Accepting The Business Architecture Challenge with @logicalleap

Forrester analyst Jeff Scott presented at Building Business Capability on what business architecture is and what business architects do. According to their current research, interest in business architecture is very high – more than half of organizations consider it “very important”, and all organizations survey showed some interest – and more than half also have an active business architecture initiative. This hasn’t changed all that much since their last survey on this in 2008, although the numbers have crept up slightly. Surprisingly, less than half of the business architecture activities are on an enterprise-wide level, although if you combine that with those that have business architecture spanning multiple lines of business, it hits about 85%. When you look at where these organizations plan to take their business architecture programs, over 80% are planning for them to be enterprise-wide but that hasn’t changed in 3 years, meaning that although the intention is there, that may not actually be happening with any speed.

He moved on to a definition of business architecture, and how it has changed in the past 15 years. In the past, it used to be more like business analysis and requirements, but now it’s considered an initiative (either by business, EA or IT) to improve business performance and business/IT alignment. The problem is, in my opinion, that the term “business/IT alignment” has become a bit meaningless in the past few years as every vendor uses it in their marketing literature. Process models are considered a part of business architecture by a large majority of organizations with a business architecture initiative, as are business capability models and business strategy, application portfolio assessments, organizational models and even IT strategy.

Business architecture has become the hot new professional area to get into, whether you’re a business analyst or an enterprise architecture, which means that it’s necessary to have a better common understanding of what business architecture actually is and who the business architects are. I’m moderating a panel on this topic with three business/IT/enterprise architects today at 4:30pm, and plan to explore this further with them. Scott showed their research on what people did before they became (or labeled themselves as) business architects: most held a business analyst role, although many also were enterprise architects, application architects and other positions. Less than half of the business architects are doing it full time, so may still be fulfilling some of those other roles in addition. Many of them are resident in the EA group, and more than half of organizations consider EA to be responsible for the outcomes of business architecture.

It’s really a complex set of factors in figuring out what business architects do: some of them are working on enterprise-wide business transformation, while others are looking at efficiency within a business unit or project. The background of the business architect – that is, what they did before they became a business architect – can hugely impact (obviously) the scope and focus of their work as a business architect. In fact, is business architecture a function performed by many players, or is it a distinct role? Who is really involved in business architecture besides those who hold the title, and where do they fit in the organization? As Scott pointed out, these are unanswered questions that will plague business architecture for a few years still to come.

He presented several shifts to make in thinking:

  • Give up your old paradigms (think different; act different to get different results)
  • Start with “why” before you settle on the how and what
  • “Should” shouldn’t matter when mapping from “what is” to “what can be”
  • Exploration, not standardization, since enterprise architecture is still undergoing innovation on its way to maturity
  • Business architecture, not technology architecture, is what provides insight, risk management and leadership (rather than engineering, knowledge and management)
  • Stress on “business” in business architecture, not “architecture”, which may not fit into the EA frameworks that are more focused on knowledge
  • Focus on opportunity rather than efficiency, which is aligned with the shift in focus for BPM benefits that I’ve been seeing in the past few years
  • Complex problems need different solutions, including looking at the problems in context rather than just functional decomposition.
  • Solve the hard “soft” problems of building business architect skills and credibility, leveraging local successes to gain support and sponsorship, and overcome resistance to change
  • Think like the business before applying architectural thinking to the business problems and processes

He finished up with encouragement to become more business savvy: not just the details of business, but innovation and strategy. This can be done via some good reading resources, finding a business mentor and building relationships, while keeping in mind that business architecture should be an approach to clarify and illuminate the organization’s business model.

He wrote a blog post on some of the challenges facing business architects back in July, definitely worth a read as well.

Agile Predictive Process Platforms for Business Agility with @jameskobielus

James Kobielus of Forrester brought the concepts of predictive analytics to processes to discuss optimizing processes using the Next Best Action (NBA): using analytics and predictive models to figure out what you should do next in a process in order to optimize customer-facing processes.

As we heard in this morning’s keynote, agility is mandatory not just for competitive differentiation, for but basic business survival. This is especially true for customer-facing processes: since customer relationships are fragile and customer satisfaction is dynamic, the processes need to be highly agile. Customer happiness metrics need to be built into process design, since customer (un)happiness can be broadcast via social media in a heartbeat. According to Kobielus, if you have the right data and can analyze it appropriately, you can figure out what a customer needs to experience in order to maximize their satisfaction and maximizing your profits.

Business agility is all about converging process, data, rules and analytics. Instead of static business processes, historical business intelligence and business rules silos, we need to have real-time business Intelligence, dynamic processes, and advanced analytics and rules that guide and automate processes. It’s all about business processes, but processes infused with agile intelligence.  This has become a huge field of study (and implementation) in customer-facing scenarios, where data mining and behavioral studies are used to create predictive models on what the next best action is for a specific customer, given their past behavior as your customer, and even social media sentiment analysis.

He walked through a number of NBA case studies, including auto-generating offers based on a customer’s portal behavior in retail; tying together multichannel customer communications in telecom; and personalizing cross-channel customer interactions in financial services. These are based on coupling front and back-office processes with predictive analytics and rules, while automating the creation of the predictive models so that they are constantly fine-tuned without human intervention.

Process Excellence at Elevations Credit Union

Following the opening keynote at Building Business Capability, I attended the session about Elevations Credit Union’s journey to process excellence. Rather than a formal presentation, this was done as a sit-down discussion with Carla Wolfe, senior business analyst at Elevations CU being interviewed by Mihnea Galateanu, Chief Storyteller for Blueworks Live at IBM. Elevations obviously has a pretty interesting culture, because they publicly state – on their Facebook page, no less – that achieving the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award is their big hairy audacious goal (BHAG). To get there, they first had to get their process house in order.

They had a lot of confusion about what business processes even are, and how to discover the business processes that they had and wanted to improve. They used the AQPC framework as a starting point, and went out to all of their business areas to see who “Got Process?”. As they found out, about 80% didn’t have any idea of their business processes, and certainly didn’t have them documented or managed in any coherent manner. As they went through process discovery, they pushed towards “enterprise process maps”: namely, their end-to-end processes, or value streams.

Elevations is a relatively small company, only 260 employees; they went from having 60 people involved in process management (which is an amazingly high percentage to begin with) to a “much higher” number now. By publicly stating the Baldridge award – which is essentially about business process quality – as a BHAG, they couldn’t back away from this; this was a key motivator that kept people involved in the process improvement efforts. As they started to look at how processes needed to work, there was a lot of pain, particularly as they looked as some of the seriously broken processes (like when the marketing department created a promotion using a coupon to bring in new customers, but didn’t inform operations about the expected bump of new business, nor tell the front line tellers how to redeem the coupons). Even processes that are perceived as being dead simple – such as cashing a $100 bill at a branch – ended up involving many more steps and people that anyone had anticipated.

What I found particularly interesting about their experience was how they really made this about business processes (using value stream terminology, but processes nonetheless), so that everything that they looked at had to relate to a value stream. “Processes are the keys to the kingdom”, said Wolfe, when asked why they focused on process rather than, for example, customers. As she pointed out, if you get your processes in order, everything else falls into place. Awesome.

It was a major shift in thinking for people to see how they fit into these processes, and how they supported the overall value stream. Since most people (not just those at Elevations) just think about their own silo, and don’t think beyond their immediate process neighbors. Now, they think about process first, transforming the entire organization into process thinking mode. As they document their processes (using, in part, a Six Sigma SIPOC movel), they add a picture of the process owner to each of the processes or major subprocesses, which really drives home the concept of process ownerships. I should point out that most of the pictures that she showed of this was of paper flow diagrams pasted on walls; although they are a Blueworks Live customer, the focus here was really on their process discovery and management. She did, however, talk about the limitations of paper-based process maps (repository management, collaboration, ease of use), and how they used Blueworks Live once they had stabilized their enterprise process maps in order to allow better collaboration around the process details. By developing the SIPOCs of the end-to-end processes first on paper, they then recreated those in Blueworks Live to serve as a framework for collaboration, and anyone creating a new process had to link it to one of those existing value streams.

It’s important to realize that this was about documenting and managing manual processes, not implementing them in an automated fashion using a BPMS execution engine. Process improvement isn’t (necessarily) about technology, as they have proved, although the the process discovery uses a technology tool, and the processes include steps that interact with their core enterprise systems. Fundamentally, these are manual processes that include system interaction. Which means, of course, that there may be a whole new level of improvement that they could consider by adding some process automation to link together their systems and possibly automate some manual steps, plus automate some of the metrics and controls.

So where are they in achieving their BHAG? One year after launching their process improvement initiative, they won the Timberline level of the Colorado Performance Excellence (CPEx) Award, and continue to have their sights set on the Baldridge in the long term. Big, hairy and audacious, indeed.

Building Business Capability Keynote with @Ronald_G_Ross, @KathleenBarret and @RogerBurlton

After a short (and entertaining) introduction by Gladys Lam, we heard the opening keynote with conference chairs Ron Ross, Kathleen Barret and Roger Burlton. These three come from the three primary areas covered by this conference – business rules, business analysis and business process – and we heard about what attendees can expect to learn about and take away from the conference:

  • The challenge of business agility, which can be improved through the use of explicit and external business rules, instead of hard-coding rules into applications and documents. Making rules explicit also allows the knowledge within those rules to be more explicitly viewed and managed.
  • The need to think differently and use new solutions to solve today’s problems, and development of a new vocabulary to describe these problems and solutions.
  • You need to rewire the house while the lights are on, that is, you can’t stop your business while you take the time to improve it, but need to ensure that current operations are maintained in the interim.
  • Business rules need to be managed in a business sense, including traceability, in order to become a key business capability. They also need to be defined declaratively, independent from the business processes in which they might be involved.
  • Process and rules are the two key tools that should be in every business analyst’s toolkit: it’s not enough just to analyze the business, but you must be looking at how the identification and management of process and rules can improve the business.

The key message from all three of the chairs is that the cross-pollination between process, rules, analysis and architecture is essential in order to identify, manage and take advantage of the capabilities of your business. There is a lot of synergy between all of these areas, so don’t just stick with your area of expertise, but check out sessions in other tracks as well. We were encouraged to step up to a more business-oriented view of solving business problems, rather than just thinking about software and systems.

I’m adding the sessions that I attend to the Lanyrd site that I created for the conference, and linking my blog posts, presentations, etc. in the “coverage” area for each session. If you’re attending or presenting at a session, add it on Lanyrd so that others can socialize around it.

I’m moderating two panels during the remainder of the conference: today at 4:30pm is a BPM vendor panel on challenges in BPM adoption, then tomorrow at 4:30pm is a panel on business architecture versus IT architecture.

Tracking Your Conference Social Buzz

I’m pretty active on social media: primarily, I blog and tweet, but I also participate in Foursquare, Facebook and, recently, the social conference site Lanyrd. When I was preparing for this week’s Building Business Capabilities conference in Fort Lauderdale, I added the sessions that I’ll be giving and a few others to the Lanyrd site that I created for the conference, and encouraged others to do the same. Just to explain, this isn’t the official BBC site, but a shadow crowd-sourced site that allows people to socialize their participation in the conference: think of it as a wiki for the conference, including some structured data that makes it more than just plain text. Logging in via your Twitter account, you can create a session (or a whole conference), add speakers to it, indicate that you’re attending or speaking at the conference, and add links to any coverage (blog posts, slides, video, etc.).

For someone tracking the conference remotely, or attending but unable to attend all of the sessions, this is a great way to find information about the sessions that is just too fast-moving to expect the conference organizers to add to the official site. If you’re at BBC, or tracking it from your desk at home, I recommend that you check out the Lanyrd site for BBC, add any sessions that you’re attending or presenting that are missing (I only added a dozen or so, so feel free to go wild there), and link in any coverage of the conference or sessions that you read about on blogs or other sites.

I’ve been using Lanyrd for about a year, sometimes just to add conferences that I know are happening, but also to add myself to ones created by others, as a speaker, participant or just a tracker. There’s also a Lanyrd iPhone app that downloads all of this to your phone. Although BBC has a mobile site, it’s slow to load and doesn’t have a lot of the social features that you’ll find in the Lanyrd app, or the ability to save details offline.

I also had an interesting social interaction about my hotel room here at the Westin Diplomat, where the conference is being held. I checked in just after noon yesterday and arrived at the room to find it was nestled right beside a very noisy mechanical room, and looked out directly at several large air conditioning units about 10 feet away on the roof of the adjacent structure. It sounded like I was in the engine room of a ship. Unable to raise the front desk by phone, I went back down, and spent 20 minutes waiting for service. Fuming slightly, I tweeted, and ended up in a conversation with the Starwood hotels Twitter presence, StarwoodBuzz, which responded almost immediately to my mention of a Westin property. The second room was beside the elevator shaft so still a bit noisy, but tolerable; however, when I returned from dinner around 10pm, the carpet was flooded from a leaking windowpane due to the torrential rain that we had all evening, and another room change was required.

The hotel responded appropriately, for the most part (the service for the first room change could have been a bit better, and I expected a really quiet room after complaining about noise in the first room), but the real surprise was the near-immediate feedback and constant care provided by the nameless person/people at StarwoodBuzz, which you can see in the Bettween widget below:

[ Update: Unfortunately, Bettween went offline, and I didn’t capture a screen shot of the conversation. 🙁 I went back and faked it by favoriting all of the tweets in the conversation, then taking a screen snap.]

This is an excellent example of how some companies monitor the social conversation about their brands, and respond in a timely and helpful manner. Kudos to Starwood for putting this service in place. This is also a good example of why you should tweet using your real name (assuming that you’re not in a situation where that would be harmful to your person): StarwoodBuzz was able to notify the hotel management of my predicament. It’s possibly that by showing that I’m a real person, rather than a whiner complaining about their hotel while hiding behind a pseudonym, they were able to better address the problem.

The really funny thing is that everyone who I’ve run into at the conference so far said that they saw my original tweet, and wanted to know what happened with my room. Now they can watch it live on Twitter.

Ramping up for BBC2011

I’m getting ready to head for Fort Lauderdale for my last conference (and, I hope, flight) of the year: Building Business Capability. This conference grew out of the Business Rules Forum when it added tracks for business process, business analysis and business architecture, so technically it includes Business Rules Forum, Business Analysis Forum, Business Architecture Summit and Business Process Forum, but there’s so much overlap in interest that it’s fair to say that few people stick just to one track at this event.

I have a couple of spots in the conference this week, starting on Monday morning when I am giving a tutorial on aligning BPM and enterprise architecture, similar to that which I gave at the IRM BPM conference in London in June. It’s October 31st so Halloween costumes are optional, but I will give a prize for the best one worn by a tutorial attendee.

On Tuesday afternoon, I’m moderating a BPM vendor panel focused on BPM adoption issues from the vendors’ point of view. I’m a bit late with my plug for this since there was some confusion about who was actually picking the panelists (as I found out a few days ago, it was me), but I’ve assembled a stellar lineup:

  • Jesse Shiah, Founder and CEO at AgilePoint. I first met Jesse back at the BPM Think Tank in 2007, when his company was still called Ascentn; since then, they’ve changed it to something that we can all pronounce while they work at turning Microsoft’s Visio and Visual Studio into real BPM tools.
  • Mihnea Galeteanu, Chief Storyteller for BlueworksLiveat IBM. Besides having the coolest job title, Mihnea and I both live in Toronto, so have the advantage of being able to really put “social” into BPM by meeting for coffee to discuss how IBM is making BPM social with BlueworksLive. Yes, I make him pay for the coffee.
  • Jeremy Westerman, Senior Product Marketing Manager for BPM at TIBCO. Part of TIBCO’s “British invasion”, Jeremy and I have a long history of me asking him about what’s coming up in their product releases (such as “how’s that AMX/BPM to tibbrintegration coming along?”), and him trying to say things that won’t get him in trouble with TIBCO’s legal department. Obviously, he’s a big fan of my “everything is off the record after the bar opens” rule.
  • Thomas Olbrich, Cofounder and Managing Director at taraneon. Unlike the other vendors on the panel which provide implementation tools, taraneon provides a process test facility for process quality, meaning that they have the best process horror stories of all. Thomas is the only one of the panelists who I haven’t met face-to-face before now, although I feel like I know him because of our lengthy Twitter exchanges, only some of which are about shoes.

There’s also a rumor that I’m moderating a panel on Wednesday afternoon on business architecture versus technology architecture, although I have yet to hear any details about it.

If you’re interested in trying out a social conference site, you can find BBC on Lanyrd, where you can indicate that you’re attending, speaking at, or just tracking the conference, as well as adding any sessions that you’re interested in. Note that this is an independent crowdsourced social conference site, not an official site of the BBC conference. You can also follow the conference on Twitter at #bbccon11.

DemoCamp Toronto 30 Demos

On October 12th, I attended the 30th edition of Toronto DemoCamp, and saw four demos from local startups.

Upverter is an online electronic design tools, using HTML5, Javascript and Google libraries to provide a drawing canvas for electrical engineers. With about 40,000 lines of code, it provides pretty complex functionality, and they are hoping to displace $100K enterprise tools. They are seeing some enterprise adoption, but are pushing in the university and college space to provide free tools for EE students doing circuit design, who presumably will then take that knowledge into their future places of employment. They have realtime design collaboration designed into it, which will be released in the next few weeks, and already allow for some collaboration and reuse of common components. They also integrate with manufacturers and distributors, providing both components catalogues as input to the design, and “print to order/make” on the completion of the design.

Vidyard is a video player for corporate websites, intended to avoid the problems of native YouTube embedding, including that of corporate networks that block YouTube content. They provide customization of the video player, SEO and analytics, including analytics from the cross-posted video on YouTube. For me, the most interesting part was that they built this in 16 weeks, and fully embraced the idea that if you’re a startup, you can do it faster.

Blu Trumpet is an advertising platform based on application discovery, providing an SDK for an app explorer to be embedded in a publisher’s app to display a list of “related” or partner apps, and redirect to the App Store.

Maide Control was the most exciting demo for me that evening, mostly because it turned my preconceived notion of how a gadget is supposed to be used on its head: they allow you to use your iPad as an input controller for 3D navigation, rather than for consumption of information. In other words, you don’t see the model on your iPad, you see it on the native application on your computer, while your iPad is the touch-based input device that does gesture recognition and translates it to the application.

That’s not to say that you’ll give up using your iPad for consumption, but that you’ll extend your use of it by providing a completely new mode of functionality during an activity (navigating a 3D space such as a building model) when your iPad is probably currently languishing in a drawer. They gave a demo of using an iPad to navigate a 3D city model on SketchUp, taking full advantage of multi-touch capabilities to zoom and reorient the model. When I saw this, I immediately thought of Ross Brown and his 3D process models (BPMVE); even for 2D models, the idea of a handheld touchpad for navigating a model when displaying during a group presentation is definitely compelling. Add the ability for multiple iPads to interface simultaneously, and you have a recipe for in-person group model collaboration that could be awesome.

They also showed the ability to use the iPad and a mouse simultaneously for controlling the view and drawing simultaneously; for impatient, ambidextrous people like me, that’s a dream come true. They have to build interfaces to each specific application, such as what they have already done with SketchUp, but I can imagine a huge market for this with Autodesk’s products, and a somewhat smaller market for 2D Visio model manipulation.

Disappointingly, Kobo didn’t show in spite of being on the schedule; it was probably just a week too early to give us a sneak peek at their new gadget.

IBM IOD Keynote Day 3: New Possibilities (When They’re Not Blacked Out)

So there I was, in my hotel room – where the wifi actually works – watching the IOD keynote online, when the video went offline during the Michael Lewis/Billy Beane talk.

I understand (now) that there are copyright issues around broadcasting Michael Lewis and Billy Beane talking about how analytics are used in baseball, but it would have been great to know that it advance: I may have headed on the long walk down to the crowded, noisy, wifi-challenged events center to watch it in person. Instead, I’m hanging out, hoping for a speedy return of the video feed, and really not knowing if it’s coming back at all. Kind of like a scheduled system outage that your sys admin forgot to tell everyone about.

I’m headed for the airport shortly, so this was my last (and somewhat unsatisfying) session from IOD 2011. Regardless, there is definitely good content at IOD, a great conference for customers, partners and industry watchers alike. I also had the chance to meet up with many of my old FileNet colleagues (where I worked in 2000-2001 as the eProcess evangelist, in what I usually refer to as the longest 16 months of my life), some of whom are still at IBM following the 2006 acquisition, and some of whom are now at IBM business partners.

My major disappointment, this morning’s keynote blackout aside, was the cancellation of the 1:1 interviews with ECM executives that were scheduled. I think that being here under the blogger program (which designates me as “press”) rather than the analyst program (which is how I attend the IBM Impact conference, and most other vendor conferences) somehow has me seen as being less influential, although obviously my output and take-aways for my clients are identical either way.

IBM FileNet BPM Product Update

Last session of the day, and Mike Fannon and Dave Yockelson are giving an update on FileNet BPM, particularly the 5.x release. The highlights:

  • The Process Engine (PE) was ported completely to a standard Java application, with some dramatic performance increases: 60% improvement in response time through the Java API, 70% (or more) reduction in CPU utilization, near-linear growth in CPU utilization for vertical scaling (i.e., more processes on a single server), and constant CPU utilization on horizontal scaling (e.g., twice as many processes on twice as many servers).
  • Linux and zLinux support.
  • Multi-tenancy, allowing multiple PE instances to run on the same virtual server, so that different isolated regions can be tied to separate PE database stores. If you have multiple isolated regions in a single store now, there will be a procedure for migrating this for better multi-tenancy.
  • Simplified installation, configuration and operation.
  • Deployment/upgrade paths directly from pretty much any currently supported FileNet BPM environment to 5.x, going all the way back to eProcess (there was one person in the audience who admitted to still using it), as well as v3.53, 4.03, 4.50 and 4.51.
  • Process Analyzer is now Case Analyzer, having been extended to add capabilities for Case Manager. Case Analyzer reporting is now supported through Cognos BI in addition to the old-school Excel pivot tables.
  • Process Monitor is now Case Monitor (I seem to be seeing  a trend here), with Cognos Real-time Monitoring 10.1 (previously called Cognos Now) bundled in as an interactive dashboard solution.
  • Integration of IBM Forms (as we saw in the Case Manager product update) to be used in the same way as FileNet eForms are used in FileNet BPM today, namely, for a richer UI replacement that provides functionality such as digital signatures.

We moved on to yet another presentation on Case Manager; I could probably have skipped the previous session and just come to this one, but there was no indication on the conference materials that that would be a good idea.

Time for a quick sprint through the vendor expo, then off to the evening networking event, which promises displays highlighting 100 years of the history of IBM and the computing industry. We’ll also have a concert by Train, which is the third Train concert at the three large vendor conferences that I’ve attended in the last six weeks: Progress, TIBCO and now IBM. Not sure if the corporate gig is a new market strategy for Train; maybe I’ll actually make it to tonight’s conference after missing the previous two.

IBM Case Manager Product Update

The nice thing about IBM Case Manager (shortened to ICM in some of their material, and ACM in others) being so new is that you can show up late to the technical product briefing and not miss anything, since the product managers spend the first 10 15 minutes re-explaining what case management and ICM are to the crowd of legacy FileNet customers. (Yes, it’s been a long day.)

This session with Dave Yockelson and Jake Lavirne discussed some of the customers that they have gained since last year’s initial product release, including banking, insurance, government and energy industry examples. They listed the integrated/bundled products that make up ICM (CM, BPM, ILOG, etc.) plus those things created specifically for ICM (case object model, task object model, case analytics) and the ease with which it is used as a framework for solution construction.

The upcoming release, v5.1, will be available within the next month or so, and includes a number of new features based on feedback from the early customers:

  • Enhanced case design, including improved data integration, enhanced widget customization, solution templates, and separate solution project areas. Specifically, the data integration framework allows data from a third-party system of record to be used directly in the ICM UI or as case metadata.
  • Direct IBM CM8 integration, with the CM8 documents staying in CM8 without requiring repository federation. This means that CM8 content can initiate cases and launch tasks, as well as being used natively in tasks, completely transparently to the case worker.
  • Improved case worker user experience, including integration of IBM Forms (in addition to the existing support for FileNet eForms) in the ICM UI for adding cases, adding tasks, or viewing task details. This provides a relatively easy way to replace the standard UI with a richer forms-based interface for the case worker. There will also be a simplified UI layout, resizing and custom theming, and the ability to email and share direct links to a case. A case can also be split to multiple cases.
  • Improved support for IBM BPM, including tighter design-time integration, universal inbox, and support for Business Space.

The session wrapped up with a review of some of the vertical applications built on ICM by partners or GBS. There are a number of IBM partners working on ICM applications; I’m sure that a lot of partners weren’t thrilled to find out that IBM had essentially made much of their custom work obsolete, but this does provide an opportunity for partners to build vertical solutions much more quickly based on the ICM framework.