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{ Monthly Archives } November 2005

Identity and folklore processes

I was reading Ethan’s The Vision Thing blog this morning, and followed a link to two previous posts on folklore processes and identity processes. Brilliant!

2005 11 28 Sandy Kemsley BPA Comments (1)

Service-Oriented Business Architecture

I’ve been doing quite a bit of enterprise architecture work lately for a couple of clients, which has me thinking about how to “package” business processes as “services” for reusability: a service-oriented business architecture (SOBA), if you will. (I have no idea if anyone else has used that term before, but it fits in describing the componentization and reuse of various functions and processes within an organization, regardless of whether or not the processes are assisted by information systems.)

When we think about SOA, we think about automated processes and services: web services that can be called, or orchestrated, to execute a specific function such as mapping a set of input data to output data. SOBA, however, is for all those unautomated or semi-automated processes (what someone in a client IT department once referred to as “human-interrupted” processes) that may be reused, such as a credit adjudication process that requires human intervention. In many large organizations, the same (or very similar) processes are done by different groups of people in different departments, and if they’re not modeling some of this via enterprise architecture, then they likely have no idea that the redundancy even exists. There are exceptions to this, usually in very paper-intensive processes; most organizations, for example, have some sort of centralized mail room and some sort of centralized filing, although there will be pockets of redundancy even in such a structure.

From a Zachman framework standpoint, most web services are modeled at row 4 (technology model) of column 2 (function), whereas business “services” are modeled at row 2 (business model) of column 2. If you’ve spent some time with Zachman, you know that the lower (higher-numbered) rows are not just more descriptive versions of the upper rows; the rows described fundamentally different perspectives on the enterprise, and often contain models that are unique to that particular row.

In talking about enterprise architecture, I often refer to business function reusability as a key benefit, but most people think purely about IT functions when they think about reusability, and overlook the benefits that could arise from reusing business processes. What’s required to get people thinking about reusing business processes, then? One thing for certain is a common process modeling language, as I discussed here, but there’s more to it than that. There needs to be some recognition of business functions and processes as enterprise assets, not just departmental assets. For quite a while now, information systems and even data have been recognized as belonging to the enterprise rather than a specific department, even if they primarily serve one department, but the same is not true of the human-facing processes around them: most departments think of their business processes as belonging to them, and have no concept of either sharing them with other departments or looking for ways to reduce the redundancy of similar business functions around the enterprise.

These ideas kicked into gear back in the summer when I read Tom Davenport’s HBR article on the commoditization of processes, and gained strength in the past few weeks as I contemplate enterprise architecture. His article focused mainly on how processes could be outsourced once they’re standardized, but I have a slightly different take on it: if processes within an organization are modeled and standardized, there’s a huge opportunity to identify the redundant business processes across an organization within the context of an enterprise architecture, consolidate the functionality into a single business “service”, then enable that service for identification and reuse where appropriate. Sure, some of these business functions may end up being outsourced, but many more may end up being turned into highly-efficient business services within the organization.

There’s common ground with some older (and slightly tarnished) techniques such as reengineering, but I believe that creating business services through enterprise architecture is ultimately a much more powerful concept.

2005 11 27 Sandy Kemsley EA Comments (5)

More on the Proforma webinar

I found an answer to EA wanna be!’s comment on my post about the Proforma EA webinar last week: David Ritter responded that the webinar was not recorded, but he’ll be presenting the same webinar again on December 9th at 2pm Eastern. You can sign up for it here. He also said that he’s reworking the material and will be doing a version in January that will be recorded, so if you miss it on the 9th you can still catch it then or (presumably) watch the recorded version on their site.

There’s a couple of other interesting-looking webinars that they’re offering; I’ve signed up for “Accelerated Process Improvement” on December 8th.

2005 11 23 Sandy Kemsley EA
ESB Comments (1)

Ghosts of articles past

This was a shocker: I clicked on a link to test some search engines, typed in my own name as the search phrase, and one of the engines returned a link to articles that I wrote (or was interviewed for) back in 1991-1994. All of these were for Computing Canada, a free IT rag similar to today’s eWeek but aimed at the Canadian marketplace.

Back in 1992, I wrote about the trend of EIM (electronic image management, or what is now ECM/BPM) vendors moving from proprietary hardware and software components to open systems: Windows workstations, UNIX servers, and Oracle RDBMS, for example. This was right around the time that both FileNet and Wang were migrating off proprietary hardware, but both were still using customized or fully proprietary versions of the underlying O/S and DBMS. My predictions at that time (keep in mind that “open systems” was largely synonymous with “UNIX” in that dark period):

Future EIM systems will continue toward open platforms and other emerging industry standards. As the market evolves, expect the following trends.

  • More EIM vendors will offer systems consisting of a standard Unix server with MS Windows workstations. Some will port their software to third-party hardware and abandon the hardware market altogether.
  • EIM systems will increasingly turn to commercial products for such underlying components as databases and device drivers. Advances in these components can thus be more quickly incorporated into a system.
  • A greater emphasis will be placed on professional software integration services to customize EIM systems.

On an open platform, EIM systems will become part of a wider office technology solution, growing into an integral and seamless component of the corporate computing environment.

Okay, not so bad; I can confidently say that all that really happened in the intervening years. The prediction that some of the EIM vendors would abandon the specialized hardware market altogether still makes me giggle, since I can’t imagine Fuego or Lombardi, for example, building their own servers.

In another article that same year, I wrote about a client of mine where we had replaced the exchange of paper with the exchange of data: an early e-business application. I summarized with:

Whenever possible, exchange electronic data rather than paper with other departments or organizations. In our example, Canadian and U.S. offices will exchange database records electronically, eliminating several steps in document processing.

This was just not done on a small scale at that time: the only e-business applications were full-on, expensive EDI applications, and we had to create the whole underlying structure to support a small e-business application without using EDI. What I wouldn’t have given for BizTalk back then.

By early 1994, I’m not talking so much about documents any more, but about process. First, I propose this radical notion:

As graphical tools become more sophisticated, development of production workflow maps can be performed by business analysts who understand the business process, rather than by IT personnel.

I finish up with some advice for evaluating Workflow Management Systems (WFMS, namely, early BPM systems):

WFMS’ vary in their routing and processing capabilities, so carefully determine the complexity of the routing rules and processing methods you require. Typical minimum requirements include rules-based conditional branching, parallel routing and rendezvous, role assignments, work-in-process monitoring and re-assignment, deadline alerts, security and some level of integration with other applications.

I find this last paragraph particularly interesting, because I’m still telling this same story to clients today. The consolidation of the BPM marketplace to include all manner of systems from EAI to BPM and everything in between has led to a number of products that can’t meet one or more of these “minimum requirements”, even though they’re all called BPM.

I’m not sure whether being recognized as an expert in this field 14 years ago makes me feel proud to be one of the senior players, or makes me feel incredibly old!

2005 11 23 Sandy Kemsley BPM Comments (1)

Through a fog of BPM standards

If you’re still confused about BPM standards, this article by Bruce Silver at BPMInstitute.org may not help much, but it’s a start at understanding both modelling and execution languages including BPMN, UML, XPDL, BPEL and how they all fit together (or don’t fit together, in most cases). I’m not sure of the age of the article since it predates the OMG-BPMI merger that happened a few months ago, but I just saw it referenced on David Ogren’s BPM Blog and it caught my attention. David’s post is worth reading as a summary but may be influenced by his employer’s (Fuego’s) product, especially his negative comments on BPEL.

A second standards-related article of interest appeared on BPTrends last week authored by Paul Harmon. Harmon’s premise is that organizations can’t be process-oriented until managers visualize their business processes as process diagrams — something like not being able to be truly fluent in a spoken language until you think in that language — and that a common process modelling notation (like BPMN) must be widely known in order to foster communication via that notation.

That idea has a lot of merit; he uses the example of a common financial language (such as “balance sheet”), but it made me think about project management notation. I’m the last person in the world to be managing a project (I like to do the creative design and architecture stuff, not the managing of project schedules), but I learned critical path methods and notation — including hand calculations of such — back in university, and those same terms and techniques are now manifested in popular products such as MS-Project. Without these common terms (such as “critical path”) and the visual notation made popular by MS-Project, project management would be in a much bigger mess than it is today.

The related effect in the world of BPM is that the sooner we all start speaking the same language (BPMN), the sooner we start being able to model our processes in a consistent fashion that’s understood by all, and therefore the sooner that we all starting thinking in BPMN instead of some ad hoc graphical notation (or even worse, a purely text description of our processes). There’s a number of modelling tools, as well as the designer modules within various BPMS, that allow you to model in BPMN these days; there’s even templates that you can find online for Visio to allow you to model in BPMN in that environment if you’re not ready for a full repository-based modeling environment. No more excuses.

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2005 11 22 Sandy Kemsley BPM standards Comments (0)

Proforma Enterprise Architecture webinar

I’ve just finished viewing a webinar put on by Proforma that talks about building, using and managing an enterprise architecture, featuring David Ritter, Proforma’s VP of Enterprise Solutions. He came out of the EA group at United Airlines so really knows how this stuff works, which is a nice change from the usual vendor webinars where they need to bring in an outside expert to lend some real-world credibility to their message. He spent a full 20 minutes up front giving an excellent background of EA before moving on to their ProVision product, then walked through a number of their different models that are used for modelling strategic direction, business architecture, system (application and data) architecture and technology architecture. More importantly, he showed how the EA artifacts (objects or models) are linked together, and how they interact: how a workflow model links to a data model and a network model, for example. He also went through an EA benefits model based on some work by Mary Knox at Gartner, showing where the different types of architecture fit on the benefits map:

After the initial 30 minutes of “what is EA” and “what is ProVision”, he dug into a more interesting topic: how to use and manage EA within your organization. I loved one diagram that he showed about where EA govenance belongs:

This reinforces what I’ve been telling people about how EA isn’t the same as IT architecture, and it can’t be “owned” by IT. He also showed the results of a survey by the Institute for Enterprise Architecture Developments, which indicates that the two biggest reasons why organizations are implementing EA are business-IT alignment (21%), and business change (17%): business reasons, not IT, are driving EA today. Even Gartner Group, following their ingestion of META Group and their robust EA practice earlier this year, has a Golden Rule of the New Enterprise Architecture that reflects this — “always make technology decisions based on business principles” — and go on to state that by 2010, companies that have not aligned their technology with their business strategy will no longer be competitive.

Some of this information is available on the Proforma website as white papers (such as the benefits map), and some is from analyst reports. With any luck, the webinar will be available for replay soon.

Tagged
2005 11 17 Sandy Kemsley EA Comments (3)

Outstanding in Winnipeg

I understand that PR people have to write something in press releases, but this one today really made me laugh: ebizQ reports that HandySoft just installed their BizFlow BPM software at Cambrian Credit Union, “the largest credit union in Winnipeg”. You probably have to be Canadian for this to elicit spontaneous laughter; the rest of you can take note that Winnipeg is a city in the Canadian prairies with a population of about 650,000, known more for rail transportation and wheat than finance, and currently enjoying -10C and a fresh 30cm of snow that’s disrupting air travel. In fact, I spoke with someone in Winnipeg just this afternoon and he laughed at my previous post about my -20C boots, which he judged as woefully inadequate for any real walking about in The ‘Peg. Every one of my business-related trips to Winnipeg have been in the winter, where -50C is not unheard of, and although most of my clients there have been financial or insurance companies — and large ones — it’s not the first place that I think of when I think of financial centres where I would brag about installing the largest of anything.

Now this whole scenario isn’t as rip-roaringly funny as, for example, installing a system at the largest credit union in Saskatoon, but I have to admit that the hyperbole used in the press release completely distracted me from the point at hand, and has probably done a disservice to HandySoft. HandySoft may have done a fine job at Cambrian. They may have even written a great press release. But I didn’t get past the first paragraph where the big selling point was that the customer is the largest credit union in Winnipeg.

I sure hope that they’re not expecting any prospective customers to go on site visits there this time of year.

Update: an ebizQ editor emailed me within hours to say that they removed the superlative from the press release on their site. You can still find the original on HandySoft’s site here.

2005 11 15 Sandy Kemsley BPM Comments (2)

Content poetry

I look at James Kobielus’ blog once in a while to browse his insightful commentary on various technical subjects. I never expected poetry about content.

2005 11 14 Sandy Kemsley off topic Comments (0)

BPM en français

Although schooled in Canada where we all have to learn some degree of French, my French is dodgy at best (although, in my opinion, it tends to improve when I’ve been drinking). However, I noticed that my blog appeared on the blogroll of a French BPM blog that just started up, and I’ve been struggling through the language barrier to check it out. There’s no information on the author, but I was instantly endeared to him (?) when I read the following in his reasons for starting the blog:

le marketing bullshit est omniprésent

Isn’t that just too true in any language?

2005 11 14 Sandy Kemsley BPM
blogging Comments (3)

More on vendor blogs

I ususally don’t put too much stock in BPM vendor blogs. First of all, there’s not a lot of them (or at least, not a lot that I’ve seen), since I imagine that getting official sanction for writing a blog about your product or company is exponentially more difficult as your company gets larger. Secondly, they can disappear rather suddenly in this era of mergers and acquisitions. Thirdly, anybody who works for a vendor and has something interesting to say is probably too busy doing other things, like building the product, to spend much time blogging. And lastly, they’re always a bit self-promotional, even when they’re not a blatant PR/marketing soapbox. (Yes, I know, my blog is self-promotional, but I am my own PR and marketing department, so I’m required to do that, or I’d have to fire myself.)

I’ve been keeping an eye on Phil Gilbert’s blog — he’s the CTO at Lombardi. I don’t know him personally, although I’ve been seeing and hearing a lot about their product lately. He wrote a post last week about “BPM as a platform” that every BPM vendor and customer should read, because it tells it like it is: the days of departmental workflow/BPM systems are past, and it’s time to grow up and think about this as part of your infrastructure. In his words:

Further, while it is a platform, it is built to handle and give visibility to processes of all sizes – from human workflows to complex integration and event processing. Choosing to start down the “process excellence” path may very well start with a simple process – therefore it’s not a “sledgehammer for a nail.” It’s a “properly sized hammer for the nail” built on a solid foundation that allows many people to be building (hammering) at once. And because of this, it scales very well from an administrative perspective. You can build one process, or you can build twenty. Sequentially, or all at once. Guess what? The maintenance of the platform is identical!

He also talks about how the real value of BPM isn’t process automation, it’s the data that the BPMS captures about the process along the way, which can then feed back into the process/performance improvement cycle and provide far more improvement than the original process automation.

He takes an unnecessary jab at Pegasystems (“the best BPM platforms aren’t some rules-engine based thing”) which probably indicates where Lombardi is getting hit from a competitive standpoint, and the writings a bit stilted, but that shows that it’s really coming from him, not being polished by a handler before it’s released. And the fact that the blog’s on Typepad rather than hosted on the Lombardi site is also interesting: it makes at least a token statement of independence on his part.

Worth checking out.

2005 11 14 Sandy Kemsley BPM Comments (0)

Planning for Disaster

I just bought a new pair of winter boots, guaranteed waterproof and warm to -20C; I stood in the store and swore to the sales clerk that I was not going to have cold, wet feet this year (I probably sounded a bit melodramatic, like Scarlett O’Hara declaring that she’d never be hungry again). For those of you who have never been to Toronto, you may not realize that some people make it through the winter without proper boots, just by avoiding the great outdoors on the few days when it is really cold or snowy. We only have a few weeks each winter as cold as -20; we only get a few big snowstorms; most of the snow usually melts within a day or two; and many days hover around the freezing mark so the bigger danger is cold slush leaking into your boots rather than the frigid air. However, every few years we have a colder-than-usual winter, or mounds of snow — like a few years back when a metre of the white stuff fell in two days, closing the city and causing sightings of cross-country skiers in the downtown financial district — and many people (including myself) aren’t properly prepared for it.

In my case, business still has to go on: being self-employed, I can’t just stay inside when the weather is foul, but have to get out there and continue with my day-to-day business of seeing clients and whatever other activities are on my schedule. In other words, the “weather event” occurs, and my business continues, although in a somewhat uncomfortable and restricted manner. There are many natural disasters that are a much greater challenge to business continuity, like the tsunamis, hurricanes and earthquakes that we’ve seen all over the world in the past year, in addition to manmade disasters and even biological events like a flu pandemic: a recent article in the Economist (subscription required) states that Gartner has advised their clients to consider the effect of 30% of their staff not showing up for work due to the flu, which would certainly fall into the “disaster” category for many businesses.

I spoke briefly about business continuity and BPM at a conference last week, and am doing a more comprehensive analysis for a client in the upcoming months. For me, it comes back to thinking about one of Tom Davenport’s nine steps to process innovation: geographical, or more specifically, location independence. BPM is one of the key technologies that may allow a process, or part of a process, to be located anywhere in the world, as long as the communications infrastructure and trained local staff exist. This has been a large driver behind the move to business process outsourcing, a controversial trend that is rejected outright by many organizations, but many people miss the fact that outsourcing also provides some level of business continuity: if you can move some of your business processes to a remote location, then you can just as easily have them at two locations so that there’s a fallback plan in the event of unforeseen events. I’m not talking about replicating systems here — that part’s relatively straightforward, although expensive — I’m talking about what is often forgotten by the IT disaster recovery team: people. If you have a single site where your human-facing business processes take place and something happens at that site, what’s your plan? Where do your people work in the advent of a physical site disaster? How do you reach them to coordinate them? Can you easily reroute client communications (phone, email, postal mail) to the new location? Are people trained at all locations to handle all processes? Can you reroute only part of the process if you have a partial failure at your main site?

Earthquakes are going to happen on the Pacific Rim; hurricanes are going to happen in the southern US, and it’s going to snow in Toronto. I’ve got my boots, are you ready?

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2005 11 14 Sandy Kemsley BPM
outsourcing Comments (0)

One last session

I’m cutting out early for my flight home, so I’m finishing the FileNet user conference with another BPM technical session, this one on process orchestration. This is a relatively new area for FileNet in terms of out-of-the-box functionality, and a bit behind the competitive curve but they appear to be charging into the fray with strong functionality. Mike Marin, BPM product architect extraordinaire, walked us through the current state: the ability of a process to consume web services, and the ability to launch and control a process as a web service. Mike sits on a couple of standards boards and is pretty up-to-date on what’s happening with the competition and future directions. Nothing here that I wasn’t already aware of, although he provided some good technical insights into how it all works under the covers as well as an excellent distinction between choreography and orchestration. He also talked about using web services as a method for federating process engine services, that is, allowing a process to span servers, which I think is absolutely brilliant. The same thing holds for invoking and being invoked by a process on a BPEL engine (like Oracle’s), because it’s just a web service interface.

Time to grab some lunch and head for the airport. Regular (non-UserNet) blogging resumes later this week.

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2005 11 09 Sandy Kemsley BPM
BPM standards
FileNet Comments (2)

BAM technical session

This seemed to be a morning for networking, and I’m arriving late for a technical session on FileNet’s BAM. I missed the hands-on session this morning so wanted to get a closer look at this before it’s released sometime in the next couple of months.

The key functional things in the product are dashboards, rules and alerts. The dashboard part is pretty standard BI presentation-layer stuff: pick a data source, pick a display/graph type, and position it on the dashboard. Rules are where the smarts come in: pick a data source, configure the condition for firing an alert, then set the content and recipient of the alert. Alerts can be displayed on the recipient’s dashboard, or sent as an email or SMS, or even launch other processes or services to handle an exception condition automatically.

There’s a nice interface for configuring the dimensions (aggregations) in the underlying OLAP cubes, and for configuring buckets for running statistics. The data kept on the BAM server is cycled out pretty quickly: it’s really for tracking work in progress with just enough historical data to do some statistical smoothing.

Because they’re using a third-party OEM product for BAM, it’s open to other data sources plugged into the server, used in the OLAP cubes, combined on the dashboards or used in the rules. However, this model adds yet another server, since it pulls pre-processed work-in-progress data from the Process Analyzer (so PA is still required) and has a sufficiently hefty memory requirement since it’s maintaining the cubes in memory that it’s probably not a good idea to co-locate it on a shared application server. I suppose that this demotes PA to a data mart for historical data as well as a pre-processor, which is not a completely bad thing, but I’m imagining that a full replacement for PA might be better received by the customers.

2005 11 09 Sandy Kemsley BAM
FileNet Comments (0)

Rules, rules, rules

I consider rules (specifically, a BRE) to be pretty much essential as an adjunct to a BPMS these days. There’s a number of reasons for this:

- Rules are a lot more complex than you can implement in most BPMS, with the exception of rules-based systems like Pegasystems: FileNet’s expression builder, for example, is not a replacement for a BRE no matter how many times that I hear that from their product marketing group. A BRE lets a business analyst create business rules in a declarative fashion, using the language of the business.

- Rules in a BRE can be used consistently from different process flows, and also from other applications such as CRM: anywhere in the organization that needs to apply that rule can be assured of using the same rule if they’re all calling the same BRE.

- Most importantly, in my opinion, is the ability to change business rules on work in progress. If you implement a business rule in FileNet’s expression builder at a step in the process, then once a process instance is kicked off, it can’t (easily) be changed: it will execute to completion based on the workflow, and hence rule, definition at the time that it was instantiated. If you instead call a BRE at a step in the workflow, then that call isn’t made until that step is executed, so the current definition of the business rule at that time will be invoked. This, in my opinion, is one of the best reasons to get your business rules out of FileNet and into a BRE, where they belong.

I finished the conference today in a session on BPM that is much too rudimentary for me (hence why I’m blogging my thoughts on BRE), and not enough cover to dash for the door without being seen. It’s finishing up with Carl Hillier doing a demo, which is always entertaining: he showed pictures of both his baby and his Porsche.

I also found out that FileNet commissioned the Economist to do a survey on process management; I’ll have my eyes open for that.

2005 11 08 Sandy Kemsley BRM
FileNet Comments (0)

Hot BAM!

If there’s anything better than hearing about a hot new product like FileNet’s BAM, it’s hearing it in Danny Pidutti’s lovely Aussie accent. There’s a few misconceptions in his presentation around the differences between BI and BAM; I see BAM as just a process-oriented subset of BI, although the real-time nature means that we’re in the realm of operational BI, such as was discussed in an eBizq webinar “Improving Business Visibility Through Operational BI” on Oct 27th (www.ebizq.net/webinars/6298.html according to my calendar, sorry for the lack of a direct hyperlink but that’s the limits of blogging via Blackberry email) and an earlier one about operational BI on Oct 12th, although I can’t recall who hosted it.

This looks like a pretty significant improvement on the old Process Analyzer: about 20 pre-configured reports, configurable role-based dashboards, KPIs for scorecard-like capabilities, alerts and other fun stuff. A bit of a catch-up from.a competitive standpoint, but FileNet’s more known for solid technology than being the first to market these days.

The demo starts with a Celequest login screen, telling you who the OEM vendor is. At this point, it’s really a standard BI demo, showing how dashboards are configured, alerts set and related functions.

My only question is, what took you guys so long?

2005 11 08 Sandy Kemsley BAM
BI
FileNet Comments (0)

BPM SIG

I’m in the BPM special interest group session, which is much more sparsely attended than I expected, but it’s just after lunch and people are still trickling in. The conversation is starting out a bit granular, questions about some very specific functionality although I suppose that’s part of the goal.

Chris Preston just made a statement that the clear direction for interoperability is BPEL, which is definitely the right answer although there’s still a lot of issues around handling the human-facing steps in a process. Unfortunately, in the absence of any questions from the audience, he’s off on a long rant about “re-engineering” using FileNet tools for process modelling, execution, analysis and simulation, which is a little too sales-y althoguh he’s doing his best to be consultative. He needs to encourage much more give-and-take with the audience rather than going into full oratory mode.

Minutes go by, and I’m really starting to wish that I sat closer to an escape route…

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2005 11 08 Sandy Kemsley BPM
BPM standards
FileNet Comments (0)

Fun with compliance

I spent some time this morning with the guys from BWise, which turned into a very informative session. Although FileNet has partnered with them primarily for their compliance solution, they do so much more in the entire area of internal controls. The compliance frameworks certainly are impressive, though. I’ll definitely be taking a closer look at this.

I’m currently sitting beside the pool at Caesar’s Palace, and although I don’t think that it’s warm enough to be dressed the way that some people are (or aren’t, to be more accurate), it’s a nice respite from the conference crowds for a few minutes before I head back to the sessions. This morning’s BPF hands-on session was so full that I didn’t get near a computer – better to let the customers at them first — and I’m surprised the FileNet didn’t anticipate this level of interest in the labs.

I’ve talked to a lot of UserNet first-timers, and they’re all a bit overwhelmed by the amount of information but seem to be getting a lot out of it in general.

Off to an afternoon of BPM and BAM sessions.

2005 11 08 Sandy Kemsley FileNet
compliance Comments (0)

Wrapping up Monday

I did my breakout presentation at the end of day yesterday — after the two solid days on the weekend, an hour-long presentation is a piece of cake, and in fact I had to cut out material on the fly because I enthused overly long about enterprise architecture. Some great feedback from that: many people who attended are starting to think about the bigger picture of enterprise architecture and corporate performance management when they think about BPM, which means that more and more of these systems are actually going to start making a difference for the companies that install them.

The surprise hit of the conference is my business card: I now have people asking me for my card because they want to see the graphic on the back. Just last week, my cards with Hugh’s “read my blog” cartoon arrived, and I’ve been using those as my standard business card here at the conference. A few people tried to hand them back, thinking that I had given them a card that I had doodled on; a few read it and don’t get it, but very many have a good laugh over it and (I hope) come here to check out what I have to say. When it comes down to it, this blog really is my primary marketing activity, if you can call it that, and I’m totally sold on many of Hugh’s ideas about how blogging is changing the face of PR and advertising, especially for small companies.

Lots of interesting contacts: I’m talking to Cognos about what they’re doing in corporate performance management (which is very interesting) and, in the context of this conference, how that can be integrated into BPM. Also spending a bit of time with BWise, who does a compliance solution built on top of FileNet. Since most of my customers are in financial services, both of these topics are of great interest to them.

Expecting some good sessions today: a hands-on session is scheduled for the business process framework (which is being productized), and some detailed sessions on the new BAM releases.

Blogging by email is a bit hit-and-miss. Since Blogger has to publish via ftp to my own domain, sometimes it doesn’t succeed in the unattended process and the posts don’t appear, requiring me to get onto one of the public terminals available in the conference centre and give it a whack on the side of the head. Because of that, posts can be a bit delayed.

2005 11 08 Sandy Kemsley BPM
EA
FileNet Comments (0)

High-level product info

Dave McCann, FileNet’s SVP of Products, is talking in some very broad strokes about product directions, and I’m yearning for more details on all the new announcements. I suppose that will come mostly in the breakout sessions, I just need to be patient. He’s also talking a lot about content, which is not my focus (in case you haven’t noticed already) — I consider content to be like the air we breathe: it’s always there, I just don’t think about it.

A few interesting factoids that he’s dropped into his talk based on his conversations with customers: a large insurance company who sits on the FileNet technical advisory board stated that the largest cost in their IT budget is integration between all of the vendor products that they own. Yikes! A European customer told him that 82% of their IT budget is committed to maintaining what’s already in place, with only the remaining 18% to spend on new technology. These two facts taken together point out the need for easier ways to integrate all the things that are there, which will free up part of the budget for new technology that will help companies maintain a competitive advantage. The need for consistent architectures and reusability has never been greater.

He’s finally onto the process stuff, and is talking about the recent and upcoming enhancements to the BPM product suite:

- Productization of the Business Process Framework, which is a BPM application development framework developed by FileNet’s Professional Services for use in their own customer engagements, including things like case management and skills/roles management. They’re being very careful about positioning this so that it’s not perceived as being too competitive with partner solutions, although I’m sure that there will be a few partners who are going to be a bit put out by this.

- Business Activity Monitoring as a new product, replacing the rudimentary Process Analyzer that has been holding the fort in the BAM area for the past few years. Shipping in December. I’ll definitely be going to the lab on this later this week, since this is something that I constantly talk to customers about.

- Enhanced integration with business intelligence, especially through their recent cozying up with Cognos. I’ll be talking about corporate performance management, and mentioning Cognos specifically, in my breakout session this afternoon, since I feel that this is a critical step for most organizations.

- eForms enhancements, which are always interesting but a bit peripheral to what I usually do.

- A business rules connectivity framework that integrates to Fair Isac, Corticon and Resolution in addition to the longer-standing integration with ILOG. BRE is another functionality that I feel is essential to BPM, as I discussed in my course on the weekend.

He’s also talking about the FileNet Enterprise Reference Architecture, which fits nicely as a technical architecture for ECM against a full EA context.

The most exciting thing about the features that will be released next year is full BPMN support, which further validates my personal preference for BPMN over UML for process modelling.

All-in-all, I’m quite pleased with what they’ve announced in the BPM area, since it’s addressing some key weaknesses (like BAM) that have existed in the product suite to date.

Tagged
2005 11 07 Sandy Kemsley BAM
BI
BPM
BPM standards
BRM
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Survey Says…

Martyn Christian, FileNet’s CMO, is up on stage right now giving the usual rah-rah speech about how great FileNet is doing with their customers, but with a very cool twist: all the customers in the audience (more than 700 of them) have a handheld voting device and can respond to questions that Martyn is asking, with the responses shown live on the screen.

So far (I’m paraphrasing the questions slightly since I couldn’t write them down quickly enough):

Question 1: What % of your projects are using BPM?

25% responded “none”, 49% said that less than a third of their projects used BPM, 13% said about half, 9% said about two-thirds, and 4% said all. Martyn also quoted Gartner (I believe) in stating that 95% of BPM projects are successful these days, which is an amazing number.

Question 2: What’s the primary driver for ECM solutions in your organization?

“Content” scored 27%, “Process” scored 45%, and “Compliance” scored 28%. Interesting results, considering the relatively low usage of BPM indicated in the responses to question 1, and the fact that compliance was a non-issue only two or so years ago.

Question 3: How do you select a FileNet partner to work with on your implementations?

18% already have selected a partner and 30% don’t use one, but the breakdown of the remaining votes was interesting: 32% make their choice based on the partner’s technical knowledge of FileNet and their own environment, whereas 20% select based on industry knowledge. I can certainly validate that from my experiences: although I specialize in financial services and insurance, I end up doing work in other industry verticals because of the value placed on my BPM knowledge. I would guess that this holds true for many products, not just FileNet.

Question 4: Are content and process management part of a larger information management architecture in your organization?

28% said that this is true today, 39% responded that it will be happening in the next 12 months, 28% said that it will be happening but beyond 12 months, and 5% said that it’s just never going to happen. My breakout session this afternoon is on enterprise architecture and BPM, so I’m very encouraged by the fact that about two-thirds of this audience is considering content and process management in the larger EA context.

By the way, please excuse any typos and the lack of links in these posts from the FileNet user conference: there’s no WiFi in the meeting rooms so I’m blogging live from my Blackberry.

2005 11 07 Sandy Kemsley BPM
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