I’ll be speaking on a webinar this Wednesday at noon Eastern time about how business and IT really need to work together in order to make BPM projects happen: this isn’t truly end-user computing in anything more than simple human-centric workflows. It’s sponsored by Active Endpoints, and their product manager will also be talking a bit about their ActiveVOS product.
You can register here.
I recently ran up against the question of when to use a content/document management system and when to use a wiki for content inside an organization. I had some thoughts of my own on the subject, my customer had some other thoughts, I went out the Twitterverse for advice, and had an interesting dinner discussion at home to see what others had to say. The results were interesting.
I ended up having a phone call with David Bressler, and thanks to Theo Priestley I shared some tweets with Chris Bennetts-Cash and Andrew Smith, after which Andrew wrote a blog post that summed it up as follows:
Use a wiki for pure content that requires no level of security and maximum levels of accessibility. Use a document management / ECM system for everything else.
Although I come from a more traditional ECM environment, I tend towards a definition coming from the other direction, although likely with a similar effect: use wikis for all internal content by default, unless specific factors dictate the use of ECM. If you think about it, much internal content follows some basic patterns:
There’s a ton of content sitting out there right now on companies’ shared network drives that follow exactly that pattern: documents and spreadsheets that are regularly updated by multiple authors for things such as project status, departmental administration, meeting agendas and even collaborative design documents. Some of that content needs to have the edit permissions restricted to a smaller group, but still follows the same general characteristics, such as procedures and support documents.
There are, of course, many types of content that does need the more industrial-strength management capabilities of an ECM system, and here’s the list that I came up with:
I fully expect some of this second list to start to emerge as wiki functionality over the near term, and although it’s not clear that ECM and wikis will ever merge as a concept (much less within a single product platform), there’s going to start to be a lot more overlap. There’s also hybrid concepts, such as having a wiki page link to a document in an ECM system so that collaborative discussion can take place on the wiki, then changes made through the strict ECM environment; or situations where content starts collaboratively in a wiki, then needs to be converted to a document and stored in ECM when it reaches a certain point where ECM functionality is required. Lots of grey areas, in any case.
If you’re using both ECM and wikis internally, I suggest that you start with the default position of everything going into wikis, then work back from there using the second checklist to figure out what needs to go into ECM instead. Just please don’t leave it out there on the shared drives, because unless you have enterprise search, no one is ever going to find those documents when they need them.
Via Mashable, I discovered a cool little gadget this morning: Retaggr, which allows me to create a profile page and badge with all my social media links, then embed it on my blog or website:
You can click on the links within it to show the content from those sites directly within the badge, or click through to the whole profile page. The badge here updates when I update my profile on Retaggr. I can also create my own custom badge, although the minimum width is wider than my current sidebar so I can’t put one there.
I’ve already added it to the contact page on my website and the About Me page on this blog in place of the manually-maintained lists of contact information on those pages.
I finally found time to watch the replay of the webinar that I missed earlier this week featuring Mike Gotta of the Burton Group on enterprise social networking. He started with an evolution of enterprise social networks, beginning with email: although fragmented and a highly flawed model, that’s how many people and organizations interacted for social/community (i.e., non-transactional) purposes. From there, online communities evolved, but that tended to result in stovepiped communities where the relationships spanned community boundaries; even inside companies, participation often fails to cross departmental boundaries. Social networking sites within enterprises try to create borderless participation: greater transparency and visibility of information by having a place where people can built their social graph through structures such as online profiles and collaboration tools.
Some business drivers for enterprise social networking have been with us a long time: connecting with other people globally to share information and collaborate, and enable crowdsourcing for bottom-up innovation. Others, however are relatively new: addressing generational shifts in how people work and interact online, and creating new ways to learn through social networking.
Unfortunately, many enterprise social networking projects are considered discretionary, so are suffering from budget cuts in today’s economic environment. To get approval for them now, you need to make it relevant to the business, showing how social networking can have an ROI through improved quality and efficiency of work. Since social networking spans multiple levels and departments within an enterprise, sponsors may come from a number of different areas and include some of the up-and-coming younger management.
Gotta had some interesting thoughts on how corporate culture and leadership affects adoption, as well as the need for governance and best practices for participation. Many parts of an organization can feel threatened by employee self-service: if you can update a wiki yourself, someone in IT support no longer has that function to help justify their job. There’s also a control issue, where top-down command-and-control style organizations have a difficult time letting go and allowing anyone within the organization to see certain information, much less make updates to it. They should all take a hard look at what Avenue A|Razorfish has been doing for more than 2 years: making their entire intranet one big wiki that anyone can edit. I still have customers that want to track the time that it takes for employees to go to the bathroom; I really can’t see them ready to take some of these steps yet, although we all have to start somewhere.
There’s a big HR component to enterprise social networking: there’s information that might be on the social sites that would have traditionally be locked inside HR’s files (such as each person’s skills and interests). Instead of feeling threatened by social networking inside the enterprise, HR should be taking a strategic role and seeing this as an opportunity to better engage with employees as well as provide better talent management and professional development.
He also had some excellent pointers on encouraging adoption, discussing how different organizations have different ways to do that: some focused on the early adopters and their behaviors, some on top-down participation, and some on pushing certain content types. He noted that there’s no right way to do this, but each organization has to try things out and respond to the ones that work. It’s great to leverage people’s acceptance and knowledge of consumer sites like Facebook, although that message is diluted if your enterprise blocks access to Facebook while holding it up as an example of social networking.
Although it seems retro, communities can be one way to help people get started co-creating with social networking, assuming that they’re embedded within the social networking infrastructure: the ability to create communities of interest or ad hoc groups at the grassroots level shows people that social networking is a platform on which to build communication, not just a specific application.
The bottom line is that social networks enable more adaptive organizations, through transparency of knowledge sharing, improved collaboration, and better use of the internal talent pool.
We also heard from Brian Kellner of NewsGator (the webinar sponsor) about some customer success stories: large and small enterprises, and both internal and external-facing networks. Check out the webinar for more details on the specific case studies, as well as his tips for successful enterprise social networking; I found the most critical to be understanding the cost of not acting now (which is common to most initiatives).
There was a great Q&A at the end, covering a variety of subjects:
For those of you in the US, have a great long Memorial Day weekend!
Neil Ward-Dutton gave a webinar this morning about delivering on the promise of BPM: how we have to get past the vision of BPM as model-driven development for rapid application delivery, and focus on the bigger picture of enabling continuous process improvement through technology use. There are a lot of challenges when you move past departmental solutions and start rolling out BPM company-wide: you need to scale communication, collaboration, change management and governance to match your deployment.
He started with the key drivers for large-scale business process improvement: globalization, such that your customers, partners and competition can come from anywhere; transparency in terms of regulations and open competition; and smart, connected markets where you need to engage your customers in the online world. Both business and IT recognize the need for flexibility, innovation, value and differentiation in order to exist in this changing world. BPM is important to this because it’s not just about model-driven development, and about building applications faster: it’s about creating a better way to manage your business and its key processes.
It’s this combination of management philosophy, efficiency optimization methods and technology that makes it powerful, and allows you to improve operational efficiency, support innovation, and enjoy flexibility in your business model. Process also creates a common language for business and IT to collaborate, and we’re seeing that reflected in the BPM tools that allow business and IT to each have their own perspective on a shared process model. He made an excellent point that just using a process-focused toolset doesn’t give you a true agile process improvement environment: it just gives you a fast waterfall method. You really need to have model-driven process management in order to have that unbroken cycle of exploring/measuring, defining and executing/monitoring your processes.
I loved the phrase on one of his slides on scaling communication and collaboration – “You can’t scale a BPM initiative if you rely on a small ‘priesthood’ to carry out Six Sigma ceremonies” – with his point being that you have to have the culture of process innovation exist throughout your organization. He also pointed out that you have to be able to manage process model assets effectively in order to be able to locate and reuse models as required: something that requires a proper model repository, not a collection of files out on a shared network drive somewhere.
We also heard from Brandon Baxter of Lombardi (who sponsored the webinar) about how they address model-driven development in Teamworks, where all authors work in a single shared environment. In addition to providing tools for both business analysts and IT, they provide the ability to have “playbacks” to show the current state of the process to people who aren’t involved directly in the process modeling. He described a situation where they took a huge requirements document and a tsunami of Visio diagrams from a client, did an initial version in Teamworks, then did a playback to the group that provided the requirements: not surprisingly, the process wasn’t at all what they wanted, even though it was what they asked for. I see this all the time with clients, and push for an early prototype/playback as soon as possible in order to validate the requirements and process flows, but sometimes it’s hard for them to believe that all those requirements that they spent time gathering, writing and approving aren’t really the best way to go about developing their processes.
He also spent some time talking about their asset repository; although I haven’t done an in-depth review of Teamworks for a while, I recall that it’s very robust. Maybe I’m so steeped in the concepts of the value of content management that management of process assets seems like a no-brainer to me: any business content (including process models) that has any value should be in some sort of controlled environment that allows it to be secured (if necessary), versioned, and easily found and reused.
There was a good Q&A at the end, including some on executable versus non-executable models, and the value of importing non-executable models into a BPMS. Interchange formats for exchanging models between pure modeling tools and executable BPM tools are necessary, but there a whole lot of the process that will likely not be imported since it’s not executable, as well as a lot of enrichment that needs to be done to the processes once they’re in the BPMS. Due to both of these factors, round-tripping often is not possible between the modeling and execution environments. I had a conversation with a customer on exactly this issue yesterday; to those who haven’t worked with these systems, it’s hard to grasp why you can’t just round-trip the models (answer: the modeling environment may not support the execution enrichment) or why you would ever need to change a model in the execution environment rather than do it in the modeling environment and re-import (answer: agility).
The webinar was at a fairly basic level, but provided some great information for those who are still new to BPM. In a survey taken during the webinar, it looked as if a majority of the people were either gathering information or just getting started. Baxter’s part was mostly unique to Lombardi’s product, although many of the other BPM products out there have a similar set of features.
I accessed the live version of the webinar here, but I’m not sure if the replay will be there as well.
I’ll be at the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston next month as part of their bloggers’ network. If you plan to attend, you can click the badge at the left for 30% off your registration, or to receive a free pavilion pass.
I am not compensated in any way if you click through for this, although I am receiving a free press pass to attend the conference (but paying my own travel expenses hence not staying at the hideously overpriced conference hotel).
I’m looking forward to seeing everyone there again this year.
I had a request from a reader for a list explaining the various acronyms that I use in these blog posts, and around BPM in general. I’m sure that there are several lists like this, but I’ve pulled together a starting list and have opened it up by creating it in a Google spreadsheet that anyone can edit.
Please go ahead and edit the Google spreadsheet to add your own here, or to make any corrections to the list. I reserve the right to edit or delete any inappropriate entries.
Robert Shapiro spoke on a webinar today about BPMN 2.0, including some of the history of how BPMN got to this point, changes and new features from the previous version and the challenges that those may create, the need for portability and conformance, and an update on XPDL 2.2. The webinar was hosted by the Workflow Management Coalition, where Shapiro chairs the conformance working group.
He started out with how WPDL started as an interchange format in the mid-90’s, then became XPDL 1.0 around 2001, around the time that the BPMN 1.0 standard was being kicked off. For those of you not up on your standards, XPDL is an interchange format (i.e., the file format) and BPMN prior to version 2.0 is a notation format (i.e., the visual representation); since BPMN didn’t include an interchange format, XPDL was updated to provide serialization of all BPMN elements.
With BPMN 2.0, serialization is being added to the BPMN standard, as well as many other new components including formalization of execution semantics and the definition of choreography model. In particular, there are significant changes to conformance, swimlanes and pools, data objects, subprocesses, and events; Shapiro walked through each of these in detail. I like some of the changes to events, such as the distinction between boundary and regular intermediate events, as well as the concept of interrupting and non-interrupting events. This makes for a more complex set of events, but much more representative.
Bruce Silver, who has been involved in the development of BPMN 2.0, wrote recently on what he thinks is missing from BPMN 2.0; definitely worth a read for some of what might be coming up in future versions (if Bruce has his way).
One key thing that is emerging, both as part of the standard and in practice, is portability conformance: one of the main reasons for these standards is to be able to move process models from one modeling tool to another without loss of information. This led to a discussion about BPEL, and how BPMN is not just for BPEL, or even just for executable processes. BPEL doesn’t fully support BPMN: there are things that you can model in BPMN that will be lost if you serialize to BPEL, since BPEL is intended as a web service orchestration language. For business analysts modeling processes – especially non-executable processes – a more complete serialization is critical.
In case you’re wondering about BPDM, which was originally intended to be the serialization format for BPMN, it appears to have become too much of an academic exercise and not enough about solving the practical serialization problem at hand. Even as serialization is built into BPMN 2.0 and beyond, XPDL will likely remain a key interchange format because of the existing base of XPDL support by a number of BPM and BPA vendors. Nonetheless, XPDL will need to work at remaining relevant to the BPM market in the world of BPEL and BPMN, although it is likely to remain as a supported standard for years to come even if the BPMN 2.0 serialization standard is picked up by a majority of the vendors.
The webinar has about 60 attendees on it, including the imaginatively named “asdf” (check the left side of your keyboard) and several acquaintances from the BPM standards and vendor communities. The registration page for the webinar is here, and I imagine that that will eventually link to the replay of the webinar. The slides will also be available on the WfMC site.
If you want to read more about BPMN 2.0, don’t go searching on the OMG site: for some reason, they don’t want to share draft versions of the specification except to paid OMG members. Here’s a direct link to the 0.9 draft version from November 2008, but I also recommend tracking Bruce Silver’s blog for insightful commentary on BPMN.
Tagged BPDM, BPEL, BPMN, XPDLIt’s the last session of the day – and for me, for the conference – and I’m attending the open forum on workflow and BPM hosted by a number of people from inside and outside SAP with experience in different workflow and BPM areas. The format was 100% audience Q&A, and the focus was really on the SAP Business Workflow within the core ERP system, not NetWeaver BPM; this isn’t completely surprising considering that BPM just went into unrestricted release this week, so there’s probably not enough of it in the wild to generate much of a discussion on it.
There was an interesting discussion on what types of processes and applications lend themselves to being “workflowed” – time-sensitive (deadline monitoring), review and approval, audit and control requirements – which was not specific to the workflow/BPM platform.
Unfortunately, not enough content for me, since BW is too buried within the ERP to be of interest to me, and I ducked out early.
Tagged sapphire09I spent yesterday and this morning in the global communications center at the north end of the conference center, since SAP’s teams for managing social media (that’s us bloggers), press and analysts brings the SAP executives to us for meetings up there. They pipe in the keynote sessions, give us comfy tables with internet access, power and printers, and feed and water us; I’m guessing that some of the press/bloggers/analysts never venture out of the global communications center all week. I just can’t resist the call of the regular sessions, however, and I hiked through the extensive show floor to the south concourse for Ginger Gatling’s session on the Universal Worklist (UWL).
This session isn’t specifically about BPM, but the UWL is used as the common inbox portal for tasks from a variety of sources including BPM and business workflow. This session was for people who use UWL already, with Gatling’s top ten recommendation for configuring it for better usage.
Almost no one uses UWL out of the box – only one person in the audience claimed to be doing this, and even they have recently started to customize it – since there are a variety of ways to customize it: processing of multiple tasks in the list simultaneously, forcing comments/responses when specific actions are taken, override the default task launch mechanism, create custom action buttons, or just basic visual styling. UWL can also handle non-SAP tasks: a task from any application can be integrated by using the UWL Java API to create a UWL connector for that application. In fact, that’s how NetWeaver BPM tasks end up in the UWL. There were a couple of people in the audience interested in using UWL for non-SAP tasks, with one of them stating that they had 19 different workflow systems and want to use UWL as their “window to everything”.
Interestingly, although UWL can be personalized by users, almost everyone in the audience said that they hide that option because it makes it harder to support. This is pretty basic personalization, such as column order and sorting, but it’s amazing what people can get confused over, especially when they’re trying to explain it to a remote support person. Also, most of the audience disable substitution (that is, redirecting your tasks to someone else while you are away) at the UWL portal layer, since there could be several applications surfacing tasks into UWL, and you can’t apply the same substitution rules across all of them. Both of these – personalization and substitution – are examples of features created by developers who don’t really understand the business environment, but were likely designed and tested in an overly simplistic version of that environment: otherwise, who would assume that all of the tasks in a “universal” worklist could be delegated to the same person?
This is not something that I will ever have to do myself, but it’s an important glimpse at what sort of customization needs to happen for a BPM application that is going to use UWL as an inbox, in addition to the customization that is done for the task user interface itself within BPM.
Tagged sapphire09I started to get paranoid yesterday when my meeting with Wolfgang Hilpert and Thomas Vollmering was scheduled at the same time as Ginger Gatling’s session on NetWeaver BPM, then they didn’t show for the meeting – was there something they didn’t want me to know? However, it was just a scheduling glitch, and eventually we met up so that they could brief me on the current release and what’s coming later this year.
When I last had an in-depth look at the product late last year, it was in late beta; since then, it’s been through the SAP ramp-up (early ship) process, and was released for unrestricted shipment on Monday. I’ll be finishing up my review of the current release in an upcoming post, and as soon as Thomas forwards on the material that he promised to send (hint, hint), I’ll be able to post a bit more on the future directions.
The newly released version is still lacking a lot of expected BPMS functionality, but has focused on the features that SAP’s customers said that they needed the most: human-centric BPM (since there are existing products in the SAP suite that cover lower-level orchestration) and a integrated composition environment that can eventually be used for process composition across all layers: human-facing tasks, web services, and core ERP processes. Due to their Yasu acquisition, they also did direct integration between the BPM and BRM environments, although there were some rough edges there and in some of the other areas, such as handling the user interface at process steps.
In spite of the shortcomings of the first release, SAP’s vision for BPM is far-reaching, especially around the integration of events and analytics. They are taking advantage of the innovation that’s happening within the BusinessObjects group, and there’s a potential for them to create a powerful platform not just for managing processes, but for handling events, including the results of analytics at a human-facing step as a decision-support tool, and for analyzing and optimizing processes.
Tagged sapphire09A small group of bloggers had the opportunity to sit around a table with Marge Breya to expand on what we saw during the press conference on BusinessObjects Explorer. She discussed how unstructured data has being elevated to first class status within SAP, with analytics and reporting tools that can lay over unstructured as well as structured data. Part of this involves parsing structure out of unstructured data through an appropriate semantic layer.
They’re also playing with things (that she couldn’t really talk about, although some customers have access) that provide much more of an hosted Web 2.0-type of experience. They’re working on Explorer On Demand, which allows you to upload spreadsheets and other file-oriented data, then do some analysis and visualization on your own data to get an idea of how valuable tools like this are. They handed out some test drive passes for this, so I may get a chance to play around with it some time soon. I expect that many organizations won’t want their data warehouse in the cloud, but this will at least give them a chance to try it out in a no-risk environment. They’re doing this with more of their BusinessObjects platform, where there’s a free version that allows for some starter functionality, then hope for it to go viral in terms of stepping up to paid on demand or on premise versions. That’s a pretty powerful model in the consumer space, although traditional enterprises may have a more difficult time adopting technology in this manner. Considering that the higher-end of Explorer is targeted at large organizations, this could be the biggest challenge.
Breya had some interesting background on product strategy as well, especially around how SAP had traditionally been doing OLAP-based business intelligence, and BusinessObjects didn’t have much in the way of OLAP, so the acquisition produced a minimum of overlap. Polestar, on the market for a couple of years as an ad hoc query tool, was retooled into Explorer for a million or so rows of data, and Explorer Accelerated, a software and hardware bundle, that can handle billions or rows.
She went on to talk about the ties between BI and BPM, and although she couldn’t talk about anything specific, there are some interesting things coming in terms of operational BI, monitoring and characterizing processes for the purposes of process improvement, as well as invoking analytics within processes for decision support.
In response to a question about the consumerization of SAP products, she promises us “an experience that will take decisioning to the next level, involving collaboration” in something that is just entering private beta now. I’m picturing a cross between Xbox Live and Vanilla Sky, which would be cool, but I still think that there are challenges to adoption of completely new user experience paradigms. Since SAP has a wide customer base in manufacturing and other industries with low margins and the requirement for constant product innovation, this may not be as much of a challenge as it would be verticals such as financial services and insurance.
We had a discussion about the cloud versus on premise as the location for data, with the underlying theme that it’s not an all or nothing proposition: while operational data may be behind the firewall, it makes much more sense to leave third-party benchmarking data in the cloud where it can be shared and frequently updated. The new generation of BI products from any vendor can’t be restrictive in their data sources, but have to be able to aggregate information from a variety of sources both inside and outside the firewall.
Tagged sapphire09
