Jim Sinur hosted a case study panel on scenario-based rules with two presenters: David Luce at UTi (a logistics outsourcing firm) and Husayn Alvarez-Gomariz at Micron (a semiconductor manufacturer).

Luce started out talking about UTi, and how as a logistics provider, they are actually a business process outsourcer. They pride themselves on customer intimacy, but that drives up their operational costs since there are so many manual, special-case processes. They were looking for ways to maintain the same level of customer intimacy while automating processes and rules wherever possible in order to increase efficiency and drive down costs, and what they devised was a rules-driven architecture where they use business rules as a policy validation tool. They've externalized rules from legacy code into a business rules management system, which provides them with the level of agility that they need to provide customized service to their customers while still automating their processes.

Alvarez-Gomariz discussed scenario analysis, and how to use scenarios to provide the agility to respond to changing market events. His talk was both detailed and abstract, not a good combination for holding my attention, although he had some good points about the intersection between BPM, BI and planning.

Like yesterday's panel session, this was really more like two separate 30-minute presentations, with no interaction between the panelists. This format should definitely be changed to something more interactive, or be labelled as consecutive short presentations rather than a panel.

Although it's only lunchtime, this was my last session of the day and of the conference: I'm on a flight back to Toronto in a couple of hours. I didn't blog about the fun at the vendor hospitality suites, but suffice to say that it included Michael Beckley in a very tropical hat (he also hade a "Made in Mexico" sticker on his forehead at one point, but I couldn't verify that statement with his parents), Scott the hotel bartender talking about SOA and Six Sigma, and a vendor ending up in my room for the night.

I hope that you enjoyed my coverage of the conference; I've had a lot of great feedback from people here, and I'll soon catch up with the comments that you've added to my posts in the last couple of days.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 02:59 PM in BRE • GartnerBPM2007 | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

For the second half of this morning's vendor sessions, I sat in on Fair Isaac's customer presentation, Michele Sprayregen Edelman of Discover Financial Services on Managing Business Rules and Analytics as an Enterprise Asset. As the largest proprietary credit card network in the US with 50 million cardholders and 4 million merchant and cash access locations, they need to have a good handle not just on what their customers are doing, but on how current market trends will change what their customers want to do in the future.

To them, this means using an advanced decision management environment: start with criteria- and rule-based decisions, then automate processes with business rule management, then increase decision precision with predictive analytics, and finally optimize strategies with predictive analytics. They're only a few steps of the way along this route, but are starting to automate decisions in a more sophisticated manner for things such as individual purchase approval/denial, in order to increase revenue and reduce losses.

They wanted a modelling environment that could be done by analysts without requiring IT support, as well as methods for integrating with the transactional systems for automating decisions. They use other decisioning tools besides Fair Isaac's, including SAS, and combine the decisions from all of the systems in order to make the ultimate decisions. When you look at what they've done, even in the simplified diagrams that Edelman showed us, it's hugely complex but provides them with a huge competitive advantage: they're using automated decisioning in a number of different areas across their organization, including portfolio scoring, dispute processing, customer contact strategy and many others.

She presented some final recommendations, the primary one being the importance of the data infrastructure that's going to drive the decisioning.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 01:45 PM in BRE • GartnerBPM2007 | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (1) | Add to del.icio.us

I wanted to stop in on the Microsoft session, People-Ready Processes, in part because I'm a bit confused about what Microsoft is doing in this area, and in part because of the Business Process Alliance announcement from Monday. Microsoft sees themselves as a force for commoditizing (and in the subtext, dumbing down) technology so that it is accessible to a much wider audience, and this presentation was Burley Kawasaki's take on how they're doing that for BPM. He describes people-ready processes as a fusion of document-centric processes and system-centric processes, and I really with that he (and many other people in the industry) would stop equating human-centric with document-centric. Although human-facing BPM grew out of the workflow that started in document imaging systems, that was a long time ago, and there are many instances of human-facing BPM that don't include documents -- depending, of course, on how you define a document.

My previous view of Microsoft BizTalk was as a B2B message broker or an internal ESB. My view of SharePoint was as a collaboration and document management platform. I wanted to see how Microsoft was bringing together the technologies and concepts from both of these to create a seamless BPM solution.

Kawasaki showed a spectrum of BPM application types, from collaborative to transactional processes. Individual ad hoc processes (e.g., individual task lists), human semi-structured (e.g., vacation approval), system highly structured (e.g., expense reporting) and fixed process (e.g., supply chain). He then overlaid a split between a collaboration server and a process server, with some overlap in the middle of spectrum, and labelled these as SharePoint and BizTalk. My heart sank.

Okay, you can have a SharePoint collaboration or document kick off a BizTalk process, but that's not the same as having a single end-to-end BPM solution. In the future, the Windows Workflow Foundation will be used as the underlying process infrastructure for both SharePoint and BizTalk, which might help to integrate them more closely.

He finished up with a light-speed overview of the Microsoft process platform roadmap, which includes Windows Workflow Foundation, the .Net framework, Office (including SharePoint) and BizTalk. He also made a big push for the benefits of a platform and partner ecosystem rather than a single vendor "close and proprietary" BPM stack. Not sure that I'm convinced.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 01:13 PM in BPM • ESB • GartnerBPM2007 | Permalink | TrackBacks (1) | Add to del.icio.us

We started the last day at the Gartner summit with a keynote by Yvonne Genovese, Business Applications Through 2010: Major Changes Will Affect Your Process Environment. Early in her presentation, she made an important statement: "the technology keeps breaking our processes". Her focus is on business applications, not specifically BPM, but she's looking at trends of what's happening with enterprise applications like ERP and CRM systems. Her point is that these business applications have, in the past, forced businesses to use rigid business processes implemented within those systems.

However, the current trend is towards unbundling some of this functionality, exposing it through services, then consuming those services using a BPMS. This allows you to not only call specific functionality from your business applications at any point in a process that you now control, you can actually replace or augment the functionality of those applications by calling other services. This also provides an opportunity to more easily integrate between business applications if you have multiple ones in your environment. Although the business application vendors have been pushing suites for some time now, that packaging model will be less compelling to their customers as organizations start to slice and dice the atomic functionality of the business applications and compose their own processes using BPM rather than use the suite in its monolithic form.

Business applications aren't going away: there's still a huge amount of good functionality available in them, and as long as that commoditized functionality can be consumed as services, you're not going to be writing a replacement yourself. What I think will happen, however, is that the amount of the functionality used from any given business application platform will begin to erode as other internal or external services replace some of that functionality. This frees organizations from the vendor lock-in that they're subjected to now, and adds a new possibility for creating business applications: instead of just "buy" or "build", you can now also "compose". And if the megavendors in this field are going to stay competitive, they need to embrace and encourage an ecosystem that allows smaller vendors to provide services that can easily be integrated with their larger platform. This isn't going to be the old model of the vendor controlling the ecosystem by anointing their favourite technology partners, however: the customer organizations are going to build their own ecosystem from their preferred vendors in a truly best-of-breed fashion.

At the end of the day, BPM is an essential part of all this, since it will be used as a composition framework for combining functionality from business applications, along with internal and external services, into the processes that the business really needs.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 12:26 PM in BPM • GartnerBPM2007 • SOA | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

I finished up the day by attending Jim Sinur's session on continuous optimization. And thanks to Gartner, we have a brand new acronym: BOSS, for business optimization support systems.

He has an interesting take on optimization that I agree with: it's an antidote to entropy. Laws of entropy say that systems tend to become more chaotic over time, and you have to have something in place that will actively head off that slide into chaos. Continuous improvement is not, however, a replacement for disruptive or radical change within an organization: former provides some refinements along the way to a goal, while the latter causes changes in direction to a new goal.

He defined continuous optimization as "keeping a process efficient, effective and relevant under all possible and changing conditions," and laid out a list of benefits of continuous process optimization, not the least of which is creating a balance amongst competing goals: sacrificing a local optimization in favour of an overall optimization.

There was some amount of repeated material from Bill Gassman's BI/BAM presentation earlier today, but Sinur went into a number of other areas, such as understanding both drivers for process optimization and inhibitors for the adoption of optimization. It's completely necessary to link processes to desired outcomes so that the goals of optimization are well understood, and also have to anticipate the shift to indeterminate/ad hoc/collaborative processes that don't have pre-determined process maps, but are usually triggered by events and are goal-driven.

He looked at how to discover the opportunities for optimization, and selecting the proper optimization capability from a set of optimization tools and techniques. He also made some good points about matching your optimization method and your risk profile, which I've heard in earlier presentations this week: if you're very risk-averse, for example, you're unlikely to have self-optimizing systems that change their own behaviour based on patterns of events in the system.

This is a growth area, and one that can be providing some competitive advantage: only the leader organizations are using this technology now, and it has the potential to make a huge impact on a company's agility.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 09:05 PM in BI • BPM • GartnerBPM2007 | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

I really wanted to attend Daryl Plummer's analyst/user roundtable on BPM and Web 2.0, but they don't let press into those sessions, so I ducked in to hear Jesper Joergenson of BEA talk about Best Practices in Business Transformation. Jesper, I know that you're reading this -- no offence intended on being my second choice :)  I stayed through both half-hour sessions this time, seeing Jesper talk first, then BEA's customer, Christophe Marcel of Integro Insurance Brokers with Building the Business Case for BPM.

Joergenson started with a cooking theme for this "BPM secret sauce" talk: start with sharp knives, make big meals of small dishes, measure to taste and adjust as required, have a recipe, and follow the recipe. In BPM, this translates to start with common tools, build a platform out of small projects, use simulation and measurement, have established best practices, and follow those best practices. Cute theme, and some nice cooking utensil graphics, although I have to admit that I rarely follow a recipe in the kitchen, even if I bother to have one.

He talked about the importance of modelling tools for business users, with a shared process model for the IT side for implementation to avoid the inevitably incomplete round-tripping that happens when you model in one tool and implement in another. He also discussed how to identify suitable first targets for BPM implementation -- low complexity, high impact, and low maturity level -- while planning for scale in both the tool selection and the methodology, since one successful project will breed demand. He briefly discussed process simulation and measurement/monitoring, and the importance of a process centre of excellence.

After a brief break, Christophe Marcel talked about their experiences with BPM. Their focus was on integration, tying together a number of existing systems with a minimum amount of new development. They made use of both human-facing tasks and web services calls to update data in the underlying enterprise systems, and built their own web-based user interface. In addition to the enterprise data systems, they integrated Microsoft Sharepoint as their document management system.

One of the major challenges, which I've seen many times before whenever you integrate BPM with enterprise systems, is the issue of data synchronization. When data is replicated into the BPMS for display or control purposes, any changes to the data either in the BPMS or the underlying enterprise system need to be considered for replication to the other system. Similarly, if an entire insurance program is sold, all tasks the BPMS may need to be updated or deleted to reflect that change.

Marcel had some best practices to share: do a proof of concept; hire an experienced consultant; keep in mind that data synchronization is probably a lot more complex than you think it is; use your best business analysts on the workflow rather than the UI; and users want all of their tasks in a single system, whether that's the BPMS or their email.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 07:52 PM in BPM • GartnerBPM2007 | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

This afternoon, Jim Sinur hosted a panel on Implementing an Enterprise-Transforming BPMS, which included Jeff Akin from American Home Shield, Alan Jones from Sandisk, Craig Edmonds from Symetra Financial and Jodi Starkman-Mendelsohn of West Park Assessment Centre.

American Home Shield's goal was to double their revenue by 2010 with limited growth in their service centres, which they planned to accomplish by replacing older systems with more agile systems and move towards a more process-centric view. They've just rolled things out so aren't seeing the ROI yet, but are seeing more consistent customer handling and enforcement of best practices. They're implementing Pegasystems as their BPM.

Symetra's object was to improve satisfaction, since they recognize that it's much easier to keep a customer than to get a new one, and they used goal management as their approach when building processes. They did what appears to be a fairly standard imaging+workflow type of implementation using Global 360, although with today's BPM technology that provides greater agility than the older workflow systems. They've seen huge ROI numbers, and have increased levels of customer service in terms of transaction turnaround times.

Sandisk has deployed 4 mission-critical BPM applications using Handysoft, started with the purchase requisition process, which was paper-based and not scalable. Their goal was to improve employee efficiency by improving the approval cycle time and reducing processing costs. Like American Home Shield, they consider different classes of solutions: a module in their ERP system, online forms, and finally selected a BPMS. They reduced the processing cycle time from 3 weeks to 1 week, and saw a number of other advantages.

West Park Assessment Centre needed to bolster their IT infrastructure to allow them to grow, and improve the quality of their services such as scheduling. They also wanted to see cost savings to a 3-year ROI, improve productivity of remote users and improve operating efficiencies. They wanted to automate their processes from the point that a referral arrived (regardless of channel), scheduling, booking, reporting, invoicing and all the other tasks that are involved in providing their services. They went live in late 2002 using Ultimus, just in time for the SARS outbreak in early 2003 that locked them out of their hospital-based offices in Toronto. With no access to their physical records, or any space to provide assessment services, they set up shop in a local hotel and were up and running within two business days due in no small part to their BPM implementation -- effectively preventing total business failure. They did get their 3-year ROI and reduced turnaround time by 27%; these efficiencies have increased their profitability. By externalizing their business rules and logic in the BPMS, they have improved their agility to the point where they can make changes to their systems within a couple of days.

Although I like to hear the customer case studies, I find these panels to be a pretty artificial construct: it's like 4 mini-presentations by customers with a few questions from Sinur at the end of each section, joint questions from the audience at the end, but no interaction between the panelists. I'd really like to see less canned presentations and more conversation between the panelists.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 06:45 PM in BPM • GartnerBPM2007 | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

The afternoon started with several simultaneous sessions by Gartner analysts, and I sat in on Bill Gassman talking about Measuring Processes in Real Time, or as he put it later, learning to live in real time.

There's no doubt that process visibility is a key benefit gained from BPM, and that visibility usually occurs through the integration of business intelligence (BI) or business activity monitoring (BAM) tools to assist in process monitoring. The goal of BAM is to monitor key objectives, anticipate operations risks, and reduce latency between events and actions, and there's a number of different channels for funneling this information back to those who need to know, such as business intelligence systems for predictive modelling and historical reports, real-time dashboards, and alerts.

So what's the difference between BI and BAM? According to Gassman, BI is used for insight and planning, and is based on historical -- rather than real-time -- data. BAM is event driven, and issues alerts when events occur. Personally, I think that there's a spectrum between his definitions of BI and BAM, and it's not clear to me that it's a useful distinction; in many cases, data is trickle-fed from operational systems to BI systems so that the data is near-real-time, allowing dashboards to be driven directly from the BI system. True, traditional BI tools will typically see update intervals more like 15 minutes than the near-real-time event alerts that you'll find in BAM, but that's not a problem in some cases.

Gassman discussed the different real-time analytic techniques that are widely used today: process monitoring, logistics optimization (often based on optimizing delivery times while minimizing penalties), situational awareness, pattern matching (complex event processing, or CEP), track and trace (typically used for B2B processes), and comparison between predictions and reality.

Gartner found in a survey 18 months ago that half of their customers surveyed don't use BAM, and claim that they don't use it because they don't really know about it. Considering that BI had long been a technology that can be cost-justified in an extremely short time-frame, and BAM follows the same ROI patterns, I find this surprising (and I had the feeling that they were a bit surprised, too), although I have had large customers who fall into the same category.

Looking at it from a BPM standpoint, automating a process without having appropriate monitoring is risky business: there's a business value to awareness of what's happening in your processes, so that problems are detected early, or possibly before they even occur. There's a natural synergy between BPM and BAM: BPM generates a mound of process instance data, often in an event-driven manner, that just begs to be analyzed, aggregated, sliced and diced.

Gassman discussed some best practices for BAM/BPM synergy before moving on to his definition of the four generations of BAM architecture: isolated silos, standalone, integrated, and composite. We're still seeing lots of 1st and 2nd generation BAM tools, the 3rd generation has just started happening, and the 4th generation is still at least a year away. He points out that most BPM vendors are adding BAM, but are using a 1st generation BAM system that's an isolated silo. He sees the potential to move through 5 different styles of BAM automation, that is, how the analysis from the BAM tool feeds back to change the business process. The potential benefits are great as you move from the simple BAM dashboards up through adaptive rules that choose a path based on goals, but the risks increase as well.

BAM is coming from a number of different types of vendors, in spite of the small size of the market, and there will definitely be some convergence and shakeouts in this market. An example of a trend that I think will continue is the recent acquisition of BAM vendor Celequest, used by some BPM vendors as their embedded BAM, by Cognos, a BI vendor. When you're using BPM, you're also going to have to face the question of whether to use a BPM vendor's embedded BAM, or look for a more fully-functional standalone BAM tool. Gassman showed a spider graph of how BPM/BAM matches up against BI on 8 different dimensions, which indicates that you may want to look for a separate product if you need more analytical capability or need to monitor events outside of the process model.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 05:25 PM in BI • BPM • GartnerBPM2007 | Permalink | TrackBacks (1) | Add to del.icio.us

Lunchtime today was spent chatting with two other BPM bloggers: first, I met with Jesper Joergensen of BEA for a chat about what they're doing; then I spent some time with Keith Swenson of Fujitsu, mostly talking about BPM standards. Add this to the fact that I had breakfast with Jason Klemow, and there's been some pretty good BPM blogger networking today.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 05:08 PM in BPM • Blogging • GartnerBPM2007 | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

Arun Mathews of Motorola, a Savvion customer, presented on the experiences of implementing BPM at Motorola. He started out with a list of reasons why they started with BPM, ranging from Six Sigma projects driving the need for new policies and procedures, through metrics and measurement needs. They started by mapping the as-is business processes, analyzing the processes, designing the to-be processes, and implementing in Savvion: pretty standard stuff.

Then, they start on process monitoring and continuous process improvement; as a big Six Sigma shop, continuous improvement and innovation are part of their corporate culture and their a process-oriented company, which gives them a huge advantage over many other large companies. They also have a focussed methodology for doing all of this, which appears to be a key differentiator for them over other organizations implementing (or attempting to implement) BPM.

They have a number of successful BPM projects that they've implemented, including core supply chain processes. Although he couldn't share many of the numbers with us, since it's proprietary information, he did discuss the metrics that they used as direct input into process improvement, such as timeliness and reworks, both of which impact customer satisfaction.

What did they learn from all this? First of all, this is a major paradigm shift that needs some amount of change management at all levels, but the business loves it once they start to see the benefits. Training in BPM methodology is key to this acceptance. Incorporate BPM into a long-term architecture plan, but start small on implementation projects with high ROI and/or high visibility.

Motorola has obviously made a big commitment to BPM, and are reaping the benefits of it: they've redefined their process automation and management to use a collaborative methodology with the business taking on much more ownership, which in turn reduces project timelines and costs. Motorola IT is recognized as an industry leader, and in 2005, their CIO recognized BPM as one of the top reasons for their innovation. The bottom line, however, is that it's not enough to just buy a BPMS and start implementing: you have to have a process view on things.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 02:26 PM in BPM • GartnerBPM2007 | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

Next up was the Appian customer panel, hosted by Michael Beckley, co-founder and VP of Product Strategy at Appian, who I had met last night at the Appian booth.

Beckley started out with a few remarks about Appian, but the main part of the panel was hearing from their customers: Tom Bolger and Todd McGinnis of West Monroe Partners, Bruce Grenfell of Concur Technologies, Terry Jost of Talisen, and Dennis Nickel of Telus (who I met at breakfast this morning).

• West Monroe is automating loan origination processes for their customers
• Telus is adding Appian to their IT outsourcing business process not for the purpose of automation, but to make sure that the hand-offs between people are done in a standard fashion so that details are not lost.
• Concur Technologies delivers travel and expense management services via SaaS to their customers, and manages business processes such as approvals involved in those services.
• Talisen is adding BPM to procurement processes for their customers.

Interestingly, only one of the five is actually an end-customer; the others are technology companies who are implementing BPM for their customers in some way.

They really just got rolling when the first 30-minute session was up; like the ones I complained about yesterday, they structured an hour-long session spanning the two 30-minute session timeslots. With no logical breakpoint, I stepped out in the middle of the panel in order to catch the presentation by Savvion's customer, Motorola.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 02:00 PM in BPM • GartnerBPM2007 | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

The second keynote speaker of the day is Bruce Williams of Savvi International, author of Six Sigma for Dummies (and the accompanying workbook) and Lean for Dummies, speaking on What BPM Means to Business Innovation. Funny, at last year's Gartner BPM summit, everything was about Six Sigma; this year, this is the first time that I've heard it mentioned.

He points out one view of BPM, that it's just a faster, better treadmill, but we're still doing the same old things. BPM is more than that: not just operational efficiencies and defect reductions, but measurements and activity monitoring, process controls, and integration between systems and services. Furthermore, he goes on to say that the biggest value from BPM is in business innovation, not process improvement: the introduction of something new and useful and the process by which it is brought to life.

But why is innovation important? Why not just milk the cash cows? The answer is pretty obvious, although ignored by many traditional organizations: the lifecycle of every product or service eventually comes to an end, often because someone else introduces a disruptive product or service to the marketplace that obsolesces the old way of doing things. As James Morse of the Harvard Business Review said many years ago (a quote that I have referred to many times), "the only sustainable competitive advantage comes from out-innovating your competition." Ultimately, innovation trumps optimization.

Williams continues on with a lot of stuff about why the innovation cycle looks like it does, but there's really nothing new here: this is just the classic stuff for why products or services pass their peak: fatigue, customer demands, market redirections, competitive pressures, technological changes, globalization effects, organizational changes, demographic shifts, regulatory constraints, economic effects, supply drifts and many other factors. He does point out, however, that most US firms have no program in place for fostering innovation, and don't even have a clear idea of how to become more innovative. Tom Davenport did a study last year that showed that companies are focussing primarily on product innovation, and mostly ignoring things like business model innovation, or even business process innovation; Williams added some things that didn't even make the list, like innovation in accounting practices or risk management.

He went through some of the different dimensions of innovation -- reactive versus proactive; incremental/sustaining versus radical/disruptive; formal versus informal -- and looked at how these dimensions mapped onto some specific cases. When he referred to Americans as the kings of innovation, however, it made me doubt his world view overall and left me with a bit of a bad taste: it came across as ethnocentric flag-waving that has no place at a business conference. I recognize that Americans lead innovation in a number of areas, but there are many other countries in the world that are leaders in their own areas of innovation. He's also under the deluded notion that everyone wants what Americans have, driving SUVs full of consumer goods back to their monster homes in the suburbs, and laughingly pointed out a survey that he had done that concluded that if everyone in the world lived like he did, we'd need over 7 planets worth of resources to accommodate them. Yikes.

At the end of it all, although he had a pithy quote about how BPM is the grand unification theory for business (which is apparently trademarked?!), Williams had very little to say about BPM, but a lot to say about innovation: one of the prime motivators for why you might be considering BPM.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 01:23 PM in BPM • GartnerBPM2007 • SixSigma | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

The second day started with a keynote by Daryl Plummer, BPM/SOA Elixir (unfortunately, I missed the breakfast session with Michele Cantara about the BPMS market, but I ended up in a fascinating discussion about requirements collaboration using wikis with Jason Klemow, and the concept of subscribing to processes with specific attributes in a BPM with Dennis Nickel of Telus).

Plummer obviously likes to play with the new technology, which I suppose is a prerequisite for his job: he talks about TiVo and Second Life as things that are fast becoming essential parts of culture, although it's clear that few people in the audience (except maybe me) embrace both the concept of downloading and consuming what I want when I want it, and the importance of online social networks.

He starts with some basic definitions of "service", especially the relationship between processes and services, to drive home the idea that SOA impact people too, not just systems. He also made an excellent distinction between a model-driven (process-centric) view and a typical programmer view of things: a model-driven view describes what a person does (the business process); a programmer view describes what the system does (the code that attempts to implement that process). After having a discussion earlier about defining processes based on the data values that flow through those processes, when I couldn't quite elucidate why that wasn't ultimately the right way to do things, this strikes me as an important distinction.

He summarized the results of Gartner's 2006 CIO survey ("CIOs are programmers that are passin' for normal folk"), where the top business trend is improving business processes: there's a lot of pressure all around to automate processes and improve them along the way, and this is going to happen only with both SOA and BPM. Plummer takes the enterprise architecture view of this, which I really appreciate -- business context and functions driving from the top of the architectural view, and services as a way to fulfill the needs of the business. Processes need services to be implemented quickly and effectively, and services aren't of use unless they are consumed by processes. SOA allows us to build an infrastructure of shared services for ready consumption by processes.

One of the key reasons for SOA and shared services is that legacy apps are still hanging around, in spite of all our efforts to get rid of them. Adding a service layer over the legacy apps allows us to create higher-level services and processes that consume these services without having to know how -- or even what platform -- to access the data directly on its original platform.

SOA, as Plummer reinforces, is an architectural style: not web services (although web services can be used to implement SOA), not a particular product, but encapsulated functionality accessed through a standardized interface that allows for loose coupling of services and applications. He goes through a checklist of how to know SOA when you see it, although some of the items on his list (such as a centrally managed runtime middleware network) are not, strictly speaking, an essential part of SOA.

He continues on with a discussion of event-driven processes (he refers to them as event-driven services in counterpoint to BPM-driven services, which is not necessarily a separation that I agree with). Services, properly implemented, can be combined into event-driven processes rather than structured, pre-defined processes, in order to be able to respond to events that happen in an unexpected order or manner. I did, however, like his view of the "new" application container: UI and navigation via a portal, security and management as part of the network, and logic and data accessed via services from wherever they might exist. Explicit orchestration ties all this together, which provides agility in the process model.

He points out that an SOA is never finished: in fact, it's designed to never be finished. He uses the analogy of the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, a cathedral that's been under construction for more than 100 years now, and continues to change as it is built. He covers off some things about development techniques to be used when developing services within an SOA infrastructure, and highlights the business service repository as a centrepiece for BPM's use of SOA.

His final recommendation is that the critical path to competitive business advantage goes through SOA and BPM: you need to use SOA as the underlying mechanism, BPM as the methodology for tying things together in order to get the business process improvement that's required to differentiate your organization in the marketplace.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 12:30 PM in BPM • EnterpriseArchitecture • GartnerBPM2007 • SOA | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

Sessions for the day finished with Peter Schwartz of Global Business Network talking about Scenario Planning -- Business and IT Strategies in an Uncertain World. He might seem like a strange choice to speak at a BPM conference, but his job is to help companies to think about the future: something that a lot of people here are obviously thinking about.

He started with an old map of North America that showed California as an island (due to some incomplete exploration at the time), and talked about how this caused some missionaries to head east across California, across the Sierra Nevada, lugging boats along with them so that they could cross the sea that would eventually separate them from the mainland: in other words, they based their processes on an incorrect map of the environment, and suffered for it. Sound familiar in your organization?

He showed Henry Mintzberg's concept of emergent strategy, which is when environmental forces impact intended strategy to create something that wasn't originally envisioned. He introduced the concept of scenario thinking to overcome decision traps, and discussed the challenge that what is not foreseen is unlikely to be seen in time. You need a systematic methodology for developing scenarios, and a deep understanding of what you're trying to accomplish, the forces impacting the scenario. The test of a good scenario is not whether it is right or wrong, but whether it leads to better decisions. Although Schwartz has been involved in developing scenarios for (mostly) science fiction movies, he has spent much more of his time looking at political scenarios, including predicting the fall of the Soviet Union. As an aeronautical engineer, he assured us that this was not rocket science. :)

He discussed how scenario thinking is used as a tool for strategic alignment across an organization in general, then took a crack at scenarios for IT and BPM.

Environmental forces have different impacts at different points in the business process maturity model. First, environmental forces drive changes in BPM and IT: change in BPM is a function of change in customers plus change in technology plus change in competition plus change in business environment:

• Change in customers is driven by an aging population that is working longer, the long tail effect of stratified preferences, cultural diversification, supply chain integration, preferences for environmentally "green" products and services, and widening income gaps.
• Change in technology is driven by hardware advances beyond Moore's law (including orders of magnitude bandwidth increases as well as computing power), convergence of platforms, the shift from broadcast to download, and change accelerated by breakthroughs in related areas such as biotechnology and nanotechnology.
• Change in competition is driven by new business models, new competitive sets (e.g., Apple in the music business), new nations in a flattening world, new sources of competitive differentiation (e.g., design), consolidation of players, and increasing pressure for innovation.
• Change in business environment driven by interest and inflation rates, current conversion rates, geopolitical uncertainties and climate change, fluctuations in input costs (e.g., energy, silicon), and ubiquitous high-speed broadband.

He sees three possible scenarios for how BPM is deployed within organizations -- slow & moderate change, slow & radical change, and rapid & radical change -- and went through how the customer, technology, competition and business environment factors play in these scenarios. Definitely an interesting view on what we're doing with BPM.

Schwartz was an incredibly captivating speaker, and obviously appreciated by the audience. He even told us an anecdote about where he got his ideas for the scenarios in War Games: he was on node #2 of ARPANET in 1973, and hacked his way through to someone in missile control.

Off to the vendor showcase and reception.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 08:45 PM in GartnerBPM2007 | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

This is out of chronological order, but I didn't have my laptop at lunch so had to reconstruct this from memory and a few scratched notes.

I squeezed my way into the Pegasystems lunch, which was completely full, in order to hear Alan Trefler speak. He was very engaging, with lots of amusing graphics, but one phrase at the end of his talk really grabbed me: "you have to get away from the poisonous import/export environment so that BPM doesn't become the next CASE".

What he meant by this is that by modelling in one tool, then exporting it to an execution environment where there is imperfect round-tripping, there's a danger of having the processes caught in the execution environment where you'll be stuck maintaining it in a more code-like environment: presumably, the execution environment has imperfect modelling, or you wouldn't be using another modelling tool in the first place. This makes the modelling tool useless except for the initial design process, and therefore hinders the future agility of the process. He makes the analogy to CASE (think back to the 80's and 90's), where nice-looking tools generated code could then be "tweaked", but you then ended up doing any further code maintenance in the code environment rather than the CASE environment because there wasn't proper round-tripping between the environments.

This is part of the problem that I have with external modelling tools: unless you can round-trip seamlessly, you don't have process agility.

Food for thought.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 07:26 PM in BPM • GartnerBPM2007 | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

Jim Sinur took the stage for Are Rules Inside-Out in BPM?, where he claimed that he'd push the envelope in how we thought about rules. He started with how rules are a start, but agility requires a full business rule management strategy so that you can manage the rules that you've externalized, especially if you have multiple business rule engines. Now to be fair, many organizations haven't even externalized their rules yet from their enterprise applications and business processes, but if they ever do, they'd better be ready to manage them or they'll have a big mess of rules to deal with.

Today's business rules landscape is pretty confusing, covering everything from neural nets and expert systems to business rule engines and business rule management systems. If these business rules are too rigid (unchangeable), it impacts the agility of the business processes and the entire organization; if IT has to spend a huge amount of time and money to change rules, then you can be sure that it's not going to happen very often. However, IT is often unwilling to put control of the business rules into the hands of the business; there needs to be a way to have proper governance over changing of rules, but not so much control that it's impossible to keep up with shifting business requirements. In many cases, the business has no idea how difficult it is to change any given rule, and some standardization of this -- via rule externalization and management -- would also improve service levels between business and IT.

The key is to understand where rules affect processes, and see where the ability to change rules for in-flight processes can greatly improve agility. Sinur went through the business benefits of rules, and some of the risks of fixed rules: primarily, business rule management is an enabler for governance. He also walked through different models for adopting rules: the safe and steady control model (slightly smarter process), the cautiously dynamic model (process with above average intelligence), and the aggressively predictive model (Mensa process). Obviously, the model has to suit the organization's risk tolerance as well as the underlying process, since these range from just automating some well-understood decisions to suggesting and implementing new rules based on behaviour within the process.

He has some great recommendations for getting your rules under control, including such thoughts as 15% of the rules are the ones that the business really needs to change to remain agile, so pick the right ones to externalize, and understand both the business benefits and risks associated with changing that rule.

Watch for Gartner's definition of what should be in a BRMS later in 2007, since this is becoming somewhat of a commodity.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 07:18 PM in BPM • BRE • GartnerBPM2007 | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

Metastorm and Lombardi both did something that I really dislike: instead of running two 30-minute sessions after lunch, as the schedule would indicate, they ran a 1-hour session that spanned the two 30-minute spots. Since I had planned to see one session of each, I ended up feeling a bit unfulfilled by both.

Anyway, I attended the second half of the Lombardi session, Process-Driven: We've Only Just Begun, and heard Tim Barnes of Devon Canada (an oil & gas company) speak about how they were trying to improve communication between data, applications, processes, people and companies. For them, this is all about integration, and in fact started with an EAI team. They've brought in Lombardi TeamWorks, but are still figuring out how to tie that back to their ESB and their previous integration efforts. They've defined their best practices, but are still at the point of developing shared services.

They've done three smallish BPM projects so far, and he spoke about the HR onboarding process that they automated, with some degree of difficulty. One of the big problems was that the people on the project knew how to implement applications, but didn't really get process, which required a complete team refresh -- Janelle Hill spoke about exactly this issue this morning of having people on the team who are process-savvy.

Their next steps are to develop their BPM architecture and develop a formal life cycle around BPM initiatives, as well as enhance their existing BPM centre of excellence.

He was followed by Steve Schade of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (a.k.a. Mormons) discussing how they've applied BPM technology to their extensive geneaology project. They have a ton of family history records on microfiche, but if they were to image all of it (as they have done with some of it), there would be 19 PB (that's 19,000 TB) of data, so they're looking for alternatives in the process of putting this data online and searchable on their FamilySearch.org website. They had been doing some ad hoc scanning and indexing of records, but needed a scalable process where they could pinpoint inefficiences and get some control and visibility over the process.

In their first BPM implementation, they took a process that formerly took weeks to execute, and reduced the time to hours, while moving control of the project setup from IT to the business area. Through an obviously good selection of an initial project, plus good training and rollout plans, they had a big success on their hands. On their second project, they took on something that's more complex, and which Schade thought might be a bit more than they could handle, but they're still working away at it. They used Lombardi's professional services and outside consultants on the first project to get them moving, and consider this essential to their success. They also see having business operations invovled in process modelling as key.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 06:17 PM in BPM • ESB • GartnerBPM2007 • SOA | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

After lunch, we had two short vendor sessions: in some cases, the vendor themselves presented; in others, the vendor's customer presented. For the first session, I went to see Metastorm's customer Great Clips talk about The Power of SOA & BPM for Human and System-Based Process Optimization. Jim Waldo and Kathy Wetzel of Great Clips talked about how they analyzed their processes, particularly the process of opening a new (franchised) salon. Their process is very human-intensive, and there were a lot of gaps in the old process.

By applying BPM tools and techniques, they were able to eliminate 20% of the work steps and simplify another 70% of the steps, automate at least 8 handoffs and eliminate status checks. In total, they were able to shave 2 weeks of lag time out of the 16-week salon opening process, which has allowed them to grow the business without increasing the headcount -- for five years now. There's greater visibility into the processes, which provides for better management.

They phased in BPM over 3 years, and have seen an unexpected agility in introducing changes to processes, and find that they spend a lot less time worrying about the paperwork and the processes, and more time concentrating on the things that matter, like increasing their business and promoting their brand.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 05:49 PM in BPM • GartnerBPM2007 | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

More tough decisions on which session to attend, but I'm here in Janelle Hill's BPM: A Change From Business As Usual.

Hill talks about four sea changes that are currently impacting organizations:

• Globalization requires agility
• Information transparency accelerates product and service commoditization, which requires innovation if you're going to survive
• Rising importance of the consumer, since we all as consumers have more and more choice on where we give our business
• Information overload, mostly due to a flood of information being available over the internet but out of any appropriate context

So what's really new in BPM, both as a management discipline and a technology? First of all, process orientation isn't a replacement for everything that's currently in place, like BPR was touted to be, but complements a functional orientation. Second, we're moving beyond just process improvement to process visibility in order to become more effective. Third, we need to bring back some of those transformational ideas that we flung out when abandoning radical BPR (although not the techniques), and look beyond just incremental improvement to an iterative implementation of transformative change. Lastly, you have to have process agility, because the market is changing and you need to respond to it.

What else is changing is the way that we create these applications: we've moved from building it all ourselves to customizing packaged applications, and are starting to move to composing applications using agile methods rather than coding. And although BPM suites aren't exactly new news, they are starting to be used more widely in order to more readily model, automate and monitor processes.

Hill discusses why explicit processes are the new imperative -- processes that are visible to all stakeholders, and are independent of their implementation -- in order to drive visibility, agility, synchronization of design and execution and all those other good things that we need from processes these days. BPMS', by allowing the process model to directly drive the execution, help to drive the implementation of explicit processes. Evaluating BPM suites is done quite differently from evaluating other software products: there's a blurring of the design and runtime, meaning that a range of composition skills from non-technical business to deeply technical must be supported. Also, external web services and other components are used extensively, so there needs to be different sorts of tools available for more than just orchestration of these components. Since many BPMS are shipped with templates and prebuilt components, there's also a matter of selecting a suite that has templates that cater to your industry, or making a conscious decision that these templates are not relevant to you since you're going to build your own processes from scratch anyway. She showed a great chart that mapped 11 business process characteristics (with examples) to architectural implications for BPMS selection, and discussed 7 different process use cases.

She then discussed some details of the roles involved in BPM projects, and the skills required; the business-IT-shared responsibilities is identical to what Gartner's been saying for a year now, and hopefully we'll soon start to see some of those short-term shared responsibilities start to shift either to business or IT. The process architect and process analyst are roles that are pretty much new territory, and existing architects and analysts needs to gain some skills before they take this on. I had a call from one of my customer the other day, a large financial services organization, that plans to just have a business analyst with no process experience take on what is essentially a process analyst role; I don't predict a lot of success in this scenario, and I don't expect that Hill would either.

Expect a new BPMS magic quadrant from Gartner in September, with some minor shifting of the existing players. Since last time around, Fuego has been acquired by BEA and FileNet has been acquired IBM, and some of the other major and minor vendors may start to make an appearance in the quadrant.

So far, I've been successful at blogging the sessions live. I'm off to lunch now and to have some meetings at the vendor booths, so I'm sure to fall behind with some of my notes from this point on.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 03:08 PM in BPM • GartnerBPM2007 | Permalink | TrackBacks (1) | Add to del.icio.us

I know that a few people are trying to reach me here at Gartner to set up meetings. My cell phone is turned off whenever I'm in sessions, and returning voice mails is pretty low priority for me, so the best way to reach me is by email since I am online blogging all the time and all my email is routed to my Blackberry as well.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 02:15 PM in GartnerBPM2007 | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

I decided on Benoit Lheureux' session on BPM's role in multi-enterprise commerce, although we're had some technical difficulties and started late. This is much more about B2B and middleware than BPM, so it should be interesting to hear the perspective from the B2B viewpoint. If this turns out to be a dog, I'll be out of here for Process Modelling for Profit, but the slides look interesting and I'm very interested in inter-organization collaboration and process choreography. He just used the word "mashup", so I think that I'm staying, although the slightly smarmy "my friends" method of address did put me off a bit.

By now, the Gartner presentation framework is clear: each has exactly 20 slides; each has a Key Issues (agenda) slide with exactly 3 points (although Lheureux cheated by inserting a few extra slides that weren't in the downloaded version of the presentation). People with 120-slide presentations, take note of how the professionals do it.

Lheureux describes his research as looking at multi-enterprise integration, or how to bind your business processes with the business processes of your trading partners. He opens with the question of how tightly you should be binding your applications and business processes with those of your business partners.

He makes the bold statement "EDI software is dead", having been replaced by B2B gateway software that is more process-aware, and sees B2B projects as proliferating -- doubling in the next five years -- since there is a widespread recognition that organizations realize that their business processes are not just internal any more, and B2B needs to be a strategy rather than a discrete project. It used to be that you had your applications running internally, with some degree (if you're lucky) of internal visibility, but no external integration or visibility: you'd need some sort of manual process for providing both integration and visibility to external business partners. Now, however, you can't be competitive working that way any more. Furthermore, some of the functions done within organizations are being outsourced, further driving B2B requirements.

Gartner predicts that by 2011, 25% of new business software will be delivered as SaaS. Not 25% of what you're running in total, but 25% of the new stuff; still, that's huge. And I drink that particular Kool-Aid: I believe that this shift is happening now, and will continue to grow. SaaS is one form of B2B, in that you're integrating in some way with the SaaS provider, but this also provides the potential to integrate with other trading partners via the SaaS platform itself. In addition to the SaaS model of multi-enterprise integration, there's also the more traditional EDI-style e-commerce, plus integration via portals or mashups.

Lheureux discusses three approaches for implementing these B2B projects: run your own B2B gateway, outsource the B2B infrastructure (previously "EDI VAN"), or outsource the entire B2B project (previously "managed EDI"). He then dug into the issues of the choreography and monitoring of multi-enterprise BPM.

Gartner also predicts that by 2011, at least 40% of all new multi-enterprise integration projects will use BPMS. I can agree with this one too; besides, I figure if it doesn't look like it's going to come true, Gartner will just change the definition of BPM again. :)

He then discussed the four multi-enterprise BPM styles:

1. Blind document/transaction exchange, e.g., exchange purchase orders, to lower transaction cost, latency and errors by increasing automation. No shared process visibility or execution, and the process is difficult to change.
2. Intelligent document/transaction exchange, e.g., shared view of order-to-cash process, to provide some process visibility.
3. Multi-enterprise applications, e.g., shared execution of vendor-managed inventory, to centralize process control. This maximizes process visibility since both trading partners are participating in the same process (not just exposing a limited view of an internal process from one to another), but this is a big thing to do and requires a great deal of trust between the trading partners.
4. Multi-enterprise BPMS and rules, e.g., shared compliance management, in order to centralize the process and rules definition. This increases flexibility considerably, but again requires a great deal of trust and collaboration between the trading partners in order to make this work.

Organizations are going to have to implement more than one of these styles of multi-enterprise integration over the next few years as this field evolves. And if you're already using B2B, B2B-enabled middleware or BPM, portals, SaaS or a variety of other technologies, then you already have some of the infrastructure in place to get started at this. The support for B2B versions of many of the standard BPM functionalities is just not there yet, however: practically no one is doing B2B process simulation, for example.

He ended up with some recommendations for multi-enterprise BPM strategy, such as synchronizing multi-enterprise and internal BPM projects, and developing a shared B2B infrastructure, with a focus on enabling shared process visibility (via BAM) and shared process control (via business rules).

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 01:59 PM in BPM • GartnerBPM2007 • SOA | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

Before we exited for the breakout sessions, Daryl Plummer outlined their plans for an open research meeting to be held on Wednesday, where we all have a chance to participate in Gartner's research here on site. He showed us four predictions, of which two will be discussed in the research meeting:

• By 2010, Business Process Modeling will be widely and routinely used as a planning tool for performance optimization and will grow to become half as popular as the spreadsheet.
• By 2011, competitive and successful businesses that do not recognize and prepare to take advantage of BPM/SOA/Web enabled Modularized Business Processes will be dangerously exposed to being hunted and assimilated by those that do.
• By 2010, the artificial separation of transaction processing and decision support workloads will be seen as obsolete, to be replaced by case management as the preferred design pattern.
• By 2012, technologies to support BPM will have been absorbed into other products and no longer considered a distinct category.

By a show of hands, the first and fourth of these were selected for discussion. Unfortunately, this is at the end of the day on Wednesday, by which time I'll be on a flight home. Should be an interesting discussion.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 12:46 PM in BPM • GartnerBPM2007 | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

1100 attendees have signed up for this Gartner BPM summit (although I imagine that some are still stuck trying to get here), not bad for only their third year at it. They're going to run another BPM summit in Orlando in September due to the popularity; maybe I'll get organized in time to sign up for that before the last minute.

This first "real" day of the conference kicked off with a short intro by Michael Melenovsky and Jim Sinur, who gave an overview of what to expect at the conference: business process strategy and governance in addition to the technology side, which this year includes more of the peripheral technologies such as business rules. Sinur mentions Web 2.0 and collaboration (although he calls it "web two-dot-zero") and the importance of what's happening here, something that I've been writing and speaking about for months.

The, Simon Hayward with his keynote Business Processes: The Foundation Linking Business and IT. I really enjoyed his keynote last year, so was looking forward to this year's presentation: he's like the Energizer Bunny of BPM, and I mean that in the best way possible. He started with the question "what's special about this moment in time that makes BPM so relevant?", which is the same theme that he started with last year, and I think that I even remember some of the same slides being used. He discussed the trend from quality (1980's) to BPR (1990's) to BPM (2000's).

He moved to his "key issues" slide (a.k.a. the presentation agenda), and saw the first point: BPM - what does it mean as a management discipline. It struck me then that "discipline" is an fundamental concept in Gartner's definition of BP as management practice/discipline: that's what all the discipline business was about yesterday in Rosser's presentation.

Hayward continued on with concepts of shifting business values and strategies, and how today's success is taken as a given and future success has to improve on that: the whole idea of continuous process improvement. That requires that we build systems knowing that they're going to change, a whole new idea for many organizations that tend to build something and cast it in concrete. The focus of software has to shift to enabling business process innovation, whereas many organizations see the current role of software as hindering rather than helping their business agility. He talked about the emergence of SaaS in process-related activities, and how valuable this is for inter-organization commerce.

He moved on to how people are involved in processes (I'm constantly amazed by how Hayward can give an entire subject talk based on a single slide: many of these slides are loosely related and could be expanded into a separate presentation on their own); as he discusses how the goal of BPM should shift from managing the end-to-end process cycle to enabling process innovation, he brings in the idea of how it also must shift to provide greater empowerment to the people involved in the process. He predicts that by 2012, the value of productivity will become less important than that of visibility, and by 2017, innovation will take over as the key value.

He shows the process improvement cycle that I've seen many times before from Gartner, with one interesting addition: a "discovery" task as an entry point into the cycle prior to modelling. Discovery is exactly where Lombardi is positioning Blueprint, for example, but it's not even on the radar of many BPM vendors.

This all leads up to a discussion of the advantages of being a business-centric organization, what this actually means, and why the enabling technology really matters in terms of decoupling the understanding of the process from the mechanisms that are used to support it, hence providing greater agility, immediacy and visibility, as well as being a foundation for SOA. Whether the technology comes out of the convergence that is the BPMS market, or enterprise applications opened up for integration, the same results can be achieved (a similar point that Marc Kerremans made yesterday).

My favourite point that he made comes near the end of the presentation: "BPM is top-down...and BPM is bottom-up". That's exactly right, and exactly what many people don't understand: it could be either, or it could be both. Although Rosser tried to make the same point yesterday, Hayward actually ties it to BPM and the value of being a process-centric organization, which makes all the difference.

His closing recommendations covered competency actions (what type of people to have), management actions (governance; centre of excellence; management culture) and IT management (IT as enabler, not leader; links between BPM and other technologies), as well as a great closing quote: "If you focus on what stays the same, then you'll get left behind."

Decisions get tough from here: there are multiple sessions that I want to attend, although I have a half hour to think about it while we mill around waiting for them to reconfigure the ballroom into smaller rooms.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 12:37 PM in BPM • GartnerBPM2007 | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

Vendor announcements today seem to have a sci-fi theme: first it was IDS Scheer and Microsoft with the Alliance, and now it's Corticon with the Foundation: the Business Rules Foundation, that is. I had a sneak preview last week with David Straus, Corticon's SVP of Marketing, who did the most amazing thing for a guy with the word "marketing" in the title (much less an SVP): about a minute into our phone call, he said "wait, I can show you", fired up Webex, sent me an invitation, and 2 minutes later he was giving me a product demo.

Corticon's Studio product is a pretty capable business rules management system, and one of the 3 or 4 standard systems that ends up integrated into everything else, such as BPM suites that lack their own rules engines. You can define rules in a natural language, then use a decision table to map those rules onto conditions and actions, check for ambiguities and generate unconsidered cases. You can save a set of rules as a compiled service to run within their engine or to be called as a web service. You can even import (or create) test data to run against the rules, with the tests showing which rules were triggered in order to explain the decision. So far, so good: standard functionality with some nice features.

What they've announced today, however, is a version that separates the underlying services from the user interface, and allows those services to be embedded and tightly bound inside another application. The SDK opens up the ability for any application vendor to embed Corticon's rules capabilities within their product without having to use any of Corticon's user interface: they can create their own user interface paradigm for rules definition and integrate this with other parts of their appliation, so that the user is unaware that they are using software from two different vendors. The first big example of this is IDS Scheer's ARIS, which embeds the Corticon Foundation (essentially) inside its ARIS Business Rules Designer: I saw this demonstrated at the IDS Scheer user conference a few weeks ago, but didn't realize what I was seeing (although I knew that it was Corticon within ARIS).

Although the decision tables on the right look very much like the standard Corticon product, it's completely and seamlessly housed within the framework of ARIS: that's the ARIS repository tree view on the left. Since all of the new Corticon Studio is Eclipse-based, and most of the partner companies are using some sort of Eclipse tooling for their UI, this is a relatively painless integration.

There's some other interesting applications for this that Straus mentioned, such as Adobe integration for dynamic document creation (e.g., for contract creation with rules-based selection of clauses), and Microsoft Word integration. With it opening up for development as of the announcement today, I'm sure that there will soon be a number of other application vendors trying it out. I'm waiting for the BPM vendors to start embedding this within their process designers instead of the paltry expression builders that most of them have: this seamless integration of business rules with business processes would eliminate the current barriers to using business rules in a BPM environment.

What Corticon is after, of course, is the Holy Grail of business rules: a common rules repository within an organization that is invoked by any enterprise application requiring a decision (think cross-organization compliance). By making it easier to integrate rules directly into any application, they may be that much closer.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 10:20 AM in BRE •