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{ Monthly Archives } April 2008

TUCON: Centralized BPM Platform at HBOS

The last session of the day was a bit of a tough choice: I was thinking about heading over to see the session on in-process analytics through the integration of Spotfire and BusinessEvents, but decided in favor of hearing Richard Frost of HBOS (a UK-based financial services organization) discuss their centralized BPM platform and center of excellence strategy. Since they were created from a merger of Halifax and Bank of Scotland, and are made up of a number of brands, there’s quite a bit of vertical IT within the individual organizations. They’ve been moving some of this into shared services (what they call Group IT), including a business process layer based on TIBCO’s iProcess.

They had some significant drivers for BPM, allowing for growth while containing costs, and codifying processes and knowledge to reduce the impact of employee turnover. They had a variety of process types to manage as well, from straight-through processing with integration to their existing systems to high-touch human-centric and collaborative processes, so needed a product that could handle both well. They deployed BPM in a number of stages:

  • Digitizing, with human workflow and case management based on scanned documents
  • Automation
  • Optimization, through automation and separation of process logic from operational systems

As they roll this out, the benefits from automation have been most apparent and used in future business cases, and implementation costs are expected to reduce through reusability.

Instead of each division deploying their own BPM, they are moving to a centralized platform for a number of reasons:

  • Shared processes, such as complaints handling
  • Shared platform for cost savings
  • Shared resources
  • Best practices and governance
  • Architecture simplification

On this common software and hardware platform, each division has their own unique services, processes, rules and parameters; they’re now building a common services layer that will be reusable across divisions as well as consolidating onto the same physical hardware and software platform. They’ve had to determine ownership of each layer — which is owned by the divisions, shared services application development, and shared services technology — as well as governance of these layers by a business-led user group, an IT-led process certification board and a joint business-IT change approvals board.

They see the business opportunity for BPM is to remove the IT problems from what the business has to consider by providing a common platform, allowing them to focus on business and process improvement. Frost showed a chart that mapped process types (simple, regular, complex) against solutions (manual work distribution and handling, imaging and workflow with minimal integration, BPM with application integration) in order to identify the key processes to consider for BPM: although the conventional wisdom is to go for the simple processes that can be fully automated with BPM and application integration, he also feels that there’s huge benefits in looking at the complex processes that require a lot of human knowledge work. They also use this as a guideline for both simplifying processes and pushing for a greater degree of automation.

In an example of one of their insurance arrears processes, they’ve removed 60% of the human effort by automating most of the steps involved, while improving both service times and consistency.

His recommendations:

  • Understand your organizational model, recognizing where you are in your process efforts and aligning your BPM and SOA strategies
  • Don’t obsess on software selection, or the divisions will just do their own thing instead of waiting for the common platform
  • It will be hard work and will take a significant piece of time — HBOS has spent two years from when they did their first TIBCO pilot to where they are today with a shared platform
  • Reviewing and optimizing processes is crucial so that you’re automating the right processes
  • Needs a combined effort of a business push and an IT pull

An interesting message here is that although we all want 3-month delivery cycles for BPM projects, creating a shared BPM platform across multiple divisions takes a lot longer. A roadmap that allows divisional installations of the enterprise-standard platform in the interim, to be converged on the shared platform at a later date, is essential to allow progress on BPM applications within divisions while the shared platform is being developed.

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2008 04 30 BPM
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TUCON: BPM Product Update

Roger King and Justin Brunt of TIBCO gave us an update of what’s happened lately with their BPM product, and what’s coming up.

In the past year, Business Studio has added a lot of new features:

  • Support for BPMN 1.0 and XPDL 2.0
  • In-line service binding and mapping, through direct connections to Business Works, web services, Java, databases, email and scripts
  • Direct deployment to the iProcess engine
  • Management of models using any source control system that supports Eclipse, or using their packaged Subversion option
  • Visual Forms Editor for creating forms directly in Business Studio using platform-independent models at design time and platform-specific models for run time: General Interface now, and other platforms to follow. Forms can be created from a step definition with a default layout based on the exposed parameters, then the forms editor can be used to add other UI widgets.
  • In-line subprocesses and a number of other modeling niceties.

The iProcess Workspace (end-user browser client) has been simplified and updated using an Outlook visual paradigm, based on General Interface. This is supported on IE 6 and 7 (no mention of Firefox). It’s also possible to use GI Builder to create your own BPM client, since the components are provided for easy inclusion, allowing iProcess functionality to be embedded into web pages or as portlets, with no knowledge of the iProcess APIs.

The iProcess Suite has a number of other improvements, including generic data plugins and direct deployment from Business Studio, plus support for 64-bit Windows and SUSE Linux. There’s also been repackaging and installation improvements. As we heard this morning, there’s also event-driven real-time worklist management, where a user can be alerted when something in a queue changes rather than having to poll it manually. There’s also updated LDAP authentication.

iProcess also has a new version of its web services plugin providing improved inbound and outbound web services security (at the transport layer with SSL and digital signatures and at the message layer through signatures, encryption and tokens), plus enhanced authentication.

The big thing in my mind is that Business Studio 3.0 now contains all key iProcess Modeler features so that it’s no longer necessary to use iProcess Modeler as an intermediate step in moving processes from Business Studio to the iProcess execution engine: Business Studio is the new BPM IDE. At TUCON last year, I said that this definitely needed to happen, and I’m very happy to see that it has since it represents a significant advance into full model-driven development for TIBCO’s BPM.

Their vision for BPM going forward is that the complexity of process models can be pushed down into the infrastructure, and free the business process modeling/design tools from the technical details that have made process modeling into a technical rather than business role over the past years. This will allow business people to do what the BPM vendors have always told us that they could do: design executable process models without having to be a technical expert. King feels that the key to this is service and data virtualization, since data is BPM’s "dirty secret": synchronization of data within a business process with other systems is one of the key drivers for having a technical person do the process models instead of a business person. Virtualizing the location, ownership, form and transport of the data means that you don’t need to worry about a business analyst doing something inappropriate with data in the course of process modeling.

The idea is that BPM suites will become model-driven composite application development and deployment platforms (wait! isn’t that what they’re supposed to be already?), with more latitude for business sandboxes and mashups for prototyping and building situational applications.

They’re working on breaking off the front end of the process engine to allow the creation of a single enterprise "work cloud" that can be used for any source of information or work coming at someone: sort of like event processing, but at a higher semantic level.

In addition to all the event-driven goodies, they’re also focused on covering the entire domain of process patterns (as in the full academic set of process patterns), so that any process could be modeled and executed using TIBCO’s BPM. We’ll also see some enhanced resource and organizational modeling, plus scheduling, capability requirements, SLAs and more models corresponding to real-world work.

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2008 04 30 BPM
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TUCON: Merck’s SAP Integration Strategy

Daniel Freed of Merck discussed their SAP implementation, and how their integration strategy uses TIBCO to integrate with non-SAP systems. As with Connie Moore’s presentation this morning, the room was packed (I’m sitting on the floor and others standing around the perimeter of the room), and I have to believe that TIBCO completely underestimated attendees’ interest in BPM since we’re in a room that is half the size (or less) that for some of the other streams. Of course, this presentation is really about application integration rather than BPM…

They have four main integration scenarios:

  • Master data replication (since each system expects to maintain its own data, but SAP is typically the true master data source), both event-driven publish-subscribe and batch point-to-point.
  • Cross-system business process, using event-driven publish-subscribe and event-driven point-to-point.
  • Analytical extraction/consolidation with batch point-to-point from operational systems to the data warehouse.
  • Business to business, with event-driven point-to-point as well as event-driven publish-subscribe and batch point-to-point.

They have some basic principles for integration:

  • Architect for loosely coupled connectivity, in order to increase flexibility and improve BPM; the key implication is that they needed to move from point-to point integrations to hub-and-spoke architecture, publish from the source to all targets rather than chaining from one system to another, and use canonical data models.
  • Leverage industry standards and best practices
  • Build and use shared services
  • Architect for "real-time business" first
  • Proactively engage the business in considering new opportunities enabled by new integration capabilities
  • Architect to insulate Merck from external complexity
  • Design for end-to-end monitoring
  • Leverage integration technology to minimize application remediation (i.e., changes to SAP) required to support integration requirements

SAP, of course, isn’t just one monolithic system: Merck is using multiple SAP components (ECC, GTS, SCM, etc.) that have out-of-the-box integration provided by SAP through Process Integrator (PI), and Merck doesn’t plan to switch out PI for TIBCO. Instead, PI bridges to TIBCO’s bus, then all other applications (CRM, payroll, etc.) connect to TIBCO.

Gowri Chelliah of HCL (the TIBCO partner involved in the project) then discussed some of the common services that they developed for the Merck project, including auditing, error handling, cross-referencing, monitoring, and B2B services. He covered the error handling, monitoring, cross-reference and B2B services in more detail, showing the specific components, adapters and technologies used for each.

Freed came back up to discuss their key success factors:

  • Organizational
    • Creation of shared services
    • Leverage global sourcing model
  • Strategy
    • Integration strategy updated for SAP
    • Buy-in from business on integration strategy
  • Program management
    • High visibility into the development process
  • Process
    • Comprehensive on-boarding process for quick ramp-up
    • Factory approach to integration — de-skill certain tasks and roles to leverage less experienced and/or offshore resources
    • Thorough and well-documented unit testing
    • Blogs and wiki for knowledge dissemination and sharing within the team, since it was spread over 5 cities
  • Governance
    • Architecture team responsible for consistency and reuse
  • Architecture
    • Defined integration patterns and criteria for applicability
    • Enhanced common services and frameworks
    • Architecture defined to support multiple versions of services and canonical data mocdels
  • Implementation
    • Development templates for integration patterns
    • Canonical data models designed early

In short, they’ve done a pretty massive integration project with SAP at the heart of their systems, and use TIBCO (and its bridge to SAP’s PI) to move towards a primarily event-driven publish-subscribe integration with all other systems.

2008 04 30 ESB
SOA
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TUCON: Architect’s Guide to SOA and BPM

I enjoyed Paul Brown’s seminar in Toronto a few weeks back, so I attended his session today on planning and architecture for SOA and BPM: how to define the services that we need and rationalize our data architecture in the face of managing end-to-end processes that span functional silos? Although many organizations have systems within those functional silos, the lines of communication — both person-to-person and system-to-system — always cross those silos in any real business process.

A lot of new skills are required in order to adopt SOA and BPM across the enterprise, from high-level executive support to a worker-level understanding of how this changes their day-to-day work. To make all of this work, there needs to be a total architecture perspective, including business processes, people, information and systems all coalescing around a common purpose. Business needs to re-engage with IT — in many organizations, they’ve been scared away for a long time — in order to get that business-IT collaboration happening.

Brown covered some of the same ground about separating out services, processes and presentation on as he did in the seminar, which I won’t repeat here but recommend that you check out the link above for more details.

He went on to discuss the TIBCO BPM.SOA execution model. First, develop the execution strategy for the entire program:

  • Develop vision and program roadmap
  • Define and implement organization and governance
  • Define and implement technical infrastructure and standards

Then, move on to solutions and operations for each project:

  • Analyze process and develop project roadmap
  • Design, build and deploy business process
  • Operate the business

This last point highlights the importance of setting and measuring goals for the project; you don’t know whether your project was successful until it’s been in operation a while and some measurements have been taken.

He had some pointers for how to get started with BPM and SOA:

  • Focus on business processes first: they’re the source of business value, and the glue that binds the people and systems together.
  • Separate service access mediation (access control, security, routing, distribution) from services.
  • Acknowledge different types of processes, both unmanaged and managed/orchestrated.
  • Separate processes and presentation.
  • Embrace total architecture with a cross-functional architecture team

He finished up with some case studies of organizations that have taken an architectural approach to rolling out SOA and BPM, and how this has made IT departments much more responsive to new business requirements. Findings by one organization included that they wanted to have more IT involvement in business processes in order to better align the business processes with the underlying services. For services that will be used across multiple systems, it’s critical to have an enterprise architecture group review these for reusability.

His final summary: keep the business process focus as the source of business process; BPM and SOA provide opportunities for improving business process; and the major challenges are organizational, not technical.

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2008 04 30 BPM
SOA
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TUCON: Design for People, Build for Constant Change

Connie Moore kicked off the Process Improvement track with the Forrester message "design for people, build for change" and dynamic business applications to a packed room. Check out my coverage of her keynote from the Forrester technology leadership conference last year for some background to this theme.

She discussed how methods of working are changing to put the worker at the center, with access to their information, processes, functions and other components as required: the modern information worker decides what he needs to complete any given task. In order to accommodate this, workers need dynamic applications that provide a highly-contextual dashboard/portal interface that might include client information, a calendar of events related to that client’s data, what-if tools for financial analysis, tools such as online enrolment for selling additional products to the client, and other information that’s related to what’s happening right now, not static information.

She sees BPM as going mainstream, and dragged out the hockey-stick growth predictions that all the big analysts love; I’m still seeing a lot of niche and departmental applications of BPM and think that these growth projections may only be met if the analysts continue to change the boundaries of what is considered to be BPM.

She covered several of the reasons for deploying BPM, and walked through some best practices for getting started:

  • Start with a major process that is causing pain: there will be less resistance to change, and easier support and funding. Typically, these are customer-facing, high-volume processes with lots of steps and handoffs. I’m also a big fan of this approach, since no one ever justified enterprise-wide deployment of BPM by doing a proof of concept with managing expense reports.
  • Look for quick hits, using an incremental approach and targeting 3-month release phases. I’m also completely behind this idea, and always recommend getting something simpler into production sooner, then adding on functionality and fine-tuning processes incrementally. I’ve found that BPM implementations lend themselves particularly well to Agile methodologies.
  • Design for real-world processes by doing effective process discovery: avoid interviewing the managers and reading the out-of-date procedures documentation in favor of talking with the people who really know how the process currently works and where the pain points are that need fixing. You don’t want to get too granular here, but use some process modeling tools to sketch things out and identify subprocesses and services. I’m going to expanding on this topic tomorrow in my breakout session, Using BPM to Prioritize Service Creation.
  • Link BPM and SOA. 71% of large companies surveyed by Forrester said that SOA was very important to their BPM efforts: the availability of services is what makes it possible to create and modify processes quickly and easily.
  • Keep the financials in mind. Link projects to the line of business rather than infrastructure, and don’t burden the first project with the infrastructure cost. Measure the results and ROI to use for future project justifications. For ROI calculations, she listed conservative estimates of saving 30-50% of clerical workers’ time, and 20-35% for knowledge workers, with transaction-focused processes seeing even greater benefit.
  • Develop a competency center from the start, including a cross-functional and collocated team of developers and business analysts, strong involvement from the vendor, and judicious use of systems integrations for specific targeted parts of the project. Forrester has seen a strong correlation between the existence of a competency center and measurable benefits in BPM projects.

She recently interviewed a financial services client of TIBCO’s, and they shared a few of their lessons learned:

  • Reengineer the process first, then pick the tool
  • Set the tools aside and focus on the process
  • Be prepared for staffing challenges
  • A competency center is critical

This was really a whirlwind tour of Forrester’s view of BPM, much too much information for a 50-minute presentation but lots of good stuff in here.

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2008 04 30 BPM
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TUCON: Product Announcements, including a Messaging Appliance

I decided to break this out into a separate post although it’s all the same keynote, since this is getting a bit long and this post has all the product goodies in it, including TIBCO’s first-ever hardware release in the form of a messaging appliance.

Matt Quinn, TIBCO’s SVP of engineering and technology strategies, discussed product directions and their focus areas for 2008/2009:

  • Event-driven computing everywhere
  • invest in neutrality and enterprise breadth
  • Continue to simplify and streamline user experience

A bit of this was covered in the GTM strategy yesterday, but he provided much more information on specific products:

  • TIBCO ONE, covering all user interfaces from design time to run time, is now under the auspices of a single user experience team. They’ll be adopting Microsoft’s Silverlight as an alternative to their own General Interface, and some functionality will soon be available on Silverlight as well as GI.
  • He announced Spotfire version 2.1 for creating interactive business mashups, and discussed the Spotfire Operations Analytics that Ahlberg showed us yesterday.
  • BusinessEvents version 3 is in the final testing stages, providing a fully distributed and fully clustered rules, CEP and streaming engine, apparently a first in the market.
  • Over the next year, a new product called ActiveSpaces will be introduced for distributing data and state management cache, and is design to handle massive volumes in real-time.
  • iProcess version 11 is now in final testing, with real-time worklist management based on events, and some improvements to installation, LDAP support.
  • Business Studio version 3 is also being released, now fully based on Eclipse as part of the TIBCO ONE’s initiatives, and now (wait for it) with full functionality of the older process modeler, including Eclipse-based forms design.
  • ActiveMatrix version 2 and BusinessWorks 5.6 have been shipping since December, with improved capabilities such as multiple projects per BW engine, and AMX support for BW. In the future, the BW user interface will become part of TIBCO ONE, new testing, development and performance tuning tools will be added, and new deployment options such as clustering will be supported.

There were other announcements about enterprise messaging, managed file transfer, service performance management and CIM; it all went by pretty fast but there will be more information over the next two days.

The big finale was the announcement of a messaging appliance, which they showed on stage to spontaneous applause: a dedicated piece of hardware with Rendezvous embedded within it for incredible performance characteristics, allowing multiple services to be replaced by this single appliance. The appliance doesn’t replace existing Rendezvous installations, but is intended to work with them. They’ll be shipping the first units in September; press release here.

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2008 04 30 TUCON Comments (0)

TUCON: Keynote

Before I start, I have to make a comment about the analyst dinner last night. I usually have a hard-and-fast rule about not blogging anything that happens when I have a drink in my hand, but I want to shout out to Heidi Bartlett for organizing the analyst summit yesterday and arranging for an amazing dinner last night. Not only were there excellent food and wines, but I sat with Christopher Ahlberg (Spotfire) and Bruce Silver so had excellent conversation as well about analytics and BPM.

The keynote session was hosted by Tom Laffey, EVP of products and technology — an engineer in the sea of sales and marketing people that’s typical for these events. After a brief intro, we heard from Vivek Ranadivé reprising his message from yesterday of Enterprise 1.0 being the mainframe era (1960-1980), Enterprise 2.0 being the database era (1980-2000) and Enterprise 3.0 being the event-driven era (2000-2020). Someone really needs to get the message to him, or whoever in marketing writes his stuff, that Enterprise 2.0 has a specific meaning in the current vernacular, and this isn’t it.

He does have a good message, which is that we’ve moved from having some of the information available in some places some of the time, to having all information available in real-time, on demand wherever we want it. In reality, we’re not there yet — my bank, one of the largest in Canada, still can’t post my banking transactions to the web in less than 24 hours — but infrastructure like TIBCO is going to help to make it happen by providing the mechanisms to tie systems together and perform complex event processing. He seeing the transition from the last 10 years to the next 10 years as being from static to dynamic, from database to SOA, from ERP to BPM, and from BI to predictive business. A modern-day event-driven architecture has an event-driven service bus as the backplane, kicking up events to the "event cloud" where they can be consumed and combined by analytics for visualization and analysis, rules to determine what to do with specific combinations of events, and BPM to take action on those decisions.

Ranadivé was followed by Kris Gopalakrishnan, CEO of Infosys (a major TIBCO integration partner), who talked about the changing markets, economies and demographics, and how enterprises need to change in order to respond to and anticipate the new requirements. A rapid consumerization of enterprise IT is happening, with greater demand for richer digital experiences both by internal enterprise workers and external customers. Process cut across systems and organizational boundaries, and need to be managed explicitly. IT systems need to be exposed as services that are aligned to business operating model in order to allow IT to respond quickly to business needs. Analytics need to be provided to more people within an enterprise to aid decision making, and there needs to be a convergence of BPM and BI to drive business optimization. He sees that the fundamental problem of information silos still exists: a point of view that I agree with, since I see it in client organizations all the time.

We then heard from Bob Beauchamp, CEO of BMC Software, to hear the customer viewpoint on IT process management using TIBCO’s products. The theme of the conference is "building bridges", with lots of pictures of the Golden Gate bridge and other famous bridges as slide backdrops, and analogies about building bridges between systems, and he used the Golden Gate bridge in another analogy about software: the bridge cost $24 million to build, and $54 million per year to maintain. This analogy is especially true of custom integration software, where in many cases you either effectively rewrite it constantly to keep up with other changes in your environment, or allow it to fall into disrepair.

In particular, however, he’s talking about how IT processes are the last to benefit from new technologies, since they’re too focused on providing these to (or testing them on :) ) other departments within an enterprise. BMC is using TIBCO ActiveMatrix and some of their own technology to bring functions together in order to enable more efficient IT processes, including service support such as asset configuration, service automation such as auditing and compliance, and service assurance such as predictive analytics and scheduling. He sees this as transformational in how IT is managed, and believes that it will have a huge impact in the years to come.

Next up was Anthony Abbattista, VP of technology solutions at Allstate insurance. They’re a huge company — 70,000 employees and 17 million customers — and always felt that they were unique enough that they had to build their own systems for everything, a mindset that they’re actively working to change now. With a 7×24 operation that allows customers direct access to their back office systems, they had some unique challenges in replacing their custom legacy systems and point-to-point integration with standardized reusable components that gives them greater agility. They’ve completely rearchitected for data hubs, service bus and a range of new technologies, and taking advantage of standards to help them move into a new generation of systems and business processes.

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2008 04 30 TUCON Comments (3)

TIBCO Analyst Summit: Partner and Channel Strategy

Dean Hidalgo, Director of Industry and Partner Marketing, discussed the partner network and how it ties into their overall strategy. As we heard in the sales strategy sessions, partnering is extremely important in certain regions and will be increasingly so as TIBCO pushes into new geographies that they can’t cover with their own people directly. The usual big system integration companies are here: HP, EDS, Infosys, Wipro, Accenture, Deloitte and CGEY to name a few.

He also discussed their vertical marketing activities, providing tools that allow the sales teams to present vertical value propositions (VVP) — matching the functionality of TIBCO’s products to the vertical business requirements — without having vertical products. Salesware, not software. TIBCO doesn’t back down from the idea that they sell infrastructure, not vertical packaged applications, although these VVPs include "frameworks" (really unsupported templates) of pre-configured rules, policies, KPIs, dashboards and processes that they throw in for a customer to use as a starting point. These VVPs are based on successful real-world implementations, like their predictive customer interaction management that is based on what was actually implemented at one of their large retail banking customers, advanced order fulfillment for telco, dynamic claims management for insurance, predictive STP for securities, point-of-sale monitoring for retail, supply chain optimization for manufacturing and retail, and disruption management for airlines and logistics.

There was a lot of discussion in the room about the value of the VVPs: some analysts felt that this didn’t go far enough, and that TIBCO needs to put out some vertical applications in order to compete, but several of us (including me) feel that this type of vertical marketing is extremely valuable by allowing an infrastructure company to sell to business people without moving out of their sweet spot. If a customer doesn’t look closely at this, however, they might think that these are supported products rather than unsupported templates. This is likely to be exacerbated by their marketing videos that refer to (for example) "TIBCO’s airline disruption management system" — if seen in isolation, or presented by a salesperson who didn’t make that distinction clear, it would be pretty easy to make that mistake.

Abhishek, AVP and head of BPM-EAI practice at Infosys, briefed us on Infosys, their primary verticals and their horizontal technology specializations. They have a significant TIBCO practice, which has allowed them to build reusable frameworks and tools that accelerate their TIBCO-based projects with clients. I’m all for reusability, but I’ve seen some pretty disastrous frameworks built on other products by other systems integrators, and I’m wary about the maintainability and weight of any third-party framework: if you’re looking at something like this, be sure to check out issues like whether it’s productized or considered custom code, the process for upgrading the underlying platform, e.g., TIBCO, and the ability to use the underlying platform features directly for design and administration. In addition to frameworks and systems integration, Infosys is also an engineering partner of TIBCO, developing and supporting various application and technology adapters.

We were supposed to finish at 4:30, but the only thing that ended at 4:30 sharp was our internet connectivity. To be fair, TIBCO provided hard-wired connectivity and power to each table in the analyst briefing room throughout the day, and they did get the internet access turned back on about 10 minutes later so that I could publish this last post before heading to the solutions showcase. The stories that I heard about the hotel’s extortionate cost for wifi doesn’t bode well for intraday posting the rest of the week, in spite of the BPM product marketing manager’s promise to have someone follow me around with a wireless router. :)

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2008 04 29 TUCON Comments (0)

TIBCO Analyst Summit: Spotfire

Christopher Ahlberg, founder of Spotfire and now president of TIBCO’s Spotfire division, discussed Spotfire’s capabilities and what’s been done with integrating Spotfire into other TIBCO products.

Timely insights — the right information at the right time — is a competitive differentiator for most businesses, and classic business intelligence just doesn’t cut it in many cases. Consumer applications like Google Finance are raising the bar for dynamic visualization techniques, although most of them are fairly inflexible when it comes to viewing or comparing specific data in which you’re interested. In other words, we want the data selection and aggregation capabilities of our enterprise systems, and the visualization capabilities of consumer web applications. Ahlberg sees a number of disruptive BI technologies transforming the platform — in-memory processes, interactive visualization, participatory architecture, mashups — and starting to be able to link to the event-driven world of classic TIBCO.

He did a demo of copying and pasting the contents of a spreadsheet directly into Spotfire, which automatically used the column headers as metadata and created a scatterplot. He filtered and colored the chart dynamically, set thresholds and played around with the data to show what could be extracted from it, then showed a pre-built dashboard of charts that still allowed quite a bit of interactivity in terms of filtering and other view parameters. He also showed a mashup between Spotfire and Microsoft Virtual Earth that allowed a subset of the data to be selected in Spotfire, causing a shortest route between the geographic location corresponding to the data points to be plotted on Virtual Earth.

This puts a much more configurable face on standard analytics, not just in display parameters but also in area like selecting the dimensions to be compared on the fly rather than having them pre-defined in OLAP cubes. Since TIBCO is focused on real-time event processing, the logical step is to see how those events can be visualized in Spotfire: instead of just raising an alert to someone, give them a view of the analytical context behind the alert that makes it easier to close the loop on problem resolution. They’ve packaged this as Spotfire Operations Analytics, which fits most closely into a LEAN Six Sigma manufacturing environment.

There’s a session on Thursday about BPM with analytics which I’ll likely attend to see what they’re doing in that area.

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2008 04 29 BI
TUCON Comments (1)

TIBCO Analyst Summit: Go To Market Strategy

Ram Menon, EVP of Marketing and Product Strategy, discussed the go to market strategy for some of the opportunities that Murray Rode identified earlier.

One opportunity for growth is in simplification, in four major areas:

  • Improved focus on who they are targeting in the sales process, based on their experience of who is most likely to buy and through deepening their penetration within existing customers.
  • Creation of horizontal bundles that simplify purchasing for IT buyers: SOA starter edition, SOA composite apps, SOA integration, and SOA governance.
  • Focus on differentiated vertical value propositions that allow a business buyer to match TIBCO’s capabilities to their specific business needs.
  • Improved user interface and usability in the form of TIBCO ONE for deployment and management, all based on a common Eclipse framework and some of the technology that they acquired with General Interface.

They have a three core SOA messages to the market:

  • Best in class ESB
  • SOA service management
  • Extreme messaging, namely top performance

They also have some BPM-related themes:

  • Advanced order fulfillment (vertical)
  • Dynamic claims management (vertical)
  • Unify BPM and SOA: cross-selling BPM to existing SOA customers

There were two business optimization themes, including a supply chain management vertical, but that went by too fast for me.

Bruce Silver and another analyst later asked about the vertical solutions, and it appears that this is more about marketing and advertising than any verticalization of a product or service offering.

Menon discussed some of the specifics of their expansion into new geographies — including up-to-date localized product materials and websites — and new partner models.

TIBCOmmunity logoThey’ve made a big push for visibility in the market over the last two years, including such efforts as Greg the Architect videos on YouTube, resulting in a much greater chance of TIBCO’s name appearing whenever equivalent IBM and Oracle products are mentioned. They’re also launching TIBCOmmunity, a social network for their customers, although the site’s not up yet so there’s no details on what it will include.

He was followed by two of the VPs of Sales — Robin Gilthorpe for the Americas and Tony Harris for Asia-Pacific — and EVP of Sales Murat Sonmez standing in for the VP for EMEA, each discussing the specifics of their region.

A question came up at the end asking about who they’re selling to within organizations, and (not surprisingly) almost all SOA sales are to IT, whereas BPM is sometimes being sold to business management. TIBCO has a legacy of selling to IT, and I suspect that much of the sales force is most comfortable making the technical sale. Selling to business takes a slightly different set of skills, which makes me curious if they’re specifically recruiting business-oriented salespeople in their current sales force expansion.

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2008 04 29 TUCON Comments (2)

TIBCO Analyst Summit: Corporate Vision

Next up was Vivek Ranadivé, CEO, with a summary of where the company came from and some vision for the future: Enterprise 3.0 (yes, he actually said that), focused on event-driven SOA, predictive analytics and the business processes that use them.

He sees their superior technology as key, but feel that customers also gravitate to them because of their neutrality: a direct dig at IBM — who he believes is both not neutral and has inferior point-to-point event technology — and at BEA being acquired by Oracle (although rumors continue to fly in the industry about who is going to acquire TIBCO, and when).

Although this session was billed as "strategy and vision to remain a leader in the current market of consolidation and competitive pressures", I didn’t hear a lot about how they plan to do that, except for a "we’ll sell more because we’re better" sort of statement.

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2008 04 29 TUCON Comments (0)

TIBCO Analyst Summit: Corporate and Financial Overview

TIBCO’s having their first ever analyst summit in the day before the TUCON user conference starts, covering both business strategy and product announcements.

First up was Murray Rode, CFO, with a company overview and their position in the market. Their key market segments are SOA and BPM, as we know, but also business optimization (rules + analytics) based in part on the acquisition of Spotfire a year ago. They see their differentiators as their neutral platform, mission critical engineering and being event-driven and bus-based. They also see "infrastructure becoming the essential part of the architecture" and that companies are using TIBCO to "create apps from infrastructure". A key catchphrase summing up what their products can do is "simpler connectivity, more complete automation".

Their fiscal year 2007 revenue was $577M, I was surprised to hear that 50-55% of their revenue is from services, which includes both maintenance and professional services, in spite of a strong partner channel that presumably is also generated significant professional services revenue based on TIBCO products. Geographically, about 50% of the revenue is from the Americas, 40% EMEA and 10% Asia-Pacific. Financial services is their largest vertical at 25%, with telecommunications at 10-15%. They’re continuing to expand their sales force from the current 170 to 190-200, with each quota-carrying salesperson generating about $2.2M in licence revenue annually, and in addition to growing the sales force, they intend to continue expanding through new geography exploration, acquisitions and partner channels.

BPM is 11% of revenue, business optimization is 25%, and the remainder is SOA, although it’s difficult to separate out in many of the larger deals that may be driven by BPM without the licence revenue necessarily reflecting the importance.

Their growth strategy, in summary, is to build on pure-play leadership and neutrality, direct sales force expansion for broader coverage, fully penetrate Global 2000 before expanding to mid-market, continue Spotfire focus with increased cross-selling, and new geographies and indirect channels.

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2008 04 29 TUCON Comments (0)

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2008 04 24 BPM Comments (0)

Architecture & Process: Pat Cappelaere

For my last session — I have to leave for the airport around the time that the roundtables start — I sat in on Pat Cappelaere of Vightel discussing workflows, Identity 2.0 and delegated authority using REST.

He showed how lightweight protocols like ATOM — rather than SOAP — can be used to allow the quick mashup of information in near real time. He spent quite a bit of time on the advantages of a RESTful approach (summary: it’s easier), and the nature of the basic commands (post, get, put, delete) for managing web-based resources.

Where identity comes into all this is that some resources that might contribute to a mashup could be behind some type of access control, and the source system can’t manage the identities of all of the people who might want to access the end product. Identity 2.0 allows for the delegation of authentication to a trusted provider, i.e., using your OpenID (from Yahoo or other providers) on other sites instead of creating a user account on that site directly. That looks after basic authentication, but there also needs to be some authorization or pre-approval of transactions, which is what OAuth has been created for.

He’s using the term workflow to mean (I believe) the steps to assemble and process various resources and services into a web application: a service orchestration of various resources on the web using lightweight protocols. To implement this, they’ve created a RESTful version of the workflow bindings defined by WfMC as WfXML.

This was interesting, but I’m not at all clear what it was doing at this conference.

2008 04 23 Architecture&Process
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Architecture & Process: Doug Reynolds

Doug Reynolds of AgilityPlus Solutions presented on critical success factors in a BPM implementation. I’ve known Doug a long time — back in 2000 when he was at Meta Software and I was at FileNet — and have had a lot of discussions with him over the years about the BPM implementations that we’ve seen, both the successes and the failures.

He talked about how BPM is similar to other performance improvement initiatives, but that there’s some key differences, too. Any successful BPM project has several facets: solution, project management and change management. Breaking the solution component down further, it includes people, process and technology. He feels that process is the place to start with any solution, since people and technology will need to meet the needs of the process.

In order to talk about success factors, it’s important to look at why projects fail. With IT projects, we have a lot of failures to choose from for examination, since various analyst sources report failure levels of up to 70% in IT projects. In many cases, projects fail because of poor requirements or ill-defined scope; in BPM projects, the business process analysis drives the requirements, which in turn drive the solution, highlighting the critical nature of business process analysis.

He highlighted eight signs of a healthy BPM implementation, using the word semiotic as a mnemonic:

  • Stability. The system must be stable so that the business is able to rely on its availability.
  • Exploitation. You need to exploit the technology — put it to work and continually improve your usage of it — in order to get the benefit. Buying a system that was very successful for someone else doesn’t automatically confer their level of success onto you.
  • Management and leadership. You need executive sponsorship with vision and direction, but also have to consider the impact on middle management, who are heavily affected by changing processes in terms of how they manage their workforce.
  • Inertia. You need to actively change the way people work, or they’ll keep doing things the old way with the new system.
  • Ownership. Ownership of the solution needs to stay with the business, not transfer to IT, in order to have the focus stay on benefit rather than capability.
  • Transparency. Some aspects of work may appear to be less transparent — e.g., you can’t tell how much work there is to do by walking around and looking at the piles of paper — but the metrics gathered by a BPMS actually provide much more information than manual methods. This "Big Brother" view of individual performance can be threatening to some people, and their perceptions may need to be managed.
  • Integration. Integration with other systems can be a huge contributor to the benefits by facilitating automation and decoupling process from data and functional services. However, this can be too complex and cause project delays if too much integration is attempted at once. I completely agree with this, and usually advocate getting something simpler in production sooner, then adding in the integration bits as you go along.
  • Change management. Change management is key to bringing people, process and technology together successfully, and needs to be active throughout a project, not as a last-minute task just before deployment.

Doug encouraged interaction throughout the presentation by asking us to identify which two of these eight are the most foundational, and eventually identified his two foundational picks as exploitation and inertia: using the system the best way possible, and ensuring that change happens, are two things that he often sees missing in less-than-successful implementations, and are required before the rest of the things can occur.

2008 04 23 Architecture&Process
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Architecture & Process: Jaakko Riihinen

Jaakko Riihinen, head of enterprise architecture for Nokia Siemens Networks, spoke about business process architecture: a deep dive into the details of one set of models that they use in their EA efforts. He started with definitions of architecture, process and abstract modeling, reinforcing that a presentation view of a model is just a view, not the entire model. In his definition of architecture, I especially like the analogy that he made of architecture being the external energy that keeps systems within an organization from evolving into chaos. In general, architectures tend to satisfy nonfunctional requirements, such as optimization of system economics.

One of the issues in modeling processes is the different types of models that may be used in different departments, and the ultimate goal is to have a set of process models for the entire organization rather than having them be constructed piecemeal. He characterizes processes in three types: transactional, creative (team collaboration on work product), and community (dynamic, self-organizing); the modeling method that is the focus of this presentation addresses transactional processes.

He shows three elements of their process architecture:

  • A process integration model, showing the high-level view of how processes and work products interact. This is the functional design of the process architecture.
  • A process behavior model, which is a standard swimlane process model that shows the detailed view of one of the process nodes from the process integration model. It’s different from BPMN in that the work products are shown within the sequence flow rather than attached as artifacts since they are focused on linking the activities closely to what triggers them and what they produce.
  • Work instructions for performing one activity in a process.

Other characteristics of a process are also modeled:

  • Process instantiations, which can be scheduled or event-driven; where event-driven can be based on work product (e.g., inbound document) or an explicit event (e.g., timeout).
  • Execution constraints, either a free-running schedule (activities execute as soon as inputs are available) or an imposed schedule (e.g., periodic reporting)

The process integration model shows the instantiation methods for each process, as well as showing how multiple processes can provide input to another process in a variety of ways, including both informational and triggering.

All of this provides the notational background to discuss the real issue: normalization of process models and process architecture, using methods derived from classic systems methodologies such as control system theory and critical path analysis. The benefits of normalization include unambiguous definitions that are easier to understand, and better recognition and reuse of process patterns, but the real benefit is that this turns process architecture from an art to a science. There are four basic rules for process architecture normalization:

  • Structural integrity: closing alternative paths within parallel paths, and closing parallel paths within alternative paths (these are basic topology constraints from graph theory, and would be enforced by most process modeling tools anyway)
  • Functional cohesion: no disconnected activities
  • Temporal cohesion: no synchronous processing by activities outside the process (which implies that you would not use the BPMN method of separate pools for separate organizations since messaging between pools would not be allowed, but would consider that separate organization’s activities to be part of the process if your internal process needs to wait for a response from the other organization before continuing the process)
  • Modularity: activities or roles having different cardinalities belong to separate processes (this helps to determine the boundaries between processes, e.g., sets of activities that pertain to the entire company are usually in separate processes from those for individual business units), variance at the process level (when alternative paths in a process become sufficiently complex or encompass most of the process, create two variants of the process), variance at the integration model level, deployment details, process components (subprocesses shared between processes)

Determining the boundaries of a single process may involve combining what are considered to be separate processes into one: we discussed the example of employee onboarding, which involves several departments but is really a single process. Looking at the triggers for activities and processes also helps to determine the boundaries: activities that asynchronously create work products that are consumed by other activities are usually in a separate process, for example, as are activities that are performed on different schedules.

They’re using ARIS, and have configured their own metamodel for the process integration model and behavior model. Riihinen is also interested in developing automated methods for normalizing process models.

His slides are incredibly dense with information, and fascinating, so I suggest that you check them out for more details on all of this. In particular, check out the slides that show examples of the four process normalization rules.

As you can tell by the above URL, the conference is using Slideshare to publish (but not allow downloads of) all presentations here.

2008 04 23 Architecture&Process
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Architecture & Process: Robert Pillar

The first breakout session of the day was on connecting BPM, SOA and EA for enterprise transformation, with Robert Pillar of Microsoft. He’s talking about how compliance is the key driver to the coalition of BPM, SOA and EA, but that the coalition starts with holistic collaboration. There are barriers to this:

  • Organizational barriers: IT organizations and silos between EA, SOA and BPM groups
  • Cultural barriers: lack of understanding the business value, lack of understanding the concepts, and old-style mentality
  • Political barriers: resistance to change
  • Collaboration barriers: resistance to meetings and collaboration

Risks and benefits must be measured.

At this point, someone in the audience spoke up and said "we understand all this, can you just skip ahead to any solutions to these issues that you have to present?" Incredibly rude, and really put the speaker on the spot, but he had a point.

He had a summary slide on why to choose SOA:

  • It offers a focus on business processes and goals: supports customer centric view of the business, allows design of solutions that keep requirement changes (agility) in mind
  • It offers an iterative and incremental approach following EA and BPM initiatives: make change happen over time, allow employees learn about the concept of services
  • It offers a means to reap the benefits of existing investments on technology: reuse IT resources, focus on business problems without being entangled in the technology

He sees EA and BPM as leading us to SOA, which is a valid point: if you do EA and BPM, you’ll definitely start to do SOA. However, I see many organizations starting with SOA in the absence of either EA or BPM.

2008 04 23 Architecture&Process
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Architecture & Process keynote: Tom Koulopoulos

The afternoon keynote was by Tom Koulopoulos, the well-known and well-respected consultant who founded Delphi Group and is currently also at Babson College’s think tank on business innovation. He’s worked extensively in the business process/knowledge management space, so I’ve tracked his excellent work and writings for years. He spoke to us today about innovation.

Innovation is change that creates value.

Innovation and invention are separate concepts. We’re surrounded by invention, and we have a hard time picking out innovation from the noise created by the relentless invention of (often useless) gadgets. Is this invention for the sake of invention, as Koulopoulos says, or is this the necessary process for eventually refining out a few good ideas?

Innovation is the collaboration between an idea and the marketplace. The market will not be able to predict the effect of true innovation, since there’s no context for understanding that: consider that the most extreme, ambitious prediction for the world market for mobile phones was 50 million handsets, a number that’s off by two orders of magnitude today.

Innovation really happens when behaviors start to change. It’s a process, it’s not about an invention. It’s an ecosystem where good ideas are captured, inventoried and reused to help them come to fruition. Today, many of the innovations are in business models, not the product or service.

Koulopoulos had seven lessons of innovation:

  1. It’s about the process, not the product.
  2. Build an innovation competency. You have to build a competency in innovation within your organization in order to encourage, support and reward it. Many organizations institutionalize the idea of being the incumbent rather than look for ways to find innovation, putting up both cultural and logistical barriers.
  3. Separate the seeds from the weeds. You need to allow some ideas to grow in order to see which they are and allow for disruption to occur, but at some point you need to be able to tell the difference.
  4. Fail fast. Some portion of your time needs to be spent on activities where there is no expectation of success, since it gives you the breathing room for serendipitous innovation.
  5. Build for the unknown. Sometimes an innovation intended for one application becomes a success for something completely different, but sometimes it’s just a complete leap of faith to build something for an environment that’s impossible to assess until you get there.
  6. Challenge the conventional. New companies, or those moving into a new field, are often more innovative than those who are existing experts in the field. Hoover couldn’t have invented the Roomba.
  7. Abandon success. If you’re in a position of strength, take a risk and do something completely different that hasn’t been done before.

He told how his son uses the interactive toy builder on lego.com, collaboratively creating toys online with other site visitors, and how there has been a fundamental shift from wanting to protect our ideas to wanting to share our ideas. Not just with today’s kids, either: science methodology, as indicated by trends in Nobel prize winners over the past century, is shifting from individual effort to team effort.

He closed with a quote from Morpheus in The Matrix: "I didn’t say it would be easy Neo. I just said it would be the truth." So it is with innovation.

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2008 04 22 Architecture&Process Comments (0)

Architecture & Process: Rob Cloutier

The disadvantage of a small conference is that speakers tend to drop out more frequently than you’ll find in large conferences, and this afternoon my first choice didn’t show. However, it had been a tough choice in any case, so I was happy to attend the session with Rob Cloutier of Stevens Institute of Technology on patterns in enterprise architecture.

The analysis of patterns has been around along time in mathematics and engineering, but they’re often difficult to capture and reuse in real life. There are some real business drivers for enterprise architecture patterns: much of the knowledge about systems is still gathered through artifacts, not patterns, making it difficult to reuse on other projects. It also tends to control complexity, since systems are based on standard patterns, and creates a common syntax and understanding for discussing projects. This has the impact of reducing risk, since the patterns are well understood.

Patterns are not created, they’re mined from successful projects by determining the elements contributing to the success of the projects.

In an enterprise architecture sense, there’s the issue of the level of these patterns; Cloutier’s premise is that you define and use patterns relative to your scope within the architecture, so may be a system architecture pattern. He laid out a topology of patterns relative to the views within the Zachman framework: organization, business and mission patterns at the contextual/scope level; structure, role, requirements, activities and system processes at the conceptual/enterprise model level, system analysis, system design, system test, software architecture, software analysis, software requirements, hardware requirements, hardware design and operational patterns at the logical/system model level, and so on. He focused primarily on the five patterns in the enterprise model level.

He walked through an example with use cases, generalizing the purchase of a specific item to the purchase of any product: the actors, functions and data flow can be generalized, then adapted to any similar system or process by changing the names and dropping the pieces that aren’t relevant. He listed the characteristics of a pattern that need to be documented, and pointed out that it’s critical to model interfaces.

He showed the analysis that he had done of multiple command-and-control systems to create a command-and-control pattern containing four basic steps in an IDEF model — plan, detect, control and act — with the input, outputs, strategy and resources for each step. In fact, each of those steps was itself a pattern that could be used independently.

He had an interesting analogy of the electricity and distribution system as a service-oriented architecture: you can plug in a new device without notifying the provider, you might be served by multiple electricity producers without knowing, your usage is metered for your service provider to bill you for the usage, and the details of how electricity is generated is generally not known to you.

Like any enterprise architecture initiative, the development of EA patterns is often considered overhead in organizations, so may never be done. You have to take the time up front to discover and document the pattern so that it can be reused later; it’s at the first point of reuse where you start to save money, and subsequent reuses where it really starts to pay off. Although many examples of software patterns exist, enterprise architecture patterns are much rarer: Cloutier is researching the creation of an EA pattern repository in his work at Stevens Institute of Technology. Ultimately, the general availability of enterprise architecture patterns that have been created by others — a formalization of best practices — is where the real benefits lie, and can help to foster the acceptance of EA in more organizations.

2008 04 22 Architecture&Process
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