Theo Priestley on Social BPM (vs. Traditional):

“The simple answer is that hierarchy is good for repeatability and measurability, whereas self-organizing networks are better at invention,” Gabe said, “There are a lot of side effects and consequences. The lack of titles (roles) is primarily an internal signaling tool.”

“The alternate answer is that organizations that think they are hierarchical actually don’t gain advantage by it (they actually have hidden networks), and that the hierarchical appearance is the result of rent-seeking.”

So can we not design and define an enterprise on the same principles and see the same effect but on a much grander scale ? Is there a half-way house where both ideals can co-exist until we are ready to throw the shackles away for good?

Why not?

There is an emerging debate between pragmatism and “The Next New Thing” in the world of BPM vendors.  Some have characterized this as the BPM-fanatics vs. people who want to make progress.  But I don’t see any fanatics on the BPM side – just people who are tired of the endless attempts to rebrand and rename in order to differentiate “new” from “old” instead of just being happy to see progress for what it is – useful incremental improvement.

Ashish Bhagwat writes:

So, I continue drumming my beats that Synergy, wherever possible and relatively easier, should be driving our multiple efforts. When it comes to defining BPM, it will always be in a certain context and when a customer looks for the right definition, the questions that need to be asked are – what’s your business’s objective, and what’s the problem you’re trying to solve. And then, one should just go ahead and fix the problem with short term and long term interest of the Enterprise. BPM, at the end of the day needs to make the business more agile & responsive and business processes more efficient, flexible and manageable.

Couldn’t have said it better myself. But, actually, Alexander Samarin did:

Let us architect the use of existing technologies instead of blaming them for bringing complexity/inflexibility/etc. in enterprises

They’ve both made these points better than I have myself in the various debates here and here.

There’s been a lot of gnashing of teeth about the state of BPM vendors, and the BPM segment, ever since IBM announced its acquisition of Lombardi (and followed quickly by Progress’ acquisition of Savvion).  Even before then, there was much discussion over whether BPM really was a bright spot in the enterprise software space – could it really be growing when everyone else was struggling to tread water?

And since these acquisitions, the attention has often turned to case management (or, the nom du jour, “Adaptive” Case Management), and some have argued that “BPM” as imagined by advocates of BPMN is in trouble.   Of course, as with many things, one way to measure “success” is by whether the businesses advocating a particular approach are doing well – and doing well is typically defined as increasing revenue (and/or profit).  Ironically, if such a firm makes money, critics will say this only proves that the firms are good at making money, not that the software or approach to BPM is adding value for customers.  But we have to accept that in the long run, averaged over *many* decisions, the market assesses value by assigning dollars (or euros, etc.) to the products that are perceived to add value, and starving the products that don’t add value by not making purchasing decisions.

Dennis Byron says the big enterprise software firms are well-positioned to take advantage of the BPM “explosion.”  Meanwhile the independents don’t appear to be suffering.  The latest report from MWD summarizes results from Appian and Active Endpoints, two vendors who wholeheartedly support BPMN (Appian with a SaaS model, and Active Endpoints with a BPMN-up-front and BPEL-in-the-back approach).

Key data points:

Appian highlighted the growth of customer orders by 58% from Q4 2009 to Q1 2010 (and this isn’t a seasonal thing with Appian; in 2008 its Q4 was its largest quarter). Active Endpoints highlighted revenue from new customers: it tripled in Q1 2010 over the same quarter in 2009 – contributing to an overall doubling in revenue against the same period a year earlier.

Bigger firms like Pega are doing just fine as well, according to their quarterly reports.  So this is a good indicator of increasing demand for BPM software.  The increased demand for BPM skills, education, and even consulting is sure to follow.  It is an exciting time to be in the BPM market. Congratulations to these firms for having good Q1 results.

A measure of how Apple has changed the game: even die-hard advocates of a browser-first-and-last method for building applications is starting to second-guess their conclusions.  The Apple iPhone/iTouch platform has so many devices out there, that it is hard to resist developing for it first – even if it wasn’t the best-looking target environment to deploy software to.  On top of that, it *is* the best-looking target environment.  Even more troubling for other platforms: Apple has the “cool” factor working for it to.  You can develop for the most populous platform, that shows off your service or application the best, and also get a halo effect of the Apple cool-factor to rub off on you.  When’s the last time you saw USA Today take out a full page ad to advertise their Droid app?  But on Monday they had one advertising their iPhone app (or was it iPad?). And I didn’t even look at it as USA Today being a pretender – it just made sense to me that they’re targeting this platform.

But there’s another factor that analysis like that offered by John Arnold overlooks.  The mobile website experience is significantly degraded by the quality of your 3G or Edge signal.  It makes some web applications nearly unusable, even though they were specifically designed for Android or for the iPhone.

Cameron Moll gives a similar critique of the current state of affairs:

I argued that “smart clients” (lightweight apps installed on a device whose content is primarily fed by and stored in the cloud) would and should remain secondary to providing the same experience in the browser, again for the reasons mentioned above.

Since the release of iPhone and now with the release of iPad, I’ve gradually found myself questioning more and more the assumption I made. Apple has consistently proven that holistically controlling the entire user experience—inclusive of hardware to software and everything in between—has the potential to yield a more pleasant experience overall. Think of Mac OS + Mac, iPhone OS + iPhone, and now iPhone OS + iPad.

He wonders if HTML5 and CSS might still offer viable alternatives to objective-C on the iPhone, but I think without a fully “local” experience with the cached data, it won’t be good enough.  One of the things phone users are starting to value is how their applications behave when they’re offline (in the subway, on a plane, or just in a dead spot).

If I were writing my “mobile experience” for a product today, there’s no question I’d write it first for the iPhone OS.  Odds are it will have the best overall user experience and set the stage for positive reviews and buzz – as well as reaching the largest number of people.  People on phones other than iPhone and Android phones simply don’t use the mobile web – it doesn’t truly work for them.  Android is gaining steam but it is still a distant second, and has a fractured marketplace for me to publish my apps to.  In fact, I’d probably write the iPhone App first, then the mobile web app.  And then evaluate market demand for Android.

But that’s just me.

Steve Blank’s blog has a series of posts regarding the entrepreneurship courses he and his colleagues are teaching at Stanford and Berkeley.  The thing that jumped out at me is that it sure reads like there is a process for teaching entrepreneurship.

Maybe that shouldn’t be surprising.  But it was already eye-opening for me to read the process-oriented approach Steve advocates for developing your business model (aka “Customer Development” , good read on wikipedia by the way), and a process for product development that is highly complementary to this (Lean Startup, advocated by Eric Ries among others).  But it looks like Steve is cracking the code for how to teach entrepreneurship.  Of course, proof will be how well the entrepreneurs who take his classes perform relative to peers who do not attend these classes, and how many other entrepreneurs adopt the techniques Steve is advocating because they’ve heard about them from his students or writings.

Til then, we can apply our own subjective judgment to assess.  So far so good.

Jacob Ukelson of ActionBase once again writes an intriguing post on complex business processes, referencing a Clay Shirky article on the collapse of complex business models.

Ironically, while I share Jacob’s optimism about the future of products like ActionBase, I don’t agree with some of the points he makes in his post even though they are in support of a conclusion we both agree on.  First, in areas of agreement: whether you call it case management or ad-hoc processes or knowledge work – software products are increasingly going to target what Phil Gilbert used to call “the 98% of the business that isn’t in IT”.  Different vendors will tackle this differently.  A few interesting examples:

• ActionBase lets users create a process (and amend it) on the fly using Word, Excel, and Sharepoint to drive that process.  Several other vendors have been pushing “case management” or “adaptive case management”, and it looks like ActionBase is adopting some of this terminology in their positioning as well.
• Lombardi (now part of IBM) created Blueprint to foster more participation in building and understanding process models (and not strictly BPMN process model views). Simultaneously Lombardi released products to integrate ad-hoc subprocesses leveraging Sharepoint (a common example is collecting interview feedback via Sharepoint, but collecting the final decision on follow-up steps in a structured process).  Several other “community” and “social” sites have cropped up since:  Alignspace,  Blueworks, Signavio, to name a few – each with different target audience from formal process modeling to more informal networking and sharing.

However, part of Jacob’s post I don’t find myself agreeing with.  Jacob makes the argument that BPM-targeted products are becoming more complex – by adding rules, simulation, event processing (and by adding to the modeling notation itself).  I’ll agree that the BPMN notation has evolved to become more complicated – and that is a concern – but mitigated by the fact that you aren’t required to use the most complicated elements to get the job done.

As Jacob notes, supporting rules, simulation, and complex (or even simple) event processing is valuable, but I think he overstates how much complexity is added by including these elements in a BPM offering.  For one, processes often leverage rules and events regardless of whether these features are integrated into the BPM offering.  For another, transparently supporting events and the way they interact with your processes actually reduces complexity of the software solution being built.  If you have a simple process that doesn’t require events, you don’t pay a complexity penalty for those features existing – but if you need to deal with events interacting with your process, then having a well-integrated event model actually helps quite a bit.  Finally, simulation is almost a completely separate function – it doesn’t complicate execution or building the executable model, but it does give analysts a way to model behavior before they go live.

An interesting example.  One of the things you often want from a process is to be able to report on what’s happening within the process, or to do analysis on the aggregate data.  If data tracking capabilities aren’t baked into the process software you use, then you’ll have to build the data tracking capabilities (and likely, the reporting capabilities).  But if the data tracking capability is built seamlessly into your process software, then you’re more likely to track the data you need, and at less expense and complexity (as measured by lines of code written, or by just about any other measure you choose).

I guess my point, with regard to complexity is this: a given process is easier to describe and translate to execution today than it was before these features were added to BPM suites, not harder.  Of course, with increased efficiency for previously mundane but time consuming tasks, the difficulty of problems being tackles is growing – but that’s just the way the software business works – the goal posts are always moving. There is an opportunity for BPM solutions to differentiate by providing a better overall experience- making sure the various parts that Jacob describes work together as “one” product rather than feeling like they were bolted on with duct tape and bailing wire.  Some product teams have done a better job than others in this respect… in part leading to the conclusion that BPM is “too hard” or “too complicated” by some, while others think BPM is the best thing since sliced bread (and all points inbetween).  A fair amount of this variance in perspective can be traced to early experiences with specific BPM suites.

I think it is healthy for ACM (adaptive case management) advocates to hash out what ACM truly is in their own discussions and forums (as WfMC has separated it from bPM), but I think ultimately organizations are going to see ACM as a necessary component of their Business Process Management initiatives, rather than something separate from their process initiatives.  Jacob is right – many of the BPM software vendors won’t “get” the unstructured world of ACM, until it has a chance to mature and coalesce around what the key features and benefits are.

To read about chess and Kubrick and Bobby Fischer.

Chess and Process appear to be related… but otherwise this one isn’t about BPM.

Ted Leonisis of Newsweek writes about Google’s decision to stop filtering search results in China. In the first half of the article he focuses on this decision by Google and why it might be the right thing to do (for Google).  He points out, rightly, that this type of gesture would be meaningless if you couldn’t “keep the lights on,” but if you have the financial means, then he makes a persuasive argument for Google’s decision.

His take:  while Google has imperiled billions of dollars in future profit (in China), it has rendered itself “a happy company at peace with its values—and happy companies are more, not less, likely to continue being successful.”  This statement really rings true with me.  There are definitely companies that thrive on adversity and conflict, but companies in general seem to be more successful when their business and their values are in alignment.  I believe this is true regardless of what your values are – if you run a cut-throat competitive business, it is best not to shy from conflict inside the four walls of your company.  If you run a customer-service oriented business, its important to take care of your employees.

Ted also uses the example of AOL to illuminate: the mission at AOL transformed from bringing the Internet to everyone, to making the next quarter’s numbers… and many important business decisions were made that did not align with the higher calling of the company.  The separation between a company’s actions and its mission can also happen when the mission is achieved (either by your firm or others) – for example, with AOL, Internet access for everyone has happened – it just isn’t AOL that made it happen after a certain point.  For Microsoft, a computer on every desk is a reality – they’ve succeeded so well that they need a new higher calling to bind the company together.

Of course you can create motivation that lasts months or years around a competitive threat – no doubt the xbox folks could put their sites on Sony and Nintendo to motivate for years.  But what drives Nintendo is, I would argue, a better core mission.  If I had to state it, I’d call it “making gaming fun for everyone.”

Ted refers to his way of thinking as “double-bottom-line thinking.” If you expect these decisions to be non-capitalistic, then you misunderstand the logic behind his thinking.  For example, he raised prices at Washington Capitals games because he wanted to build it into a franchise that could succeed – and lower prices would only further damage its financial ability to achieve success.

This “double-bottom-line” thinking is central to the way we look at bp3′s business as well: we really believe in improved business processes, this is not just a shortcut for us.  We also focus on taking care of our team – because our team takes care of our customers.  When friends and colleagues who run their own businesses ask how we can justify paying for benefits like health insurance or 401k matching, I ask them if they are sure they can afford not to.  We believe we’re managing to our double-bottom-line, but it is something we need to revisit periodically to assess.

This “double-bottom-line” thinking is something that is not often weighed in process improvement projects, but perhaps it should be.  If we just squeeze the process without considering how to make the net result better for customers, and to align the process better with the higher calling of the company, then we might be missing something terribly important.  Aligning with both mission and the bottom line requires first, asking a question: “how does this align with our mission?”

(Note: there is a whole segment of BPM to address this, and other priorities, and how they feed into business planning: the business motivational model, or BMM )

I’ve been wondering if my generally optimistic view of the economy recovering was being influenced by being in BPM, or by being in Austin, where the recession has been “less bad” than it has been elsewhere, though it is still hurting a lot of families.  The Austin Technology Incubator had an article the other day with more evidence that Austin is a bright spot in the US economy at the moment.  (Heck, we even got our Metro Rail trains running)

I think this optimism will be spreading this year, however slowly.  I’ve been impressed with Austin’s resilience the last 10 years, and how the local economy has evolved:

Austin provides a useful lesson in how to stay on top of the innovation game. Start with an educated population (43% of Austin residents have a bachelor’s degree or higher), mix in a robust venture-capital scene (one of the best outside Silicon Valley), add a supportive community of peers (groups like Bootstrap Austin band together hundreds of entrepreneurs) and wrap all that up with a state government unafraid to throw money at companies that need a little help getting off the ground.

What I really find interesting about it, however, is how the actions of just a small collection of people have had such a big impact on the Austin economy and job market.  Some of the fastest growing employers in Austin simply didn’t exist 10 years ago.  And the startup “communities” here like Bootstrap and Capital Factory (as well as events like SXSWi) were spearheaded again by a very small group of people.  But the impacts have been broad – because these new companies, and the new communities, have grown bigger than the cadre of people who started them.  Its pretty inspiring to see the ripple effects of what people can accomplish with effort and funding that regular human beings can aspire to – and maybe that, right now, is the secret sauce in Austin: believing you can make a difference even if you’re just a “regular person”.

Bruce Silver writes:

I failed, but Robert Shapiro has carried that effort forward in the Finalization Task Force phase, and today he succeeded in getting it on the ballot.  You can see the proposal here. What that means is that in a few days, FTF members will vote to either approve the inclusion of these process modeling conformance classes in the final specification, or not.  There is still some opposition to the idea, mostly from vendors who may not be able to claim conformance with all of the classes in their first BPMN 2.0 release.  So there is a chance, maybe a good chance, that this will not pass.

So… If you want to see interchange of BPMN 2.0 models between tools, you need to make your voice heard, and quickly.  There are twenty-some voting members of the FTF, including IBM, Oracle, Lombardi, Tibco, Global 360, Fujitsu, SAP, Cordys, Red Hat, CA, HP, BizAGI, iGrafx, Camunda, Trisotech, NIST, and MITRE.  If you are a customer or partner of any of these organizations, please urge them to support the BPMN2.0 Process Modeling Conformance Class proposal.  Time is of the essence, as the vote is in the next few days!

I agree, this is important, and it will be harder to get it done later – no time like the present to push your voting members to vote for this.  Thought this battle was already lost, but it has one more shot before the final spec is approved.