Tag: Gartner

BPM soft skills

I saw this Gartner article a while back about a “new” BPM definition, and was reminded of it when it hit BPM.com again this week. He turns the focus from the hard technical skills required for BPM to the soft social skills required: much as I have done in my own career over the past 15 years or so: putting the “business” and “management” back in BPM, which has too long been focused on the mechanical “process” part. It’s not by accident that the small systems integration company that I owned in the late 90’s had the slogan “We Make Technology Mean Business”, and that I’m now developing a course called “Making BPM Mean Business“.

In that same vein, Gartner has recreated their definition of BPM to move the focus away from the tools and the mechanics of BPM:

BPM is a management practice that provides for governance of a business’s process environment toward the goal of improving agility and operational performance. BPM is a structured approach employing methods, policies, metrics, management practices and software tools to manage and continuously optimize an organization’s activities and processes.

Right on!

We needed the business for this?

Gartner recently issued a report entitled Business Process Management’s Success Hinges on Business-Led Initiatives, the abstract of which states “organizations that had the most-successful BPM initiatives spent more than 40 percent of the initial project time on process discovery.”

This is newsworthy? Hands up if you still thought that IT could implement BPM without a significant involvement by the business. Of course, there are a few IT departments that I know that definitely haven’t figured that out yet.

Global 360 Active Compliance Framework

I watched a webinar earlier this week about BPM and compliance, a topic that I’ve been working on for a while, in which Global 360 announced their Active Compliance Framework (today’s Computer Business Review also reviewed their announcement). The speakers were from Doculabs and BWise, the latter of which has just partnered with Global 360 (and a bunch of other ECM/BPM vendors) for a compliance offering. Global 360 states the advantages of their compliance framework as follows:

Improved Compliance & Risk Management (i.e., do a better job of being compliant)

  • Standardized, structured approach
  • Focused on highest risk controls & processes
  • Centralized visibility and control

Reduced Compliance Costs (i.e., be compliant in a more cost-effective way)

  • Reduced project costs via control reduction based on risk
  • Reduced testing costs for remaining controls via automation
  • Eliminated testing costs for continuously compliant processes

Process Optimization & Control (i.e., provide an opportunity to optimize your business processes)

  • Optimize process performance while increasing control
  • Proactive compliance issue visibility, notification
  • Evolution from obligation to optimization

I liked the focus on the last of these sections, or what they called “from obligation to optimization”: changing the organization’s attitude from compliance being a chore that they’re forced to implement, to compliance being an opportunity to improve business processes through standardization and measurement.

If, like 1/3 of Doculabs’ current customers, compliance is one of your highest priorities for 2005, it’s worth your time to check out compliance solutions like this from ECM/BPM vendors. The whole compliance field is still chaotic; a Gartner report on compliance management software lists 26 vendors and clearly states that the compliance market is not mature:

A key finding of our research is that there is no comprehensive compliance management application. Whether buying from one or many vendors to get a solution, you will need significant services for implementation and integration.

Partnerships like the one between Global 360 and BWise start to address this problem, but there’s still a long way to go before we can even agree on what “compliance management software” is.

Fuego and Plumtree

I don’t mean to be blogging just about Fuego these days, although since I’m in the middle of evaluating their product, I’m probably more attuned to stories about them. I found Gartner’s assessment of the recent Fuego/Plumtree OEM agreement interesting:

Fuego’s original equipment manufacturer deal with Plumtree is the first strategic relationship between a business process management suite vendor and a complementary middleware vendor. This is a game-changing event that will pull Fuego ahead of its closest competitors in the crowded BPMS market.

The agreement was made in May, but Gartner’s comments just published this week.

Integration 101 webinar

If you’re new to the world of integration, EAI, SOA and all those other good things, you can tune into the ebizQ webinar Integration 101 – From Application Integration to SOA on Tuesday at noon Eastern:

In this webinar, Roy Schulte, Vice President and Research Fellow in Gartner Inc., joins Lance Hill, webMethods Vice President Solutions Marketing, to make some sense of all the acronyms (BAM, BPM, SOA, EDA, CEP) and to describe at a fundamental level the different integration technologies that can be leveraged to integrate and enhance business systems and processes.

Roy Schulte is pretty smart about these technologies, and webMethods has just won the ebizQ EAI Buyer’s Choice award. Should be an interesting discussion.

Secrets of Success

I just received an email from a recently-graduated engineer in Germany, looking for advice on how to become a credible resource on BPM projects with only theoretical BPM knowledge and a lack of business knowledge — in other words, how to ramp up from being a newbie with a decent technical degree into an experienced BPM consultant. I didn’t want to send off some flippant answer about long years of hard work, so I spent some time thinking about a few of the key things that I did (and still do) to turn myself from a techie with an engineering degree into a BPM architect who spends as much time thinking about business as I do about technology.

My advice to him:

First, research constantly about BPM, particularly case studies. There are lots of great resources on the web, such as BPMG, that have articles on everything that you would want to know about BPM, including real live case studies. Attend a BPM conference or two, such as ones by BPMG or Gartner, listen to more experienced people talk about what they’ve done, and make some contacts that you might be able to call on when you need some free advice.

Second, do some technical research into a few major BPM products, so that you can become somewhat of an expert on how BPM products work even if you haven’t worked with them. Many BPM vendors are very happy to have you learn more about their products, and if your target customers typically use a specific product (such as FileNet or Tibco), then research the technology behind that product or even attend vendor training so that you can stay one step ahead of your first customer on the technical side.

Third, learn more about your customers’ business. For example, most of my customers are in financial services and insurance, and I have become an expert on the business processes in these organizations through research and observation, even though I have never worked for a financial company (I’ve always worked for — or owned and operated — software or service companies). Even if you don’t have a contract with a potential customer yet, offer to come in and do a brief walk-through and analysis of their operations. Sit down with some of the people while they are working and ask them what they are doing, and why they’re doing it: that’s the best way to learn about the details of a business process. Very often, an outsider can observe something in a business that someone in the company won’t see, so you may be able to tell them something about their business that they don’t know after just a brief walk-through, if you’re observant.

Lastly, focus on the business issues, not the technology. If you are consulting on BPM directly to an IT department rather than a business department, the project has a high probability of failure: remember that the “B” in BPM stands for “Business”, and you have to stay focussed on what value that you are bringing to the business in order to successfully implement BPM.

I finished up my email by telling him that there is no real substitute for experience, but it’s possible to educate yourself about BPM in a way that provides obvious value to prospective customers. Many people in the customer organizations (even in the IT department) don’t have formal systems training, so this is a good opportunity to put to use all those analysis and problem-solving skills that they taught us in engineering, just applied to business instead of technical problems.

Gartner’s BPM trends and forecasts

Another webinar going on right now, Gartner BPM Roundtable: Business Process Management Trends and Forecasts, hosted by Global 360 and featuring Jim Sinur of Gartner (yes, this turned out to be “webinar day”, I have a third one after this if I’m not burned out).

The usual webinar format is the “expert” talks to his slides for 30-40 minutes, then some marketing geek from the vendor talks about their product for 10 minutes. Not this one: it’s a very dynamic conversation between Mr. Sinur and Michael Crosno, President of Global 360, and both of these guys are really smart about BPM. Yes, Mr. Crosno talks about Global 360 product features, but it’s used as a springboard for Mr. Sinur to talk about the importance of specific functionality in the current and future BPM suites marketplace.

A few really great insights. The first one is was that legacy BPM deployments are more likely to have been for the purpose of reducing paper, whereas the new deployments are all about streamlining processes and improving productivity, with a new and increasingly important focus on extending the enterprise. Although this is something that we all know by gut feel, it’s good to see some real numbers behind it:

The second insight is that customer requirements are evolving from enterprise content management (ECM) to enterprise process management: a shift from information lifecycles to process lifecycles. As a “column 2” advocate, I’m really glad to see Gartner recognizing the shift in focus from content to process. Mr. Sinur showed a scale that started with image management and went all the way through to business optimization, with the crossover from ECM to EPM happening between portals and process execution. He puts “workflow” in the ECM space, that is, the subset of BPM that is used for content lifecycle management.

Another point was the trend for CRM vendors to integrate BPM with their products, usually by buying or OEM’ing in a third-party product, because they see it as an essential part of managing the customer relationship. I’ve been seeing this trend lately as well, such as with Onyx’s acquisition of a BPM product and their current push to integrate it into their mainstream CRM product.

By far the best webinar that I’ve listened to in months. The slides and the audio playback will be available tomorrow on Global 360’s site.

BPM tools and methodologies

The Gartner webinar that I dropped in on yesterday had some interesting points about modelling and methodologies that started me thinking.

First, on methodologies: it’s absolutely essential to have some best practices to lend structure to your BPM project. Don’t do this alone, get the help of someone like me (okay, it doesn’t have to be me) who has actually implemented BPM projects before. Whenever you change a business process, there’s a whole lot more than just technology going on, and you don’t want to get caught in the classic IT trap of believing that the business users will be just as excited about the new technology as you are (remember, they didn’t get to play with the Java code).

There were comments in yesterday’s webinar about how the soft benefits are becoming more significant, including internal factors such as real-time business agility and a process-focussed culture. However, you can’t expect your organization to change because of the introduction of BPM technology; instead, your organization needs to make cultural changes driven by business factors and enabled by the technology.

On modelling tools, I made the statement last month that most people are using Visio to model their business processes before they are implemented in a BPM system, which is true. However, just because it’s true doesn’t mean that it’s the best way to do this. If you use a standard modelling notation such as BPMN or UML activity diagrams, you’ll do fine up to a point with Visio, but somewhere along the way to your “to be” process, you’re going to need a more serious tool for process simulation and the like. If you check out the BPtrends report on modelling tools that I reviewed last week, you’ll see a lot more tools with a lot more power than Visio for your process modelling and analysis. You’re not going to put these on everyone’s desktop, but they are needed for a few analysts who will be doing the in-depth process design.