I'm in my first breakout session of the day, State of BPM – Trends and Drivers for Success: A Leading Analyst Perspective by Gartner, and although the schedule shifted slightly to accommodate overtime speakers in the breakout session, the speaker decided to just go ahead and start anyway so I have no idea who I'm listening to. He's certainly familiar, I'm sure that I've seen him at a Gartner event before, but with the recent departure of Jim Sinur (and, I have heard, Michael Melenovsky), I'm not sure who's pushing BPM at Gartner these days besides Janelle Hill, and this guy at the front of the room is definitely not her. If I can get some wifi in here, I'll look up my coverage of the Gartner events and that will likely jog my memory. Oh, wait, I think it's Simon Hayward, who I referred to previously as the Energizer Bunny of BPM for his high-energy flying tour of BPM at Gartner. Given that Hayward usually does high-profile keynotes, it's interesting that he's here doing one of five simultaneous breakout sessions -- Gartner's obviously a little thin on BPM resources these days.

Unfortunately, I've seen so many Gartner presentations now that this sort of state of the union address looks pretty rehashed to me. Gartner's business process maturity model takes a starring role, as it has for the last several months; I first saw it in a webinar that I hosted with Appian and Jim Sinur last October, when it was still labelled "the road to BPM" instead of BPMM. He went on to talk about the value of BPM to enterprises, and moving from a functionally-driven to a process-driven organization, also seen in that October webinar and many other places.

His six critical success factors for a BPM project (or for that matter, any IT project):

• Strategic alignment
• Culture and leadership
• People
• Governance
• Methods
• Information Technology

In moving from implicit processes within applications to explicit processes in a cloud above the infrastructure, he sees three paths: BPM suites, process-aware middleware (he puts TIBCO in this category), and process orchestration in composite applications.

Then, the now-ubiquitous gear diagram of BPMS, with the process orchestration engine and business services repository in the middle, surrounded by the 10 necessary features and functions required to play in this market. He moved quickly through a number of other subjects, such as how BPM and SOA are orthogonal dimensions when implementing processes (nice characterization), and the complementary relationship between BPM, BI and BAM. He finished up with a slide that I've seen many times about assigning responsibilities between IT and business, still valid although I think that some of the responsibilities are shifting more than is indicated here.

I realize that Gartner is a draw at a conference like this, but I'm hoping to see a little more innovative material out of them soon.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 02:43 PM in BPM • BPMM • TUCON | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

I'm in the online OMG tutorial on the Business Process Maturity Model (BPMM), which is a bit awkward because they've gone the really cheap route and done this with a conference call line with poor controls (everyone is in talk mode by default when they dial in, and a lot of people don't realize that it's good conference call etiquette to find the mute button on their phone so we heard a lot of background noise, beeps, coughing, breathing, etc.), and everyone needs to download the slides and follow along on their own. C'mon guys, GoToWebinar is pretty cheap, you could have sprung for that. :)

The BPMM acronym is problematic right from the beginning (aside from my gaffe last week when announcing the tutorial), when someone chimes in and says "but BPMN is in many shipping products now..."

Bill Curtis started with a history of maturity models; he and his partner have had a consulting practice around CMMI for a number of years, and obviously have a great deal of knowledge about maturity models in general. Apparently, one of their banking customers that had huge success with CMMI asked them for a business process maturity model a few years back, and so began BPMM.

Like CMMI, BPMM has five maturity models: initial, managed, standardized, predictable and optimizing (since the slides are marked as copyright of Capability Measurement, the consulting company that the two presenters run, I won't reproduce the graphics here but you can download the full presentation here). At the initial level of process maturity, organizations tend to be undisciplined, individualistic and inconsistent, which makes them inefficient and stagnant. Funny, this put me in mind of Jon Pyke's article yesterday where he spoke about how workflow systems "suck" because they don't allow people to do their own thing in order to get things done; Pyke seems to be dissing workflow systems because they enforce repeatable processes.

Levels 2 and 3 of BPMM show the benefits of putting some business process maturity in place: managed, repeatable processes, integrated across the organization and adaptable to different circumstances. Roughly speaking, Level 2 involves putting some process automation and management in place for localized process improvement, and Level 3 involves organizational-level process improvement and reengineering by standardizing processes across the organization. My feeling, and that of the speakers, is that most organizations are at Level 1 in their process maturity, with some approaching Level 2 where organizations have implemented some process improvement initiatives, particularly those including a BPMS implementation.

Level 4 is taking a more statistical look at processes, reminiscent of Six Sigma: making processes less variable and more predictable, and gets into more performance management. BPMM is a roadmap, whereas Six Sigma is a set of tools that can be applied -- probably starting around Level 3 or 4 -- therefore can work together.

Level 5 is taking it to a proactive level, where an organization can recognize the difference between where they are and where they should be, and quickly take steps to achieve that. This is the level of continuous process improvement, where change management becomes just another standardized business process, focused on defect reduction and prevention.

There was a slide at the end about cultural transformation that I particularly liked: moving between Levels 1, 2 and 3 is about discipline, while moving to Levels 4 and 5 is about trust.

Although I can't find the BPMM documents on the OMG site (which has the annoying habit of restricting access to standards in development), there is a BPMM information day in Washington DC next week where you can get more information.

On a related note, yesterday I attended the inaugural meeting of the Toronto BPMG chapter (more on that later), where Jim Baird talked about BPMG's business process maturity model. Although I'm not familiar with it, I have to wonder if there's room in the market for two business process maturity models.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 01:29 PM in BPM standards • BPMM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

Major correction: this tutorial is on BPMM (business process maturity model), not BPMN. Thanks to Phil Gilbert for emailing me a prompt correction.

If you're interested in learning more about the business process maturity model (BPMM), tune in to a tutorial that OMG is running on November 30th at noon Eastern time. From their description:

Today, management has no standards-based framework by which to assess the maturity of business processes. As a result, managers have no method to assess the risk that immature processes pose to enterprise IT projects, or to identify the causes of weaknesses in their process workflows that, if addressed, could reduce cost and increase operating efficiency. The Business Process Maturity Model (BPMM) is a proposed standard for evaluating the capability and maturity of business processes. The intent of this model, if adopted by the OMG, would be to provide an open, standard roadmap for assessing process maturity and guiding business process improvement.

Presented by Bill Curtis and John Alden, this tutorial will introduce the concept of a Maturity Model and provide insight into its origin, market requirements and benefits. The tutorial will discuss why projects fail, leading to billions of dollars in reworking costs. Case studies, examples and a detailed overview of the structure of BPMM will also be covered. We invite all OMG members to listen in.

It's not an online webinar, but more of a conference call with backup material: you download the slides in PowerPoint or PDF formation from their site, then dial in to listen to the live audio.

Now unrelated to this tutorial: If you want more in-depth information on BPMN (business process modeling notation), you can see the full version 1.0 specification on the OMG site, and check out some of the BPMN-related material on the Tyner Blain blog, which I've linked to in the past. I can't find the BPMN 2.0 spec on the OMG site, although I thought that it was in public release by now.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 01:43 PM in BPM • BPM standards • BPMM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us