Skip to content

{ Category Archives } SAPevents

Process Design Slam 2009 – The Final Judgement #SAPTechEd09 #BPXslam09

To wrap up the proceedings from last night, I was asked to critique the efforts of the groups and pick a winner: as it turned out, I was the only judge. Each of the groups did great work, and I want to call out some of the specific efforts:

  • The Business Use Case group had a great written story, including a lot of cultural and social background for our fictional city in order to provide context for the implementation.
  • The BPM Methodologies group had excellent documentation on the wiki, including graphics and charts to make it clear how the methodologies fit with the other groups.
  • The Business Rules group were stars at collaboration with the other groups, in part because everyone quickly realized the importance of business rules to data, UI and process, and solicited their input.
  • The UI and Dashboards group created mockups of monitoring dashboards that provide a starting point for future design slam work.
  • The Collaborative Modeling group led at international collaboration, using Gravity (process modeling within Google Wave) interactively with team members in Europe during the session, and produced a business process model.
  • The Service Implementation group also kicked off implementation, creating a service orchestration process model as a starting point.

In general, everyone seemed to have a good understanding of the importance of data, rules and process, but there could have been better cross-pollination between the groups; in future design slams, that could be helped by requiring some group members to move partway through the evening in order to ensure that there is a better understanding on both sides, something that is fairly common in real-life businesses where people are seconded from one department to another for part of a project. Although a certain amount of collaboration did occur, that was one area that requires more work. I saw one tweet that referred to the design slam as crowdsourced rather than collaborative, although I’m not sure that I would say that: crowdsourcing usually has more of a flavor of individuals contributing in order to achieve their own goals, whereas this was a collaboration with common goals. However, those goals were a bit fragmented by group.

Another issue that I had was the lack of an architectural view of process design: although all of the groups are contributing to a common process (or set of processes), there is little thought around the transformations required to move the process list developed by the Business Use Case group to the process model developed by the Collaborative Modeling group to the process design developed by the Service Implementation group. In enterprise architecture terms, this is a case of transforming models from one layer to another within the process column of the architecture (column 2 if you’re a Zachman fan); understanding these transformations is key so that you don’t reinvent the process at each layer. One of the goals of model-driven design is that you don’t do a business-level process model, then redraw it in another tool; instead, the business-level process model can be augmented with service-level information to become an executable process without recreating the model in another tool. In reality, that often doesn’t happen, and the business analysts draws a process in one tool (such as Visio, or in the case of the design slam, Gravity), then IT redraws it in a tool that will create an executable process (NetWeaver in this case). I have a couple of suggestions here:

  • Combine the Business Use Case and Collaborative Modeling groups into a single group, since they are both doing high-level business analysis. This would allow the process list to be directly modeled in the same group without hand-off of information.
  • Reconsider the use of tools. Although I have a great deal of appreciation for Gravity (I am, after all, a geek), the fact that it does not share a model with the execution environment is problematic since the two groups creating process models were really off doing their own thing using different tools. Consider using NetWeaver 7.2, which has a business analyst perspective in the process composer, and having the business use case/collaborative modeling group create their initial non-technical models in that environment, then allow the service implementation team to add the technical underpinnings. The cool Wave collaboration won’t be there, or maybe only as an initial sketching tool, but the link will be made between the business process models and the executable models.

When it came down to a decision, my choice of the winner was more a product of the early state of the design slam rather than the efforts or skills of the group: I suspect that my view would change if I were judging in Vienna or Bangalore when the process is further along. I selected the Business Use Case group as the winner at this point based on the four judging criteria: although they failed to include alternative media, their story was clear and well-written, it fit well with the other groups’ efforts, and they used good social and collaborative methods within their group for driving out the initial solutions.

The winning team was made up of Greg Chase, Ulrich Scholl and Claus von Riegen, all of SAP, with input from a few others as subject-matter experts on public utilities and electricity production, and started the discussions on pricing plans that ended up driving much of the Business Rules group’s work. Ulrich also has solar cells on his house that connect to the grid, so he has in-depth knowledge of the issues involved with micro-generation, and was very helpful at determining the roles involved and how people could take on multiple roles. They leveraged a lot of the content that was already on the wiki, especially references to communities with experience in micro-generation and virtual power plants. Besides this initial leg up on their work, they were forced to work fast to produce the initial use cases and processes, since that provided necessary input to the other groups to get started with their work, which left them with more of the evening to write a great story around the use case (but, apparently, not enough time to add any graphics or multimedia).

There was a huge amount of effort put into the design slam, both in the preceding weeks through conference calls and content added to the wiki, and at the session last night in Phoenix. I believe that a huge amount of groundwork has been laid for the design slams upcoming in Vienna and Bangalore, including process model, service orchestration diagrams, business rules decision tables, and monitoring dashboard mockups.

I had a great time last night, and would happily participate in a future process design slam.

2009 10 15 Sandy Kemsley BPA
BPM
BRM
SOA Comments (0)

Process Design Slam 2009 #SAPTechEd09 #BPXslam09

8pm

We’re just getting started with the Process Design Slam: one of the face-to-face sessions that make up the collaborative design process that started a couple of months ago on the Design Slam wiki. Marilyn Pratt has identified the six groups that will each work on their part of the design, collaborating between groups (a.k.a. poaching talent) as required, and even bringing in people from the Hacker Night and Business Objects events going on in the same area.

  • Business Use Case, led by Greg Chase
  • Collaborative Modeling, led by David Herrema
  • Business Rules, led by James Taylor
  • Service Implementation, led by John Harrikey
  • BPM Methodologies, led by Ann Rosenberg
  • UI and Dashboards, led by Michelle Crapo

Right now, everyone has formed into initial groups based on their interests, and is having some initial discussions before the food and beer arrives at 8:30. Since there was an initial story and process model developed by the online community, everyone is starting at something close to a common point. Participants within a group (and even the leaders) could change throughout the evening.

By the end of the night, each team will have created a story about their work, and give a 5-minute presentation on it. The story must include additional media such as video and images, and in addition to the presentation, it must be documented on the wiki. Each story must also be related to the output of the other teams – requiring some amount of collaboration throughout the evening – and include pointers on what worked and didn’t work about their process, and what they would do differently in the future.

At that point, the judging panel, which includes me plus Marc Rosson, Uli Scholl, Ann Rosenberg and Dick Hirsch, will render our judgment on the creations of the groups based on the following criteria:

  • Clarity and completeness of the story on the wiki, particularly if it could be understood without the presentation.
  • Creative use of media.
  • How well this story ties into the overall storyline of the night.
  • The social process that was used to create the story.

I’m floating around between groups to listen in on what they’re doing and some of their initial thoughts.

8:30pm

Beer o’clock. The Business Rules team is still deep in conversation, however, and Business Use Case comes over to them to ask for help in bringing the business rules and business use case together. Business Use Case outlines the actors that they have identified, and the high-level business processes that they have identified in addition to the initial business process of bringing new consumer-producers online.

9pm

BPM Methodologies has a much wider view than just this project: developing methodologies that can be used across (SAP) BPM projects, including assessing the business process maturity of an organization in order to determine where they need to start, and identifying the design roles. In the context of the design slam, they will be helping to coordinate movement of people between the teams in order to achieve the overall goals.

9:30pm

Service Implementation – viewed by groups such as Business Use Case as “the implementers” – have revised the original process map from a service standpoint; looking at the services that were required led to a process redesign. They are using the Composite Designer to model the service orchestration, including the interfaces to the services that they need and external services such as FirstLook, an wind assessment service based on location data. In their service orchestration process, they assume that the process is initiated with the data gathered from a user interface form, and they focus primarily on the automated process steps. Ginger Gatling doesn’t let me leave the table until I tell them what they have to do to win; I advise them to update the wiki with their story.

9:50pm

The Collaborative Modeling group is modeling the business process using Gravity, online with a couple of participants in Europe. This is a process model from a business standpoint, not an executable model; there is no concept of the linkage between this and what is being done by the Service Implementation team. I suggest that they should head over there to compare processes, since these should (at some level) just be different perspectives on the same process.

10pm

Business Use Case is identifying the necessary processes based on their earlier collaboration with Business Rules: this has given them a good understanding of business case, goals and incentives. They’re considering both human and automated usages, and have fed their results to the UI, Business Rules and Collaborative Modeling teams.

10:10pm

Business Rules states that they’ve had to gather information from numerous sources, and the challenge is to sequence it properly: data is captured by the UI, but is driven by the Business Use Case. They didn’t work with the Collaborative Modeling group directly, but there are links between what they do and what’s happening in the process. They’re also interested in using historical usage data to determine when to switch consumers between usage plans.

10:20pm

UI and Dashboards managed to recruit a developer who is actually coding some of their interfaces; they were visited by many of the other groups to discuss the UI aspects, since the data gathered by the UI drives the rest of the process and rules, and the data generated by the process drives the dashboard interfaces. They feel that they had the best job since they could just be consumers and visualize the solutions that they would like to have.

10:35pm

Presentations start. Marilyn Pratt is being the MC, and Greg Chase is wrangling the wiki to show what has been documented by each of the groups. Half of the Service Implementation team just bailed out. I have to start paying attention now. Checking out the wiki pages and summarizing the presentations:

  • Business Use Case worked with the UI, Collaborative Modeling and Business Rules teams, since those teams required the business use cases in order to start their work. They developed a good written story including cultural/social background about the fictional city where the power generation plan would go into effect. They defined the roles that would be involved (where one person could take on more than one role, such as a consumer that is also a producer), and the processes that are required in order to handle all of the use cases. They did not use any presentation/documentation media besides plain text.
  • BPM Methodologies had excellent documentation with the use of graphics and tables to illustrate their points, but this was a quite general methodology, not just specific to this evening’s activities. They worked briefly with the other groups and created a chart of the activities that each of these groups would do relative to the different phases in the methodology. I found the methodology a bit too waterfall-like, and not necessarily a good fit with the more agile collaborative methods needed in today’s BPM.
  • Business Rules focused on the rules related to signing up a new user with the correct pricing plan, documenting the data that must be collected and an initial decision table used to select a plan, although no graphics or other non-text media. They worked with the Business Use Case team and the UI team to drive the underlying business use cases and data collection.
  • UI and dashboards created the initial mockups that can be used as a starting point for the design slam in Vienna in a couple of weeks. They worked with Business Rules and Business Use Case in order to nail down the required user data inputs, and what is required for monitoring purposes, and included some great graphics of the monitoring dashboards (although not the data collection form).
  • Collaborative Modeling used Gravity (process modeling in Google Wave) not just for modeling with the group around the table, but also with participants in Germany and the Netherlands. They included photos of the team as well as screen snaps of the Gravity Wave that they created, although the text of the story documented on the wiki isn’t really understandable on its own. I’m not sure that they spent enough time with other groups, especially the Service Implementation group.
  • Service Implementation talked to the Business Rules and UI teams to discuss rules and data, but felt that they were running blind since there wasn’t enough of the up-front work done for them to do any substantial work. They used placeholders for a lot of the things that they didn’t know yet, and modeled the service orchestration. The documentation in the wiki is very rudimentary, although includes the process map that they developed; it’s not clear, however, how the process model developed in Collaborative Modeling relates to their map.

11:30pm

And now, on to the judging – I’ll write up the critique and results in a later post.

2009 10 15 Sandy Kemsley BPA
BPM
BRM
SOA Comments (1)

NetWeaver BPM update #SAPTechEd09

Wolfgang Hilpert and Thomas Volmering gave us an update on NetWeaver BPM, since I was last updated at SAPPHIRE when they were releasing the product to full general availability. They’re readying the next wave of BPM – NetWeaver 7.2 – with beta customers now, for ramp-up near the beginning of the year and GA in spring of 2010.

There are a number of enhancements in this version, based on increasing productivity and incorporating feedback from customers:

  • Creating user interfaces: instead of just Web DynPro for manual creation of UI using code, they can auto-generate a UI for a human-facing task step.
  • New functions in notifications.
  • Handling intermediate events for asynchronous interfaces with other systems and services.
  • More complete coverage of BPMN in terms of looping, boundary events, exception handling and other constructs;
  • Allowing a process participant to invite other people on their team to participate in a task, even if not defined in the process model (ad hoc collaboration at a step).
  • The addition of a reporting activity to the process model in order to help merge the process instance data and the process flow data to make available for in-process analytics using a tool such as BusinessObjects – the reporting activity takes a snapshot of the process instance data to the reporting database at that point in the process without having to call APIs.
  • Deeper integration with other SAP business services, making it easier to discover and consume those services directly within the NetWeaver Process Composer even if the customer hasn’t upgraded to a version of SAP ERP that has SOA capabilities
  • Better integration of the rules management (the former Yasu product) to match the NetWeaver UI paradigms, expose more of the functionality in the Composer and allow better use of rules flow for defining rules as well as rules testing.
  • Business analyst perspective in process modeler so that the BA can sketch out a model, then allow a developer to do more of the technical underpinnings; this uses a shared model so that the BA can return to make modifications to the process model at a later time.

I’d like to see more about the ad hoc runtime collaboration at a task (being able to invite team members to participate in a task) as well as the BA perspective in the process modeler and the auto-generation of user interfaces; I’m sure that there’s a 7.2 demo in my future sometime soon.

They also talked briefly about plans for post-7.2:

  • Gravity and similar concepts for collaborative process modeling.
  • Common process model to allow for modeling of the touchpoints of ERP processes in BPM, in order to leverage their natural advantage of direct access to SAP business applications.
  • Push further into the business through more comprehensive business-focused modeling tools.
  • Goal-driven processes where the entire structure of the process model is not defined at design time, only the goals.

In the future, there will continue to be a focus on productivity with the BPM tools, greater evolution of the common process model, and better use of BI and analytics as the BusinessObjects assets are leveraged in the context of BPM.

2009 10 14 Sandy Kemsley BAM
BI
BPA
BPM
BRM Comments (0)

SAP research overview: Gravity #SAPTechEd09

We had a blogger roundtable today with Soeren Balko, VP in the SAP NetWeaver BPM architecture and design group, and Marek Kowalkiewicz from the Brisbane section of SAP Research with an overview of the research and special projects going on at SAP. Innovations tend to emerge from the research centers – in conjunction with the universities with whom they collaborate and customers – then the product development groups become involved in order to determine how to productize the ideas.

The hot thing in their research right now is Gravity: the collaborative process modeling environment that they created within Google Wave. The process modeling is done purely with tools created in Google Web Toolkit; this is not SAP NetWeaver BPM embedded within Google Wave, it’s a BPMN modeler created with GWT. The process models can be exported to the BPMN 2.0 format for import into a BPMS (or another modeling tool). The Wave playback capability is especially nice for seeing how the process model was built, and different colored shadows on the model objects to denote which participant created the object.

There are bots that can be added to processes in order to check the process integrity, export process models, and to detect portions of the process flow that could potentially be collapsed into a subprocess. It makes sense that there will be other bots created in order to perform other automated checks and actions on the process model.

They’re not supporting the full BPMN 2.0 object set, but have a subset that can at least be used for simple models and as a proof of concept around the idea of a modeler within Wave.

James Taylor was at the table too, and we got into a discussion of modeling rules in a similar manner: although this is a BPMN modeler, so there’s no opportunity to model rules here, there may be an opportunity to take the NetWeaver BRM rules modeling paradigm and create a similar sort of prototype that allows for rules modeling within Wave.

We’ll be seeing more of Gravity tonight at the Process Design Slam, and if I ever get my freaking Wave account (2 invitations already on their way, but not arrived yet), then I can actually try it out for myself.

We also had a brief overview of Yowie, a project that we saw at DemoJam last night, that uses SAP text analytics to act as an intelligent agent either as a bot in Wave or when receiving emails regarding enterprise applications and assets; and BirdsEye, which receives the GPS signal sent from an iPhone (or any geopositioning RSS feed) to do near-real-time positional tracking for applications such as delivery optimization.

2009 10 14 Sandy Kemsley BPA
BPM
cloud Comments (2)

Process Design Slam preparation #SAPTechEd09 #BPXslam09

I was sitting in the blogger room this morning at SAP TechEd in Phoenix, and heard Marilyn Pratt mention my name over at another table: usually something that makes me perk up my ears, since Marilyn is a primo community builder, and I had the feeling that I was about to be recruited for something. :) I’m already signed up as a judge/critic for the Process Design Slam event here tonight, which is the culmination (along with the TechEd events in Vienna and Bangalore) of a three-month virtual community collaboration for applying BPM tools and methodologies to solve a specific business challenge.

The selected process, from the design slam wiki:

Automating business processes related to forming virtual community-based power plant made up of resident’s personal solar wind generation.

The idea is to describe a process that allows a homeowner or business to come online as a micro generator within a township and the various steps (human and automated) that are required. Sustainability gets better over time, the more neighborhoods choose to generate power from green sources to supply the very power this neighborhood consumes – and in pretty much the same timeframe. This also reduces the losses of transporting power over longer distances.  Thus, power companies will more and more become brokers, and less actual suppliers of power.

After a chat with Marilyn, we’ve decided that I’ll interview the winners (briefly, since it will be after midnight, which is 3am in my time zone) and write a short blog post about their winning contribution. This will definitely break my standard rule that everything is off the record once the bar opens.

The community has already done a lot of the work, including creating and agreeing upon a process map using NetWeaver BPM 7.1:

and rules in NetWeaver BRM 7.1:

Keep an eye on the #BPXslam09 hashtag on Twitter for up-to-date news as the day progresses.

2009 10 14 Sandy Kemsley BPA
BPM Comments (1)

NetWeaver update #SAPTechEd09

Marge Breya is responsible for a huge portfolio of SAP products, including SOA, BPM and the BusinessObjects BI unit – that is, pretty much all the SAP stuff that I’m interested in. :) At an analyst/blogger roundtable this afternoon, she gave a quick overview of the high-level strategy for NetWeaver, and had Wolfgang Hilpert and Thomas Volmering there to talk more about the BPM side.

From a platform standpoint, they’re trying to do some major renovations to build the best possible platform for SAP to run on. In orchestration, there are new things in master data management as well as business process and the models within them; when I reviewed the NetWeaver BPM platform, I talked about the strong process instance data models that they include, which is critical for appropriate monitoring and management of processes. She also mentioned Gravity, the combination of Google Wave and some SAP process discovery/modeling to allow for collaborative process modeling by what one person at the table called “mere mortals”.

From the Business Objects side of the portfolio, she also mentioned the advances in analytics and end-user experience, and how ideas being generated there are pushing forward the related technologies in other areas of the portfolio. There was a discussion about in-memory analytics; this has obvious implications for complex event processing and BPM as well as just analytics. Creating methods for users to configure their own user interface allows the business to start creating their own experiences rather than waiting for IT to do it for them.

The message that every new user entering the workforce now is a digital native comes through clearly in more than one of the conversations that I’ve heard today. SAP must be feeling the pinch of having some pretty outdated user interfaces in some of their product lines, because they seem to be taking this as a serious threat and addressing it head on.

This was more of a discussion than a presentation, but some good ideas about what’s coming up.

This is my first post from SAP TechEd in Phoenix; SAP has paid my travel expenses to be here, but is not otherwise compensating me and has no editorial control over what I write (in fact, they look downright nervous as I type).

2009 10 13 Sandy Kemsley Comments (2)

Workflow and BPM Open Forum #sapphire09

It’s the last session of the day – and for me, for the conference – and I’m attending the open forum on workflow and BPM hosted by a number of people from inside and outside SAP with experience in different workflow and BPM areas. The format was 100% audience Q&A, and the focus was really on the SAP Business Workflow within the core ERP system, not NetWeaver BPM; this isn’t completely surprising considering that BPM just went into unrestricted release this week, so there’s probably not enough of it in the wild to generate much of a discussion on it.

There was an interesting discussion on what types of processes and applications lend themselves to being “workflowed” – time-sensitive (deadline monitoring), review and approval, audit and control requirements – which was not specific to the workflow/BPM platform.

Unfortunately, not enough content for me, since BW is too buried within the ERP to be of interest to me, and I ducked out early.

Tagged
2009 05 13 Sandy Kemsley BPM Comments (0)

Ginger Gatling on the Universal Worklist #sapphire09

I spent yesterday and this morning in the global communications center at the north end of the conference center, since SAP’s teams for managing social media (that’s us bloggers), press and analysts brings the SAP executives to us for meetings up there. They pipe in the keynote sessions, give us comfy tables with internet access, power and printers, and feed and water us; I’m guessing that some of the press/bloggers/analysts never venture out of the global communications center all week. I just can’t resist the call of the regular sessions, however, and I hiked through the extensive show floor to the south concourse for Ginger Gatling’s session on the Universal Worklist (UWL).

This session isn’t specifically about BPM, but the UWL is used as the common inbox portal for tasks from a variety of sources including BPM and business workflow. This session was for people who use UWL already, with Gatling’s top ten recommendation for configuring it for better usage.

Almost no one uses UWL out of the box – only one person in the audience claimed to be doing this, and even they have recently started to customize it – since there are a variety of ways to customize it: processing of multiple tasks in the list simultaneously, forcing comments/responses when specific actions are taken, override the default task launch mechanism, create custom action buttons, or just basic visual styling. UWL can also handle non-SAP tasks: a task from any application can be integrated by using the UWL Java API to create a UWL connector for that application. In fact, that’s how NetWeaver BPM tasks end up in the UWL. There were a couple of people in the audience interested in using UWL for non-SAP tasks, with one of them stating that they had 19 different workflow systems and want to use UWL as their “window to everything”.

Interestingly, although UWL can be personalized by users, almost everyone in the audience said that they hide that option because it makes it harder to support. This is pretty basic personalization, such as column order and sorting, but it’s amazing what people can get confused over, especially when they’re trying to explain it to a remote support person. Also, most of the audience disable substitution (that is, redirecting your tasks to someone else while you are away) at the UWL portal layer, since there could be several applications surfacing tasks into UWL, and you can’t apply the same substitution rules across all of them. Both of these – personalization and substitution – are examples of features created by developers who don’t really understand the business environment, but were likely designed and tested in an overly simplistic version of that environment: otherwise, who would assume that all of the tasks in a “universal” worklist could be delegated to the same person?

This is not something that I will ever have to do myself, but it’s an important glimpse at what sort of customization needs to happen for a BPM application that is going to use UWL as an inbox, in addition to the customization that is done for the task user interface itself within BPM.

Tagged
2009 05 13 Sandy Kemsley Comments (1)

Wolfgang Hilpert and Thomas Vollmering on NetWeaver BPM #sapphire09

I started to get paranoid yesterday when my meeting with Wolfgang Hilpert and Thomas Vollmering was scheduled at the same time as Ginger Gatling’s session on NetWeaver BPM, then they didn’t show for the meeting – was there something they didn’t want me to know? However, it was just a scheduling glitch, and eventually we met up so that they could brief me on the current release and what’s coming later this year.

When I last had an in-depth look at the product late last year, it was in late beta; since then, it’s been through the SAP ramp-up (early ship) process, and was released for unrestricted shipment on Monday. I’ll be finishing up my review of the current release in an upcoming post, and as soon as Thomas forwards on the material that he promised to send (hint, hint), I’ll be able to post a bit more on the future directions.

The newly released version is still lacking a lot of expected BPMS functionality, but has focused on the features that SAP’s customers said that they needed the most: human-centric BPM (since there are existing products in the SAP suite that cover lower-level orchestration) and a integrated composition environment that can eventually be used for process composition across all layers: human-facing tasks, web services, and core ERP processes. Due to their Yasu acquisition, they also did direct integration between the BPM and BRM environments, although there were some rough edges there and in some of the other areas, such as handling the user interface at process steps.

In spite of the shortcomings of the first release, SAP’s vision for BPM is far-reaching, especially around the integration of events and analytics. They are taking advantage of the innovation that’s happening within the BusinessObjects group, and there’s a potential for them to create a powerful platform not just for managing processes, but for handling events, including the results of analytics at a human-facing step as a decision-support tool, and for analyzing and optimizing processes.

Tagged
2009 05 13 Sandy Kemsley BPM Comments (2)

Marge Breya on BusinessObjects Explorer #sapphire09

A small group of bloggers had the opportunity to sit around a table with Marge Breya to expand on what we saw during the press conference on BusinessObjects Explorer. She discussed how unstructured data has being elevated to first class status within SAP, with analytics and reporting tools that can lay over unstructured as well as structured data. Part of this involves parsing structure out of unstructured data through an appropriate semantic layer.

They’re also playing with things (that she couldn’t really talk about, although some customers have access) that provide much more of an hosted Web 2.0-type of experience. They’re working on Explorer On Demand, which allows you to upload spreadsheets and other file-oriented data, then do some analysis and visualization on your own data to get an idea of how valuable tools like this are. They handed out some test drive passes for this, so I may get a chance to play around with it some time soon. I expect that many organizations won’t want their data warehouse in the cloud, but this will at least give them a chance to try it out in a no-risk environment. They’re doing this with more of their BusinessObjects platform, where there’s a free version that allows for some starter functionality, then hope for it to go viral in terms of stepping up to paid on demand or on premise versions. That’s a pretty powerful model in the consumer space, although traditional enterprises may have a more difficult time adopting technology in this manner. Considering that the higher-end of Explorer is targeted at large organizations, this could be the biggest challenge.

Breya had some interesting background on product strategy as well, especially around how SAP had traditionally been doing OLAP-based business intelligence, and BusinessObjects didn’t have much in the way of OLAP, so the acquisition produced a minimum of overlap. Polestar, on the market for a couple of years as an ad hoc query tool, was retooled into Explorer for a million or so rows of data, and Explorer Accelerated, a software and hardware bundle, that can handle billions or rows.

She went on to talk about the ties between BI and BPM, and although she couldn’t talk about anything specific, there are some interesting things coming in terms of operational BI, monitoring and characterizing processes for the purposes of process improvement, as well as invoking analytics within processes for decision support.

In response to a question about the consumerization of SAP products, she promises us “an experience that will take decisioning to the next level, involving collaboration” in something that is just entering private beta now. I’m picturing a cross between Xbox Live and Vanilla Sky, which would be cool, but I still think that there are challenges to adoption of completely new user experience paradigms. Since SAP has a wide customer base in manufacturing and other industries with low margins and the requirement for constant product innovation, this may not be as much of a challenge as it would be verticals such as financial services and insurance.

We had a discussion about the cloud versus on premise as the location for data, with the underlying theme that it’s not an all or nothing proposition: while operational data may be behind the firewall, it makes much more sense to leave third-party benchmarking data in the cloud where it can be shared and frequently updated. The new generation of BI products from any vendor can’t be restrictive in their data sources, but have to be able to aggregate information from a variety of sources both inside and outside the firewall.

Tagged
2009 05 12 Sandy Kemsley BI
BPM Comments (0)

#sapphire09 press conference – Business Objects Explorer

Jon Schwarz, SAP Executive Board Member, gave the global press conference at SAPPHIRE this morning, with a focus on BusinessObjects Explorer (formerly known as Polestar) and how it helps their customers to become clear enterprises: seeing, thinking and acting clearly. As Prashanth Rai twittered, it’s more like a mini keynote than a press conference, or at least this part of it.

SAP is seeing a fundamental change in customer expectations, both from the buyers and the users. Buyers need to do more with less, which means reducing total cost of ownership, making it easy to deploy solutions, and getting to ROI faster. Users now want the same level of usability and sophistication of digital media as they see in consumer applications (surprise!), as well as wanting to integrate social and community aspects.

Their strategy:

  • Building on their core business process platform
  • Best foundation for an intelligence platform since the acquisition of Business Objects
  • Next-level BPM, presumably through NetWeaver BPM (although he didn’t state that explicitly)
  • On premise and on demand solutions
  • Web 2.0-like user experience
  • Non-disruptive evolution through timeless software

Marge Breya, EVP and GM of Business Objects and NetWeaver, took the stage to talk about how data is used within organizations, and pointed out a 2007 BusinessWeek research study that showed that most people don’t think that they have the right data (and granularity of data) to do their job, and poor decisions are being made due to lack of information. She then introduced BusinessObjects Explorer, a front-end tool for exploring and visualizing large data sets, both for casual and power users. It allows for searching and sorting, interactive drilldowns, and various types of dynamic graphical visualizations while navigating through the data. This can be done in the context of a SAP report screen, and she showed an experimental version running on an iPhone. In the next year, they’ll be opening up the data sources so that this can be used as an interactive analysis and visualization tool against data warehouses, flat files and other data sources. Currently, there’s a regular version, which good for up to about 1M records, and an accelerated version for much larger data sets. There are, of course, other data analysis and visualization tools in the BusinessObjects portfolio: Xcelsius, Crystal and WebI; the challenge will be a clear delineation of the usage of each of these products, or a consolidation of some of these to create a more compact portfolio.

BusinessObjects Explorer

She was then joined on stage by a panel of customers and partners: Vincent Vloemans from Sara Lee, Katrina Coyle from Molson Coors, Elke Reichart from HP and Alexander Yost from IBM. The two customers have been using Explorer and had lots of good things to say about the speed of analysis (2-3 seconds on data sets of 300M records), the fast learning curve for users with little or no training, and the short time to value. The partners discussed how their hardware optimizes the performance of this solution – apparently, a nice IBM or HP blade server will help things out considerably – and how they are shipping preconfigured and optimized systems.

Schwarz came back up to walk through a more traditional set of press announcements, including their acquisition of Clear Standards; you can read all of the news releases in the news room. We then had an audience Q&A, which ranged across a variety of subjects including the potential for appliances for products such as BusinessObjects Explorer (nothing to discuss yet, but apparently in the works), the role of business and IT in the creation and maintenance of data visualizations and other user-facing information (don’t fire your IT staff yet), sustainability (they’re for it), and the necessity for good data hygiene (seriously).

If you’re on Twitter, #sapphire09 is one of the top trends today. With 10,000 attendees on site and another 8,000 registered online for virtual participation, that’s not surprising.

Tagged
2009 05 12 Sandy Kemsley Comments (0)

Back to blogging

I’ve been absent from blogging for a while – with the exception of the links posts that are auto-generated from my Delicious bookmarks – due to a very heavy client workload and very few conferences to blog about. I have been twittering, but my Twitter stream tends to contain random thoughts and personal observations rather than BPM-related commentary.

The Twitterati may claim that blogging is dead, but there’s clearly a place for articles, reviews and opinion pieces that need more space to expand on a subject. There’s something about writing longer bits of prose (longer than 140 characters, that is) that helps my brain work around problems better, plus the comments and feedback from readers is a valuable part of the conversation. I plan to get back to more regular blogging, and to kick that off, I’ll be blogging from SAP’s SAPPHIRE conference this week in Orlando. I have a detailed review of NetWeaver BPM that has been in the works for a while, and I’ll be updating that with new information from this week and publishing that as well.

Stay tuned, and don’t delete me from your RSS reader yet.

2009 05 11 Sandy Kemsley blogging Comments (2)

Presentation grades

I did a half-day jumpstart session at the SAP Insider BPM conference in November, and just received my score: 4.25 out of 5, which was nicely above the average across all speakers of 3.91. Interestingly, I received higher marks for “speaker” than for “content”, probably because I had way too much content for 3 hours.

2009 02 01 Sandy Kemsley Comments (0)

OMG, I’m on video…

Marilyn Pratt of SAP captured me on video at the reception at the SAP Insider BPM 2008 conference. Yes, there were drinks involved.

2008 11 20 Sandy Kemsley Comments (0)

SAP BPM 2008: Business Rules Management

I was up bright and early today to hear Soum Chatterjee from SAP Labs give an introduction to their business rules product, the recently-acquired Yasu (which Chatterjee claims stands for Yet Another Start-Up). I’ve had a bit of a look at it in the context of the NetWeaver BPM demos that I’ve had, but wanted to hear about their roadmap for the product.

He started with some very fundamental information on business rules, and made an interesting comment (considering who writes his paycheck): maybe embedding rules in the code of systems like SAP’s ERP was not a great idea. Of course, neither was having rules embedded in database triggers or non-automated methods such as documenting them in procedures guides or just having them in people’s heads. In these cases, we might see lack of flexibility, lack of visibility and lack of enforcement/standardization as well as having the business rules scattered around the organization where they can’t be properly managed. The solution, of course, is SAP NetWeaver BRM :)   Consider that the audience is mostly SAP customers who are very used to the idea of business rules embedded within their ERP code, some of these ideas are pretty radical, but he does a good job of laying out the value proposition of business rules, not just a product overview. He put it in the context of BPM, where the ability to change the rules within processes provides maximum agility.

From a rules product standpoint, they have a suite including:

  • A composer for modeling rules, in an Eclipse-based environment that can be used by a business analyst. It uses a natural language-like representation of the rules, and provides conflict resolution and other up-front analysis of the rules being modeled. Rules can be represented as a decision table, classic if-the-else code, or as a graphical rule flow (which is a sort of decision tree). I’ve also seen this integrated into the process modeling environment in their BPM product.
  • A rules manager for deploying and managing rules.
  • A rules engine to execute the rules. Rules can be consumed as web services (and therefore by their BPM or any other composite application modeling environment) and ABAP business applications.
  • A repository for storing the rules assets.
  • A rules analyzer for optimization (not released yet).

They’ve focused on fast methods of testing and refining rules, particularly by a business analyst. They also have a lot of change management and governance built in.

He covered how BRM and BPM will work together:

  • Complex rule-based decisions (pricing, credit decisions, etc.)
  • Responsibility determination (rule-based task assignment)
  • Recognition of business events
  • Routing rules
  • Parameter thresholds and tolerance (constraints)

Rules can be modeled in the rules composer or in the process composer. He showed us a (canned) demo of the rules composer that would have been a lot more compelling if he had narrated it in a bit more detail: I was sitting at the front of the room so could see the screen, but I’m sure that those at the back of the room couldn’t read it and there wasn’t enough narration to follow along with what was happening in the screen playback. Eight minutes into the video (only halfway!), we move from code-based rules to decision tables, which is a bit more interesting from a demo standpoint, but I really doubt if anyone who didn’t already know something about rules modeling would have gained a lot of information from watching this. It also made the composer look a lot more difficult that it actually is, as evidenced from an audience question about whether they expected business users to use this (in a disbelieving voice).

He finished up with the product roadmap:

  • This year, they’ve delivered the business rules composition and execution environment, available for invocation from the various SAP product lines, and integrated with the BPM composition environment.
  • In 2009, there will be more complex decision sequences, integrated support for rule refinement and validation, end-to-end change management, and improved business user participation and collaboration in rules authoring and change management.
  • In 2010, the plan (which of course can change) is to have real-time rule-based responses to business events, advanced rules analysis capabilities with alignment to business goals, and better modeling capabilities for business analysts.
2008 11 19 Sandy Kemsley BRM Comments (1)

SAP Tools for Process Definition, Modeling and Management

I spent the morning presenting an introduction to BPM in a jumpstart session at the SAP BPM 2008 event put on by SAP Insider and was going to spend the afternoon by the pool, but was tempted by Ann Rosenberg’s invitation to her afternoon session, A Complete Guide to SAP Tools for Business Process Definition, Modeling and Management. Ann is in the Business Transformation Consulting group at SAP, and was joined in the session by Marilyn Pratt (SAP BPX Community Evangelist), Greg Prickril (SAP NetWeaver BPM product management) and Charles Möller (Center for Industrial Production at Aalborg University).

Several people in the audience — including Ann and Marilyn — were in my session this morning, so had some context for this; Ann did a quick overview of BPM to start, and it was a good complement to my session since she covered many of the topics that I didn’t have time to address, such as the link between BPM and quality management programs like Six Sigma, and business process maturity models. One interesting quote from Ann: “The way we will run SAP projects going forward will be different from how we did it in the past”, due to the process orchestration capabilities that are now available.

She positions IDS Scheer’s ARIS as the place where you will do your business process modeling, which includes both manual and automated activities (by “manual”, I believe that she means those that are not touched in any way by the BPMS); automated activities make up typically less than 20% of all activities. Of those automated activities, you’ll then use NetWeaver BPM to model and execute less than 20% of those activities — the ones that are a competitive differentiator — whereas the remaining 80+% are standard activities/processes within SAP’s standard business suite.

My thoughts on this:

  • I don’t agree that only 20% of what most organizations model are candidates for any sort of automation if you include the manual tasks executed within a BPMS, but I haven’t done any definitive survey on this; the percentage would depend how much process modeling that your organization is doing as a standalone initiative, but I would expect a much higher percentage if your organization has some sort of BPMS initiative.
  • The 80% or more of the automated activities that are targeted for SAP’s business suite rather than BPM are those that are intended to be more “cost-effective”, which implies that it’s much more expensive to develop and execute business processes in NetWeaver BPM than in the core business systems. I don’t know enough about SAP to make that sort of cost comparison, but given the time and effort that I’ve heard is required to deploy and maintain an SAP business suite system, I find it hard to believe that a more agile BPM system is more expensive if you are going to do a comparison of a realistic (read: not static) process. I imagine that for truly standard processes — those where you could use SAP business suite out of the box — that would be true, but it’s not my impression that that happens a lot.

She had some good comments on business process maturity and how it relates to SAP: the core business products cover off the first three or four levels to get your processes standardized, then BPM kicks in when you move into the upper levels of continuous improvement. I think that’s a good context for SAP customers moving into BPM; if they’re using SAP’s business suite properly, then they already have some degree of business process maturity, but have no hope of achieving that continuous improvement nirvana without something more agile, like BPM.

Charles Möller was up next with an academic review of the management discipline of BPM that links to the book “Business Process Management – The SAP Roadmap” that he recently co-authored with Rosenberg and two others; this covered some of the history of quality management methodologies and their connection to business process, the current analyst views, some ongoing research, and more on process maturity models. He included some research on architectural maturity models, which are related to process maturity, particularly around how IT budgets decrease with architectural maturity up to the point of a centralized optimized core set of services, but increases when you reach a maturity level of business modularity since individual business units can’t have flexible business processes without increasing IT costs. Möller’s premise from his book is that this is just not going to fly, and that we have to have new paradigms for business process maturity: a new sort of IT value change that moves beyond business process management to business process innovation; where innovation and change is the standard rather than a specific set of processes or services as a standard. He sees enterprise architecture as the enabler in moving from process management to process innovation.

Ann Rosenberg was back up to talk about BPM governance, particularly in SAP’s structured approach to moving from a functional organization to a process organization. She talked about how SAP applied this approach to their own organization, and their experiences with it. She also had an interesting point about how there are no longer IT projects: every project is a process improvement project, otherwise you shouldn’t be doing it. It’s critical to build a process-centric IT department, not the old-style functional IT where each person is a specialist in a particular system or function. IT needs to recognize that they are an enabler for business change, not a driver of change, and hand the control back to the business. I resisted the urge to stand up and cheer.

Greg Prickril gave us a view of NetWeaver BPM, starting with some of their basic philosophy — their main target is existing SAP customers who want to add the orchestration capabilities of BPM to extend their current business processes in the SAP business suite. In the context of BPM, the SAP business suite can be exposed as just another set of services to be invoked from BPM (which, of course, any other BPMS vendor who works with SAP customers knows already). I’ve had some extensive briefings on NetWeaver BPM from some of the other product management team members, and I’ll be publishing some of my observations on it this week in the context of this conference.

He pointed out that although they intended to address the needs of many personas across business and IT, their first version will be optimized for the process architect: an IT role that designs processes. In other words, they don’t yet have their business analyst perspective ready in the modeling environment. He showed us a demo of the Eclipse-based process modeling environment, and a look at the end-user experience in the context of the NetWeaver universal task list. My assessment of this first version of the product, which is in beta now and will be released in Q109, is that it has some nice integration capabilities (although no asynchronous web services calls), but that the human-centric capabilities are barely adequate, and they don’t meet the minimum requirements to be considered a BPMS in the eyes of some of the analysts. However, this is version 1.0, and you don’t expect them to land in the top right of anyone’s quadrant the first time out; from what I’ve seen, they have a good roadmap to getting to the functionality that will make them competitive with other BPMS vendors when it comes to SAP customers. Will they ever be competitive with non-SAP customers? Probably not, but then, that’s not their target market.

It’s interesting to see a BPMS demo to a group of mostly technical people who have no idea what a BPMS looks like: usually, I’m seeming demos like this at other BPMS vendors’ conferences where they’re showing the next version of their product, but everyone is familiar with the current version and basic BPM concepts. Things that those of us familiar with BPMS don’t even think about any more — like the concept of process instance parameters — have to be explained, which is a good reminder to be aware of the context and the audience background when discussing BPM.

Ann Rosenberg came back up to cover some of the BPM training curriculum, and handed it over to Marilyn Pratt to discuss the SDN BPX community. I’m a big fan of Marilyn’s: she’s one of the most active and enthusiastic community managers that I’ve met, and manages to ensure that SAP’s corporate party line doesn’t overshadow the independent discussions and interactions on the BPX site.

The afternoon jumpstart session ended with a panel that included the four speakers plus me, which gave the audience a chance to ask questions on everything from specific SAP product questions to more philosophical questions on the differences between BPR and what we’re doing now with product improvement.

2008 11 17 Sandy Kemsley BPM Comments (4)

The fall schedule

I have my fall schedule mostly sorted out, and here’s my confirmed lineup so far:

  • 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.
  • PegaWorld, the Pegasystems user conference, October 19-21, Washington DC. I’m just there as an observer and analyst/blogger.
  • Ultimus user conference, October 22-24, San Antonio. I’ll be giving a keynote on the afternoon of the first day. And yes, I know that you can’t get from DC to San Antonio.
  • Business Rules Forum, October 26-30, Orlando. I’ll be giving a presentation on mixing rules and process on the 28th.
  • SAP BPM, November 17-19, Las Vegas. I’m giving a Jumpstart pre-conference session, an introduction to BPM, on the 16th.

Look me up if you’re at any of these events.

Disclosure: with the exception of the OMG event, my travel expenses are paid for by the conference organizers; in the case of the SAP conference, I’m also being paid to deliver this half-day training session.

2008 09 22 Sandy Kemsley BPMThinkTank
BusinessRulesForum
PegaWorld
Ultimus Comments (0)

SAP SME Day: Business ByDesign deep dive

Up next is a deep dive on Business ByDesign, the SaaS offering for SMEs. The deep dives so far have been kind of shallow, and mostly centered on sales, marketing, pricing and packaging of the products rather than much to do with functionality. We’re also running 45 minutes late, and seem to be getting later with each session.

This session is particularly interesting because of the analogy to SaaS BPM: these are mission-critical business systems, responsible for the day-to-day business processes, and there’s some significant issues with customer acceptance of their core processes existing in the cloud.

I hadn’t seen Business ByDesign before — somehow I missed it at SAPPHIRE — so it was interesting to have Rainer Zinow, SVP SME Global Services, give us a demo.

The system is role based, so that functionality is exposed depending on the user’s role. Apparently, there’s some basic document management, but we didn’t see that.

The system is built on an in-memory architecture for both transactions and analytics, using a search engine rather than a database (similar to some ideas that I saw at FASTforward); transactions cause database writes, but client applications are always served from memory.

There are some pretty complete analytics available, where you can drill down into specific items of interest, and even link directly back to the transaction on the ERP side, something that you couldn’t easily do with non-integrated BI.

There’s some lightweight workflow, really just manual routing to a person’s inbox that also allows a work item to be forwarded to someone else.

One of the most interesting parts was exposed when he demonstrated saving the online reports to Excel: the Excel version can be converted to contain formulas that point back to the original data source, which are actually pointers to web services. The reporting implication is that you can save the Excel report, then come back later and update it with point-in-time data simply by refreshing the data source; even better is that this set of web services is available to any environment, not just Excel, allowing you to build mashups or other applications that access the core transactional data.

This sort of hybrid model for SaaS is nice, where you can do everything in the on-demand environment, but also be able to download some desktop tools or build mashups that link directly to the online data.

Tagged , , ,
2008 08 13 Sandy Kemsley Comments (2)

SAP SME Day: Prasad Akella with Business All-in-One deep dive

I missed the late-morning sessions, but I’m back here for Prasad Akella, Senior Director of SAP Business All-in-One Solution Marketing.

We heard about some of the new integrations with All-in-One: just announced last week, the CRM 2007 product is now tightly integrated with the All-in-One functionality, providing marketing, sales and service components. Also, the Business Objects Edge Series integrates to provide analytics and visibility. Other than that, there’s not a lot here that interests me: as with this morning, most people in the audience seem to be a lot more interested in pricing, packaging and system configuration than I am; I’m guessing that some of them make their living helping clients to wade through this sort of information.

Tagged , ,
2008 08 13 Sandy Kemsley Comments (0)

SAP SME Day: Jeff Stiles with portfolio update

Jeff Stiles is back to give us an update on the SME product portfolio, and there’s an interesting tie-in to yesterday’s message at the Business Objects day: the portfolio includes both business management and business intelligence, with a pretty strong emphasis on how BI adds value to SAP’s traditional business management.

He went through the entire SME portfolio:

  • Business One, their small business on-premise solution, sold only through channel partners.
  • Business ByDesign, their new on-demand service that provides a single end-to-end business solution, targeted at fast-growing midsize companies that don’t want to built a large IT infrastructure, and typically have less than 100 users. There are a number of pre-configured processes built in, intended to support common business processes without requiring extensive customization. Business ByDesign is available only in US, UK, Germany, France, China and India; the restriction in geography for a SaaS solution seems to indicate that this still requires a significant amount of effort at the customer location in order to sell and service the customer.
  • All-in One, for midsize companies that need a more customizable solution.
  • Analytics with Business Objects.

As you can likely tell by the volume of notes, we spent most of the session with audience questions and comments on Business ByDesign. The sessions this morning have been pretty basic, and I’ve learned way more about SAP sales channels than I ever wanted to know; hopefully we’ll get more detailed product information as the day goes on.

There’s an online tool to help figure out which SME tool best fits the customer requirements, based on five factors: the way you do business, your budget and timelines, your IT expertise and perferences, the way that your employees work, and your future growth plans.

Tagged , ,
2008 08 13 Sandy Kemsley Comments (0)