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I listened in on a webinar today that included six different BPM vendors discussing intelligent BPM for the enterprise. It’s a bit unusual to have several different vendors on the same presentation; here’s who was there:

• Jeremy Westerman, TIBCO
• Brandon Baxter, Lombardi
• Russell Keziere, Pegasystems
• Miko Matsumura, Software AG
• Simon Clephan, IBM
• Ryan Licari, IDS Scheer

Not surprisingly, this was structured as six separate mini-presentations on a similar theme.

Westerman started with an overview of TIBCO’s product suite, then drilled in on their BPMS and its functionality. Unfortunately, except for a brief look at one of their well-publicized case studies,  nothing more interesting than a product brochure, although it is good to see them playing up the role of their Spotfire acquisition as a much more capable tool than standard business activity monitoring. It was also 21.5 minutes into the webinar by the time that he finished, then they took Q&A on his presentation for another 11 minutes. The whole thing has a “canned” air to it, and I suspect that it was all pre-recorded including the Q&A, without the vendors ever being on the line together.

Baxter’s presentation was better, since it focused more on what you want to do with a BPMS rather than just listing the capabilities of their product, but each of the important features that he highlighted are well-served by Lombardi – no big surprise.

At 45 minutes into the presentation, we’re still on the 2nd of six vendor presentations, and so far the whole thing has been fairly content-free if you strip out the part where they just talk about what their product does. I viewed the slides for the remaining presentations and saw more of the same, so I bailed.

It’s probably pretty clear that I don’t recommend watching this webinar unless you want to hear a sales pitch on six different products. Since I was writing this as I went along, however, you get to hear about it. I really hope that the vendors didn’t pay a lot to be on this webinar, because I can’t believe that it will bring a lot of value to them.

Neil Ward-Dutton gave a webinar this morning about delivering on the promise of BPM: how we have to get past the vision of BPM as model-driven development for rapid application delivery, and focus on the bigger picture of enabling continuous process improvement through technology use. There are a lot of challenges when you move past departmental solutions and start rolling out BPM company-wide: you need to scale communication, collaboration, change management and governance to match your deployment.

He started with the key drivers for large-scale business process improvement: globalization, such that your customers, partners and competition can come from anywhere; transparency in terms of regulations and open competition; and smart, connected markets where you need to engage your customers in the online world. Both business and IT recognize the need for flexibility, innovation, value and differentiation in order to exist in this changing world. BPM is important to this because it’s not just about model-driven development, and about building applications faster: it’s about creating a better way to manage your business and its key processes.

It’s this combination of management philosophy, efficiency optimization methods and technology that makes it powerful, and allows you to improve operational efficiency, support innovation, and enjoy flexibility in your business model. Process also creates a common language for business and IT to collaborate, and we’re seeing that reflected in the BPM tools that allow business and IT to each have their own perspective on a shared process model. He made an excellent point that just using a process-focused toolset doesn’t give you a true agile process improvement environment: it just gives you a fast waterfall method. You really need to have model-driven process management in order to have that unbroken cycle of exploring/measuring, defining and executing/monitoring your processes.

I loved the phrase on one of his slides on scaling communication and collaboration – “You can’t scale a BPM initiative if you rely on a small ‘priesthood’ to carry out Six Sigma ceremonies” – with his point being that you have to have the culture of process innovation exist throughout your organization. He also pointed out that you have to be able to manage process model assets effectively in order to be able to locate and reuse models as required: something that requires a proper model repository, not a collection of files out on a shared network drive somewhere.

We also heard from Brandon Baxter of Lombardi (who sponsored the webinar) about how they address model-driven development in Teamworks, where all authors work in a single shared environment. In addition to providing tools for both business analysts and IT, they provide the ability to have “playbacks” to show the current state of the process to people who aren’t involved directly in the process modeling. He described a situation where they took a huge requirements document and a tsunami of Visio diagrams from a client, did an initial version in Teamworks, then did a playback to the group that provided the requirements: not surprisingly, the process wasn’t at all what they wanted, even though it was what they asked for. I see this all the time with clients, and push for an early prototype/playback as soon as possible in order to validate the requirements and process flows, but sometimes it’s hard for them to believe that all those requirements that they spent time gathering, writing and approving aren’t really the best way to go about developing their processes.

He also spent some time talking about their asset repository; although I haven’t done an in-depth review of Teamworks for a while, I recall that it’s very robust. Maybe I’m so steeped in the concepts of the value of content management that management of process assets seems like a no-brainer to me: any business content (including process models) that has any value should be in some sort of controlled environment that allows it to be secured (if necessary), versioned, and easily found and reused.

There was a good Q&A at the end, including some on executable versus non-executable models, and the value of importing non-executable models into a BPMS. Interchange formats for exchanging models between pure modeling tools and executable BPM tools are necessary, but there a whole lot of the process that will likely not be imported since it’s not executable, as well as a lot of enrichment that needs to be done to the processes once they’re in the BPMS. Due to both of these factors, round-tripping often is not possible between the modeling and execution environments. I had a conversation with a customer on exactly this issue yesterday; to those who haven’t worked with these systems, it’s hard to grasp why you can’t just round-trip the models (answer: the modeling environment may not support the execution enrichment) or why you would ever need to change a model in the execution environment rather than do it in the modeling environment and re-import (answer: agility).

The webinar was at a fairly basic level, but provided some great information for those who are still new to BPM. In a survey taken during the webinar, it looked as if a majority of the people were either gathering information or just getting started. Baxter’s part was mostly unique to Lombardi’s product, although many of the other BPM products out there have a similar set of features.

I accessed the live version of the webinar here, but I’m not sure if the replay will be there as well.

Clay Richardson of Forrester and Keith Swenson of Fujitsu gave a webinar this afternoon on dynamic BPM platforms. There will be a replay available; I’ll update this post with the link when I get it, or someone can add it to the comments if they get it first.

Richardson started with some fairly generic research by Forrester on business problems such as cross-functional processes and process agility, then defined a dynamic business process as one that is built for change and adaptable to the business context. There’s also a significant collaboration/social software message, where dynamic BPM requires both a high degree of collaboration as well as a high degree of information support.

As he points out, most BPM only tackles the structured parts of a process, but doesn’t interface with things such as personal reminder lists, external email and instant messaging. The entire business process does include those things; it’s just that most organizations are using manual, ad hoc methods to integrate between structured systems (including most BPM) and unstructured activities and systems. He stratifies this into three parallel types of work: ad hoc human activities, structured human activities, and system-intensive processes. Although many BPM solutions can do the latter two, many organizations use very different tools for purely system-to-system interactions than they do for processes that contain human-facing steps.

He stated that dynamic BPM is able to handle ad hoc and collaboration scenarios in the context of a more structured business process: being able to blend structured and unstructured work. This allows knowledge workers to do work on their own terms using the tools that they choose, but by doing this in the context of dynamic BPM, visibility into these ad hoc processes is maintained. In the course of providing this visibility, it also feeds back information to IT on how the processes are executed, allowing for these to potentially be structured and standardized where appropriate.

He then turned it over to Keith Swenson, who reinforced the definition of dynamic BPM as empowering users to get work done their way, specifically in cases where there is no pre-defined “best way”to complete the work. The plan is elaborated while you work, not ahead of time; he used one example of emergency fire response units, and another of a movie rollout by a production studio. In both cases, there is not a fixed process or assembly-line plan for how things should be done; they need to be able to do unpredictable things in the context of completing the work, with decisions about what to do next made by multiple people. In many cases, portions of the work is sub-tasked to others, who use their own judgment to create and execute the plan on the fly.

The predominant way that ad hoc processes are handled now is email: people send messages to assign a task to someone, but there’s not a lot of tracking of what work has been assigned to whom, and the status of that work. From a modeling standpoint, consider that this could end up looking like nested subprocesses of ad hoc tasks, where these subprocesses and tasks (and the resources to whom they are assigned) need to be created as they are identified. What we need is smart email, which allows someone to just break out of the structured process, fire off an email to someone who may not have been predefined as a resource, and have that email communication (including the responses) be visible through the standard tracking mechanisms as part of the process.

I’m not left with any sense of how this might tie into Fujitsu products (or, in fact, any other BPM products), although Swenson is enough of an independent thinker that it may not have a direct link, but be more of an educational push. He did mention something pretty vague about how they did support dynamic BPM, but it’s not clear if this is current standard product offering, future product offering, or services. They are promoting a two-day workshop for visualizing your current dynamic business processes, so this may be more related to what they can offer from a services standpoint since they also have some innovative stuff in process discovery. When you think about it, some part of dynamic BPM is really just process discovery, aimed at finding the parts of the ad hoc processes that can be turned into structured processes for a standard BPM implementation. The rest of it is about creating the linkages between the ad hoc process handling methods – such as email and IM – so that these become first class participants in a business process.

There’s a few of the smaller vendors who are creating direct interfaces with Outlook/Exchange in order to provide this sort of management of email requests and responses, including HandySoft (where, coincidentally, Richardson used to work) and ActionBase (which I reviewed last month), but the larger vendors needs to start including this sort of functionality in their BPM products as well.

Another webinar that I managed to miss last week: Metastorm on enabling IT service management excellence through BPM. You can download a playback of the webinar here (direct link to the .wmv file).