BPM in Action

Earlier this month, IBM announced that it has integrated its FileNet BPM offering with Cognos 8 (which IBM also owns) and its business intelligence features. The company has also transformed its January acquisition of AptSoft into IBM WebSphere Business Events, a “BPM Suite” designed to ease and speed the integration of BPM, BI, and event processing.

Whatever one wants to say or argue about whether or not this is a suite or a portfolio, and whether or not it represents a new set of solutions or old wine in new bottles, this is a meaningful development. It demonstrates that:
1. IBM is serious about integrating its FileNet technologies with BI solutions;
2. IBM is serious about integrating event-related features and processing with BPM and BI; and
3. IBM is committed to integration of BI, BPM, and event processing with/via service-oriented architectures (SOAs).

This mirrors the continuing evolution of The Big Mash-Up in enterprises of all sizes and types. Increasingly, by my lights, anyway, users are seeing BI, BPM, and analytics as tools for answering questions about “who, what, where, and why,” event-driven features and event processing as tools for answering “when,” and SOAs as answers to “how.” A construction that may be a bit inelegant, but begins to shed light on some of the forces driving The Big Mash-Up.

And IBM isn’t the only vendor heading down this path. BEA Systems, for example, is talking increasingly about the “Event-Driven SOA.” Oracle offers an “Event-Driven Architecture Suite,” an element of what the company calls “SOA 2.0.” And there’s more to come, from familiar and emerging vendors.

This is a big and growing deal. If you’d like to read more about it, check out my Aberdeen Group Analyst Insight, “Building Event-Driven Architectures: Many Paths, One Mountain.” And if you haven’t yet done so, check out my Benchmark Study, “Performance in a Service-Oriented Architecture World,” while it’s still available at no cost for a now-VERY-limited time, as the marketeers like to say. (If you’re quick and have 10 minutes to spare, you can still take my survey on application and infrastructure monitoring and management, which entitles you to FREE copies of the SOA performance study AND the report to be based on the survey when that’s published. Such a deal, as we former Brooklynites like to say!)

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

(Once again, sorry for the long darkness since my last entry. No excuses; I’m still swamped, but have almost bailed myself out …)

Issue the First: Within the past week or so, both Citigroup and Merrill Lynch have jettisoned their leaders. But perhaps even more interesting is that according to several published and broadcast reports, neither company has a strong candidate successor waiting in the wings.

If this isn’t evidence of failed or inadequate business processes, I’d be very surprised. Effective corporate leadership succession, as Bette Davis famously said about old age, “is no place for sissies.” With shareholders increasingly appearing to demand higher returns every quarter, month, or week, management time cycles are compressing significantly. This means leaders barely have time to effect meaningful change before they’re on the hot seat. Outsized challenges such as the sub-prime mortgage market meltdown only accelerate and exacerbate these challenges.

The lesson for BPM and IT decision-makers: select and begin mentoring your future leaders now, and put effective and well-documented processes into place for identifying and working with those people. With every enterprise almost entirely dependent upon IT to do business, let alone to thrive competitively, no company can afford to miss a beat or make a misstep where IT leadership is concerned. And with more and more experienced IT people retiring, this is definitely a non-trivial challenge.

Issue the Second: Yahoo! has apologized publicly for misleading Congress, and giving the Chinese government information that helped lead to the jailing of dissidents. The company claimed that it had no choice but to comply with orders to deliver to the Chinese government e-mail records and other information that led to the dissidents’ arrests.

Sigh.

The IT-enabled globalization genie is out of the bottle for sure, and ain’t getting back in any time soon. However, as country musician Aaron Tippin said in his first hit song, and as many have said before and since, “you’ve got to stand for something or you’ll fall for anything.” Yahoo! – and every other company doing business beyond the borders of the country in which it was started – must decide what its corporate values are, and live by and up to them, wherever it does business.

The lesson for BPM and IT decision-makers: ensure that values at your workplace and across your company are clearly articulated and consistently enforced. This will not only make recruiting and retention of key staff and leaders easier, it will make it easier for you and your colleagues to sleep well at night – barring unforeseen IT crises, of course...

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

Before I being the current tirade, my abject apologies to everyone at ebizQ, especially all of you readers out there – all five of you – who’ve been wondering where I’ve been. (My even more abject apologies to those who didn’t even miss me, for returning.) Let’s just say settling into a new job is challenging and time-consuming, promise it won’t happen again without more warning and faster recovery, and leave it at that. And now, back to business…processes, that is!

So The TJX Companies, owners of TJMaxx and Marshalls, among other retail chains, loses credit card information and other private data for thousands of customers. The company goes to court, and hammers out a settlement that basically offers gift certificates to victims of its failure in multiple business processes, notably those related to IT and intellectual property (IP) protection and security.

So in effect, in exchange for losing my personal data and forcing me to cancel and replace all of my credit and identity cards, I’m welcome to come back to the store with the new ones, and spend more of my time and money? If all of this happens again, am I officially permitted to stop referring to it as isolated incompetence, and to begin instead calling it a business practice?

Wal-Mart, meanwhile, has embarked on a campaign to reduce human-to-human customer interactions, according to reports on National Public Radio and elsewhere. The company has removed from its Web site its former customer service number, saying that answering the volume of calls it was receiving was getting to expensive.

So it’s too expensive to help those people who are unable or unwilling to go online, but who are able and/or willing to make their way down to a Wal-Mart store and spend time and money there. Next, Wal-Mart will be telling those same customers to stop using cash and checks, because those transactions cost too much to process.

Or, maybe both companies will come to their collective managerial senses, and realize that one can squeeze operational costs out of an environment in ways that create costs and risks elsewhere. Like the costs associated with reputational risk, when a retailer is seen as insensitive to the people it depends on for its revenues.

What can we learn? If you’re a business and/or IT decision-maker, don’t summarily change or remove something just because you decide it will make things work better, even if it will. Just because a change makes things work better doesn’t mean it will compel the people using those things to work better, not without clear communication with and inclusion of those affected.

Posted by mdortch in BPM • Business Knowledge Management • Current Events • IT Infrastructure Management  |  Permalink  | Comments (2)  | TrackBacks (0)

What IT-empowered tools are best to use for collecting information about who's using what when, where, why, and how? Well, as every industry analyst tries to answer almost every question, “that depends.”

If you've already got IT infrastructure monitoring and/or management tools in place, explore them carefully for their abilities to generate useful workflow-mapping information. Remember, the goal is to gather information without intruding on those workflows, or coming across like “Big Brother” on electronic steroids. (This is why process is more important that tools in this endeavor.)

Also note that numerous vendors are starting to focus more and more on features that specifically enable capture and mapping of user-driven workflows. Altiris, now owned by Symantec Corp., has made several moves in this direction, and made a lot of noise about workflow just after the acquisition closed in April. Expect more such noise later this year and beyond, especially at the company's ManageFusion event in Las Vegas in October (where I plan to be speaking, by the way).

Beyond client-side management, vendors of solutions for monitoring and screening of e-mail, instant messaging (IM), and other forms of collaboration and sharing of enterprise intellectual property (IP) can also be used to identify and map what users are doing with what. Some such solutions, such as those from companies such as FaceTime Communications, Inc., Orchestria Corp., and Workshare Inc., offer both useful workflow-mapping information and immediate security benefits. This combination may make them strong candidates at enterprises considering deploying software for such functions.

And of course, there are tools dedicated specifically to the capture and mapping of business workflows and processes, including my current favorite, GemWorX FlowModeler, mentioned here previously. Whether or not such purpose-specific tools can be cost-justified depends on a variety of factors. However, it's critical to note that the lack of such tools should not be seen as making such capture and mapping efforts impossible. Perhaps more cumbersome, but still doable, and worth doing.

Ultimately, the goal is to combine good processes with effective tools, to capture and map as accurately, easily, and unobtrusively as possible what users are doing, and with what they're doing what they're doing. Such information is absolutely essential to development, deployment, and management of effective business processes. It's also essential to IT's continuing efforts to provide maximum beneficial support to all key business tasks and processes.

If you've got comments about specific tools you like and/or don't like in this context, or relevant questions, post'em below and/or e-mail'em to me. Meanwhile, I'll start thinking about what happens next, after you know more about who's doing what with what for whom at your enterprise...

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

No, those ain't typo's in that headline – I MEAN “IT,” as in “information technology,” and not just a generic “it.” As you may have read here previously, I believe one of the first basic principles those pursuing BPM and BI excellence must address is finding and fixing what's broken. Once that's done, the very next basic set issues to address should answer the musical question, “How well is IT supporting the business?”

An immediately obvious follow-up question reminds me of a joke. What's the world's greatest invention? The Thermos(r) bottle. Why? Because it keeps hot things hot and cold things cold. Why does that make it the world's greatest invention? How does it know? (Insert pained groans here. I'll wait. Enjoy. Now, back to work.)

That is to say, if you're going to figure out how well or poorly IT is supporting the business, how would you do so? Well, the only reliable way I know is to assess how people are using IT to do their work today, and how well those efforts are working.

This is easy to say, but like much about BPM, BI, and business-driven IT, tricky and challenging on many levels to do. Basically, it requires processes and solutions that help business and IT decision-makers to answer those questions many of us were told in our youth that every good news story should answer – who, what, when, where, why, and how. In this context, that means knowing who's using what IT-enabled resources, as well as when, where, why, and how those users are using those resources. Journalism 101, applied to the business IT infrastructure. On demand. Everywhere. No pressure.

This is a big goal. However, every step toward it can help you know valuable information about how well your business IT investments are actually contributing to business success – or how poorly. And while you're building, documenting, managing, and refining processes aimed at this goal, vendors are toiling mightily at delivering solutions that can help. More about both processes and tools for capturing and leveraging real-life workflows to come!

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

Last time was about processes intended to help you and your colleagues figure out what applications, resources, services, and workflows were most critical to your business, and how well and/or not well IT is supporting them. This time is about tools intended to enable and support said processes.

Regarding tools, well, you've got to start with what you've got, on the assumption that there isn't budget or bandwidth to go out and find, then deploy and manage something new. This is especially true before investing significantly in any particular BPM and/or BI solution, even if it's "free." Free software, as valuable and powerful as it is, still requires time and energy, and sometimes money, to deploy effectively. And it requires just as firm and solid an operational foundation as anything else that's critical to your business.

Fortunately, you can learn a lot about what's working well and what's not by gathering and analyzing any and all available information about the IT and intellectual property (IP) resources people use to do their jobs. This information, coupled with data about things like common support problems and their resolutions, can help tremendously in efforts to identify and prioritize business-critical tasks and resources, and the IT and IP elements that enable them. This is something one can literally begin with little more than sticky notes, spreadsheets, and/or text documents.

However, if there are more sophisticated tools available for infrastructure and/or operational monitoring and/or workflow mapping, this is the time to use'em. In fact, this information-gathering process is so important and potentially valuable, it may justify investing in such tools where they are not already in place. This is particularly true given the growing number of open source and trial software offerings in this ever-evolving space.

Whatever tools are used, it can also be both helpful and illuminating for IT to share the findings of these information-gathering efforts with the users and line-of-business decision-makers those IT people are supporting. This presents the opportunity to refine and enhance those statistical findings and aggregations with anecdotal and/or survey-based "real-life" user input and feedback. This is likely to be much more reliable than the results of the sadly common and commonly ineffective practice of designating IT staffers as user ambassadors or representatives. It is also a way to demonstrate that IT is ready, willing, and able to listen and respond effectively to users, something many users and some IT people seriously doubt, I assure you. Let the users speak for themselves!

With both processes and tools, start small and focused, but start. Gather this information, and develop processes and solutions for gathering, managing, and taking advantage of it in the future. Not only can and should it inform your determinations about what's really critical to your business, it can help begin an effective dialogue among business, IT and senior executive decision-makers. Even if your enterprise is sufficiently compact and flat that those are all the same person.

By the way, there's some very interesting and refreshing additional takes on working with what you've got in a recently published book, by my industry colleague and ebizQ blogmate, decision management expert James Taylor (with co-author Neil Raden). The book is "Smart Enough Systems: How to Deliver Competitive Advantage by Automating Hidden Decisions," and the title only hints at the breadth and depth of common-sense, actionable advice you'll find within. (You can visit Amazon.com to examine some of said advice from the comfort of your Internet-connected computer.) And in an interesting bit of synchronicity, the book came out on June 29, the same date as the iPhone, one of which you can qualify to win by completing the ebizQ event processing survey. See? Good processes really do help tie everything together better!)

Posted by mdortch in BPM • Business Knowledge Management • IT Infrastructure Management  |  Permalink  | Comments (0)  | 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)

As I've been prattling on about recently, it's critical to start down the path toward BPM, BI, and related goals by focusing first on some basics. By my lights, one of the first and most important of these is to find, identify, repair, and report on anything and everything that's broken in the IT and/or business infrastructure.

This is as critical as ensuring that you've got a firm and sturdy foundation underneath you before attempting to build anything substantial and stable. And to achieve this goal effectively, you're going to need documented, effective, enforced, and proven processes, just like you need for everything else. Otherwise, every break or failure becomes a fire drill, and every effort to address every problem will likely end up reinventing wheels that already exist. This ad hoc approach works sometimes, but only inconsistently. It also opens up your enterprise to the risk that what fixes Problem A breaks the fix that was implemented to resolve Problem B. Or vice-versa.

You've probably already seen this happen, when a software "update" meant to patch or fix a previous problem creates a new one. Well, imagine the same thing happening dozens or hundreds of times a week or month, depending on the size of your enterprise, and you can begin to see the true scope of the problem. Without processes focused on finding, fixing, and ultimately avoiding infrastructure problems, those problems will consume precious resources that should be focused on helping people do more work better, and refining the processes underlying that work.

Process-driven infrastructure problem-solving is also the only way I've seen to achieve real, sustainable reduction of problems that hinder operations and drag down technological and user performance. Once there are processes in place for addressing problems effectively, those processes themselves can be expanded and refined to reduce or eliminate problems that stubbornly recur.

Of course, to find and fix problems in your infrastructure, you need knowledge about said infrastructure. This is where tools for monitoring, alarms, and alerts can be very useful on the IT side of things. When combined with input from businesspeople about the frequency and relative severity recurring problems, such tools can be focused on those problems, in ways that lead to effective problem-solving processes. These can then be adapted and applied to other tools and other problems, leading eventually to a consistent, enterprise-wide, process-driven approach to finding and fixing problems across entire IT and business infrastructures.

At least, that's what I think. More on both relevant processes and tools coming up shortly. Meanwhile, do let me know your thoughts on this important matter, and how effectively or ineffectively it's being addressed where you work. Maybe together, we can implement more effective, consistent processes for talking about this particular challenge, here and at your workplace.

Posted by mdortch in BPM • Business Knowledge Management • 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)

I have of late been following numerous parallel event and development tracks regarding BPM and related areas of interest. One of the things that becomes increasingly clear to me is that there are a lot of companies and decision-makers out there who are seriously on the fence, behind the curve (or the 8-ball), and/or all of the above regarding BPM.

I understand. BPM is challenging and complex. One of the primary reasons for this is that it is neither fish nor fowl – or, perhaps, it's fish that thinks it's fowl, or vice-versa. (I'm already confusing myself here, but will press on valiantly nonetheless.)

BPM is a set of human-centric business problems that often masquerade as or are confused for decisions and issues focused on IT solutions and systems. And vice-versa. Moreover, effective IT decisions must be made within a context defined by effective business processes.

So, to get BPM right, it is often necessary to go back to basic first principles to make the best possible decisions. One of those basic first principles comes in the form of a single compound question – what is BPM, and how is it supposed to help our business run better?

Well, I'm glad I asked me that, and hope you are or soon will be glad, too. After much cogitating about first principles for business and IT operations, here's what I've come up with so far.

At its core, BPM is really intended to answer some basic questions, in the order listed, cyclically and on demand as needed.

1. What part or parts of the IT and/or business infrastructure are not working, and can they be fixed non-disruptively? If not, what should be done instead? If so, in what order should they be fixed, and what resources are needed to fix what's broken?

2. Once all critical infrastructure disruptions are addressed, are all elements of the infrastructure providing optimal support to all business-critical applications, goals, requirements, and services? If so, how do we know this, and how can we demonstrate and measure it? If not, how do we know that, and how can we determine how best to fix the situation?

3. Throughout the life cycle of business and IT infrastructure elements and the resources they consume and support, business and IT practices and infrastructures must minimize risk, maximize security, and ensure business-mandated and regulatory compliance. To achieve these goals, do we always know who is using what IT and intellectual property (IP) resources, when, where, why, and how?

4. As basic business goals and requirements are being met, how best can the business and IT infrastructures be improved to enable and support future goals and requirements? And how can this cycle be repeated and refined in ways that lead to continuous positive transformation of business and IT processes and practices – starting again from the beginning of this list?

I'm going to be devoting more time and space here to delving into these and other related basic issues that must be addressed effectively if BPM is to have any real business value. I'm hoping these excursions will provide, over time, an increasingly rich and helpful context within which more specific BPM decisions, both operational and technological, can be made more effectively. We'll see. Stay tuned…

(PS: Yes, the headline of this post is a clumsy, annotated paraphrasing of the late, great Edwin Starr's classic, "War." And yes, we all really, really need to get out and hear newer music more often…)

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

The upcoming ebizQ Webinar "Extend and Enhance the Power of BPM with Workflow and Business Rules" promises to help attendees understand how to enable and improve business decisions with rules-based business logic and workflow automation. The Webinar's promising agenda reminds me of a recent conversation I had with the chief executive of a company best known in Europe. The company is building up its presence in the United States, in part by focusing on integrated, process-enabled IT asset and service management. The company is PS'Soft, and it takes a very interesting view of asset and service management. Its decision-makers believe BPM is a powerful way of integrating asset, infrastructure, and service management into enterprise IT architectures.

One key area of focus: software license management. PS'Soft solutions help companies to drive payback on investment in those solutions of three to six months, simply by overseeing management and reduction of software licenses.

PS'Soft solutions also rely on an integrated configuration management database (CMDB). The PS'Soft CMDB includes features for data relationship management not available in other vendors' CMDB offerings. The company believes, as do I, that it will be a long time, if ever, before we get to a single giant CMDB managing everything. Such a CMDB will also be ungainly and hard to manage, if and when we do achieve it. In the interim, federation of and integration with multiple CMDB options is the logical way to go, and was a design goal of the PS'Soft architecture from the beginning.

PS'Soft also believes strongly in self-service and BPM integration. The former eliminates the need for armies of clerks and technicians to develop and manage catalogues of IT services and asset adds, moves, and changes. The latter combines workflow approvals and software integration with asset and license records, to automate provisioning of software based on business and user requirements. The company also sees BPM as a critical element of compliance with and leverage of resources such as the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL). As I interpret PS'Soft's strategy, the company sees BPM as a pathway between the "what" elements of the ITIL recommendations and the "how" elements necessary to translate those into real-life business benefits.

The company is also focused on enabling what one of its investors calls "the revenge of the CFO," according to president and CEO Paul Rochester. IT opacity, coupled with growing requirements for regulatory compliance and governance transparency, has led to increasing dominance of the CFO over IT costs and accountability at many enterprises. A prime indicator: growing numbers of CIOs now report to CFOs and not directly to CEOs. In short, PS'Soft focuses on helping CIOs to have better conversations and relationships with their CFOs and CEOs. A large part of this is business-driven process enablement of asset and service management and related applications and tasks.

I fervently believe that integration of business-driven, human-centric process management into the management of applications and IT infrastructures is a helpful step toward the pervasiveness and invisibility BPM needs to succeed. From that perspective, I applaud PS'Soft's focus, and will be watching the company closely as it seeks to expand it presence in the U.S. You might want to do the same.

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

So you've decided to take a shot at the "CPR" approach to BPM and business knowledge management (BKM) outlined here previously. You agree that culture, process, and results represent a potentially effective strategy for engendering support for BPM and BKM initiatives. But, you're probably asking yourself, how best to proceed?

Well, I've also mentioned here previously, in a mini-rant on BPM and marketing, what I believe to be a strong candidate approach. My colleagues at Robert Frances Group (RFG) and I have found a focus on seven interconnected key factors forms a firm foundation for such initiatives. And conveniently for lovers of alliterations, all of them start with the letter "P." The "seven Ps" we believe are in fact pillars of enterprise transformation are listed (at least quasi-)logically and briefly summarized below.

• Processes are the basic building blocks of excellence, in BPM, in BKM, and in almost every other significant, strategic business and IT endeavor.
• People must be measured and organized in relation to process fulfillment.
• Platform support must be unified and integrated in terms of both people and process. (Platforms must be rendered invisible, keeping the focus on people, tasks, and information.)
• Products (and services) are what and how IT delivers business value. Each is constructed of a number of processes and interconnected IT and intellectual property (IP) elements. (They are not the products and services proffered by vendors to support enterprise initiatives. Just to be clear.)
• Planning addresses the evolution and growth of all of the other "Ps," and their alignment with business goals.
• Projects are how strategic initiatives are parsed into achievable, interconnected steps toward continuous improvement of business and IT operations, and of IT-business alignment.
• Portfolios are the means of organizing and cataloguing projects as well as IT and IP assets. Portfolios often serve as the lingua franca for IT-business collaboration. (Portfolios of IT products, projects, and services, for example, often represent the underlying elements supporting and enabling specific business services.)

The above focus areas can be customized to reflect the priorities and goals of note at any particular enterprise, and should be. They also represent headings under which specific questions need to be cataloged and prioritized. These categories of questions can then be used to foment the conversations within IT and between IT and business leaders necessary to get to successful, business-driven, human-centric BPM and BKM.

I will, perhaps unsurprisingly, have more to say about each of the above focus areas, and their particular relevance to BPM and BKM, in future outings in this space. Meanwhile, if you have experiences, opinions, or other relevant thoughts to share, do please let me know.

Posted by mdortch in BPM • Business Knowledge Management • IT Infrastructure Management  |  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)

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)

In Part 1 of this outing, I proposed that Sun Microsystems, Inc.'s DTrace offers some nifty benefits, to IT infrastructure managers and to those trying to develop and deploy effective, human-centric BPM. Herewith, a continuation and extension of those observations.

The folks who created DTrace and others at Sun are pursuing a set of initiatives collectively known as "FISHworks," where "FISH" stands for "fully integrated software and hardware." At this week's Sun Analyst Summit in San Francisco, members of the Sun team demonstrated the ability to morph general-purpose computers into purpose-specific appliances intended to replace devices ranging from network-attached storage (NAS) managers to firewalls.

The most interesting part of the demo to me, though, was the DTrace-powered dashboard with pre-built, easy-to-customize scripts and routines. These made it incredibly easy to identify and resolve performance anomalies, and to gain significant insight into who was doing what with what on a network – at least in the demo.

So why not an eventual "BPM assistant" or "BPM orchestration" appliance? One with a dashboard that consolidates and concatenates real-time and near-real-time information about how IT is performing, and what people are doing and using on the network? In ways that information can be used directly to help to craft and refine, and perhaps even "roll out" and "roll back," processes that govern the access to and use of enterprise IT and IP resources?

An example might help. Your company decides that everyone must use the same processes to get business expenses submitted and reimbursed. Once the process becomes law, performance information indicates a sudden spike in problems with a particular server, which is causing slow performance of the expense-processing application. This leads to high user dissatisfaction – with the process, not the application or server per se. However, comprehensive, robust technologies such as DTrace help to isolate and resolve the problem rapidly – or, perhaps in conjunction with modeling, simulation, and testing technologies, to avoid it in the first place.

Yes, it's an aggressively simplified example. And yes, there are still many, many steps to be taken before most enterprises could do something like this, let alone more subtle and profound BPM-related, IT-enabled things. But aggressive, ambitious goals are an essential element of successful enterprise BPM strategies. And besides, it's good to dream.

Meanwhile, back here in real life, you should know that Sun described the prototype general-purpose-computer-to-specific-function-appliance-transmogrifier with the DTrace dashboard I saw as somewhere "between concept and product." Hmm. And other IT infrastructure management solutions and vendors already offer dashboards that at least promise to deliver consolidated, comprehensive information about IT and network performance. Some of these even promise further to enable and support more effective BPM. Examples include BMC Software, Inc., CA, Inc., Hewlett-Packard Co. (HP)'s OpenView portfolio, and IBM's Tivoli unit, among others.

All of these vendors' offerings have constraints and shortcomings, cost and complexity historically being the two most profound and consistent. But technological evolution, the rise of open source, and other factors are helping to tilt things a bit further in favor of buyers and users.

The more usefully IT infrastructure management and BPM can be integrated, the more events and developments in one area can inform and potentially improve events and developments in the other. Also, the more effectively systems-centric process management can be automated and left to IT-based solutions, the more human "bandwidth" should be available to address the more human-centric BPM challenges.

If your company is already pursuing BPM, those efforts should be as closely aligned with IT infrastructure management policies, processes, and solutions as possible. If your company is already pursuing comprehensive IT infrastructure management, those efforts should be as closely aligned as possible with any current or future BPM initiatives. If your company is not pursuing either, you may want to keep an updated résumé handy. Meanwhile, check out the RFG Research Note "Best Practices for IT Infrastructure Management and Business Alignment" in the ebizQ Analyst Corner for more "deep thoughts" on these and related subjects, and let me know if you'd like to discuss any or all of these further, here or otherwise.

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

Sun Microsystems, Inc. offers a very interesting tool originally designed to identify and explore online application performance. That tool is known as DTrace, and as its name implies, performs "dynamic tracing" of what might be thought of as application workflows. To quote from Wikipedia, "DTrace is designed for tuning and troubleshooting of applications and the OS itself, giving its user operational insights with which they can make performance gains. Special consideration has been taken to make it safe to use in a production environment."

That latter sentence is particularly interesting. Folks from Sun describe DTrace as capable of automatically "instrumenting" itself to deliver the desired information. That means that you "point" DTrace at something, and it "automagically" figures out how to go to that something and configure itself in a way to extract the desired information, without materially affecting performance. Other tools used for so-called "root-cause analysis" can take hours or days to track down and identify specific causes of performance problems, even after you've spent the time and money to obtain or build and deploy the "right" probe or monitoring tool.

In addition, DTrace supports a programming language, known imaginatively enough as "D," a kind-of successor to/subset of the venerable C language. This means one could write scripts that instruct DTrace to obtain and present a wide range of information that can help to improve IT performance, process-related knowledge, or, optimally, both.

All well and good, but what's that got to do with BPM?

Well, suppose you can point a software "lens" at any or every part of a particular application or service and determine not only how it's performing, but what people are doing with it. With such information, you'd know a fair amount of information that could be very useful to defining, managing, and refining business processes. And if you could write programs for such a lens, you could perform all kinds of useful analysis and monitoring tasks repeatedly and consistently, generating historical and trending information about behavior that drives real-life business processes.

No wonder the Wall Street Journal awarded DTrace top prize in its 2006 Technology Innovation Awards competition. It came in ahead of innovative lightweight solar energy panels, and powdered insulin that can be inhaled instead of injected!

DTrace has its shortcomings, however. First of all, to do what it does requires tight integration with the kernel or heart of an operating system – in this case, Sun's own Solaris 10. However, DTrace was the very first component of OpenSolaris Sun made available under the Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL) in 2005. Sun claims more than 7 million downloads of OpenSolaris, which means a fairly large number of folks are building DTrace-enabled problem-solving and process-managing solutions even as you read this.

There is also work going on to port DTrace to the Unix-derived FreeBSD open source operating system. In addition, Apple Inc. announced last year that an upcoming release of its OS X environment will have DTrace built in as well. (Bryan Cantrill, one of the creators of DTrace, suggested to IBM Corp. back in August 2006 that IBM support development of DTrace for IBM's AIX operating environment. He made some cogent, customer-centric arguments for it, too. No word yet on any reply.)

So you will likely be able to take at least some advantage of DTrace soon in your own environment, even if you're not knowingly running Solaris. Whether or not this is true, though, I suggest you investigate DTrace and its growing ecosystem. I think the exercise could help to provide a template or wish list for the kinds of information you can and should extract from your IT infrastructure to drive your business processes.

Some good starting places include the DTrace OpenSolaris Community, and the DTrace section of Sun's BigAdmin Web site on systems administration. These contain oodles of links to discussions, downloads, information, and other resources. Meanwhile, make sure to tune in here for Part 2, wherein I will provide glimpses of an interesting, potentially bright, BPM-enabling future for DTrace and IT infrastructure management!

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