Gartner BPMS Magic Quadrant 2006

I just saw the new Gartner Magic Quadrant for BPMS, published yesterday, and although I haven’t had time to review the entire 19-page report, here’s the MQ:

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p style=”text-align: center”>Graphic removed at the request of Gartner, who seem to be missing the point that I’m actually encouraging people to read the entire 19-page report in context, not just look at the single graphic that I excerpted.Good way to alienate the blogosphere by stomping all over the notion of fair use, guys.


The most recent point of comparison from Gartner is their June 2004 MQ for pure-play BPM, which included many of these same vendors. They see BPMS as the second generation of this market, and note that many of the former leaders no longer meet the requirements.

Some interesting notes:

  • Three of the four vendors in the leaders quadrant are new arrivals as I discussed in my History of BPM posts.
  • Fuego (now BEA) and Lombardi have moved from the visionaries quadrant to leaders, relative to the Pure-Play BPM quadrant that Gartner published in 2004. Interestingly, their relative “completeness of vision” dropped as their “ability to execute” increased.
  • Savvion and Pegasystems both retained their place in the leaders quadrant, but both also dropped in relative “completeness of vision”.
  • Two long-time players in this space, FileNet and TIBCO (Staffware) have been bumped out of the leaders quadrant: FileNet for less completeness of vision (a point that I readily agree with lately) and TIBCO for less ability to execute. As I said in the afore-mentioned BPM History post, many of the larger vendors are lagging badly in implementing new features, and look a little tired these days in comparison to the shiny bright newcomers.

Tons of good detailed information in the report, worth reading.

Bluespring does it in style

This is the foie gras of eating your own dogfood: I registered online for a product demo webinar with Bluespring today, and here’s what I saw after I filled in the form:

After a few minutes, I clicked the refresh button; the process status changed to “Temporarily Delayed” and the upper part of the process map changed:

The URL included the process ID so that I could bookmark the page and can go back at any time and see where my process is, in real time; the registration confirmation email also contained the URL back to my process plus a vCalendar file to add the webinar to my calendar. It would be even more cool if they customized the vCalendar file to include the URL of my registration process, so that I could toss the registration email after the item is on my calendar without having to add the URL to the calendar entry myself, but that’s a minor quibble.

All the BPM vendors say that they can do processes that cross the firewall and keep the external participants informed, but how many of them actually do it on their public website?

SOA anti-patterns

This is brilliant: Steve Jones on SOA anti-patterns. I was going to just do my usual del.icio.us link/auto-post, but it’s inspired me to an entire post.

A few months back, I wrote an article for AIIM E-DOC Magazine on BPM Implementation Pitfalls that described my three favourite ways to screw up a BPM project: over-customization, allowing the business to design the solution, and applying the wrong BPM tool. Jones’ article on SOA anti-patterns is more formal treatment along the same lines that addresses the following burning issue:

A lot of emphasis has been placed on implementing Service Oriented Software according to best practices and principles. But how about the worst practices?

He rigourously lays out several SOA anti-patterns that had me laughing out loud, including “The Shiny Nickel” (used to incorporate the latest technology buzz within your SOA for the sake of telling people about it) and “IT2B” (creating “business” services based on the belief that IT understands the business results in services that meet neither IT nor business goals).

Savvion’s ProcessXChange

I had a chance late last week to talk to Shawn Price (CEO) and Pat Morrissey (SVP Marketing) of Savvion about the news that they’re releasing this week. It’s always flattering to hear the CEO of a BPM vendor start a sentence with “Having read your blog…”, and there’s some interesting things that they’re announcing that are aligned with what I write about, including their “Show us your models” contest announced shortly after I wrote “Show me your process models“. Their call to see your process models is their new ProcessXChange, a forum to share process models, discuss best practices and other topics related to process improvement: more ambitious than what I was suggesting, which was just a library of process models, but at the same time, more restrictive since it is limited to process models developed in the Savvion Process Modeler. I applaud their efforts to start a collaborative community around process improvement, but a vendor-specific walled garden isn’t going to cut it in the long run.

Savvion is also launching a new version of their BusinessManager product this week that attempts to increase the range of BPM participants within an organization in an effort to speed the deployment of process automation: Shawn’s comment was that an organization must deploy its first application within 90 days in order to be successful at BPM, and allow for ongoing changes to processes two more times every 90 days. I found that comment tremendously interesting, considering that many of my more conservative customers spend three or four times as long to deploy their first application, and end up being not all that succesful because the business has changed during that time and there’s been too much over-customization to make the solution agile enough to adapt. I always push for a simpler application deployed sooner, but many customers are sold (usually by a large SI) on the notion of an all-singing, all-dancing “solution” that takes a year to develop and deploy, and ends up solving nothing, in the end.

A cornerstone of Savvion’s plan to push BPM out into the organization is their free, downloadable Process Modeler, on the premise that if everyone has a process modeling tool on their desktop, they’re more likely to participate in the process improvement efforts. They’ve also added simulation capabilities to allow an application to be previewed before deployment and improved their BAM capabilities. I’ve never done an in-depth on their product so I’m not in a position to say how much of an improvement that these things are over previous versions.

One recommendation that I made to them, which I’ve made to other vendors as well, is the addition of a zero-footprint AJAX-based process modeler, if you’re really serious about having this used throughout an organization. Many companies lock down the user desktops so that software can’t be installed, and applications requiring installation may take weeks of testing by a central IT group before they are approved for use on a desktop. Move this completely to the web with no download, and the usage rate will shoot up. One thing that I do like about their modeler is that it models in BPMN directly, whereas many other vendors are relying on third-party modeling products such as the Zynium add-on to Visio that exports to XPDL, then imports into their process modeler.

One last thing that we discussed is the role of BPM as an enabler for BPO by allowing for collaboration between an organization and their outsourcer: if the “home office” can model their processes and have those process be implemented elsewhere without re-translation of the models between tools, then use the same set of tools to monitor processes or collaborate on changes to the processes, business process outsourcing would get a lot less painful. Also, the addition of automation to the outsourced processes is becoming a necessity in places such as India where the wages are creeping up and the all-manual methods are becoming less cost effective. Savvion is busy making deals with a number of Indian BPO firms with exactly these ends in mind.

A Short History of BPM, Part 8

Continued from Part 7.

Part 8 (the last): The Current State of BPM. Every analyst, vendor and customer defines BPM differently, because the current definition of BPM is very broad, and there are many vendors jostling for position within it. EAI/ESB-type vendors call their products BPM, but the products may contain only rudimentary human-facing functionality. Workflow-type vendors, also labelling themselves as BPM, lack the necessary infrastructure for integration, and often handle automated steps poorly. Some pure integration products call themselves workflow, just to confuse things further. There’s a lot of complementary products, such as process analytics and simulation, and business rules engines: BPM vendors will either tell you that a particular capability must be part of the base BPM product (if their product has it), or should never be part of the base BPM product (if their product doesn’t have it). And now there’s the whole SOA wild card thrown into the mix.

BPM is definitely a case where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. It’s not just workflow plus EAI plus B2Bi plus business rules, plus plus plus: it’s the near-seamless integration of all of these tools into a single suite that provides an organization with the ability to do things that they could never do before. That doesn’t mean that all the tools have to be from the same vendor, but it’s essential to deliver all of the BPM functionality in a single environment of closed-loop process improvement.

Smith and Fingar’s book Business Process Management, The Third Wave describes this “third wave” as providing the ability to create a single definition of a business process from which different views of that process can be rendered and new information systems can be built. This allows different people with different skills — business manager, business analyst, regular old user, programmer — to view and manipulate the same process in a representation suitable for them and derived from the same source. They make a great analogy with HTML, where a business user may use a high-level tool like FrontPage to view and edit HTML, whereas a developer may edit the HTML code directly, but they’re still working from the same source. Round-tripping between a business analyst’s modelling tool and a developer runtime environment is one way to do this, although it violates the “same source” in the purest sense, but we definitely have to get rid of the strictly one-way paths from business analysis to implementation that exist now in many organizations.

Furthermore, Smith and Fingar point out that in the world of BPM, the ability to change is far more prized than the ability to create in the first place, and that BPM has the potential to actually remove application development from the cycle — the “zero code” Holy Grail that gets a lot of press these days. They make an analogy with VisiCalc, which took customized data analysis out of the hands of the IT department and put it in the hands of the business users, thereby taking software development off the critical path for achieving results.

Getting back to the point of this post, what is the current state of BPM?

First of all, we have several companies from the pure-play BPM/BPM suites market: they provide excellent human-facing BPM and at least adequate integration capabilities, with some providing outstanding integration. At the Gartner BPM summit earlier this year, they listed three “major players” in this category who had revenues upwards of $100M — FileNet, Pegasystems and Global 360 — and five “up and comers” with revenues above $30M — Appian, Lombardi, Savvion, Metastorm and Ultimus — while ignoring anything smaller than that. All eight of these vendors hit into the right zones in the Gartner and Forrester charts, which means that they either have the necessary functionality or are partnered with someone to provide it.

Second, we have a couple of integration-focussed BPM vendors who have purchased pure-play BPM vendors to create the complete range of functionality. The two highest-profile examples are the TIBCO acquisition of Staffware in 2004, and the BEA acquisition of Fuego earlier this year. In both cases, there seems to be a reasonable fit, but my concern is that the human-facing BPM side is going to become weaker since the main focus of these companies is on integration.

Third, we have the large software companies that have developed (or acquired) a BPM product: IBM, Microsoft and Fujitsu all spring to mind. In many cases, such as IBM and Microsoft, their BPM products are primiarly integration-focussed without a lot of human-facing support, and likely started as a “would you like fries with that” sort of offering for customers who were already committed to their architecture. IBM’s MQ Series messaging is probably still the most commonly used piece of integration middleware in financial services, although I think that they call it (and everything else) “WebSphere” these days, and IBM rightly has it as a cornerstone of their BPM strategy. Fujitsu is the odd one out here, with what appears to be a fully-functional BPMS; unfortunately, they’ve been marketing it in stealth mode and most people are completely unaware of it: as I said in one of my posts about the Gartner BPM summit, “who knew that Fujitsu did BPM?”

We’ll continue to see most of the business functionality envelope being pushed by the vendors in the first category as they seek better ways to integrate business rules, analytics, performance management and other capabilities into BPM; in fact, the most innovation seems to be coming from the smaller vendors in this category because of the lack of baggage that I discussed in part 7.

Because of the current focus on process improvement in all organizations, I don’t think that there’s any great risk of any of the vendors that I’ve listed here going out of the BPM business any time soon. However, the integration vendors will acquire some of the smaller BPM suite vendors to round out their portfolios, and the large software companies will acquire some of everything, in a continuing Darwinian cycle.

Before you vendors start adding self-promoting comments to this post, keep in mind that this is not intended to be a comprehensive list or review of BPMS vendors, and I know that you’re all very special in your own way. 🙂

Show me your process models!

I had a couple of emails recently from people looking for public-domain process models, related but slightly different. The first was looking for generic process models for those processes that are the same in most businesses:

I am trying to convince [a small healthcare company] that their business is no different than many other service businesses providing service to customers. I am having a very hard time finding a reference model for just a generic enterprise, one that would include all of the standard functions such as Finance, Strategy and Planning.

The second was looking for some real-world examples of BPMN:

I’m looking for a good source for real examples of BPDs that are compliant with the BPMN spec. I’ve spent ~3 hours surfing for information on BPMN when I came across your blog and decided you might know what you’re talking about. I’ll admit to being uncompromising when it comes to adherence to the BPMN spec, but I don’t have a lot of support. So far, we’ve generated a whole bunch of examples of how not to draw models, do you know of any good sources?

Aside from not being sure whether to be flattered or not over the comment that I might know what I’m talking about, it’s really the same issue: the need for publicly available templates or samples of business processes. Think of it as design patterns for business processes, something that’s far more useful than the standard “employee expense approval” flow that seems to ship with every process modelling tool. The biggest problem, of course, is that many companies consider this to be part of their intellectual property, even if the particular process is not part of their competitive differentiation, and don’t allow those process models to be shared. What’s funny is that every customer I work with thinks that their processes are completely unique, but it usually boils down to something very similar to what I’ve seen at other customers in the same industry, or even across industries. I think that the attitude that “our business is unique” might be preventing more standardized modelling of business processes.

Anyone out there know of any libraries of real business process models available online, whether generic or industry-specific? Any that use BPMN? Does anyone have process models that they’d like to contribute to an “open source” library? Tim Vojta, the author of the first email above, has kicked things off by creating a Business Process Reference Model after our discussions and publishing it under a Creative Commons licence (yeah!), although it covers only a fairly high-level functional view of the enterprise.

Flock first look

I downloaded Flock last night, about 12 minutes after the public beta was released, and I’ve been playing with it on and off since then. Some good stuff, some things that seem good but aren’t so useful for me. Flock is based on the same code base as Firefox, so there’s lots of similarities and it can even import everything from Firefox in its initial setup, including saved web form data.

Some unique Flock features and how well they work for me:

  • Flickr or Photobucket integration right along the top edge, allowing photos to be dragged onto that area to upload it to the photo service. I’m not using Flickr much; I still create photo galleries using JAlbum and publish them for various websites, so this feature isn’t as useful for me as it would be for a dedicated Flickr fan. I’m sure that will change as soon as I buy a pocket-sized digital camera and start snapping photos every day.
  • RSS feed functionality built in. This is a non-starter for me, since I need a subset of my RSS subscriptions to drive my blog roll directly, which is what Bloglines does for me.
  • Integration from the Favorites directly to del.icio.us. This is another non-starter for me, since it doesn’t put me far enough into the del.icio.us environment to show me my del.icio.us tags, so I end up accidentally creating a bunch of new tags and have to clean them up later. However, the “add to del.icio.us” bookmarklet that I had in Firefox works just fine.
  • Built-in blog posting tool. I’m using this now, and have even figured out how to post to both Movable Type (for this blog) and Blogger (for my wine club blog) although errors are occuring on the MT posting that I haven’t resolved yet. It keeps the blog post window on top of all other Flock windows, which is a bit inconvenient since I often flip back and forth to the browser window during blogging to look things up. There’s no obvious hot key to pop up the links window, which is annoying. It generates some extra tags in the source, and I’m a sucker for clean source. Otherwise, I like it.

Overall, the experience is quite a bit like Firefox, only slower since I suspect that there’s some amount of test/debug code in here still. Given that the only extra that I might use is the offline blogging tool, there may not be enough to keep me here if it proves annoyingly slower than Firefox.