Capital Factory is getting off the ground in Austin, TX, as recently reported by TechCrunch.  Austin has always had a pretty supportive culture around startups (I remember reading once-upon-a-time that there were 400 small “hi-tech” companies in Austin with an average employee count of less than 4).  I don’t think it is because of incubators and venture capitalists and efforts like capital factory that we have a lot of startups in Austin – rather, I think the fact that we have a lot of startups brings these types of efforts together – it provides the critical mass of “demand” for the kind of funding, services, and mentorship (and collegiality) that these programs bring to the table.

Hopefully some of these ideas will turn into big, successful businesses that will continue to make Austin a great place to live and work.

I was out earlier this week in San Diego for Gartner’s BPM Summit. Dr. John Alden and I did a workshop on Process Measurement which was a three hour session spanning measurement strategy, the culture of measurement, as well as various frameworks and tactics using BPMS to help create a solid measurement capability in the shortest time frame possible. We did this at the previous summit in D.C. last fall. Gartner seems to really like the content so we will be happy to come back as long as they will have us! This time, what we did do different was to focus much more on processes that are truly customer facing  and talked quite a bit about what those measures look like; such as Net Promoter Score (NPS). The feedback was very positive with the standard outliers. However, the other thing we did was take out a walk through of a particular technique to build KPIs from raw Voice of Customer data. In hindsight, we probably should have kept that piece in as it provided more of a “how-to” and there were several comments about wanting to see something of that nature. We will just take that feedback and refine it for next time.

The overall conference was the standard format, although I have to say the content did seem to step up a notch over the previous summit. I got in on day two thanks to a flat tire and missed Erik Keller’s case study; Erik is the CIO of Sirva and someone BP3 has worked with for some time. His talk track was about leveraging BPM to deliver mission critical applications from a CIO’s perspective. Erik is not only a fantastic CIO by all accounts but also a very personable guy and the feedback I heard about the session said as much. The other session I missed that I was really wanting to catch was Professor Jeremy Siegel’s talk on “What’s Ahead for the Economy and Markets Now?”. Professor Siegel is a very well known expert in Macroeconomics and an instructor at Wharton. The short story I heard on this was while it might have been viewed as overly optimistic to some, everyone seemed to agree that we are moving toward real stabilization sooner versus later. Whew! Glad to hear it!

One of the coolest sessions I did hit was draped in a negative connotation known as “Unconscious Incompetence and Change: Worst Practices, How to Recognize Them and How to Avoid Them”. Matthew Hotle, a Gartner VP gave this session and it it was both informative and entertaining. The theme of it was really about how workers sometimes just do bad things in such route fashion that to effect change means breaking some seriously embedded habits, which in turn causes resistance even though its the right thing to do.

I think Gartner was shooting for about 700 attendees, my guess is it came in somewhere around 300 or so (update: 500 according to Gartner). I was thinking it was going to be even less but I was surprised that many turned out with travel restrictions being what they are. Again, I think one of the best things was that the content really did come up a notch in my view and I hope that is our new baseline for these BPM Summits!

I also caught up with friend and colleague Derek Miers who always has an opinion on these things but who is also in the process of writing yet another book so he hasn’t been blogging much lately (you can catch him here at bpmfocus).  I was looking for Sandy and others but it ended up being a much faster trip than I had hoped.

Those who know me well know that one of my pet peeves is the idea that whatever the “next” generation is, that generation must be managed differently, treated differently, etc.  Fortune magazine, which is one of my favorite reads, is one of the worst offenders, having promoted Generation X, Generation Y, and “the Millenials”.  I could go on a long rant about what I find wrong with these analyses.  But it is hard to know where to start.  Is it the gross overgeneralization of vast groups of people (which reminds me a bit too much of the same kind of overgeneralizations, when negative, which some call prejudice or ageism)?  Is it the idea that the next generation is always, somehow, lazier than the one before?  Is it the idea that the next generation is always, somehow, better adept at multi-tasking and networking than the one before?  Or is it the self-congratulating articles that show up in Fortune, where an author identifies with his/her own generation a bunch of happy characteristics that are clearly “unique” and unlike anything that has come before.

I posit, instead, that people are… people.  The basic emotional and intellectual underpinnings of the people I meet do not alter that dramatically between 18 year olds and 65 year olds (maturity level, sure, but the machinery behind the surface? not so much).  Yes, the “kids” are more technologically adept.  But then, my parents were more technologically adept than their parents.  And their parents were more technologically adept than their parents’ parents.  So, what would actually be different is if the next generation was *less* technologically adept, rather than more.  This is not a function of increasing ability, it is a function of increasing technology – and the exposure to more technology at a younger age, and in more seamless integration to their world, changes things.  My daughter could use an iPhone quite well at 18 months.  Is she the next Einstein?  Maybe not.  I was initially impressed, but since then I’ve seen LOTS of babies flip through photos on iPhones.  Hey, the interface makes sense, even an infant can do it.

I also hear that the younger generation (at one point, I was reading this about my own generation) wants to be managed differently, treated differently, by adults.  Actually, what every generation wants, is for the people they work for to respect their person, their work, and their lives – and they want to be effectively led by their leaders, and have the opportunity to lead their colleagues and teammates when appropriate.  From talking to my grandparents, I can see it was so with them.  From my own experiences as well. And with the 20-somethings I work with today.

So it was refreshing to read an article that did not fall into any of these pitfalls.  Gary Hamel has a blog on Management “2.0″.  And in his article “The Facebook Generation vs. the Fortune 500” he captures perfectly the *right* way to discuss this topic.

1. He distinctly avoids age as a discriminator
2. He does not ascribe ridiculous attributes to the vast majority of a whole generation of people
3. He defines the generation not by age – but by a common interest – Facebook.
4. He defines “status quo” by another common thread – companies on the Fortune 500.  (of course, Google employees would probably largely classify as both, proving that every generalization is going to be pretty off-target for some sample population).

He points out how the technology of Facebook and other technologies of its ilk have affected its users’ expectations of the word (he could have just as easily called it the Twitter generation or the Myspace generation or the Blog generation).

Among my favorite points: All ideas compete on equal footing (because of the ease with which feedback and commentary can be fostered for any idea).  Leaders serve rather than preside (long a philosophy of good corporate denizens – that they were cultivating people as well as cultivating profits).  Intrinsic rewards matter most.

My grandfather worked at Duriron (now Flowserv) for 44 years.  He retired, and then was on a pension for another 35 years.  His company evinced many of the traits Gary espouses over that time.  For example, one of the CEOs of Duriron worked under my grandfather, a Civil Engineer (and sometimes sales rep for the company), to learn the ropes.  The intrinsic value of doing a good job for the company was worth more than any bonus or incentive plan.  Power (influence) came to my grandfather because he was a good teacher – he shared what he knew freely.  He often chose his tasks – saw a problem and worked on it- rather than being assigned to it.

Read it over and see if Gary’s thoughts don’t have merit for your organization.  Setting the title aside (I was really prepared for another bad article on this subject), this is one of the better articles I’ve read on the subject of how social software has changed the dynamics, or at least, reinforced dynamics that were already in play.

Tech Ranch Austin is an interesting operation in Austin, Texas that is focused on helping startups… well, start up.  They offer good office space options, conference room options, and other resources for entrepreneurs.  The people who started Tech Ranch Austin are also closely affiliated with Bootstrap, which was started in Austin to assist people who were attempting to “bootstrap” their businesses rather than raise funding from investors. Its amazing to me how many resources there are in Austin for helping people get businesses started.  Of course, the first thing you have to do is get over your fear (of embarrassment, risk, etc) and get out there and meet some of these people.  Its a very welcoming community of mostly self-help entrepreneurs who are eager to share their experiences and knowledge.

I’m sorry I missed it but recently Jonas Lamis presented a 12 step process to go from employee to entrepreneur which I thought was a pretty interesting intersection of interests in my own life.  Sadly, the presentation embedded is all of 1 page, and we’re missing out on Jonas’ presentation of the material, which apparently was the real draw.

Bruce Silver has a nice article on BPMInstitute.org about the 5 things to like about BPMN 2.0 (he doesn’t discuss the 5 things not to like – perhaps material for a future post?!).

OMG votes on the proposal in June, but the history on OMG’s voting on BPM-related standards has typically been that it takes longer than I expect for things to get finalized.  I won’t be shocked if final approval drags out a bit longer.

Interestingly, 4 of the 5 things Bruce mentions address weaknesses that at least one pureplay BPM vendor addresses already in their product (implementing more than what BPMN 1.0 spec requires).  Let’s hope there’s more than 5 things to love about BPMN 2.0 – vigorous vendor adoption would be on my wish list!

Tom’s blog is one of my favorite to keep track of, partly because he takes a fairly pure software engineering approach to the business problem of BPM.  It sounds ironic perhaps, that I would find this interesting, given that our focus at BP3 is all about business process improvement, and *business* results. However, there is something refreshing about Tom’s approach to BPM, as embodied in the jBPM project.  There is also something pure about trying to provide tooling for a problem, without worrying about certain commercial interests that affect the behavior of enterprise software vendors.

I still think the commercial vendors are providing an overall user experience that is closer to what the business (and IT) wants out of BPM for truly business-facing processes.  However, efforts like jBPM have a real chance at becoming the de-facto plumbing behind commercial products, by providing (as Tom would put it) a “bottom up” set of foundational building blocks that build up to what you need for a BPM solution. Will jBPM be the chief open source answer to BPM the way that Apache was for web servers?  Too early to tell, and there are other efforts – but if jBPM lives up to its billing, and its core team of contributors keep at it, it seems plausible.

I’ve been thinking about what would happen if someone took a very BPMN centric point of view and tried to overlay it on jBPM – could they describe all of the behaviors in jPDL?  Would the Process Virtual Machine (PVM) have all the necessary primitives to support the BPMN aspects?  Could the end-result be tied into an existing modeling framework/toolset?

Here’s the slideshow Tom gave at a recent BeJUG meeting:

No, this isn’t really an article about the 3.0 release of iPhone software.  Not really.But there is a good article about it right here (its a good read).

Its really about what we can learn from it.  In version 3.0, Apple added 100 or so features to the iPhone OS, and 1000 developer APIs.  What were these features you ask?  Here’s a few of the ones that will likely draw snickers:

• cut and paste
• MMS messages with more than one picture
• Landscape view for basic apps (mail, notes, calendar, etc.)
• Opening .ics files
• Supporting calendar.dav protocol (calendar sharing)
• Push notification
• etc…

Why the snickers? or yawns?  Because these are largely features that other smart phones have supported for the last 2 years (since iPhone 1.0 came out).

Why would Apple put off these seemingly critical, unavoidable features?

Why is Apple adding them now?

What can we learn from this, that we can apply to our BPM (or indeed any) projects?

First, consider that Apple could have included all of these features in the first release – and either delayed the iPhone by presumably 6 months to a year, or Apple could have included these features in the first release, and perhaps sacrificed the features that really made the iPhone different and desireable.  Consider had Apple released iPhone 1.0 without multi-touch, without coverflow, without the touchscreen interface for virtual keyboards… would the iPhone have been a big hit?  What if, in iPhone 2.0 software Apple had released these features *instead of* the App Store for the iPhone.  Would we have 25,000 applications we can install?  Would there be 50,000 developers registered for the iPhone?  Would the iPhone seem so relevant, so useful?

Ok.  hopefully you’re with me on my line of reasoning.  Apple made the calculation that creating something significantly different and BETTER in some respects, would outweight the shortcomings on some of the basics in other respects.  Based on rate of adoption of the phone, I’d have to say they made the right call.  In the old days, Microsoft used to do this, and in the industry jargon we called it “super subsetting” – meaning, I have provided a subset of the spec or the de-facto spec (no copy paste!), but I am providing a “super-set” set of features that no one else provides (in MSFT world that might be tight integration with Microsoft Office applications – in the iPhone world, it is multi-touch and the App Store).  Without the super-set features, you can’t generate the demand for your product.  Once you have demand, you have revenue.  Revenue makes it easier to invest in your product.  In all aspects of your product.

Thus, to the second question.  Why add these features now?  Because the differentiating features have proven out.  Its now time to capitalize on the wide adoption by adding convenience and removing objections that existing and potential customers cite.  Take away some of the competitive ammunition now that you actually have a measurable share of the market.  Soon the iPhone will look like a strict super-set of the other phones in terms of capability, with the other vendors scrambling to get their own application stores together, but lacking critical mass behind these stores to make them vibrant (with possible exception of Android’s application store).  Keep in mind there is significant development cost to build these features and make sure they are quite robust.  And yet, with 30 million iPhone OS devices on the market, the development costs now probably look quite modest relative to the revenue streams.  Whereas, up front, these costs would have looked quite large relative to zero revenue so far.

To the third question:  What can we learn?

When building a BPM solution, we are often integrating with and replacing parts of legacy systems.  Often one of the first requirements from the business will be that the new system does everything the old system did in order to be accepted.  This is generally a bad false start to a project.

However, one of the best tactics is to figure out what the 2-3 key NEW capabilities your solution will bring to the business that are so compelling that some minor discomfort over less important details will not derail the project.  You can call this marketing, but it is truly understanding where the real value opportunities are in your project.  Sometimes these capabilities are things the users will clamor for, sometimes things that the management team will clamor for, and rarely, things that IT will clamor for.  Make sure that at least one of your major stakeholder groups is squarely behind a few of the wow features of your BPM project.  If you don’t have that excitement in one area, my experience is that you’ll find uncomfortable scrutiny on an exact comparison of the new solution versus the old solution.

Moreover, before you invest in “trueing up” your solution with all the old solution’s bells and whistles – you’d like to know that the big rocks – the major goals you are attempting to tackle with BPM – are getting addressed!  Once you *know* that those goals are being addressed, then you can go back and invest in the more mundane, but expensive, build out.

This could all fall under the heading of focusing on the highest value parts first.  But in reading about Apple’s 3.0 release, I couldn’t help but put it into a BPM context…

I don’t have a lot to add to Forrester’s review of Blueprint, but I thought it would be worth linking to here.  First, Lombardi’s blog includes a reference to it, and if you want to get directly to the article just click here.

We’ve had several previous posts about blueprint and its reviews, which you can find right here.

Gartner is pounding the table about BPM – just recently in London, and likely again next week in San Diego.  In a news article on Gartner’s site, Gartner makes the claim that enterprises will save as much as 20% within the first year of implementation, and that one-third of companies are increasing their BPM investments (my emphasis).

A really telling quote about attendees at Gartner’s London conference:

Gartner estimates that 70 percent of attendees were from companies that are in “survival” mode, and their organizations view BPM as a lifeline keeping them above water in the economic crisis. Approximately 20 percent of attendees said they were “thriving with BPM” — using BPM as a catalyst to grow their business. These were typically organizations that had successfully implemented BPM projects in the past.

This is really quite telling.  Granted, the audience is somewhat self-filtered, but this is an astonishingly high commitment to BPM for a Gartner conference.  The remaining 10% of attendees viewed BPM as not just keeping them afloat, but as weapon for capitalizing on market and economic turmoil that their less agile competition was unable to react to.

The article goes on to emphasize that BPM is more than just deploying technology – it is also about the management discipline that is paired with the technology.  And really the two together is what delivers those exceptional returns.

Given the level of attention Gartner is putting behind BPM (and other areas that help companies in a downturn), I think the momentum is going to build through 2009 and beyond.  Perhaps we’ll finally see BPM go mainstream.  I’ll know it is when I use the acronym in a social setting and the first question asked isn’t “what’s BPM?”

SXSW (south by southwest) is in effect in Austin, from the 13th to the 22nd. The early parts of the event are dedicated to ideas and groups that have attached themselves to the original musical festival later in the week. There’s SXSWi (SXSW interactive), there’s a almost a whole week of movie screenings, there’s a BarCamp session, and too many other events to list in any one place.

OneSpot, a local Austin company, has a SXSW news widget. Unfortunately the title of this widget doesn’t conform to our page width, but I’ll still include it here for those who are interested, along with any other SXSW links that come up that look interesting. One of the things I find interesting about SXSW is that it continues to evolve, starting from pure music, then films, and then interactive (software)… and as it evolves to include more startup-related activities, it continues to reflect the ethos of Austin.

These two phrases are two favorites in IT circles.  In the first case: “what can we do out of the box?” – an effort to explicitly stay on the beaten path so as to make sure everything you do is supported.  In the second case: “think outside the box, what else can we do here?”

It matters which mode you’re operating in… This is one of the hardest judgment calls for technical people to make in their jobs.  And yet, often they make this call without consciously thinking about it.  When should you use some feature that comes “out of the box” but doesn’t quite fit your needs or wants, and when should you roll your own feature “outside the box” by thinking of other clever ways to do it?

I think it is a pretty common assumption that it is harder to build things “outside the box” – because at least in theory, the box has value (someone paid for it after all, in most cases).From a pure coding point of view, that may even be a correct assumption – that outside the box is a bit harder.  But from a design and creativity point of view, this simply doesn’t hold up. In fact, it often takes more creativity to operate within the box, within a structure.

And a lot of developers will gravitate toward the hard problem, the challenging problem, that interests them.  A consultant will typically gravitate toward the solution that looks like the shortest or simplest path from A to B.  Either approach could be wrong, depending on the circumstances.  I used to joke that the difference between software developers and software consultants, was that it drove consultants nuts to write code to solve the same problem over and over again, even if the technology landscape was different – they wanted to see truly different problems.  But a software developer loves nothing more than an opportunity to write the better mousetrap, and each time to take what they learned from the last effort and maybe utilize some new libraries or patterns in the new effort.  I’m not criticizing, these just happen to be the differences I’ve noticed.  In the context of the statement I made above, I was comparing how I had to manage my developers and consultants a bit differently, in terms of expectation setting, even if I assigned them the same work, and they had the same set of technical skills.  Often people who can build “outside the box” are revered in the organization, and their “built-from-scratch” examples are badges of honor.  Often people who build using “out-of-the-box” features are assumed to be taking the easy way out.

Back to the point about creativity inside the box… Consider poetry – an English teacher once taught that rhyming poetry was amateur.  And there is a point to what they were saying – a rhyme tends to draw you into cliche phrasing, and if you’re not careful as an author, even sing-song.  And yet, how do you explain poems like Annabelle Lee by Edgar Allen Poe?  One could argue that writing real meaning in the confines of a specific formulation is more challenging than writing meaning in a less constructed format like that of e.e. cummings.

In software, sometimes before one ventures outside the box, a moment of reflection about the out-of-the-box capabilities and features is worthwhile.  Generally, building using such capabilities costs less, and leverages existing support contracts.  Building from scratch or outside the box may not leverage these same support contracts, and often incurs more up-front development cost as well.  However, there are times when building outside the box can actually save costs now and into the future.

As stated in the intro, this is a judgment call, and it is one of the hardest ones to make as a software developer.  I’d just like to see these decisions more often based on busines rationales rather than purely technically-focused rationales.  For example, let’s not talk about the speed of the code and the size of the browser download, so much as about the impact on the business in terms of their processes, their costs, or their efficiencies going forward.  Once we’re to the point of choosing between technical options that have nearly identical business outcomes, then we can pick the solution that makes pleases our technical motivations.

As readers of this blog have no-doubt noticed, I’m a fan of Apple products and their approach to the markets they compete in.  In late 2007 I switched to a MacBook Pro fulltime.  In the early 90′s I used NeXT machines, and loved them.  I also had an Apple back then, which was fun. But in the intervening years my life has been mostly on Windows with the occasional Unix/Linux thrown in for good measure (but only for development, not for my daily machine).

My first product glitch was when my daughter “helped me” by pulling a few keys off my keyboard!  I took it to the Apple store, and they fixed it for me (new keyboard) even though it was obviously *not* a warranty issue.  They also said this kind of thing would be covered by Apple care.  I thought about that, and then bought the warranty package.  Good service, rewarded by a customer pulling the trigger on a purchase…

This time, my nvidia video card kicked the bucket.  I went to the Applestore and they wanted to schedule me for a “Genius Bar” appointment.  I came back that night for my appointment, to be told that they have a 40-machine backlog, and that they’d have to ship the machine off to Apple, a 7-10 day delay.  Maybe some people can do without their hardware for a week or two, but I’m not one of them.  I don’t know anyone in business who would put up with that kind of delay.  I asked, but Apple Stores don’t do loaners, nor rentals, nor hard-drive swaps so that, at least, I could hang onto my hard drive and not have a risk of losing my data (the Genius Bar rep was careful to warn me that they don’t guarantee the data… ). I went home a bit steamed.  But I kept my laptop.  I couldn’t help but think if the normal backload is 10 repair jobs, and they currently have 40 – does that mean that Apple sold a lot more machines, or that they have a quality problem, or that they’re under-staffed?  Or all of the above?

If under-staffed, memo to Apple:  there are a LOT of people looking for work right now.  You could do a little Apple stimulus plan and improve customer service at the same time…

Steve once compared Apple to BMW or Mercedes.  But when you take your BMW (or luxury car of choice) into the shop, they give you a loaner vehicle for your trouble so you can be on your way.  I felt a bit embarrassed for the Genius at the Genius Bar that he couldn’t offer this kind of real service.  There is nothing worse than having to tell a customer that they are SOL.

But, I didn’t give up.  I knew at least one storefront in Austin that sounded promising – “Austin Mac Works” and figured there might be other options as well.  Turns out the store is certified to do warranty repairs and ship back to Apple for warranty repairs that they can’t handle.  I dropped off my MacBook Pro at lunch, and on my way home from work picked up a loaner machine – into which they had swapped my hard drive – so I am now back up and running “good-as-new” while I wait for my repairs.  My warranty repair is still “on the house” but my rental laptop is going to cost me a few dollars over the next week.

Apple:  you’re leaving a huge opportunity (in my opinion) on the table to provide better service and even further differentiate your brand.  I’d pay $100 for a loaner.  Or put down a sizable refundable deposit.  At least refer people to third party shops that may have less backlog.  Asking people to part with their computer, is like asking them to turn off their TV.  And as a recent Hulu ad posited: what are you going to do, turn off your tv AND your computer at the SAME TIME?!   Who are we kidding.

Apple execs – take your car to a Penske-owned BMW dealership, and then think again about your equipment-servicing approach.  There’s a queuing problem, a triage problem, a critical failure (no laptop for a week?), etc.  A good analysis of these issues could yield some great results.

PS: Hulu ad included for amusement- just go to about :38 into it and you’ll see the line I’m referring to.  Followed by maniacal laughter…

Rashid Khan, formerly of Ultimus, recently posted complaining about “The Hype about Simulation and Optimization“.  He has a clear vendor-perspective on this subject – he understands why prospects and analysts like simulation and optimization (and round-tripping) so much – but he laments that these two groups of people are so caught up in a set of features he views as largely hype rather than substance.

He’s particularly hard on Sinur, but that’s not surprising – Sinur is simply the most vocal / published analyst on the subject of simulation, optimization, and their value to business, so he’s the natura foil for this dialog. I look at Sinur’s comments as more aspirational and attempting to move the market toward better simulation and optimization capabilities, rather than reflecting exactly what a user’s experience will be using simulation and optimization products.

Mr. Khan rightly points out that if you are doing purse simulation, you have a lot of work to do:

Yes, BPMS can do simulation. However the results of simulation will depend entirely on the assumptions the business analyst makes about a large number of parameters. For example the business analyst has to make assumptions about the following for each step in the process:

• The Task Time, which is the time to actually do the task at the step
• Number of resources: How many people are available to do the task, and are they dedicated or shared with other tasks
• The cost of each resource
• The probability that the step will be activated, in case it is conditional
• The probability that the user will send the case backwards, because in real life things often go backwards instead of always going forward as planned.

These assumptions have to be made for all the steps in the process. So if there are 30 steps, there are at least 150 assumptions! That is no small task that “business folks” will engage in lightly.

Of course, he’s right, if you’re starting without historical data or statistics with which to populate your simulation.  As well, if you make bad assumptions, you’ll get bad results.

So far, so good.  I’m with Mr. Khan in all respects – pure simulation is hard work.  You have to know that the simulation has a probability of paying off before you take on this kind of homework.  It isn’t a typical business user task to fill in this kind of information accurately (though, I have seen a six sigma practitioner provide this kind of data to good effect).

However, Mr. Khan goes on to state that even round-tripping is a fantasy.  Round-tripping with respect to simulation/optimization is the concept of using real data from your process execution to populate your simulation or optimization scenario.  I believe Lombardi was the first vendor to include this round-tripping functionality in its core product offering, without having to use any third party reporting, simulation, or analysis tools (thus, part of putting the S for Suite in BPMS).  So what’s the advantage?  Real data is feeding your simulation or optimization exercise – real, measured data.

Mr. Khan says not-so-fast:

he most important parameter for simulation and optimization is Task Time, which is the actual time required to perform a task. One has to know the actual Task Time in order to run any kind of simulation.  However, there is no BPM software that I know of that measures Task Time, because it is simply not possible to do it. Consider the challenge. Most user steps in a process use some type of electronic form. If the software has to measure how much time the user took to complete the task, what does it measure? It cannot simply measure the time the form was open, because the user could have the form open and be having a conversation with her colleague. Or the user could open the form, understand the task, close the form and be thinking or researching the task with the form closed. There is no accurate way to measure Task Time. Therefore BPM systems simply do not measure Task Time because they cannot!

But here I have to disagree…First, I’ll concede that actual task time cannot be measured by a BPMS due to just the reasons Mr. Khan suggested-  and yet.  And yet why does it matter if the user took a phone call in the middle of the task?  Won’t that get averaged in with tasks where they didn’t do any such thing?  Isn’t that an accurate recording of how long the work took for an average worker of average productivity?  We are not, after all, automotons.  Some BPMS offerings will not capture the difference between a user taking two days to do a task, versus opening the form for 10 seconds and then again two days later for 30 seconds to finish the work.  That *is* a problem for measuring task time… However, measuring the time that an average process sits at a particular task waiting to be finished (or started) can be useful to optimization, because from a process perspective, I don’t care why the task took a long time, I just want it to get done faster (if that is a goal of the process) and meet SLA’s.  So, by measuring it, I can manage it.

Second, Task Time is not the most important parameter for simulation. Granted, lots of improvement projects focus on task time (is this a holdover from a manufacturing focus, or a misunderstanding of what makes a good process?)  Most BPMS tools in fact encourage over-focus on task time by attempting to measure and report it – primarily because task time is something that all processes have.  Not all processes have a loan amount, or a hire/no-hire decision, or a medical outcome.

The most important parameter for simulation and optimization will depend on the process. For example, if you care most about the time to complete the process, then you want to measure TOTAL process time, not individual task time, and look for the factors in your process that correlate to longer process time.   Those factors may be the particular inputs:  particular contract type, a particular region of the country, the team it was assigned to, the person assigned to a particular part of the process, etc.  Those correlations are all going to be more interesting than task time in a vacuum.  But suppose you wish to optimize on throughput.  If so, you’re looking for where instances of your process stack up, and how to smooth out those bottlenecks.  You might look to augment the staff that handle the parts of the process that back up, or you might look to improve the process upstream to make their job easier, or to route some percentage of instances around that bottleneck through automated processing.  Or, you might again go back to correlating business process variables with the instances that get stacked up in a bottleneck.  But essentially a histogram of where your instances are waiting (or a heat map) will be your most useful tool here.

But what you might be trying to do is optimize or simulate around outcomes. And that, to me, is where things really get interesting.  This is where we can attempt to understand the relationship between inputs and outputs and look to optimize on good values for those outputs.  At the core, this is applying six sigma techniques to a process, really (at least, applying the statistical tools).  But there is a bit of art to the science as well.

I do agree with Mr. Khan on many of his further points:  simulation and optimization, while useful, are not easy in practice.  You are likely to need the help of skilled specialists in either the tools or statistics, or both.  There IS too much hype around the vendor tools – many of them can’t handle the really complex or high volume processes that customers are deploying.  I, too, believe that actual adoption of simulation and optimization tools from BPMS suites is quite low – lots of playing with these tools, but not a lot of focused effort behind using them.

Great anecdotal argument at the end of his post about Sinur’s view that the state of Arizona should do simulation on what the affect of cutting 1.2 Billion dollars would be, and Mr. Khan pointing out how difficult that would be to simulate.  I would say, indeed- with a BPMS tool, impossible!  However, in Austin, Texas, the city often outsources simulation and modeling of scenarios to a group of people who have been quite successful at advising the city and businesses here:  economists.  And it makes sense – modeling and simulating economic outcomes is just different than modeling and simulating business processes!

Great thought provoking article from Mr. Khan, just had to add my 2cents… I think that simulation, optimization, and round-tripping have a lot of utility if you focus on the right things, and if you have help from people with the right skills (or you yourself have them).

Coghead just closed its doors a couple days ago.  I first saw the news on techcrunch in this post:  Coghead Grinds To A Halt, Heads To The Deadpool.  And then the following day the news that SAP acquired Coghead’s IP and hired on some of their staff:  SAP Acquires Coghead’s Technology As It Looks Towards The Cloud (hopefully this means SAP will actually incorporate some of these ideas into its products).

Coghead may or may not be an example of a SaaS BPM tool.  It has typically been described as “a web-based enterprise software editor that featured an unusually intuitive interface”, and typical competitors were seen to be tools like Intuit’s Quickbase, though I imagine some others might consider Coghead a competitor.  I believe Intalio‘s BPEL engine was used under the hood at Coghead.

Part of what got my attention on this matter though, was TechCrunch reporting that Coghead received $11M in funding.  It reminded me of a previous discussion on Sandy’s Column2 blog regarding Appian’s funding round of $10M to fund the SaaS model Appian is increasingly moving to.  At the time, I felt that $10M might not be enough for a company to develop a successful SaaS solution.  Although SaaS seems like a low-cost way to get a business started, and it *is* in many respects, customers also don’t sign big up-front checks in most cases- a few of which can solve lots of funding problems: specifically cashflow problems.  Spreading that cashflow over 3 years, for example, may be sensible, but it is really a transfer of risk from customer to vendor (the increased risks: customer can cancel before paying the full amount, customer may be purchased/merged/forced into a failure to complete the transactions, vendor has to provision all equipment, vendor has to maintain a happy customer for 3 years to continue to collect the money).  On the other hand, once this model gets going, it can be very successful and sticky (see: Salesforce).

Regardless, Coghead shows that $10M may not be enough.  I think there are people in the business who could make that work, but if you are figuring SaaS out as you go, $10M can disappear all too quickly.

(PS-  I love the crunchbase widgets.  now all I need to do is find a wordpress widget/plugin that will add them auto-magically for me!)