Jim Morris of CMU West and Bob Glushko of UC Berkeley summarized the day in a final session, and although it's coming up on 6pm and I'm eager to get back on the 101 up to San Francisco to get to the TUCON reception, I've been fascinated by today's conference and not about to leave early. As Morris pointed out, this was originally a two-day conference crammed into one day.

Glushko gave us the phrases that stuck with him from the sessions today:

• No-man's land as a zone on a graph of business models
• Sweet and sour spots for business models
• Impact and complexity of the product-service mix
• Service systems, and how they're embedded in social and economic systems
• The "nifty nine", being the nine SaaS public companies that have achieved (collectively) $1.4B in revenues
• Data lock-in as the dirty secret of the open source
• Open source as a lever for putting pressure on your competitor's business model
• Emerging architecture, which he considered to be the oxymoron of the day
• The tension between front stage and back stage design
• Collective action in the software industry

Morris chimed in with his favourite, the one that I liked as well, where in World of Warcraft you can tell if someone has a Master's in Dragon Slaying, and how good they are at it, whereas the software industry in general, and the open source community in particular, has no equivalent (but should).

Morris pointed out that Google and Amazon are gathering a huge amount of information about us, and we're giving it to them for free; at some point, they're going to leverage this information at some point in the future and make a huge amount of money from it -- not by violating the privacy of an individual's data, but through the aggregate analysis of that data.

At the end of it all, it's clear to me that this conference is pretty focussed on the new software industry in the valley, or at most, the new software industry in the U.S. It's true, there's been a disproportionate amount of software innovation done within 50 miles of where I'm sitting right now, but I think that's changing, and future "new software industry" conferences will need to be more inclusive of the global software industry, rather than see it as an external factor.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 08:59 PM in NewSoftwareIndustry | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

David Messerschmitt, a prof at UC Berkeley and the Helsinki University of Technology, finished the formal presentations for the day with a talk on how inter-firm cooperation can be improved in the software industry. This is an interesting wrap-up, since we've been hearing about technology, applications and business opportunities all day, and this takes a look at how all these new software industry companies can cooperate to the benefit of all parties.

He started out by proposing a mission statement: focus the software industry's attention and resources on providing greater value to the user and consumer. This has two aspects: do less harm, and do more direct provision of value to the customer rather than the computational equivalent of administrivia.

In general the software industry has a fairly low customer satisfaction rate of around 75%, whereas specific software sectors such as internet travel and brokerage rank significantly higher. In general, services provided by people have a lower satisfaction rate (likely due to the variability of service levels), and the satisfaction rates are decreasing each year. Complaints are focussed on gratuitous change (change due to platform changes rather than anything that enhances user value) and security, and to some extent on having to change business processes to match an application's process rather than having the system adapt to their business process. Certainly, there are lessons here for BPM implementations.

Messerschmitt raised the issue of declining enrolment of women in computer science, which he thinks is in part due to the perception that computer science is more about heads-down programming rather than about dealing with users' requirements. He sees this as a bit of a canary in a coal mine, indicating some sort of upcoming problem for the computing industry in general if it is driving away those who want to deal with the user-facing side of software development. Related to that, he recommends the book Democratizing Innovation by Eric von Hippel, for its study of how customers are providing innovation that feeds back into product design and development, not just in software but in many areas of products.

He ended up by discussing various ways to improve inter-firm cooperation, such as the Global Environment for Networking Innovations (GENI) initiative, ways to accomplish seamless operation of enterprise systems, and referring to a paper that he recently wrote and will be published in July's IEEE Proceedings, Rethinking Components: From Hardware and Software to Systems. He then listed elements of collective action that can be pursued by industry players, academia and professional organizations to help achieve this end:

• Systematically look at knowledge gaps and ensure that the research is addressing those gaps
• Create/educate the human resources that are needed by the industry
• Understand and encourage complementarities, like broadband and certain types of software
• Structures and processes: capture end-user innovations for incorporation into a product, and achieve a more orderly evolution of technology with the goal of leaving behind many fewer legacies in the future

He's definitely of the "a rising tide lifts all boats" mindset.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 08:32 PM in NewSoftwareIndustry • SoftwareDesign | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

Jason Maynard of Credit Suisse moderated a panel on investment opportunities in the new software industry, which included Bill Burnham of Inductive Capital, Scott Russell (who was with two different venture capital firms but doesn't appear to be with one at this time, although his title is listed as "venture capitalist"), and Ann Winblad of Hummer Winblad Venture Partners.

This was more of an open Q&A between the moderator and the panel with no presentation by each of them, so again, difficult to blog about since the conversation wandered around and there were no visual aids.

Winblad made a comment early on about how content management and predictive analytics are all part of the collaboration infrastructure; I think that her point is that there's growth potential in both of those areas as Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 applications mature.

There was a lengthy discussion about open source, how it generates revenue and whether it's worth investing in; Burnham and Russell are against investing in open source, although Winblad is quite bullish on it but believes that you can't just lump all open source opportunities together. Like any other market sector, there's going to be winners and losers here. They all seem to agree, however, that many startups are benefiting from open source components even though they are not offering an open source solution themselves, and that there are great advantages to be had by bootstrapping startup development using open source. So although they might not invest in open source, they'd certainly invest in a startup that used open source to accelerate their development process and reduce development costs.

Russell feels that there are a number of great opportunities in companies where the value of the company is based on content or knowledge rather than the value of their software.

SaaS startups create a whole new wrinkle in venture: the working capital management is much trickier due to the delay in revenue recognition since payments tend to trickle in rather than be paid up front, even though the SaaS company needs to invest in infrastructure. Of course, I'm seeing some SaaS companies that are using hosted infrastructure rather than buying their own; Winblad discussed these sort of rented environments, and other ways to reduce startup costs such as using virtualization to create different testing environments. There are still a lot of the same old problems however, such as sales models. She advises keeping low to the ground, getting something out to a customer in less than a year, getting a partner to help bring the product to market in less than two years. As she put it, frugality counts; the days of spending megabucks on unnecessary expenses went away in 2000 when the first bubble burst, and VCs are understandably nervous about investing in startups that exhibit that same sort of profligate spending.

Maynard challenged them each to name one public company to invest in for the next five years, and why:

• Russell: China and other emerging markets require banking and other financial data, which companies like Reuters and Bloomberg (more favoured) will be able to serve. He later made comments about how there are plenty of opportunities in niche markets for companies that own and provide data/information rather than software.
• Burnham: mapping/GPS software like Tele Atlas, that have both valuable data and good software. He would not invest in the existing middleware market, and specifically suggested shorting TIBCO and BEA (unless they are bought by HP) -- the two companies whose user conferences that I'm attending this week and next.
• Winblad: although she focusses on private rather than public investments, she makes Amazon is a good bet since they are expanding their range of services to serve bigger markets, and have a huge amount of data about their customers that allows them to . She thinks that Bezos has a good vision of where to take the company. She recommends shorting companies like CA, because they're in the old data, infrastructure and services business.

Audience questions following that discussion focussed a lot on asking the VCs opinions on various public companies, such as Yahoo. Burnham feels that Yahoo is now in the entertainment industry, not the software industry, so is not a real competitor to Google. He feels that Google versus Microsoft is the most interesting battle to come. Russell thinks that Yahoo is a keeper, nonetheless.

Questions about investments in mobile produced a pretty fuzzy answer: at some point, someone will get the interface right, and it will be a huge success; it's very hard for startups to get involved since it involves them doing long negotiations with the big providers.

Burnham had some interesting comments about investing in the consumer versus the business space, and how the metrics are completely different because marketing, distribution and other factors differ so much. Winblad added that it's very difficult to build a consumer destination site now, like MySpace or YouTube. Not only are they getting into a crowded market, but many of the startups in this area have no idea how to answer basic questions about the details of an advertising revenue model, for example.

Burnham had a great comment about what type of Web 2.0 companies not to invest in: triple-A's, that is, AdSense, AJAX and arrogance.

Winblad feels that there's still a lot of the virtualization story to unfold, since it is seriously changing the value chain in data centres. Although VMware has become the big success story in this market, there are a number of other niches that have plenty of room for new players. She also thinks that companies providing specialized analytics -- her example was basically about improving financial services sales by analyzing what worked in the past -- can provide a great deal of revenue enhancement for their customers. As a final point on that theme, Maynard suggested checking out Swivel, which provides some cool data mashups.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 07:57 PM in Enterprise2.0 • NewSoftwareIndustry • OpenSource • Web2.0 | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

Bob Glushko, a prof at UC Berkeley, and Shelley Evenson, a prof at CMU, discussed different views on bridging the front stage and back stage in service system design. As a side note, I have to say that it's fun to be back (temporarily) in an academic environment: many of these presentations are much more like grad school lectures than standard conference presentations. And like university lectures, they cover way too much material in a very short time by speaking at light speed and flipping slides so fast that there's no time to even read what's on the slide, much less absorb or document it. If I had a nickel for every time that a presenter today said "I don't have time to go into this but it's an important concept" while flipping past an interesting-looking slide, I could probably buy myself the drink that I need to calm myself after the information overload. :)

Glushko posits that greater predictability produces a better experience, even if the average level of service is lower, using the example of a self-service hotel check-in versus the variability of dealing with a reception clerk. Although he doesn't mention it, this is exactly the point of Six Sigma: reducing variability, not necessarily improving service quality.

He goes on to discuss the front stage of services, which is the interaction of the customer or other services with the services, and the back stage, which is the execution of the underlying services themselves. I love his examples: he uses an analogy of a restaurant, with the front stage being the dining room, and the back stage being the kitchen. Front stage designers focus on usability and other user interface factors, whereas the back stage designers focus on efficiency, standardization, data models and the like. This tends to create a tension between the two design perspectives, and begs the question if these are intrinsic or avoidable.

From a design standpoint, he feels that it's essential to create information flow and process models that span both the back and front stages. The focus of back stage design is to design modular and configurable services that enable flexibility and customization in the front stage, and to determine which back stage services you will perform and which you will outsource/reuse from other service providers. Front stage design, on the other hand, is focussed on designing the level of service intensity (the intensity of information exchange between the customer and the service, whether the service is human or automated), and to implement model-based user interfaces and use these models to generate/configure/specify the APIs of user interfaces for the services. By exposing back stage information in front stage design, more back stage information can improve the immediate experience for a specific customer, and can improve subsequent experiences. Data mining and business intelligence can also improve service for future customers.

Evenson, who specializes in interaction design, has a very different perspective than Glushko, who focusses on the back stage design, but rather than being opposing views, they're just different perspectives on the same issues of designing service systems.

She started out with a hilarious re-rendering of Glushko's restaurant example by making the point that she applied colour to make the division of the co-production between front and back stage more visible.

Her slides really went by so fast that I was only able to capture a few snippets: sensors will improve the degree of interaction and usefulness of web-based services; technology influences our sense of self; services are activities or events that form a product through interaction with a customer; services are performances: choreographed interactions manufactured at the point of delivery; services are the visible front end of a process that co-produces value. A service system is a framework that connects service touchpoints so that they can sense, respond and reinforce one another. The system must be dynamic enough to be able to efficiently reflect the expectations people bring to the experience at any given moment. Service systems enable people to have experiences and achieve goals.

She discussed the difficulties of designing a service system, such as the difficulty of prototyping and the difficulty of representing the experience, and pointed out that it requires combining aspects of business, technology and experience. She feels that it's helpful to create an integrated service design language: systems of elements with meanings (that designers use to communicate and users "read") plus sets of organizing principles.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 07:20 PM in NewSoftwareIndustry • SOA • SoftwareDesign | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

Martin Griss of CMU West and Adam Blum of Mobio Networks had a fairly interactive discussion about integrating traditional software engineering practices into modern service oriented development.

Griss is a big proponent of agile development, and believes that the traditional software development process is too ponderous; Blum admits to benefits from smaller teams and lightweight process for faster delivery, but he believes that some of the artifacts of traditional development methods provide value to the process.

Griss' problems with traditional development are:

• Too many large documents
• It's too hard to keep the documents in synch with each other and the development
• People spend too much time in document reviews
• Use cases are too complex
• Can't react well to changes in requirements
• Schedule and features become omnipotent, rather than actual user requirements

In response, Blum had his list of problems with agile development:

• Some things really do need upfront analysis/architecture to create requirements and specification, particularly the lower layers in the stack
• Team management needs to be more complex on larger projects
• Many agile artifacts are simply "old wine in new bottles", and it' simply a matter of determining the right level of detail
• If you have a team that's currently delivering well, the introduction of agile processes can disrupt the team and impact productivity -- if it's not broke, don't fix it
• Some of the time-boxing of agile development (e.g., SCRUM monthly sprints, daily 10-minute meetings) creates artificial schedule constraints
• Agile development theory is mostly pseudo-science without many facts to back it up
• Modern tools can make older artifacts lighter-weight and more usable

Writing requirements and specifications is something that I've spent probably 1000's of hours doing over the years, and many of my customers still require this methodology, so I'm sympathetic to Blum's viewpoint: sometimes it's not appropriate or not possible to go agile.

An interesting point emerged from the back-and-forth discussion: it may not be possible to build the development platforms and frameworks themselves (such as what Mobio builds) in an agile fashion, but the applications built on those high-level platforms lend themselves well to agile development. Features to be added to the platform are effectively prototyped in an agile way in applications built on the platform, then are handed off to the more traditional, structured development cycle of the platform itself.

Griss, who was partially looking to just stir up discussion earlier, pointed out that it's necessary to take the best parts of both ends of the software development methodology spectrum. At the end, it appears that they agree that there are methodologies and artifacts that are important, it's just a matter of the degree of ceremony to use on any given part of the software development process.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 06:14 PM in NewSoftwareIndustry • SoftwareDesign | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

First up after lunch is a panel on the role of open source in service management, moderated by Martin Griss of CMU West, and including Kim Polese of SpikeSource, and Jim Berbsleb and Tony Wasserman of CMU West.

Polese is included in the panel because her company is focussed on creating new business models for packaging and supporting open source software, whereas the other two are profs involved in open source research and projects.

The focus of the session is on how open source is increasingly being used to quickly and inexpensively create applications, both by established companies and startups: think of the number of web-based applications based on Apache and MySQL, for example. In many of these cases, a dilemma is created by the lack of traditional support models for open source components -- that's certainly an issue with the acceptance of open source for internal use within many organizations -- so new models are emerging for development, distribution and support of open source.

Open source is helping to facilitate unbundling and modularization of software components: it's very common to see open source components from multiple projects integrated with both commercial software components and custom components to create a complete application.

A question from the audience asked if there is a sense of misguided optimism about the usefulness open source; Polese pointed out in response that open source projects that aren't useful end up dying on the vine, so there's some amount of self-selection that tends to promote successful open source components and suppress those that are less successful through market acceptance.

As I mentioned during the Brainstorm BPM conference a few weeks back, it's very difficult to blog about a panel -- much less structure than a regular presentation, so the post tends to be even more disjointed than usual. With luck, you'll still get some of the flavour of the panel.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 06:13 PM in NewSoftwareIndustry • OpenSource | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

The morning finished with Timothy Chou, author of The End of Software and the former president of Oracle's online services group, discussing the radical changes in the software industry due to software-as-a-service. Anyone who entitles his talk "To Infinity and Beyond" and has a picture of Buzz Lightyear on the title slide is okay with me. :)

He looks at the economics of why the transformation is occurring, and encourages becoming a student of the economics in order to understand the shift. Considering a sort of Moore's law for software, traditional software (e.g., SAP) costs around $100/user/month to licence, install and support in various configurations; SaaS (e.g., Salesforce.com) costs around $10/user/month; and internet applications (e.g., Google) are more like $1/user/month.

He makes the point that the SaaS revolution is already occurring by listing nine SaaS companies that have gone public (including Webex and Salesforce.com); these nine went from just over $200M in revenues in 2002 to $1.4B in 2006.

Chou gives us three lessons for the future:

• Specialization matters. Think Google, which was originally an insanely simple interface for a single task: searching. Or eBay, which just does auctioning. This isn't just a product functionality or distribution issue, however; the software development process has fundamentally changed. It's now easier to become a software developer because of the tools, and this drives the development of niche applications. In a world where Citibank has more developers than Oracle, we're not just buying software from the "professionals" any more; we're creating it ourselves or buying it from much smaller players.
• Games matter. Chou uses World of Warcraft as a collaboration example, and it's a great one. People from all over the world, with different languages and ethnicity, come together for a common goal, then disperse when that goal is achieved. WoW makes specialized skills and skill levels transparent, so that you immediately know if another player's skills are complementary to your own, and how good he is at that skill. In general, you can't do that now in business collaboration environments, but it would be great if you could. Also of interest is the world of currency within these games, and how that currency is valued in the real world.
• Service matters. The service economy is not just about human labour; service is information. Consider the information that Amazon has about books, from finding them to other user reviews to recommendations. The information is there, but some of it is hard to find/analyze. The "surface web" of approximately 100TB is what you could find on Google, but there's a much deeper web of more than a million TB, mostly inside corporate firewalls. How much better service could we have if we had access to more of that information in the deep web?

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 06:11 PM in Enterprise2.0 • NewSoftwareIndustry • SaaS | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

John Zysman, a professor of Political Science at UC Berkeley, immediately followed Maglio with a related discussion on Services Transformation. The expectation was that Maglio and Zysman have diametrically opposed views and that their joint question period will degrade into fisticuffs -- or at least a lively debate -- but it turns out that they're pretty closely aligned on many issues.

A generation ago, services (within a software product company) were seen as a sink hole of productivity, but are now considered to be sources of productivity. It's not that the service sector has grown or has changed from agriculture to IT, it's that the sector has been reorganized in significant ways. In order to navigate this, we need to understand three things: strategy and organization; tools; and rules and roles (social-political dynamics).

An example of this sort of transformation is what Zysman referred to as the "American Comeback", driven by the new consumer electronics, with a shift from electro-mechanical to digital (think Walkman to iPod) as well as modularization and commoditization within the supply chain. He listed stages of service transformations, although I can't do justice to an explanation of these:

• Outsourcing
• Changes in consumption patterns
• Outsourcing household work
• The algorithmic transformation: from revolution to delusion

Most of this transformation is based on a change in how services are performed and the application of technology to allow services to be performed in different ways and locations. I heard an interesting example of this last night while having dinner with some of the TIBCO people who I'll be seeing at TUCON later this week: two of them were from the U.K., one of those two now living in the U.S., and we had a discussion about healthcare in the U.K., U.S. and Canada. One of them made the point that in the U.K., patients sit in the waiting room until the doctor comes out and calls them in, where as in both Canada and the U.S., multiple patients are taken simultaneously to separate examination rooms and prepped by medical assistants, then the doctor just goes from one room to another to do a more specialized part of the work. What's really interesting is that U.K. and Canada both have socialized medicine, which would tend to favour the less efficient but total service U.K. model, except Canada has a shortage of doctors so has moved to the more efficient U.S. service model.

A couple of random ideas from his talk that I want to capture here for later thought:

• Should we conceive a services stack?
• Automating the codifiable parts of a process is the first step in the transformation.
• By commoditizing a service, you may be "moving the whiteboards of innovation", i.e., disabling the ability to have innovation in a service.

In discussing rules and roles, Zysman talked about how services are embedded social processes, and how we need to change the way that processes work. How did we end up talking about business process reengineering? I thought that I was taking a break from process today, but as it turns out, there is no escape.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 06:09 PM in NewSoftwareIndustry | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

Paul Maglio, a senior manager of service systems research at IBM's Almaden Research Center, spoke to us on the science of service systems, looking at the services sector of the economy, including everything from high-end professional services to McJobs in the hospitality industry. The focus of much of his research is on high-value services that simply can't be automated.

Harkening back to Cusumano's talk, he showed where services generates 53% of IBM's gross revenue, but only 35% of their pretax net income; because of that, they're focussing on service innovation in order to be able to squeeze a bigger margin out of that services portion.

He showed a model of services as a system of relationships between a service provider, a service client and a service target (the reality to be transformed or operated on by the service provider for the sake of the service client). Service systems depend on value co-creation between the provider and the client. if the client wins to the detriment of the provider, it's a loss leader; in the reverse situation, it's coercion. If they both win, it's co-creation.

Although there's no equivalent to Moore's Law for services, telling us where the efficiencies will be created in the future, there are some known factors that can be applied to make services more effective, both related to people (location, education) and technology.

In mapping profits against revenues, the steepest curve (biggest return) is information, then technology, then SaaS, then labour. However, most services are a combination of all of these things, so it's considerably more complex to model.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 05:57 PM in Enterprise2.0 • NewSoftwareIndustry | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

Michael Cusumano is with the MIT Sloan School of Management, and has written several books on the changing software industry; he spoke today about the changing business of software.

In general, there is a decline of new enterprise software product revenues, and growth in services and maintenance sales. There are a number of new business models, including SaaS and ad-supported software.

Software companies tend to move from being product companies to services or hybrid product/services companies (maintenance revenue is usually included in services). However, there's a different evolution curve that shows where companies focus on product innovation, then on process innovation (e.g., making the product more efficiently), then on services innovation.

The number of publicly-owned software companies peaked in 1997 at around 400 companies. IT services firms peaked in 1999 at around 500 companies. Web companies, which can be launched with significantly less capital (due to distribution mechanisms and development tools/methodologies), had a peak in 1999 before dropping in the crash, but are now climbing to an even higher peak.

Cusumano showed a graph of three business model dimensions: revenue model, delivery model, and customers, with traditional software product vendors at the origin of the graph, and various other models scattered throughout the cube. He also asked the question, is the rise in services and new business models temporary or permanent? The "temporary" argument says that we're in a transition phase between platform and business model innovations; the "permanent" argument (with which I agree) says that software is now commoditized and prices will fall to close to zero as we embrace SaaS and ad-supported models.

Being an MIT geek, Cusumano had slide after slide of data analysis about his research on software product companies. For example, average product company revenue crossed over in 2002 so that services revenue was larger than product revenue; also, firms at 24+ years of age have more services than product revenue. The age phenomena contributes to the date-based phenomena, since many of the large enterprise product vendors are reaching this level of age maturity now. There's an interesting cycle where services are very attractive for revenue generation, but then reach a point (in terms of % of revenue) where they are performed relatively inefficiently and, due to lower profit margins, are not as profitable as product; eventually, as companies become better at providing services (e.g., reusability), it swings to a more positive contributor to profitability. Market cap follows a similar pattern, although the centre (when services are undesirable) portion of the graph is broader.

Similar things are happening with hardware companies: more than 50% of IBM's revenue, for example, is from services.

He had some interesting comments on the way that software product companies should incorporate services into their business model: it should be planned and exploited as opposed to just happening by accident, as it does with many product companies.

He ended up with some key questions:

• How to manage the mix of products, services and maintenance efforts and revenue within a product company.
• How to "servitize" products, to make them less generic and more customizable.
• How to productize services; a great point that he made here is that it's best served by creating two professional services organizations with different mandates.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 05:48 PM in Enterprise2.0 • NewSoftwareIndustry • SoftwareDesign | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

I'm at the Microsoft campus in Mountain View attending the New Software Industry conference, put on by Carnegie Mellon West and the Haas School of Business. I interviewed a few of the people from CMU West a few months ago about the new Masters of Software Management program, and ended up being invited to attend here today. Since I'm down here for TUCON this week, it was just a matter of coming in a day early and fighting the traffic down from the city this morning (although I left San Francisco at 7:30 this morning, I still arrived late, around 9:15).

Unfortunately, I missed the brief opening address which, according to the program, featured Jim Morris, Dean of CMU West, and Tom Campbell, Dean of Haas, so my day started with Ray Lane of Kleiner Perkins (formerly of Oracle) talking about the personal enterprise, or what I would call Enterprise 2.0.

Lane started with a discussion about how the software industry is changing, including factors such as packaging (including SaaS) and vertical focus. I found it interesting, if not exactly surprising, that he has a very American-centric view of the industry, so that he's really talking about the software industry in the U.S., not the global industry; he spoke about India and China gaining market share in software as some sort of external force as opposed to part of the industry.

He had some interesting points: a call to action, which including leveraging community power via mashups and other collaborative methods; and a look at how platforms are moving from monoliths to clouds (i.e., services exist in cloud and are called as required). He covered some basic about Web 2.0 and web-driven capabilities. Since I've been so immersed in this for such a long time, there wasn't much new here for me, although he had some interesting examples, particularly about collaboration and user-driven content.

He talked about the "personal enterprise", where consumer web applications inspire new enterprise applications, or what many of us have been talking about as Enterprise 2.0. He makes a great point that somehow, being at home allows us to just try something new online, whereas the act of going into the office makes us want to spend a year evaluating rather than just trying something, and how we need to change that notion.

He gave seven laws for Enterprise 2.0 applications:

• serves individual needs
• viral/organic adoption
• contextual personalize information
• no data entry or training required
• delivers instantaneous value
• utilizes community, social relationships
• minimum IT footprint

I'd love to expand further on each of these, but I'm trying to get this conference blogging back to something like real-time, so that will have to wait for another post.

He finished up with some examples of personal enterprise applications, with some discussion about what each of them contributed to advancing software industry business models:

• Services: Webex, Skype, RIM, Google
• Applications: Salesforce.com, NetSuite, RightNow
• Collaboration: SuiteTwo, Visible Path

Access to the Microsoft guest wifi is tightly guarded and requires an hour or so turnaround to get login credentials, so this first post is coming out late and the other will trickle along throughout the day. All of the posts for this conference are available here.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 05:04 PM in Enterprise2.0 • NewSoftwareIndustry • SaaS | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

There's a public domain BPMN poster and set of Visio templates on SourceForge for free download.

Via BPM.com.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 05:01 PM in BPMN | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

BEA is holding a series of half-day developer seminars in a number of cities in Europe and the Americas, focussed on building enterprise mashups with their new/rebranded en.terpri.se platform. I was excited to see that one will be in Toronto, since it seems like vendors always skip my hometown; however, I'm less excited to see that it's the only one of the seminars to be held at the same time as their own user conference, which means that I have to miss it.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 06:21 PM in mashups | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

Forgive me readers, for I have slacked off. It's been 8 days since my last blog post. I blame the Canadian government, who insist on me doing my personal taxes by April 30th.

I've had a number of vendor product demos over the past several weeks, and it's time to start blogging about them before I start into a month of travel: I'm giving a presentation at the TIBCO user conference in San Francisco next week, then attending the BEA user conference in Atlanta the following week, a few days vacation in Nova Scotia after that, then on to Las Vegas for a presentation at the Shared Insights Portals and Collaboration conference. Watch for live blogging from all three conferences, although not from my vacation.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 12:01 PM in Blogging | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

It slipped past the earlier announced launch date of April 9th, but it looks like Dion Hinchcliffe's Enterprise 2.0 TV Show will launch today. As of 2am (ET), there's only a short snippet available on the site, but I'm hopeful. I'm also hopeful for a subscription feed via iTunes so that I can watch this on my iPod, but I'm not holding my breath.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 02:10 AM in Enterprise2.0 | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

I finally made it home from Chicago around 1:30 this morning: United Airlines wimped out and cancelled all their flights, but Air Canada came through in the crunch.

I'm now on a Proforma webinar about their new V6.0 release of ProVision, of which I had a brief preview at their user conference last fall. Some highlights:

• Browser-based access for collaboration, although I suspect that this does not include full modelling capabilities based on the comments that I heard at the user conference.
• Web services access to Knowledge Exchange -- this is pretty exciting, and I'd like to hear about more of this. For example, if ProVision exposed process models via a web service, could a BPMS consume that model directly?
• Embedded Crystal Report functionality, which I recall was a big deal for the user conference attendees.
• Updated UI in their desktop application, which was looking a bit dated.
• The concept of dimensions in models, which allows for alternative versions to be created based on specific dimensions, where a dimension may be, for example, geography, or as-is versus to-be. In one model, then, you can compare North American as-is models with European to-be models, or whatever else you want to define based on your dimensions. Pretty powerful stuff.

I'm not familiar enough with ProVision to tell exactly what's new and what was there before, but it does look like some significant improvements in this version.

ProVision 6.0 is being released over the next two weeks. A replay of the webinar will be available on their website.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 03:04 PM in BPA | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

I was wrong, the last one wasn't my last session, I had time for one more: Pat Dowdle on a Roadmap to Implementing Process-Based Management, based on CAM-I's emerging Process-Based Management (PBM) assessment and framework. There's a number of pieces to this:

• Mindset/culture (how things are done; values, rules, practices)
• End-to-end processes (classification; portfolio; structure)
• Process-based measures (process performance; incentives/compensation)
• Initiative integration: (ABC/M; ISO/quality standards; Six Sigma)
• All centred around customer expectations

He went through a management model for process ownership, from a process council to process owners to team leaders and the team, and talked about a roadmap to PBM through the seven key milestones: awareness, commitment, engagement, managing processes, integration, embed and optimization. In this, he talks about moving from process metrics to transformation metrics once processes start to integrate across the organization: critical for moving from local optimized processes to global optimization, which seems to be my personal theme for the day. He also names the transitions between the seven milestones: discovery, foundation, transition, transformation (moving from managing processes to integration), institutionalization and realization.

There's a presentation on the CAM-I website that goes into more detail about PBM including much of this, and quite a bit of material of theirs on BPMInstitute.org (just search for CAM-I). Check out slide 13 on the CAM-I presentation for a great chart that maps different quality programs (such as Six Sigma) against their seven milestones.

My flight home just cancelled, so I may hang around a bit longer...

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 04:46 PM in | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

Last session of the day for me: I'm headed off to the airport following this, although I realize that the probability of a flight in or out of Chicago being on time when it's snowing is near zero. With some luck, I'll make it home tonight. The only thing that I'm missing is some sessions where the vendors get to show off their products, and a final wrapup keynote.

This session by Dan Madison is on Creating the "To Be" Process, something that I often do with customers, and I'm always looking to learn new tips and techniques from others who do the same thing. This session is part of the Organizational Performance symposium, the first of those that I've attended these two days.

He suggests a number of "lenses of analysis" to look at processes and derive the "to be" processes from the problems seen in that process.

First, create a customer report card, which for each ranked criteria, shows the current process performance (usually around quality and timeliness), what the best possible performance in that process would look like, and the two main competitors or outsourcers.

Second, look at the things that frustrate the people who are currently participating in the process, since there's a high correlation between frustration and quality problems: frustration has the ability to act as a lens focussed on problem areas. Once frustrations are identified, the process participants tend to generate a ton of ideas on how to fix the problems, and there's a huge amount of buy-in for changing the process from the grassroots level. I've definitely seen this with my customers. There was an audience question about how to keep this from becoming a bitch session, and Dan said that he uses some basic rules if things start to go that way: only process problems are discussed, not people problems; and each person can only bring forward their three main frustrations.

Third, look at the time required for each type of work in the process: processing, waiting, rework, moving, inspecting and setup. He finds that processing -- the actual work -- is typically only 2-20% of the time, which indicates that there's a huge amount of inefficiency in the process. Of that small percentage, even all of that may not be time that adds value to the process. If you've automated your process with BPM, then you can gather this information with your system, but if your processes are still manual, then figuring out how your process breaks down will be manual, too.

Fourth, a cost lens such as activity-based costing; ABC calculates what it really costs to deliver a specific product or service by looking at the labour, overhead and material costs of each step in a process.

Fifth, a quality lens such as Six Sigma for measuring defect rates or some other relevant quality measure.

Last, take a look at benchmarks and best practices, by looking at your direct competitors and what they're doing; and by looking at companies that have a process similar to your problem process and are considered to be world class, regardless of their industry.

He then moved on to design principles for the to-be process:

• Design the process around value-adding activities.
• Provide a single point of contact for customers and suppliers.
• If the inputs coming in to the process naturally cluster, create a separate process for each cluster.
• Ensure a continuous flow of the "main sequence."
• Bring downstream information needs upstream.
• Involve as few people as possible in performing a process [our old adage of reducing handoffs lives!].
• Ensure 100% quality at the beginning of the process.
• Use co-located or networked teams for complex issues.
• Redesign the process first, and then automate it.

Putting it all together, creating the to-be is the synthesis of:

• Customer feedback
• Worker frustrations
• Time analysis
• Cost analysis
• Quality analysis
• Benchmarking and best practices
• Design principles
• Information technology

Dan's obviously experienced at this: he does it as a consultant, he teaches process mapping and improvement at the local university, and he has a couple of books that he's written on it. I haven't read his books, but I'll be checking them out soon.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 03:59 PM in BPA • BrainStorm2007 | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

I'm starting to see more and more familiar faces at these BPM conferences, and this one is no exception: I've met Gregg Rock and Tom Dwyer of BPMInstitute.org at a couple of conferences now, finally met Brett Champlin at the last Gartner conference, and Bruce Silver and I meet up so often that our spouses are starting to get suspicious. :)  There's also the people who work for the vendors -- I seem to see many of the same ones at every show, and these shows must be some small form of purgatory for them.

It's also fun to meet people who I've only met online previously, and I've had a couple of those experiences here in Chicago. David Novick, who added a comment to my blog that turned into an email conversation, recognized me in one of the sessions -- I guess that Rannie's new headshot of me is paying off. At lunch, I happened to sit at the same table as Barbara Saxby from Ramco, who was on a webinar that I moderated last month. And Jean Campagna of Resolvit found me yesterday evening at the vendor showcase/drinks party to say that her colleague was sending me a hello: apparently her colleague back at the office has been reading my blog to Jean over the phone.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 02:51 PM in BrainStorm2007 | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

For the first breakout session of the day, I attended Ken Orr's talk on Business Process Driven Enterprise Architecture. He started out with some observations: improving business processes is essential for enterprises; business architecture is critical; modelling is critical; and business processes are hard to manage in the real world and especially in big organizations. Nothing earth-shattering here, but excellent points.

He made a great analogy by talking about IT levees -- fragile yet critical applications and systems where you know that they're a weak point but just never find the time or money to fix them -- and understanding when they're going to break. Apparently, a year before Hurricane Katrina, there was an exercise that modelled exactly what would happen if a force 4 or 5 hurricane hit New Orleans, but nothing was done; when Katrina hit, the levees failed exactly as modelled. Orr talked about mission critical spreadsheets as being one class of IT levees that are all set up to fail at the wrong time.

He talked about how enterprise architecture is like city planning, where your deliverables are things like a city plan, a zoning plan, a building code and an approved building-materials list. Sticking with the disaster analogies, he talked about how building codes are the result of disasters, and the obvious analogy with software and system disasters is pretty clear.

He covered off their enterprise architecture framework briefly, but used it mostly to discuss how the different layers in a framework interact: in short, technology changes enable business changes, and business changes drive the need for technology changes. He also talked about determining what type of business that you're in, that is, what business processes are you really doing, so that you can figure out whether or not you should be in those businesses as well as how to improve them. Funnily enough, he really answered part of the question that I asked in the panel in the previous session with respect to getting an end-to-end business process view, but that's sort of expected from an enterprise architecture person since EA can be a key tool in doing just that. In his terminology, what I'm talking about is a value stream, defined by James Martin in The Great Transition as "...an end-to-end set of activities which collectively create value for a customer."

Update: I forgot to add "Orr's rules of modelling", which he gave after I had shut down my laptop, so were just scribbled on a piece of paper:

1. It's more important to be clear than correct. If you're clearly wrong, someone will correct you. If you're obscurely correct, you may never know.
2. It's not important that your first model is correct, only that your last model is correct.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 02:09 PM in BPA • BrainStorm2007 • EnterpriseArchitecture | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

Following our morning break in the beautiful but sadly lacking in hot water (for tea) vendor showcase area is a panel moderated by Tom Dwyer on Transforming to a Process-Driven Enterprise, featuring speakers from Adobe (Ashish Agrawal) and BEA (John Lauck, former president of Fuego before it was acquired by Fuego) as well as the last session's speaker, Jeremy Alexis. Surprisingly, the speaker from Adobe didn't show up until 13 minutes after the panel was supposed to start, but many of us think that Adobe is pretty late to the BPM space anyway.

I've been tagged by Tom to ask a question early on in order to get things rolling, which means that I'm paying more attention than usual. :) Panels are difficult to blog about because they're so unstructured and there's no visual aids, but there's often some conversational gems that pop up.

The first question was about the business-IT divide, which resulted in a completely expected reply: if you don't get the business and IT people together, then BPM initiatives will almost certainly fail. Lauck just referred to "SOA" derisively as a buzzword, which was a bit unexpected and did make me laugh -- wonder what his current bosses think about that -- and then took a swipe at BPEL.

I then popped up and asked how organizations can move from being functionally-focussed to having an end-to-end view of their processes that will move from local optimization to global optimization. Unfortunately, the two vendors appear to have thought that I asked the question "how can I sell more software to my customers", because they both spoke about how you start with small projects, then roll out other projects across the enterprise and possibly find some efficiencies via shared services. In fact, Lauck said that if you have "grandiose plans" (his words) like modelling your end-to-end processes, then you'll just be modelling forever. Okay guys, but you're not answering my question: everyone's talking about moving from functional silos to process-centric views, but how do you actually do it? Shared services is not equivalent to finding a global optimum. Tom must have known that I wasn't satisfied, because he came back to me and asked if I wanted to clarify. By then, I was itching to have the microphone back, and said explicitly that I hadn't asked them how they could sell more software, but that's the question that they answered, and said that I was interested in Alexis' view on this since it is really a question about how companies innovate. He responded that leadership is key, which is a sort of motherhood and apple pie statement, and talked about the importance of change management. Okay, that's closer, but still doesn't answer the initial question.

A third question came up about how transitioning to a process-driven organization creates winners and losers, and how companies deal with losing people who just don't fit into the new world order. I think that the question was really about people who can't adapt to the new way of thinking, which is essentially a change management issue.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 02:06 PM in BrainStorm2007 | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

As an engineer, I love to hear about design, and I really liked Jeremy Alexis' talk on a Framework for Making Better Decisions during Product Definition. He teaches at the local Institute of Design (and has a blog about one of his design courses) and acts as a design consultant, and started out by talking about the problem with McDonalds' ketchup packages -- love it, even if it has nothing to do with BPM.

He moved on to some interesting graphs of patterns of good decision quality, and some fatal flaws in decision making:

• Overconfidence
• The endowment effect, where the owner of something feels that it is worth much more than it actually is (all Web 2.0 companies should pay attention to this)
• Loss aversion, such as fear of losing market share if a product is changed
• Horizontal flight/vertical flight: in areas of uncertainty, we tend to ignore what's important and focus on what we feel more comfortable with
• Groupthink, where not enough outside ideas are introduced and a small group believes that what they have developed is the right thing

He presented some ideas about decision making at the "fuzzy front end" of product definition, that is, during discovery and scoping, where there are few good tools for making decisions, unlike during later points in product definition (business case, develop, validate and launch) where there are a number of robust tools for decision making. He had some great findings from research on decision making at these early stages, such as its ad hoc and unstructured nature and its internal focus, and how these can make things go terribly wrong. Since there are a lot more ideas in the pipeline at the front end, it's pretty necessary to determine the winners and losers as early as possible.

Alexis showed us a high-level generalization of what really happens during the front-end discovery and scoping parts of product definition, which tends to just create more of the same rather than actually drive innovation. He then discussed a new approach -- create an innovation strategy, triage concepts as they are created, and use a consistent approach to evaluate triaged ideas -- and drove into detail on each of these steps. He brought together a number of interesting concepts, such as the 10 different types of innovation plotted against a company's "ambition level" to see which types of innovation that organizations at different levels of innovation ambition should attempt.

He ended up by stating what we in the technology industry already know: that the ultimate goal of most startup companies creating an innovative product is to be acquired rather than taking their company public, and that many large companies are counting on acquiring their innovation rather than developing it themselves.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 11:01 AM in BrainStorm2007 | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

I didn't come to Chicago specifically for the snow, but it didn't disappoint me nonetheless: big wet snow dripping down, just enough to get me wet crossing the road from my hotel to the Drake.

We started the day with a keynote by Andrew Spanyi, who I didn't give a great review earlier this year for his talk at ProcessWorld, and it seems to be a very similar talk that he gave there about business process governance although he's promising some new research data. Also, this time it's at the beginning of the day rather than the end, so I likely have a better attention span. Besides, he's a fellow Canadian (although transplanted to the US), so he knows how to pronounce "process" :)

He starts out with his 2003 and current definitions of BPM, the latter of which adds (no surprise) the words "management practice", before putting in a plug for his two books.

The study that he did through Babson College was a "mindset" study, which explored the role of executive mindsets in enabling a BPM focus, with the hypotheses that if a firm has embraced business process thinking, then they'd have an enterprise-level business process relationship map, they'd measure things from a customer's point of view, they'd have assigned process owners with accountability for cross-functional processes, and they'd have a plan for business processes within the organization.

Only a third of the 18 respondents (five, by the sounds of it), however, reported that they actually had all of these things (I have a question as to whether 18 data points is a statistically sufficient sample size, but then I never was all that good at stats). There were some common characteristics in these five companies: a supportive and vocal CEO, passion about performing for their customers, some sort of competitive or environmental threat, and a receptive culture within the organization.

The companies often used a framework to help them bootstrap their efforts, which allowed them to develop their process management models and plan in a relatively short period of time, and they were enjoyed a fair degree of success as corporations.

He went back to a subset of the original sample set for a follow-up survey -- nine companies, four of which were in that earlier "leaders" category -- and found that they still identified the same challenges. Some lessons learned emerged from this:

• Change management is key and takes longer than you think.
• IT enablement is critical to make all this happen, often by taking away the old tools and replacing them with newer tools.
• Build an organization-agnostic view of the process.

The outcome from all of this is that the organizations are seeing more cross-departmental collaboration (and less finger-pointing) due to the end-to-end view of the business processes, and that there's a much bigger focus on the processes rather than departments -- ultimately, this process-centric view is what's going to drive success.

In the Q&A, he made the statement that BPM and BI must converge, and that companies that he talked to in the survey said that they wouldn't buy software unless it had both -- and intriguing statement that I would have loved to hear more about.

I still found that Spanyi covers too much ground in a short period of time, and flips through his slides too quickly to absorb a lot of the information: there was one five-point slide with some pretty critical summary information, maybe 20 words in total on the slide, and I could only jot down the first three points before he flipped to a rather meaningless graphic where he stayed for two minutes. However, he's obviously knowledgeable about this stuff and I liked his talk this time around.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 10:14 AM in BPM • BrainStorm2007 | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

Tom Dwyer of BPMInstitute.org/BrainStorm Group finished up today's formal sessions with Enabling Business Process Innovation.

As he pointed out, innovation is what drives company growth, and he listed the types of innovation that can be seen in organizations:

• Business model, e.g., use of shared services centres
• Process and services and markets, e.g., electronic channels
• Operations, e.g., self-service

He covered a number of good examples of some strategic industry initiatives in a number of different industries, and discussed innovation concepts in general before drilling down to process innovation specifics.

He spent some time discussing process-driven companies, which is a topic that everyone seems to be talking about lately: not just analysts and vendors, but customers are starting to ask about this as they see the advantage of managing end-to-end processes rather than chopping them up into functional silos.

He moved on to redefine the acronym "BPO" -- universally recognized to mean "business process outsourcing" -- to mean "business process organization". Yikes. There were some great points here for process-driven companies, but the BPO acronym was completely distracting. He had a graph that charted the course to business process excellence, which was a sort of maturity model: "just get by", "look for efficiencies", "drive business agility" and "leverage process capital for market leadership". He also listed some of the artifacts and results of becoming process-driven, from documented process flows, a rules repository and process metrics to customer satisfaction measures. As the scheduled end-time passed, the presentation dove into a discussion of SOA and attendees started to bail out, but Tom wrapped it up with some useful summary points on how innovation helps to create a competitive edge.

The presentation was much too dense with text and statistics for any time of the day, but especially for the last timeslot of the day -- the energy level in the room was pretty low. It's too bad, because Tom had a lot of great information here.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 06:08 PM in BrainStorm2007 | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

I switched streams to the business rules symposium for the last breakout session of the day, The End of Requirements, because the description sounded too good to miss:

Business wants control of the business back. For years we’ve lived with a process where the business creates “requirements” and IT creates a business solution. While business processes are the lifeblood of an organization, rules are where the volume of business changes are. If the business is going to take back control of its own fate it all starts with making sure that the business rules they own are really under their control after they go into production. The current requirements process simply can’t handle that. It’s time to embrace a Business Engineering-based approach and move beyond the requirement-centric approach that we’ve love to hate.

He makes the distinction between knowledge and behaviour: rules is about (reusable) knowledge, and processes are about behaviour. For example, you might have a rule that would allow you to determine if a customer was a "good" customer, and you might use that knowledge in a process to provide a discount. He discussed different views of rules and how they integrate with processes:

• Rules as structural knowledge about business entities
• Rules as business judgements
• Rules that trigger events

Unfortunately, McWhorter didn't ultimately talk about how the business is going to get control of the business rules, or how it's going to work once they do, which is what I was expecting from the session description. He did finish up with a call to arms to bring a design function back into the business side -- sort of like what business analysts are supposed to do, but don't because they don't have any design training -- which would allow proper designs to be created before things are ever passed on to IT.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 04:57 PM in BRE • BrainStorm2007 | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

Peter Gilbertson is a  senior business analyst at CUNA Mutual, and his session was on Talking Process to Executives: Process, Tools and Techniques to Sell your BPM Project, which is about how to "sell" your BPM project to the people who write the cheques. Although he's looking at it as an internal person selling to his own executives, I'm often in the position of helping people like him create exactly this sort of rationale to carry up the food chain and thought that it would be worthwhile to hear what they did.

He started by talking about their business review process, which is not really specific to BPM projects:

• Build the business model, especially important for communication and education because they had a whole crop of new executives from the insurance industry, whereas CUNA deals with both insurance and investment products.
• Determine industry benchmarks, by identifying key "success levers" and comparing themselves with their competitors.
• Document core processes, which is where a lot of people start; Gilbertson felt that if they hadn't done the first two steps, then the core processes wouldn't have made sense to the executives.
• Develop performance measures, but took the usual tabular data views of things such as customer service metrics and converted them to graphs to make the business health and trends more obvious.
• Determine gaps, which they did using a pipe analogy: there were spots where the pipe leaked, or wasn't big enough, or didn't fit with other pipes. I liked the analogy, and Gilbertson said that it was immediately obvious to the executives and allowed them to move easily into process improvement specifics.
• Develop strategy, again using an analogy: "shoot the moon" with a space shuttle and booster rocket visual. In order to show how the decisions were derived, they also created a decision tree to show the path to the strategy recommendations.
• Create plan, which is the detailed execution plan and timelines.

He summed it up in his top 10 tips:

• Start at 10,000 feet and parachute down
• Show "industry standard" business models
• Focus on (and show how) the customer gets served
• Explain how you make money
• Walk through high level processes
• Pinpoint areas for improvements
• Use visual (e.g., graphs, charts, pictures, etc.)
• Use consultants or industry experts to build credibility [I liked this one :) ]
• Create a detailed plan to execute project
• Continually communicate, educate and position the project

This was really about how to present the material to executives, with very little on how to create the material, but there were some good points: use visual analogies where appropriate, feed them small bits of information at a time, and show why and how that the decisions are being made.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 04:06 PM in BPM • BrainStorm2007 | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

Bruce and I changed between the same two sessions, although he was leading both sessions and I was sitting back blogging. This one is a panel of four BPMS vendors, Global 360, IBM, Savvion and BEA, to discuss What's Next for BPM Suites. I arrived a few minutes late and didn't catch all the names, although I recognized Pat Morrissey of Savvion. This was my first tough decision of the day, since I also wanted to attend the Business Process versus Business Rules panel, especially considering that the panel that I'm in could turn out to be just regurgitation of the vendors' marketing materials. There's always the chance, however, that one of them will blurt out something unexpected.

The word "mashups" just came out of the IBM person's mouth, in response to a question about collaboration; this has nothing to do with their BPM offering of course, which doesn't really have any collaborative aspects (if you discount the FileNet Team Collaboration Manager product, which she likely hasn't even heard of) but they are offering a mashup tool so I suppose that triggered when she heard "collaboration". She's not the only vendor to drag the conversation off topic and down the rathole of their own product's functionality, but she's definitely the most effective at it.

There was a bit of a discussion about Web 2.0 at the end of the session, with the BEA person making a key point that one of the big issues is that Web 2.0 consumer applications are changing user expectations, which in turn drives the inclusion of social networking features into BPMS' -- a point that I've made here before and will be discussing at the Shared Insights conference next month.

Bruce finished up by asking each vendor to summarize what they thought was the next thing in BPMS:

• Global 360: "process intelligence", which