October 31, 2006
links for 2006-10-31
Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 06:23 PM in
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Mini-blogging in Flickr
Here's a cool twist: Dion Hinchcliffe, whose Web 2.0 writings I have often referenced in the past, has been using his Flickr account to hold the graphics that he uses to illustrate his blog posts. The twist this time, however, is that he's actually turned this "Seven Habits of Highly Effective Web 2.0 Sites" graphic and its description into a mini blog post. Since I get a feed of all my Flickr contacts' new photos in my RSS reader, I see this just like any other blog post. Of course, his description also points you to the full article on his real blog. Very Web 2.0.
Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 01:10 PM in
Blogging
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Web 2.0 webinar with Gartner
A great webinar on Web 2.0 just finished on ebizQ, which is not normally the place where you'd see a lot of pure Web 2.0 stuff unrelated to integration technologies. You'll be able to see the replay within 24 hours at the same link. David Mitchell Smith from Gartner is giving a great overview of Web 2.0, particularly how it impacts business. Be sure to download the PowerPoint slides, there are great notes attached. His bottom line: denial is pointless (I would have said "resistance is futile", but that's just the geeky me coming out), Web 2.0 is happening and you'd better get on board. He even talks about mashups and lightweight integration protocols, blogs, and other things that I don't normally hear from the type of Gartner analysts that I deal with. Christopher Crummey from IBM also spoke, and instead of being the usual vendor product pitch, he had some interesting slides on Web 2.0 for business, and particularly how IBM is using some social networking/Web 2.0 technologies internally, such as blogs and customizable portals. He wove in information about their products that support this, but it was done in a pretty unobtrusive way. I've spent a bit of time with some IBM'ers learning about their internal uses of social networking, and it's pretty progressive stuff -- I think that my former colleagues at FileNet may find that their internal collaboration takes a huge leap forward now that they're part of Big Blue. The only downside of this webinar is that the two presentations went so long that there were only a few minutes left for questions, then some sort of technical difficulty resulted in total dead air until after the scheduled end time. I bailed at 3 minutes past the hour, and more than 30% of the audience had done so by that time as well; I'm assuming that there was no Q&A after all.
Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 01:04 PM in
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OMG Infopalooza
The OMG's fall newsletter is out (although as my Aussie friends remind me, it's spring down there), including notice of their technical meeting in DC on December 4-8. This will include a session by OMG BPMI on "Improving Business Process Management using a Maturity Model Framework": "The OMG BPMI Steering Committee has been developing a plan for a Maturity Model for business process improvement, called the Business Process Maturity Model (BPMM). This program will discuss how such a BPMM would guide organizational change, relate to existing OMG standards, and how it could be made available for widespread use and adoption through the OMG standards development process. The BPMM authors include Dr. Bill Curtis and Charlie Weber, who were lead authors for the CMM/CMMI. Dr. Curtis also authored the PCMM (SEI’s People Capability Maturity Model). Topics covered will include introduction and discussion of the BPMM draft, and how it can be used by business, government and vendor communities. Specific attention will be paid to how BPMM could elevate success rates for SOA initiatives." There's also an interview with Phil Gilbert of Lombardi, who is now the BPMI steering committee chair within OMG. I realize that vendors on standards committees make valuable contributions, I'm just not sure that having one run the whole show is a good idea. Are other vendors worried that the standards produced by BPMI will favour Lombardi? Or is this just a great way of forcing all the vendors to participate in the process, since they'll be afraid of what might happen when they're out of the room?
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BPM standards
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October 30, 2006
links for 2006-10-30
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Flickr plugin for Windows Live Writer. Via mynameiskate.ca
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A great short post by Nick Malik on why you should be doing EA. A good intro to those who don't even know what EA is.
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Andrew McAfee on the 3 types of IT (free access on HBR). BPM typically fits in Enterprise IT, but is creeping into Network IT as it becomes more Web 2.0.
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Great post by Anne Zelenka on how companies can successfully interact with bloggers. Some lessons to be learned by many of the companies that I deal with regularly...
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Andrew McAfee looking for actual case studies of Enterprise 2.0. Some interesting comments already appearing in this post.
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Standards documents on BPDM from OMG
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With six computers at home, it shouldn't be too hard to find one to install this on
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Socialtext wiki software now integrated with Microsoft Sharepoint. Via Rod Boothby.
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Hunting down security flaws in your PHP apps.
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Free download of "Increase Business Agility with BPM Suites" from Forrester, sponsored by Appian.
Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 06:24 PM in
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A last few notes on Proforma
I received Proforma's press release last week about the Forrester report on process modelling tools (PDF, free download), in which Proforma places well against their usual competitors, IDS Scheer and MEGA. All three are in the leaders category, with Proforma leading on current product offerings, and IDS Scheer leading on strategy. This result is quite different from Gartner's Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Architecture tools published in April: many of the same tools are being evaluated, but the Forrester focus is purely on business process modelling, while the Gartner focus is on the broader topic of EA modelling. Gartner also published an MQ on business process analysis tools this year that has results closer to the Forrester report, not surprisingly. All of this made me realize that I still had a few notes about the Proforma user conference that I attended a couple of weeks back in Las Vegas, mostly all the ones from the Proforma folks about upcoming product release, ProVision Series 6. Here's the rundown. [All inaccuracies in this information are due to my hurried notetaking, delayed transcription, and incomplete understanding of Proforma's product, and I rely on those more knowledgeable to add any corrections in the comments.] Software as a service was mentioned in the keynote on the first day, and Proforma's push further into their Knowledge Exchange server-base product (an intended replacement for their ProServer product, and eventually their TeamWorks product with a "light" version) seems to support that concept architecturally, although the web client is not fully functional yet and web services interfaces won't be supported until version 6.1. I asked a direct question about whether it would work across the firewall and the answer was "it should work", which means to me that they haven't actually tried it and you might want to wait until they do before trying that one at home. The web client does have quite a bit of rich AJAX-y stuff going on: it shows all the inventory views in a browser, uses some nice UI controls such as elevator bars, drag+drop and double-clicking to open a property dialog, plus allows property editing in the browser client although no real modelling tasks. It uses scalable vector graphics to allow for fast zooming, panning and printing of complex models. I think that they might still be working on the licensing model for the web client: although a user must login, there is no licence required for the web client, such as there is for the desktop client, but this will certainly have to change when the web client is able to be a full desktop client replacement. They've introduced the concept of dimensions in models, which allows for alternative versions to be created based on specific dimensions, where a dimension may be, for example, geography, or as-is versus to-be. In one model, then, you can compare North American as-is models with European to-be models, or whatever else you want to define based on your dimensions. It took me a while to wrap my head around it, but it's pretty powerful stuff. This replaces the less-powerful concept of scenarios that were used in previous versions. There were a number of enhancements that aren't really meaningful to me since I'm not a regular Proforma user, but were welcomed by the audience: embedded Crystal Reports, federated search across repositories, more granular access rights down to the instance of an object, and the ability for a user to change their own password (?!). There are some new business data modelling tools that are intended to allow designers to work in ProVision, then easily bridge to other technical design tools. This theme was picked up later during a lengthy discussion about interfacing with other applications, which is ultimately the key to making Proforma work as an integral part of any organization. They have development an XML-based common interchange format (CIF) and made it openly available to anyone who wants to interface with them; this covers all model types, not just process models. They interface with an impressive number of BPMS, SOA suites, and business rules systems. Because of the rise of process model standards, however, they've also done a BPEL interface. The CTO's keynote made a strong statement in support of standards, mentioning BPEL, WS-CDL, XPDL, SVBR and others. However, during a technical presentation the following day, I asked a question about XPDL to find out that it's under review, but not even on the roadmap yet. They might use CIF as a stepping stone to get to XPDL, as they did with BPEL, but who knows. By then, BPDM will probably be out, and they'll have to address all three serialization formats at some point. In my opinion, there's a few things that they're going to have to address over the next few years in order to keep their product ahead of the big guys who are nipping at their heels, most of which are Web 2.0-type things that I've been talking about for BPMS: - Full functionality in a zero-footprint web client
- Tagging to allow users to build up their own folksonomy around models
- Syndication and feeds for alerts on changes to models, and to provide feedback to some of their new process monitoring capabilities
- Support for XPDL now, and eventually BPDM
Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 06:05 PM in
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Q&A about BPM
I had an email recently from a self-proclaimed BPMS newbie, and I thought that I'd publish his questions and my answers. Feel free to drop in your comments on any of these. Q1. I couldn't find any single BPMS product built on PHP language. All of them were built using either Java or .NET. Are there any php-based BPMS products in the market? A1. I'm unaware of any BPM products built on PHP. Most products are targeted at inside-the-firewall applications, and PHP is less commonly used there than for outward-facing applications. Q2. Most BPMS vendors ignored Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs). Could you please give me list of vendors offering BPMS product for SMEs? A2. Okay, this isn't really my answer since I'm not going to start a vendor war in the comments (or in my inbox) by naming the vendors that I listed back in reply, but suffice to say that the smaller and newer vendors came to mind. If you have any thoughts on a particular product and its suitability for the SME market, join the conversation in the comments section. Q3. I tried to explore BPMS products available on the market. I couldn't find any product that is fully web-based. I want a BPMS product that all of its software (modelling tool, work portal, dashboard, etc.) can be access through web using a "plain" standard-compliant web browser (without Java Applet, ActiveX, etc). Are there any fully web-based BPMS product in the market? A3. This is something that I constantly nag the vendors about. As far as I know, no one is offering the modelling and administration tools in a zero-footprint browser environment yet, and many of them don't even offer browser-based solutions at all. In all cases that I know of, the standard work portal for users tends to be a much more lightweight environment. Q4. It looks like there's no vendors offering BPMS as a service (like salesforce.com). Do you know any vendor offering BPMS as a service? A4. There was one, The Process Factory, which was backed by Global 360 but they lost their funding earlier this year -- there was an article about them last year (www.it-analysis.com/content.php?articleid=12707) and I know a couple of the people who were involved in it. Other than that, none that I'm aware of although I'm sure that there are some niche players in the market.
Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 05:18 PM in
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CentraSite portal and blogs now officially launched
I wrote back in July about CentraSite, a standards-based SOA forum and a freely-available product for SOA registry, repository and other functions. This week, I received notice that CentraSite is now launched (I guess that I was playing with beta code before), and that there will be a number of blogs hosted on the site to talk more about SOA. It will be interesting to see how this plays out; it has Fujitsu and Software AG behind it, and there's obviously been a lot of work put into the product, but I don't have enough experience with this class of product to tell if it's a potential winner or not.
Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 04:06 PM in
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Survey on Business Process Improvement
CIO Insight recently published a survey on business process improvement wherein 66% of the respondents state that BPI is their #1 priority. There's a lot of stats in here to paw through, such as 62% stating that data integration problems are significantly slowing down their BPI efforts -- no real surprise there -- and the general conclusion that BPM and related software aren't consistently effective. Considering that over 40% state that they don't use a BPMS or business process modelling tools and have no intention of using one any time soon, it's also not surprising that the survey concludes that a lot more could be done in terms of automating processes.
Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 01:34 PM in
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October 29, 2006
SOA explained -- on YouTube
Reportedly from IBM, although the credits don't state there, there are three short (just over a minute each) videos on SOA here, here and here on YouTube. Pretty simplistic, but a nice animated way to introduce the subject.
Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 03:56 PM in
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October 28, 2006
links for 2006-10-28
Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 07:20 PM in
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October 26, 2006
links for 2006-10-26
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"latest release of WebSphere Process Server enhances support for advanced human workflow capabilities"...guess they're not going to need that FileNet stuff after all
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The danger of overly-rigid process definitions
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Bruce Silver on mixing and matching BPM and business rules
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TIBCO General Interface now open source and with Firefox support
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Dion Hinchcliffe's graphic on Web 2.0 technologies
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References from IBM
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Still only available as hosted alpha version, but worth keeping an eye on.
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Wow! A huge list of videos on how to do anything with SharePoint, from Russ Stalters. Includes some workflow stuff.
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How to rally against the "white boys' club" of technical conferences
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Collaborative virtual research centre focussed on BPM. Check out the reports section for papers such as "Translating BPMN to BPEL"
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Linked from the SOA/BPM virtual jam
Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 07:22 PM in
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IBM's Virtual Jam on SOA and BPM
The Virtual WebSphere BPM User Group is hosting a 2-day Virtual Jam on the BPM with SOA forum. I heard about this from Bruce, who points to the registration page; note that you have to join the Global WebSphere Users Group Community, then join the Virtual WebSphere BPM User Group (there's a not-so-obvious link to join on the aforementioned registration page). If you survive all of that, hop on over to the forum site and see what's being posted; the jam runs through the end of day tomorrow. Someone from IBM has appeared to have seeded a bunch of discussion topics, but there's not a lot of participation yet. I'm not sure that a forum is a good place to hold a 2-day jam, since the cycle time of people checking and responding to forum posts can be a bit long for that. That being said, there are a few good topics running.
Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 05:44 PM in
BPM
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October 25, 2006
links for 2006-10-25
Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 07:23 PM in
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New Year's Day concert in Vienna
This is completely off topic, but I'll be in Vienna, Austria for New Year's, and there is a big concert by the Vienna Philharmonic on the morning of January 1st that we would absolutely love to attend -- my other half is Croatian and he used to listen to this concert every year on the radio from Croatia. I know that the tickets sell out a year in advance, but if you know of any way to get a couple of tickets for this, please let me know -- I'll do a blog post in your honour. :)
Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 09:53 AM in
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October 24, 2006
links for 2006-10-24
Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 07:21 PM in
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Nike BPM webinar
BPM? Just do it! I'm sitting in on a webinar about how Nike implemented BPM in their credit claims department, and it turns out that "just do it" is more than just an ad slogan, it's their internal mantra as well. That means that they're always looking for a better way to do things. Like most other large multi-nationals, their infrastructure grew organically until they reached a point where they had to do some serious retrofits in order to be able to operate like a truly global organization rather than an American company with operations in other companies (a distinction made by the speaker from Nike, which is also one that I've used many times to describe businesses that don't quite get how to work internationally). The speaker, Jim Sarvay, was the executive in charge of credit claims (whose last name that I missed) was the project manager on the BPM implementation. The process discussed in today's webinar is the credit claims process part of their supply chain, which is basically any time that a customer pays less than the invoiced amount, which can be due to any part of the supply chain process -- either within Nike or at the customer -- being broken along the way. On of Jim's slides was titled "Speed Matters. Slow Sucks.", which pretty much sums it up for any type of supply chain process, and if you don't have a handle on what's slowing your processes down and how to fix it, then it's going to suck. In Nike's case, they had a number of parts of the process that weren't integrated with their main SAP system, particularly communications with their suppliers and customers: it was the usual mix of e-mail, EDI, faxes, paper documents and everything else that you could imagine. Their strategy for fixing their supply chain problems centred around four factors: documents (content available in a central repository), people (the right person doing the right job at the right time), internal controls (processes supporting policies), and process (flexible, repeatable best practices to improve cycle time). They picked Global 360 for BPM, with Fillmore Technology doing the implementation based on Global 360's recommendation. They also looked at IBM and FileNet, and although the Jim didn't originally talk about their criteria for making the decision, he said that Global 360 worked best for them. In the Q&A at the end of the webinar, there was a question about how the vendor was selected; apparently, Global 360 was Jim's last choice after reviewing the proposals, but jumped to top spot after responding to questions and giving a demo partnered with Fillmore, wherein they proved that they were focussed on solving the business problem rather than selling a product. From what he said, it sounded like one of the other two vendors was the incumbent document management vendor and was unseated, although that wasn't perfectly clear. He listed their organizational success factors: a compelling story, executive support, a dedicated cross-functional team, and superior consulting and tools (he said some very nice things about Fillmore Technology, who did the implementation). Their results were pretty impressive: a 6-month payback on their investment, reduced cycle time to 1-15 days from the 120 days that it used to be, and improved relationships with their customers because of the faster claims resolution process. They're now looking at how they can roll BPM out to other parts of their organization, both in other claims areas and in different applications such as foreign trade/customs documents and order management processes, and seem pretty pumped about the potential to see the same type of wins in other deployments. They did a staged implementation over a matter of months, with the first stage rolled out in about 5 months from project approval, and the entire planned scope deployed in about 10 months. After that, they started integrating other systems, such as inbound faxes, over the next several months. Their lessons learned: - Consider policy first, then process, then people, then tools
- Get senior management buy-in
- "Eat the elephant one bite at a time" -- this is so key, and something that I've written about many times before: do something small as quickly as possible, then add functionality incrementally
- Rent experts -- how can I disagree with this? :)
- Leave the rocket scientists at home -- in other words, it's not as complicated as you think it is; keep it simple
- Build a team that you trust and have confidence in -- provide direction and support, listen to what they need, and stay out of their way
Aside from the obvious lessons about implementing a successful BPM rollout, this webinar definitely showed the power of an enthusiastic end-customer presentation in getting your message across. If you're a vendor, consider finding a customer like Jim at Nike to talk about what they've done and how successful it was, rather than hiring yourself an analyst for a webinar -- it makes all the difference in the world. The webinar was hosted by Fillmore; I'm not sure if they'll have a replay available, but you can check their site or maybe someone from Fillmore would be kind enough to add a comment to this post with the replay information.
Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 02:05 PM in
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October 23, 2006
Nike uses BPM to improve credit claims -- webinar tomorrow
I met David Duignan of the Fillmore Technology Group at the ABPMP meeting that I crashed in San Francisco earlier this year -- David's involved in the San Diego chapter. He sent me an email a couple of weeks ago, and a reminder today, of a webinar that they're having tomorrow about how BPM is used in Nike's credit claims department. I have no idea what BPM product that they're using for this, since Fillmore is a Global 360 partner and also appears to be a Lombardi partner, but they claim to have made some huge cost-saving improvements in the credit process. From the webinar description: Learn how Nike automated its processes while enhancing visibility and accountability that: - Increases their recovery payments
- Reduces claims resolution times
- Increases the processing of more claims
- Prioritizes claims more effectively
- Reduces customer account manipulation
You can sign up to attend here.
Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 03:50 PM in
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October 17, 2006
links for 2006-10-17
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One opinion on the different between developers and programmers
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SOA and Excel: Brenda Michelson's transcript of her recent podcast. Now if only she had full feeds on her blog...
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Bruce Silver on BPEL (again): "BPEL is really good for orchestrating business services out of fine-grained APIs — how SOA uses orchestration. It’s less good — although it can do it — for orchestrating end-to-end business processes."
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The official wiki for last week's Office 2.0 conference (which I missed). Seems to be mostly the agenda without any notes on the actual sessions from the attendees.
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Great post on site design. Via Dion Hinchcliffe.
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Dion Hinchcliffe on how Web 2.0 development tools are creeping into the enterprise.
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Dion Hinchcliffe on how Ajax changes a development environment
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BPDM still months/years away? Not good news, except for XPDL.
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SOA and the Reality of Reuse: that is, there isn't much of it.
Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 07:23 PM in
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October 16, 2006
links for 2006-10-16
Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 07:24 PM in
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Is Anyone Executing Those Processes?
There's just something about that mid-Western accent that I find endearing, and when Roy Massie from SunGard first pronounced "insurance" as a two-syllable word, I was hooked. Roy's was the last non-Proforma presentation of the conference, and he was the only partner speaking (although I suppose that technically speaking, HP Consulting is likely a partner). If you've read Column 2 much in the past, you know that I have had a big focus on systems integration and implementation, so I was very interested in what SunGard had done to integrate ProVision with their products. First of all, who knew that SunGard even had a BPMS product? Apparently the product of an acquisition, it doesn't show up on the SunGard site, but has two other sites where it lives. Although SunGard did show up as a niche player on Gartner's Magic Quadrant back in 2003, they're not there any more; I imagine that niche might be limited to only SunGard customers for their other systems. I've seen SunGard transaction processing systems (not including any BPM functionality) in many of my mutual fund and other financial customers, so this isn't a completely unexpected leap. What was unexpected was the audience response when Roy asked the audience how many of them export their processes from ProVision to a BPMS for execution; I was sitting more than halfway back in the room, and there were no hands up in front of me. I didn't turn quick enough to count, but Roy said "a couple of you" when characterizing the response. My question is if ProVision users aren't pushing their process models through to a BPMS for execution, aren't they missing a lot of value? And what, exactly, are they doing with those process models? Or is this just exposing my bigotry over what process models are good for? The integration seems pretty straightforward, and based on later information, is similar to what is done by other BPMS vendors: processes are modelled in ProVision, then exported using Proforma's open Common Interchange Format (CIF) and imported into SunGard EXP Process Director. I did like Roy's description of practices (determined by experienced specialists) versus procedures (executed by trained workers), and how they combine to make up processes. I also liked his phrase "enterprise technology sprawl", and his discussion of how an unstructured collage of technologies can start to dictate business processes. He made the great point that all compliance initiatives are based on process transparency, and (referencing the Aloha Airlines presentation about how they started modelling their business in order to organization themselves out of bankruptcy) that a near-death experience is a great motivator.
Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 03:52 PM in
BPM
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Proforma for ITIL
ITIL is not a subject that I spend a lot of time thinking about, but John Clark from HP does. John sat beside me for all of day 2 (except when he was presenting :) ), and I had the chance to talk to he and his wife at lunch. After his presentation, we had a quick session of dueling devices: I showed him the lingerie show photos on Flickr on my Blackberry, and he surfed to the same site on his laptop via a Bluetooth connection to his smartphone. John's presentation was about work that the HP Consulting organization had done for Lucent in the area of IT service change management. We saw some of the workflow diagrams that they had created in ProVision for modelling ITIL controls and policies, for example, for Lucent's incident management process. They integrated the launch and display of ProVision content directly into the HP OpenView Service Desk application for publishing a visualization of the process models directly to the users; this allowed users to see their role in the process in context without having to request that information from the modelling team. As John put it, it make the users "unconsciously competent", something that we should all strive to do when designing and building systems.
Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 03:24 PM in
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Strategic Planning with Enterprise Architecture
Laura Six-Stallings from QAD gave a presentation on how they are using enterprise architecture for strategic corporate planning, which absolutely fascinated me since most EA projects that I've been involved in have been focussed at much lower levels. She used some wonderfully funny war analogies, going so far to call ProVision a "weapon of mass depiction", which takes the prize for the best quote of the day. Since I had been online earlier and determined that her presentation was not available on the Proforma website, I ended up taking a lot of notes, so have a better memory of this presentation than some of the others. I didn't see anything in the presentation that would have made it particularly proprietary, since she didn't show their actual strategic planning results, just talked about the methodology for achieving it, but some companies are more paranoid than others. They started their EA initiative in 2002 with about a dozen business and technology architects, and started using ProVision just last year to implement the Zachman framework. They have a very holistic view of EA, from corporate strategy on down, and they hit their strategic planning process as an early target for EA. Like many organizations, they did their strategic planning in PowerPoint and Word; with over 60 pages of slides and 280 pages of backup documentation, it was a time-consuming and error-prone process to create it in the first place, then to map that onto the more concrete goals of the organization. By implementing EA and ProVision, they were looking to improve the entire process, but also gain some clarity of alignment between strategy, business and technology, and some clarity of ownership over processes and strategies. She made several turns of phrase that elicited a knowing laugh from the audience -- IKIWISI [I Know It When I See It] requirements; As-Was and Could-Be models -- but really brought home the challenges that they had to overcome, and the wins that they are expecting as this process rolls out. The biggest issues weren't surprising: a perception of complexity, based in part of the limited ProVision expertise within QAD, and the cultural shift required to embrace a new way of modelling their strategic plans. However, they now have a long-term strategic plan based roughly on balanced scorecard objectives, and have a whole list of anticipated benefits: - Common taxonomy and semantics
- A holistic multi-dimensional view of enterprise activities
- Enforced alignment to the strategic plan model
- Exposure of dependencies, relationships, impacts and conflicts
- Improved communication and acceptance of the strategic plan
- Improved priority management
- Common processes
- Effective reporting and analysis
- Improved collaboration
Quite lofty goals, but achievable given the level that they're attacking with EA. What I took away from this, and from other conversations that I had during the two days, is that to many people, "EA" really translates to IT architecture, but not at QAD.
Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 03:09 PM in
EnterpriseArchitecture
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Six Sigma and Proforma
Day 2 of the Proforma conference included three additional customer presentations, one from a partner, then all the exciting stuff about the upcoming product release. Following on the heels of the panel at the end of day 1, in which Paul Harmon and Geary Rummler slammed Six Sigma, Deb Berard from Seagate spoke about their successes with Six Sigma and Proforma. Seagate has been using Six Sigma since 1995, and has been seeing a lot of success with it and Lean -- not surprising for a manufacturing organization, which is where Six Sigma originated. They use the Six Sigma framework in ProVision, and their initial process analysis and modelling efforts led to the improvement of some of their product development processes. Based on that success, they then pushed it out to an enterprise-wide initiative. The only thing that I really had an issue with was her calling ProVision a business process management system (BPMS), which it's not: it's a modelling suite. Although BPM still doesn't have a fully accepted definition, I believe that BPMS has a very specific meaning.
Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 02:48 PM in
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Proforma Conference Day 1: Geary Rummler x 2
Our after-lunch keynote on the first day was by Geary Rummler, co-creator of the well-known Rummler-Brache methodology and author of Improving Performance: How to Manage the White Space in the Organization Chart. In case you're not getting the significance of this, the original swimlane diagrams are more properly called Rummler-Brache diagrams. Rummler retired from Rummler-Brache a few years ago, then after "failing at retirement" as he put it, went back into practice the Performance Design Lab. His talk was a bit rambling, and he had 84 slides for a one-hour presentation, but I'm quite sure that he's forgotten more about process than most of us will ever know. He talked about how "as-is" process maps tend to drive out issues into the open, something that I have seen time and time again: management looks at what you've documented as their current process, and they say "We do that? Really?" One of the prime examples of this was a financial institution that I was working with on an BPM project a few years back. I documented all of their current processes on the way to the proposed processes, including their paper handling procedures. They sent the original of all transaction documents offsite in order by date, but made a photocopy of each document and filed it locally for reference by account number. Of course, we planned to replace this with a document scanning operation, but I felt obligated to point out a pretty major problem with their current process: since they were so behind in their local filing, the photocopies of the documents were just being boxed in date-order and stored onsite, which made the account-order files useless for any recent documents. Furthermore, they had stopped sending the originals offsite some months before that, so they now had both the original documents and a photocopy of each document, stored in the same order but in separate boxes, kept onsite. The management in charge of the area was truly shocked by what was going on, and I think that my fees were covered just by what I saved them in photocopy costs. Back to Rummler, he showed a diagram of a business -- any business -- as a system, with financial stakeholders, the market, competition, resources and environmental influences as the inputs and outputs (since you can search the Proforma site and find the full presentation, I don't think that I'm spilling the beans here to include one of the diagrams). I like this view, since it simplifies the business down to the important issues, namely the interactions with external people and organizations. He also spent quite a bit of time on the processing system hierarchy: the enterprise business model at the top, the value chain extracted from that, the primary processing systems derived out of the value chain, the processes from each primary processing system, and the sub-processes, tasks and sub-tasks that make up each process. He went into organizational structure, specifically showing departments/resources on one axis and processes on the other, to illustrate how process cut across departments, but making the point that most organizations are managed by department rather than having true process owners. There was one quote in particular that stuck with me: "Visibility is a prerequisite to optimizing and managing systems." We had a second dose of Rummler in the wrap-up panel on Day 1, where he joined Paul Harmon of BPTrends and one of the Proforma team who was filling in for the missing Aloha Airlines representative. Harmon stated that none of the major business schools have any courses on process, but that they're all function-based, and that most CEOs don't see process as their primary concern. Rummler agreed, and made the point that being functionally-oriented, or siloed, leads to sub-optimization of the organization. Harmon's initial comment led me to wonder if it's necessary to have the CEO want to "do process", or if a process approach is just an implementation detail, but Rummler ended up addressing exactly that issue by saying that it is necessary because methodologies are competing directly for the CEO's attention, and it's not always possible for the CEO to distinguish between the different methodologies at that level. Harmon made quite a rant against Six Sigma, saying that "Six Sigma people don't understand high-level process", blaming the widespread acceptance of Six Sigma on Jack Welch and GE strong-arming their suppliers into using it, and stating that Six Sigma people could be converted into a business process view, as if they were some sort of cult that had to be deprogrammed. I'm not sure that I would take such a hard line on Six Sigma versus a process-centric organization; "process" can't be so easily pushed into an organization as Harmon implied since it's not a methodology, it's a pretty fuzzy concept that a lot of consultants like to bandy about. At the end of the day, I'd have to say that I also disagree with Harmon's assessment that BPMS is still very early market. Although it's not a mature market, I think that to call it "very early" is ignoring the many successful products and implementations that have been done in this space over the past several years.
Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 02:32 PM in
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Seeking a BPM definition
The last customer presentation of Day 1 at the Proforma conference was Mary Baumgartner Vellequette from Genentech's Corporate Treasury division. Through curiosity on both of our parts, Mary and I later toured the show floor of the International Lingerie show that was going on down the hall, although they were in the process of tear-down so we didn't see as much as we would have liked. ;) Mary had some great material on establishing BPM programs within an organization, including governance, but the more that I listened to her, the more I realized that we still have a definition gap: her BPM (which does mean business process management) doesn't really include one of the main foci of my BPM, namely the systems used to help automate business processes. Hers is really about analyzing and modelling the processes, integrating them into an overall architecture, documenting and communicating the processes, business reorganization and other non-automation tasks. Only on her long-term plans does she mention "business process automation" tools. She does include some BPM measures and direct/indirect benefits in good detail, helpful to anyone who is looking to establish ROI for their BPM project. She also steps through the BPM project process in detail, discusses change management and how to map process improvements to organizational change. I am left with the feeling that we still don't have a comprehensive definition of business process management: although I consider everything that Mary talked about to be part of BPM, I also consider the process automation and BPMS to be a significant part.
Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 01:18 PM in
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Dispensing with the As-Is
Sometimes I don't pick up a lot from a presentation, or at least I don't write a lot of notes about what I learned from it. Bill Riordan from HP talked about modelling customer support centre processes, but I came away with only a few points. First, the term "happy path", which in process modelling, means the best-case/simplest route through a process map, originated at HP. Who knew. Second, and likely more relevant to those who aren't as fascinated by process modelling trivia as I, is that they didn't do any "as-is" process modelling, only the "to-be" models. That way, they were able to completely bypass the "but that's the way we do it now" argument for not changing things. That really harkens back to the days of business process reengineering, where everything old was tossed out and the new processes started from a completely clean slate.
Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 12:58 PM in
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Modelling for the masses
Cheryl Hamrick of Tennessee Valley Authority didn't really tell us about their specific usages of Proforma, but took us through how they spread the use of Proforma through the enterprise. From conversations that I had at the conference, it seems that most organizations are using Proforma within a relatively small group; other people involved in modelling might use Visio or other tools, which then have to be imported or recreated within Proforma in order to include it in the global models. TVA didn't want to do that, however, so decided to bring modelling to the masses. Cheryl had a fabulous description of why you want to reconsider doing business modelling in the same old way (in this case, "we" is a centralized business analysis group, and "the customer" is the business unit under analysis): - We have to learn the customer's current process from scratch, whether we revise it or replace it
- Then, the customer has to learn how to interpret the models
- We can be seen as an intrusive, external critic
- TVA has hundreds of complex processes, which could take years to model
In other words, it takes a long time and annoys a lot of people. Furthermore, the models are outdated as soon as the analysis team leaves the premises, with no way to feedback changes or collaborate on business models, which impacts business agility. Their answer to this was to train the business units use Proforma directly, and it sounds like they're having some good success with that. The business units actually liked being able to do this themselves, and it allowed the central team to push out enterprise standards for modelling and have the business units do some of the modelling themselves. They're not trying to turn the business users into analysts, but having their direct involvement makes for happier business units, and more accurate and up-to-date models. Proforma is releasing a web viewing capability in their Series 6 that should help this out as well, since it allows for viewing and limited updates by anyone with a valid login, without requiring a licence for the web users. N.B.: Windows Live Writer, which I use for creating these posts, has been giving me a lot of grief lately over my spelling of "modelling". I know that this is beta software, but give me a break and detect that my standard dictionary is Canadian, eh?
Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 12:16 PM in
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Enterprise Architecture in pharmaceuticals
It was Craig Confoy's presentation on Johnson & Johnson Pharma where I really started to get interested in the issue of where EA sits in the enterprise. Although the "E" in EA stands for "Enterprise", it seems that most organizations, and J&J is no exception, start out with EA in the IT infrastructure group somewhere. Like many large conglomerates, they had a bit of a mess with five pharmaceutical R&D companies (out of J&J's 200-odd companies), each with its own IT department supporting 14 different functional units per company, and little alignment between the company functions. Since EA was in IT infrastructure, anything in the business layers of EA, such as business modelling, was done on a project-by-project basis and not shared between business units or companies. Sound familiar? Almost every large company that I deal with has the same issues: some real architecture going on at the lower infrastructure levels, but practically none at the business levels. About 5 years ago, J&J Pharma decided to do something about it, and created a business architecture group. There were a few stumbles along the way, such as the use of a (seemingly inappropriate) CASE tool that resulted in business process documentation that stretched over 42 feet at 8pt font -- unusable and unsustainable -- before they started using Proforma. One of their models that I really liked was an enterprise data model that could be overlaid with departmental ownership, so that you can easily see how changing any part of the model would impact which departments. I think that this is one of the basics required by any large organization, but often not used; instead, companies tend to replicate data on a per-department basis since they don't have any enterprise data models that would tell them who is using what data. This was one customer presentation that showed some clear ROI of using the Proforma tools: they found that systems could be implemented 30% faster (a huge advantage in pharmaceuticals), that the modelling process identifies system integration points and allows them to create standard EAI models for reuse, and that the data models helped meet their regulatory requirements more easily.
Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 11:54 AM in
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Milk, butter and business processes
Mary Berger from Land O' Lakes kicked off the customer presentations by talking about how they modelled several of their core business processes in spite of the lack of in-house resources, both analysts and SMEs. They backfilled their own resources with some of the Proforma team, then had sufficient success on the first three core processes that they split the efforts and did the next six processes, three product and three office, as two separate streams using Proforma and internal resources. Mary summarized a number of key success factors that any organization attempting this could take to heart: - Do the modelling live during the sessions with the SMEs, rather than taking notes and trying to transcribe them later. This increases the accuracy, since there is immediate feedback on the process model, creates the final documentation as you go along, and forces those who are facilitating and documenting the session to become very familiar with the modelling tool. I can't tell you how many nights I've spent in hotel rooms after a day of customer requirements elicitation sessions, transcribing my notes and trying to recreate every detail mentioned during the day; real-time business modelling is definitely the right way to go, assuming that you have both a facilitator and a scribe/modeller.
- Use small teams, and involve the right people from the start. Smaller teams just get things done faster and more efficiently, and having everyone on board from the beginning means that you spend less time playing catch-up with those who join later.
- In workflow models (the most common model type that they used), you can pinpoint the functions of highest risk as those with the most I/O outside their own swimlane. That seems obvious in retrospect, but she highlighted the point well.
They also found that there were a number of unexpected benefits that came out of the analysis and modelling efforts: a common corporate glossary and vocabulary; documented business procedures for use in training and procedures manuals; a visible link between busines |