I found Bruce Silver's blog entry today on IBM's new simply-branded "BPM Suite," very interesting and compelling, and recommend it to you here in our developing "takeaways" section.

And if you're not already receiving it, you can get ebizQ BPM update, which includes items like this one, by entering your email address and selecting the BPM box, right here.

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Some practitioners praise BAM as a means of increasing visibility and readiness for future business decisions. Others have yet to find any real value in BAM implementations. ebizQ’s experts want to know what YOU think!

A survey we're doing will evaluate the current state of adoption of business activity monitoring (BAM) capabilities used as part of business process management (BPM) solutions, and a report will be prepared based on its findings.

Please complete this short survey and, as thanks, get a chance to win a $250 gift certificate. Also, every participant will receive the comprehensive report on The State of BAM Adoption.

Complete the survey here!

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Today at the Gartner BPM Summit in beautiful and talented Las Vegas (where more than one person canceled a meeting this morning due to a late night at the Flamingo Hotel's Blackjack tables), I had a great meeting with HandySoft's Bruce Knudson.

Bruce and I talked about the work HandySoft is doing in the government sector, which made me recall my days covering Pentagon's activities for National Defense Magazine, and my subsequent association with the Association for Enterprise Integration, an industry group that provides a framework for collaboration between government and industry.

(The DoD CIO, as well as many other defense agencies, have turned to AFEI to be its conduit for policy and strategy input from industry through jointly chartered working groups. More recently the Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Business Transformation has requested a partnership with AFEI for the purpose of garnering industry input on transforming DoD business operations. AFEI working groups formed under these partnerships provide the opportunity for industry to influence policy, shape the future and secure the nation.

The Association for Enterprise Integration (AFEI) is a non-profit association for corporate and individual members whose common goal is to advance enterprise integration, network centric operations and world-class electronic business practices for industries and governments around the globe.)

But I digress. HandySoft is drinking some of the kool-aid that Gartner analysts are dishing out to BPM Vendors, and that's that BPM tools have to be 'more 2.0', i.e., more collaborative to be successful in the BPM market of the future. Garth seems to be taking that into consideration as he crafts his message about the tasking engine that HandySoft has built, which allows for iterative tasks to be collaborated upon between people. Garth reported that Gartner is saying that tasks additionally need to be flexible enough to be built upon across person-to-person networks, so he reports HandySoft will be working on that too in the near term.

***If you like this article, you can get all this coverage and more in our weekly ebizQ BPM Update. Sign up to receive it at this link.

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Last night I went to sleep with a mental picture of how Fujitsu organizes its new autodiscovery process engine, which was poetically described to me by Hiro Makita and Keith Swenson for Fujitsu, here at the Gartner BPM Summit in Las Vegas.

The images I saw in my briefing drew a unique picture of how processes in most companies are presented to a BPM provider. Most of the time, finding out what a companies processes are can take several months, and the image of what request goes where, and who talks to who, and who orders what, etc., can be depicted by a confusing spaghetti-like diagram.

Instead, Fujitsu offers companies the chance to give them a data dump, and about a week later, an automated process discovery mechanism prepares a report so the company knows exactly what their processes are, both for average situations, and exceptions. It's pretty cool.

The briefing also included a confidential (and extremely impressive list) of customers that Fujitsu is working with to improve their mission-critical processes. They are some of the most important companies in the world.

***If you like this article, you can get all this coverage and more in our weekly ebizQ BPM Update. Sign up to receive it at this link.

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At the Gartner BPM Summit, I just had a great meeting with Dale Skeen, a technology visionary and founder and CTO of Vitria, which today announced the industry’s first Web 2.0 BPM suite that empowers business users to directly model, manage, monitor and optimize their business processes.

This release, Dale said, represents the convergence of Web 2.0 and traditional BPM, by empowering business analysts with the ability to use 2.0 tools such as mashups, wikis and other collaboration platforms to integrate data and to give processes a higher level of context and meaning.

"Before, it's been business vs. IT, but it has to be business + IT," Dale said, to give collaboration tools the opportunity to fulfill their promise.

With Vitria's new product, business analysts can now model and execute business processes in a rich web-based environment in direct collaboration with their IT counterparts, significantly reducing the development cycle, saving companies millions of dollars and enabling a truly agile enterprise.

Until now, the modeling and collaboration capabilities of BPM solutions were constrained by a technological gap that kept business analysts and IT professionals separated. Converging BPM, Web 2.0 and Event Processing has enabled M3O to bridge that gap. The product empowers the business analysts to play a key role in building and managing their own process models without having to spend days or weeks with IT to construct and finally complete a process. With this enabling technology, both business and IT can be more agile and responsive to changes in the business, reducing implementation times for mission- critical processes from weeks to days.

ebizQ's own Beth Gold-Bernstein has high marks for the new product:

"Vitria has brought together the ability to model, manage and monitor business processes in an extremely slick and easy to use Web 2.0 interface – think iPhone meets dashboards," said Beth Gold-Bernstein, Chair of the ebizQ 'In Action' Conference Series. "The visualization capabilities provide a true synergy, enabling knowledge workers to (model and) link information and create new views or dashboards more easily than trying to explain to IT what it is they want. In fact after using M3O the knowledge workers will be the ones to unleash the true synergy of BPM, Web 2.0 and event processing in the enterprise."

I'm off right now to go look at the demo... as I can't wait to see what Dale described as bringing 'the iPhone coolness' to a BPM dashboard.

***If you like this article, you can get all this coverage and more in our weekly ebizQ BPM Update. Sign up to receive it at this link.

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Today at the Gartner BPM Summit, I heard Alan Trefler of Pegasystems, speak about his vision for the future of BPM.

Alan said there are three failed ways that the marketplace has so far attempted to close the execution gap - that is - the gap between what management wants and what IT provides. First, you have the failure of engineering, and people stop asking for help and changes in current technologies because they have so much frustration with systems as they are. The second common failure is offshore development, where you farm out the work but the solutions are continually out of reach. Third, you have the failure of mega-application providers, who are massive and expensive and make huge promises, yet still manage to keep agile solutions out of reach.

The true vision of BPM, Trefler said, is to change the way the business and IT works together, to change processes to match applications, to change expectations, directly capture objectives, automate programming, and therefore automate the business process work.

***If you like this article, you can get all this coverage and more in our weekly ebizQ BPM Update. Sign up to receive it at this link.

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This week I will be blogging (and maybe a little podcasting) from the Gartner BPM Summit in Las Vegas. At the moment, I'm scheduled to find out the latest in BPM trends and technologies with execs from Corticon, Pegasystems, Fujitsu, Vitria, Lombardi, Global360, Qualiware, and a few others. If you are going to be there, give us a shout and let's meet up. Email elizabeth@ebizq.net.

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I don't have a whole lot to say about this acquisition of Proforma by Metastorm today, except that I tried to ask a question during the media call and the conference line must have been broken, because no one asked any questions and they ended the call pretty quickly. It was either that or they were ignoring me (and everyone else who was probably trying to ask questions).

The key point, made by Metastorm's CEO Bob Farrell, is that the new Metastorm Enterprise will "uniquely address the three critical challenges facing organizations today," which are:

Understanding the underlying dynamics of the organization, collaborating to ensure the pieces fit together, and creating agility within the context of overall enterprise strategy and architecture;

Mapping out an end state that maximizes the effectiveness of key business processes, intertwined with other enterprise assets, to achieve strategic objectives;

Executing optimized, effective business processes with cross-functional transparency and the flexibility to adapt and implement new ideas quickly.

I would agree with those points. That is in line with the editorial perspective of ebizQ.

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Here at ebizQ, I don't usually publish earning statements in our news section, but I do get a slew of them at the end of each quarter in my email box. While I don't publish them, I certainly read them, because they sometimes give me insight into the kind of convergence, expansion, acquisition, consolidation, merging (whatever!) that seems to be happening so much these days. Seriously, every week we have another major acquisition that totally disrupts and changes our industry.

One thing I was very interested to read today was Metastorm's earning statement report. From the release:

The privately held company posted record revenues and profitability, experienced 30% license growth year-over-year, and reported a continued increase in enterprise deployments of the Metastorm BPM® suite. In addition, existing customers continued to invest in the solution by increasing the number of users, deploying new processes, and implementing additional functional capability to support the full roundtrip process life-cycle.

Then they went on to share the major global customer wins they've had in the last quarter, which include ADP (France), Cameron McKenna (U.K.), John Deere (Germany), MMA Financial (U.S.), Osborne Clark (U.K.), Rome Airport (Italy), Royal Pharmaceutical Society (U.K.), and Wyeth (U.S.). Existing customers expanding their use of the Metastorm BPM suite included Channel 4 Television (U.K.), Chubb & Sons (U.S), FTN Midwest (U.S.), KPMG (U.S.), SkandiaBanken (Denmark), Staples (U.S.), and the U.S. Navy (U.S.).

These are big customer wins, and now I want to know a bit more about these Process Pods®. Perhaps we should do a podcast about these process pods that we can play on our iPods?

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Yesterday, I was a juror at a trial about content management. The judge presented the facts of the case, that two companies had lost files that got into the hands of criminals, thus opening up their customers to all sorts of issues, like identity theft and credt card fraud.

The dispute we heard was between the two companies based in the deep south. Allied Claims Processing Services, is a company that processes and stores insurance claims from service providers such as hospitals and pharmacies. Inland Insurance is an insurance company that provides health insurance as well as other things. Inland uses Allied as its claims processor, and Inland sends Allied its paper files for long term storage.

During Hurricaine Katrina, paper files that were stored by Allied, on behalf of Inland, got washed away forever. In the context of the destruction of the entire city of New Orleans, this might seem minor, but there were numerous disputes between the two companies as to how much of the paper got washed away, how well the warehouse had been guarded during the hurricaine, and whether it was possible that some of the files could have been stolen. It was known that some files were certainly compromised, and some credit card and identity theft fraud took place.

And the question was, who is at fault?

Is it the company who was hired to maintain paper files, only to store them and keep them safe and dry? And in the context of a major natural disaster in which significant parts of the warehouse (in which the paper files are stored) are literally washed down the river, is the company still at fault for loss that is incurred beyond the actual paper loss? Or is the company who let the insurance claims information go out of its purview, without proper assurances that the files would be kept safe beyond a shadow of a doubt, liable to its customers for its identity theft and credit card fraud claims?

And here's why I'm not violating the law by talking about it. This all-too-real scenario was not actually a case on the books, but rather a mock trial, put on by IBM and Filenet (an IBM company) and sponsored by HP. The mock trial was presided over by a real judge and two lawyers arguing on behalf of their company clients. Witnesses were called and the case was decided by the jury, the audience.

I'm not going to tell you the outcome of the case, because that's not the point. The point is, that content management needs to be part of an ongoing process management, compliance and risk management strategy. Content management is clearly an essential part of the business process, and safety of documents is a key factor in business success and continuity.

The message of the mock trial was this: What would happen if you lost all your files, paper, digital or otherwise? What would happen if those files got into the hands of someone you don't trust? And... don't you think you'd better have a plan in place to protect yourself from that ever happening?

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Some of you might know that in a previous life, I was a reporter covering the military-industrial complex, and today's news from Appian is right along the lines of the kind of thing I used to write about. Luckily, it's all about enterprise processes, so I can write about it here today too!

Today, Northrop Grumman reported that it had selected Appian to provide business process services to the Army's 'Defense Knowledge Online' program. According to the release, "The task order, with a $267 million ceiling, was awarded under the U.S. Air Force Network-Centric Solutions contract vehicle and is the largest portal task order ever awarded in the federal government."

More from Appian:

"As the key technology provider for the initial Army Knowledge Online (AKO) initiative, Appian is excited by this next stage of implementation as it evolves into DKO to serve the entire Department of Defense,” said Matt Calkins, CEO of Appian. “DKO promises to provide all warfighters with access to the information they need to better do their jobs and complete their missions, and we are actively working to deliver the best possible solution to attain this goal.”

And more info from the release:

Leveraging Appian’s robust platform, DKO will be the single enterprise service portal, serving as the entry point for all U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) and authorized users to access DoD and government intranets supporting operations, missions and critical support processes for forces worldwide. DKO will provide relevant information and applications to the warfighter and other government users through a secure service-oriented framework to help them perform their missions more effectively. As the industry’s best-of-breed large-scale knowledge-based portal, Appian’s technology will help enable the DKO enterprise solution to grow from 1.8 million users to possibly eight million users or more, potentially across all federal government agencies.

Here's the link to this news on ebizQ.

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Jon Pyke of the Process Factory and the Workflow Management Coalition has a great article out on ebizQ right now, about the XPDL Standard as the "silent workhorse of BPM." I've had lots of comments on it, so make sure to check it out. Get it here!

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The BPM in Action panel today on Human-Centric collaborative processes is the first one to have engaged a fictional character as a speaker. That's right, Dr. Jeffrey Sterllings, is a "mildly eccentric IT and management guru," who happens to be the main character of The Power of Process: Unleashing the Source of Competitive Advantage, a book written by BPM-Blogger Kiran Garimella.

The panel discussion will focus on the differences and similarities among different types of process. How many tools does a company need? Tune in to this panel discussion and learn how to evaluate what you need in a BPM solution. Led by ebizQ's own Beth Gold-Bernstein, and featuring additional appearances by Dr. Bruce Silver, IBM's Stephanie Wilkinson and Global 360's Steve MacDonald.

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Jump in on BPM in Action now to talk about business activity monitoring as a way to secure your business process management system!

The description:

Starting out in BPM can be a daunting task. Over the years the BPM community has been reciting the mantra of "model to measure, and measure to improve", but how do you break into the process improvement lifecycle? Where do you start? Where is the biggest and fastest return going to be? It's not feasible to begin BPM by modeling all of your business processes, but the data you need in order to start is spread across your functional silos. Hear how a webMethods' customer used webMethods Fabric to measure their business processes before they modeled them. Measuring first allowed them to identify the most significant day-to-day problems, discover and analyze their root cause and implement an improvement plan.

In addition, Matt Green of webMethods, will take a look at the role that BAM plays in focusing the initial stages of your BPM implementation and how utilizing the right approach to the process improvement lifecycle can deliver a much faster return with lower associated risks.

Listen or replay here!

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Don't miss the most 'unplugged' panel of the BPM in Action Virtual Conference.

As Column 2's practically legendary blogger Sandy said yesterday:

"We are doing this live on the air with no script and no slides, and the speakers only have a rough idea of the topics that I want to cover, so tune in for some spontaneous talk about where BPM is headed in this strange new world of Enterprise 2.0."

Sure to be exciting. Sign up here!

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Tomorrow is the culmination of months of preparation by ebizQ and our partners, to bring together the best and the brightest stars of the BPM landscape at the BPM in Action Virtual Conference.

This means you! We include our readers as part of the BPM galaxy. This is because our virtual conference interface is active AND interactive. As a participant, you will be able to chat with speakers and vendor reps just like you would at a regular conference, except you won't have to wait in line at the airport or rush to catch a cab, or whatever. In fact, you will be able to experience all of BPM in Action from the comfort of your own desk.

BPM in Action follows up on last year's enormously successful SOA in Action show.

Keynote speakers include Forrester's Ken Vollmer (register here,) and Gartner's Janelle Hill (register here).

Also, don't miss the incomparable Column 2 blogger Sandy Kemsley, with her own self-selected panel about BPM and Enterprise 2.0.

A special thanks to all our sponsors for making BPM in Action happen. We really appreciate the support of IBM, Global 360, BEA, Ramco and webMethods, and we look forward to chatting with you at this great conference.

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Yesterday at the Gartner Business Process Management Summit, Microsoft announced that they had invited ten companies to join a new alliance for BPM, with the stated focus on making BPM solutions more broadly accessible and helping companies take advantage of BPM tools based on the Microsoft® platform.

The companies in the alliance are AmberPoint, Ascentn, IDS Scheer, Fair Isaac, Global360, InRule, Metastorm, PNMsoft, RuleBurst and SourceCode Technology Holdings Inc.

After I spoke with Ben Cody, VP of Product Management for Global 360, I spoke with Ed Horst, VP of Marketing for AmberPoint. Ed spoke about how the work that AmberPoint is doing with Microsoft is the continuation of a longer relationship going back to late 2001 or so, and that the work that AmberPoint has been doing in making all of its products available in the .Net environment has been a key point for the business.

Click here to download or listen to the podcast with Ed Horst.

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Yesterday at the Gartner Business Process Management Summit, Microsoft announced that they had invited ten companies to join a new alliance for BPM, with the stated focus on making BPM solutions more broadly accessible and helping companies take advantage of BPM tools based on the Microsoft® platform.

The companies in the alliance are AmberPoint, Ascentn, IDS Scheer, Fair Isaac, Global360, InRule, Metastorm, PNMsoft, RuleBurst and SourceCode Technology Holdings Inc.

Today I spoke with Ben Cody, VP of Product Management for Global 360. He spoke about how all ten companies fit into a BPM category of either modeling and analysis, business rules engines, and human-centric BPM. Global 360 falls into the human-centric aspect.

Click here to download or listen to the podcast.

After I spoke with Ben Cody, I also spoke with Ed Horst of AmberPoint on the same topic. Click here for that podcast.

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I've been grappling for awhile about how to manage the increasingly huge topic of open source technologies on ebizQ. Open source means many things to many people, and while enterprise open source is a specific area within open source, open source technologies alone also have relevance for our audience.

Today, our brand new BPM in Action blogger Michael Dortch weighed in on BPM and Open Source, so please check that out. He also linked to some really excellent RFG research on the topic, which is proprietary research worth megabux, so I recommend checking it out.

In the past, we also covered a fully open source ESB project called Mulesource, and I interviewed the head of that company, Dave Rosenberg.

We have covered IONA's Open Source Service Bus, Celtix Enterprise.

There was also a very interesting white paper published on our site last June by Jitterbit, called The Case for Open Source Integration.

ebizQ's resident Human Intteraction Management Keith Harrison-Broninski took on the open source topic, writing an incisive feature called "A Simple Way to Evaluate Open Source."

We've got a ways to go, and we are working increase our coverage of open source topics. We're even hoping to bring on an expert blogger on open source topics soon. Please email me with your ideas.

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As part of our BPM in Action site roll out, we're absolutely thrilled to welcome one of our favorite analysts, Michael Dortch, to the ebizQ blog roll. You might recognize Michael's name from his excellent and timely analysis from Robert Frances Group, which is, on occasion, shared with the ebizQ community.

But you won't have heard of Michael only from ebizQ. Michael's work has appeared in virtually every leading business computing publication, and has been quoted in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and numerous other business and technical publications. He began his career at Yankee Group in the 1970s and is the author of "The ABCs of Local Area Networks," (Sybex, Inc.). He's presently director of IT Infrastructure Management Strategies and Executive Editor for RFG.

I invite you to bookmark Michael's BPM in Action blog feed here, and read and comment on his inaugural entry!

Welcome, Michael!

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ebizQ is excited to launch the BPM in Action Virtual Conference/Resource Center, one place where you can find articles, podcasts, research, white papers, Webinars and more, on planning, building and managing Business Process Management solutions. The site will also feature a blog by BPM expert Michael Dortch. He's presently director of IT Infrastructure Management Strategies and Executive Editor for Robert Frances Group (RFG).

On March 6th and 7th, ebizQ will also host a two-day virtual conference on BPM in Action, which will feature case studies and panel discussions from those who have successfully implemented BPM solutions.

Click here to visit BPM in Action, and you can register now for the conference!

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News just in today from http://www.cio.com: Indian outsourcer Firstsource Solutions has acquired BPM, a health-care claims outsourcing company in Delaware, and its two wholly owned operating subsidiaries, MedPlans 2000 and MedPlans Partners.

Firstsource paid about US$40 million for BPM and its subsidiaries, according to informed sources. The company has not disclosed the acquisition price.

A number of Indian business process outsourcing companies and software services companies are acquiring companies in the United States and Europe, to get market access and to offer near-shore services to its customers.

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In an article published today on ebizQ, Jon Pyke, CEO of The Process Factory, says, in elegant simplicity, that current workflow management strategy sucks. Read the article here.

The article is an expansion of other Jon Pyke comments made earlier on a post highlighted by ebizQ blogger Keith Harrison-Broninski, who wrote about Jon's recent Process Factory white paper on this subject.

So let me know your thoughts. Does workflow indeed suck? Should we hear more from Jon and Keith on this stuff?

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Check out this article by Rob Risany about Shakespeare's integration lessons for IT.

The comedy of errors occurs when business people expect to be able to personally use their BPEL-enabled SOA infrastructures to magically change the way they do business today. SOA and BPEL are not designed for business people. BPM is. The tools, methodologies, best practices – even the corporate cultures – of truly BPM enabled companies are different than those solely focused on BPEL and SOA.

Read more here!

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There's an interesting post today on Gartner's Unconventional Thinking blog, called "Honing the BPM Message," by Gartner VP David McCoy.

McCoy talks about how IT needs a new reputation:

BPM is appealing to the business side of the house, so much so that its principles are driving the business to knock on IT's door for technological assistance. In some cases, IT is caught off-guard, with no hype and story to promote. Some in IT "get" BPM, but many do not - especially the core of programmers who consider BPM to be a poor man's way to do systems development. Those who do get BPM see in it a new way to justify IT's value to the business. In theory, the business wants to be agile, and at the same time, it wants to be deterministic.

Read more here.

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