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Upcoming conferences

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

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

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

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

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

Gartner MQ for SOA Governance

Although I find it hard to believe that Frank Kenney and Daryl Plummer were hard at work all day on December 31st, that’s the publication date of Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Integrated SOA Governance Technologies. Software AG, which placed well in the leaders quadrant, has the report available for download.

This is the first time for this MQ, and to quote Gartner’s definition of the SOA governance market:

SOA governance is about ensuring and validating that assets and artifacts within the architecture are operating as expected and maintaining a certain level of quality. This Magic Quadrant reduces the market to one set of technologies with strong architectural cohesion (integration) promoting ease of use and interoperability of product.

I found their definition to be a bit fuzzy, especially the part that defined the SOA governance market as including “products, sales, marketing and services specifically targeted at providing SOA governance.”

Lots of the usual suspects here — BEA, TIBCO, IBM, Fujitsu — as well as others who I don’t really think of as being in this market.

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2008 01 15 Sandy Kemsley SOA Comments (0)

Gartner’s podcasting!

It’s the last company that I expected to be giving it away (for now), but Gartner is publishing podcasts as Gartner Voice. They cover a wide variety of topics so I won’t be listening to them all, but enough of them look interesting for me to add this to my iTunes feed. I also like that they’re short, 10-15 minutes each rather than the hour-long behemoths from other sites that I never find the time to listen to.

There’s an one on BPM as a business catalyst that has some comments on how an organization’s justification for BPM changes from cost savings to agility (both business and IT) as they implement more BPM projects, and also some insights on the coming market convergence.

I’ll also be checking out the one on articulating enterprise architecture in business terms.

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2006 01 10 Sandy Kemsley BPM
EA Comments (0)

Gartner’s BPM Suite Selection Criteria

Appian has a link to Gartner’s newly-published report on BPMS selection criteria here (free registration required). Gartner has the 10 major areas of functionality used to develop the criteria listed as following:

  • Human task support: Executing human-focused process steps
  • Business process/policy modeling and simulation environment
  • Pre-built frameworks, models, flows, rules and services
  • Human interface support and content management
  • Collaboration anywhere support
  • System task and integration support
  • Business activity monitoring (BAM)
  • Runtime simulation, optimization and predictive modeling
  • Business policy/rule management support
  • Real-time agility infrastructure supports

For each of these, the report provides a description of the functionality and why it’s important, then provides a list of what to look for when you’re evaluating that particular functionality. For example, they have this to say about real-time agility:

We believe that making changes to process flows in real time is less important than making changes at the correct or relevant time.

A sentiment that I wholeheartedly agree with — in fact, I think that I said pretty much those exact words during my course earlier this week. They proceed on with several paragraphs of explanation about the factors involved and what to look for, then the dish up their “factors to seek out” list, which includes things such as BPEL support, and early warning through rules and complex event pattern matching.

Excellent reading, and a very practical checklist for anyone evaluating BPMS.

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2005 12 15 Sandy Kemsley BPM Comments (3)

Proforma Enterprise Architecture webinar

I’ve just finished viewing a webinar put on by Proforma that talks about building, using and managing an enterprise architecture, featuring David Ritter, Proforma’s VP of Enterprise Solutions. He came out of the EA group at United Airlines so really knows how this stuff works, which is a nice change from the usual vendor webinars where they need to bring in an outside expert to lend some real-world credibility to their message. He spent a full 20 minutes up front giving an excellent background of EA before moving on to their ProVision product, then walked through a number of their different models that are used for modelling strategic direction, business architecture, system (application and data) architecture and technology architecture. More importantly, he showed how the EA artifacts (objects or models) are linked together, and how they interact: how a workflow model links to a data model and a network model, for example. He also went through an EA benefits model based on some work by Mary Knox at Gartner, showing where the different types of architecture fit on the benefits map:

After the initial 30 minutes of “what is EA” and “what is ProVision”, he dug into a more interesting topic: how to use and manage EA within your organization. I loved one diagram that he showed about where EA govenance belongs:

This reinforces what I’ve been telling people about how EA isn’t the same as IT architecture, and it can’t be “owned” by IT. He also showed the results of a survey by the Institute for Enterprise Architecture Developments, which indicates that the two biggest reasons why organizations are implementing EA are business-IT alignment (21%), and business change (17%): business reasons, not IT, are driving EA today. Even Gartner Group, following their ingestion of META Group and their robust EA practice earlier this year, has a Golden Rule of the New Enterprise Architecture that reflects this — “always make technology decisions based on business principles” — and go on to state that by 2010, companies that have not aligned their technology with their business strategy will no longer be competitive.

Some of this information is available on the Proforma website as white papers (such as the benefits map), and some is from analyst reports. With any luck, the webinar will be available for replay soon.

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2005 11 17 Sandy Kemsley EA Comments (3)

BPM soft skills

I saw this Gartner article a while back about a “new” BPM definition, and was reminded of it when it hit BPM.com again this week. He turns the focus from the hard technical skills required for BPM to the soft social skills required: much as I have done in my own career over the past 15 years or so: putting the “business” and “management” back in BPM, which has too long been focused on the mechanical “process” part. It’s not by accident that the small systems integration company that I owned in the late 90’s had the slogan “We Make Technology Mean Business”, and that I’m now developing a course called “Making BPM Mean Business“.

In that same vein, Gartner has recreated their definition of BPM to move the focus away from the tools and the mechanics of BPM:

BPM is a management practice that provides for governance of a business’s process environment toward the goal of improving agility and operational performance. BPM is a structured approach employing methods, policies, metrics, management practices and software tools to manage and continuously optimize an organization’s activities and processes.

Right on!

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2005 08 19 Sandy Kemsley BPM Comments (0)

We needed the business for this?

Gartner recently issued a report entitled Business Process Management’s Success Hinges on Business-Led Initiatives, the abstract of which states “organizations that had the most-successful BPM initiatives spent more than 40 percent of the initial project time on process discovery.”

This is newsworthy? Hands up if you still thought that IT could implement BPM without a significant involvement by the business. Of course, there are a few IT departments that I know that definitely haven’t figured that out yet.

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2005 08 09 Sandy Kemsley BPM Comments (0)

What’s in a BPM suite

From a recent presentation by Jim Sinur of Gartner comes their emerging view of what’s in a BPM suite (click for larger view):

They believe, as I do, that BPM includes both human-facing and system-to-system capabilities.

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2005 08 05 Sandy Kemsley BPM Comments (0)

Quote of the Day

An oldie, but goodie from Yefim Natis, the Editor-in-Chief of Application Integration and Middleware for Gartner, June 2003:

A business process is the essence of all business.

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2005 08 05 Sandy Kemsley BPM Comments (0)

Global 360 Active Compliance Framework

I watched a webinar earlier this week about BPM and compliance, a topic that I’ve been working on for a while, in which Global 360 announced their Active Compliance Framework (today’s Computer Business Review also reviewed their announcement). The speakers were from Doculabs and BWise, the latter of which has just partnered with Global 360 (and a bunch of other ECM/BPM vendors) for a compliance offering. Global 360 states the advantages of their compliance framework as follows:

Improved Compliance & Risk Management (i.e., do a better job of being compliant)

  • Standardized, structured approach
  • Focused on highest risk controls & processes
  • Centralized visibility and control

Reduced Compliance Costs (i.e., be compliant in a more cost-effective way)

  • Reduced project costs via control reduction based on risk
  • Reduced testing costs for remaining controls via automation
  • Eliminated testing costs for continuously compliant processes

Process Optimization & Control (i.e., provide an opportunity to optimize your business processes)

  • Optimize process performance while increasing control
  • Proactive compliance issue visibility, notification
  • Evolution from obligation to optimization

I liked the focus on the last of these sections, or what they called “from obligation to optimization”: changing the organization’s attitude from compliance being a chore that they’re forced to implement, to compliance being an opportunity to improve business processes through standardization and measurement.

If, like 1/3 of Doculabs’ current customers, compliance is one of your highest priorities for 2005, it’s worth your time to check out compliance solutions like this from ECM/BPM vendors. The whole compliance field is still chaotic; a Gartner report on compliance management software lists 26 vendors and clearly states that the compliance market is not mature:

A key finding of our research is that there is no comprehensive compliance management application. Whether buying from one or many vendors to get a solution, you will need significant services for implementation and integration.

Partnerships like the one between Global 360 and BWise start to address this problem, but there’s still a long way to go before we can even agree on what “compliance management software” is.

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2005 07 28 Sandy Kemsley BPM
ECM
compliance Comments (0)

Fuego and Plumtree

I don’t mean to be blogging just about Fuego these days, although since I’m in the middle of evaluating their product, I’m probably more attuned to stories about them. I found Gartner’s assessment of the recent Fuego/Plumtree OEM agreement interesting:

Fuego’s original equipment manufacturer deal with Plumtree is the first strategic relationship between a business process management suite vendor and a complementary middleware vendor. This is a game-changing event that will pull Fuego ahead of its closest competitors in the crowded BPMS market.

The agreement was made in May, but Gartner’s comments just published this week.

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2005 07 20 Sandy Kemsley BPM Comments (1)

Integration 101 webinar

If you’re new to the world of integration, EAI, SOA and all those other good things, you can tune into the ebizQ webinar Integration 101 - From Application Integration to SOA on Tuesday at noon Eastern:

In this webinar, Roy Schulte, Vice President and Research Fellow in Gartner Inc., joins Lance Hill, webMethods Vice President Solutions Marketing, to make some sense of all the acronyms (BAM, BPM, SOA, EDA, CEP) and to describe at a fundamental level the different integration technologies that can be leveraged to integrate and enhance business systems and processes.

Roy Schulte is pretty smart about these technologies, and webMethods has just won the ebizQ EAI Buyer’s Choice award. Should be an interesting discussion.

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2005 07 10 Sandy Kemsley EAI
SOA Comments (0)

Secrets of Success

I just received an email from a recently-graduated engineer in Germany, looking for advice on how to become a credible resource on BPM projects with only theoretical BPM knowledge and a lack of business knowledge — in other words, how to ramp up from being a newbie with a decent technical degree into an experienced BPM consultant. I didn’t want to send off some flippant answer about long years of hard work, so I spent some time thinking about a few of the key things that I did (and still do) to turn myself from a techie with an engineering degree into a BPM architect who spends as much time thinking about business as I do about technology.

My advice to him:

First, research constantly about BPM, particularly case studies. There are lots of great resources on the web, such as BPMG, that have articles on everything that you would want to know about BPM, including real live case studies. Attend a BPM conference or two, such as ones by BPMG or Gartner, listen to more experienced people talk about what they’ve done, and make some contacts that you might be able to call on when you need some free advice.

Second, do some technical research into a few major BPM products, so that you can become somewhat of an expert on how BPM products work even if you haven’t worked with them. Many BPM vendors are very happy to have you learn more about their products, and if your target customers typically use a specific product (such as FileNet or Tibco), then research the technology behind that product or even attend vendor training so that you can stay one step ahead of your first customer on the technical side.

Third, learn more about your customers’ business. For example, most of my customers are in financial services and insurance, and I have become an expert on the business processes in these organizations through research and observation, even though I have never worked for a financial company (I’ve always worked for — or owned and operated — software or service companies). Even if you don’t have a contract with a potential customer yet, offer to come in and do a brief walk-through and analysis of their operations. Sit down with some of the people while they are working and ask them what they are doing, and why they’re doing it: that’s the best way to learn about the details of a business process. Very often, an outsider can observe something in a business that someone in the company won’t see, so you may be able to tell them something about their business that they don’t know after just a brief walk-through, if you’re observant.

Lastly, focus on the business issues, not the technology. If you are consulting on BPM directly to an IT department rather than a business department, the project has a high probability of failure: remember that the “B” in BPM stands for “Business”, and you have to stay focussed on what value that you are bringing to the business in order to successfully implement BPM.

I finished up my email by telling him that there is no real substitute for experience, but it’s possible to educate yourself about BPM in a way that provides obvious value to prospective customers. Many people in the customer organizations (even in the IT department) don’t have formal systems training, so this is a good opportunity to put to use all those analysis and problem-solving skills that they taught us in engineering, just applied to business instead of technical problems.

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2005 07 06 Sandy Kemsley BPM
BPMG-BPTG Comments (0)

Gartner’s BPM trends and forecasts

Another webinar going on right now, Gartner BPM Roundtable: Business Process Management Trends and Forecasts, hosted by Global 360 and featuring Jim Sinur of Gartner (yes, this turned out to be “webinar day”, I have a third one after this if I’m not burned out).

The usual webinar format is the “expert” talks to his slides for 30-40 minutes, then some marketing geek from the vendor talks about their product for 10 minutes. Not this one: it’s a very dynamic conversation between Mr. Sinur and Michael Crosno, President of Global 360, and both of these guys are really smart about BPM. Yes, Mr. Crosno talks about Global 360 product features, but it’s used as a springboard for Mr. Sinur to talk about the importance of specific functionality in the current and future BPM suites marketplace.

A few really great insights. The first one is was that legacy BPM deployments are more likely to have been for the purpose of reducing paper, whereas the new deployments are all about streamlining processes and improving productivity, with a new and increasingly important focus on extending the enterprise. Although this is something that we all know by gut feel, it’s good to see some real numbers behind it:

The second insight is that customer requirements are evolving from enterprise content management (ECM) to enterprise process management: a shift from information lifecycles to process lifecycles. As a “column 2″ advocate, I’m really glad to see Gartner recognizing the shift in focus from content to process. Mr. Sinur showed a scale that started with image management and went all the way through to business optimization, with the crossover from ECM to EPM happening between portals and process execution. He puts “workflow” in the ECM space, that is, the subset of BPM that is used for content lifecycle management.

Another point was the trend for CRM vendors to integrate BPM with their products, usually by buying or OEM’ing in a third-party product, because they see it as an essential part of managing the customer relationship. I’ve been seeing this trend lately as well, such as with Onyx’s acquisition of a BPM product and their current push to integrate it into their mainstream CRM product.

By far the best webinar that I’ve listened to in months. The slides and the audio playback will be available tomorrow on Global 360’s site.

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2005 05 24 Sandy Kemsley BPM
ECM Comments (2)

BPM tools and methodologies

The Gartner webinar that I dropped in on yesterday had some interesting points about modelling and methodologies that started me thinking.

First, on methodologies: it’s absolutely essential to have some best practices to lend structure to your BPM project. Don’t do this alone, get the help of someone like me (okay, it doesn’t have to be me) who has actually implemented BPM projects before. Whenever you change a business process, there’s a whole lot more than just technology going on, and you don’t want to get caught in the classic IT trap of believing that the business users will be just as excited about the new technology as you are (remember, they didn’t get to play with the Java code).

There were comments in yesterday’s webinar about how the soft benefits are becoming more significant, including internal factors such as real-time business agility and a process-focussed culture. However, you can’t expect your organization to change because of the introduction of BPM technology; instead, your organization needs to make cultural changes driven by business factors and enabled by the technology.

On modelling tools, I made the statement last month that most people are using Visio to model their business processes before they are implemented in a BPM system, which is true. However, just because it’s true doesn’t mean that it’s the best way to do this. If you use a standard modelling notation such as BPMN or UML activity diagrams, you’ll do fine up to a point with Visio, but somewhere along the way to your “to be” process, you’re going to need a more serious tool for process simulation and the like. If you check out the BPtrends report on modelling tools that I reviewed last week, you’ll see a lot more tools with a lot more power than Visio for your process modelling and analysis. You’re not going to put these on everyone’s desktop, but they are needed for a few analysts who will be doing the in-depth process design.

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2005 05 06 Sandy Kemsley BPA
BPM Comments (2)

BPM Momentum

I attended the The BPM Momentum: What’s Driving it? webinar today (not “what’s driving IT” as the host ebizQ erroneously labelled it, which has a much different meaning), featuring Jim Sinur of Gartner. Definitely worth catching the replay for Mr. Sinur’s comments on success factors for BPM projects and for his view of the market convergence.

He included Gartner’s Application Integration Hype cycle chart, showing how BPM technologies fit: apparently, BPM itself is sliding into the Trough of Disillusionment, whereas BPM Suites are still climbing towards the Peak of Inflated Expectations. (The hype cycle terminology always reminds me of the morality fable Pilgrim’s Progress with its Slough of Despond, but I digress.) He only put a 10% probability on the catastrophic scenario, which makes me feel a whole lot better.

He also had some good numbers on customers and their BPM projects:

  • 85% of BPM customers are now going after their human-facing processes (presumably, the automated system-to-system ones are already in place).
  • BPM projects are yielding an average IRR of 20% (although Gartner uses a more conservative figure of 15%), but larger projects can produce returns of well over 100%.
  • “Soft” benefits such as competitive advantage and higher customer satisfaction are major contributors to a project’s success.
  • Business and IT are becoming more aligned on BPM projects.

He also commented on the convergence that is happening in the marketplace, something that I’ve been seeing for some time as well: 130 BPM vendors all attempting to jostle their way into what I call the “BPM suite spot”:

This convergence is just a continuation of the evolution of BPM that I discussed in an earlier post, but it’s going to get a lot more painful for some of the players as they get eaten by the competition or body-checked off the playing field.

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2005 05 05 Sandy Kemsley BPM Comments (0)

IBM tops AIM market, but what of BPM?

A press release this week from IBM announces that a preliminary Gartner report on application integration/middleware (AIM) and portal software has crowned IBM as the market leader based on 2004 licence revenue. Their figures put IBM’s share at around 37% of the worldwide market, with chief rivals BEA, Oracle and Microsoft trailing far behind at 7.2%, 4.4% and 4.3%, respectively. The full report is due out at next week’s Application Integration and Web Services Summit.

As you poke around in the data, however, you find out that the number is made up of several products, including application servers (where they compete with BEA), integration software (where they compete with TIBCO, Microsoft BizTalk and webMethods) and portals (where they compete with Microsoft SharePoint). In fact, I suspect that anything that carries the “WebSphere” brand is considered part of their AIM stable, including ongoing licence fees for tons of pre-WebSphere-era MQSeries installations connecting ancient IBM mainframes using proprietary protocols. If you check out IBM’s software product list, there’s a whole lot of WebSphere going on, and it didn’t all start under that brand. In fact, I remember when what is now WebSphere MQ Workflow was rebranded from “FlowMark” to “MQSeries Workflow”, prior to its re-rebranding as WebSphere a year or so ago. Since MQSeries was the hot new brand at the time of the first rebranding, it was seen as an attempt to “standardize by branding”, although FlowMark wasn’t even based on MQSeries until much later.

From a BPM standpoint, the biggest complaint that I have about IBM’s products is the apparently piecemeal strategy. In recent years, we’ve seen a number of products put forward by IBM as BPM and/or workflow: WebSphere MQ Workflow (a somewhat clumsy workflow product that never really developed into a cohesive contender), Content Manager’s Document Routing (a very simple routing capability for document-based workflows), Lotus Workflow (I’m not even going there), Advanced Workflow (now apparently being sunsetted), and the latest entrant, WebSphere Business Integration.

WBI, previously called WebSphere Process Choreographer, is based on the CrossWorlds EAI product acquired by IBM: just type in www.crossworlds.com and see where it takes you. Because of that origin, it’s coming from the EAI space, and my concern is that the product focus will remain on integrating systems and will never fully develop the human-facing functionality, including business-focussed tools for modelling, simulation and analytics. Gartner’s 2004 magic quadrant for pure-play BPM doesn’t mention any of the IBM products, although they did show up in the 2004 magic quadrant for business process analysis due to the Holosofx acquisition.

If this is going to be the next-generation BPM product, IBM needs to stop spending so much time listening to the IT departments (who get far too excited about EAI) and spend more time listening to the business departments in order to develop the human-facing components that they need to move into the pure-play BPM market. At the very least, they need to perform a mercy killing on MQ Workflow as soon as possible to reduce customer confusion and focus their efforts on a single BPM product offering.

Of course, there’s always going to be some platform limitations to WBI: it’s going to require WebSphere Application Server and WebSphere MQ. Given the market penetration of WAS and MQ in large organizations, however, I don’t see that as a problem; the opportunity to grab a huge BPM market share is theirs to blow.

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2005 04 15 Sandy Kemsley BPM
SOA Comments (0)

The Case for BPM

Another interesting lunchtime webinar today, “The Case for BPM”, this one featuring Janelle Hill, a VP & Research Lead from META Group (acquired by Gartner as of last week), and Gary Morgen, a VP from Citigroup. It was sponsored by TIBCO, but the first two speakers ran overtime and the poor TIBCO guy had to squeeze his 11 slides into about 30 seconds. Some would say that’s all the time that a vendor should have in an educational webinar, but come on, give them a break, they paid for it.

I really liked Ms Hill’s focus on tying process improvements (and hence the use of BPM) back to business performance objectives or a process improvement methodology such as Six Sigma: although that might seem obvious, there’s a lot of people who get wrapped up in the cool technology and lose sight of what we’re actually trying to do here, which is to improve someone’s business.

I disagree with her broad description of a BPM suite as “unifying workflow, EAI, document/content management, portal and web services technologies”, because I don’t consider content management or portals to be a part of BPM, but rather complementary technologies. Given that we’re migrating to an SOA world, however, the boundaries are starting to blur.

Mr. Morgen talked mostly about Citigroup’s TIBCO/Staffware implementation, but he also had some great words about reducing time/cost of application development by using best-of-breed vendor solutions rather than building it themselves: a refreshing viewpoint to hear from the financial services world, where huge organizations have spent billions of dollars in the past writing their own word processors and database engines. I’ve written previously about the value of using COTS components such as e-forms, so I’m completely aligned with Mr. Morgen’s views on this subject.

I also like the cool Blackberry integration that they’ve done to their workflow, although I don’t want to appear too wrapped up in the technology.

TIBCO will be making this webinar available for download or replay on their website soon; even if you’re not interested in TIBCO/Staffware specifically, I recommend listening to Janelle Hill’s portion for a reality check on establishing your business drivers for BPM.

Also, it will be interesting in the months ahead to see how Gartner and META reconcile their sometimes very different opinions on BPM.

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2005 04 07 Sandy Kemsley BPM Comments (0)

Human, Interrupted

I just read about yet another analyst BPM workshop that claims to be “the definitive education on BPM”. Oh, puh-leeze. There is no such thing as a 2-day definitive education on a topic as broad as BPM, and besides, the analysts can’t even agree on the definition of BPM. I wrote a short course on BPM for a client recently (no, it wasn’t the definitive education on BPM), and as part of that, I created a brief history of BPM to show how this space evolved. One thing that becomes painfully clear in looking at the evolution and current state of BPM is that although everyone agrees that BPM is about managing processes, there is no clear definition of the divisions within the space, or which technologies belong where (if anywhere) within it.

It’s almost biblical: in the beginning, there was human-to-human workflow. Some time after that, there was system-to-system EAI. They were distinct, and that was good because everyone understood which was which. In time, workflow begat EAI-like capabilities in order to facilitate human-to-system interfaces, and EAI begat human-facing workflow-like capabilities in order to handle exceptions within processes. Then, workflow begat BAM and simulation, and EAI begat B2Bi. Finally, workflow and EAI together adopted process modelling and business rules (they didn’t beget these technologies, they already existed in other fields).

Then, the abomination: the analysts created a Tower of Babel by lumping all of this together and calling it BPM.

Yes, it was confusing before the term BPM was applied to it all, since workflow and EAI overlapped significantly, but it’s now monumentally more confusing to customers because any vendor in the entire BPM space can claim that they “do BPM” and can therefore compete with any other vendor. I saw a particularly painful example of this at a large company that had chosen an integration broker suite for their BPM standard. The internal IT groups were fully indoctrinated that this was the only BPM tool that they could use, and they actually seemed to believe that BPM meant the considerably narrower field of EAI. One of the senior people, on hearing me describe the requirements of a human-facing BPM project, referred to it as “human-interrupted”. Not surprisingly, there are considerably more system-to-system BPM projects than any other type in that organization; who would willing pick up that square peg and try to ram it into a round hole?

In an attempt to help with the confusion, the same analysts who lumped all of this together as BPM created divisions within the BPM space based on functionality. Unfortunately, they all created different divisions based on widely varying criteria. For example, Gartner, whose definition I tend to align with, created a taxonomy in a research note back in 2003 based on process type, dividing the space into pure-play (application-independent), integration-focussed, administrative, collaborative, and embedded. [For my work with back office systems, the key segments of the BPM space are pure-play and integration-focussed; pure-play is, more or less, what evolved from workflow, and integration-focussed is what evolved from EAI.] Delphi, on the other hand, makes divisions based on the degree of human interaction: person-to-person, person-to-system, and system-to-system. This is a very useful way to categorize applications of BPM, but I don’t agree with it as a way to categorize the products themselves, since all of them claim to do all of it.

There are many other BPM taxonomies: at least one per analyst, and usually one per vendor. Most of them are not created for the altruistic purpose of trying to clarify the space.

Creating a taxonomy is hard work, because it requires projecting a complex, multidimensional space onto a much simpler space of lower dimensionality in order to make it comprehensible and useful. BPM is definitely a case where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, making the process even more difficult. BPM is not just workflow plus EAI plus BAM plus business rules, et cetera: it’s the near-seamless integration of all of these tools that is the real competitive differentiator, because that’s what enables an organization to do things that they could never do before.

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2005 03 25 Sandy Kemsley BPM Comments (0)