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 [link fixed], 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.

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.

John Goodson, who heads up the Enterprise Data Solutions group within Progress, had the last timeslot before lunch to present on the role of informational integrity in operational responsiveness. Problems occur because business needs data faster than IT systems can deliver it, and inflexible methods can’t adapt to the fast-changing business conditions. Batch ETL just can’t keep up with this: data needs to be available from any system at any time as required to support real-time operations. We need to get rid of the overnight batch jobs that (for example) don’t allow me to see my banking transactions online until the following day, or can’t get my package tracking number until the package is already delivered.

Progress already provides Data Exchange for model-based data transformation and exchange; next month, they’re launching Progress Data Virtualization Server, providing real-time data access, integration and delivery from almost any data source, application and service. The key to their Enterprise Data Services is a common model – a sort of Babelfish for data – that allows access to multiple applications and data sources. They’ll leverage key industry-standard data models, such as ACORD in the insurance industry, with the goal of providing the right information in the right form at the right time.

Stepping back from just the information side, he pointed out that they’ll be providing responsive process management together with responsive information management; otherwise, data issues will impede responsiveness even if process improvement is undertaken.

Tom Aubuchon of Panhandle Energy (gas pipeline) joined Goodson on stage to discuss their data integration strategy: they used a customized supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) system to monitor and control their 17,000 miles of pipeline, but need to integrate that with all of their other distribution and billing data. They have approximately 1,200 different applications, and a “hairball” of connections between them. They decided to replace their SCADA with a more generic ESB, and selected Progress because the common data model allowed them to tame all of the point-to-point connections between the applications, especially the new Data Virtualization Server.

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.

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.

Rob Levy, Progress’ SVP and chief product officer (formerly of BEA), discussed more of the product strategy. Progress is really trying to bring the Wayne Gretzsky approach (“skate to where the puck is going, not to where it has been”) to their customers’ business: don’t focus on what is happening now, but on what will happen. This could mean anticipating problematic events and changing their course before they manifest in a problem, or anticipating a customer’s needs and upselling them based on their current products and purchasing trajectory.

Delivering this sort of operational responsiveness includes responsive process management, responsive information management and responsive business applications. Looking at the Progress suite of products, process management may include Actional, Apama and Savvion; information management may include DataDirect Connect, Enterprise Data Services and DataDirect Shadow; and business applications may include ObjectStore, OpenEdge and Orbix. Levy makes the strong tie between information management and process management, which is often ignored in BPM: you can’t manage your processes without also managing, or at least understanding, your data. He also emphasized the need to have cloud-based, scalable, multi-tenant solutions for certain types of applications.

This was pretty high level, but Levy has only been at Progress for a couple of months; he ended up by introducing John Bates, the CTO, for more detail.

This is my first time at a Progress Software analyst day; I’ve been at Savvion events in the past, and their acquisition by Progress is likely why I was invited here. The day started with Rick Reidy discussing the new strategy and structure that Progress is pursuing: they’ve tended to be organized into product silos, and are breaking down those internal silos to offer a more integrated experience not just at the technology layer, but with their sales and support teams. The Savvion acquisition is a key part of their product strategy, since it provides business-driven process improvement capabilities as part of their “sense and respond” initiative that aren’t as easy to do with other products. Using Savvion’s process modeler to drive processes at all levels, they’ll be able to bring together process and data capabilities across event processing, ESB and BPM.

He teased us with an announcement of a new product, Control Tower, which will allow processes to be viewed and changed dynamically by business users. He also pre-announced two suites: Responsive Process Management Suite addressing the process side of achieving operational responsiveness, and Enterprise Data Services addressing the data side. Since others have already tweeted about this, I don’t think that it’s much of a secret any more. We’ll be hearing more about the new products throughout the day, as well as how they’re changing their internal structure to better provide these to their customers.

I scored the “Keys to Success” list that Gary Kucera made for the wrap-up session (unedited):

Canadian Pacific Railway (Jeff Adams):  Cultivate Business Relationships:

• Create a 2010 “Relationship” strategy plan to build relationships with the “right” people who will help advocate and drive Process Improvement results
• Target “thought” leaders to cultivate process improvement influence
• Hand out free books
• People will only “trust” you when they have a positive relationship with you

Direct Energy (David During/Shiraz Bajwa):  Create a Change Management / Influence Strategy to improve engagement of key people:

• Y = f (x)
• Ability to influence = function (role, adaptability, coverage, status)
• Focus on people with political clout who influence people behavior
• Impact the “Inner Circle” people by spending more time with them or have your “agents” perform this function
• “Become a relationship Expert” to be an effective change-agent
• Key Takeaway:  Build an Influence Strategy “UPFRONT”
• Alternative tool:  Stakeholders Analysis tool

Bantrel (Chris Sandink):  Engage your Customer/Client

• Use a data based approach to improve KPIs to successfully influence customers/clients
• Build a process improvement plan by determining what measures can be improved which will result in improving a KPI
• Get customer/client engaged in building the business case to increase acceptance
• Key Takeaway:  Use data to make business cases to influence change and get stakeholder engagement as early as possible in this process

Create a Crisis (Multiple Speakers):

• Process Improvement change is accelerated when a crisis occurs
• Either “Create” a crisis or escalate an existing crisis to facilitate change
• Top leaders will “Rethink” business strategies
• Obtain dialogue among selected “thought leaders” to discuss what should be done “different”

Alignment of Goals within a business:

• From CEO to associate, goals need to be aligned to improve the probability of success
• Finance and Human Resources are key members to make this alignment occur
• Finance should pay bonuses and merit increases based on an aligned goal structure

People:

• Identify the skill sets needed to be successful for your team and try not to compromise with lower standards
• Before hiring a person, perform succession planning to build your exit strategy for each person on your team
• Best Practice Idea:  Have a person sign at the time of being hired a personal commitment to stay at least 2 years to reduce turnover

Project Success:

• Keep project scopes small and get many “small wins” versus one “big win” as it improves engagement and long term project success
• Make sure there is strong engagement, resources and commitment of Champion/Sponsor/Line Mgr prior to starting a project.  Planning upfront is critical to ensure project success.
• All projects should be signed off by a Finance and Operations Mgr to avoid future “fighting”.

Leadership Behavior (multiple speakers):

• Encourage leadership to change their behaviors to become more “advocates and teachers” to help motivate, encourage, and share their knowledge.
• When teaching leaders Six Sigma education, take it slow and make sure they fully understand to avoid potential future adversity.
• Need Leadership’s commitment to sustain long-term process improvement

Finance & Process Improvement Team:

• For Xerox, and Kaplan Higher Education, it has worked very well for Process Improvement team to be aligned under Finance.
• It has accelerated Process Improvement acceptance within the business since Finance controls the purse for the business and it improves Process Improvement’s accountability since Finance wants “Proof” of project savings.
• Align project savings with department budgets.
• A finance person is always recommended to sign off on project savings.

RBC Bank (Jennifer Thompson):  Continuous Certified Greenbelt/Champion Engagement 

• Goal:  Increase Effectiveness of Process Improvement Program by keeping people engaged
• E = f (Quality of change, acceptance of change)

Continuous Engagement Strategies:

• Bi-Annual Internal LSS Conference for GB’s
• Education
• Networking
• Celebration Certification
• Monthly Lunch and Learns
• Education
• Continuous Encouragement
• Champion Roundtable
• Program Tracking
• Continuous Feedback
• Continuous Encouragement

CLG (Annemarie Michaud) Improving Behavior Effectiveness To Drive Business Results

• Approximately 80% of behavior is driven by consequences
• Create positive and negative reinforcements to increase desired behavior
• Align desired behavior with desired goals
• Put in place consequences to drive behavior
• Behavior change environment will create long-term change

The final session was supposed to be a brainstorming session with Debra Yeager of Xerox Canada and Gary Kucera of Kaplan Higher Education, working with us to come up with a list of LSS and process improvement ideas that can have maximum impact within an organization, but was really the points that they gleaned from the presentations over the past two days. The lists went by past way too fast to transcribe, and I’m hoping that this will be posted on the conference website at some point (or maybe Gary will read this and send me his notes).

To wrap up the conference, it’s probably clear if you’ve read my posts that I found this worthwhile. I have a couple of local customers who practice LSS, and I can’t understand why they didn’t have someone here: a conference in your back yard is practically a gift in this economic climate, and there was definitely value here. This was a great opportunity for LSS professionals to exchange ideas and best practices with their peers – I think that I was the only non-black-belt in the room – and there was a great deal of interaction between the participants both in the sessions and at the breaks. Lots of practical ideas for everyone to take back and apply to their own projects, even for me.

Rick Hefner of Northrop Grumman gave the last full presentation of the conference before the brainstorming and wrapup. At this point in the schedule, a lot of the material that he was going to cover has already been said, leaving him free to ignore most of his slides and give more of an anecdotal talk about their journey with Six Sigma. He was originally part of TRW before their acquisition by Northrop Grumman, and acquisitions have continued to occur regularly; this meant that multiple implementations and cultures of LSS within the acquired organizations collided head on, and that constant restructuring necessitated a more consistent view of how LSS is to be applied across the organization.

Organizational restructuring, because it involves significant changes to goals, practices and operations, is a perfect opportunity for LSS and process improvement: although the initial goal of the restructuring is usually cost cutting, the long term goal is providing the greatest customer value for the least cost. LSS provides with a number of tools that can be used during restructuring, for everything from determining overall strategy to measurement and control to employee needs. The problem, however, is that everyone is caught up in the reorganization itself (or ensuring that they still have a job), and it’s difficult to get people’s attention for process improvement at the same time. LSS and process improvement teams can feel threatened by the lack of focus on their contributions, as well as not necessarily know where they’ll end up within the restructured organization.

They created a number of tools that could be used in the business areas for process improvement: value stream maps, process maps and flowcharts (similar ideas, different perspectives and level of detail, although it’s not clear where the distinctions lie). Some of this required defining “value” – which is really something that only the customer can define, and is usually something for which they are willing to pay – especially in their world of cost-plus contracts where they are not really financially incented to make processes more efficient. The cost-plus contract model is slowly being phased out in the defense industry, being replaced by fixed-price contracts; this will drive them to look for more process improvements in the future.

His summary:

• Current economic problems have caused many companies to focus on consolidation and organizational restructuring.
• Proper use of LSS tools (and LSS professionals) can help a company balance tactical cost-cutting with long-term strategic change programs.