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Getting Girls Interested In Engineering

Go ENG Girl is an event that every school of engineering across Ontario hosts for girls in Grades 7-10 in October of each year to introduce them to engineering as a potential career, and University of Waterloo (my alma mater) has their version on October 13th. I’m completely behind the idea of getting girls interested in engineering at an early age – I was, but I think I was a bit unusual in that regard – and I’m speaking at the Waterloo event to give a perspective to the girls’ parents on what engineering can give to their daughters.

If you have a daughter/granddaughter/sister/niece/friend who falls into that age range, consider suggesting that they attend. Registration is free for girls and a parent/guardian to attend.

BPM2012: Papers on Process Quality

It’s the first day of the 2012 conference on BPM research (yesterday we had the pre-conference workshops), and the first set of papers is on process quality.

Tying Process Model Quality to the Modeling Process: The Impact of Structuring, Movement, and Speed

[link to pdf paper]

The first paper, presented by Jan Claes of Ghent University and with several co-authors, looked at the possible links between process model quality and the modeling process itself, which has ramifications for teaching process modeling and related tools. Their initial research defined an understandability metric, then measured the correlation between different modeling practices and understandability. They found that structured modeling was positively correlated with understandability: if the model was created using a structured approach, that is, focusing on developing each block then assembling into the larger model, it was more understandable. Time spent modeling was negatively correlated: the longer that it took to create the model, the less understandable it is, which is similar to a finding that they referenced about how faster programmers tend to deliver code with fewer defects. A third factor, the number of times that the model objects were moved during modeling, showed only a slight correlation (personally, I find that people who are a bit obsessive tend to move model components more often, but that doesn’t necessarily lead to less understandable models).

This is fairly early in this research, and a number of areas need to be explored further. First, the understandability metric may need to be refined further; they have defined a measure of perspicuity that is about clarity of understanding, not necessarily structural correctness. Other factors need to be considered, such as the demographics and prior knowledge of the subjects.

Capabilities and Levels of Maturity in IT-Based Case Management

[link to pdf paper]

Jana Koehler of Lucerne University presented on how well case management systems support case managers in social work, healthcare and complex insurance claims. She set out key characteristics for a case management system: complex assessment instruments, setting objectives jointly with the client, and complex coordination, controlling and monitoring. Then, she discussed key capabilities: information handling (visualization, access and assessment), case history (insights, from simple descriptive artifacts to diagnostic and predictive capabilities), decisions (individual decisions through to best practices), and collaboration and administration.

The result is the C3M maturity model for IT-based case management (that is, supported by some sort of system): similar to other maturity models, this includes the stages of individualistic, supported, managed, standardized and transformative. The paper included a chart of the maturity levels, showing the main capability, benefit and risk at each level. A maturity model such as this can be helpful in evaluating case management systems by identifying capabilities, and providing potential roadmaps for vendors.

Business Process Architecture: Use and Consistency

[link to download for Springer subscribers]

The last paper in the process quality section was on business process architecture, presented by Remco Dijkman of Eindhoven University. He started with a definitely of a business process architecture as a representation of the business processes in an organization and the relationships between processes; their evaluation shows that “explicitly representing and analyzing relations between process models can help improving the correctness and consistency of the business process architecture as a whole”. They listed the different types of relations between processes (triggering, flow, composition and specialization) as well as the events that define the relationship between processes. This process architecture is not an executable process, even though it may have the look of a process model, but rather a high-level abstract view.

The goal of all of this is not just to define process architecture, but to create a framework for assessing the quality of a particular architecture based on patterns and anti-patterns within the relations between the processes; several pages of the paper cover a detailed description of the patterns and anti-patterns. They did a case study of constructing a process architecture for a subset of the SAP reference model, producing a count of each type of pattern and anti-pattern encountered. Looking at the anti-patterns specifically highlights areas in the reference model that may be problematic; although it doesn’t find many types of problems, it is a good first-stage analysis tool.

Their future plans in this research include formalization of the process architecture, visualization, and design of the architecture based on a complex organization.

Overall, a good set of papers looking at the issues of improving quality in processes.

ACM Workshop at BPM2012: BPMN Smackdown by @swensonkeith

In the last portion of the ACM workshop at BPM 2012, we had a couple of short non-research papers, the first of which was by Keith Swenson, in which he posits that BPMN is incompatible with ACM. He starts by saying that it’s not a critique of BPMN in particular, but of any two-dimensional flow diagram notation. He also makes a distinction between production case management and adaptive case management – a distinction that I find to be a bit artificial since I don’t think that there’s a hard line between them – where PCM systems have developers creating systems for people to use, whereas ACM has people doing the work themselves. The distinction between PCM and ACM has created a thin, rarified slice of what remains defined as ACM: doctors and lawyers are favorite examples, and it is self-evident that you’re not going to get either doctors or lawyers to draw event-driven BPMN models with the full set of 100+ elements for their processes, or to follow rigidly defined processes in order to accomplish their daily tasks. Instead, their “processes” should be represented as checklists, so that users can completely understand all of the tasks, and can easily modify the process as required.

He states that drawing a diagram (such as BPMN) requires a level of abstract thinking that is common with developers but not with end users, hence BPMN is really a programming language. Taking all of that together, you can see where he’s coming from, even if you disagree: if a system uses BPMN to model processes, most people will not understand how BPMN models work [if they are drawn in full complexity by developers, I would add], therefore won’t modify them; if all users can’t modify the process, then it’s not ACM. Furthermore, creating a flow model with temporal dependencies where no such dependencies exist in reality hinders adaptability, since people will be forced to follow the flow even if there is another way to accomplish their goals that might be more appropriate in a particular context.

Therefore,

BPMN ⇒~ACM

My problem with this is that BPMN has been used by developers to create complex flow models because both the language and their organization allows them to, but that’s not the only way to use it. You can use a limited subset of BPMN to create flow models – in cases where flow models are appropriate, such as when there are clear temporal dependencies – that are understandable by anyone involved in those processes. You can create a BPMN diagram that is a collection of ad hoc tasks that don’t have temporal dependencies, which is semantically identical to a checklist. You can create alternative views, so that a model may be viewed in different forms by different audiences. In other words, just like Jessica Rabbit, BPMN isn’t bad, it’s just drawn that way.

ACM Workshop at BPM2012: ACM in Practice

The first part of the afternoon at the ACM workshop at BPM 2012 moved away from theory and research, and into actual implementations of ACM plus the emerging CMMN standard.

Helle Frisak Sem of Computas presented a paper that she co-authored with her colleagues Steinar Carlsen and Gunnar John Coll, describing an ACM system that is in production at the Norwegian Food Safety Authorty (NFSA) for food safety inspections, information and investigations. This implementation was the recipient of a 2012 ACM award. At its core, the control activity module of the system has the concept of a case that is a rich folder of information about a person or business. The case manager performs tasks (such as schedule and document food inspections) in the context of a case. Each task type has a complete task template that contains all of the possible steps relevant to this task type; at runtime, the user sees a derived list of steps based on conditions in order to complete the task (similar to Ilia Bider’s respondent systems theory), which includes concepts of step dependencies and optional versus mandatory steps. Steps may appear and disappear based on changing conditions, and the user can complete the steps in any order unless there are specific dependencies. Each step, as completed, contributes to the case folder so that a complete record of every task exists. In addition to regular inspections, the system has an emergency response module for managing incidents such as livestock disease outbreak: unlike the more structured inspection tasks, this is used more for logging the incidents, proposing actions and logging decisions, as well as logging media requests and responses.

The control activity module is much more structured and pre-defined, and is hence domain-specific; the emergency control module is domain independent, since it does not contain much, if any, specific domain knowledge. A couple of questions emerged: first, whether domain-neutral systems are really ACM systems, or whether domain specificity is one of the characteristics of ACM. Secondly, the degree of adaptability that is required to be considered ACM, given a spectrum from structured to unstructured: process-driven server integration, human process management, production case management, adaptive case management. As you can imagine, I really like this spectrum because it’s very close to being a relabelling of the “spectrum” diagram that I created last year in which I stated that it’s not about BPM versus ACM, rather a spectrum of process functionality – it’s much more productive in the real world to think about the majority of the processes that fit somewhere in the middle of the spectrum, not at either extreme.

The next paper was Rüdiger Pryss of Ulm University describing a mobile task management system for medical ward rounds (i.e., doctors with iPads). Conveniently, the university also has a hospital, and they started out looking at ways to integrate workflow into ward rounds, but found that it didn’t work with the way that doctors worked when they were doing rounds, which traditionally uses pen and paper to create a to-do list as they walk around and see patients. Moving to an iPad-based system for managing their tasks on the rounds required the doctors to change their methods, although a lot of work on user experience was done in order to replicate their preferred way of working while maintaining input speed through templates and voice input. It was also able to add significant value by integrating patient information as well as predefined workflows for specific tasks to be performed by others, such as xrays. Interestingly, although the technical aspects of task management improved, the patient communication degraded since the doctors were documenting on the iPad while they were with the patient instead of waiting until after seeing the patient to document on paper, as they did previously; it was overall less time but the experience needs to be reworked, possibly with two doctors using linked iPads to interview and document simultaneously.

Last up in this section was a paper authored by Mike Marin, Richard Hull and Roman Vaculin of IBM, presented by one of their colleagues from the Haifa research lab, on the emerging OMG standard for case management modeling and notation (CMMN). Unfortunately, OMG does not release any information about proposed or in-progress standards, only published ones, so many of us have never seen this before. At the heart of CMMN is a case folder object, based on CMIS, which includes folders, documents and properties for both. The top-level behavioral model includes tasks (where work is performed, both manual and automated), stages (hierarchical clustering of work) and milestones (business-related operational objectives); progression through stages is controlled by worker requests and by sentries (rules), and dependencies can be indicated although there is not strictly a flow model. Stages in case instances can have scope lists, which indicate discretionary tasks. OMG manages the BPMN standard, and there is definitely a lot of BPMN-ness about CMMN. I think that a key question will be whether the two standards can be merged into a single standard.

ACM Workshop at BPM2012: Supporting Collaborative Work

We heard two more papers in the morning, the first presented by Nicolas Mundbrod of Ulm University on system support for collaborative knowledge work (paper co-authored by Jens Kolb and Manfred Reichert). This is the first of the papers today that is starting to show some of the crossover with social software: they studied the characteristics of collaborative knowledge work – uncertainty, goal orientation, emergence of work, and growing knowledge base – in order to determine what functionality is required to support it. From this, they defined nine dimensions by which to measure collaborative knowledge work: knowledge action types (e.g., acquisition, application, dissemination), methodology (e.g., explicit, tacit), interdisciplinarity (range from domain-specific to interdisciplinary), organizational frame (e.g., project, case, spontaneous), spatial proximity (range from direct to remote), involved knowledge workers (range from two to countless), temporary constraints (e.g., fixed, relative), information interdependency (range from no focus to main focus on interdependencies), and number of repetitions (range from unique to frequent). Based on the dimensions and characteristic, they developed a collaborative knowledge work lifecycle based on the BPM lifecycle and knowledge work lifecycle: orientation leading into template design, collaboration runtime, and records evaluation. Records evaluation is not just after-the-fact analysis of cases, but acts as an information source during the collaborative runtime. They feel that there are a number of tools that target specific aspects of the collaborative lifecycle, but that more research is required on systems to support this type of knowledge work, especially for the cross over between knowledge work and more structured workflow. There were some interesting discussions following, including about other related research such as modifying the knowledge work environment (including which steps are required) based on the experience of the individual worker so that novice workers can be guided without annoying experienced workers.

Staying with the theme of systems for supporting work, Irina Rychkova of University Paris 1 Pantheon-Sorbonne presented on automated support for case management processes with declarative configurable specifications. She maintains that process models are important for a shared understanding of work, but that a traditional BPMS cannot properly manage case management processes because of the unpredictability, variability and emergent nature of process instances. In her research, she attempted to model a flexible process (mortgage application) with BPMN, but found a number of challenges: the tradeoffs between flexibility and complexity when creating the model, especially when dealing with optional and required information; and runtime adaptability, requiring a lot of human expertise and decision-making and reducing reusability. Instead, she proposes configuration mechanisms to allow processes to be configured (data objects and rules) during runtime, which allows for a more adaptable process as well as collecting information to improve models in the future. She maintains that the problem with BPMN is not the language itself, but about modeling style: for case management, instead of using an imperative style that defines tasks in a specific order, we need to use a declarative style where tasks can be defined without explicit ordering, but with rules that allow tasks to be dynamically enabled and disabled based on conditions. BPMN works well for an imperative style of process models, but some new notation – or extension to BPMN – is required to represent configurable data objects, optional data objects, complex/composite structure of data objects, and conditionally obligatory/optional/alternative data objects based on rules. Similarly, there is a need to model the rules that drive these configurations during runtime. There is quite a bit of other research being done on declarative/goal-based process models, and some number of products emerging in this area. There are also a lot of differing opinions on whether BPMN is suitable for modeling case management processes. It’s not clear that BPMN will emerge as the standard for this sort of modeling, but it’s worth considering if it can be extended to suit because of its already widespread (albeit shallow) adoption.

ACM Workshop at BPM2012: Systems Theory and Activity Modalities

It’s the first day of the annual research/academic conference on BPM, this year held in Tallinn, Estonia, and I’m attending the ACM workshop organized by Irina Rychkova of University Paris 1 Pantheon-Sorbonne, Ilia Bider of Stockholm University and IbisSoft, and Keith Swenson of Fujitsu. This is my fifth year at this conference, and I always find it a great opportunity to see what’s going on in the academic research – some of which will eventually make its way into commercial products – as well as meet people from both the research and industry sides.

The workshop days are organized as a series of papers presented on a common theme, kicked off with a keynote from one of the session chairs. In this case, Ilia Bider gave the keynote on a non-workflow theory of business processes. He has a really interesting approach, since he models enterprises as complex multilevel adaptable systems using systems theory (a topic of particular interest, given that my degree is in systems design engineering, which included some amount of systems theory), where process instances (cases) are temporal/situational respondent systems created from system assets as required to address a situation system. This means that an instance is based, in some part, on a process template (the assets from which it is created) as well as sensors that inform it about the situation systems. He describes process instances as moving through state space, and the process model as a set of formal rules describing the valid paths of the possible trajectories. A process model, then, is a state space with a goal defined as a surface within the space, and the set of trajectories defined prescriptively (e.g., using a flow diagram), by constraint-based rules or non-prescriptive methods. Moving from theory to the systems that support adaptive processes/cases, the system must provide a shared map of the multi-dimensional state space so that everyone can see the goal and current position in order to plan the next moves; support for collaboration coordination for complex movements in multiple dimensions simultaneously; and guidance for moving along the trajectories. Unlike structured BPM systems, the latter is not the main focus, although may include concepts of obligation (must), prohibition (can’t), recommendations (should) and discouragements (should not). If the landscape of the state space changes during the execution of an instance, it’s more important to support the visibility of the space and the goals, and allow people to move within the space as required to achieve the goals. Interesting stuff. You can read more of his publications here.

The next paper on ACM from an activity modality perspective, was presented by Lars Taxén of Linköping University in Sweden. He proposes that there are six activity modalities to consider when shifting from a process-centric view to an information-centric view – objectivation, contextualization, spatialization, temporalization, stabilization, and transition – where these represent the innate predispositions that we use for decision-making and taking action. BPMN focuses almost purely on temporalization by modeling the flow; as well as being one-dimensional, it is prescriptive, which doesn’t support adaptive cases/processes very well. Process isn’t unimportant in ACM, but it is there to serve data artifacts in some way; he doesn’t suggest completely discarding process models, but finding more declarative representations than BPMN. Business processes are, of course, multi-dimensional, it has been somewhat of a disservice to focus purely on prescriptive flow models as being the sole embodiment of business processes. I definitely have not done his paper justice, since I did not read it in advance so was only summarizing on the fly from his short presentation. However, in the discussion following, there was an interesting proposal that ACM is BPM plus these other dimensions. Slowly, we move towards a grand unification theory for ACM and BPM. [link to pdf paper]

I didn’t intend to publish a post for each paper, but as we break for morning coffee, I’ll publish this and resume after the break.

Enterprise Social: Beyond The Newsfeed

In a continuation (of sorts) to the previous session on SharePoint here at Microsoft WPC, Jared Spataro discussed more about where Microsoft – specifically SharePoint – is headed with enterprise social. He did repeat some of the information from the last session, since it’s not all the same audience, specifically the discussion around key industry trends (social, consumerization, devices/mobile, cloud, and cross-organization support). The title of the talk is (I think) based on the idea that Microsoft’s previous vision of social was including newsfeeds directly in the Outlook/Exchange client: more of a customized consumption rather than truly social.

He highlighted two main capabilities required for social:

One set of tools to communicate with other people in any way: employees, customers, partners, etc., or what they call “connected experiences”: being able to collaborate with anyone from a single location.
A single platform for managing people and information, or what they call “connected platform”: being able to find anything from a single location.

Obviously, SharePoint gave them a good start on the connected platform, and is something that is more of an IT platform decision, whereas the connected experiences is what they’re hoping to bring in with Yammer with a focus on the business end users choosing to do this. Yammer will capture the organic social need in the same way that the old free version of WSS is used by the business to create their own connections and content. It’s sort of funny that Microsoft brought in SharePoint around 2000 as a free add-on to their server licences with the idea that it provided end-user computing capabilities without IT intervention, then by the time they reached SharePoint 2007, it had migrated to something that was an IT tool rather than a business tool when it came to design and deployment. Then, they spent $1B on Yammer to start the cycle again…

SharePoint is positioned as social networking with a collaboration suite, whereas Yammer is positioned as standalone social networking, although it already integrates with SharePoint. SharePoint 15 will include “new social networking capabilities” (that about all we learned about it), and Yammer will power the social experiences further in the future. The idea is that Yammer will provide a set of social networking services that is used not only by the standalone Yammer interface, but by SharePoint, Office365, Dynamics and other vertical products.

My interpretation (an a fairly common opinion since the Yammer acquisition was announced) is that they built a bunch of social capabilities in SharePoint because they needed it to compete, but realized that it wasn’t quite good enough so bought Yammer to retrofit in. If that’s true, then it would be risky to spend too much time building on the non-Yammer social networking capabilities in Office/SharePoint 15 when they are likely to be replaced over the next two years or so.

He allowed quite a bit of Q&A time in this session as well, and there were some interesting ones, such as how the Skype acquisition fits into the social collaboration spectrum together with Yammer, and the boundary between personal/consumer and enterprise social collaboration. We heard about some of the cultural shifts required for this, which is something that I talk about in my presentations on social BPM; Microsoft punts this squarely into the arms of the partners to carry forward with their customers.

An interesting couple of sessions, and I’ll drop by the reception to meet up with a few people and visit some of the partner booths. Tomorrow, I’ll be back for at least part of the day to see the keynote and check out a bit more about social CRM as well as Azure; the technical content is a bit lightweight, but it’s interesting to see the market positioning.

SharePoint: Today & Tomorrow

Since the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) ended up in my backyard this year, I decided to drop by for a couple of sessions. There’s a lot here that’s not all that interesting to me – more for the partners’ sales teams on how to sell more Microsoft stuff – but it’s a good opportunity for me to catch up on a few product announcements and also see some of my vendor contacts who are also Microsoft partners.

You can watch the keynotes and some other interviews online and follow the Twitter stream; this morning, we heard about how Windows 8 is going to be the biggest thing since Windows 95, and saw some of the new hardware that’s being developed to take advantage of the new features.

This afternoon in a breakout, Jared Spataro from SharePoint product management gave an update on trends and the product direction, although they are not yet ready to talk about SharePoint/Office 15 so I have the sense that there will be some more interesting stuff coming out later in the summer that we didn’t hear today. He did outline what they see as key industry trends:

Social. Well, duh, they just spend over $1B on Yammer. The next session is on enterprise social, and it’s not surprising that they’re looking at social in a business context.
Consumers, and the consumerization of IT.
Devices, and allowing their customers to work on whatever device they have. He claims that they no longer have a protectionist policy of supporting only Microsoft platforms, but maybe they should talk to their conference organizers about having something other than a Windows Phone app for the conference.
Cloud to reduce the time to value as well as support a broader audience. They intend to develop for the cloud first for SharePoint as well as all of Microsoft Office, and see cloud as a strategic platform for enterprises of all sizes in the future. They don’t necessarily see that organizations are going to move existing on-premise systems to the cloud, but that it will become the platform of choice (and completely seamless to the end user due to single sign-on) for new deployments, and they’re developing more tools for hybrid (cloud/on-premise) solutions.
Cross-organization support for collaboration outside a single enterprise, which is obviously supported by the cloud platform.

Over 65% of companies with SharePoint have deployed to their entire employee population, which is a good indication of the viral nature (which you can consider to be good or bad) adoption of SharePoint. About half of their base has updated to SharePoint 2010, although I see a lot of my clients with much older versions, and Microsoft needs to think about how to move them off those old versions so that they can start to leverage the collaboration capabilities rather than just a place to dump documents.

Their focus now is to transition from being a document-centric system to a people-centric system: making it a more personalized experience for each user, so that SharePoint provides the context, content and platform for doing their work. They’re starting to see more companies managing projects using SharePoint, not just storing documents, so are trying to better support conversations about documents rather than just the documents themselves. Bringing together search, content, workflow and social into a single platform has a lot of potential, especially considering the market penetration of SharePoint.

With just that whiff of what’s coming in SharePoint 15, he moved on to their FY2013 field sales priorities (which is what all these partners are crowded into the room to hear):

Win “enterprise social”, so that every new social experience in a customer is a Microsoft experience. They’ll be doing some social roadshows to back this up and keep the momentum going, so that they start winning a lot of the social deals.
Launch SharePoint 15, which pushes the social message broader and deeper into the enterprise.
Drive new seats with Office365, especially in the mid-market in the cloud.

They want to use social as a conversation-starter, but continue to move in with SharePoint and Office core functionality, pushing upgrades and cloud migration. They also see Yammer as something that business can do without a lot (or even any) IT support, so that they can start using social enterprise software without deploying internally. Then, as Microsoft develops stronger ties between Yammer and SharePoint (as they must), Yammer will leverage users into a social-enabled SharePoint.

We were left with quite a number of large gaps in upcoming product information, since they are not quite ready to spill on the features of the next version. Frustrating, but I understand that public companies just can’t do too much in the way of pre-announcements.

Spataro left half of the hour-long session for questions, and the first one was about the perceived weaknesses of the platform for BPM and workflow. He admitted that they have not spent a lot of energy making SharePoint a premier BPM platform, and that they’re really focused on capturing the market share while leaving some of the functionality to partners. There are a number of BPM-related ISV partners here at WPC this week, including AgilePoint, K2, Kofax, Laserfiche and OpenText, plus services partners who build process-centric solutions; Microsoft has to tread carefully so as not to provide functionality that undercuts their partners’ business, and partners are always at risk that Microsoft will decide that their business is just a bit too strategic to leave to partners. I find it hard to believe that there’s not some sort of BPM work going on within the core SharePoint platform, since process is becoming a key competency in many organizations and Microsoft is unlikely to walk away from that opportunity to develop deeper ties into their customers’ business operations and IT infrastructure. That risk, of course, is the nature of being a partner with a huge software company such as Microsoft (or IBM, SAP and many others): like sleeping with an elephant, it’s toasty-warm most of the time, but watch out when it rolls in your direction.