This entry cross-posted to my new blog location.

Another panel, this one with moderator Brian Gillooly from Optimize, and including panelists Jordan Frank of Traction, Mark Mader of Smartsheet.com, Suresh Chandrasekaran of Denodo, Todd Berkowitz of NewsGator and David Carter of iUpload (which I understood was going to undergo a name change based on what their CEO John Bruce said last month at EnterpriseCamp in Toronto). Since these are all product companies, I expect that this might be a bit less compelling than the previous panel, which was primarily focused on two Enterprise 2.0 end-user organizations.

I'm not going to list the details of each vendors' product; suffice it to say that Traction is an enterprise wiki platform (although there's some blog type functionality in there too), Smartsheet.com is a spreadsheet-style project management application offered as a hosted service, Denodo does enterprise data mashups for business intelligence applications (now that's kind of interesting), NewsGator is a well-known web feed aggregator and reader, and iUpload is a hosted enterprise social software service.

Mader had some interesting comments on how by making updates to a schedule completely transparent, no one wants to be the last one to add their part since everyone will know that they were last; this, however, is not unique to any Enterprise 2.0 functionality, but has been a well-known characteristic of any collaboration environment since Og was carving pictures of his kills on the community cave wall.

There was an interesting question about who, within an organization, is driving the Enterprise 2.0 technology adoption: although the CxO might be writing the cheque, it's often corporate communications who's pushing for it. In the last session, we saw that in one organization, it was pushed by HR, but I suspect that's unusual.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 03:30 PM in BI • Blogging • Enterprise2.0 • SaaS | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

This entry cross-posted to my new blog location.

We heard from IBM, so it's inevitable that we're going to hear from Microsoft too: namely, Derek Burney, GM of the SharePoint Platform and Tools group. More stuff on how we're in a new world of work, how technology is changing how and where we interact, but he also touches on the issues of the need to retain and share knowledge as the baby boomers start to retire, and what the incoming MySpace generation is going to demand in terms of functionality on enterprise platforms.

He covers the idea of a busines productivity infrastructure consisting of unified communications, business intelligence, ECM, collabroation (including wikis and blogs) and enterprise search -- amazingly, that's exactly what SharePoint offers ;)  He mentions BPM peripherally as it relates to content approval, but doesn't cite it explicitly. He does mention "workflow" but that's really Microsoft's view of workflow, which is more web service orchestration than what I think of as workflow.

He discusses all the people who might be involved in some way in your organization -- employees, partners, customers, and non-affiliated community -- and how to better allow collaboration between, not just within, these groups. He directly addressed the concern that many IT (and business) managers have about bringing blogs and wikis inside the corporation, namely a loss of productivity, by showing an example from within Microsoft of how wikis can actually improve productivity, but I think that the Razorfish intranet example that I saw at a recent conference is much more compelling.

The presentation dragged a bit towards the end: I was losing the thread as the slides blurred past, and the guy beside me appeared to nod off. I would like to review his slides if they're available online; I think that there's a great deal of good information in there, I just need to dig it out.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 11:38 AM in BI • ECM • Enterprise2.0 | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

Following hard on the heels of LucidEra, which I reviewed in March, OnDemandIQ has launched Insights, a hosted dashboard and reporting service aimed at small and medium businesses. I'm very eager to see how these new SaaS BI offerings are accepted in the marketplace -- has anyone out there used them yet?

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 06:44 PM in BI | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

My session on the changing face of BPM went pretty well, except for one guy who said that I was wrong about pretty much everything :)

Today finishes early, so I'm at the last breakout session, Colin White discussing using RSS in the enterprise, and the broader subject of using web syndication to deliver content to users. It's a bit distracting because he has exactly the same English accent as someone on my wine club board; I keep looking up and expecting to see my friend Bernard (who doesn't even know how to spell RSS) at the front of the room.

White is looking at this from an architectural rather than implementation viewpoint, and focussing on enterprise rather than internet data sources: a standardized and lightweight XML-based integration protocol. He spent an undue amount of time explaining generically what RSS feeds are and how internet syndication works in various RSS readers; is there anyone in this fairly technical portal-savvy audience who doesn't already know all this? He then moved on to the differences between RSS and Atom and the specific tags used in an RSS feed; 30 minutes into the presentation, we still haven't yet seen anything to do with RSS in the enterprise.

Eventually he does get to enterprise uses of RSS; no surprise, one big use is to have it integrated into a business portal, although the XML can also be consumed by various search tools, including ETL to capture the data and load it into a data warehouse or content management system -- something that I hadn't thought about previously, but can be done with tools like Microsoft Integration Services. He points out how RSS is one piece in the integration puzzle, which is essentially what I've been saying with respect to using RSS feeds of process execution data as one way of providing visibility into processes.

White covers the different types of feed servers: external, internal, and hosted SaaS. Interestingly, NewsGator is now in all three areas, with both an enterprise server and an on-demand solution that can aggregate and syndicate internal as well as external content, as well as their well-known external internet version. That gives a variety of ways that a feed server can fit into an enterprise environment: either an external feed server providing only the external feeds, or an internal/hosted feed server that can handle both internal and external feeds. This has the advantage of reducing network traffic, since the feed server caches the feeds, as well as providing filtering and monitoring of content that is consumed.

I'm really aware of a push to give PCC a very Enterprise 2.0 flavour; having not been at any of the previous PCC conferences, or even the first half of this one, I don't know if this is a new bandwagon that they're leaping on, or something that's a logical progression of where this conference has been in the past.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 07:39 PM in BI • Enterprise2.0 • SharedInsightsPCC • Web2.0 | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

Eduardo Chiocconi of BEA gave us a technical view of the ALBPM BAM functionality: what's available out of the box, the extensions, how to create customized dashboards, security, and a bit of the architecture underlying it all so that we have a bit of an understanding of what happens in the underlying services and data stores when a custom key performance indicator (KPI) is defined.

Like every other BPM vendors' BAM, ALBPM's BAM is visualized as a set of dashboards that show KPIs for the purpose of monitoring the health of a process and early problem detection. There are some out-of-the-box dashboards including widgets such as gauges and charts attached to a data source, and the ability to create custom dashboards. As we saw in the architectural view this morning, there's a BAM database to collect and aggregate the analytics data from one or more process engines, plus external data sources if you want a combined view. There is a single BAM database for each directory service, and an updater service that executes regularly to pull data from the associated engine database(s) to the BAM database. Data in the BAM database is very granular -- down to the second, if required -- but is flushed out as it ages, typically after a day. The OLAP data mart, which has the same data as the BAM database and is updated by the same service, is much less granular and is not automatically purged; this is used for historical analytics rather than the near-real-time requirements of the BAM database.

The out-of-the-box dashboards are instance workload, percentage workload by organizational unit, performance (e.g., end-to-end cycle time) including drill-downs to more granular levels, or a unified dashboard with all three of these measures. Surprisingly, these widgets are not currently provided as standard portlets, but can be wrapped into a portlet if required.

Most organizations will want to define their own KPIs and create their own dashboards: KPIs can be defined by a business analyst in the Designer as dimensions (e.g., time or geographic aggregation) or measures (e.g., averages and other statistical aggregations), and can be based on standard process variables or business variables. This causes a new column to be created in each of the three main BAM database tables to capture the necessary data for the three display widgets for that measure or dimension.

It's also possible to specify the points in the process where the KPI data are captured and sent to the BAM database in addition to allowing the automatic update process to occur, giving it a sort of audit functionality. Internally, the BAM data are generated from the process engine's audit trail, so you'll have to have auditing enabled for all of the processes and events that you want to track in BAM (in many cases, you would turn off auditing for processes and events that don't require it in order to improve performance).

ALBPM allows for role-based security access to the BAM dashboards, so that only specific roles can see them.

Future directions are to allow ad hoc dashboard creation and move to event-driven BAM, although that will require some architectural changes to the underlying database and services in order to handle the increased load that will result from allowing everyone to roll their own analytics.

The more I look at it, the less than I'm convinced that all the BPM vendors should be developing their own BAM like this; I think that there could be a market for a BAM product that can connect to many different BPM products as soon as we get some standardization around the process engine audit trails that are typically used to populate BAM databases.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 03:10 PM in BEAparticipate • BI | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

For the last breakout session of the day, Mark Elder of TIBCO talked about reporting and analytics with iProcess Analytics, their historical (rather than real-time) analytics product.. The crowd's thin this time of day, although I understand that the lobby bar is well-populated; this was the same timeslot that Tim and I had yesterday, but the attendees now have an additional day of conference fatigue. Also doesn't help that the presentation PC acted up and we were 10 minutes late starting.

He looks at the second half of any business process implementation: after it's up and running, you need to measure what's going on, then feed that back to the design stage for process improvement. iProcess Analytics has a number of built-in metrics, then wizard interfaces to allow a business analyst to build new KPIs by specifying dimensions and filters, then create interactive reports. It's even possible to set different threshold values for filtered subsets of data, such as setting different cycle-time goals for different geographic regions.

He moved on to a live demo after a few minutes of slideware to show us just how easy it is to create a chart or report for a process, or even a single step within a process. The wizard looks pretty easy to use, although chart generation isn't exactly rocket science. There's some nice report distribution capabilities, much like what you'd see in a business intelligence suite, so that you can share a chart or report with other members of your team. You can't do a lot of calculations on the data, however, but you can export tabular data to Excel for further calculations and aggregation.

One very cool feature is that for a given set of data that's being used to generate a report, you can reconstruct the process map from the report data to see where the data is coming from, since process metadata is passed over to iProcess Analytics along with the execution data.

It appears that if you want to get real historical data into Business Studio for simulation, you're going to create a tabular report in iProcess Analytics, export it to Excel, then save it as a text file for importing. Not as integrated as I would have expected -- this needs to be fixed as well as more people start to use the simulation functionality within Business Studio.

It's all browser-based, and can generate either the interactive web-based reports that we saw, or static HTML or PDF reports. It will be interesting to see how TIBCO moves forward with their analytics strategy, since they now have both iProcess Analytics and iProcess Insight (BAM). Although historical analytics and BAM serve different purposes, they're opposite ends of the same spectrum, and analytics requirements will continue to creep from both ends towards the middle. Like many other vendors who started with an historical analytics tool then bolted on an OEM BAM tool, they're going to have to reconcile this at some point in the future. There's also the question, which was raised by an audience member, about the boundary between iProcess Analytics and a full BI suite like Cognos. Although there's a lot of nice functionality built into iProcess Analytics that's specific to analyzing processes, many customers are going to want to go beyond this fairly rudimentary BI capability.

That's the end of day 2 at TUCON; tomorrow morning I'll probably only be able to catch one session before I have to leave for the flight home. Tonight, 750 of us are off to the SF Giants game, where we'll see if Vivek Ranadivé's throwing practice paid off when he throws out the first pitch. Watch for all of us in our spiffy new TIBCO jackets; with free wifi in the stadium, there's likely to be some geeks there with their laptops, too.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 07:50 PM in BI • TUCON | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

I played hooky for a couple of sessions to go over my presentation for later today; as I mentioned earlier, TIBCO's product base is broader than my interests, so where a couple of natural dead spots during the schedule for me.

Just before my presentation with Tim Stephenson, I sat in on Mark Elder and Venkat Swaminathan, both from TIBCO, talking about BAM. Since this room (which is also where I present next) has crappy wifi reception, publication will be delayed until after I present, since it might be considered a bit cavalier to dash out between presentations just to post.

They spent some amount of time at the beginning explaining what BAM is and why you need it; I'll assume that most of you already know that stuff.

The interesting part (for me) are the specifics about TIBO's BAM product, iProcess Insight, which is a plug-in to the BusinessFactor framework to provide BAM capability for monitoring iProcess process flows. Like most of the other BAM products that I've seen, it allows the definition of industry-specific KPIs in the business processes, then provides real-time monitoring of those KPIs with drill-downs from the aggregate statistics to the details. You can also use BusinessFactor to integrate external data sources, like a customer database. There's not shared process models between the BPM execution environment and BAM, since the first step is to download process definitions from the iProcess Engine to create a project; changes to the iProcess model require the model to be re-downloaded to the iProcess Insight project and the project manually updated to suit the updated process model. With all the round-tripping problems that we have already with process modelling in one environment and execution in another, I would have favoured a shared model approach.

Once you have your project defined, the BAM runtime sends information over to the process engine about what to monitor, and the engine sends back the relevant events to be aggregated, analyzed and presented within iProcess insight.

You can define different dashboards for different parts of the process, with different KPIs visible in each dashboard. There are some standard dashboard views, but it's pretty configurable/customizable for views such as balanced scorecards or even geographical overlays.

Looking at the components of iProcess Insight, there's a wizard interface to initially create a BusinessFactor project that will become your BAM dashboard, a process monitor for the start/end of procedures, a step monitor for the start/end of steps and their deadlines, a resource monitor for user/group metrics, and a supervisor capsule to allow someone with the appropriate credentials to change a specific process instance.

We then looked at a comparison between iProcess Insight and iProcess Analytics: basically, Insight is near-real-time, event-driven operational BAM, whereas Analytics is historical analysis and reporting based on batch statistics export from the process engine. Many BPM vendors (especially the more mature ones) end up with this same split of functionality, since they tend to have first built the analytics years ago when they built the process execution engine, then OEM'd or bought a BAM engine and strapped it on the side within the last year or two.

Based on the audience questions, and some earlier observations, I'm starting to get the idea that TIBCO's "user" base is pretty technical, with not much representation from the business side of organizations. Given that many of their products are development and low-level integration tools, this isn't surprising overall, but I expected a few more non-geeks in the BPM sessions. If this is any indication of who's using TIBCO within customer organizations, TIBCO needs to focus more on the business side of their customers to really play in the BPM space.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 08:17 PM in BI • TUCON | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

Last in the morning's general session was Tom Laffey, TIBCO's EVP of products and technologies, and Matt Quinn, VP of product management and strategy. Like Ranadivé's talk earlier, they're talking about enterprise virtualization: positioning messaging, for example, as virtualizing the network layer, and BPM as enterprise process virtualization. I'm not completely clear if virtualization is just the current analyst-created buzzword in this context.

Laffey and Quinn tag-teamed quite a bit during the talk, so I won't attribute specific comments to either. TIBCO products cover a much broader spectrum that I do, so I'll focus just on the comments about BPM and SOA.

TIBCO's been doing messaging and ESB for a long time, and some amount of the SOA talk is about incremental feature improvements such as easier use of adapters. Apparently, Quinn made a prediction some months ago that SOA would grow so fast that it would swallow up BPM, so that BPM would just be a subset of SOA. Now, he believes (and most of us from the BPM side agree :) ) that BPM and SOA are separate but extremely synergistic practices/technologies, and both need to developed to a position of strength. To quote Ismael Ghalimi, BPM is SOA’s killer application, and SOA is BPM’s enabling infrastructure, a phrase that I've included in my presentation later today; like Ismael, I see BPM as a key consumer of what's produced via SOA, but they're not the same thing.

They touched on the new release of Business Studio, with its support for BPMN, XPDL and BPEL as well as UML for some types of data modelling. There's some new intelligent workforce management features, and some advanced user interface creation functionality using intelligent forms, which I think ties in with their General Interface AJAX toolkit.

Laffey just defined "mashup" as a browser-based event bus, which is an interesting viewpoint, and likely one that resonates better with this audience than the trendier descriptions.

They discussed other functionality, including business rules management, dynamic virtual information spaces (the ability to tap into a real-time event message stream and extract just what you want), and the analytics that will be added with the acquisition of Spotfire. By the way, we now appear to be calling analytics "business insight", which lets us keep the old BI acronym without the stigma of the business intelligence latency legacy. :)

They finished up with a 2-year roadmap of product releases, which I won't reproduce here because I'd hate to have to embarrass them later, and some discussion of changes to their engineering and product development processes.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 01:28 PM in BI • BPEL • BPM • BPMN • BRE • SOA • TUCON | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

We're 19 minutes into a webinar on "Adding Process Context to BI for Process Intelligence" that is supposed to be featuring Colin Teubner of Forrester, and the sponsor (Global 360) is still talking. Even worse, I'm not completely clear on how Global 360's new "Business Process Intelligence" initiative is really any different from anyone else's simulation, analytics and performance management offerings.

Colin did eventually get the floor, and talked about how BPM and BI are converging: at the basic level of implementation, they're quite distinct, but in advanced implementation, they're quite tightly intertwined. He spoke about the distinction between data-driven BI and process-centric BI, and how the latter (usually available as part of a BPMS) are sensitive to changes in a process and can self-adjust -- hence provide better information about business processes. Colin is pushing for the the idea that BI and BPM will eventually merge into a single product class, which I'm not sure that I agree with: I think that there are a lot of valid data-driven applications for BI that aren't, strictly speaking, process analytics. It is true, however, that there needs to be better BI integrated more closely with BPM, beyond the relatively simplistic BAM capabilities that are available out of the box.

The webinar was run by Shared Insights, but should be available for replay somewhere via the Global 360 website.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 02:59 PM in BI • BPM | Permalink | Comments (4) | 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Today started with Connie Moore and Colin Teubner from Forrester delivering the keynote "Making Sense of the Business Process Management Landscape". Moore addressed the ever-present (and ever-changing) issue of defining the BPM landscape. She thinks that BPM was co-oped by the integration vendors -- a view that I've heard a few times over the past day, and with which I agree to some degree -- and thinks that it needs to be given back to the business. She splits the landscape into pure-play BPM, integration, traditional B2B, enterprise content management, application platform, and enterprise application. I found her comments about ECM vendors interesting (paraphrasing): "they don't really understand it, but they created some of the early workflow products". Considering that they put FileNet in this "don't get it" category but that FileNet also ended up right on the border between "strong performer" and "leader" in their Wave for Human-Centric BPMS doesn't match up (I mention FileNet specifically because I worked there a long time ago and still work with some of their products, so have a good idea of their capabilities), so not sure of the value of these categorizations.

She started out showing the results of a Forrester survey from last year about problems with enterprise application implementations, where several of the top responses were related to BPM in some way: inadequate support for cross-functional processes, limits on process change due to application inflexibility, lack of visibility and analytic insight into process results, and inability to extend business processes to external partners.

She showed how BPM evolved from workflow, although I think that her view is simplistic since it only considers the human-centric side. She then went on to talk about Ken Vollmer's view, which is that BPM evolved from EAI; as you can imagine, I think that's also a simplistic viewpoint. As I discussed in my history of BPM, I think that the market started to merge a few years back when workflow vendors started adding EAI, and EAI vendors started adding workflow, although all of them maintain an orientation in one direction or another. Forrester now ranks the integration vendors and the human-centric BPM vendors separately, and has very different analyst teams working on them, effectively tearing apart the originally artificial, but now well-accepted, combination of everything integration-related under the BPM umbrella that Gartner made a few years back. It feels like they're trying to put the toothpaste back into the tube, and I don't think that it's going to work. Moore does make a valid point that one product won't do it all, which is exactly what I've been telling my customers for some time: I think that most organizations need two in order to cover all the requirements currently, although they need to work together closely.

They showed a great diagram where BPM is positioned as the crossover technology between business and IT, whereas ESB and other more integration-focussed technologies are clearly on the IT side of the fence. Let's face it, an IT person might talk to a business person about BPM, but they're never going to talk about them about ESB or SOA with any degree of success: BPM lives in both of their worlds, although may show different faces to each side.

Moore then said those words that always chill my heart when I hear them from an analyst: "I'm going to talk about where BPM vendors ought to be thinking". I had a lengthy conversation yesterday about how I disagree with the power that Gartner has as a market-maker, as opposed to an organization that analyzes and reports on the market and trends, and here's Forrester playing the same game. I was quite relieved when she presented a very vanilla view of a value pyramid of BPM-related functions plus some predictions like the user experience will change dramatically (without mentioning Web 2.0), and that better integration between BPM and BI is needed. Whew.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 10:02 AM in BI • BPM • BPMThinkTank | Permalink | TrackBacks (1) | Add to del.icio.us

Lots of interesting news recently on BPM and BI. Last month, Lombardi and Cognos signed an OEM agreement to embed Lombardi's Teamworks into Cognos' analytics applications. Bruce Silver had a good post about the implications of this agreement, and the blurring lines between BPM and analytics. Then last week, IBI announced that they've embedded their WebFocus business intelligence into iWay's Process Manager (iWay is a subsidiary of IBI), further indicating this blurring of technologies.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 01:39 PM in BI • BPM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

Intelligence Enterprise has already published a short article on the BPM Maturity Model discussed yesterday here at the Gartner summit, which I blogged about in detail earlier.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 06:42 PM in BI • BPA • BPM • GartnerBPM2006 • SOA | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

The conference opened with the two key faces of Gartner's BPM vision -- Jim Sinur and Michael Melenovsky -- giving a brief welcome talk that focussed on a BPM maturity model, or what they are calling BPM³. There was only one slide for their presentation (if you don't count the cover slide) and it hasn't been published for the conference attendees, so I'll rely on my sketchy notes and somewhat imperfect memory to give an overview of the model:

• Level 0: Acknowledge operational inefficiences, with potential for the use of some business intelligence technology to measure and monitor business activities. I maintain that there is something lower than this, or maybe a redefinition of level 0 is required, wherein the organization is in complete denial about their operational inefficiences. In CMM (the Capability Maturity Model for software development processes), for example, level 0 is equivalent to having no maturity around the processes; level 1 is the "initial" stage where an organization realizes that they're really in a lot of trouble and need to do something about it.


• Level 1: Process aware, using business process analysis techniques and tools to model and analyze business processes. Think Visio with some human intelligence behind it, or a more robust tool such as those from Proforma, iGrafx or IDS Scheer.
  


• Level 2: Process control, the domain of BPMS, where process models and rules can now be executed, and some optimization can be done on the processes. They admitted that this is the level on which the conference focusses, since few organizations have moved very far beyond this point. Indeed, almost every customer that I have that uses BPM is somewhere in this range, although many of them are (foolishly) neglecting the optimization potential that this brings.
  


• Level 3: Enterprise process management, where BPM moves beyond departmental systems and becomes part of the corporate infrastructure, which typically also opens up the potential for processes that include trading partners and customers. This is a concept that I've been discussing extensively with my customers lately, namely, the importance of having BPM (and BRE and BI) as infrastructure components, not just embedded within departmental applications, because it's going to be nearly impossible to realize any sort of SOA vision without these basic building blocks available.
  


• Level 4: Enterprise performance management, which starts to look at the bigger picture of corporate performance management (which is what Gartner used to call this -- are they changing CPM to EPM??) and how processes tie into that. I think that this is a critical step that organizations have to be considering now: CPM is a great early warning indicator for performance issues, but also provides a huge leap forward in issues such as maintaining compliance. I just don't understand why Cognos or other vendors in this space aren't at this conference talking about this.
  


• Level 5: Competitive differentiation, where the business is sufficiently agile due to control over the processes that new products and services can be easily created and deployed. Personally, I believe that competitive differentiation is a measure of how well that you're doing right from level 1 on up, rather than a separate level itself: it's an indicator, not a goal per se.
  

That's it for now, I'm off to lunch. At this rate, I'll catch up on all the sessions by sometime next week. :)

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 12:34 PM in BI • BPA • BPM • GartnerBPM2006 • SOA | Permalink | TrackBacks (1) | Add to del.icio.us

James Taylor's been at the Gartner Business Intelligence Summit this week. On Monday, he posted some great thoughts on process, rules, BI and agility:

You can use business rules to automate decisions in business processes and then use analytics to optimize these decisions and hence the processes...

You must be able to change a process that you are monitoring when your monitoring tells you that something is wrong. Real-time measurement should not be combined with systems that take weeks or months to change.

Although there are caveats to that last sentence -- for example, some real-time measurement is intended to allow the human elements in a process to change rather than the system, such as work re-allocation -- I'd still like to have it tattooed on my forehead for every client to read. Making measurements with the intention of enabling agility is useless in many of the BPM installations today, not because the underlying BPMS isn't agile, but because the customer chooses (or is coerced) to undertake a huge degree of customization that effectively pours concrete over the system.

Then later that day, he posts more on how BPM, BRE and analytics go together like chocolate and peanut butter (that's my characterization, but I'm sure James would agree) -- that seems to be a popular theme at the summit. He also posts about the Tuesday and Wednesday sessions, although less BPM-related than the Monday sessions.

Maybe because I come from the BPM side of the house, I don't really see why the big fuss to rename parts of the BI space: BI seems to be an outdated term now, referring only to reporting on historical information from a data warehouse or operational data store. Other terms like CPM (corporate performance management), BAM (business activity monitoring), CEP (complex event processing) and EDM (enterprise decision management, which also involves BRE) have sprung up to cover the near-real-time space that I still think of as BI -- after all, there's much of the data aggregation, analytics and other common technology at the core. Many of these newer terms are touted as "[something more fabulous] BI", such as James' reference to EDM as "deployable BI", but it feels a bit like the emperor's new clothes. Maybe they're all just BI 2.0.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 01:24 AM in BI • BPM • BRE | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

I just watched a webinar hosted by BPMinstitute called "Proven Steps to BPM Success". By the time the webinar started, it was retitled as "Breakaway BPM -- Leveraging Business Process Innovation for Strategic Advantage", although there wasn't really a lot of content that fit that description. Unfortunately the webinar started with a (short) presentation by the hosting vendor, Metastorm, then proceeded to a presentation by AMTI, one of their partners. Basically, vendor followed by vendor. Whatever happened to having customers talk about their experiences?

A couple of good ideas and graphics from the Metastorm CEO, including this one on the evolution of BPM as driven by complex process initiatives:

However, pretty tame stuff from the "featured speaker" from AMTI talking about their process improvement efforts, like "reward success" and "process should be integral to the way you work". And he totally didn't understand why a recent Gartner survey (summarized in InfoWorld) showed that CIOs' top business priority is improving processes but their top technology priority is business intelligence. Um, BPM and BI are related, dude -- that's what business activity monitoring (BAM) and corporate performance management (CPM) are all about.

You'll be able to find a replay of the webinar on the BPMinstitute site within a few days, listed under their Round Tables section.

Multi-tasking during the webinar did give me a chance to glance through an interesting article in a recent copy of the Economist, Thinking for a living (paid subscription required), the title of which is based on the book of the same name by Tom Davenport. The article has a great nugget of truth from a consultant at Boston Consulting Group:

Mr. Morieux concludes that companies should concentrate on designing the processes that knowledge workers carry out, rather than measuring their performance.

Rather a different view on the whole BAM/CPM issue.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 01:59 PM in BI • BPM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us