BPM in Action

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!)

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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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