Archive for February, 2007
I’m not going to try to compete with Sandy’s wall-to-wall coverage of this event. Mine will be more impressionistic.
Simon Hayward keynote. Gartner likes to sell futures on technology. It’s what they do. Simon has a chart of the value realization from BPM over time, with 3 curves. Today the “productivity” curve is highest. In 2012 (safely over the horizon) the “visibility” curve overtakes it. In 2017 (I’ll be dead by then) the “innovation” curve reigns supreme. After that, I don’t know, maybe global warming wipes out the earth. Does this kind of chart really advance the ball?
An interesting difference between the Gartner and Brainstorm BPM conference is that at Gartner the keynoters assume and universally assert that if you’re not going through the whole model-design-deploy-execute-monitor-analyze-optimize thing you’re not really doing BPM. At Brainstorm the keynoting class generally advances the notion that BPM ends with modeling and “process thinking”… although the vendors who sponsor the thing really wish they would stop saying that. I like the Gartner approach, but which one is addressing the “real” BPM marketplace?
Hayward and Janelle Hill both make a big deal of the idea that BPM has to make the process “explicit” but leave activities decoupled from their actual implementation. Explicit here is kind of a code word. I think it means fully defined at the logical level, i.e. almost executable. They also say that BPM must empower the business side (not IT) to make changes to the (executable) process model. They make this sound like reality, even though it is a vision (one that I support)… rarely fulfilled by actual products.
Hayward lists 3 alternative paths to explicit (i.e. executable) process: BPMS, “process-aware middleware”, and the composite app evolution of packaged apps. The latter two I think are code for Microsoft and Oracle/SAP, respectively. I’m not sure. He does not see the fact that these paths are alternatives as a bad thing, although he admits it forces buyers into tough choices. Not a great answer.
A recurring theme is the requirement for a new role in the organization, what they call a business process analyst, with “crossover” skills blending business and IT. I think it’s someone with the smarts of IT but with a business perspective on process.
One of the SPA’s (Gartner predictions) to be discussed later in the conference says that process modeling will be adopted on a scale half as big as spreadsheets. As someone now invested in BPMN training, I can only say, “I wish…” Following that theme, I went to a session called Process Modeling for Profit by Marc Kerremans from the consulting side of Gartner, i.e not an analyst. He is one of those consultants that enlarges “process modeling” to mean all types of business modeling from business goals and strategic alignment to organizational modeling, process selection, etc. The “for Profit” part is clearly meant for someone whose life is measured in billable hours. At the end of the session I asked Mr Kerremans how he saw the adoption of BPMN versus high-end proprietary BPA tools. He said many companies had BPMN on their requirements list but nobody used it and he didn’t recommend it. In other words he’s sticking with the $15,000-per-seat tools. I guess he didn’t get the message about the SPA. Let’s see, 30 Million seats x $15,000 per seat…
Next, Janelle Hill, definitely the class of the lot. Reiterating several of Hayward’s points… BPM is built to change by the business itself, with real-time feedback of performance improvements resulting from the change, via management dashboards. Business-IT collaboration on implementation, including logical design, UI design, and business rule design. I agree with all of this. But again, I think more a vision than reality today.
She also talked about their BPM magic quadrant, due for update in September. Says you can’t evaluate BPMS purely on a feature list, given the wide range of design skills available in the organization, and the diversity of process types. These are themes I emphasize myself in the 2006 (and forthcoming 2007) BPMS Report series.
The other thing fascinating about this conference so far is the huge emphasis Gartner places on simulation as a tool for process analysis. As I’ve written about extensively, the simulation tools available to business process analysts seem to me in fact nearly useless, and in any case users have no idea how to make simulation analysis meaningful. So I wonder how much of this is reality-based versus faith-based.
February 27th, 2007
If you’ve been waiting for my course Process Modeling with BPMN to be available, it’s finally ready to go. Go to www.bpmessentials.com to sign up and get started. The Flash videos and PDF student notes are available. We’re still planning our first classroom training event. Contact me if you are interested in that. Thanks to all the beta testers who gave me great comments. They improved the final result.
February 23rd, 2007
Oldish threads sometimes take on a life of their own, and recent comments on a January post What is Case Management? have done just that. If you are interested in this important but mostly ignored corner of the BPM space, check it out. In addition to the G360 Case Manager product, it seems there is another product called Singularity that I need to know more about.
February 23rd, 2007
It’s nuts to cram a 2-day course on BPMN into an hour and a half, but I guess I’m doing it anyway. If you’re in San Diego at the Gartner BPM conference next week and staying around to the bitter end, check it out. I’m on Wednesday afternoon at 1:45. If you’re interested in talking with me about the full course - either the online Flash video version or the 2-day classroom version, or possibly licensing it yourself - it’s a good place to meet me. Drop me an email ahead of time.
February 22nd, 2007
Next week at Gartner BPM, Appian will take the wraps off Appian Anywhere, a hosted subscription-based version of Appian Enterprise. Appian Anywhere includes the full BPM suite, and leverages Appian’s ability to host the entire environment - design tools, engine, object persistence, rule engine, portal, etc. - on the web. Initially the systems will reside on Amazon’s hosting services.
Pricing varies on the scale of the hosting hardware. Entry-level is around $15 per user per month; “production”-level is around $25-30 per user per month. Customers can build their own apps using Appian’s design tools or buy them from Appian (e.g. SOX) or its ISV partners. Appian Anywhere features a new front end that supposedly makes it easier to do certain things on the design and administration side. Price of the apps is expected to be comparable to the platform price. Announcement of a number of partners and their apps is expected at Gartner.
Human-centric processes that don’t require high-performance integration with ERP or other backend apps behind the firewall are the low-hanging fruit for Appian Anywhere. The system can integrate with apps and databases hosted on the customer premises using web services and remote JDBC, although George Barlow, Appian’s GM for the venture, admits that security and performance of web services today may limit adoption for integration-intensive applications. Still, for small companies, departmental apps in large companies and government agencies, process pilots and discovery, and similar forays into BPM, the hosted subscription model is ideal. Appian expects that next year the majority of its customers will be using some amount of Appian Anywhere. The service is currently in alpha, with beta in Q2 and launch in Q3.
February 20th, 2007
[Submitted via email re my What is Case Management? column on bpminstitute.org. Posted with Ken’s permission.]
I enjoyed your article on BPM and CASE management. It is a sticky subject. The BPM folks don’t understand CASE management very well, and unfortunately, the CASE management folks don’t understand BPM any better. At the heart of the problem is that “CASE Management” is a catchall phrase that is often simply a glorified electronic filing system.
CASE management is big in law enforcement, social welfare and medical systems where you tend to track something for a long time. But my observation is that often what is being tracked is not a “case” but a “person”. This causes a lot of confusion when the same person has multiple cases. A few years ago I was involved in doing requirements for a Juvenile Justice system and I finally told them that they didn’t have a “case system” but a “kid system”.
As you pointed out, many case systems are really glorified document management systems. Indeed, since many workflow management systems were originally developed to replace routing slips attached to documents, a lot of people think that if they have a big catchall case item and a few simple forms they have their business process problems solved.
Unfortunately, most of the case management systems with simple forms have a very lightweight data interface (i.e., they really have trouble accessing and updating real industrial grade enterprise databases). This tends to lead to lots of unconnected systems. I work with an organization, for example, where they’ve been installing workflow lite + document management for 5 or 6 years and they now have about 100 separate workflow apps without a lot of data integration.
I think that there are two major forms of BPM systems: (1) one based on document-centric workflow and (2) one based on data-centric workflow. There are lots more of the 2nd category than the first, but I think that’s going to change of the next couple of years are the vendors figure out how to combine robust data base applications with business process and with business rules.
I’ve actually help one vendor develop a workflow engine that is integrated with a data-centric application generation engine and I’m also talking to a business rules organization that is working to integrate their business rule engine with a standard workflow engine—so there is some hope.
February 18th, 2007
Gian Trotta has a piece on my new BPMN training on his First Look page that’s a part of ebizQ’s BPM in Action special. It includes a podcast about this course, and BPM training in general, as well as a link to my new training website BPMessentials.com. Of course you’ll check it out!
February 15th, 2007
While I’ve been shouting from the rooftops that process modeling (in BPMN, ARIS, or whatever) is not that hard, Lombardi Software has been hearing from its customers that it’s not that easy, either. The tools are complex, expensive, and only a small fraction of their features are used. Collaborating on models - while they’re being developed - is near impossible. Making the models understandable to executives or business users means reducing them to a simple Powerpoint diagram or Visio flowchart. So process modeling - step #1 in the process of BPM - is already a barrier.
That barrier is what Lombardi aims to blow away with Blueprint, launched officially today. I’ve seen a lot of tools that the vendor insists is cool and different, but Blueprint really is cool and different. It tries to do two basic things:
- Link processes to business problems and goals
- Simplify collaborative building of process models
Blueprint is a hosted service. No software to install, no servers to maintain. The models are online and shared in real time by your project team. Modeling a process is essentially making a list of activities and their component tasks, not drawing a diagram. Each activity can be linked to business goals and problems, and assigned a problem severity and frequency score. The tool then guides you to the processes with the most significant business impact, for further modeling.
The visual metaphor for model-building is not Visio drag-and-drop but a web version of Powerpoint outliner. You list out the sequence of activities and their component tasks in the outline view (above, lower left). You link each step with a performer role. Blueprint automatically creates the diagram (above, right). As someone who has done more than his share of dragging and dropping in creating my BPMN training, I can attest that Blueprint is a lot easier. No it’s not BPMN, at least not in this view. In the simple process view, the process is just a horizontal string of boxes with a column of task boxes under each one. But you can generate a BPMN view as well (below):
At this point it’s just skeleton BPMN, but Blueprint is a full BPMN editor, so you can add more complex gateways, events, and other BPMN doo-dads if you like. You can also export into Lombardi TeamWorks, which is the BPMS, either to automate the process or to monitor the KPIs. The connection to TeamWorks is round-trip. Blueprint can sync up with model changes in TeamWorks, and I believe the performance monitoring is also accessible through Blueprint as well. Going the other way, for executive presentations, you can export the model to Powerpoint. That’s not rocket science, but it removes a lot of the busywork of real-world process modeling.
Lombardi originally planned to offer a free version of Blueprint limited to a single user and 2 processes, and the real version at a cost of approximately $50 per user per month. Check their website for the current deal. Current status of the product is “public beta.” Click here for more details. There’s a webcast about it on ebizQ tomorrow.
February 12th, 2007
The coolest thing I saw at Process World was definitely ARIS Process Performance Manager (PPM), specifically its ability to autogenerate the as-is model from instrumenting the backend systems that perform its activities. IDS CTO Wolfram Jost mentioned this in his keynote, and there were a number of comments about it in my Almost Live… post on Thursday. If you missed the thread, Marlon Dumas pointed me to an excellent academic paper on this technology, called “process mining,” by Wil van der Aalst and colleagues. Others commented that it couldn’t do magic, and Kiran Garimella did a strange riff on it as well. I obviously didn’t explain it very well, because at that time I hadn’t seen it. But now I have. It’s not magic at all, and still I think very cool. And something Kiran might actually want to take a second look at for webMethods.
Let’s strip away the automagical part. First of all, PPM is just about the as-is process, not the improved to-be model, which would be modeled in ARIS Business Architect. In that regard, PPM does not attempt to capture every bit of process logic in the flow, but just a diagram that provides context for KPIs. One of the essential differences between BAM from BI vendors and BAM from BPM vendors is that BPM provides a process context for the KPIs. You can drill down to see the root cause of problems: which subset of instances, which step. PPM focuses on exactly that.
Second, it requires the systems that it monitors to provide instance data in some structured form. That structure includes some instance identifier (for correlation), timestamp, and various attributes about the activity and state. The magical middleware is an “extractor” (I would call it an event adapter) that looks at events or logged instance data that the backend system already creates. ARIS provides extractors for SAP, databases, and files (must be structured, e.g. delimited, not text files… these woud require custom parsing extractors). So if an application in your process is hardcoded in COBOL and doesn’t generate events or log data, PPM isn’t going to mine it successfully. But did you really think it would?
PPM can work either with or without a predefined ARIS model for the process. Here’s how.
You start by instrumenting key events in your process, represented for example by document creation events in your SAP system. Instrumenting the event means watching it with an extractor. You don’t do this for every activity in the process, just the key milestones you are using to monitor performance, typically measured by cycle time. I suppose you could just put one at the beginning and another at the end, if you wanted to, but the idea is the capability to drill down to identify sources of problems in the KPIs. Kiran, I hope this is starting to sound familiar to you.
The extractors, which could be distributed across multiple systems, generate process instance fragments in the EPC form of event-function-event and funnel them to a “process warehouse.” If you have an ARIS process model already, I believe the names of events and functions are taken from that. If you don’t (the autogenerate case), the designer has to provide those. In the process warehouse, PPM then takes those fragments and merges them into a process chain for each single instance. This doesn’t show the logic at decision nodes because it’s just a trace of a single instance, along with the instance attributes, KPIs, and activity timestamps at each node. So far, nothing magic.
Then PPM can aggregate those instance models for any selected subset of instances - the ones with the fastest cycle times, or slowest, or the orders for blue widgets vs orders for red widgets, whatever instance data is avalable as a dimension for the KPI. This seems trickier, but again not magic. The aggregated models use some heuristic logic to generate the decision nodes based on the variety of paths taken in the aggregation.
So in operation it works like this. You instrument your current process with extractors. PPM creates a management dashboard of KPIs. It tells you which attributes of the instances correlate with the biggest variation in the KPI. You can then slice and dice the KPIs by one or two dimensions - say cycle time by activity and type of widget. Here, by “activity” I suppose I mean the time between 2 of the instrumentation points in your process - that’s as granular as you can get. This activity diagram is autogenerated by PPM. Aha! You see the overall cycle time problem stems from the QC step for the blue widgets, and you can drill down from there to the list of actual instances.
To me this is quite similar to what webMethods and Lombardi (possibly others) are trying to do with as-is performance monitoring prior to modeling, except that ARIS is taking the extra step of autogenerating a process context for the data. Not magic at all, but how long does it take? Molson-Coors supposedly got their first PPM process done in 10 days, although they are clearly one of IDS’s top customers and it sounded like the ARIS guys may have worked round the clock. But it’s not months.
PPM has been around for 3 years, but even IDS’s best customers are just beginning to try it out. Probably not the best marketing around it. I think this technology has great potential and I would expect it to take off once people understand it better, and not just from ARIS. They have some patent protection (supposedly), but Dumas and van der Aalst suggest that others will offer similar things soon. Kiran, forget about those lizards! This stuff is great.
February 10th, 2007
Air travel is God’s punishment for living in California. At 5:30 on Friday evening, when most attendees are safely home with loved ones, my journey home is just beginning, many miles before I sleep. Day 3 of Process World (”User Day”) was the best for me, since I came to find out what ARIS actually is and does, more than the corporate vision.
I went in with the preconception that BPMN is “simple” (conceptually) but “hard” (for business analysts), while ARIS is “complex” but “easy.” Oxymoronic, right? I come away with that notion reconfirmed, but now I’m starting to make sense of it. There’s process modeling and there’s process modeling. ARIS doesn’t try to do what BPMN tries to do… well, actually they’re starting to, but that’s not what existing ARIS customers are using it for. Here’s how I think I understand it.
In the ARIS world, modeling is largely business vocabulary management, with a process-centric twist. Value-added chain models (VACs) break down the enterprise into “processes”. At the VAC level, these are no more than names of end-to-end transactions: order to cash, procure to pay, make to order, etc. If you use SCOR or ITIL or eTOM or other such industry frameworks, this is familiar, since that’s mostly what those “standards” do as well. You can set up hierarchies of processes and subprocesses in this way, again mostly just names and their interrelationships, which can be seen by drilling down in the diagram.
You can attach processes to information about them - the who, what, which, and why, I think they call it. The visual metaphor is the ARIS “house”. It looks like a big rectangle (the process) surrounded by smaller rectangles on the right, left, bottom, and top (this one is peaked, like a roof… “house,” get it?) Those surrounding rectangles represent your company’s organization chart (who), functions and applications (what), data (which), and products and services (why).
Each of these surrounding elements is described by a slew of models in ARIS. The guiding philosophy seems to be the more models the better. You select the ones you want to use. And the relationships between these surrounding elements and the process are not just simple links, they carry business nuance. For example, you don’t simply link a department or position in the org chart to a particular process activity (function). You have to select between “is responsible for…”, “performs…”, “approves…”, etc. It starts to boggle the mind.
Unlike BPMN, which basically looks at processes one at a time, ARIS is BPM at the enterprise level, a cross-referenced catalog of all the processes involved in the business, and their relationships to organizational units, data, applications, and business purpose — all maintained in a common repository, so you can see the enterprise impact of changing any single element. That’s a totally different animal.
But here’s where BPMN and ARIS cross paths. Eventally, if you drill down long enough, you do model processes in terms of activity flows. ARIS calls them event-driven process chains (EPC), and they’re analogous to BPMN diagrams. ARIS calls them “event-driven”, but I don’t think they use events in quite the same way as BPMN does. What BPMN calls an activity is in EPC a sequence of an event, function, and another event. These fragments chain together by matching the output event of one function with the input event of the next function, so it seems to act more like a normal control flow than event-driven. But I really need to understand the EPC paradigm a bit better (which I plan to do).
This simple control flow aspect was what led me to ask Dr Jost yesterday if he could envision merging BPMN and EPC someday (he couldn’t). The difference seems to be not so much in the events as in all the other stuff - the who, what, which, why - hanging off of each activity in the EPC. The organizational responsibilities, the business objects, the products and services, the applications… most of that “stuff” is absent from BPMN, and most BPMN advocates would say “good” to that. That’s because BPMN is about detailed modeling of processes one at a time, simulating their performance, and possibly driving an executable implementation. Not what ARIS is trying to do at all.
Or is it? Yesterday one commenter on my post said that ARIS has no BPEL support. Not quite true. This afternoon I got the basics of ARIS SOA Architect, a new product. They’re still pitching this as a business analyst tool but it seems more IT. Here is what it does. You start with EPC (SOA Architect actually includes the functionality of Business Architect, the tool where you can build the VACs and EPCs and all the other business models, as well). Then you import WSDL from a registry into the repository. You add some more metadata to the WSDL that helps make the service discoverable for reuse. Using that metadata you can search for an appropriate service to bind to each EPC function (activity). Then you select an operation for each service and generate skeleton BPEL.
The skeleton BPEL does not include data mappings (Assign) or human tasks; for those “extensions” it just puts in placeholders in an ARIS namespace that conveys enough information that a developer can create the real BPEL in the execution platform’s native BPEL tool. It makes sense they do this for human tasks, but data mapping? I suppose in BPEL 1.1, Assigns are still really engine-dependent; with BPEL 2.0 there is no excuse for ARIS not to do the data mapping itself. Anyway, this is how ARIS is trying to bridge the worlds of business BPM with SOA. It draws the business-IT boundary well over into IT’s turf, it seems to me. But let’s see how it goes.
February 10th, 2007
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