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Progress Analyst Day Wrapup

I just found the last of my Progress analyst day notes from last week, scrawled in a paper notebook (which is why I usually write directly to keyboard at conferences). These were from one-on-one meetings that I had with John Bates and Dr. Ketabchi after the end of the formal presentations, where I had a chance to ask about product directions.

It’s probably good to do some writing after the fact, when I’ve had time to reflect a bit, review the presentation slides, and read posts by other attendees such as John Rymer, who sums up Progress’ mission, customer case studies and product positioning. I particularly like his description of the two new suites that Progress is offering:

Enterprise Business Solutions tracks existing transactions and services interactions to discover and verify implicit business processes, defines, senses, and responds to real-time events, automates business process flows, and provides SOA infrastructure. Core to this business unit is a new suite that brings together Progress Actional, Apama, and newly acquired Savvion. Think of the new Responsive Process Management Suite as BPM and transactional systems wrapped in real-time event management.

Enterprise Data Services maps primary information sources into a new real-time model managed by DataXtend Semantic Integrator, including integration, aggregation, data delivery, and ultimately, analysis.

To sum up my discussions with Bates and Ketabchi (these were separate, but covered related topics, so I’ve combined them) on what’s happening with the products, particularly the integration of Savvion into the Responsive Process Management suite:

  • The first version of the Control Tower monitoring application is ready, or nearly so. This is based on the Savvion process monitoring portal (which already allowed for external data sources), and constitutes the primary piece of integration between the products.
  • The existing event-handling structure in Savvion will be used to feed events from Apama. Although there will be some tightening of this integration, there are no major changes required to make this happen.
  • Currently, the modeling for CEP (Apama) and BPM (Savvion) are separate tools. However, they are both Eclipse-based, so it’s likely that they will be combined in some way and given a consistent look and feel, even if only as separate tabs within the same modeling environment. Since they both have business-facing perspectives using graphical models, this makes sense.
  • Savvion’s current event processing capabilities – the only overlap in the Savvion and Progress product portfolios prior to the acquisition – will eventually be replaced by Apama, which will have an impact on Savvion customers who use that functionality. There is no plan for an immediate rip-and-replace, and the Savvion EP will be supported for some time, but customers should start thinking about migration.

I asked about runtime collaboration within the products, but was not left with a clear picture of the future for Progress products here. Currently, Apama supports some threshold type of changes, and Savvion allows reassigning a task to another user but not changing the process model, which seems to represent a bare minimum in this emerging functional requirement.

You can find all of my coverage of the Progress Software Analyst Day here.

2010 03 09 Sandy Kemsley CEP
Progress Comments (0)

BPM Conferences Start To Come Out Of Hiding

2009 was not a stellar year for BPM conferences: many vendors cancelled or moved to an online format, and even Gartner decided that two North American conferences per year is too much. Although many organizations budgets are still tight, conference organizers are betting on a bit more available travel and education budget being available this year.

I just saw a post about Leonardo Process Days coming up in July in Sydney, and added it to the BPM events calendar that I maintain here, as I do with most other BPM-related events that I hear about. If you have an event that you want added, let me know; if you want to add a lot of events, then I can make you a contributor to the calendar. If you use Google Calendar and want to add this to the list of “Other calendars” that you can overlay on your own calendar, there’s a button at the bottom right of the calendar that will do that.

2010 03 08 Sandy Kemsley ·conferences Comments (2)

Paper on Runtime Collaboration and Dynamic Modeling in BPM

I recently wrote a paper for the February Cutter IT Journal called Runtime Collaboration and Dynamic Modeling in BPM: Allowing the Business to Shape Its Own Processes on the Fly. It’s available on the web to Cutter subscribers, and in the printed journal.

In the article, I deal purely with the topic of runtime collaboration, not collaboration during process modeling: how users participating in a process can add new participants for the purposes of collaborating on a step in a structured process, or even create their own subprocess at that step. I look at why you would want to do that (mostly auditability of processes) and how the results of that can be rolled back into process design rather than just being changes to a single process instance.

Disclosure: my payment for writing this paper was a year’s subscription to the journal, plus bragging rights.

2010 03 05 Sandy Kemsley Enterprise 2.0 Comments (3)

Dr. Ketabchi: A Shared Vision With Progress and Savvion

Dr. K. took the stage to tell us about the planned integration between the existing Progress products and Savvion, starting with a discussion of Savvion’s event-driven human-centric beginnings, model-driven development and solution accelerators. The new Progress RPM (responsive process management) suite has Savvion’s BPM at its core, combining their BPM and BRM strengths with CEP and information management. A challenge for Progress – and any other BPM vendor – is that less than 5% of enterprises’ processes run on a BPMS, and although dramatic improvements could be made to 80% or more of enterprise processes, most enterprises find it too difficult and costly to implement a BPMS in order to make these end-to-end improvements. It’s Progress’ intention that RPM overcome some of this resistance by extending visibility of business events to business managers, and provide the ability to respond in order to control business and ultimately increase revenues.

He was joined by Sandeep Phanasgaonkar of Reliance Capital, who have a large and successful Savvion implementation. Phanasgaonkar was responsible for the Savvion implementation at a huge outsourcing firm prior to his time at Reliance, where they automated and standardized their processes in the course of improving those processes. When he moved to Reliance during their expansion into their multiple financial products and channels, he saw the potential for process improvement with a BPMS, did a vendor comparison, and again selected Savvion for their processes. They use Savvion as the glue for orchestrating multiple legacy financial systems, Documentum content management, low-level WebSphere messaging processes and other systems into a fully integrated set of business processes and data.

Reliance has no other Progress products besides Savvion, but they see the importance of managing business events and processes as a cohesive whole, not as two separate streams of activity. This will allow them to detect degradation in processes due to seasonal or other fluctuations, and address the problems before they fully manifest.

2010 03 04 Sandy Kemsley BRM
CEP
Progress Comments (0)

John Bates, CTO of Progress

John Bates started with more of the Progress message on operational responsiveness, highlighting the importance of process and event management in this. He showed survey results stating that companies find it critical to respond to problematic events in real time, but only a small percentage are able to actually do that. Companies want real-time business visibility, the ability to immediately sense and respond, and continuous business process improvement in a cycle of responsive process management. Yeah, and I want a pony for Christmas. Okay, not really, but wishing doesn’t make any of this happen.

By adding BPM to their suite, Progress brings together process and event management; this makes is possible to achieve this level of operational responsiveness, but it’s not quite so easy as that. First of all, we need to hear more about how the suite of products are going to be integrated. Secondly, and more importantly, companies who want to have this level of operational responsiveness need to do something about the legacy sludge that’s keeping them from achieving it: otherwise, Progress (and all the other software vendors) are just pushing on a rope.

Bates then called up James Hardy, CIO at State Street Global Markets Technology, for an on-stage conversation about how State Street is using the Progress Apama CEP product in trading and other applications. They’re a Lean Six Sigma shop, and see CEP as a natural fit for the type of process improvement that they’re doing in the context of their LSS efforts: CEP allows for some exceptions to be corrected and resubmitted automatically rather than being pushed to human exception management. They’re also committed to cloud-based technology, but by building a private cloud, not public infrastructure, and have seen some speedy implementations due to that. They see operational responsiveness as not just about increasing revenue, but also about mitigating risk.

Bates then talked about 3Italia, an Italian telco that was having trouble dealing with the incremental credit checks and revenue generation required for their prepaid mobile customers: since their billing systems weren’t fully integrated with their servicing systems, they sometimes allowed calls to be completed even though a customer had run out of credit and their credit couldn’t be revalidated. They are also a TIBCO enterprise customer, but weren’t able to get the level of agility that they needed, so implemented Progress (this is Progress’ version of story, remember). They managed to stop most of that revenue leakage by providing direct links between billing and servicing systems, and also started doing location-based advertizing to increase their revenues.

He also spoke about Royal Dirkzwager, a shipping line, and how they were able to achieve millions in fuel savings by detecting potential issues with docking and loading before they occured, and avoid burning fuel getting to the wrong place at the wrong time.

He finished up the case studies with a couple of airline scenarios for maximizing profits using situational awareness: responding to crew or flight delays proactively rather than just responding to irate customers after the fact (this is a lesson that Lufthansa could definitely learn, based on my recent experience). To bolster this case, he introduced Joshua Norrid of Southwest Airlines – also a TIBCO customer – who discussed their journey from “Noah’s Architecture” (two of everything) to focusing on strategic products and vendor partners. They were an IONA customer, then Savvion, and recently started using Actional: having lived through two of the products that he used being acquired by Progress, he said that the acquisitions where done “in style”, which is pretty high praise considering the usual experience of customers of acquired companies. They’ve started to look at how they can be more operationally responsive: text messages when flights are delayed, for example, but also looking forward to how flight bookings might change during a weather event, or how local hotels might be pre-booked in the case of significant expected delays. They see reducing redundancies and inefficiencies in their architecture as a key to their success: lowered cost and better data integration helps in bottom line IT cost savings, operational savings and customer satisfaction.

After the customer stories, Bates discussed the future of responsive business applications: packaged applications evolving into dynamic applications; a control tower for business users to model, monitor, control and improve dynamic applications; and solution accelerators for pre-built industry-specific dynamic applications. Savvion’s strong focus on pre-built applications is an important synergy with the rest of the Progress suite. Their solution map includes these accelerators supported by a single control tower, which in turn provides access to BPM, CEP and other technology components. For example, their Responsive Process Management (RPM) Suite includes Actional, Apama and Savvion underpinned by Sonic, DataDirect Shadow and Enterprise Data Services, plus the common Control Tower and three vertical accelerator applications for finance, telecom and travel/logistics. They believe that they can continue to compete in their specialty areas such as CEP and BPM, but also as an integrated product suite.

RPM technical won’t be publicly announced until March 15th, but it’s already all over Twitter from the people in the room here in Boston.

2010 03 04 Sandy Kemsley CEP
Lean Six Sigma
Progress Comments (0)

Lean Sigma Tools Applied to BPM

Chris Rocke and Jane Long from Whirlpool presented on their experiences with integrating LSS tools into BPM practices to move beyond traditional process mapping. Whirlpool is a mature Six Sigma company: starting in their manufacturing areas, it has spread to all other functions, and they’ve insourced their own training certification program. Six Sigma is not tracked as separate cost/benefit within a project, but is an inherent part of the way every project is done.

They introduced BPM during to a large-scale overhaul of their systems, processes and practices; their use of BPM is includes process modeling and monitoring, but not explicit process automation with a BPMS outside of their existing financial and ERP systems. However, they are creating a process-centric culture that does manage business processes in the governance and management sense, if not the automation sense in all cases. They brought LSS tools to their BPM efforts, such as process failure mode and effects analysis (PFMEA), data sampling and structure methods, thought maps and control charts; these provide more rigorous analysis than is often done within BPM projects.

Looking at their dashboards, they had the same problem as Johnson & Johnson: lots of data but no consistent and actionable information. They developed some standard KPIs, visualized in a suite of seven dashboards, with alert when certain control points are exceeded. Their Six Sigma analytics are embedded within the dashboards, not explicit, so that the business owners view and click through the dashboards in their own terms. The items included in the dashboard are fairly dynamic: for example, in the shipping dashboard, the products that vary widely from expected and historic values are brought forward, while those that are within normal operating parameters may not even appear. Obviously, building the models underlying this was a big part of the work in creating the dashboards: for example, shipping dashboard alerts are based on year-over-year differences (because sales of most products are seasonal) with control limits that are the mean of the YOY differences +/-  two standard deviations for a yellow alert, or three standard deviations for a red alert, plus other factors such as checking to see if the previous year’s value was an anomaly, weighted by the number of units shipped and a few other things thrown in.

The analytical calculations behind a dashboard might include internal forecasts or market/industry values, include seasonal fluctuations or not, depending on the particular measurement. The dashboard visuals, however, conceal all the complications of the underlying model. Alerts aren’t necessarily bad, but indicate a data point that’s outside the expected range and warrants investigation or explanation. They’ve seen some success in reducing variability and therefore making their forecasts more accurate: preventing rather than detecting defects.

They’re also using SAP’s Xcelsius for the dashboard itself; that’s the third company that I’ve heard here that is using that, which is likely due in part to the large number of SAP users but also gives credit to the flexibility and ease of use of that tool. They’re using SAP’s Business Warehouse for housing the data, which extracts from their core ERP system nightly: considerably more up-to-date than some of the others that we’ve seen here, which rely on monthly extracts manipulated in Excel. Although IT was involved in creating and maintaining BW, the LSS team owns their own use of Xcelsius, which allows them to modify the dashboards quickly.

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2010 02 24 Sandy Kemsley BAM
IQPC
Lean Six Sigma Comments (0)

Using Dashboards to Run the Business and Focus Improvements

David Haigh of Johnson & Johnson presented on how they’re using dashboards in their process improvement efforts; this is much further into my comfort zone, since dashboards are an integral part of any BPM implementation. He’s part of the consumer products division rather than pharmaceutical or medical: lots of name brands that we all see and use every day.

Their process excellence program covers a range of methods and tools, but today’s talk was focused on dashboards as a visualization of a management system for your business: to set strategy, track progress, and make corrections. Like many companies, J&J has a lot of data but not very much that has been transformed into actionable information. He makes an automotive analogy: a car engine typically has 43 inputs and 35 outputs, but we drive using a dashboard that has that information rolled up into a few key indicators: speed, RPM, temperature and so on.

They see dashboards as being used for governing the company, but also for informing the company, which means that the dashboards are visible to all employees so that they understand how the company is doing, and how their job fits into the overall goals and performance. Dashboards can – and should – leverage existing reporting, especially automated reporting, in order to reduce the incremental work required to create them. They have to be specific, relating jobs to results, and relevant in terms of individual compensation metrics. They have dashboards with different of levels of details, for different audiences: real-time detailed cockpits, medium-level dashboards, and reports for when a repeatable question can’t be answered from a dashboard within three clicks (great idea for deciding when to use a dashboard versus a report, btw). They used a fairly standard, slightly waterfall-y method for developing their dashboards, although did their first rollout in about 3 months with the idea that the dashboards would be customizable to suit changing requirements. One challenge is their wide variety of data sources and the need for data manipulation and transformation before reporting and feeding into dashboards.

They had most of their reports in Excel already, and added SAP’s Xcelsius to generate dashboards from those Excel reports. That provided them with a lot of flexibility in visualization without having to rewrite their entire ETL and reporting structure (I know, export to Excel isn’t the best ETL, but if it’s already there, use it).

One of the big benefits is the cross-departmental transparency: sales and logistics can see what’s happening in each others areas, and understand how their operations interrelate. This highlights their non-traditional approach to dashboard visibility: instead of just having management view the dashboards, as happens in most companies, they expose relevant parts of the dashboard to all employees in order to bring everyone into the conversation. They actually have it on monitors in their cafeteria, as well as on the intranet. I love this approach, because I’m a big believer in the benefits of transparency within organizations: better-informed people make better decisions, and are happier in their work environment. They’re able to weave the dashboards into their process improvements and how they engage with employees in running the business: being able to show why certain decisions were made, or the impact of decisions on performance.

Their next steps are to review and improve the metrics that they collect and display, and to start involving IT to automate more of the data collection by pushing information directly to Cognos rather than Excel. There were a ton of questions from the audience on this; some are using dashboards, but many are not, and are interested in how this can help them. I’m interested in how they plan to push the dashboard results beyond just human consumption and into triggering other automated processes through event processing, but I’ll have to catch David offline for that conversation.

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2010 02 24 Sandy Kemsley BAM
CEP
IQPC
Lean Six Sigma Comments (1)

Cloud-Based BPM Vendors: Geography Matters

I’ve spoken with a lot of cloud-based BPM vendors over the past few years, and I inevitably ask where their services are hosted. Since almost all of these are American companies, or are primarily targeting the American market, the answer is, almost inevitably, in the United States. I continue to point out that that’s a problem for many non-American companies: my Canadian customers are mostly financial services and insurance, and not one of them would consider hosting any of their data – even non-executing process models – outside Canada. Yes, I’ve asked them. Similarly, many EU companies require that their data be hosted in the EU. The problem is not, as many believe, safe harbor regulations that attempt to bring US data privacy in line with the stricter laws of other countries; it’s the Patriot Act, which allows U.S. intelligence and law enforcement authorities to view personal data held by U.S. organizations without a court order, and without informing people or organizations that their data has been shared. This is in violation of Canadian privacy standards, as well as those of many other countries.

Where to host servers for Canadian clients

Yesterday, I had the chance to speak with someone at Human Resources and Skills Development Canada (our federal department dealing with labour and employment, which is pretty big due to the social benefits such as unemployment insurance and government pensions that we enjoy). They’re doing process modeling on a large scale across their department, and looking at how they can collaborate with other departments. Currently, they collaborate on process models using desktop sharing software for real-time collaboration between a modeler and a mentor who is helping them on a process, plus an internal repository and web publishing of the process models for viewing. I asked if they would consider using something like Lombardi Blueprint or one of the other online process modeling environments that are emerging, and he said, unequivocally, “only if it’s hosted in Canada.” I’m not sure if that’s an explicit Canadian government policy, but that’s their practice.

So to all the vendors who think that geography doesn’t matter for hosted solutions, a news flash: geography does matter if you plan to sell to non-American organizations, whether private sector or public sector.

</soapbox>

2010 02 18 Sandy Kemsley Cloud Comments (14)

BPM and Business Analysis Conferences, London: Call For Speakers

IRM is running both a BPM and business analysis conference in London on September 27-29, and the calls for speakers are open until March 8th.

The BPM conference is looking for presentations on:

  • Building BPM capabilities
  • Using BPM to change how businesses are managed
  • BPM governance and the centre of expertise
  • BPM success stories
  • Process modelling and improvement techniques and best practices
  • Business process design innovations
  • Process-centric approaches to business rules and business analysis
  • BPM implementation
  • BPM human change
  • BPM and emerging trends

The Business Analysis conference, in its second year and organized in conjunction with IIBA, had three proposed speaker tracks:

  • Techniques for business analysis
  • Shaping the future of business analysis
  • Business agility and business analysis

You can submit a proposal for a presentation at BPM Europe 2010 here, or at Business Analysis London 2010 here.

2010 02 16 Sandy Kemsley BPA Comments (1)

IBM BlueWorks Online BPM Community

I had a briefing a couple of weeks ago on IBM BlueWorks by Angel Diaz and Janine Sneed from the BlueWorks team. BlueWorks is IBM’s cloud-based BPM environment, providing the following capabilities:

  • Browser-based modeling, including strategy maps, capability maps, process maps and BPMN processes.
  • Pre-built content to supplement or replace a BPM center of excellence (CoE), including the ability to submit your own content.
  • Online community for collaboration and exchange of ideas.

BlueWorks content viewBlueWorks was launched last July, and has several thousand people signed up, although I didn’t get a good feel for the level of activity. It’s based on Lotus Business Space, with the modeling editor and repository from the WebSphere BPM suite, which allows IBM to offer both a hosted and on-premise version.

They’ve kicked off the content part of BlueWorks by seeding it with a lot of content from internal and external contributors, including information provided by their professional services arm. The results is a large repository of articles, sample strategy maps, business measures such as KPIs, forums and blogs with more information that you could hope to scavenge through. It’s all categorized and tagged in multiple ways, however, making it easy to filter the library to just what you’re looking for, whether by topic, industry, or type of content. They also include industry content packs, which are bundles of industry-specific strategy maps and other content.

BlueWorks process modelThe process designer is Flash-based, and it only took me about 5 minutes to crash it; luckily, it saved as I worked, so I didn’t lose any work. Some of the operations are not very intuitive (I had to go to the help file to figure out how to add a new activity), but once I learned a few of the basics, it’s pretty efficient to use, and I could use the keyboard for entering my activity list, which I like. The process is shown in both a text outline view and a process outline view, very similar to other process discovery/outlining tools such as Lombardi Blueprint (which should make the integration of Blueprint into this environment straightforward from a user interface standpoint, if not a technical one). Once complete, I could export to a PowerPoint presentation (which includes slides for the process model and the details that I entered), a Business Document Archive (a binary format that I’m not familiar with) to my local file system or the asset repository, or to a WebSphere Business Modeler XML format.

BlueWorks BPMN modelThis is where I found things a bit strange: I couldn’t export or otherwise convert the process model that I had created to use in the BPMN modeler, which is a separate tool. Maybe this is something that the Blueprint folks can teach them about. I found the BPMN modeler a bit clunky: resizing and placement of elements was awkward, although it allowed me to validate my model as valid BPMN. There definitely needs to be a way to move between these two process model types, to eliminate redrawing and also to allow a process analyst to quickly flip between the different perspectives. From the BPMN model, I could save to the shared repository, or export to BPMN 2.0 XML, WebSphere Business Modeler XML, or a Process Diagram Archive XML format.

I didn’t spend a lot of time on the strategy or capability maps; a strategy map is a mind-map type of model that allows you to model business SWOT factors as well as business goals, whereas a capability map shows the business capabilities and can link them to process models. The strategy, capability and process maps all have a similar user experience, and are all shown as siblings within folders in the BlueWorks space under the Design tab; BPMN models, on the other hand, are shown in a separate tab and have a completely different UI. The BPMN model seems like a bit of an add-on: obviously, there’s a need for BPMN modeling in an online BPM community, but they haven’t quite got it integrated yet. The three Design map types are really intended for business users, and allow functions such as pasting an indented bulleted list from a PowerPoint presentation into a strategy map to create an initial map. Links and attachments (including documents and folders) can be added to any node in any of the three Design diagram types. All four model types have versioning, and models of all types are visible in my dashboard view.

BlueWorks share model dialogAside from the functionality of the modelers, there’s the ability to collaborate on models: each person has their own private space in BlueWorks, or they can share their models with their team members. The upcoming version 7 of BlueWorks will allow more fine-grained privacy controls to allow sharing only with specific groups.

The content and community parts of BlueWorks form the basis of a CoE: smaller companies could use this as their only CoE, whereas larger ones might want to use content from BlueWorks with their own internal content. Content submitted to the content section is not only visible to anyone on BlueWorks, but also is explicitly licensed to IBM for redistribution, so this isn’t a place for your private intellectual property, but a good place to share ideas with people from other companies. IBM partner companies are starting to use it for sales material and starter content.

The hosted version of BlueWorks is free, and you don’t even need to be an IBM customer, but if you want to take this capability inside your own firewall, IBM would be happy to sell you WebSphere Business Compass (formerly WebSphere Publisher). Also based on Business Space, Diaz described it as an in-house version of BlueWorks, but it has many more tools such as forms designers, organization charts and other process modeling tools. You don’t need to use WebSphere Business Compass – it’s possible to go directly from BlueWorks to an executable system using the WebSphere and BPMN export formats – but for some companies, BlueWorks will act as the “gateway drug” to get them hooked on the bigger and better functionality of Business Compass.

I was briefed on Software AG’s online community, ARISalign, earlier this week and will post my thoughts on that soon; in both cases, these competing online communities lack some key functionality, but need to get their platforms out there for people to start using and feeding back on what’s needed. The best online community will result not from who has the most advanced starting point, but from who can be most responsive to their community’s needs.

You can sign up for your own BlueWorks account for free, and there’s a webinar tomorrow at 1pm ET on getting started with BlueWorks that will be recorded and available for replay later.

2010 02 16 Sandy Kemsley Cloud
Enterprise 2.0 Comments (2)

Henk de Man of Cordys at Software 2010

Only one other presentation at the Software 2010 conference in Oslo today was in English, which likely would have attracted me anyway, but I especially wanted to see Henk de Man of Cordys speak about adaptive BPM and case management in the cloud, which provides a nice bookend to my talk at the start of the day.

I couldn’t believe that it’s been three years since I last looked at Cordys, and I was looking for a bit of an update. Cordys Process Factory (CPF) is now tightly integrated with Google Apps, and they have some examples of customers using Google Apps, CPF and on-premise applications with data and transaction exchange between the cloud-based and on-premise software in a “hybrid cloud” configuration.

His focus today, however, was on case management: a higher-level coordination of activities that can’t be shown in a single structured process, with many bits of content and process works towards a common goal, such as is defined by OMG. This is emerging as a type of process modeling, separate but adjacent to the type of structured process modeling that we see in BPMN. In case management, there is a case file that contains all the relevant content, but multiple ways to achieve the ultimate goal, which might be dependent on the contents of the case file, current conditions, and the decisions of the individual participants working on the case. Forrester just released a research note on dynamic case management, and some of the older document management and workflow solutions are being repositioned into this “new” area, but the successful players will be those that can bring quality analytics, collaboration and modern user experience to bear: areas where Cordys is making inroads.

This is a bit of old wine in new bottles, but new technologies are definitely breathing life back into case management; the challenge will be to differentiate true case management processes from potentially structured complex processes that someone is just too lazy to model. Expect to see much more of this in 2010.

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2010 02 11 Sandy Kemsley Case management Comments (0)

BPM and Enterprise 2.0 at Software 2010 in Oslo

I’m at the Software 2010 conference held by the Norwegian Computing Society in Oslo this week, and gave the opening keynote on one of the tracks this morning: how Business Process Management is being impacted by social software and social networking:

Business Process Management Meets Enterprise 2 0

I gave a similar talk last November at the Business Rules Forum, but I find this topic to be endlessly changing and endlessly fascinating. I’ve written two related papers on it recently, too: one for the Springer BPM Handbook, and one for the Cutter IT Journal (specifically on runtime collaboration in BPM).

I won’t be attending most of the other sessions because they’re in Norwegian, but may pop out this afternoon and visit the Edvard Munch works at the National Gallery. I spent a few days in London earlier this week, visiting the Victoria & Albert, Tate Modern and British Museums, so that would round out my week nicely.

2010 02 11 Sandy Kemsley Enterprise 2.0 Comments (2)

Another Call for Papers: Americas Conference on Information Systems

Although it’s very well-hidden on the information site, the 16th Americas Conference on Information Systems, to be held in Lima in August, will have a mini-track on BPM (it’s within the Systems Analysis and Design track):

This mini-track seeks contributions that discuss the management of business processes as well as technologies for process automation. We encourage submissions from both a
managerial as well as a technical perspective.

Suggested topics include, but are not limited to, the following:

-Business process automation and workflow management systems
-Business process and rule modeling, languages and design patterns
-Strategies for business process design and innovation
-Service-oriented architectures for BPM
-Resource management and capacity planning in BPM
-Information security and assurance in BPM
-Business process monitoring and controlling
-Process mining and its applications
-Business process governance, risk and compliance management
-Management of adaptive and flexible processes
-Management of ad-hoc and collaboration processes
-Management of knowledge-intensive processes
-Formal evaluation of BPM methods and technologies
-BPM adoption and critical success factors
-BPM maturity
-Standardization of BPM, web services and workflow technology
-Industry case studies on BPM technology or BPM applications

March 1st is the submission deadline for papers.

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2010 02 04 Sandy Kemsley Comments (0)

BPM 2010 Call for Papers: Research, Education and Industry

I’ve previously extolled the benefits of attending the annual international research conference on BPM, and for those of you in North America who just weren’t ready to shell out for a trip to Europe, you’re in luck: it’s coming to Stevens Institute in New Jersey in September. Although this has always been an academic research conference, rife with papers full of statistical analysis, this year the organizers are creating an industry track for practitioners to discuss the adoption and use of BPM:

The industry track will provide practitioners with the opportunity to present insight gained through BPM projects. We are particularly interested in case studies from the perspective of user organizations. While contributions from consultants and vendors are appreciated, pure product demonstrations, method tutorials, or vendor showcases will not be accepted in the industry track. All contributions to the industry track have to describe experiences with BPM methods and/or technologies from the viewpoint of the adopting organization.

This is not the usual conference PowerPoint deck: you have to actually write a paper. If you want to present in the industry track, you must submit an abstract by February 15th.

If you’re submitting a paper for the regular research tracks, the paper (not just an abstract) is due by March 14th. You can also submit a paper in the new education track, specifically about education and training methods for the BPM professional, also due by March 14th.

Even if you’re not giving a paper, I highly recommend that BPM vendors send along someone from their design/engineering team. This conference shows BPM research that (in some cases) indicates where product functionality could go in the future; best to get in there and see it first hand.

2010 02 04 Sandy Kemsley IntlBPM Comments (0)

What To Expect From The BPM Market in 2010

Active Endpoints hosted a webinar today with Dennis Callaghan from the 451 Group on the business and technology factors of where BPM is headed. In an interesting echo of a comment that I heard at the time of the Progress-Savvion acquisition, Callaghan links the idea of Progress losing Lombardi as a partner to them acquiring Savvion, although this all happened in such a short time frame that it’s not clear that was the primary driver. He gave some estimates of annual revenue – $30M for Lombardi, $21M for Savvion – that are likely based on the final securities filings around the acquisitions, so may be reasonably accurate. In a follow-up question at the end of the webinar, he stated that Progress paid $49M for Savvion (which is public knowledge), and that 451’s unconfirmed estimate is that IBM paid $170M for Lombardi: a big difference if you consider relative revenues. He said “we have no evidence that IBM and Progress were in a bidding war for Lombardi”, although no one actually asked that question…

Not much else from Callaghan: he walked through an extremely brief overview of the remaining pure play vendors (Pegasystems, Active Endpoints, Intalio, Appian, Metastorm, Ultimus and Global 360), including such jewels of analysis as “Metastorm – still waiting for IPO”, then continued on to point out that BPM needs to bridge business and IT, and that SOA, BPM and CEM/CEP are starting to come together.

By quarter past the hour, we were into an activeVOS demo, and I’m not sure if it left me feeling more-ish or relieved. Don’t get me wrong, the demo was fine, just not what (I thought) I signed up for. You can see a replay of this webinar and many more on their iTunes podcast channel (direct iTunes link, watchable on iTouch/iPhone or on your computer) or on their website. Personally, I’m waiting for yesterday’s CTO Tuesday podcast to be posted, which had John Newton of Alfresco Software making a guest appearance to discuss linking content management and BPM using CMIS.

Disclosure: I have done a paid webinar for Active Endpoints in the past, although my future in that regard is likely in question after writing this blog post.

2010 02 03 Sandy Kemsley Comments (7)

Appian Analyst Briefing: 2009 Overview and Future Outlook

Appian issued a press release last week on their growth in 2009, and had an analyst call today to provide more detail and answer questions. I attended their user conference in October, and was interested to hear their plans in the wake of recent BPM acquisitions.

In short, their 2009 performance was the best in their history:

  • 67% increase in software license revenues
  • 59% increase in international revenues, expanding beyond their UK base to Australia, New Zealand and the Middle East (which shows an obvious bias towards English-speaking countries that they’ll need to better address at some point)
  • 112% increase in number of new customers, including a significant win at Amazon over Lombardi and Pega
  • Signed 6 major VAR/OEM relationships for both on-premise and SaaS products, including RICOH’s business process automation group

In addition to new product releases and their cloud-based offering, Appian Anywhere (which is now responsible for 10% of their revenue), they’ve productized their professional services framework and implementation methodology, and have launched a free (but closed) online community for their customers and partners. Although they still have a significant base in the US federal government, deployed in 22 agencies and departments, they’ve expanded into financial services, insurance, telecommunications and logistics.

Matt Calkins gave us his view of their future, starting with “Appian Is Not For Sale” and contrasting their position of almost 100% self-funded growth, with only recent venture capital infusions that will not force their hand any time soon, against that of recently-acquired BPM vendors who may have run out of road with their long-time VCs and forced to sell. He sees the BPM fight as now being between themselves and Pega, pitting their rate of innovation and ease of use against Pega’s dominant market share. The stack vendors are certainly serious competition, but a customer’s decision to go with a stack vendor versus a BPM suites vendor is usually made so early in the evaluation cycle that Appian rarely finds themselves in a short list head-to-head against a stack vendor. I found that to be a refreshingly realistic view of the market: BPM isn’t a homogeneous market where every customer always looks at every vendor; the vendors are passed through many filters along the way, and the true battles are between those that end up on the same short list. The higher-level strategy, of course, is to change those filters.

Appian will be a company to watch this year, as one of only a few remaining players in a still very competitive BPM space. They would be well-served by opening up their online community to non-customers (although possibly reserving product-specific portions of it for customers) in order to better show off their market leadership. They’re also in a position to achieve dominance in the SaaS BPM market (which they already claim to lead), although there’s still a lot of discussion about the actual utility of cloud-based BPM.

2010 02 03 Sandy Kemsley Cloud Comments (0)

IBM-Lombardi Deal Closes

That was fast! Proving my predictions to be ever so inaccurate when I said that it could be months before this closed, the IBM acquisition of Lombardi has closed less than six weeks after it was announced. Good news for IBM, Lombardi, and Lombardi customers.

Not surprisingly, IBM has toned down the “departmental” rhetoric that they initially used when talking about how Lombardi fits into their portfolio; there’s now only a mention of departmental managers rather than branding the software suite as being targeted only at departmental applications:

Lombardi adds a new dimension to IBM’s enterprise-wide BPM capabilities by giving organizations the ability to quickly adjust their business processes to support sudden and changing needs, especially those that rely heavily on collaboration to complete a task or project. Lombardi strengthens IBM’s capabilities in automating these processes, while empowering managers at the department level to change already running processes on the fly, eliminating the need for complicated and time-consuming technical intervention.

Of course, this now makes BP3’s upcoming bpmCamp an IBM user group conference. :)

2010 01 26 Sandy Kemsley Comments (9)

More BPM Acquisitions: Progress Buys Savvion

BPM acquisitions must be in the air: today, Progress Software announced that they’ve bought Savvion for $49M. This is hot on the heels of IBM’s announcement last month that they’re buying Lombardi, with one huge difference being that Progress doesn’t already have a BPM product in their lineup, whereas IBM has two. Of the three mid-range BPMS-only vendors that I would most commonly name – Appian, Lombardi and Savvion – that’s two out of the three announcing acquisition in less than a month. With the economy just starting to pull out of a huge pit, that’s telling news: as I mentioned in my post about Lombardi, if the economic climate were different, these would be IPOs that we’d be seeing rather than acquisitions. These acquisitions by larger companies, however, changes the BPM market landscape pretty significantly, since this makes it significantly easier for Lombardi and Savvion (under the IBM and Progress banners, respectively) to get a foot in the door of larger customers who rely on their major vendors to bring them enterprise solutions, rather than considering a smaller company. One advantage that Progress/Savvion have at this point in time is that the acquisition is actually closing today (or later this week), whereas IBM/Lombardi went the pre-acquisition announcement route, and will endure several months of limbo before the deal closes. [Update: I’ve received a few tweets and emails indicating that the IBM/Lombardi close will happen very soon, possibly around February 1st, although I haven’t heard a final date. My “several months” was based on past experience.]

I had an early morning call with Dr. John Bates (CTO of Progress) and Dr. Ketabchi (CEO of Savvion), but a few people obviously had earlier time slots: Neil Ward-Dutton has already posted his initial thoughts, as has Jason Stamper. I agree with Neil that this is a smart move for Progress: a good fit of products with minimal overlap, directly addressing some of the challenges that they’re hearing from their customers in terms of achieving operational responsiveness. The existing suite of Progress products allows for determining what happened within an organization – a rear-view mirror approach – but not much that allows the organization to quickly change how they’re doing things in order to drive efficiency or respond to changing conditions. Bringing BPM into the fold allows them to change that, primarily through tying Progress’ Apama CEP with Savvion BPM, but also by leveraging the rest of the Progress SOA and ESB infrastructure, including data and application integration.

Savvion’s had a couple of internal shakeups in the past two years: in early 2008, Savvion axed contractors, most of their marketing department and some salespeople, ostensibly in order to shift towards a solution focus, although at the time I said that they could be positioning themselves for acquisition. They’ve had a strong push on their vertical solutions since that time, wherein they develop frameworks for vertical applications, then allow partners – or even customers – to built vertical solutions on those common frameworks.

Like many BPM vendors, Savvion has often sold to the technology side of organizations but have shifted focus to the business side recently. Progress is still a very technology-focused set of tools, so it will be interesting to see how well they can bring together the different marketing messages. In my conversation with him this morning, John Bates said that they’re moving towards more of a solutions-oriented approach rather than product-oriented: although this is an easier sell to the business side, it can be used to mask a number of disparate products being clumped together without much natural cohesion (cf. “IBM BPM”).

There will need to be some product integration points to be able to really sell this as an integrated suite of tools rather than a “solution” patched together with professional services. First, they need to bring together a common process modeling environment. Ditto for an event/process monitoring environment. Third, they need to consider the touchpoints within application development: although data integration and application integration will be designed using the existing Progress products, these have to be seamlessly integrated into Savvion’s process application development environment. There are likely also areas of integration at the engine level, too, but getting the developer and analyst-facing tools integrated first is key to acceptance, and therefore sales, of an integrated solution.

Another consideration will be a software-as-a-service offering: Savvion already has inroads in this with their BPO market, although they haven’t yet announced any consumer-facing SaaS products. Bates stated that Progress considers SaaS “an important paradigm”, which I would translate as “we know that we have to do it, but aren’t there yet”. Pushing BPM and CEP to mid-range and smaller companies is going to require a strong SaaS offering, as well as providing a platform for larger enterprises to use for piloting and testing.

Because the acquisition has already closed, or is closing within the next day or two, Progress and Savvion sales and partner channels are already being brought together; the same will happen soon for marketing teams. As always happens in this case, there will be some losses, but given the small degree of overlap in product functionality, they’ll probably need most of the skills from both sides to make this work. Dr. K. has stated that he’ll stay with Progress, although his role hasn’t been announced.

The BPM+CEP equation is becoming increasingly important as organizations focus on operational responsiveness, and I think that it’s particularly significant that Progress appointed Bates – formerly co-founder and CTO of Apama before their acquisition by Progress – to the CTO position during the time when they must have been negotiating to acquire Savvion. Clearly, Progress sees BPM+CEP as an important mix, too.

 

Disclosure: Savvion has been my client within the past year, for creating a webinar and internal strategy reports, although we have no active projects at this time.

2010 01 11 Sandy Kemsley CEP
Cloud
ESB Comments (9)

Participate in a BPM Research Survey

Strangely, this message was sent to the BPM Arena Google Group on December 7th, but just delivered to my email this morning. Two students from the University of Applied Sciences
Ravensburg – Weingarten are doing a research survey about BPM usage, and are looking for participants.

I realize that many people have left for the holidays already, but if you haven’t, you probably have plenty of time to take the 15 minutes required to fill it out. Spread the Christmas cheer, and help a couple of students with their research:

We are 2 Bachelor students from the University of Applied Sciences
Ravensburg – Weingarten in Germany.

In cooperation with the Technical University of Eindhoven
(Netherlands), we are performing a study, in which we analyze possible
correlations between organizational characteristics and the success of
BPM projects.

In order to analyze selected issues, we decided to conduct an online
survey.

We write you today to ask you to participate in this survey if you
have experiences in using  BPM technologies or if you have
participated in BPM projects. Almost all questions are simple
multiple choice questions.

Their answering should not last more than 15 minutes. The
questionnaire is available via the following link:
http://sites.google.com/site/bpmsurveyen/home

The survey is online until Christmas 2009. The evaluation of the
survey results is anonymous.

Each participant that denounces a valid email address will get a free
report that summarizes major results of the survey. This report will
be sent to the participants in March 2010.

If you have questions regarding the study, feel free to contact us by
email to:
christian_waibel@gmx.de  and edgarrot@yahoo.com

We would be very grateful if you would help us with our study.

Thanks in advance for your support and kind regards.

Edgar Rot and Christian Waibel

As they mention in their email, if you include your email address when filling out the survey, you’ll receive a summary of the survey results.

2009 12 23 Sandy Kemsley Comments (0)

IBM Buying Lombardi: A Bauble on their BPM Christmas Tree?

I was on the analyst call this morning to hear about IBM’s acquisition of Lombardi – a pretty significant acquisition in the BPM space. Lombardi is the best known of the mid-range BPMS vendors, and if the economic climate weren’t quite so dreary, I imagine that they’d be doing an IPO rather than being acquired, or at least staying as an independent rather than become part of an organization that offers what Phil Gilbert (president of Lombardi) recently described as not BPM, but “Orwellian marketing rhetoric”. Given that Phil has done everything except call IBM the “evil empire”, it’s hard to imagine the drivers behind this acquisition.

Lombardi will become part of the WebSphere team, which is what I said that they should have done with FileNet’s BPM three years ago when that acquisition happened; maybe they’ll do this one right so that the product actually becomes an integral part of IBM’s BPM offering rather than a poor cousin. Obviously, the motivations for this acquisition are much different than that of FileNet: in FileNet’s case, they were buying it more for the content management capabilities, and I think that they just didn’t know what to do with the BPM product except reposition it as content-centric and leave it there; they were also buying a huge portfolio of FileNet enterprise customers where they were directly competing. With Lombardi, however, they’re clearly after the great software, both Blueprint for collaborative process modeling (which will benefit GBS, IBM’s professional services arm) and Teamworks for human-centric process execution. IBM already has a strong integration-centric offering with WebSphere Process Server (WPS), to which they’ve been attempting to add human-centric capabilities; done right, they will slide Teamworks in as a fully-integrated, human-centric part of WPS rather than keep it as a separate product offering. Neil Ward-Dutton’s first reactions this morning (prior to the analyst call) make some excellent points about the overlap in IBM’s BPM portfolio:

Although the strengths of Lombardi’s tools are different from IBM’s there is almost 100% product overlap. What’s more the design philosophy of Lombardi’s offering is almost diametrically opposed to that of IBM’s offering – many of Lombardi’s strengths come from its tightly-integrated toolset and repository. It’s not straightforward to see how these things can come together to form a coherent portfolio – unless they’re basically fenced off from each other and positioned as supporting different kinds of BPM scenario (with Lombardi focused on “people centric” processes, WebSphere on “system centric” processes). That brings its own challenges though, particularly for FileNet.

When Judith Hurwitz asked about the alignment of this with the existing IBM BPM portfolio, IBM responded with how they’ve done a lot of work already to integrate Lombardi with WebSphere (which, of course, doesn’t answer the question), then firmly upheld IBM’s position of having multiple overlapping products that will make it difficult for customers to decide which product is best for them, and easy for customers with a big pocketbook to buy multiple products to do almost the same thing, much as they do now with FileNet BPM and WebSphere Process Server. Sure, there are some use cases that are particularly well-matched to one of the three, but Lombardi’s position has always been (and many of the analysts agree, to a point) that they can manage the full range of BPMS functionality, and adding the ability to use the WPS underpinnings for better SOA management governance should be used to improve that position, not make it a competitive offering.

Amy Wohl asked about how IBM will position the Lombardi offering within the market; they see it as a BPM entry route into departments, which might then be shifted to another BPM platform as it works out. IBM’s GBS sees it as filling the layer between business and application development, rather than as an end in itself, and one of the IBM slides stated that Lombardi “brings simple, collaborative and business-driven capabilities for departmental BPM”. That seems to indicate that IBM plans to use this as a relatively low-end offering to get their foot in the door, then bring in the big WPS guns along with a huge portfolio of GBS services. That seems completely counter to the Lombardi philosophy, although I’m sure that they’re not driving the bus at this point.

Tony Baer asked about Blueprint versus BlueWorks; although there is some overlap, I see this as less of an issue since BlueWorks has been somewhat light on process modeling and more about the community. To do this right, I think that they can bring Blueprint’s modeling capabilities into BlueWorks community to replace the BlueWorks modeling; if not, there’s going to be a lot of confusion around this.

James Governer asked about the potential for integration with Lotus, where IBM’s collaboration capabilities are centered; it seems that Lombardi is being positioned as part of the WebSphere suite, so although there might be some synergies (as IBM replied in a somewhat hand-waving way), I’m not sure that that potential will be fully realized.

You can find IBM’s press release here, Lombardi’s press release here, and Phil Gilbert’s blog post about the acquisition here which, somewhat shockingly, finishes with “And remember, like I’ve always said, ‘if it’s BPM, it’s IBM.’”, an interesting counterpoint to his post that I refer to above where he states the “IBM doesn’t do BPM” as part of his long-running anti-stack vendor campaign. That about-face is definitely Orwellian.

I did have to laugh at the email from IBM to analysts this morning, which invited us to tweet using the hashtag #BPM, as if this were the only thing happening in the BPM space today. On the other hand, maybe it is.

2009 12 16 Sandy Kemsley Comments (30)