Jim Sinur has thrown in the towel on BPMN in his latest post:

BPMN for business professionals is just not up to a business level of need. Some folks think that BPMN is good enough for IT and it should be good enough for business professionals. I think the former is true, but the latter is way off the mark.

BPMN really stands for “Business People May Not…understand”

IT professionals can’t really expect business folks to understand cryptic/standard formats when they really want to see a real representation of their processes with desirable icons; not engineering Icons. It’s kind of like someone saying “let them eat cake”. It is this IT arrogance that could sink BPM technologies.

Respectfully, I think Jim is letting the business off the hook.   No need to learn any new skills over there on the business side, just draw something on a napkin and hope it turns into a process.  Just make up any old iconography you want, no problem if no one other than you can understand it (you know, the value of standards is that more than one person or team can understand what is produced).  Don’t bother to learn something that is about 10% harder than standard flowcharting (Bruce Silver has helpfully identified a subset of BPMN that is more appropriate for new-to-BPMN business users).

At a time when we’re asking IT to learn new skills and to be more business oriented, is it too much to ask Business to learn new skills to support process improvement?  This isn’t unique to BPM – if the business is going to support ACM, they’re going to have to learn new tools for that as well.  If the full BPMN icon set is too much for someone, use the subset that you understand and like to document your ideas, and make use of annotation.  If someone shows you a diagram with more icons in it that you don’t follow, it should be straight forward to get an explanation or to look up the new notations you aren’t familiar with.  While Jim may not be a fan of standardization of notation – business folks are plenty used to standards of notation (not just in BPMN).  I use BPMN basic diagramming shapes to whiteboard processes for businesses all the time (literally on the whiteboard or in collaborative tools) – and they don’t have any trouble following what’s going on.

The problem isn’t that BPMN, as a notation, is too hard. It is that too many people think that BPM starts and stops with BPMN!  There is so much more to managing business processes, and improving them, than BPMN.  By way of comparison, think about search.  Search is a highly technical subject with a very rigorous syntax.  But nearly everyone can take advantage of its more simplistic forms – just typing in a few keywords into a Google search field.  It doesn’t mean that they can’t understand a more complex query string when they see it, nor guess at the meaning of a phrase surrounded by quotes… nor understand the resulting page of search results (the outcome). In fact, if they find their need for search becoming more complex, they can actually endeavor to learn the more advanced forms (domain filtering, exclusion, wildcards, etc).

So let’s all agree that there is much that must be done in the world of BPM to address businesses better, but tossing out BPMN and letting business off the hook is hardly the solution.  One need look no further than a tool like IBM’s BPM Blueprint to see that you can ease the business into BPMN style notation by first having them engage in process mapping or value stream mapping.  You don’t have to throw out BPMN to do this.  At the first company I worked for, we used to like to quote a line from a business book: “Genius of the ‘And’” – as in, why can’t I have both a simpler mapping notation, and a more detailed process execution notation that make sense together – instead of only one or the other?

It is time for everyone to step up to the plate in BPM, not just the software vendors.  BPMN is part of the answer, but only part.

The Problem

A good friend, John Reynolds, has eloquently commented on a subject near and dear to my heart: Leadership.  More specifically, Project Leadership vs. Project Management:

My job lets me work with talented programmers and business people all over the world.  These folks all know their jobs – the programmers know how to write good code and the business folks know how to run their business – but when you bring them together they often can’t get a project finished.

The objective of all projects is to deploy Business Solutions. Requirements grow up to be Plans, Plans grow up to be Projects, but many Projects just don’t grow up to be Solutions. Like the Energizer Bunny, these Projects just keep going and going and going… but they never get anywhere.

I blame a lack of leaders.

John has captured the essence of the problem.  The projects that become successful solutions have leadership.  And this is something we’ve written about quite a bit. BPM especially requires leadership because you’re asking different constituencies to play nice together, despite the fact that the changes wrought by BPM will have uneven benefits and consequences.  The leader can coerce, cajole, persuade, confront… and can bring the resources and willpower to the project to get it done.

Leaders: Born or Made?

I fear that leaders are born, not made (although training certainly helps improve them).  When a project is stalled, a hero can’t just “take charge” and get a project back on track.  Leaders aren’t leaders without followers.

There have been many variants of this debate with regard to athletes, entrepreneurs, CEOs, leaders.  I come down on the side of nurture more than nature.  I’ll not deny that we are each born inheriting our own gifts, bestowed by our parents.  But how we develop and hone those gifts and shore up weaknesses it what makes us the adults and professionals we grow to be.

A Solution?
How do we develop leaders?  We might first ask, how do we develop heroes?

Step 1: expose your high potential team members to people you consider to be heroes.  Let them work in the proximity of great contributors to learn what it means to be a great contributor.  Try to awaken in them an awareness of what it is that makes the hero admirable, and an awareness that they, too, could be a “hero”.  Work with them to leverage their strengths.  Let them learn by following the example set by your heroes. Give them opportunities to succeed AND fail.

If I can distinguish between a hero and a leader – a good hero “leads by example” – not by consciously thinking about leading, but by doing all the things that we would want others on the team to do.  They work hard, they are focused on what’s good for the team, the project, the company.  They care about their colleagues and will help them.

The first step in evolving a leader from a hero, is to create self-consciousness (let me explain).  We have to wake in the hero, that self-awareness that they can lead intentionally, rather than unconsciously.  The key difference is intention.  A leader intends to have the effect of leading others.  A hero may lead others but isn’t intending to do so, and may even be alarmed and uncomortable when it happens.  There is a fear of responsibility, fear of failure, fear of letting others down.  If you want to foster that leader, give them the opportunity to succeed and fail.  And invest in teaching what you expect from leaders, and what their team will expect.  It takes a fair bit of coaching or self-awareness, but people can learn to lead.  I’ve seen it happen, and I’ve seen it happen even within our own projects among the customers we work with.  Soon, someone walking the path to becoming a leader, acting with intention, will learn from the feedback loop of consequences.  They’re on the path.

This is important because, for BPM to continue to grow and succeed, we need a lot of leadership.

John has a few more important points to make:

What we need are Project Leads… People who command the respect of both the Business and Technical folks.  We need people who have met both Business and Technical challenges in their careers, and who can show all of us “how to get there”…

That’s why we lack leaders for our projects.  There simply aren’t many Business people in the world who are respected by Techies, and not many Techies in the world who are respected by Business people.

This is not by any means an easy problem to solve – but if we want success for more of our projects, we need to find more of these leaders.

This is why, at BP3, we have tended to focus on developing our technical heroes into leaders who care about business.  But we also try to make sure that they understand the value that business leadership brings to the table, so that we’re ready to embrace it when we find it within our team or within our customers’ and partners’ teams. I agree with John: not an easy problem to solve, but sometimes the ones that are worth solving aren’t easy.

So the new Forrester Wave is out.  What’s that? you hadn’t heard?  If not, you haven’t talked to anyone in the analyst or BPM vendor community in the last 24 hours!

As usual, there are a raft-load of vendors declaring victory:

Appian: “Appian Still Leading the Pack”

Pega:  “Pegasystems ranked #1 as one of two BPM vendors that ‘lead the pack with the best overall combination of modeling, design and development features for business and technical roles driving process improvement’ “  (bonus, their article includes the image of the Wave graphic itself)

Metastorm: “Metastorm Recognized as a Leader in Business Process Management Suites Report…”

IBM has several congratulatory tweets about being in the leader quadrant, but I haven’t seen a press release yet.

Judging by the wave, I should be able to add links to Progress and Software AG press releases or blog posts by this time tomorrow.

Every one of these vendors will crow that the analysts have confirmed that they’re as smart as they thought they were – that they’re leaders (or even, “number 1″).

So, I’ll let you in on a little secret.  The Wave won’t tell you which BPMS makes the most sense for you.  Some of these offerings are actually so different that they rarely, if ever, compete for the same customer projects, and often corporations own more than one product because they aren’t viewed as doing the same thing.  For example, Appian’s strength in SaaS means that will compete more often for SaaS deployments – the decision “to SaaS or not to SaaS” was probably made before any vendors were called.   Metastorm’s strength in EA may play well with customers who are doing a lot of modeling, but for projects that are more focused on implementation, or who already own other EA tools, that offering won’t be as compelling as something more targeted at executing processes.  Even Pega (apparently depicted as #1 on the Wave), isn’t as often in competition for general-purpose BPM platform purchases – they tend to be in the finals for more vertical processes, where their investment in specific templates or verticals or applications can really pay off.  A friend once described Pega as more a company that sells rules- and BPM- enabled applications, rather than BPM itself (it wasn’t a criticism, my friend thought it was good strategy for the company).

Of course the meat of these things is in the written words inside the report, but it is hard to get there when there is that tasty graphic that everyone can look at.  I wonder what would happen if Forrester withheld the scoring and the graphic for a couple of weeks, and just revealed the more in-depth analysis.  Another interesting data point would be the number of times (that Forrester can determine) any two vendors were finalists in the same evaluation – which would allow for a 2×2 grid/heatmap that shows you who is competing with whom.  I was happy to see Forrester give up on separating BPM into various different flavors of BPM – that approach never really worked for me, personally.

So everyone is happy now.  But in the morning, we’ll humbly get back to work and get some processes built and deployed, and improve some processes.  Which is, after all, the whole point of BPM.

Update: as expected, a few announcements today:

Software AG announces their leadership status here.

And Progress’ blog entry can be found here.

Austin Startup has just run a piece on the 2nd Annual Capital Factory Demo Day:

The 2nd Capital Factory Demo Day is coming on September 8th. We will have 300 investors, press, and technology entrepreneurs in attendance to watch the launch of the 5 companies from our 2010 program. This is an invitation-only event, and we’re keeping the quality of the content and the networking as high as possible.

I went last year, and I found it interesting to witness, essentially, part of a process for bringing new companies to market.  The event was surprisingly good, the startups were surprisingly good, and the discussions were pretty interesting.  It sets a high bar for the second event.  I think there’s no doubt that Capital Factory and the Demo Day event have been good for the Austin startup scene, though the organizers will be the first to admit that this approach isn’t for every startup, or every entrepreneur.

I plan to be there again this year, schedule willing.

Ann All poses the question: “Is CIO the Right Person to Champion Process Improvement?” on the ITBusinessEdge Blog:

I’ve written about this idea several times. It’s hard to argue against the need for a chief process officer. Yetmany organizations do not designate a specific function for process improvement. What’s less clear is who is best positioned to fill this role. Vizard writes it “may be the chief operating officer or even the CIO.”

I think a good case can be made for the CIO. Because IT touches the entire business, the CIO has a high-level, cross-functional view of the organization shared by few other executives. IT also tends to have more hands-on experience modeling and mapping processes than other areas of the business. CIOs clearly recognize the need for process improvement. They named business process improvement their top priority for 2010 in Gartner’s annual survey.

Honestly, I’ll take anyone at the C-level or just below who is passionate about process improvement and empowered to make a difference.  Having *someone* take the lead is better than no one at all.  And in some organizations, which are heavy on IT to support the business, the CIO may be particularly well positioned (as his or her staff may know many of the business processes as well or better than the business folks who use the software, because the processes are already “encoded” in legacy systems).

However, Ann goes further in her post:

Samir Gulati, vice president of marketing for business process management software provider Appian, is another believer that a CIO or other senior IT executive is the right person to champion BPM throughout an organization. Business leaders tend to focus narrowly on the needs of their own divisions and opt for point solutions, he said when I interviewed him recently.

A lot of software companies prefer for BPM to be led by IT.  Why? Because when it is led by IT they can go for the strategic sale:  buy this software and you can apply it to all of your processes that come up!  Many IT organizations look at this a bit like setting up a utility:  we’re providing “electricity” (BPM), so that the business can turn on the lights, computers, etc (improve process). Its a comfortable relationship for software folks to build with IT organizations.  Speeds and Feeds, features, bells and whistles.  Comfortably avoiding too much discussion of business-oriented ROI.  Proving that the current topic is an emerging meme, Mark McDonald of Forrester has written about this subject as well, advocated for an expanded role for the CIO:

Well because no other executive is responsible for the long term operating model and no other executive has the resources that determine company productivity in the long run.  IT is now a significant source of leverage across the enterprise as information spans operational groups and fuels processes, communications connects people and processes and technology offers new service channels and methods. and throng time.

But this doesn’t mean that the CIO is the ideal candidate in most organizations to lead process improvements.  First of all, the most important criteria are not which three letters make up the title.  The most important criteria are specific to the person:  passion, empowerment, and capability.  Put another way, the most important criteria is leadership, and these three elements tie into the ability to lead an organizational change.

I believe a broader study of BPM would support the empirical data that we have at BP3 that organizations that lead BPM initiatives from the business generally yield higher ROI, tackle more processes, and roll them out more quickly.  Perhaps the secret sauce is that the projects are initiated out of such a close relationship to a business need, combined with accountability to that same business organization.

Having said that, we will take leadership on process over none at all any day.  And if the right person happens to be the CIO, COO, CMO, President, CEO, VP of Sales – it matters not as long as they have the passion, empowerment, and capability.

Update: Even before publishing this, Ann has added to her own thoughts on her original piece:

Of course not just any CIO can lead a BPM effort. It would have to be a CIO who is well-versed in the overall business, not one suffering from technology tunnel vision. In addition, he or she will need great communications and change management skills, since introducing BPM requires folks to make fundamental changes to the ways they work. A CIO without those skills shouldn’t be the go-to person on BPM. But guess what? A CFO or COO lacking those skills probably won’t fare any better.

Like most questions, I think there might be no one right answer to who should lead a BPM effort. lt will vary from organization to organization, depending on the skill sets of their executives.

This sounds much more in alignment with our own thinking at BP3.

bpmCamp is back, and it is coming to Austin, Texas!  We’re very proud to announce that we’re holding the second bpmCamp here in Austin.  Time is short – only 52 days until the event starts!  It is an aggressive time frame but with urgency comes creativity.  Following is the F.A.Q. with all the most important questions addressed.

F.A.Q.

Why bpmCamp?

We really think the BPM community/ecosystem needs events like this to foster growth, success, and maturity.  We believe maturity requires:

• technical breadth and depth
• project methodologies to support the roll-out of processes and improvements to those processes
• process improvement techniques and strategies that can actually be implemented and maintained in BPM suites

Also, we actually want to learn something new.  When we get the right  practitioners in a room, we’re going to learn from them, and help propagate those best practices into the BPM ecosystem.  We’re also going to share what we know from prior experience directly with the conference.  This cross-pollination is good for everyone.

Finally, we decided to put action behind our words.  We’ve long agitated politely for more tactical, focused topics at BPM conferences, but we’ve reached the point where it is time for us to contribute back to the community by creating an intimate event that fosters that kind of discussion.

When is bpmCamp?

We’ve selected a date for the Austin bpmCamp:  October 14-15, 2010. Mark your calendars.

We hope to host additional bpmCamp events in the future.  The first was at Stanford. This one, in Austin, should be special because of its proximity to ground zero of the Lombardi ecosystem (Lombardi’s headquarters was Austin, and IBM has a very large operation in Austin, including the Lombardi team).  It is also the headquarters of BP3.

If you have any questions in the meantime, contact us at:
bpmCamp at  bp-3.com

How Much Does it Cost to Attend?

bpmCamp Austin does not benefit from the free space that Stanford provided to the inaugural event.  Still, we’ve managed to find an affordable venue with great food, and therefore the impact on event costs was reasonable.  We’re charging $150 to attend the two-day conference (early-bird) from now until September 17, 2010.  Regular pricing will be $200 -  and the last day to register is October 7, 2010.

How Do I Register for bpmCamp?

Please go to:  http://bpmcampaustin.eventbrite.com/ to register! ( Early Bird Rates apply until January 1, 2010).

Where is bpmCamp Austin? Who is hosting?

Having the right host for any activity is a plus.  And having the right setting can really frame an event and set a backdrop for a good collaborative and rejuvenating experience.  BP3 will be the hosts for the event.  We’ve been working with BPM and Lombardi’s products for more than 7 years, and we’re looking forward to hosting the kind of informal conferences we always wanted to attend, right here in our home town.

We’re having our bpmCamp 2010 @ Austin event at III Forks Austin – one of Austin’s finest restaurants, but also a space that has a great historical Austin vibe to it, even while housed inside one of the more modern “Austin Architecture” buildings in town.   Importantly there is a lot of informal gathering space available, as well as a main room and at least two break-out rooms. III forks has been great collaborating menu options and space with us.  We’ll be a stone’s throw from Town Lake (aka Lake Lady Bird), right across the street from City Hall, and within walking distance of many restaurants and other venues.  Austin itself is home to Lombardi, and the base of operations for Lombardi as a part of the larger IBM campus here.

Travel Logistics

Please refer back to this page for travel logistics.

Where is the Landing Page?

UPDATED:  www.bpmCamp.org

Who’s Invited to bpmCamp?

The goal is to have a high-quality gathering of people who know the products well and are looking to collaborate and exchange ideas with peers and colleagues.  We’re inviting customer / users of Lombardi products (Teamworks/Lombardi Edition and Blueprint) who participate in deployments to attend, and we’re extending an invitation to IBM/Lombardi to participate as well.  If you’re a Lombardi or bp3 partner interested in attending/sponsoring the unconference / bpmCamp, please reach out to us at the email address below (there are limited sponsorship slots).  If you’re an analyst or blogger and you think bpmCamp would benefit from your attendance, contact us.  If you don’t fit any of the above descriptions but still want to attend, drop us a line with your thoughts.  All attendees will need to register, once the registration site goes live.  If you’re interested in receiving an invitation to register, send us email at the bpmCamp email address.

How do I Contact the Organizers?

The best way is via the bpmCamp email address:

bpmcamp at  bp-3.com

I want to Sponsor bpmCamp – how can I help?

If you think your organization would be interested in being a sponsor for bpmCamp, please contact us at the above email address and let us know you’re interested.  Please respect that we are keeping sponsorships limited to prevent over-commercializing and to make sure the sponsorship is worth something.

What will bpmCamp Cover?

We will beat the drum for topics and themes that we think will resonate.  However, we want this conference to cover topics that YOU care about.  In particular, we want to crowd-source topics for the event so that we can make sure we cover topics that attendees really care about.  The expectation is that the setting will be ripe for interaction among attendees during the sessions – that very few of the sessions will be presentation form rather than a loosely-moderated-discussion format.  However, we think it likely that attendees will be interested in a keynote address or two with Q&A to follow.  What kinds of things are fair game, you may be asking?  How about:

• Building Teamworks Coaches with YUI or GWT?
• Actual use of Optimizer in the wild?
• How to make Teamworks scale Really Big?
• Design reviews of actual Teamworks Processes?
• Making my Waterfall organization more Agile/Iterative?
• Tools for managing BPM projects (something better than MS Project??)
• Incorporating A/B testing into my process
• How much requirements gathering is too much?

We’ll have room for breakout sessions to accommodate more than one interest at a time.

Go HERE to add your ideas to the Agenda Wiki.

Who is Coming?

We’ll release information about attendees and speakers as we get closer to the event date.  Expect the bp3 team to be there!

Why focus on a single vendor? Why not another BPM product? Is this a Lombardi- or IBM-sponsored Event?

In short, we want the specificity and detail that we can get from a single-vendor conference, but the independence of a crowdsourced event.  bpmCamp isn’t sponsored nor endorsed by Lombardi.   We chose Lombardi Edition and BPM Blueprint because it is the BPM suite, and community, that we have the most extensive contacts with (and because we had already decided that a single-vendor conference could be interesting).

While we’ve worked with other tools and vendors, our network is not as deep in those communities.  If you work with another software vendor or geographic location and you’d like our help to run a similar event with you, get in touch with us, perhaps we can help.

The merger of two airlines has been used as an example of something BPM is not well-suited for, that ACM would be well-suited for.  I gave this argument a bit too literal a reading, based on Keith Swenson’s response (thought exercise vs. demonstration).  But having worked on quite a few BPM projects that were born of mergers (not the act of deciding to merge, but the after-affect of the merger), I found this article on the Wells Fargo and Wachovia merger to be just the kind of external, public information I was looking for to better explain my own views about how mergers happen – and the fact that there really is method (dare I say, process) to the madness.  When you are a big financial institution, or a big tech company (e.g. Cisco), you don’t do just one or two acquisitions in your history.  You might do one or two acquisitions a quarter.  Not all of them will be as big as Wachovia of course… These institutions are constantly reinventing themselves through acquisitions and spin-offs and joint ventures. Any time you do something so valuable, so often, you’ll want to understand it as a business process.

So how do you handle something massive like Trust conversions from Wachovia to Wells Fargo?

This year, Wells Fargo and Wachovia completed one of the biggest trust conversions ever; 81,000 trust accounts and $150 billion in assets were transferred to a common platform. Wells Fargo is now one of the largest U.S. trust providers in the U.S. with 233,000 accounts and $1.3 trillion in assets.

There was a big analysis effort to understand the processes operating at both firms, and to pick and choose best practices from both. After that they modeled these processes, simulated some of them, and implemented.  Some interesting ancillary benefits:

Another benefit is that the use of business process modeling helps the business and IT people communicate with each other. Instead of exchanging Word documents about requirements and technical specifications, where each side typically had trouble understanding the other, they’ve transitioned to graphical process models where both parties can look at the diagrammed process flow and exceptions. Watkins says this has saved thousands of hours of time in writing requirements documents and interpretation time for the technology developer.

So… is BPM low hanging fruit or was it hard work?  Sounds like it was hard, but valuable, work.  Is Wells Fargo really committed to BPM?

“Processes are pervasive whether you’re facing your customer or in the back office, and there’s been a recognition over the last couple of years among business leadership and IT that we should start focusing on more opportunities around process improvement, where we can leverage BPM technology we already own,” he says. “We’ve trained more than 400 people on BPM technology and technical standards like BPMN (business process modeling notation) as a common language for communicating process improvement,” he says.

Well, what do you think?

We now have our venue chosen for bpmCamp 2010 @ Austin, October 14-15, 2010.  We’ll be at III Forks Austin, right in the heart of downtown, next to City Hall and the Lake.  III Forks is one of Austin’s best steakhouses, but it also has a great interior space for meetings of our size, and they have agreed to open their doors during the day (when they are normally closed for business), to host bpmCamp!

I want to thank III Forks Austin for allowing us to u

se their space.  We’re looking forward to some fantastic food and snacks during the day.  Moreover, thanks to Red Velvet Events for helping connect us with III Forks along with other finalist locations.

We’ll have more announcements on this space, regarding bpmCamp, as we get the wiki, mailing list, and other travel logistics sorted out.  Please let us know if you have any questions – either in the comments here, or on our various email addresses.

Matt Harding of Aurora Energy just posted this on the SAP community blog:

Within business process modelling (from a detailed requirements and process design perspective), I believe the best option for business users is to use BPMN.  But the question is: Are we just waiting for the iPhone of Business Process Modelling to come along.

I think Matt has a point – BPMN isn’t the best for requirements elicitation – it is the best for firming up an agreement between “Business” and “IT” as to what the process execution looks like.  When we’re in the discovery/elicitation/collaboration efforts, we find it more useful to use simpler mapping approaches:

1. value stream mapping
2. outlines
3. process mapping a la Six Sigma (inputs, measurable outputs, of a linear view of the process)
4. mind mapping tools for doing associations or nested structures

Right now some of the best tools for doing this – besides white boards – are tools like IBM’s Blueprint, which doesn’t force you into a BPMN notion of things.  It has separate views of process mapping and process modeling – and my main critique of the modeling section is that it needs to be more exact, whereas what I love about the process mapping side is precisely that it doesn’t require being exact.  Another useful tool for brainstorming topics related to BPM: MindMeister.   It let’s you brainstorm ancillary ideas to the process: how business objectives and values drive the objectives for the project.  There are other tools that are useful for brainstorming project plans, etc.

Keith Swenson has announced a case management mentor meeting (or ACM Mentor Camp) following the BPM 2010 conference, at the same venue:

The “Adaptive Case Management Mentor Camp” has just been announced.  This will be a meeting of minds for people interested in learning effective techniques for using case management for knowledge work.  It is right after the BPM 2010 conference, at the same venue, symbolically representing ACM as the next thing after BPM.

I think it is a great idea to put something like this together – these informal gatherings are often more valuable than more formal conferences – the only danger is conference burn-out!  At BP3, we’re looking forward to bpmCamp in Austin.   Sadly, I can’t make BPM 2010 this year unless my schedule changes, and therefore I also can’t attend the ‘camp.  Its a great gathering of people, definitely recommend attending to anyone who can make it.  Keith argues that the symbolism is that ACM is the “next thing after BPM” – but I’d argue it also supports my point of view – the same vendors, practitioners, and customers are going to be interested in BPM and ACM…  Keith and I just draw different conclusions about what that means for what will be defined as the “BPM” market.

IBM has put out the latest BPM Blueprint update today.  It isn’t the most exciting update they’ve ever made to Blueprint, but of course I’d rather see incremental and frequent updates than one big overhaul for a service like this.  The August release seems to focus on adding avatars (aka pictures), and has a security model tweak, and a much-needed update to the Word export.

I’m still looking for more support for expert features (not necessarily their target audience yet, but I think the time has come to include more expert functionality in a tool that also appeals to more general collaboration).  Part of the reason I think this support is needed is so that users can import or export BPMN2 XML.  Not that the users will care that it is XML, but this is the modeling format that they’re going to expect BPM tooling to support.

According to the Kansas City Business Journal, 40% of US Professionals want to quit.  Wow.

But lets turn out attention to why so many professionals want to quit: their employers view them as a liability rather than an asset (read the article, it is there, between the lines). And with all the layoffs over the last 18 months, there’s more work spread across fewer employees.  In an environment of more work and stress, and fewer bonuses and benefits, we can understand why people might want to quit.  I’ve heard people say that someone should feel lucky to have a job- but equally, the employer should feel lucky to have their employees stick with them through hard times. It is, after all, your best employees who can still leave when the economy is down, and find a new job.

In another post, I tried to explain the dark side of the staffing service “body shops” out there: BPM experts are not a commodity, despite their best efforts to treat us so.  The big staffing firms I previously wrote about are also not committed to their people in any meaningful way.  When a project kicks off, the firm staffs up via hiring and contracting. But what happens when the project is over?  At these big firms, they just let go of all the people that can’t immediately place on another project.  People aren’t an asset to these firms, they’re a liability:  An obligation to pay salary and benefits. This is especially true of firms based outside the US who  leveraging local resources on a temporary basis (the locals are staffed up and down for each project independently in many cases).

We recently reached out to colleagues from a previous project – and we weren’t going to be surprised if they weren’t still working with the same customer.  But you could say that we were surprised they didn’t work for the big consulting company any more.  You might be thinking, sure, some low-level programmers got let go when the project finished. But no.  We’re talking about the people who were entrusted with running the project and managing the customer relationship.  Rather than leveraging their talents in another project, they were shown the door.

It must, at times, be hard for people who work at Fortune 500 companies, with a wealth of people walking their halls that have worked more than 10 years at the firm to understand the amount of turnover that happens at a typical big consulting body shop.  Or to understand how these firms put their teams together on short notice, and disband them equally quickly.

As a small firm, we sometimes have to hire talent to meet the demands of a project, but we’re hiring talent to reach a new plateau, and we’re taking on a commitment to continue their employment beyond just the project (otherwise, we’d just offer a contract).  We just celebrated a colleague’s one-year anniversary at BP3, and he’s about to embark on his 4th project with us.   And it isn’t a burden to pay salary to these employees. They’re our only real asset as a firm – their knowledge, experience, and commitment to our customers.

I hope in this time of economic turbulence, more employers will realize how much their people mean to their success.  And I hope we never forget that at BP3.

Max J Pucher has written recently that BPM is, essentially, common sense management that could be gleaned from dozens of management books:

In these times I would call BPM common sense management. It is no longer new or a mystery! We are rather going backwards with BPM to Tayloristic management concepts. Is there really anyone left in a management position in larger than SMBs who does NOT KNOW what the idea behind process management is? If yes, he/she shouldn’t be there. And once someone understands the acronym does he really need more than a day to understand what the idea is and how to implement it as a management approach? There are numerous books that will tell you how to do it.

Respectfully, Max is both right and wrong.  Yes, BPM is “common sense management” – but, you can read about the Himalayas and look at pictures all you want – it will not prepare you for BEING THERE.  You can read about playing tennis all you want, but playing it well requires practice, practice, practice… and… coaching.  You need a good coach to become a good player.

The point is, many things can be read about and understood in principle.  You can understand the what.  You might understand the how.  Or the when.  But the magic happens when you know what to do, you know *how* to decide what to do, and how to do it.  And you know when the time is right to do it – and you know why.  Business requires not just common sense but practice, and a good feedback loop as well.

Having said all that – the rest of his blog post is quite an interesting read, as usual.

The Process Cafe posits that Humans are your Process’ Greatest Failure Point:

Humans are your most crucial failure point in a process. When ever you are designing processes (or systems to support processes) you should ensure you try and minimise the ability of the human to cause a failure. Google Mail now, for example, can scan your email and look for the words such as ‘attached’ which might indicate that an attachment is expected. If you send the mail without an attachment it will warn you. But how many other email systems have that functionality?

Of course, it is process-improvement 101 that anywhere a human touches a process you expect to find various failure modes there.  Even the process of finding process failures can be error prone because it is performed by humans.  Often these failures are couched as “measurement error” (a  euphemism for human error or variation in that case).

But I prefer to take a more positive view of the human condition.  The humans in your process are your greatest opportunity for improving your business:

• By personalizing service for your customers
• By creating a personal relationship with your customers
• By leveraging their experience to make difficult decisions that can’t be trusted to algorithms alone
• By identifying opportunities to make their own work more effective, as well as that of those they work with (improving the process)
• By identifying new sales opportunities via direct communication with customers

And the list goes on and on.  Your humans are the critical element in your processes.  They’re your differentiating advantage.  So by all means, give them all the automated assistance you can.  Tee up all the information they need.  Double check their work and make sure it appears to be consistent in action and word.  But this is, to me, a bit like applying 5s to office work.   Sure, the knowledge worker doesn’t have to have their desk identical to their neighbors’.  Because they’ll have the same desk tomorrow.  But we can “clean up” the spaces around their process interaction, so that they’re more consistent, more useful, and more pleasant to work with.

I think BPM and process improvement proponents need to take a more positive view of human involvement in their processes.  It isn’t all about raw efficiency or cold accuracy.  Borrowing from a recent “Process Ninja” post:

So when thinking about automating processes, think about the number of moments of truth that are occurring in the process, and look to eliminate or improve them. Process is not just about time and cost, it is fundamentally about the customer experience.

True words…

Great post by R “Ray” Wang on Enterprise Irregulars about building a “Star Analyst” Firm.  While it is targeted at star analyst firms, most of the points apply well to any services firm that intends to trade on the idea of being “stars” in their requisite space. Tenet #1:

Almost everyone I spoke with began by saying, “Start with star talent.  Don’t make compromises on B-players.”  Then they added, “Most will fail to keep this up over time because the firm gets greedy and focused on leverage instead of client quality.  Keep in mind, if you lack stars, you won’t attract stars.  Set high standards for recruitment.”  The experts are right.  Buyers, sellers, and the media have to recognize your team as market leaders.

I couldn’t agree more.  It is exactly why, when we started BP3, that we started by thinking about who we wanted to talk to and build our team with.  It is also why we focus on what Ray refers to as “Star” potential.  Lombardi used to refer to these people as “heroes” – the people who could do it all: technology, process improvement, coaching, and thought leadership.  There was also a note about alumni.  I agree with Ray that it is important to recognize that people will leave over time – and to keep in touch with that alumni network.  By taking an active role in two previous employers’ alumni efforts, our business at BP3 has benefited directly and indirectly.  Of course, that wasn’t the goal, but it was one of the side-effects.

A few weeks ago I had a call with Intalio’s Ishmael Ghalimi.  It was right before vacation, and the unfortunate side-effect is that I’m only now catching up with writing the post I meant to write when I got off the phone with him.

For the last couple of years, many of us in the BPM world have wondered what exactly Ishmael and his crew at Intalio were up to.  They made a series of acquisitions and investments, the purpose of which wasn’t quite clear to much of the BPM community, because it included a CRM solution and a focus on cloud computing.  But when we finished talking, it was clear to me that Ishmael has simply made a different bet than most of the rest of the BPM community.  While the mainstream of BPM innovation has been focused on BPMN2, modeling and collaborating in the cloud, and tweaks to the method and thought process like ACM… Intalio has gone a contrarian route-  retooling and refocusing on BPM in the cloud – but not by dabbling, by jumping with both feet, so to speak.  This is the long game rather than the dink-and-dunk short game.

It is a bold move, and Ishmael makes the argument that if you really want to play with the big boys, you need to make the investments that Intalio has made in a vertically integrated stack for cloud computing.  Rather than writing all the code from scratch, of course, Intalio is relying on a bevy of open source software.  A quick look at this page reveals just how many open source projects are involved in Intalio’s offering (and that’s just on the application engines side).

A heavy focus on open source software might cause you to wonder how Intalio makes money.  Intalio contributes to some of these projects, and just leverages some others.  the distinction that Ishmael made is that while the open source project for, say, the process engine (Apache ODE and Drools Flow), is free and open source… The entire integrated solution that Intalio is offering is commercial.  You are, essentially, buying a professionally prepared 10 course meal, instead of just getting all of the ingredients for free, so to speak. As Ishmael points out, customers do not mind paying for commercial software today that includes open source parts (nearly all of the commercial BPMS offerings today include at least some significant open source project code).

Ishmael went into great detail about the investment required to make Intalio’s PAAS offering virtualization- ready – the upfront investment to natively leverage SpringSource and the like is significant. But once there, it is much easier to scale application deployments.

We walked through a pretty compelling demonstration of the authoring tooling – which was browser-based, and he scored bonus points with me by running the whole stack on a Mac (attention commercial BPM vendors: your users and developers want Mac, iPad, and iPhone support).  The ability to model data, leverage it in user interface and process diagrams, and deploy it quickly, is compelling.  It doesn’t *feel* like a BPM tool, it feels like an IDE for building apps in the cloud.  Perhaps that is the intent.  To make BPM a feature of the environment, so to speak, rather than the centerpiece of the environment.

I asked Ishmael, given that this seems like both a horizontal and global strategy and a great number of component projects that make up their product offering, how does Intalio decide what NOT to do?  We had discussed why he had made the investments he’d made, but how do they decide what not to do?  Ishmael’s take is that they are throwing the long ball – seeing themselves as a much smaller version of a Microsoft of the 90′s, where:

• The operating system is the cloud instead of Windows
• The “development studio” is Intalio Studio instead of Visual Studio
• The productivity suite is Intalio Docs instead of or in addition to Microsoft Office

Another analogy he gave is RedHat – providing the glue to pull together open source projects into coherent commercial offerings.  There are many execution challenges, but if you pull it off and execute, you’re in very good shape because most competition is either too small to deliver, or too big to abandon their existing commercial software business (or not nimble enough). His example of too large:  he argues it would be very hard for IBM to come to market with an integrated product that is also virtualized for the cloud, because there are different P&Ls within IBM’s software group, who aren’t going to work together on one seamless offering. Others might argue these points differently, but given Ishmael’s thinking, the strategy he’s pursuing makes sense in that context.

The pricing model is free up to 5 users, and then scales up in price as you expand the solution.  This makes it easy to prototype solutions, and scale cost relative to the benefit achieved.

In some respects, what Ishmael and Intalio are trying to do is offer a compelling software stack for process applications in the cloud, but also removing many of the barriers to entry companies would normally face.  One could argue that they are trying to make BPM in the cloud simple enough that mere mortals can attempt it.  And Ishmael claims it isn’t just a superficial attempt to band-aide these projects together – that they’ve thought and worked hard on every level of the stack – from hardware, to virtualization, to Infiniband networking, to the more obvious software layers that developers interact with.  The conversation with Ishmael about these topics reminded me of my conversations with Phil Gilbert of Lombardi about making versioning relevant to BPM authoring (that it isn’t enough just to check things into subversion, that real versioning requires a much deeper understanding of process authoring).  Versioning was Lombardi’s long pass in the last couple of years leading up to the acquisition by IBM. And the point of this kind of deep investment in both cases is to create simplicity out of complexity – to provide truly useful abstractions to the customers of your software.

Three is risk that Ishmael and Intalio may have made this investment “too early”.  I recall in the 90′s a firm that made a bet on server-side Java runtime environments a bit too early – betting on JRun, which was a pretty immature platform.  A year later, when the product suite was ready, the whole thing could have been accomplished in 3 months on top of newer commercial application servers (e.g. Weblogic).

Time will tell if Ishmael’s long pass pays off – he’s either stolen a march on the competition, by getting “fully cloud-enabled” early, or he’s made the march too early and paid too heavy a price to get there.  If he’s too early, we’ll know because other “mainstream” BPM vendors will quickly follow with fully cloud-ready BPM stacks.  If he’s stolen a march, then Intalio will use its technical advantages (perceived and real) to drive more business at the expense of others.

Mike Gammage posts the question:  is BPM ethical?

Against this background, the hard reality is that the business case for any significant BPM project is almost invariably based on job losses.

The jobs may be lost through automation, or through productivity increases.  The BPM project will typically enable the same work to be done by fewer people.  More positively, the BPM project may enable the same people to do more work – that is, there are no jobs lost immediately.  But, even so, the societal effect is not dissimilar because economic growth will now create fewer jobs.

Put crudely, and for the sake of this argument, BPM seems to be a job-killer.

Now I believe, as will many of you, that work is about far more than simply generating wealth and meeting basic needs. Work provides each of us with a role in the community, it enables us to develop our talents in service to others, and to contribute to the advancement of society.

So it’s a serious question that deserves attention: Is BPM – my work– ethical?

I commend Mike for undertaking a post on this subject.  I have a few thoughts for him to consider when he returns:

1: Competition is the Job Killer.

The first thing to realize, is that BPM isn’t the job killer.  The job killer is the competition for your customers. If you can’t win that competition for customers, you will have a massive dislocation of jobs.  That competition is faceless and unrelenting, unfortunately.  You don’t get to look into the whites of your competition’s eyes and try to agree on a reasonable pricing model – if you do in the US, it is called collusion or anti-competitive behavior (there are similar rules in other locales).

So you have to invest in improving the cost structure and performance of your business, in order to remain competitive.  BPM is a tool to do that.  Just like Microsoft Word and computers put a generation of typists/secretaries out of work, BPM and other software will put a generation of manual paper-movers out of work (or copier repairmen perhaps?).

2. BPM can Save the Jobs of the People you know

A Good BPM implementation can save the jobs of the best people in your company.  By making each unit of work more valuable, it is easier to justify paying them, even increasing their pay.  You’re increasing their economic value add to the system.

Moreover, if the people doing the work become the people improving the work, they can really maximize their positive effect on the business. It also frees up labor to focus on other value-adding areas of the economy (though, I’ll grant, that is an easier macro- than micro- argument – individually not everyone can make the shift, and not everyone has the savings to bridge the gap – which is why I’m a big fan of unemployment benefits and insurance).

Finally, if you can sell the value of these process improvements to your customers, you can actually use process improvement as a way to increase your top line, not just your bottom line.

3. Manage for More than one Bottom Line

BPM and the like can help you achieve more than just cost savings – BPM can help you more reliably achieve any outcome you set out to achieve – higher customer sat, a higher net promoter score (NPS), reducing impact on the environment, increasing customer lifetime value, etc. This is sometimes called the “Double Bottom Line” or “Triple Bottom Line”.  But realizing that your business is about more than just money, why shouldn’t you use process improvement to increase your odds of hitting ALL your business goals rather than just some of them?

Although BPM causes us to examine what we do, and second-guess the positive outcome, I believe overall it is not only ethical but necessary.

We’ve set our dates for bpmCamp 2010 @ Austin:  October 14-15, 2010.

Watch this space for additional announcements about bpmCamp 2010 @ Austin.

The Death of Google Wave is interesting.  We’ve written about Wave before, several times, but in particular when SAP put out its “Gravity” demonstration.

The official Google Blog blames the closure of Wave on a lack of user adoption:

But despite these wins, and numerous loyal fans, Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked. We don’t plan to continue developing Wave as a standalone product, but we will maintain the site at least through the end of the year and extend the technology for use in other Google projects. The central parts of the code, as well as the protocols that have driven many of Wave’s innovations, like drag-and-drop and character-by-character live typing, are already available as open source, so customers and partners can continue the innovation we began. In addition, we will work on tools so that users can easily “liberate” their content from Wave.

So, there’s a bunch of open source code, it looks like, that partners and customers might leverage.  But most of us, I think, would prefer to just use a finished product.  There are many other unofficial takes, here and here are two examples.  I had a few others linked, but no need – you can find such commentary easily!

When Wave was announced last year, I spent some time discussing with others what it meant for BPM.  Some thought it was a game-changer, some thought it was a non-event.  The thing that became clear to me: collaboration tools like this are going to tend toward being free, or extremely inexpensive.

Starting last fall, the discussion in BPM circles had often turned to “ACM” (A variant on Case Management).  Some in BPM circles would call this unstructured process. Some would call it “chaotic” or unpredictable processes/work.  Keith Swenson and colleagues even penned a book about managing such unpredictable work.  Google Wave was, to this crowd, a great example of where “knowledge work” is headed – into collaboration spaces, not into BPM software.  To me, it was just proof that email and lightweight project management tools were not going away.   If Google Wave accomplished anything, it showed:

1. Separating yourself from email divorces you from a knowledge worker’s daily routine (some might say, process).
2. If it isn’t trivial to involve the right people in a collaboration, then users give up
3. Collaboration is going to be free or nearly free.  Even if it has pretty amazing features.
4. It is really hard to do a “big bang launch” successfully.  It makes me even more impressed that Apple seems to pull this off with such regularity.

So what does it mean for BPM?  Not much.  Wave was never really about structured interaction, it was about ad-hoc interaction.  Although ad-hoc interaction is important to a good BPM strategy, no one (maybe except for SAP) was really leveraging Wave for this.  If they were, they can probably leverage the open source bits to get a jump on the development effort.  For the ACM crowd, its both good news and bad news.

First, the good news:

1. A free competitor to your products, supported by a major software company, has gone away.
2. Hm. I think that’s it.

The bad news:

1. If you were counting on convincing users to leave email to use your product for knowledge work, it is time to change gears.
2. If you were expecting that being good and free was good enough… Maybe it isn’t.  Although Wave was panned in the press, it really was pretty good at what it did, though perhaps it tried to do too much.
3. If you were expecting to charge a lot of money for general-purpose collaboration software… I think those days are over.
4. If Wave was your favorite example of how ACM was really relevant to what people are doing… time to find a new example.

Silver lining:

1. Collaboration software for very specific purposes will live on (aka process modeling, or services like tripIt).
2. Some of Wave’s features will likely get absorbed by Gmail.
3. Some of Wave’s features will likely show up in other products.

I think Keith Swenson summed it up best for the ACM folks on Twitter:

“nooooo. It can’t beeeee. :-( RT @jpmorgenthal: Google waves goodbye to Wave: http://bit.ly/bg3ixC”

Well, fans of Wave and its approach were bound to be disappointed.  I saw quite a few more comments on twitter with a more positive spin on Wave being shut down.  Google found Wave squeezed inbetween email and all the other things we do in life.  It apparently couldn’t live on its own.  I’m not sure the future of ACM, per se, is anything different.  Yes, the ACM proponents will have their analogies, and they sound compelling.  And we could even agree that a large percentage of work is not addressed by BPM today, or by, more specifically, structured process.  But what ACM proponents fail to mention is that even less work is currently addressed by purpose-built ACM software.  It *could* be, but isn’t.  It is still likely to be addressed by email, project management tools, telephone, hallway conversation, and more email.

Note, I’m not arguing against ACM as a description of work, I’m just looking at the software market and not seeing it as an independent market, yet.  Willing to be proven wrong.  And I think there are a couple vendors that have the right strategy or tactics, but we’ll see if they can execute.

Working on a longer collaborative post on ACM and the marketplace.  Watch this space.

A colleague of mine pointed me to an interesting McKinsey Quarterly article, which relates the tale of a service automation effort gone awry.  As I started to read it, I was sure that the author would take the tactic of implying workflow and automation were a waste of money.  Surprisingly, the article takes a turn midway through to show how, in this case, the company turned around their project by getting back to basics:

1. Don’t allow limitations of paper- and manual-based processes to continue into an automated world
2. Test drive process changes before cementing them in software.
3. Field test for important success factors
4. Build a minimalistic solution
5. Work on changing culture at the same time that you work on the Information Technology.

These are good tenets for any BPM project to incorporate – but Items 1, 2, 4, and 5 run against the grain for many organizations.  If the project team “goes with the flow”, they’re likely not to challenge assumptions in these four key tenets, and failure for the whole project is a likely result.