to create processes is an idea that’s gaining speed, but in reality, very little of it actually occurs. There’s a number of other Web 2.0 concepts that I feel could greatly benefit BPM and other enterprise software; to me, that’s the second wave of Enterprise 2.0.

Getting back to the presentations, we heard from Tom with an overview of Enterprise 2.0, Greg Van Alstyne of the Beal Institute for Strategic Creativity, OCAD with a theoretical primer for emergent media, and Sacha Chua, a grad student and IBM intern, with a report from the recent CASCON 2006 conference (which I also attended).

Tom’s presentation was a good level-set, since I think that there were a number of different views in the audience about what Enterprise 2.0 is, along with some number of local techies who will attend anything that has “2.0” in the name and serves beer. Tom’s succinct definition “Web 2.0 + solving an actual business problem = Enterprise 2.0” gets very close to the mark, and he goes on to describe some general categories of applications and what this can mean for businesses. He also spoke at length on tacit interactions — that ad hoc stuff that I was referring to earlier — and how Enterprise 2.0 can leverage tacit knowledge to provide competitive advantage.

An interesting issue that came up during the conversation after Tom’s talk is the “blank wiki” problem: how do you get people to start participating in ways that they have never participated before? This is especially true in corporate environments, where there is not (typically) the anonymity of the internet and there are political agendas floating around. There were a number of ideas about seeding a collaboration tool, such as creating some initial wikis that contain obvious but minor errors to encourage people to learn how to edit them in order to fix them, but that begs the question (to me, anyway) of how the seed data impacts the path that emerges.

Greg Van Alstyne was up next, with a presentation discussing how Enterprise 2.0 must emerge from the needs and activities of the users. Emergence, or emergent behaviour, is when new and complex patterns develop from underlying (and sometimes seemingly unrelated) components. It’s really a complement to design: where design is top-down and imposed by the designers, emergence is bottom-up and created by the participants. He gave a great example of this, which I also know because the same technique was used at my university: no pathways were initially built between buildings, but the entire complex was planted with grass; after several months, the common pathways had “emerged” from the grass and were paved. The associated quote was something along the lines of “how do we know where to build the paths until the people show us?” The same is also true for software, enterprise or not.

Sacha Chua finished the evening with a discussion of social networking software in use within IBM. Belying the big blue exterior, IBM appears to have a warm, fuzzy inside, full of employee blogs, wikis and social bookmarking. Who knew? I’ve met Sacha on several occasions, and she’s a very passionate advocate for what social networking tools can do within an organization, such as flattening the hierarchy and providing a sense of knowing the other 325,000 people in your company even if they’re geographically distant. She admits that the active participation rate — those that actually contribute content — is about 1%, but that’s a substantial community when you look at the relative numbers, and as she says, you have to learn to love the 1% that you have rather than worry about the 99% that you don’t. IBM is developing some of their own social networking software, such as Dogear social bookmarking, which is an internal equivalent to del.icio.us. I’d love to find out if they’re planning to roll this out as a customer product, but no one at IBM seems to be able to give me an answer on this.

One final comment that I heard from Bob Logan, a colleague of Greg Van Alstyne’s: “I don’t believe that there’s an inside and outside of an organization any more.” [Someone else in the audience immediately butted in that they thought this was wrong, to which Bob replied “All generalizations are wrong.” 🙂 ] The concept of increasing porosity in corporate boundaries has been happening for years, in part due to technologies like BPM: more outsourcing, integrating suppliers as part of the supply chain, and exposing the progress of internal processes to customers. There’s still a distinction between inside and outside, but it’s getting fuzzier.

Meet your Process Concierge

I had a chance last week to chat with Pat Morrissey, SVP of marketing at Savvion, in advance of their announcements today. Before I get to the real content, I have to say that “Process Concierge” is the most adorably marketing-enabled product name that I’ve heard in a long time — I’m still giggling, although I’m easily amused when it comes to silly product names.

Savvion is announcing v7.0 of their BusinessManager BPM suite, in limited release this week with general availability next month. This release is focussed on improving end-to-end collaboration through the process design and execution life cycle, and on increasing reuse.

Driving one of the changes is the realization that not everyone should have (or wants) access to the full process design environment, but that there’s a lot of people in an organization who want to be able to sketch out some ideas for a process without having to learn a complex process modeling tool, and without having to be concerned with issues such as process validation that might prevent a “rough sketch” process from being saved into a process engine’s repository. To meet this need, Savvion has introduced abstract models, which are explicitly flagged as “not executable” at the point of check-in, so a model can be partially created and checked in to the repository without concern for validation. Once someone with more advanced process modeling skills has fixed it up, it can be converted or versioned into an executable process. The goal is that this will help to break down barriers to adoption, and get more people modeling processes. My concern, as you might guess, is that many people in corporate environments don’t have sufficient permissions to even download and install the Savvion process modeler on their desktop, especially those who aren’t technical enough to work out what’s required to make a process model validate on check-in, so unless this is part of a corporate-mandated desktop installation, there’s still a significant barrier there.

Second up on the business-side enhancements is the Process Concierge (okay, I’ll stop laughing at the name now), which adds collaborative activities such as instant messaging at any point in a process to allow a user to get some help at that point without delegating the step or using some other ad hoc method like email to get an answer. The collaboration is all captured, so that there’s a full audit trail, unlike ad hoc methods, and the user never loses control of what they’re working on. I really like this concept, since I’ve implemented a number of transaction processing BPM projects where the user may need a bit of help at a step and wants to just finish the task rather than sending it to someone with more experience, so they end up either calling or walking over to someone who can help them out. Unfortunately, if you don’t capture that ad hoc collaboration in any way, the process statistics would just show a longer-than-usual time to process that step, but wouldn’t indicate the problem that occurred or how it was resolved in order to assist with future improvements to the process, procedures or training. With Process Concierge, someone should be able to dive into the details of the collaboration at those problematic steps and figure out how to make the process better. It will definitely require some cultural change, however, to get people using this rather than calling over the partition to their neighbour.

The third major business enhancement is forensic auditing, which provides a SOX-compliant history of every change made to a process and its data. The Process Concierge ties into this, since there’s now also an auditable history of the collaboration that might occur at a step in the process. This is not unexpected, since I’ve seen the same thing in every other BPM product that I’ve looked at in detail lately, and is definitely a requirement for doing BPM business these days.

On the technical side of the product announcement, the biggest focus is on component reusability. All vendors claim to facilitate reusability, but the actual reuse rates within organizations for any sort of technology are dismally low. There’s a couple of general solutions to that problem: make better repositories, so that developers can find other developers’ components, and make better components so that developers will rely on others’ components rather than recreating everything themselves. In Savvion’s case, they’re improving the repository by allowing anything in the asset repository to be reused, not just process models: services, adapters, forms, whatever. They’re also providing new testing and debugging tools to help improve the quality of what’s offered for reuse within that repository, which should tend to create higher reuse rates.

There’s still a different full studio environment for IT, as opposed to the downloadable standalone application used by business analysts; I’m curious as to how long it will take to merge the two environments, or if they have any plans to do so, since two different environments always creates some communication disconnects between users of the different environments, however small.

TIBCO freeing up Business Studio

I had a briefing with Jeff Kristick from TIBCO last week about their announcements today, and also had a demo of the new 1.1 release of the TIBCO Business Studio tool.

The big news is that Business Studio, the modeling, management and simulation environment, is now available at no cost — just download it from developer.tibco.com and install it. In case you’re not familiar with Business Studio, it’s an Eclipse-based application that and runs standalone without any connection to a server. Unfortunately, the press release states “TIBCO Business Studio V1.1 will be offered as the industry’s first FREE, full-featured BPM studio“, which is not true: Savvion started this trend by making their modeling tool available for free back in March at the Gartner BPM Summit. At that time, I wrote:

We’re going to see more and more of this, I believe: vendors giving away planning, modelling and analysis tools in order to raise their profile in the marketplace, and potentially drive more interest in the process engines that lie at the heart of their strategy.

In a post in April, I talked more about vendors releasing their modeling tools for free; in fact, at the time, I mentioned that TIBCO was releasing Business Studio 1.0 as a downloadable standalone desktop application, and I made the assumption that it was free, or soon would be. Good to see that I’m right about something once in a while. 🙂

As with the other BPM vendors providing their modeling tools for free, TIBCO’s intention is not to replace a full-up modeling tool such as ARIS or Proforma with Business Studio, but to replace the use of Visio for process modeling, or to fit somewhere in between the two extremes. It can import models directly from ARIS (and, in the hopefully near future, Visio via the Zynium add-on), and export to XPDL since that’s its default serialization format. There have been some custom imports from other platforms such as Proforma, but these aren’t productized; they do publish the XSLT required to build your own importer, so it would be straightforward for someone to build it and share it around. (In theory, XPDL makes interoperability with these tools easier, although in practice, they only write to their own iProcess Modeler-compliant version of XPDL, and some of the modeling tool vendors don’t do XPDL yet.)

I liked a number of things about the interface, especially having the simulation and modeling be two different “perspectives” on the same process model rather than having them in different applications. Simulation is really just another function within process design, so it makes sense that they’re integrated, and TIBCO’s done a nice integration here — click over to the simulation perspective, and you’ll see the simulation data right beside each activity, very similar to what I saw in the Appian process modeler that I reviewed yesterday.

I also like that they ship a number of industry samples, including the full set of standard workflow modeling patterns, and what appear to be fairly comprehensive tutorials.

There’s a few serious limitations to this version, although the near-future product roadmap overcomes all of them:

Only a limited subset of BPMN is supported. I didn’t ask exactly what wasn’t supported, but this sounds like a bad move to me: in many cases, partial support for a standard might as well be no support at all. Full BPMN support will be in v2.0, although I didn’t catch the timeline for that.
Business Studio doesn’t yet replace the existing iProcess Modeler: you have to export XPDL from Business Studio, then import it into the iProcess Modeler to get it hooked up to the process engine, although the eventual plans are to hook Business Studio up directly to the engine and obsolesce iProcess Modeler.
You can’t set web services parameters, which is part of why you have to scoot over to the iProcess Modeler to finish the technical portions of your design. In early 2007, they’ll be adding the web services capabilities directly in Business Studio, then other API functionality such as calling DLLs and .jar files. Their plan is to add a “technical perspective” to the environment for specifying these interfaces, in addition to the existing modeling and simulation perspectives, although that may require some sort of authentication scheme to prevent non-technical users from accessing the technical perspective, since there’s currently no role-based security on access to the perspectives.

As I’ve mentioned many times here before, and discussed with Jeff last week, I believe that there are compelling reasons for a browser-based process design and administration, but I’m not sure that he’s buying it yet since he claims that they have no plans for a browser-based process designer. In the meantime, a free downloadable process modeler is a great way to go, since it further lowers the barriers to potential process modelling participants. It does have the disadvantage of requiring that the user have sufficient control over their desktop environment to be able to install new software, however, which is often not the case in corporate environments.

The second part of TIBCO’s announcement is the general release of version 10.5 of their iProcess Suite, which is their end-to-end BPMS. Some interesting new upgrades here:

The next version of the AJAX client workspace is released, based on the General Interface AJAX platform that they acquired two years ago. Apparently, my previous complaints about no GI support for Firefox are going to be resolved by the end of the year, too.
There is now very granular role-based security built into the client workspace environment that allows the environment to be restricted based on the user’s role, for example, by removing controls and menu items.
Their XML API is now fully exposed so that developers and build their own applications and user interfaces more easily, if they don’t choose to use the client workspace for all functions or users.
Improvements to their BAM product, iProcess Insights, include the ability to drill down directly from the dashboard into the runtime product, so that the AJAX client is launched and the user can work the item that alerted them through the dashboard. Since many BPM vendors have used third-party BAM add-ons such as Celequest, many of the BPM dashboards are quite distinct silos from the execution environment; this requires a user to take note of some index information about a problem work item in the dashboard, then manually search for it in the process execution environment so that they can deal with the problem. This integration in iProcess Insights eliminates this manual step in the middle by allowing a direct drilldown.

I also had the pleasure of reconnecting in these meetings with Carl Hillier, who was a pre-sales engineer then the BPM product manager at FileNet when I was there back in 2000-2001 — he just started working at TIBCO last week. It’s a bit ironic, since Carl was originally based in the UK, and Staffware was his nemesis; since that time, the landscape has changed somewhat: TIBCO bought Staffware, and IBM bought FileNet.

BPMG Toronto chapter starts up

BPMG Toronto is kicking off with its inaugural meeting on November 29th, 8:30-11:00am at webMethods‘ downtown Toronto office. You can see all the details and express your interest at the upcoming.org link.

The meeting is free and all are welcome, but you need to RSVP to Jim Baird if you plan to attend.

Modeling Processes in a Browser with Appian

For those BPM vendors out there who say that you can’t create a fully-featured browser-based process modeling tool: YOU’RE WRONG. Appian does it, they do it well, and if you don’t get moving on this soon, they’ll kick your butt.

I was going to just stop there, but that would be mean, so I’ll continue on with a more complete review of the Appian 1-1/2 hour, open-the-firehose demo that I received last week via Webex, compliments of Phil Larson (director of product marketing) and Malcolm Ross (über demo god) at Appian.

In case this is the first time that you’ve read my blog, let me iterate my view that a browser-based process modeler is the way to go if your goal is to lower the barriers to enabling process modelling and design across an enterprise — this is one of the ways that Web 2.0 is impacting BPM, as I discussed in a presentation at the BPMG conference earlier this year. Appian is the only mainstream BPM vendor that provides a lightweight (dare I say, zero footprint?) browser-based process modeler; the only other mainstream vendor that even has a browser-based process modeler is FileNet, but it’s a rather weighty Java applet that downloads with some degree of trouble, in my experience. [btw, if you want to debate the term “mainstream BPM vendor” with me, first of all check if you’re anywhere in Gartner’s BPMS Magic Quadrant except for the “niche players” quadrant, or anywhere at all in Forrester’s Human-Centric BPMS Wave.]

I’d never had the Appian corporate overview until this session, and I found it quite telling that 3 of the 4 founders were from Microstrategy, a business intelligence vendor. Analytics and reporting are baked into everything in the product, including the user interface: all of the grid-based UI screens such as inbox views are actually report views driven straight out of their own reporting/analytics engine, which makes it easy to do things like switch any view to a chart (if it makes sense to do so). It also means that KPIs and business thresholds can be easily built into a process and seen in a number of different views, not just a siloed BAM dashboard, including viewing process execution stats right in the modeler while you’re viewing the model. This makes for a more seamless integration between design, execution, monitoring and analytics than you’ll find in many vendors’ products, although some customers may find a proprietary reporting and analytics engine, as well as their proprietary and built-in rules engine, to be problematic in the face of corporate standards for these types of platforms.

Although nothing to do with process design, but very cool and Web 2.0-y, is the ability for a user to flag a process instance or a task within a process instance as a favourite. Although this isn’t quite the full process tagging paradigm that I’ve written about previously and talked about in my Web 2.0/BPM presentation, it’s a great start.

I won’t talk too much about the specific functions within the Appian process modeler, except to say that it does everything that I would expect from a process designer, and more: full BPMN-compliant modeling including more complex constructs such as ad hoc activities (i.e., those that aren’t attached to the process flow, see section 5.2.3 of the BPMN spec if you want to understand what this means); the ability to chain activities in a process so that they’re locked to the same user and present them as steps in a wizard-type interface rather than having to reopen each sequentially from a task list; a full forms designer that will be released next month; import/export to XPDL (which allows you to model offline with Zynium’s add-on to Visio and interchange models with the Appian process modeler); different views and capabilities within the process modeler for business analysts and developers; and web services introspection and mapping. And it does it all in a completely AJAX environment, although due to support for VML but not SVG, it’s not supported in Firefox yet. Furthermore, all you need to cross the firewall from the modeler to the server is port 80 (i.e., standard HTTP) or port 443 (for HTTP over SSL).

If Appian really wanted to kick some butt, they’d create the browser-based equivalent of a free process modeler download: a free process modeling site exposed on the internet, available for anyone to sign up and try it out. Who would download and install a process modeling tool to try out if you could have the same functionality available online?

I’ve heard the comment from a couple of BPM vendors that a full AJAX process modeler is “hard”. Duh, of course it’s hard; if it was easy, everyone would do it. Appian started out with a Java applet process modeler, then ended up building their own AJAX library of JAVA Struts objects and moving over to AJAX in 2003 — two years before the term “AJAX” was even coined. They’ve invested a huge amount of time to make their browser-based process modeler every bit as functional and responsive as a desktop application, and it shows. It reminds me of the quote about how Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did, except backwards and in high heels: yeah, it’s hard, but it looks great.

webMethods takes a big step into BPM

I had a chat this morning with Kristin Muhlner, webMethods‘ EVP of Product Development, and I have to say that it’s refreshing to have a discussion with another technical woman for a change, since there’s really not enough of us in this industry. 🙂

The reason for our call was to discuss webMethods’ announcement today about their upcoming release of webMethods Fabric 7.0, which will include new BPM functionality that they are using to launch into the BPM suite market — a move that will place them squarely in competition with TIBCO and IBM (this latter depending on whether someone at IBM wakes up and realizes that the BPM product that they just acquired with FileNet would perfectly round out their WebSphere suite, but that’s a topic for another day).

This change in strategic direction for webMethods has been 18 months in the making, and they’ve released a new Eclipse-based process modelling environment that takes on a different personality depending on whether the user is a business analyst or a developer. Following the direction of other BPM vendors, this can be run as a standalone desktop tool without connection to a server, and although they’re not making it a free download like Savvion has done, I have the sense that that’s being discussed. One key flaw that I could see is that although they’re modelling in BPMN, they’re serializing only to BPEL for transfer to an execution environment, not to XPDL; unfortunately, not everything that you can model in BPMN can be saved to BPEL, so I’m not sure what their solution is for this. Obviously, they must be using some other format for transferring to their own execution environment. I’ve asked for a demo of the product over the next few days, so I hope to be able to resolve this question then.

We had the inevitable discussion about browser-based modelling tools — I think that offering a modelling tool for business analysts in a browser lowers the bar significantly for adoption across an enterprise, something that modelling vendors like Proforma have already figured out — but webMethods isn’t offering that in the current product release.

The goal of this process modeller, as with many of the other BPM vendors’ modellers, is to become so ubiquitous in an organization that the business analysts no longer use Visio to model processes, but use this tool instead. That’s quite a different approach from vendors like Fujitsu, who extend Visio using something like Zynium’s Byzio, as I’ve discussed previously. In both cases, however, vendors are looking to eliminate the translation errors that occur now when Visio diagrams are manually re-created in a BPM vendor’s modelling tool, by allowing a direct import of the process definition from the modelling environment, whether that’s Visio or a proprietary modeller. The advantage of what webMethods provides is all the things that you don’t have in an enhanced Visio environment, such as rich documentation capabilities, the ability to design KPIs directly into the process for later linking with BAM, and an environment that allows business analysts and developers to collaborate more easily. I think that they’re going to have to make this a free downloadable product in order to really see market penetration, however. They also provide a codeless development environment that allows a developer to just drag and drop services and pre-built AJAX components in order to build a custom application. And, speaking of BAM, they’ve included BAM, simulation and business rules integration in the BPM suite, too.

An advantage that webMethods will have is that the BPM suite is built directly on top of their existing integration platform, which gives them a way to mine their existing customer base of integration/SOA implementations to expand to include BPM.

Webinar: the value of BPM

I’ll be moderating a webinar in just a few minutes (at noon Eastern) with Michael Melenovsky of Gartner, on the value of BPM. Sign up here and tune in.