BEAParticipate: BAM

Eduardo Chiocconi of BEA gave us a technical view of the ALBPM BAM functionality: what’s available out of the box, the extensions, how to create customized dashboards, security, and a bit of the architecture underlying it all so that we have a bit of an understanding of what happens in the underlying services and data stores when a custom key performance indicator (KPI) is defined.

Like every other BPM vendors’ BAM, ALBPM’s BAM is visualized as a set of dashboards that show KPIs for the purpose of monitoring the health of a process and early problem detection. There are some out-of-the-box dashboards including widgets such as gauges and charts attached to a data source, and the ability to create custom dashboards. As we saw in the architectural view this morning, there’s a BAM database to collect and aggregate the analytics data from one or more process engines, plus external data sources if you want a combined view. There is a single BAM database for each directory service, and an updater service that executes regularly to pull data from the associated engine database(s) to the BAM database. Data in the BAM database is very granular — down to the second, if required — but is flushed out as it ages, typically after a day. The OLAP data mart, which has the same data as the BAM database and is updated by the same service, is much less granular and is not automatically purged; this is used for historical analytics rather than the near-real-time requirements of the BAM database.

The out-of-the-box dashboards are instance workload, percentage workload by organizational unit, performance (e.g., end-to-end cycle time) including drill-downs to more granular levels, or a unified dashboard with all three of these measures. Surprisingly, these widgets are not currently provided as standard portlets, but can be wrapped into a portlet if required.

Most organizations will want to define their own KPIs and create their own dashboards: KPIs can be defined by a business analyst in the Designer as dimensions (e.g., time or geographic aggregation) or measures (e.g., averages and other statistical aggregations), and can be based on standard process variables or business variables. This causes a new column to be created in each of the three main BAM database tables to capture the necessary data for the three display widgets for that measure or dimension.

It’s also possible to specify the points in the process where the KPI data are captured and sent to the BAM database in addition to allowing the automatic update process to occur, giving it a sort of audit functionality. Internally, the BAM data are generated from the process engine’s audit trail, so you’ll have to have auditing enabled for all of the processes and events that you want to track in BAM (in many cases, you would turn off auditing for processes and events that don’t require it in order to improve performance).

ALBPM allows for role-based security access to the BAM dashboards, so that only specific roles can see them.

Future directions are to allow ad hoc dashboard creation and move to event-driven BAM, although that will require some architectural changes to the underlying database and services in order to handle the increased load that will result from allowing everyone to roll their own analytics.

The more I look at it, the less than I’m convinced that all the BPM vendors should be developing their own BAM like this; I think that there could be a market for a BAM product that can connect to many different BPM products as soon as we get some standardization around the process engine audit trails that are typically used to populate BAM databases.

BEAParticipate: Adrian McDermott and Jay Simons

The general sessions finished with Adrian McDermott and Jay Simons from BEA engineering and product marketing to talk about — no surprise by now — the new Enterprise 2.0 products. This conference is starting to look like one big launch party for Pages, Ensemble and Pathways, although I can understand their excitement.

They describe Pages as “Studio on steroids”, which would make much more sense if I knew what Studio does. It’s a tool for easily building static web pages, but also allows the inclusion of more dynamic content via RSS feeds. It can be used to create blogs, wikis and other situational applications. (I just got a mention from the stage — obviously, someone’s been reading my blog this morning.)

We then had a demo of Pages; I’ll have more details after a more in-depth demo that I’m expecting to get at some point, but this shows some of the capabilities. Demo’d in Firefox, I’m pleased to say.

To start, you can create a new DataSpace, using data from back-end systems, RSS or web services, or using some pre-defined templates such as a blog DataSpace. The blog functionality looks pretty basic: a WYSIWYG editor, but it’s not clear if there’s support for categories (for auto-tagging) and other more complex blogging constructs. Cute, they just create a new DataSpace from an RSS feed: my blog is now live in their demo. Fabulous way to score points, guys, I’m loving it. What’s interesting is that they can take my posts and augment them with other unstructured information, although by replicating my posts in their entirety onto their own site, they’ve violated my copyright and the principles of fair use. 🙂

He demonstrated a nice quick mashup between a Google map and addresses of employees from an internal database, then added in the blog that he created originally and filtered the blog posts by the expertise of the employees.

Next in the demo was Ensemble, which is for creating mashups (although I’d consider what he did with Pages to be a mashup), and handling authentication, provisioning and analytics for web applications and portlets that were built without those necessary bits of IT deployment services. They showed an event calendar application built in Ruby on Rails, then showed how Ensemble can be used to create a wrapper around that application to turn it into a portlet (or pagelet): it created a friendly URL, added security (authentication, access policies, auditing), and made it accessible for including in mashups and portal environments.

They finished up with Pathways, which is a social bookmarking/tagging environment, like del.icio.us within the enterprise. It also allows for people to be tagged as well as content, making it act a bit like a social networking environment like LinkedIn or Facebook. All of this feeds into searches, so that results can be ranked based on it either being authored by or linked to by experts in a certain field. It uses tag clouds to display tag relevance (you can read my friend Tom’s opinion on why tag clouds suck and how they’re both a hallmark of Web 2.0 applications and a “sordidly abused miscarriage of functional information design”), but I’m sure (I hope) that’s not the only way to display tag relevance. There are a number of controls over how search ranks are calculated, based on both the content and people involved.

These products are all in beta now, and will be released in GA in July.

BEAParticipate: Daniel Weiler

The Ministry of Education of Luxembourg has implemented an educational portal using BEA technology, and Daniel Weiler, a professor at the Center of Technology for Education, discussed what they’ve learned over the 5 years since first implementation. They had a vision 5 years ago of a digital learning place that was accessible anywhere on any type of device, with many social computing aspects such as collaboration, that provided access to eLearning and other educational content, using single sign-on authentication and security, and different personalities depending on whether it was a teacher, student or other type of participant. Today, these requirements are no big deal. Five years ago, in an educational environment, it was a bit more revolutionary.

Weiler did a live demonstration of the portal from a teacher’s viewpoint, which provides access to educational content such as MSN Encarta, internally-created documents, email, collaboration communities, and services such as forms creation. They’ve built and integrated a number of custom applications, such as resource scheduling and library management. In the student-facing version of the portal, they have eLearning collaboration spaces that include direct Skype links to teachers as well as content specific to a certain subject area.

Each school can have a personalized extranet portal that is hosted under the mail mySchool portal, but has its own look and feel, including navigational structures; he showed examples of an elementary and a primary school that looked and behaved completely differently, but were based on the same platform. They also have a media gallery with both photos and video on various arts, literature and other topics, all managed and accessible through the portal platform.

BEAParticipate: Frank Ybarra and Bambi George

Next up were Frank Ybarra and Bambi George of Applebee’s, a customer of BEA, discussing their corporate (internal-facing) portal and business agility. They’re a public company (for now) with almost 2,000 restaurants in 49 states and 17 other countries, 75% of which are franchised, so they have a lot of internal communications challenges. They use the portal to publish operational changes, such as recipe changes that need to be implemented; sales figures and other branch-specific metrics; schedules and other HR information; and collaboration spaces for project teams such as new country startups.

They’ve had their portal in place for long enough to reach their entire target audience, and are now looking for new content to deliver through the portal to increase its value to the internal community. For example, their head chef (love his title: VP of Menu) writes a regular blog-like column, and answers questions that come in as feedback on the column; once this was put in place, no IT support was required to keep it running since the chef was posting his columns and reading/responding to feedback directly.

They’ve done some manual search optimization to help people to find documents on the portal site, and they’re looking forward to trying out AquaLogic Pathways to see how community tagging and bookmarking improves the search capabilities. They also mentioned incorporating Pages for blogging and other user content creation in the future.

BEA user conference this week

I’ll be blogging live from the BEA user conference this week in Atlanta. I arrived here today and had a quick look around the evening partner exhibition/drinks reception, but I’m really looking forward to the sessions tomorrow. Jesper Joergensen has also promised that I’ll get a proper demo of both their BPM product and the new Enterprise 2.0 product suite this week.

All of my posts for this conference will be here.

Disclosure: BEA paid my travel expenses to be at this conference.

Yahoo 404’s at AT&T Park

I was in San Francisco this week for a vendor conference, and the gala event was 750 of us heading off to AT&T Park to watch the Giants play the Colorado Rockies. I’ve never been in this stadium before, and one of the first things that I noticed was this juxtaposition of Yahoo’s ad and the 400′ distance marker on the outfield fence.

I pointed this out to a few people, had to explain it to a few others, and generally concluded that no one else had noticed this. I thought it was hilarious, and can’t believe that it’s accidental.

Oh yeah, I was there for Barry Bonds’ 743rd home run, too.

TUCON: Continuous Process Improvement Using iProcess Analytics

For the last breakout session of the day, Mark Elder of TIBCO talked about reporting and analytics with iProcess Analytics, their historical (rather than real-time) analytics product.. The crowd’s thin this time of day, although I understand that the lobby bar is well-populated; this was the same timeslot that Tim and I had yesterday, but the attendees now have an additional day of conference fatigue. Also doesn’t help that the presentation PC acted up and we were 10 minutes late starting.

He looks at the second half of any business process implementation: after it’s up and running, you need to measure what’s going on, then feed that back to the design stage for process improvement. iProcess Analytics has a number of built-in metrics, then wizard interfaces to allow a business analyst to build new KPIs by specifying dimensions and filters, then create interactive reports. It’s even possible to set different threshold values for filtered subsets of data, such as setting different cycle-time goals for different geographic regions.

He moved on to a live demo after a few minutes of slideware to show us just how easy it is to create a chart or report for a process, or even a single step within a process. The wizard looks pretty easy to use, although chart generation isn’t exactly rocket science. There’s some nice report distribution capabilities, much like what you’d see in a business intelligence suite, so that you can share a chart or report with other members of your team. You can’t do a lot of calculations on the data, however, but you can export tabular data to Excel for further calculations and aggregation.

One very cool feature is that for a given set of data that’s being used to generate a report, you can reconstruct the process map from the report data to see where the data is coming from, since process metadata is passed over to iProcess Analytics along with the execution data.

It appears that if you want to get real historical data into Business Studio for simulation, you’re going to create a tabular report in iProcess Analytics, export it to Excel, then save it as a text file for importing. Not as integrated as I would have expected — this needs to be fixed as well as more people start to use the simulation functionality within Business Studio.

It’s all browser-based, and can generate either the interactive web-based reports that we saw, or static HTML or PDF reports. It will be interesting to see how TIBCO moves forward with their analytics strategy, since they now have both iProcess Analytics and iProcess Insight (BAM). Although historical analytics and BAM serve different purposes, they’re opposite ends of the same spectrum, and analytics requirements will continue to creep from both ends towards the middle. Like many other vendors who started with an historical analytics tool then bolted on an OEM BAM tool, they’re going to have to reconcile this at some point in the future. There’s also the question, which was raised by an audience member, about the boundary between iProcess Analytics and a full BI suite like Cognos. Although there’s a lot of nice functionality built into iProcess Analytics that’s specific to analyzing processes, many customers are going to want to go beyond this fairly rudimentary BI capability.

That’s the end of day 2 at TUCON; tomorrow morning I’ll probably only be able to catch one session before I have to leave for the flight home. Tonight, 750 of us are off to the SF Giants game, where we’ll see if Vivek Ranadivé’s throwing practice paid off when he throws out the first pitch. Watch for all of us in our spiffy new TIBCO jackets; with free wifi in the stadium, there’s likely to be some geeks there with their laptops, too.

TUCON: Technology Buzz Panel

Next up in the general session is the technology buzz panel, where “journalists, analysts, and industry experts square off on buzzwords of the day”. The moderator was Gary Beach of CIO Magazine, with panelists Frank Kenney of Gartner, Jason Maynard of Credit Suisse, Rob Strickland of T-Mobile USA, and Aaron Ricadela of BusinessWeek. Their initial goal is to eliminate four tech buzzwords (one per panelist):

  • Maynard picked “Web 2.0”, apparently not only because he thinks that it’s a bad term but because he doesn’t like social networking. There was discussion around the stage: Kenney railed against the term Web 2.0 but then used the ever-overused “paradigm shift”; Strickland said that he thinks there’s too many bugs in Web 2.0 and he’s waiting for 2.0.1; Ricadela commented on the new business models coming out of this, although he didn’t use the term “Bubble 2.0”.
  • Strickland picked “the business”, in the context of the dichotomy between IT and the business; as a CIO, he sees himself as an integral part of the business. I wonder if T-Mobile’s business users feel the same way; Maynard said that he felt that his IT department was actually a detriment to productivity sometimes, and admitted to using his own MacBook Pro and Gmail (interestingly enough, a Web 2.0 application) because IT wasn’t focussed on some of the business requirements. Kenney and Ricadela both talked about aligning IT and business, which of course just points out that the divide does exist.
  • Ricadela picked “business process management”, because he believes that it’s become a catch-all term for anything to do with business improvements enabled by technology. He blames the analysts and vendors for the confusion: given that Gartner helped to promote this term in its infancy and created a tremendously confusing landscape that in turn allowed vendors to promote everything as BPM, I’d have to agree to a certain extent. Kenney feels that the term BPM is overused but should still exist; Maynard doesn’t appear to understand the distinction between BPM and packaged applications.
  • Kenney picked “enterprise”, saying that it’s not used consistently and is often just applied as a marketing buzzword: sometimes it means “within the four walls of a company”, sometimes it relates to scalability or other features of a system. Maynard points out that adding the word “enterprise”  to a software product allows vendors to charge more it, and thinks that it applies only to large companies.
  • Beach finished up by picking “virtualization”, which I identified yesterday as potentially just being an overused buzzword, so I’d have to agree.

They moved on to a discussion of several magazine headlines: “Is your company fast enough”; “No future in tech?” (which veered sharply into American protectionist rhetoric); various open source headlines (Maynard pointed out that open source is fundamentally changing the software industry, even those companies that are not open source); software as a service (nothing new here); and finally, can you trust analysts’ opinions given that they’re all sleeping with the vendors.

They finished with a lightening round with 30-second opinions on Web 2.0, gigabit everywhere, SOA, AJAX, and the future of enterprise applications.

All in all, a more entertaining panel than I’ve seen for a while.

TUCON: Jayshree Ullal

Although not on the schedule, next up was Jayshree Ullal, SVP of the data centre, switching and security technology group at Cisco. Virtualization is definitely the key phrase of the day, because she’s soon talking about network virtualization.

She talked about the type of process that HP is going through now: data centres having moved from centralized to de-centralized in years past are now moving being re-centralized. Although Mark Hurd spoke about the ramifications on servers and data centres, Ullal spoke about the impact on the networks: if you re-centralize, it’s obviously going to have network implications. At the same time, the type of applications passing data over the open internet requires new functionality with respect to security, protocol gateways and other areas. She went on to show the network layers involved in a data centre that are served by Cisco and TIBCO together, with some low-level messaging functionality being provided in the Cisco devices themselves, and other more complex transformation and orchestration functionality being served by TIBCO products, and how this combination of front-end and back-end processing can improve high-volume applications such as online trading.

Ullal’s vision is “any application, any content, any location”, which requires robust network virtualization, application and service virtualization, and device mobility. When you think about it, although she’s talking more about providing this sort of functionality for large corporations, it also has a huge impact on web-based “Office 2.0” applications as well, where individuals and small businesses are virtualizing their data centres by outsourcing the entire thing to hosted services of various types. So if you use Google Apps for your domain email, Mozy for your data backup, or access Facebook on your Blackberry, you’re also a supporter of her vision.

Disclosure: I own a few paltry shares of Cisco, and I would be very happy if you’d all buy a ton of their products so that I can retire early.

TUCON: Mark Hurd

After a quick visit from Bill Schlough, SVP and CIO of the San Francisco Giants, to talk about our visit to the big game tonight (who knew that the Giants even had a CIO? Or that they’re a TIBCO customer?), Mark Hurd of HP gave the opening keynote for today. He spent a lot of time talking about their own internal IT and how it supports their operations. They have a huge scale of operations, and their IT needs to support that: they ship 3 printers and 2 PCs each second, and a server every 10-11 seconds, across 179 countries. They have 800 million customer interactions per year. And they have one big constraint in their internal IT implementations: they have to eat their own dogfood. They’re in the process of moving from 87 data centres down to 3, reducing the number of applications, servers and data marts significantly as well, all to try and make their IT less expensive and provide a more efficient supply chain. It sounds like TIBCO’s ActiveMatrix is forming a pretty important part of HP’s IT consolidation strategy, since service virtualization is pretty important when reducing the number of servers.

As I sit here typing this post on my HP laptop — my 3rd one in a row, the older 2 of which are still in use because they just refuse to die — and with a printer back at my office that is just the latest in a long line of HP printer, I certainly agree that they know how to make hardware right. I’ve even had some reasonable experiences with their maintenance, when I had to send a laptop back to have a failed part replaced, although I’ve found their telephone support to be mostly frustrating and useless.

It’s interesting to hear Hurd’s perspective, since HP is a TIBCO customer, but is also a significant partner: they’re TIBCO’s preferred development platform, and also integrate TIBCO solutions for customers through their own services group.