For the code monkeys in the crowd, you'll fall out of your cubicle laughing at this.

(via Sutha Kamal)

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 06:46 PM in OffTopic | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

I attended TorCampDemoCamp5 this week, my first DemoCamp and a great opportunity to see some new stuff, meet some new people and catch up with some acquaintances. The popularity of this forum is amazing: there were probably 130+ people there, some of them sitting on the steps of the lecture hall since there weren't enough seats for all.

Best quote of the evening, from one of the presenters (sorry, can't remember who at this point) when asked why he had developed the code in Rails, responded "It was like this code wanted to be written in Rails", which evoked some laughter and a round of applause.

The most interesting presentation (to me) was DabbleDB -- unfortunately not yet available -- that did some of the coolest stuff with structured data that I've seen in a long time, like dynamic normalization and some really intelligent typecasting including calendaring based on data range fields. It's not often that data manipulation can make me raise my eyebrows and declare it as cool (otherwise, this blog would be called Column 1 instead of Column 2), but this actually provides a potential path to putting some structure around and sharing all of that data that's currently sitting in spreadsheets. You can read an independent review of DabbleDB here, watch a seven-minute demo (highly recommended, and similar to what was shown at DemoCamp) or a 40-minute presentation, or check out their blog. Written in Smalltalk, a language that I haven't even thought about in years.

Also of interest was Unspace's datagrid, a very Web 2.0 way of capturing and presenting formatted data.

Unfortunately, I had to head home and finish my taxes instead of heading off to the pub with the group afterwards, but I did have a chance to meet face-to-face with Markus Strohmaier, a Column 2 reader from Austria who is now in Toronto for post-doc research in his field of business process-oriented knowledge management. He initially alerted me to the BPOKI track at the International Conference on Knowledge Management.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 10:22 AM in Web2.0 | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

I'll never be in Technorati's top 100 (or anywhere near it), but I passed a milestone recently by breaking the top 100,000 with this blog. Not bad, considering that Technorati tracks over 35 million sites. If you're not familiar with Technorati, it allows you to claim your blog then see how popular it is based on the number of links from other sites to your blog. The big problem that I have with Technorati becomes visible when you look at my Technorati profile:

Is anyone else seeing triple on this screen? The first entry (with a rank of 225,034) uses the address www.column2.com, which is redirected to the actual address, www.ebizq.net/blogs/column2. The second entry (with a rank of 62,569) uses the actual address of this blog. The third entry is the old location of this blog, column2, where it lived until January of this year when I moved it over to ebizQ.

Okay, I understand why the third can't be combined with the others: it's actually a different site. However, why can't they consolidate the link count of a redirected URL (www.column2.com, which I use because it's easier for people to remember) with the site to which it's redirected? Obviously, the split lowers my ranking, since the links are split between the two "Column 2 - ebizQ" addresses which Technorati sees as different (even though they're the same).

Technorati support, in reply to my inquiry, just stated that they couldn't do it:

I'm afraid that we are unable combine links from different URLs at this time. Links are URL based and are unique citations to that blog at that time. However since you've updated your web server configuration to send a permanent redirect response (HTTP Status 301) to anyone requesting one URL to the other blog URL, then it will help consolidate your online blog presence for all web aggregators and help have your links reestablished eventually.

Their last point, about "having my links reestabished eventually" totally misses the point: I actually want people to use the www.column2.com address if it's easier for them to remember, and that's what's on my business card and in my email signature. In other words, www.column2.com is part of my online identity, whereas ebizq.net is just where my blog happens to live.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 11:22 AM in Blogging • Rant | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

I listened in on an ebizQ webinar today, The Path to SOA Enlightenment, and some interesting points came up about SOA education. The sponsor of the webinar was the Integration Consortium, which of course has a vested interest in encouraging SOA education since they already offer training and certification, but there's few who would disagree that we need better education about a number of integration-related areas. Here's a few screen snaps of the audience survey responses gathered during the webinar:

The first of these allowed the audience to select more than one response, while the second only allowed the selection of a single reponse. The two above make sense together: if people think that it's the integration specialists and architects who most need certification, then it follows that the biggest area of training would be concepts rather than technologies.

The next one, which also allowed more than one response to be selected, shows the topics that people feel are important in the training, and there's a few surprises here, such as organization, policies and governance in first place with 88% of the vote. SOA design and standards almost tied for second with 75% and 73%.

The audience also responded that although only 34% of them have an integration or SOA methdology in place, 87% are interested in having one.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 01:31 PM in SOA | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

If it's easier for you to check your email for Column 2 blog posts than to visit this site, you can now subscribe to the posts by email. Just fill in your email address in the right sidebar under the text "Have Column 2 posts delivered to your inbox. Enter your email address:", and click the Subscribe button. This is a service offered by Feedburner, which also provides my RSS feed. Your email won't be used for anything except to receive new blog posts, and you can unsubscribe at any time.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 01:13 PM in Blogging | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

Although the AIIM E-DOC magazine site still shows the January/February issue, you can find the link to the article that I wrote for the March/April issue here (or check out the dead-tree version of the publication). In this article, I highlight three major pitfalls that can occur during BPM system implementations:

• Over-customization
• Allowing the business to design the solution
• Applying the wrong BPM tool

A couple of oddities in the online version: the entire last section is in boldface, rather than just the first header sentence ("Apply the wrong BPM tool") in that section; and my mini-bio at the end states "Sandy Kemsley has BPM experience from the lenses vendor, user, and, currently, consultant experience." I have no idea what that means, but enjoy the article.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 02:55 PM in BPM | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

Phil Gilbert's post last week exposes the Emperor's clothes for what they are: BPEL is just another implementation language:

It's simply a new way to write code. It has nothing to do with the management of business processes. I don't love it or hate it; other than that it is a distraction. BPEL isn't necessary to achieve the benefits promised by business process management - and therefore it's an impediment in the market conversations that are occurring with respect to business process management.

Yes, BPEL can make writing code to implement BPM easier, but don't confuse that with anything to do with managing business, or with anything that allows the control of business processes to be moved into the hands of the business.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 10:51 AM in BPEL • BPM standards | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

I saw this post by John Wu on the myth of business process-centric enterprise definition (via Lucas Rodríguez Cervera), and I find it hard to see how anyone gets away with "defining the enterprise based on business process modeling in EA". Business process modelling has a place in enterprise architecture, but it's just one of many tools/techniques for creating the necessary EA artifacts. For example, if you're a Zachman follower, you'll find business models only in row 2 (business model/owner context), and something that could be described as a business process model really only in columns 2 (function) and 4 (people) of that row: two artifacts out of 30.

Wu proposes defining the enterprise from the aspect of mission (why), function (how), information (what), stakeholders (who), stakeholder location (where) and stakeholder demand (when) rather than the exhausted [sic] enumeration of business process modeling, which really seems just to be advocating an EA approach to defining the enterprise. And if you're an enterprise architect, regardless of the framework that you use, you already know that business process models are just one aspect of that definition.

It's important to understand business processes as part of understanding the enterprise, but I don't agree with Wu's statement that most EA projects use business process modelling as their primary understanding of the business, or that EA is just second-generation BPR.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 02:47 AM in BPA • EnterpriseArchitecture | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

An article by Bruce Silver in Intelligent Enterprise discusses the recent spate of BPM vendors releasing their process modelling tools for free. He lists Savvion, Oracle and Intalio, but the trend is widening -- TIBCO just announced the availability of their modeling tool, and although the press release doesn't specify, I heard a rumour that it's free as well (how could it not be, considering the competition?). These offerings, from companies who make their money on the BPMS engine side so can afford to give away the modelling tools, will certainly make a dent in the market share of some of the dedicated modelling tools, such as Proforma, although many of the dedicated tools provide more extensive enterprise architecture-type modelling, not just process modelling.

One significant problem with these free tools is that although the vendors assume that they will just spread to all the desktops in an organization like wildfire, most corporate IT departments lock down user desktop configurations so that you can't install applications. Although this might seem like a bit of Big Brother, there's a good reason for this: it's completely impossible for a corporate IT department to support several thousand PCs if the users can just install anything that they want on them. A case in point: a few years ago, a workstation at a client of mine started freezing "randomly", which they blamed on the BPM software that we had installed on it. After several service calls where the problem did not recur, followed by uninstalls and reinstalls, one of my engineers finally just hung around until the problem occurred. The culprit? A non-corporate-standard screen saver that showed an animated football game; the machine hung right around the first down when the cheerleaders came out. When we reverted to a standard Windows screen saver, the problem disappeared. Since then, I've never complained about the restrictions that corporate IT makes on standard user desktops, even though it keeps me from using Firefox at most customer sites.

What this means is that even if a vendor makes their software available for free, that doesn't assure acceptance, because it's not free for an organization to regression test that against their standard desktop environment(s) and all of the other applications with which it might coexist. There's two possible solutions to this:

• Create an entirely web-based process modelling tool. (Do BPMS vendors know about Web 2.0 yet?)
• Use a modelling tool that is already on most users' desktops, namely Microsoft Visio.

I had a chat with one of the BPMS vendors recently about the first option, and he asked if I felt that web-based was the way to go (I love it when BPMS vendors ask me my opinion on product direction :) ). My reply:

I like web-based since it lowers the barrier to use... many people of the type that I see in my customers who are doing process modelling are doing so at their office location and could be doing it much more easily if they don't have to get permission from their IT department to install something on their PC, but use a purely web-based tool.

We also discussed how an installed version was necessary for people who aren't always connected, but most real process modellers aren't doing it from 35,000 feet or at a trade show, they're doing it from their desk with a high-speed corporate internet connection. Yes, you have to have something for the road warriors and your sales people, but ultimately you'll be most successful if you build what's best for the target audience.

Which brings me to the second solution: Visio. Last year, Bruce Silver had a couple of articles on using Visio for process modelling, referencing the itp-commerce product. I just had a demo of a competing product, Byzio from Zynium (which sounds like a fictional space alien and his planet, sort of like Mork from Ork), another Visio add-on that allows for more robust process modelling in that ubiquitous tool. Yes, you still need to install the add-on, but chances are that a corporate IT department will find it much easier to approve a Visio add-on for installation than a full application.

Basically, Byzio allows you to draw a process model in Visio, then export it to XPDL for import into a BPMS' process modelling tool. [In case you're not up on XPDL, it's an XML file format used to store BPMN; BPMN is the graphic modelling notation.] You can use a BPMN stencil in Visio so that you're using the standard BPMN shapes, but the real power of Byzio is in the ability to map from any shape to a BPMN/XPDL construct, so if you already have a corporate standard for what shapes to use in a process model, you don't have to change that, you just have to set up the mapping. The really cool thing is that Byzio has the ability to use the text within a shape to assist in the mapping, for example, detecting the words "and" or "or" in a decision shape and choosing the correct decision type. The mapping setup, which includes a regular expression parser, is not something that you'll want every user to be playing around with, but as long as everyone in a department is using some standard notation, you should be able to set up the mapping once and replicate it around.

Although XPDL is supposed to be a standard, every BPMS vendor has their own flavour of XPDL, so the Byzio installation has to be specific to the target BPMS: the version that was demonstrated for me was for Fujitsu Interstage, but they also list Appian and DST on their website and I know that there are others in the works. In the case of Interstage, after the XPDL file is exported from Visio using the Byzio add-on, it's opened in the Interstage process designer, where it can be further enhanced with engine-specific parameters. Byzio also plans to support round-tripping, where the XPDL can be exported back from the BPMS process designer for import into Visio for rework -- I think that there's some serious challenges in making this happen, but it's doable. Not as integrated as using the BPMS' process designer directly, but it has the huge advantage of using software that's already installed on every business analysts' desktop.

I'm still torn on the best solution in the long run. I feel strongly that there's a place for BPMS vendors to create fully web-based versions of their process modelling tools intended for use by business users: namely, versions of the tools that don't include all the yucky technical details, but provide a business view of the process models as they exist in the BPMS -- no importing/exporting required. However, Visio is used for so much more than just what's going to be automated in a BPMS that it will retain its dominance in process modelling by business users for the foreseeable future. That being said, I'll give the edge to Visio paired with add-ons such as Byzio or itp-commerce.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 02:00 AM in BPA • BPM • BPMN • Web2.0 | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

Jean-Christophe Dichant, an ex-colleague of mine from FileNet, is back to blogging about BPM (en français), and has the first in what he promises to be a series of posts on the major issues in organizations that can be addressed with BPM and ECM (enterprise content management):

• Improving end-to-end processing times
• Distributing work to ensure appropriate use of the workforce
• Ensuring compliance

[JC, please correct my translation if I've mangled something here]

Although there's nothing really revolutionary here, I wanted to point this out because it's one of the few BPM-related blogs in French that I've found.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 09:31 PM in BPM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

A cool map that you can create of the countries that you've visited. Here's mine:

create your own visited countries map

When I look at it, I'm more amazed by the places that I haven't been (nothing in South America? or Asia?) than the 29 countries that I have.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 05:24 PM in OffTopic | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

I received an email from James Taylor today, and on second reading, I noticed the following in small print at the end of his signature block:

Despite not being sent from my Blackberry, this email may nevertheless be terse and contain spelling and grammatical errors.

As a very sympathetic Blackberry user, I'm still laughing.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 09:57 PM in OffTopic | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

I've just registered for the OMG's BPM Think Tank in Washington DC on May 23-25. The program is mostly about standards, which is a big focus for me right now. It will be a chance to see some people who I've met before, such as Phil Gilbert and Derek Miers, and meet a few others for the first time face-to-face, such as Bruce Silver, Keith Swenson (who I heard speak at the Gartner BPM Summit) and John Evdemon (who was referred to me by Harry Pierson when I met him at Mashup Camp).

If you're going, look me up. If you haven't signed up yet, discount registration fees for the BPM Think Tank are still available until May 1st.

OMG gets full marks for including bloggers when they're handing out press passes; my thanks to Dana Morris and Stephanie Covert for their forward-thinking press relations policies. I'll be blogging more about the event before, during and after.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 05:03 PM in BPEL • BPM standards • BPMN • BPMThinkTank • Blogging • GartnerBPM2006 | Permalink | TrackBacks (2) | Add to del.icio.us

Phil Wainewright posted one of the IT commandments today: Thou shalt document all thy works. This is a perfect followup to my post yesterday about SOA and data, although it may not appear obvious at first. Problem: application developers don't use services when they should; in yesterday's post, I was talking about how they squirrel away data in their own application-specific silos, but the real issue is more widespread than that. Wainewright hits it on the head:

Failure to document is thus one of the biggies of ZDNet's IT Commandments, high up in the mortal sin rankings with the likes of 'Thou shalt not kill'. For if you don't document your work, how is anyone else supposed to reuse any of it? From your greater sin flows a multitude of others' lesser transgressions.

In addition to yesterday's more easily defeated arguments that developers don't use services because the data may not be accurate or it make take too long, we add this one that's harder to counter: the developers don't use services because they're not properly documented. This is often blamed on developers having a "not invented here" attitude, and wanting to build everything themselves, but I disagree (in general).

I've been a developer, and I used anything available to me as long as I understood how to use it, how it worked, and its limitations. In other words, I used third-party code/services if they were properly documented, and I could determine from that documentation that they suited my needs. If they weren't documented and I had to walk through the code (if that was even available) to figure out how it worked, then I was more likely to just rewrite it myself, on the basis that if someone couldn't write proper documentation then maybe they couldn't write proper code either. Later, when I ran a development team, I made the developers write the documentation first. They bitched about it, but we had a high level of code reuse.

There is no way to achieve SOA without reusable services, and there is no way to achieve reusable services without proper documentation of those services.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 11:27 AM in SOA • SoftwareDesign | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

If you're into open source BPM, you'll be interested to know that Red Hat announced today that they're buying JBoss, makers of the open source jBPM and jBoss Rules (formerly jRules) products.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 10:57 AM in BPM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

Yesterday, I posted a rather whiny entry about rude customers (and Bob McIlree was kind enough to give me a comforting pat on the shoulder, virtually speaking -- thanks Bob!) so today I decided to get a bit more productive. Moving from whine to wine, I finally made my first cut of a Squidoo lens about Australian Wine in Toronto (yes, I'm a geek and this is how I spent part of my Sunday). Sort of a niche topic, true, but that's what Squidoo lenses are all about: it allows you to quickly build a one-page portal with links to other sites, Amazon products, eBay, RSS feeds, and a number of other kinds of information. Since it's all on the web, you can update it anywhere, which is why I've moved quite a bit of information about both wine and BPM from my websites to my two Squidoo lenses.

I want to add a bit of meat to this post to offset the whine of yesterday, and coincidentally (before I saw his comment), I was reading Bob's post on SOA and Data Issues and the need to maintain a source system of record (SSoR) for data. In particular, he discusses a conversation that was passed along to him from another organization:

A, the SOA implementer, argues that application-specific databases have no need to retain SSoR data at all since applications can invoke services at any time to receive data. He further opined that the SOA approach will eliminate application silos as his primary argument in the thread.

B, the applications development manager, is worried that he won't get the 'correct' value from A's services and that he has to retain what he receives from SSoRs to reconcile aggregations and calculated values at any point in time.

Since I'm usually working on customer projects that involve the intersection of legacy systems, operational databases, BPMS and analytical databases, I see this problem a lot. In addition to B's argument about getting the "correct" value, I also hear the efficiency argument, which usually manifests as "we have to replicate [source data] into [target system] because it's too slow to invoke the call to the source system at runtime". If you have to screen-scrape data from a legacy CICS screen and reformat it at every call, I might go for the argument to replicate the mainframe data into an operational database for faster access. However, if you're pulling data from an operational database and merging it with data from your BPMS, I'm going to find it harder to accept efficiency as a valid reason for replicating the data into the BPMS. I know, it's easier to do it that way, but it's just not right.

When data is replicated between systems, the notion of the SSoR, or "golden copy", of the data is often lost, the most common problem being when the replicated data is updated and never synchronized back to the original source. This is exacerbated by synchronization applications that attempt to update the source but were written by someone who didn't understand their responsibility in creating what is effectively a heterogeneous two-phase commit -- if the update on the SSoR fails, no effective action is taken to either rollback the change to the replicated data or raise a big red flag before anyone starts making further decisions based on either of the data sources. Furthermore, what if two developers each take the same approach against the same SSoR data, replicating it to application-specific databases, updating it, then trying to synchronize the changes back to the source?

I'm definitely in the A camp: services eliminate (or greatly reduce) the need to replicate data between systems, and create a much cleaner and safer data environment. In the days before services ruled the earth, you could be forgiven for that little data replication transgression. In today's SOA world, however, there are virtually no excuses to hide behind any more.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 10:08 PM in SOA • SoftwareDesign | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

I've had two "inconsiderate customer" incidents this week; actually, both are customers who I've done quite a bit of work for in the past but have been inactive for some time.

With customer #1, I contracted in as their business and application architect for several months; even though they didn't really get what enterprise architecture is all about, I spent most of a year trying to do some internal education on the necessity for EA to help sort out the legacy linguine that was rampant in their organization, as well as the lack of business-IT alignment. A while after leaving, on April 29th 2005 to be exact, I dropped my key contact there an email about the (then) new report from BPTrends on EA tools, saying the following:

...there's a new report out from BPTrends on enterprise architecture that you can download for free. I gave it a quick review on my business blog, which includes a link to the report. Although the product information in the report is nothing that you can't get from the vendor's sites, the first 25 or so pages are a great overview of enterprise architecture, process modelling and simulation tools that provide good background material if you're ever promoting a related project. I did an earlier post on their report on BPM suites that you might also find interesting.

Usually this type of email at least gets a "thanks", or "hey, it's been a while, let's meet for coffee", but nothing came back from this. No big deal, customer #1 is a busy person. Then on Tuesday of this week, 340 days after my original email, it arrives:

With customer #2, I did the architecture and design of their original BPM system, and they now need some analysis and design assistance to further increase efficiencies (which presumably would more than pay for my engagement there). Their internal IT architect contacted me in November 2005, we chatted on the phone and by email, then he connected me with the project manager. Long pauses in the conversation ensued, punctuated by several emails and voice mails from me to the PM. Responses took as long as six weeks, or never came at all. Finally, they made a request to have me fly to their site this coming week -- the week leading up to Easter, with Friday a holiday here in Canada, and Saturday being when 13 members of my family will be descending on my home for Easter dinner. That, of course, is my problem, so I said yes. Turns out that no one had the funding approved, however, so I received an email two weeks ago saying that the trip was off. I immediately responded with some suggestions on how to restructure the project to reduce the funding issues while still providing value. Their response? Silence, so far.

The thing that frustrates me is that I'm not an unknown salesperson cold-calling these people, I'm a geeky engineer type who worked on site as part of the in-house team with both of these customers for several months and did significant amounts of work that were well-received. Are they just snowed under with the amount of email that they receive, and ignoring all of their business contacts equally, even if they were the one to initiate the conversation? Or, because I'm a contractor/consultant, don't they consider it worth their time to reply to my email (or even open it for almost a year)? At least I'm pretty sure that they're not reading this blog entry...

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 01:46 PM in EnterpriseArchitecture • Rant | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

I've made some updates to my Squidoo BPM lens, adding a list of BPM vendors with some initial comments (more to come on that), as well as updating the book list to include recent reads such as Andrew Spanyi's More for Less that I picked up at the Gartner BPM summit last week.

I'll be working on it more over the next few days; you can check back there for updates, or subscribe to the lens' RSS feed. If you have anything that you'd like added, add a comment here.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 02:40 PM in BPM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

I realize that women bloggers in Toronto aren't exactly my main reader demographic, so you guys in Nebraska and Bangalore can just skip this, but there's interest brewing in having a BlogHer North in Toronto. Spurred on by a post from Elisa Camahort (cofounder of Blogher) about how the upcoming web 2.0 conference in Toronto, mesh, couldn't manage to find more than 6 women out of 50 speakers, Kate posted about the potential for a BlogHer North.

Count me in. If you're interested, add a comment to Kate's post or send her an email.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 12:48 PM in BlogHerNorth • Blogging | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

Do you hate the Microsoft "dinosaur" commercials as much as I do? If so, you'll love the skewering that they receive at the hands of the Economist's illustrator this week, accompanying an article entitled Spot the dinosaur (paid subscription required):

The article, of course, discusses the world of online software and what Microsoft is doing -- quite late in the game -- to join the party.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 03:35 PM in SaaS | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (1) | Add to del.icio.us

I went looking at last year's BPMG conference webpage to find out about this year's conference, and was surprised to see that not only have they moved their conference to September, but they're headlining a European Gartner BPM summit in June on their conference page. I saw Steve Towers at the Gartner summit last week, so there's obviously some cooperation going on between BPMG and Gartner, but is there really a market in London for two major BPM conferences within three months of each other? Or is this a case of Gartner just barging in, and BPMG scurrying around to try and salvage their mindshare?

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 02:15 PM in BPM • GartnerBPM2006 | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

My evangelism has paid off again, and I've convinced Sharon Boyes-Schiller of SkyScape Solutions to start blogging. Sharon and I met at the BPMG conference in London last year and have had a few conversations via email and Skype since then, many of them about blogging as a type of online portfolio for our small businesses. Her business focusses on analysis and optimization of processes, and I look forward to more of her posts.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 02:14 PM in BPA | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

According to Davenport, innovation is back in style. As he points out, however, 70% of that focus is on product innovation, and that organizations need to be thinking about a "broad portfolio of innovation domains", including process, services, managerial approaches and business models.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 03:18 PM in BPA | Permalink | TrackBacks (1) | Add to del.icio.us

With that title, you can just imagine the black-cassocked priest striding across the Irish moors to confront his personal demons... or maybe I have an overactive imagination from watching a rerun of The Thorn Birds last night.

Anyway, this isn't about Father Pat's own sins, but the sins that we all commit during the act of BPM. As a follow-up to Bruce Silver's comment on my previous posts about the Seven Deadly Sins of BPM, here they are, hot off the Savvion press:

• Don't model your current process
• Don't understand people and system requirements
• Treat BPM as an IT problem
• Focus on "architecture" in SOA rather than "service", which ensures that the business doesn't care about the project
• Commit unnatural acts with existing applications
• Hardwire your BPM application
• Implement automation [of low-value processes] only

I was going to highlight a couple of these as sins that I've seen committed, but have to admit that I've seen them all, although have rarely committed any of them myself. I can't even single one out as being the key one: they're all killers.

The true path to BPM is clear: repent of your sins!

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 03:12 PM in BPM • GartnerBPM2006 | Permalink | TrackBacks (1) | Add to del.icio.us

The last day at the Gartner conference was a short one for me: I skipped the vendor sessions in the morning, so only attended Daryl Plummer's session "BPM in the Service Oriented Architecture" and the Andrew Spanyi talk at lunch before I had to leave for the airport.

Plummer's session description started with the phrase "Is BPM in my SOA or is SOA in my BPM?" -- where have I heard that before -- then asked the questions "Where do BPM and SOA cross paths? How can SOA be leveraged for the business process? How can BPM be leveraged for an SOA?" There was quite a bit of recycled material in here, or maybe I was just getting conferenced-out by that point, but he did introduce a new (to me) acronym: ISE, or integrated service environment, which is apparently the process developer view of composite applications as opposed to BPMS, which is the business view of composite applications. He made a strong point that ISE is not just an IDE plus BPM, but is the following:

• A development environment that enables creation, assembly, orchestration, deployment, automation and maintenance of composite applications based on services from the perspective of a process-centric developer.


• Automates and manages the productivity of developers through frameworks, process flow, page flow and service invocations.


• Provides the development work environment for an application platform suite to assemble services into processes and composite applications.


• Supports SOA principles and XML Web services standards, as well as traditional component and modular code mechanisms.

First of all, it's not clear to me why this isn't just BPM plus some array of development tools. Second, it's also not clear to me that a BPMS is the business view of composite applications: that's one aspect of a BPMS, but most of them also provide a huge part of the process developer's view as well. Is ISE a valid distinction in this ever-changing SOA environment, or just the buzzword du jour?

Spanyi's talk at lunch was a bit lost in the hub-bub of a room full of people eating and -- in the case of two people at my table -- carrying on completely unrelated conversations, but I did pick up a copy of his latest book so can presumably get the gist of it from that.

One last note to Matt, who I sat with at lunch on Monday: send me your contact info, I want to hear more about your open source workflow project and I want to connect you to someone who is doing something similar.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 01:50 PM in BPM • GartnerBPM2006 • SOA | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

I finished up Tuesday at the conference with Bill Rosser's "Creating a Business Architecture". I found his enterprise architecture models to be a bit inconsistent: at one point, he includes application architecture in information architecture; later, he splits them out as most of us would tend to do. He did make a great point about architecture up front: architecture is not creating the design, it's creating the environment/boundary/envelope in which the design can be created. Since many people don't make the distinction between architecture and design (or even, in some extreme cases, architecture and coding), this was valuable as an explicit statement.

What I did find about Rosser's talk, like all the other non-BPM "special interest" sessions that I attended (Six Sigma, business rules), is that he failed to make an adequate linkage back to BPM in the presentation. I've given presentations on enterprise architecture and BPM in the past, (as well as ones that involve Six Sigma and business rules tied to BPM) and it's very easy to make a strong link between them, so I consider the lack of tie-in to BPM a critical failing of Rosser's presentation.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 01:20 PM in BPM • EnterpriseArchitecture • GartnerBPM2006 | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us