Keith Swenson weighs in on Social and BPM:

Similarly, proper use of social software will be about individuals producing, publishing and running their own processes. Not collaboration on the design phase, but designing individually, and collaborating with a completed process.  This won’t just be the BPM lifecycle using social software, it will be the elimination of the BPM lifecycle, the elimination of a design phase, the elimination of the separation between designers and workers.

How our expectations have changed in just a year – I read the above statements and agreed.  And yet, I remember a year ago even getting people to buy in to the idea of social features around designing BPM was a stretch (here’s a post from barely 9 months ago on the subject).

One thought-  social collaboration on structured processes will be important, just as Keith argues that collaboration on “user-designed” processes will be important.  As Keith put it “collaboration on the finished product” (his emphasis).  Social collaboration of users within a process could result in best practices bubbling up – much like some of the improvements discovered on factory floors by the people who work the line – but you have to have support for collecting and acting on that feedback over time.

The only part I really couldn’t agree with:

“This won’t just be the BPM lifecycle using social software, it will be the elimination of the BPM lifecycle, the elimination of a design phase, the elimination of the separation between designers and workers.”

The work will change, but I don’t believe process design goes away.  I think it just means that a rising tide lifts all boats- making more processes accessible from an ROI and skills point of view – not eliminating the need for design on a significant number of processes.  In other words, I don’t think that process collaboration turns process designers into typists whose job has become obsolete because everyone does their own word processing and typing.  I think it is a bit more like introducing productivity tools that make something that would previously have been difficult, easier.  Lowering the barriers to entry, rather than eliminating the whole discipline and process of process improvement.  However, I reserve the right to disagree with myself in a year or two as we see what the future holds! We’re still learning what “social” can mean for our businesses – too early to close our minds to a range of possibilities.

Mike Gammage on reducing individual complexity in an institutionally complex organization:

Framed in this way, BPM is the key to reducing individual complexity – “making it easy to get things done” – whatever the level of institutional complexity.

Which is why savvy CIOs see BPM as the strategic issue that it really is.

I like this turn of phrase- it aptly describes what we’ve done in several BPM projects, though we’ve had less elegant ways to articulate it.  Making it easier for the everyman/everywoman to get the job done – rather than only enabling the heroes in the organization.

I think Bruce and I attended different conferences last week.  Actually, we kind of did (I think Derek Miers and I both attended the same conference, on the other hand).  I went to “Lombardi Driven @ Impact” – a day of sessions just focused on Lombardi.  Bruce and the other analysts didn’t, to my knowledge.  I don’t know if that is because they weren’t given the opportunity or just weren’t aware of the Lombardi sessions (they weren’t terribly well publicized at Impact… and honestly, they were so packed that the rooms were uncomfortable. ), or because they wanted to cover the wider Websphere material at the event.

Bruce says:

Not a lot of BPM news out of IBM at Impact this week.  The most surprising thing for me about it is how thoroughly Lombardi – acquired just a few months ago – has enthralled the WebSphere executives.  At the opening keynote, WebSphere GM Craig Heyman called Lombardi Teamworks, rebranded IBM WebSphere BPM Lombardi Edition, “the core BPM product.”  Really?

Yes. Really.

I would have phrased this: The most surprising thing for me about it is how thoroughly IBM has co-opted the Lombardi message and positioning.  I see that as a good thing – it isn’t clear that Bruce does from his post. If Lombardi is the core BPM product… good.  Because IBM needs to simplify the path to BPM for its customers, and the Lombardi product offering and team gives IBM its best chance to do just that. And not many organizations would benefit as much as IBM would from a simplified experience with their Websphere stack.

Bruce continues :

And at today’s keynote session, Beth Smith, another top WebSphere executive, devoted the only demo of the session to a conventional walkthrough of Lombardi BluePrint and Teamworks, I mean WebSphere Lombardi Edition.  Nothing anyone who follows BPM hasn’t seen for the past couple years from Lombardi, but to the WebSphere execs this technology seems nothing short of amazing.

My experience is that any product execs present will be presented as nothing short of amazing.  Check out the Apple presentations of apps like Keynote (hello, have we not seen powerpoint before?).  IBM had an audience of 6000 people, probably 5800 of whom had never seen Blueprint nor Websphere Lombardi Edition – good chance to make your pitch.  Not to mention, paid products usually get better billing than free products at vendor conferences… (Also, since IBM has apparently been in discussions with Lombardi from time to time for 5 years, I’m sure they’d seen it before).

The ironic thing about it is that the process discovery tools and BPMN 2.0 editor in IBM BPM BlueWorks and WebSphere Business Compass – brand new, and tools aligned with the real WebSphere BPMS – are actually better than Blueprint, not to mention free.  But no mention of them.

Don’t get me wrong — I love Lombardi.

I feel the love! First, referring to WPS as the “real” Websphere BPMS (is Lombardi the fake one?), and then stating that BlueWorks is better than Blueprint.  I would say that “better” is pretty subjective, and Bruce is the first person I’ve heard say that that didn’t work at IBM prior to the merger. They’re different tools with different agendas, but it seems obvious to everyone that a consolidation strategy is needed over time – ie, they should probably be feature-sets within a common tool, rather than completely separate things, from a technical implementation point of view.  90 days into the merger, and with full integration to be complete July 1, I think it isn’t unreasonable that they’re taking their time.  As one exec put it – this is clearly something where getting it right is worth taking a little extra time.

Bruce wraps up:

Unlike Oracle’s immediate announcement of a BPM roadmap after it acquired BEA.

For the record, there was no Oracle BPM roadmap before Oracle acquired BEA… So that was a no-brainer.

Regarding what the strategy likely is… I refer you to your first quote, Bruce.  Yes, really.

(As an aside, this article from Keith is a good read, but I disagree with his conclusions)

Keith Swenson on Airline Mergers not using BPM, making the case for ACM:

Usually when I talk to BPM experts, they say something like “Of course you wouldn’t use BPM for something like a major airline merger”.    Most people understand that you would never use BPM to arrange a lunch with a colleague.    There is broad understanding that there are things that BPM is simply overkill for, or too slow for.

The merger between United and Continental is a unique event.  It has never been done before, and will never be done again in the same way.  It has similarities with other mergers, but not to the level of detail that specific action plan (process definition) could be drawn up and re-used.  This is a case where a pre-defined process will simply not be worth the benefit, or the cost in terms of delay.

Am I to believe that they used an ACM product for this?

Going into the weeds here, though I think that makes my basic point, here’s some of the background thinking:

Companies that engage in acquisitions a lot actually do have pre-defined processes for acquisitions – IBM, Cisco, Oracle.  Are there parts of the acquisition that don’t fit neatly in a box? sure there are.  That’s why it is called BPM, and not automation.  Keith is giving us a false choice: all paths must be defined in BPMN in order to be BPM, on the one hand; on the other – nothing predefined in ACM and process nirvana is achieved.  I’ll just assume that ACM would equal process nirvana in this case, and focus on the BPM choice to demonstrate my point.

With the right abstractions in your BPM models, you don’t model all possible choices, the choice is just data along the path to the next node, rather than having a separate path per choice. Nodes can be well-defined BPMN models, or they can be applications, or they can be “ACM” style processes like “Meet and make a Final Decision”, which may end up being 3 meetings or getting some additional emergent process defined.

Or they could map out the process they’d like to follow in Blueprint or ActionBase and go from there – much lower overhead for a one-off process- although THIS process has an effect measured in Billions so it might actually be worth it to spin up some cycles on defining the process even if it isn’t a running implementation of the process.  Yes, requires a little bit of thinking ahead – but it doesn’t require BPMN – and it also allows for documenting any changes as you go.  And yet, I’d still call it “BPM”.  From a technology point of view, these folks may not be using a BPMS to do their acquisitions.  But that doesn’t prove that they couldn’t.  Whether a BPMS would be helpful or not largely depends on how well it supports this kind of use case, and that varies widely from one software package/vendor to another. Part of the problem: is “BPM” defined by what a BPMS can do for you? or is a BPMS defined by what you need to do “BPM”?  Tough one.  But you see this kind of problem all the time in software market definitions.

Do I think ACM could be a good fit for an airline merger? Sure, depending on the specific software and its features – this isn’t a run-of-the-mill situation.  But if I use Keith’s logic, the fact that the airlines didn’t use ACM for this merger is proof that ACM doesn’t solve the problem.  (tongue in cheek)

Generally in my experience if your modelers can’t model the process, you need to find new modelers.  I might need to add a corollary though – your BPMS should be capable of handling abstractions well (like generic failure events, arbitrary data definitions, dynamic binding to service definitions or sub process definitions… )  It sounds like a lot of the folks writing about BPM and ACM still haven’t used a BPMS that supports these features.

(Incidentally, I agree with Keith that you wouldn’t use a BPMS to schedule lunch with a colleague.  However, that’s because there are already good software solutions for scheduling lunch.  If I was writing one of these solutions, like Tungle- I might very well use a BPMS to coordinate finding the right time on our schedule – because it is often done via electronic means and the back-and-forth is pretty inefficient.  Tungle.me didn’t use a BPMS – but they sure could have.  The point of BPM or ACM isn’t to do everything that they could do – it is to apply them when you don’t already have a good solution)

Derek Miers made the 6000 mile trip to Las Vegas to attend IBM Impact.  One could have forgiven him if jet lag dampened his enthusiasm for the material, but far from it.  I’ve been following Derek’s writing ever since Lance Gibbs introduced me to his work several years ago.  Recently he joined Forrester research, and so these days we find his blog on their site.

There was a pretty important message there. A message that was being communicated to the faithful. And whether you like it or not, IBM has a lot, and I mean a lot, of faithful followers. I didn’t do a scientific assessment of the number of IBM badges versus non IBM badges, but even if half of the attendees were internal, there were plenty of customers there too. And those internal folks were also being recruited as emissaries and evangelists for the new mantra.

Prior to attending Impact, I hadn’t realized that it was *also* a vehicle for recruiting evangelists within the IBM body politic.  Further down Derek writes:

The message was made plain and simple – that BPM was the way to run your business. That [...] process models were central to the way in which the firm operated.

This is quite an achievement for BPM – to have one of the largest software firms in the world fully get behind the BPM message. But the real punch:

The thing that really surprised me was quite how quickly the Lombardi acquisition had been “blue-washed” – taken to heart and internalized, and now, very much part of the proposition that IBM is taking to the market.

I, too, was quite surprised. I went prepared to see Lombardi pushed to a small corner of a large conference and ignored.  Instead, the day long Lombardi sessions were pushed to a corner and overflowing, and the message was coming across in keynotes and sessions throughout the conference.  And the IBM execs paid great attention to the Lombardi offering.  Derek believes that the Lombardi folks were surprised by the power and reach of the IBM brand – and I agree – the body language and interactions with IBMers spoke volumes.

The long path toward “mainstream” for BPM appears to be arriving at last.  I always said that I didn’t think independent BPM software companies need fear Oracle or IBM or SAP until they really were eating, breathing, and sleeping BPM.  I used to quip that until I heard Sam Palmisano talking about BPM, I wouldn’t be too worried.  I didn’t believe they would ever really make this switch from thinking of BPM as a checkbox feature in SOA to being actually the chief value proposition of their software stack.  IBM’s purchase of Lombardi didn’t convince me that IBM’s executives were really sold on BPM rather than just being opportunistic and optimistic about the BPM space.

Attending Impact last week, the chief value proposition sure looked like BPM.  And I have been proven wrong by one of the stack vendors: they really can learn to make process front-and-center.  I’m just glad I’m in the BPM consulting business, rather than in a competing software business to the set of players now arrayed in the BPM market.

More to come…

Frank Michael Kraft has a good writeup of ACM questions and answers, that speaks well to people familiar with BPM :

Q: What is a specific example of the kind of knowledge work that might be supported?
A specific example is described in my chapter “Improving Knowledge Work” in the book “Mastering the Unpredictable”. There is Leona who works for a telecommunications company as an engineer and she needs to do phone support. The work she does in the support area is described with examples, as customer complaints need to be solved. Some tests need to be executed and some countermeasures need to be taken. The work is unpredictable, because the tests and the countermeasures depend on the situation. However the work can still be supported with Adaptive Case Management.

What I like best about his writeup is that he doesn’t set out to bash BPM before making his case in favor of ACM by first describing the problem, then describing the solution (ACM). He has a series of posts on the subject, all worth reading.

However, if I may be so bold, let’s look at the last statement.  “… However, the work an still be supported with [software package or knowledge work management approach]“  The part in brackets, Frank has filled in with the words “Adaptive Case Management.”  But the important thing isn’t the three letter acronym (or three word phrase) that describes the space.  If you are actually implementing your knowledge work emergent processes, the important thing is what the capabilities of that software (or management approach) are – and how well it supports your work.

Max J Pucher in a comment on Keith Swenson’s blog said that he didn’t care what label was applied to Papyrus by the industry or analysts – it solved problems and created real value for clients.  I guess I feel the same way.  If software that supports the use cases that Keith Swenson and Frank Kraft are describing ends up being called ACM, I guess I shouldn’t worry about it too much.  But I think some of the negative things said about BPM software packages reflect specific experience with specific software packages.  Another package that carries the same name (BPM) may have quite different capabilities (though quite a bit of overlap as well).

Pega, IBM, Oracle, and others are going to position hard that they handle Case Management (and ACM) – and if the vendors and thought leaders pushing the ACM label want to keep it differentiated they’ll have to get into the technical details as well as the philosophical (panned versus unplanned, is a philosophical distinction more than a technical one), to illustrate why customers should choose one product over another for the particular challenges they’re facing.

I came just a couple minutes late to this session, Tuesday morning.  When I opened the door, a packed house greeted me – not a chair to be seen.  I joined a row of people standing along the back row, and made my way to a corner, where I sat on the floor for a while so that I could take some notes.  Quite a few people opened the door, assessed the lack of seating and left, but several more joined us along the back row…

Erik Keller, CIO of Sirva, gave a talk titled “One CIOs Perspective”.  He painted the picture when he started on the BPM journey with Lombardi – when Sirva had CAGR of 40%, but in the face of that growth, operational productivity and effectiveness were trending downward.

The original goals of the BPM initiative were to support the growth without a loss of productivity or effectiveness as the business ramped – this was during the height of the real estate boom, and the relocation business was booming along with the economy.  But when the economy started to go south, Sirva’s business was dramatically affected.  And the goals shifted from managing growth to managing risk and cost.  Erik called out one of the big benefits of BPM was that it (or Lombardi’s software at any rate) were flexible enough to make this shift in objectives and still support the business.

Erik described the old work flow – colored folders for different parts of the process – very paper-based.  The amount of integration to legacy systems was difficult.  They were clever about their approach, but it was still difficult to get it all done.  Some of the keys to success from Mr. Keller’s point of view:

• Focus on the most critical business priorities
• Implement changes incrementally (and the capacity to do this)
• Build competitive advantage through the BPM platform
• Apply consistent technology and process across service centers
• Leverage existing components
• Full participation (everyone needs to participate to make it a success)
• Gain control and visibility with software

There were originally 7 core processes scoped for phase 1 – but they realized that it was simply too much scope (integration, process definition, etc.) and so they are now working on 3.0 to bring in the rest of the 7 core processes.  A key lesson here is, just because your initial assessment of scope is wrong, doesn’t mean you should give up – Erik and his team were able to pivot and focus on the most important processes first, and branch out from there.

Responding to a question, Erik mentioned that they had 10 people on the first project, and they have 20 now.  We at BP3 had the good fortune of working with the Sirva team on part of the 2.0 delivery, and the core team is really good – very strong technically, and they have a great understanding of the business *and* the technology to support it.

Erik reinforced that there is a huge dependency on the quality of people and the quality of their interactions.  What a great way to phrase the human capital part of the equation.

Previously in my summary of Toby Cappello’s session on COEs, I mentioned the “wall” that people hit as they roll out BPM.  Erik described such a situation as Sirva came freshly off of a rollout of APEX 1.0 to their local service center. The service center loved it and it really supported their business, so Sirva set out to roll out the process to two more service centers…. who immediately rejected it!

Sirva took a step back and incorporated changes to support the other service centers’ needs, but also to get agreement on the “right way” to execute these processes – compromise, but require standardization as well.

Some thoughts on roles: At Sirva, BAs are Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) on the business.  Sometimes the gaps aren’t obvious til you go live or to a pilot – and they had some luck bringing in outside help to mediate between IT and the business, or to find gaps in requirements.

Sirva is now rolling out enhancements every couple of months, doing good work to support the business.  Agility is tied to how big your chunks of delivery are – the bigger the chunks, the less agile you are.

Great session, with a good Q&A at the end.  Erik does a good job answering but also facilitating getting answers from members of his team who were at the session.

Rod Favoron (formerly CEO of Lombardi), Phil Gilbert (formerly CTO of Lombardi), Craig Hayman (General Manager for Websphere), and Joan Shaiman (Integration Manager for the Lombardi acquisition) took the stage to take questions from the audience.  This was purely a Q&A session with very little pre-amble except some humble thanks from Rod, Phil, and Craig to tee it up.  Once again, standing room only, despite the fact that the room was hot and stuffy at the end of the day.  The mood was pretty upbeat.  Phil and Rod had all the good lines, Craig did a good job of adding content to a couple of the more humorous responses, and generally making the Lombardi faithful feel like he wants to keep the torch lit.

I’ll paraphrase what I heard, but I’ll put in quotes statements that are relayed from the perspective of the speaker – please realize these are not, in fact, direct quotations.

So why did IBM buy Lombardi?  The first question out of the gate was perhaps the elephant in the room for most early Lombardi customers.  Craig Hayman gave a pretty good laundry list of reasons, including that Lombardi resonated with customers as best-in-class, the customer base was largely more mature in their BPM journey than other BPM vendors’ customers, and the product fairly “oozes” simplicity.  He also admitted they had to just get over the fact that they hadn’t built Lombardi themselves and go out and buy it.   Craig might have been playing to the crowd, but he sure hit all the notes that Lombardi customers would want to hear – and his answers were nuanced and thoughtful.

He also implied that when he took the job, this acquisition was on his mind immediately.  And in relaying a story about the management team – I think to indicate just how much integrity he felt the Lombardi executive team demonstrated – he pointed out that they had kept notes on what Lombardi had said 5 years earlier (that puts it at 2004-2005 – he got a laugh about the fact that IBM keeps such copious notes) and what they had said in 2009, and they had said the same [darn] thing again.  The eye opener to me is that it sounds like IBM had been eying Lombardi for some time now (longer than I would have thought).

Craig answered another question about product confusion – this is one that it would have been good for Sandy Kemsley to be in on.  Craig’s take: BPM is a huge market and growing really rapidly.  Therefore there are a lot of opinions about what you should do, and a lot of conversations happening about the right way to do BPM.  If the conversations help make decisions, that’s great, let’s do it.  But if they slow down decisions, then that’s not good.  IBM has a strategy that allows for multiple starting points for customers to engage in the BPM journey, rather than only one BPM entry point.  This is not what the market pundits think IBM should do, but they happen to be contrarian on this point.

He gave the example of Ford – cars are a pretty mature market.  When you want an SUV, they have a hard time selling you a sports car.  You self-select what you want.  IBM thinks that BPM has some similar issues – you’ve self-selected what you want based on your biases or what you’ve worked on previously.  For line of business core offerings, nothing is better than Lombardi.

Frustration for 25 years

Phil Gilbert jumped in at this point to talk about his 25-year-long frustration about our industry as a whole suffering from ADD – moving on before we go deep.  To paraphrase Phil:

The tech involved in Websphere Lombardi Edition and other BPM products has been around for a long time, but for the last 10 years, Lombardi has gone really deep on how to use technology better for business process management.  Lombardi tried to improve developer productivity radically – not because of new tools, but because of the way the tools are put together internally. We all want more clarity in the marketplace, and there are a series of conversations going on at IBM about how to get entry points clearly defined and communicated.  There’s a lot of rhetoric about today’s positioning [...] but the joint capabilities within IBM cannot be matched.  But we have to make these capabilities work together better, more seamlessly  We’ll get clarity on where to start with 3-4 questions in the near future.

Phil further emphasized that the Websphere Lombardi Edition team intends to go very deep on the use cases and make it all a lot better in the future.

A question asking about short term product roadmap came up – likely someone who missed Damion’s session earlier in the day.  Phil clarified that Lombardi Edition would have Teamworks and Websphere (and DB2 Express) in the box from the get-go.  He repeated the commitment to make this a black box so you don’t have a bunch of ramping to do.  June 30: only Websphere, but all the DB’s will be supported.  In the near-term after that, the custom installer will be more open about app server.  But, Phil’s commitment to the audience was that they would make the longterm administrative experience with embedded Websphere much better and less expensive because you’ll spend less managing the middleware.  Craig added that support for Lombardi Edition includes support for the app server tier as well – if you go with another app server, you have to get that app server support somewhere else.  You’ll have one source of support if you go with the embedded approach.

Phil added that there was a common misunderstanding in the market: that the reason Teamworks went to JBoss embedded was to get to JBoss.  In fact, he argues, it was to get a simpler experience for Teamworks (now Websphere Lombardi Edition), and it turns out JBoss had an attractive price (free).  The Lombardi motivation was to simplify administration and licensing.  To own it – “just like we own versioning in Teamworks 7. Simplify Simplify Simplify.”  Tongue-in-cheek, Phil cracks: “It turns out that now, Websphere is available to us at very affordable rates.”

Another customer asked why so few sessions at IBM Impact for Lombardi – because there were lots of sessions on BPM and SOA, but Lombardi is a small component.  Craig responded that it is a huge event, and a very large company, and we had less than 90 days to incorporate Lombardi into the event – so the number of sessions does not adequately reflect its importance in their strategy, but that no one should read into this a lack of commitment to the platform.  In fact, Craig says that in the followup events to impact-  2-3 day versions of this event, and 1 day versions of this event, all over the world – Lombardi features front-and-center in these conversations and events.  I can’t quite capture how sincerely Craig came across in this discussion, and how credible.  It would have been *very* easy for him to blow it on this question and lose the audience, but I think people were convinced.

There were a couple detailed questions about upgrading, and Phil reassured that switching app servers isn’t as hard as switching databases (but also, there’s no need to switch databases if you don’t want to).  I can attest to this – Teamworks / Lombardi Edition is easy to run across different app servers – I frequently have a Webpshere, Weblogic, and JBoss version of Teamworks pointing at the same database instance… Phil also reinforced that there is a dedicated team building the upgrade path.

Differentiated Support

Another question asked about LODA and Support and how that changes with the merger.  Craig chimed in that the expectation is that it not change.  LODA will continue into IBM, and is considered one of the best practices – on demand assistance for developers.  IBM inner circle thinks this is something IBM can learn from Lombardi.  That’s a great shout-out to the LODA team – and to a business model that was pioneered by a small number of us within professional services at Lombardi back in 2004.  Toby Cappello and Lance Gibbs and Wes Chung started selling it and had a version 1 formulated, and later, Greg Harley and I picked up the business and added technical deliverables and renewed emphasis on subscriptions to the mix, and from there the business really flourished.  Great to hear that IBM values this service as well.  The team deserves it.

Another customer asked about whether there were plans to support file level versioning.  Phil Gilbert took this one – and the answer was “No.”  As he put it:

“To the extent that you can check in your model to clear case, you can do that. We’ve been doing versioning the same way for 40 years. But in model-based development, that doesn’t work that well.  What is the workflow and process around versioning?  None of those filesystem source systems leveraged model-driven development.  Explicit linkages available are too important to throw away for versioning.  Its dependency management.[....] We’re the best process app dev environment because of our versioning paradigm…”

So no, no file-based versioning thank you very much.  “We think it is differentiating, and we think it is the right way to go.”

Do you still have the passion for BPM?

Another customer related how impressed she was with the people at Lombardi and their passion for BPM.  The business practice and technical talent is immense.  How does IBM keep that same passion going?

Criag’s response was that the Lombardi team’s passion is second-to-none.  IBM is offloading some of the work that someone else can do – and freeing up the resources Lombardi has to focus on the stuff that makes a difference in BPM.  This frees the Lombardi team to think further and deeper about BPM.  The other emphasis is on scaling, training, and generating passion in others.  And an emphasis on how to train more people to understand the business aspects of BPM.

Summing Up

I was impressed by how they handled it.  Conversations in the room carried on for some time after the talk was over.  I actually left the room last, along with Phil, as we both wrapped up other conversations we spent just a few minutes chatting about the themes from the day.  I think we both were feeling pretty invigorated by the level of interest in Lombardi, and how well the themes were resonating with customers. If I could sum up IBM’s belief:  BPM is going to be everywhere, and IBM wants in.

I’ll write more about my overall impressions of Impact, but suffice to say, this session was a great way to cap Day 1, and I felt like anyone at IBM Impact with an interest in BPM really missed out if they weren’t there for it.  Since there was no presentation or prepared material, this is probably the best coverage we’ll get of the conversation.

Editor’s Note: If you were one of the folks I paraphrased for your questions to the execs, and you don’t mind being named/attributed, drop me an email and I’ll update the text accordingly with your name and company affiliation.  I didn’t include it in this first draft because I think people asking questions in a non-recorded forum have a reasonable expectation of privacy.

This was a good session primarily to explain how WPS and iLog can integrate with and work well with Websphere Lombardi Edition.  Marc Smith showed how we could replace the typical Lombardi rules service with a call out to an iLog toolkit asset that had been developed by the iLog team.  Of course it is pretty easy drag-and-drop and it is something you can do today – it didn’t require a new release of Lombardi.  However, you’ll still develop your iLog rules in an iLog interface – not within the Lombardi authoring environment natively.

The same kind of integration was shown with lights-out processing in WPS.

We should note that this was run-time integration, and iLog, WPS, and Lombardi interfaces were all shown to model and edit the models they were each responsible for – but the demonstration showed how Teamworks can consume the assets of the other tools by a simple drag-and-drop interface at design time, presuming pre-built iLog rules or WPS models.

There was also a Blueprint-only session earlier but I missed it while I was prepping for my own session!

The Process Ninja says:

Whilst the standardisation of process is important, making processes too rigid impacts negatively upon the customer experience…and we are forced to deal with robots. The way to improve upon this is to embrace “freedom within boundaries” and to create processes that cultivate empowerment. So next time you are writing those call centre scripts, or find yourself down in the depths of murky detail, put yourself in the shoes of the customer and imagine how you would like to be treated.

I think you could say the best use of process is to remove the mundane, and enable the great.  That means taking the mundane work away from your star performers and letting them do what they do best.  It means routing someone quickly to a real person that can help them, rather than making them suffer through the hold music… because creating good process doesn’t always mean automation is the answer (queue the automated receptionist telling us how important we are in that monotone irony of automation).

Toby Cappello ran through slides very quickly in his presentation, as he had a short time slot to cover a big topic.  The room stayed crowded for this talk though a few people trickled out, and people in the hall trickled in.  Felt like we needed a door man and a rope to do crowd control.

The point of the COE: drive greater business value.  Prioritize, select, and enable the highest value process improvements.  Align process measurement with business performance goals.  Ideally, reduce solutions implementation and management cost, and create a predictable and scalable operational performance experience for users.

Toby likes three-part phases, so naturally he has broken down COE into three phases, depending on where you are in your BPM journey.

BPM Journey: Validate -> Adopt    -> Transform
COE Journey: Define   -> Develop -> Execute

But, he says, something happens at some point along this journey – you hit the wall.  It looked so much easier in the sales cycle! (He gets a laugh for that one)  This is the time for an intervention – organizational drag has kicked in, as you have expanded outside your original core of believers and early adopters.  You need help to extend out into the organization and break down those barriers (note, the Sirva CIO Erik Keller’s presentation on their roll-out of APEX reinforces this – they ran into a big stumbling block as they rolled out to users in sites 2 and 3, but were able to address their concerns and bring everyone into alignment).  Filling that gap between capability and demand is hard – and that’s often when you need to bring in some outside help (consultants rejoice).

How long does it take? Toby says the truth is, the journey takes 1-2 years for organizational change and adoption.  I agree. Some orgs adopt faster -but that is because they already had the right organizational culture, they’re just adding tech to it.  But if process and improvement aren’t part of the culture, this takes a lot more time.  Someone asked if there was a good case study, and Toby’s answer was that typically we put people directly in touch with other customers who have done it (and he called out a few who were in the room).  I think if someone wants to write this case study on organizational change- go talk to Disney and Allianz, but also talk to Navin Kekane at Stubhub who does a great job describing the organizational drivers and shifts they underwent to become a process-focused organization.  Note: it isn’t 1-2 years to deploy, its 1-2 years to make organizational changes to support ongoing change.

Unfortunately there wasn’t time to get into a discussion of how social media and collaborative technologies (including Blueprint) might disrupt the traditional governance and control role of COEs.  It would have been good to give this topic a refresh based on what has changed in the last year in the landscape of technology everyday people are using.

I hustled from the main session to find some coffee and get down to the Lombardi Day sessions at Impact.  First process breakdown: Coffee ran out in about 5 minutes on the main floor.  Rescued by coffee down on the first floor, but, unfortunately, it wasn’t good coffee.  Not to worry, I ran the gauntlet of Lombardi employees down the hallway to the Lombardi session.  It was good to see old colleagues from Lombardi, people I haven’t seen, in some cases, in a year or more.

I got into the room, and immediately saw a problem.  This room was going to be too small. Literally every chair was full, and standing room only in the back of the room for Rod Favaron’s opening remarks.  Clearly, a room twice as big was needed for comfort (and to my untrained eye, it appeared that the salon next to ours could have been combined to provide some breathing room… ).  The room was hot and stuffy, but there were a lot people interested in hearing what Rod and company had to say.  I think IBM missed an opportunity to make this Lombardi Day event more accessible to people who aren’t familiar with Blueprint and “Websphere Lombardi Edition” – but there wasn’t room in the room…

Alan Godfrey, in holding with tradition, was emcee – introducing speakers throughout the day.  He gave a brief introduction and handed the mic to Rod Favaron.  Rod gave the opening talk for the Lombardi portion of Impact.  He described it as integrating “Driven” (The old Lombardi conference) into Impact, to try to get the best of both worlds.  Rod has talked to customer gatherings (and partner gatherings) many times over the last decade, and he was clearly at ease in front of the friendly crowd. He also knows just which points to hit.

First, he thanked the customers for investing in Lombardi “when we were small” – and said that he and the executive team really felt a responsibility of stewardship to customers, investors, and employees, to sell Lombardi to a company that could really leverage what had been done to that point.  He felt that IBM represented the best opportunity for Lombardi to scale what it had already been doing.

The Lombardi org has come en masse to IBM.  IBM and Lombardi are trying to keep the transition activities transparent to customers and prospects.  It isn’t transparent to partners, but I can attest that IBM and Lombardi folks are working hard to keep partners in the fold and to make the transition relatively painless (other than the quantity of documentation and contractual language we have to read!).

Rod emphasized investments in Lombardi activities: more R&D, support, services.  There is a plan to create a Lombardi-specific practice within GBS as well.  Someone in the audience asked “What do you do now that you’ve been bought?” Rod described IBM as a machine that has a lot of gears in motion, and he’s trying to integrate Lombardi into this spinning machinery without getting fingers cut off.  I was picturing double dutch jump rope as an analogy.  You have to watch for the rhythm before you jump in with both feet, but when you jump in, everything is moving at full speed right from the start.

The focus is also on enabling 800-1000 sales people at IBM and IBM partners.  That’s a huge increase in sales reach.  Going from 15 sales reps to 900 is quite a change in 90 days.

Rod pointed out that they’re investing more – core innovation R&D investment is Websphere Lombardi Edition, and they are applying more resources to this than they were previously planning. However, they now have the flexibility to assign additional resources to product integration, Websphere integration, localization, that don’t detract the core Lombardi team’s attention to the BPM problem space.

There was also a comment about Blueprint becoming, over time, the center of an emerging cloud strategy for BPM – which is good, because it should be!

Finally, Rod encouraged the group in the room to be patient because it will be a journey – just 90 days in, and a lot of work yet to do.

Damion Heredia, formerly VP of Product at Lombardi, now at IBM, explained the objectives for Websphere Lombardi Edition and for IBM BPM Blueprint. Like all the Lombardi Day sessions, the room was packed tight and needed a little more air circulation.

He introduced the product managers for Websphere Lombardi Edition (Leslie Jordan), IBM BPM Blueprint (Dave Marquard), and Professional Services (Kelvin King). Starting with the objectives:

• Bluewash Teamworks and Blueprint as quickly as possible (yes, Bluewash is a real term, that refers to getting software in compliance with IBM software policy)
• Leverage and Integrate other IBM products
• Ensure Existing Customer Success
• Continue Innovating (60% or more of the team working on new stuff rather than maintaining the old stuff.)

According to Damion, in IBM Websphere Lombardi Edition 7.1 will continue to incorporate all the features that make TW7 appealing – versioning, deployment scenarios, toolkits, etc. It will be released to the product catalog for all IBM sales reps. Previously, Teamworks 7 embedded the JBoss application server.  But going foward they’ll be embedding Websphere ND as the appserver, and DB2 as the embedded (default) database.  Websphere Lombardi Edition 7 will continue to support MS SQL and Oracle as well, and Weblogic and JBoss, but the embedded version will be Websphere – it sounds like they’re looking for market demand to dictate which of the other appservers they support first.   Of course, if they do they’re job right embedding this thing, we won’t even notice that there’s an app server in the stack.

There will be continued support for Unix and Windows.  Of course, I want to know if they’ll support Macs as authoring environments in the near future? Why not? the delta between Eclipse working on unix and on a Mac is trivial! (Eclipse already works, can’t be that hard to get the authoring environment to work)

In the 2nd half of 2010, they plan to provide:

• An upgrade path to all TW6x customers, including the ability to migrate in flight process instances, performance server data, the optimizer.  New analysis tools will make the upgrade planning easier.
• Improved refactoring of assets into toolkits for re-use.
• Coach Designer enhancements,
• Additional platform support
• Baked-in Integration touch points with IBM products – iLog seems an especially obvious choice, but there were some others.  He described this as “the kind of thing you can only do inside IBM” rather than as a third party software company.
• Further localization support, allowing authors to write processes in their native languages, not just customize the portal with language specifics.

For IBM BPM Blueprint, the focus is on integration between Blueprint and Websphere business modeler (other tools inside IBM, besides Teamworks, er, Lombardi Edition).  He recapped the template feature of Blueprint that was just added, and noted that they would be expanding on the template library in the near future – it currently features 100 templates, templates primarily gained from the IBM side of the house.

Cut to Q&A:
“What about upgrading from other IBM products to Websphere Lombardi Edition?” My paraphrasing of the discussion is that integrations that aide moving models from one IBM product to another are going to get attention, but that there wasn’t a focus on upgrading an implementation-level detail from one product to another (WPS to Lombardi Edition or in reverse).

“How should customers deal with the positioning of Lombardi if we don’t like it, and what advice to you offer organizations who use all kinds of process technologies?” The gist was, push back if you don’t like the direction or positioning, get heard through your IBM customer or business partner contacts, IBM will try to accommodate and listen to the customer and partner community.  The key message was that Lombardi would be the best place for green field BPM customers. Meanwhile, IBM will work on the “words on slides that cause confusion” problem.

“Which version of Teamworks will have conditional activities, or other features from 6.2.2 not yet on TW7.x?” – Fully merged into TW7 line by the end of the year.

“What is the plan for release frequency?” Damion thinks this will be minor releases about twice a year. The customer base has a hard time adopting change any faster than that.  My counterpoint to this response is that IBM/Lombardi need to improve HOW updates (minor releases) happen to make it more like downloading a Firefox update or an iPhone App update, rather than a full-blown installation effort.  Make it easier for us to absorb the changes!

“Blueworks or Blueprint?” Blueworks will be a great place to learn about BPM, and participate in a community.  But if you’re going to document the process and give it to users, Blueprint will be the place to do that (noting that is is a production software asset you roll out to your team – and provides tie ins to other IBM execution products).  Blueprint will stay laser focused on what it does: Documenting, Mapping, Collaborating.  It isn’t the strategy tool, but it is replacing sticky notes and whiteboards.

“How will industry frameworks be applied to Teamworks?” Lombardi is in the “vertical” (Damion’s word) business of process.  But IBM has expertise in many verticals, and can build assets on the Lombardi platform to attack these vertical industry frameworks.  From this author’s perspective, the combination of Lombardi and the previous acquisition (Webify aka Fabric) could yield some killer applications in vertical segments.  Lombardi addresses process within the four walls of your firm, but Fabric addresses process between you and your industry food chain – outside the four walls if you will.

There was a hint in here that Beth Smith’s keynote would have interesting news about SaaS /hosted software, in response to a direct question on the subject, but Damion didn’t provide details.

Damion also plugged the ability of companies to use Blueprint with manual execution of the process (some would call this inbetween design by doing and doing by design).  It is a low-cost way to test out process changes in green-field scenarios.

Another discussion occurred referencing round-tripping versus shared model. Damion made the pitch that round-tripping has quite a few more land mines than having a shared model – and that Lombardi feels it has proved the value of a shared model approach  over time.

“If you use the embedded Websphere license – does that entail additional licensing costs?”  No, the Websphere ND embedded license is included in your purchase of Websphere Lombardi Edition.  This will provide unified support contacts, simpler version management of WAS and Lombardi software (it will look like one product), and over time, a lot of improvement in how you administer Lombardi (aka Teamworks).

Also, there was an interesting side note that IBM folks are looking at using Lombardi internally as well…

Jacob Ukelson is once again pushing email and documents as the way process should happen when it is “design by doing”:

The only way “design by doing” can work is if you observe knowlwedge work in its natural setting. That means email, documents, meetings and telephony. That just doesn’t mesh with a BPMS. I think that most BPMS vendors would like people to tidily do all of their unpredictable, ad-hoc work in the BPMS, but the real world doesn’t work that way. People use what they like, and like what they know.  They are not going to change their habits just because the vendors think they should.

The idea that design by doing is antithetical to BPM doesn’t seem right to me – there’s a spectrum between these poles, and i’ll give you an example.

The way I’ve seen Lean applied to white collar (officework/knowledge work) processes resembles design by doing. You start by running whatever they currently do, document the wasted effort/steps, try out changes in the process, til you get it right. Then you start training more and more people to follow the process. A BPMS can support this kind of work because you can iterate fast enough to keep up with the changes, even over a very long improvement cycle with many changes.

Now, design by doing isn’t quite the same as “unpredictable work” – but obviously, they are related concepts. If the work is inherently unpredictable, or improvements to it do not justify IT investment in a doing-by-design approach then I think ActionBase is a great answer to that need. As Jacob says, email and documents are the tool of choice when one doesn’t have a process – precisely because of their ubiquity and rather than compete with that, I like how ActionBase leverages that truth.

As to his characterization of BPMS vendors – he may be right that they would prefer to have the unpredictable work go into tidy processes. But this is not a fair description of the BPM service provider community (or at least, of the firm yours truly works for), which has often been creative about applying hybrid structured and unstructured techniques to address knowledge work.

No matter what the vendors say, no business user can take a BPMS out of the box and start using it for their own work.

True – if you mean to use it without a single implementation dollar spent.  But if you have 100s or 1000s of people doing this email and document thing for a process, you can probably afford to spend a few IT dollars to figure out what the best practices are. Let the doing guide the design, but you have some efficiencies of scale to achieve. In general, BPM has to get simpler – and the kind of approach ActionBase takes seems (to me) to be a great example.

Jacob wraps up with something I couldn’t agree more with:

So if we are really to make “design by doing” a reality as part of BPMS, then somehow the tracking and management of  existing end-user tools and work paradigms (especially email) have to become a part of the conversation.

So true. BPMS vendors need to be able to track email-based processes.  A Lean or other process improvement expert can work without this technology, but as with structured processes, it is so much easier to get to the “right answers” when technology supports your efforts.

One of the more entertaining comments in the whole BPM, “you’re not my father” (Star Wars reference, sorry folks) debate:

Using an object model and letting actors express processes in terms of assembling (and continuously changing) those objects in the desired way is a very powerful way of creating applications. Is it an application? Is it a BPM process? Is it a Mashup? Who cares? The technical questions have to be asked at some point in time, but at first one needs to check with the business if they can get the functionality they need ASAP, and if they can adapt it any time they want.

We are discussing the ‘Emperor’s New Clothes’ here, I’m afraid. Let’s go and do something productive.

I think there is entirely too much gnashing of teeth over the new three letter acronym.  I might have to check out what Max’s product (Papyrus) really does now, after reading three interesting comments from him in as many days.

In the main body of the post, Keith rightly points out that there was way too much focus on BPEL in the BPM community, despite protestations from some fairly vocal members of the community.

No doubt others will cover the IBM Impact keynote better and more completely than I will.  I’ll just say a few things that really jumped out at me:

• Wow the music was loud.  And I never figured an IBM conference to be a place to hear Beyonce while waiting for the session to start. Not complaining, just pointing out a dichotomy.
• The smart planet messaging probably makes sense for an operation as big as IBM – and for the high level customers they pitch to.  But for little guys like us, it just doesn’t resonate; I want results sooner, I can’t wait on the whole planet to get smarter :)
• The wireless just plain didn’t work.  Oh, I got a signal. I had a security key. But the poor wireless infrastructure was overwhelmed, and as a result, no one could get an IP address or access to the outside world.
• The opening act – a band – definitely woke me up.  I guess that was the point.  Not a huge fan of blaring music in the morning – but I’m not sure what you do to get the attention of 6000 people at 8:30am Monday morning…
• The comedian was good.  I know, not everyone appreciated him, and I saw a lot of tweets to the effect that his humor fell flat on folks not from the USA, but honestly, if there is a comedian that everyone thinks is funny, I haven’t met that one yet. He gets bonus points for making fun of snuggies.
• I wasn’t excited about Cantor’s presentation.  I really get turned off by thought frameworks that start with the idea of putting the word “super” in front of another word… super-phone (Google), super-man (several times in history), super-corp (Cantor).  It was pretty high flying and to me, doesn’t get to the meat of things.  She also cited Second Life, which is so 2007.
• Kaiser Permanente’s David Yoo gave a great recap of what Kaiser is up to with process improvement and improving the quality of healthcare, and how technology plays into that. A friend and former colleague is at Kaiser working in the process improvement group, he would have been proud of the representation.
• I was impressed with Paul Nussbaum’s recap of Ford’s improvement efforts.  I hope they don’t let up on the gas when it comes to the focus on quality, process improvement, and product.  He gave a great endorsement of Lombardi Teamworks (now Websphere Lombardi Edition) in his talk as well. This was the first of many good mentions of the Lombardi brand within Impact.

There were some pretty interesting things going on at Impact that were logistical in nature:  RFID tags in every badge, and RFID scanners at the entrance to every session room.  IBM must get some great data about who enters each room and how well sessions were attended.  And clearly IBM knows how to handle an event of scale like this in many ways. But I think Impact would benefit from some outside ideas, and to prioritize things like making sure wifi works.  People don’t get the word out about your sessions and events if they can’t get online! (Conflict of interest disclaimer: My wife owns and operates an event management company, Red Velvet Events and I shamelessly plug the firm because they win international awards and they really get high-tech conferences – recently they ran Bazaarvoice’s Social Commerce Summit, for example).

More to come about specific sessions…

(Editors note: After a whirlwind 3 days, without a wireless connection for the entire event, I’m just now catching up on writing about the sessions I attended)

The second session I attended was a session by Shaun Jones and Mike Riegel on how to leverage IBM’s many partner resources to drive growth and value.  First a round of introductions – would have gone quickly if not for late arrivals.  Of course, not knowing anyone in this room, it was actually helpful to hear some of the introductions, where people were coming from, and why they were in the room.

There were at least two other BPM (business process) focused companies in the room.  Unfortunately I missed the names of the firms but I’ll have to try to track them down.

The “Smarter Planet” messaging will translate into a focus on smarter industry groups: a focus on “Smarter Banking” for example – leveraging industry frameworks to address the market, rather than total custom or total product.  I know this is a positioning that the Webify/Fabric team have long been advocating – to go after industry vertical solutions.

The speakers encouraged the room to get “validated” or “certified” on one of these frameworks (like CAREfx, on the healthcare framework): Being validated will give you more engagement, more opportunity, and more marketing dollars, according to IBM.

One firm was given as an example, which used the banking framework to build a $400M pipeline in a year.

A redesign of Partner World to make it easier for people to find their way around – new user interface, but there are still some particular assets they wanted to draw attention to.

There were several “Partner Plays” to respond to particular competitive situations:
1. Smarter Commerce
2. Optimize Business Performance with Optimization
3. Connect to maximize the value of business interactions
4. Sell and win against open source competitors

The materials to support these situations can be adapted or rebranded by business partners.

An interesting case of product design debt surfaced.  “Just Push Go” is the marketing equivalent of the install wizard for the Partner World website. As the number of brands and products and partner resources available to business partners has grown, the design of the site couldn’t scale to continue to make it easy for partners to get to the information they need.  This is the classic product design debt problem that Andrew Chen has previously described.   Just Push Go sounds like an interesting take on how to cut down on the confusion, but it sounds like some real product design effort needs to go into figuring out a site design that will be more useful.  I’ll find out as I’m not a Partner and will be working through this site to find IBM resources!

There was also a discussion of cross-selling – that cross-selling products leads to disproportionately higher revenues.  This makes sense (up to a point), simply because you get more efficiency from your sales efforts. There are tools to help you figure out what products are “adjacent” from a sales and marketing point of view.

IBM gave a good pitch for why all of the partners should really think about SEO.  But I think one problem that larger firms have is they often explain their internal motivations at the same time: they gave the other half – why they care about partners having good SEO.  There are 900 partners, imagine the noise they can create if they all do a good job promoting on the web – well, yes. But also, this raises the concern (to me) of how does a single partner stand out amongst these 900 partners.  That “standing out” argument is also an argument against cross-selling and in favor of specializing in an area that doesn’t get enough attention (yet).  It is part of why BP3 has and will continue to focus on BPM – it may be a big tent, but compared to IBM’s software offering it is just one sliver!

A quick aside to emphasize the value of IBM Innovation Centers. I think I just earned the price of admission to Impact right here.  I knew about the innovation centers, but I didn’t understand what the rules of engagement were. I assumed that these were very expensive offerings for big partners.  What I heard from this session:

• 38 innovation centers
• built exclusively for partners
• meetings, labs, demos, testing, product launch events: for free(!)
• Another office for you anywhere in the world.

That’s pretty amazing actually. NY, Chicago, San Mateo, etc – and free.  Very impressed that they offer this capability, and as Shaun said: “The innovation centers aren’t just for visiting and touring – you can use these centers to grow your business.”

So I’m here at IBM Impact, a little early for “Business Partner Day”.  The customers aren’t here yet, for the most part, just business partners.  This is a good soft-launch for the conference, in a sense, and helps partners get connected with IBM resources who can help partners navigate IBM.

There are over 900 partners here at Impact, which is a record.  6000 total registrants, I believe. I arrived just in time to run into a few colleagues from Lombardi, and some friends from the first (and last) Lombardi partner conference in 2009.  I then attended a lunch session that featured Criag Haymon (and others).  Since he is the General Manager for Websphere, he of course had some interesting comments about recent acquisitions iLog, Lombardi, and others.  He was very optimistic going forward, and they had some great growth numbers with iLog to point to as an example of what they intend to do with Lombardi.  After a quick break, I met up with another IBM partner (formerly also a Lombardi partner) and headed down for coffee.

After the break, I caught a session on leveraging IBM resources to go to market.  It wasn’t what I expected, but it was useful – more on that later.  Also spent some time at the exhibit hall which is massive and has some great vendor exhibits.  I’ll take a better look around on Tuesday.  Looking forward to a day of Lombardi sessions (make that, Websphere Lombardi Edition and IBM BPM Blueprint sessions).

A tweet from Phil Gilbert hints that this may not be the only innovation surprise from the Lombardi team at IBM’s Impact conference this week, but for now we’ll have to settle for a teaser: an update to Blueprint, just in time for the IBM Impact conference.

The Blueprint team released an update to its collaborative modeling software on May 1.  The update includes a batch of process templates (no doubt leaning on some of IBMs templates) and process patterns.  The interface for browsing templates is attractive, giving you a graphical sense of the shape of the process, rather than just a description of it.  Clicking on any template brings up a more detailed view of the process diagram.  My first thought was that there are enough templates, we’ll need to be able to search them.  And then I noticed the search prompt in the upper right actually is labeled “Search Templates”.  Not bad.

The other important change is the addition of a REST API.  At first blush, this API should be pretty useful for pulling back information about processes in Blueprint.  I’m a big fan of exposing APIs because it gives practitioners supported ways to innovate on top of the platform.  And it is good for the software vendor because they can’t anticipate all the useful purposes their software might be put to if they enable others to build on it. The API seems like a great first step in letting people expose Blueprint data in other applications.

Just prior to the Blueprint release announcement, on Friday, IBM announced the new names for the Lombardi product lines:

Blueprint becomes:  IBM BPM Blueprint

Teamworks becomes: IBM Websphere Lombardi Edition

Now I just have to get used to saying the new names!

Theo Priestley wonders if an upbeat economy will be bad for BPM:

I had an interesting conversation with Ian Gotts of Nimbus Partners this week that raised a thorny question. In a downbeat economy the focus is to drive out costs and improve processes a lot more aggressively, probably more so than in ‘normal’ conditions where continuous improvement already takes place, so the attention is immediately turned to what BPM can achieve for the enterprise and can potentially account for such strong results being posted by vendors.

While it is certainly a valid concern for anyone in the BPM business to have, it is too early to tell what this turn of the wheel holds.

An example.  In 1994 a little company that sold configuration software to the makers of complex equipments (PBXs, servers, super computers, mainframes, etc) was growing like crazy in the midst of a tech downturn in the US.  Why? Because those tech companies were looking to tighten the belt on costs, and accurate configuration at sales time could help them ensure they built what they sold, reduced errors by 10x, etc.

Fast forward to 2001.  Another tech downturn. But in this tech downturn, the strategy du jour was not to cut costs by being more accurate- it was to simplify the product line dramatically and reduce cost by increasing the volume of commodity parts and sell those at lower prices.  Configuration was out, commoditization was in.

What will happen to a space like BPM if the economy improves?  Hard to say in advance – it will depend on how CEOs react to the new landscape- more hiring? more tech? more automation or capital spending?.  But in general, I think we’ll all be better off if the economy does improve :)