My Web 2.0 and BPM podcast is now online at the Office 2.0 Podcast Jam. Enjoy.

Posted by sandy in BPM • Web 2.0 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (3) | Add to del.icio.us

This past weekend was Canadian Thanksgiving, so I was off for four days at the cottage. Now, I'm blogging in a hurry while I'm waiting for my airport taxi to arrive. However, I'm not headed for San Francisco; in spite of the hoopla about the Office 2.0 conference this week, I've decided not to attend in favour of going to Proforma's Vision 2006 conference in Las Vegas. Ismael belatedly offered me a speaking spot at Office 2.0 on a technical panel, but it didn't really fit what I felt that I had to offer and I declined. I probably would have attended anyway, just to float in the buzz, and I do like San Francisco a whole lot more than Vegas, but Vision 2006 is much more aligned with what I do and write about.

I haven't been a big user of ProVision in the past, although I think that it's a great product. There's much more importance being placed on process modelling and enterprise architecture in my consulting practice these days, and the conference has a great lineup of BPM speakers.

I'll be blogging from the conference, assuming that there's any sort of decent connectivity. The hotel information said that they had dialup internet in the rooms (eeek!), so if that's all that's available, I'll be hunting around for an internet cafe close by.

Although I won't be at Office 2.0, I have contributed a podcast to the Office 2.0 Podcast Jam about Web 2.0 and BPM -- a topic that I spoke about recently at the BPMG conference in London. Subscribe to the Jam's podcast feed and listen to all the podcasts, there's some great ones being published all week.

Posted by sandy in BPM • ProformaVision2006 • Web 2.0 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

A great week away, and now I'm digging into all the news stories, blog feeds, email and client work that I didn't get to while swanning around the European countryside. Quite unpredictably, it was warm and sunny in London, and rainy in southern France; I posted a few photos of France here. In spite of the rain, it was lovely in Tourouzelle, where my friends live; she is now selling real estate in the area and it's very tempting to consider a little place in Languedoc for vacations. In a weird economic twist, it took longer and cost more to take a taxi + bus from my friends' home in Stoke Poges (near Heathrow) to Stansted airport to catch my flight to Carcassonne, than it did to make the flight itself.

The few days since the conference has given me a chance to think more about the Web 2.0/BPM convergence, and coincidentally, John Evdemon was back in touch with me at the end of the week to talk about co-authoring a paper on that subject. I'm very much looking forward to that, since collaboration with someone smart like John would definitely improve the ideas.

I also had a chance to catch up with Ismael Ghalimi, who had invited me to participate in a panel discussion at his upcoming Office 2.0 conference (to be fair, he made his original invitation before the firestorm about the dearth of women speakers at the event); it appears that my acceptance email went astray and he assumed that I wasn't interested, so I may not be there after all.

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I attended many fewer sessions today since I was presenting "Web 2.0 and BPM" just after lunch, and wanted to spend the morning doing some fine-tuning -- this is the first time that I've done it in this form, although I've talked and blogged about the ideas extensively. Although I sat in on Ian Gotts' session before lunch, I have to admit that I didn't absorb a lot.

I ended up making the last changes to my presentation about 8 minutes before show time, and it could certainly use a bit more tuning now that I've presented it once straight through and have an idea of what worked and didn't work. You can find my slides here, and I'm thinking about podcasting some or all of it and making that available as well. I had some nice feedback and I'm looking forward to evolving this presentation over the next few months.

At the end of the day, Terry Schurter gave a presentation on Customer Expectation Management, based on the material in his new book. I reviewed the book for Terry before publication, and it was funny seeing the book in print, finally, with a quote from me on the front flyleaf. Following his presentation was another rather unstructured panel discussion and closing remarks, from which I ducked out early.

The conference seemed slightly less well attended than last year, although I don't know the actual numbers from either event. I made a couple of good contacts, so definitely worth the trip. I also had a chance to visit (and stay with) my friends in London, where I earned my keep by fixing his computer and teaching them both about Web 2.0 and BPM. :)

I'm now off to southern France to see more friends, Nancy and David Wood: she used to be the MD for FileNet in Australia at the same time that I worked for FileNet at their corporate headquarters, then I camped out at her place for a few months when I was bumming around Australia a few years back, and now they've moved to the south of France. She was involved in The Process Factory startup last year, an example of BPM offered as SaaS, although she's on to other things now.

I'll be offline until next Tuesday when I'm back in Toronto.

Posted by sandy in BPM • BPMGProcess2006 • Web 2.0 | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

I'm off to this year's BPMG conference, Process 2006, where I'll be giving a presentation on Wednesday about Web 2.0 and BPM. I'm doing some final edits on my slides (I know, I should have had them in to the conference organizers some time ago) and thinking about how I want to focus my talk, and I realize that it will include some elements of a rant against what systems integrators and corporate IT departments do to ruin perfectly good BPMS'.

I come from a systems integration background, having run my own 40-person firm for 13 years, but I was never a big proponent of over-building systems. Of course, back in the old days, you couldn't just take the BPMS out of the box and make it run, you had to write code just to have any end-user interface at all. Now, however, most BPMS have some sort of user interface out of the box, and even though it isn't integrated with a company's line-of-business systems and data, it's a perfectly respectable way to get started. This is especially true in organizations that are just deploying BPM for the first time, where the users (and IT) really have no idea what it can do for them. My motto is to get something simple into production fast, then start the next round of design in collaboration with the users to figure out where to do the customization and integration that will make things easier for them.

Systems integrators and corporate IT departments may be unmotivated to allow this to happen, although for different reasons:

• Systems integrators get paid for the amount of work that they do. If they write a from-the-ground-up, all-singing, all-dancing customization on top of the BPMS, they make more money up front, and more money down the road when they are required for changes to the application. Although I was never averse to making money as a systems integrator, I tended to push solutions with less customization because I had limited resources to deploy (I kept my team small and the quality extremely high), and I was easily bored so wanted to get something into production, make the customer happy, and move on to another project. In fact, after I returned to private consulting, a large systems integrator to whom I was subcontracted as the principal architect for a client project had me sidelined on the project because I had the audacity to suggest that we do less customization.
  
• Corporate IT departments feel that they need to maintain control over all software in an organization in order to justify their existence. If the users can create what they need themselves, or can get the software that they need via an SaaS model, IT decreases in importance (and, likely, size) and might even be outsourced. Encouraging the development of software that requires a complex collaboration between IT and the systems integrator in order to install or modify it is in the best interest of an empire-building IT department. So is encouraging software that can only be used for pre-determined tasks, rather than allowing the users to modify the functionality to respond to their changing requirements.

Before you totally flame me on this, I readily admit that these are generalizations: not all systems integrators are greedy, and not all corporate IT departments are control freaks. However, when you come across resistance to doing less customization and giving more control to the users, there is often a grain of truth to these hiding in there somewhere.

Getting back to BPM, this has huge ramifications: over-customization of a BPMS has the effect of turning a nascent Web 2.0 application into a big steaming pile of legacy code. I'm not saying that all BPMS' are Web 2.0 applications, but if you go back to the original O'Reilly definition of Web 2.0, BPMS' score reasonably well on a number of the points:

• Web as platform, since almost all BPMS provide their end-user experience on a reasonably lightweight web interface. Many of them still haven't moved their process designers to a pure web platform yet, which is essential for widespread collaboration on process design, and some use heavy-footprint technologies such as downloaded Java applets, but a zero-footprint web interface seems to be the direction in which most are moving.
• Harnessing collective intelligence, at least in the BPMS' that allow for collaborative process design (not just executing of collaborative processes). This implies some sort of universally-available process repository, so that I can create the first draft of a process, and a colleague in another location can make their own modifications. Think "process wiki" as a design paradigm. Harnessing collective intelligence would be hugely improved by allowing for tagging of process instances, too.
• Data is the next "Intel Inside", or as Tim O'Reilly puts it, "database management is a core competency of Web 2.0 companies." Almost without exception, BPMS' are built on databases, although the focus in the past has been more on the functionality and not so much on the data as a commodity. However, emerging standards are allowing for the exchange of process designs via BPEL or XPDL, and most BPMS' do some sort of streaming of process execution data to a business intelligence platform where it can be sliced and diced to your heart's content. In-flight processes are a bit trickier, since that data is usually proprietary to the execution engine, but I think that the designs and the execution data are the key ones.
• Software above the level of a single device, where the interfaces are suitably advanced to allow not only the Mac or Linux desktops to participate, but mobile devices too. This is trailing somewhat behind the "web as platform" initiatives, since many vendors are still using platform-specific extensions in order to achieve web interfaces, and as I mentioned earlier, many of them also don't have their process design and management tools fully webified.
• Rich user experiences for those vendors who have embraced AJAX for their user interface. Those that are lumbering along with downloaded Java applets don't meet my standard here.

The Web 2.0 areas where I think that most BPMS' fall down is with lightweight programming models, and in ending the software release cycle. In the case of lightweight programming models, we need a way to mashup process instances with other things in a way that can be done by someone in the business unit, not IT, or even by someone external to an organization if the process has external exposure. We also need RSS feeds from processes, which could easily replace/supplement email alerts and management dashboards for monitoring processes, and put the control of the monitoring process squarely in the hands of a user who wants to monitor for a particular condition.

In the case of ending the software release cycle, this is based in part on minimizing or eliminating customizations to the BPMS that increase the regression testing cycle, and in part on getting the BPMS vendors to commit to making their upgrades completely non-disruptive. I've been writing software for over 25 years, and I know that that's easier said than done, but the vendors can't start with the initial assumption that they can just throw their customer base into complete disarray with every upgrade due to, for example, database schema changes that require significant conversion efforts. Even better, get on the SaaS bandwagon and start offering BPMS as a service. As Salesforce.com has proven, if you offer a good service at a reasonable price, people will trust you with their data.

My point in this rather lengthy post is that many BPMS' are already halfway to being Web 2.0 when you take them out of the box. It's what you do with them after that that determines whether they live up to that potential, or just become more legacy code.

Posted by sandy in BPM • BPMGProcess2006 • Rant • Web 2.0 | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (5) | Add to del.icio.us

I've been negligent in my blogging lately, in part because the weather in Toronto has been absolutely beautiful -- our summers are short enough that you really have to get out there and enjoy it while you can -- and in part because two important people in my life have been moving house (one of them in with me) so I've been spending much of the last two weeks packing and moving boxes. However, the sumac bushes are starting to change colour, indicating that fall is on the way and it's time to get back to some serious work.

One project that I'm working on is my presentation on BPM and Web 2.0 for the upcoming BPMG conference in London on September 18-20th, which gives me a chance to spend a few days in one of my favourite cities. I attended the conference last year and it had a lot of great content; the agenda for this year looks to be shaping up well and I'm looking forward to sitting in on some of the sessions. If you're at the conference, please drop by to say hi.

If you're going to be in the US instead of the UK during that time, you can attend Brainstorm's BPM conference in Washington DC on September 19-20th. In fact, if you're interested in joining ABPMP, there's a special deal available where you'll get your ABPMP membership for free (a $100 value) if you register here by September 1st and specify the priority code ABPMPDCNON when registering.

We're still planning to launch the ABPMP Toronto chapter with an event sometime this fall; if you're interested in this chapter, please join our Yahoo group which acts as a mailing list.

Posted by sandy in ABPMP • BPM • BPMGProcess2006 • Web 2.0 | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (1) | Add to del.icio.us

A follow-on to last May's conference, BPM 2005, is Process 2006. I'll be headed to London for the conference next month, but this year I'll be speaking on the impact of Web 2.0 and social networking on BPM: mashups, tagging and more. From the abstract that I sent to Steve Towers, the conference organizer:

As Web 2.0 advances on the world, expectations for how software will behave are changing, and BPM is no exception. Although many of us from the technology side are working in the echo chamber of Web 2.0 hype, real applications are being deployed that are changing what people will accept with respect to software capabilities and usability. Flickr. Google Maps. Blogger. Del.icio.us. Newsgator. Gmail. Mashups. What do these have in common? More importantly, what can enterprise applications such as BPM learn from them, and what will they be forced to learn from them?

Specifically, I want to talk about some of the characteristics of Web 2.0 and how they will directly impact BPM within organizations: tagging, and the idea of a user-generated folksonomy for categorizing information; user-created content, including their own processes; collaboration; rich user interfaces for web-based applications; RSS feeds and similar subscription models; and lightweight integration models such as we're starting to see with web mashups.

The conference agenda doesn't have my session's title (Steve suggested "Web 2.0 = BPMS 2.0 ?") or description, but that will all get sorted eventually.

Should be fun, except for the fact that I may be unable to carry my laptop with me (and I'm unwilling to put it in checked baggage). I'm not afraid to fly, but I'm terrified of spending 7 hours on a flight with no laptop or iPod!

Posted by sandy in BPM • BPMGProcess2006 • Web 2.0 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

There's an Enterprise 2.0 session tonight at Rowers Pub in Toronto:

Inspired by the success of everything Camp in Toronto comes one more event for your pleasure. Enterprise2.0 is about the business world applications of "Web 2.0" and "Social Media". The idea for Enterprise 2.0 is built on the hypothesis that the real killer app for the next generation of web and collaborative media technologies is in the enterprise. How can we take our learnings from the recent boom in the consumer internet and apply them to boosting employee productivity, enabling new ways of working and doing business.

Free, although you have to buy your own beer. Sign up on the wiki if you plan to attend.

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I downloaded Flock last night, about 12 minutes after the public beta was released, and I've been playing with it on and off since then. Some good stuff, some things that seem good but aren't so useful for me. Flock is based on the same code base as Firefox, so there's lots of similarities and it can even import everything from Firefox in its initial setup, including saved web form data.

Some unique Flock features and how well they work for me:

• Flickr or Photobucket integration right along the top edge, allowing photos to be dragged onto that area to upload it to the photo service. I'm not using Flickr much; I still create photo galleries using JAlbum and publish them for various websites, so this feature isn't as useful for me as it would be for a dedicated Flickr fan. I'm sure that will change as soon as I buy a pocket-sized digital camera and start snapping photos every day.
• RSS feed functionality built in. This is a non-starter for me, since I need a subset of my RSS subscriptions to drive my blog roll directly, which is what Bloglines does for me.
• Integration from the Favorites directly to del.icio.us. This is another non-starter for me, since it doesn't put me far enough into the del.icio.us environment to show me my del.icio.us tags, so I end up accidentally creating a bunch of new tags and have to clean them up later. However, the "add to del.icio.us" bookmarklet that I had in Firefox works just fine.
• Built-in blog posting tool. I'm using this now, and have even figured out how to post to both Movable Type (for this blog) and Blogger (for my wine club blog) although errors are occuring on the MT posting that I haven't resolved yet. It keeps the blog post window on top of all other Flock windows, which is a bit inconvenient since I often flip back and forth to the browser window during blogging to look things up. There's no obvious hot key to pop up the links window, which is annoying. It generates some extra tags in the source, and I'm a sucker for clean source. Otherwise, I like it.

Overall, the experience is quite a bit like Firefox, only slower since I suspect that there's some amount of test/debug code in here still. Given that the only extra that I might use is the offline blogging tool, there may not be enough to keep me here if it proves annoyingly slower than Firefox.

Posted by sandy in Blogging • Web 2.0 | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

For years, I've been using My Yahoo! as my start page. It has lots of great modules available, I use a free Yahoo! account as my "web form" address (instead of Hotmail), and I use Yahoo! groups, all of which has made it pretty functional. When they added the ability to add any RSS feed instead of just their own modules, I was convinced that I'd never switch.

Today, I tried out Netvibes, and I've already switched my start page over. There's a few things that I'm missing (such as the movie times for my local theatre), but there other things that I find to be useful enough to make the switch.

• First of all, a to do list. That sounds like a small thing, and there are a ton of other apps that will do that for me, but to have it integrated into my start page so that it stares me in the face every time I open my browser is a big help.
• Secondly, and more significant, is access into my POP mail account so that the last 5 (number configurable) email subject lines are displayed. It doesn't provide click-through access to my email, but gives me a heads-up about anything that might need my attention. Since I have a bookmarks module containing a link to my webmail immediately below that, I effectively have one-click access to my email anyway, which is one click less than it takes to access it via MyYahoo. I spend almost my entire day with multiple tabs open in Firefox, but without Outlook open because it can be a real resource hog, so I sometimes just handle email directly through the webmail client. The really ironic part is that Yahoo! hosts my email (my real paid account as well as my free one), yet I can't do this with MyYahoo: it will only provide a count of the number of messages in my free Yahoo! account on the MyYahoo page, and nothing related to my real account.
• Third is the interface: sleek, easy to use, and advertising-free (for now). I suppose that they'll have to monetize this through advertising at some point, but right now it's beautifully unadorned.
• Last, I just figured out how to add an iCal feed from my upcoming.org calendar - cool! And there are a ton of independently-created add-ins, such as the Google maps module which provides the functionality that is missing natively.

• Left column: Upcoming.org (viewable as agenda/week/month); BBC news headlines; CBC news headlines
• Centre column: POP mail (last 6 email senders/subjects); bookmarks (imported from my Firefox bookmarks, organized in folders)
• Right column: To do list (with "done" checkboxes); Toronto weather; Google map search form; Mountain View weather (I'm headed there soon for Mashup Camp; also shows the current date/time there)

Posted by sandy in Web 2.0 | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

From Baseline/CIO Insight, a report on emerging technologies; specifically, a survey of CIOs of what technologies that they're actually using. Some results that I find to show the incredible short-sightedness of many corporate CIOs is the percentage who find the following technologies "of no interest/not on the radar":

• SaaS, 32%. How could this number of CIOs possibly have no interest in SaaS? Only one answer comes to mind: empire building.
• SOA, 30%. The percentage of CIOs who prefer to remain mired in legacy linguine.
• AJAX, 46% and RSS, 38%. How to they plan to deliver information, both interactively and via publication, in the future? This isn't just an externally-facing issue; in large organizations, these technologies are equally important for serving it up to internal users.
• Social networking, including tagging, 51%. Although other things were mentioned in this category, I see tagging as the key contributor to a corporate environment here. How long will it be before all ECM systems have tagging as a standard feature? When will CIOs stop characterizing this as "allowing the lunatics to run the asylum" and just put the right categorization tools in the hands of their users?
• Wikis, 46%. Okay, I get why a lot of companies are still uncomfortable with blogs. But wikis for collaboration make a lot more sense than clogging up everyone's email with multiple out-of-date copies of a Word file that everyone is trying to update at the same time. It's only a matter of time before Microsoft adds wiki capabilities to SharePoint (if they haven't already), at which time everyone will be using wikis below the CIO's radar. David Berlind posted yesterday about how many IT leaders have never even heard of wikis, which is likely where the "not on the radar" is really coming from.

There are a lot of other equally shocking stats about just how far behind corporate CIOs are in their thinking. Many of my clients are large financial institutions, so I suppose that I shouldn't be that shocked: if I polled them directly about these same issues, I'd likely get similar results. Unfortunately, that doesn't give me much hope that these organizations are going to become a lot more efficient or offer better services to their customers any time soon.

On the BPM front, only 21% show as "deployed", 19% "testing/piloting", 27% "evaluating/tracking" and 32% "no interest/not on the radar".

Update: I just saw this post on why AJAX and RSS matter for in-house user interfaces, particularly for BPM.

Update: Robert Scoble reports that wikis will, indeed, be in Sharepoint 2007. The meteor has landed, you guys can all just head for the tar pits.

Posted by sandy in BPM • SOA • SaaS • Web 2.0 | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBacks (1) | Add to del.icio.us

Sometimes the whole social networking phenomena still manages to surprise me. Last week was DemoCamp6, put on by my friend and neighbour David Crow. I missed it due to a bad head cold, but emailed him on Saturday to get some information and he sent the info with the comment "Sorry I missed you at DemoCamp, I had a bad day (a very bad day)." I figured that his "bad day" was just logistics problems with DemoCamp, but found out differently when I read his blog yesterday about how he had a heart attack while setting up for DemoCamp. I immediately emailed him to say that reading about it in his blog was weird (to say the least), and he responded "Welcome to web 2.0... it seemed like a perfectly useful way to diseminate the information." My best wishes are with Dave, and I'll pop upstairs to see him as soon as my cold is gone, but I have to admit that reading about it in his blog makes me laugh -- he even has shots of his angiogram on Flickr.

On a separate social networking note, thanks to all of you who left comments for my 83-year-old blogging mom on her birthday last week. Some friends and family, but lots of complete strangers who just read about it here and decide to make her day. She declared it "amazing". It's not too late to go over there and leave a happy birthday comment if you're so inclined.

My last surprise came from Assaf of co.mments, a free conversation-tracking service that I mentioned last week. He added a comment to my post thanking me for the link, and I commented back that I had found that the service didn't work with https URLs. Less than eight hours later, he responded that he could do that, and an hour after that, tracking of https URLs became part of co.mments. Now that's Web 2.0! If only David Sifry over at Technorati could be so responsive in fixing the problem with redirected URLs not combining their count with the URL to which they are redirected...

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I attended TorCampDemoCamp5 this week, my first DemoCamp and a great opportunity to see some new stuff, meet some new people and catch up with some acquaintances. The popularity of this forum is amazing: there were probably 130+ people there, some of them sitting on the steps of the lecture hall since there weren't enough seats for all.

Best quote of the evening, from one of the presenters (sorry, can't remember who at this point) when asked why he had developed the code in Rails, responded "It was like this code wanted to be written in Rails", which evoked some laughter and a round of applause.

The most interesting presentation (to me) was DabbleDB -- unfortunately not yet available -- that did some of the coolest stuff with structured data that I've seen in a long time, like dynamic normalization and some really intelligent typecasting including calendaring based on data range fields. It's not often that data manipulation can make me raise my eyebrows and declare it as cool (otherwise, this blog would be called Column 1 instead of Column 2), but this actually provides a potential path to putting some structure around and sharing all of that data that's currently sitting in spreadsheets. You can read an independent review of DabbleDB here, watch a seven-minute demo (highly recommended, and similar to what was shown at DemoCamp) or a 40-minute presentation, or check out their blog. Written in Smalltalk, a language that I haven't even thought about in years.

Also of interest was Unspace's datagrid, a very Web 2.0 way of capturing and presenting formatted data.

Unfortunately, I had to head home and finish my taxes instead of heading off to the pub with the group afterwards, but I did have a chance to meet face-to-face with Markus Strohmaier, a Column 2 reader from Austria who is now in Toronto for post-doc research in his field of business process-oriented knowledge management. He initially alerted me to the BPOKI track at the International Conference on Knowledge Management.

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An article by Bruce Silver in Intelligent Enterprise discusses the recent spate of BPM vendors releasing their process modelling tools for free. He lists Savvion, Oracle and Intalio, but the trend is widening -- TIBCO just announced the availability of their modeling tool, and although the press release doesn't specify, I heard a rumour that it's free as well (how could it not be, considering the competition?). These offerings, from companies who make their money on the BPMS engine side so can afford to give away the modelling tools, will certainly make a dent in the market share of some of the dedicated modelling tools, such as Proforma, although many of the dedicated tools provide more extensive enterprise architecture-type modelling, not just process modelling.

One significant problem with these free tools is that although the vendors assume that they will just spread to all the desktops in an organization like wildfire, most corporate IT departments lock down user desktop configurations so that you can't install applications. Although this might seem like a bit of Big Brother, there's a good reason for this: it's completely impossible for a corporate IT department to support several thousand PCs if the users can just install anything that they want on them. A case in point: a few years ago, a workstation at a client of mine started freezing "randomly", which they blamed on the BPM software that we had installed on it. After several service calls where the problem did not recur, followed by uninstalls and reinstalls, one of my engineers finally just hung around until the problem occurred. The culprit? A non-corporate-standard screen saver that showed an animated football game; the machine hung right around the first down when the cheerleaders came out. When we reverted to a standard Windows screen saver, the problem disappeared. Since then, I've never complained about the restrictions that corporate IT makes on standard user desktops, even though it keeps me from using Firefox at most customer sites.

What this means is that even if a vendor makes their software available for free, that doesn't assure acceptance, because it's not free for an organization to regression test that against their standard desktop environment(s) and all of the other applications with which it might coexist. There's two possible solutions to this:

• Create an entirely web-based process modelling tool. (Do BPMS vendors know about Web 2.0 yet?)
• Use a modelling tool that is already on most users' desktops, namely Microsoft Visio.

I had a chat with one of the BPMS vendors recently about the first option, and he asked if I felt that web-based was the way to go (I love it when BPMS vendors ask me my opinion on product direction :) ). My reply:

I like web-based since it lowers the barrier to use... many people of the type that I see in my customers who are doing process modelling are doing so at their office location and could be doing it much more easily if they don't have to get permission from their IT department to install something on their PC, but use a purely web-based tool.

We also discussed how an installed version was necessary for people who aren't always connected, but most real process modellers aren't doing it from 35,000 feet or at a trade show, they're doing it from their desk with a high-speed corporate internet connection. Yes, you have to have something for the road warriors and your sales people, but ultimately you'll be most successful if you build what's best for the target audience.

Which brings me to the second solution: Visio. Last year, Bruce Silver had a couple of articles on using Visio for process modelling, referencing the itp-commerce product. I just had a demo of a competing product, Byzio from Zynium (which sounds like a fictional space alien and his planet, sort of like Mork from Ork), another Visio add-on that allows for more robust process modelling in that ubiquitous tool. Yes, you still need to install the add-on, but chances are that a corporate IT department will find it much easier to approve a Visio add-on for installation than a full application.

Basically, Byzio allows you to draw a process model in Visio, then export it to XPDL for import into a BPMS' process modelling tool. [In case you're not up on XPDL, it's an XML file format used to store BPMN; BPMN is the graphic modelling notation.] You can use a BPMN stencil in Visio so that you're using the standard BPMN shapes, but the real power of Byzio is in the ability to map from any shape to a BPMN/XPDL construct, so if you already have a corporate standard for what shapes to use in a process model, you don't have to change that, you just have to set up the mapping. The really cool thing is that Byzio has the ability to use the text within a shape to assist in the mapping, for example, detecting the words "and" or "or" in a decision shape and choosing the correct decision type. The mapping setup, which includes a regular expression parser, is not something that you'll want every user to be playing around with, but as long as everyone in a department is using some standard notation, you should be able to set up the mapping once and replicate it around.

Although XPDL is supposed to be a standard, every BPMS vendor has their own flavour of XPDL, so the Byzio installation has to be specific to the target BPMS: the version that was demonstrated for me was for Fujitsu Interstage, but they also list Appian and DST on their website and I know that there are others in the works. In the case of Interstage, after the XPDL file is exported from Visio using the Byzio add-on, it's opened in the Interstage process designer, where it can be further enhanced with engine-specific parameters. Byzio also plans to support round-tripping, where the XPDL can be exported back from the BPMS process designer for import into Visio for rework -- I think that there's some serious challenges in making this happen, but it's doable. Not as integrated as using the BPMS' process designer directly, but it has the huge advantage of using software that's already installed on every business analysts' desktop.

I'm still torn on the best solution in the long run. I feel strongly that there's a place for BPMS vendors to create fully web-based versions of their process modelling tools intended for use by business users: namely, versions of the tools that don't include all the yucky technical details, but provide a business view of the process models as they exist in the BPMS -- no importing/exporting required. However, Visio is used for so much more than just what's going to be automated in a BPMS that it will retain its dominance in process modelling by business users for the foreseeable future. That being said, I'll give the edge to Visio paired with add-ons such as Byzio or itp-commerce.

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May 8th and 9th, no location or agenda specified as yet, but there's a Web 2.0 conference being organized in Toronto. Mathew Ingram, one of the organizers, has a post about it here.

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I spent this morning at a seminar co-hosted by TIBCO and Intelligent Enterprise, featuring Michael Melenovsky from Gartner. One of my reasons for attending was to find out more about TIBCO's newly-released version of General Interface, which they purchased a year ago, and find out just how tightly that it's integrated with the TIBCO BPM product. In other words, I was on the BPM mashup hunt that I talked about here.

Jeff Kristick, TIBCO's Director of Product Marketing, gave a presentation where he showed a screenshot of an AJAX-based rich client interface to their BPM product (I would have loved to have seen a demo rather than PPT-ware). I asked if their out-of-the-box UI for BPM was AJAX-based, and he said that they had taken advantage of the acquisition of GI to rebuild their BPM interface using their own AJAX development environment, and that's what's shipping now. Cool.

GI is available for free for public applications, and really cheap for enterprise (inside the firewall) applications, so off I went to the TIBCO technical site this afternoon to check it out. Quick signup, wait for a password via email, then off to the download page. I noticed the page of sample projects, each with both a preview and the source code, so thought I'd check these out before installing. Clicked on the first "View Preview" link:

Yikes! You want me to give up Firefox for this? I'm sure that the 45% of my readers who don't use IE agree with me on this one.

More on GI and the rest of the seminar after I remember where I hid IE...

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Attention, all you Mashup Camp attendees: go to Attendr to see a cool mashup example from Jeff Marshall that allows you to link to other attendees you already know or would like to meet. If you're going to be at MashupCamp next week, be sure to look me up and say hi.

As for the rest of you, head on over and add yourself to my Frappr map. You can see where other readers of Column 2 are located, and I've added the capability to use coloured pins to denote whether you're a customer, product vendor, services vendor or "other" as it relates to BPM and integration technologies.

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Here's an interesting tidbit from the very bottom of an article on TIBCO's recent upgrades to its BPM platform (formerly the Staffware product):

The company [TIBCO] has upgraded the BPM user interface, as well, to include AJAX for the development of RIA (Rich Internet Applications).

Significant that a large BPM vendor acknowledges the existence of Web 2.0.

Considering that BPM products are, by their nature, typically both consumers and providers of web services (they are, after all, orchestration tools), how long until a mainstream BPM vendor jumps into the mashup fray? There's already companies such as The Process Factory offering BPM in a software as a service (SaaS) model, we just need a BPM SaaS provider who also opens up the functionality via web services for integration into other applications, like Salesforce.com has done.

Or should BPM remain a part of an organization's internal backbone?

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All of a sudden, there's a lot of noise around enterprise mashups. Dennis Howlett posts about BPM and SOA, quoting a post by Jeff Clavier on the same topic. Dennis' post also quotes a post by David Berlind which is actually a quote by me from an earlier quote that David quoted, and Jeff quotes David's post that refers to me, so it all seems to come around in a circle to my earlier post on mashups and corporate SOA. Sometimes blogging is a bit like the telephone game.

Equally interesting is Jeff's post about a TiE SIG Software event next week on Web 2.0 in the enterprise. I would SOOOO like to be there; if I had know about this earlier, I might have left for Mashup Camp a few days early.

What it comes down to is that Web 2.0 is, or will be, all about integration. David Linthicum posts about Salesforce.com becoming a web service provider (without yammering on about how they had another outage in the past week, as everyone else has been doing, ignoring the fact that outages occur all the time inside corporate IT but you just don't hear about it) and links to Phil Wainewright's interview with the Salesforce.com CEO, who has the grace to admit that he didn't visualize the integration potential back when it all started.

Posted by sandy in BPM • SOA • Web 2.0 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us