Gartner – Page 5

Gartner BPM: Converging BPM, Web 2.0 and Event Processing, Vitria

I just saw a nice demo of Vitria’s new M₃O release — just hit beta yesterday — that brings an incredible amount of richness and Web 2.0-ness to the interface: monitoring through RSS feeds, very dynamic drilling down and up in process maps, etc. The demo occurred in the context of a short presentation on the convergence of BPM, Web 2.0 and event processing. The process modeler is now browser-based (or so it appeared; we were looking at a screen capture, not the live product), and has evolved into something that could be used by a business analyst. In the past, Vitria has always been pretty focused on the system-centric end of BPM, but it looks like they’re trying to push both the ability to handle human-centric BPM as well as opening up the modeling environment beyond IT.

Thye’ve done some really interesting things in monitoring, particularly through the use of RSS feeds, allowing mashups, and tying data feeds to maps. Creating dashboards and linkages between the dashboard objects is done graphically.

I’m definitely looking forward to seeing more of M₃O: it looks like they’ve done some really nice UI innovations that will definitely push more control into the hands of the business (although their claim that they’re the first vendor to bring together human-centric and integration-centric BPM — and, in fact, that Vitria is the originator of BPM — is a bit of an exaggeration).

Gartner BPM: Business Rules Management State of the Art, Marc Kerremans

Marc Kerremans’ presentation on business rules management started out looking at where rules exist in an organization, and how they are used. In many cases, rules are still embedded within applications — such that changing a rule requires changing the underlying code — or are implemented in a manual and sometimes ad hoc manner. Gartner defines business rules as “implicit and explicit business policies that define and describe a business action”, where implicit rules are those embedded within applications.

He discussed how rules can differ greatly within a single organization based on factors such as geography and the associated local regulations, and how a business rules management system — which manages rules explicitly and externally from business applications — can add value in managing all of the complex rules across an organization.

He also looked at who owns and manages business rules:

Line of business managers determine the most volatile rules that may need to be changed to meet business agility needs, define the rules required, and author/change less complex business rules.
Systems architects author more complex rules, and test rules to assure that the system is performing as required.
Business analysts discover and author new rules based on their analysis of the business health, and create and simulate rule scenarios.

Since 2004, BRE and BPM have evolved from distinct and separate markets to an integration of BRE in many BPMS, to the current state of business rules management systems (BRMS) that go beyond simple business rules engine functionality. Typically, a BRMS contains:

Rule execution engine, including execution, sequencing and chaining of rules, and event-based execution.
Rule repository, where rules are stored for access by design tools and at run time. This includes security and version control to prevent unauthorized changes to the rule definitions.
Rule modeling and simulation, for what-if analysis. This will show effects such as dependencies between rules, and performance tracking.
Monitoring and analysis of historical and real-time rule usage, including reporting and audit trails.
Rule management and administration, working in concert with the repository, to manage security, promotion between development, test and production environments, and track changes and performance.
Rule templates to provide a quick start for specific vertical industry rule sets, and horizontal rules sets such as compliance.
Rule integrated development environment, which provides a graphical, model-driven environment for authoring, testing and debugging rules. This may include wizards for easy creation of rules by business managers/analysts, and collaboration tools.

As with BPMS, not all vendors will cover all of the full range of functionality equally well. There are some open source BREs that provide only the engine functionality, such as JBOSS and NxBRE. Most of the commercial vendors, such as Corticon, Fair Isaac and ILOG, are either migrating to the full BRMS functionality or are already there. There’s also an overlap of BPMS that provide BRE functionality: Pegasystems is the most commonly-cited player here since their BPMS is actually built on a rules platform, but other BPMS vendors provide rules that can be separated from the processes to at least allow reuse across multiple processes, although not across non-BPMS applications.

Agility is the primary reason that organizations look to BRM, which can manifest as awareness (accessing and presenting the right information through rules-based event monitoring), flexibility (rule modeling and simulation to handle expected change), adaptability (rapid rule modification to handle unexpected change) and productivity (executing the right policies and procedures).

There are other reasons for implementing BRM besides agility, of course: improving the quality and consistency of business decisions, improving revenue opportunities by fine-tuning pricing rules on the fly, improving customer satisfaction through greater customization, and better regulatory compliance and governance through the use of audited rules and increased visibility into how decisions are made.

Kerremans went through a number of best practices for getting started with BRM, such as analyzing rule volatility, and establishing a process for making changes to rules. As much as possible, try to work with natural language representations of rules so that business managers are comfortable with the authoring environment, although some level of structure to the language (“rules speak”) will be necessary.

He also discussed the different types of rules technology, including inference-based and event-based rules engines, before finishing up with some recommendations on developing a business rules management strategy. As with BPMS, many larger organizations will end up with multiple BRE tools to cover their entire strategy, so don’t assume that you’ll be working with only a single vendor in this space.

For you business rules aficionados, note that I’ve change the business rules category on this blog to DM, instead of BRE.

Gartner BPM: Business Applications Through 2010, Yvonne Genovese

In the morning’s technology keynote, Yvonne Genovese talked about the trends in business applications over the next two years:

Applications shift from pre-canned logic to dynamic assemblies, something that we’re already seeing with large packaged applications (such as SAP) opening up their internal functionality as services, allowing those functions to be consumed — along with any number of other web services — as part of a composite application or business process.
Convergence of business processes, people and information: applications that provide business value will consider all of these.
Focus on performance management evolution from reporting and monitoring to predictive planning and closed-loop optimization.
Business perimeters are becoming porous, with much of the innovation occurring at the edge of organizations: not only will there be interactions with external parties such as customers and suppliers, decisions will be made by those external parties that form part of an organizations business processes.
Users and vendors have opposing strategies since many enterprise vendors are reaching end of life on their applications, so users are going to hold off on significant purchasing in favour of project-based investments.
The role of the ERP suite will change, since they typically provide a low degree of innovation; they will tend to be services consumed by other more agile applications.
There will be growth in alternative software consumption models, such as SaaS, which greatly impacts integration with existing applications and business processes and can impact process integrity.
Process integrity challenges loom on the horizon, which is the fall-out from both dynamic/composite applications that pull services and data from multiple systems, and the move to SaaS applications: consider the challenge of reversing a logical transaction that may have occurred over multiple systems, some on-premise and some SaaS.
Seismic shift in the way that users view software governance: since IT has become a critical competence within many organizations, application development and deployment has to become more predictable and visible to the business that it serves.

The use of templates/patterns that embody best practices for developing new business applications will help create standardization, and therefore predictability. In the BPM world, this includes having a BPM discipline within an organization that links your end-to-end processes to enterprise value disciplines. In general, this is all about keeping a closer eye on what your vendor is doing, and not giving them a carte blanche in building your systems or during major upgrades: their focus isn’t your process integrity, so you need to ensure that what they’re doing won’t adversely impact it.

Also check out my coverage of her presentation at last September’s BPM summit, which covers much of the same ground.

Gartner BPM: The Current State and Future Direction of the IT Industry, Diane Morello

Diane Morello delivered the closing keynote today with IT industry trends:

2007 will end up being the 6th straight year of modest enterprise IT budget growth
A growing number of CIOs are taking on new non-IT responsibilities
The more things change…

What economic and business trends will prevail during the next several years? No rocket science required to predict that the economy is slowing down almost everywhere worldwide, although a vast majority of CEOs feel very or somewhat confident that their company will grow in revenue, leading me to wonder if we need a survey on what the CEOs are smoking.

She went through five top predictions that Gartner has made for 2008: more green technology, a greater influence of user preferences on IT spending, significant amounts of IT infrastructure and business applications as a service rather than incurring capital expenditures, and (my personal fave), traveling workers leaving their notebooks at home in favor of other devices.

The top two actions for any CIO in the past three years are still delivering projects that enable business growth and linking business and IT strategies and plans, but improving the quality of IT service delivery has leapt from 7th place to 3rd place in 2007 when CIOs were asked how they support business growth. For 2008, attracting IT personnel moves up into 3rd place. Other surveys that they’ve conducted about the future of the IT organization see a further dissolving of the walls between business and IT, creating what they call the hyper-connected enterprise: the focus is on improving business processes and improving the customer experience, while security bugaboos are finally regressing in relative importance.

A key message is that any investment in IT infrastructure has to be justified in terms of its ability to contribute business value. IT leaders are looking to reduce the cost of security, compliance, privacy and risk management without compromising their organization’s operations. Since much IT infrastructure is at least partly outsourced in some way, the question becomes how to manage multisourcing effectively so as to provide value to the business as the most effective cost.

Morello showed a business intelligence maturity model, nearly identical to their business process maturity model, that maps the changing role of BI within organizations. She then went through the most frequently asked questions that they receive from enterprise architects, applications managers and other IT positions. In looking at questions regarding business process improvement, they expect the key question by 2012 to be around how to do continuous goal-driven process improvement without having total chaos. For any type of IT projects, program and portfolio managers need to learn how to prioritize ad hoc projects, since there will be less monster long-term projects and more rapidly-changing ad hoc projects.

She briefly covered the hype cycle for emerging technologies; I’m sure that I’ll be sued (or at least not invited back) if I show the diagram, but you can likely find it on Gartner’s site or by searching around elsewhere. A number of the Enterprise 2.0 technologies that I see as having break-out potential for 2008 — such as enterprise RSS and wikis — have reached the trough of disillusionment and are about to start climbing back up that slope of enlightenment. However, as one BPM vendor who was sitting with me during the presentation remarked, BPM is no longer on the emerging technologies hype cycle: does that mean that it has finally arrive?

Gartner BPM: Microsoft BPM Success Story, Mario Cataldo, FirstAgain

I stayed around for the 2nd half of the Microsoft session to hear about their BPM customer success story with Mario Cataldo, CIO of FirstAgain, an online lender.

They are doing loan origination, funding and loan servicing processes in support of their online lending operations, including credit modeling and underwriting, but also administrative processes such as invoice generation and email templates.

They’ve made heavy use of business rules within their business processes, looking for ways to minimize IT involvement when business rules change by identifying the areas of frequent change. Since their applications are essentially built in code (rather than, I am assuming, a graphical model), this is an essential contributor to their agility, and he spent quite a bit of his presentation discussing how business rules improve their processes and their selection methodology, which led to their selection of InRule.

They initially started with an unnamed third-party workflow product, but after Microsoft released .Net 3.0 and Workflow Foundation (and after they had already deployed the other product), they switched away from their selected workflow product to Microsoft WF. Since they were already in production with the other tool since 2006, they’ve been stripping that out and replacing it, and plan to go into production soon with the Microsoft WF solution. They converted to the Microsoft product because it gave them better extensibility, performance and scalability, and reduced their costs since WF is included in .Net 3.0.

This is a much more code-intensive type of implementation than what you would see with most BPM suites, since it’s really a workflow extension to a development environment rather than anything like a BPM suite. Having to build your own workflow administration, for example, puts off a lot of people.

There are some good use cases for this mode of implementation, however: one is small software shops with a group of highly capable developers and a limited budget who are more likely to spend money on talent than someone else’s code, such as a startup; this is exactly FirstAgain’s situation. Although they tried out a more full-featured workflow product, it didn’t have the scalability that they needed, and ultimately they preferred to build it themselves. Coming from a software development background, I understand this mindset: if you have a talented team, you can likely build something better for your specific needs right now. The problems come as your requirements shift, or as the BPM market changes, and new functionality offered by full-featured vendors isn’t available to you since you’d have to build it yourself. Realistically, there are many parts of a full BPM suite that you’re just not going to build if you do it yourself on the shoestring budget model; you need to consider if those are important to you or not.

Gartner BPM: Achieve people-ready processes on the Microsoft platform! Burley Kawasaki, Microsoft

Yes, there is really an exclamation point at the end of the presentation title in the published agenda: it looks like Microsoft is as surprised as the rest of us that they can achieve people-ready processes. This is the second of the vendor sessions of the day, and I’m listening to Burley Kawasaki talk about Microsoft’s BPM offerings and vision.

Kawasaki starts by talking about recent changes in enterprises, and how agility is the new competence for the enterprise. He believes that companies are sold on BPM as the right vision, but that cost, complexity and risk limit its adoption so far: placing them far down on the business process maturity curve. I’m not sure that most companies are even sold on BPM as the right vision, although I definitely agree that cost, complexity and risk are inhibiting technology implementations.

And to be People_Ready (as he puts it — obviously, I’m missing some joke in the syntax), he sees some key principles:

Routes of adoption: each initiative is focused on a specific incremental goal, specifically awareness, repeatability, automation or optimization. This totally didn’t make sense until he started mapping each of these routes to a Microsoft product: Visio, SharePoint Designer, Visual Studio/BizTalk and SharePoint Performance.
Collaborative design tools for allowing sharing of models between different roles, although in the Microsoft world this often doesn’t include literally sharing models, but rather import/export of models between environments.
Relevant to the information worker, through integration with desktop environments such as Microsoft Office. Office integration, especially the integration of processes with Outlook, is definitely a hot topic for many of my customers.
Ubiquitous process platform, wherein composite applications are created through the integration of a number of distinct pieces in the platform, whether the pieces themselves are well integrated or not.

It’s this last definition of a process platform that I most object to: Gartner and the large vendors are moving towards this “business process platform” idea rather than a BPM suite, wherein anything with a single vendor’s logo on it can be considered part of the platform, regardless of how it fits together with other components. I just don’t buy it.

Kawasaki finished up talking about the Business Process Alliance, and the growth that its seen with both customers and partners, with over 100 templates and solutions offered for 11 vertical industry.

Gartner BPM: No ‘IT Speak’ Here: How Grassroots Efforts Catalyzed BPM at Chevron, Jim Boots

I came in late for Jim Boots’ presentation on how grassroots efforts catalyzed BPM at Chevron, so didn’t take any formal notes. He had a lot of great information on challenges that they overcame and those still to overcome, key roles, and how they created an empowered employee vision.

My favorite bit, however, was how he presented his key points and subpoints: he used a mindmap type of structure to show them.

I really wish that his presentation was up on the Gartner site; I think that I missed a lot of good points here.

Gartner BPM: Why and How Allianz Uses BPM, Tim Rolfing

The second half of Lomardi’s vendor session is a presentation by Tim Rolfing, IT Director of Allianz of America Shared Services on how they use (Lombardi’s) BPM. Allianz Life is a 3000-person life insurance organization that’s part of the huge Allianz group of companies.

Their initial drivers for BPM date from 2005:

The ability to scale efficiently, based on projected increases in premiums and employees.
Leveraging common processes, since they had a number of duplicate functions due in part to their growth through acquisitions. They also had 500-700 systems that were in use throughout their organization that needed to be rationalized.
Need for transparency into operations, both to have a view of the end-to-end processes in order to look for areas of process improvement, and for real-time operational process monitoring.
Employee job enrichment, by automating some of the routine tasks done by people, thereby allowing people to focus on customer-centric activities. This also allowed the human-facing tasks to be done anywhere in the world, certainly a bonus for a company that’s part of a global organization.

They’ve implemented an impressive number of processes in a short time:

Securities application processing
Money processing for applying premiums
Life insurance underwriting
Survey response tracking
New (insurance) product implementation, which improved the cycle time to implement a new product from over 50 days to 12 days, and removes IT from the critical path
Application document search, sort and prioritization within specialty queues to allow SLAs for specific applications to be met; failure to meet the SLAs can result in financial penalities
Service recovery and customer complaint handling, including some historical analytics to determine if these have detectable patterns, such as product or broker

They have a number of other ones lined up for implementation in 2008

He ended with some lessons for success:

Look for small processes with significant impact
Plan for a deployment time frame of no more than 60-90 days
Keep the first pilot project simple
Follow an iterative methodology rather than trying to boil the ocean in the first version

They keep the BPM project teams small, and have found a great deal of improved efficiency through their implementations. They have a BPM center of excellence that they use to train the business side. The technical teams have done the Lombardi technical training, and found that the week-long training was adequate for their needs. He wouldn’t talk openly about their vendor selection process, but stated that there were significant differences between BPM products. The business owns the process and maps it down to a specific level of detail (in Blueprint, I believe) before turning it over to IT who “move it over to the BPM tool” — presumably, they’re using Blueprint for modeling by the business, which still requires export/import to get to Lombardi’s TeamWorks execution environment, so round-tripping would definitely be impacted.

As an aside, I really wish that Gartner did a better job of publishing presentation on their website, since there’s material from this (and other) presentations that I’d like to review in the future. They don’t seem to publish any of the presentations from the vendor sessions, even those by customers, and half of the regular session presentations are also missing from the site (and presumably the CD in our conference pack) as of today.

Gartner BPM: 3 Milestones of BPM Success, Toby Cappello, Lombardi

Although Gartner really only invites their own analysts and customers to speak in the conference sessions, sponsoring vendors can buy a spot in the vendor session tracks, which breaks down into two 30-minutes sessions: usually one by the vendor themselves, and one by one of their customers. I’m sitting in on Lombardi’s double session, the first part of which is with Toby Cappello, Lombardi’s VP of Professional Services; this will be followed by a session with Allianz that I’ll also stick around for.

Cappello is focused on the cycle of define, deliver and improve, with three components:

Setting direction (motivation, organization)
Directing work (process, rules)
Improving performance (analytics)

He walked through typical parts of each of the define, deliver and improve milestones; nothing earth-shattering here, but he’s really stressing the need for agility in this cycle.

He’s a big fan of hands-on involvement by the business in BPM projects, and feels that business and IT aren’t really collaborating if they’re not sharing the process models. Luckily, that’s something that Lombardi’s products allow you to do reasonably well, and will improve further with their expected mid-year product release that will combine the process model repositories for their software-as-a-service product discovery tool, Blueprint, and their core BPM environment, TeamWorks. There’s delineation of responsibilities between business and IT — basically along the line between processes and services — but they need to be working together on the same model for true collaboration.

Gartner BPM: Getting Started with BPM – Elise Olding

I saw Elise Olding speak at the September conference together with Bill Rosser, and I wasn’t completely impressed, but I think that she was fairly new to Gartner so wanted to take a second look. She’s focusing on three issues in this presentation:

How should users assess organizational readiness?
How should you initiate BPM and what does a plan for getting started look like?
What are the critical success factors to long-term success with BPM?

She breezed pretty quickly past the business process maturity model — again, I thought that Gartner would be focusing more on this — but covered some great points on the importance of corporate culture and change management when implementing BPM: exactly the things that many companies ignore, especially if BPM is being pushed by IT rather than pulled by the business. She makes the point that many factors required for BPM success don’t come naturally to many organizations, and discussed three enterprise personality profiles that determine the approach and goals:

Aggressives have an imperative to stay ahead of the pack; they’re trying to seize advantage.
Moderates have an imperative to get leverage over their direct competitors; they’re seeking parity in the marketplace.
Conservatives have an imperative to catch up with the bulk of the competitive pack; they’re trying to reduce pain and (although she didn’t state this explicitly) probably just stay alive.

She went through the different project roles and the skills associated with those roles: executive sponsor, business process improvement director, business process improvement project lead, design team, subject matter experts, and business process analyst. She drilled in specifically on the executive sponsor role and how important it is to have the right fit: an involved decision-maker with the right motivation and influence across the enterprise.

Next up were the steps for initiating a BPM project: determining objectives (e.g., agility, compliance), understanding and defining critical processes (e.g., delivering products and services), determining the initial organizational model (e.g., reporting structure for process-specific functions), implementing a “getting started” checklist (14 key project activities that she identifies, e.g., develop business case), and documenting and using the BPM plan (actually just normal project plan/management). She spent quite a bit of time on these five points, and provided a lot of valuable detail and examples; this isn’t rocket science, but it’s good planning strategy that doesn’t add a lot of overhead.

She stressed some key points that apply to any type of IT project, not just BPM:

Focus on the right methodology first before selecting even the technology class, much less a particular vendor or tool
Projects must be compelling and tied to business strategy, and be prepared to go back at the end and see if the promised benefits were actually achieved
Pick the first project carefully: a success here will pave the way for later projects
Assign the right resources at the right time, including maintaining continuity of key resources throughout the project
Establish governance, but start out with a light touch and add more rigor later

As I mentioned in my review of her previous presentation, her background seems to be focused on strategic IT planning, so that many of her comments are applicable to other technologies, but she’s done a good job of moving from a generic IT strategy to a mostly BPM-focused strategy. She’s really talking about business architecture in this presentation, where BPM is just one of the methodologies and tools that might be used as part of business architecture — she stated explicitly that enterprise architecture is the context for BPM, a view that I’ve been discussing with my clients for some time. Unfortunately, many EA efforts are really more information architecture groups within IT, and they mostly ignore business architecture and other “soft” parts of the architecture.

There was a question about how to reconcile business analysts in both business and IT reporting areas; unfortunately, I think that she misunderstood this as how to reconcile business analysts in business and system analysts in IT, which is a communication issue rather than an organizational issue. I often see the business analyst title used for people in both IT and business, and my feeling is that business analysts belong in the business, although business process analysts should have at least dotted-line reporting to a BPM center of excellence if one exists. I’d love to hear any comments from readers on what they’ve experienced here with where business (process) analysts report and what works best.

Another question was about the role of the executive sponsor, and she had some good comments on how to manage your executive sponsor: establish a service level agreement with them, where they agree to four hours each week of effort, and agree to a specific timeline for responding to requests for decisions. A recommendation of hers, which would be difficult for a lot of people, is to document in the project reports if the executive sponsor is not meeting their obligations.