Gartner – Page 3

Next week: Toronto, not San Diego

Yes, it’s true, I’m going to miss a North American Gartner BPM summit for the first time in, well, maybe forever. There’s two reasons for this: first and foremost, I’m 110% busy with time-critical client work right now, and a week in sunny San Diego just doesn’t fit into my calendar. Also, if you review my coverage of last fall’s summit, I’m not finding enough new material at each summit since they moved to the two/year format: I’m not learning much, and there’s not much new to write about. I believe that they’ve started to add some new material specific to BPM in a tight economy, and they had a pretty successful event in London a few weeks back, so I look forward to catching up with the material – and those of you attending – at the next one.

For all of you who have sent messages asking if we can meet up in San Diego next week, I’ll raise a glass to you from these chillier climes.

Gartner webinar: First 100 days as BP director

In keeping with other recently-installed change agents, Elise Olding of Gartner delivered a webinar today on your first 100 days as a business process director. As she points out, you have 100 days to make some key first impressions and get things rolling, and although you may not necessarily deliver very much in that time, it sets the tone for the ongoing BPM efforts.

She breaks this down into what you should be doing and delivering in each of the first three months:

The first month is about planning and getting a number of activities kicked off. If you’re new to the business area (often, the BP director is coming in from another part of the organization or from outside), then learn about the organization and the business. Start an assessment of how BPM will impact the business, interview key executives, and make sure that you understand the key drivers for BPM to ensure that the project actually has a long-term vision and goals. By the end of that first month, you should have delivered a high-level plan, figured out who’s going to be on the team and how it will be staffed (internal, external consultants, new hires), and create a “what is BPM” presentation to use for eduction within the organzation.
The second month is about getting the strategy in place. The team should be mostly in place, with roles and responsibilities defined, and you should have ties established with complementary groups such as enterprise architecture and strategic planning. Some amount of documentation needs to be created by this point, including the BPM charter, methodology for BPM projects and the BPM governance structure (including a competency center) that dovetails with other governance within your organization. At this point, you should also have a first draft of your BPM strategic plan and a communication plan.
The third month is about starting to deliver results. With the internal team fully in place and some new hires likely still ongoing, you’ll need to determine training needs both for the team and to roll out on a larger scale. The actual process improvement work should be started, looking at the details of processes in the business areas and considering the application of BPM practices (we’re not talking technology implementations here) to start understanding and improving processes, and try to complete two “quick win” projects where you’re showing value in the organization. The business process competency center should be kicked off and the charter drafted, and governance bodies such as steering committees in place, and you should finish your final strategic plan.

In some organizations, this will seem a wildly optimistic schedule for all of these activities, and Olding admitted that she has seen many cases of this stretching to around 18 months. I’m sure that hiring Gartner to help you out will speed things along, however. 🙂

She ended up with some recommendations that are pretty good advice on any type of project: understand the organization and have a plan that is flexible enough to accommodate theirpecific needs; communicate, particularly showing BPM in the context of business imperatives; and advocates within the business to help with the adoption process. Gartner has published quite a bit of research on getting started with your BPM initiatives, including governance and competency centers, but she recommends actions such as getting a collaboration site (e.g., SharePoint, or a hosted solution such as Google Sites if you have external participants) set up early to gather ideas and information about BPM.

Elise went into quite a bit of detail on each of these; definitely worth checking out the replay of the webinar in full (the registration was here, so the replay will likely show up there somewhere). Also, they have two BPM conferences coming up: February 23-25 in London, and March 23-25 in San Diego, and there’s a discount code given at the end of the webinar for $300 off the San Diego conference.

Comparing BPM conferences

The fall conference season has kicked off, and I’ve already had the pleasure of attending 3 BPM conferences: the International BPM conference (academic), Appian’s first user conference (vendor), and the Gartner BPM summit (analyst). It’s rare to have 3 such different conferences crammed into 2 weeks, so I’ll sum up some of the differences that I saw.

The International BPM conference (my coverage) features the presentation of papers by academics and large corporate research labs covering various areas of BPM research. Most of the research represented at the conference is around process modeling in some way — patterns, modularity, tree structures, process mining — but there were a few focused on process simulation and execution issues as well. The topics presented here are the future of BPM, but not necessarily the near future: some of these ideas will likely trickle into mainstream BPM products over the next 5 years. It’s also a very technical conference, and you may want to arm yourself with a computer science or engineering background before you wade into the graph theory, calculus and statistics included in many of these papers. This conference is targeted at academics and researchers, but many of the smaller BPM vendors (the ones who don’t have a big BPM research lab like IBM or SAP) could benefit by sending someone from their architecture or engineering group along to pick up cool ideas for the future. They might also find a few BPM-focused graduate students who will be looking for jobs soon.

Appian’s user conference (my coverage) was an impressive small conference, especially for their first time out. Only a day long, plus another day for in-depth sessions at their own offices (which I did not attend), it included the obligatory big-name analyst keynote followed by a lot of solid content. The only Appian product information that we saw from the stage was a product update and some information on their new partnership with MEGA; the remainder of the sessions was their customers talking about what they’ve done with Appian. They took advantage of the Gartner BPM summit being in their backyard, and scheduled their user conference for earlier the same week so that Appian customers already attending Gartner could easily add on a day to their trip and attend Appian’s conference as well. Well run, good content, and worth the trip for Appian customers and partners.

Gartner’s BPM summit (my coverage), on the other hand, felt bloated by comparison. Maybe I’ve just attended too many of these, especially since they started going to two conferences per year last year, but there’s not a lot of new information in what they’re presenting, and there seems to be a lot of filler: quasi-related topics that they throw in to beef up the agenda. There was a bit of new material on SaaS and BPM, but not much else that caught my interest. Two Gartner BPM summits per year is (at least) one too many; I know that they claim to be doing it in order to cover the east-west geography, but the real impact is that the vendors are having to pony up for two of these expensive events each year, which will kill some of the other BPM events due to lack of sponsorship. Although I still think that the Gartner BPM summit is a good place for newbies to get a grounding in BPM and related technologies, having a more diverse set of BPM events available would help the market overall.

If you’re a customer and have to choose one conference per year, I’d recommend the user conference put on by your BPM vendor — you’ll get enough of the general information similar to Gartner, plus specific information about the product that you’ve purchased and case studies by other customers. If you haven’t made a purchasing decision yet and/or are really new to BPM, then the Gartner BPM summit is probably a better choice, although there are other non-vendor BPM events out there as well. For those of you involved in the technical side of architecting and developing BPM products at vendors or highly sophisticated customers, I recommend attending the International BPM conference.

Gartner BPM: Global 360/Carlson Marketing

Robert Lang of Global 360 to talk about an implementation at Carlson Marketing, a travel, meeting and event planning company. They had a lot of paper-based processes that included hand-offs between departments with complex approval processes; not only was the basic process difficult to manage, but changes to a customer proposal were difficult to execute efficiently.

They used Global 360, SharePoint (as a portal), InfoPath (for complex forms UI) and SQL Server to implement their travel proposal request process, including automating the routing of work requests related to the proposal process. They automated some operations, and made other operations considerably more efficient by maintaining a common folder for the proposal that could be accessed by any relevant participants. They allowed for spawning related but independently-executing processes.

Their benefits:

Faster processing of proposal requests
Better accuracy in data collection
Less rekeying of data
Consolidation of data into a centralized database for historical analytics
Improved turnaround time by 30%
Reduced number of personnel required to process a proposal request by 19%
Ability to identify and address bottlenecks in the business process
Dynamically reconfigure and reassign staff to optimize work

They plan to use Global 360 for other projects, including A/P, HR and their call center.

That’s it for me for this Gartner BPM summit: after spending most of the last 2 weeks traveling to 3 conferences, I’m skipping the vendors’ parties tonight and the last half-day of content tomorrow morning. I’ve been thinking about a wrap-up post comparing the 3 very different conferences — one academic, one vendor and one analyst — so watch for that over the next few days.

Gartner BPM: Global 360/Citi Cards Imaging and Workflow

Global 360 has a bit of revolving door with analysts: first, they hire Jim Sinur from Gartner. Then, they hire Colin Teubner from Forrester. Then, Sinur leaves. And here today at the Gartner show, which he admits is his first-ever, Teubner presented on behalf of Global 360 about putting people first in BPM. He really only did the introduction, however, before turning over the presentation to one of their customers, Richard Van Hoever, SVP of Customer Service Paper at Citi Cards.

Citigroup uses a lot of Global 360: 10,000 users worth. They’ve implemented a pretty standard imaging and workflow transaction processing application, with work queues that push work to participants rather than allowing cherry-picking, work prioritization and routing, and load balancing across their domestic, nearshore and offshore workforces. The big challenges are the volume of work, tight integration between document management and BPM, and geographic routing.

They were able to get 75% of their required functionality out of the box with Global 360 (they were promised 90%, but that type of discrepancy is pretty common). Most of the customization was around the work filtering, sorting, assignment and presentation, as expected; Global 360, like other BPMS’, does most of the behind-the-scenes stuff out of the box.

What amazes me is that this is fundamentally not different from the types of imaging and workflow systems that I’ve been helping organizations to implement for about 15 years; the only thing that has changed is that the relative sophistication of today’s tools means much less custom code and greater process agility. However, the business process is the same inefficient, key-from-paper/image process that’s been happening the same way for years. Undoubtedly, the relative volume of some transaction types will have reduced due to online self-service, but it’s clear that many large financial services organizations have a long ways to go in terms of making it easier for their customers to do their data entry for them.

Gartner BPM: SaaS and BPM

Having bugged out of the Agile BPM session, I arrived late to Michele Cantera’s discussion of whether software as a service is a viable option for process improvement projects. She covered off some of the same material as the SaaS and BPM session in February, but there was some new information as well. I won’t repeat the material from that session on the topic of BPM SaaS delivery and multi-tenancy models, so you might want to go back to that post and check that out as background for this. Go ahead, I’ll wait.

One interesting bit, based on 2007 estimates, segmented the BPM SaaS adopters into four categories:

Pragmatists, forming 49% of the market, who are replacing departmental on-premise applications but don’t have an enterprise-wide scope.
Beginners, 40% of the market, who are replacing low-end software tools with simple utility applications. These are often small or medium businesses who don’t want to grow an IT department.
Masters, 10% of the market, who are weaving SaaS applications into their enterprise-wide application portfolio.
Visionaries, a mere 1%, who are actively replacing on-premise applications with SaaS wherever possible.

She showed these plotted out on two axes: comprehensive strategy versus IT ability to execute. Pragmatists are low on comprehensive strategy but high on IT ability to execute; beginners are low on both, masters are high on both, and visionaries are high on strategy but low on ability to execute (since they don’t need to have internal IT skills). I really like this segmentation, since I think that it provides a good way to characterize SaaS customers in general, not just SaaS BPM customers.

She went through the list of current BPMS SaaS vendors, split out into business process modeling, process-based applications, and BPMS as a service. The SaaS modeling vendors are Lombardi, Metastorm and Appian; BPMS as a service is offered by Appian and Fujitsu. Process-based applications are typically offered by companies who have taken a commercial BPMS and built a specific vertical application on top of it; the underlying BPMS is not necessarily offered as SaaS directly, and in most cases, the BPMS vendor is not the one providing the service (with the exception of DST, whose BPM product grew from their own mutual fund back-office application), since most of them are not in the vertical applications market. There are going to be more entrants into all of these spaces in the near future, as well as changes to the multi-tenancy models offered by the vendors; you’ll want to keep your eye on what’s happening in this space if you’re considering BPM via SaaS, and start to consider how you’re going to handle process governance when your business processes aren’t running on your own systems any more.

She also showed a chart of different SaaS services types (BPO, application outsourcing, hosting, traditional ASP/SaaS model, process-based applications using BPMS/SaaS, BPMS as a platform, BPMS as SaaS-enabling platform) mapped against operating characteristics (operational cost, degree of customization, process agility, cost of process agility, number of suppliers): for example, BPMS as a platform has high process agility, whereas a traditional ASP/SaaS application that likely doesn’t include a BPMS has low process agility.

There was a list of do’s and don’ts of using SaaS for process agility, such as using BPMS via SaaS for pilot projects in order to make the business case for on-premise systems. Of course, if you do that, you might just find that you like the SaaS model well enough to stick with it for the long run.

Gartner BPM: Agile BPM methods

In the spirit of discouraging conference organizers from scheduling sessions that start before 9am, I boycotted the 8:15 keynote session, but showed up for the session on Agile BPM methods. Unfortunately, it appears to be a complete rerun of David Norton’s session from February, so I’m heading out to find a different session.

Gartner BPM: Dynamic BPM

Daryl Plummer’s thing is SOA and dynamic applications, and he presented this afternoon on Dynamic BPM: the ability to support process change by any role, at any time, with very low latency. In other words, (m)any process participant can make changes to the process in order to suit their specific needs, just as Trefler was telling us at lunch. A big part of making this happen is splitting out monolithic systems into more agile components: orchestration engine, portal, rules engine and databases.

Considering the mostly business composition of the audience, he did a pretty deep technical dive into concepts such as dynamic recompilation, showing how the dynamic nature of lower level technical components help to create dynamic processes on the surface.

He went through a well-used diagram showing BPM adoption over the years and where SOA comes into the picture, and the inherent dynamism in models, which is the whole premise behind model-driven design. SOA is used to automate what machines do best, while BPM and the associated process models are used to empower what people do best. More automation actually means more capabilities for the human steps in the process.

He summarized the event capture-analysis-response chain (covered by Roy Schulte in a session this morning that I just couldn’t make myself write about): events triggering business processes, and also monitoring those processes, in order to provide better decision quality, faster response, reduce information overload and reduce cost.

Inevitably, we move on to Web 2.0 and the implications for collaborative, ad hoc and social processes, community evolution of a process, and adding presence and other types of social context to processes.

One of the keys to making processes dynamic is business rules management, since being able to change rules without changing the structure of the process gives us most of the agility that’s required in business while allowing those changes to be made by business users.

Gartner BPM: Customers say the darnedest things

At the lunch presentation today, Alan Trefler (CEO of Pegasystems) discussed how it’s necessary — and possible — to put BPM right in the hands of the business users, and let them do it themselves. There will be some IT architectural oversight and support, of course, but you just have to convince the users, Tom Sawyer-like, that they really want to paint this fence.

I was sitting beside the BPM architect from one of Pega’s customers, and at the end of the talk I turned to him and asked “Do your business users do this?” His response: “Oh, hell, no!”

We still have a ways to go on this issue…

Gartner BPM: Opening Keynote

I arrived a bit late, transferring from the Ritz out in Tysons Corner down to the Gaylord in National Harbor (which Google Maps still thinks is a construction site), but caught the last half of the opening keynote with Janelle Hill and Michelle Cantera.

They started with some of the forces affecting business, both business and technology. Technology forces of change include having to balance enterprise-class and global-class computing, by which it appears that they mean custom, heavy-duty, special-purpose applications versus mass consumer applications: she makes the analogy between a custom, craftsman-made desk for the Oval Office versus an Ikea desk for the rest of us. Business forces of change include globalization, regulatory oversight, the evolution of the workforce (this is sort of a rerun of Connie Moore’s message of yesterday), and the complex value chains created by collaborative enterprises.

Since we’re here to talk about BPM, the next part was on how BPM helps us to cope with these forces of change. Their current BPM definition includes management practices, a structured approach using the management practices and software tools, and a cultural transformation (this last one is new in their definition, and long overdue). Overall, BPM is a set of disciplines plus technologies; it both encourages and enables continuous change in response to external forces, with a focus on optimizing end-to-end processes rather than specific functions. A key part of the approach is iterative (not phased), time-boxed, agile delivery, which I agree is critical but rarely see in practice.

BPM is being used heavily by companies that need to cope with frequent process change, usually in their customer-facing processes: from changes several times a year down to weekly or even daily frequency, plus ad hoc changes to executing process instances. What you need to think about, then, is how BPM changes your planning practices: Gartner suggests planning on shorter cycles and making plans dynamic and more transparent, with explicit guidelines for business outcomes rather than an explicit path by which those outcomes are reached. BPM also changes your organization and leadership by empowering employees (that’s a bit of a tired expression) and encouraging more fluid, virtual teams. It’s not clear that BPM is the real contributor here, however: I have the sense that they could take this same slide and present it at a number of different technology conferences (e.g., Enterprise 2.0) without changing anything but the title.

To use BPM effectively, you have to take advantage of monitoring and optimization, which is hopefully built into your BPM solution. This allows for better alignment of goals, metrics and results.

They finished up with a discussion of the skills and competencies required to build a BPM center of excellence (or as Gartner calls it, a center of competence), and a flying tour of their business process adoption and maturity model. Surprisingly, this tag-team presentation went way over time, not a good start for the day.

Not much new and exciting here — pretty much what you expect from a keynote — but a good overview of BPM in the context of business for the newbies in the crowd.