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The last session of the last day, and a significant portion of the audience (especially those headed east) have bailed out but there’s still a few of us hanging around to hear Colin Teubner talk about optimizing business with BPM. I think that he drew the short straw as the junior guy, presenting in the last two sessions back-to-back. :) I think that the two-day format is just the right length; the 2-1/2 days of Gartner last week was just a bit long. Also, starting on Tuesday so that people can travel on Monday rather than having to burn up half their weekend is nice, too.
The central theme is that the ultimate goal of BPM initiatives should be transformation, not just efficiency. As he points out, many companies focus purely on efficiency, trying to trim costs for small wins rather than looking to make a transformative change that can drastically improve the organization’s competitive differentiation and revenue. BPMS is more than just modeling and automation; it includes the whole cycle of monitoring and optimization feeding back to the modeling stage. He showed a slightly different version of the BPM maturity/adoption chart that Connie Moore showed yesterday; I’m still unsure why this is a two-dimensional graph, since it is really a projection on the diagonal axis, but I suppose a one-dimensional representation just doesn’t look as nice.
He then mapped BPM onto the “design for people, build for change” theme of the conference: UI creation and process mindset belong to the design for people side of things, whereas agile processes, SOA connections, business-friendly tools and comprehensive monitoring map to building for change. Different from, but compatible with, the view of BPM in the D4PB4C theme that I covered on slide 26 of my presentation this morning. He talked about why simulation tools are not used as widely as the BPM vendors would have you believe: they’re too hypothetical and require a certain amount of guesswork (although using detailed execution data to populate your simulation can help with this). I also think that they’re a bit too complex and analytical for many of the business analysts who are targeted to use them.
Tuebner covered a number of use cases for BPM integrated with other technologies — forms technology to integrate data from other sources, content, BI and more — and the ways in which BPM enables an improved customer experience both through direct interaction or by informing the environment of an internal employee who is dealing with the customer.
He showed (for about 10 seconds) their Q3 Wave for BPM vendors; I think that this is the human-centric BPM wave, although it really went by so fast that I didn’t catch it, much less any of the vendors’ positions on it.
He had some interesting words about end-to-end organizational visibility and how it allows executives to understand processes and systems by making the link from strategy goals down through other layers; not surprisingly, he discussed this in the context of enterprise architecture.
His final recommendations:
That’s it for the Forrester Technology Leadership Forum. I’ve enjoyed it, found the content solid, and the culture a refreshing change from some other large analyst conferences.
I ended up skipping the session after mine at the end of the morning, but had some great hallway conversations with some of the business rules vendors who indicated that they think that I’m on track with what I’m saying about BPM and BR.
For the first of the afternoon sessions, I’m attending a panel discussion on the convergence of the three B’s — BI, BPM and BR — featuring Mike Gilpin (EA and application development), Boris Evelson (BI) and Colin Teubner (BPM). I covered a tiny bit of this topic in slides 22-24 of my presentation this morning, and will be doing a full-length presentation on this same topic at the Business Rules Forum next month in Orlando, so I’m interested to see if the Forrester analysts have the same thoughts on this subject as I do.
They start with the statement that “design for people, build for change” will drive the convergence of the three B’s. Interestingly, although a few people in the room stated that they use BPM and BI together, almost no one raised their hand to the combination of BPM and BR — a combination that I feel is critical to process agility. Gilpin went through a few introductory slides, pointing out that almost no business rules are explicitly defined, but are instead buried within processes and enterprise applications. He sees BI as driving effectiveness in businesses, and the combination of BPM and BR as driving efficiency.
Forrester will be publishing some reports about the convergence of the three B’s, and although there are some two-way combinations in vendor products now, there are no vendors that combine all three in a single product. I’m not sure that this is a bad thing: I don’t think that we necessarily want to see BR or BI become a part of BPM because it ultimately limits the usefulness of BR and BI. Instead, I see BR and BI as services to be consumed by BPM, with BI having the additional role of combining process execution statistics generated by the BPMS with other business data. An explicit question was asked about when to use the BR and BI included in the BPMS versus when to use a third-party best-of-breed BR or BI system; Teubner and Gilpin offered some guidelines for this as well as some examples of each situation, but it’s not completely clear if there’s a distinct boundary between when to use the BPMS’ in-built functionality versus the third-party specialist product.
My message on this topic is that BR is the key to process agility, and BI is the key to process visibility as well as feeding back into BR in order to further increase agility. By using the BR and BI functionality within your BPMS, however, you’re typically not getting full BR or BI functionality, but some limited subset that the BPMS vendor has selected to implement. Furthermore, you can’t reuse that functionality outside the BPMS, and in the case of business rules, a change to the BPMS’ rules often requires retesting and redeploying the process models, and does not apply to in-flight processes. However, if you’re not sure if you need BI or BR (hint: you do), then using the in-built functionality in the BPMS gives you an easy-to-integrate and lower cost way to get started. Moving to a separate third-party business rules system gives you a couple of key advantages: you can reuse the same rules across different processes and across other applications in your enterprise, and changes to the rule impacts in-flight processes since the rule is not executed from the BRE until that point in the process is reached. Moving to a separate third-party business intelligence system also provides the advantage of being able to analyze the process data in the context of other business data, and potentially feed back the results of complex analytics to inform the business rules, that in turn drive the business processes. The bottom line: BR and BI are used for many applications in the enterprise that are not explicitly process-related, or combine data from many systems of which the BPMS is just one source. For example, although there are processes embedded within your ERP system, your BPMS may not have direct access to all the information that’s in those processes and hence the BI that’s part of your BPMS can’t (easily) include that data in its analytics and reporting; a general-purpose BI platform may be much more suited to combining your BPMS statistics with your ERP statistics.
A lot of the conversation in this session, which was very interactive with the audience members, was around whether to use converged products versus separate products. It’s not a completely simple answer, and I’ll definitely be thinking about the use case boundaries between converged and separate products before I show up at the Business Rules Forum to continue this discussion.
Evelson and Teubner will be publishing an initial paper in this area in the next few weeks, using the concepts that they’ve presented here today, but see it as a springboard for more discussion in this area rather than an end-point.
I skipped the opening keynote by Shantanu Nayaren of Adobe and the talk by cognitive scientist Don Norman; my presentation is at 11am, and although I’m not a particularly nervous presenter, I felt that my time was better spent reviewing my notes, especially considering that I’ve crammed material from the three one-hour webinars that I did for TIBCO and my upcoming presentation at the Business Rules Forum into a single 30-minute blast. You can see my slides here (use the controls at the bottom to move through the slides right on this page):
My only regret is missing Forrester’s opening short video of movie clips illustrating the “design for people, build for change” message; the ones yesterday were very funny, and I hope that they post them all on YouTube.
We finished up the day with a panel of Forrester analysts addressing the issue of whether packaged applications (i.e., ERP software) will ever be designed for people and built for change — that is, can these apps ever be agile. This was structured as a debate monitored by Merv Adrian, pitting Sharyn Leaver on the business side against John Rymer on the IT development side.
Adrian started by repeating the four principles of dynamic business applications that Connie Moore discussed this morning, then framed some questions for the packaged application version:
Leaver and Rymer duked it out over each question, providing some really interesting viewpoints. It wasn’t exactly impromptu; each question had at least one backup presentation slide from one of them to make their point. They ended up with a slide comparing the four application biggies: Oracle, SAP, Microsoft and IBM.
From my standpoint, this was the least interesting presentation of the day, since I don’t focus on packaged applications, although it was an interesting “he said, she said” debate format. The general agreement is that the gap is narrowing between build and buy+customize, but that most customers will still require customization for competitive differentiation.
Tom Pohlmann popped back up at the end of the day with some closing remarks, then directed us off to the vendor showcase reception and the pool party. Given that it’s only 21C here in Carlsbad — compared to a balmy 28C back in Toronto (even though it’s already after dark there) — I don’t think that anyone’s going swimming tonight. Since I’m still on Eastern time, I’ll probably be asleep by 9pm again tonight.
Connie Moore moderated a panel on automating business processes, featuring David Knapp of Ford, Pamela Rucker of Philip Services and Theo van den Hurk of ABN AMRO. The room is considerably less crowded than this morning, so I’m guessing that there’s some golfing going on (probably all the CIOs whose golf games were rained out last week at the Gartner conference in Orlando). I really like how they use the big projection screens to show live video of the panelists; I’m sitting way over on the side to score some power for the laptop, so can’t see two of the presenters directly.
Moore talked about Forrester’s BPM maturity framework, which I’ve never seen before but it’s similar enough to BPMM and others that I’ve seen: moving from process knowledge to process efficiency to process consistency to business optimization to business transformation, where most companies are in the efficiency stage, moving towards consistency.
Each of them told a bit about what they’re doing with BPM:
Knapp showed an interesting slide if how BPM bridges the gap between end user computing and full-on IT application development; I think that there’s also an overlap between mashups and BPM at some part of that spectrum. Ford has an enterprise process committee that looks at process management across the organization, especially focussing on the discontinuities (hand-offs between functional silos), and decides which processes to implement. However, they’re still narrowing down and deciding which processes to implement.
Rucker said that two major issues for them was having the business take ownership for business process management, and getting away from siloed process optimization (like the accounting department) to look at end-to-end processes (like order to cash). They even got the CEO involved to drive home these points home to people.
van den Hurk talked about the complexities introduced by having several outsourced vendors involved in their systems as well as their own IT people; just getting all the stakeholders to sit down together was a challenge. ABN AMRO looked at heat maps for operational budget areas to figure out where the money was being spent, as well as what the business reported as the pain points.
There was a question about metrics, monitoring and dashboards: Ford is designing it into their systems; Philip put it in after the fact when they realized that processes weren’t improving and had no visibility into why; ABN AMRO also is building it in based on the business needs.
As panels go, this was pretty conversational rather than a series of mini-presentations: good to attend, but harder to blog about in a coherent fashion.
I had an interview with Pankaj Malviya, CEO of LongJump, back in July, and another a few days ago to bring me up date for this week’s launch of their SaaS platform and applications. There hasn’t been a lot of new functionality since then, but they’ve accelerated their launch date: in July, they said that they’d be in an open beta by the end of the year (which I said was longish), and now they’ve done a full (non-beta) launch instead in a shorter time frame, so they must have felt the heat of the competition to get things going. They’ll be starting to offer training in about a week, and will eventually have some videos available online to allow you to preview applications.
Their focus remains on the small and medium business market, with the idea to prove to those companies that LongJump is sufficiently reliable to trust with their business data. Since they’re part of Relationals, they have a track record at providing hosted CRM for a couple of years now, which is certainly a good start over many of the other SaaS providers.
Although LongJump is a platform, they’re focussed on applications, not the platform itself. The basic package contains two applications: OfficeSpace, a group calendaring and collaboration application to manage documents, projects and discussions; and Customer Manager, a starter CRM application that integrates with Outlook. There will be other CRM applications available as well, such as Deal Manager for creating and tracking quotes, and non-sales management applications such as the IT asset tracking one that I discussed in my first post about them.
In fact in their press release, they list 12 applications that they say that they are initially introducing, although it’s not clear if all 12 are available now.
I am, of course, interested in what else that they’re doing with workflow after seeing it in the initial demo; they’re not releasing that until October, but they’re moving from a list-based set of states to a graphical process designer and there will be five applications released at the same time to take advantage of the workflow capabilities.
All of the applications will be free for the next three months in order to encourage people to try out LongJump, then it will move to regular pricing. Although the regular pricing was given to me verbally, it wasn’t confirmed so I don’t want to quote it here, but suffice it to say that the price point may give them an advantage over Salesforce.com for CRM, although you’d have to dig in and do a full functionality review (which I haven’t) to know how comparable that they really are.
You can read their full press release here.
John Rymer, who I’ve read before on business rules topics, talked to us about why we should care about business rules software; Forrester’s position is that business rules are a key enabler of design for people, build for change.
He started with definitions of business rules and a business rules platform, then went on to state that business rules are an alternative to conventional programming: with business rules you don’t have to translate business terms into geek speak, and you don’t have to specify every possible combination of rules works. The implications are that business people are most likely to get what they need since they can actually understand the “language” in which the rules are written, and more complex problems can be more easily solved with much less time required to change systems. Software can even adapt based on the results of the rules; BPM is just one example of this, but business rules can be applied in the same way in other types of software.
Rymer showed how business rules can be applied in the areas of the “perfect storm” that Connie Moore mentioned this morning as causing the transformation that’s underway now: design evolution (rules add adaptation to context and design), process evolution (rules enable decisioning, auto processes, closed loops), workforce evolution (business people contribute to rules) and software evolution (rules enable global policies for SOA, service selection). He went on with a great list of how organizations benefit from business rules:
He gave some good examples from financial services, showing how business rules have been applied to core tasks such as credit scoring and underwriting, then expanded to areas such as fraud detection and call center programs.
He highlighted that business rules allow organizations to divide change management responsibilities, where business people take responsibility for maintaining the more volatile rules and processes, whereas IT remains responsible for maintaining the core rules and processes.
He ended up addressing the issues of why business rules haven’t really caught on; I see so little acceptance of this with many of my financial services customers and I’m not surprised, although it seems strange that a technology that can offer so much benefit is being ignored by so many companies. The top reason for not implementing business rules? “We don’t do things that way”, that is, they like to write their rules in Java code instead. He also cited lack of standards, high product cost (which I still don’t think is more than writing and maintaining that Java code), lack of participation from the big vendors, and a still-shifting landscape as other reasons for resistance to business rules.
Like Rymer, I believe that business rules will be a significant part of any agile organization. In some cases, organizations already have business rules software but it’s hidden away in one department, but you need to pull it out of the closet and put it to work. Forrester has a Wave (product comparison) for business rules, but he admitted that it’s a bit out of date; it sounds like a new one might be coming out shortly.
Lots of choice in the breakout sessions, but I’ve decided on Rob Koplowitz (who works with Connie Moore) on Web 2.0 and Social Computing in the Enterprise. The official statement:
Enterprise Web 2.0 can drive new efficiencies, but it needs to be approached like any new technology coming into the enterprise.
He had a good slide on how Web 2.0 changes group dynamics, from reviewed repository (predefined contributors and reviewers with a central point of communication) to facilitated community (clusters of communications with a facilitator in each cluster) to social networks (unstructured peer-to-peer communications).
He made a distinction of four types of social networking technologies: “listen to me” (blogs), “listen to us” (wikis), “find people like me” (tagging, profiles, social networks, virtual worlds) and “find stuff I need” (tagging, RSS feeds). He then went on to discuss which of these adds the most value within an enterprise based on research that they’ve done; after instant messaging, which was really just added in as a benchmark, RSS feeds came in as next most useful, which doesn’t really surprise me give what I’ve been seeing in the past months in the Enterprise 2.0 space. What happens, then, is a combined environment of a corporate information workplace with external sources of information, mashed up using various tools to provide value to users.
He referred to RSS as a lightweight integration fabric within organizations, which is a great characterization, and showed it on a spectrum of enablers that also included mashups, SOA and BPM.
Koplowitz then looked at the risks of Web 2.0 technologies within the enterprise, such as privacy and security; note that he’s talking about using consumer Web 2.0 technologies that are available via SaaS on the public internet, whereas there’s a ton of new Enterprise 2.0 solutions that are sold as on-premise, inside-the-firewall solutions rather than risk an improperly-hosted solution. There’s also many reputable Web 2.0 vendors who don’t do risky things with your data, or not any more risky than your own data center does now. He gave a scary-sounding example using Quechup, a recently social networking disaster that decided to spam your entire address book without permission and was quickly outed and shamed on the internet; this information came out with a few short days of this starting, and if the person involved had just been a bit more careful about watching the internet buzz on Quechup rather than jumping right in with their corporate address book exposed, then this would have been a non-story.
His recommendation is not to stop people from using social networking site, but to be cautious and appropriate about what they put out there, and to audit their behavior to ensure that they’re not violating corporate confidentiality. As he points out, Gen Y’s (18-26 years old) are the target hiring market for many companies these days, and they’re using these tools as creators of content as well as participants. However, the higher-level management in most companies, smack in the middle of the boomer years, are much less likely to participate and hence less likely to fund any related efforts.
Forrester will be publishing some research very shortly about vendors in the Enterprise Web 2.0 space, although he didn’t give us much of a sneak preview except to name a few vendors both in the Web 2.0 space and the enterprise space (BEA, Microsoft, SAP, IBM, Oracle), and predicting a collision. Traditional vendors are following the old-style release and adoption cycles, which may not play very well with the faster iterations that will come from the SaaS offerings from the Web 2.0 space; however, those traditional vendors are also in the position to just start bundling their Enterprise 2.0 offerings into their standard offerings (WebSphere Portal as a mashup platform, anyone?) to encourage adoption with their existing customers. There’s a new breed of vendors, however, that have deep enterprise roots and the agility of the hair-on-fire Web 2.0 vendors, that are likely to give the big guys a run for their money. Most likely, any organization is going to use a combination of vendors, both traditional enterprise vendors (who will be favored in the long run, based on history) and the new vendors (who are likely to be acquired by the big vendors). You’ll also see a combination of technologies, for example, ad hoc processes in a wiki with more structured processes in a BPM system linked to that.
His summary:
There was an interesting discussion during the Q&A on the place of Google in the environment (Koplowitz thinks they have to solve their security issues first, such as not transmitting data to and from Google spreadsheets in clear text).
He points out that for many organizations that have a significant portion of younger workers, especially in technology-heavy industries, there is no way to put this genie back in the bottle; organizations have to deal with this, and “just say no” isn’t an alternative.
The last session before lunch was by Robert Wiseman, CTO of Sabre Holdings – interesting that the two customer keynotes this morning were both by travel-related companies. They have the same problems as many other organizations, in that they have to deal with large numbers of transactions and compete on pricing, but they’re doing it at a much higher volume and with a much greater abandonment rate than most other companies: think about how many times that you use Travelocity (one of their companies) to search for prices versus how often you actually book the travel.
Wiseman talked about how it’s necessary to focus on the differentiators: their business is differentiated by the quality and quantity of content that they provide to their customers, and the level of efficiency that enables the customers to locate and consume the content that’s right for them. Everything else, as he says, is just plumbing. In that plumbing, they push towards a “cookie cutter architecture”, where technology is commoditized which in turn makes for easier build and test cycles, and improves time to market as well as TCO.
They design for technology obsolescence by staying as vendor agnostic as possible, and abstracting the technology layers.
They also design for failure: since they run 20,000 transactions per second, 24×7, all technology will eventually fail, and the fail-overs must be obvious to the operational support staff but transparent to users. The goal, in the case of failure, is to continue limping along in some fashion rather than a total meltdown.
They design for flexibility, using XML-based APIs and web services against some rather ancient mainframe technology; however, they’re now redesigning some of their web services to be less granular (so as to not invoke 30 million web service calls per day) based on tracking consumer behaviour on the website. This is an interesting concept for designing the right granularity of web services: implement your best guess, tending to be more granular, then watch the behaviour and rebuild them into less granular services.
As you might imagine given their transaction volumes, they’re very focussed on performance testing, and designing for the purposes of facilitating performance testing by standardizing hardware (e.g., blade servers) and software (e.g., DBMS) so that it’s possible to test a full range of situations. He stressed how important it is to consider performance testing at design time, not just as an afterthought.
In the Q&A, he talked more about their standardization and reuse efforts: pretty thorough at the infrastructure and even the middleware layers, but not so easy at the application layers. They’ve standardized on Linux, which an audience question referred to as “open source shareware”, which was a bit funny — they’re using a supported version of Linux, so it’s not like they’re pirating software from the internet or something. He also made an interesting comment about how the best strategy for staying vendor independent when you have a single source is to have a really good exit strategy for that vendor’s products: don’t stay with it just because it’s too hard to migrate away from it.
I saw Sandy Carter speak a week ago at the Gartner BPM conference, and as expected, there’s some amount of overlap from what I heard there in the first section on what’s driving business today and the nature of globally-integrated enterprises. Less talk about BPM (since this isn’t a BPM conference) and much more on SOA and how it contributes to these types of enterprises.
She covers off four distinct styles or paths of SOA:
She went through each of these in detail, with examples, and talked about how and why each of the approaches are typically selected from both the business and technology standpoint.
There was a booklet distributed to each of us when the session started written by Carter, entitled “The New Language of Business: SOA & Web 2.0″, and she used it as a launch point to discuss enterprise mashups and how they can be used to extend the use of SOA. There’s been lots written about mashups as the global SOA; like BPM, mashups are a primary consumer of services that help to increase reusability and therefore cost-justify SOA in the first place. She showed us some nice services-based mashups that IBM has built for their own internal use; as usual, I wish that IBM would move the internal stuff out to the real world a lot sooner since it seems that they’re doing some really interesting stuff internally that takes years to reach the market.
She then introduced Mohammed Farooz, CTO of the state of Texas, to talk about their Health and Human Services department and the transformational work that they’ve done. They’ve moved from a single channel client interaction model (where each program had its own client interaction) to a multi-channel client interaction where all programs were available to citizens through a common interface, whether they were doing web self-service or calling in to the call center. They accomplished this with an agile business framework (business modeling, capability management, performance management and governance) on top of a flexible SOA stack (Rational, WebSphere and a few other IBM bits).
Carter wrapped up with some comments on end-to-end process integrity — interaction, transactional and information — and how IBM is focussing on this. She showed the same video about Second Life “BPM Flight Simulator” as we saw last week. When they talk about simulating business processes within a simulated environment, I still just have to shake my head, although apparently there’s a greater retention rate for people using this for training versus traditional methods.
Rich Phillips, the COO of Maritz Travel, was up next to talk about creating consistency and customer value through IT. Although not a part of his presentation, he opened with a great thought about the importance of people in the process: “If you don’t think about the people, you’re not going to get the change.”
His central topic is about BPM: he sees it not just as a different class of software or a different way to manage, but as a breakthrough tool for transforming a business. In a post-9/11 world, they found their business changed drastically, due to shifting customer requirements, supply and demand issues, and regulatory compliance. Instead of just logistics management, they need to expand their systems to cover a number of other key factors, such as compliance management and data management. They undertook some strategic analysis and value stream analysis, and chose Lombardi BPM as a way to achieve some of the benefits that they were targetting. Phillips feels that it provides benefits in the area of reuse of existing systems and processes (through end-to-end process orchestration of existing services) as well as permitting collaborative development involving business, IT and the customer, and enforcing business rules as part of the process. It’s also provided an easier-to-learn user interface, allowing for user training in days instead of months — critical when they need to quickly ramp up for a spike in business.
He talked about a key issue that I see in many companies: the business is motivated to provide what the customer used to want, not what they want now. They’ve expanded their focus on logistics management to provide a more complete suite of services to their customer.
Another issue is that the business tended to abdicate their responsibility for stating what they need to IT, so IT had to just make some guesses about it (which never works out all that well). Now, much like Connie Moore’s earlier comments on how business and IT need to be blended, not aligned, Phillips said much the same thing about breaking down the barriers between business and IT.
Critical success factors that he identified:
He pointed out that they did their first BPM project in 90 days after signing the contract with Lombardi, in contrast to the 2- to 4-year development cycle that they used to have. I’ve seen equally fast implementations with other BPM vendors; in many cases, the key is not the specific BPMS, but the approach that’s taken to implementing it.
The results have been pretty amazing: reversals of their declining revenues, margins and productivity figures, and ability to fine-tune the business process control through the business rules embedded within the process (he didn’t mention another BRE, so I assume that he means the rules functionality within Lombardi). Obviously, a big part of this is the strategic and value chain planning that they’ve done, but BPM is definitely a contributor to their success. They’re now looking at correlating process results to the hard ROI numbers in their business results, such as cycle time, cost per transaction, etc.; this will help them to decide where to focus their efforts in the future.
He went on to discuss a transformation framework, first listing “big bang re-engineering” and “fixing pockets of processes” as flawed approaches. In the big bang approach, it’s mostly a problem in that people can’t make that degree of change without it being massively disruptive to the business; in the subprocesses approach, it’s not enough to make a significant difference. Like the story of the three bears, you have to find that middle approach that’s just right.
Now in their sights for future development is what he calls the real power of BPM: expanding the envelope of the process-managed domain to include revenue generation opportunities, not just cost reduction and productivity opportunities. Although productivity and ROI are important, the C-level executives are usually much more focussed on growth and revenue generation, so it’s critical to look at product development and product/solution delivery processes as well as risk and compliance processes.
Tagged agilityConnie Moore gave the opening keynote on Design for People, Build for Change: Transforming the Nature of Work. Her focus is on how business and IT have to work together in order to achieve this, but she likes the term “blended business-IT” rather than “business-IT alignment” because she wants them to be seen as a single entity rather than two separate bodies that need to be aligned in some way. I’ve heard Moore speaking at other conferences and on webinars previously, usually on the topic of BPM, and it’s significant that Forrester puts a BPM analyst in the keynote position at this forum: it really drives home that the key focus here is on process.
She posed three questions about this sort of transformation: why now, what underpins this trend, and how will it unfold.
In the “why now” category, she discussed the evolution in design that’s underway in all sorts of consumer products, and asked us to envision what would happen if the leaders in consumer product design (e.g., Apple) came into organizations and set to redesigning enterprise systems. Interesting thought, and something that I’ve written about when discussing Enterprise 2.0, which brings consumer Web 2.0 functionality into enterprise applications. The new generation of workers, dubbed “millenials” by Moore, have grown up with completely different experiences and therefore have completely different expectations about what systems will look like as they enter the workforce, particularly around social networking. Added to all this is the evolution of process management as a discipline, and the dissolution of monolithic business applications into composite applications that use BPM, SOA, business rules, collaboration and other technologies, either on-premise or as SaaS.
As for what underpins this trend, Moore discussed the dichotomy between the detailed transactional type of work (which she characterizes as left-brained) and the big picture type of work (right-brained) that have to be supported simultaneously by our systems. She lays out four key principles for designing for people, and gave a detailed example of each (including a really interesting Second Life example for the 4th point):
The first two of these are about build for change, and the last two are about design for people
This is all unfolding with the big vendors making some large investments in BPM-related technologies as well as newer things like Web 2.0 and mashups. Cisco’s TelePresence got a huge plug here (I’m guessing that they’re a big client of Forrester 
), including a clip from 24 that used it. This new focus will require some new skills as well: business analysts need to become process designers, and developers need to become (application) assemblers: this is how design for people and build for change come together. This is completely aligned with what I plan to discuss tomorrow in terms of putting the design of processes in the hands of the business and creating agile processes.
Moore finished up with how to get started on all this, from the viewpoint of IT management, business managers, process designers, application developers, enterprise architects, and the CIO.
Tom Pohlmann opened up the Forrester Technology Leadership Forum that I’m attending today and tomorrow, and it’s such an interesting contrast with the Gartner conference of last week. I’ve never been to a Forrester conference before, and the entire feeling is different than Gartner: more fun somehow; they seem to take themselves a bit less seriously while still presenting a professional program. Maybe because this is primarily an IT conference, although there are some people from the business side of process management. There also seem to actually be wifi here, although I have to go to the registration desk to get a login.
The theme of the forum is “design for people, build for change”, with the idea that we all need to start focussing on the people, not the systems — a very similar message that I heard at Gartner last week, where the people in the process gained a lot more airtime than ever before. Pohlmann started right in talking about processes, how then need to change, and how the software that supports these processes need to change in order to support the necessary degree of agility. Interesting that this is not specifically a BPM or process-specific forum, it’s a technology leadership forum, but process is the key issue. The attendees are mostly at the upper management and executive level, and when I look through the attendee list, I find several of my customers and vendors that I work with, as well as many other high-level people from name-brand companies.
Presenters are mostly Forrester analysts, including a few who I know personally and a lot more who I know on the internet; there’s also a few speakers put in by the sponsoring vendors, such as myself: I’m speaking tomorrow, sponsored by TIBCO, although I’m speaking on the more general topic of discovering and modeling agile processes rather than anything TIBCO-specific. I have to confess that I haven’t completely finished my presentation for tomorrow, because I’m really expecting to be inspired by the content today to do a little bit of fine-tuning before then.
I had a chance to hear an update of Appian Anywhere, Appian’s SaaS BPM offering, while at the Gartner BPM conference this week. I’m very interested in BPM and Enterprise 2.0, and SaaS BPM fits nicely into that intersection.
Although they originally planned for GA in Q307, it looks like Q108 before they’re going to be available to their planned SMB target audience with payments by credit card and other functionality that you’d expect for a SaaS offering. The reason appears to be that they’ve had so much interest from large corporate customers that they’re offering a large-client configuration first to a small number of select customers, so have diverted resources from the SMB functionality to focus on the big fish first. It seems to me that that would tend to cannibalize their on-premise business, although I’m sure that there are large organizations who will use this as a way to try before they buy.
They’re really trying to create an ecosystem for partners to develop applications on their platform. To prime the pump, they’ve created 30+ applications of their own that they’ll offer out for free with the basic subscription; partners are developing other applications that will be offered on a subscription based in the Appian Anywhere marketplace. Encouraging this sort of application development is a web service-like integration capability (I don’t think that it is exactly web services, but similar in nature) to integrate between Appian Anywhere applications and behind-the-firewall applications, which makes it much more useful as a BPM platform, since I can’t think of any customer of mine who wouldn’t have to integrate with one of their on-premise systems at some point.
They’re also creating some video training to minimize the need for professional services to get you up and running on the platform.
There’s still a lot of resistance to SaaS for core business processes, although I think that this could catch on for the non-critical ones as a starting point. However, there’s some pure Enterprise 2.0 vendors such as LongJump who are going to creep into this space — from the other direction and with a very different sort of offering — and pick up some of the market.
David LiRosi, an NYU graduate student, is conducting a survey on the factors involved in using a committee approach — meaning a committee of combined business and IT people — for the selection of the business processes to optimize. From the survey description online:
In the BPM field, it is commonplace for the organization to have one of three groups?the IT group, Business Unit group, or a combined committee?making the decisions on which business processes to optimize. Organizations have had success using the committee approach. The reasons behind the acceptance of the committee approach over other approaches would prove useful to organizations and the BPM field as a whole. In that respect, this survey seeks to find what factors affect the acceptance of a committee approach.
I didn’t take the survey since it’s targetted at end-user organizations, but it only takes about 10 minutes and (I assume) does not gather any information that could be used to identify you or your company. Think back to all those hours that you spent slogging over research papers at school, then click here to take the survey on surveymonkey.com.
What does the IP addresses 137.69.117.21 mean to you? How about if you look it up through Network Solutions to see who owns it? Strangely enough, this is the IP address of a comment troll who has been attempting to add offensive comments here for the last several weeks, using a variety of anonymous email address and fake names.
I’m not surprised that I occasionally get comment trolls. I am surprised that they would come from inside the corporate network of a subsidiary of a large BPM vendor.
