The Process Maverick (aka Theo Priestley) wrote a pretty interesting blog titled “Calling time on the BPM Conferences“.  In it, he points out:

In the last 6 months there’s a growing trend towards offering massive discounting or 2-for-1 deals (is this a professional meeting or a team huddle at Wal-mart ?!!) to try and attract the numbers. And it’s not working.

Lombardi pulled its famous Driven events from being physically located to purely Online now following a call from its members stating they could no longer warrant traveling and the expenses that incurred. Rumblings from the recent Spring Gartner BPM conference suggested that there was nothing new to warrant actually going. And more worryingly, a recent european conference had only 20 attendees….including the speakers ! It would seem the majority attending came from the Middle East and they understood a little about BPM and process initiatives but did they need to come all that way to learn ?

In fact, I’ve been hearing these rumblings about conferences in general, not just BPM conferences.  And there is reasonable evidence to show that BPM conferences are generally doing better than non-BPM-themed conferences (if you believe Gartner’s attendance numbers, their spring events were quite well attended).

Still, Theo’s criticisms are well-noted.  I think there is some consensus among those who regularly attend such conferences that there is not enough net-new content for a Gartner BPM Conference every 6 months, for example.  The beauty of a “Lombardi Driven” conference in past years was that it had a pull on different audiences for different reasons, and could satisfy their interests:

• Technical practitioners looking for practical help, tools, shared experiences
• Technologists looking at the road ahead, from a technical perspective, and for best practices from a technology perspective
• Business Process specialists at firms using Lombardi’s software, who wanted to get a little better understanding of the company and the products they would be employing
• Process owners looking for ideas for improvement, and inspiration and motivation to go get the budget they need to invest in their processes
• Executives looking for partners to help them expand from project to program.
• Implementation and ISV Partners looking for business opportunities
• Customers looking for help

I think what made Driven interesting was its focus on the practical. In a multi-vendor conference, not all the conversations can cross-pollinate as easily. Speakers at the more general conferences will tend to be more business centric, but perhaps at the expense of really drawing the right audience.  The format tends to be more presentation oriented than discussion (in fact, Driven was heading down that presentation/podium-focus as well, and the video-only version of Driven was completely devoid of the normal discussion that makes these events so worthy of attending).

But the real criticism of Theo’s that sticks:

“Isn’t it time the conference organisers woke up and realised that CONTENT is king and not the turnstiles?”

Yes, it is.  I propose a more barcamp-oriented solution (dare I say, crowdsourced).  Topics should be proposed by the community of attendees and presenters and voted on with feet (and web browsers).  The emphasis should be less about turning a profit from the conference, and more about breaking even, and creating value for everyone who attends, sponsors, speaks, or reads the notes later.  We have a tradition of this kind of conference in Austin, with Mr. Hurley being the driving force behind it.  I think there are some lessons to learn from this approach, that could result in a really effective BPM conference.

A wonderful example of looking at the same glass and seeing it as half-empty rather than half-full, here’s the headline from an article I just read:  “Just 15% of Companies that Implemented a BPM System are Realizing End-User Productivity Gains of More than 50%”

(or should I say, 15% full or 85% empty? )

Its a good read of an article, but let me write the headline differently using the same statistics:

“15% of Companies implementing a BPM System realize end-user productivity gains of more than 50%”

That sounds, actually, pretty good.  Presumably some larger percentage of these companies implementing BPM Systems achieve some smaller end-user productivity gains.  It also seems that these statistics are being reported in a vacuum.  Are end-user productivity gains the *only* goal of such implementations?  What about better customer service?  Lower defect rates?  Higher throughput without a loss of quality?  Faster turnaround time?  etc.

Reading into the (slightly) more detailed stats at the bottom of the article, only 1.4% of BPM Projects had negative end-user productivity impact, and 46% fell into the “don’t know” category.  That’s the real problem:  too many of the companies implementing BPM Systems really had no effective way to measure worker productivity *prior* to implementing BPM.  So often the better apples-to-apples comparisons are other statistics that are affected by end-user productivity but are secondary indicators:

• Throughput of your process (# of instances of the process in a given timeframe)
• Average and Median completion time of a process instance
• Number of defects (customer complaints, inaccurate orders, etc) per million (for example)
• Customer Service scores
• etc.

Another question asks how often end-users are involved in designing their own workarounds to get around the system.  46.5% said often, and 38.4% said occasionally.  This is a great argument for why a BPM initiative needs to be a program, and not just a one-and-done project.  Those workarounds that end users are designing need to be sussed out, examined, discussed, and incorporated into future BPM iterations… In other words, we want continuous process improvement.

I’m looking at the same statistics and seeing the glass half-full…

Intalio’s Ismael Ghalimi is crowing about some new offerings that are at least partly as a result of some acquisitions they’ve done recently.  The press release announces the new branding that is prevalent on their website.  They are now advertising themselves as the “Enterprise Cloud Company”, and essentially trying to ride the coattails of two big buzzwords- BPM and Cloud.  This isn’t that different than what some other companies are doing, though it may be a bit more aggressive on the branding side than those other efforts.  I’m not sure that I follow the strategy of moving into the CRM space (which, as anyone following that space knows, has a couple of strong competitors in Salesforce, SugarCRM, and Oracle/Siebel, among others). And it also concerns me when I read a press release that quotes an anonymous customer from “one of the World’s largest banks” – its hard to get attributed quotes from customers in time to hit press release or marketing deadlines – but that is precisely why they are so valuable.  Anyone who knows how hard it is to get them understands that you have to actually be delivering value for the customer to even have a hope of getting such a recommendation.

We’ll have to see how the acquisitions shake out for Intalio, but none of this sounds like bad news for the BPM space.   Its a very ambitious play for Intalio.  On this page, Intalio announces its utility pricing for on-premise solutions.  Again, they’re painting a pretty ambitious picture for what they’ll set up, including VMWare vSphere as the hypervisor.  The pricing at first glance looks a little high to me- but that is based on my thumbnail cost+ consideration, rather than comparing to what other solutions cost when priced the same way (at $10/GB of memory, paying $0.10/hour/GB means that you’re paying $10 for 100 hours of 1 GB, and you keep paying going forward).

UPDATE: In another page, Intalio rolls out their new slogan and messaging, answering my question above as to “why enter the CRM market?” to some degree- they’ve given their view of the value-play in that space, but haven’t fully explained the rationale behind their move into the space from a strategic point of view.  The three limits Intalio targets:

1. Deployment options – Intalio offers their CRM package on-demand, on-premises, and managed on-premises.
2. Programming language (for customization and custom extensions) – Intalio claims Salesforce only supports APEX and Visualforce, while Intalio supports a number of standard languages.
3. Capacity and Performance – Intalio appears to be offering bigger file sizes, etc. than Salesforce.

Again, interesting stuff from Intalio, and aggressive positioning.  I’m curious to see how it plays in the marketplace, and definitely interested in reading any comments, emails, or posts from folks who are using the Intalio cloud offering!

Sandy Kemsley posted a good recap of a webinar on BPMN 2.0 by Robert Shapiro.  Its a good writeup, and must have been a pretty good webinar.

Another link from Sandy – I’m not sure how I feel about this – a book on BPMN, that (I think) is intended to read like a novel… I don’t know whether to be afraid, or very afraid…

Interesting post on ignoring data by Pete Warden.  The fascinating part about his post is that he argues (with evidence gathered from some other experts) – that sometimes you have to go beyond what the data tells you, or ignore the data, or do something in spite of what the data tells you.

It reminded me of many conversations I’ve had over the years about making “informed decisions”.  My emphasis is always that you should be aware of the data out there (especially when it is readily available) before making your decision.  Often I have run into resistance from the audience receiving this advice because, I think, they’re assuming that I think the data will prove them wrong – or that if the data indicates they should do something different, they won’t be able to do what they want.

Quite the contrary!  The point of making informed decisions can be spelled out quite simply:

1. When the data confirms the decision you were about to make, you have more ammunition to rationally explain your actions to your superiors, your customers, or your team (or yourself!).
2. When the data contradicts the decision you were about to make, and the data surprised you (different than your assumptions), you may want to do some further analysis to find out why the data wasn’t what you expected.
3. When you decide to act contrary to what the data tells you, you’ll be doing it from an informed perspective – aware of the risks, and able to articulate why you’re taking those risks.

The point isn’t to replace human decision-making, it is to inform human decision-making.  If you don’t get informed decisions, you don’t get “some” decisions made with the gut, you get all of them made with the gut – something we humans aren’t that good at – and you lose the opportunity to learn from historical data (even those early gut calls).

SolarWinds just went public today after being fully subscribed in their pricing range.  Reuters reports on the debut, including (at the moment) a 16% rise in the stock on the open market.  This is not only good news for the markets and the venture investors, but good news for Austin, which hasn’t seen an IPO in approximately 3 years, despite having quite a few companies in incubation here.

We have some good friends working over at SolarWinds, and we’re very happy for them for being able to capitalize on all the hard work so far to retire debt and have money to invest in growth.  Of course, as anyone who has worked at a recently-public company will tell you – now the real work starts!

(editors note: SolarWinds is not a green energy play… check out their website to learn more about their business in network management)

A couple of posts on this subject recently, one of them by my good friend John Reynolds (Process Manager Interoperability).  Keith Swenson made a reference to the Wf-XML spec as being relatively little-known and he wasn’t kidding – neither John nor I had heard of it previously and no doubt part of that is because the name says nothing about what it can accomplish for you.  The letters “Wf-XML” just don’t say anything about what this spec will do for you (allow you to start, monitor, and react to the completion of a process run in another system/environment).

As John points out, it seems higher probability that consumers of BPM technologies will benefit more from technologies that help with interoperability between those BPM tools, rather than from the more complicated task of actually migrating those implementations across BPM tools.  Of course, the SOA camp ca well claim that they solve this problem – but it isn’t the service-oriented nature of the interface that is the problem – its having a purpose-built standard for the design pattern of two independent process platforms communicating about the state of a process instance (or subprocess instance).

Not much time left to register for this one, but it looks promising to me – Neil Ward-Dutton of MWD Advisors and Brandon Baxter of Lombardi will be presenting on the subject of gettin Beyond Model Driven Development:  Delivering on the Promise of BPM – a webinar tomorrow at 10am CST (Austin) time – I plan to be listening in.

We previously posted about Neil’s research at MWD on BPM vendor comparisons.   And Brandon has been a frequent contributor to Lombardi’s blog (Process People).

Dennis Byron has a post up on the BPM in Action blog about technology for BPM in the Cloud, in which Dennis even drops the bomb that he is now convinced by his research (converted, as he put it) into the opinion that the cloud is not just SaaS redux.  There are a couple of good links off of this article for background reading as well…

There’s an even more amusing read from Forrester’s BPM Blog by Robert Richardson.  He notes just how many cloud announcements (or SaaS announcements – unlike Dennis, he doesn’t clearly delineate which is which in his post).  The announcements are proof that not only is BPM a robust market, but that there will be no shortage of either new entrants, rebranded entrants, or simply companies that hadn’t hit my radar before.  He points out that Singularity, Cordys, IBM, Vitria, Appian, and Software AG have all put out SaaS or Cloud announcements for their BPM software.  If you add in Lomardi’s recent announcement of the Spring 2009 Blueprint Release, you’ve got yet another announcement, all in roughly 2 months.

I have to admit that for me, some of these companies have a lot to prove before I believe the press releases (I need to see it to believe it) because of past history of either management or the company.  Some companies have a history of promising without delivering in this space.  Appian and Lombardi have both BPM credibility and good SaaS credibility due to their respective offerings (Vitria, for example, is clearly more known for integration, and so is Software AG, and for that matter IBM).  Alignspace is still in beta (I’ve applied but you can’t just “get in”), but is the most “BPM-like” thing I’ve seen from Software AG yet.

I think its a good play for most of these firms, at least from a marketing point of view (not knowing how much their investing I can’t evaluate whether it is a good R&D investment): firstly, they potentially get to change the conversation to one centered on the SaaS-ness of the offering, rather than the BPM-ness of the offering; and secondly, they get a round of press about the SaaS or Cloud aspects of what they’re doing rather than just the BPM buzzword which is, no doubt, a little harder to excite journalists and bloggers with!

I read a blog post recently by Mick Liubinskas on first-mover advantage.  But the underlying analogy he uses is compound interest, arguing that the advantage of being “first-mover” is the chance to start accumulating learning and experience earlier than others, and to let that learning compound year after year. In this context, being “first-mover” isn’t that important – but learning from your experience and customers, and then growing from it is.

I can’t say for sure how well the analogy applies to startups generally, but it applies to the BPM space quite well.  How?  Through luck or by plan, most of the BPM plays have been slow-developing. They’ve grown quickly by enterprise software standards, but not so fast when compared to the growth rates that many software companies enjoyed in the late 90′s.  That growth rate has been manageable enough that the companies have organizational learning, and actually benefit from it, rather than being spread so thin that the organization isn’t earning that compound interest on experience.

Similarly, I think companies deploying BPM could do well to consider the power of compound interest.  In early months on the first project, the benefits of experience for your core BPM team aren’t quite so obvious, but as you are able to grow your capability by an increasing amount in each turn of the BPM project crank.  You can speed the learning curve by hiring or contracting expertise to your team, but it takes investment over time to make BPM a part of your team’s, or company’s, DNA.

This notion of compound interest in learning is part of the fundamental principle behind the consulting business as well – by having learned from so many BPM projects, we look to lend our expertise and experience to our customers to help them achieve a “second-mover advantage” – moving faster by skipping some of the dead-ends or detours that we might have experienced in our own journeys.  Regardless, this article reinforces something I’ve always believed in – a steady consistent investment usually performs better in the long run than big changes up and down over a short period of time.  There’s a cost to starting up, and a cost to shutting down, and with steady investment you start to earn that “compound interest” on your investment that is increased efficiency and organizational knowledge.

No, Phil Gilbert all by himself isn’t the second decade of BPM.  But he wrote a blog post yesterday that certainly paints a great vision for the road ahead.  Phil has a great “voice” in his writing and speaking, motivates his topics really well, and I like the fact that he really thinks “big”.  No small dreams for this BPM company!

You could sum up his call-to-arms in three words:

1. Communicate (or, alternately: Collaborate)
2. Automate
3. Educate

And then he goes on to point out how Blueprint addresses point #1 (although it is a bit of oversimplification because there are communication/collaboration features in Teamworks 7 as well, but the point is that Blueprint’s “reason for existance” is all about communication, collaboration, and consensus, whereas Teamworks’ bread-n-butter is automation/execution).  And then how Teamworks 7 addresses point #2, Automation, with a set of new capabilities and designs.  And finally, attempt to address the lack of available BPM talent with Lombardi University (#3: Educate).

Its a good read, and as with some of his other missives, it will no doubt affect how people think about BPM in the future.

Lombardi just announced Blueprint’s spring release.  Looks like the key features are around Sharing and Linking, as well as controlling participant and author access.  Since the release doesn’t drop til Saturday, we’ll have to wait til next week to do a review of the new functionality, but once again it looks like the Lombardi team has managed to make significant strides forward in a quarterly-release format.

Simultaneously, they’ve launched the marketing for Teamworks 7.   In that marketing push they claim a 50% advantage in productivity over Teamworks 6, better visibility, and the ability to manage every aspect of the deployment through the Teamworks Process Center.  On the Features page, they have videos that really drive home the point of how well the new approach in Teamworks 7 should work.  I’ve seen demos of Teamworks 7 before, as this has been in the labs for a long time.  They’ve made a lot of progress in the last year on this platform, and they clearly weren’t trying to hit singles or doubles, but home runs.

Snapshots and Back-in-Time are features I just haven’t seen on other BPM platforms.  The fact that two authors can edit the process at the same time, while preserving every single change as a restore-point, really removes constraints from collaboration scenarios.  Traditionally you version things in files and check them into VSS, CVS, Perforce, etc.  But Teamworks 7 takes an approach to “Versioning” that follows the Blueprint example:  snapshots, change-history, audit-trail, etc.  Its much more robust than previous versioning options.  You can even run the process “as it was” at some point in time, rather than as it currently is.  The fact that all of this is baked into the authoring environment makes it much easier for process development teams to take advantage of it.

They’ve also amped up the re-use opportunities by making re-usable toolkits easier to access.  These toolkits are separately versioned, and a process can be configured to use a particular version of a toolkit, rather than being forced to use the most current toolkit version at each point in time, or forcing the process author to micromanage the connections between processes and toolkits.

Of course, I’d like to see Teamworks make the UI still more flexible – perhaps by exposing more AJAX-oriented tools for building mashups that include Teamworks processes.  The portal is still a bit too monolithic for my taste.  But this is perhaps one area where stood pat with essentially what they already have.  Reporting also didn’t get as much attention as I might like – Teamworks already provides great support for tracking data, but some out-of-the-box toolkits for connecting to various visualization technologies would make this data more accessible.

In the new website launch, one of the features are the videos interlaced with the header of each page, featuring various folks at Lombardi giving 1-2 minute explanations of their programs.  Its cool, but it is almost disturbing when they come to life without some kind of video bounding box!  (okay, maybe that’s just me).

The only thing I wasn’t clear on for Teamworks 7 was the General Availability date – Blueprint’s release (Saturday) was published and sources tell me Teamworks 7 will be available in some form in just a few weeks…

UPDATE : wow, quite a few more articles about Lombardi’s new releases lately.
From ebizQ, CBR on Lombardi Revs is Product Suite, and the PR release on Lombardi University, and another article on the UK Register, and yet another reprint of the Teamworks release on Intelligent Enterprise, with one on Blueprint here.

Recently Austinites (or, some Austinites) expressed frustration (outrage?) that a contract to build a new City website was being filled by a company in California.  Given how many folks there are in Austin who know web design and implementation, and given how many of those might be looking for work at the moment, it just didn’t seem to make sense to send a $750,000 contract to another state for fulfillment.

And so William Hurley started an effort he’s calling OpenAustin.org, where he is promoting a different approach, one he calls “crowdsourcing“.    The idea is to crowdsource the prioritization of requirements, and then the building of the site itself.  Hurley claims that this specific project could be built for 10% of the estimate currently on the table (and, there has been some debate whether the $750k is for building the site, or just formulating the PLAN to build the site).

Several posts have cropped up about this development- on Austin’s Startup Blog, on GigaOm (thanks to Stacey Higginbotham), and again on GeekAustin, and it has a fair amount of buzz in the Austin community.

What I think is interesting about Mr. Hurley’s approach is that he’s essentially saying that a Customer Development process where you quickly iterate on learning what the customer (citizens of Austin, members of the city government) really want, and then prioritize based on their input.  By doing this, they can save a lot of what could otherwise be wasted development effort on features that no one really wants to pay for.  In a sense it is a continuing battle for transparency in the local government that Austin has been waging back and forth for decades.  In this case, we have people advocating for transparency of the development of an important City resource.

We’ve previously commented on Customer Development, which is particularly well-suited to situations where you don’t know with certainty the problem nor the solution.  In the case of the website, it looks like a fair number of people are feeling like the RFP and the Contracting process were done in a too-insular fashion, at a result of increased costs and less alignment with the public.  It will be interesting to see how it shakes out, but I sure like the idea of prioritizing city web dollars using public voices, and local city staffing.

Looks like I wasn’t the only one who noticed that IBM picked a name for their new “social BPM” site that sounds suspiciously like the most familiar name in that space – Lombardi’s Blueprint.  In my previous post, I noted that the naming seemed a bit suspicious (IBM’s BPM Blueworks) in that there’s no particular reason to include the word “Blue” in the name…

Meanwhile, Jim Rudden, VP of Marketing at Lombardi, responded on their blog:

In particular, we could not help but notice the name similarity with Blueprint — our cloud based process mapping and modeling application that has been on the market for two years. Now, before you call me paranoid, know that we average several thousand hits to our website per quarter from IBM labs in China, Italy, Germany, Canada and the US. And we get dozens of requests for Blueprint accounts from IBM Labs across the world every quarter. So, at the very least, the IBM team was aware of Blueprint — if not imitating it. They are not the first to follow Blueprint’s lead — and won’t be the last.

Jim doesn’t pull too many punches in his response to IBM’s announcement.  It is certainly interesting that IBM labs are hitting Lombardi’s Blueprint so frequently, and requesting so many accounts. He has some substantive arguments about whether IBM’s release will really “democratize” process modeling the way Lombardi’s Blueprint purports to do (its a good read whether you agree or not).

Meanwhile, Forrester’s business process blog has made note of the IBM announcement as well, in a post titled “Not Your Daddy’s IBM” by Robert Richardson. He accurately describes IBM’s participation in the BPM market circa 2006, and concludes from the announcements at their annual user conference that IBM now “gets it”.  I think it is reasonable to assume that IBM picked up some new BPM-related “DNA” with some of its acquisitions – notably that of Webify here in Austin, TX.  But IBM is a big company, and change comes slowly.  Although I think BPM makes even more sense for IBM to focus on than SOA, they have, instead, been beating the SOA drum for the last 5+ years.  So I think we’re justified in taking a wait-and-see attitude about announcements, and wait to see the shipping products.

IBM is due to release BPM Blueworks on June 26.  Lombardi is about to deliver a new version of Blueprint as well (they ship new versions approximately every quarter, and Blueprint has been live for over two years now).  Hopefully IBM will offer trial versions so we can do a bit of a comparison at that point (and maybe a few more fireworks).

Bruce Silver just posted a review on IBM’s BPM BlueWorks.  It doesn’t “ship” til end of June, so we can’t play with it yet but apparently Bruce has had a sneak preview.

It sounds like  interesting stuff, and surprising (to me) coming from IBM.  I can’t help but think that people will be especially interested in IBM’s cloud/hosted offerings because anyone who has had to install IBM’s software will be happy to avoid either doing it or paying IBM to do it for on-premise installation. I can also see some instant name confusion with another SaaS offering in the BPM space:  Lombardi’s Blueprint. One wonders if there just weren’t enough adjectives for this kind of software so “Blue” just had to be used…

We’ll have to take a look once it goes live and see if it lives up to the high expecations Bruce has set!

Keith recently listed 21 questions in his blog that he recommends a prospective buyer should ask BPM vendors when comparing products.  Not all the questions are about interoperability exclusively, but the first few are definitely focused on interoperability.  However, you have to weight questions based on how important they are to you.  You can get a highly inter-operable product that doesn’t functionally *do* what you need it to do.  You can get a product that functionally hits all your needs but doesn’t support interchange formats… and you can find data points inbetween.

Unfortunately we’re still very early in the world of interchanging business process models.  I would be hesitant to place interchange high on my list for differentiating my vendors.  I would place more emphasis on functional requirements, total cost of ownership, and adherence to my IT approach.  After those needs are met, then I’d start sorting by other things (interchange of BPM models being one).  One of the things I’ve noticed is that the general assumption seems to be that if I export a business process from one tool to XPDL and import it to another, it will just run in the new tool.  That isn’t necessarily the case.  Different BPM tools provide a different level of support for self-contained implementation specifications (implementation of those activities or services), and generally speaking those implementation details won’t translate, because they aren’t explicitly part of any of the BPM specs.

Having said that, Keith has a few questions to ask that have an impact on interoperability or interchange, but are also key differentiators of product capability, including questions about nested processes and how deep the nesting can go, data tracking, event posting, supporting wf-xml, exposing processes as webservices, etc.  Check out his list for more in-depth discussion of each one!

There are just a few software companies in Austin that, if you worked there, will ensure that you are well-networked with most of the current software companies in Austin.  Vignette is one of them.  Everyone knows someone who worked there, and the network among Vignette alumni is pretty good. I’ve worked with a number of Vignette alumni who were top notch, including our own Greg Harley.

I first saw the mention of the acquisition on the Austin Startup blog.

In a previous article, the Six Barriers to BPM Adoption in the Enterprise, #4 was “The Bus Brake Effect”.  The short version is that anyone on the bus can pull the break and stop everyone’s progress.  For many organizations, that is true of their BPM efforts (and indeed, most IT efforts).  The problem is especially acute for BPM programs because BPM touches so many different parts of the organization.

I recently read Steve Blank’s article on killing innovation with corner cases, and it really struck a chord for me.  He correctly points out that this problem is even more acute when you have a lot of smart, confident people in the room.  His take on corner cases is almost perfect for either exceptions or corner cases for BPM:

A corner case is an objection that may be:

1. technically reasonable
2. may have a probability of occurring
3. its probability of occurring is lower than your probability of running out of money.

In the context of Steve’s article, discussing startups, his point is that running out of money is more important than any number of corner cases.  We could look at BPM a little differently, because we’re not going to run out of money – but how about the probability that your project runs out of budget?  or that your process improvement project doesn’t achieve positive ROI?

Steve’s suggestion, with which I concur, is:  Listen to the objection or corner case.  Ask the objector to calculate the odds, and estimate the damage.  When you multiply the two together, you get your expected economic impact (a 10% probability of a $100 event is a $10 expected outcome…). The beauty of the approach is that it can help keep your meetings productive, and once people see your tactic, they’ll anticipate it and save you a lot of wrangling in front of 20-person meetings. It also is a teachable point of view on how to handle objections – something people can do for themselves even when you’re not in the room or in the discussion.  It sure seems like a good way to mitigate the bus-brake effect!

We’ve been working hard on Putting the Band Back Together over the last 2 years. I’m happy to say we’ve just added two new members to the team that have a long, successful history deploying BPM solutions, but who were ready for a new chapter in their careers after writing successful prior chapters.

Pavan is someone we’ve worked with on-and-off for the last 4 years, and he’s had successful deployments both with us and without us during that time, as he was one of the foremost experts on the ground in BPM at BearingPoint.  He’s deployed Lombardi solutions but also worked with other vendor products, and he’s one of those guys you can always count on in a pinch. I’ve been talking to Pavan quite literally for over a year looking for the right opportunity to bring him on board.

Wade is another guy we’ve worked with on-and-off over the last 4 years, and when I found out he was leaving his previous role, we jumped at the chance to bring him on board.  He was the technical lead for a major insurance company’s BPM efforts, and has additional experience with significant IT apps at that firm and at previous firms.  He adds to our insurance expertise, but also brings a wealth of BPM experience to the table.

Both of these guys are the kind of people you’re proud to work with, and proud to have on your team.  They can play more than one role, and yet when push comes to shove they can solve hard problems with software.  They’ll be helping us out with a major project right off the bat, and we couldn’t be happier to have them on the team.  When we say we’re putting the band back together, these are the kind of guys we want on our team-  experience in the school of hard knocks, time in the trenches of BPM deployments, prior experience with other applications and integrations, and maturity.

Welcome aboard, guys!

The News

So Oracle just bought Sun.  I didn’t think this had any real bearing on the BPM market because I couldn’t think of any BPM software that Sun has been pushing.  Dennis Byron of ebizQ confirms in his article “Does Oracle/Sun Mean It’s a Horse Race for BPM?” (registration required but it’s painless, I assure you), that Sun has already pretty well “de-emphasized the BPM-related elements in the remnants of SeeBeyond, which it acquired in 2005.” The only impact I expect the acquisition to have on BPM is that it assures that Oracle’s thought leaders will be spread even more thinly as they work hard to incorporate Sun’s many software offerings, not to mention as they try to figure out the hardware business for the first time.  BPM is such a small part of what Oracle does now, that it is hard to imagine it won’t get starved for attention inside the walls of Oracle.

The Background

This is an argument I’ve been having on-and-off with Dennis Byron of ebizQ this year, and in a  previous post on the subject,  I summarized my arguments that had been scattered across a few posts on Dennis Byron’s blog.  Dennis largely took the side of the big stack vendors, arguing that they innovate as much as the little guys (in general, and in BPM).  I took the general point of view that while stack vendors bring advantages to the table, innovation is not chief among those advantages, and that the innovation in the BPM space (and in most spaces) comes from the upstarts and smaller companies.

From the Analysts’ Mouths to…

Well, not that Gartner is the final word on everything, but their statements over the last 4 years are pretty illuminating, from my perspective (thanks to the folks at the Lombardi partner conference for bringing these front of mind):

Gartner, 2005: “Current offerings from IBM, Microsoft, Oracle and SAP provide weaker support for human workflow patterns integrated into a broader process, business-user-oriented rule definition and maintenance (for decisions, re-sourcing and flows), human collaboration, and integrated document and content flow, compared with popular pure-play vendor products [...]” – “Business Process Management: Act Strategically and Buy Tactically”, Gartner Group, June 21, 2005.

In other words, in summer of 2005, the assessment was that the stack vendors just “weren’t there yet”.  But the prevailing view was that if we just gave them another 18-24 months they’d get there.  Even the pure play vendors themselves worried greatly about growing as fast as possible during this “window of opportunity” while the stack vendors were playing catch up.

But, in 2007, what did Gartner have to say? Paraphrasing, their 2007 report noted that none of the stack vendors had a good, integrated experience for people playing a role in process improvement life cycles.  They specifically called out IBM, SAP, and Oracle on this.

Again, everyone thought, if we just wait 18-24 months, these guys will catch up.  The analysts would say it, the stack vendors said it, the pure play vendors again attacked their “window of opportunity”, worried about what would happen in 2 years when the stack vendors “caught up”.

And then in 2009,

“Products from IBM, Oracle and SAP do not yet address the ideal BPMS use case – even in vision – and this can’t be overcome by sheer marketing and sales. “ – Gartner BPMS Magic Quadrant, 2009.

Side Note: Examples of the marketing are everywhere, such as the SAP/Aris positioning here… I’m not sure if the use of punctuation and capitalization are supposed to lend credibility to the offering or just make it harder for spellchecker to check your work… but Chemical.PerformanceREADY as a product name doesn’t give me a feel-good that SAP and Aris have really gone deep in the chemical business and committed to it – the name doesn’t identify what processes are covered, and is so vague that the definition of the product could be that it runs my whole business or that it runs a background check (HR) process tuned to the chemical business.  And there’s a neat set of concentric circles that try to make standard SAP implementation sound easy.  But, having said that, at least the Aris division of SAP is beating the BPM drum whole-heartedly, which is more than we can say for most BPM-related software packages acquired by stack vendors.

So, essentially we have 4 years of reports on BPMS, and the “stack vendors” still haven’t provided a unified BPMS that really addresses the use cases that pure play vendors address. Meanwhile, pureplay vendors have shown a lot of innovation in terms of deployment scenarios (hosted, on premise, SaaS), and new software features.  If, in 2005, you put off your BPM implementations for 2 years to get the latest and greatest from the Stack Vendors, you’d still be waiting today, 4 years later, and the expected wait is…. still 2 years…

Why?

This isn’t an issue of capability. Each of the stack vendors has produced world-class software in other areas, and each of them employ a bunch of world-class engineers.  But BPMS has not received the attention, focus, and thought leadership that it requires for these vendors to be successful.  The folks making product decisions around their BPMS products may still think of BPM as a check-mark on their SOA software stack, and in any case they don’t seem to understand the incredibly broad potential of BPM (and of a BPMS). It looks to me like even the analysts (e.g. Gartner) have grown weary of the posturing of the stack vendors absent any real delivery compared with the pure play vendors.  And it isn’t lost on me that in general, all of the stack vendors have acquired pure play vendors only to see their pace of innovation stall or stop as they figure out how to integrate the new software (often in this argument, it is pointed out that since stack vendors buy pureplays, they “inherit” that innovation, but it just doesn’t work out that way in most cases).  And then because they’re often giving away the BPMS on the back of a stack SOA offering, they aren’t seeing the dollars attached to BPM that would drive them to increase their investment (self-fulfilling prophecy)…

Of course, in 18 to 24 months one of the stack vendors could surprise me and “catch up” to the pure plays (through actual engineering effort, not just by purchasing one of the existing pure plays), but I’m not holding my breath just yet.  If you want to get ROI in the next 18-24 months, go pure play, and get those projects in production.  And then see where the market is after that… and which tools make the most sense for the next leg of your process improvement journey.

So Who is Going to Win?

I don’t pretend to know who is going to win the BPM/BPMS market.  However, as a customer, I would be wary of pure play vendors that sell to stack vendors, when that stack vendor is not putting all their weight behind BPM and BPMS. If the stack vendor isn’t re-aligning their business behind BPM and expecting a significant percentage of their revenues to come from BPM, then the pure play vendor will likely suffer the fates of staffware, fuego, collaxa, and others who have been absorbed and (nearly) forgotten by the market. If you’re a pure play vendor, and you want your venture to succeed within one of these stack vendors, you need to make sure they’re really aligned with BPM – that they believe it is the future of the enterprise software business.  If they don’t, I wouldn’t have much faith that they’re really going to invest in the engineering needed to succeed.