Column 2

BPM tough love

This story makes me want to drive out to Oakville (which is just east of Toronto) and buy Neil Montgomery a beer. In summary, Davis Controls, a 50-person manufacturing firm in Oakville headed by Montgomery, put in a BPMS from Exact back in 2001 to handle business processes ranging from sales orders to vacation requests. They now have 25% higher revenues with the same number of staff, and have reduced administrative headcount to 1/3 of its pre-BPM number.

That success was not without some rocks along the road. As with every BPMS installation that I’ve ever seen, there was some amount of push-back from the employees, who continued to circumvent the BPMS using email. Montgomery did everything possible to convince the team to use the system, to the point of having to mandate its use, but a half dozen empl0yees still used email instead. So he cut off their email accounts, which is pretty much the most drastic thing that I’ve heard of anyone doing to get people to use BPM, until I read on that two of the employees, including the CTO, still resisted (are they stupid, or what?), and he gave them the boot.

This man deserves a medal, although I’m sure that some of the people who work for him, or used to work for him, might disagree. BPM is one of those technologies that fundamentally changes the way that people do a lot of everyday tasks, and those people can put up a surprising amount of resistance to change, even though they accept logically that the new technology and methods make them more productive. As John Maynard Keynes said, the greatest difficulty lies not in persuading people to accept new ideas, but in persuading them to abandon old ones.

SaaS: Mean time to fix security holes

I hadn’t looked at the news feed from Information Week for a few days, so when I checked it today there was a really interesting story told by way of headlines:

Yahoo Mail Worm Harvesting Addresses: The “Yamanner” worm exploits a JavaScript vulnerability in Yahoo’s Web mail client. Users should watch out for messages with a “From” address of [email protected] and the subject line, “New Graphic Site.” Posted on: Mon, Jun 12 2006 11:41 AM

Yahoo Quashes Mail Bug: Yahoo says it has patched a bug that was letting attackers hijack systems through a flaw in the portal’s free Web-based e-mail service. Posted on: Tue, Jun 13 2006 1:23 PM

Yahoo Mail Worm May Be First Of Many As Ajax Proliferates: The Yamanner worm that hit Yahoo Mail shows how increasingly popular techniques like Ajax and Javascript that make Web-based software perform well also could make it vulnerable. Posted on: Tue, Jun 13 2006 4:00 PM

As alarming as this might sound, think about the timeline for a minute. Late Monday morning, the problem hits the news. Early Tuesday afternoon, the security hole is fixed; because there’s no software installed on any desktops, the fix is effectively distributed everywhere instantaneously. By late Tuesday afternoon, they’re already into the post-game analysis since there’s nothing else to talk about.

Quite different from applications that run on your desktop or your servers: this is the reality of web-based SaaS.

A Short History of BPM, Part 7

Continued from Part 6.

Part 7: The New Arrivals. In the years following the dot-com bust in 2000, a number of new BPM vendors came into being, mostly in the coveted pure-play space. (Funnily enough, “pure-play BPM” is now not the desirable place to be, having been replaced by the “BPM suites” space that, according to some large analysts’ research, seems to have nearly identical functionality to pure-play BPM.) In many cases, these were started by those who were bounced out of their previous positions during the bursting of the bubble, so there was a lot of experience being put to the task of starting this new generation of BPM vendors.

The big advantage that a new vendor has in any industry is the lack of baggage, and nowhere was this truer than in BPM: they could start designing the next generation of BPM without having to reuse their existing technology or support their installed base, because they had neither. The BPM market needed to be reinvented, and these upstart young companies were the only ones who could shake things up enough to do it. I’m not going to credit the new arrivals with all the innovation in BPM during that time, but they certainly lit a fire under the old guard. Suddenly, we had BPM calling web services, or being called as a web service, in order to speed integration (and eventually become part of the SOA ecosystem). We had BAM, or at least some half-decent process monitoring and analytics for a change. We had simulation and optimization. We had integration with third-party modelling tools. We had business rule integration.

The startup environment during that time wasn’t the best — not a lot of venture funding around for technology, the perception that this was just a rehashing of the well-established workflow market — but a few of the vendors have become successful and many others are still straggling in their wake.

Meanwhile, the established BPM vendors had a big challenge on their hands: although few of the upstarts were challenging them directly for sales, the new guys were changing the perception of what the BPM market should be, forcing the big guys to follow suit as Gartner and the other large analysts published lists of must-have features that included this new functionality. Many of the larger vendors lagged badly in implementing new features, and look a little tired these days in comparison to the shiny bright newcomers. In some very conservative industries, such as financial services and insurance where most of my clients are, this hasn’t been a problem because they’d rather pick a vendor with a longer track record and the proven ability to process hundreds of thousands of items per day. However, this is where many of the dinosaur-like CIOs are fighting the losing battle against the push for emerging technology, and eventually the new kids will prove themselves scalable and stable enough for even the most conservative industries.

Even if none of the post-2000 vendors survive the upcoming bout of acquisitions, they have to be credited with not just injecting new life into BPM, but helping to reinvent it.

Next: The Current State

The Eight — er, Four — Misperceptions of Outsourcing

I was catching up on some older Gartner podcasts recently — they’re not really time-sensitive, so fine to listen to them weeks or months later, and some of them do contain some good tidbits of information. There was one good one called The Eight Misperceptions of Outsourcing: Part I, in which Linda Cohen starts by listing these eight misperceptions:

the myth of sourcing independence;
the myth of service autonomy (this was particularly interesting since it touched on the subject of the interdependence of services due to SOA and BPM);
the myth of economies of scale;
the myth of service management as self-management;
the myth of the enemy;
the myth of procurement;
the myth of steady state; and
the myth of sourcing competency.

She then went on to discuss the first four in detail, whetting my appetite for Part II, which was to contain the second four. I checked my iPod: not there. I checked the iTunes directory: ditto. I checked the Gartner podcast page: Part II just doesn’t exist. Okay, it’s only been four months since Part I, maybe I’m being a bit impatient, but bring on the second four myths, already!

Of course, I’m not one to be throwing stones here: I posted the first six episodes of my Short History of BPM over a month ago, and haven’t completed the last two. Now that JC has caught up with translating them to French on his blog, however, I need to get moving on this.

Start page heaven

For years, I’ve been using My Yahoo! as my start page. It has lots of great modules available, I use a free Yahoo! account as my “web form” address (instead of Hotmail), and I use Yahoo! groups, all of which has made it pretty functional. When they added the ability to add any RSS feed instead of just their own modules, I was convinced that I’d never switch.

Today, I tried out Netvibes, and I’ve already switched my start page over. There’s a few things that I’m missing (such as the movie times for my local theatre), but there other things that I find to be useful enough to make the switch.

First of all, a to do list. That sounds like a small thing, and there are a ton of other apps that will do that for me, but to have it integrated into my start page so that it stares me in the face every time I open my browser is a big help.
Secondly, and more significant, is access into my POP mail account so that the last 5 (number configurable) email subject lines are displayed. It doesn’t provide click-through access to my email, but gives me a heads-up about anything that might need my attention. Since I have a bookmarks module containing a link to my webmail immediately below that, I effectively have one-click access to my email anyway, which is one click less than it takes to access it via MyYahoo. I spend almost my entire day with multiple tabs open in Firefox, but without Outlook open because it can be a real resource hog, so I sometimes just handle email directly through the webmail client. The really ironic part is that Yahoo! hosts my email (my real paid account as well as my free one), yet I can’t do this with MyYahoo: it will only provide a count of the number of messages in my free Yahoo! account on the MyYahoo page, and nothing related to my real account.
Third is the interface: sleek, easy to use, and advertising-free (for now). I suppose that they’ll have to monetize this through advertising at some point, but right now it’s beautifully unadorned.
Last, I just figured out how to add an iCal feed from my upcoming.org calendar – cool! And there are a ton of independently-created add-ins, such as the Google maps module which provides the functionality that is missing natively.

Just to summarize, here’s what I have on my NetVibes start page:

Left column: Upcoming.org (viewable as agenda/week/month); BBC news headlines; CBC news headlines
Centre column: POP mail (last 6 email senders/subjects); bookmarks (imported from my Firefox bookmarks, organized in folders)
Right column: To do list (with “done” checkboxes); Toronto weather; Google map search form; Mountain View weather (I’m headed there soon for Mashup Camp; also shows the current date/time there)

Weekend of not blogging

Heads down on a couple of client projects, plus a home project to completely disassemble a Compaq Armada M700 in order to resolder the power connector, which is conveniently located on the underside of the motherboard where you can’t get at it without at least 45 minutes of disassembly. This is just one of the reasons that I keep an electrical engineer around the house — my degree in systems design engineering qualifies me to correctly identify a soldering gun, but not actually do anything with it. However, since I’m the software guru of the household, I’ll be installing SQL Server later this week as payback.

I also went out yesterday for my first sail of the season with my friend Ingrid, who owns a 25′ C&C and is completely tolerant of my inability to learn much about sailing except how not to fall off the boat. She started a blog several months ago on my urging, and is now at the “so what now?” stage of business blogging. We talked about a number of issues with regards to getting customers — especially somewhat technology-challenged ones — to read her blog, and it’s given me some great ideas for topics for BlogHerNorth when we get it kicked off.

Back to work…

Appian/Zynium webinar

If you haven’t had the chance to see Zynium’s Byzio product in action yet, Appian is hosting a webinar on June 21st that will show off how Byzio works with their BPMS. As I discussed previously, Byzio lets you draw your process map in Visio, then export it to XPDL as a standard BPMN map for importing into a BPMS for execution. I expect that a lot of the webinar will not be specific to Appian, so if you want to get a look at Byzio this should be a good forum.

CIO as dinosaur

From Baseline/CIO Insight, a report on emerging technologies; specifically, a survey of CIOs of what technologies that they’re actually using. Some results that I find to show the incredible short-sightedness of many corporate CIOs is the percentage who find the following technologies “of no interest/not on the radar”:

SaaS, 32%. How could this number of CIOs possibly have no interest in SaaS? Only one answer comes to mind: empire building.
SOA, 30%. The percentage of CIOs who prefer to remain mired in legacy linguine.
AJAX, 46% and RSS, 38%. How to they plan to deliver information, both interactively and via publication, in the future? This isn’t just an externally-facing issue; in large organizations, these technologies are equally important for serving it up to internal users.
Social networking, including tagging, 51%. Although other things were mentioned in this category, I see tagging as the key contributor to a corporate environment here. How long will it be before all ECM systems have tagging as a standard feature? When will CIOs stop characterizing this as “allowing the lunatics to run the asylum” and just put the right categorization tools in the hands of their users?
Wikis, 46%. Okay, I get why a lot of companies are still uncomfortable with blogs. But wikis for collaboration make a lot more sense than clogging up everyone’s email with multiple out-of-date copies of a Word file that everyone is trying to update at the same time. It’s only a matter of time before Microsoft adds wiki capabilities to SharePoint (if they haven’t already), at which time everyone will be using wikis below the CIO’s radar. David Berlind posted yesterday about how many IT leaders have never even heard of wikis, which is likely where the “not on the radar” is really coming from.

There are a lot of other equally shocking stats about just how far behind corporate CIOs are in their thinking. Many of my clients are large financial institutions, so I suppose that I shouldn’t be that shocked: if I polled them directly about these same issues, I’d likely get similar results. Unfortunately, that doesn’t give me much hope that these organizations are going to become a lot more efficient or offer better services to their customers any time soon.

On the BPM front, only 21% show as “deployed”, 19% “testing/piloting”, 27% “evaluating/tracking” and 32% “no interest/not on the radar”.

Update: I just saw this post on why AJAX and RSS matter for in-house user interfaces, particularly for BPM.

Update: Robert Scoble reports that wikis will, indeed, be in Sharepoint 2007. The meteor has landed, you guys can all just head for the tar pits.

Webinar on supply-chain integration

Although supply-chain integration is definitely not my key area of expertise, I’ve been asked to moderate an ebizQ webinar this Thursday featuring Extol. I’ll do the introduction up front, then ask the questions that the audience sends in at the end. You’ll be able to watch a replay of the webinar shortly after it finishes using the same link.