"I don't see Business Process Automation being used that much any more. Maybe I just don't read the right articles, but it seems that BPM is the preferred term."
The BPA vs. business process management (BPM) debate intrigues me because it is inconceivable to me that we cannot agree on what to call an information technology (IT) market that accounts for anywhere between $3 billion and $30 billion in software spending per year (depending on definitions) involving a term--as I researched in January 2009--that has been around for a century or more.
The debate also intrigues me because when I started doing BPM-technology-specific research at IDC in 2003 (after 10 years of doing BPM-related research, primarily on ERP), IDC had already decided to call the category BPA. But IDC did not care about the meanings of automation vs. management. The issue at IDC was that BP already stood for "business performance" rather than "business process." I sure hope I didn't keep this arcane argument going by not fighting harder for BPM six years ago. (NOTE: I left IDC in 2006 and am now an independent market researcher. My replacement at IDC wisely started using BPM to mean business process management.)
David McCoy says his comment dates to the beginnings of his BPM related research in the late 1990s. His point is a variation on my frequent statement that BPM is a value proposition not just software. You can do BPM with a pencil and post-it notes if you want. Similarly, fellow BPM in Action Live Panel panelist Derek Miers makes the argument that BPM is a management discipline not a technology.
However although it's great fodder for academic-like debates among industry and market analysts, BPA fails the WWTMS test. Ask yourself: "what would the marketplace say?" The answer is business process management, not BPA.
And the market will make this choice for the same reason that it has not wrapped itself around in knots questioning CRM, ERP, PLM, and so forth. None of those concepts requires technology either, all are basically value propositions or management disciplines, and all predate the IT era in some form.
Yet no one is suggesting that we change CRM to customer relationship automation.
And hopefully no one will suggest we rename BPM to business process re-engineering :)
-- Dennis Byron
]]>AsI blogged about here on BPM in Action on June 10, one of the most interesting questions in information technology (IT) management is the role of ERP vs. business process management (BPM).
Or vice versa depending on how you want to look at it.
My guest for the attached podcast is Garth Knudson, Managing Director of International Sales and Alliances at HandySoft, and he has some good viewpoints on the intersection of BPM and ERP. Garth has also been a contributing author here on ebizQ, most recently in April 2009. With 15 years broad experience with ERP and BPM users like yourselves, Knudson has focused for the past 5 years on BPM-oriented initiatives. Knudson received his B.A. from Brigham Young University, and M.B.A. from Case and a Masters of International Management from Thunderbird.
In simplified terms, Garth says he sees ERP as a way to integrate the data layer of different processes (e.g. AP/AR, Payroll, Order Entry) within larger processes (e.g., Financials, HR, SCM). The value is an integrated system. In contrast, BPM enables users to streamline processes spanning multiple divisions, systems and data sources. BPM might compete with and/or replace ERP on smaller scale projects. But BPM absolutely complements ERP by creating a "single view" into process spanning multiple groups/systems (e.g., on-boarding). The results are visibility and control.
But don't take my opinion on what he said. Take 10 minutes to listen.
-- Dennis Byron
]]>In July I will be updating my January 2008 review of the place of open source software (OSS) in BPM development and marketing. A lot has happened in open source culture and licensing practices in the intervening 18 months. Of course, a lot has happened in BPM in that time as well. Note that I have been writing for three years now that open source is not a market so I am not interested just in BPM software distributed with OSS terms and conditions (But if you are involved in such projects, send me the info). I am equally interested in how BPM software not marketed with OSS terms and conditions is developed using open source.
If you build or sell a part of your BPM offering in any way using open source send me an email at dennis@ebizq.net to be included. I'll do some secondary research on your offering and meet up with you for an interview.
The article on Open Source in BPM, 2009 is tentatively scheduled for release in mid July 2009 so whether you are a user or a supplier, contact me by Monday July 6, 2009.
Thanks
-- Dennis Byron
]]>I'll be moderating a Live Panel of BPM experts at Noon ET on Wednesday June 24 and if you sign up now, you can also get a question in for us to answer (last step in the registration process or just send it to me direct at dennis@ebizq.net). Us includes Derek Miers of BPM-Focus, Mike Lees of Software Ag, Keith Swenson of Fujitsu and Dr. M.A. Ketabchi of Savvion as well as myself.
The key message we want to concentrate on in these tough economic times is how BPM can help you in
"... choosing the situational BPM applications that can provide the fastest return on investment."
This is not going to be about technology or theory but a chance to disucss real-life situations where your peers are reaping benefits already because they have adopted the BPM value proposition.
Things you might be interested in include:
But don't depend on us to think of what you might be most interested in. Send in your questions now and listen in on June 24 at noon ET (the Live Panel will also be available on ebizQ for listening after the event; but then it will be too late to take your questions).
-- Dennis Byron
]]>So I was happy to find that Garth Knudson of Handysoft, who recently provided ebizQ with this guest editorial on Transforming Email 'Noise' into Business Process Knowledge, shares a similar appreciation of commparing and contrasting BPM and ERP. He and I completed a podcast on June 11, which will appear on ebizQ shortly.
The necessary brevity of a podcast (how long do you want to listen to my monotone?) means we couldn't cover half of what we each wanted to say. For example, below are some of Garth's conclusions which are not included in the podcast:
If you read any of my blog posts on supply chain automation and BPM, you know I especially agree with his third point above. The podcast itself goes into:
Look for it on ebizQ somtime in June 2009. It will be referenced in a BPM in Action blog post.
And send in your emails and comments on how you think BPM and ERP go together. Or not!
-- Dennis Byron
]]>Andrea Tauschmann of inubit followed my suggestion. Her Germany-based company was one of the ones I listed in my post as not having heard of it before. The inubit BPM-Suite was and is the core product of inubit and is currently at Release 5.2. Its development started in 1999. As with many of the companies converging on the BPM value proposition, the original inubit software was focused on EAI and B2B-integration; it's based on J2EE. A 2002 release added workflow and SOA basics plus connectors to applications such as SAP, Baan, Oracle, and so forth. In 2003 the company added business process modeling and support for long-running transactions and runtime deployment and 2005 saw BPEL import/export/execution, WS-Security, UDDI support, ARIS/ADONIS/XMI imports, compliance to JSR168, and process simulation.
Andrea says inubit BPM is second generation BPM by which she means
"full support for all BPM phases (modeling, simulation, execution, integration, human interaction, activity monitoring and real-time reporting) in addition to a seamless and unique handling of external systems, business partners, services and humans while managing business processes purely end-to-end."
I hadn't thought of what she describes in generational terms but I absolutely agree that the convergence of various types of software into BPM as diagrammed in my recent BPM VIEWPOINT, So What Does BPM Mean?, signfies that eventually BPM will support process sets across as well as within the firewall, straight-through as well as workflow-centric, event as well as data driven.
As I had guessed in the earlier post, inubit is not yet marketing actively in North America (but this is the new world; go look them up on the Internet).
Thanks for the email, Andrea. If anyone else reading this has a BPM offering you think I am not aware of, send along the information.
-- Dennis Byron
]]>I had said in my call for input to the article that:
"I am interpreting process discovery loosely as anything you are doing as a supplier or a user to simplify and streamline the development and deployment of BPM solutions."
More on the discussion with Tim in the upcoming article but our conversation led me further down the BPM taxonomy road. Serena's Mashup Composer product/program applies to process discovery in the sense that there is a need for Rapid BPM (RBPM--to draft off the old term RAD for rapid applications development) or BPMLite (Tim did not like that term) or Lean BPM (which Tim credits to Clay Richardson of Forrester--whom I have met virutally through our being co-judges in the Global 360 competitive program in March 2009)
In Serena's case, Tim says this program/product applies best to collaborative apps which may be freestanding or front-end to more full-bodied case-management or STP BPM automated by another BPM supplier's software. As with the concept with RAD, he says many clients are telling Serena there's just a need to get something up there fast and inexpensively. Serena supports such development through a 2-day half-day-each workshop. It is part of the Serena pre-sales process and gets the right line and IT people in a room; maps out the need and implements it in Serena's free Mashup Composer. The app gets deployed on demand; and the interval to the second half-day session lets the client look at how the app works on real data. In the second half-day Serena returns and the conversation continues. With or without the workshop you can try Serena Mashup Composer-developed applications for 30 days.
I hear them called situational applications as well as mashups. What do you think? Is there a need for such BPM? Will it recreate the 1970s COBOL/RPG spaghetti-code problem or the 1990s VB problem?
-- Dennis Byron
-- Dennis Byron
What bothers me is that the 1990ish "we invented the Internet" tack of the Clinton Administration has turned into "the Internet can re-invent government" tack of the current U.S. adminstration. I started thinking about this as I walked through the Clinton Presidential Library in Little Rock the week of May 25 and heard a lot of the material noted in the above linked Wikipedia article for the first time in years. This June 3 blog post on zdNet is a good summary of the dozens of different things I'm hearing from the current U.S. government that seem to pick up where the Clinton message left off.
The zdNet article is in no way the only place this spin is showing up. The old bald guy (I can say that; look at my picture) that now presides over the U.S-government-run General Motors (GM) announced at the bankruptcy press conference on June 1 that GM was going to be a better place because it was going to put all kinds of stuff -- undefined -- up on the web going forward. But to mix metaphors that deserve to be mixed in GM's case, you can' t drive that to the bank.
The Internet is not going to save GM. And no technology can change government for the better (some has changed it for the worse).
A government (any government) will only be as transparent as its citizens demand and politicians and bureacrats accede to. U.S citizens have progressively wanted to know less about their government over our 233-year history, not more. Our politicians and bureaucrats have obliged. Transparency is not going to make any difference as long as so few people look.
In terms of applying social computing technology, replacing the U.S. Postal Service with the Internet as a communications medium is really all that is happening. So a tweet replaces a post card. If you vote based on either communications medium, you get the government you deserve.
As for BPM, yes there is a little of the eGovernment variety going on. I can get my car registered over the net now. In some states you can vote. But in general, when you send a politician an email you get a form email back instead of a form letter. But when I both email and phone the Attorney General of Massachuetts about scandalous and surely illegal direct marketing aimed at bilking money from the elderly (I do qualify under the very relaxed rules of the AARP), I get no reponse and no action, just the same as if I had sent her a letter.
Bet I get an emailed campaign contribution request from her though when she runs for governor.
-- Dennis Byron
]]>I am a big-tent proponent when thinking about how to implement BPM and I do not limit the BPM category to just ECM/workflow or EAI/STP or to the so-called BPM pure plays. (If you want me to comment on why I say "so-called," drop me an email.)
I was pleased to see that the Object Management Group (OMG) apparently agrees based on its web page titled "BPM Vendor Directory Listing." In fact, based on my 40 years of researching the software market, I like to play "stump the band" and see if someone can mention a software company I have never researched or at least heard of well enough to describe. I was surprised to see that a few such companies made the OMG BPM listing. These include Abstracted, Ackinas, Agilium, Alfagroup, Ashan, bRisk, Cryo, Cyrberconn, e-Serve, Evidant, ICMG, InUbit, Kanbay, Liantis, Method Maker, Monosys, Polymita, Risk Reward, Silverroad, Web and Flo (nice!) and Zero (ooooh?)
I didn't link through to each web site but I think based on the Ltd.'s, Gmbh's and SA's on the ends of their names, I do not know them because they are based outside the U.S. and probably do not do business on this side of the big ponds. I also think many on the list are probably more BPM consultancies than BPM product providers, which is where--only out of habit--I spend most of my time. Because I did a lot of international marketing in my time (including being based in Paris) I try to think globally. But if you do not email me, I'll most likely not know you.
Also I had not associated some of the companies listed with BPM but knew them as OMG members. That's goodness; when it comes to understanding BPM; the more the merrier.
(Also note that there are more new-to-me BPM companies earlier in the alphabet. This is because Marketing 101 says name your company something that will get listed first in directories because directories are almost always alphabetized and almost everyone reads them in sequence. As a piece of unrelated advice to IT users, turn that around when you read a product directory and do not ignore the companies whose names begin with T, U, V, W, etc. Just because they didn't take Marketing 101 or are contrarians doesn't mean the product is bad.)
-- Dennis Byron
"1. The easiest way to do process discovery would be through some automated system that looks at what people do (both on their desktop, servers, and through their communication channels) and use that to ferret out the implicit processes in their normal flow of work. That is of course (besides being extremely intrusive) impossible.
"2. The next best thing would be to use email correspondance to try and ferret out the unstructured, ad-hoc, human processes done via email and then codify the processes that were uncovered. Besides the privacy issues, doing it this way is also very difficult (if not impossible using today's technology) including issues of natural language understanding.
His comments raise a couple of disparate issues I plan to delve into more deeply as the research proceeds.
As I said on May 25, let me know what you think. Send me an email at dennis@ebizq.net to be included. I'll do some secondary research on your offering and meet up with you for an interview. Even if you have recently completed a survey for one of my earlier feature articles, please send me an email highlighting your process discovery features. The article on BPM Process Discovery is tentatively scheduled for release in mid June 2009 so whether you are a user or a supplier, contact me by Monday June 8, 2009.
-- Dennis Byron
]]>As I said in February I don't endorse one software product or service of any kind over another as a condition of what I do. But I do endorse the idea of building up the bank of case studies that show how BPM makes a difference in the real world. This ebizQ article from June 2008 cited some examples and, as I hoped, activities like Global 360's help expand the repertoire. I will also be moderating some sessions in the June 2009 ebizQ BPM in Action conference and leading the conversation in a real-world direction.
My fellow judges included Bruce Richardson, Chief Research Officer, AMR Research; and Clay Richardson, Senior Analyst, Business Process Management, Forrester Research. As the non-Richardson on the panel, I got to be quoted for the others saying
"I was very pleased to participate as an objective third-party judge, gaining additional insight into how organizations are leveraging BPM technologies to drive greater business results for their organization."
Top honors went to Intuit's Payment Division, Nike's Customer Financial Services group and Nissan's Motor Acceptance Corporation. Winners in regional categories included AIU Holdings Small Business, and Irish Life Corporate Business and its supplier Zarion.
There was a good line up of other competitors among the Global 360 customer base and I read that Gartner is holding a similar BPM competition. It takes time on your part to enter your BPM project but getting the word out is good for the whole BPM and information technology community. And good for building cred with your own management.
No matter what suppliers you or looking at or which you eventually choose, it is important to go to your management with "BPM in the Real World" examples.
-- Dennis Byron
For June, the subject is process discovery, which I am interpreting loosely as anything you are doing as a supplier or a user to simplify and streamline the development and deployment of BPM solutions. Maybe you make a better magic marker for use on the whiteboard? Hopefully we'll find something things more advanced than that. Certainly this will include modeling tools of all types and -- although I'm not aware of any -- things that get the power user into the BPM world. Send me everything you got!
If you sell a part of your BPM offering for help in process discovery as I defined it above (and/or sell discrete products that do what I described) send me an email at dennis@ebizq.net to be included. I'll do some secondary research on your offering and meet up with you for an interview. Even if you have recently completed a survey for one of my earlier feature articles, please send me an email highlighting your process discovery features.
The article on BPM Process Discovery is tentatively scheduled for release in mid June 2009 so whether you are a user or a supplier, contact me by Monday June 8, 2009.
Thanks
-- Dennis Byron
]]>Some of the technology, such as the new Tap In Cloud Management Service (CMS) is generic to cloud computing and not simply BPM related. It is a low-cost systems management solution for managing your cloud and on-premises infrastructure from one point. It is built on an event management architecture and not surprisingly, it itself runs in the cloud, initially in the Amazon cloud. Peter Loh, Tap In founder, explained how agents are available for both Linux and Windows and let you pick what you want to monitor. Then CMS interfaces to other management tools such as HP OpenView or brand-name configuration management products. The leading BPM players need to talk to Peter to get their own agents out on his cloud.
And I also saw a lot of technology developments unique to BPM. They're are in the areas of federation, support for dual-instance (public/private) cloud deployments, support for process (vs. systems) peformance monitoring, audting features and other applications that--as I say in my feature article--make one and one (BPM and the cloud) add up to more than two. A lot of the technology I saw seems to make the concept of intelligent process automation that I have been writing and speaking about for 5 years seem a little closer. Maybe the cloud's the thing that will push intelligent process automation (the medling of BI and BPM) into the mainstream.
In addition to the upcoming article, we will discuss these trends at the June 3 QCamp on BPM in the Cloud. As always, send me emails and comments so I can concentrate on questions that interest you. You can also leave comments and questions on the Cloud QCamp registration page.
-- Dennis Byron
]]>