Surprised to run across this post the other day on the BlueWorks blog. Not sure exactly what prompted the timing of it, but it is a good introduction to BPMN and why it exists.
Meanwhile, Tom Baeyens has his first Activiti presentation available via slideshare and on his blog. Activiti is the new BPMN 2 open source project he is working on at Alfresco.
Recently at IBM Impact I said that “process data wants to be free” – available in more places, more accessible to users and managers, and more sensible in form and structure.
Jacob Ukelson makes the case (paraphrasing) that process just wants to be free:
From my perspective the simplest answer is that we focus on unstructured, unpredictable, ad-hoc human processes that knowledge workers do, while BPM suites focus on structured, predictable processes – and the two approaches are complementary.
In other words, make it easier for the everyman/everywoman to execute their processes. He focuses on three key themes that differentiate ActionBase from other approaches to knowledge work:
1. Familiarity – ActionBase leverages email and documents in a way that is immediately famliar, rather than asking users to learn a new tool or URL.
2. Collaboration – This is as much a benefit of leveraging email as anything, but the point is that users can dynamically bring others into a process to help, at runtime.
3. Managed – applying “enough structure to make the process manageable, but not so much as to strangle it.” And so the focus is on visibility rather than constraining or controlling the flow.
These are good tenets for anyone to build software around. Philosophically, I think ActionBase has it about right.
We’re very committed to BPMN 2.0. In fact, we’re aiming to build the #1 BPMN 2.0 process engine and deliver the full BPM Suite components, all available as open source.
Glad to hear it – I’m sure the world of BPMN and Open Source BPM will be the better for it.
Bruce Silver gets the scoop on most product updates in the BPM space, and this time is no different. He received an update from Pega, and his writeup gives a little bit of market positioning and background, followed by a quick run-through of their product offering, screen shots included.
Two of the UI-design elements jumped out at me – the “chiclet style” process mapping diagram (Bruce’s phrasing) that is so similar to Blueprint, and the tab-centric interface so common to CRM platforms (even dating back to the early 1990′s).
Bruce also summarizes their Case Management offering, and calls Pega “clearly a major player in Case Management”.
Andrew Smith has a great post on the 5 reasons that organizations of 200-300 people fail to implement BPM. Of course there are many reasons, but these are pretty good. The biggest reason that I’ve seen: budget. It isn’t that there isn’t ROI for these projects, but the ROI still requires the “I” to be paid, largely up front, in terms of implementing the process they need. Often the folks within these organizations that have the need for BPM and the knowledge and drive to pursue it, simply don’t have a budget that let’s them go after it.
However, with the advent of more and more SaaS and open source offerings, and more “rent” than “buy” models becoming available, even within the BPM space, companies of this size will find the up-front “I” in their ROI equation may be declining – so they don’t have to take the same budget or cashflow hit to achieve the results they want… So perhaps going forward the other issues Andrew mentioned will dominate.
We had a brief hiatus while I was out for a few much-needed vacation days. At my highschool reunion this past weekend, I took note of the phones in evidence – almost every one I saw was a blackberry or an iPhone (noteworthy: everyone who had a blackberry said it was company issued, or they’d have an iPhone). I didn’t see any Android phones – but maybe I did and just didn’t recognize them as such. Apparently, however, there are 160,000 getting activated every day (I’m wondering where they are… I still don’t see them yet, but I don’t doubt Google is reporting accurate numbers). I also had a great brunch with my parents and a number of their friends near their home in Florida. It turns out that of the 9 people there, 7 had iPhones. Not the demographic I would have expected to adopt iPhones, but last year my parents got each other iPhones for Christmas.
Tomorrow, a significant percentage of BP3 is heading to an Apple Store of their choosing to pick up an iPhone 4. My friends are a little surprised – although I’m somewhat of an early adopter on technology, I detest standing in line today for what I could buy easily another day with no wait. I also hate to buy things the moment they come out because if there are any hitches, you don’t know what they are yet. Finally, I hate to pay the early adopter premium. But tomorrow I’m breaking these rules for a few reasons… First, I’m standing in line because I didn’t see the home-delivery option when I pre-ordered (maybe I didn’t see it or maybe I ordered too late on Day 1 to see that option?). I’m buying early because Apple has earned my trust with the iPhone 3G (and 3GS, and iPod Touch… and several MacBook Pros). Finally, the pricing doesn’t penalize the buyer for early adopter status. So I’ll be there bright and early in the morning for my iPhone 4 pickup, and I’m looking forward to the Retina Display and other fun new bells and whistles.
Interesting article and followup discussion on the nature of Open vs. Closed, by Chris Dixon. It would be interesting thought experiment to characterize BPM in a similar fashion into dimensions and open/closed plotted against product offerings. You could imagine this chart from Chris:
OS vs. platform (originally from Tom Elsenmann, et al)
We could list on the left column, database, appserver, etc. But perhaps the most relevant items would be:
End User (browser-based, likely)
Authoring User (BPMN visualization)
Authoring User (BPMN data)
Engine (BPM engine)
Solution Provider (SIs, value added software resellers)
Platform Sponsor (BPM suite supplier)
…
At least, its interesting to think about the BPM space and what open means- each vendor is open and “closed” in different ways, which has an impact depending on the consumers of that solution.
Neil, always a thoughtful writer in our little corner of the world where business meets technology, has another note out about BPM and Process Automation not being a binary choice. I couldn’t agree more. So many times we are presented with false choices, that are incredibly binary – but the world isn’t really like that. The world is full of gray.
Moreover, disagreements are often an issue of framing. If you frame the discussion just a bit differently, there isn’t nearly as much disagreement, because now all parties have a new way to establish context to their arguments and perhaps see where the other folks are coming from.
Neil reframes the discussion of Automation and BPM – often people think that BPM is only about automation – and in so doing, resolves much of the potential conflicts for anyone that can agree with his framework:
It might seem like this is a bit of an academic way of looking at things, but it becomes particularly useful as a frame of reference, I think, in the context of discussions that are currently swirling around concepts like Advanced Case Management, Dynamic BPM, etc etc. I’ve seen a lot of debate about whether the scenarios described as being relevant in ‘Advanced Case Management’ can be addressed by ‘BPM technology’ and the only answer I can come up with is “it depends on how you scope your definition of ‘BPM technology’”.
In my mind (and I agree with Ian Gotts here, as well as with many others) the four aspects of software automation in BPM are independent of each other.
(emphasis added by me)
Well said. The four areas of automation Neil identifies:
Please see Neil’s post for the full write-up. As Neil points out, these four types of automation are neither mutually exclusive, nor mutually dependent. They are independent aspects, and I think you can reasonably apply any of these to BPM efforts.
As a side note, what we need in the discussion of ACM and BPM is a similar re-framing of the discussion. The two ideas are clearly complementary, and I see the opportunity to find a framework that BPM and ACM philosophies fit into. I made one attempt, because I felt that someone else had actually expressed it quite well as philosophically approaching “processes” or “knowledge work” from different points of view – where one tries to understand and improve the aggregate quality, output, and throughput – and the other tries to improve the specific instance quality, output, and outcome, expecting that improving the individual case will roll up to system-level improvements. I’m not passing judgment negatively against either by stating it that way – and I’m not constraining exactly where to draw the line – just stating a philosophical difference. Each philosophy has its place (in my view), and doesn’t require denigrating the other philosophy to justify its existence. However, the title of my post turned out to be ironic, as the comments implied a bit of controversy after all.
Paul Vincent writes a note explaining the virtues of a new customizable conflict resolution for inference rules:
Whenever I meet production-rule fan (and now co-chair of OMG Production Rule Representation) James Owen, he always asks me “so what exactly is the conflict resolution strategy in the TIBCO rule engine?“. Recently, TIBCO BusinessEvents 4.0 introduced a feature to make him (and other rule programming specialists) very happy – the customisable conflict resolution mechanism!
So, Paul isn’t talking BPM, he’s talking CEP and Rules- and he has an excellent blog for following news in that space. But often people in the BPM space will tout a rules-based approach for BPM as being easier for the business… Whenever someone tells says that rules are easy, they should just explain a few phrases and see how comfortable they are doing so:
So what is the customizing the conflict resolution stated above? It is adding a rank to the rules to determine ordering, which is, um, different than rule priorities, which have priority over rank… got that?
Having worked in the high-end configuration space a decade ago, I don’t find this confusing or hard. I’m just well aware that rule sets can quickly get difficult to understand by the lay person, while being very powerful in the hands of experts.
For a simple example, while configuring cars on websites (check out Ford‘s), the conflict resolution strategy was to assess rules against user selections first, and then applying the “completion engine” which would progressively apply default selections to complete a configuration. The magic was that when the user made their next selection, our conflict resolution would prioritize user selection-inspired rules over “completion” (default) rules, and default rules had a “rank” for order of processing. Thus, preventing innocent default selections from interfering with what the user wanted to explicitly select. But consumer car configurations are simple compared to the stuff we used to configure (jets, PBXs, super computers, mainframes, central office switches, high end networking gear), which required rules for resource allocation, spatial configuration, containment, composites, connections, and backward chaining heuristic search. And these different types of constraints could compete or conflict with each other. Fun stuff.
It was very cool stuff (to the technical geeks), but it wasn’t for the faint of heart. There is a time and place for rules – but the KISS approach applies. Keep it simple, if you can.
Bruce Silver writes about the “right amount” of BPMN for the business:
In a way, we’re still back to the question Michael and I were wrestling with a couple years ago. Do you want to limit the BPMN palette to what business users already know (or think they know) from traditional flowcharting, and allow them to bend the semantics and rules? Or do you want to raise the bar and say here is a common process language that can be shared between business and IT? That takes a bit of education or training, since they probably don’t already know how to use it properly. But it’s not rocket science.
He goes on to say that he prefers the latter. In general, I do too. Once upon a time flowchart symbols weren’t familiar to businesses either. People can adapt to new notations and skills. BPMN isn’t *that* hard conceptually.
Of course, using a subset for white-boarding makes perfect sense because you are in a conversation, and if you draw something that isn’t precisely the right kind of gateway but write a note next to it or explain what you want, the people in the room will understand. I use a form of shorthand BPMN when I whiteboard that works well for me. You know someone does this a lot if they draw the message events in one continuous pen stroke (envelope and all).
Inc. has a fantastic article adapted from Tony Hsieh’s upcoming book, it is a riveting read, to me. Tony and his CFO championed a culture as the key means of differentiation in the difficult online shoe and apparel retailer segment. Competing against Amazon online isn’t easy.
What makes Zappos different is that they don’t compete on price:
Zappos sells shoes and apparel online, but what distinguished us from our competitors was that we’d put our company culture above all else. We’d bet that by being good to our employees — for instance, by paying for 100 percent of health care premiums, spending heavily on personal development, and giving customer service reps more freedom than at a typical call center — we would be able to offer better service than our competitors. Better service would translate into lots of repeat customers, which would mean low marketing expenses, long-term profits, and fast growth. Amazingly, it all seemed to be working.
They compete by differentiating on service. And they’ve bet that by taking exceptionally good care of their employees, that that would translate into better customer service. By all accounts it was working quite well, but the board wasn’t supportive of “Tony’s social experiments”, but rather tolerated them as long as things went smoothly and the risks to the business weren’t too great.
I think it would be too easy for business owners and managers to conclude that Zappos, and by inference, Tony’s “social experiments”, failed because they sold to Amazon (albeit at an attractive price). I believe precisely the opposite is true – that they were able to command north of a $1B value precisely because of the culture they created – which made them both an interesting business for Amazon to acquire, and a separate culture which Amazon would find worth preserving (despite the normal tendency of acquirers to stamp their culture upon acquisitions instead).
At BP3, we also pay 100% of insurance premiums. We invest in our employees’ retirement plans (through matching – not just through paying the administrative fees) – more companies should be doing this. But we’re also looking to increase our investment in other team growth opportunities – including events like bpmCamp. We’ve invested here in there in other personal development opportunities but if I’m honest, we haven’t done enough yet.
As a professional services firm, we can relate to Tony’s thought process on culture. If you take care of the people who touch customers, you are, by inference, taking care of your customers as well. If you take the people who touch your customers for granted, you are borrowing trouble and relying on people to swim upstream to provide a positive experience for their customers. You’ll find it harder to retain the best talent, and you’ll find your competition acquiring the best talent.
Taking care of your team is job 1. My hat is off to Tony and the whole team at Zappos. We’ve been fans, and we’ve been happy customers, here’s hoping that Zappos continues the culture crusade into the future.
Adam Deane declares war against ECM in a humorous post titled “BPM and ECM – The War Begins”.
Despite the humorous tone of the post, it is still worth reading if you get down to some of the nuts and bolts at the end:
Case Management
[... ]
We will redefine case management to deal with individual instances of the process.
Well, this might be a reference to a post of ours about BPM and CM / ACM. But, to be clear, I am *not* “defining” CM (or ACM) in that post. I’m not defining BPM either. What I was attempting to do was explain philosophical differences in point of view – which is separate from the definition of something. For example: Snow is snow. But to a bird in flight and to a mammal on the ground, the implications of “snow” are totally different. And no, I’m not going to try to compare BPM and CM to birds and mammals explicitly! Just pointing out that perspective or philosophy can help explain differences in opinion about how to do something, or differences in opinion about the goals of doing the same thing the same way.
Food for thought.
Apple’s iPhone 4 continues a trend they clearly established with the iPod line, and are continuing with the iPhone line: yearly, substantial, incremental improvements in the device and platform.
We’ve previously commented on both the process and the efficiency of Apple’s approach. I found some of the commentary on the latest release pretty interesting, and likely it is just getting started, as most of us haven’t even held one of these devices yet, the closest we’ve come is that WWDC keynote…
Forrester’s Charles Golvin says “While the iPhone 4 isn’t the leap forward that Apple paints it as, it is an exceptionally beautiful device and is a substantial upgrade that will succeed in maintaining Apple’s mind and market share growth.” I expect we’ll see a lot of commentary that amounts to a big yawn (for example, who cares if it has a gyroscope instead of in addition to an accelerometer). I think this is largely because of the dribble of leaks mentioned below.
On the other hand, Oppenheimer’s coverage (Yair Reiner):
Despite the “dribble of leaks” before Monday’s keynote, he said, Apple’s latest iPhone “catapults the smartphone category forward along every axis of relevance to consumers: OS sophistication, speed, battery life, display resolution, video connectivity and camera quality. If products like the HTC Incredible demonstrate that Apple’s competitors have significantly improved their game, the iPhone 4 suggests the stronger competition has sparked an almost fierce level of innovation at Apple.”
The dribble of leaks lessened the impact of the release. But smartphone innovation is in its sweet spot right now, from my perspective. It reminds me of the pace of change in laptops in the 90′s – every 12 months you could get a new laptop that made your old laptop look obsolete. Smart phones are in a similar cycle. I’m not sure it will continue for more than a few years at this pace – but when it does, Apple has previously shown it knows how to diversify its product line while keeping it simple: color, storage, form factor. It has done this with the iPod lineup. I haven’t felt a need to upgrade my iPod for years – but for a few years I would have wanted a new one about every other year.
Apple is doing a good job of not just innovating (or catching up) on the device (display, CPU, cameras, etc), but also on the ecosystem. It is analogous to the same plays it made in the iPod line, though obviously the smart phone market and ecosystem is more complex than the iPod ecosystem. The key thing, however, is that Apple is busy making a steady stream of improvements that make their products a more and more attractive value proposition. And they’re raking in profits that will enable them to keep investing in R&D on those products that will be hard for competitors to match if they can’t produce similar profits.
Some would point out that other phones (Android in particular) will add more features than the iPhone, especially inbetween the iPhone product cycle releases each year. However, I’d remind the critics that in the MP3 player market, there was one feature that many of Apple’s competitors had, but which Apple never replicated – and Apple *still* has 70% of the market at a higher price point. What is it? FM stereo tuning. It turns out, the ecosystem is more important than FM.
Business Insider reports on wage increases at Foxconn:
WSJ reports that according to a company announcement, minimum wage workers may see a more than doubling of wages, while others will see at least a 30% hike — previously the company had indicated a 20% wage hike to deal with the problem, so this is already an expansion.
I’m curious if this is going to stick at Foxconn, and if it will affect wages in China generally. If so, I think it is generally a good thing for China, for the potential growth of the middle class there, etc. It may raise prices modestly here, but counter-balancing that it may also moderate downward wage pressures here as well. Or, perhaps it will create pressure to put manufacturing in other locations around the world. Time will tell.
Ok not really. But they are 7 Process Statements to watch out for. Great post from process2go. My favorite? “But we documented all of our processes last year”. Why do we like lists in blog posts? I don’t know but this one works for me.
Another favorite are the Six Barriers to BPM Adoption, a post from 2008 on this very blog.
Imagine my surprise to see a pretty reasonable comparison of BPM and Case Management, that doesn’t attempt to belittle either approach, nor pigeon-hole either approach, and yet captures an interesting distinction (from David Yockelson of IBM):
Business process management focuses on optimization of a process with a key goal to increase the volume of throughput or work completed for an individual process. Case management has a different “design goal” and focuses on optimization of outcomes for individual cases by providing an integrated set of information and services for the case worker. However, case management leverages BPM capabilities to address the different types of processes that could be called upon to drive case outcomes. These could involve complex structured processes, dynamically assembled sets of services, or ad hoc exchanges among those related to the case (including the customer).
I would have phrased it a bit differently – but if I can pull apart the previous definition a bit I think we can get at the key elements. If BPM is focused on optimizing the aggregate of many process instances, Case Management is focused on optimizing the outcome of an individual run of a process by providing better information and tools to the case worker. To take the medical example – case management would philosophically try to help improve the outcome for a single patient. BPM would philosophically try to improve the overall outcome of health care provided by the facility across all patients.
This seems like an interesting working model for how to think about the two approaches, but I’m curious to see what the ACM folks (besides David Yockelson of IBM) think of this definition.
Jason Snell of Macworld writes:
I don’t think the company needs to stop controlling what apps get in the App Store. All Apple needs to do is add a new feature, buried several menu items down in the Settings app, that mirrors the one found on Android devices: an option that lets you install Apps from “unknown sources.” If a user tried to turn this option on, they’d get a scary warning about how these sources couldn’t be trusted, and that they may lead to instability, crashes, loss of data, you name it. Scary stuff.
Most users will never find that setting. Many who do will be loath to turn it on. But by putting it there, Apple immediately shuts up every single claim that the iPhone isn’t open. (Just as iPhone OS 4’s multitasking feature is debatably not “true multitasking,” no doubt many tech insiders would immediately howl that allowing unapproved apps isn’t truly “open,” but I don’t think regular consumers would notice.)
This is why I am surprised that Apple hasn’t taken this step earlier: By keeping the App Store closed, and by using a rigorous approval process, most iPhone OS users would never, ever consider installing an unapproved third-party app. Even in a world where unapproved apps can get loaded on an iPhone, developers will desperately want to be in the App Store.
(And who knows? Perhaps Apple would even feel free to tighten the screws on App Store approvals even further in such a scenario, to make the contents of the store even more groomed and filtered.)
What a fascinating idea. I think another approach Apple could take is to have another storefront that only restricts based on API usage and malware type issues – basically, non-editorial stuff. So, the content may be objectionable, it may do awful things for your phone experience, but it isn’t a virus and it doesn’t violate basic TOS. Its a thought. Jason’s is easier to implement though, and keeps those apps at arms length.
(Thanks to Sandy Kemsley for this link.)
Ann All writes that companies are increasingly opting for automation over outsourcing:
Is process automation the new offshoring? I made that case several months back, noting that companies may increasingly opt for automation over outsourcing as a cost-saving measure.
I cited a New York Times interview with Infosys CEO S. Gopalakrishnan, who shared his belief that advanced automation eventually will eliminate many of the labor-intensive, back-office functions now being performed in India and other lower-cost countries, and my interview with The Hackett Group’s Erik Dorr who told me “the biggest competitor to globalization is automation.”
In my opinion, outsourcing (off-shoring) delayed the adoption of many automation technologies and projects. Quite simply: for a while, it looked cheaper to get less expensive labor, than to increase the productivity of the existing workforce through automation (or, more generally, cap-ex).
But, inevitably, as the cost of human capital around the world gradually averages upward – especially for skilled functions – and the cost of automation is, in many ways, declining – thanks to SaaS, BPM, SOA, etc. – attention is turning to automation.
Growing businesses focus on automation as a way to free their scarce, knowledgeable workers to focus on value-added activities. Mature businesses focus on automation as a way to reduce headcount or reduce the skills required to perform a specific function.
In the short-to-medium term, this is going to hurt employment. But in the long run, these advances will make each unit of labor more efficient, and at least offer the possibility of more hiring in the future. Past experience in the US has shown that while employment may decline in one area, new job markets open up as human capital (people) is freed up for mundane work to do more specialized work.
The bulk of the jobs HP is eliminating will likely come from operations it acquired from EDS in 2008, a purchase that made HP the world’s second-largest provider of commercial technology services, behind rival IBM. HP has already cut nearly 25,000 former EDS jobs. HP’s services division is now one of its biggest sources of revenue and profit, accounting for $8.7 billion in sales and $1.4 billion in operating profit in 2010′s first quarter.
Sadly for those involved, those 25,000 jobs are unlikely to come back. But the economy in similar situations, historically, provides other opportunities that mean the overall output of the economy grows faster than the number of people employed.
Unfortunately many people assume that BPM is all about workforce reductions. But BPM is just as much about planning for growth or peak loads, better customer service, regulatory compliance, visibility to operational data, elimination of errors and defects.
Much has been made, recently, of Apple’s “Walled Garden” – a term borrowed from AOL’s days of providing a restricted internet experience.
And many authors go on to describe Apple as being “un-web-like” or providing a walled garden – exactly analogous to the old AOL days.
Next week, Apple will make any number of announcements at its WWDC. I’m hoping the company will announce that it is tacking away from its walled garden approach with the iPad, but I’m not going to hold my breath. Apple makes gorgeous products, but ultimately, I think any product which rejects the web’s core value of connection will simply disappoint. But more likely than not, it’ll be a year or two before that becomes apparent.
Look, Batelle is far more qualified to write about Apple than I am. But I think the analogy is backward. When AOL was providing its walled garden, PC’s were the wild west – you could install any application you wanted on them, and there was very little accountability by the software providers, and very little ability for a consumer to verify authenticity or lack of viruses or spyware. But the Internet experience via AOL was “curated” or walled garden in nature. It was often explained as protecting people from the wild west of the Internet. As Batelle says, ultimately the model failed.
But Batelle claims that this was because of the link. I would contend it was because of the browser as well. The browser did “enough” to protect you from the perils of the Internet, eventually (let’s not review all the security issues in early browsers), as the browser was increasingly sand-boxed. Essentially, the consumer’s risk from browsing the web today is a lot less than it in the early days of browsing, and users have learned to be more careful about what they click on. In fact, in some ways, services like bit.ly have an opportunity to provide curated links that are somewhat guaranteed to not contain spyware or other harmful material.
So why is the analogy to AOL’s walled garden backward? Because Apple sells devices, it has the opportunity to provid an ecosystem where the web is wide open, but the applications are curated. To me, this is much more like a garden with a view. The applications are verified and safe: and for my productivity applications this is what I need. And the web is open to use as desired – and since I never know where a link will take me, this is also what I need. And the applications aren’t restricted to only Apple-developed apps – anyone can submit an application into a great distribution channel.
Many, including Batelle, claim this has been tried before and failed… but I’m not convinced it has been tried before (certainly not by AOL). There will be competition from even more harshly controlled ecosystems (feature phones), and from completely open ecosystems (Android). But the outcome isn’t a foregone conclusion yet, because it is a different game.
(I’ve also heard the argument that one cannot tinker on the iPhone or iPad… but the tinkerers can spend a whopping $99 for Apple’s development tools, and tinker all they want with custom software. It isn’t free, but it is hardly a king’s ransom.)
Parting thought: I wonder if Siri, a recent Apple acquisition, will be the foundation of interesting inter-application linking within the iPhone/iPad ecosystem. Batelle laments the lack of deep linking within applications in the iPhone ecosystem, but an API built around Siri’s approach, or the Mac’s “Services” registry, offers interesting open-ended alternatives, without forcing Apple to give up their curated app store.
Sandy Kemsley reviews Pega’s SmartBPM V6 in her Column 2 blog recently:
I had a remote product demo of SmartBPM prior to PegaWORLD, then a briefing from Kerim Akgonul at the conference. A lot of the changes to the product over the past year and a half have been focused on making it easier to use, trying to fight the perception that it’s a great product but that the inherent complexity makes it hard to use. In fact, the two main themes that I saw for this version are that it’s easy to use, and easy to share through design and runtime collaboration.
Once again, reference to themes of simplicity and ease of use. Sounds like some of the bigger players in the BPM space have awakened to common themes. The question is whether there will be real, substantive follow through on these themes from the same vendors.