Tag: web20

Modeling Processes in a Browser with Appian

For those BPM vendors out there who say that you can’t create a fully-featured browser-based process modeling tool: YOU’RE WRONG. Appian does it, they do it well, and if you don’t get moving on this soon, they’ll kick your butt.

I was going to just stop there, but that would be mean, so I’ll continue on with a more complete review of the Appian 1-1/2 hour, open-the-firehose demo that I received last week via Webex, compliments of Phil Larson (director of product marketing) and Malcolm Ross (über demo god) at Appian.

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In case this is the first time that you’ve read my blog, let me iterate my view that a browser-based process modeler is the way to go if your goal is to lower the barriers to enabling process modelling and design across an enterprise — this is one of the ways that Web 2.0 is impacting BPM, as I discussed in a presentation at the BPMG conference earlier this year. Appian is the only mainstream BPM vendor that provides a lightweight (dare I say, zero footprint?) browser-based process modeler; the only other mainstream vendor that even has a browser-based process modeler is FileNet, but it’s a rather weighty Java applet that downloads with some degree of trouble, in my experience. [btw, if you want to debate the term “mainstream BPM vendor” with me, first of all check if you’re anywhere in Gartner’s BPMS Magic Quadrant except for the “niche players” quadrant, or anywhere at all in Forrester’s Human-Centric BPMS Wave.]

I’d never had the Appian corporate overview until this session, and I found it quite telling that 3 of the 4 founders were from Microstrategy, a business intelligence vendor. Analytics and reporting are baked into everything in the product, including the user interface: all of the grid-based UI screens such as inbox views are actually report views driven straight out of their own reporting/analytics engine, which makes it easy to do things like switch any view to a chart (if it makes sense to do so). It also means that KPIs and business thresholds can be easily built into a process and seen in a number of different views, not just a siloed BAM dashboard, including viewing process execution stats right in the modeler while you’re viewing the model. This makes for a more seamless integration between design, execution, monitoring and analytics than you’ll find in many vendors’ products, although some customers may find a proprietary reporting and analytics engine, as well as their proprietary and built-in rules engine, to be problematic in the face of corporate standards for these types of platforms.

Although nothing to do with process design, but very cool and Web 2.0-y, is the ability for a user to flag a process instance or a task within a process instance as a favourite. Although this isn’t quite the full process tagging paradigm that I’ve written about previously and talked about in my Web 2.0/BPM presentation, it’s a great start.

I won’t talk too much about the specific functions within the Appian process modeler, except to say that it does everything that I would expect from a process designer, and more: full BPMN-compliant modeling including more complex constructs such as ad hoc activities (i.e., those that aren’t attached to the process flow, see section 5.2.3 of the BPMN spec if you want to understand what this means); the ability to chain activities in a process so that they’re locked to the same user and present them as steps in a wizard-type interface rather than having to reopen each sequentially from a task list; a full forms designer that will be released next month; import/export to XPDL (which allows you to model offline with Zynium’s add-on to Visio and interchange models with the Appian process modeler); different views and capabilities within the process modeler for business analysts and developers; and web services introspection and mapping. And it does it all in a completely AJAX environment, although due to support for VML but not SVG, it’s not supported in Firefox yet. Furthermore, all you need to cross the firewall from the modeler to the server is port 80 (i.e., standard HTTP) or port 443 (for HTTP over SSL).

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If Appian really wanted to kick some butt, they’d create the browser-based equivalent of a free process modeler download: a free process modeling site exposed on the internet, available for anyone to sign up and try it out. Who would download and install a process modeling tool to try out if you could have the same functionality available online?

I’ve heard the comment from a couple of BPM vendors that a full AJAX process modeler is “hard”. Duh, of course it’s hard; if it was easy, everyone would do it. Appian started out with a Java applet process modeler, then ended up building their own AJAX library of JAVA Struts objects and moving over to AJAX in 2003 — two years before the term “AJAX” was even coined. They’ve invested a huge amount of time to make their browser-based process modeler every bit as functional and responsive as a desktop application, and it shows. It reminds me of the quote about how Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did, except backwards and in high heels: yeah, it’s hard, but it looks great.

Mini-blogging in Flickr

Here’s a cool twist: Dion Hinchcliffe, whose Web 2.0 writings I have often referenced in the past, has been using his Flickr account to hold the graphics that he uses to illustrate his blog posts. The twist this time, however, is that he’s actually turned this “Seven Habits of Highly Effective Web 2.0 Sites” graphic and its description into a mini blog post. Since I get a feed of all my Flickr contacts’ new photos in my RSS reader, I see this just like any other blog post. Of course, his description also points you to the full article on his real blog.

Very Web 2.0.

Web 2.0 webinar with Gartner

A great webinar on Web 2.0 just finished on ebizQ, which is not normally the place where you’d see a lot of pure Web 2.0 stuff unrelated to integration technologies. You’ll be able to see the replay within 24 hours at the same link.

David Mitchell Smith from Gartner is giving a great overview of Web 2.0, particularly how it impacts business. Be sure to download the PowerPoint slides, there are great notes attached.

His bottom line: denial is pointless (I would have said “resistance is futile”, but that’s just the geeky me coming out), Web 2.0 is happening and you’d better get on board. He even talks about mashups and lightweight integration protocols, blogs, and other things that I don’t normally hear from the type of Gartner analysts that I deal with.

Christopher Crummey from IBM also spoke, and instead of being the usual vendor product pitch, he had some interesting slides on Web 2.0 for business, and particularly how IBM is using some social networking/Web 2.0 technologies internally, such as blogs and customizable portals. He wove in information about their products that support this, but it was done in a pretty unobtrusive way. I’ve spent a bit of time with some IBM’ers learning about their internal uses of social networking, and it’s pretty progressive stuff — I think that my former colleagues at FileNet may find that their internal collaboration takes a huge leap forward now that they’re part of Big Blue.

The only downside of this webinar is that the two presentations went so long that there were only a few minutes left for questions, then some sort of technical difficulty resulted in total dead air until after the scheduled end time. I bailed at 3 minutes past the hour, and more than 30% of the audience had done so by that time as well; I’m assuming that there was no Q&A after all.

Office 2.0 no, Vision 2006 yes

This past weekend was Canadian Thanksgiving, so I was off for four days at the cottage. Now, I’m blogging in a hurry while I’m waiting for my airport taxi to arrive. However, I’m not headed for San Francisco; in spite of the hoopla about the Office 2.0 conference this week, I’ve decided not to attend in favour of going to Proforma’s Vision 2006 conference in Las Vegas. Ismael belatedly offered me a speaking spot at Office 2.0 on a technical panel, but it didn’t really fit what I felt that I had to offer and I declined. I probably would have attended anyway, just to float in the buzz, and I do like San Francisco a whole lot more than Vegas, but Vision 2006 is much more aligned with what I do and write about.

I haven’t been a big user of ProVision in the past, although I think that it’s a great product. There’s much more importance being placed on process modelling and enterprise architecture in my consulting practice these days, and the conference has a great lineup of BPM speakers.

I’ll be blogging from the conference, assuming that there’s any sort of decent connectivity. The hotel information said that they had dialup internet in the rooms (eeek!), so if that’s all that’s available, I’ll be hunting around for an internet cafe close by.

Although I won’t be at Office 2.0, I have contributed a podcast to the Office 2.0 Podcast Jam about Web 2.0 and BPM — a topic that I spoke about recently at the BPMG conference in London. Subscribe to the Jam’s podcast feed and listen to all the podcasts, there’s some great ones being published all week.

Thinking about the next phase of Web 2.0 + BPM

A great week away, and now I’m digging into all the news stories, blog feeds, email and client work that I didn’t get to while swanning around the European countryside. Quite unpredictably, it was warm and sunny in London, and rainy in southern France. In spite of the rain, it was lovely in Tourouzelle, where my friends live; she is now selling real estate in the area and it’s very tempting to consider a little place in Languedoc for vacations. In a weird economic twist, it took longer and cost more to take a taxi + bus from my friends’ home in Stoke Poges (near Heathrow) to Stansted airport to catch my flight to Carcassonne, than it did to make the flight itself.

The few days since the conference has given me a chance to think more about the Web 2.0/BPM convergence, and coincidentally, John Evdemon was back in touch with me at the end of the week to talk about co-authoring a paper on that subject. I’m very much looking forward to that, since collaboration with someone smart like John would definitely improve the ideas.

I also had a chance to catch up with Ismael Ghalimi, who had invited me to participate in a panel discussion at his upcoming Office 2.0 conference (to be fair, he made his original invitation before the firestorm about the dearth of women speakers at the event); it appears that my acceptance email went astray and he assumed that I wasn’t interested, so I may not be there after all.

Process 2006 Day 2

I attended many fewer sessions today since I was presenting “Web 2.0 and BPM” just after lunch, and wanted to spend the morning doing some fine-tuning — this is the first time that I’ve done it in this form, although I’ve talked and blogged about the ideas extensively. Although I sat in on Ian Gotts’ session before lunch, I have to admit that I didn’t absorb a lot.

I ended up making the last changes to my presentation about 8 minutes before show time, and it could certainly use a bit more tuning now that I’ve presented it once straight through and have an idea of what worked and didn’t work. You can find my slides here, and I’m thinking about podcasting some or all of it and making that available as well. I had some nice feedback and I’m looking forward to evolving this presentation over the next few months.

At the end of the day, Terry Schurter gave a presentation on Customer Expectation Management, based on the material in his new book. I reviewed the book for Terry before publication, and it was funny seeing the book in print, finally, with a quote from me on the front flyleaf. Following his presentation was another rather unstructured panel discussion and closing remarks, from which I ducked out early.

The conference seemed slightly less well attended than last year, although I don’t know the actual numbers from either event. I made a couple of good contacts, so definitely worth the trip. I also had a chance to visit (and stay with) my friends in London, where I earned my keep by fixing his computer and teaching them both about Web 2.0 and BPM. 🙂

I’m now off to southern France to see more friends, Nancy and David Wood: she used to be the MD for FileNet in Australia at the same time that I worked for FileNet at their corporate headquarters, then I camped out at her place for a few months when I was bumming around Australia a few years back, and now they’ve moved to the south of France. She was involved in The Process Factory startup last year, an example of BPM offered as SaaS, although she’s on to other things now.

I’ll be offline until next Tuesday when I’m back in Toronto.

BPM and Web 2.0

I’m off to this year’s BPMG conference, Process 2006, where I’ll be giving a presentation on Wednesday about Web 2.0 and BPM. I’m doing some final edits on my slides (I know, I should have had them in to the conference organizers some time ago) and thinking about how I want to focus my talk, and I realize that it will include some elements of a rant against what systems integrators and corporate IT departments do to ruin perfectly good BPMS’.

I come from a systems integration background, having run my own 40-person firm for 13 years, but I was never a big proponent of over-building systems. Of course, back in the old days, you couldn’t just take the BPMS out of the box and make it run, you had to write code just to have any end-user interface at all. Now, however, most BPMS have some sort of user interface out of the box, and even though it isn’t integrated with a company’s line-of-business systems and data, it’s a perfectly respectable way to get started. This is especially true in organizations that are just deploying BPM for the first time, where the users (and IT) really have no idea what it can do for them. My motto is to get something simple into production fast, then start the next round of design in collaboration with the users to figure out where to do the customization and integration that will make things easier for them.

Systems integrators and corporate IT departments may be unmotivated to allow this to happen, although for different reasons:

  • Systems integrators get paid for the amount of work that they do. If they write a from-the-ground-up, all-singing, all-dancing customization on top of the BPMS, they make more money up front, and more money down the road when they are required for changes to the application. Although I was never averse to making money as a systems integrator, I tended to push solutions with less customization because I had limited resources to deploy (I kept my team small and the quality extremely high), and I was easily bored so wanted to get something into production, make the customer happy, and move on to another project. In fact, after I returned to private consulting, a large systems integrator to whom I was subcontracted as the principal architect for a client project had me sidelined on the project because I had the audacity to suggest that we do less customization.
  • Corporate IT departments feel that they need to maintain control over all software in an organization in order to justify their existence. If the users can create what they need themselves, or can get the software that they need via an SaaS model, IT decreases in importance (and, likely, size) and might even be outsourced. Encouraging the development of software that requires a complex collaboration between IT and the systems integrator in order to install or modify it is in the best interest of an empire-building IT department. So is encouraging software that can only be used for pre-determined tasks, rather than allowing the users to modify the functionality to respond to their changing requirements.

Before you totally flame me on this, I readily admit that these are generalizations: not all systems integrators are greedy, and not all corporate IT departments are control freaks. However, when you come across resistance to doing less customization and giving more control to the users, there is often a grain of truth to these hiding in there somewhere.

Getting back to BPM, this has huge ramifications: over-customization of a BPMS has the effect of turning a nascent Web 2.0 application into a big steaming pile of legacy code. I’m not saying that all BPMS’ are Web 2.0 applications, but if you go back to the original O’Reilly definition of Web 2.0, BPMS’ score reasonably well on a number of the points:

  • Web as platform, since almost all BPMS provide their end-user experience on a reasonably lightweight web interface. Many of them still haven’t moved their process designers to a pure web platform yet, which is essential for widespread collaboration on process design, and some use heavy-footprint technologies such as downloaded Java applets, but a zero-footprint web interface seems to be the direction in which most are moving.
  • Harnessing collective intelligence, at least in the BPMS’ that allow for collaborative process design (not just executing of collaborative processes). This implies some sort of universally-available process repository, so that I can create the first draft of a process, and a colleague in another location can make their own modifications. Think “process wiki” as a design paradigm. Harnessing collective intelligence would be hugely improved by allowing for tagging of process instances, too.
  • Data is the next “Intel Inside”, or as Tim O’Reilly puts it, “database management is a core competency of Web 2.0 companies.” Almost without exception, BPMS’ are built on databases, although the focus in the past has been more on the functionality and not so much on the data as a commodity. However, emerging standards are allowing for the exchange of process designs via BPEL or XPDL, and most BPMS’ do some sort of streaming of process execution data to a business intelligence platform where it can be sliced and diced to your heart’s content. In-flight processes are a bit trickier, since that data is usually proprietary to the execution engine, but I think that the designs and the execution data are the key ones.
  • Software above the level of a single device, where the interfaces are suitably advanced to allow not only the Mac or Linux desktops to participate, but mobile devices too. This is trailing somewhat behind the “web as platform” initiatives, since many vendors are still using platform-specific extensions in order to achieve web interfaces, and as I mentioned earlier, many of them also don’t have their process design and management tools fully webified.
  • Rich user experiences for those vendors who have embraced AJAX for their user interface. Those that are lumbering along with downloaded Java applets don’t meet my standard here.

The Web 2.0 areas where I think that most BPMS’ fall down is with lightweight programming models, and in ending the software release cycle. In the case of lightweight programming models, we need a way to mashup process instances with other things in a way that can be done by someone in the business unit, not IT, or even by someone external to an organization if the process has external exposure. We also need RSS feeds from processes, which could easily replace/supplement email alerts and management dashboards for monitoring processes, and put the control of the monitoring process squarely in the hands of a user who wants to monitor for a particular condition.

In the case of ending the software release cycle, this is based in part on minimizing or eliminating customizations to the BPMS that increase the regression testing cycle, and in part on getting the BPMS vendors to commit to making their upgrades completely non-disruptive. I’ve been writing software for over 25 years, and I know that that’s easier said than done, but the vendors can’t start with the initial assumption that they can just throw their customer base into complete disarray with every upgrade due to, for example, database schema changes that require significant conversion efforts. Even better, get on the SaaS bandwagon and start offering BPMS as a service. As Salesforce.com has proven, if you offer a good service at a reasonable price, people will trust you with their data.

My point in this rather lengthy post is that many BPMS’ are already halfway to being Web 2.0 when you take them out of the box. It’s what you do with them after that that determines whether they live up to that potential, or just become more legacy code.

Upcoming BPM conferences

I’ve been negligent in my blogging lately, in part because the weather in Toronto has been absolutely beautiful — our summers are short enough that you really have to get out there and enjoy it while you can — and in part because two important people in my life have been moving house (one of them in with me) so I’ve been spending much of the last two weeks packing and moving boxes. However, the sumac bushes are starting to change colour, indicating that fall is on the way and it’s time to get back to some serious work.

One project that I’m working on is my presentation on BPM and Web 2.0 for the upcoming BPMG conference in London on September 18-20th, which gives me a chance to spend a few days in one of my favourite cities. I attended the conference last year and it had a lot of great content; the agenda for this year looks to be shaping up well and I’m looking forward to sitting in on some of the sessions. If you’re at the conference, please drop by to say hi.

If you’re going to be in the US instead of the UK during that time, you can attend BrainStorm’s BPM conference in Washington DC on September 19-20th. In fact, if you’re interested in joining ABPMP, there’s a special deal available where you’ll get your ABPMP membership for free (a $100 value) if you register here by September 1st and specify the priority code ABPMPDCNON when registering.

We’re still planning to launch the ABPMP Toronto chapter with an event sometime this fall; if you’re interested in this chapter, please join our Yahoo group which acts as a mailing list.

Process 2006: BPMG’s annual conference

A follow-on to last May’s conference, BPM 2005, is Process 2006. I’ll be headed to London for the conference next month, but this year I’ll be speaking on the impact of Web 2.0 and social networking on BPM: mashups, tagging and more. From the abstract that I sent to Steve Towers, the conference organizer:

As Web 2.0 advances on the world, expectations for how software will behave are changing, and BPM is no exception. Although many of us from the technology side are working in the echo chamber of Web 2.0 hype, real applications are being deployed that are changing what people will accept with respect to software capabilities and usability. Flickr. Google Maps. Blogger. Del.icio.us. Newsgator. Gmail. Mashups. What do these have in common? More importantly, what can enterprise applications such as BPM learn from them, and what will they be forced to learn from them?

Specifically, I want to talk about some of the characteristics of Web 2.0 and how they will directly impact BPM within organizations: tagging, and the idea of a user-generated folksonomy for categorizing information; user-created content, including their own processes; collaboration; rich user interfaces for web-based applications; RSS feeds and similar subscription models; and lightweight integration models such as we’re starting to see with web mashups.

The conference agenda doesn’t have my session’s title (Steve suggested “Web 2.0 = BPMS 2.0 ?”) or description, but that will all get sorted eventually.

Should be fun, except for the fact that I may be unable to carry my laptop with me (and I’m unwilling to put it in checked baggage). I’m not afraid to fly, but I’m terrified of spending 7 hours on a flight with no laptop or iPod!