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BPM and Social Software Workshop

I attended the workshop on BPM and social software yesterday, but somehow didn’t get it together to actually blog about it. The workshop chairs, Selmin Nurcan and Rainer Schmidt, organized a good program of presentations covering a wide variety of topics in social software and BPM:

Combining Social Software and BPM, by Rainer Schmidt
Implicit Social Production, by Ben Jennings
Evolutive Vocabulary for Collaborative BPM Discussions, by David Martinho
Declarative Configurable Process Specifications for Adaptive Case Management, by Selmin Nurcan
Emergent Case Management for Ad-hoc Processes, by Martin Böhringer
Merging Social Software with Business Process Support, by Ilia Bider
Processpedia, by António Silva
Social Software for Coordination of Collaborative Process Activities, by Frank Dengler
Empowering Business Users to Model and Execute Business Processes, originally to be presented by Florian Schnabel but with a last-minute replacement whose name I didn’t catch

I picked up a few interesting nuggets during the day. In Martinho’s presentation, he discussed the gaps – in skills, concerns and lanuage – between business users, business modelers and developers, and some ideas for overcoming this in collaboration on process modifications. By allowing users to associate tags and other information to the underlying process models as they are interacting with a step in that process through a business application, this information and interactions between users at that point can be analyzed and fed back into the formal process design stage for eventual incorporation into the process model. I’ve seen a bit of this in practice, both in BPM (e.g., Pega’s SmartBPM V6) and in other types of software (e.g., Google’s Feedback Extension), and think that this model for allowing a user to feed back directly on their view of an activity rather than a potentially unfamiliar process model should be a feature in all enterprise software.

Silva’s presentation on Processpedia also makes me want to go back and read his paper in more detail. It is also concerned with collaboration on process models and how to address the different perspectives of different types of stakeholders. He advocates that not all process instance variations need to be described by a formal (standard) model: this is the underlying message in the dynamic BPM capabilities that we’re seeing in many commercial BPM systems. He also concludes that process instance deviations capture tacit knowledge from which abstractions can emerge, which is the core behind a lot of process mining research, too. The key is that there be no separation between the collaboration and working environments, that is, collaboration happens directly in the business users’ applications, not in some other tool or representation with which they might be unfamiliar.

Headed for BPM 2010

I’m on my way to Hoboken, New Jersey for what has become my favorite BPM conference of the year: BPM 2010, which is a conference on what’s happening in BPM research, both in academia and private research labs. If you want a view of what’s coming in BPM in the next five years, this is the place for you; BPM vendors should definitely be sending their product designers and architects to hear (or present) ideas, and maybe even find a bright young Ph.D. student for cooperative research.

Hope to see you there.

TIBCO Now Roadshow: Toronto Edition (Part 1)

TIBCO’s doing a roadshow called TIBCO Now, and because the Toronto one is practically in my backyard – and is at the Hockey Hall of Fame, which I’ve always wanted to visit – I’m here this afternoon to hear about what’s coming up product-wise, and also hear from some of their local customers.

We had a quick update from TIBCO (sorry, missed the name while I was looking for non-existent wifi and getting my tethering set up) on their direction: I love the “two-second advantage” message that I’ve been hearing since their TUCON conference in May, but really dislike the “Enterprise 3.0” nonsense. He had one slide in his presentation that really resonated: “Business is event-based. IT systems are transaction and query-based.” That sums up the difference between how things happen in the real world, and the nature of the systems designed to support those things.

Grant Geminiuc, former CEO of Shoppers Drug Mart (a large Canadian retail store), gave a presentation about the Canadian retail perspective on the two-second advantage. Given that we’re smack in the middle of the financial district, I’m imagining that most of these blue suits belong to the towers above us, but there are common themes about reducing operational costs and increasing revenues that apply to everyone. For Shoppers Drug Mart, the two-second advantage is about the window of opportunity when the customer is in the store or on the website, and having enough information about the customer and their buying history to position a cross-sell or up-sell that will resonate with them. For Canadian Tire, it’s about managing inventory to reduce out-of-stock situations, and expose inventory levels – and purchase capabilities – to customers on a website rather than by going to the store. For Rogers, it’s about back-office and channel integration to enable service bundling, consolidated billing and a single point of self-service provisioning. In short, leverage and integrate assets, and understand your customer.

Tom Laffey, TIBCO’s EVP of products, was up next to talk about their technology. He gave us a review during the analyst session at TUCON, summarized by Matt Quinn the next day; this was mostly a review of that. He outlined four critical requirements for businesses and their technology: handling events on a massive scale; universal application development lifecycle management providing freedom to innovate; integrating people; and deploying what you need, when and where you need it. He gave use the 50,000 foot view of their new and enhanced product suites:

ActiveSpaces Suite, including the DataGrid product for an in-memory data management, and the Transactions and Patterns products (both via acquired companies) providing data manipulation; on top of ActiveSpaces, you can run their event-driven architecture or service-oriented architecture
FTL, their next generation appliance for extreme low latency message handling (which I think has the coolest name but probably not well-liked by the marketing folks)
ActiveMatrix application development platform
ActiveMatrix BPM product that I recently reviewed
Formvine, a browser-based end-user application creation environment
Tibbr, a microblogging tool (think Twitter for the enterprise)
Silver Spotfire, a cloud-based data analysis and visualization tool based on their (acquired) Spotfire platform

Next was David Hickman, long-time TIBCO employee and currently in SOA Product Marketing, to cover their SOA strategy. He started with a couple of examples of how their customers have used TIBCO products to create shared services and components, and integrate systems, then moved on to a more detailed view of the ActiveMatrix platform. All AMX products share a single runtime engine, a single design-time interface (Business Studio) and a single administrative console; this reduces complexity for the IT users as well as reducing costs through shared components. He covered the somewhat large list of the AMX products, spending a short time on each one to note what it does, how it fits into the big picture, and the specific benefits of their product over the competition.

Last up before the break, we heard from HP, who is co-sponsoring this shindig as well as being a long-time partner of TIBCO’s, on application lifecycle management. There was no discussion, however, about the lifecycle of HP CEOs.

We’re taking a break now; but I’ll be sticking around because I’d never hear the end of it if I skip Jeremy Westerman’s talk on AMX BPM. Plus, there’s a cocktail reception afterwards.

The Great BPMN Debate of 2010

I go off on vacation for a week, and a firestorm erupts around BPMN usage by business people. It’s taken me the weekend to comb through all the posts and comments; there’s a lot of reading here, and I recommend checking out the discussions in the comments on each of these posts as well as the posts themselves.

Where it all started

BPMN for Business Professionals: Burn Baby Burn: Jim Sinur blogs about how BPMN is too hard for business people, touching off a storm of comments on this post, and several posts from others on the same subject.

The responses

Process for the Enterprise » Blog Archive » Apparently BPMN is Too Hard: Scott Francis responds to Jim Sinur’s post, saying that if you’re already flowcharting processes, then BPMN (at least the basic set) really isn’t much different from that, and provides the benefit of standardization. He doesn’t want to let the business off the hook of learning a new skill when it’s really not that hard, and provides some benefit to the business (not just to IT).

Dave Thinking Aloud: BPMN only part of the solution: Dave French agrees with Scott’s post and offers a great quote: “It would be really scary if those responsible for the operation of multimillion dollar enterprises can’t take on the meaning of a set of symbols that can be put on a small wallchart”. My thoughts are pretty much aligned with Scott and Dave’s.

BPMN 2.0: no longer for Business Professionals | On Collaborative Planning: Keith Swenson points out that most of the enhancements to the new version of BPMN are for developers, not business people, turning it into a graphical programming language for processes. He questions whether vendors will move from BPMN 1.2 to 2.0 if their focus is on modeling rather than execution. I think that Keith is throwing the baby out with the bathwater here: although a lot of new constructs have been added that make BPMN more useful for developers, that doesn’t make the basic subset inappropriate for business people who are already mapping their business processes with flowcharts. In the absence of any specific direction, I most often see business people (and business analysts) use flowcharts to represent their business processes; introducing them to the simplest BPMN subset will at least put some standardization around those flowcharts so that there’s no confusion over the shapes used on the diagram, and to reduce some of the spaghetti around flowcharting events.

On IT-business alignment and related things » BPMN “not for the business”? Let’s lose the hype: Neil Ward-Dutton takes a similar middle ground to mine: “there’s significant evidence to suggest that a core subset of BPMN symbols are absolutely usable by business analysts with experience in high-level analysis and design and provide great results in terms of delivering a common language across multi-disciplinary teams”. BPMN is not useful to everyone. And business people are never going to learn more than a subset of BPMN. That’s not justification for stating that BPMN has no value for business.

Chris Adams Responds to: “BPMN for Business Professionals: Burn Baby Burn” by Jim Sinur (Gartner): Chris Adams relates a conversation with a CIO who had BPMN representations created for business processes that were too complex for the business to understand. Sounds like these weren’t modeled by the business, or at the right level.

The wrap-ups

Process for the Enterprise » Blog Archive » I See Business Professionals… Using BPMN: Scott Francis wraps up a lot of the discussions, finishing with the statement “Regardless of what the theory says, the practical reality is our customers’ businesses are using this stuff”. I find that this is true for me as well: my customers are using flowcharting extensively for modeling business processes, and with a small amount of guidance, they are using the simplest subset of BPMN. I know that’s right up there with the theory that it’s aerodynamically impossible for bumblebees to fly, and yet they persist in doing so.

BPMN Quotes of the week « Adam Deane: Adam Deane wraps up the week of BPMN blog posts with the best quotes drawn from several of them.

My take

BPMN | How to explain BPMN to Business Users | VOSibilities: The replay of a webinar that I did in June on BPMN and business users. I make the points that the subset is all that’s needed for business, and that there’s a difference between knowing enough BPMN to create models and knowing enough BPMN to understand models. Here’s just the slides:

In short: BPMN isn’t for all uses, but if your business people are already flowcharting their business processes, then teaching them a few BPMN symbols in order to standardize those flowcharts has benefits.

Internet Explorer Theme Problems

Seems that there’s a problem with this theme on IE6 and IE7 – I only tested on IE8, my bad. I’ll get a fix in this weekend, either a new theme or a modified version of this one. Thanks for your patience!

Update: I’ve reinstalled my old theme for now, although now the header gradient doesn’t work — might be related to the new hosting. I’ll keep at it.

Column 2 Now on PressHarbor

I’ve been seeing some performance problems with this blog, and have moved it over to PressHarbor on the advice of my friend Joey, who uses it for his very popular blog that sees a lot more traffic that I do.

I’ve also changed the theme to a cleaner look that supports a few additional features that I was looking for.

If you’re reading this post, your DNS server has rerouted you properly.

If you read via RSS, nothing for you to do.

If you see anything weird, add a comment or email me.

BPM 2010 Coming Up Soon: Are You There?

My favorite BPM conference of the year, the 8th International Conference on Business Process Management, is coming up in less than three weeks, on September 13-16. In the past, this has primarily been an academic conference where BPM researchers present their ongoing research, and this year they are adding industry case studies, tutorials, keynotes and fireside chats with lots of big names in BPM, plus a follow-on day on September 17 on adaptive case management.

I’ve recommended this conference in the past for those involved in BPM product development because this is where your new product ideas are going to come from: although some of this research is a bit esoteric, much of it is practical and could be introduced as product functionality by forward-thinking BPM vendors in the near future. With the added non-academic tracks this year, those of you who shun eigenvectors still have a wealth of presentations by practitioners available to you, turning this into more of a multi-purpose BPM conference than it has been in the past.

This is also the first time that the conference is being held in North America, at Stevens Institute in Hoboken, NJ – don’t worry, that’s just a short ferry ride from Manhattan, so you don’t even have to admit to having visited New Jersey. 🙂 You can still register for the regular registration fee; after August 31, you’ll be paying a higher late/onsite fee to register.

I’ll be there from Monday to Thursday – unfortunately, I found out about the ACM day on Friday too late to change my plans – so feel free to look me up if you’re there. If you can’t make it, watch for my blog coverage of the sessions.

Planning the Fall BPM Conference Lineup

It’s been a quiet summer for travel – I haven’t been on a plane since June – but my fall travel schedule awaits:

September 13-16 is BPM 2010, the 8th International Conference on Business Process Management, which is the academic BPM conference that I’ve attended in Germany and Italy the past two years. This year, I get to go all the way to New Jersey, instead, for its first North American appearance. I’m not presenting, but will be blogging from there.
September 27-29 is IRM’s BPM conference in London, where I’m delivering a half-day workshop on the BPM technology landscape, presenting a session on collaboration and BPM and facilitating a roundtable discussion on transforming business process models into IT requirements.
October 17-21 is Building Business Capability 2010, which is Business Rules Forum plus the new Business Process Forum and Business Analysis Forum, in Washington DC. I’ll be doing the same three presentations as at the IRM BPM conference the previous month.
November 19 is a new one-day event, BPM World Convention, in London. I’ve agreed to keynote if it goes ahead as planned.

As of now, I don’t have any other definite conference plans for the fall, but there are lots of possibilities and tentative invitations:

Intalio|World, October 5-6 in San Francisco
Forrester’s Business Process and Application Delivery Forum, October 7-8 in Washington DC
SAP TechEd Berlin, October 12-14 and TechEd US, October 18-22 in Las Vegas
IBM Information On Demand, October 24-28 in Las Vegas
IBM CASCON, November 1-4 in Toronto – it’s not BPM-specific, but it’s a good conference and is local for me

I keep a calendar of all the BPM-related events that I hear about, mostly for my own reference but I have made it public:

If you have something that you’d like to add to the calendar, add a comment here or email me directly. I typically do not include webinars or other online-only events, since that would tend to crowd out the physical events.

Note that you can view this in Week, Month or Agenda view using the controls at the top right. If you’re a Google calendar user, you can add it to your list of calendars using the button at the bottom right, which will allow you to see it overlaid on your own calendar.

TIBCO Silver Spotfire: BI/Analytics in the Cloud

TIBCO announces their cloud-based BI/analytics today: TIBCO Silver Spotfire, and you can even sign up for a free one-year trial.

This shouldn’t be a huge surprise to those watching TIBCO announcements to date: at their conference in May, “Silver Analytics” was mentioned in the general session as an upcoming product release, and they’ve made much ado about moving all of their other products onto the Silver cloud platform that this seems inevitable.

I haven’t had a demo or a chance to play with Silver Spotfire yet, but from their press release, it appears that it provides the usual sort of easy-to-use BI capabilities plus a social aspect: collaborative building and sharing of reports, dashboards and other visualizations and analytics. Spotfire has made a name for itself as an incredibly easy to use yet powerful BI platform; moving this to the cloud and adding social aspects should help to push adoption of Spotfire as well as start to make BI a bit more mainstream.

Update: There’s a short video showing the installation (yes, there’s a desktop client), data loading and web publication to get you started.