BPM in Action

I'm taking a brief break from my recent continuing diatribe about BPM first principles, to prepare for transition to a new job (which I'm thrilled to say will not affect my blogging for ebizQ), and to suggest that you might want to take a close look at a company called Autotask Corp.

As the name implies, the company's software is designed to automate a set of tasks. The set of tasks the company has chosen to automate are those used by providers of managed IT services to run their businesses. Specific processes and services supported range from management of customer relations, projects, and service desks to billing, dispatching, reporting, and time-tracking. And it's Web-based software as a service (SaaS), which means it's accessible from almost any browser-equipped, connected system Microsoft Windows-compatible connected device, optionally including handhelds, and it's available on demand. (No mention of Apple Inc. Macintosh or Linux support, but I'm sure these are coming – and will try to confirm same directly with the company.)

In addition, the company offers several other options, including the option of building other options, via its AutotaskExtend set of application programming interfaces (APIs), tools, and Web services. Autotask customers also have access to the AutotaskExtend Network (AXN), an online community and catalog of available Autotask extensions. (I'm a big fan of this approach, as exemplified by the Altiris Juice network, Salesforce.com, Inc.'s AppExchange and Apex Developer Network, and of course, the Java community pioneered by Sun Microsystems, Inc.)

Now, I understand that many if not most of you are probably not providers of managed IT services. However, I believe solutions such as those from Autotask can provide a wealth of information and market-proven experience that can help you to craft strategies for automating and managing IT operations and practices, whatever business your business is in. And given the flexibility and configuration options, Autotask can probably be put to work effectively in almost any IT organization, (And since free trials of the software are available, it's probably worth the exploration.) Also, the company offers numerous case studies and success stories at its Web site. These can help those of you leading IT and/or BPM efforts, too, by providing examples of how best to pursue initial deployments, and to “market” initial successes.

Every IT organization is increasingly called upon to act like a service provider or utility. In some cases, this actually means bidding and competing with outside alternative providers for enterprise projects. Whatever those of you responsible for such efforts can learn from those who are succeeding as commercial services providers cannot help but be helpful. At the very least, you should make sure that any IT service provider used or considered by your enterprise manages its business with Autotask or some similarly comprehensive and integrated set of solutions and practices.

Posted by mdortch in BPM • Business Knowledge Management • Collaboration • Software as a Service  |  Permalink  | Comments (0)  | TrackBacks (0)

What IT-empowered tools are best to use for collecting information about who's using what when, where, why, and how? Well, as every industry analyst tries to answer almost every question, “that depends.”

If you've already got IT infrastructure monitoring and/or management tools in place, explore them carefully for their abilities to generate useful workflow-mapping information. Remember, the goal is to gather information without intruding on those workflows, or coming across like “Big Brother” on electronic steroids. (This is why process is more important that tools in this endeavor.)

Also note that numerous vendors are starting to focus more and more on features that specifically enable capture and mapping of user-driven workflows. Altiris, now owned by Symantec Corp., has made several moves in this direction, and made a lot of noise about workflow just after the acquisition closed in April. Expect more such noise later this year and beyond, especially at the company's ManageFusion event in Las Vegas in October (where I plan to be speaking, by the way).

Beyond client-side management, vendors of solutions for monitoring and screening of e-mail, instant messaging (IM), and other forms of collaboration and sharing of enterprise intellectual property (IP) can also be used to identify and map what users are doing with what. Some such solutions, such as those from companies such as FaceTime Communications, Inc., Orchestria Corp., and Workshare Inc., offer both useful workflow-mapping information and immediate security benefits. This combination may make them strong candidates at enterprises considering deploying software for such functions.

And of course, there are tools dedicated specifically to the capture and mapping of business workflows and processes, including my current favorite, GemWorX FlowModeler, mentioned here previously. Whether or not such purpose-specific tools can be cost-justified depends on a variety of factors. However, it's critical to note that the lack of such tools should not be seen as making such capture and mapping efforts impossible. Perhaps more cumbersome, but still doable, and worth doing.

Ultimately, the goal is to combine good processes with effective tools, to capture and map as accurately, easily, and unobtrusively as possible what users are doing, and with what they're doing what they're doing. Such information is absolutely essential to development, deployment, and management of effective business processes. It's also essential to IT's continuing efforts to provide maximum beneficial support to all key business tasks and processes.

If you've got comments about specific tools you like and/or don't like in this context, or relevant questions, post'em below and/or e-mail'em to me. Meanwhile, I'll start thinking about what happens next, after you know more about who's doing what with what for whom at your enterprise...

Posted by mdortch in BPM • Business Knowledge Management • IT Infrastructure Management  |  Permalink  | Comments (0)  | TrackBacks (0)

Figuring out what users are using and how they're using what they're using is a critical first principle for effective BPM. However, doing so is both straightforward and complex, and both obvious and subtle. This apparently self-contradictory state is possible because...well, because humans are involved.

When you run into a friend or acquaintance, greet one another, and exchange pleasantries, it's typically a brief, simple conversation. However, dozens if not hundreds of conscious and subconscious verbal and non-verbal internal and external communications support each such apparently simple exchange. (Simple examples include the ability of each participant to recognize one another, to determine and use the right verbiage for the exchange, and to understand multifaceted constructs such as “go to lunch” and/or “have a drink.”)

When someone decides to create a new report at work, sits down, opens a new document, and starts scouring the enterprise's intellectual property (IP) for source data, a similar situation ensues. Yet at many if not most enterprises, there is no documentation guiding that worker, nor any formal, proven, repeatable processes for that person to use as a starting point. Oftentimes, there isn't even an accurate, complete catalog of reports that have been generated previously. The result is much frustrating wheel-spinning and unnecessary, potentially conflict- and confusion-producing wheel reinvention.

However, it is unwise, if not impossible, to impose processes intended to capture every piece of information about every task performed by every user. Such processes, unless very cleverly crafted and implemented, will almost always come across and odious and intrusive, and evidence that the company has little to no trust and/or confidence in its workers. This situation typically leads to workers ignoring or “working around” such processes, and not being very happy with their jobs or bosses. Since retention is easier and cheaper than acquisition and assimilation, and higher worker productivity and satisfaction cheaper than the alternatives, the impetus to avoid such disgruntlement is great.

Instead, IT decision-makers must collaborate with line-of-business decision-makers and, where practical, directly with workers. The goal of such collaboration is to convince those constituents that greater knowledge about what they do and how they do it will help IT to help them better. Then, IT must demonstrate willingness and commitment to include input from users in decisions that affect those users, and to take that input seriously. A good start is to work with users and their leaders to determine how best to collect such input in the first place. Combinations of online and in-person interviews and surveys, both anonymous and personal, are all options worth considering. Final choices must be made based on the specific information needed and desired, and the preferences of the subjects. But all such discussions must begin with and be framed by processes that focus on the shared goals of greater IT efficiency and user productivity and satisfaction.

At many enterprises, a first useful step toward these goals is the formation of a team that includes IT and business decision-makers, as well as users or user representatives chosen by users. (IT sometimes attempts to select or provide these representatives. When this happens, the information they gather from users is almost always filtered and interpreted in ways that create mismatch between what users actually want and need and what IT delivers.)

If you've got ideas for processes that can help IT decision-makers gather useful information about real-life human workflows, or questions about such things, do let me know. Meanwhile, thoughts on relevant tools to come...

Posted by mdortch in BPM • Business Knowledge Management • Collaboration  |  Permalink  | Comments (1)  | TrackBacks (0)

No, those ain't typo's in that headline – I MEAN “IT,” as in “information technology,” and not just a generic “it.” As you may have read here previously, I believe one of the first basic principles those pursuing BPM and BI excellence must address is finding and fixing what's broken. Once that's done, the very next basic set issues to address should answer the musical question, “How well is IT supporting the business?”

An immediately obvious follow-up question reminds me of a joke. What's the world's greatest invention? The Thermos(r) bottle. Why? Because it keeps hot things hot and cold things cold. Why does that make it the world's greatest invention? How does it know? (Insert pained groans here. I'll wait. Enjoy. Now, back to work.)

That is to say, if you're going to figure out how well or poorly IT is supporting the business, how would you do so? Well, the only reliable way I know is to assess how people are using IT to do their work today, and how well those efforts are working.

This is easy to say, but like much about BPM, BI, and business-driven IT, tricky and challenging on many levels to do. Basically, it requires processes and solutions that help business and IT decision-makers to answer those questions many of us were told in our youth that every good news story should answer – who, what, when, where, why, and how. In this context, that means knowing who's using what IT-enabled resources, as well as when, where, why, and how those users are using those resources. Journalism 101, applied to the business IT infrastructure. On demand. Everywhere. No pressure.

This is a big goal. However, every step toward it can help you know valuable information about how well your business IT investments are actually contributing to business success – or how poorly. And while you're building, documenting, managing, and refining processes aimed at this goal, vendors are toiling mightily at delivering solutions that can help. More about both processes and tools for capturing and leveraging real-life workflows to come!

Posted by mdortch in BPM • Business Knowledge Management • IT Infrastructure Management  |  Permalink  | Comments (0)  | TrackBacks (0)

Last time was about processes intended to help you and your colleagues figure out what applications, resources, services, and workflows were most critical to your business, and how well and/or not well IT is supporting them. This time is about tools intended to enable and support said processes.

Regarding tools, well, you've got to start with what you've got, on the assumption that there isn't budget or bandwidth to go out and find, then deploy and manage something new. This is especially true before investing significantly in any particular BPM and/or BI solution, even if it's "free." Free software, as valuable and powerful as it is, still requires time and energy, and sometimes money, to deploy effectively. And it requires just as firm and solid an operational foundation as anything else that's critical to your business.

Fortunately, you can learn a lot about what's working well and what's not by gathering and analyzing any and all available information about the IT and intellectual property (IP) resources people use to do their jobs. This information, coupled with data about things like common support problems and their resolutions, can help tremendously in efforts to identify and prioritize business-critical tasks and resources, and the IT and IP elements that enable them. This is something one can literally begin with little more than sticky notes, spreadsheets, and/or text documents.

However, if there are more sophisticated tools available for infrastructure and/or operational monitoring and/or workflow mapping, this is the time to use'em. In fact, this information-gathering process is so important and potentially valuable, it may justify investing in such tools where they are not already in place. This is particularly true given the growing number of open source and trial software offerings in this ever-evolving space.

Whatever tools are used, it can also be both helpful and illuminating for IT to share the findings of these information-gathering efforts with the users and line-of-business decision-makers those IT people are supporting. This presents the opportunity to refine and enhance those statistical findings and aggregations with anecdotal and/or survey-based "real-life" user input and feedback. This is likely to be much more reliable than the results of the sadly common and commonly ineffective practice of designating IT staffers as user ambassadors or representatives. It is also a way to demonstrate that IT is ready, willing, and able to listen and respond effectively to users, something many users and some IT people seriously doubt, I assure you. Let the users speak for themselves!

With both processes and tools, start small and focused, but start. Gather this information, and develop processes and solutions for gathering, managing, and taking advantage of it in the future. Not only can and should it inform your determinations about what's really critical to your business, it can help begin an effective dialogue among business, IT and senior executive decision-makers. Even if your enterprise is sufficiently compact and flat that those are all the same person.

By the way, there's some very interesting and refreshing additional takes on working with what you've got in a recently published book, by my industry colleague and ebizQ blogmate, decision management expert James Taylor (with co-author Neil Raden). The book is "Smart Enough Systems: How to Deliver Competitive Advantage by Automating Hidden Decisions," and the title only hints at the breadth and depth of common-sense, actionable advice you'll find within. (You can visit Amazon.com to examine some of said advice from the comfort of your Internet-connected computer.) And in an interesting bit of synchronicity, the book came out on June 29, the same date as the iPhone, one of which you can qualify to win by completing the ebizQ event processing survey. See? Good processes really do help tie everything together better!)

Posted by mdortch in BPM • Business Knowledge Management • IT Infrastructure Management  |  Permalink  | Comments (0)  | TrackBacks (0)

In case you're just stumbling across this particular line of thought/discourse/diatribe on my part, I'm currently focused on the argument that effective BI, BPM, and related goals begin with some basic first principles. Preferably before any significant investments are made in any particular "solution." And if this isn't new to you, welcome back, and to our next installment. Thanks for buying into the argument as made so far. Or at least remaining curious enough about it to have come this far. You might need to get out more often, but I do appreciate the support.

My first first principle is to find what's broke, fix it, and put processes into place that make the processes of finding what's broke and fixing it consistent, replicable, and scalable. No mean feat, but just a beginning.

I offer as the next most important first principle the ability to figure out if IT as deployed is delivering maximum business benefit. This is important because almost every critical function of almost every business on the planet relies on IT, at least in part. So once the IT and business infrastructure leaks are repaired, it's time to compare the current course with all relevant maps and plans.

Of course, success with this endeavor requires both robust processes and effective, well-designed tools. Regarding processes, as I've said previously, effective process management relies heavily on Socratic, question-and-answer dialogue. This means it would be helpful here to start with a set of basic questions the answers to which will provide foundations for effective processes.

The fundamental question to be asked and answered here goes something like this: Are all elements of the infrastructure providing optimal support to all business-critical applications, goals, requirements, and services? But here are just some of the questions you'll need to ask and answer before coming close to being able to answer that fundamental question effectively (in no particular order).

What are the applications, goals, requirements, and services critical to the business? Which are the most critical? How do I/we know? What are the most relevant metrics for making these determinations, and how are they applied and their results evaluated?

Do I/we know the answers to all of the above questions, whenever we need to know them? If so, what are the processes and tools that make this knowledge possible, and how well and regularly are they reviewed and tested? If not, how do I/we know that, and what can and should I/we do (and/or not do) to best address this deficit?

And of course, the always-popular recurring imperative – are the processes for determining the answers to these questions agreed upon, documented, enforced, managed, and subject to regular review and refinement?

That's enough about process in this context – for now, anyway. Next time: tools! Meanwhile, if you have opinions, reactions, or relevant experiences to share, please post them below and/or e-mail them to me. Thanks, and come back soon. This could get interesting…

Posted by mdortch in BPM • Business Knowledge Management • Collaboration • IT Infrastructure Management  |  Permalink  | Comments (0)  | TrackBacks (0)

As I've been prattling on about recently, it's critical to start down the path toward BPM, BI, and related goals by focusing first on some basics. By my lights, one of the first and most important of these is to find, identify, repair, and report on anything and everything that's broken in the IT and/or business infrastructure.

This is as critical as ensuring that you've got a firm and sturdy foundation underneath you before attempting to build anything substantial and stable. And to achieve this goal effectively, you're going to need documented, effective, enforced, and proven processes, just like you need for everything else. Otherwise, every break or failure becomes a fire drill, and every effort to address every problem will likely end up reinventing wheels that already exist. This ad hoc approach works sometimes, but only inconsistently. It also opens up your enterprise to the risk that what fixes Problem A breaks the fix that was implemented to resolve Problem B. Or vice-versa.

You've probably already seen this happen, when a software "update" meant to patch or fix a previous problem creates a new one. Well, imagine the same thing happening dozens or hundreds of times a week or month, depending on the size of your enterprise, and you can begin to see the true scope of the problem. Without processes focused on finding, fixing, and ultimately avoiding infrastructure problems, those problems will consume precious resources that should be focused on helping people do more work better, and refining the processes underlying that work.

Process-driven infrastructure problem-solving is also the only way I've seen to achieve real, sustainable reduction of problems that hinder operations and drag down technological and user performance. Once there are processes in place for addressing problems effectively, those processes themselves can be expanded and refined to reduce or eliminate problems that stubbornly recur.

Of course, to find and fix problems in your infrastructure, you need knowledge about said infrastructure. This is where tools for monitoring, alarms, and alerts can be very useful on the IT side of things. When combined with input from businesspeople about the frequency and relative severity recurring problems, such tools can be focused on those problems, in ways that lead to effective problem-solving processes. These can then be adapted and applied to other tools and other problems, leading eventually to a consistent, enterprise-wide, process-driven approach to finding and fixing problems across entire IT and business infrastructures.

At least, that's what I think. More on both relevant processes and tools coming up shortly. Meanwhile, do let me know your thoughts on this important matter, and how effectively or ineffectively it's being addressed where you work. Maybe together, we can implement more effective, consistent processes for talking about this particular challenge, here and at your workplace.

Posted by mdortch in BPM • Business Knowledge Management • IT Infrastructure Management  |  Permalink  | Comments (0)  | TrackBacks (0)

What the heck am/was I talking about last time out?

Here's what I was and am talking about. I, along with many of my fellow BPM and BI industry observers, are apparently increasingly finding the same kinds of things. One of the most prevalent of these: business processes are difficult if not impossible to manage if there are no formal processes (not to mention useful tools) in place to capture and document said business processes.

And beyond capture, there's documenting, which includes all of the links connecting all of the key processes with their sub-processes and supporting IT processes and tools. Then there's achieving consensus on the priorities and importance of the most strategic processes. And managing and maintaining up-to-date information about all of the above. And this is all just top-line, broad-brush stuff. All of these things get recapitulated repeatedly as decision-makers and their teams drill further down into this morass.

Now, there are several really good tools to help with all of this – but those tools are without business value until and unless they are accompanied, supported, and surrounded by strong, repeatable, well-documented processes. Such processes are even necessary to identify, compare, and select candidate solutions and vendors, and to manage relationships effectively with those vendors that get chosen.

What all of this means is that effectively, every business task and decision ought to start from a process-centric foundation, to be consistent with corporate policies and goals, and to be easy to repeat and scale as necessary. Which brings us back to the "first principles" I mentioned previously.

In the field of content and intellectual property management, one of the most persistent and pervasive problems is information capture. That is to say, it's relatively easy to impose content management rules and tools on newly created, electronic content. The real sticky challenges come with trying to impose those rules and tools on already-existing (often paper) information. It's difficult to do, but if it's not done, content management is inconsistent, creating all kinds of risks and opportunities for error.

The same thing is true with process management. Until and unless it is sufficiently pervasive, ubiquitous, and invisible to users, it will not be applied equally to every resource, task, and user, creating significant opportunities for operational, technological, and other business risks. This is, in essence, the "first-mile" problem that bedevils and challenges many if not most efforts at business analysis, business intelligence (BI), BPM, and what I and others refer to as business knowledge management (BKM).

And it's not just me thinking these things. Check out this quote from an e-mail sent to me by Mark Talaba, VP of marketing and sales at Global Enterprise Managers, Inc., makers of GemworX FlowModeler, in response to my initial rant on this current "back to basics" theme.

"In dozens of conversations with 'BPM-seekers', I have been told that organizations do not feel they are "ready for BPM." Why? Because they are (and have been, for a long while) having a hard time just documenting their human-driven processes. I believe that this stems from the IT/software development orientation of most BPM toolsets. Both the methods and the notation are distracting and intimidating to those on the business side."

I'll have more to say about GemworX FlowModeler soon. In the meantime, though, please keep in mind that until and unless you and your organization go back to first principles, no investment in any BPM tool or solution will deliver maximum business value – if it delivers any. And those first principles, whether the ones I outlined previously or others, must include efforts to capture, define, prioritize, and rationalize the critical business processes already in place. These steps are essential to building the common vocabulary and taxonomy necessary for productive, inclusive conversations among business and IT people about BI, BKM, BPM, continuous improvement, enterprise transformation, and the like.

Speaking of business processes, ebizQ is conducting a survey on event processing, which can also contribute valuable fundamental information to process capture, documentation, and improvement efforts. And, every complete response is eligible to win an iPhone! So if you haven't yet, please take the survey here, while waiting for more rants from me…

Posted by mdortch in BPM • Business Knowledge Management • Collaboration • IT Infrastructure Management  |  Permalink  | Comments (0)  | TrackBacks (0)