Gartner MQ for SOA Governance

Although I find it hard to believe that Frank Kenney and Daryl Plummer were hard at work all day on December 31st, that’s the publication date of Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Integrated SOA Governance Technologies. Software AG, which placed well in the leaders quadrant, has the report available for download.

This is the first time for this MQ, and to quote Gartner’s definition of the SOA governance market:

SOA governance is about ensuring and validating that assets and artifacts within the architecture are operating as expected and maintaining a certain level of quality. This Magic Quadrant reduces the market to one set of technologies with strong architectural cohesion (integration) promoting ease of use and interoperability of product.

I found their definition to be a bit fuzzy, especially the part that defined the SOA governance market as including “products, sales, marketing and services specifically targeted at providing SOA governance.”

Lots of the usual suspects here — BEA, TIBCO, IBM, Fujitsu — as well as others who I don’t really think of as being in this market.

Andrew McAfee and Tom Davenport debate the viability of Enterprise 2.0

I missed the McAfee/Davenport debate when I arrived a bit late to the Enterprise 2.0 conference last June, so I’m happy to be listening in on today’s version.

McAfee kicked off with some examples of where he’s seeing Enterprise 2.0 making a difference: a construction company that encouraged its employees to blog; a large financial services centre using an internal wiki for their customer service people to share information, which has reduced their average call time; and Intellipedia within the US intelligence community.

Davenport countered that organizations are even more hierarchical than before, and that Enterprise 2.0 is not having the collaborative and flattening effects that were expected, and that if it was just about the technology and not transforming the enterprise, it should have been called “Knowledge Management 1.5”.

There then ensued a wordsmithing debate over what it should be called, what version number it should have, and whether the functionality provided by today’s Enterprise 2.0 collaborative software is really all that innovative, or just a natural progression from previous groupware applications like Sharepoint and Lotus Notes. As the debate goes on, Davenport continue to drive the point that this technology isn’t revolutionary relative to corporate information management/sharing tools, it’s evolutionary.

Davenport stated that if you don’t do the organizational preparation in advance, then Enterprise 2.0 will fail at its goals; McAfee disagreed, saying that he’s seen examples of organizations that were very poorly suited to engaging in Enterprise 2.0 collaboration (such as the intelligence community) have some key people latch onto the tools once they’re in place and help to shift the organizational culture.

In other words, is the technology driving the collaborative effects, or does the organization have to be collaboratively-minded before the technology will be used? That seems to be the core issue that’s being addressed in this debate so far.

McAfee feels that Enterprise 2.0 tools don’t make it any easier to engage in bad behaviour (harassing other employees, sharing company information externally) that people could have done before these tools; I tend to agree with this: if employees are educated about what is and isn’t appropriate behaviour, they’ll make their choices on how to behave regardless of the tools available.

30 minutes into the debate, and process was just mentioned for the first time, in the context of how Enterprise 2.0 is impacting the business processes between a company and its customers/partners. Davenport states that Web 2.0 is having a bigger impact here, since he sees Enterprise 2.0 as purely behind the firewall, whereas McAfee said that his definition of Enterprise 2.0 includes interactions between a company and its partners and customers that happen on the web. Does this include Facebook groups sponsored by a company, or just a company’s own websites?

There was an interesting discussion on control, on which they mostly agreed, and how the “gatekeeper” model of enterprise knowledge management systems is giving way to a more wiki-like “gardening” model: let everyone contribute then clean up the results, rather than restricting who can contribute.

For the second time in this debate, Davenport refers to McAfee’s language as “messianic” in terms of how he promotes the capabilities of Enterprise 2.0 tools; Davenport insists that older-style tools could provide much of the same collaborative environment, and although there is some great new functionality, the technology is not driving the type of organizational change that is suggested by the definitions of Enterprise 2.0.

In summary, Davenport feels that companies should be exploring the technology and loosening control over information creation, but not expect the deployment of these Enterprise 2.0 technologies to change organizational culture. McAfee agrees with the first part, but not the second — he feels that putting these technologies in place will cause emergent applications that will create organizational culture changes.

The debate was recorded and will be posted at the FASTForward blog.

Webinar: The New Paradigm for Business Intelligence – Collaborative, User Centric, Process Embedded

I’m watching this webinar featuring Don Tapscott of New Paradigm and Katrina Coyle of Molson Canada, sponsored by SAP.

Tapscott spoke first, and started with a reworked version of the same presentation that I saw last June at the Enterprise 2.0 conference, covering the four basic drivers for change: web 2.0, the net generation, the social revolution, and the economic revolution. He went on, however, to talk about the changing face of business intelligence: moving from cost-cutting to a focus on growth and creating relationships with customers and partners. There’s a number of factors at play:

  • Simplifying BI from a tool for tech-savvy power users to a visual, interactive tool for business decision makers
  • Making it easier to filter out the relevant data for making decisions rather that being confronted with a sea of data (a foundation of automated decisioning and complex event processing)
  • Providing interactive and iterative tools rather than creating standard reports through batch processes
  • Integrating with business processes for automated decisioning rather than just one-way periodic reporting

He sees more of this in the future: simpler interfaces to allow more people to participate in BI, new visualization techniques, better integration with other technologies, and support for harnessing the collective intelligence of participants.

I love that Tapscott’s using the term “BI 2.0”, which I first used in early 2006 to refer to the entire field of analytics in the face of a new batch of terms that seemed determined to relegate BI to refer only to periodic, one-way reporting.

We were then treated to a 24-slide presentation by Lothar Schubert, Director of Solution Marketing for SAP NetWeaver. Although he provided coverage of the landscape and history of BI, this could have been a bit shorter since we were left with only about 10 minutes for the customer case study.

Next up was Katrina Coyle, BI Team Manager for Molson, discussing their complex business environment — partnerships, acquisitions, multiple geographic locations with different go-to-market strategies, changes to consumer preferences — and how a single version of the truth through BI is absolutely necessary in order for them to continue to build their brand successfully.

Molson has been pushing innovation in their products and through social networking, but also through information using BI. This greatly improves information quality and timeliness throughout their supply chain, which in turn changes their physical loading and shipping practices. Problems in the supply chain are identified as they occur, and less time is spent managing the information and reporting.

You can see a replay of the webinar at the first link above.

WordPress fact o’ the day: fun with feeds

I’m browsing through the new WordPress For Dummies book, with the assumption that even though I’ve been using WordPress for a couple of years and am reasonably comfortable hacking small bits of the code, there’s always some tidbit to be learned. It took me until page 147, but here it is: you can get a feed for a specific post (that is, all comments added to that post) or to a category by adding feed/ to the end of the URL.

For example:

These aren’t fancy conditioned feeds like those that I publish for all posts and all comments via Feedburner, but you can copy and paste the URL directly to your feed reader if your feed reader isn’t auto-detected.

By the way, I didn’t have to do anything to my WordPress blog to make this happen, so it should work for any WordPress-based blog that uses pretty permalinks.

Outsourcing the intranet

I’ve told a lot of people about Avenue A|Razorfish and their use of MediaWiki as their intranet platform (discussed here), and there’s a lot of people who are downright uncomfortable with the idea of any sort of non-standard intranet platform, such as allowing anyone in the company to edit any page on the intranet, or contribute content to the home page via tagging and feeds.

Imagine, then, how freaked out those people would be to have Facebook as their intranet.

Andrew McAfee discusses a prototype of a Facebook application that he’s seen that provides a secure enterprise overlay for Facebook, allowing for easy but secure social networking within the organization. According to WorkLight, the creators of the application:

WorkBook combines all the capabilities of Facebook with all the controls of a corporate environment, including integration with existing enterprise security services and information sources. With WorkBook, employees can find and stay in touch with corporate colleagues, publish company-related news, create bookmarks to enterprise application data and securely share the bookmarks with authorized colleagues, update on status change and get general company news.

This sort of interaction is critical for any organization, and once you get past a certain size or start to spread geographically, you can’t do it with a bulletin board and a water cooler any more; however, many companies either build their own (usually badly) or use some of the emerging Enterprise 2.0 software to do something inside their firewall. As Facebook becomes more widely used for business purposes, however, why not leverage a platform that pretty much everyone under the age of 40 is already using (and a few of us over that age)? One company, Serena Software, is already doing this, although they appear to be using the naked Facebook platform, so likely aren’t putting any sensitive information on there, even in invitation-only groups.

Personally, I quite like the idea, although I’m a bit of an anarchist when it comes to corporate organizations.

There’s a lot that would have to happen for Facebook to become a company’s intranet (or even a part of it): primarily sorting out issues of data ownership and export. There’s lots of people putting confidential data into Salesforce.com and other SaaS platforms that I think we can get past the philosophical question of whether or not to store corporate data outside the firewall; it just needs to be proven to be private, secure and exportable.

I also found an interesting post, coincidentally by an analyst at Serena, discussing how business mashups should be human process centric, which was in response to Keith Harrison-Broninski’s post on mashups and process. Although Facebook isn’t a mashup platform in any real sense, one thing that should be considered in using Facebook as a company’s intranet is how much process can — or should — be built into that. You really can’t do a full intranet without some sort of processes, and although WorkBook is targeted only at the social networking part of the intranet, it could easily become the preferred intranet user interface if it were adopted for that purpose.

Update: Facebook launched Friends Lists today, that is, the ability to group your contacts into different lists that can then be used for messaging and invitations. Although it doesn’t (yet) include the ability to assign different privacy settings for each group, it’s a big step on the way to more of a business platform. LinkedIn, you better get that IPO done soon…

Last day for early bird rate for Gartner BPM summit

It’s not like me to post twice about Gartner in the same day, but I noticed that today is the last day to get the early bird price for the BPM summit that’s coming up February 4-7 in Las Vegas. I’ll be blogging live from there, as I have for the last several Gartner BPM summits.

Fun with feeds

For those of you who subscribe to my feed instead of reading this directly, you’ll notice the new copyright notice and link to the post that’s included at the top of each post in the feed. Although I haven’t had a full-on feed theft of the scale that I experienced back in March, I do see occasional unauthorized reposts of my material on various ad sites. If they’re automatically farming from my feed, this way I’ll at least get a link back.

If you’re using WordPress and interested in doing the same, you can find the FeedEntryHeader plugin here.

Agent Logic’s RulePoint and RTAM

This post has been a long time coming: I missed talking to Agent Logic at the Gartner BPM event in Orlando in September since I didn’t stick around for the CEP part of the week, they persisted and we had both an intro phone call and a longer demo session in the weeks following. Then I had a crazy period of travel, came home to a backlog of client work and a major laptop upgrade, and seemed to lose my blogging mojo for a month.

If you’re not yet familiar with the relatively new field of CEP (complex event processing), there are many references online, including a recent ebizQ white paper based on their event processing survey which determined that a majority of the survey respondents believe that event-driven architecture comprises all three of the following:

  • Real-time event notification – A business event occurs and those individuals or systems who are interested in that event are notified, and potentially act on the event.
  • Event stream processing – Many instances of an event occur, such as a stock trade, and a process filters the event stream and notifies individuals or systems only about the occurrences of interest, such as a stock price reaching a certain level.
  • Complex event processing – Different types of events, from unrelated transactions, correlated together to identify opportunities, trends, anomalies or threats.

And although the survey shows that the CEP market is dominated by IBM, BEA and TIBCO, there are a number of other significant smaller players, including Agent Logic.

In my discussions with Agent Logic, I had the chance to speak with Mike Appelbaum (CEO), Chris Bradley (EVP of Marketing) and Chris Carlson (Director of Product Management). My initial interest was to gain a better understanding of how BPM and CEP come together as well as how their product worked; I was more than a bit amused when they referred to BPM as an “event generator”. I was someone mollified when they also pointed out that business rules engines are event generators: both types of systems (and many others) generate thousands of events to their history logs as they operate, most of which are of no importance whatsoever; CEP helps to find the few unique combinations of events from multiple data feeds that are actually meaningful to the business, such as detecting credit card fraud based on geographic data, spending patterns, and historical account information.

Agent Logic - RulePoint - Home

Agent Logic has been around since 1999, and employs about 50 people. Although they initially targeted defence and intelligence industries, they’re now working with financial services and manufacturing as well. Their focus is on providing an end-user-driven CEP tool for non-technical users to write rules, rather than developers — something that distinguishes them from the big three players in the market. After taking a look at the product, I think that they got their definition of “non-technical user” from the same place as the BPM vendors: the prime target audience for their product would be a technically-minded business analyst. This definitely pushes down the control and enforcement of policies and procedures closer to the business user.

They also seem to be more focused on allowing people to respond to events in real-time (rather than, for example, spawning automated processes to react to events, although the product is certainly capable of that). As with other CEP tools, they allow multiple data feeds to be combined and analyzed, and rules set for alerts and actions to fire based on specific business events corresponding to combinations of events in the data feeds.

Agent Logic has two separate user environments (both browser-based): RulePoint, where the rules are built that will trigger alerts, and RTAM, where the alerts are monitored.

Agent Logic - RulePoint - Rule builderRulePoint is structured to allow more technical users work together with less technical users. Not only can users share rules, but a more technical user can create “topics”, which are aggregated, filtered data sources, then expose these to the less technical to be used as input for their rules. Rules can be further combined to create higher-level rules.

RulePoint has three modes for creating rules: templates, wizards and advanced. In all cases, you’re applying conditions to a data source (topic) and creating a response, but they vary widely in terms of ease of use and flexibility.

  • Templates can be used by non-technical users, who can only set parameter values for controlling filtering and responses, and save their newly-created rule for immediate use.
  • The wizard creation tool allows for much more complex conditions and responses to be created. As I mentioned previously, this is not really end-user friendly — more like business analyst friendly — but not bad.
  • The advanced creation mode allows you to write DRQL (detect and response query language) directly, for example, ‘when 1 “Stock Quote” s with s.symbol = “MSFT” and s.price > 90 then “Instant Message” with to=”[email protected]”,body=’MSFT is at ${s.price}”‘. Not for everyone, but the interesting thing is that by using template variables within the DRQL statements, you can converted rules created in advanced mode into templates for use by non-technical users: another example of how different levels of users can work together.

Agent Logic - RulePoint - WatchlistsWatchlists are lists that can be used as parameter sets, such as a list of approved airlines for rules related to travel expenses, which then become drop-down selection lists when used in templates. Watchlists can be dynamically updated by rules, such as adding a company to a list of high-risk companies if a SWIFT message is received that references both that company and a high-risk country.

Agent Logic - RulePoint - ServicesRulePoint includes a large number of predefined services that can be used as data sources or responders, including SQL, web services and RSS feeds. You can also create your own services. By providing access to web services both as a data source and as a method of responding to an alert, this allows Agent Logic to do things like kick off a new fraud review process in a BPMS when a set of events occur across a range of systems that indicate a potential for fraud.

Lastly, in terms of rule creation, there are both standard and custom responses that can be attached to a rule, ranging from sending an alert to a specific user in RTAM to sending an email message to writing a database record.

Although most of the power of Agent Logic shows up in RulePoint, we spent a bit of time looking at RTAM, the browser-based real-time alert manager. Some Agent Logic customers don’t use RTAM at all, or only for high-priority alerts, preferring to use RulePoint to send responses to other systems. However, compared to a typical BAM environment, RTAM provides pretty rich functionality: it can link to underlying data sources, for example, by linking to an external web site with criminal record data on receiving an alert that a job candidate has a record, and allows for mashups with external services such as Google maps.

Agent Logic - RTAM - AlertsIt’s also more of an alert management system rather than just monitoring: you can filter alerts by the various rules that trigger them, and perform other actions such as acknowledging the alert or forwarding it to another user.

Admittedly, I haven’t seen a lot of other CEP products to this depth to provide any fair comparison, but there were a couple of things that I really liked about Agent Logic. First of all, RulePoint provides a high degree of functionality with three different levels of interfaces for three different skill levels, allowing more technical users to create aggregated, easier-to-use data sources and services for less technical users to include in their rules. Rule creation ranges from dead simple (but inflexible) with templates to roll-your-own in advanced mode.

Secondly, the separation of RulePoint and RTAM allows the use of any BI/BAM tool instead of RTAM, or just feeding the alerts out as RSS feeds or to a portal such as Google Gadgets or Pageflakes. I saw a case study of how Bank of America is using RSS for company-wide alerts at the Enterprise 2.0 conference earlier this year, and see a natural fit between CEP and this sort of RSS usage.

Update: Agent Logic contacted me and requested that I remove a few of the screenshots that they don’t want published. Given that I always ask vendors during a demo if there is anything that I can’t blog about, I’m not sure how that misunderstanding occurred, but I’ve complied with their request.

Trouble with tracking

Why is that most of the time these days when I try to track a comment with co.mments, it doesn’t work at least 50% of the time? I just see the endless “Loading…” message as the script tries to load, and the same when I visit the website. With no access to the website, it’s also impossible to report the problem.

I’ve had to revert to using cocomment, which I don’t like as much, and now seems to be timing out occasionally as well.

I like the idea of being able to track comments on any post on someone else’s blog, whether I’ve commented on it or not, and have them feed to my reader so that I can see if anyone else has contributed to the conversation.