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Vacation pause

For those of you who were kind enough to comment on blog posts from the BPM conference in Ulm last week, my apologies for being so late to approve the comments: I’ve been on vacation in Switzerland and Germany since then, and mostly off the internet due to being in small towns with crappy wifi coverage. To give them credit, the towns do have great wines, cycling along the river, boat rides, 15th century castles, all the schnitzel you can eat, and a number of other good points. 🙂

The short version of the trip report: after leaving Ulm (which was a really great place for recreation as well as an excellent conference), I headed to Zurich for the weekend to visit a friend, stayed in the old town on the east side of the river, visited the old cathedral, climbed a small mountain, went for a boat cruise on the lake, and went to a piano bar where I experienced a minor dancing injury (and I wasn’t even dancing). I then returned to Germany to spend a day in Baden-Baden and visit the incomparable Friedrichsbad Roman-style spa, then two days in Cochem on the Mosel River, complete with a 4-hour hike to Burg Eltz, a view of a castle from my hotel room and some lovely local wines, before heading back to Dusseldorf.

I’ll be getting on a flight home in a few minutes and back to work tomorrow, but will be jet-lagged so don’t expect too much witty repartee.

Wrap up notes on #BPM2009

Another great BPM conference: as with last year, I was impressed with the quality of the papers and the amount of interesting research going on.

The logistics here have also been excellent: everything well organized and executed, including someone in a “BPM2009 team” shirt meeting a group of us at the bus stop the first day to take us to the registration. The student volunteers ran the logistics on campus, including everything from staffing the coffee breaks to excellent signage everywhere we went. I haven’t discussed my usual conference complaint, wifi, since I’m on a university campus and the wifi rocks. It would be nice to have a few more power points around, but with my netbook’s 6-hour battery life, that’s much less of an issue than it used to be; since today is a short day, I didn’t even bring along a power cable.

This is primarily an academic conference, taking place on a university campus, which is much different than the usual commercial conference. Most attendees are staying in or near the historic city center, and the campus is a bit outside the center, but they provide us with a bus pass so that we can take advantage of the excellent transit system: easy to navigate even if you don’t speak German.

We had a very corporate-style reception dinner Monday night at BellaVista, a fancy rooftop restaurant with a great view of the cathedral; upscale food, and alcohol still flowing at 1am when I left, and last night we had the conference dinner at Stadthaus; also great food and wine. These dinner events were funded by the contributions of the conference sponsors: BizAgi, IBM, Metastorm, IDS Scheer and inubit. During the day at the university, however, we had lunch in the student cafeteria, which is really quite terrible. Short of catering in something else, this is the only real alternative considering our distance from town; maybe what they saved on lunch went into the bar tab at the two dinners.

Next year the conference moves to North America for the first time, where it will be hosted by Stevens Institute in Hoboken, New Jersey on September 13-16. It’s already on my calendar.

BPMN 2.0 tutorial #BPM2009

Hagen Völzer from IBM Research in Zurich – and a member of the BPMN standards group – gave a tutorial on BPMN 2.0, with a specific focus on the new execution semantics.

BPMN 1.1 has taken us a long way towards a standardized process modeling notation, but has several shortcomings: no standardized execution semantics, no standardized serialization, and lack of choreography support. BPMN 2.0 addresses these and some other issues, but does not include organizational models, data models, strategy and business rules. BPMN 2.0 is still being finalized and will be adopted as a standard sometime in 2010, but many vendors are starting to include the new features in their products. The challenge, as he points out, is representing the interrelationship between the new diagram types.

He walked through BPMN, highlighting the changes to the visual notation in 2.0:

Lanes can be used to structure visualization of activities by any suitable attribute, not just roles
Call activity type that can call another process or a global task.
Business rule activity type (although this could be handled with a service task type).
Non-interrupting boundary events, including all event types except error events.
Escalation events.
Event subprocesses, which is an event handler within a subprocess (hence has access to the subprocess context); this can be triggered multiple times for the containing subprocess, and all event subprocesses must terminate before the containing subprocess terminates.
Inline error handler, which appears similar to the event subprocesses but for handling errors; it can handle the error locally rather than propagating it up the scope tree.
Compensation event subprocess, similar to the previous two handlers but for handling compensation events.
Data are now first class elements, and can be used as an input or output to an activity using the new data association that describes data flow between data objects and activities or events.
Choreography diagrams containing (not surprisingly) choreography activities that represent the activities between the participants; the pools and message flows are hidden, and only the choreography activities and the linkages between them are modeled. The two diagram types can be combined to show the choreography in the context of the pools and message flows.
Conversations, which collapse multiple related message flows to visually simplify a diagram; conversations can include more than two participants.

He also walked through the execution semantics, which are based on token flows, with token being produced and consumed by activities, events and gateways. BPMN 2.0 also specifies the representation of an activity lifecycle to map all of the actions that can occur around an activity. We looked in detail at the token-based execution semantics for an inclusive join (where the number of tokens generated by the split is not known locally) in a variety of nested contexts. The complexity of this explains a lot about why the 7PMG guidelines recommend not using inclusive ORs: if it’s this hard to figure out all the possible execution semantics, it’s going to be complex for a human to understand the model visually.

He ended up with research opportunities that have been created by the new specification, such as formalizing semantics of choreography diagrams (now we know his motivation for sitting on the committee 🙂 ); it seems that there are many unresolved issues remaining.

It was useful to have a complete walkthrough of the specification as a refresher and to see the changes in context. I’m left with the impression that the event handlers and some of the other new features are exceptionally useful, but unlikely to be well-understood (and therefore used) by non-technical business analysts. As another one of the attendees pointed out, they’ve just invented a new visual programming language.

Value co-creation in IT service processes using Semantic MediaWiki #BPM2009 #BPMS2’09

Axel Kieninger of the Universitat Karlsruhe had the first presentation after lunch, discussing processes for service creators and consumers (or prosumers) to collaboratively co-create services in order to raise the value of the services to the consumer. There are a number of barriers to collaboration, primarily those of cultural differences and specialized or standards tools/notation. By using Semantic MediaWiki as a collaboration platform, both collaboration and formal annotation are supported, providing functionality that supports specialized notation while encouraging participation.

In many cases, design of IT services and the accompanying SLAs was done without proper participation of the business units, which in turn led to the business complaining of lack of alignment between business and IT. In the author’s Semantic MediaWiki scenario, they can catalog the services and their SLAs, report on service performance, and document service proposals. This allowed the business to more easily add their feedback and suggestions on the services provided by IT.

This is more about the collaboration on and documentation of manual processes that may have some automated tasks, as opposed to structured processes: the processes in this case are descriptive, with those descriptions being developed in a collaborative manner using Semantic MediaWiki. The use of Semantic MediaWiki rather than a standard wiki platform allows additional attributes to be associated with content, including class hierarchies and semantic properties; the inline query language allows interactive queries on the semantic properties and classes, such as locating related services, process owners and process participants, to be represented dynamically in another wiki page.

AGILIPO: Embedding social software features into business process tools #BPM2009 #BPMS2’09

Three years ago, I gave a presentation entitled “Web 2.0 and BPM” at the BPMG conference in London, in which I said that the future of BPM and Web 2.0 (or what we would now call social software) will include tagging of process instances. Today, I saw some research that includes exactly that functionality, as part of a presentation on AGILIPO, an environment based on Agile principles to provide collaborative process modeling and execution. I missed the presenter’s name, and with six authors on the associated paper, I’m not going to take a guess. Update: the presenter was David Martinho of the Center for Organizational Design and Engineering in Lisbon.

This was a very fast-paced presentation with an Ignite-like pacing, so it was difficult to take notes, but there was some great material here. It really is looking at an Agile approach, with “short feedback cycles to steer instead of align” to avoid long modeling phases and allow unexpected behavior to occur.

One interesting bit is on allowing a user to create generic (non-specific) activities: what we’re starting to see in the commercial market as dynamic BPM, but simplified by allowing the inclusion of generic activities that can then be tagged with their specific details. The user adding the activity will assign tags specific to this process instance to associate semantics to the dynamically-added generic activity; the new process steps can be added back to the main process design through versioning.

Both comments and tags are allowed at the process instance level, as well as on the step in the process model.

Interesting ideas; I look forward to seeing how the concepts of process instance tagging are used in other applications.

Size does matter: travelling light with netbook and iPhone

I love technology more as it gets smaller. I haven’t been travelling much this year, but the next two months will change that. For the first time in years, however, I’ll be carrying only my suitcase (a roll-aboard that fits in the overhead bin) and my handbag: no computer bag. That’s because I am the proud owner of an HP Mini netbook, which slides right into the back compartment of my smallish purse with room to spare. The screen is a bit small, but adequate – in fact for widescreen video viewing, it’s great – and the keyboard is large enough for comfortable touch typing. Battery life is 6 hours, which rocks. Disk is 160GB, leaving space for me to load it up with e-books and video to entertain me while away from home.

It runs XP, and I’ve loaded the following software:

Chrome as my primary browser – much cleaner and takes up less screen real estate, so good for the smaller screen.
Google mail/calendar with offline synchronization, since my email accounts are all Gmail or Google Apps; this means that my mail and calendar will stay synchronized between this computer, my office computer (which uses Outlook and Google Apps Sync), my iPhone and the web.
It has a trial version of MS-Office included, but I’ve also loaded Open Office and will see if that works for the relatively light editing needs that I’ll have on the road. If so, then I won’t bother to buy the license for Office when the trial expires.
Live Writer for blogging, since I do a lot of that while at conferences.
Dropbox for synchronizing working files to the web for backup, and back to my home machine (use this link to sign up for Dropbox if you’re interested, and we’ll both get an extra 250MB storage).
Tweetdeck for Twittering.
Flickr Uploader for uploading photos.
iTunes, since it’s required in order to use my iPhone for USB cable-based internet tethering.

I’ve been using the netbook instead of my usual computer off and on for the past two weeks, and I’m quite convinced that I’ll be fine for days at a time with this on the road. I’m missing my financial software and a whole raft of utilities, but nothing that I can’t do without for a while.

I also finally broke down and bought an iPhone 3GS, so if you saw me earlier in the year with my iPod Touch and a Nokia flip phone, those two gadgets have now been replaced by one: more room in my purse. There will probably be some short trips where I can make do with just the iPhone, and leave the netbook at home, since it has everything on there, including Dropbox to access documents. It’s not a great blogging platform, however; as a former Blackberry addict, I can authoritatively state that the iPhone keyboard sucks for any large amount of typing.

With my new technology in tow, I leave on Friday for Germany to attend BPM2009 in Ulm next week – watch for the live blogging from there – then spend another week having a bit of a vacation in locations yet to be determined, but likely a couple of days in Zurich and a trip through western Germany back up to Dusseldorf for my flight home. [For those of you who think giving this sort of information provides an opportunity for someone to break into my home and steal all my worldly belongings, rest assured that I leave behind my black belt hubby – and I don’t mean a Six Sigma black belt – and a pretty mean cat.]

Social media for community projects

If you ever wonder what BPM analyst/architect/bloggers do in their spare time, wonder no more:

Ignite Toronto: Sandy Kemsley -The Hungry Geek from Ignite Toronto on Vimeo.

I was invited to give a presentation at Ignite! Toronto this week, and decided to discuss how I’ve been using social media – Twitter, Flickr, Facebook, blogging – and some integration technologies including RSS and Python scripting to promote a new farmers’ market in my community. I’m on the local volunteer committee that acts as the marketing team for the market. Here’s the presentation, it’s not too clear on the video:

If you’re not familiar with Ignite, it’s a type of speed presentation: 20 slides, 5 minutes, and your slides auto-advance every 15 seconds. For a marathon presenter like me, keeping it down to 5 minutes is a serious challenge, but this was a lot of fun.

For a technology view, check out slide 17 in the slide deck, which shows a sort of context diagram of the components involved. Twitter is central to this “market message delivery framework”, displaying content from a number of sources on the market Twitter account:

I manually tweet when I see something of interest related to the market or food. Also, I monitor and retweet some of our followers, and reply to anyone asking a question via Twitter.
When I publish a post on my personal blog that is in the category “market”, Twitterfeed picks it up through the RSS feed and posts the title and link on Twitter. These are posted to both the market account and my own Twitter account, so you may have seen them if you’re following me there.
Each week, I save up a list of interesting links and other tweet-worthy info, and put them in a text file. My talented other half wrote a Python script that tweets one message from that file each hour for the two days prior to each Saturday market day.
I connected my Flickr account with Twitter, and can either manually tweet a link to a photo directly from Flickr, or email a photo from my iPhone to a private Flickr email address that will cause the link to be tweeted. I could have used Twitpic for the latter functionality, but Flickr gives me better control over my photo archive.

The whole exercise has been a great case study on using social media for community projects with no budget, using some small bits of technology to tie things together so that it doesn’t take much of my time now that it’s up and running. I’d be doing most of the activities anyway: taking pictures of the market, cooking and blogging about it, and reading articles on local food and markets online. This just takes all of that and pushes it out to the market’s online community with very little additional effort on my part.

The Open Group’s Service Integration Maturity Model and SOA Governance Framework

I had a chance last week for a pre-release briefing from The Open Group’s Chris Harding, Forum Director for SOA and Semantic Interoperability, on two new standards that they are releasing today: the Service Integration Maturity Model (OSIMM) and the SOA Governance Framework. These are both vendor-neutral (although several large vendors were involved in their creation), and are available for free on The Open Group’s site. In their words:

OSIMM will provide an industry recognized maturity model for advancing the continuing adoption of SOA and Cloud Computing within and across businesses. The SOA Governance Framework is a free guide for organizations to apply proven governance standards that will accelerate service-oriented architecture success rates.

OSIMM is a strategic planning tool: it is used to assess where you are in your SOA initiatives relative to a standard, vendor-neutral maturity model, and help create a roadmap for how to move on to the higher levels of maturity. At the heart of it is the OSIMM matrix, with maturity levels as columns progressing from left to right, and the different organizational dimensions being measured as rows: business view, governance and organization, methods, applications, architecture, information, and infrastructure and management.

Within each cell of the matrix are the indicators for that dimension and maturity level: for example, if you’re using object oriented modeling methods, that indicates that your methods are at level 2, whereas using service oriented modeling would move you up to level 4 or 5 in the methods dimension. Behind this matrix, OSIMM includes a full set of maturity indicators and attributes, plus assessment questions that organizations can use to determine where they are in terms of maturity: each dimension can be (and likely will be) at a different level of maturity.

This has the potential to be an incredibly useful self-assessment tool for organizations: rather than the very product-specific measurements that you see from vendors (“Not using our product? Oh, you’re not at all advanced in your SOA efforts…”), this is independent of whatever products that you’re using: it’s more about the type of products, and the methods and governance that you’re using to apply them. You’ll be able to use it to understand services and SOA, assess the maturity of your organization, and develop a roadmap to reach your goals.

The first version of the OSIMM Technical Standard will be available here for free download, although that link was still not working at the time that I wrote this. Other industry-specific standards organizations are free to use OSIMM directly, or extend it with their own dimensions and indicators as required.

The other major announcement today is about the SOA governance framework, which helps an organization to define their governance processes and methods. This is more of a practical framework for defining policies aligned between business and IT, aiding communication and capturing vendor-neutral best practices. This includes best practices around both lifecycle management and portfolio management, for both services and service-based solutions.

Lifecycle and portfolio management are quite different: for example, a service lifecycle would include the idea or motivator for the service, the service definition, service creation, putting the service into operation, modifying and maintaining the service, and eventually retiring the service from operation. Service portfolio management is more concerned with reusability, and the practice of looking in the portfolio in the early stages of service lifecycle to see if there is an existing service that suits the requirements. The same applies to solution lifecycle and portfolio management; this differs from any other type of solution governance since there may be service-specific issues such as composition to be considered.

This generic reference model for SOA governance is provided as a standard, to be used by companies to create (and constantly monitor and update) their own specific governance model and best practices. The SOA governance framework may be used in the context of another governance framework, such as COBIT or ITIL; the SOA working group did a mapping of COBIT to this framework as part of the framework development process, and plan to do more in the future in order to help organizations preserve their investment in COBIT/ITIL training and implementation.

The SOA Governance Framework will be available here for free download.

My fall BPM conference schedule

This year has been extremely light for conferences, due to some conference cancellations (or conversion to online-only conferences), and reduced PR budgets that meant that vendors didn’t have the means to offer me travel expenses to attend their conference. According to TripIt, I’ve only been to FASTforward, SAPPHIRE and Enterprise 2.0 so far this year, although I also attended the Open Group EA conference here in Toronto for a total of four. Last year by this time, I had attended 10 conferences, and ended up with a total of 19 for the year.

I will have a bit of conference travel this fall, however:

September 7-10, BPM 2009, Ulm, Germany. This is an academic/research BPM conference that draws the best research minds in BPM from all over the world, mostly from universities and corporate research institutes. I attended last year in Milan, and was overwhelmed with the quality and forward-thinking nature of the presentations. This conference gives a glimpse into the future of BPM, and I urge every BPMS vendor to get someone from their architecture/design/engineering group there to absorb some of this.
October 5-7, Gartner BPM summit, Orlando. I skipped the spring BPM summit, but am looking forward to the new material that is on the agenda since last fall.
October 8-9, Forrester Business Technology Forum, Chicago. I haven’t been to a Forrester conference ever since I spoke at the IT Leadership Forum in Carlsbad in 2007, but this one seems to be really focused on lean processes and process improvement.
October 27-28, Appian Forum user conference, Washington DC. I’ll be giving a presentation on BPM centers of excellence, based in part on the webinar series and white paper that I did for Appian’s BPM Basics site.
November 2-5, Business Rules Forum, Las Vegas. I’ll be giving a presentation on BPM, collaboration and social networking, plus facilitating a peer-to-peer workshop on BPM as a service. I’m very excited that BRF now has a separate BPM track, since there’s a lot of overlap both in vendors and in applications. Unfortunately, I have to miss CASCON which is going on in Toronto at the same time.

There are one or two other possibilities, although this is already starting to look pretty busy. If you’re at any of these events, look me up.

Gartner’s 2009 Hype Cycle

Gartner’s hype cycle for 2009 was released this week, and there was a webinar today with Jackie Fenn to walk through it. The actual diagrams are not working on their press release right now, but ReadWriteWeb is hosting their own copy of the emerging technologies hype cycle (which was in the press release originally) if you want to take a look.

Gartner has 79 different hype cycles focused on individual technologies, rolled up in this special report that is free but doesn’t contain the meat: for that, you need to click through to the hype cycle for the technology in which you’re interested and purchase that report.

Fenn explained the concept of the hype cycle: technologies move from an innovation trigger up a steep slope of positive hype to the peak of inflated expectations, then down an equally steep slope of negative hype to the trough of disillusionment before increasing gradually along the slope of enlightenment to the plateau of productivity. She explained some of the specific indicators for each part of the cycle – which is what Gartner is analyzing to tell where on the hype cycle that a particular technology lies, along with the analysts’ subjective opinions – such as when certain rounds of venture funding kick in, and when best practices emerge. Different types of companies adopt technologies at different points in the hype cycle, depending on how conservative that they are, and how critical the particular technology is to their competitive differentiation.

By bisecting the curve at the local minimum in the trough of disillusionment, companies can ask themselves “what’s here that we could be using” for technologies to the left (considered new/cutting edge), and “what’s here that we’re not using” for those to the right (considered mainstream). There are some anomalies, such as corporate blogging and wikis already climbing the slope of enlightenment, whereas social software suites – which would likely include both of those – are just past the peak of inflated expectations.

She did a quick poll to see what technologies (from a very select subset of emerging technologies) that the attendees think will generate the most value for their organizations during the next two years, then linked the responses to where those technologies lie on the curve: not surprisingly, cloud computing topped the poll at 42%, and it’s at the peak of inflated expectations right now, where there is a proliferation of suppliers and activity beyond early adopters. Social software suites, just past the peak with negative press beginning and supplier consolidation approaching, was second at 29%.

There are several new hype cycles this year, including cloud computing, data center power and cooling, and virtualization; there are also several new technologies listed in the emerging technologies hype cycle that Fenn focused on in the webinar, such as wireless power.

Every technology on the emerging technologies hype cycle is also on a priority matrix that serves as a rough risk-benefit measure, showing the expected years to mainstream adoption (based on Gartner’s analysis of how fast that each is moving through the hype cycle) mapped against the level of expected benefits (low-moderate-high-transformational).

Gartner produced their first hype cycle in 1995, and Fenn showed the original one from back then with a few of the technologies mapped on it; some of those are still poking along, such as speech recognition that hasn’t moved much in 10 years; others, such as Bluetooth, moved through the cycle at a brisk pace and reached mainstream adoption quickly.

Gartner has published a book on Mastering the Hype Cycle: How to Choose the Right Innovation at the Right Time (Gartner), which provides a framework for understanding the hype cycle and adoption patterns that new technologies will move through, and understanding the danger zones.