March 25, 2008
The Big Mash-Up, Continued: What Does BPM Want?
As I’ve mentioned here previously, I (along with some other industry observers whose opinions I respect, sometimes more than my own) fervently believe we’re watching the colliding convergence of multiple technologies. These include, but are not limited to, BPM, event-driven architectures (EDAs), enterprise information integration (EII), information lifecycle management (ILM), master data management (MDM), and service-oriented architectures (SOAs).
This time out, I want to throw out some more detailed musings about the forces driving BPM closer to EII, ILM, and MDM. While these latter three areas are overlapping and often only vaguely defined, they all attempt to address the same core needs. As I see it, there are two that matter most.
Need the First: The ability to base every business action, decision, and process on the most accurate, consistent, secure, and timely information available, without fail.
Need the Second: The ability to answer the “Journalism 101” questions about that information – who’s using what, when, where, why, and how – accurately and completely, on demand at any time.
These are the needs underlying increasing industry focus on “one version of the truth,” a phrase cited frequently by those focused on tasks or goals such as data quality or management of customer or product information.
But meeting these needs as completely and consistently as possible is also essential if BPM is to succeed and deliver maximum business value. Processes developed, enforced or revised based on inaccurate, inconsistent, or just plain wrong information are opportunities to make what we called sardonically in my young analyst days “career-limiting decisions.”
But don’t just take my word for it. Recent survey-based research conducted by me and my august colleagues at Aberdeen Group finds that companies using or planning MDM know more about “time to information,” the time between business activity and delivery of useful information to decision-makers, than those with no MDM activities or plans. Aberdeen research also finds that most companies are pursuing EDA plans, and that those companies also pursuing SOA and/or MDM plans are going after EDAs more aggressively.
Now, even if you could build an EDA or an SOA without BPM, I’m not sure I’d want to see the results. And even if you have no plans for EDAs or SOAs, the more business-critical your processes become, the more they require effective management, and the more that management requires the best information available.
Drop me a line if you’d like to see the Aberdeen research I’ve mentioned. Also please drop a line or post a comment if you’re pursuing BPM initiatives in concert with EII, ILM, and/or MDM, or if you have supporting or contrarian ideas about this particular element of The Big Mash-Up.
Posted by mdortch in
BPM
• Business Knowledge Management
• Enterprise Information Integration
• Event-Driven Architecture
• Information Lifecycle Management
• SOA
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March 24, 2008
“Renting BPM,” “BPM Live,” and “The Big Mash-Up”
Dennis Byron, my new ebizQ BPM “blogmate” and one of my favorite pundits, wrote recently about Appian and Enterprise Rent-a-Car. I love the idea of “renting BPM,” and agree with Dennis completely that it’s something we could sooner rather than later, and not necessarily just from Appian.
I found another recent announcement equally interesting. In February, Vitria announced M3O, an environment it claims “empowers business users to directly model, manage, monitor and optimize their business processes.”
If you talk with senior executives at other BPM companies, as I have done recently, you hear several terms and variations repeated with increasing frequency. A distillation of what I’ve heard, without quite so much release-related rigor, comes out very close to the Vitria announcement.
That is to say, what users apparently want and need – or at least what vendors think users want and need now – is the ability to model processes, then execute those model processes immediately and directly, with as much IT cooperation as available and as little required IT intervention as possible.
A single view of the process, the data it accesses, and its effects, in a secure “sandbox” that allows near-real-time manipulation and optimization, without disrupting business operations. Rapid collaboration between and among the businesspeople driving processes and the IT people managing the infrastructures that enable those processes.
You get the idea. Think of it as a kind of “BPM Live.”
Now, Vitria’s not the only vendor of BPM or related solutions pointing in this general direction. I expect to see more such announcements soon and frequently, especially as more “rental”/software-as-a-service (SaaS) alternatives for BPM and related functions appear. I think you should expect the same, as part of what I, Joe McKendrick and other members of the “punditocracy” appear to be predicting with greater frequency – something I’m calling, at least for now, “The Big Mash-Up.” That’s BPM, plus event-driven architectures (EDAs), enterprise information integration (EII), information lifecycle management (ILM), master data management (MDM), and service-oriented architectures (SOAs), among other significant IT initiatives.
Research I’m conducting at Aberdeen Group is unearthing high levels of interdependency and “cross-pollination” among such efforts. You can read more about it in the recent Aberdeen reports I wrote on EII and SOA performance, both of which are available at no cost at the Aberdeen Group Web site for, as they say, a limited time only.
More to come on this. Lots more. Stay tuned – and make sure to make Dennis feel welcome, too!
Posted by mdortch in
BPM
• Business Knowledge Management
• Current Events
• Enterprise Information Integration
• Event-Driven Architecture
• Information Lifecycle Management
• SOA
• Software as a Service
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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.
Dennis Byron is an analyst with ebizQ, focusing on Open Source Software as well as Business Process Management technologies.
