BPM in Action

Aside from its sterling reporting and analysis, one of my favorite features of The Economist is that it names columns about regions after figures important to that region’s history. So the column on what is now called the European Union (EU) is named Charlemagne, after “one of the continent’s great unifiers,” and the first crowned Holy Roman Emperor, according to the Economist.com Web site.

Always good to begin with a digression thinly disguised as background. But I…well, you know…

Anyway, the Nov. 17 edition of the Charlemagne column, “A dissertation on Romanian pork,” seemed to me directly relevant to the art and craft of business process management. In brief, it turns out that the animal-welfare requirements stipulated for EU membership fly in the face of long-held traditions among Romanian farmers. The farmers are allowed to kill pigs at home for personal consumption, as they have for some time – but only if they use an EU-specified animal-stunning device, something most of Romania’s millions of subsistence/family farmers can’t afford. (It’s also risky to combine electric stunning devices with the snow and wet ground common to Romania during winter, when the traditional ritual pig-killing takes place.)

Anyway, the Romanian farmers appealed for exemptions similar to those granted by the EU to Jewish and Muslim butchers, but were turned down, according to the column. The reason? That exemption applies only to religious rites, while the EU says the Romanian tradition is, well, “only” a tradition. Even though the pigs in question are traditionally killed around the end-of-winter feast of Saint Ignatius and Christmas holidays, which seem more religious than mere traditional associations to this admittedly distant observer.

Of course, this whole thing involving human beings, compromise is being sought. One possibility is having veterinarians screen the pigs for trichinosis and “throw in pig stunning free,” as The Economist so pithily put it. Meanwhile, at least some of the same farmers who are struggling to comply with the animal-welfare strictures are welcoming greater restrictions on potentially harmful pesticides. And so it goes.

The Take-Aways:
1. No process is ever developed, managed, revised, or retired in a vacuum.
2. No person or team is ever smart enough to predict the consequences of every such action completely accurately each and every time.
3. Unintended consequences are at least as difficult to plan for/around as they are to avoid.
4. Unintended consequences CAN be managed around, however, given clearly defined goals, clear consistent communications, and active inclusion of and participation by all affected stakeholders.

Please adjust your collaboration, communications, documentation, and/or process management tools and policies accordingly.

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

So if you run more and larger data centers than almost anybody, and you have an IQ above ambient air temperature, you’d already be looking for ways to cut your energy costs. And if you were really, really clever, you might figure out that some of the things you’ve learned and/or developed, or are learning and/or developing, might have value beyond your corporate borders.

So if you were, say, Google, maybe you’d do all of this in a way that not only bought you cost savings, but brought you a great amount of good press, by positioning your company as a committed explorer and developer of green/alternative energy. Which is precisely what Google has done.

The great thing about many environmental challenges is that they present opportunities for corporations of many sizes and types to “do well by doing good.” That is to say, a company can “go green” in ways that not only try to help the environment, but generate and/or boost revenues as well. Which is precisely what Google has done.

According to the rapidly growing bushel basket of stories already posted online, Google, hot on the heels of the Climate Savers Initiative it announced with Intel in June, is investing bushel baskets of money in alternative energy. Google plans to invest hundreds of millions of dollars, initially focused on geothermal, solar, and wind power, under the rubric “Renewable Energy Cheaper than Coal,” or the charmless, clunky abbreviation “RE

Anyway, Google’s created a new R&D division, to be run by its Google.org philanthropic non-profit. And even if the initiative never produces anything usable by the world at large, it is a great example of the combination of good process, and process done well.

The Take-Aways:
1. If they don’t already exist at your organization, argue, lobby, and work for policies that encourage and support:
+ awareness of energy-related and other environmental issues, and addressing of those most beneficial, challenging, and/or potentially threatening, to the organization and its ecosystem;
+ identification and exploitation of opportunities to “do good” organizationally, especially if and when such efforts can also contribute to revenues and/or reputational enhancement; and
+ sharing and promotion of your organization’s most positive policies and initiatives, across and beyond the organization, and including the communities in which it lives and does business wherever appropriate.

(By the way, some IT-enabled tool or set of tools for process capture and management and collaboration might possibly aid and abet such efforts. I’m just saying.)

2. If such policies are in place where you work, find as many ways as you can to nurture and grow them across and throughout the organization – and count yourself very, very lucky, professionally and personally.

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So my long-time industry colleague James Gaskin, in a profoundly impressive piece of analyst double-bagging, manages to quote both me and another industry colleague of whom I’m a big fan, Andi Mann of Enterprise Management Associates (EMA). In a recent piece for security.ITworld.com, James discusses Andi’s idea of an organizational “culture of security,” and why inculcation of such a culture would likely benefit almost any organization. Wisely, I believe, James argues vigorously that such inculcation requires leadership from senior executives.

Mere days later, in an ITworld.com piece entitled “Process Versus Culture,” James graciously quotes yours truly, and laments the dark side of the fact that culture almost always changes – and therefore must almost always be changed – from the top down. “Bad ides, like waste products, flow downhill” is a phrase with some impressive visual imagery and staying power, and a useful summary of some of James’ salient points.

He quotes, or rather paraphrases, me as saying that culture beats process every time. Actually, as it was explained to me by a senior IT decision-maker at a large financial institution years ago, at many if not most organizations, “culture eats process for lunch every day.”

I’m not trying to pick on James, but to make what I think is a critical point as clearly as possible. It doesn’t matter one whit how great your processes are on paper or its electronic equivalent. Nor does it matter how flexible, robust, and/or scalable your IT-empowered process management solution(s) is/are. If process management efforts do not make room for and/or are not informed by acknowledgement of cultural issues, those efforts will fail.

Invariably. Always. Without question. (Not that I have any strong feelings about this or anything.)

I want to thank James publicly for encouraging my behavior, at least in this specific arena. I also want to take the opportunity to refer you to my earlier musings on the subject of culture and process in this space – specifically my April 6 outing, “Success with BPM: A 'CPR' Approach.” (“CPR” in this case stands for “culture, process, results;” you’ll actually have to read the blog entry for more details.) I then encourage you strongly to take just such an approach to everything you do that’s process-related at your organization – which is just about everything, really. Do let me know how it goes…I promise you, it won’t be boring.

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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)

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)

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)

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)

As part of my "day job" as a Robert Frances Group (RFG) analyst, I had a very interesting conversation with the founders of a very interesting business. The people were Stuart Cohen, former CEO of the non-profit Open Source Development Labs (now part of the Linux Foundation), and Evan Bauer, former CTO at Credit Suisse First Boston (and RFG colleague of mine). The business: the Collaborative Software Initiative (CSI).

The goal is both evolutionary and almost subversively revolutionary. The CSI wants to broker connections among what it calls "like-minded IT leaders," and use the best elements of the open source development model to create business applications. The CSI believes this could reduce the cost of building proprietary applications by huge amounts – from, say, $1 to $2 million to as low as $50,000 for each company supporting collaborative development. A "customer core team" of a few companies would collaborate with CSI principals, who do the actual "heavy lifting" needed to get the software created. Each software project will have a broad audience beyond the core team, and each will be fully supported by CSI and its partners, as released software and/or as software as a service, á la Salesforce.com, Inc.

What I like most about CSI, though, is the ability to bring collective experience, knowledge, proven practices and processes, and perhaps even wisdom to collaboratively developed applications. After all, if CSI can draw top-tier enterprises together, the people from those enterprises should be repositories of some pretty good practices and processes. And if there's anybody who can facilitate translation of those into agile and adept applications, it's Evan, Stuart, and their partners. By the way, on the vendor side, those partners currently include Hewlett-Packard Co. (HP), IBM Corp., Intel Corp., and Novell Inc. – testament to the strength of the ideas and people behind CSI, methinks.

Past efforts at collaborative building of enterprise solutions have been fraught with challenges. I believe this is largely because many such efforts have focused on developers or vendor channel partners, to the sidelining or exclusion of the enterprises that want and need the solutions. By focusing on an alternative to the traditional methods of building business-specific applications, the CSI should be able to avoid those earlier drawbacks. After all, users pursuing solutions to common problems may be easier to coordinate than vendors and resellers seeking larger markets in which to compete while allegedly cooperating.

The CSI has not yet publicly announced any applications or enterprise customers, but that should be coming soon. Meanwhile, if you work at an enterprise that might benefit from an alternative to expensive and slow proprietary internal application development, you should definitely check out the CSI – and please let me know what you think. I think it's an idea that could go from "What the heck?" to "What took us so long?" pretty quickly. We'll see…

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

As you may have already read here, I believe the creation and maintenance of BPPs could be a critically valuable and instructive step towards effective, human-centric BPM and business knowledge management (BKM). Several of you have e-mailed your general agreement. However, more than a few of you have expressed curiosity, if not confusion, over what information belongs in a BPP, and how best to capture, create, and organize that information.

I'm about to utter words that industry analysts, consultants, and pundits have avoided, and users and vendors have suspected and frequently longed to hear, for decades. Those words are "I don't know."

Or, to be more precise, "I'm not sure. It depends." (Ahhh – comfortable territory once more.)

To elaborate a bit, below is a list of basic elements that belong in any BPP that's going to provide any significant business value. These are not necessarily listed in any particular order of importance.

• Name of Process
• Owner(s)
• Key Contributors and Affected/Supported Constituencies (including specific people, groups, and lines of business, in order of importance or criticality where possible)
• Supported and Supporting Business and IT Activities, Processes, and Services
• Required and Affected Intellectual Property (IP) Resources (including access information and restrictions)
• Relevant Compliance, Governance, and Risk Considerations (in order of importance or criticality where possible)
• Relevant Effectiveness Metrics (as determined by relevant IT and business decision-makers)
• Recommended/Required Assessment Method(s) and Frequency/Frequencies
• Historical Performance Assessment Efforts and Results

I stand by the above list of BPP element recommendations. However, I also assert that it is beyond my knowledge, and my ability to deliver value to those who ask, for me to go much beyond those recommendations.

That's because while many businesses have processes in common, they often express those processes using different taxonomies and vocabularies. For any BPM-related initiative to deliver maximum value, it has got to be integrated and harmonized with how the business does business now. And this goes as far as the words used to define and document processes and their interconnections with other elements of the business and IT infrastructures.

One company's "customer" is another's "client." One company's "sale" is another's "order." One company's "shipment" is another's "fulfillment." Multiply these differences too many times, and they make clear communication and consensus impossible. And that makes success with BPM and/or BKM impossible.

At many enterprises, the first successful steps toward creating useful BPPs will be in achieving consensus regarding the very terms and rules used to define and describe the processes to be managed. And the processes used to accomplish these tasks must themselves be submitted to the same scrutiny as other processes, to maximize consistency, repeatability, and scalability.

And of course, there needs to be agreement about how all of this is to be captured and stored, and how access to it is managed, to maximize that value of that information. And the processes used to make those determinations should themselves be captured and documented, just in case anyone might want to use them again, or refine them.

[This is now officially one of those times where you who work at larger enterprises can freely envy your counterparts at small and mid-sized businesses. Those smaller companies may have fewer resources to throw at such problems, but I bet their people have to endure far fewer meetings to make decisions.]

If you have or can find recent examples of tools used to profile or describe other business or IT infrastructure elements at your company, by all means, try to adapt these to your BPP-building purposes. However, I'd be skeptical of any purported template or format that promised much more than greater detail focused on areas such as those I have outlined here previously. Remember, your enterprise's goals and processes are unique – just like every other enterprise's.

Reactions, suggestions, or other tangentially related thoughts? Please share them, by posting comments here or e-mailing me. Let's see where this goes...

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This may seem counterintuitive, but Salesforce.com, Inc. says it wants to help to create and nurture future competitors.

Yes. To itself.

The company's ability to deliver software as a service (SaaS) for customer relationship management (CRM) and other critical business functions is well proven. It has opened up its SaaS delivery architecture and its development tools, to enable creation of applications custom-tailored for specific businesses, their needs, and their processes. It is now offering a Platform Edition of its architecture, for those who want to deliver on-demand applications other than those which Salesforce.com itself offers. It has created a rapidly growing online AppExchange and supporting business model, to help others market and find such applications. (The folks at Forbes.com called the Salesforce.com AppExchange "the iTunes of business software" and one of the "top 10 disruptors of 2006.")

Now, Salesforce.com has created the AppExchange Incubator. It's (initially) a single physical building. It currently houses 32 ventures – some start-ups, some extensions of already established companies – in various stages of, well, incubation. Salesforce.com business and technical resources and expertise are immediately available to them on demand, as are all the support services you'd expect to find in a modern office/start-up facility.

The upshot of this should be rapid and broad development of applications that focus on specific combinations of specific business types and supporting processes. A broad range of specific combinations. Resulting in an expanding marketplace of pre-built and easily customizable process-aware, process-enabled, and process-enabling applications. Applications that can be deployed as needed, with minimal infrastructure investments, just like Salesforce.com's core, proven applications.

This should also result in a lively online ecosystem of technology- and business-focused folks with growing bases of experience in designing, building, and deploying such applications. An ecosystem that becomes an easily tapped fount of knowledge, skills, and talent for those seeking help with their own applications. And so on. And so on.

But enough of what I think. What does the company itself say about its plans? This – it wants to "[b]ecome the trusted business and technology platform for empowering the next generation of on-demand."

And what do the "incubatees" think? Well, I spoke with several of them during my visit to the Incubator yesterday. They all said a bunch of interesting things, but the most interesting was one they almost all said in almost the same way. A lot of other vendors are saying the right things about SaaS, on-demand applications, and integrating business processes within those applications. But only Salesforce.com has proven the ability and the willingness to "walk the talk," and to bet their entire corporate strategy on enabling and supporting success with on-demand applications.

I think the Salesforce.com strategy could help accelerate progress toward that wonderful day when we can stop worrying about how to manage business processes explicitly. Instead, we can focus on managing people and the IT resources they use to do their jobs, confident that many if not all of those resources are delivering the functionality and information we need to integrate process management with management of those people and resources.

Sigh. We'll see. Meanwhile, dreams are good, right? (And let's not forget, others such as WebEx are contemplating similar strategies.) What's it all mean? Let me know what you think...

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

As discussed here previously, a "CPR" approach that addresses culture, process, and results is a solid path towards success with BPM and business knowledge management (BKM). And that CPR approach works best with a focus on seven interconnected factors – processes, people, platforms, products, planning, projects, and portfolios. Having addressed processes previously, the next issue to approach is people.

People are the second most critical success factor to any BPM, BKM, or strategic business or IT initiative. No, not the first. That's because without clear and clearly defined processes, people tend to mill about aimlessly, at least but not necessarily exclusively metaphorically. (We could debate this from the perspective of the people necessary to craft and enforce those processes, but fortunately, this is not a blog devoted to philosophy or organizational dynamics. Though it does touch on both from time to time, I will admit.)

So processes are needed to ensure that the right people are included in the capture, creation, documentation, management, and refinement of effective business processes. Processes are also needed to ensure that all observers, participants, and stakeholders in the success of BPM/BKM efforts understand their roles, and are willing and able to play them. And processes are also needed to evaluate how well those people are doing, and how best to align people and resources for continuous improvement.

People need processes to succeed with almost anything, and especially with the multi-faceted challenges to effective, human-centric BPM and BKM. In turn, processes need to reflect and support the concerns and goals of the people capturing, creating, and using those processes. Initial efforts at ensuring that processes are in place to address the people-centric concerns above are good, solid first steps – but they are only that. Ideally, they lead to the collaboration, communication, and consensus necessary to navigate the rest of the seven Ps successfully.

More to come soon. If you have comments, suggestions, or horror stories to share about the "people" dimension of BPM, do please let me know.

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OK, so we're moving merrily along towards a "CPR" ("culture, process, results") approach to success with BPM and business knowledge management (BKM). Such an approach must address seven interconnected factors to succeed. These are processes, people, platforms, products, planning, projects, and portfolios – the seven Ps. Previous outings have addressed processes and people. Next up: platforms.

Platforms are more than particular configurations of hardware or operating systems. Where users are concerned, the applications they rely upon to do their jobs are the only platforms they care about. Which is exactly as it should be in almost all cases I've seen. In case you were wondering.

So the key questions that need answering are these.

1. What are the key application and service "platforms" that matter most to those who make the business go?

2. Are those application and service platforms "BPM/BKM-enabled?"

What "BPM/BKM-enabled" means can vary from situation to situation. However, at a high level, what it means encompasses things like the ability to audit usage patterns in ways that help to capture, document, and identify useful BPM/BKM elements. If BPM/BKM tools are in place, such enablement also means appropriate, bidirectional interoperability with those tools, and whatever tools are used to manage them.

This is also an area in which another potential "platform" becomes important – the so-called "common/configuration management database. This is often referred to as a "CMDB," although the definition of the "C" varies (as does the number of "Cs," at least in IBM Corp.'s case, which calls its permutation a "change and configuration management database" or "CCMDB." Sigh.)

Anyway, if there is a management database in place or under consideration, it, too, must be appropriately BPM/BKM-enabled. In this case, what that means is that the database must be sufficiently extensible and flexible to support easy addition of information that is more BPM/BKM-related than focused on particular technological minutiae. Eventually, such databases appear destined to become the central management points for all critical responsibilities, restrictions, rights, roles, and rules governing access to and use of business IT and intellectual property (IP) resources. This means that management and optimization of business processes and knowledge, and of the human interactions that surround and rely upon these, will likely rely heavily on such databases. This makes now the time to start thinking along these lines, whether or not your chosen solution vendors are doing so yet or not.

Finally, if BPM and BKM efforts are to work, they have to touch and be touched by every resource important to the business. This means that BPM and BKM solutions and processes absolutely must be technologically platform-agnostic, natively and/or through interfaces compliant with open, industry-supported standards.

More on platforms later and/or offline, if you'd like. Just let me know. Next up: products (and services) – and not (just) those you buy or sell, either…

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

As a short break from my emerging, multi-entry rant about the seven pillars of enterprise transformation, I thought I'd take a shot at answering a question I received from an attendee of a recent BPM Webinar conducted by my employer, Robert Frances Group (RFG). The question, from an educator, asked if I knew of any BPM textbooks worth recommending.

Frankly, where IT and related subjects are concerned I don't look at textbooks very often any more. First of all, there are all those college-day flashbacks. Second, I worry that the fast pace of IT and BPM evolution makes it difficult, if not impossible, for most textbook publishers to keep up. So I offered some alternative suggestions.

Of course, any or all of the blogs here at ebizQ that address BPM, business intelligence (BI), business knowledge management (BKM), and related subjects can be helpful and interesting. "Helpful" and "interesting" are, in my experience, two hallmark characteristics of the best textbooks. In any case, if anyone interested in the above subjects can head for the ebizQ blog list, scan it for relevant recent entries, read a selection of them, and not learn something helpful or interesting, I'd be very, very surprised. (By the way, in case you haven't seen it yet, ebizQ's "BI in Action" Web site is live, featuring blogs by Joe McKendrick and yours truly.)

Among other blogs, I'm a big fan of Ismael Ghalimi, co-founder of Intalio. Intalio makes one of the only enterprise-class, open source business process management solutions, and offers its process modeling software for free. Ismael, is also a deep thinker about BPM, among other subjects, so his blogs (some of which have appeared at ebizQ, in fact) should offer much food for thought. They also offer lots of links to other blogs and similarly worthwhile textbook substitutes and adjuncts.

I'm also a fan of what I've found at the Web site for Role Modellers, whose founder, Keith Harrison-Broninski, is a founding thinker about human interaction management (and another ebizQ "blogmate"). He describes it as "human-driven" process management, not just what Forrester Research and others call "human-centric."

As I think I understand it, a key difference is that so-called human-centric processes can still be boringly similar and repeatable, while human-driven processes almost always involve variations and the unexpected. But I'm still trying to figure out what I do and don't understand about all of this, as you will doubtless read here soon and often. Meanwhile, Keith's Web site at www.human-interaction-management.info also offers some great textbook-like content.

I believe IT in general, and BPM in particular, represent subjects where the timeliness, as well as the diversity of opinions and viewpoints, all make online resources superior to textbooks. (Yes, I understand that it's possible to publish perfectly good textbooks more quickly now, thanks largely to advances in IT. But there's still a significant delay. Not to mention having to kill all those trees. Or buy all that recycled paper. Or figure out how to get electronic substitutes into the hands of schools that can't even always afford current textbooks. But I digress.) After all, if all of this stuff is really moving at "Internet speed," whatever that means, information, opinion, and intended guidance about it should, too…

Having said all of that, read any good books about BPM and/or IT lately? Please let me know…

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

Anyone who has heard me speak at an industry event, live or online, has probably heard me tell this story – but I think it's so important to success with business processes, I'm going to keep telling it.

At an event hosted by my august employer Robert Frances Group (RFG) a while ago, a client from a large financial services company spoke out during a roundtable discussion. Basically, the client complemented us and industry analysts generally, for understanding how vital IT is to most businesses, and how good processes are essential to success with IT. However, the client then chided me, my colleagues, and our industry, for missing something both blindingly obvious and incredibly significant.

At most companies, year in and year out, this client asserted, "culture eats process for lunch every day."

Well. I could just stop here and say, "Thanks for coming out, everybody, drive carefully on your way home, and goodnight!" You should be so lucky.

BPM and similarly strategically important, IT-empowered business initiatives share the trait described by the client quoted above. Every such initiative is by definition collaborative. And in almost every collaboration I've ever seen or been part of, at least some stakeholders come away disappointed. And that's OK. Because as Mr. Spock and Captain Kirk conclude in "Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan," the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few – or the one. (Never let it be said that I have any shame or modesty when seeking out newly strained analogies or boldly going where no metaphor has gone before!)

But the above aphorism only holds true once every affected constituent is convinced that their concerns are taken seriously. And that is in fact a cultural, political issue. Precisely the type of issue that challenges technically-focused folk tremendously. I didn't say this would be easy.

What I've come up with is something I'm calling a "CPR" approach. Make all the gratuitous connections to life support and resuscitation you feel appropriate here.

"C" stands for "culture," meaning those cultural, personal, and political issues that, when unaddressed, invariably sabotage even the most well-meaning, benefit-laden initiative.

"P" stands for "process." To be effective, processes must be, among other things, broadly adopted and supported. They must therefore be reflective and supportive of how people do work in real life. Which means they must acknowledge and address relevant cultural, political, sometimes personal issues – in ways that are dispassionate, non-personal, and focused on the business.

"R" stands for "results." Those promoting particular initiatives and/or processes must demonstrate their real-life business value, via one or more pilot deployments that produce credible, unambiguous results. These will not always be positive, but if they are credible and unambiguous, they will contribute to the credibility of the overall initiative – and its proponents.

IT and business decision-makers at every enterprise – even when they're different parts of the same individuals – must come together around this approach, or something with similar focus, if they hope to achieve truly effective management and optimization of business activities, knowledge, and processes. That's not just my opinion, nor is it just the opinion of other observers. In my experience, I have never seen a strategic initiative achieve sustained success without taking an approach very much like this one.

What have you seen? How has or might this approach work for you and your enterprise? Let me know, and do expect to read more about this here. Can't say you weren't warned...

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

I've quoted Shakespeare's Henry V above. (That's "Henry the Fifth" for the apparently increasing number of you who have never received instruction about Roman numerals.) The king went on to say this to encourage his troops into spirited battle.

"In peace there's nothing so becomes a man
As modest stillness and humility:
But when the blast of war blows in our ears,
Then imitate the action of the tiger;
Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood…"

Now, I of course know that there's nothing about BPM and related subjects that's anything like war. However, I do fervently believe there are Things Going On that will require IT and business decision-makers at user and vendor companies to similarly gird themselves in preparation for an unknown, but likely turbulent future.

Some of that turbulence is already evident, as users and vendors struggle to integrate and consolidate their efforts and thinking around business analytics, intelligence, and the capture, discovery, mapping, management, and optimization of business activities and processes. But a very interesting element of this has to do specifically with the combination of search and analysis/intelligence functionality.

I've written here previously about how unstructured data can both challenge and inform BPM efforts. The thing is, a lot of useful information – almost all truly useful information, according to some – is captured and stored as what computers, at least, think of as unstructured data. And of course, unstructured data, being, well, unstructured, is much harder to search through and extract from than neat little columns and rows of known, consistent characters.

So IBM has devoted a fair amount of effort into developing and encouraging development of technologies that make searching unstructured data less onerous and more useful. That effort has led to offerings and initiatives such as LanguageWare, a "human language technology" platform intended to ease and speed multi-lingual (or, as IBM calls it, "language-neutral") analysis and management of unstructured data such as what businesspeople often call "content" and "documents." Also OmniFind, the search and text analytics technology that is a key component of IBM's content management portfolio. And the Unstructured Information Management Architecture (UIMA) project. And, of course, IBM's acquisition of FileNet, one of the first content management solution vendors to focus on the intersections between business content and process management.

And now, IBM is partnering with BI and analytics solution vendor Business Objects SA. As reported at ebizQ, IBM has announced a new "dynamic warehousing" strategy, and some new data warehousing solutions. One of these includes Business Objects Crystal Reports Server; another supports tight integration with Business Objects' Crystal Decisions BI suite.

This is separate from yet another IBM announcement of BI integration with IBM enterprise computing solutions. Also as reported at ebizQ, IBM announced integration into its System i "all-in-one" business computing platform a special edition of the WebFOCUS BI suite from Information Builders.

What does all of this mean? Broader and deeper abilities to unearth clues and facts about how real people use real information to do real work. Information that can greatly inform efforts to discover, map, and optimize business processes and workflows, for systems and users. More powerful features for searching for – and actually finding – actionable information about the processes governing IT resource and infrastructure management and business alignment. And a wide range of options, for a broad and growing range of enterprise sizes and types.

At least, that's what I hope and believe. What about you? Do let me know.

Posted by mdortch in BPM • Collaboration • IBM • IT Infrastructure Management  |  Permalink  | Comments (0)  | TrackBacks (1)

So Cisco Systems, Inc. is buying WebEx Communications, Inc., as reported at ebizQ, and you may be wondering "Why?" and/or "What the heck has that got to do with BPM?" Both good questions, each of which I'll attempt to answer, at least cursorily.

Cisco said WebEx brings it all kinds of additional goodness to add to its "unified communications" vision, especially for small and mid-sized businesses. Now, when I hear terms like "unified communications," I remember reading what Gandhi said in response to a request for his opinion about Western-style "representative democracy" – "it would be a good idea." But I think I understand what Cisco intends to mean. (And that last sentence reminds me of something Humpty Dumpty said in Lewis Carroll's "Alice in Wonderland" – "I know you believe you understand what you think I said, but what you fail to realize is that what you heard is not what I meant." But I digress.)

Basically, all communications (and, increasingly, all collaborations) other than in-person, face-to-face meetings are enabled by IT and networks, a lot of which rely on Cisco technologies. From Cisco's perspective, then, "unified communications" is shorthand for "matching communications technology mixes seamlessly with how people want and need to communicate." Hence, the BPM connection. (I'm sure Cisco would also add something about doing this in ways that create new and extend existing revenue streams, but perhaps fortunately, that's not my focus here.)

WebEx, meanwhile, has attracted more users to its software-as-a-service (SaaS) collaboration and communications platforms than even Salesforce.com, about which I've written repeatedly here previously. In addition, WebEx recently introduced WebEx Connect, which basically enables developers and enterprises to build and deploy processes and applications atop the WebEx SaaS platform. This is at least conceptually similar to what Salesforce.com has done with its SaaS platform and development tools, and both are very good ways to build processes into frequently used business applications and services. Which, in turn, is, I think, a great way to make processes ubiquitous and invisible, increasing the odds that they will actually get managed effectively.

Now, what makes this particularly interesting is that Salesforce.com has of late been touting Cisco itself as one of Salesforce.com's recent big customer wins. This perhaps sets the stage for some interesting competitions between Salesforce.com and WebEx solutions within Cisco, some interesting integrations of the two environments at and/or enabled by Cisco, or all of the above.

In the meantime, though, this is another prime example of vendors evolving in response to the evolution of user and enterprise behaviors, goals, and needs. Whatever you do and wherever you work, I'm pretty certain you should be tracking what Cisco and WebEx do and plan, as well as what Salesforce.com has in mind. The range and scope of available, on-demand, process-enabled applications is about to start getting pretty big pretty fast, and you want to be ready. Ready or not, let me know what happens, and what you plan to do next.

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

There's another exciting ebizQ webinar coming up on March 28, with a killer topic for BPM wonks, despite the slightly ungainly but entirely appropriate title. It's "Taking Enterprise Mash-ups From Buzzword to Business Reality – Gain One Integrated View of BI, CRM, ERP and Other Enterprise Systems."

The speaker is Paul Wlodarczyk, VP of Solutions Consulting at JustSystems, possibly the largest software company the most of us had never heard of before now. Just Systems claims to be Japan's largest software company. It is likely best known in North America for xfy, software that enables creation of XML-compliant composite applications atop IBM Corp.'s Lotus Notes platform. As I've opined here previously, the latest Lotus Notes represents significant opportunity to build business processes into applications and services. Which I'm convinced is a good thing.

Paul was previously "a Service Line Manager for a content lifecycle consultancy with Xerox Global Services." So my semi-educated guess is the guys knows a little bit about how BI (business intelligence), CRM, ERP, and other applications get mashed up in ways that align with and deviate from business processes in real-life business environments.

Why is this important? Two primary reasons.
1. Composite applications, or mash-ups, get that way as they get closer and closer to mirroring and supporting how real people do real work in real businesses – or at least would like to do their work.
2. Business processes drive how real people do real work in real businesses – and how those people do their work defines, or at least should define, how well those processes are working, and where they need refinement, replacement, or retirement.

For those who are trying to succeed with BPM, one of the most effective ways, in my opinion, at least, is to embed process-related and process-supporting features into every element of the IT infrastructure users touch. Those "BPM streams" can be collected, consolidated, and managed in ways that enable consistent deployment and improvement of key processes, without getting in the way of users. The tools to make this possible are still few and limited in scope, but better ones are coming. So now is the time to start thinking about the processes needed to maximize the value of those tools, and all of your BPM investments. (This is as true for vendors trying to sell BPM as it is for users trying to make it work, by the way.)

So do try to attend Paul's webinar, or at least to replay it from the archive if you can't make it live. Despite the omission of "BPM" from its title, I'm sure you'll benefit from it, whether through new ideas or validation of what you're already doing. And if you are doing anything with or about composite applications or mash-ups that's BPM-related, please let me know.

Posted by mdortch in BPM • Collaboration  |  Permalink  | Comments (0)  | TrackBacks (0)

A critical but often overlooked step toward BPM success is getting every employee to understand how BPM affects their jobs, and how their jobs contribute to more effective business processes at their organizations. How best to do this depends on who's available, and their skills and comfort levels regarding communicating to and with groups – and with evangelism, which is in fact what is often required to "sell" people on caring about business processes.

If you want your enterprise to succeed with BPM, you have got to start by getting people to buy into the importance of BPM, and of their contributions to it. This is by no means an easy set of tasks, for many reasons. Some of these are discussed most eloquently by Ismael Ghalimi, founder of open source BPM solution provider Intalio, most recently in "What is Wrong with BPM" in his IT Redux blog.

For better or worse, at many enterprises, this evangelism is going to have to start with people focused on IT. This is because they are often those with the most (if not the only) experience applying at least quasi-rigorous processes at least quasi-rigorously to business challenges. Also, this process of connecting people to BPM is going to require a fair amount of communication, and much of that takes place via IT-empowered tools, such as e-mail, portals, and wikis. This is why I started this multi-part screed with IT and not BPM training recommendations.

Ultimately, what I think everyone needs is a brief, enterprise-specific mini-handbook on how to use the top three to five IT tools available to them, and another explaining their roles in the company's top business activities, goals, and processes. These documents need to be supported by processes that ensure that they get regularly revisited and updated, and that they are appropriately distributed and their use and value promoted.

Where they exist, IT people should help to spearhead these efforts, but they cannot and should not shoulder the entire burden alone. Input from business-focused constituents is essential as well. At many enterprises, unfortunately, IT people will need their best and brightest marketing and sales skills to convince their business colleagues to make the effort.

Where there are no IT people available, business people are going to have to take up the slack at both ends. That is to say, those business people must evangelize for business process engagement, and for the IT infrastructure elements supporting the business and its processes.

Whether or not there are dedicated IT people (multiple definitions of "dedicated" absolutely intended here!) at your organization, they're going to need help here. As a start, I would modestly offer some of my previous musings in this space, particularly "BPM: Be Prepared to Market" and "BPM: Beginning Proactive Messaging." I would also recommend a bunch of the stuff in the RFG section of the ebizQ Analyst Corner, as well as the other resources at ebizQ. And if you're already dealing with incumbent or candidate BPM and/or IT infrastructure management vendors, you should see how and if they can help here as well. Let me know what you're doing and how it's working out. I'll try to help you to help us to help others.

Posted by mdortch in BPM • Collaboration  |  Permalink  | Comments (0)  | TrackBacks (0)

Last time out, I offered some steps you can take to try to get everyone at your enterprise at least some basic schooling about IT. Herewith, a couple of other IT-specific observations and suggestions, before we try to tackle some basic BPM-specific issues.

If Microsoft Office is the standard at your organization, make sure every new employee gets a copy of "Office for Dummies" or some equivalently comprehensive, straightforward, and task-focused guide along with their computer and password(s). If OpenOffice is the standard, get "OpenOffice for Dummies" or a similar equivalent. I'm also a big fan of "The Little PC Book" for PC users, and "The Little Mac Book" for Mac users. All of these books, as well as several worthy alternatives, are available from Amazon.com, and from at least some of the independent booksellers affiliated with the BookSense Web site. Or you can just call your local bookstore and have them order some copies for you and your organization.

Such books do not replace training, but they are far superior to trying to corner a busy IT person to answer a question for which that IT person's skills are not really needed. I recommend to everyone I meet who uses computers but is not an IT expert and does not have an IT expert handy that they keep one such book near their primary computer at all times. I further recommend that when they have some free time, say during breaks or meals taken at their desks, that they just pick up the book, and randomly select some feature to explore. A few minutes with the book, accompanied perhaps by a bit of poking around on-screen menus, can do a lot to help users become smarter about and more comfortable with those technologies they have to use every day.

Such books also do NOT replace the company-specific documentation the creation and maintenance of which I've already recommended strongly. In fact, the books should be accompanied by a short introductory document explaining specifically how the books and that company-specific documentation and indoctrination activities all work together. ("The introductory indoctrination gets you started, the company-specific documentation helps you to get your basic work done, and the books help you to learn more, and to avoid and navigate around problems." Or something similar.)

Regarding business processes, well, it's a bit trickier to capture and document these in ways that are easily assimilated and digested. But it can be done. Basically, I recommend you review the specific steps I recommended for IT indoctrination and support, and adapt these to specific tasks and underlying business processes. This includes the creation of some shared collaboration space where users can share information to help support themselves.

But there is a critical additional step needed to succeed in getting up to speed on enterprise business processes. Someone has got to help users make the links between the tasks they do every day and the goals and requirements of "da bidness." More about that next time. Meanwhile, do please keep in touch, especially if you'd like to request and/or share more suggestions about this admittedly sticky, tricky stuff…

Posted by mdortch in BPM • Collaboration  |  Permalink  | Comments (0)  | TrackBacks (0)

I had a great conversation recently with Mark Anderson, Executive Vice President of Overtone Software, Inc., and Mark Presnell, CEO at Ability Software Ltd. Overtone offers several interesting and useful solutions for creating and managing content from Microsoft Corp. Exchange e-mail or SharePoint collaboration deployments. Overtone is also the exclusive North American distributor and reseller for what I feel has become Overtone's "jewel in the crown," the AbilitySuite for IBM Corp.'s Lotus Notes.

The solution offers three levels of archiving and archive management, all selectable and configurable by enterprise IT and business decision-makers. The first level supports basic archiving based on simple rules, and focuses on capturing all e-mails for compliance and governance purposes. The next level combines support for more complex rules with methods for reducing overall archive and mailbox size, without sacrificing access to full content. (I'm intentionally compressing and simplifying here; more details are of course available at the Overtone Software Web site.)

The coolest stuff happens at the third level, however. That's where consolidation and integration of diverse incumbent compliance, discovery, litigation support, and records and security management tools can happen. That's also where enterprises can tag and categorize e-mails based on their own specific business goals, needs, and processes. It's also where Overtone's powerful AbilitySuite Central Search Portal can be used to find almost anything you'd care to find in a centralized message archive. That's why the company refers to what happens at this level as "Information Governance," or "E-mail Knowledge Management."

But look carefully at what that archive can tell you, not just about e-mails and collaborations, but about business processes. A growing number of my analyst industry colleagues are increasingly reporting that high percentages of business-critical intellectual property (IP) reside in those e-mails. That means that once you can not only search through archives, but analyze content and collaboration "flows," you can determine much about what people are doing, and how and why they're doing it. In other words, you can get a lot closer to human-centric BPM.

Suppose you could easily see, for example, that changes to the IT infrastructure or customer-facing business processes were accompanied by spikes in e-mails to, from, or among certain internal constituencies. Might not that information be useful in helping to make (or unmake) refinements to the IT infrastructure and/or relevant processes? Similarly, if e-mails containing particular enterprise IP elements increase or decrease in response to particular business and/or IT changes, that e-mail pattern shift might tell you valuable things as well. For example, you might equip e-mail users not already so equipped with a shared portal, to make sharing of the IP they're using easier for them and perhaps more secure for the enterprise.

Overtone is not the only e-mail archiving solution vendor out there, of course, and if you're using an e-mail archive, you can already apply some useful analysis to at least some of the information stored there. However, what makes the Overtone AbilitySuite stand out, from my BPM-centric perspective, is the combination of its reporting and integration features. Also, since it is built to be closely aligned with the Lotus Notes platform, it is poised to take full advantage of the improvements IBM recently made to that platform, as discussed here previously.

Heck, I can easily imagine a day when real-time and near-real-time e-mail traffic analysis is used not only to flag and route around IT infrastructure problems, but to highlight and spur refinements in business processes. But then, Mom always said I was naively optimistic. Nonetheless, the Overtone folks seem to share at least some of my optimism and excitement about the real and potential links between e-mail archive management and BPM improvement and optimization. But as always, I'm most interested in what YOU think, so do please let me know.

Posted by mdortch in BPM • Collaboration • IBM  |  Permalink  | Comments (0)  | TrackBacks (0)

My ebizQ colleague Gian Trotta and his First Look team have recently investigated Appian Corp.'s latest BPM solution, as well as Alfresco Software, Inc.'s open source, BPM-enabled, service-oriented-architecture (SOA)-ready enterprise content management (ECM) offering. (Whew!) You should definitely check out Gian's posts – "Appian Enterprise 5.5: BPM Via Your iPod?" and "Alfresco's Cool Approach to ECM, Open Source Marketing, BPM and SOA," respectively. Here are some thoughts they engendered for me that you might find interesting and/or useful.

1. Truly effective BPM must be invisible, pervasive, and ubiquitous. That is to say, it must touch every user, and embrace every element of every business value chain. For this to happen, BPM, like the IT infrastructure itself, must also embrace every device and "work style" likely to be a part of the enterprise mix. This is a lot of what Appian's director of product management Phil Larson alludes to when he talks about people rerouting work or escalating tasks via voice commands from cell phones. (I'll wait until I actually see it before commenting on his idea of initiating business processes from an iPod…although I'm all over doing so from one of Apple's new iPhones!)

2. Effective, comprehensive BPM must follow the same evolutionary trail being blazed right now by enterprise collaboration and communications solutions. Multiple channels and access methods must be easily and securely integrated, to enable people to work the ways they work best, while delivering to them (only) the information and tools they need to do their jobs. This also means close integration between the IT-enabled tools used for BPM and those used for ECM, which I and others sometimes call "intellectual property lifecycle management" or "IPLM." That integration is a large part of the coolness factor of Appian Enterprise 5.5.

3. Open source solutions for tasks such as BPM and ECM can not only shorten vendor sales cycles, but can accelerate internal "sales" and "marketing" efforts between enterprise IT and business decision-makers. Instead of debating over terminologies and unstated but obvious political agendas, open source tools can be used to build models and simulations of processes, or pilot ECM or BPM deployments. Thus, open source ECM tools such as Alfresco's, or BPM tools such as those from Intalio, an Alfresco partner, can short-circuit a lot of debate and "FUD" ("fear, uncertainty, and doubt") about BPM, ECM, and/or enterprise open source solutions.

4. BPM, ECM, IPLM, and SOA are all important and intertwined, but none of them per se is the "point of the exercise." Rather, each is a step towards a larger goal – using IT to enable and empower people with the information and tools they need to perform the tasks needed to make the business live and grow. This is the "IT 3.0" focus on people, tasks, and information absolutely essential to the support of any serious effort to build and sustain a "Web 2.0" enterprise…whatever that might be…

Once you've given a look and/or listen to Gian Trotta's posts on Alfresco and Appian, you might also want to check out some relevant reading on how IT infrastructures are or should be aligned with BPM, ECM, and SOA initiatives. Potentially useful RFG research in the ebizQ Analyst Corner includes "Best Practices for IT Infrastructure Management and Business Alignment," "Building an Agile IT Infrastructure," "Business Knowledge Management," Parts I and II, "From SOA to Business-Oriented Architectures," "Making the BPM-SOA Connection," and "RFG's Recommendations for SOA Initiatives." There are lots of other helpful resources all over ebizQ as well. Go peruse some of them, then let me know how BPM and "IT 3.0" are evolving – or not – where you, your customers, or your partners work.

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

I've been writing a lot here recently about various approaches to capturing information that can and should drive business process definition and refinement. And there's a lot of interesting stuff in the special SAP Business Process Expert (BPX) Community section of the ebizQ Web site about what it takes and means to be a business process expert or manager. All of this has led me to the sudden, retrospectively blindingly obvious realization of what likely is or should be the largest first challenge facing those pursuing BPM initiatives.

Who owns the process of defining and prioritizing business processes?

Senior executives sometimes argue that they define critical business processes "by definition," since they set overall corporate strategies and business goals, and are held accountable for fulfilling these, at least in theory. Line-of-business leaders often argue with equal vehemence that they own responsibility for defining business processes, since they and their teams are the ones with the "feet on the street" and their "fingers on the pulse" of the marketplace, particularly customers, partners, and prospects.

There are even IT decision-makers who will argue that they and their teams own or should own business process definition. Their reasoning? The business runs on IT, and IT is where all the real knowledge about who does what resides, within IT management logs and databases. Therefore, only IT has the breadth and depth of knowledge necessary to define processes accurately and effectively.

The right answer is more like "some part of all of the above, plus none of the above."

If enterprises managed IT based solely on "speeds and feeds" information, without taking into account business goals or user experiences, many enterprise IT deployments would look very different from how they look today. Similarly, effective business process definition and prioritization requires input from all of the stakeholders and influencers listed above.

However, no one group owns all of the processes used to define and refine business processes. In fact, the best roles for the three groups of stakeholders discussed here mirror the roles they play in the running of the business. Senior executives should define big-picture goals, and help to orchestrate more granular goals and processes supporting those higher-level goals. Line-of-business leaders and their teams should provide the information from the field necessary to make sure that both strategic and tactical processes are grounded in real life, and delivering real business value. IT decision-makers and their teams, meanwhile, should focus on ensuring that IT efforts provide maximum support for business goals, and engage business decision-makers when those goals threaten to disrupt IT or business operations unacceptably.

Broadly, business and IT teams are a lot like the cast and the crew on a movie or theatrical production. Frequently, neither camp can stand the other, but each realizes that ultimately, without both camps, ya got no show. (When Benjamin Franklin said "we must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately," he could easily have been describing the dynamic that governs IT-business relations at many enterprises.)

BPM is both an opportunity and a critical requirement to replace confrontation and conflict with collaboration and cooperation. A good starting place is to come together to define and prioritize core business processes collaboratively, and to build a framework for continuing refinement and improvement of those processes.

If you'd like to see some more relevant observations and recommendations, check out Part Two of the two-part RFG Research Note "Business Knowledge Management: The 'Missing Link' for BPM, IPLM, and SOAs?" Then, let me know what you think, and how processes are defined and prioritized at your organization.

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

Unstructured Data: Yet Another "First Mile" Challenge to Effective BPM

OK, this is likely my last Lotusphere-inspired rant for this year, for those of you who have been waiting for me to stop harping on that event. However, I did see a fair amount of thought-provoking, BPM-related stuff there, especially related to the "first mile" problem of information capture...

One such item was a prototype "smart personal assistant" that "lives inside" a user's computer. In the demo and discussion presented to me by an enthusiastic chap from IBM Corp. in Ireland, I saw software "skim through" incoming e-mails and rapidly and accurately triage them in order of importance and urgency. Criteria included key words in subject lines and message bodies, as well as sender information. These