Progress Revolution Keynotes: Goodson and more @DrJohnBates

The second morning keynote was by John Goodson, SVP of products, digging a bit more deeply into the technology and products behind responsive business management (Control Tower, Savvion, Apama, Actional, Visual Analytics) and responsive business integration (Actional, DataXtend, DataDirect, Sonic). This is a formidable suite of products, and there are 20 more in their portfolio that he didn’t even cover; some degree of integration between these is really required to make this a bit less unwieldy.

He showed a (canned) demo of Progress RPM and Control Tower, including event and process monitoring as well as process modeling directly in the same environment. He stressed that Control Tower is not just about visibility, it’s about being able to make changes in real time.

photoHe quoted Mike Gualtieri of Forrester, who said “Java is a dead-end for enterprise application development” earlier this year; Goodson pointed out that Java coding is not inherently agile enough for a truly responsive business as he announced OpenEdge 11: fully integrated with BPM, multi-tenanted and deployable in the cloud, with support for iPad and Silverlight. It appears that OpenEdge is now positioned as part of RPM, with OpenEdge BPM being positioned as “the world’s first business process-enabled application development platform”. Furthermore, it’s deployable in the cloud on their Arcade platform.

John Bates returned to the stage – complete in a British red coat and tricorner hat last seen in Boston around 1776 – to discuss the industry solution accelerators available for RPM: capital markets, telecom and more. These accelerators allow developers to quickly assemble applications that combine RPM capabilities and their own industry knowledge. Interestingly, Savvion refocused on solution accelerators a year or more before their acquisition by Progress, and these are now considered by the analysts to be a requires feature in a BPMS.

He finished with a recorded demo of a detecting wash trades in the market, based on the capital markets solution accelerator, including discovering alerts, analyzing the related data, and setting up custom event correlation on the fly.

Progress Revolution Kicks Off: @RReidy and @DrJohnBates Keynotes

I arrived in Boston yesterday for Progress Software’s user conference, Revolution, and to deliver an Introduction to BPM workshop yesterday afternoon. With that out of the way, I can focus on the other speakers here, and what’s happening with Progress these days.

The keynotes opened with Rick Reidy, the CEO, with a bit of history of Progress as a supporter of business-led software development, and their current leading position in helping companies to become more operationally responsive to external events. This seems a bit strange, given that it was announced six weeks ago that Reidy will be leaving as soon as a successor is found – what was the board thinking, allowing this to happen just prior to the user conference without a replacement in place?

Regardless of this elephant in the room, he spoke well about creating the responsive business as a revolution in both technology and business, and what Progress is doing to lead that with new versions of OpenEdge and RPM, the latter of which includes the Progress Control Tower, an interactive cockpit. In spite of Progress’ long history with their OpenEdge software development environment, it’s clear that much of their future success is based on the Apama CEP and Savvion BPM acquisitions, and the integration of these product functionalities into a comprehensive solution.

Next up was John Bates, CTO, talking about how business success is defined by how you respond to the continuous disruption that occurs in everyday business life. Looking just at stock trading – a favorite topic for Bates, who has done a lot of work in this area – consider flash crashes and events such as the recent UBS $2B loss due to a single rogue trader; but he also touched on the business responses to natural disasters such as the Japan earthquake earlier this year, where entire supply chains were reconfigured. On a smaller scale, consider business responses to customer events such as missed SLAs, complaints and even Twitter messages about your company or products. It’s not just disaster management/avoidance: there are also fleeting opportunities for revenue such as mobile promotions, web upsells, and algorithmic trading, which can’t rely on a person noticing that something needs to be done, but must be automated based on external events.

Bates pointed out that companies that use classic business intelligence are driving in the rear view mirror: using past data to try to predict the future. Instead, you need to become operationally responsive:

  • Continuously mitigating risk
  • Optimizing operations dynamically
  • Capitalizing on real-time revenue opportunities

Progress has developed a responsive business prescription, which is a set of methods and tools for ensuring operational responsiveness. That starts with continuous business visibility, so that you can figure out how your business is doing in real time. That allows the next step, which is to sense and respond to opportunities and threats. Finally, you can improve your business processes based on this real-time sense and respond capability. See—Respond—Improve.

In order to do this, Progress provides an integrated suite of products that they call Responsive Process Management, which includes BPMS, CEP, business transaction management (BTM) and business analytics. The analysts are jumping on board: Gartner refers to this as intelligent business operations; IDC refers to it as business navigation systems.

BPM and CEP together are key to this: the BPMS allows for agile modeling and deployment of processes, while CEP correlates external events to determine what should impact the processes on the fly. He gave an example using the “tarmac rule” – the rule in the US that results in huge fines for airlines who load up a plane and leave the passengers sitting for more than 3 hours – where the combination of weather events, flight operations events, maintenance events and crew events can be used to avoid violating the tarmac rule by redeploying crew and aircraft as required, or avoid boarding a plane where it’s already known that the rule would be violated.

In order to become more responsive, business analytics have to combine real time and historical data, without necessarily replacing the core legacy systems that run the business. I touched on this yesterday during my workshop, in response to questions about the value of BPM when you have a perfectly good monolithic legacy application: basically, you want to gain visibility into (and potentially control) those legacy applications. This is where business transaction management comes into play, allowing you to monitor the events and state changes within the legacy applications, track and orchestrate the entire flow in  BPM – for example, linking together CRM, ERP and logistics systems, plus adding new functionality in an end-to-end process flow – then use Control Tower to view and control the entire process, including the underlying legacy applications.

Bates is a great speaker (and a really smart guy), so it’s always a pleasure to see him present: equally informative and entertaining.

Introduction to BPM Workshop at Progress Revolution

I gave a workshop on Introduction to BPM at the pre-conference day yesterday for Progress Software’s user conference, Revolution:

The room was full, well over 120 people, and I’ve had a lot of good feedback from the session. As always, I could have talked all day about this stuff, but had to limit myself to about 2.5 hours, with another hour hanging around talking to attendees afterwards. It was great to get my presentation out of the way early in the conference; now I can relax and focus on (and blog about) other people’s presentations.

The Changing Nature of Work

I’ve been completely remiss with my blogging this week at the academic/research conference on BPM this week in Clermont-Ferrand, France. This isn’t for lack of good material from the workshops and presentations, but I’ve been a bit busy preparing for the keynote that I gave this morning:

The Changing Nature of Work

I really enjoyed the discussion afterwards, both in the Q&A and at the break later. There is quite a bit of research already happening in the areas that I list as “unsolved problems” (by which I mean, generally unsolved in commercial products), and I gained some good insights on removing the boundary between what we now thing of as structured and unstructured processes.

There is a bit of Twitter action going on at the conference, using both the hashtags #BPM2011 and #BPM11, with Michael zur Muehlen leading the pack on live-tweeting my presentation.

2011 BPM Conference Season, Part 2

The fall conference season is about to kick off. Although I’ve turned down a few invitations because of the heavy client travel schedule (where I’m actually implementing the stuff I talk about, but don’t talk about directly, hence the lack of blogging lately), you can catch me at a few places this fall:

bpmlogoBPM 2011, the 9th annual academic research conference on BPM in Clermont-Ferrand. where I will be keynoting the industry track. I have attended this conference for the past few years and am hugely honored to be asked to keynote. I love this conference because it gives me a peek into the academic research going on in BPM – although I barely remember what an eigenvector is, I can always see some good ideas emerging here that will undoubtedly become some software vendor’s killer feature in a few years. This conference was in the US last year for the first time (it is usually in Europe, where a great deal of the research goes on) and I encouraged a lot of US BPM vendors to attend; hopefully, they will have seen the value in the conference and will get themselves on an international flight this time.

progresstriumph_logoProgress Software’s Revolution user conference in Boston, where I will be delivering an Introduction to BPM workshop. As Progress continues to integrate the Savvion acquisition, they are dedicated to educating their user community and channel partners on BPM, and this workshop forms part of those efforts.

bbc_125_isfBuilding Business Capability (formerly Business Rules Forum and Business Process Forum) in Fort Lauderdale, where I am reprising an updated version of my Aligning BPM and Enterprise Architecture tutorial that I gave at the IRM BPM conference in London in June. I’m also sitting on and/or moderating three panels: one on the Process Knowledge Initiative, one on Business  Architecture versus Technical Architecture, and a BPM vendor panel.

I may be attending a few other conferences, but with my Air Canada gold status already in the bag for next year, there’s no pressure. 🙂

Salesforce’s Peter Coffee On The Cloud

I just found my notes from a Salesforce.com lunch event that I went to in Toronto back in April, where Peter Coffee spoke enthusiastically while we ate three lovingly-prepared courses at Bymark, and was going to just pitch them out but found that there was actually quite a bit of good material in there. Not sure how I managed to write so much while still eating everything in front of me.

This came just a few days after the SF.com acquisition of Radian6, a move that increased the Canadian staff to 600. SF has about 1,500 customers in Canada, a few of whom where in the room that day. Their big push with these and all their customers is on strategic IT in the cloud, rather than just cost savings. One of the ways that they’re doing this is by incorporating process throughout the platform, allowing it to become a global user portal rather than just a collection of silos of information.

Coffee discussed a range of cloud platform types:

  • Infrastructure as a service (IAAS) provides virtualization, but persists the old IT and application development models, combining the weaknesses of all of them. Although you’ve outsourced your hardware, you’re still stuck maintaining and upgrading operating systems and applications.
  • Basic cloud application development, such as Google apps and their add-ons.
  • SF.com, which provides a full application development environment including UI and application support.

The old model of customization, that most of us are familiar with in the IT world, has led to about 1/3 of all enterprise software running on the current version, and the rest stuck with a previous version, unable to do the upgrade because the customization has locked it in to a specific version. This is the primary reason that I am so anti-customization: you get stuck on that old version, and the cost of upgrading is not just the cost of upgrading the base software, but of regression testing (and, in the worst case, redeveloping) all the customization that was done on top of the old version. Any wonder that software maintenance ends up costing 10x the original purchase cost?

The SF.com model, however, is an untouchable core code base sitting on managed infrastructure (in fact, 23 physical instances with about 2,000 Dell servers), and the customization layer is just an abstraction of the database, business logic and UI so that it is actually metadata but appears to be a physical database and code. In other words, when you develop custom apps on the SF.com platform, you’re really just creating metadata that is fairly loosely coupled with the underlying platform, and resistant to changes therein. When security or any other function on the core SF.com platform is upgraded, it happens for all customers; virtualization or infrastructure-as-a-service doesn’t have that, but requires independent upgrades for each instance.

Creating an SF.com app doesn’t restrict you to just your app or that platform, however: although SF.com is partitioned by customer, it allows linkages between partners through remapping of business objects, leveraging data and app sharing. Furthermore, you can integrate with other cloud platforms such as Google, Amazon or Facebook, and with on-premise systems using Cast Iron, Boomi and Informatica. A shared infrastructure, however, doesn’t compromise security: the ownership metadata is stored directly with the application data to ensure that direct database access by an administrator doesn’t allow complete access to the data: it’s these layers of abstraction that help make the shared infrastructure secure. Coffee did punt on a question from the (mostly Canadian financial services) audience about having Canadian financial data in the US: he suggested that it could be encrypted, possibly using an add-on such as CipherCloud. They currently have four US data centers and one in Singapore, with plans for Japan and the EU; as long as customers can select the data center country location that they wish (such as on Amazon), that will solve a lot of the problem, since the EU privacy laws are much closer to those in Canada. However, recent seizures of US-owned offshore servers brings that strategy into question, and he made some comments about fail-overs between sites that makes me think that they are not necessarily segregating data by the country specified by the customer, but rather picking the one that optimizes performance. There are other options, such as putting the data on a location-specific Amazon instance, and using SF.com for just the process parts, although that’s obviously going to be a bit more work.

Although he was focused on using SF.com for enterprises, there are stories of their platform being used for consumer-facing applications, such as Groupon using the Force.com application development platform to power the entire deals cycle on their website. There’s a lot to be said for using an application development environment like this: in addition to availability and auto-upgrading, there’s also built-in support for multiples mobile devices without changing the application, using iTunes for provisioning, and adding Chatter for collaboration to any application. Add the new Radian6 capabilities to monitor social media and drive processes based on social media interactions and mentions, and you have a pretty large baseline functionality out of the box, before you even start writing code. There are native ERP system and desktop application connectors, and a large partner network offering add-ins and entire application suites.

I haven’t spent any time doing evaluation specifically of Salesforce or the Force.com application development platform (except for a briefing that I had over a year ago on their Visual Process Manager), but I’m a big fan of building applications in the cloud for many of the reasons that Coffee discussed. Yes, we still need to work out the data privacy issues; mostly due to the potential for US government intervention, not hackers. More importantly, we need to get over the notion that everything that we do within enterprises has to reside on our own servers, and be built from the metal up with fully customized code, because that way madness lies.

Building a Business Architecture Capability and Practice Within Shell

For the first breakout of the day, I attended Dan Jeavon’s session on Shell’s business architecture practice. For such a massive company – 93,000 employees in 90 countries – this was a big undertaking, and they’ve been at this for five years.

He defines business architecture as the business strategy, governance, organization and key business process information, as well as the interaction between these concepts, which is taken directly from the TOGAF 9 definition. Basically, this involves design, must be implemented and not just conceptual, and requires flexibility based on business agility requirements. They started on their business architecture journey because of factors that affect many other companies: globalization, competition, regulatory requirements, realization of current inefficiencies, and emergence of a single governance board for the multi-national company.

Their early efforts were centered on a huge new ERP system, especially with the problems due to local variations from the global standard process models. “Process” (and ERP) became naughty words to many people, with connotations of bloated, not-quite-successful projects. Following on from some of the success points, their central business architecture initiative actually started with process modeling/design: standard processes across the different business areas with global best practices. This was used to create and roll out a standard set of financial processes, with a small core team doing the process redesign, and coordinating with IT to create a common metamodel and architectural standards. As they found out, many other parts of the company had similar process issues – HR, IT and others – so they branched out to start building a business architecture for other areas as well.

They had a number of challenges in creating a process design center of excellence:

  • Degree of experience with the tool and the methodology; initial projects weren’t sufficiently structured, reducing benefits.
  • Perceived value to the business, especially near-term versus long-term ROI.
  • Impact of new projects, and ensuring that they follow the methodology.
  • Governance and high-level sponsorship.

They also found a number of key steps to implementing their CoE and process architecture:

  • Sponsorship
  • Standard methodology, embedded within standard project delivery framework
  • Communication of success stories

Then, they migrated their process architecture initiative to a full business architecture by looking at the relationships to other elements of business architecture; this led to them do business architecture (mostly) as part of process design initiatives. Recent data quality/management initiatives have also brought a renewed focus on architecture, and Jeavons feels that although the past five years have been about process, the next several years will be more about data.

He showed a simplified version of their standard metamodel, including aspects of process hierarchy models, process flow models, strategy models and organization models. He also showed a high-level view of their enterprise process model in a value stream format, with core processes surrounded by governing and supporting processes. From there, he showed how they link the enterprise process model to their enterprise data catalogue, which links to the “city plan” of their IT architecture and portfolio investment cycle; this allows for traceability as well as transparency. They’ve also been linking processes to strategy – this is one of the key points of synergy between EA and BPM – so that business goals can be driven down into process performance measures.

The EA and process design CoE have been combined (interesting idea) into a single EA CoE, including process architects and business architects, among other architect positions; I’m not sure that you could include an entire BPM CoE within an EA CoE due to BPM’s operational implementation focus, but there are certainly a lot of overlapping activities and functions, and should have overlapping roles and resources.

He shared lots of great lessons learned, as well as some frank assessment of the problems that they ran into. I particularly found it interesting how they morphed a process design effort into an entire business architecture, based on their experience that the business really is driven by its processes.

Designing a Breakout Business Strategy

The keynote this morning was A Strategic Toolkit for Designing and Delivering A Breakout Strategy by Professor Thomas Lawton of EMYLON Business School. This was about business strategy, starting with a view of how different companies responded to the recent/ongoing recession: panic, protect, cloak or conquer, where the first three are reactive but with different results (negative, neutral, positive) and the last of which is proactive. He had examples of each; for example, how Sony used a “cloak” response to take business cutback measures that would have been difficult during good times, improving the business overall. He challenged the audience to consider which of the four responses that our organizations have adopted, and some strategies for dealing with the current economic conditions. Although it’s not easy to think about success when you’re fighting for survival, you need to be proactively preparing for the inevitable upturn so as to be able to seize the market when it starts improving. I definitely started thinking about BPM at this point; organizations that implement BPM during a down market in order to control costs often find themselves well-positioned to improve their market share during the upswing because they are more efficient and more agile to respond to customer needs.

He introduced a few different tools that form a strategy system:

  • Identify your route to breakout and market success. He showed a quadrant comparing breakout styles, “taking by storm” and “laggard to leader” (often an ailing company that is turned around), against emergent and established markets; all of these indicate significant opportunities for growth. Again, he had great examples for each of these, and discussed issues of adapting these strategies to different corporate cultures and geographic/regulatory environments. He presented a second quadrant for those organizations who are staying out in front of their market, with the breakout styles “expanding horizons” and “shifting shape”, also against emergent and established markets. For each of the squares in each of these quadrants, he has an evocative moniker, such as “boundary breakers” or “conquistadors”, to describe the companies that fit that growth strategy profile.
  • Identify your corporate vision, providing a sense of purpose, and considering the viewpoints of all stakeholders. The vision wheel is his technique for finding the corporate vision by breaking down the organization, culture, markets and relationships into their constituent parts, considering both current and future state, ending up with four worksheets across which you will see some common threads to guide the future strategy. Vision can be a bit of a fuzzy concept, but is a guiding star that is critical for direction setting and strategic coordination.
  • Align your value proposition with the needs of your customers. Aspire to create a “magnet company”, one that excites markets, attracts and retains customers, repels new entrants, and renders competitors unable to respond. This doesn’t mean you have to be the best in all aspects of what you do, but you have to be top in the features of what your customers care about, from the general areas of price, features, quality, support, availability and reputation.
  • Assemble an IT-enabled business model that is both efficient and effective; think about your business model as a vehicle for delivering your value proposition, and focus on alignment between those two. He discussed the six pillars of a business model: cost, innovation, reliability, relationships, channels and brand (which are just the other side of the six features discussed in the value proposition); some of these will emerge as your core competencies and become the source of competitive advantage.
  • Every business is both a techno and socio system: you need to consider both hard and soft aspects. He pointed out that it’s necessary to embed IT in strategy implementation, since almost all businesses these days are highly dependent on technology; technology can be used to realize an energized and productive socio-system (e.g., inspiring trust and loyalty) as well as an efficient and productive techno-system.

The breakout strategy system that he lays out has strategic leadership at the center, with products and programs, vision, value proposition, and business model surrounding it.

He finished up with the interaction between business and IT strategy:

  • Breakout strategies are enabled by IT
  • IT contributes to improve financial performance
  • IT supports strategy implementation

Unfortunately, only 19% of companies involve IT in the early strategy phase of growth initiatives; in other words, executives are not really considering how IT can help them with strategy. The impact of IT on business strategies, corporate structure and culture should be better understood. In particular, EA should be involved in strategy at this level, and BPM can be an important enabler of breakout strategies if that is understood early enough in the strategy development cycle.

Really great presentation, and I’ll definitely be tracking down some of his books for more reading on the topic.

By the way, some great tweets are starting to flow at the conference; you can find them at the hashtags #IRMBPM and #IRMEAC.

IRM BPM and EA Conferences Kickoff

Sally Bean and Roger Burlton opened the dual IRM’s colocated BPM and EA conferences in London this morning with a tag-team presentation on the synergies between EA and BPM – fitting nicely with 3-hour workshop that I gave yesterday on BPM in an EA context.

EA provides a framework to structure for transiting from strategy to implementation. BPM – from architecture through implementation – is a process-centric slice that intersects EA at points, but also includes process-specific operational activities. They present EA and BPM as collaborative, synergistic disciplines:

  • Common, explicit view of business drivers and business strategy
  • Shared understanding of business design
  • Disciplined approach to change prioritization and road maps
  • Coherent view of the enterprise through shared models
  • Monitoring fit between current performance and business environment

They briefly introduced John Zachman to the stage, but wouldn’t actually let him speak more than a minute, because we’d never get to the keynote Winking smile. I had the pleasure of having a conversation with John yesterday evening while having a drink with Roger and a few others (which was a bit weird because I had just been talking about his framework in my workshop, and this blog is named after the process column therein); during that time, I helped him get his iPhone onto the hotel wifi, which probably says something about the differences between EA and BPM…

BPM Success at BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee

Rodney Woods of Tennessee BCBS started out talking about their 18-month history with Pegasystems SmartBPM by stating that you would have to pry Pega out of his cold, dead hands to get it away from him.

His laws of BPM success:

  1. The most important activity in business is improvement: improvement ensures competitiveness; your job is to drive improvement; if you improve the right things, in the right sequence, your business will take care of itself.
  2. Setbacks are not failures; failure is staying the same. Success requires setbacks; winning daily firefights is not progress.

There are four areas of improvement to consider: profit, product, process and people. His key is to make these sorts of innovation second nature, so that they occur routinely within your organization.

He had some good points about identifying the right BPM project, including:

  • Make sure that it’s related to a key strategic business issue: e.g., not just process efficiency, but tied to more effective customer service
  • Get customer and stakeholder input on the issue
  • State the problem as threat or need, not a solution
  • Define the process owner and key stakeholders
  • Focus on the process that is most critical and/or contributes the most

Most of his comments were about organizational issues, not technical issues: strategy, reporting relationships, continuous improvement, and executive support. Many of these were not specific to BPM projects, but any potentially transformational business-technology project. In fact, except for his initial comment, he didn’t really talk about their Pega solution at all; instead, lots of great advice regardless of your technology selection.

That’s it for me at the Gartner BPM summit 2011 in Baltimore; there’s vendor hospitality suites tonight and a half-day of sessions tomorrow, but I’m headed home after a week on the road.