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{ Monthly Archives } July 2007

links for 2007-07-31

2007 07 31 Links Comments (0)

Gartner BPM conference in September

I booked my travel for the Gartner BPM conference on September 16-19 in Orlando: I have a bad habit of forgetting to do that until late, then finding that the airfare is $$$ and I’ve missed all the hotel rooms, so thought that I’d do it early this time. I’ll be live-blogging from the conference as usual. I won’t be staying on for the Event Processing Summit that they’re running for the remainder of the week; although it looks interesting, I’m speaking at the Forrester IT Leadership Forum the following week in Carlsbad, and wanted to spend a few days at home in between, plus I want to be back in Toronto on the evening of the 19th to make it to our second Girl Geek dinner.

There was a lot of vendor grumbling about this conference coming so soon after the one in the spring, but I’m sure that all the usual suspects will show up nonetheless.

Disclaimer: Gartner provides me with a press pass to the event, although I am not otherwise compensated for expenses or my time.

2007 07 31 BPM Comments (0)

links for 2007-07-30

  • Google Transit
    Public transit trip planning in various US locations and all of Japan. I want this for Toronto! Funny that the California sites include Orange County which (based on my 1-1/2 years living there) has really bad transit coverage, but not San Francisco.
    (tags: travel)
2007 07 30 Links Comments (1)

Take the Ajax challenge

I had a chance to talk to Kevin Hakman of TIBCO late last week about their Ajax Challenge (Kevin co-founded General Interface, which was acquired by TIBCO a couple of years back), the goal of which is to build the world’s largest mashup. You have to use General Interface to build it, but more interestingly, you have to use PageBus, a JavaScript client-side message bus that TIBCO just contributed to the OpenAjax Alliance as open source to become part of the OpenAjax Hub 1.0 installation.

The contest is splashy (win an oversized TV! win a video iPod!) but PageBus is the real news here: it provides a message bus for mashups in an attempt to eliminate the spaghetti mess of point-to-point integrations that we’re already starting to see emerge. In the enterprise world, this is why ESBs have become an essential part of any sizable application integration effort: without a message bus, you’re creating a unique integration between each pair of applications. Okay when you have two applications, but not when you have 10. [To be fair, usually you don't have every application interact with every other application in a complex integration: each one may only interact with a couple of others, but that just shifts the pain point, it doesn't eliminate it.]

Getting back to mashups and the OpenAjax Hub, the PageBus exposes the basic functions of messaging – publish, subscribe, unsubscribe — all in less than 5k of JavaScript, so that multiple Ajax components on an HTML page can share data using these standard methods. This allows the development of a mashup to be more easily split up between multiple developers since each can focus on their specific component and not on the interface between components; it will also allow for easier “no programing required” assembly of components within a PageBus-enabled mashup framework.

This is a pretty important step in mashup-land: I’m starting to see a lot of things referred to as mashups that are actually portals, where the components don’t intercommunicate, but the fundamental benefit of mashups is that they *are* an integration, not just components that happen to coexist on the same page.

TIBCO is apparently already using this in their BPM product for things such as task list publication, which means (I think) that you could create a mashup between your iProcess task list and some other component or data source — a real BPM mashup. Although many vendors are starting to provide RSS feeds of task lists/inboxes (I hope that my past year of nagging about this has had some contribution to those efforts), this is the first truly mashup-enabled BPM environment of which I’m aware.

The full OpenAjax Hub specification is about 4-6 weeks away from release, but the project is already on SourceForge. TIBCO will continue to develop the source and contribute to the open source efforts in the future; their press release about PageBus is here.

2007 07 30 BPM
ESB
mashups Comments (0)

Can RSS replace trickle feeds for BI?

I was having a conversation late last week with a SaaS BI vendor about how organizations get data into their online data warehouse (ftp seems to be the most popular method), when it struck me: why couldn’t they use an RSS feed from a transactional system to feed data into the data warehouse for BI purposes (or Atom, for that matter)? Near-real-time data is essential for many types of BI analysis, so there has to be something better than once-daily uploads.

2007 07 30 BI Comments (5)

BPM Think Tank Day 2: BPMN/BPDM Roundtable

I’m just getting to the last of the BPM Think Tank sessions, namely, the roundtables and one lunch session that I had documented on paper. The three sessions of roundtables spanned Tuesday and Wednesday afternoons, and were some of the best conversations that I had at the conference. I’ll cover each of the ones that I attended in a separate post, then the summaries of the others in another post, just to keep things from getting too long. These were fairly unstructured, general sessions so the notes might be a bit fragmented

The first roundtable that I attended was BPMN and BPDM, with Stephen White of IBM and Antoine Lonjon of MEGA.

There are insufficient books and tools for educating the community on how to use BPMN for different purposes. There is a requirement for a reference document to educate end-user organizations that is smaller and more understandable than the specification (possibly both a business-oriented primer and a technical reference). Stephen stated that additional reference documents will be available within a few months. There is an HTML version of the specification online at ModelDriven.org.

Small consulting organizations and independents can’t realistically get involved in standards creation so we’re always “users” of the specification. I didn’t raise this point, but do agree with it — paying my own travel expenses and missing out on days of revenue to attend standards meetings several times each year is just not in my budget.

BPM vendors are unlikely to replace their own internal model formats with BPDM, but will translate to/from BPDM. Vendors need to review and understand BPDM and how it maps between different representations. There is a need for BPMN/BPDM conformance testing and certification of BPA/BPM products.

BPDM gives BPMN credibility as a modelling format since the specification is now “complete”. There was a great deal of discussion, both in this session and at other times during the think tank where this same point was raised, namely, that BPMN was rushed out without a serialization format, and that may have been a short-term mistake. One person at the table was concerned that combining BPMN and BPDM, and thereby increasing complexity, may be a mistake.

A comment that Phil Gilbert made on my TIBCO webinar Q&A post made a valid point about how there’s two main use cases for BPMN: non-executable process mapping and analysis by business analysts, and “visual coding” to create an executable process. We discussed this a bit at the roundtable, particularly around how business analysts could use the basic shapes (i.e., skip some of the internal graphic symbols that distinguish between different flavours of the shapes) and hence might benefit from a much simpler training program to get started. There was some discussion about how far up the chain that BPMN will or can be used for modelling businesses, e.g., whether it can be extended to strategy and goals or whether that’s more the mandate of BMM (Business Motivational Metamodel)

I had an interesting side conversation with Antoine after the roundtable ended about adoption patterns for BPMN and BPDM. Although standards organizations tend to have the “if you build it, they will come” attitude towards standards adoption, I believe that there needs to be some good reasons put forward for why BPDM provides benefits to the end customer and for the BPM vendors before we can expect to see widespread adoption.

2007 07 30 BPMN
BPMThinkTank Comments (0)

links for 2007-07-27

2007 07 27 Links Comments (0)

links for 2007-07-26

2007 07 26 Links Comments (0)

BPM Think Tank Day 3: BPM & SOA panel

We’re starting to wind down a bit, and many of the east coast people have taken off already to avoid the red-eye flight home so the audience is getting a bit sparse. Those of us with presentations this afternoon, however, are still here.

First after lunch is a panel on BPM & SOA, and how they complement each other, with Tony  Baer of onStrategies and Brenda Michelson of the SOA Consortium. This is more of the mini-presentation format rather than a true panel, but I promised Brenda that I wouldn’t blame the presenters for that. :)

Tony started out with the “BPM is from Venus, SOA is from Mars” phrase, which we’ve all been bandying about for a while, although he really meant ‘business is from Venus and IT is from Mars). Considering, however, that Venus is the goddess of love (collaboration in its most basic form, perhaps?) and Mars is the god of war (technology shoot-outs and other battle language), that may not be far from the truth.

He addressed the culture issues: both business and IT talk about business processes, but business tends to take a top-down approach versus IT’s bottom-up approach, and business is using BPM to rationalize the business whereas IT is using SOA as the next great way to integrate applications. He sees a process orchestration battleground between BPM and SOA about where to do integration in a process. He also pointed out that BPEL is still at the “checklist” level (that is, it’s on the RFP checklist but not actually used) for most BPM applications, an opinion that I stated here a couple of weeks ago.

Brenda was up next talking about business-driven SOA and the SOA Consortium, and looked at the correlation between an Economist survey of late last year with her personal findings in touring around talking to CIOs and CTOs: the top thing that they state is critical for both revenue generation and cost cutting is the creation of services. One CTO saw BPM, SOA, Lean and Six Sigma all as the same basic thing, namely business strategy and structure, and they need to work together without artificial divisions between them in order to enable a platform for business agility.

Before SOA, business and IT strategy weren’t well aligned and were often developed independently, and the business process became an output of an IT solution rather than driven directly by business requirements. Business and IT need to collaborate on both strategy and architecture, which in turn drives out portfolio planning and delivery of the business solutions. She pointed out that also “enterprise architecture” is currently mostly technology architecture with a bit of business architecture on the side (if you’re lucky), in the future it will become more balanced with equal contributions from business and technical architecture.

Part of what the SOA Consortium is doing is providing guidelines for how the too-technical technology architects can become more valuable enterprise architects, and to break the artificial divide between business and IT. Part of this, I think, is similar to something I posted a year and a half ago, where enterprise architecture is not an IT function, but something that is in a strategic position between business and IT.

We’re off to do the last of the roundtables now, where I’ll be leading one on Enterprise 2.0 and BPM mashups. My notes will be on paper, and I’ll summarize them over here sometime on that overnight flight home tonight.

2007 07 25 BPMThinkTank
EA
SOA Comments (2)

BPM Think Tank Day 3: BPM vendor panel

Next up was a panel of BPM vendors: Phil Gilbert (Lombardi), Angel Diaz (IBM), Marco ten Vanholt (SAP BPX), Burley Kawasaki (Microsoft), Scott Byrnes (Handysoft) and David Shaffer (Oracle). Derek Miers moderated, and posed a series of questions to the panelists rather than having the panelists do short presentations as we saw on previous panels — a much better panel format, in my opinion, and it even generated some conversation between the panelists directly.

Phil mixed it up right away by agreeing with the other panelists that standards are important (duh), but said that the first thing that we need to standardize is the meaning of the term BPM. He also thinks that OSM (Organizational Structure Metamodel) is going to be one of the most significant standards in the coming months, next to BPMN. In other words, people are going to start modelling their business, not just their processes. Marco added that there’s going to be an increasing interest in the processes that span organizations, and standards that support that will become more important. They all seem to agree that business users don’t really care about standards explicitly, but that standards are an implicit part of things that the business types to want: portability of models and reusability of skills, for example.

One question was whether BPM offered via SaaS is reducing the barriers to entry to what is still a complex implementation. Burley feels that it will make a difference for departmental applications that just can’t justify the spend, and for cross-organizational choreographic processes where no one organization is “in charge”, but that there will still be a strong market for on-premise solutions especially at an enterprise level. Angel added that standards are going to play a strong role here, since there’s likely to be a hybrid approach that uses both on-premise and on-demand systems within the same processes. Marco made the statement that some industries will “never, ever have software as a service”; it will be interesting to come back in a few years and see if he has to eat his words. Many organizations already have their data centres outsourced, including those that require advanced security, and I think that SaaS is just a small step beyond that from a security standpoint even though it might be perceived as being something entirely different. Scott things that a template-driven, simpler type of BPM functionality could be adopted by the SMB market. David pointed out that there’s a difference between having BPM embedded in a SaaS application and offering BPM directly as a SaaS, and feels that the latter is going to see much lower adoption. Phil stated that their Blueprint product is a tactic in their way to building a cloud capability, implying that we’ll see some hybrid on-premise/on-demand functionality from Lombardi in the future

They then discussed mechanisms for supporting more collaboration and deeper embedding into a worker’s environment. Scott talked about being able to share, for example, information about the experts for a specific process, and be able to IM them directly. Marco talked about being able to do some collaborative Visio diagramming in a wiki-type plug-in (presumably on BPX); I’m not sure if this something that they have with a browser design interface, or if it’s a place to upload Visio diagrams. He also pointed out that wikis, forums and IM are going to be start to be built into applications for collaboration, further pushing the need for standards since none of us want the BPM vendors to build their own wiki or IM software.

A question from the audience asked whether the vendors are getting inquiries from other vendors to embed/OEM their BPM functionality inside another product, whether SaaS or not. David, Burley and Angel spoke up that they are seeing this; not surprising since Oracle, Microsoft and IBM are all “platform” BPM vendors that tend to offer components rather than a more cohesive suite. Although I haven’t written up my notes from the BPEL roundtable yesterday, this is one of the areas where standards like BPEL will help to facilitate that type of integration. Phil added that they’re seeing this as well, but more from the standpoint of embedding more of their suite rather than just the engine.

Another question was on the distinction between modelling processes for business improvement purposes, and modelling processes as a visual coding/RAD tool. Phil responded that if you’re just buying BPM as a RAD tool, don’t buy it: stick with Java or .Net.

There was a discussion on the role of large vendors in standards, and how large vendors can sometimes take a standard off into their own organization and develop it 80% of the way and bring it back to the standards group: sometimes this works well, and sometimes it allows the vendor to just mould the standard to their own product agenda. We also came back around to the comment that Phil made at the beginning of the panel, where we need to define what BPM is in the market: the vendors all seemed to agree that they all have their own definition of BPM that coincidentally matches completely with their product functionality, and they all agreed on the buzzphrase “BPM is all about the business”. :) The analysts also all have their own definitions, although they all seem to be congealing around the Gartner definition of BPM as a management practice, which doesn’t at all help the issue when the BPM vendors define it in terms of the technology capabilities. Bruce Silver lobbed a small incendiary device from the audience by stating that from the viewpoint of BPM as a management discipline, the vendor products are all exactly the same, and that customers may just see them as snake oil salesmen trying to sell the same thing in a different way. Not sure that we’re going to solve this one today.

It’s interesting watching a vendor panel like this, where the panelists are not allowed to do any product pitches, and where they’re all pretty smart guys: the discussion is a complex weave of philosophy, techno-geekery and thinly-veiled nudging towards their own specific agendas. This is part of what I like about the BPM Think Tank: there’s much more open collaboration between vendors than at other conferences, although there’s always a strong streak of friendly competition throughout the interactions.

2007 07 25 BPM
BPMThinkTank
SaaS Comments (0)

BPM Think Tank Day 3: Randy Heffner

Day 3 opened with a keynote from Randy Heffner of Forrester on BPM in the world of digital business architecture.

He spoke about the old model of enterprise applications, which was that of functional silos with point-to-point integration between them, and how that’s changing to a process-centric model: not just using BPM to connect up the functional silos, but breaking down the functional silos so that the technology becomes a better reflection of the essential business processes. He envisions a number of portals for different worker roles — sales process portal, executive portal, fulfillment portal, etc. — with a layer of business-oriented services that support those portals by accessing virtualized enterprise data sources (which, of course, may still come from those old enterprise applications).

He seems focussed on SOA and business services rather than BPM and the orchestration of those services; he models the enterprise as portals consuming the services where presumably BPM is implicit in the portal in some way rather than discussing BPM directly. That becomes a bit more clear in a layered diagram of the new “programming” model, with various user interaction channels at the top, then a layer of interaction services, then human-centric process flow, then business services, then integration-centric process flow, then the underlying systems and data sources. Along the side spanning the layers are both business metadata (across interaction services and human-centric process flow) and technical metadata (across business services and integration-centric process flow), and business measurement and optimization across all the layers.

In his slide on the future of key technology platforms, there’s this big fuzzy bit in the middle called “business metadata core / business design platform”, which he admits is poorly defined and states that BPM provides a start to some of that functionality. The surrounding technologies, including the SOA sweet spot of business services, are otherwise pretty well defined in his view.

He finishes with a list of core competencies for the future of IT:

  • Deep integration of business and technology savvy: cross-functional focus on business design
  • Architecture visioning and strategy: vision + implementation = street-level strategy; multilevel investment strategy (strategic, soft dollar, hard dollar)
  • Portfolio management: road map for your business to position and justify investments
  • Project-level architecture governance: incremental build-out against architecture strategy

Forrester seems to have a distinct division between SOA and BPM in its analysts: they either know one domain or the other, but don’t seem all that comfortable talking about the other side. Heffner is definitely an SOA guy.

2007 07 25 BPMThinkTank
SOA Comments (0)

BPM Events calendar 2.0

I woke up this morning with the thought that there was an easier way to access the BPM Events calendar that I created yesterday, so I created this page here on Column 2 that embeds the calendar. You can always find it using the “BPM Events” link under the Pages section at the top of the sidebar on the left.

2007 07 25 BPM Comments (2)

Strangest contest condition at BPM Think Tank

Must not be present to win?

Weird BEA contest condition

2007 07 25 BPMThinkTank Comments (2)

BPM events calendar

I’ve heard from a few people lately about how hard it is to schedule BPM events since there’s so many calendar conflicts. I joked yesterday that we needed a global Google calendar to which everyone can add their events, and today I’m not laughing, I’m creating it. Click here to subscribe to the calendar in Google calendar using your Gmail login, click here to access the calendar directly without a login, or here for the RSS feed.

I’ll add events to it as I hear about them, and if you want to be able to add your own events, just email me and I’ll add you to the list of people who can add events to the calendar. It would be great if a lot of the BPM vendors could get on this calendar so that people who are interested in events can come to one place to find out where and when things are.

This is the first public Google calendar that I’ve created, so if I’ve done something dumb here, or could make it better in some way, add a comment or drop me an email and I’ll do what I can.

The definition of “BPM event” is a bit loose, so any event that would be of interest to the community is welcome here.

2007 07 25 BPM Comments (0)

BPM Think Tank Day 2: Jim Rudden

Jim Rudden of Lombardi gave the first presentation after lunch. Like the BEA presentation yesterday, Lombardi gets this short timeslot since they’re a platinum sponsor of the event, and Jim’s topic was on modelling your business, not just your process. I’ve seen a similar presentation, likely in a Lombardi webinar, with the three key areas of focus for modelling business: setting direction, controlling processes and work, and improving performance.

Challenges in setting direction:

  • Accessibility: can everyone participate easily?
  • Audience: can we involve business teams?
  • Standardization: is everyone gathering the same information?
  • Consensus: does everyone agree with the model?
  • Prioritization: is it clear where to start improvement?
  • Leverage: can you move quickly to implementation?

He then went into a brief (pre-recorded) demo of Blueprint, Lombardi’s SaaS process discovery product, to show how it can address the issues of setting direction. I need to get back and give this another in-depth review, since it’s obviously had a lot of changes since I saw it back at product launch time. They’ve done some nice things with the different views, providing a map/outline view, a diagram (BPMN) view and a documentation view, plus metadata such as goals, problems and impacts in a sort of structured wiki-like environment.

The remainder of the day is the roundtables, where I’ll take notes on paper so they won’t be posted until later tonight or tomorrow. I’m first attending the session on BPMN and BPDM with Antoine Lonjon and Stephen White, then the one on BPEL with Ismael Ghalimi.

2007 07 24 BPMThinkTank Comments (0)

links for 2007-07-24

  • ITtoolbox/PJA Social Media Index
    Very interesting study on how IT decision-makers use social media and user-generated content in their purchasing decisions. One of the top 10 findings: user-generated content (including blogs) is the top-ranked trusted source, more than paid analysts.
    (tags: socialmedia)
2007 07 24 Links Comments (0)

BPM Think Tank Day 2: Practitioners’ Case Studies

We had two case studies about BPM projects in the real world, the first of which was Lance Gibbs talking about AFLAC using BPM in their administrative services. They started with their invoice reconciliation process, since they dealt with over 500,000 remittances each month, and 30% of them didn’t match the invoice so couldn’t be automatically processed — a problem that I see in many of my own customers in a wide variety of industries. In their case, a mismatched invoice may correspond to a change in coverage, which required changes by their Policy Servicing group, and someone needed to figure out what was wrong with the invoice and start it through the remediation process. There was no visibility into the process, no prioritization to ensure that higher priority invoices were processed first, no coordination between the groups, and a lot of paper flying around. They really needed to get an invoice reconciliation turned around in less than 30 days, or else another incorrect invoice would be sent out for the next month’s billing.

To address this problem, they focussed on straight-through business process automation, human-facing workflow, and business activity monitoring. They started by scanning and indexing documents up front in the mail room, and early sorting and triage of transactions, which cut more than a day off their cycle time and allowed their reconciliation specialists to start work right away. They created web services that access their mainframe billing system using webMethods to be consumed by BPM. They had just achieved CMM level 3, and had to work at using agile BPM development processes that didn’t violate their CMM methodologies. Although it’s less than perfect, they now have more than 85% “one and done” for fixing invoices.

To establish KPIs, they looked at which were critical to the customer, and generally fell into three categories: quality, delivery and cost. They went from more general, hard to measure needs through to specific, measurable KPIs. For example, good customer service (a need) is a result of knowledgeable and friendly CSRs and a short wait time (drivers); knowledgeable CSRs can be measured by whether they were able to answer a question without further research (KPI, or what they call CTC for critical to customer).

They had a core process team of about five people, with other integration specialists being accesses as required. They went through a 4-1/2 month vendor selection process with a full bake-off between the two short-listed vendors (which he didn’t name, probably having been told not to mention vendors specifically from the podium). Update: Lance told me later than the BPMS is Lombardi.

The next case study was Clear Channel, with someone else pinch-hitting for David Jemeyson who took ill suddenly, discussing how they interfaced with Google to place ads through Clear Channel’s radio stations. The basic process is that a customer makes an ad purchase and uploads their audio spot with Google, who dispatches it to Clear Channel where it is prepared for broadcast and sent on to the radio station. At each step, they’re using loosely-coupled web services to move the data through the process, and they’ve modelled the entire thing in BPMN which he showed on the slides complete with drill-down to the detailed process with swimlanes. The result is that the entire process can be executed without manual intervention, including sending on the relevant information to their financial systems, and they were able to develop it all in about six months.

They used BizTalk and SharePoint for most of the SOA infrastructure.

The contrast between the two case studies was interesting: AFLAC was optimizing an existing business process; whereas Clear Channel was opening a completely new market enabled by the technology, which is one of those elusive ROI factors that we talk about but rarely see.

2007 07 24 BPM
BPMThinkTank Comments (0)

BPM Think Tank Day 2: Business Process Frameworks

Next was a panel on business process frameworks with representative from various framework standards

Tom Mercer (VRM from the Value Chain Group), Lloyd Chumbley (ACORD), Philippe de Smedt (OMG Finance Domain) and Paul Harmon (covering SCOR and eTOM, and also moderating).

Each panelist spoke briefly about the mission of their organization and framework:

  • VRM (Value Reference Model) is an analytical framework that establishes a classification scheme for business processes using a hierarchy of levels and relationships through inputs/outputs. Unlike many other frameworks, it doesn’t appear to be specific to any industry vertical, which makes it more like a methodology than a framework. Mercer said that they’re working on a relationship/mapping between VRM and BPMM. With 38 slides for a 10-minute presentation, I’m sure that I missed something along the way…
  • ACORD is an insurance standards organization, and all of their standards are focussed on that vertical. They started with (paper) insurance forms, then moved on to EDI and XML for exchanging data. More recently, they’ve started standardizing terminology/vocabulary and high-level process components (e.g., “determine coverage”, “indicate beneficiary”), which has some pretty exciting potential both for improving insurance companies internally as well as the cross-organization processes. Chumbley gave the benefits of a framework: save time, reduce risks, enable business agility, reduce costs, and enable incremental development. Many insurance companies were already using their own proprietary frameworks, and ACORD is working to have them come together in an industry-standard framework in order to facilitate the integration of third parties — reinsurers, contractors, geographically-diverse divisions, outsourcers, agencies, etc. — into a company’s process. They identify the three key components of the framework as a common glossary and data structures (standardized terms and relationships); business capabilities and process definitions (library of standard process building blocks); and a business messaging library. Their goal is consumability of those standards, and they see the necessity of working with OMG, OASIS and W3C to come into line on these.
  • OMG creates domain-specific specifications and standards like reference models of business processes for financial services, which has been issued in RFP format. They focus on two key use cases — funds transfer (including payment authorization, clearing and settlement) and account opening (including loan origination, subscription, applications and enrollment) — with a goal to reduce the risk of sensitive data exposure by reducing the amount of data that has to be transmitted in order to execute a specific type of process. The reference models will include data models, service models, process models and trust models, and it’s their goal to create a metamodel that can be applied to a wide range of financial services.
  • SCOR was developed in order to facilitate supply chains that cross company boundaries, as well as to standardize and improve supply chain internal processes. This started as a common vocabulary, then a standard set of measures for the purpose of establishing industry benchmarks. Harmon gave an example of what happened during the HP-Compaq merger, where the supply chain groups (both using SCOR) were able to model their processes and select the software that supported the more efficient version of process — no arguments over whose process or software was better, since they had industry-standard benchmarks against which to measure.
  • eTOM is a framework specifically for telecommunications organizations, and models the value chains and processes across the company. They take these down to explicit process models in UML, and show where ITIL fits in.

In general, the domain-specific frameworks tend to drill down to deeper levels of detail, which appears to me to have the potential to provide greater value.

2007 07 24 BPMThinkTank Comments (0)

BPM Think Tank Day 2: John Alden

Replacing the scheduled Bill Curtis (who had to cancel due to a family emergency), Chief Process Officer at McAfee, John Alden of Capability Measurement (which he co-founded with Curtis) gave the second day keynote on the role of the Chief Process Officer in business process improvement.

Responsibilities of the CPO:

  • Champion enterprise process discipline: quantify the need, articulate the vision, and infiltrate the mindset. It’s important for the CPO to be an internal evangelist for process improvement. Low process maturity organizations are spending 30-40% of their total time doing rework due to errors earlier in the process. In mid-maturity organizations, processes are stabilized but not standardized. In mature organizations, processes are standardized to reduce variability.
  • Drive process measurement: quantify business cases, support local management needs first, and mature the measures with the process over time. Derive the measurements, or KPIs, from strategic goals. Measures in immature organizations are unreliable, inconsistent and inaccurate; in mid-level maturity organizations, they become more standardized; and in mature organizations, they become strategic.
  • Coordinate enterprise process integration: represent cross-functional interests, establish enterprise process capability, and coordinate enterprise improvement projects. This requires optimizing the workflow rather than the functional performance of any given group, that is, focussing on the end-to-end process rather than silos: moving from siloed improvements, to coordinating functions through cross-functional processes, to enterprise processes that draw on functions as roles. There needs to be some sort of enterprise infrastructure to support these efforts, possibly through a centre of excellence.
  • Develop local process improvement capabilities: build business unit BPI capability, support local BPI activities, and establish enterprise improvement assets.

Alden talked a bit about BPMM, and how it needs to start at the local level and have the right type of leadership from the local managers, and finished up with a brief look at the CPO function and the related process improvement structures that are in place at McAfee.

I would have love to hear Curtis talk about this himself, since I’m sure that he’d bring more passion and hands-on knowledge about his role at McAfee to it, but Alden is very knowledgeable in this area and was a reasonable substitute.

2007 07 24 BPMM
BPMThinkTank Comments (0)

BPM Think Tank Day 1: BPM Standards Panel

The final session of the day was a panel with representatives from four standards organizations: Fred Cummins of OMG (BPMN, BPDM), Charlton Barreto of W3C, Keith Swenson of WfMC (XPDL) and John Evdemon of OASIS (BPEL), moderated by Fred Waskiewicz of OMG.

The first question was on the focus or mission of each organization:

  • OMG has a focus on modelling business processes by business people through specifications such as BPMN and BPDM.
  • The W3C’s focus is on “keeping the web from fragmenting”, which seems a somewhat lofty goal. Relative to BPM, it’s about providing a testable architecture.
  • WfMC’s mission is to help the process design ecosystem work together better by providing process-specific standards such as XPDL. XPDL stills reigns as the de facto interchange standard for process models, with over 60 different systems and open source projects supporting it, and I can’t imagine that WfMC is going to back away from that for quite a while.
  • OASIS is involved in both orchestration, through BPEL, and choreography, through BPSS. Evdemon acknowledged some of the shortcomings with BPEL, such as the lack of support for human-facing tasks, looping and subprocesses, and discussed how they are addressing those with upcoming extensions.

So far, so polite. Everyone seems to be acknowledging everyone else’s position, and it seems like one big happy standards family. The question is, of course, is there room in the landscape for all of these? If so, how do they fit together? Is there One Language To Rule Them All?

Barroto called for more workshops to bring together the standards bodies to work out the issues of overlap and compatibility, and Evdemon agreed; I understood that that was part of the reason for the BPM Think Tanks in the first place, but they seem to be suggesting something different, like a technical skunkworks of some sort where the engineers just get together and hack it out. Since they come from the two organizations that produce much more technical standards, that’s not a surprising view, but I’m not sure that it is sufficiently sensitive to the nature of all of the types of people (including business people) who might need to be involved in the development of BPM standards.

Great question from Phil Larson of Appian: since BPMN is the only thing that everyone can agree on, why is OMG messing things up by including BPDM into BPMN, when there is still an active competition (on some level) between BPDM, XPDL and BPEL (when it’s used as an interchange standard rather than an execution language)? Phil Gilbert responded that BPMN wasn’t right in the first place since it was missing the representation part, and the inclusion of BPDM fixes that somehow. I’m not sure that answers Larson’s question, and he came back to ask if WfMC and OASIS see BPDM as a threat, and if not, why not? Swenson reinforced the big happy standards family idea that all of these can exist together, but mentioned something about migrating from XPDL to BPDM; Evdemon also said that if something better than BPEL comes along, then you should be looking at it. To me, it sounds like both WfMC and OASIS are in a wait-and-see mode to see what BPDM will turn out to be in reality, and both seem to be making noises about how if a superior standard emerges that handles all the use cases, then it would make sense to consider moving in that direction. As if they could say anything else.

That’s it for day 1. We’re all headed for the bar to see which vendors buys the first round.

2007 07 23 BPM standards
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