Intelligent Enterprise

At this week's Gartner BPM Summit, Bill Rosser presented a decision framework for identifying when to use BPA (business process analysis), EA (enterprise architecture) and BPM modeling tools for modeling processes: all of them can model processes, but which should be used when?

It's first necessary to understand why you're modeling your processes, and the requirements for the model: these could be related to quality, project validation, process implementation, as part of a larger enterprise architecture modeling effort and many other reasons. In the land of BPM, we tend to focus on modeling for process implementation because of the heavy focus on model-driven development in BPMS, hence model within our BPMS, but many organizations have other process modeling needs that are not directly related to execution in a BPMS. Much of this goes back to EA modeling, where several levels of process modeling that occur in order to fulfill a number of different requirements: they're all typically in one column of the EA framework (column 2 in Zachman, hence the name of this blog), but stretch across multiple rows of the framework such as conceptual, logical and implementation.

Recovery.gov, a showcase government-transparency Web site that relaunched on Monday, fails to meet U.S. federal government Section 508 accessibility standards or accessibility best practices. The non-compliance issues relate to display of data tables -- an essential point given the site's promise of "Data, Data & More Data" -- despite on-site compliance claims. Other elements including navigation maps, while compliant, are poorly designed. Sharron Rush, co-founder and executive director of accessibility-advocacy organization Knowbility, goes so far as to state, "The recovery.gov Web site is a good example of what NOT to do for accessibility in my opinion."

I am a big fan of OMG's Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) 2.0, which has passed its first approval hurdle and is now in the Finalization Task Force stage. A major reason I'm a fan is that for the first time, BPMN has standardized the schema for XML interchange of process models. That means you will be able to create a BPMN model in one tool with confidence you can open it in a different tool. I think that's what every user expects from a "standard," but BPMN never had it until v2.0. There is one part of the standard that the team messed up big time: Diagram Interchange (DI), meaning the graphical layout of the shapes and symbols.

As business process management (BPM) begins to expand beyond isolated projects to mainstream programs at the division or enterprise level, there is a need to engage a far greater number of business people in the effort. That's not easy, and achieving it is going to require significant change in the way BPM is practiced.

The most important role for business is probably documenting current-state business processes and analyzing them for possible improvement. But conventional practices in this area are inefficient and inherently small-scale.

Michele Cantara and Janelle Hill hosted a Webinar last week on the timely topic of surviving and thriving with aid of business process management (BPM). Cantara started by talking about the sorry state of the economy, complete with a picture of an ax-wielding executioner, and how many companies are laying off staff to attempt to balance their budgets. Their premise is that BPM can turn the ax-man into a surgeon: you'll still have cuts, but they're more precise and less likely to damage the core of your organization. Pretty grim start, regardless.

They showed some quotes from customers, such as "the current economic climate is BPM nirvana" and "BPM is not a luxury," pointing out that companies are recognizing that BPM can provide the means to do business more efficiently to survive the downturn, and even to grow and transform the organization by being able to outperform their competition. In other words, if a bear (market) is chasing you, you don't have to outrun the bear, you only have to outrun the person running beside you.

The media and my fellow analysts have been breathlessly touting IBM's acquisition of SPSS ($1.2B) as some sort groundbreaking to a new era of analytics. I don't see it that way.

IBM has been collecting BI and analytics pieces for a few years now, beginning way back in pre-history with the acquisition of Ascential. This was eclipsed when they acquired Cognos ($5B), the largest BI vendor at the time. There have been quite a few other smaller ones, such as AlphaBlox, Applix, Exeros and others. And let's not forget ILOG a year ago. You can't put predictive analytics into motion without a Business Rules Management System to drive the process. If anyone thinks this acquisition of SPSS marks IBM's serious entry into analytics, they've been sleeping.

In these tough times, even the most change-resistant organizations are reexamining whether past practice should continue to govern standard operating procedures. Government and airlines, for example, spring to mind. I recently saw evidence of this in delivering a BPMN training class to one of the many Federal agencies involved in financial regulation. I was surprised to find that most in the class were experienced process modelers already. Many had prior BPMN experience, for some including BPMN-based BPM Suites. The processes of greatest interest concerned internal policies and procedures: hiring and employee onboarding, granting security clearances, etc.

On the flight home, another pleasant surprise: Wi-Fi and AC power at my seat in coach! For about the same price as one of those nasty "snack-paks" they offer, you can get in-flight Internet service coast-to-coast. While other airlines solemnly invoke policies and procedures to ban cell phones, GPS devices, and even powered headphones below 10,000 feet, Virgin America has figured out that giving business travelers an extra full workday might be good for customer satisfaction.

In a Teutonic transaction not likely to be surpassed unless applications giant SAP is ever acquired, Software AG announced today that it has issued a tender offer for IDS Scheer AG, the business process modeling and optimization vendor. Software AG and IDS Scheer have much in common, including their roots in Germany and their common focus on business process management. Both companies have also sought to gain marketshare in the vast North American market; Software AG made headway in 2007 by acquiring WebMethods while IDS Scheer has favored organic growth.

Given that BI thought leaders are wrestling with the notion of events, perhaps we will see a BI-mainstreaming of event processing in the not-too-distant future. Myself, I was way ahead of the game in my expectations of demand for BI access to stream sources. While a combination of legacy database and analytical technology has held BI back, lack of perception of need has been a far greater factor, especially given the under-utilization of conventional BI decades after the term first became popular.

Interest in streams and events has definitely picked up in the last few months -- I've reported on novel applications for "continuous transformation" and otherwise done a bit of writing to promote awareness -- and next year could very well be the break-out year for BI on data and event streams.

The vote on BPMN 2.0 is not the only thing on the agenda at this week's Object Management Group (OMG) meeting in Costa Rica. There is also the release of an RFP for a new Case Management standard, authored by Henk de Man of Cordys.

The RFP asserts that BPMN is inadequate for case management but that case management should leverage BPMN for the "process" part, and I agree with that. It also seeks to tie in to OMG government task force efforts on records management for the case folder part. That might be useful as an option, but I hope it's not a requirement.

At this week's Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston, Lee Bryant of Headshift looked at the adoption challenges for 2.0 technologies in companies that have grown up around a centralized model of IT, particularly for the second wave adopters required to move Enterprise 2.0 into the mainstream within an organization. He points out that we can't afford the high-friction, high-cost model of deploying technology and processes, but need to rebalance the role of people within the enterprise.

External tools are subject to evolutionary forces and either adapt or die quickly, whereas we are forced to put up with Paleolithic-era tools inside the enterprise because it's a captive market. 21st century enterprises, however, aren't putting up with that: they're going outside and getting the best possible tools for their uses on demand, rather than waiting for IT to provide a second-rate solution, months or years later.

"Cool" is not a word I would normally apply to IBM's business process management (BPM) software, but for the new BPM BlueWorks offering announced at the company's Impact 2009 event early this month, the term is appropriate. IBM bills BPM BlueWorks as a BPM community in the cloud, and it is that, plus a lot more. Actually, I think its greatest immediate impact could be to transform the market for business process analysis (BPA) tools.

The essence of BPA is a suite of tools for modeling the business and a repository for those modeling artifacts: not just processes, but strategies, goals, and metrics; value chains and capability maps; process models, from high-level maps to detailed BPMN diagrams; organizational entities and roles; policies and rules. All of these models are linked through the repository. Such suites are central to business process management at the enterprise level, and historically they have been aimed at a small priesthood of architects who don't mind the 5-figure cost per seat, mind-numbing complexity, and three weeks of intensive training. But you can't really create a culture of BPM within an enterprise, or move from isolated projects to an enterprise BPM program, without democratizing modeling and analysis. BlueWorks does that.

Last week a major outage affected 14% of Google users and caused widespread panic. Okay, it caused frustration, as users could not access their free search engines, free document management systems, and free e-mail systems. Perhaps they should ask for their money back. The comment that I kept hearing was "I had to use Yahoo." Priceless.

Still, the timing could not have been worse, considering that the US Government began discussing how cloud computing fits into their $78 billion IT budget for 2010. Many in the private sector are looking at cloud computing as well. The hype leading them there is the possibility of saving some money.

When I last had an in-depth look at NetWeaver BPM (business process management) late last year, it was in late beta; since then, it's been through the SAP ramp-up (early ship) process, and was released for unrestricted shipment last week. SAP's Wolfgang Hilpert and Thomas Vollmering briefed me at Sapphire on the current release and what's coming later this year. I'll be finishing up my review of the current release in an upcoming post, and as soon as Thomas forwards on the material that he promised to send (hint, hint), I'll be able to post a bit more on the future directions.

The newly released version is still lacking a lot of expected BPMS functionality, but has focused on the features that SAP's customers said that they needed the most: human-centric BPM (since there are existing products in the SAP suite that cover lower-level orchestration) and an integrated composition environment that can eventually be used for process composition across all layers -- human-facing tasks, Web services and core ERP processes.

When James Taylor and I wrote Smart Enough Systems: How to Deliver Competitive Advantage by Automating Hidden Decisions we knew it was going to be a lonely outpost for a while. It isn't easy for two guys to insert such a big idea into the collective consciousness. We didn't really have a natural sponsor for the whole picture to walk with us. The business rules community more or less understood it as a Business Rules Management System, which is a key component of the architecture. The predictive analytics crowd was interested as PA was prominent in the architecture, but in reality, very few really grasped EDM in its entirety. It was certainly easy to describe:

Thus, with unintended irony, did our former president illustrate the consequences of low expectations in the debate over No Child Left Behind. No Child's insistence on achieving a minimum competence in reading and arithmetic was scorned by many as too demanding, even "elitist," even though we all know that without those things both the child and the nation as a whole will suffer.

Today, as BPMN 2.0 rumbles toward finalization, we're seeing the same bogus charge again from those who should know better. This time it's posts from assorted dead-enders saying that BPMN is too complicated for business analysts. Usually they have their own proprietary notation which they say is far superior. They invariably take comfort from the conclusion by Michael zur Muehlen and Jan Recker, based on their survey around a year ago, that "all the BPMN you need" is the part that is unchanged from 1990s-era swimlane flowcharts. The rest, they say, is overkill.

BPMN 2.0 is almost here. If all goes as planned, it will be voted on by OMG members in June. Assuming it passes, that doesn't mean BPMN 2.0 is officially adopted and available in commercial tools, just that it has entered the "finalization" phase when tool vendors can start building it in. Even though the diagram notation of BPMN 2.0 appears little changed from previous versions, it represents a big step forward.

Most of the effort put into BPMN 2.0 has focused on making the diagrams executable on a process engine. That will be huge for customers of Oracle, IBM, SAP, and other vendors who elect to go that route. But even for the majority of today's process modelers, who are just thinking about BPMN as a diagramming tool for documenting, analyzing, and improving – not necessarily executing – their business processes, version 2.0 offers a lot to love.

Here's my pick of the top-five improvements:

I pledged to write a blog post for today, Ada Lovelace Day, in honor of a woman in technology who I admire. Although there have been some great women in technology throughout history -- Grace Hopper comes to mind, and is the subject of many blog posts today -- I wanted to write about someone who I know personally, and who I feel has contributed to my personal or professional development.

I didn't have any women mentors in the early part of my technology career. I went to a high school in suburban Toronto during the mid-70's where I had to fight to be admitted to the technical courses, and my mentors there were two male teachers who helped get me gain entry into the courses, then taught me the right (and wrong) way to wire circuits and design mechanical gearboxes. I moved on to engineering at University of Waterloo, where I recall one female professor and one woman teaching assistant during the entire time, neither of whom had a lasting impact. I did my work terms at mines, pulp mills and oil companies in northern Ontario and Alberta: again, not many women around. I came to believe that I didn't need to have other technical women in my life, since I was doing just fine with male mentors (a convenient belief, consider that was my only choice).

Gartner's had a good webinar series lately, including one last month with Alexa Bona on software licensing and pricing (link to "roll your own webinar" download of slides in PDF and audio in mp3 separately), as part of its series on IT and the economy. As enterprises look to tighten their belts, software licenses are one place to do that, both on-premise and software-as-a-service, but you need to have flexible terms and conditions in your software contract in order to be able to negotiate a reduction in fees, particularly if there are high switching costs to move to another platform.

For on-premise enterprise software, keep in mind that you don't own the software, you just have a license to use it. There's no secondary market for enterprise software: you can't sell off your Oracle or SAP licenses if you don't need them anymore. Even worse, in many cases, maintenance is from a single source: the original vendor. It's not that easy to walk away from enterprise software, however, even if you do find a suitable replacement, you've probably spent three to seven times the cost of the licenses on non-reusable external services (customization, training, ongoing services, maintenance), plus the time spent by internal resources and the commitment to build mindshare within the company to support the product. In many cases, changing vendors is not an option and, unfortunately, the vendors know that.

The stock market reaches a 12-year low... GM threatened with bankruptcy... this week's news presents fresh evidence of the fragile state of the US and global economies. But it has been abundantly clear since late last year that companies need to hit the reset button when it comes to setting enterprise information management and applications priorities. In the face of new economic realities, what would you still cite as top priority?

In an Intelligent Enterprise/InformationWeek Analytics survey conducted in January, we surveyed more than 300 information technology and business professionals about their attitudes and imperatives in five key areas of enterprise technology: information management, business intelligence, enterprise applications, performance management, and process management. In this post-economic-meltdown survey, readers shared their opinions on the squeakiest wheels requiring continued investment over the coming 12 to 24 months.

Keith Swenson's Go Flow blog continues to produce thought-provoking discussions of BPM issues. Check it out if you are not a subscriber. His latest concerns simulation, one of my hot buttons. A couple years ago I wrote that simulation was a "fake feature" -- one of those things vendors put in the tool to tick off the Gartner checklist but that don't do anything useful. Since then the situation has not improved to any great degree. This is too bad, because, as Keith suggests, simulation can be of great value in projecting the expected performance improvement from a process change before committing the resources needed to make that change.

But it would be better to say it could be of great value, if the tools were any good. I recently did a small consulting project for a BPMS vendor on what was good and not so good about their product. They really hyped their simulation tool, but I had to tell them it was, in my opinion, mostly useless, because it did not distinguish between the active time of a process activity, which consumes the assigned resource, and wait time (sometimes called lag time), which does not. It considered the total time to be active time.

Just in time for Valentine's Day and your C-Suite of CEO, CFO, COO and CIO budget review, SAP has announced SAP Business Suite 7, which is the latest version of the company's on-premise enterprise-level application suite. This application suite, which encompasses CRM, ERP, PLM, SCM and Supplier Relationship Management, is now brought out in a uniform product release that include everything from a newer version of their SAP NetWeaver application and integration platform and user interface capabilities in their applications that can support their vertical industries and demands of line of business. Now SAP has worked for many years to bring this major version to market but of course the economic environment and difficult time by companies using SAP has complicated the usual opportunity for organizations to upgrade. There are many business technology priorities for 2009 that have to be reconciled with the examination of SAP Business Suite 7 as a purchase this year and next. At the same time SAP is also trying to advance separately new solutions for priorities in business like enterprise performance management and for finance, risk management, and governance, risk and compliance with BI and information management that are also key priorities for many organizations using SAP today.

As explained in this story, TIBCO today made a splashy announcement about its first-ever hardware offering, the TIBCO Messaging Appliance P-7500. Well detailed are all the important facts about this appliance-based implementation of TIBCO's venerable Rendezvous messaging software: 10 times higher message volume capacity, a 50-percent reduction in message latency, and better predictability than message bus deployments on general-purpose hardware. What's more, the 4U box will bring data centers comparable message processing capacity with one tenth the physical footprint and one tenth the power consumption of conventional deployments (and even better if you're replacing really old servers).

What's missing from the story is competitive context. To wit, TIBCO's biggest competitor, IBM, entered the appliance-based message bus market way back in 2006. But that's not to say that TIBCO doesn't have something to crow about – at least for now.

Today Autonomy announced it intends to buy Interwoven.

It was a surprise move for sure. Not that I was surprised that Interwoven was acquired, far from it; I expected that. But I did not expect them to be acquired by Autonomy. Autonomy has grown by acquisition and is one of the few firms that recently announced good revenues and a bullish outlook for 2009.

In keeping with other recently installed change agents, Elise Olding of Gartner offers this Webinar on your first 100 days as a business process (BP) director. As she points out, you have 100 days to make some key first impressions and get things rolling, and although you may not necessarily deliver very much in that time, it sets the tone for the ongoing BPM efforts.

She breaks this down into what you should be doing and delivering in each of the first three months:

Continue reading "The First 100 Days: Set the Tone, Get Results"

Comments


Microsoft's Big BI Ads... and About Those Editors' Choice Awards

Posted by Cindi Howson
Tuesday, January 13, 2009
11:44 AM


I know business intelligence is becoming mainstream when my husband asks me about it in the midst of a Giants' football game (note, we are in NJ, but my son has converted me to a Packer's fan, so our real misery was last week. Go figure). It seems Microsoft has launched a new advertising campaign where business intelligence gets top billing. You and your business users will be seeing the ads in print and TV. That's great for business people who need to be the driving force behind BI. It's also great news for IT people who needs the business to care about BI.


I applaud any efforts that raise the awareness of BI, particularly in this tough economy when making better decisions – based on facts – and operating efficiently is a matter of survival for many.

Continue reading "Microsoft's Big BI Ads... and About Those Editors' Choice Awards"

Comments


SAP 'Fully Integrates' Business Objects

Posted by Doug Henschen
Thursday, January 8, 2009
10:47 AM


Earlier this week, I joined a few colleagues at InformationWeek to take part in an exclusive interview with SAP's Bill McDermott, President and CEO of Global Field Operations and an Executive Board Member. The two-hour discussion was broad ranging, but I honed in on the state of Business Objects and demand for performance management and process management. McDermott called the Bobj acquisition "one of the greatest moves that SAP ever made," and he also detailed a few ways in which the business intelligence vendor is being more closely integrated into SAP.

Never one to sound downbeat, McDermott said the acquisition has "turned out so well" because "Business Objects is platform agnostic, so when you're operating in a heterogeneous environment and you want to unify a management team on a common platform approach, you have to be able to extract data from any source. You have to be able to process that data very quickly and you have to be able to pop that data up to each role in the value chain based on the attributes that they care about. Before Business Objects, we couldn't talk to CEOs, CFOs and other executives about that as intelligently as we can today."

Continue reading "SAP 'Fully Integrates' Business Objects"

Comments


Satyam's Stunning Offshore Fiasco

Posted by Rajan Chandras
Thursday, January 8, 2009
9:18 AM


In news that is still unfolding, the founder and chairman of Satyam Computer Services, India's fourth largest offshore services vendor, has made a stunning admission of massive financial fraud. Are you impacted? If so, how do you react?

First, the event, in case it's news to you: Satyam co-founder and chairman Ramalinga Raju has just admitted to cooking the books... for years. In his words...

"What started as a marginal gap between actual operating profit and the one reflected in the books of accounts continued to grow over the years. It has attained unmanageable proportions as the size of company operations grew. It was like riding a tiger, not knowing how to get off without being eaten."

Continue reading "Satyam's Stunning Offshore Fiasco"

Comments


Who Loves the Incumbent Vendor?

Posted by Alan Pelz-Sharpe
Friday, December 26, 2008
10:00 AM


One of my favorite little phrases is "double edged sword," and I found a perfect application for it recently: the discussion of "incumbent vendors" — those whose product(s) you're already using.

Imagine you have been using a particular vendor's technology for the past five or ten years. It could be EMC|Documentum or Open Text or any one of the 197 other products CMS Watch evaluates. I'll just call them Vendor X. But now it's time for an upgrade, or even a replacement of that technology. It did what it was supposed to do at the time, but now technology has moved on and it's time for a refresh. So you're kicking off a major project and starting up the RFP and shortlisting process.


Continue reading "Who Loves the Incumbent Vendor?"

Comments


BPMN's Three Levels, Reconsidered

Posted by Bruce Silver
Tuesday, December 23, 2008
9:38 AM


Several months ago, I got an urgent request from OMG – the organization responsible for BPMN and other BPM standards – to give a short blurb I had written a permanent URL on my Web site. The blurb was a promotional piece for my BPMessentials training called "Three Levels of Process Modeling with BPMN." OMG proudly proclaims that BPMN assumes no particular methodology, but the notion of using it at three specific "levels" was just something I made up when I launched my BPMN course, to describe its value to different audiences. Now OMG needed it as a "reference" for their OCEB certification exam? I protested. "That's just ad copy! It's not in the standard. You can't make that a reference." But they did, and you can still find it here.

I've now been doing BPMN training for two years, and only recently have I begun to appreciate the true nature of BPMN usage levels. This reconsidered view may help you better understand what is rapidly becoming the one significant standard in BPM.


Continue reading "BPMN's Three Levels, Reconsidered"

Comments


Will IBM Add Analytics to its Toolbelt?

Posted by Doug Henschen
Thursday, December 18, 2008
12:30 PM


The gist of Ambuj Goyal's message in this Q&A interview is that predictive and statistical modeling — key offerings for the likes of SAS and SPSS — are overrated. IBM has what Goyal describes as better, cheaper alternatives in a mix of techniques developed for industry- and domain-specific challenges. Okay, I'm fine with challenging conventional wisdom and seeking the simplest possible solutions, but I also believe there's good reason SAS, SPSS, and a few other analytics specialists have grown large and stable businesses. What's more, I won't be surprised if and when IBM acquires one of these analytics vendors.

Continue reading "Will IBM Add Analytics to its Toolbelt?"

Comments


What Makes a Good Business Analyst?

Posted by Rajan Chandras
Friday, December 12, 2008
3:28 PM


Good business solutions begin with good business analysis. But what's needed to excel as a business analyst and to get projects started on a good footing?

Much has been (and will continue to be) said about the set of skills that go to making a good business analyst. Forrester Research, for example, has published a spreadsheet (called the Business Analyst Assessment Workbook -- Note: subscription required) that lists more than 150 attributes of a good business analyst, grouped into categories such as Core Capabilities, Business Knowledge, Job-Specific Skills, Technical Knowledge etc. (I was particularly pleased to see this last category: It is important but not quite obvious that business analysts should also have a rudimentary general understanding of technology environments and architectures… mostly built up through seeing past analysis engagements fructify into delivered solutions).


Continue reading "What Makes a Good Business Analyst?"

Comments


Surround the Warehouse: Prediction for 2009

Posted by Neil Raden
Thursday, December 11, 2008
1:31 PM


The data warehouse has been positioned as the sole source of analytical data in organizations, but that is changing. Rather than trying to remodel the data warehouse to accommodate fresher and more detailed operational data (near real-time activity in operational systems, process logs, etc.), these data sources will operate in parallel (or horizontally, whichever word you like) as complementary feeds to analytics. It takes too long and is too expensive to expand the data warehouse concept to do this.

BI tools like Microstrategy have to retool to be able to query multiple sources to satisfy a single query (they are doing that in the upcoming release 9, I believe). All of the other BI vendors will do the same.


Continue reading "Surround the Warehouse: Prediction for 2009"

Comments


Build Your Social Network Before You Get Laid Off

Posted by Sandy Kemsley
Wednesday, December 10, 2008
10:30 AM


I know, this advice is completely obvious advice, right? Wrong.

I recently received an email from a friend who works in telecommunications sales with the subject line "Networking," informing her list of contacts (I assume; at least she was polite enough to BCC us all) that she had been laid off and was looking for work, and listing her qualifications. I immediately emailed back to ask if she had a profile on LinkedIn or any other sort of online resume that I could look at to see if I knew of anything that might fit, and she responded "What is LinkedIn? Is it similar to Facebook?" Needless to say, she's not on either of those two very popular social networking sites.

That prompted me to do my quarterly LinkedIn maintenance: import the email addresses from my contact list, see who's on LinkedIn that I'm not already connected to (LinkedIn shows you if a person has a profile if you enter their email address), and connect to them — if you just received a LinkedIn invitation from me, that's why. What amazed me in doing that exercise was how many of my business contacts don't have a LinkedIn profile, or at least don't have one linked to their business email address. Do they think that they can never lose their job, or are they just not convinced of the power of online social networks? Both are dangerous opinions to hold in today's economic climate.


Continue reading "Build Your Social Network Before You Get Laid Off"

Comments


'Soul of the Web' At Stake

Posted by Doug Henschen
Monday, November 17, 2008
5:08 PM


I'm here at Mashup Camp in Mountain View, CA, where weighty topics including "the most exciting development environment ever" and "a battle for the soul of the Internet" are being debated. The environment being discussed, of course, is the mashup, which Camp co-founder David Berlind predicted will "trump all other development ecosystems" because it's focused on quickly and easily knitting together the meat of the functionality rather than all the system-level code required in conventional development and computing.

"Just as the spreadsheet enabled all sorts of people to become number crunchers, mashups are going to enable a much larger community to become Web developers," Berlind said in his kickoff keynote.

The battle for the Web is forming between Adobe Flash and Microsoft Silverlight, on the one hand, and OpenAjax on the other. The topic came up during a panel discussion on "Why Ajax Standards Matter," which didn't sound too promising going in. Things started getting really interesting when Christopher Keene, CEO of WaveMaker Software, warned, "there's a struggle for the soul of the Web," where rich Internet and Web application development is concerned, and "proprietary engines like Adobe Flash and Microsoft Silverlight are coming on strong."


Continue reading "'Soul of the Web' At Stake"

Comments


ChoicePoint Blends BPM, BAM and BI

Posted by Sandy Kemsley
Thursday, November 13, 2008
7:32 PM


I attended a session at Software AG's recent Innovation World 2008 conference in which Cory Kirspel, VP of identity risk management at ChoicePoint (a LexisNexis company), described how the company has created an external-facing solution using business process management (BPM), business activity monitoring (BAM) and an enterprise service bus (ESB). ChoicePoint screens and authenticates people for employment screening, insurance services and other identity-related purposes, plus does court document retrieval. There's a fine line to walk here: companies need to protect the privacy of individuals while minimizing identify fraud.

Even though the company only really does two things — credential and investigate people and businesses — it had 43+ separate applications on 12 platforms with various technologies in order to do it. Not only did that make it hard to do what they needed internally, customers were also wanting to integrate ChoicePoint's systems directly into their own with an implementation time of only three to four months, and provide visibility into the processes.


Continue reading "ChoicePoint Blends BPM, BAM and BI"

Comments


Process Intelligence, CEP and Operational BI

Posted by Neil Raden
Tuesday, November 11, 2008
7:49 AM


In case you haven't heard it yet, here comes a new product category: Process Intelligence. But what does it mean? All of these terms overlap: Operational BI, Pervasive BI, Operational Intelligence, Process Intelligence, BAM, CEP (Complex Event Processing), Decision Management, Decision Services. Arguments over definitions tend to be vigorous for two reasons. First, the taxonomy of product classes tends to be pretty leaky and second, the stakes are so low.

The reason it is important to get some clarity on the definitions is that the wider BI industry (and I don't know what to call it) is driven by marketing, not by function or requirements. Software vendors invent things, acquire or get acquired by other vendors and give names to the combined capabilities they possess. Then it's packaged and sold to companies.


Continue reading "Process Intelligence, CEP and Operational BI"

Comments


Put BPMN and BPEL in Perspective

Posted by Bruce Silver
Wednesday, November 5, 2008
10:06 AM


Anyone interested in the history of business process management (BPM) technology (brief as it is) should not miss Ismael Ghalimi's recounting of it, "Why All This Matters." As a seminal figure in that history, Ghalimi's discussion of the relationship between BPMN and BPEL, the two important standards in BPM, is especially notable. Neither standard is perfect. But while BPMN has succeeded in the BPMS world in spite of its shortcomings, BPEL's shortcomings have largely confined it to the SOA/integration space, where "business-empowerment" does not have especially high priority. And in spite of the fact that BPEL was originally conceived by IBM and Microsoft as an Intalio/BPML-killer — Ismael does not say that directly, but I will — his post insists that BPEL remains central to BPM's (and Intalio's) larger mission.

Continue reading "Put BPMN and BPEL in Perspective"

Comments


Taylor and Raden Define Decision Management

Posted by Sandy Kemsley
Thursday, October 30, 2008
3:42 PM


Opening the second day of the Business Rules Forum, James Taylor and Neil Raden gave a keynote about competing on decisions. First up was James, who started with a definition of what a decision is (and isn't), speaking particularly about operation decisions that we often see in the context of automated business processes. He made a good point that your customers react to your business decisions as if they were deliberate and personal to them, when often they're not; James' premise is that you should be making these deliberate and personal, providing the level of micro-targeting that's appropriate to your business (without getting too creepy about it), but that there's a mismatch between what customers want and what most organizations provide.

Decisions have to be built into processes and systems that manage your business, so although business may drive change, IT gets to manage it. James used the term "orthogonal" when talking about the crossover between process and rules; I used this same expression in a discussion with him yesterday in discussing how processes and decisions should not be dependent upon each other: if a decision and a process are interdependent, then you're likely dealing with a process decision that should be embedded within the process, rather than a business decision.


Continue reading "Taylor and Raden Define Decision Management"

Comments


From Here to Agility: Ron Ross on Rules

Posted by Sandy Kemsley
Wednesday, October 29, 2008
9:25 AM


The good news is that it's a lovely sunny, breezy and cool day: perfect fall weather for Toronto. The bad news is that I'm in Orlando, and was hoping to wear shorts more than sweaters this week. However, I'm here to attend — and speak at — the Business Rules Forum, not sit by the pool.

Ron Ross, executive editor of BRCommunity.com, kicked off this week's Business Rules Forum with a keynote called From Here to Agility; agility, of course, is one of the key reasons that you consider implementing business rules, whether in the context of BPM or other applications. It's pretty well attended — probably 200 people here at the opening keynote, and likely a lot of vendors off setting up their booths for later today.

Continue reading "From Here to Agility: Ron Ross on Rules"

Comments