links for 2010-03-05

Paul Vincent of TIBCO presents some standard patterns for mixing CEP with BPM and SOA: standalone CEP, CEP enriching BPM processes and/or SOA services, CEP monitoring processes and services, CEP-based decisions for processes and services, dynamic process and service control, and embedded processes and services within CEP. Good examples with diagrams.

Organizations place less value on what we used to call "embedded workflow" (process management within ERP and other enterprise systems), since they realize that processes span multiple business and technology silos. Processes need to be orchestrated across systems, not just within systems. Of course, there's still strong use cases for inter-system workflows, but there needs to be a bigger picture to tie them together.

Gartner reports that BPM has crossed the chasm and will make it into the mainstream this year. I think that's the 3rd year running for that proclamation. More troubling, "The right answer in selecting a BPMS is often three BPMSs, based on the particular projects' needs.", which seems to indicate that Gartner is bowing to pressure from platform vendors that have multiple fragmented BPM offerings. Not a good thing for customers.

Some interesting BPM aspects to this: #5 is "enterprise platforms gaining a social layer", which is what I've been seeing (and presenting on) happening in BPMS for a couple of years. Also, #8, "enterprise social media workflow" is an opportunity for current BPMS vendors to get into the social space, or social media vendors to get into the BPM space.

Another small BPM SaaS player: is this the future of BPM for SMB (probably), and if so, when will we start to see some leaders emerge and market consolidation occur?

The #1 way: make collaboration part of a business process, in order to show ROI and further the business goals.

I'm a big fan of getting something simple into production fast, then adding on more features as the users work with the system and provide some real feedback. Steve Blank presents a nice view of why you want to implement the minimum feature set first, but how you have to sell the 18-month vision at the same time.

Jon Pyke on Garter's recent BPM conference in London: "BPM is far too important a topic to leave in the hands of product vendors", especially since the products are becoming indistinguishable from one another.

Michael zur Meuhlen of Stevens Institute is teaching a masters-level BPM course through their web-based distance learning environment. You can take this as a standalone course, as part of a graduate certificate in BPM, or as part of their Masters in IS with a BPM concentration.

Michael Blechar of Gartner on service-oriented development of applications, and how business process analysis tools support that by promoting cross-organizational reuse.

ARISalign — Software AG's online BPM collaboration offering — was put into open beta this week at Cebit. My review is yet to come, but here's one from Theo Priestley.

Some Q&A about ERP, BPM and SOA: how SOA is leveling the BPM integration playing field, where ERP vendors who also have BPM fit in, and the balance between integration and modeling capabilities.

The world of industry analysts is changing, and this wiki is capturing some of the ideas about how industry analysts are judged, and some best practices. Social media has had a huge impact here, breaking the previous correlation between insight, influence and exposure.

Is CMIS the killer app for mashups and ECM? Or are ECM mashup widgets just a way for vendors to create some eye candy to hold customers' attention while they rework their old user interfaces?

SAP now has a BPX training and certification program. I haven't seen any of the material so not sure how it matches with other programs, although it differs since it's specific to SAP products.

Pros and cons of Windows Worflow Foundation, which is working its way into a wide range of Microsoft products.

Although BPM could potentially help with #3 and #5, some BPM implementations are just turning into rigid enterprise-y software themselves.

If you enjoyed Forrester's #bpmjam tweet jam last month, they're holding a #crmjam on March 24th. One of the topics is whether BPM has a place in CRM strategies; interestingly, their wording of the question equates BPM with lean thinking.

Ovum's report on a decision matrix for selecting a BPM vendor. Provided courtesy of Active Endpoints (direct link to PDF).

Process and content go hand-in-hand, at least in my experience. Here's some tips on integrating ECM and BPM: these are mostly the "whys" rather than the "hows", but provides some good incentives for getting started with this.

Process mining: discovering business processes automatically by looking at audit logs of your SAP ERP system. This looks at some of the research available for this, but take note that Fujitsu's process mining product could be used for this already, whether or not you choose to use Fujitsu Interstage BPM, SAP NetWeaver BPM, or some other BPM to automate some of these processes.

Co-working spaces in Toronto. I'm thinking about getting a hot desk at one of these for one or two days each week: working from home is great most of the time, but sometimes you just need a bit of interaction. Lots of great people work at these spaces, which means some lateral thinking is injected into the day's work.

Theo exposes our super-secret vendor demo rating system: how many shirts can you iron while they are doing the PowerPoint part of what is supposed to be a live online demo? I'm considering a little graphic that I can include with my product reviews.

A 21-minute podcast on SAP BPM use cases available on SCN, and how they are helping other projects.

Heathrow airport uses Pega BPM software to manage aircraft ground flow and passenger movements. Nice to see this being done with generic BPM software that can be easily integrated with other data sources and monitoring software, instead of a closed system.

A history of BPM, including references to (and one graphic from) my 2006 "History of BPM" series on this blog.

Product review of Nimbus Control BPM, by Theo Priestley.

Evaluating CEP? Here's a checklist of functionality to start with for your evaluation scorecard. It's from TIBCO, so expect some bias towards their products.

Dion Hinchcliffe on whether making enterprise applications more social really make major difference to enterprises in a meaningful way. The answer: "It depends". He lists five major reasons how adding social aspects to enterprise IT can show real benefits.