I've just booked my flight to Chicago for BPMInstitute.org's BrainStorm BPM conference on April 10-11, so you'll see me live blogging from there (wifi permitting) under the BrainStorm2007 category.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 01:32 PM in BrainStorm2007 | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

No, this isn't some new dish from the Swedish Chef, it's a new way to fool around with domain names to get them to actually spell something: en.terpri.se (using a Swedish domain name). Following in the etymological footsteps of del.icio.us, en.terpri.se is a site launched by BEA to showcase their Enterprise 2.0 tools: Pages for web authoring (including wikis and blogs), Ensemble for mashups, and Pathways for information discovery via tags, bookmarks and activity analysis.I haven't seen a demo yet, but you know I want one.

These all fall under the AquaLogic family, and were previously known as Project Builder, Project Runner and Project Graffiti, respectively; it remains to be seen whether this is something new or just the old stuff with some rounded corners. They're showing all this off at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology conference this week.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 12:46 PM in Enterprise2.0 • mashups | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (1) | Add to del.icio.us

Although it's not yet on their website, Gartner issued a press release this morning stating that BPMS will be among the fastest growing software markets over the next five years: from $1B this year to $2.6B in 2011.

And I thought that hockey (stick) season was over.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 12:26 PM in BPM | Permalink | TrackBacks (1) | Add to del.icio.us

Earlier this month was the second meeting of the Toronto BPMG chapter, following a successful turnout at the first meeting. Unfortunately, this one fell on a Friday after a large snowfall when the city had warned people not to travel unless necessary, which encouraged many people to take a snow day in spite of it turning out to be a sunny day with all of the snow melting. (For those of you who live in places where you don't have snow days, try to imagine the pure delight of missing a day of school and spending it at the local park sledding down the hills, then apply that feeling to missing a day of work. Of course, everyone claims to be working at home...) The result: all the vendors and consultants struggled through the slush and made it to the meeting, and almost none of the "practitioners" (end-customers) did, resulting in an embarrassing total of three practitioners -- including the speaker -- out of about 25 people. It was funny to hear, however, that three people at the meeting said that they attended because they read about it on my blog.

As with the last meeting, Jim Baird talked about BPMG, then Ultimus (the meeting sponsor and the vendor to our speaker) gave a short overview of BPM without too much of a product plug. The main speaker was Jodi Starkman-Mendelsohn of West Park Assessment Centre, who I had heard speak earlier that same week at the Gartner conference in San Diego. Although I had heard some of the WPAC story, this was in much more detail:

• One key business line for them was to assess injuries from auto accidents, with patient referrals from both insurance companies and lawyers.
• The main driver for improved systems, including BPM, was 300% revenue growth over a 3-year period that basically broke their manual scheduling process. With increased numbers of double-booking and no shows, they were finding it hard to maintain their service levels and estimated that $3M/year in revenue was at risk.
• They defined a strategic plan in 2001 with the objective to improve productivity and operating efficiencies by integrating multiple web-based applications together seamlessly to address their scheduling and financial management needs. They set a target of a 3-year return on investment.
• In October 2002, they went live with a new scheduling system, a new financial system, a fax server, and Ultimus BPM for process management and to bind together the other components. Events in the scheduling system initiate processes, and there's integration between BPM and scheduling throughout the processes. The fax server is kicked off at various points in the process to generate outbound documents. There are nightly uploads to the financial system (which is deemed adequate frequency), and occasional downloads of the master file.
• Currently, they have 79 different processes, 29 active users, and 6,000 active incidents/month. I was surprised at the large number of different processes: maintaining 79 business processes that may be only slight variations of each other would be a significant burden, although I don't know how similar the individual processes are.
• They saw huge benefits: ROI in 3 years, reduced turnaround times, improved business efficiency, and reduced errors, allowing them to grow beyond their previous capabilities and meet market demands. They're also adding value to customers by providing better visibility into processes, and have better agility of the business logic by externalizing it in the BPM rather than embedding it within financial or scheduling systems.

The big success story that Starkman-Mendelsohn talked about at Gartner and here was what happened to them when SARS hit Toronto in 2003. Although SARS didn't affect most of us in Toronto all that much, it had a severe impact on health-care facilities, where all but critical services were cancelled. Although a private business, WPAC operates within a public healthcare facility, which meant that they were shut out of their own offices with very little warning. Prior to their new systems, this would have put them out of commission for the entire seven weeks of the lock-out, costing them $600K in direct revenue and untold damages in lost opportunity; with all of their applications available online via web interfaces, however, they were managing their business processes as usual by the next day, and two days later had outfitted space in a local hotel with examining tables and equipment to allow them to continue business as usual. Since they're not capturing the patient files electronically, they still needed access to the paper files, but were allowed to send one person back into their offices once per day to fetch the necessary files.

I created a short course on business continuity planning last year, and I talked about exactly this issue: how having your business processes and other applications online can save your butt when disaster hits. If you have mostly manual processes, consider that that process is actually embodied within the worker's heads, and likely in paper files on their desk or notes saved only to their local PC. Take away the physical desk, and they might have a hard time reconstructing a particular instance of a business process. Take away the specific worker as well, and you can forget about reconstructing that process instance until you can get access to either their desk or the person. If the business process is online, however, most of the notes and other instance-specific data is captured within the online process, making it possible to replace the original worker and/or remove them from their physical working environment with a minimal impact on their ability to complete the business processes, as long as they have access to the online systems.

Starkman-Mendelsohn talked about challenges that they are facing now due to recent deregulation in the auto insurance industry: first of all, one part of their business is likely to decrease because of changing rules around the use of assessment centres for resolving insurance disputes. Secondly, if someone is required to have an assessment, there is now a maximum distance that they're required to travel. They were able to change their business processes to suit the new requirements and remain competitive -- although the decreased business has resulted in reduced staff numbers -- and set up four satellite locations, enabled by the ability to access the business applications remotely. In other words, the easy adaptability of the systems is providing them with the business agility that they require in a rapidly-changing business environment.

She finished up by noting that a BPM system needs to evolve over time, it's not a one-time project -- a big vote for not over-customizing your systems. She also said that involve their subject matter experts in process mapping and implementation was a big part of their success, and resulted in good staff buy-in.

And the final big win for them: the Infoworld 100 Awards named them as a winner in the health-care sector in November.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 10:33 AM in BPM • BPMG | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

After several weeks of receiving emails saying "Good news! We expect to have your account activated within the week.", I received this:

Is there something that Lombardi doesn't want me to see?

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 03:48 PM in BPM • Web2.0 | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

In case you're one of the 5 people who subscribe to my comments feed (in addition to my entries feed), you might notice that I've now fixed the feed. Previously, clicking on a comment in the feed just took you back to the main blog page; now it takes you to the entry on which the comment is placed.

With proper comments spam filtering in place, this now works pretty well if you want to track the conversations here.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 03:14 PM in Blogging | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

I've been meaning for a while to to go back and add some detail to Appian's software-as-a-service offering, Appian Anywhere. I mentioned the release last month when it was announced, but since then, I've had a chance for a conversation with George Barlow, GM of the Appian Anywhere unit, I saw it in action at the Gartner BPM summit a few weeks ago, and Phil Larson discussed it briefly on our BPM and Enterprise 2.0 panel.

Appian has taken their software code base and created simplified sign-on and admin (and presumably some multi-tenancy functionality) to create Appian Anywhere, but will be keeping their enterprise product and the SaaS offering in synch. Since their entire BPM suite is already browser-based, this appears to be more of an issue of adding on some functionality rather than having to rewrite significant portions of the existing product.

In alpha this quarter, in beta in Q2 with a few selected partners and customers, it's scheduled to be generally available in Q3. There will be a couple of pricing options: an entry level for around $15/user/month, running within a shared instance and with some storage limitations, and a level that runs within a separate instance and has more storage available for $25-30/user/month.

Appian Anywhere is currently hosted on Amazon EC2 (which provides computing capacity) and Amazon S3 (which provides storage), which gives them a lot of flexibility in terms of scaling: as more customers come on, the Amazon services scale up seamlessly, and Appian just pays them on a utility model, like buying electricity. This is smart: Appian recognizes that although they do want to be in the business of running a SaaS operation, they're not in the business of owning hosting infrastructure, and they can just buy cycles from Amazon (or wherever they end up with their production hosting) instead of buying gear.

They're working on some ideas similar to Salesforce.com's AppExchange, where there will be a marketplace of add-on applications (created by Appian or third parties) that can be purchased on a subscription basis as required by Appian Anywhere customers. Customers can also build their own applications from scratch or using a wizard, or modify one of the pre-built applications included as templates. If you want to link any of your in-house applications together with Appian Anywhere, you're going to do it via web services calls, same as we're seeing with most other SaaS applications. I'm wondering -- although with no data for or against -- whether or not this is going to provide adequate performance for user-facing steps within a process.

I did see Appian Anywhere briefly at the Gartner conference, although it was still early days for demos, and we were mostly seeing the latest version of their enterprise product. I was watching their über demo god hold court with a small group when he looked over and saw my eyes riveted on that new little RSS icon on their interface. Oh my god, after all these months of nagging lobbying vendors about adding feeds to their BPM products, someone finally did it, at least for process models. Our eyes met across the crowded booth. He smiled, and said "we wanted to surprise you with it". I think I'm in love (with process feeds).

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 05:19 PM in BPM • SaaS | Permalink | TrackBacks (2) | Add to del.icio.us

It's been an Enterprise 2.0 sort of week (or two). First, this post by Dan Farber points to an Enterprise 2.0 meme map by Stephen Danelutti, and also to some of Dion Hinchcliffe's latest, including 10 predictions for Enterprise 2.0 in 2007. Although Hinchcliffe's entire list is worth reading, #7 stood out for me:

It will be a make or break year for the first round of Enterprise 2.0 tools that add a process aspect.  While SOAs and even Web 2.0 apps tend to be more about services and capabilities, the world of business is much more about processes.  This has triggered some discussion that the best way to add enterprise context to consumer tools may be to make them more process-oriented.  Thus, a number of upcoming Enterprise 2.0 tools have a process bent to them including the above mentioned Itensil, but also the nascent BPM 2.0 movement which can be enabled with these same tools.  By the end of next year, we should have a good feeling if this is a good bet or not. My guess: A new market leader in this space will begin to emerge.

This week, the buzz is all about the Under The Radar conference "Why Office 2.0 matters" in Mountain View today, where a few people who I know from the TorCamp community are presenting their enterprise collaborative solutions: Firestoker, a blog-like platform for the enterprise, and ConceptShare, for online design collaboration.

2007 is shaping up to be an interesting year for Enterprise 2.0. As Hinchcliffe puts it, "2007 will probably be the year that will uncover the issues, and determine the fate of one of the more interesting offshoots of the Web 2.0 phenomenon."

Update: congrats to Scott and the boys at ConceptShare for winning both the judges and audience vote in the Web Sharing category at UTR. If you're doing geographically (and/or temporally) dispersed collaboration on a design process, check out their hosted solution.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 03:37 PM in Enterprise2.0 | Permalink | TrackBacks (2) | Add to del.icio.us

I just listened in on To BPEL or Not To BPEL, the title of which I believe resolves the pronunciation issue once and for all: although the presenter (Danny van der Rijn, principal architect at TIBCO) said "BEH-pull", clearly it must be "BEE-pull" to make the title work. :)

Intended for those with a technical interest in BPEL, van der Rijn went through the history of BPEL from its origins as a melding of IBM's WSFL and Microsoft's XLANG, through the BPEL4WS 1.0 specification in 2002, 1.1 in 2003 and the soon-to-be-approved WS-BPEL 2.0. More importantly, he looked at why BPEL emerged: basically, the web services stack didn't do enough to allow the orchestration of processes.

He then talked about what you're not going to do with BPEL -- it's not a process modelling notation, it's not for service creation -- and stated that it's not for portability: he mentions XPDL as a solution in that area (with no mention of BPDM). What I'm seeing, however, is that although BPEL may not have been intended as an interchange format, that's exactly what it's being used for in many cases. For many BPM engines, the "E" in BPEL is apocryphal: BPEL is a format that's used to import process models from other applications, but it's then converted to an internal (proprietary) format for the actual execution.

He covers off all the changes in 2.0: data, scoping model, message handling, activities and more, and walks through the basic BPEL components in some amount of detail. Overall, a good technical introduction to BPEL.

Unfortunately, about 40 minutes into the presentation, I received an "Invalid Flash Player Version" stating that I needed Flash Player version 8 to view the current content, and I lost all audio and video of the presentation. Flash? I was supposed to be using the Windows Media Player version of the presentation! On24.com really needs to get their act together: changing system requirements mid-presentation is not cool. Even when I installed the new Flash version and did a successful test, I wasn't able to get back in. Guess that I'll have to see the last bit in reruns.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 12:58 PM in BPEL • BPM standards | Permalink | Comments (9) | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

A couple of interesting reports on MIT Sloan Management Review today: The Future of the Web, including an article on "Beyond Enterprise 2.0" by Andrew McAfee, and Measuring to Manage, including an article by Michael Hammer (a.k.a. "Mr. BPR") on "The 7 Deadly Sins of Performance Measurement and How to Avoid Them".

Both are currently free to download, although you need to pay if you want permission to copy them.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 06:05 PM in Enterprise2.0 | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

Time for another Enterprise 2.0 event in Toronto, this time in conjunction with Toronto Tech Week. Our last one was a less formal, more camp-like event back in January; this one will be a breakfast panel with Anthony Williams (co-author of Wikinomics) followed by a camp-style workshops for the remainder of the day. As Tom Purves puts it:

The plan is to bring together the worlds of the leading minds from the technology and consulting side of Enterprise2.0 with business leaders (CxO’s, executives and IT/HR professionals) to bring a practical and real-world perspective to these ideas.

It will be interesting to see how -- or if -- the "business leaders" interact in an unstructured, unconference environment.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 01:00 PM in Enterprise2.0 • torcamp | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

I don't usually blog about someone getting a new job, but this one was interesting: webMethods has hired Bruce Williams (who, according to their press release, is a Renowned Process Improvement Expert, but I'd never heard of him prior to the Gartner conference) as VP and GM for BPM solutions:

Drawing upon all of the company's global resources, including product engineering, marketing, industry solutions, professional services, and business development, Williams will direct webMethods' go-to-market strategies, solution development and customer evangelism for the BPM market.

I saw Williams speak at the recent Gartner conference, and I didn't find that he had much to say about BPM: he seems to be a Six Sigma expert rather than having any direct experience in BPM, which makes him (in my opinion) an odd choice for what is essentially a BPM product marketing leadership role.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 11:51 AM in BPM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

An interesting bit on the WfMC site comparing XPDL and BPEL that was highlighted in a WfMC mailing this week:

BPEL and XPDL are entirely different yet complimentary standards.  BPEL is an "execution language" designed to provide a definition of web services orchestration, specifically the underlying sequence of interactions, the flow of data from point-to-point. For this reason, it is best suited for straight-through processing or data-flows vis-a-vis application integration.  The goal of XPDL is to store and exchange the process diagram, to allow one tool to model a process diagram, and another to read the diagram and edit, another to "run" the process model on an XPDL-compliant BPM engine, and so on. For this reason, XPDL is not an executable programming language like BPEL, but specifically a process design format that literally represents the "drawing" of the process definition. To wit, it has ‘XY' or vector coordinates, including lines and points that define process flows. This allows an XPDL to store a one-to-one representation of a BPMN process diagram. For this reason, XPDL is effectively the file format or "serialization" of BPMN, as well as any non-BPMN design method or process model which use in their underlying definition the XPDL meta-model (there are presently about 50 tools which use XPDL for storing process models.)

A good distinction between the best uses of BPEL and XPDL, except for one point: very few vendors are using BPEL as an execution language; they're using it as an interchange format, which is causing a lot of confusion about what format to use (XPDL or BPEL) to move process maps between a modelling and execution environment. As the above paragraph points out, XPDL maintains the graphical drawing information as well as the execution-specific information; it also supports everything that can be modelled in BPMN (which BPEL currently can't).

There's also an article by Jon Pyke of WfMC in Computer Business Review Online where he smacks them down for calling XPDL a failure in a previous article, and states that XPDL is "often incorrectly perceived to be competitive with the business process execution language, BPEL, standard". XPDL and BPEL aren't competing in the sense that someone would elect to use one over the other, but they are competitive in that they're both used as interchange formats, just for different types of processes or in different tools. Unless your BPM engine actually uses BPEL as an execution language (which few do), you're not going to go from BPMN to XPDL to BPEL and then on to your BPM engine's proprietary execution language, because there's no value added from an additional data transformation: you'd do BPMN=>BPEL=>[BPM engine execution language] (obviously skipping the last transformation if the native execution language is BPEL) for web services orchestration-type processes that can be described completely using BPEL, or you'd use BPMN=>XPDL=>[BPM engine execution language] (where the latter may or may not be BPEL) for the larger set of functions supported by XPDL, like human-facing steps. In many cases, the choice of XPDL or BPEL is dictated by what's supported by the tools that you use for processes modelling; those tools intended to model processes of web services orchestrations are more likely to support BPEL, whereas those targetted at the "BPM suites" market are more likely to use XPDL.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 11:21 AM in BPEL • BPM standards | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

Three months ago, I wrote about how the free BIJ (Business Integration Journal), formerly EAI Journal, was becoming Business Transformation and Innovation -- available only as a paid subscription. I believe that my comment at the time about paying for mostly vendor-written and vendor-sponsored material was "hahahahaha". And my comment on the new name was "it doesn't actually mean anything".

This week, I received an invitation for a free subscription to Align Journal (their tagline is "Aligning IT and Business Strategy"), and when I went to the site (and the online PDF version of the Jan-Feb issue), it looked familiar, so I dug into their About page:

Align Journal is the next step in the evolution of Business Integration Journal (BIJ). Over the past two years, the focus of BIJ was broadened to bring a business perspective to the use of technology for gaining such benefits as faster time to market, governance, increased agility to pursue new opportunities, improvements in managing business processes, and cost savings through the reuse of application components. Since the editorial focus of BIJ had evolved to no longer be strictly focused on integration topics, it was time to also evolve the magazine's name to Align Journal.

No mention of BTI, although if you go to the BTI URL that was advertised back in December when I wrote my post about it, it redirects to Align Journal.

If this first issue is any indication, it's definitely trending away from purely integration topics: the table of contents divides the articles into Business Strategy (3 articles), Leadership/Communication (3 articles), Technology (2 articles), Innovation (1 article), and Governance/Compliance (1 article). It's not clear to me, however, why "Maximizing IT for Effective Inventory Management" falls under Business Strategy, while "Leverage SOA to Increase Your Revenues" falls under Technology.

The paid subscription model is gone, unless you want the print copy and you're outside the U.S., and the digital copy is provided in a PDF that allows printing, but unfortunately not content extraction (so you won't see me quoting from it here -- I'm too lazy to retype what they've already published). And the name still doesn't actually mean anything.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 10:00 AM in BPM • SOA | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

Eleven months after I used the phrase "BI 2.0" in a blog post (and James Taylor loved it), Intelligent Enterprise used it in an article. Doing a Google blogsearch on the phrase shows a lot of other use in the last few months.

An inevitable naming trend, but I like to think that I was there at the beginning. :)

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 11:19 AM in BI | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

There's been a few interesting posts about BPEL lately.

First, SOA World Magazine (which appears on the WebSphere Journal site, not sure if it actually exists elsewhere since there was no back-link) has a post on BPEL's Growing Up, covering a brief history, current status and the view forward, including BPEL4People:

Going forward, we're already seeing the next generation of standards around BPEL being discussed. For example, the "BPEL4People" effort was first announced in late 2005 and is intended to standardize an approach similar to the one described above for incorporating human workflow tasks in BPEL processes. Besides being one of our favorite standards acronyms, BPEL4People is an important area of work since most business processes span both systems and humans.

They neglect to mention that BPEL4People is not really much more than a white paper, although a lot of people talk about it as if it's a standard just about to hit the big time. I recently linked to a Oracle Contractors blog post where one of the comments on the post (#5) pointed out that "so far, there is no BPEL4PEOPLE". Or as I put it in my commentary on the link, the emperor is looking around for his boxers.

SOA World Magazine goes on to say:

While BPEL vendors provide easy-to-use graphical tools for creating and editing BPEL processes, the very fact that BPEL processes are so detailed as to be executable makes these tools too complex for most business users. Instead, business users need to be able to specify higher-level process blueprints that can then be filled in by developers to make them executable.

Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) is a standard from OAG [sic] to address the above requirement.

Um, not necessarily. Now, the article was written by two guys who work for Oracle, so I can see why they have this view, but I'm not sure that everyone would share the view that developers are required to fill in the details in order to make models created by business analysts usable.

Secondly, the comments about Microsoft supporting BPEL. As David Chappell put it:

Like BizTalk Server today, WF [Windows Workflow Foundation] treats BPEL as a way to move process logic between different workflow engines, not as an executable format (and certainly not as a development language).

He goes on to nail the real reason for Microsoft's adoption of BPEL:

Adding the ability to export and import BPEL workflows to WF -- and thus to Windows itself -- will help WF in situations where support for BPEL is a political necessity.

BPEL has become more of an RFP check item than a real requirement, since most end-customer organizations don't really understand what it is or what it might do for them. And if you believe a recent Burton Group report, BPEL is just a placeholder for WS-CDL until that choreography standard is ready for prime time.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 11:07 AM in BPEL | Permalink | TrackBacks (2) | Add to del.icio.us

OMG has opened up registration for their BPM Think Tank to be held this July in San Francisco. I attended this last year and found it extremely valuable -- you can find my coverage of the 2006 Think Tank here.

This time, I'll be leading the technical track roundtable discussion on Enterprise 2.0 and BPM mashups, which promises to be interesting.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 04:31 PM in BPMThinkTank • Enterprise2.0 | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (1) | Add to del.icio.us

A while back, I started publishing blog posts that are a collection of my del.icio.us links for that day: I wrote about why I did it here, and you can find all the posts here. This is actually an automated script in del.icio.us, so I didn't have to do much except set it up.

Lately, I realized that a lot of the links are not really on topic for BPM and the other topics that I write about here, so I've moved them to another blog of mine where they're more topical. If you're interested, you can always find my links here, and subscribe to a feed of them using the link at the bottom of that page.

If there are particular links that I think might be of interest here, I'll write a quick post and include the link.

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

• Speedtest.net - The Global Broadband Speed Test
  (tags: tools)
• SOA as a SaaS...What to Plan For | March 2, 2007 05:34 AM | By Dave Linthicum
  My question: when do mashup APIs become SOA as SaaS?
  (tags: saas soa)
• How to install Wordpress on a USB stick
  (tags: blogging tools)
• A List Apart: Articles: Printing a Book with CSS: Boom!
  Using HTML and CSS to create a printed book.
  (tags: blogging books)
• bobdc.blog: Checking Out Yahoo Pipes
  I really have to try this out, soon.
  (tags: web2.0 webdesign)
• The Obvious?: The 100% guaranteed easiest way to do Enterprise 2.0?
  (tags: enterprise2.0)
• How to web 2.0 your bank « The Bankwatch
  I've had this post bookmarked in my reader for a while, thought that it was time to share it.
  (tags: web2.0 enterprise2.0)

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 07:31 PM in Links | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

• TheStar.com Traffic cameras in Toronto
  Traffic cameras in Toronto, all in one place. Click on the pin to see the latest camera view.
  (tags: toronto travel)

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 06:18 PM in Links | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

• LinuxDevCenter.com -- Creating a Dual-Boot Windows XP and Ubuntu Laptop
  Guess what I'm doing today?
  (tags: linux)

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 06:19 PM in Links | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

• reBOOT Canada
  Donate your old computers, monitors and printers and get a tax receipt. In Toronto.
  (tags: toronto business)
• HCI at Stanford University: Ubicomp Mashups
  Research in mashups. Email mashups@cs.standord.edu if you want to get involved.
  (tags: mashups)
• unconference the book
  A collaborative, wiki-based environment with the aim to create a book about unconferences (i.e., camps).
  (tags: books collaboration)
• Oracle Blog » Blog Archive » Workflow Futures?
  Check out comment #5: "so far, there is no BPEL4PEOPLE", a.k.a. "the emperor is looking around for his boxers"
  (tags: bpel)
• My Name is Kate: TED 2007 - first session ... already mind blowing
  Kate's at TED, and I'm jealous.
  (tags: conference)
• The New Software Industry Conference 2007
  Put on by CMU West: Forces at Play, Business in Motion. April 30th in Mountain View, CA.
  (tags: conference)

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 06:20 PM in Links | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

Having finished moderating a BPM in Action webinar on business process platform strategy, I'm listening in on the panel moderated by Beth Gold-Bernstein that includes Bruce Silver, Jeffrey Sterllings (a character from Kiran Garimella's book The Power of Process), Stephanie Wilkinson of IBM, and Steve McDonald of Global 360.

There were some interesting audience questions during the discussion; Beth structured it so that she'd ask an audience poll, then ask related questions of one or more of the panelists, then publish the audience results. I didn't use any audience questions in my panel yesterday, and I found this an interesting technique.

For example, 63% of the listeners use modelling as the starting point for their BPM initiative, 26% state that process automation is their starting point, and 10% use monitoring. I was surprised that there weren't more using monitoring as their starting point, since any organization that has Six Sigma or some other quality management initiative will be monitoring and measuring things before they ever start a BPM initiative. For those that aren't using monitoring, how do you even know that you need BPM if you don't have some sort of measurement of your current processes?

The audience was all over the place in terms of the type of processes that they need to support: although a third of them listed "human and automated" and another quarter listed "human and collaborative". When you added up all the categories, 50% of them have collaborative processes, 58% have automated processes, and 66% have human-facing processes, with a great deal of overlap.

There's still a split between who's driving the BPM initiative, although 56% of the audience said that it's the business side of their organization rather than IT.

I always have to laugh when you get competing vendors on a panel together. In some cases, like my panel yesterday, you get a verbal sparring match (or a brawl, if you have Phil Gilbert on the line). Even when things are more civilized, there's always the competitive streak that makes them have to say things their own way, and not agreeing outright with their competitors. At one point in today's panel, "Jeffrey Sterllings" (Kiran from webMethods) made a statement about BPM and SOA, and Stephanie Wilkinson said emphatically "Well, I absolutely can't disagree with that". Oh, is that the same as agreeing? ;)

By the way, am I the only one who noticed that these sessions were supposed to end at 45 minutes past the hour?

As with all of the other BPM in Action panels and webinars, you'll be able to listen to the replay within a day or two at the same link.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 03:13 PM in BPM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

I'm listening in on Janelle Hill's keynote at the online BPM In Action conference: BPM Technology: From Best-of-Breed Tools to BPM Suites to Business Process Platforms. I heard her speak at the Gartner BPM summit last week; this is a completely different talk from what she gave there, but appears to be a nearly-identical slide set to that used in Marc Kerreman's presentation.

She started off with a discussion of implicit versus explicit business process management: the implicit ones are buried within application silos, whereas the explicit ones are implemented within some sort of integration technology, such as BPM and its predecessors, workflow and EAI.

She's now giving an explanation of Gartner's shift in terminology from "pure-play BPM", which she sees as "1st generation" (she named Savvion, Fuego, Metastorm, Ultimus and Lombardi as having started in this earlier category), to their current terminology, "BPM suites" or BPMS. Apparently, the suites are more well-balanced and can handle the system-to-system integration better than the pure-plays, although I think that this is much more of an evolution than an entire new category. The cynics in the crowd will say that Gartner just changes the name every few years to keep things fresh. :)

Hill is now talking about business process platforms, which is the topic of the webinar that I'm hosting at 1pm. Gartner's definition:

The business process platform is a combined IT and business model that enables enterprises to accommodate rapid but controlled business process change through the use of integrated process composition technologies and the delivery of reusable business process components and their management.

It's not clear to me how this differs from any other "roll your own" environment, although this has the blessing of somehow being an "architecture" as opposed to just a collection of services and tools. For example, Microsoft referred to their combination of SharePoint and BizTalk as a process platform at Gartner last week.

She makes a great point about how the best proof of concept is one that crosses physical boundaries: by crossing functional/people boundaries, the POC will almost certainly also cross information and system boundaries.

Unfortunately, Janelle was dropped off the line when the Q&A started, leaving us only with the IBM sponsors.

The replay of the webinar should be available soon if you missed it live.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 11:51 AM in BPM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

• YouTube - Web 2.0 ... The Machine is Us/ing Us
  Absolutely brilliant Web 2.0 video. Via Joey deVilla.
  (tags: blogging mashups web2.0)
• Gardiner Museum - Home Page
  Great ceramics museum in Toronto. Now reopened after a long renovation, and free on the first Friday of each month.
  (tags: toronto)
• Business of BPM: ABPMP vs. BPMG
  Comparing two BPM member associations based on their websites.
  (tags: bpm)

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 06:19 PM in Links | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

I just had a great time hosting the BPM and Enterprise 2.0 panel with Phil, Phil and Ismael. These three have some radically different viewpoints, which made for a lively discussion (insert graphic of me dressed as a lion tamer, complete with whip and chair).

My favourite quote from the panel, from Phil Larson when speaking about mashing up BPM data: "BPM *is* a mashup".

And from Phil Gilbert, in an email note afterwards: "Awesome... most fun I've ever had on a webinar.  OK, OK, that's a low bar, I guess... BUT it was fun."

The replay should be available soon at the same link if you missed the live version.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 02:21 PM in BPM • Enterprise2.0 • Web2.0 | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (4) | Add to del.icio.us

This meme has been floating around for a few months on the web, and it's time for it to die. I was tagged by Neil Ward-Dutton, and I promised to respond although I'm not passing it on from here. Time for a new meme!

So here goes, five things that you (probably) don't know about me:

1. I hold a private pilot's licence, although I've only flown once in the last five years. I remember my first solo flight like it was yesterday, and regret not keeping it up.
2. My favourite TV shows are Desperate Housewives and Battlestar Galactica. Don't even try to psychoanalyze that one.
3. I love to cook, and most times would rather cook for friends than go out to a restaurant. In particular, I will cook just about anything on a barbeque regardless of weather, which seems less weird if you consider that my family traditionally cooks a 30-lb Christmas turkey on the barbeque. In the snow. My favourite vacation ever was cooking school in Tuscany.
4. My first programming language was FORTRAN, and I never learned COBOL. I started my career writing Fourier analysis pattern recognition applications for satellite images, although I'd be hard-pressed to remember what an eigenvalue is these days.
5. I learned to read at age 4, and it's been my most common leisure activity since that time. In spite of that (or maybe because of the number of books that I read), I rarely keep books for very long: I either borrow them from the public library, or buy them and pass them on to friends/family when I've read them. My only "permanent" collections are cookbooks and travel guides.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 11:10 AM in OffTopic | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

I had the chance last week for a chat with Ken Rudin and Alex Moissis of LucidEra, and a preview of their SaaS business intelligence offering aimed at the SMB marketplace that is being released in general availability today. Rudin, LucidEra's CEO, was previously with Salesforce.com, Oracle and Siebel CRM OnDemand, so you have to assume that he knows something about both BI and SaaS; Moissis, VP of Marketing, had a long run at Business Objects in product marketing and product strategy.

In most BI projects that I've seen, ROI comes quickly -- usually less than a year, sometimes less than six months -- since it allows analysis of costs, revenues and risks in ways that just aren't possible using spreadsheets and paper reports. Once the patterns in the data are made visible, companies can act on these trends to cut costs and increase revenues, either in a manual or automated fashion. This is great if you have hundreds of thousands of dollars to spend on a big BI solution, and an IT team to put it in place and get the initial reports up and running, but not so great if you're smaller, with less money to spend and little or no IT support for a BI project.

What LucidEra showed me will help to address that issue for SMBs: a very Web 2.0-looking hosted BI application, supporting multiple data sources, and easy enough to use by anyone familiar with a spreadsheet. In short, they're trying to simplify BI enough that a smaller company with little IT infrastructure can adopt it and start to reap the benefits. There's a basic BI platform with pre-built solutions on top of the platform; some of the solutions, like their initial forecast-to-billing one, are included in the base price, whereas others may be at an additional cost, especially those created by third parties. The base price will be around $3,000 per month, which includes 100 users, 3 different data connections, and the aforementioned forecast-to-billing application. It seems like a lot of money, but think about it: the per-user price is about halfway between Salesforce.com and Blueprint. Welcome to the world of paying for your "enterprise" software monthly on your American Express card, and stopping it at any time that you're not happy with it.

Setting up a new company in LucidEra is a self-service activity, and LucidEra doesn't even offer professional services to assist with this, although they do provide telephone and online support. Typically for their beta customers (of which there are about a dozen, ranging in size from less than 50 to several hundred employees), this takes up to five person-days spread over as much as three weeks, and is mostly about getting the data sources properly hooked up and doing some data cleansing on the results. Although I didn't review this process, it sounds as if you're not going to need professional help for this one, just someone internally who understands your data sources already.

We spent quite a bit of time looking at the forecast-to-billing application, doing some slicing and dicing on the data. In the sample that we looked at, the customer data (expected revenue) came from Salesforce.com, the financials (booked revenue) came from NetSuite, and the quota information came from an Excel spreadsheet. These are just three of the data sources that LucidEra can support in any combination: for example, the financials could have come from Oracle Financials instead.

The really cool thing is that there is no distinction between the design and view environment: if you're viewing a report, you can change it interactively. We added fields to the report, filtered it, grouped by fields (creating the equivalent to an Excel pivot table) and viewed it as a graph, all through dragging things around on the screen. If we didn't like our changes, we could undo them one at a time, or revert back to the original report.

A few technical notes: the client is purely browser-based, and will run in IE or Firefox on Windows. Ken was going to confirm whether it ran on other platforms (Mac and Linux) but I haven't heard back yet. They developed their own back-end database based on the Broadbase data warehouse source code and some open-source technology, then rebuilt for multi-tenancy, ease-of-use and to optimize for the SaaS environment. All of this was put together in about 15 months, a timeline that they could not have accomplished except by using the code bases that they started with.

The press release isn't up on their site yet, but you should be able to find it, and all the other information, there later today.

BI isn't a field that I usually cover in depth, but keep in mind last week's themes at the Gartner conference: visibility and agility. BI combined with BPM is one of the ways that visibility into business processes is being realized.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 08:28 AM in BI • SaaS | Permalink | TrackBacks (1) | Add to del.icio.us

ebizQ's BPM in Action online conference is today and tomorrow, and you have a chance to listen to me both days, if you can stand the excitement. :)

Today at 1pm Eastern, I'm hosting a panel on BPM and Enterprise 2.0, with Phil Gilbert of Lombardi, Phil Larson of Appian, and Ismael Ghalimi of Intalio. We are doing this live on the air with no script and no slides, and the speakers only have a rough idea of the topics that I want to cover, so tune in for some spontaneous talk about where BPM is headed in this strange new world of Enterprise 2.0.

Tomorrow at 1pm Eastern (I think -- the time on the agenda and the event page differ, but my schedule says 1pm), I'm moderating a webinar on business process platform strategy, with Josh Greenbaum of Enterprise Applications Consulting and Rich Sides of Preferred Meal Systems, sponsored by Ramco. This is more of the usual webinar gig, where I do the introductions, then moderate the questions at the end.

Update: The BPM in Action site has been corrected to show the time of 1pm on all pages for the Wednesday webinar.

Lots of other great sessions: the whole thing kicks off with a keynote by Ken Vollmer of Forrester today, and one by Janelle Hill of Gartner tomorrow (who I heard speak at the Gartner BPM conference last week). It's structured to run midday on the east coast (11-2 today, 11-3 tomorrow), which is late afternoon/early evening for those of you in Europe and morning for those on the west coast. If you're in Asia, you can check out the replays if you don't have insomnia.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 12:04 AM in BPM • Enterprise2.0 | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

I'm now confirmed to head to Boston in June for the Enterprise 2.0 conference, where I'll be doing my usual live-blogging coverage under this tag. More on this as we get closer to the event.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 09:59 PM in Enterprise2.0 • Web2.0 | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

• Toronto transit map - TTC, GO Transit, VIVA, etc. all on one Google map!
  Mashup between Google Maps and Toronto's transit maps
  (tags: toronto travel web2.0)
• ttcrider.ca
  Toronto transit efficiency guide, including such tips as what end of the platform to exit for which streets
  (tags: toronto travel)
• Welcome to BiblioCommons
  Input for LibraryCamp?
  (tags: web2.0)
• Vidipedia - The web's first video enclyclopedia - Main Page
  Contains some great video clips. Via CommandN.tv
  (tags: reference tv)

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 06:23 PM in Links | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

At last year's Gartner BPM summit in Nashville, they divided up the BPM marketplace into the "pure play" BPM vendors (those companies for whom BPM is their primary business, whose products provide excellent human-facing capabilities and at least adequate integration capabilities), integration-focussed vendors who have purchased a BPM company to round out their portfolio, and large software companies who have developed or acquired a BPM product. In the pure-play market, they listed three "major players" (revenues above $100M) -- FileNet, Pegasystems and Global 360 -- and five "up and comers" (revenues above $30M) -- Appian, Lombardi, Metastorm, Savvion and Ultimus. Of course, since then, FileNet has been purchased by IBM, moving them from the pure-play to large software company categorization, which also includes companies like Microsoft, Fujitsu and even Oracle. A few of the integration-focussed vendors, such as TIBCO, BEA and webMethods, are starting to give the pure-plays a run for their money in the BPM space, and there are likely to be more to follow.

I didn't see a Gartner presentation at this year's summit that did the same sort of vendor shoot-out -- unless that was in the Wednesday breakfast session that I missed (c'mon guys, 7:30 on the morning after the vendor hospitality suites?!) -- but there's a BPMS magic quadrant due out this year, and it will be interesting to see how the players continue to shift around.

I did have someone jokingly ask me if I was going to publish my own "magic quadrant" comparison of BPM vendors, but with that name and concept trademarked to Gartner, I'll have to do a mystical hypercube instead.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 11:57 AM in BPM | Permalink | TrackBacks (1) | Add to del.icio.us

A month ago, I had a chance for a comprehensive demo of the Cordys BPMS via Webex, and I saw them briefly at the Gartner show last week. Their suite is of particular interest to me because the entire process life cycle of modelling, execution and monitoring is completely browser-based. I've been pushing browser-based process modelling/design for quite a while, since I think that this is the key to widespread collaboration in process modelling across all stakeholders of a process. I've reviewed a couple of browser-based process modellers -- a full-featured version from Appian, and a front-end process mapping/sketch tool from Lombardi -- and if it wasn't already clear from what Appian has done, Cordys also proves that you can create a fully-functional process designer that runs in a browser and can have participants outside the corporate firewall. Like Appian, however, they currently only support Internet Explorer (and hence Windows), which will limit the collaboration capabilities at some point.

Cordys' claim is that their modeller is BPMN compliant and supports the entire set of BPMN elements including all of the complex constructs such as transactions and compensation rollback, although I saw a few non-standard visual notations. They also support both XPDL 2.0 and BPEL for import and export, but no word on BPDM. Given this dedication to standards, I find it surprising that they can integrate only with their own ESB and business rules engine, although you could call third-party products via web services. They also have their own content repository (although you can integrate with any repository that allows object access via URL) and their own BAM. In general, I find that when a smaller vendor tries to build everything in a BPM suite themselves, some of the components are going to be lacking; furthermore, many organizations already have corporate standards for some or all of these, and you'd better integrate with the major players or you won't get in the door.

Like most BPMS', much of the Cordys process design environment is too complex for the average business user/analyst, and probably would be used by someone on the IT side with input from the business people; a business analyst might draw some of the process models, but as soon as you start clicking on objects and pulling up SOAP syntax, they're going to be out of there. Like most BPMS vendors, Cordys claims that the process design environmen