I'll be presenting on a webinar today at noon (Eastern) sponsored by TIBCO, the first in a series of three webinars covering process discovery, process modeling and process design. It's not too late to sign up if you want to join in.

From their description of today's webinar:

Join analyst and blogger Sandy Kemsley for an in-depth look at process discovery. Sandy will discuss drivers for process improvement and provide how-to information to addressing:

• Analyzing current processes and doing walkthroughs
• Identifying opportunities for process improvement and automation
• Moving from a functional viewpoint to a business process viewpoint
• Discovering "hidden" processes in emails and manual procedures
• Process prototyping

I spoke briefly at the TUCON conference earlier this year on a related subject, "Modeling for the Masses", and you can see my presentation from that conference below in SlideShare:

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

From Markus Strohmaier of the Know-Center Graz, information on this September's I-KNOW (International Conference on Knowledge Management), including a special track on Task and Process Exploration and Modelling with the following objectives:

In contrast to the well researched and applied top-down approaches to business process modelling and management the “Task and Process Exploration and Modelling (TPEM)” tries to find answers to the following guiding research questions:

• To what extend is knowledge work capturing possible? Barriers? Challenges?
• Can knowledge work be modelled or derived from usage data? Do knowledge work patterns exist and how can they be automatically discovered?
• What is the impact of usage data analysis on knowledge work support and business process modelling and management?

I've been seeing some interesting things with BPM vendors lately about deriving process patterns from usage data, both for the purposes of automating decisions and to suggest decisions to a human operator; there's a lot of interesting research going on in this area, and some is starting to manifest already. Deadline to submit a paper is May 21st.

Markus is a Column 2 reader who I met face-to-face when he moved to Toronto last year for post-doctoral research; he's now headed home to Austria.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 02:25 PM in BPA | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

Last session of the morning was Mateo Almenta Recca of BEA and Kunal Shah of Citigroup talking about advanced process modelling -- specifically process exceptions -- in ALBPM. Exceptions can be either system exceptions, such as a service being unavailable, or business (user-defined) exceptions, such as an account being closed. System exceptions are typically handled through automated retries and/or transaction rollbacks, whereas business exceptions are modelled into the process by the process designer.

Exception handlers can be built into the process at either the individual activity, group (similar to a BPMN transaction) or process level. Exception handlers at an activity appear just as an alternative path out of that activity, although an exception is typically invoked by a timeout or other non-decision activity instead of an explicit decision at that point. Exception handlers at the group level are shown connected to the group wrapper boundary, as in BPMN transaction exceptions, and process exception handlers are visualized as disconnected from the process but on the same model.

All exception handlers can take one of three basic actions: abort the process and go to the end of the process, go back and retry the step that threw the exception, or skip the step that threw the exception and move on to the next step in the process. The back and skip functionality is always at the activity level: an exception at the group level that causes a "back" instruction from the exception handler would return to the specific activity to be retried, not the entire group; "skip" would skip the activity but continue on to any later activities in the same group. This was counter-intuitive for me and I asked specifically about that: I would have expected that a group would be treated more like a BPMN transaction wrapper, such that a retry or skip would apply to the entire group, not the specific activity. Exception handlers can be automatic or manual steps: an automatic exception handler might perform some related transaction rollback in another system before aborting a process, for example, whereas a manual exception handler might allow for data repair before retrying the failed step.

They then talked about compensation flows, which seems to match the BPMN meaning of a compensation, in that it reverses a completed activity or group of activities. This isn't so easy as just rolling back any changed data values in the process instance, since there may have been external systems updated that now need to be rolled back to an earlier state, or non-transactional activities such as sending an email. Compensation flows are used when you can't use automatic rollback because an activity executed successfully, but can also be called by exception handlers. Visually, these appear very similar on the process model to exception handlers, in that they can be attached at the activity, group or process level. Since groups can be nested in a process model, the compensation flow for a group will invoke the compensation flows for any groups nested within it as it rolls back the entire flow of the group.

They finished up with a short Citigroup case study on how they handle trade exceptions in their back-office processes. Although most financial trades are handled straight through with no manual intervention, they handle 2000 trade exceptions each day. From designing a number of similar transactional BPM implementations, I know that there's huge financial risk if you don't handle your exceptions in a timely manner: market fluctuations that occur after the trade is accepted and priced but before it's completed are purely the risk of the financial institution, not the customer, so it's key to get the exceptions resolved as quickly as possible. Citigroup has implemented this as process-level exception handlers that log the exceptions and pass them on for manual review. In most cases, the exception handling process is just a matter of some manual data repair and the trade is resubmitted to the automated process, although some trades are cancelled from within the exception handler.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 12:07 PM in BEAparticipate • BPA • BPM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

In the last session of the day, hence the only thing standing between the attendees and the bar, Tim and I gave a talk on business process modelling. My portion of the talk, which was not at all TIBCO-specific, talked about modelling for the masses; I'll publish it here when I get a chance. Tim followed on with information about the new release of Business Studio, and how it's used for process modelling. Tim and I met via email about a month ago when we were getting this all set up, and on Sunday we finally had a chance to meet face-to-face. In spite of our short time together, we're pretty aligned on most of the issues, so had some pretty good synergy in our talk.

I feel sorry for Tim, as I do for anyone who presents after me, since I tend to get really carried away with what I'm talking about, and I went over my 20-minute allotment of our 40-minute presentation. 10 minutes over. I had a great time, however. :)

Tim went into many of the details of process modelling in the TIBCO Business Studio environment, and showed some particular BPMN examples that can be tricky to understand, such as gateways and events. It looks like they've done some nice work of creating process fragments -- design patterns for portions of a process -- that can be easily inserted in at any point in a process to save time. He also discussed their concept modeller for business domain modelling, allowing you to create an enterprise common object model using formal UML notation. He also had to shore up the damage that I did by slamming the lack of round-tripping by most BPA and BPM vendors.

That's it for today; we're all off for drinks at the evening reception, then I have dinner with some of the product marketing team which will give me a chance to pump them for information about what's coming up.

Tomorrow promises to be interesting -- the BPM track is packed with winners, so I'll be stuck in this same room with the crappy wifi all day, but promise to emerge occasionally and publish what I've written.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 08:19 PM in BPA • BPM • TUCON | Permalink | TrackBacks (1) | 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

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

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

Vendor announcements are dropping from the trees around here this week, but I found this one particularly interesting after my trip to the IDS Scheer user conference a few weeks ago: Microsoft has selected IDS Scheer as a preferred business process modelling/monitoring partner in the newly-formed Business Process Alliance. Now, before you get too excited, the press release says "a" preferred partner, not "the one and only", implying that other business process modelling and monitoring companies might also be invited to the dance; right now, the Alliance lists AmberPoint, Ascentn, Fair Isaac, Global 360, InRule, Metastorm, PNMsoft, RuleBurst and K2.net as members, so no other modelling but lots of competing business rules and BPM vendors. (By the way, Microsoft's incorrect use of "is comprised of" on their page -- sloppy editing.)

There's a real-world example of the ARIS UML Designer (now part of ARIS SOA Architect) being used to model business processes for execution in BizTalk at Siemens IT Operations over the past 2 years, so this is built on a pretty strong success story. This provides BizTalk with a fully functional process designer, which was not a strong suit of theirs in the past.

It's not clear to me whether this is anything beyond a co-marketing campaign; presumably, the existing BPEL export from ARIS would serve for import into BizTalk, or IDS Scheer may choose to do a closer "standards-based" (but not standard) integration such as they have done with SAP and Oracle.

I have to say, however, that I had strong negative feelings about the term Alliance since I first watched the TV series Firefly: they're the authoritarian bad guys, right? Or maybe they only look bad from the little guy's viewpoint. :)

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 10:16 AM in BPA • GartnerBPM2007 • SOA | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

I hosted a webinar -- now available for replay -- with Colin Teubner of Forrester and Jim Rudden of Lombardi on Tuesday this week, discussing collaborative process modelling and on-demand BPM in the wake of Lombardi's beta release of Blueprint on Monday.

I have to say, the conversation that we had in the 20 minutes following the presentation portion of the webinar was so much fun, I told Colin and Jim that next time they only get one slide each, and we spend the rest of the time on open discussion. It was great to host an analyst like Colin who is great at off-the-cuff answers, even when I ask questions totally out of left field, and Jim was very up front when I quizzed him on his competitors (Appian's SaaS announcement on Monday, which I'll write more about later today) and interoperability (yes, you could take the BPDM output from Blueprint and import it to any BPMS that supports BPDM).

We didn't get to half of the audience questions, but obviously the conversation was compelling, because the number of attendees in the webinar didn't drop off during the Q&A portion as usually happens.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 08:13 AM in BPA • BPM • SaaS | Permalink | TrackBacks (1) | Add to del.icio.us

Nothing like a good old-fashioned vendor smackdown. In response to the software-as-a-service announcements by Lombardi and Appian on Monday, Pat "Fighting Irish" Morrissey of Savvion threw in his two cents worth:

Yesterday's announcements are a beautiful snapshot of on-demand's reality and hype in practice. Appian’s solution is a good Web-only application - and we applaud their effort to focus on BPM for the small and medium market (SMBs). Lombardi, however, is trying to use SaaS as a way to divert attention from the fact that they now have a beta modeling tool with PowerPoint export - it's not on-demand, it's BPM modeler ‘light’.

Pat is right about one thing: Lombardi's Blueprint is BPM Modeler Lite -- but that's exactly the intention. I had a chance to talk to Pat today, and I'm not sure that Savvion, and most likely other BPM vendors, are really understanding what Lombardi is doing, and how they're pushing into a relatively new part of a very crowded BPA/BPM space. Although Lombardi talks up the easy-to-use high-level process "sketching" view in Blueprint, what I think is so hot about Blueprint is the collaboration functionality: presence and the shared whiteboard paradigm. Not "collaboration" by virtue of a shared repository where multiple people can serially access a process model, but a true interactive collaboration. You can be sure that there will be a lot of scouting around the vendor booths at the Gartner BPM conference in a couple of weeks as people try to figure out what this all means.

Morrissey went on to say (in his press statement yesterday):

Savvion has offered a full-featured process modeler as a free download on our website to help business and IT users get started with BPM for more than two years. 75,000 users have downloaded our modeler and we welcome Lombardi’s move to adopting our market leading strategy.

Interesting, but I think that this misses the point: regardless of functionality, what Appian and Lombardi are offering is zero-download software as a service, and what Savvion is offering is a downloadable desktop application. Apples, meet oranges.

In a post last April, I talked about the wave of free, downloadable modeling tools, and the big problem with them -- the installation restrictions on many corporate desktops -- that made this solution my least favourite of the ways to distribute process modeling to the masses. In short, a few vendors, such as Savvion (who pioneered the concept) provide a free downloadable version of their process design tool, which can be installed and run standalone on your desktop without connecting to a server. Although I like the idea of process design for the masses, and this type of solution enforces standards and provides some degree of process validation, it has a major flaw that I find to be a show-stopper in most of my customer's corporate environments: it requires that the user be able to download and install an application on their desktop. If you are a business analyst at, say, a large bank, you almost certainly can't do that because IT policies prevent it through some sort of desktop lockdown security. Even if you could, the process of downloading and installing software is not something that a lot of business analysts do regularly, so could be a bit of a barrier in itself, but that's a moot point if the user doesn't even have the ability to install software locally.

At that time of that post in April, I gave the edge to Visio together with an add-on like Zynium's Byzio to model a process in Visio, optionally using a BPMN template, then export it as XPDL for import into a vendor's BPM design tool. This alternative, used by Fujitsu among others, has the huge advantage of using a tool that is already on the desktop of virtually every business analyst, and easing the learning curve as the business analyst moves into process design and starts to learn BPMN. The disadvantage is that Visio is a general purpose tool that creates "dumb" process models: it doesn't enforce standards such as BPMN, doesn't prevent the analyst from adding all sort of nonsensical things to a process model, doesn't provide any sort of validation against the process server, and doesn't provide higher level functions that you'll find in a BPM vendor's process designer, such as direct hookups to rules engines or web services.

In the past several months, however, I'm leaning towards the browser-based approach, especially after seeing what's possible in a full-featured process modeller from Appian, and Lombardi's new process mapper.

As I've been predicting for a while, this will be the year of SaaS BPM, and the only way to accomplish that is with a fully browser-based solution like Appian Anywhere. And as I've also been predicting, this will be the year of Web 2.0 colliding with BPM, of which Lombardi is giving us a taste.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 06:34 PM in BPA • BPM • SaaS | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

Unfortunately, I had to step away from the conference for a couple of hours for some unrelated business -- a group podcast that you'll see here shortly, and an upcoming webinar -- but I was back in time to see Leopoldo Fuentes of AxxiS Consulting discuss a project at the Secreteria de la Funcion Publica de Mexico for implementing best practices within the federal government using ARIS.

One of the first things that they did was to create a knowledge repository for the results defined by their strategic planning process:

• Organization charts, HR profiles, position descriptions, and knowledge maps
• Compliance information
• Activity analysis
• Operational flows
• A set of process models derived from all of the above

Once the repository was populated with this information, they could start to leverage it for a number of transformational purposes:

• To professionalize human resources of the institution
• To develop the talent of the institution
• To supply the decision making
• To transform the ministry into a world-class institution

Not surprisingly, it all came down to process: the process models ultimately allowed them to define the roles and skills of people that they required. However, it had a number of other process improvement type of benefits as well, such as being able to use process models in strategic planning activities, gain some process improvement through better understanding of the processes, and changes to the organization charts to better match the process models. Using custom scripting (rather than the report web publication capabilities of ARIS, which did not allow them the proper degree of change control on the website), they also publish this on their intranet and, selectively, on the public internet, thereby increasing transparency of the organization. You can see the public portions of this here, including the profiles and roles of individual public servants (my Spanish is really bad, so I now can't find the right link to navigate to those sections, but go ahead and poke around). This type of transparency is becoming a critical factor in most government organizations these days.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 04:42 PM in ARISProcessWorld2007 • BPA | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

The second session of the day was an executive customer roundtable with John Wheeler of Business Processes in Motion (he was formerly with Nova Chemicals, an ARIS customer, but now seems to be offering consulting services that he gently flogged during parts of the discussion), Deb Boykin of Molson Coors, Steve Tieman of Estée Lauder and Todd Lohr of Zurich (whose breakout session I blogged about yesterday), moderated by Jason Mausberg of IDS Scheer.

Conversations ranged around people, executive committment, ERP systems, ARIS as process-enabling tool, data standards and other topics. Most of them seem to be saying that they're "not yet into the technical layer", which means that there's a lot of modelling going on, but there's still a gap to the executable part -- a trend that I've been seeing not just over the past few days, but over a much longer period. An audience question at the end of the talk asked that explicitly; the answers were "we're at the start of it", "we're in the early stages", "not that far along at all" and "it depends on how you define SOA" (which was a bit of a nonsense answer that included BPM as part of SOA so stated that if you had implemented BPM, then you had done some SOA -- another way of saying the same thing as the others, I think).

Random thoughts from the various speakers:

• using ARIS to link strategic to tactical goals, identify metrics and get a handle on costs (this was from Molson)
• business architect plays a key role in achieving agility; a dissenting opinion said that their management didn't see the benefit of agility (which I found amazing)
• adherence to standards, both by customers and the software vendors who serve them, is critical
• BPM isn't a fad, it's part of a long-term push to process innovation
• use BPM to determine if people are behaving the way that we think that they're behaving

There was an audience question about how the panel members got their senior management to embrace BPM. The consensus was to start at a tactical level, get some wins on smaller projects, then use those successes to engage the executives by showing them some real benefits. No surprises here: this is not a fundamentally different story from introducing any new concepts or technology within a company.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 04:00 PM in ARISProcessWorld2007 • BPA • BPM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

Dr. Jost started the day with a presentation on "The Basis for Linking BPM & SOA". Someone may have been reading one of my posts from yesterday, because when he put up the obligatory slide of VW, he referred to them as "Volkswagen -- of course, you know who they are". :)

His talk was part ARIS product marketing and part generic material on BPM and SOA.

There was a lot on the separation of modelling and execution environments, or what he characterized as "business BPM" (business process strategy, design, implementation and controlling) and "technical BPM" (define, create, execute, monitor) -- really, it's like layers in a Zachman or other enterprise architecture diagram, although he didn't really make that distinction. ARIS is used in the upper layer of functions/definitions, with links to the technical BPM functions in the lower layer.

He did have some nice slides and explanations of BPM and SOA: BPM as a management discipline involved in strategy, design, implementation and measurement of business processes, with the purpose of continuously improve the productivity and degree of innovation of business processes; SOA as an architectural style of business applications based on distributable, sharable and loosely coupled modules, with the purpose to improve the flexibility of business applications needed to support changes in business processes with less time and effort. He showed a 3-layer model of strategy (business model), BPM (business processes) and SOA (business applications), where there might be changes at any of these levels that would ripple through the others: strategy could change due to market forces; business processes could change due to organizational changes, and applications could change due to technology innovations.

Another point that he made, and one that I used in my response to Phil Gilbert's comment on one of my posts yesterday, there's value in using modelling tools that are separate from the BPMS themselves, especially if you're creating the business models in advance of technology acquisition, or if you have a variety of process execution environments and want a single modelling environment for your business analysts. Of course, when Jost talks about business models being technology-independent, he's excluding their own technology from that definition.

On the product side, Jost discussed the six solutions that they offer, which appear to be combining/packaging of existing products to address specific markets: Enterprise BPM, Enterprise Architecture, Process-Driven SAP, Business-Driven SOA, Process Intelligence & Performance, and Governance, Risk & Compliance. He also spoke about the new ARIS SOA Architect product, used to translate their "business BPM" into "technical BPM".

The review of their multi-vendor platform strategy showed up some of the weaknesses that Phil Gilbert had mentioned in his comments yesterday: although they use BPEL and UML to interface bi-directionally with Oracle, and BPEL for bi-directionality with TIBCO, they use a much more tightly integrated -- and proprietary -- interface to SAP. Other BPMS products, including IBM WebSphere, Microsoft BizTalk, BEA and Fujitsu only have uni-directional exports, which is pretty useless in practical usage.

Jost finished up his talk with a quick review of the ARIS 2007 product roadmap.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 03:56 PM in ARISProcessWorld2007 • BPA • BPM • SOA | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

I don't usually blog about breakfast, but I happened to end up sitting with Marc Kase of SAIC, whose presentation that I posted about yesterday.

We had a great discussion about how they organize their team of business architects and business analysts, training, collaboration within the team and to their internal customers; Marc obviously has a good handle on how to create and manage such a diverse team of skills.

My question of the week is about integration between ARIS (or any process modelling environment) and a business process execution environment, whether a full BPMS or something that fits more into the SOA layer, and Marc confirmed my suspicions that the unidirectional interfaces are problematic for a variety of reasons, and not used within their environment of ARIS and the BEA AquaLogic BPMS (Fuego). They only provide a high-level process view to the (separate and IT-focussed) BPMS team, who then redraw it in BEA and add a lot of detail required for execution. This creates the opportunity for translation errors between the model and the implementation, although their ultimate QA is against the process models in ARIS in order to reduce those effects. Marc expressed that the lack of round-tripping was a factor in them not using direct integration as well.

I also found out that Vince, the senior business architect who accompanied Marc in his presentation, is Vince Outlaw of AboutEA -- a blogger with whom I have exchanged links and comments. We discovered Vince in the internet cafe (of course) for an introduction, thereby creating one more real-world link to strengthen the ties of bloggers.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 11:11 AM in ARISProcessWorld2007 • BPA • BPM • Blogging | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

The second customer breakout session was Todd Lohr of Zurich North America, who discussed various process modelling initiatives within Zurich. They've expended a ton of effort on detailed as-is process mapping in order to drive process improvement, and it appears to have paid off even before implementing process automation.

They had some interesting discoveries: 4 out of 5 top activities (by time spent) did not add value to the underwriting process; many activities done by an underwriter could be done by an underwriting assistant; the start time of certain processes was causing unnecessary delays due to timing or unavailability of staff (underwriters work late, whereas the assistants work 7-3, so all assistant-level work after 3pm was done by an underwriter); and bad insurance applications (e.g., missing data) can be found and aborted earlier in the process through the appropriate triage. Having worked with a lot of insurance customers, I don't find any of these surprising, but I was impressed by the thoroughness of their as-is modelling and how they were able to exploit it to improve processes, technology and organizational structure.

They use ARIS to create the future state models and help the transition from the as-is to the to-be processes. They see it as a tool for training, simulating and communicating, as well as determine staffing and economic value of processes.

Future plans include integration of business rules, and getting some of these processes automated in a BPMS.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 05:04 PM in ARISProcessWorld2007 • BPA • EnterpriseArchitecture | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

After lunch, I attended a couple of ARIS customer breakouts, the first of which was Marc Kase of SAIC. I won't give a lot of detail about their business processes, since I'm not sure how much that they really want to share outside the conference, but there were some great points and lessons learned that are more generic.

One of the first stats that hit me on the SAIC case is that they moved from 700 to 70 (it may have been 78 -- I was in the back and the print on the slide was small) job roles as part of their process modelling efforts, which is an incredible success story.

They've focussed on building a business architecture, with process models created for projects stored in local repositories, then promoted to a central enterprise architecture repository at certain milestones. From this, they've been able to see a number of benefits:

• Context, e.g., which systems use which data
• Documentation that allows requirements and design to be traced back to business processes
• Standards enforcement
• Ability to cascade changes across models
• Web publication of process and architecture content
• Strengthened ties between IT and functional process owners

They also learned a few lessons, such as some of the difficulties in enforcing change control in moving from a single project to a portfolio of projects, and some practical issues around setting tightly-controlled standards in order to reduce the user learning curve; in fact, with the appropriate filters and standards in place, their users find ARIS "much easier to use than Visio".

They have a number of plans for 2007, including simulation, integration with a number of other systems including their BPMS, building out the complete enterprise business architecture, and using "system of systems engineering" to track interdependencies between projects.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 04:43 PM in ARISProcessWorld2007 • BPA • EnterpriseArchitecture | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

Following the keynote by Prof. Scheer, we had the Gartner tag team of Jim Sinur (who covers BPM overall) and Michael Blechar (who covers modelling, information architecture, and model-driven architecture) on the subject of "What's New With BPM?" They did a great back-and-forth presentation on stage, although they did end up with the inevitable plug for the upcoming Gartner BPM summit in San Diego.

The audience, on survey, were self-declared as more than 50% IT, which surprised me a bit, considering the earlier comments from IDS Scheer about how 80% of their users are now business people.

Blechar started off by talking about how the requirement for modelling comes from people looking for ways to rapidly prototype, design, assemble and orchestrate business processes; being able to compose business processes from services while maintaining a corporate context; moving away from high level of enterprise architecture to the reality of a business architecture that's controlled by the business people. Sinur followed with Gartner's definition of BPM as a management practice and structured approach, how the current focus on optimization/measurement goals are bringing modelling and execution closer together, and the business process maturity model.

There were a number of concepts that I've seen in other Gartner presentations, both at their BPM summit last year and in webinar, such as how responsibilities for BPM are assigned across the enterprise (business, IT, or shared), and their "gear" diagram of BPM suites with the process orchestration engine and business services repository in the centre and the 10 essential functionalities surrounding it. New to this diagram from previous versions is collaboration and inline optimization, which Sinur discussed at length. He made the point that this doesn't all have to come from one vendor, saying "BPM is an architecture, not a technology, a BPM suite is one way to implement that architecture."

There was also a discussion of BPM and SOA approaches and roles, looking at the key roles for both BPM and SOA, and (once again) how the work of design and modelling is divided between the business analysts and the IT folks. A process-centric view of an organization tends to favour business analysts for most of the process modelling and design, although many BPMS vendor modelling tools have realistically only been usable by IT, which opens the door for the use of business-focussed modelling tools like ARIS. By involving the business side in the modelling and design of processes, business will start to understand the value of services and SOA -- something that's still a pretty hard sell in a lot of organizations outside the IT department.

With the new focus on collaboration and inline optimization, Gartner believes that processes will become less deterministic: less focussed on a predetermined "happy path", and more goal-oriented. As new pathways and process maps emerge to meet those goals, they become input to the next round of process discovery.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 01:44 PM in ARISProcessWorld2007 • BPA • BPM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

The opening keynote this morning was by Prof. August-Wilhelm Scheer, the founder and serious brain-trust behind IDS Scheer. You have to love this guy: not only is he brilliant and able to describe his ideas clearly, he opened and closed his session by playing sax in a jazz trio on stage.

He covered a lot of material in his talk, and I can't begin to do it justice but will try to hit a few of the high points.

The goal of a modelling tool like ARIS is to support business processes from strategy to model to detailed description to implementation, including changes to any part of that chain and how the changes ripple through the other layers. The design-implementation-control life cycle of business processes, with a current strong focus on the optimization end of things, serves to bring together process modelling and execution like never before.

The business model at the top of any business process is the key competitive differentiator for an organization, requiring identification of the value proposition, supply chain, and target customer. This places the business model, and the surrounding business architecture, as part of an overall enterprise architecture. Looking at the business process architecture stack (think Zachman column 2), the business model leads to the business process, which requires/populates the business process repository. This, in turn, populates the IT-business process repository for the subset of the processes to be automated, through standardized modelling formats like BPMN and serialization formats like BPEL, which in turn connect to the enterprise service repository that documents the underlying services. Surrounding all this is the business process platform for service assembly/orchestration, portals, B2B, WFMS (wow, haven't heard that term for a while: workflow management systems, for the youngsters in the crowd) and EAI.

IDS Scheer is involved with (or at least concerned with) a number of process-related standards, including ones such as BPMN and IDEF at the business process modelling level. I'm interested to see if they're involved in the BPM Think Tank that OMG runs, such as the one coming up in July in San Francisco -- an email exchange with someone from OMG a few minutes ago indicate that they're not heavily involved in OMG standards. ARIS' business model metamodel and their generally high level of innovation could almost certainly contribute to OMG standards development, if they're not already.

One interesting point that Prof. Scheer finished with (well, before he started playing sax again) was that BPMS (i.e., process execution) vendor platforms will continue to be proprietary in spite of their "commitment" to standards (my quotation marks, since I agree with this thought), so products like ARIS are necessary in order to help facilitate the movement of models between execution systems. The business view needs to be open, while the implementation layer will remain proprietary.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 12:21 PM in ARISProcessWorld2007 • BPA • BPEL • BPM • BPM standards • BPMN | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (1) | Add to del.icio.us

I'm going to do as much live blogging as possible in order to give you a sense of what's going on here, which means that I won't be doing a lot of in-depth analysis in these posts, but will try to add more of that after a bit of introspection.

This is the first IDS Scheer user conference that I've attended, and one of the first conferences where I've attended a press/analyst briefing. I've spent the past 12 years implementing BPM systems, doing design and architecture, and this transition to "press/analyst" is still a bit weird for me, although I'm sure that I'll get used to it :)  One nice thing about these conferences is getting to meet people who I've only ever "met" online, such as Gregg Rock from BPM Institute, and Jim Sinur from Gartner

The briefing was hosted by Sinur, and included a panel of IDS Scheer executives: Thomas Volk (CEO), Dr. Wolfram Jost (CTO), Dr. Mathias Kirchmer (Chief Innovation and Marketing Officer), and Charlie Doucot (SVP of Sales for the Americas).

In Volk's high-level update on IDS Scheer at the start of the briefing, I found that the BPM acronym is being used here to focus on the modelling end of the spectrum; not surprising, but likely causes some confusion still in the marketplace where BPMS vendors push BPM as an acronym for the execution end of the spectrum.

We heard from Jost about some of their new technology that we'll see showcased here this week, and rolled out over the coming months:

• As a result of their partnership with Corticon, an integration of the rules engine into modelling as a Business Rules Designer, which is being piloted at Barclays Bank now
• A new SOA Designer (piloting within SAP, who is a user as well as an OEM partner) for modelling services and bringing business modelling to SOA
• A new version of Business Optimizer
• Six "solutions" that are pre-made combinations of their underlying products in order to offer specific vertical market solutions

Volk discussed some of the corporate expansion initiatives: although the bulk of their revenue is still in Europe, they are opening an office on the US west coast (I heard something about the Mountain View area, presumably to be close to Oracle) in addition to the current eastern US offices. They are also expanding in Asia from their strong base in Japan, including 100 people in China and further expansion plans in other Asian countries, through partnerships as well as regional offices. They will be announcing many more partnerships in the coming months, and see both OEM and SI partners as a crucial part of their growth.

I was particularly intrigued by the innovation relationships that they have with a number of universities around the world. Having graduated in Engineering from University of Waterloo, I'm very aware of the amazing things that can happen from the synergy between an innovation-minded technology company and a university, so I think that this is a great idea. I had to chuckle at one comment from Jost during the discussion of customers where they are helping to drive innovation and piloting their products: he mentioned VW/Audi, then qualified that with "they're a big automotive company in Germany", as if we might not have heard of them. I love the weird language and cultural mashups that occur when people from different countries get together (the Germans also say proh-cess instead of praw-cess, so I feel right at home), although I think that IDS Scheer needs to loosen up a bit in the press conference format to fit the more casual North American business environment.

There was a discussion based on a question from the floor about the involvement of business people both in the decision to purchase ARIS, and the general user population, and it appears that more and more non-technical people are using the product and attending the conference. 10 years ago, 80% of users were technical; now 80% have a business background or are in a business function. They've seen a definite change in mindset over recent years for business to drive IT rather than vice versa. Sinur expanded with what Gartner is seeing, in that as organizations migrate from functional excellence to end-to-end process excellence, it forces  business and IT to work together across the organization and also facilitates a larger role for business.

We also heard about how they differentiate their product from the modelling capabilities within a BPMS, a topic that I've been looking at lately. They see ARIS as process modelling in a larger context, not just for execution but for the management of business processes and their performance. They see the modelling done in BPMS products as "technical" modelling, whereas ARIS is for "business" modelling, a distinction that I think is starting to get a bit fuzzy as the BPMS vendors introduce different views/personalities in their modelling tools for different roles. However, it is the case that you can't use a BPMS modelling tool to model non-automated processes, only those things that will be executed/automated by the BPMS, so there is some value to IDS Scheer's perspective on this. ARIS can integrate with a number of BPMS engines, including SAP NetWeaver, Oracle Fusion, IBM WebSphere, Microsoft BizTalk, BEA Weblogic, Fujitsu Interstate, and TIBCO; most of these vendors come from the ESB space so haven't developed the same sophistication of modelling tools as the pure-play BPMS vendors or those from human-facing workflow origins, and most benefit from partnership with a serious modelling product like ARIS.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 10:39 AM in ARISProcessWorld2007 • BPA • BPM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (1) | Add to del.icio.us

I'm at the IDS Scheer user conference this week, so expect to see a lot of blogging about that around here. Leaving Toronto in -15C for +15C in Jacksonville, Florida wasn't my only reason for attending; I'm very interested in how people are modelling their processes more collaboratively, and a room full of real users is the best way to get a good cross-section. As I wrote yesterday, I'm also interested in how processes are moving from a model to an executable environment, since I think that there's still a lot of people who are recreating those models in their BPMS after they've already been created once in a process modelling tool like ARIS or ProVision. I saw a press release early today how about IDS Scheer and Fujitsu will be showing off their integration at the conference this week, and I imagine that there will be a few other BPMS vendors there with the same story.

I had a great conversation at tonight's reception with a couple of people from an end-user organization about the whole modelling-execution conundrum, and hope to have more of this over the next few days. I also want to see what customers are doing to advance modelling/design collaboration in their enterprises.

All related posts this week will be tagged with the category ARISProcessWorld2007.

Disclosure: IDS Scheer covered my expenses to attend. If you think that's not fair, keep in mind that I'm an independent analyst/architect/blogger and I'm not paid for the blogging part (that's right, I don't work for ebizQ, they just host my blog), so 4 days down here means 4 lost days of real billable work for me.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 08:39 PM in ARISProcessWorld2007 • BPA • BPM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

I attended a webinar last week about Proforma and Workpoint, and I have to say that the "for more information" slide at the end of the presentation is the best one that I've ever seen in all my years of corporate presentations. Dan, that may not be your picture on the slide, but kudos. Update: screenshot of the slide removed at the behest of Workpoint, who claim that the slide that I saw on the screen didn't exist in their slide deck.

The topic of the webinar was Bringing BPM and BPA Together (replay available on Feb 7th), and it focussed on how you can do your complex modelling, analysis and simulation in Proforma's ProVision, then export/import your way over to Workpoint's BPMS for execution.

I found this particularly interesting because it highlights the divide between the BPMS vendors who (attempt to) provide everything to do with process under their own banner, and those that rely on partner relationships through a best-of-breed approach.

At the Proforma user conference last year, one of the speakers asked the audience how many of them were exporting their process models to a BPMS for execution. Out of about 150 people, only a couple of hands went up, which surprised me (as I discussed in my post about that presentation, Is Anyone Executing Those Processes?). ProVision doesn't yet support XPDL, and many of the BPM vendors are just getting onboard with XPDL themselves so haven't been ready to accept process models from a modelling tool, but there has been integration done between ProVision and some number of BPMS using their Proforma's XML-based interchange format, CIF. Presuming that many of the companies using ProVision are also using a BPMS, this seems to imply that someone is taking the process models created in ProVision and recreating them manually in the BPMS. So why is this happening? Is it a technology disconnect (BPA and BPM can't exchange models) or a human disconnect (modellers/architects and BPM jockeys don't exchange models)?

Proforma and Workpoint are obviously trying to buck this trend by promoting how much better things can be when you use the strengths of both of their products. I'm a fan of this approach if you're using a full enterprise architecture modeller like ProVision as opposed to a process-only modeller, since you can do all of your EA models in it and your process models become part of the larger picture. I'm headed off to the ARIS ProcessWorld conference later this week, so I may discover more of the advantages of a process-only modeller, too.

It makes sense for smaller BPMS vendors like Workpoint (whose product I am completely unfamiliar with, except for last week's webinar) to leverage relationships with modelling vendors like Proforma to fill in the gaps in their product, although larger vendors who are side-slipping into the BPM space are also going that gap-filling route, such as we see with the Oracle-IDS Scheer relationship.

At the other end of the spectrum are the mainstream BPMS vendors, particularly those categorized as "suites" or "pure-play" (depending on which version of which analyst report that you read), which include modelling, simulation and all manner of process analysis as part of their product. Although you can't escape having a process modeller (and likely simulation) in your BPMS in order to be considered a serious player, I'm still left with the feeling that there's a lot to be gained by using a tool that is both more specialized in process modelling -- in order to be able to capture non-automated steps, for example -- and provides a broader enterprise architecture modelling scope.

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

I received Proforma's press release last week about the Forrester report on process modelling tools (PDF, free download), in which Proforma places well against their usual competitors, IDS Scheer and MEGA. All three are in the leaders category, with Proforma leading on current product offerings, and IDS Scheer leading on strategy. This result is quite different from Gartner's Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Architecture tools published in April: many of the same tools are being evaluated, but the Forrester focus is purely on business process modelling, while the Gartner focus is on the broader topic of EA modelling. Gartner also published an MQ on business process analysis tools this year that has results closer to the Forrester report, not surprisingly.

All of this made me realize that I still had a few notes about the Proforma user conference that I attended a couple of weeks back in Las Vegas, mostly all the ones from the Proforma folks about upcoming product release, ProVision Series 6. Here's the rundown. [All inaccuracies in this information are due to my hurried notetaking, delayed transcription, and incomplete understanding of Proforma's product, and I rely on those more knowledgeable to add any corrections in the comments.]

Software as a service was mentioned in the keynote on the first day, and Proforma's push further into their Knowledge Exchange server-base product (an intended replacement for their ProServer product, and eventually their TeamWorks product with a "light" version) seems to support that concept architecturally, although the web client is not fully functional yet and web services interfaces won't be supported until version 6.1. I asked a direct question about whether it would work across the firewall and the answer was "it should work", which means to me that they haven't actually tried it and you might want to wait until they do before trying that one at home.

The web client does have quite a bit of rich AJAX-y stuff going on: it shows all the inventory views in a browser, uses some nice UI controls such as elevator bars, drag+drop and double-clicking to open a property dialog, plus allows property editing in the browser client although no real modelling tasks. It uses scalable vector graphics to allow for fast zooming, panning and printing of complex models. I think that they might still be working on the licensing model for the web client: although a user must login, there is no licence required for the web client, such as there is for the desktop client, but this will certainly have to change when the web client is able to be a full desktop client replacement.

They've introduced the concept of dimensions in models, which allows for alternative versions to be created based on specific dimensions, where a dimension may be, for example, geography, or as-is versus to-be. In one model, then, you can compare North American as-is models with European to-be models, or whatever else you want to define based on your dimensions. It took me a while to wrap my head around it, but it's pretty powerful stuff. This replaces the less-powerful concept of scenarios that were used in previous versions.

There were a number of enhancements that aren't really meaningful to me since I'm not a regular Proforma user, but were welcomed by the audience: embedded Crystal Reports, federated search across repositories, more granular access rights down to the instance of an object, and the ability for a user to change their own password (?!).

There are some new business data modelling tools that are intended to allow designers to work in ProVision, then easily bridge to other technical design tools. This theme was picked up later during a lengthy discussion about interfacing with other applications, which is ultimately the key to making Proforma work as an integral part of any organization. They have development an XML-based common interchange format (CIF) and made it openly available to anyone who wants to interface with them; this covers all model types, not just process models. They interface with an impressive number of BPMS, SOA suites, and business rules systems.

Because of the rise of process model standards, however, they've also done a BPEL interface. The CTO's keynote made a strong statement in support of standards, mentioning BPEL, WS-CDL, XPDL, SVBR and others. However, during a technical presentation the following day, I asked a question about XPDL to find out that it's under review, but not even on the roadmap yet. They might use CIF as a stepping stone to get to XPDL, as they did with BPEL, but who knows. By then, BPDM will probably be out, and they'll have to address all three serialization formats at some point.

In my opinion, there's a few things that they're going to have to address over the next few years in order to keep their product ahead of the big guys who are nipping at their heels, most of which are Web 2.0-type things that I've been talking about for BPMS:

• Full functionality in a zero-footprint web client
• Tagging to allow users to build up their own folksonomy around models
• Syndication and feeds for alerts on changes to models, and to provide feedback to some of their new process monitoring capabilities
• Support for XPDL now, and eventually BPDM

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 06:05 PM in BPA • ProformaVision2006 | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

CIO Insight recently published a survey on business process improvement wherein 66% of the respondents state that BPI is their #1 priority. There's a lot of stats in here to paw through, such as 62% stating that data integration problems are significantly slowing down their BPI efforts -- no real surprise there -- and the general conclusion that BPM and related software aren't consistently effective. Considering that over 40% state that they don't use a BPMS or business process modelling tools and have no intention of using one any time soon, it's also not surprising that the survey concludes that a lot more could be done in terms of automating processes.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 01:34 PM in BPA • BPM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

Day 2 of the Proforma conference included three additional customer presentations, one from a partner, then all the exciting stuff about the upcoming product release.

Following on the heels of the panel at the end of day 1, in which Paul Harmon and Geary Rummler slammed Six Sigma, Deb Berard from Seagate spoke about their successes with Six Sigma and Proforma. Seagate has been using Six Sigma since 1995, and has been seeing a lot of success with it and Lean -- not surprising for a manufacturing organization, which is where Six Sigma originated. They use the Six Sigma framework in ProVision, and their initial process analysis and modelling efforts led to the improvement of some of their product development processes. Based on that success, they then pushed it out to an enterprise-wide initiative.

The only thing that I really had an issue with was her calling ProVision a business process management system (BPMS), which it's not: it's a modelling suite. Although BPM still doesn't have a fully accepted definition, I believe that BPMS has a very specific meaning.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 02:48 PM in BPA • BPM • ProformaVision2006 • SixSigma | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

Our after-lunch keynote on the first day was by Geary Rummler, co-creator of the well-known Rummler-Brache methodology and author of Improving Performance: How to Manage the White Space in the Organization Chart. In case you're not getting the significance of this, the original swimlane diagrams are more properly called Rummler-Brache diagrams.

Rummler retired from Rummler-Brache a few years ago, then after "failing at retirement" as he put it, went back into practice the Performance Design Lab. His talk was a bit rambling, and he had 84 slides for a one-hour presentation, but I'm quite sure that he's forgotten more about process than most of us will ever know.

He talked about how "as-is" process maps tend to drive out issues into the open, something that I have seen time and time again: management looks at what you've documented as their current process, and they say "We do that? Really?" One of the prime examples of this was a financial institution that I was working with on an BPM project a few years back. I documented all of their current processes on the way to the proposed processes, including their paper handling procedures. They sent the original of all transaction documents offsite in order by date, but made a photocopy of each document and filed it locally for reference by account number. Of course, we planned to replace this with a document scanning operation, but I felt obligated to point out a pretty major problem with their current process: since they were so behind in their local filing, the photocopies of the documents were just being boxed in date-order and stored onsite, which made the account-order files useless for any recent documents. Furthermore, they had stopped sending the originals offsite some months before that, so they now had both the original documents and a photocopy of each document, stored in the same order but in separate boxes, kept onsite. The management in charge of the area was truly shocked by what was going on, and I think that my fees were covered just by what I saved them in photocopy costs.

Back to Rummler, he showed a diagram of a business -- any business -- as a system, with financial stakeholders, the market, competition, resources and environmental influences as the inputs and outputs (since you can search the Proforma site and find the full presentation, I don't think that I'm spilling the beans here to include one of the diagrams). I like this view, since it simplifies the business down to the important issues, namely the interactions with external people and organizations. He also spent quite a bit of time on the processing system hierarchy: the enterprise business model at the top, the value chain extracted from that, the primary processing systems derived out of the value chain, the processes from each primary processing system, and the sub-processes, tasks and sub-tasks that make up each process.

He went into organizational structure, specifically showing departments/resources on one axis and processes on the other, to illustrate how process cut across departments, but making the point that most organizations are managed by department rather than having true process owners.

There was one quote in particular that stuck with me: "Visibility is a prerequisite to optimizing and managing systems."

We had a second dose of Rummler in the wrap-up panel on Day 1, where he joined Paul Harmon of BPTrends and one of the Proforma team who was filling in for the missing