Tuesday's session by Jim Sinur, "When Will the Power Vendors Offer Credible BPM Solutions?", was one of the most interesting that I attended all week. For one thing, it left me with the question "which BPM vendor will Oracle buy?", which is certainly not something that Sinur said but I can see the writing on the wall.

Sinur defines a "power vendor" as a company that has more than $1 billion in annual revenue and is a known brand to the average person: in this case, Fujitsu, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle and SAP are included in the soon-to-be-released magic quadrant.

I really like Sinur's presentation style: he started with the summary in order to ease the suspense somewhat, although he did add in a lot of new information throughout the presentation. His big message to the existing BPM vendors: look out, because the power vendors have the ability to crush you within three years if they do everything right and you aren't sufficiently innovative and financial stable. He sees the power vendors as being 12-18 months away from competing successfully in the full BPM space (as opposed to the integration-focussed side of the space, where most of them started), and that they'll continue to partner with and OEM other companies' products (such as SAP OEMing IDS Scheer) to build up capabilities as they mature.

He went through a map of BPM capabilities for each of the vendors (I posted about an earlier version of the generic scoring diagram last August), and I imagine that you'll be able to get the full scoring details from Gartner soon. Basically, the top part of the map shows human-facing capabilities, the bottom shows integration capabilities, the left indicates incremental improvement and optimization capabilities, and the right shows the ability to make BPM human-friendly (including portals and content management, for example). Interestingly, he shows both the inherent vendor capabilities and the capabilities when combined with their partners on each map, using solid and dotted lines.

There were some surprises in here for me, since I tend to focus on the BPM vendors and not the power vendors. First, who knew that Fujitsu is in the BPM market? Or that both Fujitsu and Oracle have strong support for human task processing? Turns out that Fujitsu is big in Asian markets, but has little presence in North America and Europe, so has more of a marketing than a technical problem. No surprises with IBM or Microsoft, both of whom have strong integration support typical of a platform vendor, but are still building the human-facing side. As for SAP, probably the less said, the better.

He showed charts of the five vendors with a ranking of poor, medium or strong for each of the 10 capabilities in the diagram: one chart with just the vendor product, and one when combined with partner products. In the combined chart, Fujitsu had the highest number of "strong" ratings, at 4/10, but when you add the medium and strong, three vendors tie for a score of 7/10: Fujitsu, IBM and Oracle.

Sinur's conclusion: Oracle is the best contender to close the gap soonest, with IBM a strong second; Fujitsu needs some serious North American and European marketing push to be a viable contender. Which leads me back to my original question: which BPM vendor will Oracle buy in order to close the gap sooner?

He also went through a list of non-power vendors who could become power vendors if they do everything right -- Pegasystems, FileNet and Global 360 -- as well as other large vendors who could decide to enter the space, including such wild cards as Yahoo!, eBay and Google. My favourite quote from the presentation came from his somewhat offhand dismissal of JBoss, the open source BPMS: "If you can't sue them, do you want to buy them?"

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 01:47 PM in BPM • GartnerBPM2006 | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

Daryl Plummer's Tuesday keynote, "How Do You Measure and Justify Business Agility" made a few good points about the completely over-hyped notion of business agility:

• Agility is a legitimate management practice. If you don't have people focussed on agility, it's unlikely to just happen by accident.
• Agility is as important, or more important, than planning in order to be able to react to the unexpected. Remember "Built To Last"? That's so last year; now it's "Built To Change."
• Agility and speed are not synonymous. You can very quickly create another legacy environment (and probably already have).

My only major disagreement with what he said is that I see agility as a characteristic that can be measured at any point in an organization's life, not an end goal to which an organization aspires. He also introduces the Agility Quotient, which is "...calculated by measuring the things that inhibit agility and examining how willing you are to overcome them", which ultimately strikes me as a new age-y business measurement that does more to increase Gartner's consulting revenues than their customers' agility.

He finishes up with some comments on some of the technological components and ideas critical to business agility: decoupled business components related through event passing ("beyond SOA"), mobile access, identity management, and how to bring some of these things together. Although he's not explicit about it, he seems to indicate that business agility isn't a problem for the business so much as it is for the IT groups that support them, which is certainly something that I've seen playing out in practice.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 01:03 PM in BPM • GartnerBPM2006 • SOA | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

Hey, I finally made it to blogging about Tuesday, and it's only Friday.

Tuesday was a pretty full day at the summit: sessions all day and vendor hospitality suites in the evening, a true test of a marathon conference-goer. The day started out with Daryl Plummer's keynote on "How Do You Measure and Justify Business Agility" -- this guy should be an evangelical preacher, he's so passionate about his subject (and I mean that in a good way.) That was followed by the Six Sigma keynote by Mikel Harry that I left due to a severe lack of interest, although as I noted earlier, I found it odd that he seems to be using Six Sigma as a "brand" of sorts and distancing himself from the original statistical meaning. Certainly there's some positioning going on with Gartner, BPM and Six Sigma.

In the afternoon, I attended Jim Sinur's "When Will the Power Vendors Offer Credible BPM Solutions?", which was fascinating but left out some tantalizing details (which can presumably be purchased from Gartner), and finished up the day at Bill Rosser's "Creating a Business Architecture".

The vendor hospitality suites were fun, although I had to lodge a complaint that Lombardi's Blue Pomegranate Martinis (BPM, get it?) weren't really blue but some sort of murky purple, and I could never figure out how to turn off the flashing ice cube that I picked up at another vendor's suite so discarded it before airport security decided that it was something questionable. Between the vendor booths and the hospitality suites, I scored an alarming amount of swag: three jazz CDs from Lombardi, t-shirts from K2 and TIBCO, a 3-d globe puzzle from Global 360 that I'm afraid to take apart, a USB-powered light (perfect for lighting up your keyboard on flights when the overhead light causes glare on the screen) from Singularity, and a flash-when-it-bounces ball from Fujitsu.

The best part was after all the customers bailed out, and the vendors started to visit each other's suites. I found the smaller vendors more likely to do this, possibly because they don't have the sort of "us versus them" mentality about their competitors that is encouraged in larger companies, or possibly because they realize (consciously or not) that by next year they could be working together through job changes or corporate acquisitions. A particular thumbs-up to Savvion, whose suite became the "Switzerland of hospitality suites" (according to Rob Risany in their product marketing group) by the end of the night.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 12:38 PM in BPM • GartnerBPM2006 • SixSigma | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

I managed to squeeze in a couple of vendor sessions on Monday, and particularly enjoyed that by Patrick Morrissey of Savvion on "The Seven Deadly Sins of BPM". He sees a process-centric future with BPM as a standard part of IT archicture, a view with which I agree, and quoted Simon Hayward from the keynote:

There is no business without process...process is the heart of competitive advantage.

Morrissey stated an alarming statistic (I can't recall the original source): in the last five years, companies have spent $40 billion on ERP, CRM and HR software, and $650 billion on the services related to that software. That's more than 16:1 in favour of services, for the math-challenged in the crowd. I see overcustomization happening in all of my customers, where (usually) a large SI sells them on the notion of a huge services contract to customize a system that already meets most of their requirements. This renders a huge disservice to the customers, who pay through the nose for the custom work then for all future maintenance on it, but it's also a disservice to the product vendors, since the value of their systems is never fully realized in such a situation. In fact, two of the "deadly sins" that Morrissey discussed were "unnatural acts with existing applications" and "hardwire your BPM applications", both of which are the result of poorly-designed customization: SI's gone wild, and not in a way that we want to see on video.

In the obligatory plug for Savvion, Morrissey pointed out that Savvion has released its process modeller as a standalone free version, and it was available the booth at the show. You can also download it from their website here. We're going to see more and more of this, I believe: vendors giving away planning, modelling and analysis tools in order to raise their profile in the marketplace, and potentially drive more interest in the process engines that lie at the heart of their strategy.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 11:59 AM in BPM • GartnerBPM2006 | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

I attended Dale Vecchio's session on "Using SOA from Legacy in BPMS", which promised "ways to create web services out of existing systems and use them in BPM solutions". An interesting tidbit: he claimed that the most common surprise during the application archaeology required for Y2K rework projects was that IT departments didn't know what was connected to what, and that the requirement to understand legacy linguine still often leads to the decision to do nothing rather than have to understand and unravel the mess.

I also liked his definition of a business process:

A set of activities & tasks performed by resources (humans & machines) Using a variety of information (structured & unstructured) Interacting in various ways (predictable & unpredictable) Guided by business policies and principles (business rules & decision criteria)

since it sums it up nicely for those who still think that an application is a business process. With that as a focus, he talked about the importance of multilevel modelling, where you model a business architectural view, a system architectural (by which I think that he meant application and data/information architectural) view and multiple technical views: not fundamentally different from what we do when using an enterprise architecture approach to BPM.

He went through a couple of different approaches for modernizing legacy systems in order to allow them to be consumed as services by BPM and other systems, lining up nicely with Janelle Hill's earlier talk on leveraging existing IT assets in BPM. Nothing earth-shattering, but some good stuff on separating the presentation layer and replacing it with a services layer versus just wrapping the legacy app, and on different approaches to determining service granularity that still maintains the philosophy of a service as a business function.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 11:40 AM in BPM • ESB • GartnerBPM2006 • SOA | Permalink | TrackBacks (1) | Add to del.icio.us

The biggest surprise that I had at the Gartner BPM summit this week was opening up the package of attendee materials and finding this ebizQ brochure with my picture printed on it:

I had several "don't I know you?" looks from people, and a few actually came up to me and told me that they read my blog. Very flattering.

The second biggest surprise was finding out that I have my own fan club inside Lombardi: everyone who I talked to at their booth claims to read my blog. Hi guys!

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 09:48 AM in BPM • Blogging • GartnerBPM2006 | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

I really hate that the bloggers that I read daily are making me work by changing my RSS feeds :)

James Taylor, who I have referenced in posts about business rules, is now blogging here on ebizQ, although it's not clear if he also intends to keep his old blog going as well. Personally, I have trouble enough keeping up with writing one business blog, and my wine blogging has suffered for it lately.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 04:44 PM in BRE • Blogging | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

Bruce Silver, who has been "crashing on the couch" (his words) at IT|Redux for a couple of months, is now blogging on his own site. I've already added a comment to his post about the BPM "Immaturity Model", as he calls it.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 03:22 PM in BPM • Blogging | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

I know, it's already the third (and last) day of the Gartner BPM conference and I'm still blogging about day 1 -- consider that to be a good reflection on the sessions that I don't have lots of time to blog about them because I'm too busy listening to them. I'm comfortably ensconced in my "Nashville office", a.k.a., the women's restroom right beside the main conference rooms. You men may not realize it, but the women's facilities in most large hotels include a lounge with comfy chairs, a few side tables, a box of tissues (in case a presentation brings you to tears, I suppose) and sometimes even flowers. This one also happens to have power for my laptop and a full-strength wifi connection -- sometimes gender discrimination works in our favour. :)

One of my favourite sessions on Monday was by Janelle Hill: "Leveraging Existing IT Assets in BPM Initiatives." For an analyst, Hill has a very practical view on BPM implementations, and her session was focussed on changing the behaviour of systems by putting a services face on some of those old legacy applications to allow them to participate in BPM. She discussed three basic strategies:

• Surrond strategy, where the legacy system is wrapped with a services layer and BPM is used to streamline the exceptions that are triggered by the legacy applications. I've done an implementation of exactly this strategy in many cases; one example is the claims processing functionality in an insurance company, where exceptions that are raised in their mainframe-based auto-adjudication system are picked up by a BPM system and routed to the appropriate people (and services) for manual adjudication or data repair-and-resubmit.
  


• Extend strategy, where the previously unautomated steps are automated -- often paper-based steps such as data collection forms, or ad hoc human processes such as collaboration. Case management, something that I work on with all of my insurance customers, as well as other financial services falls into both of those categories: it's often a loosely structured process that is tracked on paper, since older systems didn't lend themselves well to enabling this type of functionality.
  


• Leverage-what-you-have strategy, where the legacy databases are integrated directly (usually for read-only operations), or the legacy functions are called via EAI-type adapter technology. I see direct access of legacy databases quite commonly for consolidated reporting, for example.
  

I'm not sure that the lines are so clearly drawn between each of these three strategies: the distinction between the type of functions that would constitute surrond versus extend is fuzzy in a lot of areas, and the technologies used for surrond and leverage-what-you-have can overlap significantly. However, it's a useful categorization to start looking at how to start eating the legacy system integration elephant.

I also like Hill's definition of SOA -- an architectural style that is modular, distributable and loosely coupled -- because it (rightly) takes the focus away from specific products or technologies. She goes on to define a service, or component, as a software process that acts in response to a request, and a web service as a special case that uses specific protocols and standards. Again, this takes the focus away from web services specifically in favour of just services, something that is essential if you want to maintain flexibility in how you create and consume services both inside and outside your organization. Consider that mashups typically consume services that use lighter-weight protocols than web services, for example.

One of the lessons to take away from this is that SOA and BPM can be done independently, but when combined, the whole is much greater than the sum of the parts. SOA provides the framework for creating services that will be consumed (assembled and orchestrated) by BPM; in turn, BPM puts a human face on SOA which makes it easier for the business to understand.

I'm off to the airport, so this conference is over for me. The blogging, however, goes on...

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 02:32 PM in BPM • GartnerBPM2006 • SOA | Permalink | TrackBacks (1) | Add to del.icio.us

Intelligence Enterprise has already published a short article on the BPM Maturity Model discussed yesterday here at the Gartner summit, which I blogged about in detail earlier.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 06:42 PM in BI • BPA • BPM • GartnerBPM2006 • SOA | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

After Sinur and Melenovsky's welcome, Simon Hayward gave a great opening keynote yesterday, "Living in a process-centric world". To quote the session description on the agenda:

Process is now gaining importance as an organizing concept for dealing with change at all levels. We live in a world of processes, becoming conscious of those processes and taking control of them can be the key to personal and corporate effectiveness.

As one attendee mentioned later, everything sounds more intelligent when it's said with a British accent, and I have to admit to having a soft spot for anyone that says process with an "oh" rather than an "aw". However, Hayward had some good content for us as well.

He started with the question of why we're all thinking about process now, and linked it back to the fact that leaders in the industry became that way in part because of their focus on process -- especially processes that touch their trading partners and customers. There are challenges around maintaining control over and having visibility into outsourced processes, as well as determining intellectual property rights in cases where the process itself may be a competitive differentiator.

Along the way, he floated the notion that agility (the ability to react to unexpected change) is becoming as, or more, important than innovation, and as I mentioned in a previous post, I interpret this to mean that reacting to market forces can actually be considered innovation if it's done in the right way.

Another key point was compliance = explicit process management (taken from their 2005 Planning Guidance for Compliance report), which shows how process forms an integral part of compliance. I created a course on compliance for a customer last year, and process was a surprisingly large part of it: I found that if you can't understand, control and report on your processes, you're going to have a hard time getting compliant and proving it.

Then something came up for the second time that morning: Six Sigma. It appears that Gartner is making a strong link between Six Sigma and BPM at this conference (and likely in other research of theirs), although I found the Mikel Harry keynote this morning out of place, somehow, especially when he appeared to be using Six Sigma as a "brand" of sorts and distancing himself from the original statistical meaning. BPM certainly helps to provide a "closed loop" environment for Six Sigma's Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, Control (DMAIC) continuous process improvement cycle through the inclusion of process analytics and simulation, but I think that it's a bit dangerous to downplay the statistical significance and rigor of Six Sigma to somehow make it friendly to the BPM crowd. Hayward later showed a graph of overlaid hype cycles that showed BPM as the current incarnation of trends that start with quality (process improvement) and migrate through process reengineering to BPM. I don't disagree, but that doesn't mean that BPM is the next "version" of Six Sigma somehow.

Getting back to Hayward's talk, he had a good list of the IT disciplines needed for a process-centric environment, with a necessary focus on impact analysis and selective regression testing: if we're putting all that emphasis on agility, we'd better be able to understand the ripple effects of changes and be able to test scenarios before deploying them. He talked about how to assess both IT and business for their current state of process centricity, and showed a chart of how to approach the various scenarios:

He finished up with a list of great recommendations including having less respect for silos and getting rid of baronial hostility that really point to one of the key issues in a process-centric organization: process is part of the infrastructure, not just embedded in some departmental systems.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 04:57 PM in BPM • GartnerBPM2006 • SixSigma | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

The conference opened with the two key faces of Gartner's BPM vision -- Jim Sinur and Michael Melenovsky -- giving a brief welcome talk that focussed on a BPM maturity model, or what they are calling BPM³. There was only one slide for their presentation (if you don't count the cover slide) and it hasn't been published for the conference attendees, so I'll rely on my sketchy notes and somewhat imperfect memory to give an overview of the model:

• Level 0: Acknowledge operational inefficiences, with potential for the use of some business intelligence technology to measure and monitor business activities. I maintain that there is something lower than this, or maybe a redefinition of level 0 is required, wherein the organization is in complete denial about their operational inefficiences. In CMM (the Capability Maturity Model for software development processes), for example, level 0 is equivalent to having no maturity around the processes; level 1 is the "initial" stage where an organization realizes that they're really in a lot of trouble and need to do something about it.


• Level 1: Process aware, using business process analysis techniques and tools to model and analyze business processes. Think Visio with some human intelligence behind it, or a more robust tool such as those from Proforma, iGrafx or IDS Scheer.
  


• Level 2: Process control, the domain of BPMS, where process models and rules can now be executed, and some optimization can be done on the processes. They admitted that this is the level on which the conference focusses, since few organizations have moved very far beyond this point. Indeed, almost every customer that I have that uses BPM is somewhere in this range, although many of them are (foolishly) neglecting the optimization potential that this brings.
  


• Level 3: Enterprise process management, where BPM moves beyond departmental systems and becomes part of the corporate infrastructure, which typically also opens up the potential for processes that include trading partners and customers. This is a concept that I've been discussing extensively with my customers lately, namely, the importance of having BPM (and BRE and BI) as infrastructure components, not just embedded within departmental applications, because it's going to be nearly impossible to realize any sort of SOA vision without these basic building blocks available.
  


• Level 4: Enterprise performance management, which starts to look at the bigger picture of corporate performance management (which is what Gartner used to call this -- are they changing CPM to EPM??) and how processes tie into that. I think that this is a critical step that organizations have to be considering now: CPM is a great early warning indicator for performance issues, but also provides a huge leap forward in issues such as maintaining compliance. I just don't understand why Cognos or other vendors in this space aren't at this conference talking about this.
  


• Level 5: Competitive differentiation, where the business is sufficiently agile due to control over the processes that new products and services can be easily created and deployed. Personally, I believe that competitive differentiation is a measure of how well that you're doing right from level 1 on up, rather than a separate level itself: it's an indicator, not a goal per se.
  

That's it for now, I'm off to lunch. At this rate, I'll catch up on all the sessions by sometime next week. :)

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 12:34 PM in BI • BPA • BPM • GartnerBPM2006 • SOA | Permalink | TrackBacks (1) | Add to del.icio.us

I know, I should have posted all this yesterday, but I didn't realize that there was wifi at the conference until late in the day so left my laptop at the hotel, and Movable Type doesn't allow me to blog by email from my Blackberry. Today, however, I have my trusty tablet in hand and hope to blog throughout the day when I get a chance. I'll post all these entries under the category GartnerBPM2006 so that you can more easily find them by clicking on the category in the right sidebar.

Some great sessions at the conference, although I think that it would be greatly improved by opening up the speaking slots a bit. Right now, it's mostly Gartner analysts, a few select Gartner customers, a few vendors (who apparently pay for the privilege so it's really just an extension of their booth marketing presence), and a few odd selections such as the keynote by Mikel Harry of the Six Sigma Management Institute (probably a good management consultant but not an inspiring speaker) that I just left early. Gartner has sufficient pull to be able to do a limited call for papers that would result in some really excellent presentations to complement their own analysts' views without diluting the value of the conference. Maybe another year.

A key theme that I've heard in a couple of talks: agility (the ability to react to unexpected change) is becoming as, or more, important than innovation: you don't need to define and implement everything up front if you have confidence in your ability to react to change. The way that I interpret that is that reacting to market forces is the new innovation. Think about it.

I'll summarize some of the more interesting sessions in separate posts following this, but suffice it to say that my favourites yesterday were Simon Hayward who delivered the keynote "Living in a Process-Centric World", Janelle Hill with "Leveraging Existing IT Assets in BPM Initiatives", and a short but very dynamic presentation by Patrick Morrissey from Savvion on "The Seven Deadly Sins of BPM".

Today, I'm looking forward to this afternoon's session by Jim Sinur on "When Will the Power Vendors Offer Credible BPM Solutions?", which promises:

The power vendors have been lagging behind some of the more technically advanced and assertive BPM vendors, but recently each has made moves on the right direction. We expect the “Giants” to try to out stride some of the more advanced and nimble BPMS players in the long run and become a viable options for more than those who buy in a “best of brand” fashion. This session will outline the progress to date of the power vendors, the expected time lines, and where the best-of-breed vendors will try to widen the gap.

• Where are the power vendors in relationship with more advanced BPMS players?
• Who is in the best position to close the gap?
• What differentiators are likely to keep the power vendors at bay?

I've been asking the same questions.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 11:36 AM in BPM • GartnerBPM2006 | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

Last night, I was having dinner with some friends, one of whom works for a large BPM vendor. He commented that the BPM market had not taken off as predicted, and I said that it certainly wasn't meeting the hockey stick projections that the industry experts predict for BPM.

"Hockey stick projections?!", he exclaimed, "We're not even finished the first period yet!"

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 11:14 AM in BPM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

I'll be attending the Gartner BPM Summit next week in Nashville, and I just noticed on Sanjay Kalra's blog that he will be there as well, and is looking to meet other bloggers.

Anyone else interested in meeting up, maybe Monday night after the solution showcase reception finishes at 7:45?

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 05:01 PM in BPM • Blogging | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

A great post by James Taylor on business and IT collaboration as it applies to business rules:

This might lead one to suppose that business users should just be given tools that let them right the rules themselves in some unconstrained way. Like the healthcare folks I was talking with, I don't think so. The reality is that the rules must be deployed in a real system with performance and scalability needs. The rules must execute against data stored and managed in other information systems. Business users are not as used to the discipline of QA and testing that most organizations would want to see before new rules are rolled out.

He goes on to discuss how to create the right environment for business and IT to collaborate on business rules management.

Now, just take his post and replace the word "rules" with "process", and you've made my case as well.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 04:36 PM in BPM • BRE | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

A couple of weeks ago, I posted a letter from a reader who asked the question "Is Automation BPM?" Peter Dawson and David Chassels both chimed in with their comments, and I want to add my thoughts. Excepts from the original letter:

I have a hard time referring to it as BPM when a person simply automates a business process. To me that is workflow. Granted, we have powerful stand-alone workflow engines now that allow a workflow to route work between more people and systems than ever before, but it is still workflow.

If you have a workflow process that is less focused on automating work and more focused on gathering data about a process for later analysis, then you have entered the realm of BPM.

I disagree. I started in the old workflow world: for the past 18 years, I've been focussed on processes that usually have a large human-facing component. I started with traditional workflow products that only provided person-to-person routing of scanned documents, which is about as old fashioned as it gets in the workflow world. Since I worked for most of that time providing services to the customers of these systems, I did a lot of automation and integration work from scratch because that funcitonality just didn't exist in the workflow systems. Want an automated function in your 1993 IBM ImagePlus system to escalate items that have been sitting in a queue too long? No problem, we'd write a daemon that would cycle through the work in a queue and push specific items to an exception queue. Want to integrate your 1991 Keyfile system with an Oracle database application? Give us a few weeks, we'd write a front-end application that integrated the two systems at the presentation layer by making API calls to each system. Want to have some process reports from your 1994 FileNet Visual WorkFlo system? Okay, we'd write a batch process to interrogate the database history logs each night, extract the process-related data and print some reports.

The point is, the systems as provided by the vendors had no automation and no integration: they were concerned only with the flow of work from one queue to another. Work. Flow. Workflow. Everything else -- integration, automation, process monitoring and governance -- was custom built. I could, in fact, make the argument that what we did as services firms was to turn vendors' workflow products into business process management systems.

From a semantic standpoint, the term "workflow" has been absorbed into most definitions of "BPM" (except, perhaps, those definitions created by ESB vendors who prefer an integration-focussed definition). Even the old-style workflow that I describe above -- just routing from one person to another -- is a part of BPM, even though a system that only provides that level of functionality would not compete very well in the broad BPM marketplace. The fact is, however, that almost every product in the BPM space has a set of functions that doesn't quite overlap with anyone others, and doesn't overlap at all with some other products that are also called BPM. Gartner published a report on BPMS selection criteria a few months back that listed 10 major areas of functionality, but there are many products in the BPM space that don't have one or more of those functions covered. The problem, as I've written about before, is that the term is too broad, and was a bit of an artificial creation on the part of the analysts, who took workflow, EAI, and anything else remotely related to process and called it all BPM.

To get back to my rebuttal, then, I believe that as soon as you add integration and automation capabilities to human-facing workflow, you've got BPM (as opposed to just being able to call it BPM because workflow is now defined as a subset of BPM). From the other side of the house, the same can be said about adding human-facing functionality to EAI to create BPM.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 03:12 PM in BPM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (1) | Add to del.icio.us

Saturday marked the 1-year anniversary of my first Column 2 post, although it was on my original site rather than here on ebizQ. I celebrated by not blogging. :)

The past week has been particularly hectic, between two major projects due for clients and a broken dishwasher, hence the lack of posts. With a little luck, the drought will end by tomorrow -- I have a flood of things to blog about.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 12:39 PM in Blogging | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

Two worthwhile SOA webinars from ebizQ in the past two days. Yesterday, it was Developing an SOA Ecosystem with Steve Craggs from the Integration Consortium. Craggs, who also runs a U.K.-based consulting company, Saint Consulting, spoke for a solid 40 minutes, starting with a quick but thorough definition of SOA, moving on to the concept and components of an SOA ecosystem as it should exist in your organization, and finishing up with some tips for success for building an ecosystem that can support 100's of services. And, I loved two of his quotes near the end: "SOA is not just about technology -- it's a transformation of the business" and "SOA ecosystems ensure sustainable advantage", very business-oriented views of SOA benefits that are often lost in the more-frequent technical discussions about SOA.

He talked about how SOA has changed from a focus purely on web services (the little blue bit in the diagram below) to a focus on all the other things that need to exist in order to make SOA successful:

My only argument with his taxonomy of the ecosystem is that he puts orchestration as part of the mediation services, and BPM floating somewhere out there as a consumer of the SOA ecosystem, almost as part of the application layer. However, I consider orchestration to be part of the larger definition of BPM, hence believe that BPM belongs as part of the SOA ecosystem itself and in fact includes most of the mediation services that he lists.

My favourite bit was where he referred to web services as "an answer looking for a problem", and went on to list why just using web services over HTTP is problematic in building an SOA, and why it led to the development of the SOA ecosystem concept. He also gave some compelling reasons why the "best of breed" approach is still the best route in assembling your SOA ecosystem today, and the value of an enterprise service bus and the service registry. None of this is rocket science -- in fact, his bit on the importance of correct granularity for services is really just an SOA twist on the age-old programmers' dilemma of granularity -- but it is a nicely packaged talk, delivered in a way that's understandable to an SOA newbie. Definitely worth a listen.

Today, Frank Kenney from Gartner gave a short but impassioned talk on Policy-Driven SOA, followed by a fairly informative session from Sean Fitts, chief architect at Amberpoint, the webinar sponsor.

Under the heading "SOA does not come for free", Kenney talked about everything that's required to get SOA in place: infrastructure, methodology, services creation, testing, etc., but states that it's worth the price -- an argument that I seem to be making to customers over and over again.

He feels that you need to have a certain type of infrastructure that allows you to govern what's going on in SOA. It's a different view than Cragg's SOA ecosystem shown above -- kind of a slice across the lower half of Cragg's diagram, or maybe a third dimension.

Kenney talks about services, processes and policies as assets that can be used for competitive differentiation, which really lines up with Cragg's statement about ensuring sustainable advantage. What they're both saying is that the old cowboy web services methods aren't enough any more: if you really expect to reap the potential benefits of SOA, you need to start putting some discipline in place.

He finished up by stating that governance is a business issue, and that no one vendor can sell governance, but they can help you to achieve governance.

Replays are available at the links. I'd love to see these available as downloadable video for my iPod, by the way.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 08:51 PM in BPM • ESB • SOA | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (1) | Add to del.icio.us

Registration for the AIIM Expo 2006, to be held May 16-18 in Philadelphia, is now available online. I haven't attended AIIM in a few years, but I'm thinking about attending the exhibits. So far, however, the list of BPM vendors and BI vendors look pretty sparse -- I think that most of these vendors tend to hit industry-related shows rather than general (and somewhat outdated) shows like AIIM, or hold public webinars. The advantage of attending a trade show, in theory, is that you see the new/little vendors/products that might not otherwise hit your radar screen, but I'm not sure that many of them are coming to AIIM.

And, if I want a really good product demo, there's better ways to do that than at a trade show: I've had two private demos directly from vendors via Webex in the past two weeks, with another coming up soon. Not that I don't want to visit Philly, but Webex is definitely the way to go for demos.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 11:06 AM in BPM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

Gartner has released their Magic Quadrant for business process analysis, and the first big news is that they've updated the style of the graphics: rounded corners, one-sided arrows and --wait for it -- orange dots!

Seriously, though, this is a good report and comparision of the primary tools used for modelling and analyzing your business processes, whether or not you're going to automate some of those processes using BPM. However, it's the linkage between BPA and BPM that is really driving the BPA marketplace, including the whole round-tripping process that allows BAM results to be fed back into the BPA tool for further analysis and optimization.

Many of the BPM vendors have BPA included in their product; in fact, Gartner makes a note that they dropped FileNet from this report since their BPA is so deeply embedded that it's not sold as a separate product, but they've added other BPM vendors such as Fuego (now BEA) and Savvion, although they languish in the lower left corner. In other words, you'd use their BPA if you were using their BPM, but you're not going to buy it as a standalone BPA tool, as I've discussed previously. For that, you look to the big guns in the top right of the quadrant, such as IDS Scheer and Proforma. Although IDS Scheer focusses purely on process modelling, Proforma, Telelogic (formerly Popkin) and a few others go far beyond that to full enterprise architecture modelling, of which process modelling is an important but small part. I haven't written much about EA lately, but it's definitely a topic very near and dear to my heart.

I find it interesting that Gartner has chosen the vendors for this MQ in such a way that they are only in the "leaders" or "niche players" quadrants: not a one in the "visionaries" or "challengers" quadrants. They give an explanation for why this happened in the full report, but I feel that the comparison chart is less useful for tracking future trends without the visionaries and challengers. Personally, I would have put Microsoft (Visio in the BPA product under review) a bit more to the left into the challengers' quadrant, since it's not clear to me that their vision for making Visio a full BPA offering is particularly complete.

Last year, I posted about BPTrends' report on enterprise architecture, process modelling and simulation tools, which includes many of those in Gartner's upper right quadrant. The vendors paid to be part of the BPTrends report, so it's not exactly indepedent analysis, but it includes some good background material on the market (and it's free).

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 09:41 AM in BPA • BPM • EnterpriseArchitecture | Permalink | TrackBacks (1) | Add to del.icio.us

Several months ago, I ordered some of Hugh MacLeod's Blogcards, which I hand out regularly in place of my regular corporate-looking business card to people who I meet in more casual situations. In particular, I ordered the "Read My Blog" card, because I often find myself referring people to my blog for more information on something that we're discussing.

What I really need to do, however, is start handing them to people that I have known for years.

Yesterday, I had the occasion to meet or telephone three friends. All of them work in technology. At one point, we used to all work for the same BPM technology company (during my brief hiatus in corporate-land). Two of them (both very technical) still work there, and the third works for a company that provides aggregated business analysis content through RSS feeds, among other methods.

None of them read my blog, although the two who still work for the BPM technology company could undoubtedly learn something about their market, their customers, or even their own company by reading it. In fact, all three of them don't read any blogs on a regular basis, and don't know how to use an RSS reader -- even the one who now sells content via RSS to businesses.

I only have one thing to say: read my blog.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 08:21 AM in Blogging | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

I went to a literary reading last night that paid tribute to author Barbara Gowdy, who read from her novel in progress after we heard readings from five other great authors about their views and experiences of Gowdy. Catherine Graham, one of the other authors who spoke, made the most amazing statement in her short piece "It Chooses You": she said that if you write, you should write about what obsesses you. I'm a huge believer in being passionate about my work, and definitely do my best work when it's something that I just can't put down, so that really resonated with me.

This morning, I saw these entrepreneurial proverbs (for geeks) by Marc Hedlund on O'Reilly Radar (via Boing Boing), which included basically the same advice as Graham offers: "pay attention to the idea that won't leave you alone".

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 12:10 PM in Business | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

James Taylor's been at the Gartner Business Intelligence Summit this week. On Monday, he posted some great thoughts on process, rules, BI and agility:

You can use business rules to automate decisions in business processes and then use analytics to optimize these decisions and hence the processes...

You must be able to change a process that you are monitoring when your monitoring tells you that something is wrong. Real-time measurement should not be combined with systems that take weeks or months to change.

Although there are caveats to that last sentence -- for example, some real-time measurement is intended to allow the human elements in a process to change rather than the system, such as work re-allocation -- I'd still like to have it tattooed on my forehead for every client to read. Making measurements with the intention of enabling agility is useless in many of the BPM installations today, not because the underlying BPMS isn't agile, but because the customer chooses (or is coerced) to undertake a huge degree of customization that effectively pours concrete over the system.

Then later that day, he posts more on how BPM, BRE and analytics go together like chocolate and peanut butter (that's my characterization, but I'm sure James would agree) -- that seems to be a popular theme at the summit. He also posts about the Tuesday and Wednesday sessions, although less BPM-related than the Monday sessions.

Maybe because I come from the BPM side of the house, I don't really see why the big fuss to rename parts of the BI space: BI seems to be an outdated term now, referring only to reporting on historical information from a data warehouse or operational data store. Other terms like CPM (corporate performance management), BAM (business activity monitoring), CEP (complex event processing) and EDM (enterprise decision management, which also involves BRE) have sprung up to cover the near-real-time space that I still think of as BI -- after all, there's much of the data aggregation, analytics and other common technology at the core. Many of these newer terms are touted as "[something more fabulous] BI", such as James' reference to EDM as "deployable BI", but it feels a bit like the emperor's new clothes. Maybe they're all just BI 2.0.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 01:24 AM in BI • BPM • BRE | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

Before I went to Mashup Camp, I exchanged emails with Chris Radcliff of EVDB/Eventful, and it was great to meet him face-to-face at camp. EVDB makes an API for managing event, venue, and calendar data, and Eventful uses that API in an events/calendaring/social networking mashup of events submitted directly to Eventful plus those grabbed from other event sites.

Today, I see that Eventful was covered on Boing Boing, which should bring it a huge amount of well-deserved attention. Congrats!

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 01:52 PM in mashupcamp | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

I received the following opinion by email from a Column 2 reader who makes a distinction between automation/workflow and BPM. I invite discussion, and I'll be adding in my $0.02.

I have a hard time referring to it as BPM when a person simply automates a business process. To me that is workflow. Granted, we have powerful stand-alone workflow engines now that allow a workflow to route work between more people and systems than ever before, but it is still workflow. Just because the workflow engines now call themselves BPM does not mean that a person is doing BPM when they use them.

When a website or an article about BPM touts the benefits of BPM as being the ability to speed up or automate a business process, reduce the time work is in transit, pinpoint where work is real-time, gather all relevant data on one screen for the worker, increase accountability or allow for the automation of exceptions, I feel that that author just does not 'get it'. Getting the right thing to the right person (or system) at the right time is workflow; its benefits have long been established (i.e. http://e-workflow.org).

Workflow is powerful and generally has very high payback. One of the weaknesses of workflow is that the process you just automated may not be the best or most efficient process. That is where BPM comes in. If you have a workflow process that is less focused on automating work and more focused on gathering data about a process for later analysis, then you have entered the realm of BPM. If there are places in the BPM process that can be automated while still keeping the focus on gathering the metrics, that is and added bonus. In my mind that constitutes the incorporation of workflow capabilities and benefits into your BPM effort.

I envision a BPM flow initially being only human steps where a person reports back that they have done certain things. In the beginning it would just be additional overhead. As more information is gathered and analyzed this human process is rearranged quickly to remove bottlenecks and inefficiencies. Over time automation of redundant or time consuming steps are added. When automation is added we must be very careful not to make the flow inflexible since the primary goal is to gather data and be flexible, not to automate. If a point of automation is identified but it will add inflexibility, then maybe a tactical workflow application is created and the BPM flow just consumes it as a service. You get the automation but keep the BPM flow as flexible as possible.

Workflow is workflow and BPM is BPM. The trend is to use the workflow engines to do BPM, but they are still distinct entities and are implemented in distinctly different ways. I think this distinction is important because you are not going to get all the benefits promised by the BPM crowed if you spend all your time automating. Automation is good, but BPM + Strategic Automation is better.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 08:55 AM in BPM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

I attended the bloggers' dinner in Toronto on Monday (photographic evidence here), and had the chance to meet Shel Israel, Alec Saunders (who helped to arrange the event and blogged about it here) and his business partner Howard Thaw, and a lot of other bloggers who I have previously met only via RSS. Something that I found interesting: every one of the people with whom I exchanged cards also uses LinkedIn (the professional networking site), although a couple of them have a dismally small number of connections. My usual practice is to check for each new contact on LinkedIn and invite them to connect immediately, before we both forget why our conversation was important.

I had a lengthy chat with Peter Flaschner and Lucia Mancuso from The Blog Studio about how they design and consult on corporate blogging for small businesses, which I found interesting considering all of my friends with small businesses who I've been nagging to start blogging. I use my blog as my primary marketing vehicle, and Peter and Lucia are trying to bring that same sensibility to other small businesses.

Also had interesting conversations with Mike Bowler from Gargoyle Software, who helps companies to improve their (web) software development procesess through the introduction of XP/Agile concepts; Shelley McKay and Michael Bodalski from Cricket Marketing and PR, whose home page of their corporate site is actually in blog format (!); and Peter Dawson, with whom I discussed the relative merits of using the term "landscaping" versus "architecture" as applied to business, IT and enterprise architecture.

I also met Timothy Li, an eager young engineering student at University of Waterloo who, when I told him that I graduated Waterloo engineering in 1984, rather untactfully pointed out that that was the year that he was born (he also said that he didn't realize that the Systems Design Engineering program was "that old"). Tim followed up our exchange by posting a comment to my blog, so I checked out his blog and almost fell off my chair laughing at his retelling of a conversation where I was present. I passed it on to Rick Segal (coincidentally, the only person at the event who I actually knew face-to-face), although I'm not sure he laughed as much of the description of him as "mid aged" and obviously striking terror in the heart of younger men. :)

Although dinner never materialized, it was a great get-together for Toronto bloggers. Coming from a closet introvert who cringes at the thought of business networking events, that's high praise.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 08:21 AM in Blogging | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (1) | Add to del.icio.us

Upgrades to the site continue, and I just noticed that individual entries are not accessible here on Column 2. That means that you can't make a comment, or see previous comments or trackbacks. Hopefully, this will be fixed soon.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 10:41 AM in Blogging | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

Almost a year ago, I wrote about a borrowing and lending exchange called Zopa that had just launched in the U.K. -- a sort of peer-to-peer lending service where individuals participate directly with each other rather than through a bank or other financial institution. Since most of my clients are financial institutions, I found this an interesting bit of disintermediation, except for once it was the big guys (the banks) being disintermediated out of the supply chain.

The Economist just published news of a similar exchange (paid subscription required to read article) opening in the U.S.: Prosper. There are a few differences in how they operate (Zopa always spreads a loan across at least 50 lenders, whereas Prosper allows the higher-risk scenario of one lender to assume an entire loan), but they both take on much of the administration work around the loan -- credit scoring, collection agencies in the case of a borrower defaulting -- for a fee of 1% of the loan amount taken from the borrower. Prosper also allows borrowers to form social networking-type groups, such as alumni from a particular university, where the loan repayment track record of the group can have a positive reflection on the members, and therefore lower the expected interest rate. In addition to reduced interest rates, the Economist also discusses the warm-and-fuzzy part of the equation:

There is a psychic pay-off, too. Users on Zopa have said that they like lending and borrowing within a community of "“real"” people, rather than through a faceless bank. Mr Duvall [Zopa's CEO] notes that affinity credit cards (ie, those linked to an activity or membership) tend to have lower default rates than traditional credit cards. "The sense of community matters,"” he says.

It will be interesting to see if this technique that's proving successful in the British marketplace can make inroads with Americans.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 09:52 AM in FinancialServices | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

The great web team at ebizQ upgraded the Movable Type installation to version 3.2, which has hugely improved the spam filtering on both trackbacks and comments that I was fighting with previously. There are still a few spam comments slipping through the filter so I won't remove comment moderation yet since they would just pour into the comments RSS feed, but I hope to be able to get rid of it in the near future since I believe that comment moderation impedes the flow of ideas.

There's also a few changes to the stylesheets going on, as you will notice if you read this directly on the ebizQ site rather than through the feed, which should settle down soon.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 07:19 AM in Blogging | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

David Ogren continues his inside look at being acquired by BEA, while taking a swipe at Bruce Silver, Sanjay Kalra, myself and undoubtedly others for being so bold as to compare this to the TIBCO-Staffware acquisition. Charmingly loyal.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 10:12 AM in BPM | Permalink | TrackBacks (3) | Add to del.icio.us