Gartner Day 3: Jim Sinur scenario-based rules panel

Jim Sinur hosted a case study panel on scenario-based rules with two presenters: David Luce at UTi (a logistics outsourcing firm) and Husayn Alvarez-Gomariz at Micron (a semiconductor manufacturer).

Luce started out talking about UTi, and how as a logistics provider, they are actually a business process outsourcer. They pride themselves on customer intimacy, but that drives up their operational costs since there are so many manual, special-case processes. They were looking for ways to maintain the same level of customer intimacy while automating processes and rules wherever possible in order to increase efficiency and drive down costs, and what they devised was a rules-driven architecture where they use business rules as a policy validation tool. They’ve externalized rules from legacy code into a business rules management system, which provides them with the level of agility that they need to provide customized service to their customers while still automating their processes.

Alvarez-Gomariz discussed scenario analysis, and how to use scenarios to provide the agility to respond to changing market events. His talk was both detailed and abstract, not a good combination for holding my attention, although he had some good points about the intersection between BPM, BI and planning.

Like yesterday’s panel session, this was really more like two separate 30-minute presentations, with no interaction between the panelists. This format should definitely be changed to something more interactive, or be labelled as consecutive short presentations rather than a panel.

Although it’s only lunchtime, this was my last session of the day and of the conference: I’m on a flight back to Toronto in a couple of hours. I didn’t blog about the fun at the vendor hospitality suites, but suffice to say that it included Michael Beckley in a very tropical hat (he also hade a “Made in Mexico” sticker on his forehead at one point, but I couldn’t verify that statement with his parents), Scott the hotel bartender talking about SOA and Six Sigma, and a vendor ending up in my room for the night.

I hope that you enjoyed my coverage of the conference; I’ve had a lot of great feedback from people here, and I’ll soon catch up with the comments that you’ve added to my posts in the last couple of days.

Gartner Day 3: Fair Isaac customer session

For the second half of this morning’s vendor sessions, I sat in on Fair Isaac’s customer presentation, Michele Sprayregen Edelman of Discover Financial Services on Managing Business Rules and Analytics as an Enterprise Asset. As the largest proprietary credit card network in the US with 50 million cardholders and 4 million merchant and cash access locations, they need to have a good handle not just on what their customers are doing, but on how current market trends will change what their customers want to do in the future.

To them, this means using an advanced decision management environment: start with criteria- and rule-based decisions, then automate processes with business rule management, then increase decision precision with predictive analytics, and finally optimize strategies with predictive analytics. They’re only a few steps of the way along this route, but are starting to automate decisions in a more sophisticated manner for things such as individual purchase approval/denial, in order to increase revenue and reduce losses.

They wanted a modelling environment that could be done by analysts without requiring IT support, as well as methods for integrating with the transactional systems for automating decisions. They use other decisioning tools besides Fair Isaac’s, including SAS, and combine the decisions from all of the systems in order to make the ultimate decisions. When you look at what they’ve done, even in the simplified diagrams that Edelman showed us, it’s hugely complex but provides them with a huge competitive advantage: they’re using automated decisioning in a number of different areas across their organization, including portfolio scoring, dispute processing, customer contact strategy and many others.

She presented some final recommendations, the primary one being the importance of the data infrastructure that’s going to drive the decisioning.

Gartner Day 1: Peter Schwartz closing keynote

Sessions for the day finished with Peter Schwartz of Global Business Network talking about Scenario Planning — Business and IT Strategies in an Uncertain World. He might seem like a strange choice to speak at a BPM conference, but his job is to help companies to think about the future: something that a lot of people here are obviously thinking about.

He started with an old map of North America that showed California as an island (due to some incomplete exploration at the time), and talked about how this caused some missionaries to head east across California, across the Sierra Nevada, lugging boats along with them so that they could cross the sea that would eventually separate them from the mainland: in other words, they based their processes on an incorrect map of the environment, and suffered for it. Sound familiar in your organization?

He showed Henry Mintzberg‘s concept of emergent strategy, which is when environmental forces impact intended strategy to create something that wasn’t originally envisioned. He introduced the concept of scenario thinking to overcome decision traps, and discussed the challenge that what is not foreseen is unlikely to be seen in time. You need a systematic methodology for developing scenarios, and a deep understanding of what you’re trying to accomplish, the forces impacting the scenario. The test of a good scenario is not whether it is right or wrong, but whether it leads to better decisions. Although Schwartz has been involved in developing scenarios for (mostly) science fiction movies, he has spent much more of his time looking at political scenarios, including predicting the fall of the Soviet Union. As an aeronautical engineer, he assured us that this was not rocket science. 🙂

He discussed how scenario thinking is used as a tool for strategic alignment across an organization in general, then took a crack at scenarios for IT and BPM.

Environmental forces have different impacts at different points in the business process maturity model. First, environmental forces drive changes in BPM and IT: change in BPM is a function of change in customers plus change in technology plus change in competition plus change in business environment:

  • Change in customers is driven by an aging population that is working longer, the long tail effect of stratified preferences, cultural diversification, supply chain integration, preferences for environmentally “green” products and services, and widening income gaps.
  • Change in technology is driven by hardware advances beyond Moore’s law (including orders of magnitude bandwidth increases as well as computing power), convergence of platforms, the shift from broadcast to download, and change accelerated by breakthroughs in related areas such as biotechnology and nanotechnology.
  • Change in competition is driven by new business models, new competitive sets (e.g., Apple in the music business), new nations in a flattening world, new sources of competitive differentiation (e.g., design), consolidation of players, and increasing pressure for innovation.
  • Change in business environment driven by interest and inflation rates, current conversion rates, geopolitical uncertainties and climate change, fluctuations in input costs (e.g., energy, silicon), and ubiquitous high-speed broadband.

He sees three possible scenarios for how BPM is deployed within organizations — slow & moderate change, slow & radical change, and rapid & radical change — and went through how the customer, technology, competition and business environment factors play in these scenarios. Definitely an interesting view on what we’re doing with BPM.

Schwartz was an incredibly captivating speaker, and obviously appreciated by the audience. He even told us an anecdote about where he got his ideas for the scenarios in War Games: he was on node #2 of ARPANET in 1973, and hacked his way through to someone in missile control.

Off to the vendor showcase and reception.

Contacting me at Gartner

I know that a few people are trying to reach me here at Gartner to set up meetings. My cell phone is turned off whenever I’m in sessions, and returning voice mails is pretty low priority for me, so the best way to reach me is by email since I am online blogging all the time and all my email is routed to my Blackberry as well.

Corticon Business Rules Foundation

Vendor announcements today seem to have a sci-fi theme: first it was IDS Scheer and Microsoft with the Alliance, and now it’s Corticon with the Foundation: the Business Rules Foundation, that is. I had a sneak preview last week with David Straus, Corticon’s SVP of Marketing, who did the most amazing thing for a guy with the word “marketing” in the title (much less an SVP): about a minute into our phone call, he said “wait, I can show you”, fired up Webex, sent me an invitation, and 2 minutes later he was giving me a product demo.

Corticon’s Studio product is a pretty capable business rules management system, and one of the 3 or 4 standard systems that ends up integrated into everything else, such as BPM suites that lack their own rules engines. You can define rules in a natural language, then use a decision table to map those rules onto conditions and actions, check for ambiguities and generate unconsidered cases. You can save a set of rules as a compiled service to run within their engine or to be called as a web service. You can even import (or create) test data to run against the rules, with the tests showing which rules were triggered in order to explain the decision. So far, so good: standard functionality with some nice features.

What they’ve announced today, however, is a version that separates the underlying services from the user interface, and allows those services to be embedded and tightly bound inside another application. The SDK opens up the ability for any application vendor to embed Corticon’s rules capabilities within their product without having to use any of Corticon’s user interface: they can create their own user interface paradigm for rules definition and integrate this with other parts of their appliation, so that the user is unaware that they are using software from two different vendors. The first big example of this is IDS Scheer’s ARIS, which embeds the Corticon Foundation (essentially) inside its ARIS Business Rules Designer: I saw this demonstrated at the IDS Scheer user conference a few weeks ago, but didn’t realize what I was seeing (although I knew that it was Corticon within ARIS).

Although the decision tables on the right look very much like the standard Corticon product, it’s completely and seamlessly housed within the framework of ARIS: that’s the ARIS repository tree view on the left. Since all of the new Corticon Studio is Eclipse-based, and most of the partner companies are using some sort of Eclipse tooling for their UI, this is a relatively painless integration.

There’s some other interesting applications for this that Straus mentioned, such as Adobe integration for dynamic document creation (e.g., for contract creation with rules-based selection of clauses), and Microsoft Word integration. With it opening up for development as of the announcement today, I’m sure that there will soon be a number of other application vendors trying it out. I’m waiting for the BPM vendors to start embedding this within their process designers instead of the paltry expression builders that most of them have: this seamless integration of business rules with business processes would eliminate the current barriers to using business rules in a BPM environment.

What Corticon is after, of course, is the Holy Grail of business rules: a common rules repository within an organization that is invoked by any enterprise application requiring a decision (think cross-organization compliance). By making it easier to integrate rules directly into any application, they may be that much closer.

Phil Gilbert writes a book…I think

I’m staying at the conference hotel for the Gartner BPM summit, which means that I get the goody bags in my room with some extra vendor spiffs. In tonight’s bag: a rather weird “Top Secret” cardboard mini-briefcase from Global 360 containing a dogtag and some cryptic instructions about a secret identity; a “BPM” (Bottled water, Peanuts, and M&Ms) pack from Appian; and a few vendor glossies.

One of the vendor sheets is from Lombardi, plugging a new book by Phil Gilbert, but unfortunately the link to download the preview chapter takes my information but yields only a “page not found” error. This is the second thing that I’ve failed to get online with Lombardi; I’m starting to get paranoid!

Sporadic email problems

If you’ve emailed me this week at my kemsleydesign.com address and the email has bounced, it’s because I’m in the process of changing hosting providers and Yahoo (the relinquishing provider) is doing everything in its power to screw things up for me — like not transferring my domain to a new registrar upon request. I’ve updated my MX records to point to my new hosting provider (GoDaddy) while I’m waiting for the domain transfer to happen, and sometimes things get confused.

Email to me at the column2.com address shown on my blog profile page seems to be working fine, even though it redirects to the same kemsleydesign.com address, since the email for that domain name is routed through GoDaddy and it seems to know about other MX records hosted by GoDaddy.

With any luck, this will all be sorted out by the weekend.

The Incredible BPMN

Last year, I developed a course on process standards for FileNet (now IBM) that they use to train their sales teams and partners. It included a bit on BPMN, among other standards, because FileNet will soon be launching an ability to model in BPMN through an integration with Visio.

Frighteningly, their recent press release says “New features support BPM standards for business process modeling (BPMN) and execution (XPDL) and BPM integration as part of an overall Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) strategy” — do they think that the X in XPDL stands for eXecution?

This morning, I received an email from someone at a FileNet reseller who recently took the course that I developed online. He said “Thanks for your really great webcast” (I love feedback like that!), and also created a BPMN diagram using icons from The Incredible Machine:

The thought of combining the whimsical — yet design-like — diagrams of TIM with those of BPMN gave me a giggle and really made my day.

Weirdness in the conference circuit

I have a busy next few months lined up, between conferences that I’m attending (such as next week’s Gartner BPM summit in San Diego — check back here then for live blogging) and ones where I’m speaking (such as the Shared Insights collaboration conference in May in Las Vegas). Regardless of my role at a conference, I blog pretty much everything that I see and hear, which the conference organizers like because it gives them a lot of coverage, as well as giving me (and all of you, of course) an historical record of the conference in a searchable format.

I also had an invitation to speak at the American Strategic Management Institute’s BPM summit in Miami next month, but as of today, I’ve been uninvited (although the current version of the brochure on their site still list me as a speaker). The entire interaction with ASMI (or The Performance Institute — the email addresses are from this domain, but I’m not sure of the relationship between the organizations) has been a bit odd. It all started back in November, when I had an unsolicited invitation from Matthew Sheaff of ASMI to speak at the upcoming conference, which was at that time scheduled for March 19-21. His first email to me went like this:

On behalf of The American Strategic Management Institute, I’d like to extend to you an invitation to participate in The 2007 Business Process Management Summit being held March 19-21, 2007. Your remarks would begin at 2:30 on the 19th and last about an hour. The topic of the session that we would be honored for you to present on is “Using Business Intelligence Methods to Forecast Enterprise Process Improvement.”

Weird — what sort of conference has specific session titles preassigned four months in advance, before they even have speakers? Typically, if someone is asking me to speak (unless it’s a last minute fill-in), they specify a track or broad subject area and ask me for an abstract of what I’d like to speak about, and we’d work something out from that which suits their conference and that I’ll enjoy presenting. In most cases, I’m not paid for speaking at conferences, so I like to talk about things that I’m passionate about, and that also happen to fit into the conference theme.

I responded back to Sheaff that I was interested (after all, it’s Miami in March, how bad can it be?) and asked for a few details, and he responded:

As with all speakers, we cover your airfare to and from the event, transportation from the airport to the hotel, your food, conference attendance and one night stay at the hotel.

Okay, pretty standard stuff so far. A few weeks ago, I got an email from the event planner, Caroline Bracher, about speaker logistics. It included the phrase “We allow up to $400 for roundtrip tickets, for your reference if making your arrangements through another venue“, which in conjunction with Sheaff’s earlier assurance that they cover all travel expenses, I interpreted to mean that if I use their travel agent, everything is covered, but if I book my own tickets, they’ll allow me to charge them back up to $400. I have every intention of letting their agent book it, since you really can’t get a flight for $400 from Toronto to Miami this time of year — we are in another country, after all, and a cold one.

Yesterday, I email their travel agent and give him my planned dates of travel. He makes a couple of tentative bookings, and emails me back:

I have made two reservations for and emailed it for you. If you fly on US the fare is 603.95, but if you the AA flights, the fare is 751.90. Please let me know which you prefer cause Performance Institute will cover up to $400.00.

Huh? Must be some misunderstanding, Sheaff’s original email to me clearly stated that my airfare was covered. I emailed back, copying Bracher on the email:

Sorry, I will not be covering any additional airfare — Caroline, that’s not the arrangement that I had with you, you were to cover my airfare and hotel. Please sort this out and get back to me.

Silence descended. No phone calls, no email. Then this morning, the following arrives from Sheaff:

Due to some spacing limitations that we have encountered at the conference hotel in Miami – we’ve had to consolidate our two track event into one. Unfortunately, due to that, we’ve had to cut out some sessions. With that we’ve decided not to run the session on Business Intelligence. I want to thank you for all your help during this process and I hope that we can have the opportunity to work with you in the future. Caroline Bracher, who is cc’d on this email, will be handling all the logistics for the change in the program. I’m sorry for any inconvenience this may have caused you.

Things like this just make me shake my head in wonder. The difference between my airfare and their limit was $203.95 (or 351.90, if I went for the non-stop option so as not to have to spend 2 entire days in airports to spend 1 hour speaking at a conference). They’re charging attendees $1,795 for the 2-day conference, which means that about 60% of a single attendee’s fee would pay for all of my travel expenses.

If you’ve already booked for this conference, you may want to request the revised schedule from them: if they really have reduced it to a single track, it may no longer have the sessions that you’re looking for, and you still have a couple of weeks to get a refund. If their last email to me is inaccurate and they’ve just replaced me as a speaker because I wanted them to uphold their part of our speaker’s agreement: well, you can make your own decision on that.

Next Mashup Camp scheduled

Mashup Camp 4 is scheduled for July 18-19, back in Silicon Valley. I’m at the BPM Think Tank in San Francisco the following week, so I’ll just stay out there for the duration and enjoy the weekend between in San Francisco.

Message to David Berlind: we really need to talk about a Mashup Camp in Toronto. We have a huge community here of unconference organizers and attendees, and have had 2 BarCamps, 12 DemoCamps, 3 EnterpriseCamps and a host of other “camps”, including the recent TransitCamp. Just don’t do it in February.