Kiran Garimella's BPM Blog

When BPM becomes really NICE

2007-05-31T20:51:46Z

I am back from a hectic round of travel: conferences, BPM Master Classes, client meetings, and vacation. I attended both the SharedInsights’ BPM conference in Ft. Lauderdale, FL, and the ISSSP conference in Scottsdale, AZ (yes, we evangelists live a tough life!)

At the SharedInsights’ conference, Roger Burlton, the conference chair, opened the proceedings with his keynote, “Business Process and Beyond.” One of his standard slides is his ROI graph. When I saw it a few years ago, I grew enamored with it. I think it is a really neat way to communicate the key drivers of ROI. The traditional MBA approach is to focus on the Y-axis, the money: reducing costs, improving productivity, increasing market channels, product innovation, and so on. For many companies, this is approaching the point of diminishing returns. Roger highlights the X-axis, the time. The competition is now in time-to-market, time-to-profit, and time-in-profit. This is nothing new, of course, expect for the increased focus that BPM brings to the X-axis. BPM’s role in improving the ROI from time, the “Return on Time (ROT)” if you will, is leading to ‘aha’ moments for people when presented this way.

At our BPM Master Classes, I introduce two other levers of profitability: the probability of delivery, and the probability of profit. The first highlights the very high failure rate of projects (60-70%), and the second highlights the challenge with delivering what the customer really wants (and is willing to pay for).

Just when I thought I had finally absorbed Roger’s ROI model, he comes up with another. This one is NICE (of course, it is nice, but that’s the acronym). Picture a 2 X 2 matrix. The X-axis represents ‘Understanding’ of the problem domain (values are: ‘little,’ and ‘lots’). The Y-axis represents ‘Detail’ of information about the problem domain (values are: ‘little,’ and ‘lots’).

When we have little detail and little understanding of the problem domain, our analysis of the problem is going to be ‘Naïve.’ The usual reaction to this is to acquire lots of data, i.e., a data warehouse or data mart project. However, lots of data with little understanding makes the whole problem domain incomprehensible (the 'I' of the model). This is congruent with my own experience, as I covered in my article ‘Re-Energizing BI with BPM’ in Data Management Review, April 2007.

It is possible to gain a understanding from an ocean of data, thus moving into the third cell of Roger’s NICE model. In this cell, the world is a complex (‘C’) entity, demanding tremendous amount of work trying to keep up with change. In my opinion, this is a terrible spot to be in, with data and information overload. More BI (as in the traditional approach) is guaranteed to take you here. The issue isn’t simply more understanding, but more understanding at a reasonable price.

The ROI for understanding comes in cell 4, ‘Elegant.’ Here, only the right information is delivered in a way that is intuitive, actionable, and relevant for solving critical business problems. This is the cell that is the result of applying Occam’s Razor diligently to a Complex model of the problem domain. Since it is impractical to insist that a company always reside in the ‘Elegant’ cell, ideally it should be able to quickly move through the first three steps (Naïve, Incomprehensible, and Complex) to come and rest in an elegant state. Those three phases should be no more than short-term perturbations in the system, while ‘Elegant’ should be the homeostatic condition that a company must aspire to.

The NICE model is the high bar that BPM must vault over to be truly useful.

How can I say "no" to Paris and Frankfurt in April?

2007-04-13T16:34:26Z

...especially given that I live in Milwaukee?

I just got back from a hectic tour in France and Germany. We held a BPM MasterClass in Frankfurt and Paris. This is the second time I have been in both cities; the first time I stayed at Sofitel within a stone’s throw from Versailles, and did not get a chance to visit it! This time, I did not get a chance to look around Frankfurt, but Paris offered a respite. We did a quick tour of Notre Dame (awesome!), swung by the Eiffel Tower (both during day and night), and plenty of walking through the streets. webMethods has an office next to the Arc de Triomphe. Paris in April – one cannot complain! Frankfurt ist auch eine schöne Stadt (Frankfurt is also a lovely city). 90 mph in a Mercedes Benz cab on the autobahn in Frankfurt is an experience!

There were a couple of interesting differences between audiences in Europe versus the US. For one, over 90% of those who registered showed up for the class; we had to scramble around to find extra chairs! Second, they all spoke at least two languages, more often three and even four. We English speakers were cautioned to stay away from idiomatic expressions and jokes based on the American context; apart from that, their fluency in English is astonishing. I wrongly assumed that the language barrier would prevent participation, but there was plenty of dialog; just as much as in a US class (and perhaps a tad more than the interaction we got at a couple of US locations).

The European attendees seemed less exposed to Six Sigma and Lean compared to their US counterparts; however, they showed greater appreciation for the concept of discipline. One favorite question I pose attendees is “Does their company have a Project Management Office, and if so, what is the attitude of the rest of the company towards the PMO?” I get the classic roll of the eyes: PMO is viewed as unnecessary bureaucracy (except by the PMO folks, of course). In an environment that demands agility and rapid execution, any hint of oversight, process, or tollgates is viewed negatively.

Not so in Europe. They seemed to appreciate the need for discipline. They do not make the mistake of confusing discipline for bureaucracy. Discipline means being responsible, having a plan, and sticking to it. Good financial traders know this. It turns out that the key to superior financial performance is to pick a decent trading strategy and stick to it without second-guessing it. Research shows that changing horses midstream is a sure way to get wet and miserable.

The best companies speak of “responsible growth,” meaning, how to grow shareholder value without compromising on ethics or taking on irresponsible risk. For public companies, governance has additional regulatory implications. But the concern remains, how do we take the concept of discipline and make it an enabler of agility and execution? How do we take out bureaucracy? One, by making discipline an integral part of what we do, so we make the time to do it. For example, no one complains about having to brush teeth every day. Two, by making space for it. Traditional project methodologies waste a lot of time discovering the current state of the business and by documenting requirements in different formats to suit different audiences.

When process governance is an integral part of BPM, it enforces this discipline. Governance becomes a seamless part of how projects are done and business operations are conducted. By eliminating the need for endless documentation and translation between various models of requirements, BPM also makes space for responsible behaviors in project execution and business operations.

Does lack of a formal Six Sigma or Lean methodology seriously hamper the quest for continuous process improvement? Hardly. While the formal methodologies are extremely useful, we are now seeing a move away from overly relying on the heavy frameworks towards a lighter approach. The caveat here is to adhere to the spirit of Six Sigma and Lean, and not to slide into bad techniques. Richard Douglass, webMethods’ VP of Global Industry Solutions, and an expert on Supply Chain, Manufacturing, and Six Sigma, spoke of continuous process improvement by using the principles of the formal methodologies even when not using the whole toolkit. The specific ‘get started’ strategy we advocate is to measure the state of your business first, and use real data and metrics to drive the discussion around process improvement.

These are some of the key messages that we will be delivering in Toronto next Tuesday. Joining us will be Yvon Berube, President of Logimethods, Inc., our systems integration partner in Canada. Neale Partington of SaskTel, our joint customer, will be sharing their experience implementing webMethods’ BPM. If you are in the general area of Toronto, we’d love to see you at this event.

The death of BPM (it ain’t over until it’s really over)

2007-03-26T22:12:27Z

At Gartner’s BPM Summit last month in San Diego, everything went fine until the last Gartner analyst left a lasting impression at the last session of the last day. Simon Hayward, VP and Gartner Fellow, who helped kick off the BPM Summit, has the dubious honor of also sounding its death knell. His bombshell? The prediction that, to paraphrase, “By the year 2012, BPM will be subsumed into major applications.” I forget the exact probability he assigned to this scenario, but it was precisely between 0.7 and 0.8 (both inclusive).

Predictably (i.e., with probably 1.0), there was violent disagreement from the audience. Their cries of “No!” reverberated in the auditorium. There was applause for attendees who spoke in protest. I am sure there was concern among the participants about the discipline of BPM itself vanishing (and with it, boondoggles to sunny climes), and among the vendors on the implied demise of their own companies. If Simon’s intention was to end the conference on a vigorous and memorable note of controversy, he definitely succeeded.

Now, I can’t predict the future as accurately as Gartner. I don’t know if BPM functionality will indeed be subsumed under applications from the largest app vendors. What I do know is that if it does happen, it will happen only if one of the following conditions is met:

one, a major app vendor will take over all the applications and supply one huge ERP that covers all businesses end-to-end for all the companies (regardless of size) on the entire planet and the space station;

two, app vendors will package BPM-like functionality without truly understanding what it means, thereby fooling themselves and all of their customers all the time.

Your guess is as good as mine (or Gartner’s) on the likelihood of these scenarios happening.

Conceptually, though, suggesting that BPM functionality will reside in apps is like saying operating system algorithms will be subsumed by applications (i.e., that OS functionality like system resource management, job scheduling, load management, memory management, etc. will be built into each and every application). Talk to your app vendor and ask them if they’d be willing to develop OS functionality (as in Unix and Windows) directly into their apps. Also, ask them if they’d be willing to create their own database engine rather than connect to an existing, independent DB engine. How about their own reporting solution?

BPM is to business processes what the OS is to IT programs: BPM is a process operating system. Just as an OS provides a ‘system process space’ context for pieces of running code, BPM provides a ‘business process space’ context for applications. What are the elements of this business process space context? A comprehensive answer is too long for this post, but it should include process metrics, process design, business semantics, and process governance (the analogy to the OS should be clear: an OS collects and displays system metrics, such as memory utilization, resource handles, CPU utilization etc.; for the design of applications, it provides an API to applications for accessing system level resources; it defines the system semantics through such APIs and through the use of semaphores, threads, handles, sockets, pipes, devices, etc.; it ‘responsibly’ manages the use of system resources to eliminate contention, resolve deadlock, terminate hanging processes, implement prioritized scheduling, etc.) Imagine an app vendor having to build this entire infrastructure (whether OS or BPM) into each application!

BPM provides the abstraction layer that is common to all applications that must function as responsible citizens in the corporate world, just as an OS provides an abstraction layer to all applications that must reside and play nicely together on a computer.

People attend BPM conferences because they see problems that are not (and cannot) be solved by their current stack of applications (CRM, ERP, G/L, etc.) These apps are in a terrible mess in their own right today because they are not designed according to SOA principles (some would question if they were designed in any way at all). App vendors have their work cut out in trying to fix application level problems. Why would anyone egg them on to take on functionality that is an order of magnitude more sophisticated and more abstract?

Let us hope that this is one Gartner prediction that will never come to pass.

eSeminar on BPM and Change Management

2007-03-14T14:39:43Z

"Understanding Business Process Management & the 'People' Factor of Process Change"

This is the first of three e-seminars on business process management sponsored by Talisen Technologies. I have been invited to join Howard Webb (Principal, the BPM Group) in this first e-seminar to discuss the “people aspect” of BPM and how change leaders are enabled by BPM adoption. The next two sessions will feature a discussion of process and technology aspects of BPM.

Change management and people issues are a neglected aspect of BPM adoption. In the BPM Master Classes that webMethods conducts, I frequently quiz the audience on their change management practices. Most technologists don't realize the importance of this. They assume that the cool technology of the day will win the hearts and minds of the business folks. In reality, business executives are besieged by change: from customers, competitors, and economic conditions. Many of them are barely coping with it. Asking them to deal with another change—a pretty radical one at that—is rather risky without employing some change management techniques.

While Howard will cover how to get support for BPM and link it with other process improvement efforts, I'll focus on the implications on an organization of implementing BPM.

Making the future become what it could be

2007-02-21T14:36:38Z

Recently I participated in a podcast with fellow ebizQ bloggers to make some fearless predictions for BPM in 2007. Making predictions, of course, is a dicey affair. There are only two ways to do it. Either you make a firm prediction and hang your hat on it, or you make a fairly general prediction that few can refute and fewer still will bother to do so.

One interesting example that actually achieved both objectives (unintentionally, of course) was this statement of Henry Ellsworth, Commissioner of the U.S. Patent Office, in his 1843 report to Congress: "The advancement of the arts, from year to year, taxes our credulity and seems to presage the arrival of that period when human improvement must end." This is apocryphally misquoted as: "Everything that can be invented has been invented."

Check out our fearless predictions on this podcast. Fellow intrepid gazers at the crystal ball are Keith Harrison-Broninski, James Taylor, Joe McKendrick, Sandy Kemsley, Michael Dortch, and David Kelly (whose article put the said crystal ball temptingly on our bloggers' table). Elizabeth Book, ebizQ's editor-in-chief, moderated the podcast.

Of course, if none of the predictions come true, then we'll borrow a leaf from Yogi Berra and claim that 'the future ain't what it used to be.'

But a large part of where the BPM market goes is really in our collective hands. One of the 'sooths' that I say is that there will be an increasing awareness and adoption of BPM within companies. It is up to us—bloggers and readers— to make sure this comes true, by actively evangelizing the benefits of BPM, educating our colleagues on the concepts of BPM, and boldly going where no ERP ever ventures.

I'll be in Chicago this Thursday, bravely spreading the word along with some of my colleagues through a BPM Master Class. Oh yes, the classes are free. Attendees get a free copy of my book ('The Power of Process'), and get to hear Bruce Williams, co-author of three 'For Dummies' books in Six Sigma and Lean. But most important, attendees get a ton of information and practical tips on BPM, plus a first-hand look at BPM in action through webMethods' Fabric 7.0 platform.

The Arrogance of IT (don't read this post!)

2007-02-06T15:09:25Z

Ignorance can be bliss. Knowledge can be dangerous. You have been warned!

Several years ago, I remember reading about a top business executive who commented on the arrogance of IT. Paraphrasing his statement, “IT is the only function that is so arrogant that IT professionals insist their business clients learn and speak the language of IT.” Of course, IT professionals don’t try to teach programming to the non-IT folks. So where does the arrogance of IT lie?

Consider that the IT-business divide is difficult to bridge precisely because IT keeps thinking of “special technical solutions” for what are essentially ‘end-to-end’ problems in business processes. Rules can’t be managed? Use a BRMS. Data can’t be managed? Use EDM. You don’t know what the data means? Use metadata. You don’t know what happened? Use BI. Need to manage customers and prospects? Use CRM. Can’t find all your documents? Use ECM. Need to comply with SOX? Buy some shrink-wrapped panacea.

But business users don’t think or operate this way. They don’t compartmentalize their minds while running their company. Only IT forces them to do so. Let us say a business executive wakes up one day and says, “I think we have a problem with our loan processing. I hear anecdotes about our competition undercutting us. I have to find out what the data actually shows. Are all our financial products suffering equally? Do we have similar issues in Europe? I wonder how well our underwriting rules perform. In fact, where are our underwriting policy documents? Is everyone using the same policy document? I know we made some changes, so maybe there are different versions floating about. I must solve this problem.”

Unfortunately, the moment this executive encounters an IT manager in the corridor, he says, “We have a problem. We can’t locate the data. We are struggling with dropping loan revenues. Can you get me some reports?”

The IT manager says, “Sure, what you need is a BI solution.”

The executive then encounters an IT program manager. “I am afraid our salespeople are using different rate sheets. In fact, I think even our underwriters are working with different versions of the underwriting policy. Everywhere, it is the same problem. How do we fix this?”

The program manager says, “There are ways to manage our enterprise content. There are software applications called ECM suites. We should buy one of those. I’ll start the evaluation process right away.”

Executives don’t verbalize their internal problem definitions in front of IT, partly because they have been conditioned to ‘simplify’ requirements, partly because they don't think gets it.

A few years later, this company is saddled with a BI application, an ECM suite, a CRM package, and a bunch of other applications. What’s more, there is now a huge IT staff maintaining all those applications. However, the executive is no closer to solving the original problem that brought on all this investment. To crack that problem, this hapless executive (or their equally frustrated employees) must now run to all of the above applications and try to make sense of them. Some IT people don’t understand this, because they never face those problems. Of course, if pushed, they will profess an intellectual appreciation, but it is not part of their emotions or their DNA. Those that do get it are bogged down administering the complexity of the existing systems that were bequeathed to them.

This—the forced segmentation or compartmentalization of requirements that business users employ in talking to IT—is the subtle sense in which IT has indoctrinated their business colleagues into adopting IT-speak. Why else would someone in the business walk up to a developer and ask for one additional field to be programmed into their CRM screen?

If IT professionals actually sit in the hot seat running a non-IT business for a few months, their outlook would change. They might just build a business architecture platform that actually works, even if it runs on paper.

(It’s not too late to stop reading!)

Fortunately, whether through design or happenstance, we do have such a business architecture platform today. It is called BPM. It is the one platform that ties all these functional capabilities together and gives them a complete business context. How it accomplishes all this, and how it should co-exist or coordinate with these compartmentalized solutions and legacy systems (which do have specialized uses), are deeper issues.

In the past, ignorance and lack of technological sophistication were good excuses for proliferating the 'arrogant' attitude. But if you read this far, despite my warning, you now know about BPM. You have no excuse for not adopting it. Sorry!

BPM isn’t just one more application package. It is not BRMS. It is not ECM. It is not BI. It is not CRM. It is not ERP. IT doesn't matter. As Smith and Fingar say, "Business processes do."

And for that, let us be thankful.

(To learn more about what BPM is and what it does, sign up for a BPM Master Class!)

Paper, paper, everywhere, but nothing intelligent to read

2007-02-02T15:11:01Z

Let me expand on the intersection of ECM and BPM from my earlier post.

Enterprise content is basically of two kinds: (a) content that denotes knowledge of the what and the how of business operations (or processes, if you will); and (b) content that denotes the outcome or product of those operations or processes. The former includes price lists, business rules, decisioning rules, policies, organization structures, roles, compliance rules, product categories, business entities, etc. I call these the ‘knowledge artifacts.’ The latter are the actual transactional documents (such as loan applications, orders, and service requests) and several kinds of non-transactional documents (such as website content, email, and presentations). The set of knowledge artifacts is relatively static in size and functions as a Book of Knowledge for the company. In contrast, transactional documents are generated in huge volumes. They must be stored, indexed, searched, imaged, retained, retrieved, destroyed, and reported; these specialized capabilities and associated technologies are the domain of ECM. However, the Book of Knowledge is better served under BPM, because knowledge artifacts must be dealt with in the context of business processes. To take artifacts of knowledge out of the context of business processes and to manage them outside a BPMS makes no sense.

As far as ECM is concerned, Bruce Silver observes that there is considerable investment in content repositories. True, but there is even more investment in paper than in ECM. That doesn't mean companies should continue to proliferate paper, or that BPM doesn't have anything to say about that. ECM looks at the huge mounds of paper and electronic documents, takes that as an immutable fact, and tries to offer a solution for dealing with it. It addresses the symptoms, not the disease. There is nothing wrong with that, since the symptoms need treatment. But, with all the advances in technology, BPM questions (or at least, I do) why there has to be paper in the first place. I do not claim that this problem can be solved right away, which is why ECM and Document Management will continue to exist. Hopefully, after another twenty years, much of this mountain of data will be past its retention period, and will be mercifully incinerated or consigned to be bit bucket.

In the meantime, companies should employ BPM and Continuous Process Improvement to avoid generating unstructured transactional documents (paper & electronic) in the first place, and to store artifacts of process knowledge within process models. I know this is not possible in some areas because paper documents are legally more acceptable than electronic ones, but at least consider the option. Like the fitness mantra says, stop the insanity.

Know thyself (or, BPM is an ECM disenfranchiser)

2007-01-30T05:19:49Z

Most companies worry about what competitors are doing, how the economy is doing, what competitors are up to, and where interest rates are headed. (Which reminds me of the wag who said he knew exactly how interests would behave in the future. “Interest rates will rise, or they will fall, unless, of course, they stay flat!”)

But few companies worry about what they know and what they don’t know about their own business operations. They are woefully equipped to innovate, respond to competitive threats, or adapt to changing conditions. Consider that each of these situations begins with a mad scramble to figure out where the business stands. The managers are asking themselves, “What does my business process look like? Who performs in what roles? Where are the operations policies? Who is following them, and who isn’t? How do our business metrics look like?” I have never seen any exception to this, not one situation where the affected manager said, “Here is the latest and greatest repository of our corporate knowledge. It is completely up-to-date. Let us consult it before responding to the change.” It’s not that the managers don’t realize the importance of such self-knowledge, but that it comes with a huge price tag—in time, if not in money; but then, time is money.

Years ago, I helped a soap manufacturer analyze their business to see what their most profitable brands were. It turned out that rather than any specific soap line, a byproduct of the soap manufacturing process called oxalic acid (a key reagent in many industrial chemical reactions), was the most profitable one. So, this soap industrialist could have taken the process part way and stopped when oxalic acid was created, and turned completely profitable. (They didn’t choose that; instead, they found out that their company was sitting on prime real estate that could be more profitable as a shopping mall. Besides, shopping malls smell better than a soap factory, so that’s what they did).

The point of this story is that BPM has interesting byproducts that you wouldn’t think are worth much. You start off a BPM project to reduce cycle time for order processing, only to discover that linking ordering processing and shipping business rules to the process steps turned out to be the best thing since sliced bread. BPM, it turns out, is a perfect vehicle to capture and maintain process knowledge. Which reminds of the recent discussion about BPM, ECM, and security in posts by Ismael Ghalimi and James McGovern.

If BPM takes on management of process knowledge, as I think it should, what’s left for ECM? Will ECM morph into the middleware for management of transactional documents? After all, it seems pretty evident by now that we will never be a paperless society. Besides, a lot of enterprise content will be on PostIt notes (to the utter delight of 3M). So, if we leave transactional documents for ECM and Document Management, then Knowledge Management can be carved out for BPM. The interesting thing is, BPM doesn’t even break into a sweat while dealing with knowledge management. It is an effortless (almost, but not quite) byproduct of process modeling and process management.

Would that knowing oneself (in the spiritual sense) was similarly a byproduct of some fun activity (like watching Monday night football).

Slaughter all the tall ones

2007-01-25T23:45:53Z

At the beginning of the thirteenth century, the Tatars of the East were a ferocious people. They were very effective at raiding and plundering. Their most remarkable aspect was their speed of execution. They copied Caesar’s ‘Veni, vidi, vici’ mantra, but conveniently omitted the ‘vidi.’ Not for them the survey of their opponents or any attempt at understanding them. Instead, they came as a flood and departed, seemingly in one breath, leaving behind total destruction. They nipped at the edges of Genghis Khan’s empire so persistently that he was determined to either exterminate them or discipline them. Fortunately for both parties and unfortunately for his enemies, he managed to discipline them by the simple expedient of killing any Tatar who was taller than the axle of one of his desert carts (James Michener, Poland).

Every time I talk to both IT and business users, listening to their description of the mess of applications, I am reminded of the Tatars. Like each set of functional applications may be very effective, much like a small band of Tatars. But best of breed solutions do not make up a coherent enterprise architecture, just as the Tatars never won any major wars or leave any lasting legacy behind them. It took a Genghis Khan to control them, and orchestrate them into his campaigns. Before you start wondering if you should pull the plug on applications that don’t conform to the axle wheel of your architecture stack, consider how to achieve the same positive outcome—discipline—without resorting to catastrophic measures.

Firstly, realize that discipline need not be boring or bureaucratic. Secondly, discipline need not add overhead; in fact, properly cultivated, discipline can increase speed of execution. Thirdly, discipline can become part of corporate culture, a habit, a way of doing business. It means picking an investment strategy and sticking to it, without second-guessing it or letting your emotions upset it. It means growing your company in a responsible way (i.e., paying attention to risk). It means complying with the highest standards of business ethics. It means methodically ticking off the pre-flight checklist before takeoff without relying on memory, even though you have done it a thousand times before.

To institutionalize discipline, a governance process is essential. This is the umbrella process that ensures all other project methodologies, ways of doing business, operational mechanisms, etc. comply with best practices, ethical guidelines, and regulation. In the context of process management and its cousin, SOA, governance implies, among other things, the following:
• Processes & services are documented correctly and completely
• Documentation is maintained and kept current
• Projects reuse processes and services
• Implementations take into account the full end-to-end process, and not just the sub-process that is in scope for the project
• There are policies for submitting processes and services into the repository, and that these policies are followed
• Processes that are executing are monitored against key performance indicators, and that proper alerts and notifications are in place

This is not an exhaustive treatment of governance, of course. But the key is that companies cannot avoid the consequences of non-governance. They will end up paying the piper sometime. But companies do have option of making governance part of their corporate culture. To do so, top executives must be ready to lead the change in mindset. At some point, they must be prepared to pay for solutions that are comprehensive and address the various aspects of governance.

If you spot a copy of the Management Secrets of Genghis Khan floating about your CEO’s office, quietly substitute it with the Power of Process.

As versatile as Sanders, as safe as Blyton

2007-01-17T16:38:32Z

I discovered Lawrence Sanders when I read his murder-mystery, First Deadly Sin, as an impressionable teenager. His writing is brilliant, the characterization is remarkable, and the plot is well orchestrated. The book was subsequently made into a unmemorable movie, with a completely mis-cast Frank Sinatra playing the detective Edward X. Delaney. Sanders went on to write more murder mysteries in the Deadly Sin series. He would have gone down in history as an excellent writer if he had stopped with this. But he was just getting started. He went on to write a chilling science fiction novel, The Tomorrow File. Then he started on his famous Commandment series. (Funnily enough, I found several books in this series displayed on the “Religion” table at a book fair; I warn you, don’t present any of Sanders’ books to minors!)

Sanders also wrote a psycho thriller (The Case of Lucy Bending), and in his final years, his McNally series. This is not all. I haven’t covered his Wolf Lannihan stories and a bunch of other writings. What is remarkable is that each of these genres has a different writing style; the mood is different (ranging from mystery-noir to light-hearted, flippant protagonists, to an orthogonally different dystopian sci fi); the vocabulary is different. It’s as if he had a multiple personality disorder, except in his case, it shouldn't be called a disorder.

BPM is a bit like that. It is imbued (as opposed to afflicted) with multiple facets. It’s a technology…no, it’s a form of enterprise architecture…no, it’s a set of practices…no, it’s a management philosophy…wait, it’s all of the above! BPM pervades the entire business. (Proof: The business of companies is business. Companies carry out business through business processes. Business processes are, by definition, the domain of Business Process Management. BPM, therefore, covers everything that a company does. Q.E.D.)

I do not believe that BPM is a piece of technology alone. I do not believe that BPM can be truly effective without technology. Like Sanders, BPM is versatile. Unlike Sander’s books, it is rated ‘G’ so that it is safe for ‘minors’ (i.e., those who are just dipping their feet into BPM and those who are not experts in leading-edge technologies).

I am thrilled to be blogging for ebizQ. Through this medium, I hope to share with the world at large my thoughts about this vast ocean. About the power of BPM.

Welcoming Kiran Garimella to ebizQ!

2007-01-17T13:25:19Z

Guest post from Elizabeth Book, ebizQ's editor-in-chief:

This week, we bid farewell to David Ogren, the originator of BPM-Blog, and we welcome Kiran Garimella, who will be "BPM-blogging" in the same location.

David, a BPM thought leader who has hung his hat with several enterprise technology vendors; with Sun, with Fuego, and most recently with BEA after its acquisition of Fuego, has decided to take a break from blogging. We very much look forward to hearing more of him and from him in the future. For posterity, we want to leave David's blogging archives in place.

But starting today, we welcome Kiran Garimella, a VP of webMethods, as a new blogger on ebizQ. Kiran has a flair for the dramatic, having recently published a novel about BPM, called The Power of Process: Unleashing the Source of Competitive Advantage.

You will see what I mean about a flair for the dramatic when you read Kiran's first entry in BPM-Blog.

Happy reading!

BPM Retiring

2007-01-15T04:41:14Z

I've been blogging for roughly two and half years (counting both my Sun blog and BPM Blog). It's been great in a lot of ways. But blogging while keeping up the pace of working in a startup, and simultaneously keeping the confidentiality of the customers I've been working with, has been a challenge. So, as you've noticed, I haven't been blogging regularly.

So, I'm going to take a vacation from blogging. I'm retiring BPM Blog. Thanks to all of the readers over all the years. Blogging has made reality out of the "everyone is a publisher" vision of the internet.

Thanks again for reading.

David

ALBPM 5.7

2006-10-10T20:51:01Z

Today, at BEAWorld Prague, we announced AquaLogicBPM 5.7. Read the press release for all of the details. It's actually been available on the download site for a couple of days, but BEAWorld Prague is the official launch event.

I don't want to repeat the laundry list of features from the press release, but there are really two core themes. The first is localization, especially Asian localization as I've mentioned before. The second is alignment with BEA and BEA's position as the SOA market leader. This theme is vary broad: including both technical features (like UDDI integration), functional additions (like process librarians and templates), as well as marketing/branding updates (BEA licensing and branding).

Anyway, I've been using ALBPM 5.7 for a little while now and I'm happy that the rest of the world is going to get to use it too.

Visio XML file converter

2006-10-03T20:30:04Z

I've been remiss in posting for a while; I'm still trying to get caught up from my Asia trip. More late this week but here's a quick post to get started.

Microsoft Visio has two formats it can use to store diagrams. A proprietary format (VSD) and a relatively new XML based format (VisioXML). Because VisioXML format is much more open it is the format required by many tools that can import from Visio. This includes many BPM tools (including BEA AquaLogicBPM) that can import from Visio. It also includes many other diagramming tools such as OmniGraffle Pro, a diagramming tool I use on my Mac.

Unfortunately, because the proprietary VSD format is still the default format in Visio, most people are still not using VisioXML. When I receive a Visio file attachment from a customer, it's almost always in the proprietary format. This usually means I have to track down a PC and a copy of Visio to convert the file.

However, I've found an online service that will convert from VSD to VisioXML. So if you are using AquaLogicBPM Studio and need to import a VSD, you can use this site to convert the VSD to the needed VisioXML format.

Back from Asia

2006-09-13T04:55:24Z

Well I'm back from my trip to Japan and China. Obviously I didn't get the chance to make this blog a travel diary, like I planned. I've never dealt well with jet lag or dealt with living out of a hotel well. Definitely a disadvantage considering how much travel I had. The result, however, was that I'd wake up at 5:00am and would spend a couple hours trying to get caught up on the email that had arrived overnight from the states during daylight hours. Then a full day teaching class. Then dinner and other social events with our students and hosts. At which point I'd be exhausted and would typically go to sleep right after getting back to the hotel.

Not that I'm complaining. Our hosts in Tokyo and Beijing were fabulous. Many thanks go out to Michiya Matsumoto and Kunio Aoki of BEA BID Japan and Song Hu, the BPM expert of China. As I mentioned in my last post this was my first trip to Asia and these guys not only made sure that we didn't have any logistical issues with the training but also made sure that I (and my co-instructor) had a great time. We visited Mount Fuji, the Hakone Jinjya shrine, and a hot spring onsen in Japan and Tienamen Square and the Forbidden City in Beijing. These are all things that I never thought I would see in my lifetime. I was filled with awe to stand in Tienamen Square: a place that was the heart of the ancient Chinese empire, the site of "June 4th Incident" and the resulting turmoil, and the heart of what was once a very foreign and intimidating country to me. (As someone who grew up in the 1970's I still remember "Red China".)

The clickable pictures to the right are from our Tokyo and Beijing training events, respectfully. The first is a class picture after all of the students had presented their final projects. (The training we conducted has a hands on case study lab that is very challenging.) They look very happy to have survived their peer review! The second picture is Song Hu teaching. Since language was more of a barrier in our Beijing class, Song and the rest of the BEA Systems Engineers helped out with a lot of the instruction and translation.

All in all it was very exciting to be bringing the Business Process Management vision to Asia. Although we still think of BPM is as emerging technology in the Americas and Europe, it is truly leading edge in Asia. Being able to present a solution that not only is a leader in the space but also meets all of their localization and internationalization needs, and also has a local team to support them is a powerful message. I have high hopes for AquaLogicBPM in Asia. I'm headed back to my regular job, which is largely US-centric, but will be following up with my hosts to see how BPM can cross this cultural divide.