IIR BPM: Me and the role of standards in BPM

I’m up now, and here’s what I’ll be presenting:

I know, it’s long, but I’ll breeze past a number of the slides that I put in there just for reference. If this isn’t enough on standards for you, I highly recommend Michael zur Muehlen’s BPM standards tutorial. I liked it so much, I stole a couple of his slides, although he’ll probably sit in on my session to keep me honest.

IIR BPM: Facilitated session on standards

Alec Sharp led a facilitated session on standards that we love, hate, or wish were there (or don’t care about). This is a bit similar to the BPM Think Tank roundtables, but we’re at about six small tables so had a chance for some mini-break-out sessions to discuss ideas, then gather them together.

The notes that came out of this:

  • One group had some general comments about standards, stating that a common language can simplify, but that the alphabet soup of standards is too complicated and IT driven.
  • Another group hates BPMN because they feel that a 200-page specification isn’t understandable by business users, and that BPMN is really for specifying automated process execution but is not for business consumption. It’s stifling and constrains what can be modelled.
  • Standards aren’t written in plain English. There are two sets of standards: methodology standards and tool standards, and we often confuse the two. Once is focussed on human-driven processes, and the other on technology-driven processes. A great analogy: the people coming up with the tools have never baked the cake, or even eaten one.
  • Standards are often misunderstood, both in terms of who they’re for and what they’re for: they’re misinterpreted by marketing types. [I see this a lot with BPEL having become a standard “check box” on BPM RFPs rather than a real requirement.]
  • Standards can seem inflexible.
  • Interchange standards are either insufficient or improperly used by the tools, making it near-impossible to do round-tripping between different tools. They’re intended to use for translation between business and technology domains, but notational standards are possibly becoming less understandable because they are targetted at flowing into interchange standards. [I’m not sure that I agree with this: IT may require that business model in specific forms rather than just allow business to use BPMN in the way that they best fits the organization.]
  • Standards should be discovered, not invented [Vint Cerf, via Michael zur Muehlen], and BPM standards have been mostly invented.
  • In defense of standards, one person noted that the form of a sonnet is one of the most constrained/standardized forms of writing, but that Shakespeare wrote some of his most beautiful works as sonnets.
  • I got in a few comments about the importance of interchange standards, and how round-tripping is one of the primary problems with these standards — or rather their implementation within the BPA and BPM tools.
  • There’s an issue with the priority when adopting standards: is it to empower the business users, or to support IT implementation? If the former, then it will likely work out, but if it’s for the latter, then the business is not going to totally buy in to the standards.
  • The relationship with the business has changed: it used to be treated as a black box, but now has to be more integrated with IT, which means that they have to bite the bullet and start using some of these standards rather than abdicate responsibility for process modelling.

I don’t necessarily agree with all of these points, since this turned into mostly a standards-bashing session, but it was an interesting debate.

Forgotten posts

I was in Windows Live Writer this morning (the offline tool that I use for writing blog posts) and noticed that I had totally forgotten to post the last two from Integration World last week. I’ve published them on the dates that they were written, and you can find Tata’s short presentation on next-generation SOA here, and Bruce Williams’ presentation on process improvement here.

Sorry about the slip; I’m definitely getting conference fatigue, and am currently at what I hope to be the last one for the year (since I have to skip SOA India).

Integration World Day 2: Next Generation SOA

Santosh Mohanty from Tata gave a presentation on SOA, with a bit about the current generation, and how to move on to the next generation. Tata is a pretty major sponsor of the conference: I think that webMethods created a new “diamond” level of sponsorship just for them, which gives them both the opening night reception plus a keynote this morning.

His lessons for achieving next generation SOA:

  • Define agility controls.
  • Create an agile platform.
  • Articulate enterprise value in terms of efficiency, agility and adaptability.
  • Create a performance framework in order to create a performance-driven organization. This ties in strongly with webMethods message about “measure first” and the focus on BAM and analytics.
  • Create business and IT collaboration. Much easier said than done, and I’m not convinced that business needs to be all that involved in SOA since it’s really not relevant to most business people how the services get delivered, just that they are delivered. Of course, I see BPM and SOA and two distinct technologies; those that see BPM as just an extension of SOA will see business-IT collaboration as a necessity, and I think that Tata may fall into this latter camp.
  • Establish the right governance.

Tata was (I believe) one of the first companies to achieve CMM level 5 certification, and it makes sense that Mohanty’s first point is about control. It won’t do much to foster emergent applications, however. I think that all the large systems integrators are in a similar position: although there’s lots of work for them around legacy modernization and creating services, the current generation of BPM tools has to scare them, since it allows organizations to do a lot more of their own codeless development of business processes.

Integration World: Peter Schwartz

The futurist Peter Schwartz gave the final keynote this morning; I saw him giving a closing keynote at the Gartner BPM conference in February this year and really enjoyed it; unfortunately, this was pretty much the same talk. Long tail…blah, blah, blah…nanophotonics…blah, blah, blah…flattening world…blah, blah, blah…global warming…blah, blah, blah…ubiquitous broadband.

Conference organizers should definitely take a look at who’s been doing the generic keynotes at recent conferences that their attendees are very likely to have attended.

Integration World Day 1: David Mitchell keynote

David Mitchell, COO of webMethods Business Division, was up next with a much greater focus on BPM. webMethods had been positioning BPM — including both system-to-system and human-facing — as their growth area before the acquisition, and that’s still the message. Companies are competing on process, not just products and services, since process represents the ability to meet customer requirements in the face of changing conditions. As I’ve written many times before, the value is in process agility and visibility in a heterogeneous environment.

He had a number of case studies of how customers have improved their processes and operations based on what they’ve done with webMethods to integrate their systems for the goals of agility and visibility. He said "If you have unlimited time and unlimited money, you can pay IBM to do this for you", followed by the clear message that the rest of us should be using webMethods instead.

He also discussed the impact of the merger: long-time Software AG customers engaging with the webMethods product line since they trust Software AG to help them with their modernization efforts. There were some interesting comments about mergers in this marketplace, and the issue of aligning the products and customers of the acquired and the acquirer. As Mitchell put it, that question has now been answered for webMethods, but is still up in the air for companies such as BEA and TIBCO.

Integration World Day 1: Karl-Heinz Steibich keynote

Well, not really day 1: there were classes yesterday, but this is the first day of the Integration World conference per se. Someone in webMethods management must have a serious love for electric guitars, since the prize at last night’s reception was a Gibson Les Paul guitar, and a loud (for 8:30am) rock band was on stage to open the conference. My ears are still ringing.

Mark Jeffries of webMethods led off this marathon 2-hour keynote session, then Karl-Heinz Streibich, CEO of Software AG, was up to talk about the combined corporate structure and their general future plans. He showed the evolution of the software industry, from build to buy to compose, and how Software AG sits directly on that infrastructure space focused on composite applications. It’s not like companies are throwing away all the applications and infrastructure that were built (or bought), but the growth is in the composition area. This growth, plus the webMethods acquisition, will push Software AG into the $1B revenue range next year (although those are, unfortunately, rapidly declining $US 🙂 ).

I attended the BPM Advisory Council breakfast prior to this, and had an interesting discussion with a couple of large (and long-time) webMethods customers about how webMethods stacks up in the BPM space. Clearly (to me, anyway), they’re behind the curve in terms of the pure BPM technology, but they play to their strengths in the integration end of things. The customers pooh-poohed the BPM vendors that don’t provide the whole integration stack as "just calling individual services", which is a bit of a simplistic view, but considering that these customers are coming from the traditional EAI-type usage of webMethods, it’s understandable. When you’re modernizing your legacy systems, there needs to be something in there to allow you to easily plug into those old systems using a web services interface, and that’s provided by webMethods. The Software AG acquisition will allow them to strengthen those linkages for Adabas/Natural applications, which are technologies still well-represented within large organizations.

Software AG analyst briefing at Integration World

Thanks to Air Canada’s ever-shifting schedule (why does the same flight number that I flew to Orlando two weeks ago now leave an hour later?), I arrived too late to the analyst briefing to hear the Peter Kurpick and David Mitchell of the webMethods division, but did sit in on the latter half to hear about the enterprise transaction systems division, which includes their Adabas and Natural products. There’s a press release in the packet about a new Software AG release due for tomorrow: Natural for Ajax, reminding me that there’s a ton of companies out there with Adabas and Natural applications on their mainframes that are still supported by Software AG, and need to find some alternatives to keep the life in those systems. I have a few financial services customers that have mission-critical Adabas/Natural applications, and they have no intention of rewriting them for some other software platform.

Simply replacing the mainframe with some other technology platform isn’t always the best solution, and is a total non-starter in many situations where there’s a significant amount of legacy business logic and data in those systems. I’ve been referring to mainframes as "just big servers" for quite some time now, and there’s no reason not to think of them that way: big database and back-end application servers that serve a useful purpose within large organizations. You might not start building a new system from scratch on a mainframe, but there’s often good reasons to keep them around if they’re already in place. Software AG, by providing tools such as Natural for Ajax, is providing some of the tools that organizations need to make the transition into more modern technology, without requiring a full rip-and-replace. I’m not sure that I completely agree with their vision of a mainframe Renaissance, however.

We had 20 minutes of corporate financial review from the CFO, which reminded me firmly why I went into engineering instead of accounting; I’m sure that there’s many capable financial analysts who have written about the numbers so I can slack off here. In looking at the overall financials, I’m reminded of the presentation that I saw at the New Software Industry conference earlier this year about how the proportion of product to services shifts as a software company ages: if you ignore software maintenance revenue — which is about 2/3 the size of the licence revenue — then the product-to-service ratio is about 1:1, and if you include maintenance in services, then the ratio goes to about 3:5. The theory is that as software companies age, they get better at providing services, and therefore it’s more profitable, hence tend to encourage the growth of that part of their business. This is completely off on a tangent, but I’m trying to keep my mind on the presentation as the CFO discusses the "Brazilian effect", and I have no idea what he means (since I assume that he’s not talking about the type of Brazilian effect that you get at a salon).

I had a chance to review the materials from the presentations that I missed, and there’s some interesting things there. This is a condensed version of what will be presented to customers here at Integration World, and I have a one-on-one meeting with Peter Kurpick on Wednesday so will undoubtedly see this again over the next two days. And hopefully have some more insightful comments at that time.