Well I have some good news and some bad news. President-elect Obama has announced the U.S. will have BPM for everyone in the person of a U.S. government chief performance officer. The nominee is a McKinsey consultant named Nancy Killefer.
The bad news is, I suspect, to Ms. Killefer (and therefore to Obama) BPM means business performance measurement. So memo to the Business Process Management world: We need a new acronym.
The battle has gone on for so long over the two BPMs.
As I posted about on January 2, "our BPM" has been around for over 100 years. But that doesn't matter any more. All Ms. Killefer has to do is throw out a few of "her BPMs" at a press conference or two over the next few years, and those damn guys at the BPM Forum end up winning :) Obviously they know it and have already rubbed our noses in it with the press release.
The strange thing is that I have been in this situation before. When IDC started researching BPM back around 2000, Henry Morris--of analytical applications fame--was already using BPM to mean--you guessed it: business performance measurement. (Actually somewhere along the line I think Henry changed it to business performance management.) IDC did not want the same acronym meaning two different things in its software taxonomy so at IDC, until recently, "our BPM" was called business process automation (BPA). I think my successor at IDC, Maureen Fleming, finally got IDC to drop the charade.
But now the game is on again and we have probably lost. So I suggest you all get ready to call what you think of as BPM, BPA. Or, maybe even workflow. This could end up more interesting than the difference between free/libre and open source software.
If you have any better suggestions to overcome this tragic situation, send me an email or leave a comment.
-- Dennis Byron
Those are some of the questions we would like to answer. Previous industry-specific articles have covered BPM in Insurance, BPM in Financial Services (certainly a hot topic in 2008), BPM in Government (sure to be a hot topic in 2009 at least in the U.S.), and so forth. In addition to such industry-specific examples, other articles in 2008 covered SOA vis a vis BPM, and the Role of BPM in Enterprise Governance.
Next up is "BPM in Financial Management" in February 2009. We are looking for examples of how BPM is used in basic accounting, customer/supplier accounting (and variations of that in healthcare or other services industries where the terminology may differ), treasury management, government compliance, and controller/auditor functions.
If you sell such a product, I will email you the survey instrument if you will simply send me an email at dennis@ebizq.net. If you would prefer to be interviewed, put that in the email and we can set up a time.
If you are an IT guy or BPM expert--an employee or consultant--implementing such a project in or for a CFO or other financial manager, send me an email and I will contact you.
The article on BPM in Financial Management is tentatively scheduled for release in mid-February 2009. A company's product(s) or projects may be mentioned based on my secondary research but if you would like to formally participate, contact me by Monday January 26, 2008 at dennis@ebizq.net.
-- Dennis Byron
]]>"Sure! What's a community manager?"
Well I've been doing it now for a few months and I hope you find it useful. In 25 words or less, it means
"I am acting on your behalf to find, report and occassionally write real interesting stuff about business process management (BPM), stuff you don't have time to surf for yourself."
What I'm doing varies as follows (and you have a role too or it's not a community).
So I'm here for you when it comes to BPM. Let me know what you'd like to see.
-- Dennis Byron
]]>So, thanks to your input, the nominees are (in alphabetical order):
In turns out that it really doesn't matter to the accuracy of my search for the source of the term BPM if one of these name-brand BPM companies first used the term in 1994 or 1997 or 1999 or 2000. As Steve Nicholson of Stephen Nicholson and Associates, Melbourne, pointed out in response to my initial blog post, the Business Process Management Journal (not to be confused with the recently started IBM Business Process Management Journal) was first published in 1995.
That means the term must have been floating around academia for some time before that. So I went to academia to ask my question and Professor Michael zur Muehlen,. Director of the Center of Excellence in Business Process Innovation at Stevens Institute of Technology in New Jersey tells me:
" Sorry, I think there's been a lot of uses in the (pre-1990s) past, not all traceable. Some people trace it back to Taylor's idea of Scientific Management; I have seen others refer to 18th century sources..."
But ironically, Dr. zur Muehlen also points to Michael Zisman's thesis at the University of Pennsylvania in 1978 as "the first description of a modern workflow system" and seminal to BPM thinking. That's ironic because Zisman is on the board of Metastorm (or was at the time of its now-withdrawn SEC IPO filing) and Metastorm appears to be repositioning itself away from the term BPM.
Oh well it was a good end-of-year, slow-news-period research exercise.
]]>But most likely, if history is any indicator, nothing will happen over the holidays.
So see you on January 2.
Happy New Year.
-- Dennis Byron
Preparing the article reminds me that ebizQ watches close to 100 software products that support the business process management (BPM) value proposition. If your company (if you are a supplier) or your supplier (if you are a user) is not listed in the article, drop me an email at dennis@ebizq.net and I will follow up.
In ebizQ topic terms, the business process management value proposition encompasses:
These are the topics you see as branch points under the subject area "Improving Business Processes", which in turn branches off the ebizQ home page. If you would like to suggest other topics related to improving business processes, also send me an email.
And look for my 2009 predictions the first week of January.
-- Dennis Byron
]]>Combining the two strains of thought, I expressed my surprise that after 4 years--during which I had not been researching BPM in any detailed manner--that there was still a BPML/BPEL controversy.
Well the above paragraph is not entirely accurate: the current debate is between BPEL (Business Process Execution Language) and the Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) standard, which emerged as a remnant of BPML. It surprised me because I thought, and many of you agreed, that one was a notation language with no execution engine and the other was an execution engine with a very fundamental non-notational language.
So what's the debate?
Well it turns out that the debate is not really about the BPMN that I had looked at 4 years ago. The debate rages in my opinion because there is a new standard, BPMN 2.0 (or 1.2--but who cares), under consideration. That's because the BPMN I knew in 2004 was turned over to the OMG in 2005. Apparently the OMG had hoped to peacefully merge BPMN with a standard it had been developing at the time, called the Business Process Definition Metamodel (BPDM). (Among my other biases against de jure standards, I hate keeping track of all the acronyms. Wintel is a standard you don't have to look up. VHS is a standard whose meaning you understood even if you never saw a Betamax tape.)
According to Wikipedia:
"BPDM is an alternative to the existing process interchange format XPDL (XML Process Definition Language) from the WfMC (Workflow Management Coalition). The two specifications are similar in that they can be used by process design tools to exchange business process definitions. They are different in that BPDM provides a specification of semantics integrated in a metamodel, and it includes additional modeling capabilities such as choreography... In addition, XPDL has many implementations, though only some support for XPDL 2.x, needed for interchanging BPMN. BPDM implementations are in preparation, including support for BPMN, and translation to XPDL."
So the issue in my opinion is that unable for whatever reason to combine BPMN and BPDM, and not really caring about the Business Process Management Initiative's decision in 2004 to drop BPML in favor of BPEL (see earlier post), OMG is off to the races with a new competing standard. It's because we have these multiple standards groups, that we have competing standards.
I am not even going to figure out which supplier is for which standard. I know the answer if I ask them will be: "We're for both!"
In addition the new BPMN/BPDM combo was originally supposed to be approved in September 2006. Instead--surprise/surprise--the new standard is still working its way through the OMG standards process. I say that based on conversations with OMG members. I can't find any exact information about the progress on the OMG web site but my real message is: It doesn't matter!
According to those participating, the question is deciding where the handoff between analyst and developer takes place from a standards point of view, and how much programming work there is left to do after the handoff. The right answer should be there is no handoff and no further work to do after the model is done. But in the standards-debate view, there are still two roles--analyst and developer--and the roles need to talk to each other better. In addition the new hybrid role, modeler, gets thrown into the discussion.
Among the vendor community, Active Endpoints has been most vocal about this debate at least on the record. (An early Oasis BPEL TC member, Active Endpoints is also actively pushing the standard down the open-source road via a related organization called ActiveBPEL.) Mike Rowley of Active Endpoints tells me the extent of the conflict depends on whether the eventually approved version of BPMN 2.0 (or is it 1.2?) allows things like a WSDL specification of services or permits expressions the way Xpath did/does. Active Endpoints believes the market would be best served by the two standards remaining complementary. The company believes notations must be first serialized into an execution-focused language like BPEL because no notation system can specify everything that needs to be done. Active Endpoints believes that's why most modeling-oriented approaches end up frustrating business analysts and forcing developers to write lots of Java code to implement simple processes.
So it appears the market is no closer to providing a simple seamless standard method of executing a model. And more important a simple seamless method of changing a model in response to customer or supplier demands, or a merger, or a government regulation (TARP anyone; how are you going to model and measure your CEO's excessive compensation?)
Now the market is going to decide. Which is the way I prefer it anyways.
[As an aside, BPEL is also evolving under a movement called BPEL4People that is intended to make it more human-centric-workflow based. OASIS doesn't appear to want to get involved. So that effort is even slower--maybe even stalled--than the BPMN/BPDM exercise within OMG.]
]]>The first is this article that says "BPM and SOA: Where IT Is Going if Real People Take It There" by David Chassels, CEO, Procession.Dave says the
"Time has come to focus on where business is created."
The second is a two-part series BPM: Knowing the Future Means Knowing the Past by Vickesh Dhookie, who has consulted to major banks in South Africa, as well as an insurance company, the government and a mining company. The link gets you to part I and hopefully, subject to the fact that we're still working out the kinks in the new web site, Part I will get you to Part II. As anyone who reads my articles knows, I like such historical dramas.
And if you have a point of view on BPM that you'd like to express in 800-1200 words or so, send me an email care of dennis@ebizq.net with a short description. As community manager, I'll provide editorial help and any other advice you'd like. Both users and suppliers are welcome to submit such guest editorials. There are a few rules--basically don't make it a blatant product pitch for your company. Other than that, fire away: your peers would like to know what you think.
-- Dennis Byron
]]>"In the current market conditions, organizations will look to streamline processes even further, utilizing products such as business process management (BPM), data integration, data quality, master data management (MDM), compliance and risk solutions and corporate performance management."
I'm interpreting "even further" to "outpace market" because overall Gartner is pessimistic about what you'll be spending overall on enterprise software next year. In fact, I don't know exactly how it got from its pessimistic tone to a prediction of 6%-plus growth. I would guess (a word I could not use when I was predicting this number at IDC) more like flat.
There is a couple of things to remember about "software spending" when you see press releases such as this from Gartner or IDC.
It is the latter type of project where business process management (BPM) software is most relevant. There is not enough of an installed base yet to make it a major factor in the maintnenance or upgrade category and BPM is rarely bundled in at the factory.
So, on one hand (good IDC/Gartner speak), BPM is going to be on lists of projects that get cut in the economic downturn that is upon us before maintenance/upgrade expenses get cut. But on the other, as Gartner points out, you need BPM to streamline processes.
-- Dennis Byron
]]>My biases come from involvement in the 88open, the beginnings of the Object Management Group (OMG), and various users groups. If you are a user with good experiences with standards and/or standards organizations, please comment or send me an email if you feel the need to counteract my negativity. But basically my advice to users is to key on the functionality no matter what the standards status of a particular piece of software and--except in the rarest circumstances--only acquire software that is going to return your investment in 12 months no matter how many standards it meets.
I mention the above in order to set the stage for this two-part BPM Viewpoint on the BPM Standards Debate of 2008 because four years ago, in November 2004, while at IDC, I wrote (with some grammatical corrections to make it readable today and a few interspersed notes):
"Near term, I believe vanilla business process orchestration will be done with web services and therefore the Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) makes sense. (Note: officially, BPEL is an OASIS-approved dejure standard, WS-BPEL 2.0, approved in April 2007, about five years after Microsoft and IBM created it. The WS stands for Web Services.)
"However longer term, performance needs and attempts to develop market differentiation will lead to outright competitors to or non-standard implementations of BPEL. Given the support of IBM, Microsoft, Oracle (Collaxa) and SAP (Note: the four largest enterprise software suppliers by a wide margin), BPEL compliance by BPM software suppliers will most likely be a must have for RFP checklist reasons even if competitors or non-standard implementations become more popular.
"The open-source BPEL engines now emerging in the market and others on the near horizon will make it easy for BPM vendors to include a BPEL engine as an RFP check off item even if they do not want to devote a lot of development dollars to BPEL and/or do not believe in BPEL's long-term success.
"...until June 2004, there was another competing business-process language standard called the Business Process Markup Language (BPML), promoted by an industry consortium called the Business Process Management Initiative (BPMI). BPML had more of an ecommerce-workflow-specific view of the world than the industry movers and shakers behind BPEL seemed to want turned into a software commodity, which is what standards do to technologies. With its definition of enterprise business processes, the definition of multi-party collaborations, as well as the definition of how complex Web services interact in BPM, BPML might have been a better choice long term (Note: I believe the big win for BPM is in inter-legal-entity workflows).
"The battle between BPEL and BPML ended in June 2004 with BPMI officially endorsing BPEL (Note: Basically they withdrew BPML because of the challenge of competing with a competing standard endorsed by four companies that account for half of the software market). BPMI's next project was promoting the Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) standard for BPM modeling tools that had been included with BPML. The group subsequently hoped to provide a semantic-model standard and a query language standard, to operate "on top of" and "beside" BPEL respectively in a stack metaphor.
"These efforts of course could put BPMI/BPMN back in competition with OASIS. But it appears as if BPMI wants to become more like The Open Group, in terms of promoting standards adherence, rather than being a standards group itself (Note: BPMI subsequently became part of the OMG, not really the best thing it could have done if it wanted to be like The Open Group)."
Back in 2004 I was happy to get the issue of BPM standards off my plate. All the major suppliers--my clients at IDC--agreed on one standard, which in my opinion, didn't matter anyways from a market research perspective.
I also had the strong impression based on the questions that my clients were asking me, that they didn't care much about BPM standards either. I don't recall the question coming up once in 2005. I took a sabbatical in 2006. I concentrated on market research in another technology area in 2007 and only returned to closely researching the BPM market in 2008.
So I have to say, I was surprised to find a debate raging over BPMN and BPEL. It was like I had never left. The current iteration of the debate dated at least from September 2008 (if not earlier--see Lombardi's Phil Gilbert in 2006). As I pointed out in ebizQ's "More from the Web" section over the last two months, two bloggers in particular seemed to have joined the fray: Bruce Silver and Ismael Ghalimi (also see our unrelated blog post on Ismael's company, Intalio, on December 4). But it has raged elsewhere in the BPM blogosphere as well (see posts by José D. De la Cruz, David French, Michael Rowley, and Pierre Vigneras).
But when I read all of the above mentioned posts, I decided I was missing something. It didn't appear that anything had changed since 2004. So why the debate? When I asked on the BPM in Action blog on December 4 "What Do You Think about BPMN and BPEL?", one of you commented it's the difference between "UML vs. Java." Another reader emailed me to say, it "is sort of like asking engine vs. transmission - they are complementary and both have a place in the lifecycle from process design to execution (respectively)." That was my opinion as well.
So part II of this Viewpoint will dig down deeper, looking forward where the above looks back.
---- Dennis Byron
Update: This post originally said "two good bloggers" referring to Bruce Silver and Ismael Ghalimi. I apologize if anyone thought I meant that the other bloggers mentioned were not "good bloggers." What I meant to say was "two bloggers in particular" (that is, good in the sense that they had written about the subject frequently)
]]>On November 22, 2008, I blogged about an interesting BPM software company, Macronetics. I characterized it as taking a Data-centric View of BPM. In this podcast we have Dr. Vinh Nguyen, CEO at Macronetics, to tell us more.
When I first met Vinh in 2005 the company was still incubating. It has made a lot of progress in the three years since in terms of strategic relationships and developing what was in 2005 a new technology perspective on BPM.
On the strategic relationship front, we saw in October how Macronetics' BPM software was being bundled into the JNetDirect business intelligence (BI) software. The combination is an example of the intelligent process automation trend I have described in the BPM in Action blog.
On the technology front, the thing that interests me is that Macronetics has an interesting approach to automating workflow. It is based on a powerful little context-based workflow modeling engine. At the heart of Macronetics' Automate BPM suite is a finite state machine embedded in a data environment. Data is bound to user forms, external applications, databases, web services, and other data in the context to make workflow business rules. In fact, the only way to change the workflow status is through manipulation of the context data.
But lets let Vinh explain it, which I am sure he can do better than I... just spend a few minutes listening to this podcast.
-- Dennis Byron
Coincidentally I had a discussion on this topic with Intalio's Ismael Ghalimi on December 5th. Ismael thinks he's found a solution (see his blog for more details) to the need for BPM consultants (or even to the need for guys from the IT staff for that matter). This is important, especially when mergers, acquisition, suppliers, customers or common sense say you need to make the inevitable changes to your business processes--and therefore to your BPM software.
Intalio's response to this situation is the acquisition of a PERL/JAVA-based BPM process-design product called "Process Square." Process Square already has customers like Allianz and ABB. It will be incorporated with current Intalio "business process platform" products (which I call BPM middleware) into a suite called it Intalio Business Edition. It simplifies the notation required to model workflow, it supports easy transition from the model to executable, and--most important--it supports the inevitable changes mentioned above.
The more interesting thing for Intalio and Ismael, whom I first met when I first started researching the middleware market at IDC in 2003 and needed someone to explain to me what the heck pi-calculus was, is that he is no longer in the BPM middleware market. With some of the acquisitions and open-source community relationships he has made, Intalio is lining up total middleware functionality one for one with the big namebrand enterprise software suppliers. In addition to the Business Edition described above, he has added or will be adding a Developers Edition of Intalio BPP.
In for a dime, in for a dollar.
-- Dennis Byron
]]>I've got my Irish up over in the IT Investment Research space about a European Union (EU)-based front group's proposal to "open the world." From an investment point of view, my objection is to governments determining winners and losers in a free market, be it the business process management (BPM) software market or the broader software market. It is not only a matter of the government choosing winning technologies (the EU and/or some of its members have tried to do that for 50 years and failed) but actually choosing winning companies (by making up rules that only certain software companies can follow).
I don't know how the winning companies are chosen. I assume the ones that are legally domiciled so they can be taxed highest are the "winners," I guess that's how politicians decide such things.
The front group's means for picking winners and losers is ostensibly through the use of Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS). FLOSS is the EU's way of saying open source. They add the French word libre (meaning free as in 'not a slave') to the mix so as to be clear that they don't mean free as in the English language sense of 'at no cost.' It's also the EU's way of saying not Microsoft.
Anyway, along with a lot of other open source blogoblather, this latest Open World/Standard/Cloud/Interface/you-pick-it proposal also proposes:
"BPM/Management will be the new frontier in FLOSS applications. Beyond infrastructures and even ERP, the management of the mashup IT and business services of tomorrow will be key to the future. Large communities must develop key initiatives, to build open foundations for these tools, around large multi-vendor communities such as Apache and OW2 (a European-based OSS consortium".
Now I have no objection to that idea, because I say basically the same thing all the time on this blog, except I don't care one way or the other whether you use open source software or an abacus. I do object to the word 'must," which along with "should" and "impose" is littered throughout the manifesto (the front group's term, honest) as if the document were handed out by the late Chairman Mao.
Which leads me to ask: "
What about Open Source Business Processes (in manifestos, concepts are always capitalized)?
I have never considered it before despite the fact that I have been specifically studying open source software as a culture and as a set of software-market terms and conditions for two years (and I have been involved in the culture off and on since 1975).
The front group does not ever actually say it but open source business processes are essentially what it wants when it argues against patents. But that only matters to you if you plan to put some great business process flow you've thought up into a piece of packaged application software and try to license it or sell it as a service. What if you just want to use your unique process flow to help you (and maybe your customers and business partners) do something or other better than the guy down the street? In that case, you don't want your competitor, the guy down the street, to be able to use the same process.
Let me know what you think with a comment or an email at dennis@ebizq.net
-- Dennis Byron
]]>At least I think it's timely: Does the date notation on the article--'12-3-2008'--mean December 3rd or March 12th? I don't know; there's no standard for that. Or are there multiple standards?
Well that's Footen's point. He sounds like a man after my own heart when it comes to standards. Better yet he quotes Andres S. Tannenbaum saying,
"The nicest thing about standards is that there are so many of them to choose from."
(Tannenbaum, for you IT historians, is better known as the Dutch college professor who was falsely accused of being the real "father of Linux." Tannenbaum explains the story here, vehemently denying the accusation because he didn't think the "first version of Linux" was that good.)
Anyways, by popular demand but with great trepidation and hopefully a light touch, I am going to wade into the great BPEL vs. BPMN discussion that I first alerted you to back on October 23. If you want to weigh in with your two-cents on BPEL vs. BPMN, for me to use in writing my two cents worth on the subject, give me a call or send me an email at dennis@ebizq.net.
-- Dennis Byron
AHS is using Pegasystems' BPM software to support service call scheduling, customer follow-up and other customer-facing processes by tying CRM systems together with the backoffice. I was amused because the presenters--Lynda Schirck of AHS and Jeff Akin of Pega--said cancelling a service request is one of the most frequent processes the BPM system has to handle. Guilty as charged; I do it to my AHS technician at least twice a year (out of four possible calls!!)
The presenters' major pieces of advice for those thinking of choosing a BPM-based implementation over ERP or CRM:
If you are a user of BPM software with an experience you would like to share (or provider of BPM software that would like to suggest a user I could talk to for more blog posts like this), drop me an email at dennis@ebizq.net.
-- Dennis Byron
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