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.

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.

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.

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.

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:

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Posted Tuesday, June 23, 2009
12:38 PM
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NetWeaver BPM Boosts Human-Centric Workflows

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.

>>Continue reading "NetWeaver BPM Boosts Human-Centric Workflows"


Posted Monday, May 18, 2009
10:06 AM
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SAP BusinessObjects Explorer Announced

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.


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Posted Tuesday, May 12, 2009
2:28 PM
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In Honor of Ada Lovelace

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).

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Posted Tuesday, March 24, 2009
10:11 AM
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Gartner Tips on Cutting Software Costs

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.

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Posted Tuesday, March 17, 2009
10:59 AM
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Microsoft Details (FAST) Search Strategy

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."

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Posted Monday, February 16, 2009
8:23 AM
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Gartner on Emergency IT Cost Cutting

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:

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Posted Wednesday, January 28, 2009
11:30 AM
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The First 100 Days: Set the Tone, Get Results

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:

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Posted Thursday, January 22, 2009
9:45 AM
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Build Your Social Network Before You Get Laid Off

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.


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Posted Wednesday, December 10, 2008
10:30 AM
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ChoicePoint Blends BPM, BAM and BI

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.


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Posted Thursday, November 13, 2008
7:32 PM
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Taylor and Raden Define Decision Management

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.


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Posted Thursday, October 30, 2008
3:42 PM
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From Here to Agility: Ron Ross on Rules

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.

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Posted Wednesday, October 29, 2008
9:25 AM
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8 Things You Should Tell Your CEO

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:


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Posted Thursday, October 23, 2008
2:11 PM
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Pegasystems Bows Platform as a Service

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.


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Posted Friday, October 17, 2008
9:55 AM
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Gartner Sums Up SaaS-Based BPM Options

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.


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Posted Friday, September 12, 2008
9:58 AM
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Customers Say the Darnedest Things

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.

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Posted Thursday, September 11, 2008
10:45 AM
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The Future of BPM: Flyin' With Eagles or Scratchin' with Chickens?

Peter Dadam of University of Ulm helped wrap up last week's BPM 2008: Milan conference with a keynote on the future of BPM: Flying with the Eagles, or Scratchin' with the Chickens? He went through some of his history in getting into research (in the IBM DB2 area), with a conclusion that when you ask current users about what they want, they tend to use the current technology as a given, and only request workarounds within the constraints of the existing solution. The role of research is, in part, to disseminate knowledge about what is possible: the new paradigm for the future. Anyone who has worked on the bleeding edge of innovation recognizes this, and realizes that you first have to educate the market on what's possible before you can begin to start developing the use cases for it.

He discussed the nature of university research versus industrial research, where the pendulum has swung from research being done in universities, to the more significant research efforts being done (or being perceived as being done) in industrial research centers, to the closing of many industrial research labs and a refocusing on pragmatic, product-oriented research by the rest. This puts the universities back in the position of being able to offer more visionary research, but there is a risk of just being the research tail that the industry dog wags.


>>Continue reading "The Future of BPM: Flyin' With Eagles or Scratchin' with Chickens?"


Posted Tuesday, September 9, 2008
11:29 AM
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Social Software Supports BPM: Let Us Count the Ways

I've been excited about attending this weeks' BPM 2008: Milan conference for months since it's focused on the research that's happening in the field of BPM, rather than the usual vendor and analyst conference that I attend. As a prelude to the conference, there was a full-day workshops on various BPM topics, and I attended a session on BPM and Social Software.

The workshop was chaired by Selmin Nurcan of the University of Paris and Rainer Schmidt of Aalen University, and will consist of discussion of the various research papers contributed by the attendees — in fact, I seem to be one of the few people in the (small) audience who has not contributed a paper.

Before we got into the individual papers, Rainer Schmidt gave an overview of the issues in BPM and social software. I gave a presentation two years ago at the BPMG conference in London on BPM and Web 2.0 (the terms Enterprise 2.0 and social software were just starting to be used back then) that covers some of the same subject matter.


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Posted Friday, September 5, 2008
10:09 AM
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Business Objects Summit Q&A

At the conclusion of Business Object's Influencer Summit yesterday, Jonathan Becher hosted a wrap-up Q&A with Doug Merritt, Marge Breya and Sanjay Poonen. Rather than attributing quotes to each executive, I've consolidated the responses on five topics:

>>Continue reading "Business Objects Summit Q&A"


Posted Wednesday, August 13, 2008
12:53 PM
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Business Objects Keynote: BI Meets Process

I was in rainy Boston yesterday at the Business Objects Influencer Summit, which was kicked off with Jonathan Becher, SVP of Marketing for Business Objects. It's a very process-oriented message (which explains why I'm here): using business intelligence to drive process efficiency, improve insight to close the gap between strategy and execution, and add flexibility to create new business processes that align operations to strategy.

Becher was joined by Doug Merritt, EVP and GM of Business User Global Sales (moving from a product role), who continued with the message of how total insight allows organizations to optimize business performance. Merritt discussed a number of customer case studies, focusing on how their easy-to-use end-user tools are being used to solve real business problems.


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Posted Wednesday, August 13, 2008
9:39 AM
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The People Part in SOA Failure

I was going to just link to Mike Kavis' post on the Top 10 Reasons Why People Are Making SOA Fail, but I wanted to added some of my own comments. By the way, he's talking primarily about IT people, not business people, in the fail part of the equation.

Number 1 reason: they fail to explain SOA's business value. Kavis recommends (and I completely agree) starting with business problems first, specifically using BPM as the "killer app" to justify the existence of SOA.


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Posted Tuesday, July 22, 2008
4:13 PM
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Companies That Get It

Here's a company that gets how marketing 2.0 works: Metastorm is publishing podcasts on iTunes (that is, you can get them without providing your personal information to Metastorm) as well as having a YouTube channel and customer success stories on their own site that don't require registration.

I posted a while back about how Active Endpoints is publishing webinar replays (video) as well as audio podcasts and product release information (PDF) all in an RSS feed that I subscribe to in iTunes, no signup required. IDS Scheer has ARIS TV, also on YouTube. More companies are realizing that blogging is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to new ways to interact with their audience.


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Posted Friday, July 11, 2008
10:27 AM
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Fujitsu's Interstage Update is Fit for SaaS

Fujitsu is releasing version 10 of its Interstage BPM, and I had a chance for an in-depth demo a few weeks ago in advance of the recent announcement. On the design side, their new version of Studio now allows business analysts and IT to work together, and it includes forms development. In terms of end-user functionality, there have been improvements to workflow to enable collaboration and new dashboard functionality. Most exciting, I think, is full support for multi-tenanting to allow for shared services and SaaS.

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Posted Wednesday, June 25, 2008
6:33 PM
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Twitter and Micro Blogging Explained

At last week's Enterprise 2.0 event, Dennis Howlett hosted a panel on micro-blogging (with a strong focus on Twitter, but not exclusively) that also included Chris Brogan of CrossTechMedia, Loren Feldman of 1938 Media, Rachel Happe of IDC and Laura Fitton of Pistachio Consulting. Although not explicitly stated in the session description, the focus was on the adoption of micro-blogging in the enterprise.

Fitton and Happe feel that micro-blogging allows us to exploit the power of weak ties. It changes the velocity of when we get to the value, or "a-ha", moment. It's like a gateway drug to social media, demonstrating the value of social media quickly. It allows for serendipity in business relationships, where people who you might not think of including in a project will see what you're twittering about it and self-select themselves into it, or leverage your ideas in their own work. Fitton also live-tweeted her ideas on the advantages of micro-blogging in the enterprise (these are copied directly from her Twitter stream, hence are in reverse chrono order):


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Posted Wednesday, June 18, 2008
9:37 AM
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Enterprise 2.0: IBM's Social Networking Directions

I had a great one-hour session here with Jeff Schick, VP of social networking at IBM, and Joan DiMicco who came to IBM after doing media studies at MIT and is one of the key people behind Beehive. There were only seven of us plus these two quite technical IBM'ers in a suite upstairs in the hotel, giving us an opportunity to have an informal roundtable discussion: a sort of social networking nerd heaven.

We started out with a discussion about Beehive — a sort of enterprise Facebook that IBM has developed for internal use — which has gained 33,000 users in less than a year since internal release. That's 10% of IBM's workforce, which is a pretty significant adoption rate considering that it's not optional for creating any sort of work product. Beehive is purely a social platform, not a work platform, to allow IBM employees to create social and personal connections. I have friends within IBM, mostly former FileNet people who were absorbed during the acquisition, and one of them speaks glowingly of Beehive as a way to find other people with similar interests to her in order to find people whom with to collaborate.


>>Continue reading "Enterprise 2.0: IBM's Social Networking Directions"


Posted Wednesday, June 11, 2008
11:05 AM
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Google Sees Cloud Shaping the Enterprise

The Enterprise 2.0 conference kicked off yesterday with some workshops, but I just flew in this morning and am at my first session of the day (although not the first session of the day), a keynote by Google's Rishi Chandra on cloud computing. The same key message (buy lots of Google cloud computing) but some complementary points to the presentation I saw by Matthew Glotzbach at IT360 a couple of months ago; considering that they're both in product marketing for Google Enterprise, that's not surprising.

The focus of the presentation is cloud computing and how the trends in consumer applications are starting to bleed over into the enterprise world. Chandra discussed four trends that will accelerate adoption of cloud computing among enterprises:


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Posted Tuesday, June 10, 2008
12:19 PM
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Oracle-BEA vs. IBM-FileNet: The Borg vs. Death by a Thousand Cuts

Almost two years ago, I reported on the IBM acquisition of FileNet, wherein I quoted their plan to "integrate IBM's BPM and SOA technologies with the FileNet platform." I interpreted this to mean that FileNet BPM could finally get separated from its document-centric chains, and become the product that it should have been years ago. Just as Jessica Rabbit said "I'm not bad, I'm just drawn that way," the FileNet BPM wasn't (isn't) document-centric, it's just marketed that way.

As the former director of e-business evangelism for FileNet in 2000-1 when they were launching this generation of the BPM product, I had some idea of what I was talking about — I saw that 40% of the BPM installations in some countries did not involve documents at all, and that this was due to the local sales and marketing messages and techniques rather than any inherently different BPM requirements between countries. So several years after I left FileNet, when the acquisition occurred and I saw that initial press release, I imagined that the best possible thing would be if the BPM product were to be separated out and made part of the IBM WebSphere suite, in order to flesh out the badly-needed human-facing workflow side of things over there. I realized that would mean some major surgery on the product, but a stronger unified BPM suite would emerge from that.

>>Continue reading "Oracle-BEA vs. IBM-FileNet: The Borg vs. Death by a Thousand Cuts"


Posted Monday, June 9, 2008
10:16 AM
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Want to Mashup Your Legacy Apps?

I recently had a chance to demo OpenSpan, which is one of the tools that you can consider for bringing those legacy apps into the modern age of composite applications. A big problem with the existing user environment is that it has multiple, disparate applications — Windows, legacy, Web, whatever — that operate as non-integrated, functional silos. This requires re-keying of data between applications, or copy and paste if the user is particularly sophisticated. I see this all the time with my clients, and I'm constantly working with them to find improvements that reduce double keying.

In OpenSpan Studio, the visual design environment, you add a Windows (including terminal emulator or even DOS window) or Web application that you want to integrate, then use the interrogation tool to individually interrogate each individual Windows object (e.g., button) or Web page object (e.g., text box, hyperlink) to automatically create interfaces to those objects: a very sophisticated form of screen-scraping, if you will. However, you can also capture the events that occur with those objects, such as a button being clicked, and cause that to invoke actions or transfer data to other objects in other applications. Even bookmarks in MS-Word documents show up as entry/access points in the Studio environment.


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Posted Wednesday, May 21, 2008
11:43 AM
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SAPPHIRE: Wolfgang Hilpert on SAP BPM

I'm picking and choosing my sessions here at SAPPHIRE carefully, in part because I have some prearranged meetings specifically about BPM. I had a chance one-on-one meeting with Wolfgang Hilpert, SVP of NetWeaver BPM, this afternoon; funnily enough, just after I attended Ginger Gatling's session this morning, I had lunch in the press area, and when I mentioned that I'd seen the session on the new SAP BPM, three pairs of ears at the table swiveled around. These three, who I didn't know (nametags, unfortunately, hang below the level of the table when seated), gave me a light grilling on my opinions of what I had seen; although I figured that they worked for SAP, it wasn't until they stood up that I saw Hilpert's name tag.

By the time that we had our prearranged meeting, then, he knew that I'd seen a product overview, and he'd already heard my views on it, so we could jump right to some of the good stuff.

>>Continue reading "SAPPHIRE: Wolfgang Hilpert on SAP BPM"


Posted Tuesday, May 6, 2008
9:44 AM
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SAPPHIRE: SAP Explains BPM in NetWeaver

It's my first time at SAPPHIRE, and I have one initial impression: this conference is huge. For me, 1,500 people at a conference is big, and this one is ten times that size. The press room is the size of a regular conference's general session ballroom. I just hiked 15 minutes to get to a session. More sessions run simultaneously than you'll find in total at most conferences. There are 30 official conference hotels. Wow. And I have to report that there are five bars of free wifi coverage everywhere in the conference center.

After a review of the massive schedule, I finally made it to a session: Ginger Gatling, SAP NetWeaver BPM Product Manager, giving an overview of the business process management (BPM) component in SAP, including a demo and some thoughts on the future functionality. She started with a discussion of the evolution of BPM, including the drivers that have moved us from the old-style workflow and EAI to the present-day collaborative design environment where multiple people might be working on modeling different components, from human-facing processes to rules. For SAP, however, a lot of this is future-state, not what they have now in the shipping product.


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Posted Monday, May 5, 2008
2:09 PM
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Spotfire Takes Spotlight at TUCON

Speaking at this week's "TUCON 08" TIBCO user conference in San Francisco, Christopher Ahlberg, founder of Spotfire and now president of that TIBCO division, discussed the capabilities of the technology and what's been done to integrate Spotfire into other TIBCO products.

Timely insight — the right information at the right time — is a competitive differentiator for most businesses, and classic business intelligence (BI) just doesn't cut it in many cases. Consumer applications like Google Finance are raising the bar for dynamic visualization techniques, although most of them are fairly inflexible when it comes to viewing or comparing specific data. In other words, we want the data selection and aggregation capabilities of our enterprise systems, and the visualization capabilities of consumer Web applications. Ahlberg sees a number of disruptive BI technologies transforming the platform — in-memory processes, interactive visualization, participatory architecture, mashups — and starting to be able to link to the event-driven world of classic TIBCO.


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Posted Thursday, May 1, 2008
3:09 PM
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Google Exec Cites 5 Gifts of Cloud Computing

I attended IT360 this week, mostly to hear Matthew Glotzbach, director of product management for Google Enterprise. It's a sad commentary on the culture of Canadian IT conferences that this session is entitled "Meet Matthew Glotzbach of Google" in the conference guide, as if he doesn't need to actually talk about anything, just show up here in the frozen north — we Canadians need to work on that "we're not worthy" attitude!

Google's Enterprise division includes, as you might expect, search applications such as site search and dedicated search appliances, but also includes Google Apps, which many of us now use for hosting email, calendaring and document collaboration functions.


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Posted Friday, April 11, 2008
11:47 AM
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Lombardi Upgrades SaaS-Based Modeling

Last week, Lombardi held its second analyst update by teleconference; I found the first one back in January to be informative, and obviously Lombardi had sufficient positive feedback to continue. Strangely enough, we were instructed to embargo information about the new Blueprint until today, although the Blueprint team blogged about it on the weekend.

Phil Gilbert started out with a high-level corporate update, including growth — both new hires and through the channel — and some of the new sales where they continue to compete successfully against larger vendors. However, most of the information was about products and services.


>>Continue reading "Lombardi Upgrades SaaS-Based Modeling"


Posted Tuesday, April 8, 2008
10:26 AM
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Experience!Tech: Searching for a Web 2.0 Clue

I attended Experience!Tech 2008 last week at the MaRS Centre in Toronto — nice to attending a conference in my hometown for a change. The opening day's sessions are beamed to us live from the IDC Directions conference in Boston, so although we have the timeliness of seeing the speakers present, it's not quite the same as seeing them in person.

Unfortunately, it appears that I missed the only good presentation of the opening morning, given by Grover Righter of iMobileInternet, but apparently the slides are online and a number of my peeps were Twittering about it. The rest of the morning's presentations, all provided by IDC executives, sound like guys who are either scrambling to figure out what Web 2.0 is, think that they're teaching Web 2.0 101 to some of the suits in the audience, or inadvertently loaded a 2006 slide deck. Honestly, if I hear one more middle-aged guy talk about how his kids shop/watch TV/live their lives on the Internet (implying, of course, that he still has his executive assistant print out his email for him), I will not be responsible for my actions. Obviously, I'm living in Middle Age 2.0, because I'm sitting in the audience Twittering with the people who are sitting directly beside me, and creating this blog post.


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Posted Tuesday, March 25, 2008
9:40 AM
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BI Goes Mainstream at Procter &Gamble

Philip Bierhoff, Systems Manager at Procter & Gamble, spoke at last week's FASTforward conference about strategies to increase user adoption as business intelligence goes mainstream [Editor's note: it's a topic very much at the center of Cindi Howson's recent feature on "Pervasive BI"]. P&G's Symphony project creates "decision cockpits": dashboards based on specific roles and corporate divisions, and including information ranging from traditional BI reports to documents to news.

The underlying data landscape has moved from their first iteration of a common data warehouse in the mid-'90s with regional servers plus ETL, storage and aggregation, where BI was driven by stored aggregations; to the current atomic data warehouse with a central server plus ETL and storage, where BI is driven by query rewrite — effectively, aggregation on the fly. They also have SAP generating data into SAP/BW; altogether, they have about 65 TB in the data warehouse and 50 TB in SAP/BW.


>>Continue reading "BI Goes Mainstream at Procter &Gamble"


Posted Friday, February 29, 2008
9:07 AM
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Why You Should Love Information Mess

David Weinberger, author of Everything is Miscellaneous, spoke at last week's FASTforward conference (ostensibly the user conference for FAST Search & Transfer) about the power of digital disorder, and how we need to unlearn what we think that we know about the best ways to organize information. He feels that we're approaching the end of the age of information — by which he means a focus on rigidly structured information — and a move away from being "informationalized," where we consider everything to be information even if they're just symbolic representations of reality.

He looked at how many projects, typically physical projects, require a much greater degree of control as they increase in size, but contrasts that with the web, which has growth only because of the lack of control. Control doesn't scale; we just thought that it did, and managed to scale with control by eliminating information.


>>Continue reading "Why You Should Love Information Mess"


Posted Wednesday, February 27, 2008
3:39 PM
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Weaving BPM into the Enterprise

At last week's Gartner BPM Summit, Elise Olding moderated a panel on weaving BPM into the enterprise, with Eric Abecassis, Architecture and Integration Manager with Schlumberger, Jim Boots, Enterprise Architect at Chevron, and Kevin Morgan, Program Manager at Dolby.

Abecassis started with the process-related problems that they had at Schlumberger: processes had to be standardized in order to effectively manage growth and improve execution, reduce the administrative burden on the field people, and improve alignment between business and IT. Their approach was to focus on three main types of activities:


>>Continue reading "Weaving BPM into the Enterprise"


Posted Wednesday, February 13, 2008
9:12 AM
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The State of BPM: Top-Five Trends

Speaking at this week's Gartner BPM Summit in Las Vegas, Jay Simons, VP of Marketing for BEA, presented the company's recent research results on the state of the BPM market, including a survey of 200-plus BEA customers, mostly IT people but spread across vertical markets and geographies. They've also gathered information through their online BPM Lifecycle Assessment.

The results show a number of interesting trends indicating that CIOs and business leaders are focused on improving their processes. Existing customers described how they expect to get their ROI from their BPM implementations, and most expect to see ROI over the next three years.

>>Continue reading "The State of BPM: Top-Five Trends"


Posted Friday, February 8, 2008
1:29 PM
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Gartner BPM Summit: Opening Keynote

I'm here in Vegas for Gartner's 5th BPM Summit, and they're reporting about 1,000 attendees (though I'm not sure if that includes Gartner and vendors). For those of us who attend business process management events religiously, I'm hoping it's not a complete replay of September's BPM Summit in Orlando.

Janelle Hill gave us Gartner's big-picture view of BPM, which will be covered in detail in other sessions throughout the conference. Hill seems to be hitting her stride as Gartner's face of BPM since Jim Sinur left almost a year ago. She started with the now-familiar view of process improvement over the ages, from Deming and Taylorism through TQM, BPR, Six Sigma and a variety of other methodologies and tools since the 1920's. This has changed from a focus on scientific management, to computerized process flow, to package applications as best practice, to flexible and adaptive process.


>>Continue reading "Gartner BPM Summit: Opening Keynote"


Posted Wednesday, February 6, 2008
5:57 AM
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Lombardi Executive Re-org and 2007 Results

Lombardi held an analyst conference call last week in advance of today's press releases — a relatively new format for them — to discuss their executive reorganization against the backdrop of their 2007 results and 2008 strategy. Rod Favaron, CEO (and, until last week, President) and Phil Gilbert, President (formerly CTO) gave us the update. The press releases are here and here.

>>Continue reading "Lombardi Executive Re-org and 2007 Results"


Posted Monday, January 28, 2008
3:40 PM
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Why Integrate Business Processes and Rules?

I sat in on a presentation by Michael zur Muehlen on business processes and rules at the recent IIR/Shared Insights BPM conference. Michael is responsible for Business Process Management courses at Stevens Institute of Technology. He started out with the bottom line on why you want to integrate process and rules:

• Simpler processes
• Higher agility
• Better risk management

Who wouldn't want this? However, he points out that users don't like processes, since they find them abstract (or possibly requiring a more analytic view of the organization) and restrictive (that is, not able to capture all the actual business cases). He also points out the obvious problem with Eclipse-based process modeling tools: they're not friendly to business types, so you end up with technical people maintaining business processes, which usually results in a lot of code and the next generation of legacy systems.


>>Continue reading "Why Integrate Business Processes and Rules?"


Posted Wednesday, December 5, 2007
10:09 AM
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Smart Enough Systems: Change Rules, Not Processes

I'm sure that James Taylor has almost given up on me ever writing a book review of Smart Enough Systems: I wrote a brief advance review back in April that's printed in the book, but nothing since it was released. Recently, I had a chance to finally meet James face-to-face after a couple of years of emailing back and forth. Also, James' situation has changed since the book was released: he left Fair Isaac and is now an independent, working (I think) with his co-author, Neil Raden. Neil, who also I met briefly recently, is an independent consultant and analyst who has been focused on business intelligence for quite a while; James refers to his work as "BI 2.0″ (a term that I think that I invented in my blog in early 2006). The two of them met through James' blog and started the conversation about how someone needed to write a book about this crossover area between business rules and business intelligence.

Just to get started, here's my pre-release review:


>>Continue reading "Smart Enough Systems: Change Rules, Not Processes"


Posted Tuesday, November 6, 2007
9:48 AM
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Good Rules Can Eliminate 65% of Activities

At last week's Business Rules Forum, Kathy Long of the Process Renewal Group talked about how to derive rules from processes and use them as guides to the process. There are a number of process-related problems that can occur when the rules are not explicit: assumed policies, activities with experience as the only guide, and inconsistent (and therefore likely non-compliant) processes.

The key things to consider when analyzing the guides for a process can be focused around what happens at a given activity (and what knowledge is required, what decisions are required, what reports have to be generated) as well as a number of other factors. Long presents a number of questions to ask to drive out the rules and make them explicit.


>>Continue reading "Good Rules Can Eliminate 65% of Activities"


Posted Wednesday, October 31, 2007
9:45 AM
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Business Rules and BI Make Great Bedfellows

David Straus of Corticon gave an engaging presentation here at this week's Business Rules Forum about business rules and business intelligence, starting with the Wikipedia definitions of each. He characterized BI as "understanding" and BR as "action" (not unlike my statement that BI in BPM is about visibility and BR in BPM is about agility). He started with the basic drivers for a business rules management system — agility (speed and cost), business control while maintaining IT compliance, transparency, and business improvement (reduce costs, reduce risk, increase revenue) — and went on to some generalized use cases for rules-driven analysis:

• Analyze transaction compliance, i.e., are the human decisions in a business process compliant with the policies and regulations?

• Analyze the effect of automation with business rules, i.e., when a previously manual step is automated through the application of rules

• Analyze business policy rules change (automated or non-automated)


>>Continue reading "Business Rules and BI Make Great Bedfellows"


Posted Thursday, October 25, 2007
5:09 PM
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Business Rules Forum: Ron Ross on Smart Processes

After a brief intro by Gladys Lam, the executive director of the Business Rules Forum, the conference kicked off with a keynote from Ron Ross, the driving force behind this event and a big name in the business rules community. A couple of things are distracting my attention from his talk: I'm up directly after him, and I'm presenting in this room, which is the main (read: big) conference hall. Let me make my ever-present complaint about passworded wifi in the meeting room and no free wifi or wired internet in the hotel, since I know that my regular readers would be disappointed without that news from the front lines.

Ron and I have exchanged email over the years, but this is our first opportunity to meet face-to-face; I'll also have the chance to meet James Taylor and a few others who I only know from afar. Today, Ron's talking about the shift from business rules to enterprise decisioning. This is the first business rules conference that I've ever attended, which means that most of the attendees likely know a lot more about the subject matter than I do, and most of the sessions will be new material for me.


>>Continue reading "Business Rules Forum: Ron Ross on Smart Processes"


Posted Wednesday, October 24, 2007
6:28 AM
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My Date With Government Processes - Good and Bad

A few months ago, I blogged about the unexpectedly good experience I had at the Canadian passport office, where the process actually worked the way it was supposed to, and rewarded the consumer (me) by accelerating my wait time since I did my own data entry online. I recently had two other government business process experiences: one good, one bad.

The good experience was with NEXUS, a joint program between the Canadian and American governments to allow frequent travelers to replace the long immigration line-ups in both directions with a retinal scan for authentication and a few questions on a touch-screen kiosk. Since I travel across the border fairly regularly, I decided to apply for this, especially after being stuck in a line of 500 people waiting for immigration checks a few times. Friends warned that it took six to seven weeks for the preliminary approval, and that the follow-up interviews were already being scheduled for December. Wrong.


>>Continue reading "My Date With Government Processes - Good and Bad"


Posted Friday, October 19, 2007
5:36 PM
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Forrester: Why BI, BPM and Rules Technologies Will Converge

I'm attended a panel discussion here at the Forrester Technology Leadership Forum on the convergence of the three Bs — business intelligence, business process management and business rules — featuring Mike Gilpin (EA and application development), Boris Evelson (BI) and Colin Teubner (BPM). I covered a tiny bit of this topic in slides 22-24 of my presentation this morning, and will be doing a full-length presentation on this same topic at the Business Rules Forum next month in Orlando, so I'm interested to see if the Forrester analysts have the same thoughts on this subject as I do.

They start with the statement that "design for people, build for change" will drive the convergence of the three B's. Interestingly, although a few people in the room stated that they use BPM and BI together, almost no one raised their hand to the combination of BPM and BR — a combination that I feel is critical to process agility. Gilpin went through a few introductory slides, pointing out that almost no business rules are explicitly defined, but are instead buried within processes and enterprise applications. He sees BI as driving effectiveness in businesses, and the combination of BPM and BR as driving efficiency.


>>Continue reading "Forrester: Why BI, BPM and Rules Technologies Will Converge"


Posted Thursday, September 27, 2007
3:43 PM
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Forrester Says 'Design for People, Build for Change'

Analyst Connie Moore offered the opening keynote, entitled "Design for People, Build for Change: Transforming the Nature of Work," at this week's Forrester Technology Leadership Forum. Her focus is on how business and IT have to work together in order to achieve this, but she likes the term "blended business-IT" rather than "business-IT alignment" because she wants them to be seen as a single entity rather than two separate bodies that need to be aligned in some way. I've heard Moore speaking at other conferences and on webinars previously, usually on the topic of BPM, and it's significant that Forrester puts a BPM analyst in the keynote position at this forum: it really drives home that the key focus here is on process.

She posed three questions about this sort of transformation: why now, what underpins this trend, and how will it unfold?


>>Continue reading "Forrester Says 'Design for People, Build for Change'"


Posted Wednesday, September 26, 2007
10:26 AM
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Gartner BPM Summit: Smith on Performance Metrics

Analyst Michael Smith had a session here at the Gartner BPM Summit on using performance metrics to align business processes with strategy. His area of expertise is performance management, and he's found lately that business process improvement is a growing theme in that sector.

Smith started out by quashing the notion of best-practice business processes: processes are so different between different types of companies that there isn't a single best practice. [I think that there are best practices within industry verticals, but he didn't seem to consider that.] He went on to say that business strategies are, in general, poorly defined, poorly understood and poorly executed, then went on to outline a process for developing a business strategy:

• Define strategic intent
• Define strategic objectives
• Identify performance metrics
• IT strategy and objectives
• Measures of IT performance


>>Continue reading "Gartner BPM Summit: Smith on Performance Metrics"


Posted Wednesday, September 19, 2007
3:33 PM
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Gartner BPM Summit: Gassman on BAM

A session presented by analyst Bill Gassman here on day two of the Gartner BPM Summit was on measuring processes in real time, namely business activity monitoring (BAM), and how it needs to be considered up front as processes are being design and implemented.

Gassman started off with a few definitions — BAM, real-time BI, operational BI, and process-driven BI — with some pretty fuzzy distinctions between some of these, especially in these days of converging functionality in the BI products. He then defined the goals of BAM: to monitor key objectives, anticipate operational risks, and reduce latency between events and actions.

>>Continue reading "Gartner BPM Summit: Gassman on BAM"


Posted Tuesday, September 18, 2007
3:45 PM
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Gartner BPM Summit: Hill on Designing for Change

My third time today for hearing Janelle Hill speak, but I usually find her to be pretty interesting. This time, her topic is "BPM: A Change from Business as Usual", taking a look at what's really new in BPM, how BPM can change the way a company operates, and some BPM use cases.

She started out with a great chart showing what's new and the implications of each of these points; for example, the fact that processes must be effective and transparent, not just efficient, implies that processes must be explicit and not embedded within applications. In discussing the harmonization of incremental improvement and transformative change, she comes back to the phrase "design for change", which I've heard several times today already; interestingly enough, the subtitle of the Forrester IT Leadership Forum where I'm speaking next week is "Design for People, Build for Change", indicating that the analysts are really setting the focus on this concept. This is, of course, the heart of business agility: if something isn't designed and built with the intention that it would be changed frequently, then you're not going to be changing it much.


>>Continue reading "Gartner BPM Summit: Hill on Designing for Change"


Posted Tuesday, September 18, 2007
6:37 AM
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Gartner BPM Summit Day 1: Opening Keynote

Scrambling down to the opening of the Gartner BPM Summit in Orlando this morning — I arrived late last night and didn't get enough sleep, much less a chance to register — I struck up a conversation in the elevator with someone who was already wearing a Gartner conference badge and asked him where the registration area was. He pointed me in the right direction, and said that he hoped that the process was faster than last night, saying that he didn't know what they were running on their systems but that it was very slow. I tossed off my usual comment about systems that don't work well — "probably Windows" — then turned to him and saw the Microsoft logo on his shirt. Great, I'm not even at the conference yet, and I've made my first enemy.

The conference kicked off with a welcome from Daryl Plummer, Bill Rosser and Pascal Winckel [all speakers that I reference at this conference are with Gartner unless otherwise noted]. Plummer started off with an audience vote that showed that there are way more business than technical people here, a great (and fairly unusual) thing for a BPM conference. Like most business-focussed conferences, however, the logistics are not blogging-friendly: there's no wifi, only an Internet area where I can plug into a physical cable, and there's no power at the tables to keep my laptop juiced. In fact, when I ran into Jesper Joergensen from BEA at the break, the first thing that he said to me was "uh oh, no wifi — the conference is going to get a bad review!"


>>Continue reading "Gartner BPM Summit Day 1: Opening Keynote"


Posted Monday, September 17, 2007
2:16 PM
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