BPM in Action

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)

Dennis Byron, my new ebizQ BPM “blogmate” and one of my favorite pundits, wrote recently about Appian and Enterprise Rent-a-Car. I love the idea of “renting BPM,” and agree with Dennis completely that it’s something we could sooner rather than later, and not necessarily just from Appian.

I found another recent announcement equally interesting. In February, Vitria announced M3O, an environment it claims “empowers business users to directly model, manage, monitor and optimize their business processes.”

If you talk with senior executives at other BPM companies, as I have done recently, you hear several terms and variations repeated with increasing frequency. A distillation of what I’ve heard, without quite so much release-related rigor, comes out very close to the Vitria announcement.

That is to say, what users apparently want and need – or at least what vendors think users want and need now – is the ability to model processes, then execute those model processes immediately and directly, with as much IT cooperation as available and as little required IT intervention as possible.

A single view of the process, the data it accesses, and its effects, in a secure “sandbox” that allows near-real-time manipulation and optimization, without disrupting business operations. Rapid collaboration between and among the businesspeople driving processes and the IT people managing the infrastructures that enable those processes.

You get the idea. Think of it as a kind of “BPM Live.”

Now, Vitria’s not the only vendor of BPM or related solutions pointing in this general direction. I expect to see more such announcements soon and frequently, especially as more “rental”/software-as-a-service (SaaS) alternatives for BPM and related functions appear. I think you should expect the same, as part of what I, Joe McKendrick and other members of the “punditocracy” appear to be predicting with greater frequency – something I’m calling, at least for now, “The Big Mash-Up.” That’s BPM, plus event-driven architectures (EDAs), enterprise information integration (EII), information lifecycle management (ILM), master data management (MDM), and service-oriented architectures (SOAs), among other significant IT initiatives.

Research I’m conducting at Aberdeen Group is unearthing high levels of interdependency and “cross-pollination” among such efforts. You can read more about it in the recent Aberdeen reports I wrote on EII and SOA performance, both of which are available at no cost at the Aberdeen Group Web site for, as they say, a limited time only.

More to come on this. Lots more. Stay tuned – and make sure to make Dennis feel welcome, too!

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

Appian announced today that Enterprise Rent-A-Car has gone live with an Appian-Enterprise-based business process management (BPM) solution for Enterprise’s IT department. A couple of things surprised me about the announcement.

First, Enterprise is bigger than Hertz and Avis. The reason is that they get most of their business renting to those of us whose car is in the shop or when we otherwise need a car near our homes. Being the furthest from the gate in big airports hasn’t hurt them at all. The new solution, called Request Online, is dedicated to 1500 IT guys that fulfill product and service requests from Enterprise’s more than 65,000 employees worldwide.

Second, Appian is doing well in its strategy to widen the circle of industries it supports. Despite its Vienna, VA location, it now has a lot more than just U.S. government business.

Which led me to think maybe the way to grow BPM usage is the way Enterprise grew its rental car business. Go where the real need is rather than just to the airports. So I caught up with Malcolm Ross, Appian’s director of product management, to learn more.

From its legacy in the portal/knowledge-management (KM) space, Appian has built its functionality into a full blown BPM suite. In turn, it's built on a Java base following the Unified Modeling Language (UML) and the XML Process Definition Language (xPDL). (These are solid standards all, and which seem to be doing what standards should do without the interference of the European Union and Document Freedom Day groupies--see my recent rants about the ODF-OOXML battles). From an open source perspective, Appian comes with JBoss out of the box but of course works with WebSphere and WebLogic. It makes use of Lucene search engine as well. Not open source but Appian’s doing some real interesting stuff with KX Systems Kdb.

But the good news is that users don’t have to worry about all that technology stuff that I like to obsess about. Appian’s Form and Rules Designers and other real-user-facing components all work vis a straight Web interface (no need for Flash, plug-ins, etc.). That’s important for security requirements, which is key to many of Appian's government customers. But it is also good for ease of use for any customer. More important are the ease of Appian BPM implementation templates developed over the 10 years since it was founded. Examples are available for procurement in federal government, for wealth management with rules for credit scoring, a program with Instill to build a quality management solution for the food/service industry. Industry by industry, the Enterprise deal looks like it might be the entrée to a powerful IT Help Desk template.

And why stop with IT help desks? The web-based interface also feeds into Appian’s Software as a Service (SaaS) offering called Appian Anywhere. Depending on how Appian decides to grow its business, based on its SaaS capabilities, maybe we could be renting BPM down the line.

-- Dennis Byron

Posted by dennisb in Current Events  |  Permalink  | Comments (0)  | TrackBacks (0)

Business process management (BPM) is an analyst’s dream. Because there are a half-dozen different definitions of BPM (workflow, straight-through, and so forth) and two fundamentally different ways to view BPM, users and investors are always looking for advice. And BPM suppliers are always looking for ways to muddy the waters.

Advice and muddying the waters: that’s what us analysts do for a living.

In fact, it hasn’t been this good for analysts since we used to describe the same concept as “business process re-engineering.” That long-forgotten term highlights the two fundamental views I’m talking about: BPM the value proposition vs. BPM products. Jarrod Gingras of CMS Watch explained it well in a presentation at the AiiM Conference on March 4. He explained that the first question users need to ask is: Are you looking to analyze your operations or do you simply need some technology? If you confuse the two, you’re likely going to spend too much money and get very little in return, buying the technology before you have done the analysis.

My view is similar but I come at it as a marketing research person as opposed to a pure analyst. I think breadth-and-depth-challenged software suppliers want to make their products differentiated for marketing reasons. So they define BPM from fairly narrow functionality and architectural technology perspectives. For example, it is or it isn’t human-centric; it is based on BPEL or BPML; it is or isn’t service oriented architecture (SOA), and so forth.

On the other hand, users -- working from a real-life point of view -- consider BPM a value proposition. That value can be achieved using many different types of software with various functions and architectures. Which is why Jarrod suggests you ask the business process question first before choosing the technology. For example, everything from Microsoft Project to Houston-based BMC Remedy's ARS to IBM Rational tools can help users manage business processes, not just the products with BPM somewhere in their name and SOA on the first page of the data sheet. It's important to know what business process flow you need to manage before picking the tools.

I'm mostly going to blog here about products with BPM somewhere in their name. In my opinion, they are best for business process flows that cross legal entities. I know from my market research that many of these products are used inside the firewall but that is typically overkill (exception: your comapny is actually the merger of two or more other companies; then using BPM products with BPM somewhere in the name makes sense because you are still treating your IT needs as if you are two separate legal entities.)

But if you have business processes that include customers, suppliers, sales partners and so forth and you want them tied together in a seamless whole, look to the BPM products with BPM somewhere in the name.. If you have a product you'd like me to talk about, send me an email at dennis@ebizq.net and I'll go talk to the guys that make it.

Now, having given you the advice, let me muddy the water.

Do you need a product that works only with selected infrastructure software (e.g., JEE or Microsoft) or products that are neutral as to platform and architecture. Should it be optimized for a certain application set or heterogenous? Is it for high transaction volume or more social computing? SaaS or on premise? Open source or proprietary?

-- Dennis Byron

Posted by dennisb in BPM  |  Permalink  | Comments (1)  | TrackBacks (0)