BPM in Action

Lombardi’s chairman and CEO Rod Favaron and Phil Gilbert, CTO and President, spoke about the condition of their own company with analysts on November 18. But they also had some interesting thoughts about the future of business process management (BPM) in the current environment. They think BPM may be countercyclical in the down economy. It makes sense when you dig down into their thought process. It makes sense to follow the flow with Lombardi clients.

Favaron says enterprises he's talking to are looking almost exclusively at managing more core processes, operations in both the front and back office at this time. Peripheral processes such as HR and IT Lifecycle Management (ITLM) are not making the cut when it comes to projects Lombardi is seeing.

Counterintuitively, however, some deals are accelerating into the last three months of 2008 from calendar Q1 2009. Favaron admits that while he hopes that is unique to his products' features and functions, it’s probably happening so a client won’t lose budget in the new year.

Whichever way you cut it, Favaron says everyone is being very pragmatic, looking for a 12-18 month payback. I think that’s good advice in good times and down times. Phil Gilbert adds that the more mature companies that have been through down times before are using the current situation to make their company core processes work better so that they hit the ground running when the economy turns around again.

Gilbert, who has his own excellent blog by the way, says clients are “diving in and doing it” with fewer pilots. There is also more looking at outside-in view of processes with the nod going to workflows that enhance customer experience, increase customer touch points. In other words, there is more B2B than A2A. I think that is also a long-term recipe for success for BPM. (In fact, I don’t think you even need BPM unless you’re thinking about it from a B2B/supply-chain perspective.)

Oh by the way, the to executives said Lombardi is doing well so far in 2008.

-- Dennis Byron

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So what do you do in your spare time? I watch too much C-Span but Paul Lorenz writes business process management (BPM) software. I don’t know Paul (or anything about him other than what he himself has written on serverside.com) but I like his kind of story. On November 5 he formally beta’d Sarasvati, a workflow/BPM engine based on graph execution. He distributes it open source under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL). It has been incubating on Google Code since May.

His story is what’s really right about open source. It epitomizes the Dennis Ritchie description of what writing Unix was all about 40 years ago. According to the Sarasvasti thread on serverside, Paul’s

“been maintaining a proprietary workflow engine and writing process definitions for the engine over the last four years. The engine is about 10 years old and is based on hierarchical colored petri nets. On the whole it has done well, but for several reasons we are looking for a replacement.”

In his “launch” message Paul says his product is designed for situations where

“You don't want the workflow engine to dictate how users, groups and tasks should be modeled.”

He doesn’t say what proprietary product is being replaced but by his description I suspect it’s one of the engines built into a packaged application, as opposed to a BPM middleware product (who uses colored petri nets?). This is solely my guess.

The analogy with the real beginnings of open source is that Paul’s “launch” contains no diatribe about the evils of the proprietary software world and no false illusions about open source. He explains how he looked at jBPM and why he then wrote his own open source software. Open source is so simple when you take all the Microhate and industry politics out of it. Paul’s got some code; he needs a community.

(As as aside, he says “Sarasvati is both the name of a river and of a Hindu Goddess. This project is named in honor of the goddess… The patron deity of all that flows seems a worthy namesake for a workflow engine.”)

-- Dennis Byron

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To be brief, you can never find better bargains than during economic turbulence. So if you can find technologies that deliver business value – lower costs, higher profits, better productivity or customer/partner satisfaction – you should find a way to invest or expand investments in them. My favorite three candidates:

BPM and related solutions and services – because there’s no better time to optimize processes than when every improvement can mean more money in the business’ coffers.

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) – because the technologies have evolved and improved, and keeping better track of high-value business assets, from laptops to people, is a sure way to make and save money.

Software as a Service (SaaS) and cloud computing – because they are nothing less than the future of how software will be developed, delivered, and supported cost-effectively, because no business decision-maker I know also wants to be in the IT infrastructure management business.

The great thing is, RFID and SaaS can be both driven by business processes and provide information that can help to improve them. Which can result in even more business benefit.

The big caveats:
1. Make sure you have accurate, reliable metrics and processes for identifying opportunities to pursue initiatives in these areas that can generate meaningful business benefit. There is never a time for a business to invest in anything just because “it’s cool.” During economic turbulence, such investments are opportunities to make what some of us analysts like to call “career-limiting decisions.”
2. Make sure you do sufficient due diligence on every candidate and chosen vendor. You don’t want to pick a strategic partner that suddenly disappears, which means you want to focus on those with deep pockets and/or wealthy and well-established industry allies…or both.

An Invitation: If your business has any interest in or curiosity about RFID, please go to http://www.aberdeen.com/survey/rfidbeyond/ ASAP and take my 10-to-15-minute survey. You’ll get current and upcoming Aberdeen Group research at no cost, and help me a lot. Thanks, and please tell all of your professional friends.

Another Invitation: If your business has any interest in SaaS and/or cloud computing, check out my initial take on Salesforce.com’s recent Dreamforce event, courtesy of still more complimentary Aberdeen research: http://www.aberdeen.com/summary/report/market_alert/5627-MA-salesforce-software-service.asp.

Posted by mdortch in BPM • Business Knowledge Management • Current Events • IT Infrastructure Management • Process Visibility • RFID • Software as a Service • The Big Mash-Up  |  Permalink  | Comments (0)  | TrackBacks (0)

I’ve written here and here about the general problems with magic quadrants and waves and other x-/y-axis analyst views of enterprise software. There are no hard numbers behind the product placements on the grids and as a former IDC analyst, I’m sure that that’s what bothers me. The dimensions and characteristics are always amorphous things like “ability to execute,” “feature/functionality content,” “side of head on which CEO parts hair,” and so forth. I’m from the Jerry McGuire school: “Show me the money.”

Now along comes a hard business process management (BPM) example that half proves my point. My concern has always been that almost every product makes the upper right corner of the quadrant. Active Endpoint’s Alex Neihaus’ has the opposite complaint in his recent blog posting about the Forrester Wave on Integration-centric BPM Suites. Only 10 BPM suppliers out of the hundred or so in the market were considered. The wide range of choices you enjoy/face in BPM software was illustrated on November 10 release of the Alfresco Open Source Barometer.

Alex goes on to say that probably not coincidentally only the BPM market leaders were considered. If Forrester had said that BPM market leadership was the criteria to be included in its survey that would have been fair. (But in that case Forrester should have interviewed Fujitsu and Autonomy rather than Cordys and Vitria.)

The bigger issue in my opinion is why do analysts draw artificial distinctions among BPM (and other types of) products. Forrester says there are also human-centric BPM and document-centric BPM products in addition to Integration-centric BPM suites. That’s not an exhaustive BPM taxonomy. Where would Active Endpoints’ BPM product fit if those were the only three choices you had? My 30-plus years of information technology market research say you don’t make such distinctions. According to you—in the plural, statistically speaking—functionality rules. My last half dozen years of BPM product research says that integration/document/human-centric/etc. functionality is all merging in 21st century BPM.

-- Dennis Byron

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Ian Howell at Alfresco helps illustrate how fragmented the business process management (BPM) market is in his latest Alfresco Barometer survey. That means good news/bad news: you still have both a lot of choices and a lot of choices to make when it comes to BPM.

The survey has some methodological issues to which Ian admits and about which we have posted here. (Also see this interview with Ian on broader matters.) But when it comes to BPM, these issues are less relevant because the open source vs. closed source biases researchers like me worry about at the low end of the stack are less relevant with BPM, at the top of the stack.

One bias that skews these results is an oversample of UNIX/Linux sites vs. Windows site. That accounts for the fact that Red Hat’s jBPM was the BPM product most often mentioned. But at only 12% of the sample, and with products/companies as diverse as Active Endpoint, IBM, Intalio, Lombardi, Microsoft Sharepoint, Oracle/BEA or Oracle/Collaxa, and TIBCO right behind, these are probably pretty accurate results given the sample set, which is large.

Most interesting, “other” accounted for 62% of the answers. That means the BPM market is still the wild west.

It’s interesting that Active Endpoints made the list and that the potential list of BPM suppliers is so large. More on that subject in an upcoming BPM VIEWPOINT. That finding says, “Don’t just look at the namebrand software suppliers.”

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Following up belatedly on the September 29, 2008 announcement of Savvion Businessmanager 7.5, I find that the more interesting news is the subsequent announcement of Savvion’s Communications Order Management and Banking Foundation for Business solutions. I talked with Ajay Khanna, Savvion’s Senior. Director, Product Marketing and Management who described how methodically but comprehensively Savvion is entering the industry-centric applications market based on the strengths of its long-time business process management (BPM) middleware.

(As a side note Savvion is in contention to be named one of the earliest users of the term BPM—in the business process management sense—based on the academic work of its founder Dr. M. A. Ketabchi in the early 1990s. If you have any earlier nominees, email me at dennis@ebizq.net or leave a comment.)

The industry-centric strategy is interesting in two respects.

First, it aligns with the likelihood that as BPM becomes the new ERP, its functionality will have to be less cross-industry and more related to your needs as a manufacturer, retailer, professional services provider, and so forth. ERP has really always been industry-centric across the standard-industry-classification-code spectrum even though manufacturing ERP got all the press because the term was an outgrowth of the acronym for manufacturing requirements planning.

Second it acts as a Trojan horse marketing technique, getting the Savvion middleware into an enterprise to meet a specific silo need but letting the Savvion user then grow its usage to other BPM needs within the company. For example, a communications industry user can start with Order Management but than grow the use of the underlying Businessmanager software to operations and back-office needs. (That would be considered an upgrade for which a new license would be required.)

-- Dennis Byron

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The acquisition of Haley/RuleBurst by Oracle announced on October 30 raises or re-raises the question of whether there is still a place in the business process management (BPM) market for tools and point products. Or will the entire BPM market move to “suite.” Active Endpoint blogger Alex Neihaus’ complaint about the recent Forrester “Integration-centric BPMS” analysis raises a similar question (more on that next week from a methodology point of view).

The issue is not unique to BPM and is as old as the enterprise software and information technology (IT) market. It is natural for separate products to become important features. Then they simply become ‘functionality.’ The moving of spell checkers into word processors, followed by the moving of word processors into office suites is the classic example. Will rules engines like Haley’s and orchestration software such as Active Endpoints’ have a continuing separate place in the market? Or is such functionality destined to be embedded into the major BPM suites?

Simplistically it depends on whether rules engines and orchestration tools (and other currently separate products that are also features of BPM software) are spell checkers or word processors? Generically, the question is whether they have a separate use outside of whatever suite into which they are being embedded. Word processors sort of live on separately as specialized publishing systems (and even as text editors for developers). Spell checkers on the other hand morphed into specialized grammatical syntax systems but can also be considered embedded in that instance.

So there is usefulness for the WP outside of the suite, there does not appear to be a similar separate usefulness for spell checkers. I believe rules engines and orchestration tools both have separate usefulness outside of BPM. Of course, that is true if you agree with me that IT Information Lifecycle Management (ITLM) software is separate from BPM. There are many uses of rules engines in specialized industry-centric applications as well that are not in enough demand to get embedded into ERP systems.

And there is a demand for separate orchestration and similar tools also if you agree with me that BPM is not service oriented architecture (SOA).

-- Dennis Byron

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