Intelligent Enterprise | Sandy Kemsley's Column Two

More BPM Acquisitions: Progress Buys Savvion

Thu, 14 Jan 2010 15:44:35 -0500

BPM acquisitions must be in the air: on Monday, Progress Software announced that they've bought Savvion for $49M. This is hot on the heels of IBM's announcement last month that they're buying Lombardi, with one huge difference being that Progress doesn't already have a BPM product in their lineup, whereas IBM has two. Of the three mid-range BPMS-only vendors that I would most commonly name -- Appian, Lombardi and Savvion -- that's two out of the three announcing acquisition in less than a month. With the economy just starting to pull out of a huge pit, that's telling news: as I mentioned in my post about Lombardi, if the economic climate were different, these would be IPOs that we'd be seeing rather than acquisitions.

IBM Buying Lombardi: A Bauble on Big Blue's Christmas Tree?

Wed, 16 Dec 2009 12:12:36 -0500

I was on the analyst call this morning to hear about IBM's acquisition of Lombardi -- a pretty significant acquisition in the BPM space. Lombardi is the best known of the mid-range BPMS vendors, and if the economic climate weren't quite so dreary, I imagine they'd be doing an IPO rather than being acquired. Or at least they'd be staying as an independent rather than becoming part of an organization that offers what Phil Gilbert (president of Lombardi) recently described as not BPM, but "Orwellian marketing rhetoric." Given that Phil has done everything except call IBM the "evil empire," it's hard to imagine the drivers behind this acquisition.

Smarter Systems for Uncertain Times

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 09:43:05 -0500

At last week's Business Rules Forum, I attended James Taylor's keynote on the role of decision management in agile, smarter systems. Much of this is based on the book he co-authored with Neil Raden, Smart (Enough) Systems, which I reviewed shortly after its release.

Our systems need to be smarter because we live in a time of constant, rapid change -- regulations change; competition changes due to globalization; business models and methods change -- and businesses need to respond to this change or risk losing their competitive edge. It's not enough to be a smarter organization, however: you have to have smarter systems because of the volume and complexity of the events that drive businesses today, the need to respond in real time, and the complexity of the network of systems by which products and services are delivered to customers.

Rapid Change: The New Decision Dilemma

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 12:53:04 -0500

The Business Rules Forum has started here in Las Vegas, and I'm here all week giving a presentation in the BPM track, facilitating a workshop and sitting on a panel. James Taylor and Eric Charpentier are also here presenting and blogging, with a focus more purely on rules and decision management; you will want to check out their blogs as well since we'll likely all be at different sessions. I'm really impressed with what this conference has grown into: attendance is fairly low, as it has been at every conference that I've attended this year due to the economy, but there is a great roster of speakers and five concurrent tracks of breakout sessions including the new BPM track. As I've been blogging about for a while (as has James), process and rules belong together; this conference is the opportunity to learn about both as well as their overlap.

Forrester Touts Lean as the New Imperative

Mon, 12 Oct 2009 09:05:17 -0500

Forrester's Business Technology Forum, held last week in Chicago, focused on Lean as the new business imperative: how to use Lean concepts and methods to address the overly complex things in our business environment.

Forrester's Mike Gilpin opened the conference with a short address on how our businesses and systems got to be so bloated that Lean has become such an imperative. Then Connie Moore took over for the keynote. From the keynote's description on the event agenda site:

How to Choose Process Modeling Tools

Wed, 07 Oct 2009 13:26:25 -0500

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.

Gartner Releases 2009 Hype Cycle

Tue, 18 Aug 2009 07:40:30 -0500

Gartner's hype cycle for 2009 was released last week, and there was a webinar with Jackie Fenn to walk through it. The actual diagrams are not working on their press release at this writing, but ReadWriteWeb is hosting its own copy of the emerging technologies hype cycle (which was in the press release originally) if you want to take a look.

Gartner has 79 different hype cycles focused on individual technologies, rolled up in this special report that is free but doesn't contain the meat: for that, you need to click through to the hype cycle for the technology in which you're interested and purchase that report.

Using BPM to Survive, Thrive and Capitalize

Tue, 04 Aug 2009 12:25:54 -0500

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.

Transition Strategies for Enterprise 2.0 Adoption

Wed, 24 Jun 2009 13:37:58 -0500

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.

Enterprise 2.0 Reality Check

Tue, 23 Jun 2009 12:38:13 -0500

I'm at this week's Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston watching the panel entitled "Enterprise 2.0 Reality Check: What's Working, What's Not, What's Next," moderated by Matthew Fraser, and featuring Christian Finn of Microsoft, Nate Nash of BearingPoint, Neil Callahan of mktg and Ross Mayfield of Socialtext. Amazingly, I've found the optimal way to do this is to go back to my room and watch it streaming over the Web, since the wifi is completely overloaded in the conference area and the seating is cramped.

It's always difficult to blog a panel since the topics tend to vary widely (and quickly), so just a few thoughts:

NetWeaver BPM Boosts Human-Centric Workflows

Mon, 18 May 2009 10:06:47 -0500

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.

SAP BusinessObjects Explorer Announced

Tue, 12 May 2009 14:28:15 -0500

Jon Schwarz, SAP Executive Board Member, gave the global press conference at Sapphire 2009 this morning, with a focus on SAP BusinessObjects Explorer (formerly known as Polestar) and how it helps their customers to become clear enterprises: seeing, thinking and acting clearly. As Prashanth Rai twittered, it's more like a mini keynote than a press conference, or at least this part of it.

SAP is seeing a fundamental change in customer expectations, both from the buyers and the users. Buyers need to do more with less, which means reducing total cost of ownership, making it easy to deploy solutions, and getting to ROI faster. Users now want the same level of usability and sophistication of digital media as they see in consumer applications (surprise!), as well as wanting to integrate social and community aspects.

In Honor of Ada Lovelace

Tue, 24 Mar 2009 10:11:17 -0500

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 Tips on Cutting Software Costs

Tue, 17 Mar 2009 10:59:22 -0500

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.

Microsoft Details (FAST) Search Strategy

Mon, 16 Feb 2009 08:23:08 -0500

At Microsoft's FASTForward event in Las Vegas last week, Kirk Koenigsbauer outlined Microsoft's enterprise search vision and roadmap. These days, no one is making a lot of $1.2B technology acquisitions, but at last year's conference, the FAST acquisition was in progress; now they've had a year to work out where they're going with it.

Microsoft is keeping a significant engineering team focused on enterprise search, as well as a global sales and support organization. They've doubled the number of partners, and there's been 100,000 downloads of Search Server Express, the free, low-end enterprise search product. Koenigsbauer's point was that they're committed to the enterprise search market, and he stated that search is central to Microsoft's overall strategy of "creating experiences that combine the magic of software with the power of internet services across a world of devices."

Gartner on Emergency IT Cost Cutting

Wed, 28 Jan 2009 11:30:58 -0500

I had a heads up this morning via Shane Schick's Twitter stream that Gartner was holding a webinar on emergency cost cutting in IT, featuring Kurt Potter, and 20 minutes later I was there.

Gartner's been talking with a lot of their customers about the impact of the recession, and although most are not in completely dire straits, they are seeing some who are having to deploy emergency measures, and there are lessons to be learned from the squeezing being done.

There are factors in any organization that make it difficult to cut costs:

The First 100 Days: Set the Tone, Get Results

Thu, 22 Jan 2009 09:45:43 -0500

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:

Build Your Social Network Before You Get Laid Off

Wed, 10 Dec 2008 10:30:06 -0500

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.

ChoicePoint Blends BPM, BAM and BI

Thu, 13 Nov 2008 19:32:37 -0500

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.

Taylor and Raden Define Decision Management

Thu, 30 Oct 2008 15:42:28 -0500

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.

From Here to Agility: Ron Ross on Rules

Wed, 29 Oct 2008 09:25:36 -0500

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.

8 Things You Should Tell Your CEO

Thu, 23 Oct 2008 14:11:39 -0500

When Pegasystems invited me to attend this week's PegaWorld conference outside of Washington, D.C., I took a quick glance at the agenda and thought that it said that George Clooney would be speaking. I immediately accepted. On second look, I noticed that it was actually George Colony, founder and CEO of Forrester Research.

The somewhat-less-famous George talked about business technology (BT) in the format of eight things that he would tell your CEO over coffee:

Pegasystems Bows Platform as a Service

Fri, 17 Oct 2008 09:55:29 -0500

Earlier this month, Pegasystems announced a "Platform as a Service" (PaaS) business process management offering, and I had a chance prior to that to chat with Kerim Akgonul, VP of product management. My first thought on reading the phrase "internal cloud" was that they were just hitching a ride on the cloud bandwagon � check out James Governor's 15 Ways to Tell It's Not Cloud Computing for all the reasons that this isn't cloud computing � but there are definite cloud-like capabilities to what they're offering from the viewpoint of the individual projects, although not to the organization as a whole.

A problem that I see in many large customer organizations is that BPM projects end up being departmental, and even if the vendor manages to sell enterprise-wide licensing, it often ends up only deployed in one department. In many cases, this is because departments don't want to share BPMS instances, and it's just too hard to go through the effort of deploying another separate server and instance for every project. There's also the need for multiple instances for development and testing, usually hand-installed at some cost. This is exacerbated in large organizations with a variety of geographically-dispersed business units, where they may have several different independent BPM projects on the go at the same time, and have difficulty in applying successes in one area to another.

Gartner Sums Up SaaS-Based BPM Options

Fri, 12 Sep 2008 09:58:36 -0500

Is software as a service a viable option for process improvement projects? Michele Cantera covered some of the same material here at this week's Gartner BPM Summit in Washington DC, as the SaaS and BPM session in February, but there was some new information as well. For example, based on 2007 estimates, she segmented the BPM SaaS adopters into four categories:

� Pragmatists, forming 49% of the market, are replacing departmental on-premise applications but don't have an enterprise-wide scope.
� Beginners, 40% of the market, are replacing low-end software tools with simple utility applications. These are often small or medium businesses who don't want to grow an IT department.
� Masters, 10% of the market, are weaving SaaS applications into their enterprise-wide application portfolio.
� Visionaries, a mere 1%, are actively replacing on-premise applications with SaaS wherever possible.

Customers Say the Darnedest Things

Thu, 11 Sep 2008 10:45:58 -0500

At yesterday's lunch presentation at the Gartner BPM Summit in Washington DC, Alan Trefler (CEO of Pegasystems) discussed how it's necessary � and possible � to put business process management right in the hands of the business users and let them do it themselves. There will be some IT architectural oversight and support, of course, but you just have to convince the users, Tom Sawyer-like, that they really want to paint this fence.