BPM in Action

If you blog on business process management (BPM) and open source software (OSS) as I do, every once in a while you get a two-fer such as the recent announcement at the Red Hat Summit that Collossa has joined the Red Hat Exchange (RHX). I wrote about Colossa here and the RHX here.

This is good news for both trends. RHX has been plauged by not enough true applications (do not be confused that I often argue that software such as Colosa's is middleware). The BPM movement has been hampered by not enough open source.

Of course as I researched in this article on open source BPM (ebizQ Gold Club membership required but there is no fee), Red Hat's own jBPM qualifies but the whole idea of the exchange is to up the count of non-Red-Hat choices. Colosa's listing brings the total to 20 such packages; next goal is 200.

More to come in business intelligence, ERP (including SCM, PLM and CRM), and all kinds of standalone collaborative and transactional applications. Why not all that IBM BPM software that runs on Linux? After all, RHX doesn't require that the exchange software be open source does it?

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A webinar we conducted with Jim Sinur of Global 360 on June 18 highlighted some of the most interesting developments in business process management (BPM) in 2008. By the way, you can still listen to the webinar (and the entire conference) and see the presentations by logging on here on the ebizQ events calendar page.

The format of the Q and A that followed the webinar and the methodology of the poll we conducted after the presentations mean the results cannot be considered statistically significant. But I think both indicate some of the strong directions BPM is taking in the marketplace (which means in your enterprise).

First, the poll results. When asked for the reasons our attendees were thinking about BPM, the answers were:
• People productivity 59%
• Competitive advantage 56%
• Process innovation 48%
• Cost savings 48%
• Time 42%
• Compliance 22%

I was not surprised how low compliance ranked given the current state of BPM functionality that I review. Some of you might want to look at suppliers that combine BPM with IT lifecycle management (ITLM) however, which some vendors consider an ITLM subsector and I consider a BPM subsector (BPM for the IT shop).

I was happy to see that solid business reasons were at the top of the list whereas the more theoretical benefits were in the middle of the pack. I am guessing our attendees were primarily IT folks and it’s good to see that you are thinking like your clients and management.

As for the Q and A, as a U.S. taxpayer I was glad to see a lot of interest in government BPM. Questions centered on successful BPM implementations in civilian and defense sides of the Federal government (U.S., I assume) as well as state and city government and all levels of education.

Although you cannot ask a question of Jim and I together by listening to the recording highlighted above, do not hesitate to contact me at dennis@ebizq.net with any questions or ideas for future articles or contact Jim at jim.sinur@global360.com for information on his company’s products or just to tap his wide deep knowledge of BPM.

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I wrote recently that business process management (BPM) is a value proposition, not a technology. I will discuss that perspective more on June 18 in a webinar that is part of the ebizQ Process Management virtual conference; the conference runs all day June 18 and I speak at Noon ET (subsequently available for replay).

I used IBM Flowmark as an extreme example of how users continue to deploy and maintain legacy software to manage workflow and processes and do not necessarily use just software with BPM in the name and announced this decade to do BPM. That usage and commitment of maintenance dollars by you is just as much a part of the BPM market as any new license dollar to the extent a 'free market' is a decision to do x instead of y. The announcement on June 17 that Adobe will build in the Alfresco open source content management software is another reminder of how users really interact with suppliers in a free market (as well as an example of the growing trend by the established supplier community to embrace the open source development model).

Here’s the PR explanation of what Adobe and Alfresco do together:

“Adobe LiveCycle ES is an integrated family of software for automating processes that help businesses and governments more effectively engage with customers, citizens, partners, and suppliers. Alfresco uses the innovation of open source to provide a highly scalable enterprise-class content management system. Through the addition of Alfresco’s content management technologies to Adobe LiveCycle ES, customers can rapidly develop and deploy content-rich engagement applications that blend data capture, information assurance, document output, process management and content services.”

Uncharacteristically I agree with the PR hype if you take out a few of the adverbs and adjectives. Classic Adobe content/document collaboration capabilities plus the LiveCycle "process functionality" built under Adobe’s foundation software make it a Top 20 BPM provider along with companies like AT&T/Sterling, BMC/Remedy, EMC/Documentum, Fujitsu, Vignette and others not typically thought of as on a BPM software supplier list.

As for the Alfresco connection, it was the Web 2.0/Enterprise 2.0 connection and the open source development model that steered Adobe toward the London-based company about which we have written frequently under the ebizQ OSS tab. Adobe, like Microsoft one of the last holdouts for a proprietary development model, is moving rapidly to embrace open source. Note that under the OSS terms and conditions relevant to this deal, this does not mean LiveCycle is being open sourced. The trend is that open source is rapildy becoming just the way software is built because now Adobe has access to the rapid development iteration that happens with products like Alfresco. Adobe's decision is not a philosophical or legal/political statement; it is just good business and a reason you should look at open source development if you are not already doing so.

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The release of Gartner statistics during the week of June 9 that show that IBM still rules the middleware market reminded me to ask the question: Who rules the BPM software market? It’s a trick question: IBM rules the BPM software market too.

There are ways analysts and other BPM software companies can parse the definition of BPM software to push IBM down the list and even off of the leader board. But none of these marketing communications tricks make much sense to users. To users business process management is a value proposition, not a function. Users buy value propositions.

For example, perhaps you don’t want to consider workflow software like IBM’s venerable Flowmark part of the BPM market. But users are still maintaining it to the tune of tens of millions of dollars a year and the way markets work, that’s tens of millions not being spent on new BPM point products or suites with BPM in their name. Even products such as AT&T/Sterling’s Gentran Integration suite, the BMC/Remedy Action Request System (ARS), Notes Worklow and Oracle/BEA ecommerce ‘applications’ circa 1998 deserve to be counted. Every maintenance dollar spent on these older products—and I think Gentran and ARS are also still actively marketed—is spent to accomplish business process management.

Another favorite analytical device is to count only companies that only sell BPM products, so-called pure plays. But users don’t begin an RFP process by saying “I’ll only look at companies that only sell BPM products,” so the pure-play filter is another canard.

Coincidentally, Fujitsu—another BPM market leader often neglected by analysts primarily because it does the vast majority of its business outside the U.S.—announced a new version of its Interstage BPM product on June 16. Markets dominated by work horses like Fujitsu, IBM, Remedy and Sterling are boring from an analyst perspective but the numbers are the numbers. If you’re going to do market analysis, ask the market, ask the user.

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Why are American Apparel, South America's Falabella, BGN, a major book retailer in the Netherlands, Staples superstores in Canada, and other retailers around the world attaching Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags to every item in many of its stores? Especially since retailers tend to be risk- and cost-averse, sometimes especially where technology is concerned? Why, to improve customer service, inventory accuracy, and employee productivity. (The fewer customers who can't find what they want, the more happy customers. The fewer employees and hours needed to count items manually, the more time and people available to help those customers.)

What is a business? Well, basically, by my lights, every business is a constantly shifting mix of two primary resources: information and process. (Every person at every business I've ever seen plays a role that is a combination of these resources as well, so people are included within this admittedly nearly absurdist reduction.)

So what is one of IT's primary reasons for existing, and spending/costing so much of the business' money? Why, to make available information that drives continual improvement of business processes, of course.

Which leads to my current take on RFID, something I've been writing about a lot since joining Aberdeen Group last September. My surveys and interviews of many, many users and discussions with a bunch of vendors have led to some basic beliefs I think you'll find directly relevant to your considerations of business process management, business knowledge management, and perhaps many other related areas.

When a discussion of RFID focuses on “radio frequency identification” and its many, many technological variants, that discussion, many if not most times, is already off course. Because unless they work for RFID companies, most business executives I've met couldn't possibly care any less about RFID's technological minutiae and their respective strengths and weaknesses.

So why is RFID important, to retailers and a bunch of other businesses, including many that don't know it yet? Because of what it can mean to the business – real-time, fully integrated data. The more you can know about what's going on at the edge of your network the closer to when it's actually going on, the more opportunities you have to inform, refine and optimize business processes.

RFID and other sensor-based and data-generating network edge technologies can feed the operational applications at the core of just about any business – if the IT infrastructure supporting that business is ready, that is. This means that infrastructure must be designed, deployed, and managed in ways that minimize “time to information.” This is the time and effort required to convert data, whatever its source, into information business applications and users can actually use.

There are several free pieces of research available at the Aberdeen Group Web site about RFID, many of which were actually written by me, including one that discusses American Apparel and Falabella specifically. But you also have a chance to help to shape research I'm planning to publish at the end of this month, specifically about RFID and IT infrastructure management and integration. Spend 10 minutes or so taking my survey, at www.aberdeen.com/survey/rfid-im-ebizq. You'll get a free copy of the resulting study, AND a free copy of my recent “Winning Master Data Management Strategies for 2008-2009” study as well. Because mastering data is yet another important component of The Big Mash-Up – even and especially when that data can help to improve business processes, increase usable information, and delight customers.

Posted by mdortch in BPM • Business Knowledge Management • Collaboration • Enterprise Information Integration • Information Lifecycle Management • Process Visibility • RFID • SOA • The Big Mash-Up  |  Permalink  | Comments (0)  | TrackBacks (0)

I recently read an essay about “the butterfly effect.” Read Wikipedia explanation or any of the more scholarly explanations but I think of it as the sort of thing the late Carl Sagan used to do connecting the dots to explain some scientific or technology history. (I also appreciate the butterfly effect for its science-fiction application, particularly in the movies Frequency and Sliding Door—and I have to admit it, the Back to the Future trilogy.)

I was reminded of the connect-the-dot process June 9 when I spoke to Jan Baan about ERP and Supply Chain Management (SCM) and their connection to business process management (BPM). The conversation led to a long list of interesting technology and application issues which will appear in an article about his post-Baan-the-company business efforts, especially his BPM company Cordys. The article will appear here in July but I thought it would be interesting to preview it with a tour de force of how Jan explained the history from Baan-the-product’s Customer Order Decoupling Point (CODP) concept circa 1995 to BPM today. (Note: the whole dot thing below is mine, not Jan's.)

Jan said he had seen the recent ebizQ article where I talk about BPM as the fruition of what the industry had hoped ERP and SCM would deliver. He said he agrees with my basic premise and adds customer relationship management and product lifecycle management to the mix as well.

Then he explained that he had reached his conclusion with CODP as the starting point, and based on work Baan had done at Baan the company in the 1990s at the request of Microsoft to get Baan the product working on SQL Server (the Ballmer dot). This work allowed Baan to build software that divorced process from data. Around the same time, he said, Baan the company was working on a joint product with the non-stop-computing company Tandem whose latest server line at the time was called—here's the next dot—Himalaya. This work got Baan thinking of the importance of being able to change processes in real time, more like organizations change and less like the lethargic pace that IT infrastructure—because of its complexity and cost—changes. Tandem was later acquired by Compaq which was later acquired by HP.

Before leaving Baan, the company invested in Top Tier. This is the environmentally-friendly-car dot and I admit it's a stretch on my part. Top Tier was run by a young businessman in Israel who was thinking along the same lines as Jan Baan when it came to divorcing processes from data although the young man thought of processes more as services. The Israeli’s name is Shai Agassi. Top Tier was later acquired completely (including Baan’s share) by SAP, and Agassi became SAP’s President of the Products and Technology Group where he turned Top Tier and some other SAP technology into NetWeaver. Top Tier technology taught Jan Baan about the middleware that would be needed to tie processes, once divorced from data, to the organization. Agassi has since left SAP to start a company “focusing on a green transportation infrastructure based on electric cars as an alternative to the current fossil fuel technology.”

Finally, after leaving Baan, Jan Baan made a major investment in WebEx—the Cisco dot. That experience was important for the implications of rich very thin clients.

I don’t want to imply this was just walk down memory lane. There will be more to come later in the article but obviously Baan ties it all together and believes he delivers today in Cordys’ BPMS a product with a rich thin client that separates data from process via state of the art middleware for an event driven architecture, with support for stateful objects that provides fault tolerance and real-time applicability. This was his idea for Baan the product but this is a better approach because he also realizes not everyone is going to buy Baan (or SAP or BEA or etc.)

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I’ve been looking for some new news out of Microsoft TechEd about BizTalk but have yet to see anything. Pending something that might happen in the event’s second week (apparently an excuse to play golf over the weekend), I’ll comment on the plans Steve Martin announced in May on his blog involving B2B in Biztalk:

“…there’s more great news about our (Microsoft’s) B2B technology. Today, we’re announcing another important update for our customers—we’ve come to an agreement with our partner Covast to acquire advanced B2B capabilities.”

This partnership is another sign that Microsoft is serious about true business process management (BPM) and is not just looking at managing processes inside the firewall or treating BizTalk as another way to do integration.

Covast specializes in B2B integration solutions for supply chain management (SCM) through an appliance it calls the Covast BBot. As I have researched over the last few months (for example, see here) BPM can be both the “new ERP” and provide the functionality that SCM promised 10 years ago but could not really deliver unless users stuck to one vendor. BBot enables integration between the complex B2B systems of large supply chain hubs and their smaller customers and suppliers. And that’s what it takes to make SCM really work because all the players use different brands of software.

Covast is both a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner and an IBM Business Partner, which is also a vote for open choice.

(I’ll update more on BizTalk if I hear more from TechEd Week Two. By the way, I'm on Cape Cod not in Orlando. It's hot in Florida this time of year, maybe even over 80 degrees F.)

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If you had complete visibility into everything that happened across your enterprise and its networks and IT resources, how would your business processes change?

This is not just a philosophical exercise, at least not anymore. If it’s true that “you can’t manage what you can’t measure,” it’s at least equally true that “you can’t manage or measure what you can’t see or know.” And so, both vendors and users are seeking a new quasi-Holy Grail: visibility. Visibility into every process, and every element of IT and business infrastructures. Some examples:

In April, Fujitsu Computer Systems announced an Automated Business Process Discovery service. It promises to do exactly what the name implies – to help companies discover, map, and refine and improve their business processes, faster and more economically than they can do it manually. And how better to achieve process visibility than by starting with a comprehensive, accurate map? (Fujitsu said in its announcement that select companies could qualify for a free trial of the new solution – seems like a price worth paying to me.)

At the 2008 JavaOne Conference in May, one of the biggest buzzes of the show surrounded Sentilla. Sentilla is the latest iteration of a company previously known as Moteiv (as in “motive,” as in “mote,” as in The Mote in God’s Eye,” a great science-fiction novel, and the mote in the Gospel of Luke (6:14) from which the title of said novel comes). Sentilla aims to make the long-forestalled promises of “pervasive computing” real, by putting a Java-based application support platform on teeny-tiny computers, each about the size of a quarter currently. If RFID technology generates useful data from the edge of the corporate network, how much more visibility can you get from full-blown Java-enabled devices chattering away at each other and at your IT infrastructure?

And near the end of May, Cisco Systems unveiled its Cisco Motion initiative. A key element is the Cisco 3300 Series Mobility Services Engine. This is an appliance intended to ease and speed the integration and management of a variety of wireless technologies, including but not limited to RFID. It’s also intended to enable “context-aware mobility,” and to let developers build and users use applications that span a wide variety of fixed and mobile communications alternatives. All while providing – wait for it – complete visibility of who’s using what, where and when.

There’s more coming. Lots more. Watch for more on this subject, here and in my Aberdeen Group research. Meanwhile, your mission, should you decide to accept it, is to ensure NOW that your IT and business infrastructures are ready.

To help you, here’s a link to an Aberdeen Group survey I’m conducting on RFID and IT infrastructure management: www.aberdeen.com/survey/rfid-im-ebizq. Take the survey, and you’ll get a free copy of the resulting report when it’s published – AND a free copy of my study on “Winning Master Data Management Strategies for 2008 – 2009” as soon as you complete the survey. Such a deal!

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

Jim Sinur of Global 360 asked the question "Do We Really Need BPM 2.0?" on his blog last week. He meant it two ways I think:
-- Is there a new generation of business process management (BPM) on the way?
-- Should it be saddled with a hokey numeral the way the web was?
My answers differ a little from his but not entirely.

As to the substantive question, yes we are beginning to see suites that handle STP and workflow, event and data driven processes, case management and adhoc requirements, and other broad characteristics that take me a rubics cube to diagram:

This is the ultimate in BPM capability and is still aways from full availability in the market. But discuss with your potential BPM supplier whether it is looking at its product roadmap this way.

One exception: your supplier does not have to support every industry possibility, just yours. (And any industry that your company might enter via acquisition!)

As for the second question, the use of the hokey numeral, I vote no. BPM is BPM. BPM is finally well understood as business process management and not business performance management. Let's not confuse people all over again.

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