I was recently struck by the difference between a couple of posts about SAP Gravity and Microsoft’s Windows Workflow Foundation.

In the first, some demonstrations of SAP Gravity with Google Wave are presented. But they seem a bit contrived to me – and moreover Google Wave isn’t realistic for enterprise use yet – which makes SAP’s focus on Wave all the more puzzling (since they usually don’t focus on any technology until its pretty tried and true).  Gravity seems to be long on sizzle and short on substance to me.  But I give SAP props for trying something different to unlock innovation around their huge install base.  And honestly, what they’ve done so far has definite “cool” factor.

But then I saw this post on Windows Workflow Foundation, and I see that it is possible to have been in the BPM space for 10 years and still not get the importance of the business – it is still a programmer’s product, rather than a business-person’s product.  You can sum it all up right here:

“The purpose of WF is not to be a complete workflow solution for Windows. Instead, the goal is to make it easier for software developers to create workflow-based Windows applications.”

Luckily, if you really want to be on a Windows-centric solution, there are BPMS vendors out there that do that…

Every so often, someone makes the argument that essentially nothing has changed in the world of BPM.  Actually, this isn’t unique to BPM – it is a common refrain across all kinds of software categories.

And it is tempting to buy into this, when you realize how durable a writeup like the history of BPM can be (this isn’t a bad writeup, by the way). But one has to remember that history *should* be a bit durable with the passage of time. Jon Pyke recently opined that no one in BPM has anything new to offer.  But the substance of his post is that the marketing isn’t differentiated, and the product positioning isn’t differentiated, and further, that the people who work at these companies don’t know what differentiates them.

Having worked on both sides of the coin (on the software side and the consulting side), I have to disagree with some of Jon’s conclusions because the input data is more limited than he’s realized.

For example:  of course the marketing messages are commoditized among BPM vendors, as is product positioning.  Sadly, it is perfectly easy to copy someone else’s marketing and positioning – it takes minutes, hours, or days at most to do so.  I think the tragedy in BPM is that all the vendors seem willing to implement “checkbox” versions of every feature that analysts care about, rather than go deep with the product in areas that produce real value for customers.  Unfortunately, vendors have been largely rewarded for such behavior with good product comparison reviews and chart placement – but their customers have not been similarly rewarded by this kind of investment.

There are real differences in these products, but it requires a much more in-depth understanding of the products to appreciate it.  Can we be surprised that customers have a hard time achieving this level of product knowledge during the evaluation process?  I used to work with someone who was always telling me how “nothing had changed” in the last 5 years in BPM – at a time when, 5 years before, there was no BPMN – and at that time, BPMN was the de facto modeling standard for BPMS offerings.

There has been quite a bit of innovation in the last 10 years in BPM, but some of the best ideas didn’t get enough investment to go from interesting to indispensable, and some of the best ideas really were commoditized – picked up by all the pure play vendors (and later, but the stack vendors).  I could argue that nothing much has changed since 1994, when I wrote a sales process application that leveraged Lotus Notes VIP to replicate sales data and manage workflow between Sales, Sales Engineering, Manufacturing, and R&D.  But that would be a bit disingenuous. I could write that solution in 1994, but I didn’t have a way to communicate the process to the business (BPMN), that accurately reflected the implementation so we could make sure we had it right.  And I didn’t have a standard data representation for analyzing the process data (for business process improvement).  I certainly couldn’t handle in a trivial way a process that required parallelism the way I can with executable BPMN models.

Jon says:

That’s why, and I’ve said this many times before, BPM is far too important a topic to leave in the hands of product vendors – this is a Business thing – the clue is in the name BUSINESS PROCESS MANAGEMENT. [...] They will talk about the presentation layer, the SOA integration support, analytics, modeling and what have you.

This is, unfortunately, true of a great many people in the BPM ecosystem.  However, it doesn’t sound like a few of the pure plays that have been acquired (take a gander at Phil Gilbert’s blog for several essays on the subject of business taking control back from IT), and it doesn’t sound like some of the new vendors (ActionBase as one example).  Whether these vendors are well-represented at Gartner conferences is another question entirely, but it is ironic that it is typically the small vendor that is more focused on business value. One of Jon’s last points:

Every vendor believes they are unique but the fact of the matter is many of the software metaphors used in these products were defined by pioneering workflow vendors such as Filenet, Staffware, Plexus and Wang

Well, honestly, software metaphors are meant to be re-used, so I’m not sure that that, in and of itself, is a point of criticism.  For example, some of the metaphors in older integration technologies like CORBA and DCOM are embodied in SOAP and WSDL – but not many would argue that web services weren’t a step forward. And if BPM functionality is truly commoditized – is that bad for the customer and the industry if it becomes more standard and more cheaply available?

I know it is tempting to look at the glass as half-empty, but with so many BPM vendors performing so well in a challenging environment, its hard not to look at the glass as half-full. Call me an optimist.

The summary of an MIT Enterprise Forum’s gathering of 3 economists seemed to be optimistic, but with major caveats and concerns.  With three bubbles in our rear view mirror (dot.com, oil, and banking/real-estate), the concern has turned to a potential fourth bubble: cash (when there’s too much of it, inflation can eat away at it too quickly).

Here in Austin, a major new shopping center has opened (phase 2 of the Domain), and the tallest building in Austin is nearly complete (the Austonian, apparently the largest residential tower in Texas).  Meanwhile, Facebook is opening an office and hiring 200 people in Austin.  And co-working facilities seem to be doing well, while providing a good support network for small businesses. So perhaps the better-than-average local economy is influencing my optimistic outlook.

Meanwhile, the Senate has passed a $15B jobs bill. I don’t know if anything in the bill will affect our business directly, but we make our decisions without regard to tax effects (generally that seems like putting the cart before the horse), and from what we can see the environment is still favorable for BPM software and deployments – businesses are investing in process improvement, and BPM.  And big software companies are investing in BPM software (witness the acquisition activity of December and January).  Its a good time to be focused on BPM.

MWD Advisors has a post up about the coming move from “systems integrators” to “service integrators”.  Its a smart read, pointing out that customers who want to offload technical details to service providers are also likely to hand-off the technical lifting to integrate and coordinate these SaaS/Cloud services together to the companies that currently do systems integration.

Interestingly, if BPM vendors provide the right tooling, a SaaS BPMS (or even a hosted one) could be ideal tooling for pulling together these other services to support cross-functional processes for the business.