Metastorm M3 Demonstration

I had a briefing on Metastorm’s M3 collaborative modeling and Smart Business Workspace two weeks ago, and last week we had a follow-up demo. This is the start of a push towards a full BPM suite in the cloud, providing collaborative process modeling and the end user runtime hosted on Azure, but Microsoft still needs to add some planned functionality to Azure in order to allow Metastorm to move the BPM engine there as well. When that happens, however, the Azure Fabric Connector will allow the BPM engine to connect to on-premise systems and data sources, regardless of whether the Azure instance is on-premise or hosted elsewhere.

We first walked through M3, which provides self-registration for a modeling account. This isn’t just process modeling, however; based on their Provision acquisition, there are 11 different types of models available: Workflow, Organization, Goal, Location, System, Capability, Activity, Deliverable, Project, Requirement and Rule. Although I have seen multiple model types in some of the other collaborative modeling tools – such as strategy and capability maps in IBM’s BPM BlueWorks, this goes beyond that in scope, and has a more robust backing of the ProVision metamodel, allowing the models to be exported from M3 and imported into the full version of ProVision. It’s also possible to create associations between different model types: for example, linking an activity in a workflow model with a measurement or location. Models can be exported in ProVision’s CIF (Common Interchange Format) only, although there are tools to transform a process model in CIF to XPDL or BPEL.

We also viewed a sharing session, which is a synchronous collaboration of two or more people that allows for interactive whiteboarding and chat. Although users in an interactive whiteboarding environment will more likely use telephone as their primary communications tool rather than chat, the chat is useful because it is logged as part of the session history, so can be used to record decisions and notes. A shared session can be played back using a VCR-like control to see how a model evolved over the session.

M3 provides extensive help for modelers, including best practices and strategies for modeling, and will continue to be augmented with feedback from the online Metastorm community. There’s not a direct link to that community, which would be useful; it seems like some of the best practice sections in the help have just been copied from the community site, not directly linked.

Metastorm M3 - 2010

The second part of the demo was on Smart Business Workspace, Metastorm’s Silverlight-based composite application development (mashup) environment. Except for the fact that it’s based on Silverlight (which may not be considered an advantage in some circles), there’s not much different here than most other mashup environments except for the inclusion of their own BPM and model widgets. There’s a role-based starting point for the workspace, and pages can be fully personalized if the user has the appropriate permissions. Widgets are dragged on from a predefined palette, and can be dynamically sized and the general page layout changed. Administrators and page designers can lock down specific pages and widgets for a more controlled environment. Depending on the type of widget, there is publish/subscribe wiring between the widgets to allow for standard use cases such as list-detail or map display of data. Branding and general appearance of the workspace can be styled with CSS and .Net resource files.

Smart Business Workspace allows you to add any Silverlight widget, but does not support other widely-used widget standards. Although you can add any webpage as a “personal widget”, these are really more like unwired portlets than true widgets; you’ll have to use the widget designer to turn something into a first class widget.

Metastorm Smart Business Workspace - 2010

Webinar on Process Intelligence and Predictive Analytics

Summer is the time when no one holds conferences, because vacation schedules make it difficult to get the attendance, so webinars tend to expand to fill the gap. I’ll be presenting on another BP Logix webinar on August 10th, discussing process intelligence and predictive analytics; you can register (and see my smiling face in a video) here.

I first presented on the combination of BPM, business rules and business intelligence at Business Rules Forum in 2007:

Near the end of the presentation, I talk about self-learning decisions in processes, where process statistics are captured with business intelligence, analyzed and fed back to business rules, which then modify the behavior of the processes. In the three years since then, technology has advanced significantly: rules are now accepted as a necessary part of BPM, and process intelligence has moved far beyond simple visualizations of process instance data. In the webinar, I’ll be discussing those trends and what they mean for process improvement.

BPM Summer Camp #3: Five Things You Should Never, Ever Do In Process Development

This Thursday is the 3rd and last of the BPM Summer Camp webinar series that I’m doing with Active Endpoints. We’ve been keeping these light – even irreverent – but with some valuable information that you can take away and use in your own organization. This week, I’ll be presenting the five things you should never, ever do in a process development initiative; with 20 years of practical experience at implementing workflow and BPM, I’ve seen a lot of no-nos and it was a challenge to narrow it down to only five. I’m still fine-tuning the presentation, so if you have any particular burrs under your saddle in this area, let me know and I might include them.

The format will be a presentation by me, followed by an ActiveVOS demo from Michael Rowley, Active Endpoints’ CTO, then a Q&A period that will go on as long as you stick around and ask questions. Although these are nominally an hour in length, we usually end up running long because there’s so much interest from the audience.

You can sign up for Thursday’s webinar here. If you missed the other webinars that we did as part of BPM Summer Camp, you can replay #1 on Team Dynamics in BPM Projects and #2 on How to Explain BPMN to Business Users, or subscribe for free to the VOSibilities channel on iTunes.

TIBCO Silver Spotfire: BI/Analytics in the Cloud

TIBCO announces their cloud-based BI/analytics today: TIBCO Silver Spotfire, and you can even sign up for a free one-year trial.

This shouldn’t be a huge surprise to those watching TIBCO announcements to date: at their conference in May, “Silver Analytics” was mentioned in the general session as an upcoming product release, and they’ve made much ado about moving all of their other products onto the Silver cloud platform that this seems inevitable.

I haven’t had a demo or a chance to play with Silver Spotfire yet, but from their press release, it appears that it provides the usual sort of easy-to-use BI capabilities plus a social aspect: collaborative building and sharing of reports, dashboards and other visualizations and analytics. Spotfire has made a name for itself as an incredibly easy to use yet powerful BI platform; moving this to the cloud and adding social aspects should help to push adoption of Spotfire as well as start to make BI a bit more mainstream.

Update: There’s a short video showing the installation (yes, there’s a desktop client), data loading and web publication to get you started.

My New MOO Cards

Those of you who have met me in person have probably seen my business cards: plain on the front, with the necessary information, and a Hugh MacLeod cartoon on the back.

These StreetCards cards have served me well for a couple of years, but as my current stock declined, I thought it was time for a change. Coincidentally, an invitation from MOO to try out their cards landed in my inbox, and I took advantage of their offer for 50 free business cards.

MOO loves color and images, and of their many options for business cards, I selected to have photographs from my Flickr collection printed on the back (I could have also uploaded the photos directly, or imported from Etsy, Facebook or SmugMug). This meant combing through almost 7,000 photos to find my 50 favorites, probably the most time-consuming part of the process; next time, I’ll probably just select 5-10 faves and have them repeated over the print run. I could have also selected from their patterns (like some amazing ones from the UK Science Museum) or colored text options for the back of the card, but I liked the idea of something that was a bit more personal.

I entered the text for the front of the cards, which allowed me to select a variety of layouts, fonts, alignment and text/background color: completely easy interface, and a preview of the final design. I selected the MOO Green card stock, which is made of 100% recycled post consumer waste, is recyclable and biodegradable, and was manufactured using wind power. I felt virtuous as I clicked the Next button.

The order was pretty fast, they had the printing done within a couple of days, and even though it was shipped from the US to Toronto, it only took about a week via USPS. For those of us in Canada receiving goods from the US, USPS is hugely superior to most courier services since they handle the duty and customs brokerage, so there are no extra fees to pay on receipt.

The unboxing of the cards reminded me of how a playful yet customer-focused organization works: the cards were in a box that included two little dividers labeled “Mine” and “Theirs”, so that I can take the box to a conference, hand out and receive cards, and store them all in the handy box until I am back in my office. They also include a hilarious “Buzzword Challenge” game on a card, inviting you to use such phrases as “data-fluffed” and “future-retroactivate” at your next meeting to see how long it takes before someone asks you what they mean.

The cards themselves are lovely. The recycled paper has a slightly rougher texture than a standard business card, but a fairly clean white look, and holds the colors of the printed photographs well.

The verdict: I’d order MOO cards again. I like the use of color and images, and the ability to customize. At around $0.50 per card, they’re a bit pricey for business cards but about the same as the StreetCards that I was already using; I hand out so few business cards each year that it’s worth it to make each one a bit more memorable. As an independent, I can make my business cards look as I please rather than having to follow corporate guidelines, but I’ve also seen people with social media positions in larger companies use the mini MOO cards for their Twitter, blog and other social info that might not be on their corporate card.

Disclosure: MOO provided me with a free order of 50 business cards. Next time, I’ll be happy to pay for them.

Metastorm New Releases: Collaborative Modeling with M3 and Smart Business Workspace Application Builder

Although we didn’t have a chance for a demo, I had a quick briefing with Greg Carter, Metastorm’s CTO, on the announcements that they made today.

M3 Collaborative Modeling

We discussed M3, their cloud-based collaborative process modeling tool. This is one of the first BPA/BPM offerings that I’ve seen on the Microsoft Windows Azure platform, allowing for a variety of hosting options: private hosted, private on-premise or public cloud, all accessed via a browser. Unlike many of the cloud process modeling tools available that offer fairly simple workflow and interaction models, Metastorm has taken advantage of the rich modeling capabilities from the Provision acquisition and are offering multiple model types, objects and viewpoints for more complete business models. Their rich object-based models allow more information to be attached to objects in addition to more model types and the ability to associate objects with multiple model types: for example, a goal model will include the definition of measurements, and those same measurements can be associated with a related process model.

Their press release lists the model types available:

Modeling capabilities for 11 different model types: goal, organization, capability, system, process/workflow, activity, rule, project, requirement, location and deliverable; providing 23 modeling objects and viewpoints beyond just a process model to deliver more comprehensive, holistic business improvements that factor in a full range of enterprise assets

Metastorm M3 Sharing SessionM3 also includes a number of collaboration features: you can share models (with different levels of access control) with other users, and have an interactive modeling session between multiple users. The entire session is available for playback, including any chat conversations that occurred during the session.

The big question is how this will fit into their existing portfolio of modeling tools: ProVision EA for full enterprise architecture modeling; Provision BPA, a subset of EA that includes 12 models used for process modeling; and the process designer within Metastorm BPM. These are all desktop applications without explicit collaboration capabilities, providing a greater range of modeling and analysis functionality than M3: ProVision has more model types, plus analytics and simulation, and the BPM process designer includes service and integration management.

Metastorm’s answer to this is that the three products (if you consider ProVision EA and BPA as a single product) are targeted at three different personas: M3 is for the casual, untrained user that needs to do some lightweight modeling and process discovery; ProVision is for the trained analyst or architect to do more comprehensive analysis and optimization of the models; and BPM is for the developer to hook up all the technical underpinnings to the model in order to make it executable. That’s a reasonable split of capabilities, although there are a couple of issues with that: model portability/round-tripping, and vastly different user experiences. They are approaching the model portability problem by moving towards directly sharing models in a common repository; this will require that BPM be modified to use the ProVision metamodel (M3 already uses the same metamodel), then bring them together into a shared repository. Once that is done, a model could be started in M3, then worked on in ProVision and/or BPM directly. As for the multiple user interfaces, Carter said that they would likely deprecate one of the modelers in the future; I would expect to see the BPM process designer replaced by additional functionality in ProVision, for example, although he didn’t say that.

The Azure platform provides a multi-tenant environment that can be run in the public cloud, or as a private cloud either hosted or on-premise. Process models created in the public cloud version can be shared with an on-premise version of ProVision; in the future, this will be done using Azure’s app fabric to make it more seamless. Microsoft is also implementing features in Azure that allow for data location control, so that specific data objects can be defined as being held in a specific geographic region.

The public cloud version of Metastorm M3 is free to existing Metastorm customers in 2010, and subscription pricing will be introduced in 2011. The M3 product page includes a “Register for an Account” link at the bottom if you want to try it out.

The market place for collaborative process modelers is very busy right now, with long-time players like IBM (Lombardi) Blueprint and a raft of more recent entrants, but I wouldn’t call the market mature at this time: there is definitely room for new players, especially if they can offer a richer modeling experience such as Metastorm is claiming to provide.

Smart Business Workspace

We also discussed Smart Business Workspace (SBW), Metastorm’s entry into the rich internet application/mashup development area. Based on Microsoft Silverlight, it provides an environment for integrating Metastorm applications and any other applications into a common user environment. It’s not just for creating standard mashup pages, however: driven by metadata, it can change the environment based on the user’s role, skills and other information.

Metastorm SBW Multiple Layouts

Metastorm publishes the specifications for widgets that can be used in SBW, and provides a widget designer, but doesn’t interface with JSR168, Google widgets or other existing standards. So although you can, in theory, integrate any application or data, it’s likely going to take a bit of work.

Although it seems like M3 and SBW are completely different products, they’re actually quite closely related: M3 is based on SBW, so all the hosting and collaboration features discussed for M3 can be generalized to any SBW application: public and private cloud, plus chat and shared whiteboard sessions.

This is Metastorm’s start to creating a workspace in the cloud. Although SBW based in the public cloud can’t yet make a connection to on-premise Metastorm BPM, that will be available in a future release. Also, there are plans to move Metastorm BPM into the cloud using Azure, making it easy for business process outsourcers to offer process as a service.

Speaking at Business Process Forum in October

A bit early for this, but maybe you’re already starting to organize your fall calendar. The business process track that was at the Business Rules Forum last year has grown, and become its own Business Process Forum. I believe that we need a good independent BPM conference – the ones run by the large analysts are too focused on their own viewpoints to be considered really independent – and this could be the start of something significant.

I’ll be speaking at the conference, which runs October 17-21 in Washington, DC. Look for me presenting a half-day tutorial on the BPM technology landscape, as well as the facilitator of a peer discussion session on transforming business process models into IT requirements.

Update: Forgot one, I’m also doing a presentation on Social BPM. The full conference agenda is here for all three tracks: business rules, business analysis and business process.

The super early bird registration ends tomorrow, and saves you $300.

Webinar This Week: Improving BPM Time to Value

I’ll be presenting this Wednesday on how to improve BPM time to value by giving greater functionality to the knowledge workers to create their own processes, instead of having everything be implemented as an IT-controlled implementation. It’s sponsored by BP Logix, and you can register to attend here.

Having been involved in a lot of BPM implementations over the years, I know that there are many use cases for high-volume structured processes that are implemented primarily by IT. However, there are also a lot of processes that are too specialized or variable for an IT-driven implementation: that would take too long and the costs may not be justified. In many organizations, these processes are handled by email and other uncontrolled (and, in many cases, unaudited) methods, but there are emerging classes of BPMS that allow knowledge workers to create their own processes. We had a lengthy discussion a few months back on the need for multiple BPMS in an organization: I disagreed with the notion of a vendor selling three BPMS’ for a single customer application, but agreed that organizations may need two BPMS’ for different types of applications. It’s not an either-or proposition: both classes of BPMS can co-exist in an organization, with the appropriate one being used for different purposes. Join us on Wednesday to continue the discussion.

Does The Enterprise 2.0 Emperor Have No Clothes?

It’s noon, the keynotes have been going on all morning, and I have only just been inspired to blog. I’m not saying that standalone Enterprise 2.0 initiatives have jumped the shark, but there’s only so much rah-rah about enterprise collaboration that I can take before I fall back on three thoughts:

  1. Collaboration is already going on in enterprises, and always has: all that Enterprise 2.0 does is give us some nicer tools for doing what we’ve already been doing via word of mouth, email, and other methods.
  2. Collaboration is just not that interesting if it doesn’t directly impact the core business processes.
  3. The millennials are not going to save us.

People collaborate inside enterprises when they care about what they do. In other words, if you make someone’s job interesting and something that they have passion about, they will naturally collaborate using whatever tools are at hand in order to do it better. Andy McAfee’s keynote included a point about Enterprise 2.0 cargo cults, where organizations believe that deploying some tools will make the magic happen, without understanding all of the underlying things that need to be in place in order to make benefits happen: I strongly believe that you first have to make people care about their work before they will engage in creative collaboration, regardless of the shiny tools that you give them.

That brings me to the second point, that this has to be about the core business, or it’s just not very interesting at the end of the day. It’s not about providing a platform for some fun Facebook-for-the-enterprise; it’s about providing tools that people need in order to do their job better. In the 90’s, I was often involved in projects where people were using Windows for the first time in order to use the systems that we were creating for them. Some companies thought that the best way to train people on Windows was to have them play Solitaire (seriously); I always found it much more effective to train them on Windows using tools that were applicable to their job so that they could make that connection. We risk the same thing today by teaching people about enterprise social software by performing tasks that are, ultimately, meaningless: not only is there no benefit to the enterprise, but people know that what they’re doing is useless beyond a small amount of UI learning. I’m not saying that all non-core enterprise social functionality is useless: building an enterprise social network is important, but it’s ultimately important for purposes that benefit the enterprise, such as connecting people who might collaborate together on projects.

The millennial argument is, not to put too fine a point on it, bullshit, and I’m tired of hearing it spouted from the stage at conferences. You don’t have to be under 28 to know how to live and breathe social media, or to expect that you should be able to use better-quality consumer tools rather than what a company issues to you, or to find it natural to collaborate online. Many of us who are well north of that age manage it just fine, and I don’t believe that I’m an outlier based on age: I see a large number of under-28’ers who don’t do any of these things, and lots of old fogies like me who do them all the time. It’s more about your attitudes towards contribution and autonomy: I like to give back to the community, I’m an independent thinker, and I work for myself. All of these drive me to contribute widely in social media: here on my business blog (occasionally cross-posted to Intelligent Enterprise and Enterprise Irregulars), my personal blog, on Twitter, on Flickr, on Facebook, on YouTube, on FourSquare… wherever I can either connect with people who I want to be connected with, or where it amuses me to broadcast my thoughts and creations. For those of you who don’t do any of this, wake up! Social networking is your personal brand. You just need to accept that as truth, and take advantage of it. The ones who don’t, and use their age as an excuse for it, just don’t get it, and you shouldn’t be listening to anything that they say about social media.

To wrap it up: enterprise collaboration is good when it has a business purpose, and anyone can do it.