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.)
Michael Dortch has been an analyst, 'information entrepreneur,' speaker, and writer about IT and 'the real world" for the past 30 years. After almost 10 years at the Robert Frances Group (RFG), Michael begins a new position with Aberdeen Group in September.
