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Next week: Toronto, not San Diego

Yes, it’s true, I’m going to miss a North American Gartner BPM summit for the first time in, well, maybe forever. There’s two reasons for this: first and foremost, I’m 110% busy with time-critical client work right now, and a week in sunny San Diego just doesn’t fit into my calendar. Also, if you review my coverage of last fall’s summit, I’m not finding enough new material at each summit since they moved to the two/year format: I’m not learning much, and there’s not much new to write about. I believe that they’ve started to add some new material specific to BPM in a tight economy, and they had a pretty successful event in London a few weeks back, so I look forward to catching up with the material – and those of you attending – at the next one.

For all of you who have sent messages asking if we can meet up in San Diego next week, I’ll raise a glass to you from these chillier climes.

2009 03 18 Sandy Kemsley Comments (3)

Gartner webinar: First 100 days as BP director

In keeping with other recently-installed change agents, Elise Olding of Gartner delivered a webinar today on your first 100 days as a business process director. As she points out, you have 100 days to make some key first impressions and get things rolling, and although you may not necessarily deliver very much in that time, it sets the tone for the ongoing BPM efforts.

She breaks this down into what you should be doing and delivering in each of the first three months:

The first month is about planning and getting a number of activities kicked off. If you’re new to the business area (often, the BP director is coming in from another part of the organization or from outside), then learn about the organization and the business. Start an assessment of how BPM will impact the business, interview key executives, and make sure that you understand the key drivers for BPM to ensure that the project actually has a long-term vision and goals. By the end of that first month, you should have delivered a high-level plan, figured out who’s going to be on the team and how it will be staffed (internal, external consultants, new hires), and create a “what is BPM” presentation to use for eduction within the organzation.
The second month is about getting the strategy in place. The team should be mostly in place, with roles and responsibilities defined, and you should have ties established with complementary groups such as enterprise architecture and strategic planning. Some amount of documentation needs to be created by this point, including the BPM charter, methodology for BPM projects and the BPM governance structure (including a competency center) that dovetails with other governance within your organization. At this point, you should also have a first draft of your BPM strategic plan and a communication plan.
The third month is about starting to deliver results. With the internal team fully in place and some new hires likely still ongoing, you’ll need to determine training needs both for the team and to roll out on a larger scale. The actual process improvement work should be started, looking at the details of processes in the business areas and considering the application of BPM practices (we’re not talking technology implementations here) to start understanding and improving processes, and try to complete two “quick win” projects where you’re showing value in the organization. The business process competency center should be kicked off and the charter drafted, and governance bodies such as steering committees in place, and you should finish your final strategic plan.

In some organizations, this will seem a wildly optimistic schedule for all of these activities, and Olding admitted that she has seen many cases of this stretching to around 18 months. I’m sure that hiring Gartner to help you out will speed things along, however.

She ended up with some recommendations that are pretty good advice on any type of project: understand the organization and have a plan that is flexible enough to accommodate theirpecific needs; communicate, particularly showing BPM in the context of business imperatives; and advocates within the business to help with the adoption process. Gartner has published quite a bit of research on getting started with your BPM initiatives, including governance and competency centers, but she recommends actions such as getting a collaboration site (e.g., SharePoint, or a hosted solution such as Google Sites if you have external participants) set up early to gather ideas and information about BPM.

Elise went into quite a bit of detail on each of these; definitely worth checking out the replay of the webinar in full (the registration was here, so the replay will likely show up there somewhere). Also, they have two BPM conferences coming up: February 23-25 in London, and March 23-25 in San Diego, and there’s a discount code given at the end of the webinar for $300 off the San Diego conference.

2009 01 21 Sandy Kemsley BPM Comments (1)

Comparing BPM conferences

The fall conference season has kicked off, and I’ve already had the pleasure of attending 3 BPM conferences: the International BPM conference (academic), Appian’s first user conference (vendor), and the Gartner BPM summit (analyst). It’s rare to have 3 such different conferences crammed into 2 weeks, so I’ll sum up some of the differences that I saw.

The International BPM conference (my coverage) features the presentation of papers by academics and large corporate research labs covering various areas of BPM research. Most of the research represented at the conference is around process modeling in some way — patterns, modularity, tree structures, process mining — but there were a few focused on process simulation and execution issues as well. The topics presented here are the future of BPM, but not necessarily the near future: some of these ideas will likely trickle into mainstream BPM products over the next 5 years. It’s also a very technical conference, and you may want to arm yourself with a computer science or engineering background before you wade into the graph theory, calculus and statistics included in many of these papers. This conference is targeted at academics and researchers, but many of the smaller BPM vendors (the ones who don’t have a big BPM research lab like IBM or SAP) could benefit by sending someone from their architecture or engineering group along to pick up cool ideas for the future. They might also find a few BPM-focused graduate students who will be looking for jobs soon.

Appian’s user conference (my coverage) was an impressive small conference, especially for their first time out. Only a day long, plus another day for in-depth sessions at their own offices (which I did not attend), it included the obligatory big-name analyst keynote followed by a lot of solid content. The only Appian product information that we saw from the stage was a product update and some information on their new partnership with MEGA; the remainder of the sessions was their customers talking about what they’ve done with Appian. They took advantage of the Gartner BPM summit being in their backyard, and scheduled their user conference for earlier the same week so that Appian customers already attending Gartner could easily add on a day to their trip and attend Appian’s conference as well. Well run, good content, and worth the trip for Appian customers and partners.

Gartner’s BPM summit (my coverage), on the other hand, felt bloated by comparison. Maybe I’ve just attended too many of these, especially since they started going to two conferences per year last year, but there’s not a lot of new information in what they’re presenting, and there seems to be a lot of filler: quasi-related topics that they throw in to beef up the agenda. There was a bit of new material on SaaS and BPM, but not much else that caught my interest. Two Gartner BPM summits per year is (at least) one too many; I know that they claim to be doing it in order to cover the east-west geography, but the real impact is that the vendors are having to pony up for two of these expensive events each year, which will kill some of the other BPM events due to lack of sponsorship. Although I still think that the Gartner BPM summit is a good place for newbies to get a grounding in BPM and related technologies, having a more diverse set of BPM events available would help the market overall.

If you’re a customer and have to choose one conference per year, I’d recommend the user conference put on by your BPM vendor — you’ll get enough of the general information similar to Gartner, plus specific information about the product that you’ve purchased and case studies by other customers. If you haven’t made a purchasing decision yet and/or are really new to BPM, then the Gartner BPM summit is probably a better choice, although there are other non-vendor BPM events out there as well. For those of you involved in the technical side of architecting and developing BPM products at vendors or highly sophisticated customers, I recommend attending the International BPM conference.

Gartner BPM: Global 360/Carlson Marketing

Robert Lang of Global 360 to talk about an implementation at Carlson Marketing, a travel, meeting and event planning company. They had a lot of paper-based processes that included hand-offs between departments with complex approval processes; not only was the basic process difficult to manage, but changes to a customer proposal were difficult to execute efficiently.

They used Global 360, SharePoint (as a portal), InfoPath (for complex forms UI) and SQL Server to implement their travel proposal request process, including automating the routing of work requests related to the proposal process. They automated some operations, and made other operations considerably more efficient by maintaining a common folder for the proposal that could be accessed by any relevant participants. They allowed for spawning related but independently-executing processes.

Their benefits:

Faster processing of proposal requests
Better accuracy in data collection
Less rekeying of data
Consolidation of data into a centralized database for historical analytics
Improved turnaround time by 30%
Reduced number of personnel required to process a proposal request by 19%
Ability to identify and address bottlenecks in the business process
Dynamically reconfigure and reassign staff to optimize work

They plan to use Global 360 for other projects, including A/P, HR and their call center.

That’s it for me for this Gartner BPM summit: after spending most of the last 2 weeks traveling to 3 conferences, I’m skipping the vendors’ parties tonight and the last half-day of content tomorrow morning. I’ve been thinking about a wrap-up post comparing the 3 very different conferences — one academic, one vendor and one analyst — so watch for that over the next few days.

2008 09 11 Sandy Kemsley BPM Comments (0)

Gartner BPM: Global 360/Citi Cards Imaging and Workflow

Global 360 has a bit of revolving door with analysts: first, they hire Jim Sinur from Gartner. Then, they hire Colin Teubner from Forrester. Then, Sinur leaves. And here today at the Gartner show, which he admits is his first-ever, Teubner presented on behalf of Global 360 about putting people first in BPM. He really only did the introduction, however, before turning over the presentation to one of their customers, Richard Van Hoever, SVP of Customer Service Paper at Citi Cards.

Citigroup uses a lot of Global 360: 10,000 users worth. They’ve implemented a pretty standard imaging and workflow transaction processing application, with work queues that push work to participants rather than allowing cherry-picking, work prioritization and routing, and load balancing across their domestic, nearshore and offshore workforces. The big challenges are the volume of work, tight integration between document management and BPM, and geographic routing.

They were able to get 75% of their required functionality out of the box with Global 360 (they were promised 90%, but that type of discrepancy is pretty common). Most of the customization was around the work filtering, sorting, assignment and presentation, as expected; Global 360, like other BPMS’, does most of the behind-the-scenes stuff out of the box.

What amazes me is that this is fundamentally not different from the types of imaging and workflow systems that I’ve been helping organizations to implement for about 15 years; the only thing that has changed is that the relative sophistication of today’s tools means much less custom code and greater process agility. However, the business process is the same inefficient, key-from-paper/image process that’s been happening the same way for years. Undoubtedly, the relative volume of some transaction types will have reduced due to online self-service, but it’s clear that many large financial services organizations have a long ways to go in terms of making it easier for their customers to do their data entry for them.

2008 09 11 Sandy Kemsley BPM Comments (0)

Gartner BPM: SaaS and BPM

Having bugged out of the Agile BPM session, I arrived late to Michele Cantera’s discussion of whether software as a service is a viable option for process improvement projects. She covered off some of the same material as the SaaS and BPM session in February, but there was some new information as well. I won’t repeat the material from that session on the topic of BPM SaaS delivery and multi-tenancy models, so you might want to go back to that post and check that out as background for this. Go ahead, I’ll wait.

One interesting bit, based on 2007 estimates, segmented the BPM SaaS adopters into four categories:

Pragmatists, forming 49% of the market, who are replacing departmental on-premise applications but don’t have an enterprise-wide scope.
Beginners, 40% of the market, who are replacing low-end software tools with simple utility applications. These are often small or medium businesses who don’t want to grow an IT department.
Masters, 10% of the market, who are weaving SaaS applications into their enterprise-wide application portfolio.
Visionaries, a mere 1%, who are actively replacing on-premise applications with SaaS wherever possible.

She showed these plotted out on two axes: comprehensive strategy versus IT ability to execute. Pragmatists are low on comprehensive strategy but high on IT ability to execute; beginners are low on both, masters are high on both, and visionaries are high on strategy but low on ability to execute (since they don’t need to have internal IT skills). I really like this segmentation, since I think that it provides a good way to characterize SaaS customers in general, not just SaaS BPM customers.

She went through the list of current BPMS SaaS vendors, split out into business process modeling, process-based applications, and BPMS as a service. The SaaS modeling vendors are Lombardi, Metastorm and Appian; BPMS as a service is offered by Appian and Fujitsu. Process-based applications are typically offered by companies who have taken a commercial BPMS and built a specific vertical application on top of it; the underlying BPMS is not necessarily offered as SaaS directly, and in most cases, the BPMS vendor is not the one providing the service (with the exception of DST, whose BPM product grew from their own mutual fund back-office application), since most of them are not in the vertical applications market. There are going to be more entrants into all of these spaces in the near future, as well as changes to the multi-tenancy models offered by the vendors; you’ll want to keep your eye on what’s happening in this space if you’re considering BPM via SaaS, and start to consider how you’re going to handle process governance when your business processes aren’t running on your own systems any more.

She also showed a chart of different SaaS services types (BPO, application outsourcing, hosting, traditional ASP/SaaS model, process-based applications using BPMS/SaaS, BPMS as a platform, BPMS as SaaS-enabling platform) mapped against operating characteristics (operational cost, degree of customization, process agility, cost of process agility, number of suppliers): for example, BPMS as a platform has high process agility, whereas a traditional ASP/SaaS application that likely doesn’t include a BPMS has low process agility.

There was a list of do’s and don’ts of using SaaS for process agility, such as using BPMS via SaaS for pilot projects in order to make the business case for on-premise systems. Of course, if you do that, you might just find that you like the SaaS model well enough to stick with it for the long run.

2008 09 11 Sandy Kemsley BPM
SaaS Comments (2)

Gartner BPM: Agile BPM methods

In the spirit of discouraging conference organizers from scheduling sessions that start before 9am, I boycotted the 8:15 keynote session, but showed up for the session on Agile BPM methods. Unfortunately, it appears to be a complete rerun of David Norton’s session from February, so I’m heading out to find a different session.

2008 09 11 Sandy Kemsley Comments (0)

Gartner BPM: Dynamic BPM

Daryl Plummer’s thing is SOA and dynamic applications, and he presented this afternoon on Dynamic BPM: the ability to support process change by any role, at any time, with very low latency. In other words, (m)any process participant can make changes to the process in order to suit their specific needs, just as Trefler was telling us at lunch. A big part of making this happen is splitting out monolithic systems into more agile components: orchestration engine, portal, rules engine and databases.

Considering the mostly business composition of the audience, he did a pretty deep technical dive into concepts such as dynamic recompilation, showing how the dynamic nature of lower level technical components help to create dynamic processes on the surface.

He went through a well-used diagram showing BPM adoption over the years and where SOA comes into the picture, and the inherent dynamism in models, which is the whole premise behind model-driven design. SOA is used to automate what machines do best, while BPM and the associated process models are used to empower what people do best. More automation actually means more capabilities for the human steps in the process.

He summarized the event capture-analysis-response chain (covered by Roy Schulte in a session this morning that I just couldn’t make myself write about): events triggering business processes, and also monitoring those processes, in order to provide better decision quality, faster response, reduce information overload and reduce cost.

Inevitably, we move on to Web 2.0 and the implications for collaborative, ad hoc and social processes, community evolution of a process, and adding presence and other types of social context to processes.

One of the keys to making processes dynamic is business rules management, since being able to change rules without changing the structure of the process gives us most of the agility that’s required in business while allowing those changes to be made by business users.

2008 09 10 Sandy Kemsley Comments (3)

Gartner BPM: Customers say the darnedest things

At the lunch presentation today, Alan Trefler (CEO of Pegasystems) discussed how it’s necessary — and possible — to put BPM right in the hands of the business users, and let them do it themselves. There will be some IT architectural oversight and support, of course, but you just have to convince the users, Tom Sawyer-like, that they really want to paint this fence.

I was sitting beside the BPM architect from one of Pega’s customers, and at the end of the talk I turned to him and asked “Do your business users do this?” His response: “Oh, hell, no!”

We still have a ways to go on this issue…

2008 09 10 Sandy Kemsley Comments (0)

Gartner BPM: Opening Keynote

I arrived a bit late, transferring from the Ritz out in Tysons Corner down to the Gaylord in National Harbor (which Google Maps still thinks is a construction site), but caught the last half of the opening keynote with Janelle Hill and Michelle Cantera.

They started with some of the forces affecting business, both business and technology. Technology forces of change include having to balance enterprise-class and global-class computing, by which it appears that they mean custom, heavy-duty, special-purpose applications versus mass consumer applications: she makes the analogy between a custom, craftsman-made desk for the Oval Office versus an Ikea desk for the rest of us. Business forces of change include globalization, regulatory oversight, the evolution of the workforce (this is sort of a rerun of Connie Moore’s message of yesterday), and the complex value chains created by collaborative enterprises.

Since we’re here to talk about BPM, the next part was on how BPM helps us to cope with these forces of change. Their current BPM definition includes management practices, a structured approach using the management practices and software tools, and a cultural transformation (this last one is new in their definition, and long overdue). Overall, BPM is a set of disciplines plus technologies; it both encourages and enables continuous change in response to external forces, with a focus on optimizing end-to-end processes rather than specific functions. A key part of the approach is iterative (not phased), time-boxed, agile delivery, which I agree is critical but rarely see in practice.

BPM is being used heavily by companies that need to cope with frequent process change, usually in their customer-facing processes: from changes several times a year down to weekly or even daily frequency, plus ad hoc changes to executing process instances. What you need to think about, then, is how BPM changes your planning practices: Gartner suggests planning on shorter cycles and making plans dynamic and more transparent, with explicit guidelines for business outcomes rather than an explicit path by which those outcomes are reached. BPM also changes your organization and leadership by empowering employees (that’s a bit of a tired expression) and encouraging more fluid, virtual teams. It’s not clear that BPM is the real contributor here, however: I have the sense that they could take this same slide and present it at a number of different technology conferences (e.g., Enterprise 2.0) without changing anything but the title.

To use BPM effectively, you have to take advantage of monitoring and optimization, which is hopefully built into your BPM solution. This allows for better alignment of goals, metrics and results.

They finished up with a discussion of the skills and competencies required to build a BPM center of excellence (or as Gartner calls it, a center of competence), and a flying tour of their business process adoption and maturity model. Surprisingly, this tag-team presentation went way over time, not a good start for the day.

Not much new and exciting here — pretty much what you expect from a keynote — but a good overview of BPM in the context of business for the newbies in the crowd.

2008 09 10 Sandy Kemsley BPM Comments (0)

This week in BPM conferences

Last week and this week saw some very difficult choices for conference attending: I went to the International BPM conference in Milan last week, but missed Office 2.0; this week, I’m attending Appian’s user conference and Gartner’s BPM summit in Washington DC, but missing SAP’s TechEd and all my Enterprise Irregulars peeps (although I won’t at all miss going to Las Vegas).

Watch for my coverage of the Appian user conference tomorrow, then Gartner starting on Wednesday.

2008 09 08 Sandy Kemsley AppianForum Comments (0)

Upcoming conferences

I’ve been sticking close to home for the summer, but my fall lineup is about to begin. So far, I’m definitely attending the following:

Business Objects Influencer Summit and SAP SME Day, August 12-13, Boston. This is an analyst/press event, not a public conference, but I’ll be blogging from there.
International Conference on BPM, September 1-4, Milan. I’m very excited to be attending this conference since it represents a lot of the academic research going on in BPM, not just what the vendors and analysts have to show. There are some great workshops lined up, such as BPM and social software; interesting sessions; and demos from some of the universities and research labs. You can find last year’s proceedings here.
The Appian user conference, September 8-10, Washington DC. This is the first time that I’ve attended an Appian conference, and I’m looking forward to seeing what all those new marketing dollars are buying.
The Gartner BPM summit, September 10-12, Washington DC. I’ve been to enough of these lately that I don’t need to attend the whole summit, but since I’m in DC that week for Appian’s conference, I’m adding one more day for Gartner. I think that it’s pretty clever for Appian to schedule like this: it should drive up attendance at their conference, since Appian customers/partners flying in for Gartner will figure that it’s only a couple of extra days to do both.
OMG BPM Think Tank, October 6-7, Chicago. I’m on the program committee, and will be leading a roundtable on achieving collaboration between business and IT in BPM on the first day.
Business Rules Forum, October 26-30, Orlando. I’ll be giving a presentation on mixing rules and process.
SAP BPM, November 17-19, Las Vegas. I’m giving a Jumpstart pre-conference session, an introduction to BPM, on the 16th.

Given that I fly everywhere on Star Alliance, this will bump me over the 35,000 miles for the year that gives me Aeroplan Elite status for 2009, without which I really don’t want to fly.

From a disclosure standpoint, my expenses are being paid for the Appian conference, the Business Rules Forum, and two SAP events; for the latter SAP event, I’m also being paid to deliver the half-day training session.

Tagged appian, business rules forum, Gartner, OMG, SAP

2008 08 01 Sandy Kemsley AppianForum
BPMThinkTank
BusinessRulesForum
IntlBPM
SAPevents Comments (0)

Gartner BPM: Open Research Meeting

I feel like I’m on the last mile of a marathon: it’s the closing keynote of the conference, and it seems like it’s been going on a long time. Gartner may have jumped the shark by moving to two North American BPM summits per year; a lot of the material is heavily recycled, making it much less valuable to repeat attendees (although still very good for first-timers), and I’m sure that the vendors are completely fatigued — both in terms of time and money — from attending two of these each year, plus the one in London. Attendance feels lower than last spring, although more than last fall’s dismal attendance, and at some point the vendors will find that it’s just not worth their time and money to attend both North American BPM summits each year; that in turn will impact the quality of the experience for the end-customer attendees since they’ll see less of the vendors’ customer presentations, and less vendors at the trade show.

I’m hearing Daryl Plummer for the first time this week — not sure how I missed him earlier — as he moderates the open research meeting, joined by Janelle Hill, Matt Hotle, Elise Olding and Jeff Woods. I’ve never managed to attend one of these before, since I always seem to have been heading out of town during the last session. The format is that they put forward a series of strategic planning assumptions, then they are debated by the analysts on the stage and anyone from the audience who wants to participate.

The first strategic planning assumption is that business application vendors that do not deliver model-driven applications by 2012 will be marginalized as application providers. The dominant players — SAP, Microsoft and Oracle — are already moving in the direction of model-driven architecture, but there are still a lot of other ERP applications out there that are not heading that way, and there seems to be a strong argument that four years is just too aggressive of a timeline, especially in vertical industries where there might only be one dominant layer for a vertical-specific application. When it does come, it will likely be driven by the business, since model-driven architecture provides a world of difference to business (although it still has significant benefit to IT).

The second strategic planning assumption is that by 2012, more than half of new mission-critical business functions will be delivered by teams outside of IT through model-driven and agile techniques. Related to the previous SPA, this means that not only will the vendors be providing the model-driven applications, but that the business area will be delivering the functionality based on them, and on inherently model-driven platforms such as BPMS. This, of course, presupposes that the business even wants to lead these initiatives, which isn’t at all obvious since it isn’t happening in a majority of companies now. An interesting debate rose out of this that resulted in one of the analysts stating that “it might happen, but it might not work”, and pointing out that if their strategic planning assumptions don’t have some risk of being wrong, then they’re just tactical planning points.

The third strategic planning assumption is that enterprises that modernize their applications portfolio without a model-driven application focus will spend an equivalent amount of money by 2012 on a second round of modernization to get to model-driven applications. This highlights that not only will it be necessary to move to model-driven applications, but that it’s expensive; there was also discussion that if it’s not model-driven, then it’s not modernization, which seems to be a bit of a stretch.

All in all, I found this session interesting and am glad that I stuck around for it. I think that Gartner is very bullish on model-driven applications, and are overly optimistic about the timelines for how this technology will roll out. I don’t think that there’s any question that these things will occur, but 2012 is only four years away.

2008 02 07 Sandy Kemsley Comments (1)

Gartner BPM: The BPM Scenario: A Change from Business as Usual, Janelle Hill

Janelle Hill addressed the issues of what’s really new in BPM and how it can change how you do business. She starts off by discussing how BPM is different from older business process reengineering techniques:

Process orientation complements functional organization, along the lines of what Rummler was discussing yesterday: processes overlay functional silos, which drives matrix management so that processes can be managed end to end.
Processes must be effective and transparent, not just efficient.
Processes must be adjustable (sometimes by process participants), not perfect, in order to adjust to changing customer requirements.
Small incremental improvements must be harmonized with larger transformative change.

Gartner defines an explicit process as one that it visible and independent from its implementation; namely, the process has been modeled separate from context manual or automated context. This type of modeling and the management of the explicit processes is essential for effectiveness and innovation; it allows for the establishment of process KPIs and allows you to model potential changes to the process. These process models provide a view of work in progress; as these models are implemented in BPMS, they become the visual metaphor for the work for monitoring and management purposes. They also provide a method of communicating about the process, both between business team members as well as between business and IT.

This also leads to new management techniques. Management becomes more real-time as the process monitoring tools allow for view of what’s happening right now in the business process, instead of managing through the rear-view mirror via historical reports. Typically, a process-centric view encourages collaboration among team members, and also encourages participation by the process workers. Both business and IT workers have different roles: the business user may be assembling their own solutions, while the IT person is designing and building components to be assembled.

She looks at a number of key factors for determining when a BPMS might be used:

Strong focus on coordinating multiple resources to create successful work outcomes, including people, systems, information and policies.
The process crosses a large number of boundaries.
The process is poorly understood.
The process is customer-facing or partner-facing.
The process is more susceptible to external or internal disruption.
Business will be responsible for change management, not IT.

If these factors aren’t present, then a more traditional coding approach might be used.

Hill went through some of the process design patterns — I saw this at the previous summit and really liked it, since I use something quite similar with customers — in order to map process characteristics onto different styles of processes, and therefore onto a subset of the BPMS products that might best suit those needs. The three most common patterns that they see with BPMS are case management, form-driven workflow, and participant-driven workflow.

She finished up with the BPMS magic quadrant, and explained that there are so many vendors in the leaders quadrant because they’ve changed the definition of what’s included in BPMS; I see that as a reason why there’s more vendors in the magic quadrant overall, but not why it’s so heavily weighted to the upper-right quadrant. She believes that consolidation for the purposes of acquiring technology functionality has already mostly occurred. She also sees that the larger platform vendors such as Microsoft are focused on software development as the primary method for BPMS rather than model-driven approaches that limit the amount of code.

She believes that this is not the time (yet) to pick the enterprise-standard composition platform, because no one tool handles all of the six process styles that she showed earlier. This is still not a mature market, in spite of the purchasing activity going on.

2008 02 07 Sandy Kemsley BPM Comments (1)

Gartner BPM: Weaving BPM into the Fiber of the Enterprise

Elise Olding moderated a panel on weaving BPM into the enterprise, with Eric Abecassis, Architecture and Integration Manager with Schlumberger, Jim Boots, Enterprise Architect at Chevron, and Kevin Morgan, Program Manager at Dolby.

Abecassis started with the process-related problems that they had at Schlumberger: processes had to be standardized in order to effectively manage growth and improve execution, reduce the administrative burden on the field people, and improve alignment between business and IT. Their approach was to focus on three main types of activities:

Doing the right things (business)
Understand the right things (business/IT)
Doing things right (IT)

It appears that their BPM projects are primarily driven by IT (although with heavy involvement by the business), in contrast to Chevron, where grassroots business actions drove the BPM efforts. In their case, a business unit had some amount of success, then a few individuals worked at selling the ideas across the company until it was accepted as a broader platform that can be used elsewhere. They’re still somewhat in stealth mode inside their own organization

At Chevron, they learned how to use the tool, then started to play around with how it could be used: looking for emergent applications of the technology. They showed off BPM to anyone who would listen, particularly trying to link it to existing initiatives, and continued to develop their BPM approach as it become popular in other areas. Overall, the grassroots efforts within the business delivered a proof of concept and a core set of advocates, but eventually key management endorsements and dedicated resources were required to make the transition to an enterprise-wide effort.

Dolby is a sort of 40-year-old startup that just went public two years ago, and is going through some major cultural changes to adapt to the changing world of entertainment technology. A management consulting firm provided them with recommendations for reorganization, then when they started to implement that internally, they discovered that this reorganization — a common issue — actually broke a lot of their business processes. He found an interesting effect: internal audit people have great insight into where problems might exist in business processes, and typically have the attention of management to a greater degree than a BPM team, so he worked closely with them.

It’s good to hear some success stories about how organizations are starting to become more process-centric: these stories aren’t just about how a specific implementation worked, but how the organization started to embrace the benefits that BPM could bring.

It’s a bit distracting that the panel members have obviously been told not to mention their BPM vendor by name; they dance around it by describing the tool, how they selected it and how they use it, but never say what it is.

2008 02 07 Sandy Kemsley BPM Comments (0)

Gartner BPM: The New Agile BPM Method, David Norton

This morning, I attended with David Norton’s session on integrating BPM and Agile software development methods. In BPM, we always talk about how BPM brings agility to business processes, but what facilitates that agility? Although a lot of this talk is about Agile, it’s definitely valid to look at how to apply Agile methods to BPM projects, since there’s still some amount of software development in almost every BPM project.

He started with a review of software development methods: architected model-driven (including BPM, where you draw an executable process model rather than writing code to handle work routing), architected RAD, and Agile. He then drilled in on Gartner’s 10 principles of NeoRAD (an example of Agile), such as close involvement of the customer, peer review and an iterative approach.

BPM needs to be a mix of agility and discipline, but not a waterfall methodology that we so often see used by old-style development teams when they take on a BPM project; BPM is predominantly architected model-driven because of the executable process models, but also uses some aspects of architected RAD and Agile since there are integration and UI components that require development beyond just the process modeling stage.

He described the principles of Extreme Programming as a coding methodology, and Scrum as a way to manage agile development projects; Scrum, in particular, has a lot of useful concepts that could be applied to BPM projects. He also covered Dynamic Systems Development Method, a type of RAD framework that includes the concept of turning an operational prototype into the end product to reduce waste and time in the development cycle, and Lean Software Development, focused on reducing waste and defects in the same sort of way as Lean works in the manufacturing sector.

He then looked at how BPM release cycles — continuous cycle of design and optimization, iterations of under six weeks, new policies and rules in a day — and how they are much more aligned with Agile methodologies than the traditional waterfall approach, which typically sees the first release in 4-6 months (in the best possible case). Unfortunately, most development teams inside organizations are still stuck in waterfall methodologies, and third-party professional services firms are more motivated to suggest long development cycles with large development teams. That means that even though the process model might be done as zero-code architected model-driven, the (often excessive) customization that happens in the component/service layer and the user interface drags down the project schedule.

This presentation was really much more about Agile than BPM — sometimes Gartner makes a bit of a stretch when bringing in their analysts from other areas and trying to make them BPM-ish — but if you’re not already looking at Agile development for any BPM-related project, you definitely should be.

2008 02 07 Sandy Kemsley Software design Comments (4)

Gartner BPM: Geary Rummler closing keynote

Today’s sessions closed with a presentation by Dr. Geary Rummler of the Performance Design Lab on the nature of process and the value of shifting an organization to process centricity. I saw him speak at the 2006 Proforma user conference, and enjoyed it; how can you not like listening to the guy who invented swimlanes?

He started with a historical perspective on process, starting in the 1982-92 timeframe with his highly-successful process-related work at Motorola that resulted a lot of useful process management/improvement tools, followed by the somewhat disastrous 1992-97 re-engineering phase that resulted in the split between business management and process management. When re-engineering became a prominent feature in Dilbert cartoons, Rummler decided to retire.

It didn’t take, and four years later (in 2001), he came out of retirement to find a confusing landscape of acronyms, an unnatural focus on technology, low-level process improvement techniques masquerading as methodologies, and subprocesses being implemented in silos. A majority of process activities was in the weeds, and had little linkage to business results. All of this brought him to today, where he asks the questions “why are we doing this ‘process’ stuff anyway?”

He moved on to a business perspective on process, where we’ve perverted the order of things such that budgets are allocated along the lines of the organizational chart, and therefore the work systems — including applications, data and networks — to which those resources are applied end up (naturally) siloed. Making improvements within a silo, as we all know, can only have limited impact on end-to-end process improvement and particularly in the interfaces to customers. The work system becomes invisible, and it’s managed only indirectly through management of resources: reorganizations and down-sizing as action items instead of considering how the underlying work systems themselves need fixing.

What we need to do is change our focus on work and resources, and focus on the business as a system for creating value, manifested in the products and services delivered to the customers. The value creation system — effectively, the customer-facing business processes — and the resources must both be managed directly and in concert. BPM, therefore, isn’t just about modeling, improvement and management, it’s about creating the value creation dimension of the business.

He then looked at a future perspective, with the Performance Design Labs’ framework for value creation, which provides a model of a business, its customers and external impacts. Inside the business in the first level of the model, we see the value creation system, enabling processes and management systems; driving down to the second level shows the three primary process systems in any value creation system (product/service launched, sold, deliverer); then the third level of detail shows the high-level business processing systems; the fourth level is the processes and subprocesses; and the fifth level is the tasks and subtasks that actually connect to the (human or system) performers of the tasks. This five-level hierarchy maps to a set of business architectures: supersystem maps, cross-functional maps, business process architecture, then down to the process and task maps, all of which become a management-friendly schematic of the business.

Within the hierarchy, the first three levels represent the strategic application of process work, and the lower parts of the third level through all of levels four and five represent the tactical side. Unfortunately, much of BPM is focused on levels four and five, which is disconnected from the value that’s outlined in the first level and from business leadership.

The implication of all this is that businesses need to be managed on two dimensions: the functional silos (buckets of resources), and the business processes that cut orthogonally across them (the value creation). And, just as there are problems in things disappearing into the vertical white spaces between functional silos, they can also get lost in the horizontal white space between business processes.

BPM must drive the articulation of the value dimension, thereby making it possible to link from level one down through to level four of the value creation hierarchy.

Rummler is a delightfully funny and informative speaker, and I enjoyed this even more than the last time that I saw him speak.

2008 02 06 Sandy Kemsley BPM Comments (5)

Gartner BPM: Pursuing Process Agility Goals Using SaaS

Michele Cantera and Ben Pring talked about the compatibility of BPM and SaaS, especially in the key issue of whether process agility can be achieved with SaaS delivery models, or if that’s only suitable for standardized applications and processes.

Pring’s area of expertise is SaaS, and the first part of the presentation was on the SaaS trends in the next five years, and the areas where it will have the most impact. He spent some amount of time defining SaaS (which I won’t reproduce here), how it is confused with outsourcing and hosting, and its benefits. It is useful to consider, however, some of the reasons why companies are moving to SaaS, since these are true for BPM as it becomes available in a SaaS environment:

Too much software and hardware that is purchased but never used.
The high cost of software implementation, particularly the cost of services required.
The hidden costs of IT that drive up the effective cost of on-premise systems.
The emergence of new technologies that enable SaaS, such as grid computing.

SaaS is almost always used to reduce costs, both the up-front costs of the systems themselves and the infrastructure required to support them. However, many organizations have security concerns (which may or may not be unfounded), and there is often a real or perceived reduction in functionality (particularly related to integration) compared to an on-premise system. SaaS is no longer seen as a crazy idea any more — Salesforce.com proved that organizations would put confidential business-critical data in a remote system — and many enterprise application vendors are looking for ways to capitalize on this growing market.

Cantera took over to talk about BPMS and SaaS, starting with the range of different service delivery models from on-premise shared services (which she refers to as “not really SaaS” — you think?), to business process outsourcing (again, not SaaS since the end-customer doesn’t provide the people in the process and/or it’s not purchased on a subscription basis), to SaaS delivery of process-based applications (e.g., Enkata, based on Lombardi TeamWorks, or L@W, based on Metastorm), to an actual SaaS BPMS platform (e.g., Appian Anywhere, or Fujitsu Interstage). In most cases, the process-based applications are fairly rigid to the end consumers; unlike the platforms, which expose pretty much the entire functionality of the equivalent on-premise BPMS, the applications may not allow any process changes, or only limited changes.

She said that she doesn’t see a push to using a BPMS platform via SaaS, but I think that’s a chicken-and-egg problem: Appian’s product isn’t even released yet, and Fujitsu’s seems to be under the radar, so customers either don’t even know that this capability exists or think (correctly) that it’s not available yet.

There are a number of architectural patterns for implementing multi-tenancy BPMS on a single SaaS server:

Each application has its own instance of the BPMS, and its own instance of a repository, but on a shared server. Gartner sees this as the dominant architecture in order to ensure process agility, although at a higher cost due to separate BPMS and repository instances for each application.
Each application has its own instance of the BPMS, but all instances share a partitioned repository on the shared server.
Each application shares a single instance of the BPMS and repository on the shared server (currently, no BPMS vendors support this model).

Cantera and Pring spoke together on what degree of process agility can be expected in a SaaS BPMS environment. They started by discussing — separately — how to determine if SaaS is right for you, and if BPMS is right for you, then looked at the process agility characteristics of BPMS in the various service delivery environments. If we look just at the characteristics for BPMS platforms via SaaS, they indicate a moderate operational cost, high degree of customization possible and therefore high process agility with a low to moderate cost associated with that process agility. The problem, of course, is that the vendors just aren’t quite there yet.

2008 02 06 Sandy Kemsley BPM
SaaS Comments (1)

Gartner BPM: Verizon Business Corrals Complexity with One of the Industry’s Biggest BPM Deployments, David Landry

David Landry, Verizon’s Executive Director of Sales Support and Billing Systems, spoke about how they used BPM to simplify and improve Verizon’s billing process. They started with a pretty serious spaghetti mess of contract-to-billing processes: 120 different processes, disjointed legacy systems, manual processes, local variations, and a number of other factors making everything from contracts to billing painful for both customers and employees. Due to growth via acquisitions, they also had a number of overlapping systems and processes.

What they needed was a standardized, simplified and automated process for capturing customer contracts, and mapping that into the billing system so that customers’ bills would accurately reflect the terms of their signed contract. Using BEA’s AquaLogic BPM and Service Bus, plus WebLogic Portal, they were able to streamline the process, reduce staff requirements for manual processing and reduce errors in manual data entry (and re-entry), resulting in $9M in savings from staff redeployment and billing credits, as well as greater customer satisfaction due to the quicker, more efficient and more accurate billing processes.

They had a number of drivers behind deploying a reliable, BPM-based solution: SOX compliance was the biggest one, since they now have better auditing of their processes and other controls, but they also considered flexibility of the process with respect to design and incident escalation, self-documenting processes, real-time process monitoring, automation of some manual tasks, and the ability to integrate multiple systems into the processes.

He ended up with five tips for implementing BPM:

Secure technically capable staff; in Verizon’s situation, the processes were so complex and involved the integration of so many legacy systems that some very sharp IT people were required.
Understand the business process
Secure business buy-in
Be prepared to model early in the lifecycle, and modify the models iteratively throughout the project.
Understand your development model

In their case, the project was very IT-led (including the modeling activities), although it was a collaboration between the CFO’s office and IT. They started the project in May last year, and delivered their first version in December — pretty fast for something of this complexity. They’ll be doing an incremental next version within the next couple of months, and see this as an ongoing process, not a one-shot implementation.

2008 02 06 Sandy Kemsley BPM Comments (1)

Gartner BPM, State of the BPM Market, Jay Simons, BEA

Jay Simons, VP of Marketing for BEA, presented the results of their recent research into the state of the BPM market, including a survey of 200+ BEA customers, mostly IT people but spread across vertical markets and geographies. They’ve also gathered information through their online BPM Lifecycle Assessment. I had the pleasure of collaborating with BEA on the resulting white paper, which they’re distributing a sneak preview version here at the show and will have more widely available on their website in about two weeks; consider as this disclosure that BEA is my client in case you haven’t checked my disclosure page lately.

The results show a number of interesting trends indicating that CIOs and business leaders are focused on improving their processes. Existing customers described how they expect to get their ROI from their BPM implementations, and most expect to see ROI over the next three years.

The top five trends:

IT embraces BPM enterprise-wide, which broadens the scope for BPM beyond the existing departmental systems, and centralizes the practices around BPM. In general, this is occurring because of the ability of BPM to connect applications into improved business processes; more than half already are or will be connecting BPM and SOA in their environment.
BPM is becoming event-driven, in order to support the event-driven nature of business today. This will result in much more agile processes that can respond to both expected and unexpected events.
Increased focus on knowledge-intensive processes, and using collaborative BPM to enable ad hoc processes both on their own or as an offshoot from a structured process. That includes a variety of collaborative activities, including producing documents, sharing collaborative workspaces, and discussion forums. Over 90% of BEA customers indicated that they have some sort of collaborative processes.
Enterprise social computing (Enterprise 2.0) as it starts to impact BPM, which I’ve been writing about for a couple of years: introducing tagging, wiki, social connectedness and the like with more traditional process management in order to add context and more easily collaborate.
Moving towards dynamic business applications, and how BPM holds a central role in that. Yvonne Genovese spoke in the keynote this morning about the move towards dynamic/composite applications in order to free organizations from the pre-canned logic in packaged enterprise applications, but BPM (together with services exposed in an SOA layer) allows for the fast assembly of applications that are more suited to current business needs.

2008 02 06 Sandy Kemsley BPM Comments (2)

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