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Making Process Governance Work

Samantha Searle presented some of Gartner’s research on how to set up effective process governance and ownership. She started with the definition of a process owner, and reinforced that it’s necessary to have someone accountable for delivering the business outcomes of an end-to-end process. A process owner is typically at the executive level, but doesn’t necessarily have all process participants reporting up to them; they’re not the process police, they’re more like an orchestra conductor, guiding skilled professionals to work together.

She identified a number of best practices for process ownership and governance:

  1. Identify clear responsibilities for BP owners, setting expectations, establishing objectives and agreeing on key responsibilities.
  2. Establish BP governance for a BPM decision framework, creating a RACI matrix (for example) mapping actions against roles.
  3. Set goals and gather data to improve process decision making, using a BP analyst in a support role.
  4. Get commitment to process ownership through incentives, since these people are rarely fully dedicated to that role.
  5. Assign collective responsibility for business outcomes, empowering the community and having each person understand their contribution.

[My formatting is a bit primitive here at Gartner BPM since I'm on the Android tablet with the WordPress app, and there's no easy way to add lists. Update: hacking lists with direct html tags.]

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2013 04 02 Sandy Kemsley BPM Comments (0) Permalink

SAP BPM At Bank Of America

At Gartner BPM, there are always a few sessions given over to the sponsors and their clients to present case studies; since it’s been a while since I looked at what SAP is doing with BPM, I decided to sit in on John Cuomo from Bank of America talk about what B of A is doing with SAP BPM.

SAP NetWeaver Process Orchestration includes BPM and business rules, but also UI composition, monitoring and analytics, SOA governance, EAI, and B2B collaboration. When I initially reviewed SAP BPM a few years back on its release, I said that it isn’t the most innovative BPMS on the market (although it’s quite good), but their goal is to be the best BPMS for existing SAP customers through direct integration with their ERP solutions. B of A uses SAP ERP for their invoice processing with BPM on top, with the classic A/P drivers of integrating multiple systems, having flexible processes and providing better control over processes and rules. They receive over a million invoices per month, but only 2% require human intervention/approval and are escalated into BPM. They make heavy use of business rules to dynamically assign approvers to any specific invoice depending on the content, rather than having an identical process flow for every invoice or requiring manual assignment.

They started their SAP BPM initiatives in 2010, working with their process flows that had been defined in ARIS and moving that into the BPM automation environment. It’s pretty common for organizations to have some process flows mapped out already, but no automation.

They’re now expanding their BPM use outside of invoice processing, although all surrounding their SAP ERP usage, including general ledger, fixed assets, provisioning point, and audit processes. In short, they’re using SAP BPM for doing the exception handling for SAP ERP, providing a much more flexible and rules-driven approach to exception handling processes. This is a perfect use case for SAP BPM in conjunction with their ERP; now that SAP BPM is allowing much better access and orchestration of granular ERP functions, they should be able to expand the usage further to deeply integrate the two systems.

Peter McNulty of SAP provided some additional information on some of SAP’s newer capabilities, specifically their Operational Process Intelligence that monitors process events from a variety of platforms, both theirs and third-party, uses HANA to do the big data analytics, then displays in a consolidated dashboard.

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2013 04 02 Sandy Kemsley BPM Comments (2) Permalink

Continuous Innovation With A BPM Program Wins Over The Sporadic Tinkering Of Projects

In her presentation at Gartner BPM 2013, Elise Olding addressed an issue that ties in with my presentation last week on BPM maturity and centers of excellence: BPM’s real value is in becoming an enterprise capability, not through occasional BPM projects. From a BPM maturity standpoint, that means getting beyond levels 1 and 2, where you’re just doing isolated projects, and crossing the chasm to enterprise BPM initiatives that permit greater innovation.

She gave the audience a quiz on how BPM is being adopted within their organizations: Is there a 2-year vision for BPM? Is there a link between BPM and strategic vision? Are your projects focused on delivering measurable business benefits? Are you communicating why process is important? Are you constantly tweaking your BPM techniques? Are you innovating and constantly improving? I’m not sure how much of this is just because I’m firmly ensconced in the BPM echo chamber, but I’m really seeing BPM being put forward as a driver for innovation; this is the “big picture” BPM that is really about the methodologies and mindsets, not just the technology, but technology plays an important role. If you’re stuck on projects and technology, then BPM just becomes another silo.

Olding is much less focused on BPM technology and more about organizational change, so she brings an important point of view on the mindset of the individuals and the organizational culture required for change. Her suggestion is to start thinking like a startup (presumably a startup that is not wallowing around in a glut of VC cash), where every effort has to be directly linked to some value to the organization. To ensure that you don’t get trapped in the project mentality, don’t just solve the immediate problem: drill in to find out the motivations behind those problems or desired changes to see the bigger picture. Her technique involves asking “why” several times in succession (which appears to be effective but does remind me of someone’s five year old), moving from a tactical problem such as “we need to reduce costs” to a more strategic “we need a better strategy for integrating our recent acquisitions”. Also, consider that best practices are really standard practices, and you don’t have to slavishly do what your competitors do, especially if you want to differentiate yourself in the market.

She finished with some case studies of companies that have gone beyond BPM projects to full-on programs, such as multi-nationals that were able to leverage locally-created solutions worldwide, and had some final recommendations:

Stop driving efficiency, tinkering, and mapping all processes.

Start enabling effectiveness, innovating, and defining outcomes.

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2013 04 02 Sandy Kemsley BPM Comments (0) Permalink

Business Architecture Bridging Strategic Vision And Operational Excellence

I made it to the Gartner BPM Summit 2013 in Washington DC today just in time for the 11am session that Betsy Burton gave on bridging the gap between strategic vision and operational excellence with business architecture (BA). I like her view on this: strategic vision really isn’t much good unless you have a plan (or at least a direction) for how you’re going to do it. She points out that most organizations don’t execute on their vision — only about 10% if you believe the studies by Hammer and others — and you’re not going to get there unless along with vision, you also define implications, constraints, risks and interdependencies. Business strategy, which is a big part of business architecture, requires a diagnosis, guiding policy, coherent actions and target outcomes. I also like her distinction between “deliberate strategy” (that which is foreseen and planned) and “emergent strategy” (that which happens in response to actual conditions, a.k.a., “how we get stuff done”), although I’m not sure that I’d consider the emergent part to be strategy, strictly speaking.

She showed a good example of a business capability model that had been developed for a financial services firm, where capabilities are “things the business does”, not processes or departments. Overlaid with that was color coding showing the level of investment to each capability, and bolding to show the capabilities with strategic importance, plus physical grouping of capabilities related to a specific business goal. This gives a view, on one chart, of how the business vision is aligned with capabilities and spending. For example, in the group “Self and Service Products” were six capabilities. Once of those was “Onboard Customers”, which was bolded to indicate that it’s of strategic importance, but is white to indicate that it is getting only a minimal amount of investment. Then, overlaid on that, she showed how processes intersect with capabilities by adding numbered bubbles to indicate which process impacts each capability. Keep in mind that a process can span multiple capabilities, and a capability may require multiple processes. So that Onboard Customers capability intersects with A1, an account management process, as do 10 other capabilities. Next, she overlaid information sources and consumers and their linkages, that is, which capabilities create or consume information from other capabilities. As you add in the application portfolio, the inconsistencies in the architecture start to emerge, and low-risk, non-strategic capabilities are exposed as targets for cloud or outsourcing.

Gartner provides a classification for applications (their Pace Layering): they’re there for innovation, differentiation. or for record (commodity). Extending this to the capability map allows the processes and capabilities to also be categorized this way. To quote her presentation notes, “processes associated with innovative business capabilities will be more likely to change, will be more complex and potentially high value.” This identifies processes that really drive the business growth and goal achievement. Making the link between capabilities, processes and applications, the impact on people and processes of changing capabilities and swapping out applications becomes obvious.

Since this is a BPM conference, she has to make links to what this means for BP professionals, and ended up with some specific recommendations for BP directors, starting with “work with your EA team to understand the role of business architecture”, and understanding the link between BA and BPM. I’m impressed with the level of integration that she’s made between BPM and BA, and provided some good ideas on how to connect these up as part of the business strategy.

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2013 04 02 Sandy Kemsley BPM
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Maintaining Ethical Standards As An Industry Analyst And Enterprise Consultant

Every once in a while, someone suggests that vendors pay me for coverage. The latest accusation actually used the term “pay-for-play”, which is a derogatory term for industry analysts who require that vendors be their paid clients before they receive any coverage by the analyst, and is often considered to be unethical. Vendors who work with me know that’s not true, but I just wanted to sum up how I work with vendors.

Unpaid Work

  • I will accept a briefing from any vendor whose products that I find interesting. I might also write about an interesting piece of news, a webinar that I watched, or information about upcoming events. If I choose to write about any of this here (which I sometimes don’t, due to time constraints or lack of interest), the vendors do not have review/edit privileges before I post: they see my review the same time as all other readers. This last policy, by the way, has resulted in some vendors shutting me out of their analyst programs, since they want to control the message; needless to say, I don’t write about them much since all they give me is the same information as you could find on their websites.
  • I will attend a vendor conference but must have my travel expenses reimbursed since I’m an independent and would have to pay these costs myself.

I know that a lot of analyst firms charge for merely attending briefings and conferences, and maybe I will start doing that some day, but I want the freedom to write (or not) whatever I want about what I see without any sort of oversight or censorship, since I think that’s important to my readers. If there is information presented that’s under embargo or NDA, I always honor that. Note that in both of these cases, I give up my time – which could have been spent on revenue-generating work – to attend events and briefings, so if you’re envious of all my “free” trips to exotic locations, remember that I don’t get paid while I’m there unless I’m doing paid work.

Paid Work

My website describes the types of paid work that I do for vendors, but to sum up:

  • I consult on strategy, including product and go-to-market strategy. When I do this, you’ll probably never hear about it since anything I produce will be under NDA to my client.
  • I give webinars and conference presentations, and write white papers. Although I choose my subject to be of interest to my client (the vendor) and their audience, what I write is my own opinion: the fact that a vendor pays me to write a white paper does not mean that I am endorsing their product, even though they appear as a sponsor of the paper. If appropriate, I will mention their product as an illustrative example. I upload my presentations and papers and link to them from my blog because people always request copies, and because these materials form part of my online portfolio to allow other prospective customers to understand what I can do for them. When doing a (paid) conference presentation, I may also be blogging from the conference, which is covered under the unpaid work section above.

Regardless of my relationship with a vendor, I am never compensated for product sales, nor for blogging about them, nor for giving a positive review about their product. I have a disclosure statement that summarizes these principles and lists current and recent vendor clients. It would be fair to say that vendors who take the time to cultivate a relationship with me and invite me to their conferences tend to get more coverage because I’m exposed to more information about them, but it’s not necessarily favorable coverage.

Since most of my work is for enterprise clients – primarily helping financial services and insurance organizations with BPM implementations – I follow strict ethical guidelines, including disclosing the names of my vendor clients to my enterprise clients at the start. Since many enterprise clients use my blog and white papers as a way to get to know my work, it’s important that I present unbiased information of value.

</rant>

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2013 04 01 Sandy Kemsley blogging
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Thinking Beyond Traditional BPM Webinar Replay And Slides

The webinar that I did on Smart Process Applications (a Forrester term, but one that is being adopted by a number of case management/application development vendors) was broadcast today, sponsored by OpenText, and is available for replay here.

You can also check out my slides below:

2013 03 27 Sandy Kemsley ACM
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BPM Maturity And Centers Of Excellence Presentation

I uploaded this yesterday but forgot to post it here: slides from my presentation on BPM maturity and centers of excellence:

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2013 03 27 Sandy Kemsley BPM Comments (1) Permalink

AWD Product Madness With @lw927

I finished up my day at AWD ADVANCE in the product roadmap session held by Lisa Williams and Mike Lovell. It’s March Madness here in the US (that’s some college basketball thing) so they kept with that theme with mini basketballs and some yearbook pics of Lisa on the court.

Like any vendor’s product management group, they need to consider (and anticipate) the market for their products, and spend their resources most wisely to add capabilities that will be of most value to their customers while supporting or deprecating existing features. Here’s what’s coming:

  • Dynamic case management in v10.7, expected at the end of May; we heard about this in detail from Judith Morley this morning and will include mobile capabilities in a future version
  • Seamless installation process (this tweet from the hands-on labs here says that’s probably true)
  • Overall usability including people/roles administration in v10.9; they have a lot of new plans for user portals
  • Enhance monitoring capabilities and deprecate the existing BI client
  • Process design and orchestration
  • Communications service for multi-channel correspondence management

There was a laundry list of features coming up, and some audible approval in the room for things that sound small but I know can be huge for reusability, such as variable timers and support for localized business day calendars.

Dates beyond v10.7 are not announced, although likely they will not meet their past targets of two releases per year with some of the major changes in progress now. I think that they’re also challenged somewhat by a customer base that is dragging their feet moving off the legacy platform – still about 1/3 on it – and then start to take advantage of the new functionality once they’re on the new platform. It’s hard to be completely forward-thinking when there are still active instances of your software that are old enough to vote.

Looking to the 3-5 year horizon, it’s about creating products that allow their customers to adapt to changing business environments: primarily, shifting from “imaging and workflow” (which is how many of their customers categorize what AWD does for them) to “customer event management”. They talked about some of the areas where this innovation is likely to happen: capture, moving from paper to direct data entry by the customer, and mobile check capture; predictive analytics and simulation; adaptive case management, as opposed to the production case management that’s launching soon; work allocation to support collaborative/team work; user experience; and more. Nothing specific here, and also nothing that’s groundbreaking from a market perspective, but will likely shake things up for their conservative customer base.

That’s it for me at AWD ADVANCE for 2013, it’s been a great day of presentations following a fun customer advisory board dinner last night that included discussions of my cat on Twitter. I’m on a plane again next week – third week in a row – to the Gartner BPM show in DC.

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2013 03 26 Sandy Kemsley ACM
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Crowdsourcing And Microwork With DST

In the afternoon, after my BPM COE presentation, I moved over to the AWD ADVANCE technical track to hear Roy Brackett and Mike Hudgins talk about crowdsourcing and microwork. DST and some of their partners/siblings/subsidiaries are business process outsourcers, and always looking at ways to make that outsourcing more efficient. They use the term crowdsourcing to mean the use of a global, elastic workforce, such as Amazon Mechanical Turk; the concept of microwork is breaking work down into small tasks that can be done with little or no training.

There are some basic requirements for allocating microwork, especially in a financial services environment:

  • Quality, which is typically managed by dual entry (assigning the same piece of work to different workers, then comparing the results) or by validating against another data source (e.g., comparing the values entered independently for name and account number against a customer database).
  • Security, which is typically managed by feeding the tasks in such small tasks that there are few privacy issues since the workers rarely see more than a one or two pieces of data related to any given transaction, and have no way to link the data.
  • Priority, which is typically managed by serving up the tasks to workers only at the point that they are prepared to do the work so that the highest priority task is executed first; also, since the work is divided into tasks, many of those tasks may be executed in parallel.

Looking at common work activities, they typically break down to transcribe (e.g., data entry from scanned form), remediate (e.g., data entry from unstructured content where information may need to be looked up in other systems based on the content), business knowledge, and system knowledge, only the first two of which are appropriate for microwork.

DST is doing some research into microwork, so what they talked about does not represent a product or even, necessarily, a product direction. They started with transcription tasks – not that they want to compete with OCR/ICR vendors, but those tools are not perfect especially on images with subpar capture quality – using dual entry, with a remediation step if the two entries disagreed. This could be used for post-OCR repair, or for older scanned documents where the quality would not support adequate OCR rates. DST did a test using CrowdFlower for transcribing 1,000 dummy forms containing both machine-printed and handwritten content on a structured form: single entry gave 99% accuracy, while dual entry increased that to 99.6%.

They then did a pilot using one of their own business processes and real-world data from an outsourcing customer, transcribing fund and account information from inbound paper correspondence. Since only 25% of the documents were forms, they used fingerprinting and other recognition technologies to identify where these two fields might be on the page, then provide image slices for data entry. With the automated fingerprinting that they have developed, they were getting 98% classification, with zero misclassifications (the remainder were rejected as unclassified rather that being misclassified). For the microwork participants, they used new offshore hires and US-based part-time employees, so still used DST employees but with almost no training and relatively low skill levels; using single entry, they reduced data entry errors by 50% from their old-style “one-and-done” data entry technique (and presumably reduced the costs). They then rolled this out to handle all transaction types for that customer in a production environment.

They’re piloting other data entry processes for other customers now based on that success, starting with one that is driven purely by standard forms and has highly variable volumes, which is a perfect match for crowdsourced microwork because of the ease of segmenting forms for data entry and the elasticy of the workforce. There are optimizations on the basic methods, such as sending one person only (for example) tax ID fields to transcribe, since it’s faster to do data entry on a single field type due to no context switching.

The result: quality is improved, with more errors caught earlier; and better productivity (and hence cost) using less-skilled workers and a workforce that can increase and decrease in size to match the volume. There was a great question from the audience about what employees feel about this; the responses included both “we’re using this on the training path for higher-skilled workers” and “this separates out transcription and remediation as services (presumably done by someone whose careers are not of concern to the organization, either outsourced or offshore employees) and leaves the high-value knowledge work”: it’s fair to say that most companies don’t expect to be doing low level data entry in a very few number of years, but will have their customers do it for them on the web.

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2013 03 26 Sandy Kemsley BPM
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DST Case Management Indoctrination Day Continues! With @JMo1113

Judith Morley, product manager for DST’s case management, presented at a business breakout at AWD ADVANCE on the need for case management (which was pretty much already covered in John Vaughn’s keynote and Neil Ward-Dutton’s breakout session), and stressed the need for allowing context and collaboration, as well as individual decision-making. She made the distinction between adaptive case management and production case management, and maintained that AWD provides both, although might lean more toward the PCM end of the spectrum.

They’ve added capabilities to their traditional structured BPM to provide case management functionality on the same platform, not a different tool or application: it manifests through a user workspace that can be enabled for specific users, but also introduces concepts of case ownership, tasks within cases (same as existing AWD tasks), task due date forecasts and prioritization, and team stats to aid with collaboration. As with the remainder of the AWD10 platform, these are all available as RESTful services and widgets, so are easily integrated with other web-based platforms. There’s an activity stream view of everything related to a case and its tasks; note that this is a view of activity on a single case, not an activity stream of everything going on that we see in other social BPM/case management products: effectively, this is a history log of the case, although it also allows commenting on any of the activity entries.

Since AWD customers have a lot of proven processes in production already, cases can invoke these existing processes, often in order to kick off tasks done by someone else other than the knowledge worker who owns the case, such as sending an item for data entry after approval. There’s a case template that’s created within their design studio where the tasks within the case are listed, and can either be linked to an existing process or to a generic case model that is just a user task. Tasks can have dependencies, as well as their own due dates based on case creation or predecessor task dates. It appears, although I’m not completely sure, that all tasks in a case have to be defined at design time, not added on the fly by knowledge workers. Update: as Judith added in her comment to this post, you can add tasks at runtime, too.

Coming up in future releases: mobile support (although it already works on a full-size tablet); task groups that are instantiated on milestones rather than at case creation; automation, particularly in the area of work assignment, integrated comments to move the existing comment styles into the new activity stream style; custom skinning/branding of the user interface; enhanced view for managers that shows aggregate information for their teams; and monitoring for knowledge work to show true progress indicators.

btw, my post title came from the presenter herself. Smile

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2013 03 26 Sandy Kemsley ACM Comments (2) Permalink

A Case For Change With @neilwd

Neil Ward-Dutton spoke at the first business-themed breakout session here at AWD ADVANCE on the topic of case management: how it represents a shift in thinking from our old rigid processes that don’t serve customers all that well in today’s environment. We are truly in the age of the consumer, with so much choice in online purchasing (15% of which is being done from mobile devices), but also through showrooming, which forces bricks-and-mortar retailers to price competitively with online alternatives. Customer expectations for service and experience have changed – I talk about this a lot in my presentations on social BPM – and if you don’t meet those expectations, they’ll not only pick another supplier, but influence their friends to do so, too.

Structured BPM, where all processes are defined in advance, just doesn’t work for many customer-facing processes; rather than quality and efficiency, the key is flexibility and support for knowledge workers to make decisions about what to do next. That doesn’t mean that things won’t be efficient and of high quality; if you let a knowledge worker “do the right thing” to achieve a goal, then it will more likely be faster and better than having them try to work around the system when it doesn’t allow them to handle exceptions properly. As Neil pointed out, if you’re modeling your processes and find that you’re spending a lot of time modeling exceptions, then maybe you should be looking at a less structured approach. Structured processes do work in some situations – manufacturing, straight-through processing and the like – but you have to consider which of your processes would be better served by defining less up front, allowing for exception handling and fast-changing processes to provide a better customer experience.

He introduced the concept of case management as a goal-oriented environment for knowledge work, guided by best practices and rules/constraints, but where the knowledge worker creates the process on the fly. There may be predefined tasks and process fragments that can be selected by the worker, or they may define their own. The case is a persistent artifact – representing a customer, a complaint, or whatever is defined as a case – containing both content (documents) and a record of the actions taken, so that analytics can be used to determine how similar situations were handled in the past.

He left the audience with a great question: how do you build your work around your customer? Clearly, in many cases, the answer includes case management.

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2013 03 26 Sandy Kemsley ACM Comments (5) Permalink

Everything’s New At DST

John Vaughn opened AWD ADVANCE 2013 talking about a new focus for DST: a new CEO (following the retirement of their very first one), a new organizational structure (bringing together product and hosting groups into a single business process solutions group), 66% of customers either on or moving to the new platform, new case management functionality, new visibility with analysts and in the market (woo hoo! I’m listed on the slide with the “big guys”), new social media engagement (Vaughn’s activity on Twitter has probably moved that along), and new ways of dealing with customers. Great vision for moving forward, although those comfortable with DST’s conservative pace in the past may be a bit nervous, especially when he used the term “sunsetting” about their legacy platform.

He highlighted a number of sessions that will be going on here today and tomorrow, and challenged the companies in the room to start thinking differently since AWD now supports new ways of working. As he put it, “a lot of your workflows are older than my kids”; he pointed out that the business world is changing and customer expectations are changing. Social and mobile are not going away, and they are driving customer channels and interactions. Crowdsourcing and microwork (outsourcing on a task level) are changing how work gets done inside organizations. The old way of doing things is just too expensive, and doesn’t meet customer needs; change or die (the last being my words, but his implication). On the big data front – every vendor keynote has to hit all the hot industry topics – Vaughn noted that since most of their customers don’t ever delete their scanned images, it’s time to start mining those for better informational context about customers. This is potentially a huge deal: I have many customers with millions of images, and if some recognition could be applied (even at relatively poor recognition rates), the benefits for big data and analytics would be incredible. Or scary, if you prefer.

On a slight tangent, next month DST will be releasing TreeSwing: a completely mobile investment platform for those with less than $10k to invest, providing a link from the investor’s checking account to a curated set of mutual fund investments for micro-investments (DST is a registered financial broker/dealer, so can do this legally as well as having the industry knowledge to do so). It includes a number of social features, including location aware coupons (e.g., save $1 at Starbucks and invest it instead), gamification  and more. Interestingly, DST launched it at SXSW, which is not how most large software companies roll. Certainly gives them some street cred in the mobile and social markets.

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2013 03 26 Sandy Kemsley ACM
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Teeing Up For DST’s AWD ADVANCE

Last year, I think that I was the first industry analyst to ever be invited by DST to the somewhat secret society that is their AWD ADVANCE conference. That must have worked out for them, because this year I’m back to speak, as well as Neil Ward-Dutton and Clay Richardson. That’s not the only change: instead of DST’s home town of Kansas City, we’re at the Omni at ChampionsGate in Orlando, where golf trumps Disney as the main pastime.

I won’t be blogging as much as last year, and definitely not as much as last week’s 6,800 word marathon at bpmNEXT: I’m only here for today, headed home tomorrow before the sessions start, since I’m in the middle of three weeks of conference travel. If you check out this week’s agenda, you’ll see a lot of case management, highlighting some of DST’s recent push in this direction, and I’ll be interested to see how that’s covered in the opening keynote as well as the product roadmap session.

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2013 03 26 Sandy Kemsley BPM Comments (0) Permalink

Lightening Up The Travel Gear

Google_Nexus_7_front-back-side_270x206This week at bpmNEXT was my first solo outing with the new blogging setup: Google Nexus 7 tablet, Logitech Bluetooth keyboard, and WordPress app for Android. I was also working on a white paper for a client, so had to edit and view documents in Word and PowerPoint formats, for which I use use the Kingsoft Office Android app, plus Dropbox for synchronizing my work to the cloud for backup and Astro File Manager for local document management. Prior to this, I carried an HP Mini netbook running Windows 7, which provided me with the same functionality as on my desktop, with all of my documents synced locally via Dropbox. When I started carrying the Nexus while travelling for media consumption, the combination of Windows netbook + Android tablet + iPhone started to seem like overkill; a comment from my brother (a non-technical lawyer, of all people) made me start thinking about adding a keyboard to the tablet as a netbook replacement.

wpid-91hO7brqtZL._SL1500_.jpegIn summary, it worked great. Once I learned that some familiar keyboard shortcuts work on Android (Ctrl+X/C/V for cut/copy/paste, Ctrl+A for select all, Alt+Tab for switching active applications, Fn+Backspace for Delete), my productivity increased tremendously. The keyboard is as big — maybe a bit bigger — than my netbook keyboard, so touch typing was speedy as you might have surmised from the thousands of words that I pumped out in blog posts this week. Kingsoft Office had a hiccup over one particular Word document, but I copied and pasted the text to strip out the formatting and had no problem with basic editing. Today, when I had to send off a draft of the white paper to my client, I used Astro to attach the Word document to an email (native Android only allows adding media file attachments). Email worked well, since my domain email is hosted on Google Apps: I could add/remove tags for organization, as well as send/receive and most other functions; since I also had my iPhone, I did a lot of email and calendar functions there. Chrome, Pocket and Feedly kept my online reading in sync, and for tweeting, I used the very capable Buffer and Twitter apps. Also, the battery life on the Nexus is great, lasting for an entire day even with Bluetooth and wifi enabled, which is better than the netbook. If I needed to scrimp on power, I could turn wifi off since most things could be done offline.

There are a couple of remaining challenges:
- As far as I know, there is no way to give a presentation from the tablet using the standard setup that is available at a conference (namely, a VGA cable connected to a projector). That means that I still need to carry the netbook when I will be giving a presentation, unless I am so organized that I have it completely finished before departing for the conference, and the conference has a PC with my presentation loaded. If anyone knows of a small gadget that would allow me to connect my tablet to any standard projector (a Bluetooth to VGA converter, maybe?), I want to know about it.
- The formatting in the WordPress app is a bit basic, with no support for bullets or quote blocks as I would have in the regular web interface or Windows Live Writer on the PC. Unlike the web, however, I can compose offline (as I’m doing right now at 35,000 feet) and it saves a local draft for posting later.
- The usage of Bluetooth devices is not really permitted on aircraft, although I have to believe that there are many devices on my current flight with Bluetooth enabled, and we’re still flying. Flight attendants either haven’t noticed or don’t care about the keyboard.
- Dropbox requires that I mark each file individually that I want synchronized locally, which means that I have to remember to mark the right ones while I’m connected so that I have my reference and editing materials available. A “sync this folder” function would be great.
- Kingsoft Office is good for editing, but I really need to review any document that I create or edit with it on my desktop to make sure that the formatting didn’t get screwed up. Kingsoft is free, and I’d be happy to pay for an Android MS-Office clone if I had better confidence in its formatting integrity.

The verdict: this will be my go-to gear for travel when I do not have to do a presentation, or when my presentation is submitted in advance. If I find a way to present directly from the tablet, then this will be my only travel configuration unless there is a weird requirement such as Visio on the road, and the netbook may be permanently retired.

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2013 03 22 Sandy Kemsley blogging Comments (6) Permalink

bpmNEXT Wrapup: The Good, The Bad And The Best In Show

The first bpmNEXT conference has finished, and it was a great experience for me. I’m still on the west coast, enjoying a half-day in San Francisco before flying home, and having a bit of time to reflect on what I liked — and the few things I didn’t like — about this week’s event.

First and foremost, this was primarily a meeting of peers to discuss BPM innovation in an open fashion. It was not targeted at customers, so there was little of the peacock-like preening and posturing that you get when vendors parade in front of them. It was also not attended by the major analyst firms, so ditto. Since the format required that presenters give a demo, there was a much heavier bias towards technical attendees, although many of them were in product management/marketing or company founder roles, so not code monkeys. For me, that’s the perfect group for networking: people who are technical and articulate, but want to talk about more than just the technology. The atmosphere was collegial and friendly, even (for the most part) between competitors, and I had the feeling that many of the presenters just wanted to show off their cool new stuff because they knew that this was the audience that would most appreciate it. I really think that Bruce and Nathaniel achieved their goal of making this “like DEMO for BPM”. For the vendors that didn’t attend, or who attended but didn’t participate because they didn’t want to show all their cool new stuff to their competitors: you are totally missing the point, and you missed a great opportunity. Ideas need a bit of exposure to the light in order to grow properly, and this is the place for that.

Second, cool and awesome demos! The “Best in Show” awards that we all voted on at the end (to Fluxicon, Whitestein and Fujitsu) were well-deserved, although many others were equally deserving. I loved the bleeding edge demos — Gero Decker of Signavio accidentally showed us how to do process modeling with head gestures — and the skunkworks projects that may never see the light of day but represent some different thinking — Keith Swenson of Fujitsu with his Cognoscenti demo really brought advanced case management to life. Anne Rozinat and Christian Gunther were in the first demo slot, which could have been tough, but they set the bar extremely high (they won first prize, after all) and wowed a lot of the North Americans there who had never had the chance to see their Disco process mining product, born out of their work at Eindhoven University. The demos that didn’t work as well were those that spent too much time on slides instead of the demo, those that were customer-facing rather than optimized for peer review, and those that tried to cover too much ground in a 20-minute demo. If I can give a word of advice to those vendors who have given me briefings in the past, treat this like that: no slides, no bullshit, no distractions.

Third, nice location, although there were some minuses as well as pluses here. Asilomar is beautiful, but we had no spare time to do more than take a quick walk to the beach on a break. I don’t propose lengthening the calendar or reducing the number of demos, but rather rearranging the first day: take a nice long break in the middle of the day after lunch for people to explore around, then go a bit later or even have some evening demos after dinner. Since pretty much everyone arrived by Tuesday dinner, there could have been demos on that evening, too. It’s a fairly remote location, people mostly didn’t do much after dinner anyway (except, for those of us from time zones further east, go to bed early), and evening demos could have been fun sessions with some libations involved — maybe a BPM buzzword drinking game? The remote location may have deterred some, it’s a 2-1/2 hour drive south of San Francisco, but it did mean that we mostly hung out with groups of other attendees, making for better networking.

Fourth, this was an unparalleled networking experience. As an extroverted introvert (really, just check my Myers-Briggs), I usually dislike networking events, but this felt less like an uncomfortable meet-and-greet and more like chatting with old friends. Which, for the most part, it was: I knew a lot of people there, both face-to-face and online. I had the chance to meet several people who I knew only online in the past but already felt like I knew, such as Anatoly Belaychuk and Ashish Bhagwat. About 1/3 of the 80 attendees were international (including three Canadians), meaning that there was a significant European contingent here, showing off some of the outstanding BPM innovation that is less often seen in North America, and possibly creating some trans-Atlantic relationships that might bloom into partnerships in the future.

Lastly, a few healthier, lower-carb snacks would not have gone amiss: I think that I ate my own weight in chocolate. Only the health benefits of the red wine offset all that. :-)

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2013 03 21 Sandy Kemsley BPM Comments (3) Permalink

bpmNEXT – Trisotech, EnterpriseWeb, Computas, Fujitsu

Full bpmNEXT program here. The format is 30 minutes per speaker: 20 minutes of demo, 10 minutes of Q&A.

Day 2, third session – last of the conference: dynamic processes and case management

Performing Collections of Activities as Means to Business Ends, Denis Gagne, Trisotech

Recorded demo of gathering requirements in the Discovery Accelerator on Business Process Incubator and gradually structure the data elements collected into a data model, using a pinboard paradigm. Can switch to a text view where a text description is added and key terms extracted for use in the board representation. The result is a structured set of activities that have been identified from requirements sessions and documents. This coordinated collection of activities is used to guide BPMN or CMMN modeling, creating the activities within the model as a starting point for further modeling. Their Visio add-on provides BPMN and CMMN modeling support, including model validation. There are also web-based modelers for BPMN and CMMN that can access and edit models from the same repository as the Visio-based modelers, providing the same user experience on multiple versions of Visio and any browser platform.

Event-Driven Rules-based Business Processes for the Real-Time Enterprise, Dave Duggal, EnterpriseWeb

Automated agents connects people, data and services on the fly (late binding) based on interpretation of models, context and available data. Every executing process may be different, and can be correlated with other instances. Brief demo showing searches and relationships between objects, e.g., between people and projects. Allows for creation of dynamic processes by the user as required.

Malleable Tasks and ACM, Helle Frisak Sem, Computas AS

Demo of MATS system developed for Norwegian Food Safety, winner of 2012 ACM Award for public sector. Knowledge workers involved in food safety inspections and audits of farms, fisheries, food industry and restaurants, requiring thousands of rules from Norway and harmonized across the EU. A case represents an entity subject to inspection — a person or business — with the case folder containing all information and documentation related to that entity, from which a knowledge worker can launch any of a number of tasks to be performed on that entity. The rules provide guidance to the user on which tasks are required from the general template for that task type, since the users are food safety subject matter experts, but the specific tasks to be applied are often a legal issue and based on the context. The tasks may be executed in any order unless there are specific dependencies. The data in the case folder is central, with the transitory tasks/process fragments acting on that data. Control objects are modeled declaratively, significantly reducing coding. Demo showed system use in response to a telephone call regarding a potential health safety violation; the task template is selected that most closely matches the caller report, and the required steps are added or removed based on the parameters selected. Provides support to ensure that workers are performing legally-required activities, but flexibility for them to control their work order and environment.

Antifragile Systems for Innovation and Learning Organizations, Keith Swenson, Fujitsu America

From the “>antifragile concepts in Nicholas Taleb’s latest book, business systems that are highly adaptive due to exposure to variable and adverse conditions can be significantly stronger than those that are protected. Creative, innovative organizations that thrive in an unpredictable world have to rely less on predefined processes, rules and predictions, and more on adapting to the current context and information. Demo of Interstage Cognoscenti (unreleased Fujitsu product Fujitsu research prototype) that allows users to create a case, referred to as a project, that is completely empty. The case owner can add documents, including sending an email to external participants with a URL for uploading documents without having an explicit login, and write notes. A project can be used as a template, and its characteristics merged into an existing project. Goals (tasks) can be created and assigned, and turned into subprojects for more complex activities. Other users may have the project in their watch list, and have goals assigned to them. In order to link projects together, a project can generate a streaming link that is linked into another project; the projects can then be set up to synchronize goals and documents between the linked projects. The system is intended for non-technical knowledge workers to create cases on the fly; there is no “design time” environment or more technical requirements.

That’s it for the bpmNEXT sessions — it’s been an awesome conference in terms on content, participants and atmosphere. We’re going to vote on Best in Show and wrap up, and I’ll likely post some final thoughts in a day or two after I’ve had some time to digest everything. Next week, I’ll be at DST’s AWD ADVANCE conference, although my volume of blogging will be lower since I’m giving a presentation there rather than just an observer.

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2013 03 21 Sandy Kemsley BPM Comments (2) Permalink

bpmNEXT – Kofax, Knowledge Partners/Sapiens, Bosch

Full bpmNEXT program here. The format is 30 minutes per speaker: 20 minutes of demo, 10 minutes of Q&A.

Day 2, second session.

Fully Exploiting the Potential of BPM in the Cloud, Carl Hillier, Kofax

A prime motivator for cloud is instant provisioning; demo showed the live provisioning of a Kofax TotalAgility cloud instance (based on Microsoft Azure). Instances must be provisioned by Kofax, not directly by the customer. Each customer gets their own SQL database and data storage, but the (stateless) web application and presentation layers are multi-tenant. After entry of the instance attributes, the instance was generated within 3 minutes and the TotalAgility designer was available for immediate use in the new instance for creating and executing process models. Identical functionality is provided on public cloud, private cloud and on premise. Software updates are applied automatically in the public cloud, but can be controlled by the customer in the private cloud and on premise environments.

The Decision Model, Michael Grohs, Knowledge Partners International

Business-friendly decision models can compress the months that it normally takes for IT to encode business rules into enterprise systems down to a few weeks; the goal is to eventually be able to directly author business policies and the underlying rules in a business-understandable and machine-readable form, allowing for near-instant deployment of new business rules. “>The Decision Model is a methodology and book, manifested in the DECISION product from Sapiens, for representing business logic as a separate component within an architecture. Any decisions that can be defined declaratively are extracted from the process model and stored in the decision model, which can then be referenced within the process model. The decision model notation is a goal-driven hierarchical representation of rules and rule families, along with the data that is acted upon by those rules. The elements in the decision model are linked to the implementation methods, forming the hand-off point between business and IT. The decision model connects the process model, rule models, use cases and business motivation models. Very brief demo of DECISION showing graphical representation of a decision model as well as the tabular structure of the rule families associated with the model. When creating a new model, import a text document of the policy wording, system can detect synonyms and other vocabulary analysis to identify inconsistencies in policies and assist with creation of the decision model.

BPM for the Internet of Things, Tom Debevoise and Troy Foster, Bosch

In the internet of things, there are potentially billions of devices out there generating data and requiring instructions. These are typically organized as massive distributed systems of systems, such as Smart Home or Smart Grid, to organize and control collections of devices. Localized rules can monitor collections of sensors/devices, and report up the chain to higher-level controllers when certain events occur, allowing information to be aggregated and actions to be taken, including launching BPM processes. Rules are present at the device level and at the higher collector level, as well as potentially within the BPM process. Demo of their monitor dashboard (from inubit acquisition) can show status of specific machines as well as aggregate statistics, e.g., how many machines are in a critical state requiring maintenance or replacement. Rules (from VisualRules acquisition) allow rules to be created for different machine types, e.g., to display an alert when a vibration sensor indicates that the machine requires preventive maintenance to avoid failure; this, in turn, could instantiate a BPM process to dispatch a field maintenance worker to the machine.

Break for lunch. One more session after lunch, then Best of Show voting and wrap-up.

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2013 03 21 Sandy Kemsley BPM Comments (0) Permalink

bpmNEXT – Process Analytica, Whitestein, Oracle, SAP

Full bpmNEXT program here. The format is 30 minutes per speaker: 20 minutes of demo, 10 minutes of Q&A.

Day 2, first session: data-driven processes and analytics

Visual Analytics and Smart Tools, Robert Shapiro, Process Analytica

Optima is their product for performing statistical analysis and optimizing process models, with four quadrants providing visibility into Model, Simulate, Analyze and Optimize toolkits, which act on a shared model. Model provides standard BPMN modeling including setting advanced attributes on elements. Simulation attributes are set in Simulate, then Optimize is used to define the parameters for optimization, e.g., cycle time, number of resources, cost. Analyze shows different representations of simulated runtime information, including histograms and scatterplots to allow identification of outliers, and a Gantt chart for critical path calculation. Can filter the data set based on the analytics, e.g., show only the process instances represented by a cluster on the scatterplot of cycle times. Remote demo via Skype, which made the communication a bit stilted.

Goals in the Process Continuum: from BPM to ACM and Beyond, Dominic Greenwood, Whitestein Technologies

Their target is to allow process automation across the continuum from unstructured to structured processes, for which they propose executable goal-oriented BPMN. They see rules-driven processes as being reactive, and goal-based processes having the potential to be proactive: assessing what to do next based on current and target future states, and selecting best actions to achieve a specific goal. They have a taxonomy of process goals: milestone goals (aligning intent with action, representing something to be achieved) and governance goals (obtaining/maintaining a specific target, representing something to be maintained), plus a layered process scoping to provide both tactical (single instance) governance and strategic (multiple/aggregate instance) governance. Demo of Eclipse-based design environment showing hierarchy of goals and activities: activities are the leaf nodes for achieving a specific atomic goal, and can be expanded into a full BPMN model. Individual processes are essentially functions that are called to achieve the goals, not the top-level artifact; the goals are constantly being evaluated to see how best to satisfy them, then uses a goal-seeking controller to instantiate and control the processes as required. Planning for a GO-BPMN extension.

KPI Risk Assessment, Manoj Das, Oracle

Demonstration of unreleased analytics capabilities for Oracle BPM. BAM Composer is a web tool targeted at business analysts, allowing creation of Dashboard, KPI, Query, Alert, View or Data Object. A dashboard is a standard BAM-style dashboard including process data and external data sources, with graphical visualizations, made up of the other elements. KPIs can be realtime (constantly calculated) or scheduled (periodically calculated), and are defined by the measurement of a specific data object, optionally over a rolling window; a threshold, with high/medium/low deviation ranges and actions to be triggers when thresholds are reached; and additional optional risk indicators such as other data values that may make this KPI particularly critical. Queries are a measurement of a specific data object to show trending changes, also allowing rules and actions to be triggered. Their event processing is focused on meaningful business patterns, including trends, moving averages and missing events.

Operational Process Intelligence for Real-Time Business Process Visibility, Patrick Schmidt, SAP

Intelligence business operations powered by HANA: in-memory big data analytics for real-time informational context to support decision-making in processes. Demonstration of a business dashboard showing internal data from multiple systems (BPM, Business Suite, databases, etc.), plus Twitter feeds and other external data sources. Interactively drill into or filter by problem areas highlighted by graphical representations to see underlying processes and data, including drilling into specific process instances. KPIs for processes updated and displayed in realtime. In the NetWeaver BPM design environment, a phase view (higher level sequential process view, similar to a value chain) can be created where process phases are a collection of the activities in an existing process model; the phase view is also available in the runtime business dashboard with the aggregate runtime statistics for the process activities contained in each phase. NW BPM can now use HANA directly as its database so that the history logs don’t need to be exported and imported before the analytics can be generated.

Mid-morning break, time to check out of my room and get back here for the next session.

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2013 03 21 Sandy Kemsley BPM Comments (0) Permalink

bpmNEXT – WebRatio, TidalWave

Full bpmNEXT program here. The format is 30 minutes per speaker: 20 minutes of demo, 10 minutes of Q&A.

Day 1, fourth session: More social!

Model-Driven Generation of Social BPM Applications, Emanuele Molteni, WebRatio

WebRatio, in conjunction with the Politecnico Milano, have developed WebML, a modeling language for defining applications. There are a number of core components for BPM, content, SOA and more, plus optional components available from the WebRatio store including a package of social components. This allowed process such as reading, analyzing and posting Facebook and Twitter updates as part of a process or application page. This is beyond simple posting: there are actions for finding all users tweeting on a specific hashtag, for example, and for interrogating attributes such as number of likes on Facebook comments. They’ve also created a voting application for the conference sessions that we will be able to all try out tomorrow.

Social Process in the Cloud with Facebook, Stuart Browning, TidalWave Interactive

TidalWave has a Facebook application builder for launching processes in their cloud-based BPM. TidalWave for Facebook creates the processes behind the scenes, so that the designer of the Facebook app doesn’t need to understand process modeling. Starting with a template, such as a customer service request form, the designer selects layout and color scheme, then allows customization by adding/editing fields on the form, adding images and other branding. The new application is deployed to a Facebook page, where it appears as a link to the application page where the end user can fill out the form and submit it. Behind the scenes, a TidalWave process is running, populated with the data filled in by the user as well as their Facebook-provided information such as name and email address. In the case of the new customer service application demonstrated, submitting the form sent an email to both the submitter and the Facebook page owner, and also kicked off a TidalWave process. On the TidalWave portal, someone who is not necessarily on Facebook can resolve the case or reassign it to someone else, completing the activities in the process model. The process model associated with each of the Facebook application templates needs to be created in their regular BPM environment, but the application templates provide a way for a non-BPM (and non-technical) user to create and deploy Facebook applications that trigger processes.

That’s it for day 1 of bpmNEXT. Big kudos to Bruce and Nathaniel for putting together a great program, and to all the presenters for participating. A great environment of sharing ideas and talking about innovation in BPM, and I’m looking forward to tomorrow.

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2013 03 20 Sandy Kemsley BPM Comments (0) Permalink

bpmNEXT – BP3, OpenText, BonitaSoft

Full bpmNEXT program here. The format is 30 minutes per speaker: 20 minutes of demo, 10 minutes of Q&A.

Day 1, third session. Repeat after me: Mobile. Social. Mobile. Social.

BPM for Mobile, Mobile for BPM, Scott Francis, BP3 Global, Inc.

Problems with existing mobile BPM: an unprioritized activity stream as an interface for business processes is no better than email: everything is mixed together in a single view, with no process context; using desktop HTML instead of native apps ignores device constraints and capabilities. Rethinking that requires a more responsive UI to adjust to size/orientation/touch aspects of mobile screens, hybrid apps to leverage native capabilities while sharing some code with the desktop, and REST APIs to provide process-specific context. Demo shows their add-ons to IBM BPM, allowing new UI components to be added to UIs created within the IBM BPM design environment that better support mobile devices through automatic form factor (size/orientation) adjustment, gestures (e.g., iPhone swipe), and use of device capabilities (e.g., camera). Although the trend is towards native HTML5 and responsive UIs, hybrid and native apps are bridging the gap in the interim; having a common IDE for all development means that there don’t have to be separate desktop/mobile development teams that use different tools. They also advocate specific apps for major process-related functions rather than a common task list, reducing the number of clicks required to complete a task.

Social and Mobile Computing for BPM and Case Management, Rhonda Gray, OpenText

A new project at OpenText, called Touch, is looking at capturing and engaging new BPM participants, including mobile field personnel and customers. Their social BPM includes both socially-enabled software (collaborating within a complex case management environment) and social applications (activity stream task interface). Their cloud-based Touch server will provide an interface point for mobile and desktop devices to their source systems (P360, MBPM, C360, pV, mV), although desktop applications can also access the source systems directly. The iPad app demo showed the activity stream interface, controlling it through subscriptions to specific people and topics, microblogging and collaboration on cases. A user can request that another user follow a specific topic; topics can be pinned to the menu or added to the activity stream. The app uses device features including camera and GPS. The same social activity stream can be embedded in a desktop web application, e.g., alongside standard case management functions, allowing it to be a common source of social activity across all platforms.

Connecting BPM to Social Feeds Improves User Adoption, Mac McConnell, BonitaSoft

BPM exists in different social contexts, including both internal collaboration and responding to social media mentions and complaints. For internal collaboration, the demo showed notifications of pending process tasks exposed in Chatter: essentially, Chatter is acting as an inbox for process tasks, if the users are already using that as their most common access point. Task completion still required going to the Bonita screens, hence Chatter (or Yammer) is just used as a notification inbox. For external social media monitoring, tweets to a specific account were monitored, allowing the user to either respond directly and mark the situation as resolved, or kick off a process to route the tweet to someone who can deal with the situation. By integrating social listening directly into the Bonita application, instantiating processes is a single-click operation rather than having to transfer information from a social monitoring tool to a BPM environment. First live demo by a non-technical marketing guy, bravo!

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2013 03 20 Sandy Kemsley BPM Comments (1) Permalink