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Gian Trotta: Welcome to another "First Look" podcast. I'm host, Gian Trotta. Our guest today is Phil Gilbert, CTO of Lombardi Software, which is probably the only IT company named after a sports figure. And, like their namesake, the famous Green Bay Packer's coach Vince Lombardi, the company puts a premium on mentoring and motivating and excellence through precise execution and enabling of teamwork. Phil's also no stranger to ebizQ listeners, having made a hard-hitting appearance during our Enterprise and Web 2.0 panel discussion during our BPM Virtual Conference.

Today, he'll be talking about Lombardi's new Blueprint software, a BPM tool that is simple to use across organizations to document and map processes. Welcome, Phil, and thanks for joining us!

Phil Gilbert: Hi, Gian! Thanks a lot!

GT: Okay! Phil, let's try to get the obvious question out of the way. Why did you name your company after the iconic coach?

PG: (laughs.) Good question! You know, back in the day, we were founded in 2000. And, somebody -- probably me -- had the great idea of hiring a very expensive PR firm to take our concepts of the world in terms of what you said. We've got this notion about coaching people through processes and teamwork, and a lot of people collaborating to get things done. And I'm sure we spent days. And I know we spent too much money. And they came back with this great idea of, hey, there's nobody better to personify that than Vince Lombardi.

And so, in fact, we were named after Vince Lombardi for that reason. And we had all sorts of football metaphors with, in our initial product, which is called Teamworks. And our forms designer and forms then became "coaches." And our BAM capabilities, which we've done a lot of work in were called "undercover agents." And so we did all this football stuff. And it wasn't until maybe the next day when I woke up and realized that that's great for the United States, but football means something completely different everywhere else in the world!

GT: Like Chevy with Nova. It's a great name in the US but I think in most Latin American countries, it means "it doesn't go!"

PG: Well, exactly! So, anyway, some things you get right, and some things you get wrong. And so that's our football metaphor. That's also most of what I know about football other than no matter where you play it in the world, it does require a lot of people collaborating, working together to get things done and to get to victory and from that standpoint, football as a metaphor holds up. Vince Lombardi is great for us and by the way, we own the Wisconsin market.

GT: Wow, I didn't know that -- I don't think it's too far a reach. I think that John Wooden of UCLA actually designed a pyramid of success that required each player, it determined what they needed to do and also mentally and in execution and teamwork. Where they had to perform.

PG: Exactly!

GT: Unfortunately, I think Wooden would be a worse name than Lombardi.

PG: But it served us well and we're known everywhere now and that's a good thing.

GT: Right. And, you know, in American football fans, you will come up in the search results around Super Bowl time for the Vince Lombardi trophy.

PG: You bet!

GT: (laughs.) Okay, Phil. Well, I mean it -- it carries over. You weren't afraid to run against the field in our recent BPM in Action show. You argued strongly that senior execs need to call the key plays regarding BPM. That they needed an effective communication method that would put them right in a huddle, so to speak.

PG: Yep! You know, we think that -- there's a lot of confusion in the marketplace. It's very funny, you know. On Google, for example, you know, one of our biggest hits for AdWords is still "workflow." And our view really is that you can do, you can use BPM tools for any number of projects. And you can do those projects bottom-up and you can get value out of those projects. There's no question. And many, many, many of our customers, in fact, probably a majority of our customers' first time experience is they have a project in mind. It's really a big workflow project.

What we do believe, though, many BPM vendors really think that's BPM. Our view is that business process management is a business function and it is something that should be pervasive to your organization. And if you are really going to change things in your company, if you're really going to start viewing your company through the prism of process, this requires top-down commitment. This also is more than just technology but technology plays a key role in it.

But when you start getting into the notion of "I'm actually going to try to do this at scale across my company," the interesting questions are less about, "can I find a process" or "can I find a workflow that I can improve?" And it becomes more about "what parts of my business should I allocate my scarce employees and resources towards improving?" And this notion of prioritizing across many processes, you know -- "what should I do?" and "how do I do it?" are the biggest issues that our customers that are really trying to change themselves are having to deal with.

Coming up with 50 projects to go apply this technology to is easy. What's hard is to go do all 50 projects. And so all of a sudden, you get into a prioritization discussion. And that prioritization discussion means I need to have some governance model; some mental model around which I evaluate these competing alternatives. And that's really where strategy and where top-down thinking comes in. If you don't do it top-down, if you do it bottom-up -- then you don't really have a scaleable way to ensure that you're doing the right things at the right time.

And so that's where the top-down appears. Now, the beauty of this technology is, and the big idea of this technology is that the implementation of any particular solution can be done in a very decentralized fashion. And so the big idea here is "how do we move you as quickly through that top-down discussion as possible, so that you can distribute the implementation?" And that's the big idea behind Blueprint.

What we saw was a screaming need in the market place to have that high-level business conversation and quickly move an aligned set of middle, senior and upper management through this top-down conversation so that we can all get aligned around "what are the priorities of the business?" at this decentralized implementation level. And that's what Blueprint does. It helps walk that group of people, senior IT and senior business leadership through that top-down process. I'm talking a matter of days and weeks instead of a matter of months and years.

GT: Right. It's understood. Staying with the football motif, I think earlier you said that each team needs a complete set of plays.

PG: Yep!

GT: Some of those plays will be higher-return, higher-scoring than others.

PG: Yep!

GT: But -- the team does need a full playbook. You can't run the same ten plays. You start, you'd lose your business value from --

PG: Yeah, yeah. And, you know, the top-down part of that conversation -- it's actually a great analogy, or great metaphor, I guess. I mean, the top-down part of this conversation is you have an offensive coordinator up in the box, right?

GT: That's interesting, yes!

PG: And that person is actually surveying the entire field. They're looking at all the defensive possibilities. They know how the defense operates and they are able to look at a higher level and -- they're not implementing the plays. I mean, for goodness sakes, if you see the side profile of most of those offensive coordinators, they couldn't!

GT: (laughs.)

PG: But the implementation is at a very decentralized level. But the implementation is being guided strategically by that top-level decision-making. Obviously, with the ability to call audibles when you need to. And that's the beauty of this, the behind-the-firewall part of the technology. Blueprint helps you have that top-level conversation and get aligned very strategically and helps you tie those to your big goals. And then Teamworks, which is the behind-the-firewall product or the BPMS part of what we do, helps you implement that very quickly and also helps you call the audible or make it a very agile set of business rules that drive that thing.

GT: Right. That's an excellent analysis, strategy and a good call to action. How does one focus on the everyday pain, such as documentation and modeling?

PG: So we, Blueprint has a couple of parts of its value proposition. We focus very hard on this notion of aligning the, having the business conversation. Aligning the multiple people. But we also have a very strong, what I call a personal value proposition. And so Blueprint itself has got the ability to drive the documentation, to collect all that process maps to draw to some level of detail, although not completely through to implementation level of detail, to start diagramming the process. And then collect all of the metadata around all of those process components that you need. I need to know what are the roles in this process? I need to know, who is the business owner? Who is the process-owner of this process? Who are the subject matter experts on the floor around this process?

I need to have potentially screenshots of forms. I need to understand the inputs and outputs. And I need to understand those inputs and outputs both from a business standpoint, i.e., English -- or French or Spanish or whatever language you speak. And I also need to understand those ins and outs from a technical standpoint. So we give you the ability to document all that. Documentation is a big part of that. But it really should be around this broader business conversation.

I'll say, Gian, that -- you know -- this stuff is going on. Whoever is listening to this podcast, your company is doing this. But the way you're doing it today is implicitly. You're doing it in a very ad hoc basis. But there are Visio diagrams. There are Arris drawings. There are PowerPoint business cases. There are emails going back and forth. You've probably hired one or two or more strategy consultants to come in and help you with this stuff. This stuff is being done. It's just being done -- there is a confusion of artifacts, almost.

And so when we build Blueprint, which is really the first tool that tries to really disintermediate all of that confusion. Is we really wanted to do kind of three things: we wanted to make all of those artifacts centrally accessible. Oh, it's a process issue -- I know where to go. It's in Blueprint. We wanted to make it drop-dead easy to use and so it's got all the very latest kind of browser-based technologies that are in play. You point to Blueprint.Lombardi.com and you get going. It's very easy. And then we also wanted to deal with this collaboration issue. So not only is it centrally accessible and easy to use but multiple people can be working on the same thing at the same time. And there's complete version control. And there's the complete ability to undo people's changes, very much like wikis work for those of you are familiar with wikis.

So, that's it. I mean, documentation and just getting the process into one place is important. Making sure that everybody knows where that is and they can get to it and they can use it, is even more important.

GT: This is a question that comes up just out of the discussion and that's: how does this get around people who are not team players? Or won't play ball?

PG: (laughs.)

GT: How do you ensure real-time collaboration around an obstructionist?

PG: Well, you know, I'll be honest with you -- I haven't met too many of those people? I don't --

GT: I hear they exist, though!

PG: You know, I do too. Anecdotally. I've never really met anybody that came into the office in the morning and said "I don't want to work with other people. I don't want to share my work. And I want things to be harder rather than easier." What I think, is that -- and again, this is the 80/20 rule and I'm sure that there are people who think knowledge is power and therefore, they're not going to share, in which case they will be able to set up their own account in Blueprint and not share it with anybody and it will be an easy-to-use tool for them, and I guess that's fine.

But what I find more often, is that when you really ask the next question. Of somebody who is perceived as not being a team player. When you really drill down, it's because tooling is frustrating them or the process through which they have to go to do something is harder than if they do it themselves. And that's really what I think the 80% case is, is that people would be happy to collaborate and share if only the tools were easy to collaborate and share with.

And so, that's the market we're going after. If you want to, if you want to lock up your data, you know, it's going to happen. But more and more in organizations today, people who, people who have opaque work product typically aren't going to be in positions of power for very long.

GT: You can say that. I want to move towards some more positive examples. Can you give us some examples where Blueprint really helped documentation and mapping?

PG: Yeah, sure! So we just recently got through, we just recently got through an exercise at a Global Ten company where 80 senior IT and business executives from around the world blueprinted six of their seventeen strategic processes in ten working days. And they gained alignment for the first time ever. And this is a company that's more than 100 years old. They gained alignment for the first time ever around global common processes across six geographical regions and factory locations for worldwide production of their products.

I can't tell you how big of a breakthrough that is. Now, the implementations -- and this is where business process management in my view, done correctly, is closer to the goals of business intelligence than it is to the goals of workflow. When we did this process at this company, what these managers and senior managers, and senior senior executive leadership found is that, I can actually move to global common processes by managing these disparate implementations using common metrics, common instrumentation and common KPIs.

And by doing that, I'm going to be able to understand my business better. But I'm also to be able to understand which implementations in which factories need the most help the sooner. I can drive my IT integration and consolidation and commonality roadmap by understanding which of these divisions and factories are giving me the most pain. I've abstracted the process metrics from the implementation. To us, workflow? A particular workflow? Is a tactic.

In fact, if you buy into the notion that processes improve and change all the time, then workflow is not the end game. Management and visibility is the end game. And any particular workflow at any particular point in time is just a tactic.

GT: So, in a way, you're helping bring around a fusion between BI and BPM, much as some people are saying that SaaS is using with SOA. Yes, SaaS still has a role to play now in Bluespring, which is a SaaS-type solution.

PG: Yep!

GT: Could you tie them all together?

PG: Well! I mean, absolutely. I mean, at a very high level -- right? If BPM is about providing a leverageable, scaleable platform to provide insight into my business using the prism of process, then using that insight, I'm going to build my business case for which parts of my SOA need to get implemented first. Because ultimately, the leverage factor? The leverage factor from a cost standpoint. I mean, Google -- all of these lessons have been learned. General Motors taught us this in 1918 and you can read Alfred Sloan's book from 1963, "My Life with General Motors." That taught us, you know, decentralization.

Google has taught us that scale is achieved by using, by automating as many transactions as possible. And you can drive revenue per head to 800,000 thousand dollars per head. The lessons have been learned. We just fail to apply them. And what BPM is trying to do, is it's trying to do two things with respect to the humans. It's trying to give me the metrics so that I can discover the non obvious business rules that my humans are applying. And therefore, I can automate that work away from them. And it should also then be giving the metrics around, you know, where I do need humans within a process. I want them using highly collaborative technologies at the edge of the process. It's giving me a common set of ways that I can measure the work that my humans do so that where I have problems, which may be training problems. It may be skill problems. Or it may be any number of problems, data quality problems. It's giving me a normalized set of metrics across the organization that I can apply to my humans.

GT: -- like comparing individual stats and team stats, on a football team.

PG: Absolutely!

GT: There are teams that have seven All-Pros but can't make the playoffs.

PG: Yeah. And if you look at those guys, you know, if you read Billy Bean's book, what you're trying to do is you're trying to understand the parts of human behavior that actually contribute to the winning team, whether it's on the football field or the baseball diamond or in your company. And that's what BPM's trying to do. And so from that standpoint, you know, we were talking about them merging, the BPM BI and SOA. You know, if you think about the understanding or visibility, if you think about that in the context of BPI and instead of BI you call it PI, process intelligence, maybe.

The BPMS is generating the artifacts of execution, how long do things take, what were the milestones, when were the milestones passed, what SLAs were met, what SLAs were missed. Moving them up into the BI layer and the results of that are driving the implementation of my automation and commonality roadmap in my infrastructure. And that's where this huge virtuous loop gets tied together. That's what we're working on.

So the BPM platform is really less about executing a particular workflow at a particular point in time because that can be done any number of ways? It's really about generating the artifacts of that execution. So that I can understand them at the intelligence layer and I can make the proper resourcing decisions and allocation decisions to solve the biggest bottlenecks in my business. Drive up revenue per employee. And increase profitability. And increase the customer experience.

GT: Right. That's still classic BPM, the objectives. But have you seen the concept -- I came across this the other day -- TPM? Team process management? You think TPM will take its place in the acronym league, so to speak?

PG: Oh -- I hope not.

GT: Too many acronyms, or it's already covered?

PG: Too many acronyms and I think it's covered. It's another cute way to kind of get to the same issue, but -- These are big issues. And the issues, you know, as a team, as an individual, you know, role-based understanding of my organization is a huge area. And I do think that moving process is the next step. Because in order to understand organizational behavior, I have to normalize the data that I'm assessing my people against. And the business metric that I assess my people against is always their ability to achieve what they committed, i.e., their ability to meet their SLAs. Across their processes.

And so an area that we're moving into, you know, with Blueprint is starting to understand -- okay, what people are involved. What are all the processes these people are involved in? What SLAs apply to those processes? How can I assess the performance of my people across processes? And then as we actually execute those processes and teamworks, we're starting to say things like "okay, I'm really meeting these SLAs. This role is really missing those SLAs. What if I reprioritize tasks? Would they meet everything?

So moving, using process as a way to normalize SLA data, so that I can now start assessing my team or my organization's performance against all those processes, is the next step. Step no. 1 is "I've got to normalize my company around its processes first."

GT: Right. I think that in six months, you might have some much more interesting case studies for us --

PG: Yeah!

GT: And you'll probably join us.

PG: Absolutely! I'd be glad to.

GT: Yeah. Phil, as always, our time's winding down but as always -- it's enjoyable and enlightening. And I wish you all the luck with Blueprint.

PG: Great! Thanks a lot. I appreciate it, Gian and anytime. Be glad to do this or another panel would be fun as well!

GT: Great! I want to thank you again for joining us and Phil -- where would folks go for more information on Blueprint?

PG: It's real simple. www.blueprint.lombardi.com. And if you want to send us an email, it's just blueprint (at) lombardi.com.

GT: Okay, Phil. In the meantime, can I tell the audience that you'll field any questions that they might send your way after this podcast?

PG: You bet!

GT: Okay, excellent! And this is Gian Trotta reminding you all that if you want other cutting-edge podcasts, blogs, Webinars and white papers, the address, as always, is www.ebizQ.net. Thank you very much and you all have a great day!