Laura Six-Stallings from QAD gave a presentation on how they are using enterprise architecture for strategic corporate planning, which absolutely fascinated me since most EA projects that I've been involved in have been focussed at much lower levels. She used some wonderfully funny war analogies, going so far to call ProVision a "weapon of mass depiction", which takes the prize for the best quote of the day.

Since I had been online earlier and determined that her presentation was not available on the Proforma website, I ended up taking a lot of notes, so have a better memory of this presentation than some of the others. I didn't see anything in the presentation that would have made it particularly proprietary, since she didn't show their actual strategic planning results, just talked about the methodology for achieving it, but some companies are more paranoid than others.

They started their EA initiative in 2002 with about a dozen business and technology architects, and started using ProVision just last year to implement the Zachman framework. They have a very holistic view of EA, from corporate strategy on down, and they hit their strategic planning process as an early target for EA. Like many organizations, they did their strategic planning in PowerPoint and Word; with over 60 pages of slides and 280 pages of backup documentation, it was a time-consuming and error-prone process to create it in the first place, then to map that onto the more concrete goals of the organization. By implementing EA and ProVision, they were looking to improve the entire process, but also gain some clarity of alignment between strategy, business and technology, and some clarity of ownership over processes and strategies.

She made several turns of phrase that elicited a knowing laugh from the audience -- IKIWISI [I Know It When I See It] requirements; As-Was and Could-Be models -- but really brought home the challenges that they had to overcome, and the wins that they are expecting as this process rolls out. The biggest issues weren't surprising: a perception of complexity, based in part of the limited ProVision expertise within QAD, and the cultural shift required to embrace a new way of modelling their strategic plans. However, they now have a long-term strategic plan based roughly on balanced scorecard objectives, and have a whole list of anticipated benefits:

• Common taxonomy and semantics
• A holistic multi-dimensional view of enterprise activities
• Enforced alignment to the strategic plan model
• Exposure of dependencies, relationships, impacts and conflicts
• Improved communication and acceptance of the strategic plan
• Improved priority management
• Common processes
• Effective reporting and analysis
• Improved collaboration

Quite lofty goals, but achievable given the level that they're attacking with EA. What I took away from this, and from other conversations that I had during the two days, is that to many people, "EA" really translates to IT architecture, but not at QAD.

Posted by sandy in Enterprise Architecture • ProformaVision2006 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

It was Craig Confoy's presentation on Johnson & Johnson Pharma where I really started to get interested in the issue of where EA sits in the enterprise. Although the "E" in EA stands for "Enterprise", it seems that most organizations, and J&J is no exception, start out with EA in the IT infrastructure group somewhere. Like many large conglomerates, they had a bit of a mess with five pharmaceutical R&D companies (out of J&J's 200-odd companies), each with its own IT department supporting 14 different functional units per company, and little alignment between the company functions. Since EA was in IT infrastructure, anything in the business layers of EA, such as business modelling, was done on a project-by-project basis and not shared between business units or companies.

Sound familiar? Almost every large company that I deal with has the same issues: some real architecture going on at the lower infrastructure levels, but practically none at the business levels.

About 5 years ago, J&J Pharma decided to do something about it, and created a business architecture group. There were a few stumbles along the way, such as the use of a (seemingly inappropriate) CASE tool that resulted in business process documentation that stretched over 42 feet at 8pt font -- unusable and unsustainable -- before they started using Proforma.

One of their models that I really liked was an enterprise data model that could be overlaid with departmental ownership, so that you can easily see how changing any part of the model would impact which departments. I think that this is one of the basics required by any large organization, but often not used; instead, companies tend to replicate data on a per-department basis since they don't have any enterprise data models that would tell them who is using what data.

This was one customer presentation that showed some clear ROI of using the Proforma tools: they found that systems could be implemented 30% faster (a huge advantage in pharmaceuticals), that the modelling process identifies system integration points and allows them to create standard EAI models for reuse, and that the data models helped meet their regulatory requirements more easily.

Posted by sandy in BPA • Enterprise Architecture • ProformaVision2006 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

I totally slacked off after leaving the conference on Thursday afternoon, spending the early evening at the Voodoo Lounge catching the sunset from 51 floors, then hanging around the Masquerade mezzanine watching the Mardi Gras show before turning in early enough to make that 7am flight home on Friday. So here it is, Monday morning, and I'm catching up on a week's worth of blogging.

This was a relatively small conference, about 150 customers attending, but what an enthusiastic group! When one of the speakers talked about how ARIS had been abandoned on a project because of its complexity, there was clapping from the audience, and I don't think that all of it came from Proforma employees. There were no breakout sessions, just a main stage, and almost half of the presentations were given over to customer presentations. Not only that, all of them were talking about what they've actually done with Proforma's products, not what they plan to do, so had some pretty practical advice for the rest of the crowd.

The product presentations from the Proforma people were also pretty interesting, in part because I haven't worked with the product that much so a lot of it was new to me.

More detail on the individual presentations to follow.

I also had a number of interesting conversations with customers, and I kept driving to the question of where enterprise architecture fits in their organization. For the most part, companies are keeping it under IT (which I think is a big mistake and posted about previously, not surprisingly when I was reviewing a Proforma webinar), and there seem to be a lot of conflicts in defining the roles of data, information, business and enterprise architects still.

Posted by sandy in BPM • Enterprise Architecture • ProformaVision2006 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

There's wifi in the conference room, but you have to sign up at the business centre for it ahead of time, which was just too much logistics for me to blog live. However, it's 5am on Day 2 and my brain is still on Eastern time, so time for a few updates. I'll do a more complete review of the sessions after it's all over. First, let's start with the other conferences that were running in the same conference centre,which you can see in the photo on the left.

Best quote of the conference so far: "I can DODAF FEMA!", from Tony Devino, an engineer with the Navy, in his presentation about creating a process for quality control on temporary housing installations in New Orleans following Katrina. First time that I've heard "DODAF" used as a verb, and a bit funny (well, to EA geeks), especially when you consider that they use DODAF for weapons systems.

Best dance (not usually a category that I assign at conferences): Judson Laipply, a motivational speaker who gave a keynote, also happens to be the originator of the Evolution of Dance, the most-viewed clip ever on YouTube. He talked about change, which is the theme of the conference, then did a live, extended-play version of the Evolution of Dance for us at the end of his talk. I really would have hated to follow him on stage as a speaker!

Dr. Geary Rummler spoke at the afternoon keynote (yes, that Rummler), which was pretty exciting for those of us who have been around in process modelling and management long enough to have a view of his part in its history.

There was a bit of discussion about Proforma's leading position in the new Forrester report, which is an amazing coup for Proforma when they're up against a company that's many times their size.

I'm left with a great impression of Proforma as a company. Although considerably smaller than IDS Scheer, their major competitor, they have an enthusiastic customer base, judging by both the customer presenters and the attendees who I've met, and a really nice corporate culture. I sat at the dinner last night with Dave Ritter, one of the founders and currently VP of Enterprise Solutions; we had a lengthy chat before we realized that we had (sort of) met on a Proforma webinar where he spoke several months back, and in some follow-up emails to that webinar. Michelle Bretscher, their PR Director, has given me completely red-carpet treatment, offering to set up meetings with any of the executives, and making sure that I have whatever I need. I don't think that a lot of press shows up to their user conferences, but when you're a one-person consultant/analyst/blogger organization, it's nice to be treated with that level of respect, something that larger vendors could take a lesson from. I also had the most pleasant surprise when I turned to page 6 of the program and saw the watermarked graphic behind the print.

Sessions today include a lot of material from Proforma on their upcoming Series 6, and I've very eager to hear about their advances in zero-footprint clients and other Web 2.0-like features, considering my recent focus on Web 2.0 and BPM.

Posted by sandy in BPA • Enterprise Architecture • ProformaVision2006 • SixSigma | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

I've been a member of IEEE for over 20 years, and browse the periodicals that arrive at my door monthly, but have just become aware of the content that they offer to members and non-members on Spectrum Online. I've downloaded a number of the podcasts from Spectrum Radio and thoroughly enjoyed the two-parter about the enormously expensive and unsuccessful FBI case file project (I'd love to link to it directly, but they have a stupid Flash interface that doesn't allow that, so you'll just have to find it on the Radio page).

IEEE actually had to litigate to have the report about this project released under freedom of information laws, and the software experts in discussion on the podcast dissect the report and talk about what went wrong as well as lessons that can be learned for any large software project. Interesting that a company that has CMM level 5 certification can end up developing a $170M project with no proper requirements, no enterprise architecture, and a number of other things that seem like no-brainers for any large software project. Worth listening.

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I'm in a webinar (sponsored by Proforma) with BPTrends' Paul Harmon discussing their recent survey of business process trends. I expect to meet Paul face-to-face next week at the ABPMP chapter meeting in San Francisco, where he'll be speaking on "Business Process Today and Tomorrow".

The first part of the webinar is pretty much just a review of the report itself, with a minor degree of added value, although it's good for those who find it hard to plough through a 54-page report and find the high points without nodding off. He highlighted that most people are still doing their process modelling in Visio or PowerPoint (see page 29 of the report), although sees that as an indicator that an organization isn't yet fully serious about their process modelling efforts because of the lack of an enterprise view that you can get with a repository-based tool such as Proforma's. He sees many of the survey results as indicators that the BPM market that is still developing, not yet mature, and calls the market for tools "confusing" as he discusses the diagram on page 45. Considering that analysts tend to redefine "BPM" every couple of years, causing a vendor feature catch-up scramble, neither of these points is surprising and I agree with him. Furthermore, I think that the large percentage of Visio modelling is also an indicator of an immature market as much as it is of immature BPM initiatives within an organization.

He went through some results that I don't recall seeing in the report that summarized what people would be doing less, the same, or more of in 2006 (the survey was taken in February), grouped into enterprise, process level and implementation activities as per their pyramid (page 41-42 in the report). He sees most of these trends as further proof that we're still in a developing market for BPM, such as the large number of companies that are planning more of BPM systems, major process redesign and automation projects, and process analysis and design training in 2006 than they've done previously, as well as developing an enterprise architecture and enterprise performance management. I like the fact that he doesn't show any bogus hockey stick projections for BPM growth; those of us in the BPM business have been seeing those for many years now and are understandably wary.

The webinar will be available for replay at some point; check the original registration link or the Proforma website to find it in a few days.

Slightly off topic, I appreciate the collaborative spirit of many recent webinars that I've attended of opening up the dial-in line so that any of the attendees can speak up with their questions (rather than using a chat window), but it doesn't work so well in practice due to the large number of people who can't find the mute button on their phone or just don't consider the listening experience of others on the call. I can hear background conversations, papers rustling, computer noises of all sorts, and even a dog barking, all in spite of the speaker's repeated request for people to mute their phones. Even on an online demo that I attended the other day with only two other attendees besides myself, one of those two put his phone on hold during half of the demo which treated the rest of us to the periodic "beep-beep" that most phone systems emit to the party on hold (and gave the speaker a pretty good indication of just how unimportant the material was to that attendee, since we could easily identify who had hit the hold button).

Posted by sandy in ABPMP • BPM • Enterprise Architecture | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

Since I'm here in part to firm up my knowledge about BPM standards, I chose to attend four technology roundtables and none of the executive (business focussed) ones. The first one that I attended was on BPMN, led by Petko Chobantonov of Lombardi. Petko's involved with the development of the BPMN standard and was really pushing us to find out what else should be added to the standard in the future. I was the scribe for that session so have a ton of notes, my problem is trimming them down and making them understandable in this post.

First of all, Petko made the statement that OMG is not recommending XPDL for serialization of BPMN (i.e., a file format in which to save BPMN), but recommends the use of BPDM (which isn't released yet, although a very early draft is due next month). This sets up for an interesting showdown between XPDL, which is already in use by 30+ modelling and BPM vendors, and BPDM when it finally is released this year or next.

For the first time, I heard about BPRI, Busines Process Runtime Interface, which incorporates information gathered at runtime such as metrics and statistics about a process (I think). Petko has a bit more on his blog about it here, and I'll be looking at this in more detail since I think that this is a necessary standard as well.

One of the participants from an end-user organization said that they have extended BPMN with 3-4 custom types in their internal use, one for applications and one for data elements. He also said that they have difficulties in publishing and communicating BPMN diagrams because of the complexity, and that there needs to be some easier ways to abstract a flow in order to present it to someone who is not intimately involved with the process, such as executive management. Although using just a linear set of milestones was suggested as an abstraction model, removing all of the split/merge and other flow information, I think that some of the flow information should be left in place even in a high-level diagram in order to provide sufficient value.

This was also one of the times during the day when I heard about the crossover between BPMN and enterprise architecture. We discussed different perspectives (similar to the perspectives in a Zachman diagram), and although Petko felt that the standard could be extended to become effectively a higher-level diagram from which you could invoke other EA perspectives, like organizational and motivational models, I think that BPMN holds a place as a standard for creating artifacts in one or two of the Zachman cells in column 2 (process), not as an overarching EA model.

We had a discussion about the standard organizational tree-type chart, and how the boxes in that correspond to swimlanes in a BPMN diagram. From that, we talked about how to represent information in the org chart based on which processes that a particular role participates in, and also discussed the stickier subject of assigning roles a bit more dynamically based on a collection of capabilities rather than a pre-determined role. That got me thinking about whether we're asking the question the wrong way around: instead of the asking what capabilities exist in a role or person, should we be creating the roles or services based on what combinations of capabilities exist? Something to think about later.

We talked about a dependency diagram for subprocesses used in multiple processes, and whether this should be a standard view defined in BPMN, or if it's informational rather than notational. If the audience for this information is primarily the business analysts who use BPMN, then perhaps a graphical standard is appropriate, although it's a "report" of sorts, not a working model.

Petko finished up with some ideas about defining aspects of a process, such as security, escalation and exception handling, in order to simplify the primary representation. The aspects would be invoked whenever an activity is executed, but represented on separate diagrams. In that way, an aspect would effectively be a template for activities that could be overlaid on any of the activities in the main diagram and extend the meaning of the main diagram. Each activity in the main diagram would need a mechanism for passing some number of parameters to the instance of each aspect that may execute for that activity, for example, some measure of the time-criticality of an activity in order to trigger an escalation at the approriate time.

Tons of ideas came out here, as they did at the later roundtable that I attended on BPEL, and I'm looking forward to the roundtables today.

Time to head off to the conference (I'm already 5 minutes late and still have to finish packing and check out); more throughout the day as I get a chance.

Posted by sandy in BPMN • BPMThinkTank2006 • Enterprise Architecture | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (1) | Add to del.icio.us

A good 9-minute podcast from Gartner on the role of enterprise architecture leaders, featuring Robert Handler, one of their research VPs. He spends some time discussing how an EA role is more than just IT:

"It's become a truly leadership role, one that involves strong communication skills and fundamentally bilingual capabilities, being able to speak both business and IT."

Handler mentions that the EA role often includes aspects of process optimization now. He also says that although EA's have moved up from reporting a couple of levels below the CIO to reporting directly to the CIO, that they should really be reporting to the CEO -- something that I've posted about previously. Lots of good stuff on who the enterprise architect should be forming strong relationships with, in order to help foster architectural alignment throughout the organization.

Update: there's also an EA-related podcast from Macehiter Ward-Dutton, a UK-based consultancy. The first part is unrelated industry news analysis, but there's some EA bits based on a discussion that Neil Macehiter had (offline) with James McGovern starting at the 23-minute mark. Apparently, they'll be having McGovern on the podcast later this month.

Posted by sandy in Enterprise Architecture | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

I saw this post by John Wu on the myth of business process-centric enterprise definition (via Lucas Rodríguez Cervera), and I find it hard to see how anyone gets away with "defining the enterprise based on business process modeling in EA". Business process modelling has a place in enterprise architecture, but it's just one of many tools/techniques for creating the necessary EA artifacts. For example, if you're a Zachman follower, you'll find business models only in row 2 (business model/owner context), and something that could be described as a business process model really only in columns 2 (function) and 4 (people) of that row: two artifacts out of 30.

Wu proposes defining the enterprise from the aspect of mission (why), function (how), information (what), stakeholders (who), stakeholder location (where) and stakeholder demand (when) rather than the exhausted [sic] enumeration of business process modeling, which really seems just to be advocating an EA approach to defining the enterprise. And if you're an enterprise architect, regardless of the framework that you use, you already know that business process models are just one aspect of that definition.

It's important to understand business processes as part of understanding the enterprise, but I don't agree with Wu's statement that most EA projects use business process modelling as their primary understanding of the business, or that EA is just second-generation BPR.

Posted by sandy in BPA • Enterprise Architecture | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

I've had two "inconsiderate customer" incidents this week; actually, both are customers who I've done quite a bit of work for in the past but have been inactive for some time.

With customer #1, I contracted in as their business and application architect for several months; even though they didn't really get what enterprise architecture is all about, I spent most of a year trying to do some internal education on the necessity for EA to help sort out the legacy linguine that was rampant in their organization, as well as the lack of business-IT alignment. A while after leaving, on April 29th 2005 to be exact, I dropped my key contact there an email about the (then) new report from BPTrends on EA tools, saying the following:

...there's a new report out from BPTrends on enterprise architecture that you can download for free. I gave it a quick review on my business blog, which includes a link to the report. Although the product information in the report is nothing that you can't get from the vendor's sites, the first 25 or so pages are a great overview of enterprise architecture, process modelling and simulation tools that provide good background material if you're ever promoting a related project. I did an earlier post on their report on BPM suites that you might also find interesting.

Usually this type of email at least gets a "thanks", or "hey, it's been a while, let's meet for coffee", but nothing came back from this. No big deal, customer #1 is a busy person. Then on Tuesday of this week, 340 days after my original email, it arrives:

With customer #2, I did the architecture and design of their original BPM system, and they now need some analysis and design assistance to further increase efficiencies (which presumably would more than pay for my engagement there). Their internal IT architect contacted me in November 2005, we chatted on the phone and by email, then he connected me with the project manager. Long pauses in the conversation ensued, punctuated by several emails and voice mails from me to the PM. Responses took as long as six weeks, or never came at all. Finally, they made a request to have me fly to their site this coming week -- the week leading up to Easter, with Friday a holiday here in Canada, and Saturday being when 13 members of my family will be descending on my home for Easter dinner. That, of course, is my problem, so I said yes. Turns out that no one had the funding approved, however, so I received an email two weeks ago saying that the trip was off. I immediately responded with some suggestions on how to restructure the project to reduce the funding issues while still providing value. Their response? Silence, so far.

The thing that frustrates me is that I'm not an unknown salesperson cold-calling these people, I'm a geeky engineer type who worked on site as part of the in-house team with both of these customers for several months and did significant amounts of work that were well-received. Are they just snowed under with the amount of email that they receive, and ignoring all of their business contacts equally, even if they were the one to initiate the conversation? Or, because I'm a contractor/consultant, don't they consider it worth their time to reply to my email (or even open it for almost a year)? At least I'm pretty sure that they're not reading this blog entry...

Posted by sandy in Enterprise Architecture • Rant | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

I finished up Tuesday at the conference with Bill Rosser's "Creating a Business Architecture". I found his enterprise architecture models to be a bit inconsistent: at one point, he includes application architecture in information architecture; later, he splits them out as most of us would tend to do. He did make a great point about architecture up front: architecture is not creating the design, it's creating the environment/boundary/envelope in which the design can be created. Since many people don't make the distinction between architecture and design (or even, in some extreme cases, architecture and coding), this was valuable as an explicit statement.

What I did find about Rosser's talk, like all the other non-BPM "special interest" sessions that I attended (Six Sigma, business rules), is that he failed to make an adequate linkage back to BPM in the presentation. I've given presentations on enterprise architecture and BPM in the past, (as well as ones that involve Six Sigma and business rules tied to BPM) and it's very easy to make a strong link between them, so I consider the lack of tie-in to BPM a critical failing of Rosser's presentation.

Posted by sandy in BPM • Enterprise Architecture • GartnerBPM2006 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

Gartner has released their Magic Quadrant for business process analysis, and the first big news is that they've updated the style of the graphics: rounded corners, one-sided arrows and --wait for it -- orange dots!

Seriously, though, this is a good report and comparision of the primary tools used for modelling and analyzing your business processes, whether or not you're going to automate some of those processes using BPM. However, it's the linkage between BPA and BPM that is really driving the BPA marketplace, including the whole round-tripping process that allows BAM results to be fed back into the BPA tool for further analysis and optimization.

Many of the BPM vendors have BPA included in their product; in fact, Gartner makes a note that they dropped FileNet from this report since their BPA is so deeply embedded that it's not sold as a separate product, but they've added other BPM vendors such as Fuego (now BEA) and Savvion, although they languish in the lower left corner. In other words, you'd use their BPA if you were using their BPM, but you're not going to buy it as a standalone BPA tool, as I've discussed previously. For that, you look to the big guns in the top right of the quadrant, such as IDS Scheer and Proforma. Although IDS Scheer focusses purely on process modelling, Proforma, Telelogic (formerly Popkin) and a few others go far beyond that to full enterprise architecture modelling, of which process modelling is an important but small part. I haven't written much about EA lately, but it's definitely a topic very near and dear to my heart.

I find it interesting that Gartner has chosen the vendors for this MQ in such a way that they are only in the "leaders" or "niche players" quadrants: not a one in the "visionaries" or "challengers" quadrants. They give an explanation for why this happened in the full report, but I feel that the comparison chart is less useful for tracking future trends without the visionaries and challengers. Personally, I would have put Microsoft (Visio in the BPA product under review) a bit more to the left into the challengers' quadrant, since it's not clear to me that their vision for making Visio a full BPA offering is particularly complete.

Last year, I posted about BPTrends' report on enterprise architecture, process modelling and simulation tools, which includes many of those in Gartner's upper right quadrant. The vendors paid to be part of the BPTrends report, so it's not exactly indepedent analysis, but it includes some good background material on the market (and it's free).

Posted by sandy in BPA • BPM • Enterprise Architecture | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (1) | Add to del.icio.us

I've just finished listening to an ebizQ webinar How to Take BPM to Another Level in Your Organization, featuring Jim Sinur from Gartner. webMethods is the sponsor, so Susan Ganeshan, their VP of Product Development, is also on the line.

Sinur made a quick plug for the upcoming overpriced Gartner BPM summit, but then dug into some interesting material. Much of it was a duplicate of what I had seen presented by Michael Melenovsky in Toronto a few weeks ago -- such as the comparison between a functionally-driven and process-driven enterprise, and the set of practices required around BPM -- but it was good to see it again since I still haven't received a set of slides from the Toronto seminar so had to rely on my rough notes. I liked the slide on the roles and responsibilities of business and IT, especially the centre column showing the shared responsibilities:

• Process deployment
• Process execution and performance
• Business and process rules analysis and management
• Operational procedures including version level control
• Creation of process, rules, and events repository
• Detailed process design
• Training and education
• Event analysis and management

This lines up with what I'm seeing with my customers, as IT relinquishes more control to the business, and the business starts to step up to the challenge in order to ensure that what gets implemented is actually what they need. I believe that the business still needs to be more proactive in this area: in the large financial institutions that I mainly work with, many parts of the business have become completely passive with respect to new technology, and just accept (while complaining) whatever is given them. I'm not in favour of giving over design control to the business, but they definitely need to be involved in this list of activities if the BPM project is going to hit the ground running.

I also liked the slide on what's happening with rules and BPM in the context of policy-managed applications:

This is a very enterprise architecture-like view of the process, where you see the business policies at the top, the resultant rules immediately below that, then the linkages from the rules to the data and services at the bottom, which are in turn plugged into specific steps of the process. Making these linkages is what ultimately provides business agility, since it allows you to see what parts of the technology will be impacted by a change in a policy, or vice versa. There really needs to be more enterprise architecture modelling going on as part of most organizations, but particularly as it related to process orchestration and BPM in general.

At the 22 minute mark, Sinur returned to another 2 minutes of shameless plugging for the conference. Considering that we were just warming up for the "real" vendor to start plugging their product, the commercial content of this webinar was a bit high.

Although webMethods supposedly entered the BPM market back in 2001 on their acquisition of IntelliFrame, I'm not seeing them on any BPM radar screens -- they're really considered more of an integration suite. Ganeshan really should have practiced reading her script before she read it on the air, too, although she was much better at the Q&A. Except for the remark about how they don't do BPMN because their customers really like webMethods' "richer" proprietary interface instead (as if they have a choice).

At the end, the moderator showed the results of the survey question that she had posed near the beginning of the webinar. No big surprises here, although interesting to note that all of the drivers (except for document compliance) are becoming equally important to people. The trend that I'm seeing is that the goal of improving operational efficiency (shown on this survey as "reduce operational costs" and "reduce process errors") are being taken for granted: everyone expects that will be the result of implementing BPM, so it's not considered the main business driver. Instead, process visibility and process orchestration are moving to the forefront, which in turn drive the agility that allows an organization to bring its products and services to market faster.

ebizQ is using some new webinar software lately (or maybe a new version) which has some nice new features. It allows you to download the presentation at any time (other webinar providers could learn a HUGE lesson from that), zoom on the slides, and other features from the previous version, but now also shows a list of upcoming webinars in the sidebar and allows you to pop up a list of the attendees (first name and company only). Unfortunately, I had some major connectivity problems that resulted in a five minute gap right at the beginning of the Q&A, so I'll have to go back to the replay and check it out. Fortunately, they publish the replays very quickly after the event, using the original URL, another good lesson for other webinar providers.

Posted by sandy in BPM • BPMN • Enterprise Architecture | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us