Enterprise 2.0 and Toronto Tech Week

Time for another Enterprise 2.0 event in Toronto, this time in conjunction with Toronto Tech Week. Our last one was a less formal, more camp-like event back in January; this one will be a breakfast panel with Anthony Williams (co-author of Wikinomics) followed by a camp-style workshops for the remainder of the day. As Tom Purves puts it:

The plan is to bring together the worlds of the leading minds from the technology and consulting side of Enterprise2.0 with business leaders (CxO’s, executives and IT/HR professionals) to bring a practical and real-world perspective to these ideas.

It will be interesting to see how — or if — the “business leaders” interact in an unstructured, unconference environment.

XPDL and BPEL

An interesting bit on the WfMC site comparing XPDL and BPEL that was highlighted in a WfMC mailing this week:

BPEL and XPDL are entirely different yet complimentary standards.  BPEL is an “execution language” designed to provide a definition of web services orchestration, specifically the underlying sequence of interactions, the flow of data from point-to-point. For this reason, it is best suited for straight-through processing or data-flows vis-a-vis application integration.  The goal of XPDL is to store and exchange the process diagram, to allow one tool to model a process diagram, and another to read the diagram and edit, another to “run” the process model on an XPDL-compliant BPM engine, and so on. For this reason, XPDL is not an executable programming language like BPEL, but specifically a process design format that literally represents the “drawing” of the process definition. To wit, it has ‘XY’ or vector coordinates, including lines and points that define process flows. This allows an XPDL to store a one-to-one representation of a BPMN process diagram. For this reason, XPDL is effectively the file format or “serialization” of BPMN, as well as any non-BPMN design method or process model which use in their underlying definition the XPDL meta-model (there are presently about 50 tools which use XPDL for storing process models.)

A good distinction between the best uses of BPEL and XPDL, except for one point: very few vendors are using BPEL as an execution language; they’re using it as an interchange format, which is causing a lot of confusion about what format to use (XPDL or BPEL) to move process maps between a modelling and execution environment. As the above paragraph points out, XPDL maintains the graphical drawing information as well as the execution-specific information; it also supports everything that can be modelled in BPMN (which BPEL currently can’t).

There’s also an article by Jon Pyke of WfMC in Computer Business Review Online where he smacks them down for calling XPDL a failure in a previous article, and states that XPDL is “often incorrectly perceived to be competitive with the business process execution language, BPEL, standard”. XPDL and BPEL aren’t competing in the sense that someone would elect to use one over the other, but they are competitive in that they’re both used as interchange formats, just for different types of processes or in different tools. Unless your BPM engine actually uses BPEL as an execution language (which few do), you’re not going to go from BPMN to XPDL to BPEL and then on to your BPM engine’s proprietary execution language, because there’s no value added from an additional data transformation: you’d do BPMN=>BPEL=>[BPM engine execution language] (obviously skipping the last transformation if the native execution language is BPEL) for web services orchestration-type processes that can be described completely using BPEL, or you’d use BPMN=>XPDL=>[BPM engine execution language] (where the latter may or may not be BPEL) for the larger set of functions supported by XPDL, like human-facing steps. In many cases, the choice of XPDL or BPEL is dictated by what’s supported by the tools that you use for processes modelling; those tools intended to model processes of web services orchestrations are more likely to support BPEL, whereas those targetted at the “BPM suites” market are more likely to use XPDL.

Assorted thoughts on BPEL

There’s been a few interesting posts about BPEL lately.

First, SOA World Magazine (which appears on the WebSphere Journal site, not sure if it actually exists elsewhere since there was no back-link) has a post on BPEL’s Growing Up, covering a brief history, current status and the view forward, including BPEL4People:

Going forward, we’re already seeing the next generation of standards around BPEL being discussed. For example, the “BPEL4People” effort was first announced in late 2005 and is intended to standardize an approach similar to the one described above for incorporating human workflow tasks in BPEL processes. Besides being one of our favorite standards acronyms, BPEL4People is an important area of work since most business processes span both systems and humans.

They neglect to mention that BPEL4People is not really much more than a white paper, although a lot of people talk about it as if it’s a standard just about to hit the big time. I recently linked to a Oracle Contractors blog post where one of the comments on the post (#5) pointed out that “so far, there is no BPEL4PEOPLE”. Or as I put it in my commentary on the link, the emperor is looking around for his boxers.

SOA World Magazine goes on to say:

While BPEL vendors provide easy-to-use graphical tools for creating and editing BPEL processes, the very fact that BPEL processes are so detailed as to be executable makes these tools too complex for most business users. Instead, business users need to be able to specify higher-level process blueprints that can then be filled in by developers to make them executable.

Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) is a standard from OAG [sic] to address the above requirement.

Um, not necessarily. Now, the article was written by two guys who work for Oracle, so I can see why they have this view, but I’m not sure that everyone would share the view that developers are required to fill in the details in order to make models created by business analysts usable.

Secondly, the comments about Microsoft supporting BPEL. As David Chappell put it:

Like BizTalk Server today, WF [Windows Workflow Foundation] treats BPEL as a way to move process logic between different workflow engines, not as an executable format (and certainly not as a development language).

He goes on to nail the real reason for Microsoft’s adoption of BPEL:

Adding the ability to export and import BPEL workflows to WF — and thus to Windows itself — will help WF in situations where support for BPEL is a political necessity.

BPEL has become more of an RFP check item than a real requirement, since most end-customer organizations don’t really understand what it is or what it might do for them. And if you believe a recent Burton Group report, BPEL is just a placeholder for WS-CDL until that choreography standard is ready for prime time.

OMG’s BPM Think Tank 2007

OMG has opened up registration for their BPM Think Tank to be held this July in San Francisco. I attended this last year and found it extremely valuable — you can find my coverage of the 2006 Think Tank here.

This time, I’ll be leading the technical track roundtable discussion on Enterprise 2.0 and BPM mashups, which promises to be interesting.

Five things that you don’t know about Sandy Kemsley

This meme has been floating around for a few months on the web, and it’s time for it to die. I was tagged by Neil Ward-Dutton, and I promised to respond although I’m not passing it on from here. Time for a new meme!

So here goes, five things that you (probably) don’t know about me:

  1. I hold a private pilot’s licence, although I’ve only flown once in the last five years. I remember my first solo flight like it was yesterday, and regret not keeping it up.
  2. My favourite TV shows are Desperate Housewives and Battlestar Galactica. Don’t even try to psychoanalyze that one.
  3. I love to cook, and most times would rather cook for friends than go out to a restaurant. In particular, I will cook just about anything on a barbeque regardless of weather, which seems less weird if you consider that my family traditionally cooks a 30-lb Christmas turkey on the barbeque. In the snow. My favourite vacation ever was cooking school in Tuscany.
  4. My first programming language was FORTRAN, and I never learned COBOL. I started my career writing Fourier analysis pattern recognition applications for satellite images, although I’d be hard-pressed to remember what an eigenvalue is these days.
  5. I learned to read at age 4, and it’s been my most common leisure activity since that time. In spite of that (or maybe because of the number of books that I read), I rarely keep books for very long: I either borrow them from the public library, or buy them and pass them on to friends/family when I’ve read them. My only “permanent” collections are cookbooks and travel guides.

LucidEra launches today

I had the chance last week for a chat with Ken Rudin and Alex Moissis of LucidEra, and a preview of their SaaS business intelligence offering aimed at the SMB marketplace that is being released in general availability today. Rudin, LucidEra’s CEO, was previously with Salesforce.com, Oracle and Siebel CRM OnDemand, so you have to assume that he knows something about both BI and SaaS; Moissis, VP of Marketing, had a long run at Business Objects in product marketing and product strategy.

In most BI projects that I’ve seen, ROI comes quickly — usually less than a year, sometimes less than six months — since it allows analysis of costs, revenues and risks in ways that just aren’t possible using spreadsheets and paper reports. Once the patterns in the data are made visible, companies can act on these trends to cut costs and increase revenues, either in a manual or automated fashion. This is great if you have hundreds of thousands of dollars to spend on a big BI solution, and an IT team to put it in place and get the initial reports up and running, but not so great if you’re smaller, with less money to spend and little or no IT support for a BI project.

LucidEra report with quota field addedWhat LucidEra showed me will help to address that issue for SMBs: a very Web 2.0-looking hosted BI application, supporting multiple data sources, and easy enough to use by anyone familiar with a spreadsheet. In short, they’re trying to simplify BI enough that a smaller company with little IT infrastructure can adopt it and start to reap the benefits. There’s a basic BI platform with pre-built solutions on top of the platform; some of the solutions, like their initial forecast-to-billing one, are included in the base price, whereas others may be at an additional cost, especially those created by third parties. The base price will be around $3,000 per month, which includes 100 users, 3 different data connections, and the aforementioned forecast-to-billing application. It seems like a lot of money, but think about it: the per-user price is about halfway between Salesforce.com and Blueprint. Welcome to the world of paying for your “enterprise” software monthly on your American Express card, and stopping it at any time that you’re not happy with it.

Setting up a new company in LucidEra is a self-service activity, and LucidEra doesn’t even offer professional services to assist with this, although they do provide telephone and online support. Typically for their beta customers (of which there are about a dozen, ranging in size from less than 50 to several hundred employees), this takes up to five person-days spread over as much as three weeks, and is mostly about getting the data sources properly hooked up and doing some data cleansing on the results. Although I didn’t review this process, it sounds as if you’re not going to need professional help for this one, just someone internally who understands your data sources already.

LucidEra graph by regionWe spent quite a bit of time looking at the forecast-to-billing application, doing some slicing and dicing on the data. In the sample that we looked at, the customer data (expected revenue) came from Salesforce.com, the financials (booked revenue) came from NetSuite, and the quota information came from an Excel spreadsheet. These are just three of the data sources that LucidEra can support in any combination: for example, the financials could have come from Oracle Financials instead.

The really cool thing is that there is no distinction between the design and view environment: if you’re viewing a report, you can change it interactively. We added fields to the report, filtered it, grouped by fields (creating the equivalent to an Excel pivot table) and viewed it as a graph, all through dragging things around on the screen. If we didn’t like our changes, we could undo them one at a time, or revert back to the original report.

A few technical notes: the client is purely browser-based, and will run in IE or Firefox on Windows. Ken was going to confirm whether it ran on other platforms (Mac and Linux) but I haven’t heard back yet. They developed their own back-end database based on the Broadbase data warehouse source code and some open-source technology, then rebuilt for multi-tenancy, ease-of-use and to optimize for the SaaS environment. All of this was put together in about 15 months, a timeline that they could not have accomplished except by using the code bases that they started with.

The press release isn’t up on their site yet, but you should be able to find it, and all the other information, there later today.

BI isn’t a field that I usually cover in depth, but keep in mind last week’s themes at the Gartner conference: visibility and agility. BI combined with BPM is one of the ways that visibility into business processes is being realized.

CMU Masters in Software Management

Often, when I receive a request for a meeting on something that’s far outside of my usual BPM/Enterprise 2.0 interests, I’ll turn it down. However, when the meeting is with various deans and professors at Carnegie Mellon University West about their new Masters in Software Management program (press release here), I’m happy to make an exception. I graduated as an engineer over 20 years ago, and programs like this just weren’t available then; I was curious to see how engineering education has advanced. I had a call with Dr. Jim Morris, dean of the CMU west coast campus, Dr. Martin Griss, associate dean for education and director of the software engineering program, and Tony Wasserman, executive director of the Center for Open Source Investigation. Of course, they’re all professors at CMU as well, at the relatively new campus in Silicon Valley.

The Masters in Software Management is like a software engineering equivalent to an executive MBA: it’s intended for people who are already experienced practitioners but want to improve their management skills in a big way, and do so part-time while they continue to work so that they can start to see immediate application and benefit. It grew out of the high level of interest in the management courses offered as part of the Masters in Software Engineering program that’s been running since 2002, as well as interest from employers in the marketplace for the skills that they plan to teach. The Masters in Software Management is less technical than the Masters in Software Engineering, but offers some amazing courses that I think should work their way into any senior software engineering or computer science curriculum: open source, enterprise architecture, managing distributed teams, outsourcing, and many others. Since these are presented in a current business context, using long-running teams and simulating a small company experience, the goal is to produce the next generation of software leaders.

The program doesn’t kick off until later this year, so they don’t know the demographics of the student population yet, but are expecting that most will have a technical computer science/software engineering background, and that there will be a mix of those from small companies who want to improve their skills and build the next Google, and some from large companies who are either closet entrepreneurs or are serious about software management within their organization. About 1/3 of the Masters in Software Engineering program attendees are women, and they expect the percentage to be higher in the Software Management program. As in the Software Engineering program (where about 30% of the students are offsite), they’ll allow remote students, although they need to be onsite for the 4-day kickoff and a few more times during the 2-year program.