Preamble

With the thinning of the herd of Pure Play BPM software vendors, and with the energies of firms like Oracle and IBM behind BPM, I think two predictions we can reasonably make are:

1. BPM software will be pervasive (or pervasively available).  IBM, Oracle, Pega, Progress, Software AG – they’re all going to move a lot of BPM software.  And of course it looks like open source offerings are going to be more prevalent as well.
2. BPM software is going to get better – either because the big stack vendors invest in the new products they’ve acquired, or because the remaining pure play vendors continue to innovate at a faster pace and grow, or because open source solutions will lift the bar for the minimum requirements that all the BPM software suites have to match.

Why Pure Play BPM Consulting?

But the other prediction we can make, is that there is a growing need for specialty BPM consulting firms – or, dare we say it, “pure play” BPM firms.  These BPM consulting firms are all about BPM – and not about being all things to all people. Nearly all of the points I’ll make about BPM pure play service firms likely apply to pure play services firms in other market segments.  The advantages:

• They really “get it” with BPM – and they’re willing to explain it to customers, they even evangelize to people who might never be customers.
• They’re really invested in understanding the BPM space – which pays dividends over time. Their staff don’t go from BPM project to integration project to database architecture project – they’re transitioning from BPM project to BPM project. It takes time and patience to develop a deep practice in BPM, and it takes time to develop a deep bench in any services business.
• The right methodology and tactics to get BPM projects successfully deployed. And after all, success is what we’re after…
• Really deep expertise on at least one BPM software suite – every product suite has its own strengths and weaknesses and you want staff that knows what those are before they start your project.
• Process improvement staff, that understands how to marry improvement methodology to BPM Software.
• They are “high touch” - high quality, long-term relationships with customers are more important than chasing the next shiny deal, because they’re not selling software…
• Experience, quality, focus, and vision. Not volume.
  

Pure Play BPM consulting firms also fill the void left by pure play BPM software companies being purchased by the Big Software companies of our day – previously these pure play firms had staff focused on BPM alone, but now that they’re part of a bigger machine, focus will be diluted within a much much bigger team.

It’s hard to imagine the big guys matching this focus – not that they can’t afford to, but just because they have so many customers, and so many products, and so many people, that they’ll always depend on specialists (pure plays, if you will) to augment their teams of business and technology generalists.  These general purpose consulting, outsourcing, and off-shoring firms just don’t bring the BPM-specific focus to the table.  As such, customers will continue to need pure play service providers to bring that depth of experience and focus to the table.

Requirements Risk

The BPM Pure Play consulting firms know that you can’t throw requirements over the wall to 50 guys offshore to build the software to meet those requirements.  That’s very old-school separation of responsibilities, but it is based on a lack of trust between the parties – requirements have to be thoroughly specified before anyone can start working – and all the work has to be exactingly matching the requirements or it isn’t accepted.  Keep in mind that the biggest risk to any project is that the requirements are wrong; any methodology that puts off finding out the bad news is going to increase risk.

As my friend and colleague John Reynolds pointed out in the comments on my previous post, so much of this is about Trust.  The pure play firms understand how to build that trust with the business by building the solution in the same room, and doing frequent playbacks of the results of their labor.  Iterations and Accountability are the watch-words of these engagements. It doesn’t take 50 people to get the process right, it takes just a few of the right people in the room, and they have to be brave enough to hear the feedback of the business on a daily or weekly basis, and then course-adjust.

Prioritizing

Another issue: the big firms don’t know what they are not.  They’re trying to provide any service their customer needs. Pure play BPM services firms don’t need to increase their own footprint on the project by capturing non-BPM work, because the universe of BPM consulting work is already so much bigger than their ability to capture that business.  Sure, an increased budget will be good for the bottom line of any services company.  But a pure play services firm can be relied upon to turn down work that isn’t in their sweet spot – or at least to advise you that you are asking the firm to take on work that isn’t their strong suit.  Pure play services firms (not just in the BPM ecosystem) can afford to turn down work because they know what they are, and more importantly, what they are not.

Where did we get these crazy ideas?

These aren’t revolutionary ideas – they’re well known and understood and tested in industry as best practice (and not just for BPM projects).  But the general firms just can’t adjust from a world of 100+ person projects to a world of smaller, independently motivated teams engaging in highly value-added projects that act independently – it just isn’t part of their business model.

The BPM Pure Play service firms are the tips of the spears in a sense – the vanguard of experts that increase your odds as a customer of punching through the inertia and hitting the target of success we’re all aiming for.  The BPM ecosystem needs that ability to cut through the noise and focus on what matters most.

Dave Duggal attempts a take-down of BPMN in a comment on Keith Swenson’s blog, concluding with:

“There is a reason why business leaders are suddenly have wandering eyes, they don’t think BPMN is the vehicle for the component-based distributed future.”

I humbly refer you to Bruce Silver’s blog for a quick rebuttal.  The market is adopting BPMN more than ever, and at an increasing pace.  Better to spend your energies figuring out how to make BPMN more effective (in combination with whatever other techniques you recommend) rather than making your recommended approaches an either-or proposition.  I think I’ve been hearing about this component-based distributed future since CORBA. I’m all for distributed and component-based, but I don’t hear an either-or proposition, and this doesn’t sound like business-leader language.

The question business leaders ask is will BPM and BPMN yield ROI? and the answer is yes.

My bank purchased an investment bank in 2008.  As a long-time customer, I had a small amount of optimism that the purchase of the investment bank would lead to some benefit to me, their banking customer.

Changes happened in the intervening months – my bank brokerage account and money market account were moved to the investment bank.  Fine.  The letters have different typeface, but the online banking and everything else was still seamless.  I was still waiting for the payoff – some way in which this merger benefited me.  A call from an investment banker or financial advisor? A recommendation for better interest-bearing options for any spare change in my account?  Better investment advice (up to this point I’ve received none, after all…)?

Yesterday I got the answer in the mail.  My formerly linked Checking and Money Market funds are now being severed – no more transparently putting cash into interest-bearing money market funds.  In fact, if I take no further action, my checking account balance will be zero in May.  That sounds like a recipe for bounced checks, doesn’t it?  Did I mention that my bank (and all the other banks) have raised their bounced check fees?  If I don’t want to have a zero dollar balance in my Checking Account, I have to fill out a form and sign it and mail it in (no online options) to the investment bank to tell them to sever the accounts and put my cash in the checking account.  Or, I can call their 1-800 number and try that approach.

Hm. I think, why don’t I speak to my Bank, which is, after all, the institution I have a relationship (of sorts) with?  I talked to them – on the phone, and at my local branch.  They are actually powerless to help me, except by referring me to an investment bank financial adviser, because they’re not allowed to touch that side of the house.

I’m fairly disappointed at this state of affairs- an organization I never chose to work with (investment bank) has now made several very poor customer management decisions on behalf of the organization I chose (the Bank).  They’ve dramatically increased the likelihood that I pull all my investment money out  and place it with an institution that is a little more customer-focused, and one that consults with me before changing my financial fortunes.

Unfortunately, I think the institution has lost sight of their most important asset: their customers. (there’s a lesson in there for all of us)

I’ve been remiss in getting the last couple of bpmCamp updates out to the the blog,

In one of the sessions on the first day, I gave a summary of an approach to BPM projects that I like to call “Fixed Effort” – but clearly I didn’t come up the ranks through marketing.

The whole point of the discussion was to give people a different way to think about a problem they face all the time with BPM projects: changing and evolving requirements.  As I pointed out in the discussion, the point wasn’t to argue whether requirements should change or shouldn’t change, the point was to discuss how to organize around principles that will protect you from the negative effects of requirements change.

I have found that sometimes a fresh set of analogies and thought models can help give business and IT leaders new arguments to support “doing the right thing” for their process projects.  I’ve previously discussed “Fixed Effort” in our blog, but this is an opportunity to really focus on it.

A quick review of the familiar approaches:

• Fixed price.  Typically you fix the scope as well before agreeing upon price.  The customer is paying for deliverables rather than hours of work.  Any changes go through change-order (and cost) process.  The problem: The biggest risk to any project is getting the requirements wrong – and because we’re fixing requirements early, they are very likely to be wrong.  And because the bid is fixed based on the fixed scope, any change we make will likely increase our budget, reducing ROI. Fixed price projects also fail at a pretty high rate, and the Vendor takes on a lot of the financial risk.
• Time and Materials.  Scope may change, at additional cost.  The customer is paying for hours worked, not results.  Generally a light change-order process.  The problem: Timeline and budget risks are high (scope changes lead to longer delivery times and increased hourly charges). Customer takes primary financial risk.

So what is Fixed Effort?

Deliver variable scope on a fixed budget.

It sounds impossible, but it is, in my opinion, the most responsible way to deliver BPM projects.  The emphasis shifts to prioritizing scope based on importance of each item to the business (return) and based on cost to implement (investment).  The basic idea is: any new items get prioritized into the existing list, and the BPM team works on the highest priority items first, and the team makes sure to pull it together into a production release with completed items before the budget runs out.

Of course, there is more to it than just that – but philosophically, that’s all there is to it!  One of my catchphrases at bp3 is “Respect the Budget” – don’t assume you can go back to the well for additional funds – make sure you are production-ready before you run out of money.

What I really love about this approach is that I can treat a T&M project as though it is Fixed Effort, by emphasizing prioritizing, and making sure that we’re always in a position to shift gears and go live with what we’ve got.  You can even get a Fixed Price project to behave more like a Fixed Effort project if you can convince your colleagues to treat the change-order process as a prioritize-and-replace process.

Of course, we got into a lot of discussion about specific cases and situations and how these techniques can be applied – but since I was speaking I didn’t capture that in my notes!  Comments to add to this are welcome -

I wanted to refer interested readers to what I thought was a very thoughtful recap of SXSW-interactive. Doug Freeman recaps the event. He’s covered the SXSW music festival for years, and nicely discounts much of the criticism of SXSW by some others – as he says, sometimes the good ole days are just the good ole days, but the now is actually pretty interesting in and of itself, and may just require a little change in the routine to take advantage of the new reality.

It isn’t that the criticism isn’t accurate in many respects- but the real issue is a mismatch between one’s expectations and reality (ie, if you expected Google i/o, that is not SXSWi… ), rather than an absolute standard that the conference is falling short of.

I’m happy to announce that I’ve been invited to speak at IBM Impact / Lombardi Driven – I’ll be sharing what we learned at bpmCamp 2010 @ Stanford, covering several topics from the unconference we held at Stanford at the end of January.  I’ll do my best to boil it down to the highlights for sharing with the community, but I invite anyone who wants to speak more about the contents and learnings from bpmCamp to seek me out directly and initiate a conversation – either at Impact or offline via email.  If you’re interested in helping us organize a bpmCamp in your area, again, let me know – we may be able to work together on it, and I’d love to share the bpmCamp experience with more BPM practitioners in other geographies, or gauge interest for doing a bpmCamp in Austin.

Our session on lessons from bpmCamp is from 3:45 to 4:10 on Monday, May 3rd.  May 3rd has an entire Lombardi Driven or “Lombardi Day” agenda set up with over 20 Lombardi sessions and 100+ BPM sessions overall.  For Lombardi customers and IBM customers and prospects this should be an interesting value proposition.  While Impact runs from May 2-7, a two-day pass would get you to Lombardi Driven plus an extra day to check out the rest of the conference.   We’re planning on attending from May 2 to the 4th, and for anyone that would like to meet and chat in person, please reach out to me via my twitter handle (@sfrancisatx) or email, so we can plan in advance.

I’m looking forward to meeting new faces and reacquainting with familiar faces at Impact.

Initial Thoughts…

I previously posted about my first two days at SXSW-interactive. I had a good experience at the conference, overall, but it does present some challenges (not least of which is the lack of eating options at lunch).  And there was a flurry of criticism post-conference which might be a bit predictable: that the conference had gotten too big for its britches and perhaps too focused on celebrity and parties, and not enough on technology.

I don’t think size necessarily is a problem of its own – SXSWi is like several mini-conferences all under one umbrella.  There were enough sessions on blogging to be a pure blogging conference, for example.  Another set of sessions on using social media in your marketing and demand generation.  Another set of sessions on Javascript.  Another set of sessions unveiling relatively new startups.  I think the criticism that SXSWi wasn’t technical enough misses the mark – as I recall it is “interactive” not “technical”… and the definition of what falls under that “interactive” umbrella has shifted over the years from blogging to social media to location-based apps to mobile apps in general.  Part of what makes SXSWi interesting is that it can adapt over time to the changing technology landscape – and then put sessions together that are as much about how to use the technologies as they are about how to build software leveraging those technologies, or how the software works under the hood. If you’re coming to SXSWi expecting Google i/o, you’ll be disappointed.  But if you’re expecting CES you would also be disappointed.  SXSWi is somewhere inbetween, although that comparison doesn’t really do it justice.

If you want to figure out how to leverage blogs, twitter, facebook, and mobile apps to improve your business, SXSW was a good conference for you.  If you wanted to get exposure to a set of people that will affect perception of your product or firm among an elite set of users, SXSW was a good conference for you.  But of course, SXSW isn’t without its challenges.  As someone else pointed out, choosing between 28 sessions at one time slot is a daunting task at best.  But fewer sessions may not be the answer – because fewer sessions would mean a larger average size and therefore less discussion-oriented sessions (which were my favorites).

Of course, the interesting thing about SXSW-interactive is that each year, attendees VOTE on the topics ahead of time.  And the topics are put forth by people who want to present or moderate at the conference.  This is part of the flexibility of the conference, and the reason its appeal has widened over the years.  Surely no conference committee could come up with 20+ simultaneous sessions 4-5 times a day for 5 days in a row.  But the democratic polling process absolutely can fill the conference.

If you didn’t like the conference this time, propose a panel, and VOTE!  You can at least create a channel through the event of panels that you find highly valuable.

Improving on a Good Thing?

Having said that, what can the conference do to improve?

1. Provide better food options during lunch time.  Lots of food options.  Austin is practically the capital of airstream-trailer-food, as well as live music, so why not bring a fleet of these vehicles to both the front- and back-side of the convention center (Trinity and Red River) to handle the mad rush of business between the end of the 11am sessions and the beginning of the 12:30pm sessions. Also, wouldn’t be a bad idea to convince Fogo de Chao and some other local restaurants to open for lunch for a change.
2. Better descriptions of the panels.  As we get closer to the event and you have to choose, it would really help to have a better understanding of the panels being offered, but some of them had woefully inadequate descriptions.
3. Group panels not just by location (which helps!) but also by topic-grouping, so that it is easier to find the kinds of things you want to know more about.
4. Provide a couple time slots that have fewer sessions to drive some traffic to the exhibit floor, or give more people time for lunch (whichever).
5. Pick the keynote speakers (or interviewers) carefully.  Its a tough job, and a tough crowd.  Give the folks who do this a chance to succeed!
6. If there are shuttles, etc., make that information more obvious.

Well, those are my thoughts.  I attended SXSW-interactive not so much because I thought it would directly impact our business at BP3; I wanted to see how it had evolved over the years, make some new connections outside of our usual trails in the BPM ecosystem, and to get exposed to some ideas outside of the BPM echo chamber.  And I also wanted to learn how to attend SXSWi in a more efficient way in the future (in other words, how to optimize my work-conference-personal life balance during the conference).

Highlights for me:

I really enjoyed hearing from speakers across a number of topics:

• How some bloggers make money from doing this, and what drives them
• How people feel about yelp, and how it affects the way restaurants run their business.  Note to businesses who don’t think yelp applies to them: there is a site called “Get Satisfaction” that has an even more aggressive version of a very similar business model.
• How good speakers can weave entertaining presentations from *ANY* set of slides put in front of them (battle decks presentation showdown)
• Interesting startups like AnyClip (although, this one will diminish the value of my encyclopedic quoting knowledge of certain movies), I-nigma (2D barcode scanning, so fast its hard to believe it works), ShopSavvy (price comparison using barcode scanning), and Siri, which is a voice-activated application that integrates well with a bunch of other services on your phone – it literally feels like magic.  Definitely one to keep an eye on.
• Despite all the advice to the contrary, whenever a panel of judges asks a startup presenter to tell them about their competition, they answer “well, no one does exactly what we do, but here are a few that some people might consider competitors”… I guess if you’re mostly giving these answers instead of saying them, you don’t realize how much this undermines your credibility.  For example, for Siri, I would have responded that “Google Voice Search and voice-activated dialing and voice-activated reminders are all competing for our users’ attention and overlap with our application.  We need to create a more compelling experience to draw them away and part of how we do that is by allowing the user to do MORE with voice activation, and part of how we do that is by providing better voice analysis, which is actually quite hard.”
• Some people in Austin are doing great things with their businesses.  Entrepreneurship is alive and well in our town.

Other highlights included having lunch at Moonshine (a great Austin restaurant) with my wife (owner of Red Velvet Events) and two other entrepreneurs.  Colleagues raising a quick $500 for a wheel chair for someone who had fallen ill (thanks Thom!).   Successful exhibits by local Austin startups Spiceworks (some good friends work here) and Das Keyboard (I met the co-founders at the exhibit and they’re great!).  The CEO of SlideRocket started a conversation as we were waiting to get our caffeine fix at the Hilton coffee shop (and convinced me to check it out as we compared notes on what sessions to catch).  I met a few old friends who were back in Austin for the conference (a couple of co-founder/CTOs, and a director of Business Development), as well as friends from Austin that I hadn’t seen in several moons.  And maybe that is some of the magic of SXSW-interactive – to mix it up and see what comes of it.

UPDATE: great recap from Doug Freeman, who has covered the SXSW music festival for years, and nicely discounts much of the criticism of SXSW by some others – as he says, sometimes the good ole days are just the good ole days, but the now is actually pretty interesting in and of itself, even if it isn’t “the good ole days…”

Really interesting take on the Apple-Google conflict on Daring Fireball (John Gruber’s blog), as well as in the New York Times. It at least seems that the competition and animosity between these two companies runs deeper than perhaps anyone on the outside realized.

It’s really too bad because most of what these two companies do is so complementary, and symbiotic.  One wonders if Google is fighting too many battles on too many fronts- the same kind of question that was often posed to Microsoft when they were competing with so many software companies for so many of its applications.  The interesting thing to me is, I’m not sure that this fight was necessary for Google.  “Smart” phones were inevitably going to give Google the opening in the mobile space that it was looking for… The only real concern I can see is whether these platforms would, in some fashion, be closed to Google’s applications and ad platforms.  It doesn’t seem likely, given how compelling Google’s map and search applications are, and the ubiquity of Google Apps as a platform. And given that smart phones are already cheap ($99 or less), price doesn’t seem to be a huge barrier to entry anymore…

I hope that in spite of the competition in some areas, that these two firms can work together in areas where it makes sense-  I love the map application on my iPhone, but I’m not switching to Android in the foreseeable future – I like the overall Apple iPhone experience.

Anatoly has a good post on a process anti-pattern, which is a process that shows a “sure” message receive (in other words, doesn’t allow for other outcomes – an approval process without a “reject” path for example, or a “time-out” path).

Of course, the simpler version of the process is fine for getting the basics of the process down, but you have to make sure you don’t base estimates on the simple representation, when there is more effort to make a more robust implementation work correctly.

I described an alternate (work-around) pattern that works on BPMS tools that support multiple attached events on an activity in the comments of Anatoly’s post, but I thought it only fair to supply an actual diagram here (click to enlarge):

I left out the second pool and cross-pool messaging to simplify the diagram a bit for purposes of posting here.  Essentially, rather than use an “event gateway” which looks ahead in the diagram to figure out which event fired and therefore which path is followed, we use attached events to do the same thing – if any of these events fire, it will close the activity and move down the path to the next activity.  Of course, the events could be configured so that they don’t close the activity they’re attached to (for example, a timing event could warn you of a delay, rather than canceling due to a delay).

It isn’t “pure” BPMN diagramming to do this the way I’ve drawn it – but with pretty much every BPM vendor these days you have to make some compromises to get the job done, and BPMN certainly gives you more than one way to solve any problem you’re presented with.  As Anatoly mentioned in his post: most of the BPM vendors consider the event gateway a “luxury” and therefore don’t implement it, or don’t implement it fully.  Hopefully one of the vendors will take the entire BPMN spec seriously, or one of the open source projects will, and put pressure on the others to step it up.

Good coverage of Progress Software’s analyst day by Sandy Kemsley.  In particular, the coverage of the John Bates CTO talk and the wrap-up were the most interesting reads.  There’s obviously a good product-fit for Progress and Savvion and so their go-to-market is shaping up quickly around this RPM concept (Responsive Process Management).

On March 15th, Progress put out an official release on the Responsive Process Management suite.   Its a great packaging of the strengths Progress brings to the table, generally available in late April.  We’ve noted before that it is pretty easy for other companies to copy market positioning and marketing, without following through with real product changes required to support that positioning.  I’m curious to see how quickly the new, bigger BPM vendors will now coalesce around a new set of product position statements.  Progress has put their flag in the ground.  What will the positioning of IBM, Tibco, Pega, Appian, and others be?

Just yesterday, Mark Palmer (of StreamBase, but formerly GM of Apama at Progress), gave a tough critique of Progress’ new strategy.  Of course, being a former GM there, and currently running a competitor (StreamBase) – colors his view.  On the one hand, he has a lot of insight into the company’s strengths and weaknesses, and the market itself.  On the other hand, he’s somewhat pre-disposed against Progress, and that tone comes across pretty well in his post.  Not that he doesn’t raise some legitimate concerns for Progress to address – but the clear assumption in his post is that Progress won’t be able to address his concerns.  And while he points out “problems” one could also flip it around and see “opportunities.”  Example:  He points out three customers who presented (Southwest, 3Italia, and State Street) each only use one Progress product.  So, that could be an example (as he uses it) of how Progress won’t be able to sell their suite.  Or, looked at a bit differently, it looks like the Opportunity Progress has to sell 6-7 more products to happy customers of at least one product… and it makes their effort to unify their sales force look that much smarter.

As much as I might like the scrappy start-up mold of company, and the innovation that comes out of it, Progress (and IBM, Tibco, Oracle) are in a realm where they have to increase the yield on a captive (and channel) sales team.  Adding Savvion to the mix is beneficial to that efficiency argument, in the same way that adding Lombardi to IBM’s mix was beneficial to their sales yield.  But it sounds like Progress had sales org changes to make which Mark criticizes, but which, I have to say, make a lot of sense for a company with 7 products to sell.  It may hurt Progress’ ability to compete in certain niche segments of CEP with the likes of StreamBoat – but it also means they’ll sell CEP to customers who will never even pick up the phone to call StreamBoat because they were really talking to Progress because they wanted BPM and ESB products, and CEP was a nice-to-have for them.

A more balanced take is Neil’s writeup at MWD Advisors: making the Next Big Thing big enough.  I think the best part of Neil’s blog post is summed up here:

I think I know what Progress is trying to do with RPM – it’s trying to show how CEP, transaction monitoring, SOA infrastructure and BPM taken together can make the business value of each investment more compelling.

Think about it as adding probabilities: 0.2 + 0.2 + 0.2 + 0.2 = 0.8. (to use some random numbers).

The danger with the tack it’s currently taking is that it could end up multiplying those probabilities, not adding them. (0.2 x 0.2 x 0.2 x 0.2 = 0.0016).

Of course, we’re not really talking about probabilities – we’re talking about yield: revenue per sales rep.  And while each new product added does not typically create a case of 1+1 = 2, it can very well be the case that a sales rep with two complimentary products sells 150% or more than what they would sell with only one product.  If you hit the “suite” just right, and solution sell, a rep may actually be able to sell something that is more than the sum of the parts:  a solution to a hard problem, for a customer who values that solution quite highly (customers will generally pay more for a solution than they will for a collection of parts that can be tied together… and they’ll pay more for a packed product solution than a bespoke solution – that’s not a scientific analysis that’s just based on observational experience and understanding risk).

Also, while Progress painted a future vision of RPM that might be too aggressive for many customers, the more modest vision of having “best of breed” technology in several core areas combined into a suite that matches up with your business processes really well, is actually a pretty compelling offering.  It seems like a reasonable way to leverage the years of trust Progress has developed with its individual product brands.

As Neil lays out:

Key to Progress succeeding in its endeavour will be its ability to lay out the RPM vision to industry in a non-threatening way – showing how customers and prospects can get from where they are to ‘RPM nirvana’ and showing how value can be added at each step on the journey.

That’s just it – there has to be a way to get from square 1 to “RPM Nirvana”.

Theo Priestley puts the question to BPM Redux readers:

Is There A Need For An Independent “Magic Quadrant” Or “Wave” Report ?

And in the middle, a sentence caught my attention: “Or change the format entirely….”

So, Theo, here are my ideas for changing up the format:

• A plot of reality versus hype (a polite term for B.S.).  The horizontal axis represents amount of functionality “in reality”, and the vertical axis could be inverted so that the maximum plot on the vertical axis is zero false or over-hyped claims. Would be easy to compute the ratio of reality-to-hype… could plot size of dots based on the amount of Twitter spam generated by each vendor for bonus points.
• A chart or ranking of “BPM Street Cred”, versus vendor credibility with analysts.  Could be two separate lists or some form of graph.  Again, get creative with what dot-size means.
• A chart or ranking of “most quotable BPM executives”

I think a somewhat humorous take on the rankings could be pretty entertaining as well as informative.  Surprise us, Theo!

Despite being at the SXSW-interactive conference in Austin the last 4 days, I did manage to see the news that Pega bought Chordiant.  Hopefully this is a good deal for Chordiant, its employees, and shareholders – I have a number of friends who worked for Chordiant over the years, and certainly hope this was a good event for them.

I think Theo Priestley had the most interesting take I’ve read on this so far – that this is about Pega getting into CRM with their BPM capabilities.  This mirrors a move that Intalio has been broadcasting in their own blog and website, and as Theo points out, is the converse of SalesForce.com’s addition of the Visual Process Designer to Force.com.  (of course, Sandy Kemsley points out that suddenly it is hard to find information on how the Visual Process Designer works… they took the video private for example ).

The world of BPM just keeps getting more interesting…

Update: Good write-up of the acquisition in “OnStrategies Perspectives” – first about Pega growing up, complimenting Pega on its vertical and template strategy, and the terms of the deal.

In honor of SXSW-interactive and the prevalence of twitter here, I’ll give my brief take:

“Is the Checklist Mightier than the Model?”
In a word: No.

Longer version:

Checklists are useful.  Just because we have lots of new-fangled tech and old tech like MS Project or Rally or what-have-you, doesn’t mean a checklist won’t help you get through your day or get things done.  But it is a complement not a replacement, and it isn’t a competition at all.

I thought I’d share a few of my thoughts from two days at SXSW-interactive…

1. Austinites don’t really know escalator protocol.  We stand on both sides of the escalator, annoying the folks from both coasts who know that you stand to the right to let the impatient blow by you on the left.  The Austin Convention Center has some very long escalators, and the traffic jams have been beauteous.
2. People will not take the time to go to another floor to find shorter food and beverage lines.  Try the 4th floor first thing in the morning – its a morgue because everyone stops at the first “Starbucks served here” sign they see – which happens to be on the first floor.
3. Unlike my experiences at every other conference I’ve ever been to, SXSW (at the Austin Convention Center at least) had power supplies everywhere.  I swear I saw one above the urinal in the Men’s bathroom.  No, not really.  But they were almost everywhere else.
4. Do not screw up a bay-area coffee snob’s coffee order.  They will not be amused.  (I love coffee, but I don’t qualify as a snob because I actually like Starbucks just fine.  If you think people who like Starbucks coffee are coffee snobs, trust me, this is a finely layered cake and Starbucks is now where near the top of the coffee snob cake).
5. People who blog about comic strips can expect to see 1000 comments in a couple of days.  There aren’t 1000 comments in the whole BP3 blog yet.  Apparently BPM is only mainstream in the eyes of Gartner and Forrester – it is not mainstream in the eyes of comic-strip readers, or anyone else you could call “mainstream”.
6. Nearly every blogging-related panelist seemed to have started blogging when computers were built with vacuum tubes.  I jest, it was only 1997 or 1998… which amounts to the same thing as far as blogging goes.  Would have been good to hear from a successful blogger who started more recently…
7. A classic quote (missed the name for attribution): “In 2002, I thought [cynically], ‘hasn’t everyone who wanted to start a blog already started one? I mean, there are literally thousands of them.” Needless to say, as he pointed out, he vastly under-estimated the number of people who wanted to start their own blogs.
8. Fun quotes: “If you think Twitter is a good substitute for a blog you weren’t a good blogger to begin with”… “Huffpo could just be tweets”… “New generation of blogging sees it as furthering your existing self.  Whereas before, it was unearthing the self you were afraid to expose” (paraphrased)…
9. Do design and platform matter? The panel says, largely: no.  “Design is 5% important. Craigslist is popular and its the worst designed site on the web.”
10. There need to be about 10 more food trailers outside to satisfy the hunger of 15,000 attendees.  Seriously.  It turns out that Austin is not just ground-zero for Migas and Breakfast Tacos, but also for the food-in-an-airstream-trailer – even good food.
11. Going to Moonshine for a 1:30pm lunch was a good call. But it was a 45-minute wait.  Food trailer was also nearly a 45 minute wait. Guess which one was better?
12. There was a running joke about how to get a million page views on a blog post, but I won’t repeat it here.
13. Top ten lists were also cited as a key driver of traffic.  Why? No one knows for sure, but it works.  Check Digg, Reddit… etc… it always seems to work.   (I wonder if a top-29 list will work?? hmmmmmmmm let’s find out).
14. Apparently it is hard to make $50k/year blogging.  I’m not sure what “hard” means in the context of blogging, but everyone nodded their head (we know hard isn’t hard like mining coal, but does “hard” mean you need to be lucky or does “hard” mean it takes many many hours of investment without much assurance of return on that investment? or something else?)
15. A Google product manager talked about link quality like it was a moral good and not just something you worry about because you want your page rank to be good and you want Google search to drive traffic.  Kind of losing sight of the fact that getting paid for linking isn’t really amoral, it just inconveniences Google’s search quality – and then Google will punish you for having paid links that aren’t marked as such with no-follow (they literally used the term payola).  The example given was that you should turn down that $1000/month someone is offering you to link to their site.  The guy next to me said (sarcastically) “yeah, that’s a problem I have.”  Right.
16. Saw a panel about “unsexy” but profitable businesses.  Great representation from local firm, uShip, among others.  If Business Process Management (BPM) consulting doesn’t qualify for unsexy, someone explain to me the looks of desperate un-interest I can generate by telling people at SXSWi what I do for a living (BPM Consulting).  Hopefully this means we’re destined for profits as well.
17. There are too many stock photo sites in the world. But that’s good, because next time I need one they won’t be too expensive (I saw 4, at least, on the exhibit floor).  There are a LOT of tools for building websites (I saw 4, at least, on the exhibit floor). Couldn’t help but wonder if they were all partnered up with stock photo sites…
18. There are too many sessions! I can’t possibly see everything I’m interested in.  But I’m glad there are so many sessions because the small sessions are the real gems.
19. The Chevy Volt actually looked kinda cool.   Kinda.
20. There’s an under-served interest in well-designed physical products at the exhibit.  DAS keyboards and blue lounge where the two that I saw, and they looked great and had good attendance the two times I looked.  Everything else was a bit too virtual.
21. The AT&T U-verse store was, unsurprisingly, unable to tell me if they serve our neighborhood yet. On the other hand, AT&T the wireless carrier seemed to hold up pretty well the first two days of SXSW.
22. @paulcarr with British accent:  “The internet is a major distraction.  I recommend you all stop using it.” In the context of this audience, that was high humor.
23. It turns out, hashtags have to be shorter than 140 characters to be useful on Twitter.  Please take note of this, SXSW organizers…
24. Apparently: “if you’re goal isn’t to make money, you’re not actually in business”.  I like the way that panelist thinks.  If I remember right, that was also @paulcarr, of Techcrunch.
25. Sushi goes quite well with Tres Leches, thankyouverymuchialwaysthoughtso.  And this is why I love Austin.
26. Pedi-cabs in Austin cost more during SXSW than any other time of the year.  Why does Austin have so many pedi-cabs?  I don’t remember them being here when I first moved to Austin, but they’re everywhere downtown now.
27. Bijoy is everywhere.
28. SXSWi men’s fashion can be summed up as converse sneakers with tshirt and jeans and a sport coat.  Fedora optional.
29. No matter how many people are here, you can still bump into your friends, and make new friends. Good seeing everyone yesterday.  If you see me looking lost today, say hi and distract me from finding the next panel room.

I’m looking forward to the rest of the conference, its quite an experience.  Really impressed with the Austin representation.

John Reynold’s post on Activity Data, from a process participant’s perspective, is just too comprehensive and good not to devote a short, sweet post that cross-links to his article. If you think about what went wrong with your last activity implementation – it was likely that you weren’t considering the full list of things that John lists here.

This isn’t particular or specific to the world of BPM conferences – there’s a general “conference malaise” going on – in which only the “best”  conferences are really tearing it up.

Outside of the BPM world, its clear that conferences like SXSW in Austin are doing just fine (and did just fine last year too, by the way).  Record attendance and a record number of panels and bands and acts is just the norm at SXSW these days (conference starts today).

But in the world of BPM, 2009 was tough for conferences, when the expectation was that people would still be attending BPM conferences due to how applicable they are to everyone’s business.  Several vendors postponed their conferences or took them virtual (Lombardi’s Driven), but the ones who waited until the fall (Appian) benefited from the beginning of the rebound in businesses planning for the future rather than businesses just living in fear of the next shoe dropping.

Sandy Kemsley has pointed out this problem with BPM conferences several times, as has Theo Priestley, and we’ve chimed in as well on the topic.  Some fresh perspectives:

• Sandy points out that 2010 looks like a rebound year for conferences.  We’ll see – Gartner’s BPM summit is in March in Las Vegas, and IBM’s “Impact” is in May – good test cases of the demand for these conferences.  Word from the London Gartner summit implied that attendance was low?  (I wasn’t there, so its second-hand to me).
• Theo Priestley and Mike Gammage hypothesize that Gartner and IQPC could merge events by 2012 – which again sounds like weakness rather than strength to me.
• Interestingly, Gammage was more encouraging about Gartner’s latest offering, while Jon Pyke’s contacts were not impressed.

Theo has a separate blog post, and while the bulk of it is about building community more broadly, at the end he makes a telling argument:

“When a sponsor at a BPM conference turns round and says he was perplexed at why there was such a low turnout given how important BPM has become according to what surveys seem to suggest the answer may be in the fact that we can’t even agree on what we’re telling clients in the first place.

For a group that practices change we’re incredibly resistant to it ourselves…..”

I’ve said before and I’ll say it again: I think BPM conferences need to do a few things:

1. Localize.  Have the conference closer to the bulk of your attendees, so that more people can come without travel costs.
2. Face-to-Face.  Tele-presence and high-def video conferencing is great.  But a virtual conference is a broadcast medium.  If attendees want one-way communication they can read the book or watch the video after the fact.  If they want interaction, then you need physical presence to really encourage that.
3. Respect budgets.  Don’t make cost of attendance a barrier – keep it reasonable. For anyone traveling, travel costs should dominate their total expenses, not registration costs.
4. Crowd-source.  Leverage the community to arrive at the topics.  There’s been too much top-down sourcing of content at conferences, without soliciting feedback from potential and actual attendees.
5. Narrow the focus. The narrower the focus, the more involved the people who attend can be.  People mistakenly think you have to broaden the audience to get more people – but the point isn’t MORE – the point is BETTER.  If the event is BETTER then you’ll get more value out of your investment of time and money.

We’ve followed this philosophy for bpmCamp and it was a great success for us – the feedback has been enormously positive, with a lot of interest in repeating the event next year.  But of course, our “unconference” was limited to 40 attendees – and its easier to organize around these principles when you keep the size of the conference smaller. Still, I think there are lessons to learn for those who would put on BPM-focused events, and the biggest one is:

It’s about the audience, not about the organizer.

For more information from bpmCamp, follow this link to our blog coverage of the bpmCamp event.  The element that I think is most crucial is the impromptu discussion that can happen in a more intimate setting.  Questions don’t wait for a microphone or a moderator – the hand goes up or the question is proposed and people can jump in and contribute.  I was really pleased with how this dynamic worked at bpmCamp and I hope we can reproduce this at other events.  I think 2010 will be a better year for conferences, but organizers need to keep in mind how to make these gatherings *more* valuable for attendees or they’re going to lose their attention next time.

In “Pick one and own it“, Jason Cohen advocates for picking just one advantage over your competition to sell, and really owning it.

Its a valuable debating technique to learn, regardless:  when confronted with an argument, instead of switching to a different argument, stick to the one at hand, and finish it out.  When you switch gears you’re often conceding ground, without arriving at consensus. It also prevents you from being intellectually lazy if you can’t just switch subjects when the discussion isn’t going your way or the way you expected.

It is also a good way to build your brand if you can focus on just a few key advantages, taking each one to logical conclusion, instead of overwhelming the message with 100 advantages that are difficult to prove or show.

AustinStartup has had a couple of posts attempting to help those new to SXSW find some of the gems hidden in the long schedule of events at SXSW.

Here’s another take on panels you shouldn’t miss, by Carla Thompson.

Interesting reading about Social Tools within Intuit on the Dachis Group’s site, as they discuss engaging with social tools in their business and the new processes they have to embrace.  Christine Morrison responds to questions from Dachis Group, and I’ve quoted the exchange that caught my attention:

Getting diverse constituents to agree on process changes, or new processes can be difficult. Any tips you can share on bringing people together?

The answer is, it depends.

If the goal is to just make a new, first-ever process that’s never been attempted before in your organization happen (and it doesn’t have to be large-scale right off the bat), I recommend a skunkworks operation: prove your case in a limited, low risk way, and use that data to drive adoption across the organization. The overhead in this scenario is a lot easier to achieve: you usually just need one well-placed promoter who is willing to take a risk on a new way of doing things. Some of TurboTax’s most long-term, strategically important social initiatives were launched this way (Live Community and Inner Circle, for example). [...]

Call me a BPM geek but I like seeing people outside of the BPM world thinking about process, and in this case realizing that social tools don’t get you out of having to think about process – but they do have implications for change in your processes as they exist today, if you’re open-minded enough to allow for it.

Stacy Higginbotham from GigaOm gets things rolling with 10 Austin Startups you should meet at SXSW.  Notably, she avoided the obvious in Gowalla and listed out a few that folks outside of Austin might not have heard of or made contact with.  There are certainly other interesting startups in Austin, but she managed to call out a couple of my favorites (Whurleyvision, Appozite, and OtherInbox).

There are a mind-numbing number of panels, just for the interactive portion of SXSW. I’m going to attend some of the sessions this year and I’m still trying to figure out how to narrow it down. Its definitely a time to feel fortunate to live in Austin to have this kind of opportunity to see what’s going on in the world of music, movies, and “interactive” (this year, by the way, the focus seems to have turned toward mobile platforms… whereas interactive used to be more focused on blogging).

UPDATE: of course, as I soon as I posted this I found an article I’d been saving to read that should have been included:

Austin Startup’s “Tech Tips for N00bs to Survive SXSW“.  It gives some classic advice about double checking the locations of your events before assuming they are all co-located.  SXSW uses *all* of Austin for its events – especially for the music festival.  I recall one year that they reported using 300 music venues in Austin for one festival.  The article also includes great links to sites with more information on SXSW, and who to follow on twitter to keep up with the latest and greatest.

The best advice: bring earplugs.