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ProcessWorld 2008: Interview with Georg Simon

I had a chance for a private interview with Georg Simon, director of ARIS solutions, to get a bit more detail about their upcoming (March) release and other product plans for 2008. I was especially interested to hear about what’s happening with the execution engine to which Dr. Jost referred in his closing keynote yesterday.

The big news in the upcoming 7.1 release is model versioning, a long-awaited feature that allows you to see graphically how a model has changed between versions. In retrospect, I can’t see why they didn’t do this long ago; it seems like an obvious key capability and customers must have been crying for it. The new WYSIWYG report generator also seems like it’s a bit late to market. They’ve added some new Six Sigma support, as well as event monitoring as part of their monitoring and management offering.

I think of ARIS primarily as a modeling environment, but many of their customers also use their PPM process monitoring tool as well, which allows process measurements to flow back from the execution environment and be displayed and compared relative to the original models. As well as offering this directly, ARIS PPM is also bundled into some BPMS vendors’ monitoring capabilities, including TIBCO and Fujitsu.

Looking ahead to what will be released by the end of 2008, I was most interested in finding out about the execution engine; Simon stated that this will be for “non-operational” processes such as release cycles, and the processes that govern the creating of artifacts within ARIS. They’re service-enabling their platform so that it will both expose services and consume services, which means that it will be able to be called from other BPMS environments for similar functionality, and they admit that they might compete with low-end human-centric BPMS for non-operational processes. It appears that they’re avoiding any mention of operational processes because they don’t want to perceive to be in any sort of competition with their main partners, such as SAP, IBM and Microsoft.

They’re also planning to release some new risk and compliance management capabilities, not tied to any specific regulatory requirement but flexible enough to allow partners to build out vertical regulatory compliance solutions. Of course, they’ll have some of the big standards, such as SOX and Basel II, available out of the box but still customizable.

There’s also some new things coming allowing mashups of their monitoring capabilities in order to allow people to build their own dashboards, instead of being restricted to just customizing the out-of-the-box dashboard; I see this as a definite trend in process monitoring capabilities, and think that most vendors need to open up their monitoring environment using a variety of lightweight techniques such as JSR168 and RSS to meet future needs.

2008 02 15 Sandy Kemsley Comments (0)

ProcessWorld 2008: Maureen Fleming, IDC

Maureen Fleming of IDC spoke in the Process Intelligence and Performance Management track on process measurement, and how it’s used to support decisions about a process as well as having an application context. She defines strategic measurement as guiding decisions about where to focus across processes, providing information on where to improve a process, and supporting fact-based dispute arbitration.

She showed a chart of timeliness of measurement versus complexity:

  • Simple and timely: measure and spot-check performance within a process
  • Simple and time critical: need for continuous measurement and problem identification within homogeneous processes
  • Complex and timely: regular reporting to check performance across heterogeneous process islands
  • Complex and time-critical: need for continuous measurement and problem identification across heterogeneous process islands

Leading enterprises are moving towards more complex measurement. I’m not sure I agree with her definition of “timely”, which seems to be used to mean “historical” in this context.

She breaks down measurement tools by the intention of the measurement system: what happened (process intelligence and reporting)/what will happen(analytics, complex event processing)/what is happening (BAM)/why it is happening (root cause analysis))/how we should respond (intelligent process automation).

She went through IDC’s categorization of BPMS — decision-centric automation (human-centric), sensing automation (integration-centric and complex event processing), and transaction-centric automation (integration-centric) — and discussed the problem of each BPMS vendors’ individual BAM creating islands of process measurement. Process metrics from all process automation systems need to feed into a consolidated process measurement infrastructure: likely an enterprise process warehouse with analytics/BAM tied to that more comprehensive view, such as ARIS PPM.

She discussed KPIs and how the goals for those KPIs need to consider both business objectives and past performance: you can’t understand performance variations that might occur in the present without looking at when and why they occurred in the past.

Although her presentation mostly focussed on process measurement, the Q&A was much more about sense and respond: how to have specific measurements/events trigger something back in the process side in order to respond to an event.

2008 02 15 Sandy Kemsley BAM
BI Comments (0)

ProcessWorld 2008: Customer panel

Dr. Dirk Oevermann, who heads up IDS Scheer’s consulting operation, hosted a discussion with two customers, Zak Mars of GraceKennedy and Chris Meiser of Tallard Technologies, about their best practices with ARIS for enterprise software roll-outs. There is an ARIS SmartPath model for implementation, using templates/frameworks and consulting services; originally targetted at small and medium businesses, they’re now finding traction with it in large businesses as well. This morning’s panel included two medium-sized companies that used ARIS SmartPath for their SAP implementations.

GKFoods (part of GraceKennedy) has a widely distributed food manufacturing and distribution organization — 5 manufacturing facilities, 6 sales and marketing organizations, 8 major distribution centers from their corporate headquarters in Jamaica — and decided in 2005 to bring in SAP to replace the 9 different systems then in use, providing better visibility into their operations, reducing redundancy and more fully integrating their operations. They credit ARIS SmartPath with allowing them to meet their 18-month target for roll-out to 12 companies, and since their implementation, have leveraged what they built through another major acquisition and the build-out of other integrated functionality such as sales force automation and vendor payment automation. They plan to use the same templates and best practices to continue this growth in 2008 with another new acquisition plus undergo an SAP version upgrade as well as the implementation of capacity planning and HR modules.

Tallard is a value-added distributor of hardware, software and services in Latin America, with 300 employees in 8 countries and a network of 1000 resellers, retailers, VARs and integrators. They implemented SAP and IDS Scheer starting in 2000, and since then have grown from $40M to $220M in revenue; managing that growth across multiple countries and 3 languages has been a key challenge. ARIS SmartPath helped them to align their business processes across the regions. They use the ARIS toolset to design and document their overall business processes in a centralized repository, ARIS Web Publisher to provide enterprise-wide access to the process documentation and attach manuals, and ARIS for SAP NetWeaver for SAP process design. They learned some valuable lessons, particularly that of obtaining executive support: first promoting process modeling as a tool to improve sales and efficiencies, and second as a tool to document and train internally. They also found it essential to hire dedicated resources, such as a business process architect, and provide adequate user training in order to facilitate active use of the tools.

2008 02 15 Sandy Kemsley Comments (0)

ProcessWorld 2008: Business Process Excellence Awards

We closed off the day with the IDS Scheer Business Process Excellence awards in six different categories:

  • Boeing, for business-driven SOA management
  • ENMAX Energy, for process-driven SAP management
  • Bayer, for process intelligence and performance management
  • MacGregor Golf in the small and medium enterprise category
  • E2E in the partner innovation category

Unfortunately, I missed the name of the company who won in the enterprise architecture management category — a mining company headquartered in Brazil — but it should appear on the IDS Scheer site at some point soon.

Update: the winner in the enterprise architecture management category was VALE. Thanks to Mark Tordik of Springboard PR for noticing my gap here, and taking the time to follow up.

2008 02 14 Sandy Kemsley Comments (0)

ProcessWorld 2008: Dr. Wolfram Jost

The final keynote of the first day was given by Dr. Wolfram Jost, who has responsibility for the ARIS product line. I have a bit of difficulty sorting out the European titles sometimes; his title is “Executive Board Member responsible for products”, which in North America would translate to “VP of product management” or something similar.

He makes a distinction between the “business layer” and “technical layer” of BPM, where the technical layer appears to be defined as the BPMS and other systems (such as SAP) that are used to execute business processes, and the business layer (ARIS) is used to monitor and manage the performance of the processes. Interestingly, they’re putting performance management ahead of modeling in importance, even though they’re likely better known for modeling; performance management is much more closely tied to process improvement in people’s minds, even though you likely wouldn’t get to that point if you didn’t model the processes in the first place, and the models provide a framework on which to hang the measurement data.

Jost sees a convergence of major improvement initiatives within organizations: BPA/BPM, SOA, EA, BI and GRC (governance, risk and compliance). To address this, ARIS is bundled as solutions to approach these initiatives on top of the base ARIS platform.

He covered some of the new functionality in the upcoming product release with respect to modeling:

  • Versioning of models
  • WYSIWYG report designer
  • Timeline display of models

ARIS Business Architect 7.1 - Versioning and model comparison ARIS Business Architect 7.1 - Time-based modelling

He also reinforced how they provide a standard modeling and performance management platform for a number of different implementation platforms, from ERP platforms such as SAP to BPMS such as TIBCO or Fujitsu.

There’s some completely new functionality in this product release as well, such as the IT Inventory capability.

ARIS IT Inventory 1.0 - Overview

He went on to discuss how by the end of 2008, they will release a process execution environment “for governance processes”, the subtlety of which escapes me somewhat — does that mean that they are about to become a full-up BPMS, or only for specific types of processes? If they do release an execution environment that operates directly from the models in their repository, they’ll definitely annoy some of their  BPMS business partners, but more importantly, they have the potential to become one of the most powerful BPM suites around because of the top-notch modeling and performance management. I have an interview tomorrow morning with someone in product development that should help to clear up my fuzziness on this — tune in then for more.

2008 02 14 Sandy Kemsley Comments (3)

ProcessWorld 2008: Michael Blechar, Gartner

You would think that I had enough of Gartner last week in Las Vegas, but here I am at yet another Gartner presentation.

Although Gartner is a big proponent of buying everything in a BPM suite (including modeling) from one vendor, Michael Blechar is here to play nice and talk about best-of-breed modeling and analysis using tools such as ARIS — even going so far as to refer to it as the “Cadillac of BPA”. They completely underestimated the interest in this track, and the room is standing room only.

He looked at the three major types of BPA tool buyers: business process modelers, (enterprise)architects, and BPMS modelers (who are concerned with the actual implementation within a BPMS execution environment, hence focused on design and construction). BPMS modelers typically start with the modeling tool provided by the BPMS, then may add in a more comprehensive modeling environment after implementing one or two processes and finding that the modeling tool is inadequate, whereas business process modelers are typically creating models independent of any particular execution implementation. In many cases, business process modelers are starting with Microsoft Visio because it’s the most readily available tool, but find that they need something much more robust for modeling, providing functionality such as activity-based costing and simulation.

He reviewed the players in the recently-published BPA magic quadrant, where IDS Scheer sits as the clear top-right leader. This market is undergoing a lot of consolidation, mostly as BPA vendors are being acquired by BPMS vendors; surprisingly, the magic quadrant only has leaders and niche players (bottom left), but nothing in the challengers or visionaries quadrants. Personally, I wouldn’t have put Microsoft (with Visio) in the leaders quadrant; although they are clearly a dominant force in the market, their product is pretty low-end compared to the real contenders: IDS Scheer, Proforma, Mega, iGrapfx, Telelogic and Casewise.

Blechar is talking about how in the future, Microsoft and others will allow you to create models that actually execute without writing code, but isn’t this what almost all BPMS products do now? There’s some confusing stuff going on in this presentation from a BPMS viewpoint, such as talk about the convergence of BPMN and UML, and an over-emphasis on BPEL as a cornerstone.

He finished up with some recommendations:

  • When BPM initiatives reach the point of requiring business architecture definition — or there is a need to visualize, simulate, animate or automate business process as models — BPA tools should be implemented.
  • As business look to implement business processes in a service-oriented architecture, there is an increased urgency to collaborate more closely with IT archtiects and analysts including shared models.
  • Be pragmatic in scoping modeling efforts: do not try to “boil the ocean” in terms of modeling the “as-is” and “to-be” business architecture and processes.
  • Ensure the key business roles of business process owner, architect and analyst are staffed and enabled.
  • Monitor standards efforts and be prepared to use increased model automation tools and techniques.
  • Match BP methods and tools to the primary focus group of usrs - be they BP modelers, architects or BPMS modelers.
  • Monitor opportunities to purchase pre-built models to jump-start your BPI projects.
2008 02 14 Sandy Kemsley BPA Comments (0)

ProcessWorld 2008: Prof. Dr. August-Wilhelm Scheer Keynote

I had completely forgotten last year’s jazz performance until Dr. Scheer arrived on stage for his keynote toting a saxophone, and had a quick session with bass, keyboard and drums before starting the keynote.

His presentation focus was on a framework for business performance management: a holistic management concept for improving performance and profitability of a company via two BP(e)M [Business Performance Management] wheels. He started with a content wheel that included several of the dimensions along which to consider business performance management initiatives, through three phases of market maturity (roughly, pre-2000, 2000-current, and future). For example, “objects”, or the artifacts captured to drive the frameworks, has shifted from data to processes, and is starting to move to events and rules.

He moved on to a technology wheel model, covering various aspects of application architecture, as they moved from standalone process models to tight integration with ERP packages — which effectively acts as the business process execution layer — to the emerging generation of model-driven business software.

He overlaid these wheels with areas covered by classical BI and BPM to show the gaps between ARIS and other classes of products, and showed how it could be used for evaluating process improvement efforts to date within an organization.

2008 02 14 Sandy Kemsley BPA
BPM Comments (1)

ProcessWorld 2008: Opening Keynote

Charlie Doucot, head of IDS Scheer’s North American operations, opened the conference by talking about their growth in the past year, particularly in their new and growing partnerships with Microsoft and SAP. SAP has a huge presence at this show — one of this morning’s three tracks is “process-driven SAP management” — and I’m looking forward to seeing more of what they’re doing together, especially since it now looks like I’ll be attending SAPPHIRE in May.

Thomas Volk, president and CEO of IDS Scheer, talked to us briefly about the rise of the operational CEO, who

  • sets objectives prescriptively
  • manages accountability objectively
  • monitors execution constantly
  • sees potential problems early
  • makes adjustments regularly

in order to return shareholder value, increase market valuation, grow the top line, and mitigate risks. He sees ARIS as providing “corner office command-and-control of the operational strategy”, which I think is a great phrase to describe how today’s executives need to keep an eye on what’s happening in their organizations at a high level.

I missed the press briefing this morning (through no fault IDS Scheer’s excellent press relations, but through my own inability to read a schedule), but there were a number of announcements there as well. From their press releases:

2008 02 14 Sandy Kemsley Comments (1)

Upcoming conferences

I’ll be attending three conferences in the next three weeks (after a hiatus of over two months, it’s going to be strange to get back on a plane), and live-blogging from each conference, wifi permitting.

Next week is the Gartner BPM summit in Las Vegas: one of the key BPM conferences of the year (at least, until Gartner watered it down by running a second one in September last year). The presentations are typically a mix of Gartner analysts discussing BPM, SOA and related subjects, and customers discussing their implementations. The trade show includes every BPM vendor who wants to be taken seriously in this market. Expect to see some of my posts from this week syndicated over on Intelligent Enterprise, plus I’ll be doing a wrap-up article at the end of the week exclusively on their site.

February 13-15 is ARIS ProcessWorld in Orlando, IDS Scheer’s user conference. I attended this last year and enjoyed it; last year was only the second time that I’d been to any sort of process modelling user conference (having attended Proforma’s conference in 2006), and it’s really valuable to see how the front-end modelling tools fit together with the BPMS that automate those processes. IDS Scheer is paying my travel expenses to attend.

February 18-20 I’m back in Orlando for FASTforward, which is sort of a user conference for FAST enterprise search (which is being acquired by Microsoft), but really goes beyond that cover a lot of Enterprise 2.0 territory. Featured speakers include Andrew McAfee, Tom Davenport and Don Tapscott, all of whom I’ve written about in the past couple of week. You can register for FASTforward here, and put my name (Sandy Kemsley) in the reference field so that they know where you came from. FAST is paying my travel expenses to attend. All of my live-blogging posts will be cross-posted to the FASTforward blog, and I’ll do a daily wrap-up post exclusive to their site.

As an aside, I’ve consolidated all posts for all Gartner BPM coverage under one category regardless of year, and all for ProcessWorld under their own category.

If you’re going to be at any of these events, look me up.

2008 01 30 Sandy Kemsley BPA
BPM
Enterprise 2.0
FASTforward08
Gartner BPM Comments (4)

ProcessWorld Day 2 wrapup

I fly home in the morning, so I’ll be missing tomorrow’s ARIS User Day; this was by design, since I really didn’t want to sit through detailed product training sessions.

I’ve had a number of people here recognize me from having read my blog, which is very flattering. I had one person tell me that if he weren’t here, reading my blog would be just like being here (um, but you are here, dude…). I was even called the queen of blogging. I’m blushing. The stream of consciousness blogging has been fun, although now I need to go back through all those notes and make sense of some of the ideas.

I sat with a professor from Widener University today who teaches in their Center for Business Process Excellence, a program that I didn’t even know was offered. She was quick to whip out a brochure for me, and although it’s very sponsor-laden (both IDS Scheer and SAP appear on it), it does give an outline of their program and states their mandate:

  • A global initiative designed to forge new levels of business process innovation by strengthening collaboration between the corporate and academic communities
  • Promote research into next-generation business solutions to better prepare tomorrow’s workforce
  • Promote business process modelling by incorporating such issues into the undergraduate and graduate curricula and support faculty and students to engage in research efforts

They offer Masters of Information Systems and MBA’s that incorporate process innovation, plus certificate programs in business process innovation. Some of the courses seem a bit light — a few of them are completed in three Saturdays — and I have no idea what sort of accreditation or recognition that they have for these programs, but any university that is recognizing BPM as an area of study is worth a second look. You can find out more about it on their site here.

In case you haven’t clicked through on any of the photos in these posts, you can find the entire set from this trip here, although it also includes a bunch of gratuitous beach sunrise photos taken from my hotel balcony.

2007 02 08 Sandy Kemsley Comments (0)

ProcessWorld Day 2: General session with Andrew Spanyi

Last up today is Andrew Spanyi discussing the “soft and fuzzy stuff about business process governance” (his words), and I have to say that I don’t envy him the 5pm speaking slot. The audience is sparse — many having departed to catch a flight, go shopping, or just take a break after an already-long day — and those of us that are here are a bit apathetic.

This whole topic, of course, requires a new acronym: BPG (business process governance), which is the set of guidelines focussed on organizing all BPM activities and initiatives of an organization.

Ten minutes into his talk, I’m really starting to feel sorry that I sat on the opposite side of the room from the door, making it impossible to depart politely. Either he’s flipping slides too fast, or my brain has slowed to a crawl, since I absolutely cannot seem to take any notes of value. I did, however, catch his three critical leadership behaviours required for BPG:

  • A high level process model
  • Well-defined performance metrics
  • Broad-based education on process methods

He also pointed out something that he heard from Tom Davenport: major IT systems are difficult to implement, and many projects fail; process change involves new skills, behaviours and attitudes so is also difficult; that makes it difficult to do both at once. And what I’ve seen with BPM initiatives, almost all companies try to do both at once.

Spanyi had a great list of five sure-fire ways to fail:

  • Lack of accountability and authority
  • Insufficient focus on common language
  • Lack of linkage to strategy
  • Insufficient focus on improvement
  • Focusing on method rather than results (e.g., focus on modelling rather than improvement)

At the end of all this, I’m left with the notion that BPG is just another way for consultants to make money. Okay, I’m a consultant too, but not the fuzzy management consulting type: at the end of the day, I actually want to see a system running.

2007 02 08 Sandy Kemsley Comments (2)

ProcessWorld Day 2: Services industry breakout with Leopoldo Feuntes of AxxiS Consulting

Unfortunately, I had to step away from the conference for a couple of hours for some unrelated business — a group podcast that you’ll see here shortly, and an upcoming webinar — but I was back in time to see Leopoldo Fuentes of AxxiS Consulting discuss a project at the Secreteria de la Funcion Publica de Mexico for implementing best practices within the federal government using ARIS.

One of the first things that they did was to create a knowledge repository for the results defined by their strategic planning process:

  • Organization charts, HR profiles, position descriptions, and knowledge maps
  • Compliance information
  • Activity analysis
  • Operational flows
  • A set of process models derived from all of the above

Once the repository was populated with this information, they could start to leverage it for a number of transformational purposes:

  • To professionalize human resources of the institution
  • To develop the talent of the institution
  • To supply the decision making
  • To transform the ministry into a world-class institution

Not surprisingly, it all came down to process: the process models ultimately allowed them to define the roles and skills of people that they required. However, it had a number of other process improvement type of benefits as well, such as being able to use process models in strategic planning activities, gain some process improvement through better understanding of the processes, and changes to the organization charts to better match the process models. Using custom scripting (rather than the report web publication capabilities of ARIS, which did not allow them the proper degree of change control on the website), they also publish this on their intranet and, selectively, on the public internet, thereby increasing transparency of the organization. You can see the public portions of this here, including the profiles and roles of individual public servants (my Spanish is really bad, so I now can’t find the right link to navigate to those sections, but go ahead and poke around). This type of transparency is becoming a critical factor in most government organizations these days.

2007 02 08 Sandy Kemsley BPA Comments (0)

ProcessWorld Day 2: Services industry breakout with Marshal Edgison of ELM Resources

The first breakout of day 2, I attended a session on “Optimizing Process Through Business Rules” with Marshal Edgison, Director of Application Development for ELM Resources, a not-for-profit organization focussed on facilitating and processing student loans, about how they’re leveraging both the process modeling and business rules modeling functionality of ARIS in order to drive their modernization efforts. The rules engine integrated into ARIS as the ARIS Business Rules Designer is Corticon.

They selected ARIS because they wanted a modelling tool that was not closely associated with the technology (i.e., from the process execution vendors) and could be used by business analysts. As a loan processing organization, their processes are very rules-based, and they found that their business rules were everywhere — in application code, in database triggers, in user interfaces — and were hard-coded into the system: the classic situation where business rules can be of enormous benefit. They saw an opportunity to not just model their business processes in order to get them under control, but modelling their business rules and encapsulating them into a business rules management system.

They recognized that BRMS could add agility to processes by automating recurring decisions, centralizing rules for easy management and consistent deployment, manage complex logic (they had over 1 million interdependent rules, although they fall into about 5 basic categories), increase development speed and reduce maintenance time and costs. With the ARIS Business Rules Designer, the rules could be seamlessly integrated into processes as automated decision points: ARIS defines the enterprise data model and vocabulary, and the BRMS leverages that vocabulary in transaction processing.

Edgison went through a case study of a new federally-mandated graduate loan program that came into effect in February 2006, with all participants required to support it by July 2006. Many of the financial institutions who are ELM’s member organizations were unable to comply within that timeframe, and it took ELM six months and more than $500K to implement it. As part of the sales cycle for the ARIS Business Rules Designer, they redid this using ARIS and the BRMS: it took one day with four people.

He ended up with some notes on determining whether business rules are right for you:

  • Do you have decision-intensive processes?
  • Do you have operational inefficiencies around decisions?
  • Do you have dynamic, frequently changing rules?
  • Do you need better synergy between business requirements and IT implementation?

Although a bit wordy and totally unable to control one the audience member who asked about 12 questions, Edgison was a great speaker: very knowledgeable about both his projects and the importance of business rules in modelling processes, with the ability to communicate his ideas clearly and in a compelling manner.

2007 02 08 Sandy Kemsley BRM Comments (0)

ProcessWorld Day 2: Executive Customer Roundtable

The second session of the day was an executive customer roundtable with John Wheeler of Business Processes in Motion (he was formerly with Nova Chemicals, an ARIS customer, but now seems to be offering consulting services that he gently flogged during parts of the discussion), Deb Boykin of Molson Coors, Steve Tieman of Estée Lauder and Todd Lohr of Zurich (whose breakout session I blogged about yesterday), moderated by Jason Mausberg of IDS Scheer.

Executive customer roundtable

Conversations ranged around people, executive committment, ERP systems, ARIS as process-enabling tool, data standards and other topics. Most of them seem to be saying that they’re “not yet into the technical layer”, which means that there’s a lot of modelling going on, but there’s still a gap to the executable part — a trend that I’ve been seeing not just over the past few days, but over a much longer period. An audience question at the end of the talk asked that explicitly; the answers were “we’re at the start of it”, “we’re in the early stages”, “not that far along at all” and “it depends on how you define SOA” (which was a bit of a nonsense answer that included BPM as part of SOA so stated that if you had implemented BPM, then you had done some SOA — another way of saying the same thing as the others, I think).

Random thoughts from the various speakers:

  • using ARIS to link strategic to tactical goals, identify metrics and get a handle on costs (this was from Molson)
  • business architect plays a key role in achieving agility; a dissenting opinion said that their management didn’t see the benefit of agility (which I found amazing)
  • adherence to standards, both by customers and the software vendors who serve them, is critical
  • BPM isn’t a fad, it’s part of a long-term push to process innovation
  • use BPM to determine if people are behaving the way that we think that they’re behaving

There was an audience question about how the panel members got their senior management to embrace BPM. The consensus was to start at a tactical level, get some wins on smaller projects, then use those successes to engage the executives by showing them some real benefits. No surprises here: this is not a fundamentally different story from introducing any new concepts or technology within a company.

2007 02 08 Sandy Kemsley BPA
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ProcessWorld Day 2: Keynote with Dr. Wolfram Jost

Dr. Wolfram JostDr. Jost started the day with a presentation on “The Basis for Linking BPM & SOA”. Someone may have been reading one of my posts from yesterday, because when he put up the obligatory slide of VW, he referred to them as “Volkswagen — of course, you know who they are”. :)

His talk was part ARIS product marketing and part generic material on BPM and SOA.

There was a lot on the separation of modelling and execution environments, or what he characterized as “business BPM” (business process strategy, design, implementation and controlling) and “technical BPM” (define, create, execute, monitor) — really, it’s like layers in a Zachman or other enterprise architecture diagram, although he didn’t really make that distinction. ARIS is used in the upper layer of functions/definitions, with links to the technical BPM functions in the lower layer.

He did have some nice slides and explanations of BPM and SOA: BPM as a management discipline involved in strategy, design, implementation and measurement of business processes, with the purpose of continuously improve the productivity and degree of innovation of business processes; SOA as an architectural style of business applications based on distributable, sharable and loosely coupled modules, with the purpose to improve the flexibility of business applications needed to support changes in business processes with less time and effort. He showed a 3-layer model of strategy (business model), BPM (business processes) and SOA (business applications), where there might be changes at any of these levels that would ripple through the others: strategy could change due to market forces; business processes could change due to organizational changes, and applications could change due to technology innovations.

Another point that he made, and one that I used in my response to Phil Gilbert’s comment on one of my posts yesterday, there’s value in using modelling tools that are separate from the BPMS themselves, especially if you’re creating the business models in advance of technology acquisition, or if you have a variety of process execution environments and want a single modelling environment for your business analysts. Of course, when Jost talks about business models being technology-independent, he’s excluding their own technology from that definition.

On the product side, Jost discussed the six solutions that they offer, which appear to be combining/packaging of existing products to address specific markets: Enterprise BPM, Enterprise Architecture, Process-Driven SAP, Business-Driven SOA, Process Intelligence & Performance, and Governance, Risk & Compliance. He also spoke about the new ARIS SOA Architect product, used to translate their “business BPM” into “technical BPM”.

The review of their multi-vendor platform strategy showed up some of the weaknesses that Phil Gilbert had mentioned in his comments yesterday: although they use BPEL and UML to interface bi-directionally with Oracle, and BPEL for bi-directionality with TIBCO, they use a much more tightly integrated — and proprietary — interface to SAP. Other BPMS products, including IBM WebSphere, Microsoft BizTalk, BEA and Fujitsu only have uni-directional exports, which is pretty useless in practical usage.

Jost finished up his talk with a quick review of the ARIS 2007 product roadmap.

2007 02 08 Sandy Kemsley BPA
BPM
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ProcessWorld Day 2: Breakfast

I don’t usually blog about breakfast, but I happened to end up sitting with Marc Kase of SAIC, whose presentation that I posted about yesterday.

We had a great discussion about how they organize their team of business architects and business analysts, training, collaboration within the team and to their internal customers; Marc obviously has a good handle on how to create and manage such a diverse team of skills.

My question of the week is about integration between ARIS (or any process modelling environment) and a business process execution environment, whether a full BPMS or something that fits more into the SOA layer, and Marc confirmed my suspicions that the unidirectional interfaces are problematic for a variety of reasons, and not used within their environment of ARIS and the BEA AquaLogic BPMS (Fuego). They only provide a high-level process view to the (separate and IT-focussed) BPMS team, who then redraw it in BEA and add a lot of detail required for execution. This creates the opportunity for translation errors between the model and the implementation, although their ultimate QA is against the process models in ARIS in order to reduce those effects. Marc expressed that the lack of round-tripping was a factor in them not using direct integration as well.

I also found out that Vince, the senior business architect who accompanied Marc in his presentation, is Vince Outlaw of AboutEA — a blogger with whom I have exchanged links and comments. We discovered Vince in the internet cafe (of course) for an introduction, thereby creating one more real-world link to strengthen the ties of bloggers.

2007 02 08 Sandy Kemsley BPA
BPM
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ProcessWorld Day 1 wrapup

Great hotel? Check. Good food? Check. Wifi in the conference rooms? Check. Green tea available at the breaks? Check. M&M’s in the press room? Check. Oh yeah, the conference content is good, too. :)

I have to admit, I didn’t pay a lot of attention during Dr. Mathias Kirchmer’s last presentation of the day on “open BPM”: I’ve been in meetings since 7am, and I was pretty much conferenced out by the time that I finished my interview with Trevor Naidoo. Kirchmer finished his talk with the IDS Scheer annual BPE Verve awards for their customers and one partner:

I’m really enjoying my time here, as I do at most user conferences. I’m meeting a ton of new people: other press and analysts whose names I know but have never met face-to-face, IDS Scheer customers, as well as the IDS Scheer folks themselves. I have to give a big shout out to the people at Springboard PR, especially Mark Tordik who has been my main liaison, for helping to make this happen.

The theme party tonight is Havana Nights, which promises a Cuban buffet, mojitos, casino tables, mojitos, a Latin band, and mojitos. Can you tell where my mind goes at the end of a long day?

2007 02 07 Sandy Kemsley Comments (0)

ProcessWorld Day 1: Briefing with Trevor Naidoo of IDS Scheer

I skipped the last breakout session of the day for a discussion with Trevor Naidoo, IDS Scheer’s Director of ARIS Solution Engineering. He’s responsible for the pre-sales technical activities, and used to be an ARIS customer, so is very familiar with how customers use the product and how they want to use it.

We spoke first about integration between ARIS and the BPMS products that automate processes, which included some discussion about standards. He pointed out that integration using pure standards tends to degrade to the least common denominator — a point that I’m not sure that I agree with for all standards, although it makes sense if you picked BPEL as your standard — which led them to take a different approach with their most tightly integrated partners, SAP and Oracle: that of “standards-based” integration, where they extend BPEL (I believe) in order to provide increased functionality. I’m not sure at what point a “standards-based” approach becomes “proprietary”, although I can see the value of going this way. In any case, they’re using different approaches for different vendors: “standards-based” for SAP and Oracle, BPEL for Lombardi, and XPDL for Fujitsu.

This really came around to the issue of how to get those process models into an execution engine, or if anyone is really doing it at all. Naidoo said that what was moving from ARIS to the execution engine was a “process outline”, which then required some amount of work to hook it up to the BPMS engine (as expected), and that the main value is not in the transfer itself — which could be readily recreated in the BPMS designer directly — but in engaging the business in the entire process design cycle. This, then, is what I suspected: that most people really are redrawing the process models in the BPMS designer, adding who knows how many translation errors along the way, because there is insufficient value to bother with the direct integration. This is not unique to ARIS; I saw the same thing at the Proforma user conference last year.

We moved on to talk about the technology. I hadn’t done my homework in this area, and was really unaware of ARIS’ support for browser-based design (yes, I’m on my usual rant about browser-based process modelling); they have a Java applet client for design in a browser environment, which is a pretty heavy footprint by today’s AJAX standards. I’d love to hear more about their plans to put that client on a diet, which will greatly facilitate design collaboration with occasional users, both inside and outside the corporate firewall.

We finished with a discussion of how to move the process modelling story from what is usually a departmental beginning within a company up to the executive level and therefore out across the entire organization: internal evangelism, if you will, to leverage that initial 10-person ARIS project into making ARIS an enterprise-wide process modelling tool. This is addressed to some degree by one of their new “solutions” (which appear to be specific packaging and bundling of products and services), the Enterprise BPM solution which (based on information from their website) includes the ARIS Business Architect, ARIS Business Optimizer, ARIS Business Simulator and ARIS Business Publisher as the basis for implementing a company-wide BPM infrastructure. I still think that there’s a fundamental disconnect in language between the players: the average business analyst or architect is likely too mired in detail to be able to present a high-level plan to the executives of their organization on why to super-size their ARIS installation, but I’m sure that the IDS Scheer sales team would be happy to help out. With Trevor’s able assistance, of course.

2007 02 07 Sandy Kemsley BPM
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ProcessWorld Day 1: Services industry breakout with Todd Lohr of Zurich North America

The second customer breakout session was Todd Lohr of Zurich North America, who discussed various process modelling initiatives within Zurich. They’ve expended a ton of effort on detailed as-is process mapping in order to drive process improvement, and it appears to have paid off even before implementing process automation.

They had some interesting discoveries: 4 out of 5 top activities (by time spent) did not add value to the underwriting process; many activities done by an underwriter could be done by an underwriting assistant; the start time of certain processes was causing unnecessary delays due to timing or unavailability of staff (underwriters work late, whereas the assistants work 7-3, so all assistant-level work after 3pm was done by an underwriter); and bad insurance applications (e.g., missing data) can be found and aborted earlier in the process through the appropriate triage. Having worked with a lot of insurance customers, I don’t find any of these surprising, but I was impressed by the thoroughness of their as-is modelling and how they were able to exploit it to improve processes, technology and organizational structure.

They use ARIS to create the future state models and help the transition from the as-is to the to-be processes. They see it as a tool for training, simulating and communicating, as well as determine staffing and economic value of processes.

Future plans include integration of business rules, and getting some of these processes automated in a BPMS.

2007 02 07 Sandy Kemsley BPA
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ProcessWorld Day 1: Services industry breakout with Marc Kase of SAIC

After lunch, I attended a couple of ARIS customer breakouts, the first of which was Marc Kase of SAIC. I won’t give a lot of detail about their business processes, since I’m not sure how much that they really want to share outside the conference, but there were some great points and lessons learned that are more generic.

One of the first stats that hit me on the SAIC case is that they moved from 700 to 70 (it may have been 78 — I was in the back and the print on the slide was small) job roles as part of their process modelling efforts, which is an incredible success story.

They’ve focussed on building a business architecture, with process models created for projects stored in local repositories, then promoted to a central enterprise architecture repository at certain milestones. From this, they’ve been able to see a number of benefits:

  • Context, e.g., which systems use which data
  • Documentation that allows requirements and design to be traced back to business processes
  • Standards enforcement
  • Ability to cascade changes across models
  • Web publication of process and architecture content
  • Strengthened ties between IT and functional process owners

They also learned a few lessons, such as some of the difficulties in enforcing change control in moving from a single project to a portfolio of projects, and some practical issues around setting tightly-controlled standards in order to reduce the user learning curve; in fact, with the appropriate filters and standards in place, their users find ARIS “much easier to use than Visio”.

They have a number of plans for 2007, including simulation, integration with a number of other systems including their BPMS, building out the complete enterprise business architecture, and using “system of systems engineering” to track interdependencies between projects.

2007 02 07 Sandy Kemsley BPA
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