Ismael has lately been posting about dogfood lately – er, rather, Intalio eating its own dogfood by deploying Intalio’s BPM software to run internal processes at Intalio.  It goes into a bit too much detail for my interest- listing just about every open-source project known to man-kind that is being leveraged at Intalio (which is great, but more detail than necessary for me!).

However, the point raised by this is a valid one.  Often software startups write software that is purported to help with some general-purpose endeavor, but then fail to employ their own software for their own business.  At a previous employer, we wrote software to improve salesforce productivity, but we didn’t use our own software in our salesforce.  I think that not using our software actually hurt our business, and hurt our ability to understand customer complaints and issues.

While I was at Lombardi, we used our own softare (Teamworks) for building the support site.  It had great advantages for the company over using a pre-packaged solution:

1. Our support staff had to become very intimate with our product in order to build the support site.
2. We gained an important production beta-test site for new releases.
3. We gained an important migration site from one version of software to another.
4. We could actually see our own warts.

Lombardi also used Teamworks for certain internal processes – running the build and test processes for example.  But we didn’t use Teamworks to run our sales process – we used Salesforce for that – for the simple reason that Salesforce is a specialized application around that process, and the benefits of using a mature technical solution outweighed the benefits of eating our own dogfood.  And, as it turns out, it helped us understand how to help customers with processes that Salesforce didn’t quite handle.

One thing I learned about using your own software:  the commitment to develop the applications has to be critical to getting your job done, or include support from the top.  Support from the top doesn’t just mean “I like that idea, go do it!”, and it doesn’t just mean tacit support of getting it done, or even pressure to get it done.  It means providing the air cover, equipment, time, and funding to get it done.  “What funding?” some would ask – after all, you own your own software.  But if you are applying a developer’s time to an internal task, that is time she is not spending on product development – an opportunity cost.  If it is a consultant, then your opportunity cost is that consultant’s hourly rate, plus the cost of a potentially under-served customer base.  So there is a real cost to the time devoted to internal projects.

Why air cover?  Because there will be demands to pull you or your staff away from these internal improvement projects – just like there are these demands with your customers’ teams.  In order to resist the temptation to distract your team with too many competing priorities, you need to provide the air cover for them (with your management), or your management needs to offer that air cover to you.

Equipment?  You’ll need to deploy your application somewhere when it goes into production.  It may not require dedicated hardware, but you need some kind of environment to deploy to, and the support of your IT staff to keep it up and running.  You may well need development hardware and test hardware (or allocations in a shared environment, which again will require support from the IT staff).

If you get everything lined up, there can be a lot of benefits from deploying your own software internally – and those benefits tend to last and build on themselves over a long period of time.  But if you are missing the key ingredients you run a pretty high risk of delay and/or failure.

David McCoy of Gartner recently commented on Elise Olding’s prediction that 50% of BPM Programs will fail.  This is initially a fairly stunning prediction when you are as aware as I am of all the BPM project successes out there, but the interpretive notes matter in this case.  As David points out:

1. The failure potential is at the program level and not at the project level.
2. The main cause of death will be failing to create a credible Business Process Competency Center (BPCC).
3. We published this research in our annual Gartner Predicts piece on BPM.

My thoughts:  item 1 is spot-on.  Project success is not enough to assure Program success.  In fact, I’m surprised the 50% number that Gartner predicts for program failure isn’t higher based on this notion alone.  In some circles the prediction of success for any one project isn’t higher than 50% (My experience with BPM projects is that the success rate is much higher).

But getting out of the “project” box and into the broader spectrum of a Program is harder.  It takes real, effective, leadership.  That leadership must be accompanied by effective tools and methods.  And these in turn have to be adequately funded for the program to succeed.  As an example in another space informs me:  I’ve seen SOA programs fail after having project success because the SOA team is underfunded, understaffed, and as a result, is perceived by the business and the rest of IT as under-responsive and ineffective (friction to project success rather than grease).

Item 2 – that the main cause of death will be a failing to create a Business Process Competency Center – I have to disagree with that assessment.  A BPCC is an outgrowth of a successful program, rather than a cause.  The causes of success are leadership, tools, method, funding, staffing.  The organizational side-effects are secondary effects.

For example, any center of competency (BPCC in this case) without adequate leadership will get pulled apart by competing demands and inability to prioritize.

A BPCC without adequate funding can’t satisfy enough of the demand – so either projects will happen without the blessing and expertise of the BPCC, or projects will be delayed for lack of support from the BPCC, or projects will go a “non-BPM” direction due to lack of BPCC support.  We can look to SOA competency center experience for guidance.  When the enterprise integration or SOA competency center couldn’t provide resources, projects would resort to ad-hoc point-to-point integrations.  When those P2P integrations weren’t allowed, projects were delayed or canceled while waiting for Competency Center support – often forgoing large Return on Investment opportunities.

A BPCC without the tools and methods will fail to deliver consistent, measureable success. Of course, one could argue that the very definition of a Center for Competency would be that it includes good method and tools!

Having said all that, Sandy Kemsley provides a very good summary of Elise Olding’s webinar on the first 100 days as BP director – and in that summary, Elise gives very sound advice on the topics of staffing, strategy, governance, and getting results.  Its a lot to chew on in 100 days, but if your title is BP Director, I think you had better figure 100 days is the time frame in which you can start reporting measurable progress as well as a plan for the remainder of the year.

We recently promoted Greg Harley to Chief Architect on the BP3 team.  A well-deserved promotion and recognition of his outstanding contributions to BP3 (and all of his previous employers).  He’s the guy everyone on our team consults with when faced with a tough technical question.  To further embarrass Greg with compliments, the Austin Statesman covered it, as well as the Austin Business Journal (don’t worry, Greg, we didn’t distribute your picture, so your anonymity in Austin is safe for now).  But, we are sorry the Statesman misspelled your name!

I read Bruce Silver’s post on IBM’s (Websphere) Dynamic BPM recently, and I thought I’d add a few pennies to the information out there.  As Bruce points out, the Websphere Dynamic Process Edition is based on Webify, which it just happens was a startup based here in Austin, Texas.  In fact, back in 2004 I talked to Webify and got to know a bit about their product, perhaps before all the spin and hype was as well formulated :)

Bruce is generally complementary of the offering, and I don’t blame him – its a different approach to processes.  But I think IBM and just about everyone else, kind of misses the point of the Webify software.  Because IBM puts the word “dynamic” in front of BPM, the focus tends to be on the idea that the process is discovered in real-time based on the customer, product, segment, etc.  At the time I talked to Webify, they were pitching the idea of a configurable business process (configurable versus “dynamic”).  At the time IBM was pitching “liquid computing” or somesuch and it just seemed a natural fit with an Austin startup that seemed to have already written the key technology to IBM’s marketing spiel.

First of all, Configurable is a better (more accurate) modifier than “Dynamic”.  Giving parameters that affect the “product” you receive is more accurately described as configured than dynamic (when you use an online car store, and pick your options, it isn’t “dynamic shopping” but depending on what you order it goes to different factories, gets different options installed, taps into different suppliers, etc.). It isn’t that the process is all that configurable, it is that the specific implementation choices for each element of the process are configurable based on the inputs (based on pre-defined policies, pre-defined business service metadata, etc).  That’s valuable, no doubt, but the word dynamic appears to modify process, when it really is a modifier against the implementation of specific parts of the pre-defined process. This kind of configuration is powerful, because it can allow the process to select the lowest-cost provider that can still meet SLAs – and the answer to that question may change as the current lowest-cost-provider runs out of capacity, for example – and that change happens “dynamically” if you will, but it isn’t the process that changed – its the selected provider.

Bruce puts it well near the end of the post:

WDPE is really oriented to core processes where the degree of variation makes conventional models unmaintainable.  In fact, it works best with canonical industry processes where many of the building blocks of solution content can be prepackaged.  Not surprisingly, IBM has done that in its key verticals.

I would sum it up this way:  most of the BPM tools on the market today are really quite good at representing an organizations internal processes- processes “inside the four walls”.  Webify (now, IBM’s Dynamic BPM Edition) seems particularly well suited to processes that live outside the four walls – connecting multiple customers, intermediaries, vendors, suppliers.  Hospital systems, insurance companies, drug companies, and the various medical practices involved in providing care for a patient are a reasonably good example of this, and a strong market for IBM’s offering as a result.  At the same time, “internal” and customer-facing processes at Blue Cross Blue Shield companies, other insurance companies, and hospital systems are also really good fits for a more “traditional” BPM solution.

The Webify / Dynamic BPM Edition approach seems to work best when you can get a network of participants in a particular industry-vertical process to participate in the process implementation.  Once you pass the tipping point you can achieve network effects.  If you know that some of the founding members of Webify have a background from the old B2B commerce companies like Extraprise/CommerceOne, its no mystery that they would apply some of the lessons learned to a new market and a new software approach. This is pretty neat stuff – and it takes a player like IBM to really leverage the kind of technology that Webify was building out – the scale, the ability to sign up multiple players in an industry into a composite process, etc.

I highly recommend Bruce’s whitepaper(free registration required), it goes into considerable detail and provides better background than my meagre comments can, but perhaps these comments will help illuminate the paper further.

Bruce Silver put an update on the BPMN 2.0 specification he’s been participating in, and how its progressing. He pointed out a couple things that I happen to agree with, and if you do too, probably pays to be commenting on Bruce’s blog or elsewhere to help generate some public support for his commentary.

First, the focus on a different notion of “executable” BPMN – where all the attributes necessary for executing are available.  That’s not a bad notion – I don’t think anyone is necessarily “against” it.  But as Bruce points out, we need for BPMN models to conform without being executable – to support use cases for BPMN that are primarily modeling and not execution as schema-valid models (not all processes will be executed).

Its a good read, hope we can hear more about the process before the final submission (or after, as the case may be).  Participating in these efforts is tough for independent consultancies like Bruce because you don’t get paid for the work.  For a big company, the contributors may get paid to participate, or they may do it on their own time.  For independents, it hits the bottom line if the work encroaches on work-hours.  Kudos to Bruce for making the time to assist with BPMN 2.0, and I’m sure the spec will be the better for his input.

We have all heard about how difficult the banking situation is on folks holding a mortgage who maybe at risk of foreclosure. Last night I happened to catch this segment on ABC News: Nightline.

The more I watched the more irritated I became, and it didn’t even affect me!  Why? Because it is SO unnecessary. This is the result of process failure, pure and simple and has nothing to do with how complex any given mortgage may or may not be.

How do I know this? Because folks couldn’t get to any given department to begin the process of ascertaining complexity! Bank Of America, IndyMAC (now bankrupt), Countrywide, and most others should be embarrassed to no end in their lack of ability to serve their customers. You see, it’s not just mortgages albeit that was the topic of this televised segment, it’s almost any customer interaction anymore that is not a point-of-sale transaction. These companies and most others have spent the lion’s share of their capital in removing friction to capturing revenue, and reduce whatever costs possible to increase the margin. That’s expected by and large, but here’s the rub. They have lost site of the value of a customer and as such have no idea what areas are acceptable to refactor and what areas should be considered competitive, value-added differentiators on the operations side.

Simple enough image, companies for the most part do everything from poor to excellent in just getting their good or service out the door. It’s in that other arrow – “information flow” – that a lot of companies out there do a horrendous job. Requests come back into the organization from a customer and depending on their nature it can be a deal-killer for a customer.

In today’s world, you need quality in delivery AND in information flow to really be a serious, long-term competitor.  That paradigm is increasing in potency and speed a lot quicker than many organizations are able to determine strategies to deal with it. Ask yourself, will the next generation of customers/buyers be as forgiving as we have been in the past decade? I don’t believe they will be, because as time marches on, these next round of customers will have even more choice in who they do business with.  The implicit bet that these banks mentioned above are making is that their customers have no choices in today’s economic environment.  In the short-term that may be true – but it only takes one experience like this to lose a customer for life.  And it only takes handling this customer process really *well* to win a customer for years to come.

Folks, it is about process and even more important than the execution of process is knowing what and which processes matter. Companies have to stop with investing in every link in a chain whereby every link is continuously fed resources (that will not scale, it just burns money) and understand instead where is my WEAKEST link in any given chain; don’t forget the whole point of process improvement. Develop a superior relationship with a customer at the lowest possible cost.  When there are such glaring opportunities to differentiate your business without having to compete on price, one is hard-pressed to find a better investment in terms of ROI.  If you’re not doing process improvement with an eye on the customer then as our new President said, “you are on the wrong side of history”.

Previously, we wrote about the individual vendor assessments that MWD put out.  Macehiter Ward-Dutton recently (Dec 18, 2008) updated their individual vendor reports with a comparison/summary report, which does a pretty good job of bringing it all together.

It weighs in at 13 pages, and in combination with the individual assessments makes for a nice resource.  For the categories and vendors that I’m familiar with, the comparison seems to hit the mark – rating products of similar capability in an area with the same rating (from Very Strong to Weak).  However, A quick glance at the chart would give you a few impressions that I’m not sure fully bear out my experience.

For example, Appian and Lombardi look like the winners, with Appian having the most squares darkened as Very Strong, out of any of the vendors.  Lombardi is in second, as the only vendor with no Fair or Weak scores, as well as a lot of Very Strong rankings. However, I wouldn’t describe Lombardi as “Very Strong” in rules, nor Appian as “Very Strong” in optimization.

Second, IBM shows as very strong through the various capabilities in the “Scenarios” evaluation.  However, each of these “scenarios” requires one more different IBM products – it isn’t at all an integrated experience – so if you buy an IBM “BPM” product you won’t find yourself able to do all of these things.  It isn’t a criticism of any one product – its the total experience that customers find frustrating.  You’ll have to buy all the other software to be able to address these scenarios.  And as anyone who has installed a suite of IBM software applications and their requisite fixpacks can tell you, it may be more of an adventure than you expect.

I haven’t seen Software AG’s latest offering, but it is described as a well-integrated BPM suite… and yet the definition of the “ownership” evaluation is something about the pedigree of the software suite and whether it was cobbled together or built-in-house for example.  Software AG’s offering, to my knowledge was very much a product of many acquisitions by WebMethods, which was, in turn, acquired by Software AG.  In the intervening years Software AG may have made the investments to turn this into a polished and unified experience.

Another general note-  I would say all of the rankings are a little high – I would bump most of the evaluations from Very Strong down to Strong, from Strong to Fair, etc.  But how to *characterize* the ranking is really a subjective exercise, and a relative one (Very Strong as compared to what? as compared to an objective standard or as compared to the other vendors?)- so this is a bit of a nitpick – but I think it would come closer to representing how customers would perceive the vendors’ performance in each area if the rankings were all lowered a notch with just a couple exceptions for the truly exceptional vendor-coverage areas (customers being generally less impressed than vendors by the software in question in all categories, I think).

This is a great start to anyone’s software vendor analysis, and I imagine anyone who is serious would invest in getting access to the premium service that let’s you adjust the scoring to fit your scenarios.

I want to thank MWD for putting this research out in the public domain – hopefully my comments will be taken as constructive rather than snarky!

In the BPM world, not much is said about Apple, and people in our business don’t associate Apple with BPM.  I’d say the association is more like Apple to Innovation.  Yes, there are people who are rabid fans (or equally enthusiastic detractors), but BPM doesn’t come to mind when one thinks about Apple at any rate.

However, as I was reading a blog entry titled “How Apple could sell 77 million iPhones in 2013″ by Philip Elmer-DeWitt on his “Apple 2.0″ blog, I think there is a bit of method to Apple’s innovation madness.  One might even call it process.  At least, when I look at the iPod and iPhone entries into the respective MP3 player and Mobile Phone / Smart Phone markets, it appears to the outsider that there is a process being implemented.

• Step 1:  Identify adjacent market where “more features” on the device will not necessarily yield more sales.  Early entrants in the space have innovated on features, but are approaching the point where the complications of the features are making the device less palatable to mass consumption.  In early phases, an extra few features would yield more sales, but like Microsoft Word in software, the device has reached the point where it cannot create more demand by adding another feature to the hardware. Ideally, general consumer satisfaction with these devices should be middling to poor.  Ironically, its actually okay if the market is saturated with the “crappy” devices identified in this market.
• Step 2:  Conceptually, determine whether a new device could be designed that is dramatically simpler and captures the most important features discovered and pioneered by the vendors in this space.
• Step 3:  Identify whether a vertical platform (for purposes of our discussion, think web application or cloud application platform for either buying, storing, trading, etc.)  can provide a compelling, competitive advantage.  Do any of the existing vendors offer a decent platform?  Is the integrated experience a good one?  Does it create long-term lock-in?  Does it allow for easily migrating hardware devices while retaining your relationship to the vertical platform?
• Step 4:  In the labs, design prototype devices that emphasize simplicity and elegance (as currently defined), and evoke the Apple brand.  In all but the most basic functions, trade-off simplicity of look and use over additional functionality.  Make this an IT lust item, a fashion accessory, such that the exact number of MB and knobs and twiddles are less important than how it feels in your hand or looks while you use it in public.  Do not recreate the original brick cell phone!
• Step 5:  Release product and platform at the same time.
• Step 6:  Revise product, release again, every 6-18 months depending on the product cycle, cost, etc.  New releases generally should encompass a bit more technical horsepower, but additional benefit of each release is an improved fit-and-finish, look, fashion, etc. This is approximately what BMW does with its cars – each version has a technologically superior engine, but the difference between new and old is still minor – but each new model year also has design cues to draw the buyer in.

So, why doesn’t it matter if the market is currently saturated?  Because if the current products aren’t that good, then Apple’s “good” products will displace their demand.  Also, Apple can start with a premium price point for a few reasons:

First, a high initial price protects them against ramping production too quickly and overshooting demand (which is then followed by discounting, etc).  At the very least, it reduces this risk.

Second, Apple displaces low-profit sales of the competition with high-profit sales for itself.

Third, as demand curves become more predictable, Apple ramps production, and can afford to lower prices with volume discounting on parts, pre-pays, etc.

The existing vendors can produce a new device, a better mousetrap. They can even release devices with more RAM, CPU speed, technical specs of all kinds. They could at some point release a device that *looks better* than Apple’s devices.  However, for the most part the competition does not have a vertical platform to begin with.  Their new devices end up looking like pretty baubles or paper weights because they aren’t tied in with the network effects of a platform.  When it is time for Apple to goose its revenues, it has quite a few options in front of it:

• Lower the price on the existing units
• Release a new, improved unit with the old (high) price
• Release more varied looks with approximately current technical specs (e.g. the colored iPod Nanos, for example)
• Create new pricepoints with low-cost components – e.g. RAM.
• Improve the platform by adding new services or functions
• Change the pricing of services on the platform
• Any combination of the above.

Apple’s strategy gives it a lot of leverage on the markets it enters.  And it implements a version of the fast-follower that is quite compelling – the follow-better strategy rather than the follow-cheaper strategy employed by so many vendors in the software and hardware markets of IT.

So what’s the point?  Well, for one thing, I believe Apple’s process allows it to chase goals like 70-80 Million iPhone sales in a year, though Apple likely doesn’t set its goals quite that way.  But, more importantly, there is a science behind the art of building great products, and that “science” is a process that allows for capturing important inputs and putting together a winning model.

At a minimum, Apple is likely using some components of DFSS (could be DMADV or could be DCCI or DMEDI, or some other variant).  QFD, and VOC (Voice Of Customer) seem like candidates to be part of the product design lifecyle.  While I don’t have direct evidence of that, there is some indirect evidence (e.g. the client list here). Because Apple keeps such a good lid on how they go about their business, the product design process is considered a bit of a black box.  But the outward, measurable view of Apple indicates, to me, that they are implementing a repeatable process.  So why assume that what happens inside the box isn’t a repeatable process as well?

That’s not to say that there isn’t some art involved.  Look at Pixar.  They run a very repeatable blockbuster-movie-making machine.  However, failures can happen – judgments about character and art have to be made and if they’re too far off instead of a blockbuster you get a dud.  But the track record of Pixar is too consistent to be random chance.  And the movies weren’t all inspired/written/executed by the same creative mind.  Again, my external view tells me this must be a well-formulated process – one that is less likely to fail than the traditional “make a movie on gut alone” approach…

So, there are a few key design tools used for products and processes. Tools such as Quality Function Deployment, Transfer Functions for tracing requirements, TRIZ for problem solving, Kano Analysis for Voice of Customer, etc. Many of these are coupled together and employed based on the breadth of the design consideration as well as the need for a certain confidence level before baselining and taking a design to production/implementation/fabrication. These are all aspects of a solid BPM program which has a portion of its focus on innovation versus basic remediation of problem areas. We can’t say for sure what Apple may be applying to their design process and product strategy.  And although we can help you apply these techniques to your business, we unfortunately can’t promise to turn you into the next Apple!

But we can help you begin the journey by improving on what you do now, and by turning improvement and management of processes into a core part of your team’s character.

After reading through Phil Gilbert’s CIO article and writing about it, what do I find via the magic of Google Reader, but an article that tells me that (potentially) all is not lost… (as if by magic)

In Dennis Byron’s post on ebizQ, he recaps the latest Gartner release, its 2009 Executive Programs CIO survey.  In which, he points out that perhaps all is not lost.  The #1 business priority in the survey, for the 5th year in a row, is “Improving Business Process”, and Business Intelligence is the top technology priority for another year.

The good news: these sound like good first-priorities.  The bad news: IT hasn’t (quite) gotten on the bandwagon with Business Process being the top priority.  And after these first two, the lists diverge pretty alarmingly.  Why alarmingly?  Because the IT list doesn’t appear to hew closely to the business needs.  The IT list doesn’t appear to hew closely to business value.  I’d like to see IT listing Business Process Improvement as the first priority as well, and I’d like to see IT focusing on improving its own processes as well…

As Dennis notes at the end of his piece:

I think I have avoided the trap of saying business process management (BPM) is key to recovery from the current recession. It definitely will not be as long as CIOs think they can accomplish BPM with ERP and standalone BI.

I would say, BPM could be the key to recovery, but it is up to our CEO’s and CIO’s to get the train out of the station.

Phil Gilbert, President and CTO of Lombardi, recently wrote an article for CIO.com, where he argues that the melt-downs in banking and in the automotive industries were primarily from a lack of visibility to crucial data and processes, rather than the common bogeymen of Unions and Greed.  Well sure, Greed may have been part of the problem on Wall Street, but Phil makes a persuasive argument that lack of understanding and visibility led to underestimating risk. He also explains why Detroit’s problem has been primarily a white-collar problem rather than a Union problem.

Phil goes on to take a shot at off-shoring:

Ironically, the off-shoring, which was the first response to the symptoms of the artisan-economy-on-steroids, served to increase risk and darkness even as it hid behind the allure of cost savings.

Because the growth in the service workforce was not easily scalable (costs went up in a linear fashion as heads were added), CEOs found it easier to fire local workers and hire distant ones who were paid a fraction of their U.S. counterparts. These executives took the easy way out, often-times they actually added headcount to an already-unwieldy process and boasted about their “savings.”

So now our U.S. companies are in increased peril: white collar tasks are more opaque than ever, while customer and product risks are on the rise.

I think this is a truly concise way to capture the very real risks of off-shoring.  I’ve tried to express the same risk-reward equation to others in the past, but Phil has hit upon a much better way to explain it and relate it to current events.

About 10 years ago, the company I was working for was persistently trying to sell services to GE, with mixed success.  One thing we learned was that GE had some really deeply ingrained principles around business, and if you ran afoul of them you would not get the sale.  At one point I remember a GE exec telling us that GE would not let another company get between itself and its customers on the Internet.  Its a good policy:  you have to have an ear for the voice of the customer to react to the market effectively.  I think too many companies have lacked this same policy with respect to their processes:

Let no company come between us and visibility into our core processes.  You cannot effectively off-shore or implement processes in remote locations without better process management so that you retain visibility to the big-picture data about the process as well as the internal workings  of the process as needed.  As a company, you have to be able to fine-tune your processes to react to market forces depending on the environment, in order to increase customer satisfaction, reduce waste, reduce response time, etc.

Without BPM, the discipline as well as the technology, our service economy might well become bloated and inefficient – Phil makes the case quite well.

I have spent some time exploring this company (Athenium) and I think their approach and solution for Insurers is really interesting. Moreover, even though they have maintained a focus in just a couple of industries it’s not hard to see the potential across the board.

Their software solution is not a BPMS however, the outcome from its utilization is quite similar and the complexity is not nearly as sophisticated as system-to-system, or even human-to-system interactions. If you come from the business or operations side and have an interest in P&C claims processing, litigation management, or sourcing they are worth a look in my opinion. They also have a blog with content written by senior folks coming from these discipline areas; the content is very specific to the nuances of performing particular work.

I track Gartner’s Blog on Business Process Improvement, which on occasion has a good read, and on Wednesday David McCoy posted about their strategy vis-a-vis BPM for 2009:

Everyone knows that BPM can reduce costs. So, BPM should be a hot topic and investment area during 2009′s brutal reign, right? Well, we at Gartner think so. Elise Olding, Jim Sinur and I are going to be driving a full-court press on BPM and Cost Management this year and we are all excited about the prospects. We are so excited, we have established an internal working group to make this a weekly research topic. In fact, I am shifting my own research attention to this topic – it will be my top research focus for 2009. BPM has so much to offer. You know this. We are going to make it clear to the rest of the world.

Perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising that they are making this shift in focus, and attempting to amp up the level of coverage given to the BPM space – but I did find it refreshing disclosure of a decision made behind the four walls of the Firm.  At BP3 we welcome the full-court press on BPM because we are absolutely sold on the benefits of BPM for our customers. Perhaps some additional research and marketing support from Gartner and other analyst firms will help build the consensus and momentum around BPM and its benefits vis-a-vis cost containment.

Gartner has a couple BPM conferences coming up – the BPM Summit in London in February, and the BPM Summit in San Diego in March,  website here.  Early Bird registration ends January 30th for the San Diego event.  I expect we’ll be there – if you are going to be there and want to connect in person, drop us a note here in the comments or at info@bp-3.com (which gets forwarded directly to me, by the way).

(I should add, there are links to webinars leading up to the event here, that look pretty interesting.  )

In Jason Stamper’s blog “What are the 10 most recession-proof IT sectors?“.  He has some interesting calls, and for the most part, I agree with him.  The point isn’t so much, which sectors will grow, its which sectors will perform well relative to the “average” for IT in 2009.

Some of the calls are pretty easy:  Virtualization and Open Source Software for example (everyone likes more software running on the same hardware in a tough environment, or better yet – free software!).

Mr. Stamper makes a great case for why cloud computing (and SaaS) will do well, and why they are, essentially, merging as a concept or market.  I think he’s right, and that this space will grow in 2009, but there may be a shakeout among some of the nascent players, in my opinion.  And the *real* leverage on these technologies is probably further out than just the next year…

Mobile computing is another easy putt.  With the iPhone selling in the millions, and the android-based market for phones picking up steam, there will be a much greater number of phones that can run mobile applications that are not directly controlled by the telecommunications providers (finally!).

We couldn’t agree more about integration and BPM.  We’re obviously biased, but we see this space as critical for companies to cut costs in a long-term, sustainable way.  Not to mention, to cut costs in an intelligent way.  Of course, only time will tell if Mr. Stamper’s predictions (and our own) will bear out.  We’re doing our best to prove him right in the spaces we play in.

For those companies out there who are not employing the “ostrich strategy” and are thinking in terms of longer than 12 months, there are some real opportunities which may be worthwhile to consider, outside of just cost reduction or revenue protection objectives. In fact, it would likely be a good time to take a moment and re-discover what your business value drivers really are. Keep in mind that selecting projects or otherwise making decisions with the center of gravity being “reduce cost”, “improve profit” are really only effects; these are not projects in and of themselves. The only way you can ensure you are chasing the right possibilities is by understanding the company’s value-drivers and the “what, which, and how much” of each; find the game changers in essence. Those things which can not only help in the short-term but catapult a company over the long term (+12 months) to be more competitive, more profitable and deliver better to what your customers actually want.

Some of the really potent game changers that you may want to consider pursuing in a downturn would be in designing new processes or products, reducing operational complexity, and certainly doing work to understand what your customer’s (former and current) and your competitors customers are really seeking from your organization.

Designing new processes or products/services in a downturn is a great way to employ your assets and since you likely will have cut in other areas, put your money back to work for the future. Business process management methods and tools can help accelerate time-to-market and just as important validate that you are delivering solutions that will truly matter. Getting something out there fast is good but not if nobody wants it or cares. There is a very prescriptive way to generate these new designs and equally important process-centric tools which will help create a foundation to actually sustain these innovations.

Reduce complexity, not just reduce your workforce. “We just need to do more with less”, for some organizations they seem to believe that the laws of physics can be defied in their conference rooms. The rest of the universe is at the mercy of said laws, but not the organization. If we assume your company is a tad more realistic, then now is absolutely the time to refactor areas of the business.

Here is a great area to look at first: in most businesses there is the notion of sales configuration and there is the back-office functions to support or fulfill those various customer order permutations.  A lot of businesses try to make the back office support functions more efficient (read: “cheaper”) and they do this through automation, consolidation, etc.  As we all know, this is a never ending fight….never ending. One option here is to begin to rationalize those order configurations with the support functions. In almost all cases they are decoupled from one another and that is a problem. Until that notion is embraced, you’ll just be bailing water forever. Again, now is the time to use resources to see what can be done to harmonize these functions, this will promote process flow; and flow is exactly what we need in core processes.

Another area is doing work to get better intelligence in what current, former, and potential customers are really after. Too much of the time reactive data alone  is used to make decisions on what a company needs to improve on or even offer as a good or service. Reactive data is data the company doesn’t seek out. Proactive data is information that the company solicits from its customer and prospect base. If you do not have a solid voice of customer program that addresses aggregation of both reactive and proactive data, strong analysis capability of that data, and the right vehicles to get that information transformed into projects, then again now would definitely be the time to invest.

Any rate, these are a few examples of some game changing initiatives that could really provide a platform for future capability that can be had much cheaper than when the organization is operating at capacity. Think of this as a hedge, once the volume turns up again in the business how fast will you be able to respond, compete, lead? Chances are you have cut deep, and recouping that prior organizational capability is going to lag significantly; longer than the downturn lasted as a certainty.

I ran across Colin Canfield’s blog entry “First impressions of Lombardi Blueprint” today and thought I’d share the link for two reasons – one, it reads like they are fresh impressions from just having used the product, and two, he has some experience with other tools (specifically he mentions Aris).  Unfortunately his blog only posts once in a great while, which explains why I hadn’t found it before.

Among the strongpoints from his point of view:  being SaaS and well-suited to collaboration, smooth transitions from a process listing view to a process flow view (BPMN) to a process documentation view.  And he compares it favorably to Visio, which is always a good start.

Among his complaints: lack of support for XPDL, requirement for named users for collaboration, and the re-use of artifacts within the diagram (for example, inputs and outputs).  (To this latter point, one could argue that sometimes tools get too much in the way of the user in order to force re-use, and that blueprint avoids this trap.  However, there’s a good argument for supporting both types of editing in a tool – one that encourages/requires re-use and one that allows more free-flowing editing).

Dennis Byron published an article about where the term “Business Process Management” comes from.  I think the difficulty with finding the roots of the term, however, are that the term BPM or “Business Process Management” is the coincidence of three very common words that have been in the lexicon for a very long time.

To me, I think the more interesting question is who started to apply the term BPM to the software they were building – or who started to write software to target the as-yet-non-existant BPM software market :) That would at least point toward who the early thought-leaders were in the software part of the BPM space.

Unfortunately it looks like his findings (based mostly on reader feedback and academic feedback) are somewhat inconclusive!  I guess we’ll have to settle for waiting to find out who “wins” the BPM market instead.  It is taking a lot longer to play out than I anticipated when I got involved in the BPM market in 2003.