BPM in Action

Co-incident with the insurance industry’s Association for Cooperative Operations Research and Development (Acord)/Loma conference in Nevada, insurance-industry-specific BPM press releases are hitting the wires. (By the way, LOMA has been around for almost a century and I cannot find the meaning of the acronym; the “L,” I believe, stands for life insurance. Anyone that knows, please send me an email or leave a comment.)

Patni announced a new BPM-based framework for insurers. It incorporates Business Process Management (BPM) from Global 360 and Business Rules Management technology from Corticon, as well as Patni’s insurance reference model that covers all lines of business. Patni said it chose Global 360 and Corticon because they have been tuned to the insurance industry. Conversely, Patni joined Global 360’s partner program.

Pegasystems has followed with a claim servicing package. The new contact center framework, CPM for Insurance, centers around an intent-driven approach with capabilities needed to operate multi-channel, including screens, scripts, processes, scenarios and rules that be modified without additional programming.

The announcements highlight the re-emphasized importance of industry specificity in BPM. After all, early BPM grew out of industries such as insurance and legal. Conversely, BPM is only a late entry in the manufacturing and healthcare delivery space. Increasingly, it will not be enough for a software or service supplier to offer you a one-size-fits-all BPM approach. Instead we expect the most successful BPM suppliers to hone and productize their industry domain expertise just as the ERP and other packaged applications suppliers have done over the last 15 years.

As with the ERP industry 15 years ago, this will be done in partnership with services providers such as Patni. Even one of the biggest services providers, IBM, uses partnerships as illustrated with another BPM-related insurance industry announcement out of Nevada with Thunderhead.

ebizQ plans to follow this trend closely and invites you to provide information about industry-specific BPM products and services for our research file. I can be reached at dennis@ebizq.net.

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A recent Xconomy article celebrated the 25th anniversary of Pegasystems, a company that clearly highlights the technology and business model evolution behind business process management (BPM).

When analysts have their annual debates about who the leading BPM suppliers are and who to count when answering that question—dancing on the head of a pin over workflow vs. BPEL vs. document management vs. SOA, and so forth—we often forget to include SAP, which has really been leading BPM all along. The problem is that to call SAP the BPM leader you have to recognize that it’s because of SAP R/3’s 8000 prepackaged business process sets. A few years ago SAP figured out that maybe everyone did not want to use only the 8000 business-process-set possibilities that SAP had figured out for them. Belatedly SAP began selling its NetWeaver middleware separately as a BPM tool. (For anyone that wants to argue that SAP tried to sell ABAP back in 1996, I agree. But let’s take it offline.)

Pegasystems figured out this desire by users for more choice even earlier. Just as SAP began as an ERP software supplier, Pegasystems began as a bank-platform application supplier in the 80s. (The platform is the place in old-fashioned banks where you used to “step up” to deal with the loan manager or the administrator that was going to open an account for you.) In the 1990s Pegasystems morphed into a customer relationship management (CRM) application supplier, realizing that most of the business process sets that support dealing with customers on the “platform” of a bank apply equally to the front office in other industries.

But much sooner than many applications suppliers, Pegasystems figured out that its customers wanted the flexibility to use its “middleware” to integrate their business processes their own way. Pegasystems moved to a BPM message early this decade and has been strengthening its related technology ever since. Each transition (banking to CRM and CRM to BPM) caused a hiccup for the company but it seems to have weathered the storm.

Congratulations on the anniversary, Pegaystems. Many other applications suppliers never figured out that their customers wanted flexibility and they no longer exist as any kind of technology supplier (or exist as only one of the many pieces of Infor).

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In an upcoming ebizQ article to be featured in this BPM section, I dig into a question that has underlay a lot of my research for the last 15 years. Is ERP superior to BPM or is it the other way around? Of course, 15 years ago no one called it BPM; it was workflow. And the term ERP had just metamorphed from MRP II (which completely confused people outside of manufacturing but that's another blog post).

Without giving away the answer to my question before you read the article, let me quote one sentence from the conclusion:

"For BPM to really fit at the top of the stack, it cannot just support workflow or just support integration."

I noticed that Intalio made an interesting announcement last week that addresses the issue. When it looks for partners, Intalio appears to be looking for software functionality that combines its features (which tilt toward integration) with other products that fill similar customer needs, in this case workflow management. The result is a platform on which users can structure many IT requirements. The result, without getting into a buzzword battle, is BPM as service oriented architecture (SOA) platform because the many products that are needed can all best be instantiated as services.

The particular Intalio announcement involved Liferay, Inc., creators of Liferay Portal. Together, Intalio says, the products allow employees to have a common interface to manage their daily workload. The portal enables a single integrated view of the user’s calendar, email, task list and whatever other functions the employee or IT department includes. Intalio also partners with the Mule and WSO2 ESBs, Alfresco ECM, the Drools business rules engine, and the JBoss application server but the arrangement with Liferay looks like the first that deals with the applications (i.e., ERP) layer of the stack.

Where might this trend go from here? Well for example Intalio is one of the many companies that SAP Ventures has invested in (and to be clear, Intalio has investors other than SAP). So maybe we could begin to see some combination of SAP enterprise services with Intalio and other BPM integration products other than NetWeaver. All those Infor functions need to be decomposed over the next 10 years to keep tens of thousands of mid-sized companies humming; they could be made to work with TIBCO BPM or with Metastorm. Microsoft Great Plains modules broken into services to run on.... And so forth. And so forth.

BPM as SOA platform is an idea whose time has come.

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Earlier this month, IBM announced that it has integrated its FileNet BPM offering with Cognos 8 (which IBM also owns) and its business intelligence features. The company has also transformed its January acquisition of AptSoft into IBM WebSphere Business Events, a “BPM Suite” designed to ease and speed the integration of BPM, BI, and event processing.

Whatever one wants to say or argue about whether or not this is a suite or a portfolio, and whether or not it represents a new set of solutions or old wine in new bottles, this is a meaningful development. It demonstrates that:
1. IBM is serious about integrating its FileNet technologies with BI solutions;
2. IBM is serious about integrating event-related features and processing with BPM and BI; and
3. IBM is committed to integration of BI, BPM, and event processing with/via service-oriented architectures (SOAs).

This mirrors the continuing evolution of The Big Mash-Up in enterprises of all sizes and types. Increasingly, by my lights, anyway, users are seeing BI, BPM, and analytics as tools for answering questions about “who, what, where, and why,” event-driven features and event processing as tools for answering “when,” and SOAs as answers to “how.” A construction that may be a bit inelegant, but begins to shed light on some of the forces driving The Big Mash-Up.

And IBM isn’t the only vendor heading down this path. BEA Systems, for example, is talking increasingly about the “Event-Driven SOA.” Oracle offers an “Event-Driven Architecture Suite,” an element of what the company calls “SOA 2.0.” And there’s more to come, from familiar and emerging vendors.

This is a big and growing deal. If you’d like to read more about it, check out my Aberdeen Group Analyst Insight, “Building Event-Driven Architectures: Many Paths, One Mountain.” And if you haven’t yet done so, check out my Benchmark Study, “Performance in a Service-Oriented Architecture World,” while it’s still available at no cost for a now-VERY-limited time, as the marketeers like to say. (If you’re quick and have 10 minutes to spare, you can still take my survey on application and infrastructure monitoring and management, which entitles you to FREE copies of the SOA performance study AND the report to be based on the survey when that’s published. Such a deal, as we former Brooklynites like to say!)

Posted by mdortch in BPM • Business Knowledge Management • Current Events • Enterprise Information Integration • Event-Driven Architecture • IBM • IT Infrastructure Management • SOA • The Big Mash-Up  |  Permalink  | Comments (0)  | TrackBacks (0)

Lombardi had a couple of interesting announcements during the week of April 7 so I hooked up with its Director of Marketing, Wayne Snell, to get the background and to find out how the two announcements work together.

First Lombardi announced that its 1-year-old Blueprint service is now into its ’08 release. Lombardi believes that someone within an organization is probably thinking about a business process management (BPM) project for a year or more before the organization gets serious. Blueprint is an enabler for that person, a sort of Dr. Phil for BPM and it’s free (not open source but free). Blueprint puts the Lombardi name in front of at least one person within the organization during that year.

At a little higher level, a fee-based professional edition of Blueprint lets a group of analysts and end users talk to together about BPM before a project begins while being able to import from Visio and export to the Business Process Management Notation (BPMN) format. Either way, users can simply point their browser at the Blueprint URL, log in, and start “discovering” and documenting business process sets without training and without even having to download or install anything.

A second April 8 announcement takes the process to a third step, bringing professional BPM services into the conversation. This is the new news for the week of April 7. Lombardi BPM services called Lombardi Process Definition packages combine Blueprint and other Lombardi BPM technology with Lombardi experts. They are fixed-price 1-, 2- or 3-week offerings with templates to help the enterprise find and agree on such important BPM project factors as metrics, “as is” and “to be” process maps, a detailed process optimization roadmap, service-level agreements (SLA) and a business case detailing potential return.

When the BPM talking stops and the doing BPM starts, Lombardi hopes you’ll chose their technology but even if you don’t, you’ll have the process maps (if you use the free service), the maps and the BPMN notation, and so forth (if you use the professional edition of Blueprint), and/or all the rest of the deliverables if you go the package route.

The Lombardi BPM technology, called Teamworks for those not aware of the company, consists of an execution and analytical core product (which is a Java application that runs on JBoss or other JEE application server), a front-end authoring environment for modeling (which is an Eclipse plug-in for BPMN models—see my article on BPM standards here--you have to join the ebizQ Gold Club but there is no charge). One version of the front end is designed for process analysts another for what Lombardi calls an integration analyst. There is also a selection of end-user-oriented plugins
• for Microsoft Office
• for Microsoft Sharepoint
• for organization management, which enables “virtual matrix optimization” of matrix managed business process

If you are a Lombardi Teamworks user, drop me a line at dennis@ebizq.net and let me know what you think.

-- Dennis Byron

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I'm getting on the bandwagon for Michael's term, The Big Mash-up.

As Michael defines it, The Big Mash-Up is a:

"BPM initiative in concert with EII, ILM, and/or MDM... plus event-driven architectures (EDAs) and service-oriented architectures (SOAs)"

My only nitpick is that I would add collaboration functionality too.

In some recent research I did that is excerpted here on ebizQ, all the suppliers I interviewed noted that monitoring process flow dynamically is the way to add business activity monitoring (BAM)-based ILM to the BPM middleware feature list. That is one piece of Michael's vision. Getting data and information into the mix by EII and MDM is an important additive. A couple of years ago when I was at IDC, we were calling the combination of BPM, EII and MDM "intelligent process automation." I do not know if they kept the term after I left but Michael's description is much catchier anyways.

TIBCO has some interesting pre-packaged offerings along these lines and SAP and Oracle will have equivalent feature/function lineups as soon as they digest Business Objects and BEA respectively. In a recent webinar, presented here on ebizQ, BEA highlighted some survey results from January 2008 about the way BPM, Collaboration and Social Computing are converging. Metastorm nears this functionality when you remember that it is the combination of Commercequest, legacy Metastorm, Process Competence, Proforma, and Spotlight Data. Appian, Cordys, Global 360, Intalio and Software AG/WebMethods are other suppliers I have spoken with recently that appear to understand the need.

Caution: this is an extremely slippery-when-wet slope. If you are interested in tying pieces of your operation together this way--and you should be--start small and expect some hiccups.
1. Line up some business partners and get them involved in the planning; do not spring a new way of doing business with you on them some sunny Monday morning.
2. Know your data sources when it comes to your EII plans and budget extra to get some one to scrub and normalize it squeakly clean for you.
3. Even though you want to start with a focused operational area as a trial, think through your entire taxonomy to test the MDM thoroughly.
4. Fully rolled out, it will be hard to get all of this to work well together without an EDA or an SOA. But it would be technically possible to deploy all of the functionality on a more classical client/server infrastructure for a focused test.

And as Michael says, if anyone is thinking of doing a project like this, let us know of your progress.

-- Dennis Byron

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As I’ve mentioned here previously, I (along with some other industry observers whose opinions I respect, sometimes more than my own) fervently believe we’re watching the colliding convergence of multiple technologies. These include, but are not limited to, BPM, event-driven architectures (EDAs), enterprise information integration (EII), information lifecycle management (ILM), master data management (MDM), and service-oriented architectures (SOAs).

This time out, I want to throw out some more detailed musings about the forces driving BPM closer to EII, ILM, and MDM. While these latter three areas are overlapping and often only vaguely defined, they all attempt to address the same core needs. As I see it, there are two that matter most.

Need the First: The ability to base every business action, decision, and process on the most accurate, consistent, secure, and timely information available, without fail.

Need the Second: The ability to answer the “Journalism 101” questions about that information – who’s using what, when, where, why, and how – accurately and completely, on demand at any time.

These are the needs underlying increasing industry focus on “one version of the truth,” a phrase cited frequently by those focused on tasks or goals such as data quality or management of customer or product information.

But meeting these needs as completely and consistently as possible is also essential if BPM is to succeed and deliver maximum business value. Processes developed, enforced or revised based on inaccurate, inconsistent, or just plain wrong information are opportunities to make what we called sardonically in my young analyst days “career-limiting decisions.”

But don’t just take my word for it. Recent survey-based research conducted by me and my august colleagues at Aberdeen Group finds that companies using or planning MDM know more about “time to information,” the time between business activity and delivery of useful information to decision-makers, than those with no MDM activities or plans. Aberdeen research also finds that most companies are pursuing EDA plans, and that those companies also pursuing SOA and/or MDM plans are going after EDAs more aggressively.

Now, even if you could build an EDA or an SOA without BPM, I’m not sure I’d want to see the results. And even if you have no plans for EDAs or SOAs, the more business-critical your processes become, the more they require effective management, and the more that management requires the best information available.

Drop me a line if you’d like to see the Aberdeen research I’ve mentioned. Also please drop a line or post a comment if you’re pursuing BPM initiatives in concert with EII, ILM, and/or MDM, or if you have supporting or contrarian ideas about this particular element of The Big Mash-Up.

Posted by mdortch in BPM • Business Knowledge Management • Enterprise Information Integration • Event-Driven Architecture • Information Lifecycle Management • SOA  |  Permalink  | Comments (0)  | TrackBacks (0)