Web 2.0 webinar with Gartner

A great webinar on Web 2.0 just finished on ebizQ, which is not normally the place where you’d see a lot of pure Web 2.0 stuff unrelated to integration technologies. You’ll be able to see the replay within 24 hours at the same link.

David Mitchell Smith from Gartner is giving a great overview of Web 2.0, particularly how it impacts business. Be sure to download the PowerPoint slides, there are great notes attached.

His bottom line: denial is pointless (I would have said “resistance is futile”, but that’s just the geeky me coming out), Web 2.0 is happening and you’d better get on board. He even talks about mashups and lightweight integration protocols, blogs, and other things that I don’t normally hear from the type of Gartner analysts that I deal with.

Christopher Crummey from IBM also spoke, and instead of being the usual vendor product pitch, he had some interesting slides on Web 2.0 for business, and particularly how IBM is using some social networking/Web 2.0 technologies internally, such as blogs and customizable portals. He wove in information about their products that support this, but it was done in a pretty unobtrusive way. I’ve spent a bit of time with some IBM’ers learning about their internal uses of social networking, and it’s pretty progressive stuff — I think that my former colleagues at FileNet may find that their internal collaboration takes a huge leap forward now that they’re part of Big Blue.

The only downside of this webinar is that the two presentations went so long that there were only a few minutes left for questions, then some sort of technical difficulty resulted in total dead air until after the scheduled end time. I bailed at 3 minutes past the hour, and more than 30% of the audience had done so by that time as well; I’m assuming that there was no Q&A after all.

OMG Infopalooza

The OMG’s fall newsletter is out (although as my Aussie friends remind me, it’s spring down there), including notice of their technical meeting in DC on December 4-8. This will include a session by OMG BPMI on “Improving Business Process Management using a Maturity Model Framework”:

“The OMG BPMI Steering Committee has been developing a plan for a Maturity Model for business process improvement, called the Business Process Maturity Model (BPMM). This program will discuss how such a BPMM would guide organizational change, relate to existing OMG standards, and how it could be made available for widespread use and adoption through the OMG standards development process. The BPMM authors include Dr. Bill Curtis and Charlie Weber, who were lead authors for the CMM/CMMI. Dr. Curtis also authored the PCMM (SEI’s People Capability Maturity Model). Topics covered will include introduction and discussion of the BPMM draft, and how it can be used by business, government and vendor communities. Specific attention will be paid to how BPMM could elevate success rates for SOA initiatives.”

There’s also an interview with Phil Gilbert of Lombardi, who is now the BPMI steering committee chair within OMG. I realize that vendors on standards committees make valuable contributions, I’m just not sure that having one run the whole show is a good idea. Are other vendors worried that the standards produced by BPMI will favour Lombardi? Or is this just a great way of forcing all the vendors to participate in the process, since they’ll be afraid of what might happen when they’re out of the room?

A last few notes on Proforma

I received Proforma’s press release last week about the Forrester report on process modelling tools (PDF, free download), in which Proforma places well against their usual competitors, IDS Scheer and MEGA. All three are in the leaders category, with Proforma leading on current product offerings, and IDS Scheer leading on strategy. This result is quite different from Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Architecture tools published in April: many of the same tools are being evaluated, but the Forrester focus is purely on business process modelling, while the Gartner focus is on the broader topic of EA modelling. Gartner also published an MQ on business process analysis tools this year that has results closer to the Forrester report, not surprisingly.

All of this made me realize that I still had a few notes about the Proforma user conference that I attended a couple of weeks back in Las Vegas, mostly all the ones from the Proforma folks about upcoming product release, ProVision Series 6. Here’s the rundown. [All inaccuracies in this information are due to my hurried notetaking, delayed transcription, and incomplete understanding of Proforma’s product, and I rely on those more knowledgeable to add any corrections in the comments.]

Software as a service was mentioned in the keynote on the first day, and Proforma’s push further into their Knowledge Exchange server-base product (an intended replacement for their ProServer product, and eventually their TeamWorks product with a “light” version) seems to support that concept architecturally, although the web client is not fully functional yet and web services interfaces won’t be supported until version 6.1. I asked a direct question about whether it would work across the firewall and the answer was “it should work”, which means to me that they haven’t actually tried it and you might want to wait until they do before trying that one at home.

The web client does have quite a bit of rich AJAX-y stuff going on: it shows all the inventory views in a browser, uses some nice UI controls such as elevator bars, drag+drop and double-clicking to open a property dialog, plus allows property editing in the browser client although no real modelling tasks. It uses scalable vector graphics to allow for fast zooming, panning and printing of complex models. I think that they might still be working on the licensing model for the web client: although a user must login, there is no licence required for the web client, such as there is for the desktop client, but this will certainly have to change when the web client is able to be a full desktop client replacement.

They’ve introduced the concept of dimensions in models, which allows for alternative versions to be created based on specific dimensions, where a dimension may be, for example, geography, or as-is versus to-be. In one model, then, you can compare North American as-is models with European to-be models, or whatever else you want to define based on your dimensions. It took me a while to wrap my head around it, but it’s pretty powerful stuff. This replaces the less-powerful concept of scenarios that were used in previous versions.

There were a number of enhancements that aren’t really meaningful to me since I’m not a regular Proforma user, but were welcomed by the audience: embedded Crystal Reports, federated search across repositories, more granular access rights down to the instance of an object, and the ability for a user to change their own password (?!).

There are some new business data modelling tools that are intended to allow designers to work in ProVision, then easily bridge to other technical design tools. This theme was picked up later during a lengthy discussion about interfacing with other applications, which is ultimately the key to making Proforma work as an integral part of any organization. They have development an XML-based common interchange format (CIF) and made it openly available to anyone who wants to interface with them; this covers all model types, not just process models. They interface with an impressive number of BPMS, SOA suites, and business rules systems.

Because of the rise of process model standards, however, they’ve also done a BPEL interface. The CTO’s keynote made a strong statement in support of standards, mentioning BPEL, WS-CDL, XPDL, SVBR and others. However, during a technical presentation the following day, I asked a question about XPDL to find out that it’s under review, but not even on the roadmap yet. They might use CIF as a stepping stone to get to XPDL, as they did with BPEL, but who knows. By then, BPDM will probably be out, and they’ll have to address all three serialization formats at some point.

In my opinion, there’s a few things that they’re going to have to address over the next few years in order to keep their product ahead of the big guys who are nipping at their heels, most of which are Web 2.0-type things that I’ve been talking about for BPMS:

  • Full functionality in a zero-footprint web client
  • Tagging to allow users to build up their own folksonomy around models
  • Syndication and feeds for alerts on changes to models, and to provide feedback to some of their new process monitoring capabilities
  • Support for XPDL now, and eventually BPDM

Q&A about BPM

I had an email recently from a self-proclaimed BPMS newbie, and I thought that I’d publish his questions and my answers. Feel free to drop in your comments on any of these.

Q1. I couldn’t find any single BPMS product built on PHP language. All of them were built using either Java or .NET. Are there any php-based BPMS products in the market?

A1. I’m unaware of any BPM products built on PHP. Most products are targeted at inside-the-firewall applications, and PHP is less commonly used there than for outward-facing applications.

Q2. Most BPMS vendors ignored Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs). Could you please give me list of vendors offering BPMS product for SMEs?

A2. Okay, this isn’t really my answer since I’m not going to start a vendor war in the comments (or in my inbox) by naming the vendors that I listed back in reply, but suffice to say that the smaller and newer vendors came to mind. If you have any thoughts on a particular product and its suitability for the SME market, join the conversation in the comments section.

Q3. I tried to explore BPMS products available on the market. I couldn’t find any product that is fully web-based. I want a BPMS product that all of its software (modelling tool, work portal, dashboard, etc.) can be access through web using a “plain” standard-compliant web browser (without Java Applet, ActiveX, etc). Are there any fully web-based BPMS product in the market?

A3. This is something that I constantly nag the vendors about. As far as I know, no one is offering the modelling and administration tools in a zero-footprint browser environment yet, and many of them don’t even offer browser-based solutions at all. In all cases that I know of, the standard work portal for users tends to be a much more lightweight environment.

Q4. It looks like there’s no vendors offering BPMS as a service (like salesforce.com). Do you know any vendor offering BPMS as a service?

A4. There was one, The Process Factory, which was backed by Global 360 but they lost their funding earlier this year — there was an article about them last year (www.it-analysis.com/content.php?articleid=12707) and I know a couple of the people who were involved in it. Other than that, none that I’m aware of although I’m sure that there are some niche players in the market.

CentraSite portal and blogs now officially launched

I wrote back in July about CentraSite, a standards-based SOA forum and a freely-available product for SOA registry, repository and other functions. This week, I received notice that CentraSite is now launched (I guess that I was playing with beta code before), and that there will be a number of blogs hosted on the site to talk more about SOA. It will be interesting to see how this plays out; it has Fujitsu and Software AG behind it, and there’s obviously been a lot of work put into the product, but I don’t have enough experience with this class of product to tell if it’s a potential winner or not.

Survey on Business Process Improvement

CIO Insight recently published a survey on business process improvement wherein 66% of the respondents state that BPI is their #1 priority. There’s a lot of stats in here to paw through, such as 62% stating that data integration problems are significantly slowing down their BPI efforts — no real surprise there — and the general conclusion that BPM and related software aren’t consistently effective. Considering that over 40% state that they don’t use a BPMS or business process modelling tools and have no intention of using one any time soon, it’s also not surprising that the survey concludes that a lot more could be done in terms of automating processes.

IBM’s Virtual Jam on SOA and BPM

The Virtual WebSphere BPM User Group is hosting a 2-day Virtual Jam on the BPM with SOA forum. I heard about this from Bruce, who points to the registration page; note that you have to join the Global WebSphere Users Group Community, then join the Virtual WebSphere BPM User Group (there’s a not-so-obvious link to join on the aforementioned registration page). If you survive all of that, hop on over to the forum site and see what’s being posted; the jam runs through the end of day tomorrow.

Someone from IBM has appeared to have seeded a bunch of discussion topics, but there’s not a lot of participation yet. I’m not sure that a forum is a good place to hold a 2-day jam, since the cycle time of people checking and responding to forum posts can be a bit long for that. That being said, there are a few good topics running.

Nike BPM webinar

BPM? Just do it!

I’m sitting in on a webinar about how Nike implemented BPM in their credit claims department, and it turns out that “just do it” is more than just an ad slogan, it’s their internal mantra as well. That means that they’re always looking for a better way to do things. Like most other large multi-nationals, their infrastructure grew organically until they reached a point where they had to do some serious retrofits in order to be able to operate like a truly global organization rather than an American company with operations in other companies (a distinction made by the speaker from Nike, which is also one that I’ve used many times to describe businesses that don’t quite get how to work internationally). The speaker, Jim Sarvay, was the executive in charge of credit claims (whose last name that I missed) was the project manager on the BPM implementation.

The process discussed in today’s webinar is the credit claims process part of their supply chain, which is basically any time that a customer pays less than the invoiced amount, which can be due to any part of the supply chain process — either within Nike or at the customer — being broken along the way.

On of Jim’s slides was titled “Speed Matters. Slow Sucks.”, which pretty much sums it up for any type of supply chain process, and if you don’t have a handle on what’s slowing your processes down and how to fix it, then it’s going to suck. In Nike’s case, they had a number of parts of the process that weren’t integrated with their main SAP system, particularly communications with their suppliers and customers: it was the usual mix of e-mail, EDI, faxes, paper documents and everything else that you could imagine.

Their strategy for fixing their supply chain problems centred around four factors: documents (content available in a central repository), people (the right person doing the right job at the right time), internal controls (processes supporting policies), and process (flexible, repeatable best practices to improve cycle time).

They picked Global 360 for BPM, with Fillmore Technology doing the implementation based on Global 360’s recommendation. They also looked at IBM and FileNet, and although the Jim didn’t originally talk about their criteria for making the decision, he said that Global 360 worked best for them. In the Q&A at the end of the webinar, there was a question about how the vendor was selected; apparently, Global 360 was Jim’s last choice after reviewing the proposals, but jumped to top spot after responding to questions and giving a demo partnered with Fillmore, wherein they proved that they were focussed on solving the business problem rather than selling a product. From what he said, it sounded like one of the other two vendors was the incumbent document management vendor and was unseated, although that wasn’t perfectly clear.

He listed their organizational success factors: a compelling story, executive support, a dedicated cross-functional team, and superior consulting and tools (he said some very nice things about Fillmore Technology, who did the implementation). Their results were pretty impressive: a 6-month payback on their investment, reduced cycle time to 1-15 days from the 120 days that it used to be, and improved relationships with their customers because of the faster claims resolution process. They’re now looking at how they can roll BPM out to other parts of their organization, both in other claims areas and in different applications such as foreign trade/customs documents and order management processes, and seem pretty pumped about the potential to see the same type of wins in other deployments.

They did a staged implementation over a matter of months, with the first stage rolled out in about 5 months from project approval, and the entire planned scope deployed in about 10 months. After that, they started integrating other systems, such as inbound faxes, over the next several months.

Their lessons learned:

  • Consider policy first, then process, then people, then tools
  • Get senior management buy-in
  • “Eat the elephant one bite at a time” — this is so key, and something that I’ve written about many times before: do something small as quickly as possible, then add functionality incrementally
  • Rent experts — how can I disagree with this? 🙂
  • Leave the rocket scientists at home — in other words, it’s not as complicated as you think it is; keep it simple
  • Build a team that you trust and have confidence in — provide direction and support, listen to what they need, and stay out of their way

Aside from the obvious lessons about implementing a successful BPM rollout, this webinar definitely showed the power of an enthusiastic end-customer presentation in getting your message across. If you’re a vendor, consider finding a customer like Jim at Nike to talk about what they’ve done and how successful it was, rather than hiring yourself an analyst for a webinar — it makes all the difference in the world.

The webinar was hosted by Fillmore;  I’m not sure if they’ll have a replay available, but you can check their site or maybe someone from Fillmore would be kind enough to add a comment to this post with the replay information.

Nike uses BPM to improve credit claims — webinar tomorrow

I met David Duignan of the Fillmore Technology Group at the ABPMP meeting that I crashed in San Francisco earlier this year — David’s involved in the San Diego chapter. He sent me an email a couple of weeks ago, and a reminder today, of a webinar that they’re having tomorrow about how BPM is used in Nike’s credit claims department.

I have no idea what BPM product that they’re using for this, since Fillmore is a Global 360 partner and also appears to be a Lombardi partner, but they claim to have made some huge cost-saving improvements in the credit process. From the webinar description:

Learn how Nike automated its processes while enhancing visibility and accountability that:

  • Increases their recovery payments
  • Reduces claims resolution times
  • Increases the processing of more claims
  • Prioritizes claims more effectively
  • Reduces customer account manipulation

You can sign up to attend here.

Is Anyone Executing Those Processes?

There’s just something about that mid-Western accent that I find endearing, and when Roy Massie from SunGard first pronounced “insurance” as a two-syllable word, I was hooked. Roy’s was the last non-Proforma presentation of the conference, and he was the only partner speaking (although I suppose that technically speaking, HP Consulting is likely a partner). If you’ve read Column 2 much in the past, you know that I have had a big focus on systems integration and implementation, so I was very interested in what SunGard had done to integrate ProVision with their products.

First of all, who knew that SunGard even had a BPMS product? Apparently the product of an acquisition, it doesn’t show up on the SunGard site, but has two other sites where it lives. Although SunGard did show up as a niche player on Gartner’s Magic Quadrant back in 2003, they’re not there any more; I imagine that niche might be limited to only SunGard customers for their other systems. I’ve seen SunGard transaction processing systems (not including any BPM functionality) in many of my mutual fund and other financial customers, so this isn’t a completely unexpected leap.

What was unexpected was the audience response when Roy asked the audience how many of them export their processes from ProVision to a BPMS for execution; I was sitting more than halfway back in the room, and there were no hands up in front of me. I didn’t turn quick enough to count, but Roy said “a couple of you” when characterizing the response. My question is if ProVision users aren’t pushing their process models through to a BPMS for execution, aren’t they missing a lot of value? And what, exactly, are they doing with those process models? Or is this just exposing my bigotry over what process models are good for?

The integration seems pretty straightforward, and based on later information, is similar to what is done by other BPMS vendors: processes are modelled in ProVision, then exported using Proforma’s open Common Interchange Format (CIF) and imported into SunGard EXP Process Director.

I did like Roy’s description of practices (determined by experienced specialists) versus procedures (executed by trained workers), and how they combine to make up processes. I also liked his phrase “enterprise technology sprawl”, and his discussion of how an unstructured collage of technologies can start to dictate business processes. He made the great point that all compliance initiatives are based on process transparency, and (referencing the Aloha Airlines presentation about how they started modelling their business in order to organization themselves out of bankruptcy) that a near-death experience is a great motivator.