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Innovations In AWD User Experience

To finish off the first morning at DST ADVANCE 2015, I attended the session on customer and work experience, which was presented as a case study of background investigations on a security-sensitive hiring process, such as for a government immigration and border control agency. This is a relatively straightforward case management scenario: create a case, uploading and indexing the initiating documents using a form; then case management from a case worker’s viewpoint, including tasks assigned to them or other people on the team, and an activity stream view of all case activity. They demonstrated a number of the new widget capabilities, including grid views of case tasks and investigation team members, and Google Maps integration with case data overlaid on the map. We also saw a field investigator’s portal view that limits the view to that user’s active case progress and the details of their assignments. The data entry forms regarding the person being investigated are reused from other parts of the process, plus forms specific to the investigator such as travel expenses.

This shows quite different interfaces depending on the user persona: the simple forms-based view for the case initiator; the full case management interface for the knowledge worker; a worklist-oriented case portal view for the field investigator; and a traditional internal worklist view for internal workers who are assigned specific tasks without visibility onto the entire case.

We didn’t see anything on how these interfaces are built, although there was some discussion of that; I think that there’s a more technical session on building interfaces using the widgets tomorrow.

Unfortunately, this session was in conflict with the Solutions for Tomorrow’s Workforce presentation about goal-driven design and some of the customer research that they’ve done; difficult to get to all of the sessions of interest here.

AWD 2015 Product Strategy

Roy Brackett and Mike Lovell from DST’s BPS (Business Process Solutions) product management gave us a review of what happened in 2014 and an update on their 2015 product strategy, following on from the bits that we heard from John Vaughn in the opening session.

DST has a ton of experience with the back office, since they run a huge outsourcing operation, but their current push is to also improve front office and customer-facing functionality. They are accelerating their release cycles, and providing detailed information via web conferences and technical briefings with customers. They’ve also mapped out a value journey for their customers for complex implementations: from defining outcomes and performance metrics to a solution design, proof of concept and production implementation.

With a large portfolio of products, including quite a bit of legacy still running at client locations, they have some product management challenges both in refactoring and modernizing platforms, and implementing newer technologies to keep up with the competition. Over three releases from June 2014 to January 2015, they added a number of capabilities:

UI widgets that use their RESTful services, including messaging between the widgets and with other applications
Advanced comments that allow threading and an activity feed view, bringing a more collaborative, social feel to authenticated comments within AWD
Variable timers that can be set at runtime
Multiple recipients on outbound letters, such as sending a broker or advisor a copy of a letter sent to a client
RESTful authentication
Security upgrades, including enforcing trusted sources for server data, and prohibiting JavaScript in comments
Separating out batch actions to improve performance

With their next releases, scheduled for April and beyond, they are adding or enhancing the following functionality:

Consume SAML-based web services
Communications editor for creating outbound correspondence
Updated platform support for WebSphere, Jbox, WebLogic, Oracle, WinSQL and IE 11
Updates to case management functionality including date functions, such as basing a date on the completion of dependencies, and adding case end dates
Early release of their Processing Workspace, which will mark the beginning of the end of their current portal UI; this improves real estate and navigation, and adds personalization for the primary workspace, worklists, search and attachment handling
Process analytics
Advanced workgroup management, rather than just a simple supervisor-worker hierarchy
Quality metrics and related analytics
Enhanced data transfer from AWD to the BI warehouse — there will be a session following this on the entire BI roadmap

There’s also some work being done on creating robust data centers under their Project Rainforest, which will be covered in sessions later today.

We pulled back from the details to look at the business problems that are front of mind for organizations: enhanced customer experience, process efficiency, targeted marketing (via analytics) and cost reduction top the list. Broken down by industry, DST’s big three customer verticals of banking/investments, insurance and healthcare are definitely focused on enhanced customer experience, but also concerned with risk and compliance more than the overall average. To address this, DST is doing significant product development in the vertical application solutions and accelerators that can help their target customers achieve value sooner.

DST has never been seen as an innovator in the BPMS market in terms of features, and their current roadmap isn’t going to change that view. However, what they do provide is a deep pool of domain expertise in their core markets, and solid products that solve the real business problems for those customers. This has allowed them to create extremely strong relationships with their customers, who rely on them to support existing practices while modernizing their technology.

Kicking Off #DSTAdvance15 – DST Update From @JCV816

Conference season always brings some decisions and conflicts, and this year’s first one (for me) came down to a decision between DST‘s ADVANCE in Phoenix, and IBM InterConnect in Las Vegas. DST had booked me to speak at this year’s conference right after last year, and when IBM combined Impact into InterConnect, the date moved from their usual March or April event to February, directly in conflict with DST. Also: Phoenix over Vegas? No competition.

DST has combined some of their smaller financial services events into ADVANCE this year, giving this a stronger than ever focus on financial services especially in the area of asset/fund management. This is a big chunk of their customer base, along with insurance, although many of the solutions that they offer — including their BPMS — cn apply to other verticals. I’ll be presenting later today about the challenges of onboarding, and how BPM, case management, smart process applications and other technologies can be applied to solve some of the business problems associated with these unpredictable, complex and risk-laden processes.

There were hands-on labs for customers yesterday, but the main conference started this morning with an opening session hosted by John Vaughn and featuring three of the senior management team, focused on the four key things that DST has been focusing on in the past year in order to help their customers with business growth and retention: transforming the customer experience, optimizing distribution, staying ahead of compliance risks, and providing smarter business process solutions. We heard a quick overview about their advances in customer experience; advanced analytics applied to distribution solutions leveraged by their acquisition of kasina; GRC solutions that extend into the distribution chain; and business process solutions including their onboarding, claims processing and AML/KYC frameworks, plus their upcoming AltServe offering for managing alternative investments.

Since DST has an outsourcing operation that processes a huge portion of the mutual fund and similar transactions in the US, and they are their own first and best customer, they know what they’re doing in creating technology solutions for managing the tough problems in financial services. As Vaughn pointed out during the keynote, a lot of the “easy” transactions are now being done outside your back office, either further up in the distribution channel or through customer self-service, meaning that the work being done internally includes more of the difficult, unpredictable business problems; their frameworks and solution accelerators are focused on many of those.

Lots of great sessions on the agenda today; I’m going to head to the BPM product strategy breakout to see what’s coming up

BPM Cyber Monday: Camunda 7.2 Adds Tasklist And CMMN

I caught up with Jakob Freund and Daniel Meyer of camunda last week in advance of their 7.2 release; with 1,700 person-days of work invested in this April-November release cycle, this includes a new tasklist application, an initial implementation of the Case Management Model and Notation (CMMN) standard, developer accelerators particularly for non-Java developers, and performance and stability improvements. You can hear more about the new release and see a demo in their webinar on Wednesday this week, and read their blog post about it. [Update: you can see the webinar replay here and the slides here, no registration required.]

It’s been interesting to track the progress of camunda and Activiti after camunda forked from the Activiti project in early 2013, since they are targeting slightly different markets but still offer competitive solutions in the open source BPM space. Last week, I wrote about Activiti’s recent release of their BPM Suite, which includes end-user task list and forms interfaces and tools for for “citizen developers” (read: non-hard-core-Java developers); we are seeing some similar themes in the new camunda release, although camunda sticks closer to a true open source model by releasing pretty much all of the code as part of the open source project, while Activiti is making everything except the core engine part of their commercial product.

The biggest news of this release is the tasklist app, since this marks a completely new foray by camunda into end-user interfaces that remain part of the open source project. Developed in conjunction with their customer DAB bank, it’s a single-page JavaScript application that is usable out of the box but intended to be developer-friendly for customization. The 3-panel UI (inspired by MS Outlook, although I thought that might not be considered very inspiring by some) shows filters, the task list resulting from the selected filter, and the details of the selected task. Any of the three columns can be collapsed or expanded by the user: you might want to maximize the active task form while completing a task, for example, or collapse the form to see just the filters and task list for quickly sorting or triaging work.

Filters can be created using expressions based on drop-down lists of instance properties, and can be shared for use by other users or groups. Filters can also specify process variables so that those variables are visible in the task list and can be used for searching and sorting, which makes it easier to locate a specific task without having to click on each task to see the details. If permissions allow, other user’s tasks can be included in the task list. During our demo, they pointed out the ability to use keyboard controls to navigate through the task list, something that was suggested by the users: having seen many keyboard-centric users slowed down by having to use a mouse for controlling their screens, this was not a surprise to me, but I think that many software developers don’t think about the needs of the old-school keyboarding users.

They have had to improve their APIs to expose more information and functionality to support the tasklist app, which helps developers even if they are not using the tasklist. For the forms interface of an active task, they created the camunda JavaScript Forms SDK to simplify the connection to their REST APIs, allowing HTML form controls to be bound directly to process variables so that the SDK handles the interactions with the process engine as well as type conversions. This can be used for the forms interface even if you replace the tasklist app with your own HTML5 UI, and the SDK optionally integrates with AngularJS for additional features such as form validation. There are some nice page/process-flow control features for tasks: the option to use a Save button as well as Complete, which saves the task in place (with any instance data updates) but does not move it through the process flow; and the ability for a user completing a task to directly access the following task for this instance if it is assigned to them.

The task detail pane of the UI contains more than just the task form: it also has a history tab showing events, due dates and comments; a diagram tab highlighting the current task within the BPMN diagram; and a description tab that I didn’t see, but I assume can contain task instructions.

The other new major user-facing functionality is support for CMMN; 2015 is definitely going to be the year when we see the BPM vendors pile on here, and camunda is out in front with this. Like many other BPM vendors, camunda’s BPMN implementation does not support ad hoc activities – arguably, support for events and ad hoc activities provides most of what is required for case management – so they are using the Trisotech CMMN modeler instead of their own modeler, but executing on the same core camunda engine which exposes standard engine features such as REST APIs and scripting. Cases can be instantiated through the API directly by a web form or other event, or can be instantiated using a call from a structured process. In turn, cases can instantiate structured processes through a call from an activity. This covers all of the use cases along the structured/unstructured spectrum: completely pre-defined processes, pre-defined with ad hoc exceptions, ad hoc with pre-defined fragments, and completely ad hoc. Calls from BPMN that instantiate a CMMN case can be synchronous (i.e., wait for completion), or asynchronous.

Case tasks, once instantiated, will appear in the tasklist along with those from BPMN processes; however, note that ad hoc tasks will require some sort of custom UI to allow a user to instantiate them if they are not triggered automatically by events or other tasks. They have nothing on the out of the box tasklist app to do this, although I can envision that they might extend this in the future to allow a case owner or participant to see and trigger ad hoc case tasks.

CMMN is still pretty new, although the concepts of case management have been around for a long time; camunda has some customers testing and providing feedback on their CMMN implementation, and they are expecting requirements and capabilities to emerge as they get more practical experience with it. By providing an open source engine that supports CMMN, they also hope to contribute to the CMMN standard and its use cases in general since others can use their engine to test the standard.

Moving on to some of the developer and non-functional features in the new release, they are positioning their developer-friendly methods against “death by property panel” in zero-code BPM suites. The subject of many conversations amongst BPM practitioners, fully model-driven development BPM suites may not require Java coding but often are suitably complex that they require developer skills to use them; this can frustrate developers who are saddled with inefficient (to them) environments for creating applications. However, not every developer is a hard-core Java coder, and many organizations have access to a middle ground of people with development skills but who want to use lighter-weight languages, often regional IT resources embedded within business units. Where Activiti’s new citizen developer tools leans more to the less-technical, model-driven developer, camunda focuses on developers using scripting languages such as JavaScript, Groovy, Jython and JRuby by allowing these languages to be used in place of the expression language or custom Java code within their implementation of BPMN models, including listeners, script tasks and sequence flow conditions. Wrappers for templates, e.g., XSLT, allow these to be added for composing or mapping data. There’s a new API for implementing connectors, with SOAP and REST connectors included out of the box with 7.2. Finally, Java objects are now serialized in XML/JSON rather than byte streams, allowing other languages – and BPMN processes, via APIs – to introspect and consume them directly without converting to Java objects, and making it possible to easily combine Java with other languages within an implementation.

On the execution performance side, camunda likes to distinguish their product within the open source BPM field as being for high-load straight-through processing rather than just manual activities, where they define “high-load” as 10 process instances per second: they’ve been steadily improving execution engine performance since the split and are even working on implementing with alternative storage/computing strategies such as in-memory grids (I jokingly asked if we would see camunda on HANA any time soon). In tests on an earlier 7.x release, they were already 10-30x (that’s times, not percent) faster than Red Hat’s jBPM; 7.2 improves the caching and load balancing, and enhances the asynchronous history logging to allow the level of data logged to be configured by process class and activity. This helps provides the level of scalability that they need for their highest-volume customers, such as telcos, that may be executing more than 1,000 process instances per second.

The camunda open source community edition is available for download and they will be pushing out updates to their Enterprise subscription customers. Check out their upcoming webinar, or sign up for the webinar and watch the recording later.

Disclosure: camunda has been my customer during 2014 for services including a webinar, white paper and the keynote at their user conference. However, I have not been compensated in any way for researching and writing this review.

Activiti BPM Suite – Sweet!

There are definitely changes afoot in the open source BPM market, with both Alfresco’s Activiti and camunda releasing out-of-the-box end-user interfaces and model-driven development tools to augment their usual [Java] developer-friendly approach. In both cases, they are targeting “citizen developers”: people who have technical skills and do some amount of development, but in languages lighter weight than Java. There are a lot of people who fall into this category, including those (like me) who used to be hard-core developers but fell out of practice, and those who have little formal training in software development but have some other form of scientific or technical background.

Prior to this year, Activiti BPM was not available as a standalone commercial product from Alfresco, only bundled with Alfresco or as the community open source edition; as I discussed last year, their main push was to position Activiti as the human-centric workflow within their ECM platform. However, Activiti sports a solid BPMN engine that can be used for more than just document routing and lifecycle management, and in May Alfresco released a commercially-supported Alfresco Activiti product, although focused on the human-centric BPM market. This provides them with opportunities to monetize the existing Activiti community, as well as evolving the BPM platform independently of their ECM platform, such as providing cloud and hybrid services; however, it may have some impact on their partners who were relying on support revenue for the community version.

The open source community engine remains the core of the commercial product – in fact, the enterprise release of the engine lags behind the community release, as it should – but the commercial offering adds all of the UI tools for design, administration and end-user interface, plus cluster configuration for the execution engine.

The Activiti Administrator is an on-premise web application for managing clusters, deploying process models from local packages or the Activiti Editor, and technical monitoring and administration of in-flight processes. There’s a nice setup wizard for new clusters – the open source version requires manual configuration of each node – and allows nodes within the cluster to be auto-discovered and monitored. The monitoring of process instances allows drilling into processes to see variables, the in-flight process model, and more. Not a business monitoring tool, but seems like a solid technical monitoring tool for on-premise Activiti Enterprise servers.

The Activiti Editor is a web-based BPMN process modeling environment that is a reimplementation of other open-source tools, refactored with JavaScript libraries for better performance. The palette can be configured based on the user profile in order to restrict the environment, which would typically be used to limit the number of BPMN objects available for modeling in order to reduce complexity for certain business users to create simple models; a nice feature for companies that want to OEM this into a larger environment. Models can be shared for comments (in a history stream format), versioned, then accessed from the Eclipse plug-in to create more technical executable models. Although I saw this as a standalone web app back in April, it is now integrated as the Visual Editor portion of Kickstart within the Activiti Suite.

The Activiti Suite is a web application that brings together several applications into a single portal:

Kickstart is their citizen development environment, providing a simple step editor that generates BPMN 2.0 – which can then be refined further using the full BPMN Visual Editor or imported into the Eclipse-based Activiti Designer – plus a reusable forms library and the ability to bundles processes into a single process application for publishing within the Suite. In the SaaS version, it will integrate with cloud services including Google Drive, Alfresco, Salesforce, Dropbox and Box.
Tasks is the end-user interface for starting, tracking and participating in processes. It provides an inbox and other task lists, and provides for task collaboration by allowing a task recipient to add others who can then view and comment on the task. Written in Angular JS.
Profile Management to , for user profile and administration
Analytics, for process statistics and reports.

The Suite is not fully responsive and doesn’t have a mobile version, although apparently there are mobile solutions on the way. Since BP3 is an Activiti partner, some of the Brazos tooling is available already, and I suspect that more mobile support may be on the way from BP3 or Alfresco directly.

They have also partnered with Fluxicon to integrate process mining, allowing for introspection of the Activiti BPM history logs; I think that this is still a bit ahead of the market for most process analysts but will make it easy when they are ready to start doing process discovery for bottlenecks and outliers.

I played around with the cloud version, and it was pretty easy to use (I even found a few bugs Smile ) and it would be usable by someone with some process modeling and lightweight development skills to build apps. The Step Editor provides a non-BPMN flowcharting style that includes a limited number of functions, but certainly enough to build functional human-centric apps: implicit process instance data definition via graphical forms design; step types for human, email, “choice” (gateway), sub-process and publishing to Alfresco Cloud; a large variety of form field types; and timeouts on human tasks (although timers based on business days, rather than calendar days, are not there yet). The BPMN Editor has a pretty complete palette of BPMN objects if you want to do a more technical model that includes service tasks and a large variety of events.

Although initially launched in a public cloud version, everything is also available on premise as of the end of November. They have pricing for departmental (single-server up to four cores with a limit on active processes) and enterprise (eight cores over any number of servers, with additional core licensing available) configurations, and subscription licensing for the on-premise versions of Kickstart and Administrator. The cloud version is all subscription pricing. It seems that the target is really for hybrid BPM usage, with processes living on premise or in the cloud depending on the access and security requirements. Also, with the focus on integration with content and human-centric processes, they are well-positioned to make a play in the content-centric case management space.

Instead of just being an accelerator for adding process management to Java development projects, we’re now seeing open source BPM tools like Activiti being positioned as accelerators for lighter-weight development of situational applications. This is going to open up an entire new market for them: an opportunity, but also some serious new competition.

ActiveMatrix BPM at Citibank Brazil

Roberto Mercadante, SVP of operations and technology at Citibank Brazil, presented a session on their journey with AMX BPM. I also had a chance to talk to him yesterday about their projects, so have a bit of additional information beyond what he covered in the presentation They are applying AMX BPM to their commercial account opening/onboarding processes for “mid-sized” companies (between $500M-1B in annual revenue), where there is a very competitive market in Brazil that requires fast turnaround especially for establishing credit. As a global company in 160 countries, they are accustomed to dealing with very large multi-national organizations; unfortunately, some of those very robust features manifest in delays when handling smaller single-country transactions, such as their need to have a unique customer ID generated in their Philippines operation for any account opening. Even for functions performed completely within Brazil, they found that processes created for handling large corporate customers were just too slow and cumbersome for the mid-size market.

Prior to BPM implementation, the process was very paper-intensive, with 300+ steps to open an account, requiring as many as 15 signatures by the customer’s executives. Because it took so long, the commercial banking salespeople would try to bypass the process by collecting the paperwork and walking it through the operations center personally; this is obviously not a sustainable method for expediting processes, and wasn’t available to those people far from their processing center in Sao Paulo. Salespeople were spending as much as 50% of their time on operations, rather than building customer relationships.

They use an Oracle ERP, but found that it really only handled about 70% of their processes and was not, in the opinion of the business heads, a good fit for the remainder; they brought in AMX BPM to help fill that gap, typically representing localized processes due to unique market needs or regulations. In fact, they really consider AMX BPM to be their application development environment for building agile, flexible, localized apps around the centralized ERP.

When Citi implemented AMX BPM last year — for which they won an award — they were seeking to standardize and automate processes with the primary target to reduce the cycle time, which could be as long as 40 days. Interestingly, instead of reengineering the entire process, they did some overall modeling and process improvement (e.g., removing or parallelizing steps), but only did a complete rework on activities that would impact their goal of reducing cycle time, while enforcing their regulatory and compliance standards.

A key contributor to reducing cycle time, not surprisingly, was to remove the paper documents as early as possible in the process, which meant scanning documents in the branches and pushing them directly into their IBM FileNet repository, then kicking off the related AMX BPM processes. The custom scanning application included a checklist so that the branch-based salespeople could immediately know what documents that they were missing. Because they had some very remote branches with low communications bandwidth, they had to also create some custom store-and-forward mechanisms to save document transmission for times of low bandwidth usage, although that was eventually retired as their telecom infrastructure was upgraded. I’ve seen similar challenges with some of my Canadian banking customers regarding branch capture, with solutions ranging from using existing multifunction printers to actually faxing in documents to a central operational facility; paper capture still represents some of the hairiest problems in business processes, in spite of the fact that we’re all supposed to be paperless.

They built BPM analytics in Spotfire (this was prior to the Jaspersoft acquisition, which might have been a better fit for some parts of this) to display a real-time dashboard to identify operational bottlenecks — they felt strongly about including this from the start since they needed to be able to show real benefits in order to prove the value of BPM and justify future development. The result: 70% reduction in their onboarding cycle time within 3 months of implementation, from as much as 40 days down to a best time of about 3 days; it’s likely that they will not be able to reduce it further since some of that time is waiting for the customers to provide necessary documentation, although they do all the steps possible even in the absence of some documents so that the process can complete quickly as soon as the documents arrive. They also saw a 90% reduction in standard deviation, since no one was skewing the results by personally escorting documents through the operations center. Their customer rejection rate was reduced by 58%, so they captured a much larger portion of the companies that applied.

The benefits, however, extended beyond just operational efficiency: it allowed for decentralization of some amount of the front office functions, and allowed relocation of some back-office operations. This allows for leveraging shared services in other Citibank offices, relocating operations to less-expensive locations, and even outsourcing some operations completely.

They’re now looking at implementing additional functionality in the onboarding process, including FATCA compliance, mobile analytics, more legacy integration, and ongoing process improvement. They’re also looking at related problems that they can solve in order to achieve the same level of productivity, and considering how they can expand the BPMS implementation practices to support other regions. For this, they need to implement better BPM governance on a global basis, possibly through some center of excellence practices. They plan to do a survey of Citibank worldwide to identify the critical processes not handled by the ERP, and try to leverage some coordinated efforts for development as well as sharing experiences and best practices.

There’s one more breakout slot but nothing catches my eye, so I’m going to call it quits for TIBCO NOW 2014, and head out to enjoy a bit of San Francisco before I head home tomorrow morning. This is my last conference for the year, but I have a backlog of half-written product reviews that I will try to get up here before too long.

Event Analytics in Oil and Gas at TIBCONOW

Michael O’Connell, TIBCO’s chief data scientist, and Hayden Schultz, a TIBCO architect, discussed and demonstrated an event-handling example using remote sensor data with Spotfire and Streambase. One oil company may have thousands of submersible pumps moving oil up from well, and these modern pumps include sensors and telemetry to allow them to be monitored and controlled remotely. One of their oil and gas customers said that through active monitoring and control such as this, they are avoiding downtime worth $1000/day/well, meaning an additional $100M in additional revenue each year. In addition to production monitoring, they can also use remote monitoring in drilling operations to detect conditions that might be a physical risk. They use standards for sensor data format, and a variety of data sources including SAP HANA.

For the production monitoring, the submersible pumps emit a lot of data about their current state: monitoring for changes to temperature, pressure and current shows patterns that can be correlated with specific pre-failure conditions. By developing models of these pre-failure patterns using Spotfire’s data discovery capabilities on historical failure data, data pushed into Streambase can be monitored for the patterns, then Spotfire used to trigger a notification and allow visualization and analytics by someone monitoring the pumps.

We saw a demonstration of how the pre-failure patterns are modeled in Spotfire, then how the rules are implemented in Streambase for real-time monitoring and response using visual modeling and some XML snippets generated by Spotfire. We saw the result in Streambase LiveView, which provides visualization of streaming data and highlights those data points that are exhibiting the pre-failure condition. The engineers monitoring the pumps can change some of the configuration of the failure conditions, allowing them to fine-tune to reduce false positives without missing actual failure events. Events can kick off notification emails, generate Spotfire root cause analysis reports, or invoke other applications such as instantiating a BPM process.

There are a number of similar industrial applications, such as in mining: wherever there are a large number of remote devices that require monitoring and control.

AMX BPM and Analytics at TIBCONOW

Nicolas Marzin, from the TIBCO BPM field group, presented a breakout session on the benefits of combining BPM and analytics — I’m not sure that anyone really needs to be convinced of the benefits, although plenty of organizations don’t implement this very well (or at all) so it obviously isn’t given a high priority is some situations.

BPM analytics have a number of different audiences — end users, team leaders, live of business managers, and customer service managers — and each of them are interested in different things, from operational performance to customer satisfaction measures. Since we’re talking about BPM analytics, most of these are focused on processing work, but different views and aspects of that process-related information. Regardless of the information that they seek, the analytics need to be ease to use as well as informative, and focused on how analytics is more driven by questions that more static reporting.

There are some key BPM metrics regardless of industry:

Work backlog breakdown, including by priority, segment and skillset (required to determine resourcing requirements) or SLA status (required to calculate risk)
Resource pool and capacity
Aggregate process performance
Business data-specific measures, e.g., troublesome products or top customers

Monitoring and analytics are important not just for managing daily operations, but also to feed back into process improvement: actions taken based on the analytics can include work reprioritization, resource reallocation, or a request for process improvement. Some of these actions can be automated, particularly the first two; there’s also value in doing an in situ simulation to predict the impacts of these actions on the SLAs or costs.

By appropriately combining BPM and analytics, you can improve productivity, improve visibility, reduce time to action and improve the user experience. A good summary of the benefits; as I mentioned earlier, this is likely not really news to the customer in the audience, but I am guessing that a lot of them are not yet using analytics to the full extent in their BPM implementations, and this information might help them to justify it.

In AMX BPM, Spotfire was previously positioned for analytics and visualization, but TIBCO’s acquisition of Jaspersoft means that they are now bundling Jaspersoft with AMX BPM. You can use either (or both), and I think that TIBCO needs to get on top of identifying the use cases for each so that customers are not confused by two apparently overlapping BPM analytics solutions. Spotfire allows for very rich interactive visualizations of data from multiple sources, including drill-downs and what-if scenarios, especially when the analysis is more ad hoc and exploratory; Jaspersoft is better suited for pre-defined dashboards for monitoring well-understood KPIs.

TIBCONOW ActiveMatrix BPM Roadmap

On Monday, we heard an update on the current state of AMX BPM from Roger King; today, he gave us more on the new release and future plans in his “BPM for Tomorrow” breakout session. He started out introducing ActiveMatrix BPM 3.1, including the following key themes:

Case management
Data
Usability and productivity

As we saw in the previous breakout, the addition of ad hoc activities to process models enables case management capabilities. Ad hoc (disconnected) activities are fully supported in BPMN; TIBCO provides tooling to add preconditions and the choice of manual/automatic invocation: that allow an activity to be started manually or to start itself once the preconditions are met. If there are no preconditions, the activity will start (or be available to start) as soon as the process is instantiated. Manually-startable activities are surfaced for the user in the case UI, in the task list and in the process list. Case states and actions are defined in the case model, specifying the states, actions, and which actions are valid for each state. Support for CMIS has been extended to allow the addition of content (in an external ECM system) to a case object via a case folder paradigm; this includes some new document operations such as linking/unlinking to a case object.

Data and self-serving reporting is now enabled with the inclusion of the full capabilities of Jaspersoft — acquired by TIBCO in April 2014 — in AMX BPM (limited in use to BPM) and a number of out of the box reports and dashboards. This works with case data as well as process data. The messaging and capabilities of Spotfire for BPM analytics has been a bit lacking in the past, and obviously Jaspersoft is being positioned as the “right” way to do BPM analytics (which is probably not happy news for the customers that sweated through the BPM-Spotfire implementations).

On the usability side, they have improved some BPM developer tools such as developer server configuration, and added “live development” capability for iterative development of UI forms without needing to rebuild and redeploy: just edit, save and test directly.

He then talked about their future product direction, which is predicated on their role in managing the “crown jewel” core business processes, necessitating a lot of non-functional capability such as high availability and scalability. As for market trends, they are seeing the cloud being used to drive innovation through experimentation because of the low cost of failure, and the rise of disposable enterprise apps. As enterprise processes become more and more digital, organizations are starting to respond with more automated business processes as well as case management for more dynamic processes. Not surprisingly, they are seeing BPMS with HTML5 as an enterprise rapid application development platform: I have been seeing a merging of the high end of the BPMS market with the application development platform market for some time.

Every organization has a lot of non-differentiating applications with standardized experiences, such as those that support procurement and HR; TIBCO’s target is the differentiating apps within an enterprise, which may not be the systems of record but likely are the systems of engagement. The key to this is enterprise case management and process-centric apps, which include data, process, organizational and social aspects, but also UI composition capabilities, since out-of-the-box UI is rarely differentiating. They are moving toward having some large part of their development environment on the web rather than Eclipse, which will roll out around the time that Microsoft finally forces companies onto Internet Explorer 11 where HTML5 is properly supported. Through this, they will support more of the composable situational apps that can be built, rolled out, used and discarded in less time that it used to take you to write the requirements for an app.

Declarative (data and rules-driven) versus imperative (predefined flow) process models are on their roadmap, and they will start to roll out declarative models in the context of case management: not to the exclusion of imperative models, but to augment them where they provide a better fit. Tied into this, at least in my mind, they are providing stronger support for rules integrated into BPM development.

He restated the official TIBCO party line that BPMN is not for business users, but that they need something more like Nimbus UPN instead; however, those are currently offered by two separate and non-integrated products that can’t exchange models, making Nimbus less useful for process discovery that will lead to automation. In the future, they will address this with enterprise BPM in the cloud, providing a “Nimbus-style” experience for business users and business-IT collaboration to start, then more analyst-style BPMN modeling, design and implementation. Not clear how they are going to reconcile UPM and BPMN, however.

King then announced TIBCO Cloud BPM — not yet available, but soon — which will be a BPM service powered by AMX BPM. They deprecated their Silver Fabric BPM support, which allowed you to run AMX BPM in the Amazon cloud; it wasn’t a particularly flexible or supportable cloud BPM offering, and a true SaaS offering will be a good addition when it comes along.

Case Management at TIBCONOW 2014

Yesterday, I attended the analyst sessions (which were mostly Q&A with Matt Quinn on the topics that he covered in the keynote), then was on the “Clash of the BPM Titans” panel, so not a lot of writing. No keynotes today, on this last day of TIBCO NOW 2014, but some BPM breakouts on the calendar — stay tuned.

I started the day with Jeremy Smith and Nam Ton That presenting on case management. They discussed customer journeys, and how their Fast Data platform allows you to detect and respond to that journey: this often includes semi-structured, dynamic processes that need to change based on external events and the process to date. It’s more than just process, of course; there needs to be context, actionable analytics, internal and external collaboration, and recommended actions, all working adaptively towards the customer-centric goal.

TIBCO addresses case management with additions to AMX BPM, not with a separate product; I believe that this is the best way to go for a lot of case management use cases that might need to combine more traditional structured processes with adaptive cases. The new capabilities added to support case management are:

Case data, providing context for performing actions. The case data model is created independently of a process model; the modeling uses UML to create relational-style ERDs, but also scripting and other functions beyond simple data modeling. This appears to be where the power — and the complexity — of the case management capabilities lie.
Case folders, integrating a variety of document sources, including from multiple ECM systems using CMIS, to act as the repository for case-related artifacts.
Case state and actions, allowing a user (or agent) to view and set the state of a case — e.g., received, in process, closed — and take any one of a number of actions allowed for the case when it is that state. This is modeled graphical with a state/action model, which also can apply user/role permissions, in a very similar fashion to their existing page flows capability. Actions can include social interactions, such as requesting information from an expert, accessing a Nimbus-based operations manual related to the current action, applying/viewing analytics to provide context for the action at that state, or providing recommendations such as next best action. Rules can be integrated through pre-conditions that prevent, require or invoke actions.
Ad hoc tasks, allowing the case user to instantiate a user task or subprocess; it appears they are doing this by pre-defining these in the process model (as ad hoc, or disconnected, tasks) so although they can be invoked on an ad hoc basis, they can’t be created from scratch by the user during execution. Given that multiple process models can be invoked from a case, there is still a lot of flexibility here.
Case UI, providing some out of the box user interfaces, but also providing a framework for building custom UIs or embedding these capabilities within another UI or portal.

Related cases can be linked via an association field created in the case data model; since this is, at heart, an integration application development environment, you can do pretty much anything although it looks like some of it might result in a fairly complex and technical case data model.

They didn’t do an actual demo during the presentation, I’ll drop by the showcase later and take a peek at it later today.