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Innovation World: ChoicePoint external customers solutions with BPM, BAM and ESB

I took some time out from sessions this afternoon to meet with Software AG’s deputy CTOs, Bjoern Brauel and Miko Matsumura, but I’m back for the last session of the day with Cory Kirspel, VP of identity risk management at ChoicePoint (a LexisNexis company), on how they have created externally-facing solutions using BPM, BAM and ESB. ChoicePoint screens and authenticates people for employment screening, insurance services and other identity-related purposes, plus does court document retrieval. There’s a fine line to walk here: companies need to protect the privacy of individuals while minimizing identify fraud.

Even though they only really do two things — credential and investigate people and businesses — they had 43+ separate applications on 12 platforms with various technologies in order to do this. Not only did that make it hard to do what they needed internally, customers were also wanting to integrate ChoicePoint’s systems directly into their own with an implementation time of only 3-4 months, and provide visibility into the processes.

They were already a Software AG customer with the legacy modernization products, so took a look at their BPM, BAM and ESB. The result is that they had better visibility, and could leverage the tools to build solutions much faster since they weren’t building everything from the ground up. He walked us through some of the application screens that they developed for use in their customers’ call centers: allow a CSR to enter some data about a caller, select a matching identity by address, verify the identity (e.g., does the SSN match the name), authenticate the caller with questions that only they could answer, then provide a pass/fall result. The overall flow and the parameters of every screen can be controlled by the customer organization, and the whole flow is driven by a process model in the BPMS which allows them to assign and track KPIs on each step in the process.

They’re also moving their own executives from the old way of keeping an eye on business — looking at historical reports — to the new way with near real-time dashboards. As well as having visibility into transaction volumes, they are also able to detect unusual situations that might indicate fraud or other situations of increased risk, and alert their customers. They found that BAM and BI were misunderstood, poorly managed and under-leveraged; these technologies could be used on legacy systems to start getting benefits even before BPM was added into the mix.

All of this allowed them to reduce the cost of ownership, which protects them in a business that competes on price, as well as offering a level of innovation and integration with their customers’ systems that their competitors are unable to achieve.

They used Software AG’s professional services, and paired each external person with an internal one in order to achieve knowledge transfer.

2008 11 04 Sandy Kemsley BPM
ESB
InnovationWorld Comments (0)

Business Rules Forum: James Taylor and Neil Raden keynote

Opening the second conference day, James Taylor and Neil Raden gave a keynote about competing on decisions. First up was James, who started with a definition of what a decision is (and isn’t), speaking particularly about operation decisions that we often see in the context of automated business processes. He made a good point that your customers react to your business decisions as if they were deliberate and personal to them, when often they’re not; James’ premise is that you should be making these deliberate and personal, providing the level of micro-targeting that’s appropriate to your business (without getting too creepy about it), but that there’s a mismatch between what customers want and what most organizations provide.

Decisions have to be built into processes and systems that manage your business, so although business may drive change, IT gets to manage it. James used the term “orthogonal” when talking about the crossover between process and rules; I used this same expression in a discussion with him yesterday in discussing how processes and decisions should not be dependent upon each other: if a decision and a process are interdependent, then you’re likely dealing with a process decision that should be embedded within the process, rather than a business decision.

A decision-centric organization is focused on the effectiveness of its decisions rather than aggregated, after-the-fact metrics; decision-making is seen as a specific competency, and resources are dedicated to making those decisions better.

Enterprise decision management, as James and Neil now define it, is an approach for managing and approving the decisions that drive your business:

  • Making the decisions explicit
  • Tracking the effectiveness of the decisions in order to improve them
  • Learning from the past to increase the precision of the decisions
  • Defining and managing these decisions for consistency
  • Ensuring that they can be changed as needed for maximum agility
  • Knowing how fast the decisions must be made in order to match the speed of the business context
  • Minimizing the cost of decisions

Using an airline pilot analogy, he discussed how business executives need a number of decision-related tools to do their job effectively:

  • Simulators (what-if analysis), to learn what impact an action might have
  • Auto-pilot, so that their business can (sometimes) work effectively without them
  • Heads-up display, so they can see what’s happening now, what’s coming up, and the available options
  • Controls, simple to use but able to control complex outcomes
  • Time, to be able to take a more strategic look at their business

Continuing on the pilot analogy, he pointed out that the term dashboard is used in business to really mean an instrument cluster: display, but no control. A true dashboard must include not just a display of what’s happening, but controls that can impact what’s happening in the business. I saw a great example of that last week at the Ultimus conference: their dashboard includes a type of interactive dial that can be used to temporarily change thresholds that control the process.

James turned the floor over to Neil, who dug further into the agility imperative: rethinking BI for processes. He sees that today’s BI tools are insufficient for monitoring and analyzing business processes, because of the agile and interconnected nature of these processes. This comes through in the results of a survey that they did about how often people are using related tools: the average hours per week that a marketing analyst spends using their BI tool was 1.2, versus 17.4 for Excel, 4.2 for Access and 6.2 for other data administration tools. I see Excel everywhere in most businesses, whereas BI tools are typically only used by specialists, so this result does not come as a big surprise.

The analytical needs of processes are inherently complex, requiring an understanding of the resources involved and process instance data, as well as the actual process flow. Processes are complex causal systems: much more than just that simple BPMN diagram that you see. A business process may span multiple automated (monitored) processes, and may be created or modified frequently. Stakeholders require different views of those processes; simple tactical needs can be served by BAM-type dashboards, but strategic needs — particularly predictive analysis — are not well-served by this technology. This is beyond BI: it’s process intelligence, where there must be understanding of other factors affecting a process, not just measuring the aggregated outcomes. He sees process intelligence as a distinct product type, not the same as BI; unfortunately, the market is being served (or not really served) by traditional query-based approaches against a relatively static data model, or what Neil refers to as a “tortured OLAP cube-based approach”.

What process intelligence really needs is the ability to analyze the timing of the traffic flow within a process model in order to provide more accurate flow predictions, while allowing for more agile process views that are generated automatically from the BPMN process models. The analytics of process intelligence are based on the process logs, not pre-determined KPIs.

Neil ended up by tying this back to decisions: basically, you can’t make good decisions if you don’t understand how your processes work in the first place.

Interesting that James and Neil deal with two very important aspects of business processes: James covers decisions, and Neil covers analytics. I’ve done presentations in the past on the crossover between BPM, BRM and BI; but they’ve dug into these concepts in much more detail. If you haven’t read their book, Smart Enough Systems, there’s a lot of great material in there on this same theme; if you’re here at the forum, you can pick up a copy at their table at the expo this afternoon.

2008 10 29 Sandy Kemsley BI
BPM
BRM
BusinessRulesForum Comments (23)

Ultimus: Process optimization

Chris Adams is back to talk to us about process optimization, both as a concept and in the context of the Ultimus tools available to assist with this. I’m a bit surprised with the tone/content of this presentation, in which Chris is explaining why you need to optimize processes; I would have thought that anyone who has bought a BPMS probably gets the need for process optimization.

The strategies that they support:

  • Classic: updating your process and republishing it without changing work in progress
  • Iterative: focused and more specific changes updating live process instances
  • Situational/temporary: managers changing the runtime logic (really, the thresholds applied using rules) in live processes, such as changing an approval threshold during a month-end volume increase
  • Round-trip optimization: comparing live data against modeling result sets in simulation

There’s a number of tools for optimizing and updating processes:

  • Ultimus Director, allowing a business manager to change the rules in active processes
  • Studio Client, the main process design environment, which allows for versioning each artifact of a process; it also allows changes to be published back to update work in progress
  • iBAM, providing visibility into work in progress; it’s a generic dashboarding tool that can also be used for visualization of other data sets, not just Ultimus BPM instance data

He finished up with some best practices:

  • Make small optimizations to the process and update often, particularly because Ultimus allows for the easy upgrade of existing process instances
  • Use Ultimus Director to get notifications of
  • Use Ultimus iBAM interactive dials to allow executives to make temporary changes to rule thresholds that impact process flow

There was a great question from the audience about the use of engineering systems methodology in process optimization, such as theory of constraints; I don’t think that most of the vendors are addressing this explicitly, although the ideas are creeping into some of the more sophisticated simulation product.

2008 10 23 Sandy Kemsley BI
BPA
Ultimus Comments (1)

Ultimus: Reports and Dashboards

Chris Adams is probably now thinking that I’m stalking him: not only do I attend his first two technical sessions, but when he switches to the business track for this presentation, I follow him. However, I wanted to hear about their reporting and analytics capabilities, and he covered off reporting, dashboards, BAM, alerts and using third-party analytics.

Ultimus BPM SuiteHe started out with the underlying premise that you need to have governance over your business data, or your processes won’t be effective and efficient; in order to do that, you need to identify the key performance indicators (KPIs) that will be used to measure the health of your processes. This means both real-time monitoring and historical analytics.

Ultimus iBAM provides a real-time dashboard that works with both V7 and V8. Only in V8, there’s also email alerts when specific KPI thresholds are reached.

For offline reporting, they have three types:

  • Process reports, automatically created for process instance analytics
  • User reports, also automatically created for workload and user productivity
  • Custom reports that allow for filtering of the historical data, filtered by other business data

Reports can be viewed as charts as well as tabular reports; there is a third-party report generation tool invisibly built in (Infologistics?); Chris noted that this is the only third-party OEM component in Ultimus.

If you’re using Crystal Reports or Cognos, Ultimus has now opened up and created connectors to allow for reporting on the Ultimus history data directly from those platforms; by the end of the year, they’ll add support for SQL Server Reporting Services as well.

There will be a more technical session on the reporting and analytics later today.

2008 10 23 Sandy Kemsley BI
Ultimus 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 ARISProcessWorld
BI Comments (0)

Agent Logic’s RulePoint and RTAM

This post has been a long time coming: I missed talking to Agent Logic at the Gartner BPM event in Orlando in September since I didn’t stick around for the CEP part of the week, they persisted and we had both an intro phone call and a longer demo session in the weeks following. Then I had a crazy period of travel, came home to a backlog of client work and a major laptop upgrade, and seemed to lose my blogging mojo for a month.

If you’re not yet familiar with the relatively new field of CEP (complex event processing), there are many references online, including a recent ebizQ white paper based on their event processing survey which determined that a majority of the survey respondents believe that event-driven architecture comprises all three of the following:

  • Real-time event notification – A business event occurs and those individuals or systems who are interested in that event are notified, and potentially act on the event.
  • Event stream processing – Many instances of an event occur, such as a stock trade, and a process filters the event stream and notifies individuals or systems only about the occurrences of interest, such as a stock price reaching a certain level.
  • Complex event processing – Different types of events, from unrelated transactions, correlated together to identify opportunities, trends, anomalies or threats.

And although the survey shows that the CEP market is dominated by IBM, BEA and TIBCO, there are a number of other significant smaller players, including Agent Logic.

In my discussions with Agent Logic, I had the chance to speak with Mike Appelbaum (CEO), Chris Bradley (EVP of Marketing) and Chris Carlson (Director of Product Management). My initial interest was to gain a better understanding of how BPM and CEP come together as well as how their product worked; I was more than a bit amused when they referred to BPM as an “event generator”. I was someone mollified when they also pointed out that business rules engines are event generators: both types of systems (and many others) generate thousands of events to their history logs as they operate, most of which are of no importance whatsoever; CEP helps to find the few unique combinations of events from multiple data feeds that are actually meaningful to the business, such as detecting credit card fraud based on geographic data, spending patterns, and historical account information.

Agent Logic - RulePoint - Home

Agent Logic has been around since 1999, and employs about 50 people. Although they initially targeted defence and intelligence industries, they’re now working with financial services and manufacturing as well. Their focus is on providing an end-user-driven CEP tool for non-technical users to write rules, rather than developers — something that distinguishes them from the big three players in the market. After taking a look at the product, I think that they got their definition of “non-technical user” from the same place as the BPM vendors: the prime target audience for their product would be a technically-minded business analyst. This definitely pushes down the control and enforcement of policies and procedures closer to the business user.

They also seem to be more focused on allowing people to respond to events in real-time (rather than, for example, spawning automated processes to react to events, although the product is certainly capable of that). As with other CEP tools, they allow multiple data feeds to be combined and analyzed, and rules set for alerts and actions to fire based on specific business events corresponding to combinations of events in the data feeds.

Agent Logic has two separate user environments (both browser-based): RulePoint, where the rules are built that will trigger alerts, and RTAM, where the alerts are monitored.

Agent Logic - RulePoint - Rule builderRulePoint is structured to allow more technical users work together with less technical users. Not only can users share rules, but a more technical user can create “topics”, which are aggregated, filtered data sources, then expose these to the less technical to be used as input for their rules. Rules can be further combined to create higher-level rules.

RulePoint has three modes for creating rules: templates, wizards and advanced. In all cases, you’re applying conditions to a data source (topic) and creating a response, but they vary widely in terms of ease of use and flexibility.

  • Templates can be used by non-technical users, who can only set parameter values for controlling filtering and responses, and save their newly-created rule for immediate use.
  • The wizard creation tool allows for much more complex conditions and responses to be created. As I mentioned previously, this is not really end-user friendly — more like business analyst friendly — but not bad.
  • The advanced creation mode allows you to write DRQL (detect and response query language) directly, for example, ‘when 1 “Stock Quote” s with s.symbol = “MSFT” and s.price > 90 then “Instant Message” with to=”broker@broker.com”,body=’MSFT is at ${s.price}”‘. Not for everyone, but the interesting thing is that by using template variables within the DRQL statements, you can converted rules created in advanced mode into templates for use by non-technical users: another example of how different levels of users can work together.

Agent Logic - RulePoint - WatchlistsWatchlists are lists that can be used as parameter sets, such as a list of approved airlines for rules related to travel expenses, which then become drop-down selection lists when used in templates. Watchlists can be dynamically updated by rules, such as adding a company to a list of high-risk companies if a SWIFT message is received that references both that company and a high-risk country.

Agent Logic - RulePoint - ServicesRulePoint includes a large number of predefined services that can be used as data sources or responders, including SQL, web services and RSS feeds. You can also create your own services. By providing access to web services both as a data source and as a method of responding to an alert, this allows Agent Logic to do things like kick off a new fraud review process in a BPMS when a set of events occur across a range of systems that indicate a potential for fraud.

Lastly, in terms of rule creation, there are both standard and custom responses that can be attached to a rule, ranging from sending an alert to a specific user in RTAM to sending an email message to writing a database record.

Although most of the power of Agent Logic shows up in RulePoint, we spent a bit of time looking at RTAM, the browser-based real-time alert manager. Some Agent Logic customers don’t use RTAM at all, or only for high-priority alerts, preferring to use RulePoint to send responses to other systems. However, compared to a typical BAM environment, RTAM provides pretty rich functionality: it can link to underlying data sources, for example, by linking to an external web site with criminal record data on receiving an alert that a job candidate has a record, and allows for mashups with external services such as Google maps.

Agent Logic - RTAM - AlertsIt’s also more of an alert management system rather than just monitoring: you can filter alerts by the various rules that trigger them, and perform other actions such as acknowledging the alert or forwarding it to another user.

Admittedly, I haven’t seen a lot of other CEP products to this depth to provide any fair comparison, but there were a couple of things that I really liked about Agent Logic. First of all, RulePoint provides a high degree of functionality with three different levels of interfaces for three different skill levels, allowing more technical users to create aggregated, easier-to-use data sources and services for less technical users to include in their rules. Rule creation ranges from dead simple (but inflexible) with templates to roll-your-own in advanced mode.

Secondly, the separation of RulePoint and RTAM allows the use of any BI/BAM tool instead of RTAM, or just feeding the alerts out as RSS feeds or to a portal such as Google Gadgets or Pageflakes. I saw a case study of how Bank of America is using RSS for company-wide alerts at the Enterprise 2.0 conference earlier this year, and see a natural fit between CEP and this sort of RSS usage.

Update: Agent Logic contacted me and requested that I remove a few of the screenshots that they don’t want published. Given that I always ask vendors during a demo if there is anything that I can’t blog about, I’m not sure how that misunderstanding occurred, but I’ve complied with their request.

2007 12 12 Sandy Kemsley CEP Comments (0)

Integration World Day 1: Peter Kurpick

Peter Kurpick, CPO (Chief Product Officer) of webMethods Business Division, gave an overview of the technology direction. He talked about the paradigm for SOA governance, with the layers of technical services, business services and policies being consumed by business processes: the addition of the policy layer (which is the SOA governance part) sets this apart from many of the visions of SOA that you see.

He brought along Susan Ganeshan, the SVP of Product Management and Product Marketing, to give a (canned) demo similar to one that we saw yesterday at the end of the analyst sessions. She showed the process map as modelled in their BPM layer, where the appropriate services were called and other points of integration using webMethods, then we saw the custom portal-type interfaces for customers, suppliers and internal workers. They have Fair Isaac’s Blaze Advisor integrated with the BPMS that allows them to change rules for in-flight processes, and their own monitoring and analytics as well as some new Cognos analytics integration. She also showed us the CentraSite integration, where information about services and their policies are stored; CentraSite can be used to dynamically select from multiple equivalent services based on policies, such as selecting from one of several suppliers. The idea of the demo is to show how all of the pieces can come together — people, web services, B2B services, legacy services, and policy governance — all using the webMethods suite.

The original core functionality provided by webMethods is the ESB (originally from the EAI space), but now that’s surrounded by BPM, composite applications, B2B integration and legacy modernization tools (from the Software AG side). Around that is BAM, which is being raised in importance from being just an adjunct to BPM to being an event-related technology in its own right. Around all of this is SOA governance, which is what CentraSite brings to this.

The next release, due sometime in 2008, will be a fully-integrated suite of the Software AG and webMethods products, although Kurpick didn’t provide a lot of information.

2007 11 06 Sandy Kemsley BPM
ESB
InnovationWorld Comments (0)

IQPC BPM Summit: Kirk Gould

Kirk Gould, a performance consultant with Pinnacle West Capital, talked about business processes and metrics. I like his definition of a metric: “A tool created to tie the performance of the organization to the business objectives”, and he had lots of great advice about how to — and how not to — develop metrics that work for your company.

I came right off of my presentation before this one, so I’m a bit too juiced up to focus as well on his presentation as it deserves. However, his slides are great and I’ll be reviewing them later. He also has a good handout that takes us through the 10 steps of metric development:

  1. Plan
  2. Perform
  3. Capture
  4. Analyze
  5. Display
  6. Level
  7. Automate
  8. Adjust
  9. Manage
  10. Achieve

He has a great deal more detail for each of these steps, both on the handout and in his presentation. He discussed critical success factors and performance indicators, and how they fit into a metrics framework, but the best parts were when he described the ways in which you can screw up your metrics programs: there were a lot of sheepish chuckles and head-shaking around the room, so I know that many of these hit home.

He went through the stages of metrics maturity, which I’ll definitely have to check out later since he flew through the too-dense slides pretty quickly. He quotes the oft-used (and very true) line that “what gets measured, gets managed”, a concept that is at the heart of metrics.

2007 06 27 Sandy Kemsley IQPC BPM Comments (1)

Complex Event Processing

A good intro article on complex event processing (CEP), subtitled “Bringing BPM into the real world”. The future of BAM.

2006 01 08 Sandy Kemsley BPM
CEP Comments (0)

BAM technical session

This seemed to be a morning for networking, and I’m arriving late for a technical session on FileNet’s BAM. I missed the hands-on session this morning so wanted to get a closer look at this before it’s released sometime in the next couple of months.

The key functional things in the product are dashboards, rules and alerts. The dashboard part is pretty standard BI presentation-layer stuff: pick a data source, pick a display/graph type, and position it on the dashboard. Rules are where the smarts come in: pick a data source, configure the condition for firing an alert, then set the content and recipient of the alert. Alerts can be displayed on the recipient’s dashboard, or sent as an email or SMS, or even launch other processes or services to handle an exception condition automatically.

There’s a nice interface for configuring the dimensions (aggregations) in the underlying OLAP cubes, and for configuring buckets for running statistics. The data kept on the BAM server is cycled out pretty quickly: it’s really for tracking work in progress with just enough historical data to do some statistical smoothing.

Because they’re using a third-party OEM product for BAM, it’s open to other data sources plugged into the server, used in the OLAP cubes, combined on the dashboards or used in the rules. However, this model adds yet another server, since it pulls pre-processed work-in-progress data from the Process Analyzer (so PA is still required) and has a sufficiently hefty memory requirement since it’s maintaining the cubes in memory that it’s probably not a good idea to co-locate it on a shared application server. I suppose that this demotes PA to a data mart for historical data as well as a pre-processor, which is not a completely bad thing, but I’m imagining that a full replacement for PA might be better received by the customers.

2005 11 09 Sandy Kemsley UserNet2005 Comments (0)

Hot BAM!

If there’s anything better than hearing about a hot new product like FileNet’s BAM, it’s hearing it in Danny Pidutti’s lovely Aussie accent. There’s a few misconceptions in his presentation around the differences between BI and BAM; I see BAM as just a process-oriented subset of BI, although the real-time nature means that we’re in the realm of operational BI, such as was discussed in an eBizq webinar “Improving Business Visibility Through Operational BI” on Oct 27th (www.ebizq.net/webinars/6298.html according to my calendar, sorry for the lack of a direct hyperlink but that’s the limits of blogging via Blackberry email) and an earlier one about operational BI on Oct 12th, although I can’t recall who hosted it.

This looks like a pretty significant improvement on the old Process Analyzer: about 20 pre-configured reports, configurable role-based dashboards, KPIs for scorecard-like capabilities, alerts and other fun stuff. A bit of a catch-up from.a competitive standpoint, but FileNet’s more known for solid technology than being the first to market these days.

The demo starts with a Celequest login screen, telling you who the OEM vendor is. At this point, it’s really a standard BI demo, showing how dashboards are configured, alerts set and related functions.

My only question is, what took you guys so long?

2005 11 08 Sandy Kemsley BI
UserNet2005 Comments (0)

High-level product info

Dave McCann, FileNet’s SVP of Products, is talking in some very broad strokes about product directions, and I’m yearning for more details on all the new announcements. I suppose that will come mostly in the breakout sessions, I just need to be patient. He’s also talking a lot about content, which is not my focus (in case you haven’t noticed already) — I consider content to be like the air we breathe: it’s always there, I just don’t think about it.

A few interesting factoids that he’s dropped into his talk based on his conversations with customers: a large insurance company who sits on the FileNet technical advisory board stated that the largest cost in their IT budget is integration between all of the vendor products that they own. Yikes! A European customer told him that 82% of their IT budget is committed to maintaining what’s already in place, with only the remaining 18% to spend on new technology. These two facts taken together point out the need for easier ways to integrate all the things that are there, which will free up part of the budget for new technology that will help companies maintain a competitive advantage. The need for consistent architectures and reusability has never been greater.

He’s finally onto the process stuff, and is talking about the recent and upcoming enhancements to the BPM product suite:

- Productization of the Business Process Framework, which is a BPM application development framework developed by FileNet’s Professional Services for use in their own customer engagements, including things like case management and skills/roles management. They’re being very careful about positioning this so that it’s not perceived as being too competitive with partner solutions, although I’m sure that there will be a few partners who are going to be a bit put out by this.

- Business Activity Monitoring as a new product, replacing the rudimentary Process Analyzer that has been holding the fort in the BAM area for the past few years. Shipping in December. I’ll definitely be going to the lab on this later this week, since this is something that I constantly talk to customers about.

- Enhanced integration with business intelligence, especially through their recent cozying up with Cognos. I’ll be talking about corporate performance management, and mentioning Cognos specifically, in my breakout session this afternoon, since I feel that this is a critical step for most organizations.

- eForms enhancements, which are always interesting but a bit peripheral to what I usually do.

- A business rules connectivity framework that integrates to Fair Isac, Corticon and Resolution in addition to the longer-standing integration with ILOG. BRE is another functionality that I feel is essential to BPM, as I discussed in my course on the weekend.

He’s also talking about the FileNet Enterprise Reference Architecture, which fits nicely as a technical architecture for ECM against a full EA context.

The most exciting thing about the features that will be released next year is full BPMN support, which further validates my personal preference for BPMN over UML for process modelling.

All-in-all, I’m quite pleased with what they’ve announced in the BPM area, since it’s addressing some key weaknesses (like BAM) that have existed in the product suite to date.

Tagged
2005 11 07 Sandy Kemsley BI
BPM
BPM standards
BRM
UserNet2005 Comments (0)

Neural nets in BPM?

Just saw this article in eWeek about Fuego releasing neural net capabilities in their BPM product.

Neural Network works through a decision activity capability that lets users define a set of variables that can be analyzed for process improvement…Neural Network takes that set of variables and builds a learning activity set that can monitor decisions and suggest behavior to improve the process.

I haven’t heard the term “neural net” much since my days in graduate school when I was slogging through a thesis on pattern recognition; it usually refers to a hardware implementation consisting of a massively-parallel network of simple processors (modelled on the human brain and its highly-connected network of neurons): think grid computing on a very tiny scale. Because these terms are not widely understood, there’s a long history of misuse: in fact, the first company that I worked for after university had the word “perceptron” (a type of neural net) in its name, although we wrote pattern recognition and scientific image analysis software, with nary a neural net in sight.

That being said, I’m assuming that what Fuego is calling “Neural Network” is actually artificial intelligence (AI) or cognitive modelling, although I can understand why the marketing types would avoid the overused “AI”, with its shades of science fiction, and positively run screaming from the overly-geeky “cognitive”. The problem with introducing a functionality that is barely understood in the marketplace (besides having to explain it to your own marketing people) is that the customers have no clue what to do with it, and probably not much time to spend doing the out-of-the-box thinking required to come up with some real business scenarios that have the potential for ROI. If you keep reading the article, you’ll see that the VP of process management at an existing Fuego customer considered “the Neural Network technology” to be “intriguing but not essential”. See the problem? It’s still “technology” in the minds of that customer, not a solution to a business problem.

I think that AI has a great future in BPM, but it’s still very early in the hype cycle. As a natural extension to business activity monitoring (BAM), pushing it into the milieu of semi-automated corporate performance management (CPM), it’s going to be the next “must-do” on BPM vendors’ product plans.

By the way, I wrote this post on my tablet PC (in tablet mode) — the handwriting recognition is really good, although a bit slower than my typing. I would like copy-cut-paste soft keys on the handwriting input panel, however: I had to keep switching from handwriting mode to keyboard mode in order to use Ctrl+C, Ctrl+X and Ctrl+V.

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2005 10 26 Sandy Kemsley BPM Comments (0)

Fractured Language

Yesterday, I was finishing off a presentation for a talk that I’ll be giving next month about corporate performance management, including some of the analytics tools that are used to build things like executive dashboards to display the key performance indicators of a company’s operations as charts and dials. Two tools/metaphors are used a lot: dashboards and scorecards, which both do exactly as they sound. Unfortunately, in my research I found at least one vendor of these products who verbs the nouns, and refers to “dashboarding” and “scorecarding” as the activities of creating these things for a company. Blech.

I felt better after this morning’s daily dose of Savage Chickens.

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2005 10 07 Sandy Kemsley BI Comments (1)

Intelligent Enterprise BPM cover

Today’s Intelligent Enterprise cover story “Business Process Management is Under Construction” is focussed specifically on modeling, analysis and reporting, business activity monitoring (BAM) and simulation features (since they cover integration and automation features in an earlier article).

Their assessment shows BPM as still at a relatively early adoption state:

BPM software is headed for mainstream adoption, but it’s still a relatively small, immature market… Plenty of organizations have yet to discover BPM… 36 percent said they were considering BPM and 29 percent said they had no plans to implement it, while only 24 percent said they were either piloting, rolling out, in production with or upgrading BPM.

That’s certainly what I’m seeing in many organizations, and why BPM evangelism is going to be required for some time still. Yes, there’s lots of successful BPM case studies to point at, but if you dig into the infrastructure at a large financial institution (for example), you’ll find a lot of EAI and not a lot of real BPM. Intelligent Enterprise states that even the basic automation and integration are still a challenge for many organizations, but I’m finding that the integration part has pushed forward because EAI is typically an IT initiative to integrate systems behind the scenes: the business benefits obliquely but their environment may not be impacted at all. On the other hand, automation requires true BPM (including human-facing workflow, modelling and simulation, and a whole raft of other features not typically found in EAI), plus full involvement of the business in order to achieve success, so gets hung up on the continuing disconnect between IT and the business that they serve.

Compliance is certainly going to push BPM forward, although that requires closed-loop process control throught the addition of analytics and simulation. There needs to be a bigger focus on making BPM performance monitoring and improvement a part of the larger corporate performance management framework, and showing how BPM fits into an organization’s enterprise architecture framework.

There are two more BPM articles in this issue of Intelligent Enterprise, “IT Detours on the Road to BPM” that discusses nine BPM suites’ closed-loop capabilities, and “Simple Process Management: Quick, Cheap and Easy” about Nsite, a hosted solution for a limited range of administrative-type workflows. I’d love to stay and blog all day about them, but it’s a holiday here and I’m going sailing.

2005 08 01 Sandy Kemsley BPM
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BPM, Six Sigma, & the Road to Process Perfection

An article in Business Integration Journal about using BPM to achieve Six Sigma objectives, by Carl Hillier, a former colleague of mine at FileNet. I first met Carl about 10 years ago when he was a FileNet systems engineer in London and I owned a professional services firm that helped customers implement FileNet systems, and I’ve always had a great deal of respect for his opinions (although not always for his choice of bosses): not only is he smart technically and knows more about FileNet BPM than just about anyone, but he can write beautifully coherent sentences about it.

Of course, he does give space to the FileNet party line in several spots, (”a robust BPM solution provides a fully integrated content repository” — I consider an integrated content repository to be “nice to have” but not essential), but he does hit the nail on the head when he talks about BPM helping to provide a “closed loop” environment for Six Sigma’s Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, Control (DMAIC) continuous process improvement cycle through the inclusion of process analytics and simulation.

2005 07 25 Sandy Kemsley BPM
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Business Performance Management survey

If you caught their webinar on Business Performance Management and Optimization a few weeks ago, you’ll know that ebizQ is putting together a survey on business performance management for their Buyer’s Choice Awards. You can help create and weight the criteria that will be used in the survey if you’re so inclined.

I’m still having a bit of trouble with the whole business performance management thing. The goal is to optimize business performance by aligning what goes on in the business with the corporate KPIs (e.g., customer retention rate). Okay, it makes sense that you focus on doing things that provide measurable improvement to the business; in fact, it’s not only common sense, it’s very similar conceptually to Six Sigma and a number of other business improvement practices that have been around for decades. A somewhat more esoteric goal of business performance management is to allow an organization to make decisions in real time, and become predictive rather than reactive. Lots of potential pitfalls this; it harkens back to the agility problem, which says that organizations aren’t being agile even when they have the capability to do so. Also, BPM definitely plays a major role as an input channel to business performance management, but don’t follow into the trap of optimizing operational processes while inadvertantly blowing your KPIs.

Business performance management is being defined as a combination of methodologies, best practices and technologies, where the technology includes event/process monitoring, management dashboards, rules engines, business intelligence, simulation, collaboration and potentially the kitchen sink. Maybe that’s why we have so many vendors claiming that they’re in business performance management: by this definition, there’s probably fewer software vendors who are not included than who are. In some cases, the technologies of business performance management are collectively referred to as BAM; in other cases, BAM refers only to the event/process monitoring. Personally, I would go for the former definition, but I don’t have a lot invested either way.

My problem is this: what distinguishes the concept of business performance management from that of the decision support systems (DSS) or executive information sytems (EIS) that we built in the 1980’s, except that the technology is a bit more advanced? This is being hailed as the new saviour of business, and I feel a bit like I’m looking at the Emperor’s new clothes.

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2005 07 19 Sandy Kemsley BPM Comments (0)

Suites versus best of breed

I found this post about BPM suites versus best of breed to be an interesting take, although misguided. The blog is written by a Fuego systems engineer and as expected, his blog entry espouses the corporate party line of “BPM suites good, best of breed bad”. Every suites vendor will tell you exactly the same thing, and they’re all a bit right and a bit wrong. Yes, there are benefits to having an end-to-end integrated solution: typically, information flows more easily between components, and there’s no finger-pointing when an interface doesn’t work as expected. However, if the suites vendor’s components don’t give you all the functionality that you require, then you really should be looking elsewhere for the specific components.

Apparently an analyst told one of his customers that no BPM suite does it all, and to consider separate modelling, execution and BAM vendors. Good advice, as far as I’m concerned. Personally, I don’t interpret this to mean that the suites vendor should be excluded from the evaluation of all components, it just means that other vendors should be included. It also doesn’t mean that business is yielding their role in the design and management of processes to IT by choosing multiple tools, just that they use different (and equally competent) tools to participate.

Process modelling is a great example. Most BPMS modelling tools don’t allow for the modelling of manual steps, that is, steps that have nothing to do with the automated process, such as opening mail; they also don’t allow for modelling in the larger context of enterprise architecture. Any business that is serious about documenting enterprise architecture and improving their processes has probably already started modelling their processes using something like IDS Scheer’s ARIS Business Architect or Proforma’s ProVision. For a BPMS vendor to assume that a) process is the only thing to be modelled in the enterprise and b) only steps that touch their product are important, is being a bit unrealistic about where BPM fits into enterprise architecture. I’m the first person to step up and state that process is a key part of any organization, but I would never imagine that it’s the only part.

BAM is another example. Again, BPM suites include enough BAM to monitor and report on the processes that are controlled by their execution engine, but have no vision of the larger performance management landscape that exists within an organization. Execution stats from a BPMS are only one source of data that can feed into a broader performance management system: a company does not manage by process alone.

As a final note on the blog post that started my train of thought, I find it interesting (yet unsurprising) that the only component that he doesn’t recommend buying from the BPM suites vendor, a rules engine, is one that Fuego doesn’t sell.

2005 07 18 Sandy Kemsley BPA
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Process Orchestration 101

Today’s Integration 101 webinar talked about why it’s important to integrate applications. Basically, if you don’t, then you probably have the following problems in your business processes:

  • No real-time visibility into the process
  • Long cycle time due to manual data gathering and other non-automated tasks

In other words, your customer drops their information into a black hole and nothing happens for a long time, so there is a higher risk that they take their business elsewhere. Not only is the process inefficient (and therefore costs you more to operate), but it results in lost revenue.

When you use BPM for your large scale processes where several internal and external applications are integrated, you’re moving into the area of process orchestration: the BPMS is invoking, controlling and tracking what goes on in all of the applications. Add in a business rules engine to automate decision-making in the process, and BAM to publish a real-time view of what’s going on, and not only are things more efficient due to fewer manual steps in the process, but your customer can see what’s going on at each step of the process.

Realistically, the only way to do this level of enterprise application integration such that it’s maintainable, flexible, extensible and reusable, is to use a service oriented architecture to expose the applications’ functionality as services to be called by the BPMS. Otherwise, you’ll be right back in a spaghetti mess with the same (or competing) business logic embedded in multiple applications.

Sandy Kemsley BPM
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BPM as part of BAM

A few more notes on today’s ebizQ webinar on BAM. Ms Gold-Bernstein talked about another topic close to my heart, namely that BPM is one of the contributing sources to BAM/performance management, rather than BAM being a part of BPM (as the BPM vendors would have you believe). The term “BAM” was originally coined by Gartner, so they’ve had first dibs at saying what is and is not BAM:

BAM defines the concept of providing real-time access to critical business performance indicators, along with the supporting information to improve the speed and effectiveness of business operations.BAM is accomplished by monitoring multiple systems, creating real-time dashboards, and using context and rules to detect the occurrence of a pre-defined set of circumstances.

They list BAM technologies as including BPM, integration middleware (arguably part of BPM under Gartner’s own definition), BI, dashboards with KPIs (which I would consider part of BI), and IT operational management (ditto). Since BAM is defined as a concept and is linked to all of these technologies, there are a lot of vendors from all different areas scrambling to get into BAM magic quadrant — not unlike what’s happening with BPM vendors ever since Gartner lumped together all process-related technologies as “BPM”.

To confuse things further, Gartner’s report on the convergence of BPM and BAM lists three main areas of overlap, and therefore potential conflict:

  • BPM acting as “BPM+BAM”
  • BPM serving as BAM’s response mechanism or recipient
  • BPM ? or business process analysis (BPA) ? serving as a passive analytic/visualization model for BAM

Prior to Gartner defining BAM, there was performance management, which is more focussed on the BI side of the equation, including technologies such as BI, dashboards and, lately, CEP (complex event processing). Although the goals of performance management are fundamentally the same as BAM (business alignment, real-time KPIs), the scope is narrower by excluding BPM and middleware technologies.

Somehow, the concept of performance management as pure business intelligence makes more sense to me than including (rather arbitrarily) some of the technologies that produce the data that feed into the performance management. If BPM is included as one of BAM’s technologies, why not databases, or CRM, or any other technology within an enterprise that produces data that may be of interest to management? In fact, if there’s a technology within an enterprise that doesn’t contribute data to performance management KPIs, why is it there?

2005 05 18 Sandy Kemsley BPM Comments (0)