bpmNEXT – WebRatio, TidalWave

Full bpmNEXT program here. The format is 30 minutes per speaker: 20 minutes of demo, 10 minutes of Q&A.

Day 1, fourth session: More social!

Model-Driven Generation of Social BPM Applications, Emanuele Molteni, WebRatio

WebRatio, in conjunction with the Politecnico Milano, have developed WebML, a modeling language for defining applications. There are a number of core components for BPM, content, SOA and more, plus optional components available from the WebRatio store including a package of social components. This allowed process such as reading, analyzing and posting Facebook and Twitter updates as part of a process or application page. This is beyond simple posting: there are actions for finding all users tweeting on a specific hashtag, for example, and for interrogating attributes such as number of likes on Facebook comments. They’ve also created a voting application for the conference sessions that we will be able to all try out tomorrow.

Social Process in the Cloud with Facebook, Stuart Browning, TidalWave Interactive

TidalWave has a Facebook application builder for launching processes in their cloud-based BPM. TidalWave for Facebook creates the processes behind the scenes, so that the designer of the Facebook app doesn’t need to understand process modeling. Starting with a template, such as a customer service request form, the designer selects layout and color scheme, then allows customization by adding/editing fields on the form, adding images and other branding. The new application is deployed to a Facebook page, where it appears as a link to the application page where the end user can fill out the form and submit it. Behind the scenes, a TidalWave process is running, populated with the data filled in by the user as well as their Facebook-provided information such as name and email address. In the case of the new customer service application demonstrated, submitting the form sent an email to both the submitter and the Facebook page owner, and also kicked off a TidalWave process. On the TidalWave portal, someone who is not necessarily on Facebook can resolve the case or reassign it to someone else, completing the activities in the process model. The process model associated with each of the Facebook application templates needs to be created in their regular BPM environment, but the application templates provide a way for a non-BPM (and non-technical) user to create and deploy Facebook applications that trigger processes.

That’s it for day 1 of bpmNEXT. Big kudos to Bruce and Nathaniel for putting together a great program, and to all the presenters for participating. A great environment of sharing ideas and talking about innovation in BPM, and I’m looking forward to tomorrow.

bpmNEXT – BP3, OpenText, BonitaSoft

Full bpmNEXT program here. The format is 30 minutes per speaker: 20 minutes of demo, 10 minutes of Q&A.

Day 1, third session. Repeat after me: Mobile. Social. Mobile. Social.

BPM for Mobile, Mobile for BPM, Scott Francis, BP3 Global, Inc.

Problems with existing mobile BPM: an unprioritized activity stream as an interface for business processes is no better than email: everything is mixed together in a single view, with no process context; using desktop HTML instead of native apps ignores device constraints and capabilities. Rethinking that requires a more responsive UI to adjust to size/orientation/touch aspects of mobile screens, hybrid apps to leverage native capabilities while sharing some code with the desktop, and REST APIs to provide process-specific context. Demo shows their add-ons to IBM BPM, allowing new UI components to be added to UIs created within the IBM BPM design environment that better support mobile devices through automatic form factor (size/orientation) adjustment, gestures (e.g., iPhone swipe), and use of device capabilities (e.g., camera). Although the trend is towards native HTML5 and responsive UIs, hybrid and native apps are bridging the gap in the interim; having a common IDE for all development means that there don’t have to be separate desktop/mobile development teams that use different tools. They also advocate specific apps for major process-related functions rather than a common task list, reducing the number of clicks required to complete a task.

Social and Mobile Computing for BPM and Case Management, Rhonda Gray, OpenText

A new project at OpenText, called Touch, is looking at capturing and engaging new BPM participants, including mobile field personnel and customers. Their social BPM includes both socially-enabled software (collaborating within a complex case management environment) and social applications (activity stream task interface). Their cloud-based Touch server will provide an interface point for mobile and desktop devices to their source systems (P360, MBPM, C360, pV, mV), although desktop applications can also access the source systems directly. The iPad app demo showed the activity stream interface, controlling it through subscriptions to specific people and topics, microblogging and collaboration on cases. A user can request that another user follow a specific topic; topics can be pinned to the menu or added to the activity stream. The app uses device features including camera and GPS. The same social activity stream can be embedded in a desktop web application, e.g., alongside standard case management functions, allowing it to be a common source of social activity across all platforms.

Connecting BPM to Social Feeds Improves User Adoption, Mac McConnell, BonitaSoft

BPM exists in different social contexts, including both internal collaboration and responding to social media mentions and complaints. For internal collaboration, the demo showed notifications of pending process tasks exposed in Chatter: essentially, Chatter is acting as an inbox for process tasks, if the users are already using that as their most common access point. Task completion still required going to the Bonita screens, hence Chatter (or Yammer) is just used as a notification inbox. For external social media monitoring, tweets to a specific account were monitored, allowing the user to either respond directly and mark the situation as resolved, or kick off a process to route the tweet to someone who can deal with the situation. By integrating social listening directly into the Bonita application, instantiating processes is a single-click operation rather than having to transfer information from a social monitoring tool to a BPM environment. First live demo by a non-technical marketing guy, bravo!

bpmNEXT – IBM, IMSC, camunda

Full bpmNEXT program here. The format is 30 minutes per speaker: 20 minutes of demo, 10 minutes of Q&A.

Day 1, second session

Data-Centric BPM, John Reynolds, IBM – process improv

Define attributes and rules of data elements, and create a data lifecycle model; similar to document lifecycles from products such as FileNet, but at a finer scale. When data changes, trigger the rules and lifecycle accordingly, which may create human tasks. A managed data interface (MDI) creates an integrating layer between business apps (including BPM) and the underlying connections to systems of records, which allows the full information context to be presented in the business application to support the knowledge work. Knowledge workers do unscripted work to complete tasks, within that information context, with the rules enforced; if they cause data to change, then other tasks (and users) may be notified based on trigger rules defined for those data elements. Adding data as a first class citizen in processes makes is easier to deal with unscripted work. First non-live demo of the day.

Extreme BPMN: Semantic Web Leveraging BPMN XML Serialization, Lloyd Dugan and Mohamed Keshk, IMSC US – searching for meaning in processes

BPMN modeling tool with RDF triple store, SPARQL query engine using Jena API, and BPMN-to-OWL generator for an ontological representation; based on ongoing research and being applied at US DoD and Veterans Affairs. Required the BPMN 2.0 specification for the full metamodel and serialization, but offers advantages over the XML form of a BPMN model with the addition of semantic concepts. Showed an interesting example of using a BPMN model as an architecture model for a system: collapse all pools except the system pool, the linkages in/out of the pool represent user interfaces, and the functions internally are the system specification. By translating the BPMN XML to OWL, it’s possible to do different types of queries on processes, such as identifying all services used in the model, or style conformance. The demo (a bit old skool, a text application in a command line window, and also not live) showed sample queries for finding all tasks assigned to a certain role, finding the task preceding a named task, and finding all diverging gateways. Can also be used to link process instance data with the original model to allow business process monitoring in a standards-based fashion, that is, without vendor lock-in to the specific log format and monitoring tool.

Model-BPMS Roundtripping, Jakob Freund, camunda services GmbH – a meeting of the models

Zero-code approaches to model-driven development (i.e., having a business user create their own executable process models, which can then be technically augmented by a developer) are too complicated, too restrictive, and have some proprietary aspects, making them problematic for both the business and IT participants. camunda BPM does not attempt to be a zero-coding environment, but is an embeddable framework intended to be used as part of application development. It uses BPMN 2.0 natively, which is exposed to the developer in their Eclipse environment, but the business user can use any compliant BPMN modeling tool. Traditionally, the problem with this is that if the developer changes the model (augmenting it for execution), the business user doesn’t see those changes in their model; camunda Cycle connects the business user’s BPMN modeler with the camunda Modeler for roundtripping. In Cycle, create a roundtrip and add a connection to the business BPMN model — demonstrated with the Signavio cloud modeler — to a specific model in the camunda Modeler; this does the forward-tripping to create the developer’s model in camunda from the Signavio model. The developer can now open and edit this in the Eclipse modeler, typically to edit technical attributes on activities and add service tasks. Cycle now shows that the models are out of sync since the model was changed by the developer in camunda; the model can be synchronized back to Signavio, including a commit message, which creates a new revision of the model in the Signavio repository. The business person can see the changed model (and the diff with the previous revision, since that functionality is provided by Signavio), and make further revisions. Cycle shows the last sync, as well as a thumbnail view of the process on either side.

Breaking for lunch and brain reboot. Have already seen more cool stuff in a half day than normally seen in an entire conference.

bpmNEXT: Fluxicon, PeopleServ, Signavio, itp commerce

Full bpmNEXT program here. The format is 30 minutes per speaker: 20 minutes of demo, 10 minutes of Q&A.

Day 1, first session: it’s Model Morning!

Process Mining: Discovering Process Maps from Data, Anne Rozinat and Christian Gunther, Fluxicon – uncovering the secrets within your processes

Process mining, beginning with an analogy of analyzing wind and currents to optimize sailing routes. The process reality is always more complex than the ideal model. The model is helpful for understanding the overall flow, but you need to see what’s actually happening if you want to understand – and optimize – it in more detail. Demo of their Disco product, starting with a log file in a spreadsheet that includes a case ID, start and end timestamp, activity name, resource and role for each activity in a process (resource and role are not required, but can help with the analysis). Imported this into Disco, identify the fields, and Disco reconstructs the process as it was actually executed. The colors, thickness of arcs and numbers indicate the frequency of each path – great for identifying exceptions and non-compliance. Interactive filters can remove less frequent paths to show the main flow. Statistics views show aggregate information for the data set, such as case (process instance) duration and mean wait time. Filters can be added, e.g. to identify the cases with the longest duration, then switch back to the process diagram view to see the flow for that filtered set of cases to identify the bottlenecks and loopbacks. Performance view of process diagram shows the time for each path. Animation view feeds the actual log data through the process diagram to help with visualization of bottlenecks. Clicking on a path creates a filter for only those cases that follow that path — the example shown is to find the small number of cases that bypassed a mandatory compliance step — then view the actual log data to identify the cases and resources involved. Can also generate a performance view of the log data rather than a process view, that shows the path between roles, indicating handoffs in the process and allowing for identification of resource bottlenecks. They’re working with a simulation vendor to link the models that they generate with simulation capabilities, which would allow for what-if scenarios. A number of questions about the log file: obviously, if the data’s not there, you can’t analyze it, and you might have to massage the log file prior to importing to Disco.

Managing Process Roles and Relationships, Roy Altman, PeopleServ – putting people into context

People in today’s organizations may assume multiple roles and have complex relationships with others, with can make it difficult to manage an organizational view of the company as well as people’s responsibilities within processes. Most organizations have some sort of matrix structure when it comes to projects, for example, so that a person’s manager on a project is not the same as their reporting manager. Issues such as delegation can make things more complex. PeopleServ’s Connexxions uses a rules-based approach to determine the correct role for each resource in the context of each process; it creates a functional integration between people and a technical integration between systems. Within the tool, create a context, then add a person and department and create the relationship between them (e.g., manages). Add another person and create relationship between then, (e.g., peer). Add rules, which may include links to data from other systems such as HR systems (e.g., all of the people actively working in that department), LDAP and other sources of organizational information. Contexts can be nested, so one context can be added as a node in another context. The context can be traversed starting at a node (e.g., find a person’s manager in that context, or find all people reporting to a person): this is where a lot of the power comes in, since allows identification of someone’s role and relationships in each individual context, e.g., projects, teams and departments. These contexts/traversals can be accessed/consumed from applications in order to control access and establish contextual reporting structure. People throughout the organization could create and edit contexts as appropriate: HR may manage the overall organization chart, departmental and project managers may manage roles within their teams, and anyone may manage roles for more casual groups such as social teams.

Lowering the Barriers to BPMN, Gero Decker, Signavio – BPMN made easy, and cool

Signavio is used not just for BPMN process modeling for IT projects such as ERP, CRM and BPMS implementations; in fact, that’s only 30% of their business. 40% of customers use it purely for process analysis and improvement, and the remaining 30% used it as part of their certification, risk or compliance efforts. They focus on providing capabilities for both easy creation of an initial graphical process model, then more complex tools for validation, understanding and refinement of the model, in order to lower the barriers to good process modeling. For people less familiar with graphical modeling, they can use Quick Model to enter the activities in a spreadsheet-style format, and see the diagram generated as each activity is entered or edited. The columns in the activity entry table are What, Who, How, IT Systems, Input documents, and Output documents; only the What is required (which becomes the activity name), specifying the How causes swimlanes to appear. At any point, you can switch to the full graphical editor, which allows addition of gateways and other elements, and also supports voice input. The shape palette can be filtered by the BPMN 2.0 specification, e.g., core elements only, and there is a tool to validate against Bruce Silver’s BPMN Method and Style conventions, which displays the improper usages and suggests fixes. They can also apply best practices and other style guides, such as DODAF, and can show a list of the rules and which are violated by the model. The tool can maintain and compare different versions of a model, much like a code diff either for subsequent revisions on the same model, or variants that are branched off. Models can be exported in BPMN XML and other formats, and their tool is integrated and/or OEMed into several BPM automation tools as the front-end modeler. They have an experimental feature — not yet, or possibly ever, part of the core product — using a device that detects hand movements and gestures (or, as we saw accidentally, head movements) to edit the process models; although this would not work for fine-grained modeling, it would be cool when presenting and doing some minor edits on a model in front of a larger group. They’re also working on vocabulary analysis for refactoring/correcting element labels, which would ensure that standardized language is used within the models.

Automated Assessment of BPMN 2.0 Model Quality, Stephan Fischli and Antonio Palumbo, itp commerce – a quality engineer’s dream

itp commerce is a long-standing process modeling and analysis product that uses Microsoft Visio with their add-on as the front end graphical environment, which provides a transition for existing Visio users to create BPMN 2.0 standard process models. Bruce Silver uses this in his training (he also now uses Signavio, not sure if he’ll be maintaining both), since they were the first to provide validation of models against his style guide. They also provide a number of process model quality metrics — validation, conformance, complexity, consistency and vagueness — some of which are difficult or fuzzy or both. Looking at the model quality pop-up (from their Visio add-on), it shows overall model quality with a long list of checks to turn on/off, and preset filters for process analysis, process execution, diagram interchange, and process simulation to show the quality for those intended activities for the model. Models can also be assessed for maturity level, which is an indicator of an organization’s overall process maturity; obviously, models are only one aspect of organizational maturity, but looking at a maturity model such as OMG’s BPMM can yield requirements for process models at each maturity level, e.g., KPIs would be required in models at process maturity level 4. In their Repository Explorer tool, you can run a quality report on a process chain (a set of related processes), which generates a full spreadsheet of all of the individual metrics for each process, plus aggregate statistics on quality, conformance, maturity and much more.

Awesome first session at bpmNEXT. It’s only the mid-morning break on the first day, lots more to come.

bpmNEXT Opens With Paul Harmon Keynote

There’s a select group of about 80 BPM industry experts gathered together this week at the Asilomar conference center in Pacific Grove, CA, attending a new conference organized by Bruce Silver and Nathaniel Palmer: bpmNEXT, billed as “defining the next generation of process innovation”. The first afternoon was mostly just for getting here and getting settled, but before we got down to the serious business of enjoying some local wines, we had a welcome from Bruce and a keynote from Paul Harmon of BPTrends. This conference is mostly about BPM technology innovation, and Paul — who focuses more on the practitioner side — spoke about how that innovation is impacting business process practices.

Business process management is the broader category that includes business management, process improvement methodologies, and technology such as BPMS. Although a recent BPTrends survey found that 16% of companies think that BPM is synonymous with BPMS, it’s really the much bigger picture of how companies use process to improve their business. A number of different practices and technologies are needed to make this happen: Lean (to cut out waste steps), human performance management (to determine if the people in the process are doing a quality/efficient job, decision management (to decide what steps need to be done, and when), BPMS (for process automation), Six Sigma (to measure deviation from the quality metrics) and more. He walked us through the CMMI-style business process maturity model from level 1, with no organized processes to level 5, where processes are continuously being improved. He pointed out (quite rightly) that most BPM technology vendors are selling the ability to implement level 5, yet most organizations are at level 1 or 2, and struggling to improve their process maturity.

There’s been a lot of BPM evolution in the past 10 years: the problems have become more interesting, with the technology chasing (or driving) these problems, and new platforms being added all along. Most (western) businesses today are in the service industry, so the problems that process managers and practitioners face are no longer standardized processes: it’s a much more complex and dynamic environment, with a collaboration within and across companies, and social media impacting and driving processes.

Paul sees the biggest issue for practitioners is the chasm between levels 2 and 3 in process maturity, since that jump from tactical to strategic requires an enterprise commitment to process, not just departmental process improvement efforts. If you can’t get the senior company management sold on the value of BPM to the enterprise, and to make a long-term investment in it, then you’re never going to cross that chasm. For vendors, the challenges are the wide range of technologies that are now considered part of (or need to be tightly integrated with) BPMS, and the platforms that need to be supported. If you consider a company that grows through acquisitions, such as IBM or TIBCO, there’s an additional challenge of how to integrate and refactor these disparate products into a unified experience.

The good news: the BPTrends 2011 survey showed the first uptick in corporate interest in BPMS, and Paul estimates that the market is growing by 15% per year. It’s not the hockey stick projections that the vendors like to show, but it’s not bad. Has BPMS crossed Moore’s chasm of adoption? Not in his opinion, and in part that’s due to the complexity of the market and the technology offerings.

There was a really great Q&A/discussion at the end, as you might expect in a room full of people who are deeply involved in BPM, and where everyone in the room is probably at no more than two degrees of separation from anyone else in the room. A good indication of what the atmosphere is going to be like for the next two days.

I’m blogging here using a Google Nexus 7 tablet, a Logitech bluetooth keyboard and the WordPress Android app, so if the formatting is a bit wonky, I’ll fix it up later. I’m testing this out as a travel platform, since I bring the Nexus along anyway as my ebook reader and general entertainment device; just having to bring along a keyboard instead of the whole netbook makes the load a bit lighter. Definitely not quite as fast for creating posts, especially for adding links, but overall seems to be working out fine.

Stick A (Open Source) Fork In It: camunda BPM Splits From Activiti

At the end of 2012, I had a few hints that things at Alfresco’s Activiti BPM group was undergoing some amount of transition: Tom Baeyens, the original architect and developer of Activiti (now CEO of the Effektif cloud BPM startup announced last week), was no longer leading the Activiti project and had decided to leave Alfresco after less than three years; and camunda, one of the biggest Activiti contributors (besides Alfresco) as well as a major implementation consulting partner, was making noises that Activiti might be too tightly tied to Alfresco’s requirements for document-centric workflow rather than the more general BPM platform that Activiti started as. I’m not in a position to judge how Alfresco was controlling the direction and release cycle of Activiti, who was making the biggest contribution to the open source efforts, or what was said behind closed doors, but obviously things reached a breaking point, and this week camunda announced that they are forking a new open source project from Activiti, to be known as camunda BPM.

This is big news in the world of open source BPM. There are a few players already – Activiti, BonitaSoft, jBPM and Processmaker, to name a few – and it’s not clear that there’s enough demand for open source BPM software to warrant another entrant. Also, there has to be some hard feelings between the parties here, and this is a small community where you can’t really afford to make enemies, because you never know who you’re going to end up working with in years to come. This parting of the ways is described as “sad” by both camunda in their announcement post and by Joram Barrez (current Activiti lead core developer) in his post, and puts Activiti and camunda in direct competition for both existing Activiti users and future business. Signavio, whose process modeler is deeply integrated with camunda BPM, issued a press release stating that the camunda BPM fork will be good for Signavio customers, and including a nice quote from Tom Baeyens; keep in mind that Signavio just provided the funding for Baeyens’ new startup. It’s like the Peyton Place of BPM.

Leaving the personal (and personnel) aspects aside, camunda BPM is offering some significant additional capabilities beyond what is available in Activiti, mostly through open-sourcing their previously proprietary Activiti add-ons. I had a briefing a couple of weeks ago with Jakob Freund, camunda’s CEO, to get caught up on what they’re doing. camunda is about 20 people now, founded 4-1/2 years ago and completely self-funded. That makes them a bit small for launching an enterprise software product – including the implementation and support aspects – but also not driven to unreasonable growth since they have no external investors to please. Having once grown a consulting company to about twice that size without external funding, I can understand the advantages of maintaining the organic growth: control to pick the projects and products that you want to build, and to hand-pick a great team.

camunda BPM, as with Activiti (and jBPM, for that matter) are not claiming to be zero-code BPM suites – some would argue that even those claiming to be, aren’t – but are BPM engines and capabilities intended to be embedded within line-of-business enterprise applications. They see the zero-coding market as being general tooling for non-strategic processes, and likely served equally well or better by outsourcing or cloud solutions (Effektif, anyone?); instead, camunda targets situations where IT is a competitive differentiator, and BPM is just part of the functionality within a larger application. That doesn’t mean that there’s nothing for the non-technical business analyst here: BPMN is used as a bridge for business-IT alignment, and camunda is bringing their previously proprietary BPMN round-tripping capabilities into the new open source project. Their BPMN plugin for Eclipse provides an easy-to-use modeler for business analysts, or round-tripping with Signavio, Adonis and other modeling tools; camunda blogged back in June 2012 about how to integrate several different BPMN modelers with camunda BPM, although they have a definite preference for Signavio.

camunda BPM is a complete open source BPM stack under an Apache License (except for Eclipse, the framework for the designer/developer UI, which uses the Eclipse Public License). The Community (open source) edition will always be the most up-to-date edition – note that some commercial open source vendors relegate their community edition to being a version behind the commercial edition in order to drive revenue – with the Enterprise (commercial) edition lagging slightly to undergo further testing and integrations. The only capabilities available exclusively in the Enterprise edition are WebSphere Application Server (WAS) integration and Cockpit Pro, a monitoring/administration tool, although there is a Cockpit Light capability in the Community edition. You can see a Community-Enterprise feature comparison here, and a more complete list here. Unless you’re tied to WAS from the start, or need quite a bit of support, the Community edition is likely enough to get you up and running initially, allowing for an easier transition from open source to commercial.

However, the question is not really whether camunda has some great contributions to make to the Activiti code base (they do), but whether they can sustain and build an open source fork of Activiti. They have some good people internally to provide vision – Daniel Meyer for the core process engine architecture, Bernd Rücker for a technical consulting/product management view, Jakob Freund for the business aspects of BPM – and a development team experienced with the Activiti and camunda code bases. They have showed significant leadership in the Activiti open source community and development, so are likely capable of running a camunda BPM open source community, but need to make sure that they dedicate enough resource to it to keep it vital. There is a German camunda community already, but that’s not the same as an open source community, and also is only in German, so they have some work to do there.

And then there’s the existing Activiti and camunda users. Existing camunda customers probably won’t be freaked out about the fork since the contributions important to them were being made by camunda anyway, but existing Activiti users (and prospects) aren’t just going to fall into camunda’s lap: they might be weighing the additional functionality against the bigger company, stable brand and existing community behind Activiti. Given some of the new UI features being rolled into Activiti from the Alfresco team, it’s fair to say that Alfresco will continue to innovate Activiti, and attempt to maintain their solid standing in the open source BPM market. There’s likely a small window for existing Acitiviti users to shift to camunda BPM if they want to: right now, the engine is identical and the migration will be trivial, but I expect that within six months, both sides will make enough changes to their respective projects that it will become a more significant effort. In other words, if you’re on Activiti or camunda now and are thinking of switching, do it now.

camunda could be ruffling a few feathers by declaring an open source fork rather than just rolling their proprietary offerings into the Activiti project; they might have been able to become a stronger influencer within the project by doing that, counteracting any (perceived) document-centric influence from Alfresco. Again, I’m not internal to either of the companies nor part of the Activiti open source community, so that’s just speculation.

Meanwhile, Alfresco remains officially silent on the whole business. Given that they had advance warning about this, that’s a pretty serious PR mistake.

Effektif BPM In The Cloud

No, that’s not a typo in the title: Effektif is the newest cloud BPM offering, and it has some pretty impressive BPM credentials: the newly formed company is led by Tom Baeyens, who created not one, but two open source BPM projects: jBPM (now part of Red Hat/JBoss) and Activiti (now part of Alfresco). It’s funded (and partially staffed) by Signavio, creators of a popular process modeling tool; Signavio is headed up by Gero Decker, who has a strong process modeling background including participation in the BPMN standards. I had a chance to chat last week with Tom and Gero about the market needs that led them to start Effektif, and what it’s going to look like. On Monday this week they launched an information-only Effektif website, and expect to have initial rollout of the prototype product launch by early summer.

The aim of Effektif is to provide a simpler cloud BPM platform than what is currently available, with a lower cost point to reduce the barriers to smaller organizations and non-technical users. It will be completely tooled for the cloud, as simple and streamlined as possible but with more complex functionality available. We talked a lot about that aspect – having a less technical, yet still complete, set of functionality for business people to create their own processes, and more technical perspectives for other personas and uses – and agreed that many existing products don’t do a good job of segmenting into usable layers by complexity or technical ability: typically, there are some required functions that are just too technical for business users, even if the product is billed as such.

They also want to include checklist paradigms for simple task management and case management, some of which can be created and configured on the fly, plus collaboration around the content on checklist forms. I haven’t seen a demo yet, but they described three levels of functionality:

  1. The first level will provide a non-technical way to coordinate people using forms-based processes for tasks with email notification. The idea is to allow these to be implemented in five minutes by a non-technical user, but provide a bit more functionality than simple online task lists like Do or Asana since they will have processes built into them, even if the user doesn’t think of them as processes. Tom compared this level with IFTTT, in that it will have simple business paradigms that create operational processes; I’m looking forward to seeing what this looks like, since this is key to adoption in the consumer cloud.
  2. The second level will provide integration to pre-built services such as Google Apps and Salesforce, with likely Salesforce as a first target for integration since those users already have the right mindset about cloud services. This will be a bit more technical, but still require no coding.
  3. The third level will allow custom code to be developed and run inside a process step, more like the functionality that we see in the process portion of most full BPMS.

The target market is not the same as the heavyweight BPMS being used to create enterprise applications; rather, this is aimed at “end-user computing” that is currently the domain of Excel spreadsheets and Access databases. However, with the planned administration capabilities, this is not just a platform for the business to develop and provision their own applications, but also to allow for IT support and governance. That’s a delicate balance to strike, and one that is often not done very well (think of the rampant SharePoint virus in many organizations), but it is essential to provide some degree of governance before anyone would allow Effektif to be used for anything beyond simple processes, namely, the second and third levels discussed above.

Key to this transition between levels is that even the simple first level task management will be based on processes, even if hidden to the user, which provides the potential to expand to more complex functionality without changing products: a continuum of functionality from a simple to-do list to a full business process. Although some BPMS vendors cover the range of functionality, they often split this up between two or more products, or expose too much of the technical underpinnings at the simplest level.

We spent quite a bit of time discussing the process modeling paradigm throughout the levels:

  • Starts as simple sequential modeling
    • Value chain visualization for steps
    • Bullet list of items within steps
    • Model individual tasks as (presumably sequential) BPMN activities
    • Checklist within tasks for to do items: modeled as form data
  • Guide towards BPMN for more complex implementations, since that is what’s underneath the simpler model view
  • For less-rigid ACM functionality/flexibility:
    • Allow adding new items to task list on the fly; switch to form editing view
    • Allow deviation from downstream process steps in current instance or all new instances
    • Activity feed shows what is happening, allows social interaction/collaboration
    • Can deactivate flexibility for more rigid steps/processes, but available by default

As expected, everything is logged in the audit trail, regardless of whether pre-defined or on the fly.

One interesting feature for runtime collaboration will be the ability to allow simultaneous access for multiple users to form-based checklists, so that a single form could be filled out and checked off by multiple participants. I’m not sure what the controls will be for ensuring that these collaborating users don’t overwrite each others changes, but presumably there will be some mechanism.

Mobile apps are not planned for first half-year after release, but are on the radar. The site is created with HTML5 and Javascript, which will allow for mobile websites even before apps have been developed.

Pricing, although likely to based on the number of activity (process) instances, is still to be determined. There may be a free option, although the idea is that the cost is low enough cost that there is no financial barrier to adoption. Hosting will likely be in both central Europe and the US, and you can be sure that I reminded them about issues with data stored on US servers, particularly that owned by non-US companies, and how that would be a complete non-starter for most non-US companies.

I’ve had a lot of interest in what Tom and Gero have been doing separately over the past years; now, I’m very interested to see what they can do together. Looking forward to my first demo of Effektif.

IBMConnect (Lotusphere) 2013 Highlights: Product Updates, Smarter Workforce and Smarter Commerce

A couple of weeks ago, IBM had two analyst calls about the announcements this week at IBM Connect 2013; since I’m not at the conference, I wrote most of this at that time but only published today due to embargo restrictions. It’s the 20th anniversary of Lotusphere, although the conference is no longer branded as Lotusphere since the “smarter workforce” and “smarter commerce” streams are beyond just products with a Lotus heritage or brand.

The first briefing featured Jeff Schick, who heads up social software at IBM. He discussed new software and cloud services to put social business capabilities in the hands of C-level executives in HR and marketing, covering the dual goals of managing corporate intranets and talent, and managing external marketing campaigns. The catchphrases are “Activate the Workforce” and “Delight Customers”, enabled by IBM social business solutions for Smarter Workforce and Smarter Commerce, built on the social integration capabilities of IBM WebSphere Portal.

Specific product releases coming up in the next several weeks:

  • IBM Connections v4.5, with FileNet ECM now available as a native service: documents and their processes (processes within FileNet, I assume, not within IBM BPM) can be integrated into a Connections community, exposing FileNet functionality such as metadata and foldering through Connections, and providing fully integrated social capabilities such as tagging, commenting and liking, making content a first-class social citizen. This is hot. It will not include records management or Case Manager: it appears that these functions would be available on the FileNet side, but not exposed (at this time) through Connections. Quickr customers are being offered a migration path to IBM Connections Content Manager, which is a bundled FileNet repository that can be upgraded to the full ECM suite if you wanted to use it outside the Connections context. Connections can also integrate with SharePoint and Outlook, so is an option even if you’re a Microsoft customer in those areas.
  • IBM Notes 9 Social Edition, competing against Outlook 2013 with social-enabled email, activity Streams and other social capabilities.
  • IBM Docs for web-based collaboration, now available on-premise as well as in the cloud. This competes against Office 365 and Google Docs, but offers better collaboration than O365 (which requires passing control of a document between collaborators) and better rendering/conversion of Office documents than GDocs. IBM Docs is integrated with Connections for social features and sharing, in the same sort of way as Content Manager.
  • IBM Sametime replaces their existing meeting service in the cloud, including iOS and Android support. It uses the Polycom framework for video and audio support.
  • Deployment of all of this can be public cloud, private cloud, on-premise (not really sure of the distinction there) or a hybrid of these. Their SmartCloud for Social Business provides for the cloud deployment and adds wiki, blogs and other social authoring functionality. SmartCloud has Safe Harbor certification, making it a bit mire immune to government snooping, and can be private-labeled, with two telelcom companies already using this to provide these capabilities to their customers.

Everything is focused on mobile: mobile meetings, chat, Connections including Content Manager access, Docs and more.

Jonathan Ferrar, who heads up strategy for the Smarter Workforce business area, gave us an update on what they’re providing to support attracting, empowering and motivating employees. They have just completed their acquisition of Kenexa, and offer a portfolio of HR and workforce management products that includes behavioral sciences plus the entire platform for social business that Schick talked about, including analytics, collaboration and content management.

There are three main functional areas related to workforce management: attract (including recruitment, hiring, onboarding), empower (including learning and intranet content such as benefits and procedures), and motivate (including surveys, assessments and talent management). An integrated employee and HR portal uses existing IBM portal technology to expose Kennexa functionality and social features. There are also workforce analytics to monitor, provide insight and predict based on demographic, qualitative and social data, using both Cognos for dashboards and SPSS for analysis. There’s also some features related to outsourcing but not a lot of details; I was left with the impression that this was a strong capability of Kennexa prior to the acquisition.

I don’t know a lot about HR systems, although I’m seeing a huge potential to integrate this with operational systems such as BPM to drive analytics from the operational systems to the HR systems (e.g., employee performance measures), and even some from HR to the operational systems (e.g., learning management to push training to people at the point in their work when they need the training).

In the second briefing, we heard from Larry Bowden, VP of Web Experience software at IBM, covering the website building and user experience sides of Smarter Commerce and Social Business. He started out the the same “smarter workforce/exceptional customer experience” catchphrases as we heard on the earlier call, then went on to highlight some of their customers recognized for exceptional web experience awards in 2012. Web experience includes the smarter workforce (employee engagement, workplace social portal) and smarter commerce (web presence and brand marketing, buy, sell, market) areas, but also can include direct business uses (e.g., online banking, claims), engaging a broad variety of constituents (e.g., e-government), and customer self-service. The core of the IBM customer experience suite, however, is on the buy, market, sell  and service capabilities under their Smarter Commerce umbrella. They are working at putting the web marketing/commerce capabilities directly into the hands of business users (although if this is anything similar to how most vendors put BPMS capabilities directly into the hands of business users, I wouldn’t be too worried if I were a web developer), including both web content management/analytics and campaign management.

The Smarter Workforce and Smarter Commerce solutions are built on the IBM Social Business Platform, as we heard from Schick earlier, which includes WebSphere Portal, Web Content Manager, Connections, Notes & Domino Social Edition, Sametime, Social Analytics Suite, ECM, Web Experience Factory and Forms. That’s nine products just in the platform, then the Customer Experience Suite and Employee Experience Suite solutions built on top of that. Whew. There are other products that come in at the higher level, such as Worklight for mobile enablement.

There’s been a refresh on all of their web experience capabilities, resulting in a new IBM Web Experience “Next”, providing for faster content creation, social content rendering and multi-channel publishing. This is not so much a product as the list of everything across their product base that is being updated, and a more consistent user interface.

There’s a new digital asset management system for rich media management (part of a WCM Rich Media Edition?), although that’s currently in tech preview rather than released.

They’ve also done some PureSystems updates that make it faster to deploy and optimized complex configurations of the multiple IBM products required to support these capabilities – arguably, they should have spent some time on refactoring and reducing the number of products, rather than working out how to make bigger and better hardware to support these patterns.

As always after an IBM briefing, I’m left with a sense of almost overwhelming complexity in the number — and possible combinations — of products that make up these integrated solutions. Powerful: yes. But expect some rough edges in the integration.

Having A Spammy Time

This blog has been inundated with comment spam lately: yesterday, I deleted over 4,600 spam comments that had accumulated in the spam folder in the past two weeks, which is about 100x the usual volume. Akismet is doing a great job of trapping it, since I’m only seeing one or two per week pass through to the moderation queue, and none have been auto-published. However, that means that I can’t manually check the spam queue and fish out legitimate comments, so if you make a comment and it doesn’t show up, let me know and I’ll try to find it.

Wanted: UK/European Customer Case Studies For IRM BPM London, June 2013

Each year for the past few years, I’ve been a speaker at the IRM BPM conference in London; this year, it’s June 11-13 at the Radisson Blu Portman Square, and is co-located with the Enterprise Architecture conference. There’s always a good lineup of speakers, including half-day workshops, keynotes and breakout sessions on a variety of tracks.

This year, they’re looking for a few more UK and European customer case study presentations at the conference. If you have an interesting BPM initiative going on in your organization that you’d like to present, or if you’re a vendor and have a customer who might fit the bill, contact conference co-chair Roger Burlton, rburlton (at) bptrendsassociates.com. The call for speakers ended in December, but I know that they have some spots available for customer case studies.