Tag: lombardi

Lombardi Driven: Rod Favaron and Phil Gilbert Keynote

I’m not sure what possessed Lombardi to hold their user conference in Austin in June — it’s going to 39C here today — but a couple of hundred customers have gathered for a couple of days about Lombardi’s products and the customers using them. There’s the usual difficulty in figuring out how to deal with new media, and I’ve been somewhat muzzled on giving the names of customers who are speaking here, although if you had half a brain, you could check the agenda and figure out who I’m referring to when I use the approved verbiage “a large US-based automotive company”. Of course, if there’s customers here who blog (or comment on blogs) or Twitter, then likely they haven’t been given the same explicit instructions, so no restrictions for them. 🙂

After a few opening remarks from Jim Rudden (who was kind enough to ask for my suggestions on what makes a conference great several months ago, and appears to have actually implemented several of them), Rod Favaron kicked things off with a discussion of the evolution of BPM over the past 6 years. Lombardi has a new focus on BPM programs within organizations, and sees the evolution of business-led projects to today’s IT-led programs to a jointly-led culture of process in the future.

Phil Gilbert then took the stage to talk about how to deal with the period of transition that most businesses find themselves in now. He reinforced this new Lombardi message of moving from projects to programs: in 2006, everyone was doing projects, and are now trying to take a few discrete projects and move it to a larger scale in order to achieve economies of scale and shared resources. This isn’t about making the projects bigger, it’s about how to roll out many small (90-day) projects efficiently so that BPM can become part of the enterprise’s DNA. A part of this is having people understand cross-functional issues, since most are still focused on their own department’s processes, and don’t think about the end-to-end process; Phil feels that IT has a better perspective on cross-functional business processes than the business does, which I don’t completely agree with. I think that IT has the potential to have a better perspective on the cross-functional business processes, but doesn’t reach that potential in most organizations.

He had an interesting quote from a customer: “I used to think that BPM is the glue around my applications. Now I know that the applications revolve around BPM.” This indicates the shift that is happening in how people see BPM, from EAI-type infrastructure to the portal through which people manage their work. Another customer stated that BPM is challenging their fundamental business model, allowing for less-costly decentralized processing — including home-based work — while maintaining a high degree of visibility and control over the processes.

He reinforced Rod’s earlier message that we’ve moved from business-led projects to IT-led projects and programs today: it appears that Lombardi thinks that this is a good thing, although I think that we still need a stronger business pull for BPM rather than an IT push. He talked briefly about the upcoming release of Teamworks, how Blueprint fosters BPM collaboration, and Lombardi’s service packages building on the service offerings that they announced a few months ago; I’m sure that there will be a lot more about this over the next two days.

Phil’s going to be posting a series of charters for BPM governance on his blog, starting today, which he hopes to open source in order to get involvement from the larger BPM community:

  • Charter for BPM platform sharing (rules for access among projects, entities)
  • Charter for BPM democracy (access, visibility, dialog)
  • Charter for BPM budget transparency: top down, bottom up, peer review – ex ante, ex post
  • Charter for BPM “conflict situations” (BPM and SOA, interface definition)
  • Charter for BPM investment (maintaining the infrastructure, upgrading, maintenance)

He believes that these charters for governance are necessary in order to figure out how to run many BPM projects simultaneously as part of a cohesive program. I look forward to participating in the development of these ideas.

The usual logistics: there’s wifi, which is some combination of the hotel’s paid wifi and what appears to be some free access in the conference area. However, there’s no power near the tables so I’m offline most of the time to preserve battery. I’ll scout around for a seat near a plug for the later sessions.

Lombardi analyst update

On April 2nd, Lombardi held their second analyst update by teleconference; I found the first one back in January to be informative, and obviously Lombardi had sufficient positive feedback from it to continue. Strangely enough, we were instructed to embargo information about the new Blueprint until today, although the Blueprint team blogged about it on the weekend.

Phil Gilbert started out with a high-level corporate update, including their growth — both new hires and through their channel — and some of the new sales where they continue to compete successfully against larger vendors. However, most of the information was about their products and services.

Blueprint, their SaaS process discovery tool, now has 2,400 customer accounts (averaging 5 users per account) in 88 countries. A major update was just released, where they’ve moved on from just business mapping to a more complete BPMN modeler. Later this year, they’ll be improving the wiki-style documentation capabilities in the process repository, and at the end of this year or early next year, they’ll be moving some of Teamworks’ performance analysis tools — process simulation and executive dashboards — into Blueprint. Phil tried to counter the fears of companies not wanting to keep key business information in a hosted environment outside the firewall, but I know that until Blueprint can be hosted outside the US, where privacy laws are not well-aligned with many other countries such as Canada, a lot of my customers wouldn’t even consider it. I asked Phil if they planned to host outside of the US, and he said “probably in 2009” but indicated that it would be based on customer demand. The only other analyst on the call who seemed concerned about this — especially when it includes passing back operational data to the modeling environment for simulation — was Neil Ward-Dutton, who was the only other person who wasn’t US-based.

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We had a demo of the new version of Blueprint, which includes the ability to reuse processes across Blueprint projects as linked subprocesses: a significant architectural improvement. The new diagramming capabilities include in-line embedded subprocesses that can be expanded and collapsed in place (nice!), the ability to easily convert a single step to a subprocess, and backward looping. It also includes a Visio importer, although not in the free version. In other words, this has clearly moved beyond the “toy” label that many other vendors have been applying to Blueprint, and appears to be a fairly full-featured process modeling tool now.

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They’ll continue with their current Blueprint pricing model that has a free version for a single user and a limited number of processes in order to try it out, then subscription pricing of $50/user/month for the professional version, which includes the Visio importer and Teamworks integration.

The other major announcement is about three packages of services that Lombardi will be offering, all of which involve working closely with the customer and using Blueprint to document the processes:

  • Process inventory, a 3-week engagement that includes a full inventory of level 1 “as-is” processes within an organization, identification of 30+ key business KPIs and SLAs, and a report of process improvement opportunities and roadmap. Expected price is $40k.
  • Process assessment, a 2-day engagement to assess a single process: ranking the problems and opportunities, level 1 and 2 “as-is” process maps, and identification of 5-10 key process KPIs and SLAs. Expected price is $15k.
  • Process analysis, a 2-week engagement that follows on from the process assessment with a full analysis of a process by adding detailed ranking of process problems and opportunities, level 1 and 2 “as-is” and “to-be” process maps, the identification of 10-20 key process KPIs and SLAs, and an estimated potential ROI analysis. Expected price is $40k.

The idea is that a customer would have the process inventory done to take a look at all of their business processes and select one or two critical ones, then have the assessment and analysis done for each of those critical processes.

These service packages are available now worldwide, and are working to train their partners to provide these services, although they don’t yet have any partners who can deliver the entire set of packages.