It is that time again – New Year’s Eve, and time for another quick review of the year just past.

2010 Started with declarations of the Second Decade of BPM, as well as proclaimations of the Death of BPM.  We saw the buzz around ACM reach a crescendo as BPM vendors left out of the consolidations of 2009 tried to reposition their spin on BPM.  We even saw a flurry of discussions claiming “so many BPM Projects Fail” – though they don’t.  Some postulated that while BPM grew during 2008 and 2009, when times were tough, that as the economy improved BPM would suffer – while we argued that the past simply doesn’t predict the future: each economic cycle has its own surprises.  And our best evidence pointed toward BPM vendors and services providers continuing to do well in 2010.  Through it all, we at BP3 maintained that BPM was doing just fine, thank you, and growing nicely.

2010 was a good year for BP3, thanks to gracious customers who offered us a great opportunity to assist with their BPM efforts.  We understand that our customers are making an investment in BP3 when they contract our services, just as we’re investing our time and energy in their BPM initiatives.  We’re very grateful for their trust and faith in our ability to grow and run our business to their benefit.

Secondly, I have to thank our team – a team we’re really proud of.  They worked really hard in 2010 to make it a great year for us and our clients.

Our new offices (and coffee machine!) worked out great for our productivity and melding as a team in Austin.  We were able to participate at IBM’s Impact this year, sharing what we learned at bpmCamp, which was held in January 2010 at Stanford.

Most of all, we were able to assemble a top-notch team – we’ve more than doubled our staff in 2010, and we still have the most experienced IBM Lombardi BPM team on the market, bar none.  This sets us up to grow again in 2011, as BPM continues to be a cornerstone of the IBM value pitch, while at the same time being a key target for corporations’ investments in business improvement.

Here’s to another great year in BPM, and hopefully a great year for the larger economy as well!  Happy New Year!

entering 2011 prepared to have a great year.

From Vinicius Vacanti’s blog on How New Ideas Almost Killed Our Startup, there’s a diagram that caught my attention:

After more than 3.5 years of BP3, I feel like we’re at stage 5- informed optimism.  We’ve had our uninformed optimism (year 1).  We’ve had informed pessimism (hello financial markets meltdown), leading to a crisis of meaning/direction/future.  But we are now informed optimists.  BPM is here to stay.  Our business is growing, and our impact on behalf of customers definitely punches above our weight class.

Being a services company, we didn’t have the same distractions that Vinicius did – our distractions are more a question of what services we can offer and build a business around. And I think we’ve learned to vet those ideas at this point.  The first question we ask ourselves is “can we do this right” – meaning, without cutting corners, white glove treatment.  We’re not interested in the race to the bottom – we’re interested in really providing a high level of service.

You know I like a good discussion of simplicity, but sometimes we have to call out the lack thereof.  The charts on the Aris BPM blog illustrating how simple the SAP BPM story could be:

From this “simple” slide, we’re to infer that SAP has a more complete offering (er, vision) for BPM than just NetWeaver. I agree with the author of the article that SAP’s BPM message needs to improve – by most definitions NetWeaver is more integration than BPM.  And SAP’s “CAF” (Collaborative Application Framework) which was once described as “beyond” BPM and coming in “two years”, sounded like a subset of BPM as well. There have been some interesting demos (Gravity).  But the thing that strikes me about the chart is that I still don’t understand what SAP products are doing for my business process needs.  I can’t tell if these are the names of SAP products or just general ideas of what you would want to do if you are at the intersection of management control and strategy (financial management??).

But the prescribed solutions are listed thusly:

1. The Forrester BPMS vision of SAP is mostly based on the capabilities of the Netweaver BPM platform and not on the complete BPM vision of SAP
2. SAP does not sufficiently communicate their complete BPM vision towards the market research companies like Forrester and Gartner.
3. The SAP platform is not considered the best of breed BPMS platform by the market research firms like Gartner and Forrester
4. The BPMS capabilities framework of Gartner and Forrester could be extended in order to capture the capabilities the SAP platform can offer.

So… the problem is that Forrester (and Gartner) are only looking at one of many products to place SAP on the BPMS frameworks… and that Forrester and Gartner aren’t sufficiently taking into account the SAP platform’s many other capabilities.  And, this is mostly a problem of communication/marketing, rather than say, substance.

Love this post by Jason Cohen on vetting a startup, in which he reveals the process he went through to vet two startup ideas in succession, and describing how the process turned out differently for the two ideas:

Let me dispose of any lingering ideas that WPEngine was a great flash of insight, born perfect from conception like a Greek God emerging from the ocean, a once-per-decade occurrence sourced from unsystematic inspiration. Let me also dispel your doubts that you can’t produce similar ideas with similar results using a similar process. You can, because there’s nothing magical in how I got to this point.

Like the mighty sudoku puzzle, there might actually be a process to this startup thing…

Inspiration and luck play important roles at the beginning, but turning a bright idea into a real business where strangers come to a website and part with money is an intentional process. A process you can learn and get better at.

Of course, some prefer the “luck” and “inspiration” theories.  It is convenient to think that you just need an idea. Read on in his blog for the details.

Anytime Derek publishes, it is worth reading.  This time, it is on the subject of “roles” – and how they are employed by BPM vendors and BPM solutions.  Unfortunately the answer is that each product and each solution just approaches the definition and use of Roles differently.  As Derek says, it probably reflects how they view organizations, as to how they enable one to leverage roles.

Derek calls attention to a real problem for BPM (and those who adopt it):

The central issue I want to highlight is one that many folks just do not see coming in their BPMS and Dynamic Case Management implementations. Very often, there is only a loose concept of “role” within an organization. When the word “role” is used, it is usually equated to an existing job title (part of the organization structure), rather than responsibility (at least initially). It is further complicated by the fact that within a given job title, there are usually wide variations in the skills and expertise levels of those that work in that area. And while this is not a problem where people manually coordinate their work, when it comes to automating work routing (to the most appropriate person to deal with a given work item or case), there are often major complications.

The problem with using the job title is that it is a poor approximation for the richness of the real situation found in many firms. Job titles alone do not help you deal with responsibility for action, versus accountability and control. [...]

It is a problem because this disconnect around how to handle roles can act as a barrier to adoption, and a barrier to acceptance, of BPM solutions.  It also can lead to mis-set expectations for BPM solutions – requirements misunderstood and badly implemented.

Many small organizations eschew job titles because they sound more limiting than enabling.  And that is potentially the problem for BPM solutions that rely on LDAP repositories that define titles and roles – they may artificially limit the range and scope of a person’s activities and influence on a process.

As we do every year, we want to wish a Merry Christmas from BP3 to our customers, partners, vendors and colleagues.  Hope everyone is having a wonderful holiday season!

In reading about RIM, I’m always amazed at how complex their statements are about their products.  It is almost the opposite of how Apple talks about their products.

Business Week’s quote of Balsillie:

“There’s tremendous turbulence in the ecosystem, of course, in mobility. And that’s sort of an obvious thing, but also there is tremendous architectural contention at play. And I’m going to really frame our mobile architectural distinction. We’ve taken two fundamentally different approaches in their causalness. It’s a causal difference, not just nuance. It’s not just a causal direction that I’m going to really articulate here — and feel free to go as deep as you want — it’s really as fundamental as causalness.”

Wow.  Sometimes complex language hides simple truths – usually truths we don’t want to face.

I hope RIM gets their product lineup act together. I was a happy RIM user for years (well, not so happy with voice quality of the phones, but the texting/email was great).  But I feel like Apple (and Android) have completely thrown them off their game.  They’re no longer pursuing their own best path, they’re reacting.  I’d recommend they focus on their own vision of mobile computing – and simplify.  Simplify the message, simplify the product line, simplify the hardware, and simplify the software. Make it easier for consumers to articulate why they use a blackberry instead of an iPhone.

The Lombardi Blog reminded me that it has been a year since IBM announced its acquisition of Lombardi.  Minhea Galeteanu tells the story from his point of view, and it made me take a step back to think about it from mine.

I remember getting the news on a conference call and having an immediate sense that everything was about to change.

I got the news in a phone call at 5am(!) and then had to wait to confirm it by reading the press release before I really reacted – and I recall having the exact same sense that everything was about to change-  that feeling of standing at the point of the fulcrum on a see-saw, waiting to find out which end will go down and which end up. I was on-site with a customer – I remember worrying that they would have doubts about the platform because of the acquisition – but those fears were put to rest when members of their team came over to congratulate me (they knew I had previously worked for Lombardi).  My initial thoughts on the merger are in the blog.

I got a chance to meet many of my new colleagues at Impact 2010 (which happened to be not only their first trip to Impact, but also mine). Low and behold, what for so long represented “competition” were actually people and moreover nice ones. For the industry (customers and analysts) Impact 2010 was a chance to meet the new IBM Lombardi team. For me, it was a chance to meet the people with whom I now interact with on a daily basis, working together towards laying down the plumbing for the next decade of BPM.

That almost perfectly captures what Impact was like for me as well- a bit of a coming out party for Lombardi’s version of BPM, and I also remember being very impressed with the power of IBM’s “machine”.  I think the Lombardi folks were equally impressed with IBM’s reach. And everyone was impressed with how quickly IBM positioned the Lombardi BPM offering and got behind the message.  As an outsider, you just don’t expect a big company to pivot that quickly.

Mihnea then touts the achievements since the merger, in terms of product releases-  two significant releases of Websphere Lombardi Edition (7.1 and 7.2), and the relaunch of a combined Blueworks and Blueprint being chief among them.  But he’s right – mergers are even more about people and culture.

For our part – the merger has worked out better than we could have expected-  IBM’s partnership programs are more explicit than Lombardi’s were, more prescriptive.  The products Lombardi built are playing on a bigger stage, for a bigger audience.  And those products are actually being improved upon at a pace that impresses us, from the outside.  Moreover, there is the opportunity to share what we know about BPM with a whole new set of customers.

And, just as we predicted, the innovation in the BPM space isn’t over- 2010 more than delivered on the innovation front.

This isn’t a review of Activiti 5, per se – I haven’t had time to play with it enough to render a review.  This is a bit like my previous post on the subject, where I had time to download, install, and build an example.  Just like last time, I was happy with how easy the process was to download, install, and run on my Mac OSX laptop.

Tom Baeyens announced Activiti 5′s GA, and I have to hand it to the team for meeting their aggressive goal of releasing before the end of 2010!

Moreover, Joram announced the introduction of a feature to “generate” the BPMN diagrams (based on the diagram interchange specification), as of Activiti 5.1.

It is quite an impressive feat of community building and momentum – including the Activiti Cycle module that I’ve been reading about on Camunda’s blog posts. Clearly Activiti has raised the bar for BPM on open source, liberal license, open development community.  While Activiti has a way to go to reach the same level of maturity as some other BPM offerings, it already has a lot to offer for someone who wants to both develop a BPM solution and contribute to a fairly interesting entrant in the BPM space.

In Blueworks Live, we almost have a “twitter” client for a BPM offering.

In Austin, a new startup, Mass Relevance, may be building the better mousetrap for processes involving twitter – they recently received funding from the usual suspects, including one of Austin’s favorite investors, Mike Maples, Jr.  The founders include the developers of @tweetriver (Brian Dainton and Eric Falcao) and Sam Decker, the former CMO of Bazaarvoice (which really owns the process of collecting, and curating, customer reviews and feedback for all kinds of online merchants). It’s a great founding team and they have some particular expertise in the space – so I’m looking for something truly interesting from these guys. It is also another healthy sign for Austin.

Perhaps Mass Relevance is building the BPM for Twitter.

Congratulations to the team – but of course now the real work starts!

So far IBM is keeping to their word that they’ll keep the updates rolling with Blueworks Live.  Another update just went live over the weekend, and IBM’s summary of it is posted here.  As one might expect, with an update coming a bare 4 weeks after the initial launch of Blueworks Live, there isn’t a lot of meat on the bone to this update, but there are implications if IBM continues the trajectory.

What was added is simply the ability to post updates to one’s private feed (presumably, to specific “Spaces” within your company space).  I tested it out in the BP3 domain and it works nicely and offers the opportunity for others in our space to respond.

With this change (and, no doubt, changes yet to come), Blueworks Live is picking up more of the features found in a tool like yammer.  Of course, for these discussion-style features to be meaningful, the usage has to reach critical mass within a team or company.  It will be interesting when one can comment on a process update in the feed, and have that comment also appear alongside the actual process instance (or model) as well.  (There is already a commenting feature within process execution screens – the ideal place to put those comments).

David Brakoniecki’s blog post echoes some of my own thoughts – IBM is showing signs of learning from the MVP (Minimum Viable Product) school of thought, quite a departure from the usual software development process at companies their size. In the comments on my previous post, Marco Brambilla has wondered aloud if it is “too minimum”… but I think it is just a matter of giving it time – and seeing what IBM comes out with next.

Seems we just posted on Lean-Agile as it relates to BPM, when  another article on Agile BPM appears on ebizQ, by Jack Vaughan.

Oh wait, we really did just write about this topic! Only the day before the ebizQ article was published.

Both articles are worth a second look.  If you’re not applying agile principles to BPM solution development, it might be time to take a second look.

Jim Sinur has listed his top 10 BPM Developments for 2010, and a few choice bits:

[...]

9.  There are several vendors exhibiting spectacular growth rates (north of 60%) even with the power vendors making an impact.

10.  BPM is enabling greater leverage of existing application / package portfolios

I don’t have great access to the growth #’s for the software vendors, but I’ll bet Jim does.  And the growth rates don’t really surprise me – we’ve seen a lot of activity in our sphere, so to speak.  BPM is clearly going more and more mainstream.  The other day I mentioned BPM to someone at a social event and they actually knew what I was talking about.  (Please, don’t judge me for mentioning BPM in a social context – someone asked me what I do for a living!)

Why Lean–Agile Delivery for BPM?

With all the different techniques out there for software delivery it’s understandable why companies pick different flavors based on the nature of their projects. Even the analyst community at times differs on what iterative-based approaches are best suited for BPMS roll-outs; and that’s OK. The real answer, at least in our minds, is to select an approach that is best suited for the make-up of the organization, and one that has the thinnest profile in terms of overhead to get the job done. The winning profile is one that is “built for change”.  Simply stated: it’s the approach that allows for the greatest adaptability and efficiency to be realized along the project journey. If you are in the business process improvement game then you already know how critical it is to be able to respond to change. Business Process Management truly is a management discipline to business process improvement. It is certainly not the only one out there but it is one in which information technology plays a value-added role and not the role of a constraint which must be subordinated.

Since effective BPM initiatives hit both sides of the ledger between operational process improvement and technological support, having a delivery method that speaks the language of process is very powerful. In the same vein that the business processes should be effective, efficient, and adaptive through the systematic reduction of waste (pure non-value added activities) so should the method in which you employ the technology to support them. Lean-Agile based delivery does that.

Don’t Call it a Strategy

Lean-Agile delivery isn’t a strategy in and of itself but rather a set of mostly common sense principals and practices to reduce waste in the software development lifecycle – and to support your strategy. So consider, if you have designed a green field process or if you have a process which requires remediation, the last thing you will be doing is seeing just how heavy and restrictive you can make it. On the contrary, you are looking for ways to make it flow through defect removal, automate where it makes sense.  And if you are very smart, at a minimum you will focus in on those in-flight process metrics which confirm the outcomes you seek and provide the end-to-end visibility.

The exact same thing should be present as you manifest that process into tooling and the software delivery lifecycle!  You want your development process (and it IS a process) to flow, to reduce hand-off’s, to avoid stagnation, to value working software over copious/short-lived documentation.  Even if you are doing iterative development, it’s astounding how much waste you can remove and still get the solution realized by the business customers who really and truly need it.  And not only do they need it now, but they need a solution that can support changes coming quickly as they learn more about the true process capabilities and the inevitable external influences driving continued improvement.

A quick real-world Value Stream example, looking at a delivery process…

Before a Lean approach is applied to an Iterative Delivery Process (target iteration run-time of 3 weeks)

After a Lean approach is added to the Iterative Delivery Process

Again, if you think of your delivery process apply the same notions you applied to the business process, bring these two sides of the ledger into harmony. Everyone speaking the same language between business and IT is a fundamental “must have” to solidify, succeed, and grow your BPM capability. Gartner has a good research paper entitled “Agile Foundation: Lean Software Development” and it is one of the differentiators they cited about BP3 in terms of our delivery model in their “Who’s Who in Business Process Management Consulting and Systems Integration”. Bottom line, it just makes sense if you’re serious about BPM to take a look and figure out how you can tailor these principles and practices into your organization. Is there anyone opposed to shaving a days out of their development lifecycle increasing product quality by doing so?

(As an aside – I do have this in BlueWorks Live as a pseudo VSM as well but I couldn’t see the single view, big-picture plus details and metrics, hopefully BlueWorks Live will start supporting these types of process views)

We’d been waiting for Blueworks Live to go live ever since we first heard about it in November.  Now that it is actually live… well, now what?

Why, review the reviews, of course!

First up: Sandy Kemsley:

Lombardi has always been at the forefront of the integration of social and BPM, although previously focused purely on the process discovery/design phase, and the IBM acquisition has allowed Lombardi’s social process discovery to be combined with IBM’s online BPM community to create something greater than the sum of the parts. For all my criticism of IBM, they have some incredible pockets of innovation that sometimes burst out into actual product.

and later:

Overall, although there’s nothing really new about this sort of easy sequential workflow design and execution, the user interface is clean and uncluttered, and pop-up tips on the fields assist the user on what to enter. Assuming that you can wrench your users away from using email for these processes, there won’t be much of a learning curve for them to create new processes on their own, and even less to use processes created by others. If you want to see this in action, there’s a Blueworks Live YouTube channel with a couple of videos on creating and participating in a process.

But she’s not convinced that Blueworks truly addresses the community goals that Phil Gilbert set out to address, nor that the different functions are well-integrated enough. Interesting comment thread where IBM explains why the tooling is different between process execution and “modeling”.  I actually agree with the justification, and I don’t see a reason to view the separation of complexity from simplicity as a negative.  I like doing to one place for process, rather than more than one…

Next up:  Mike Gammage:

Sandy Kemsley has a characteristically sound review on her Column 2 blog, and her verdict on Blueworks Live is downbeat.  She’s underwhelmed by the Twitter integration, the public and private streams, and the level of integration with the Blueprint BPMS engine.

I think Sandy’s blog comes across as downbeat because she starts with the positive (check my quote above) and finishes with the criticisms, rather than the other way around.  Mike’s central criticisms:

It’s Overly Democratic. Every enterprise wants its people engaged with process excellence and continuous improvement. But it’s a step too far to simply say that everyone should therefore be able to create and automate process.  [...]

Well, first of all – these Luddites (tongue-in-cheek) already define, and execute processes today!  Using email, spreadsheets, and word documents.  Since they already do it today, Blueworks Live isn’t making it worse – it is rather attempting to give those users more appropriate tools for the job.  He continues with point #2:

It’s a Governance Headache. I don’t see how governance, compliance, risks and controls can be efficiently managed in a world where an organization’s processes are automated in such a decentralized way by people who may be experts in their field but are novices in process design and management.

Again, given that these folks are doing this today, we’re not worse off.  In fact, we’re better off because the processes defined and executed in Blueworks Live are actually tracked, keep audit trail, and feed into reports in a centralized, governable space.  And if someone is abusing it, you (as site administrator) can revoke their access or reduce their permissions.

There is a real danger that IBM’s and Phil’s messaging could in a sense “devalue” the process improvement expert-  or even IT experts.  But having talked to Phil about this at length- the point isn’t to devalue the expertise or discipline of process improvement or IT – if the community functions well, those experts will actually become:

• more accessible
• more leveraged
• more valuable

Because it is easier for those with process knowledge to share it.  The processes that can be executed in Blueworks Live today are so simple that they simply don’t require process design expertise.  And that’s intentional.

I love Mike’s closing argument:

In that context, it’s difficult to see how Blueworks Live helps at all.  Would you dine at a restaurant where each chef did their own thing? A good menu has coherence.  A good restaurant creates the perfect customer experience by harnessing the genius and creativity of each chef de partie and their team together with the skills of the maitre d’ and his or her team. I don’t want beetroot for a pudding, or filet be boeuf Wellington served Thai style and with popcorn.

Actually, I’ve been dining at that restaurant my whole adult life.  Email, Lotus Notes databases, Excel spreadsheets, ad-hoc website forms.  Sharepoint “processes”.  Each “chef” doing their own thing – with the exceptions being a few excellent process-oriented software applications.  Blueworks may not be filet mignon, but perhaps it is fast-food?

My own summary:  For “version 1″ of the new vision for Blueworks Live, it is pretty good.  No one is completely satisfied, but the potential for something greater is there, and I have no doubt they’ll keep beating the drum by releasing updates every 6-9 weeks.  We’ve already “toyed” with it, using it for a vacation request process, for example.  I was a little disappointed the reporting was buried on the admin page, for example.  But otherwise it is clean and easy to use, with a LOT of room for improvement.  The key thing will be which improvements to say no to, not which ones to say yes to.  IBM is going to have to edit itself if this product offering is going to succeed.

(Side Note: interesting response from Phil in the comments section of Mike’s blog: execute to get documentation)

UPDATE:  In writing this, I omitted two other blog entries of note that I intended to include.

First, Phil Gilbert’s own blog:

The arc of history is clear: technology advances always insert specialists to use new technology, taking control from the original worker. Then, as the technology matures and becomes more accessible, people with more general skills gain access to the technology and regain control over their work. From farming to manufacturing to computing this has been the case. We’ve spent the past half century digitizing the assets of the business and that required, in essence, that control over those assets were assumed by IT. But now it’s shifting back, and BPM is the mechanism by which that move is most fully realized today. IBM Blueworks Live is a major step in that evolution. It doesn’t solve every BPM problem – by design! But it does solve a set of problems that have eluded IT for decades: how do we give our businesses the tooling to continue the flexible ad hoc processes they need in a changing world, while normalizing the information so that those processes are more efficient, more transparent and easy to build and deploy.

Meet IBM Blueworks Live: the new face of BPM.

And from David Moser:

All very worthy, but much less interesting than the next piece of news, which was the launch of Blueworks Live. This combines three elements – the Blueworks BPM collaboration community (blogs, wikis); the highly successful (Lombardi) Blueprint process discovery and definition environment; and a new workflow execution engine. All running in the Cloud and, apparently, available through your browser for a test drive from November 20th. (Yes, that’s this Saturday – perhaps one of the software world’s most specific launch dates ever…!).

In the comments Ian Gotts frets that some users won’t be happy only having access to “automated” processes and not to the modeled processes in Blueworks, but this strikes me as an unlikely problem for the real users.  Second, it is better to start with too little, than too much, in your product.  Wikipedia contains excellent links and content explaining Minimum Viable Product.

Alberto Manuel’s excellent blog takes on the “year in review” post before anyone else this year!

He’s clearly a fan of the emergence of the ACM meme, and not a fan of the Social BPM meme.  He takes issue with BPMN2′s complexity:

BPMN 2.0: Well the new standard finally hit the cloud doesn’t it? I hate BPMN for the following reasons:
- It takes more time to draw a process with BPMN that other process notation language;

- Never provided 100% compliance with BPEL and XPDL, providing data loss when importing the never ending, complicated, difficult to understand flowcharts (read my previous post on Antiamba about this).

Anyway despite all the clutter provided it’s becoming a standard, because BPM community never cared about how processes should be mapped.

Well, I don’t fault BPMN2 for not complying with BPEL – that argument has been fought and won – BPEL doesn’t represent everything BPMN can represent without losing data/information – that’s a deficiency of BPEL’s representation more than BPMN’s.

I wouldn’t impugn the intent of the BPM community to having “never cared” about how processes should be mapped.  Bruce Silver, for example, is part of the BPM/BPMN community and he clearly cares (and has the classes and writings to prove it! ).

I’m also more optimistic about the PKBoK effort than he is (although, the name seems horribly circular and redundant…. ).   These types of efforts take a long time, however, so it isn’t like anyone should be waiting on the output of PKBoK to get started on their BPM initiatives!

I’m not quite ready to look back on 2010 and sum it up.  That’ll have to wait til  a bit closer to end of year.

Steve Blank writes about the “enterpreneurial singularity“, a result of a combination of factors that make it easier than ever to start up a new company – combined with a set of factors that reduce the opportunity cost of doing so (the implied risk is less than it has been in a long time).

The Entrepreneurial Singularity
The barriers to entrepreneurship are not just being removed. In each case they’re being replaced by innovations that are speeding up each step, some by a factor of ten. For example, Internet commerce startups the time needed to get the first product to market has been cut by a factor of ten, the dollars needed to get the first product to market cut by a factor of ten, the number of sources of initial capital for entrepreneurs has increased by a factor of ten, etc.

And while innovation is moving at Internet speed, this won’t be limited to just internet commerce startups. It will spread to the enterprise and ultimately every other business segment.

When It’s Darkest Men See the Stars
The economic downturn in the United States has had an unexpected consequence for startups – it has created more of them. Young and old, innovators who are unemployed or underemployed now face less risk in starting a company.  They have a lot less to lose and a lot more to gain.

This is partly why I’ve remained (perhaps overly) optimistic throughout the recession.  I just believe the seeds are being planted for a sound recovery, and perhaps a more diverse future economic base.  Companies that survive the recession will emerge with new skills, customers, products, and survival skills that will help immensely as the economy grows.

The Process Knowledge Initiative published a November update recently that had some interesting information about its structure and who the participants are. The core teams have been announced. Interestingly, the technical integration team will be working with “working groups” on specific areas.  The specific working groups haven’t been formed, but the structure to support them is in place.

Quite a few people I know are involved in the effort – congratulations to the core team participants – looking forward to seeing more updates coming down the line.  The point is to have an open source repository of process knowledge, which could be of great benefit to the community as a whole.

Note: Sandy Kemsley also has posted some information about the PKBoK technical team here.

It looks like the next step is to put out a draft of the knowledge areas in January. Very good stuff and we’re looking forward to contributing however we can (and as much as we can make time for it).  I’m always amazed how much people will do for volunteer efforts like this, and the OMG OCEB specification.  There area lot of people truly dedicated to our BPM field – and while there might be a little bit of benefit to each person for participating, it is a tenuous link between contribution and financial gain, at best.  Bravo to the volunteers!

Vivek Wadhwa writes that there is no simple answer to the question of whether there is a shortage or a glut of engineers:

So there are many issues here. But the national debates about competitiveness, immigration, and education, typically focus on the issue of supply and demand of engineers and scientists. They paint this issue in black or white when it is shades of gray.

And he makes a few additional points supporting the notion that educational institutions don’t always teach the specific skills companies want, and that our corporations aren’t investing in teaching the skills they want to their employees either.  The combination of these two effects leaves many companies feeling as if there is a shortage in general, when it may really be specific areas of shortage instead.

Of course, a shortage of people with the right skills has been a real problem in the BPM space – so this is nothing new to us.  And we think the primary answer is to invest in the people you hire to keep them up-to-date with the skills you need, while augmenting with help from outside your organization (leverage).

However, there was one point where perhaps the cause-and-effect were mis-stated:

The world’s best and brightest aren’t beating a path to the U.S. any more. In previous years, H-1B visas for foreign nationals were in such high demand that they had to be awarded by lottery. This year, the annual quota of 65,000 hasn’t even been used yet. Instead, these workers are staying home and entrepreneurship is booming in countries like India and China.

I don’t believe the lower number of H-1B visas has anything to do with the demand from foreign nationals to live and work in the United States.  The issue is that you can’t get an H-1B visa without a corporate sponsor.  Many companies have pulled back on hiring H-1B’s – partly because of the economy or their own circumstances, partly because of moderating labor costs for US nationals, partly because of public (and internal) backlash against abuses of the visas (mostly other than H1B), and partly because many of the multi-nationals have offices in various countries around the world – and may prefer to hire these same people for lower wages in their home countries.  I think the Startup Visa movement was one great way to help keep talented H-1B visa holders in the United States, and I think it illustrates that the problem is one of process, rather than demand imbalance.

A few days ago, IBM announced the release of two new versions of Websphere Lombardi Edition:

WLE 7.1 for Linux on System z – so you can run the (nearly) latest Lombardi portfolio on a mainframe!  (Note: Phil Gilbert points out that earlier versions of Lombardi also supported System z, but it wasn’t widely known)

WLE 7.2 – which includes expanded globalization and translation capabilities (including the authoring application itself).  But 7.2 also ships with better integration to WPS (Websphere Process Server), iLOG, FileNet, and DB2 (as well as optional integrations to Outlook and Sharepoint – SKUs formerly known as Teamworks for Sharepoint and Teamworks for Office).

Its a good incremental step for incorporating Lombardi BPM into IBM’s Websphere application family – and given IBM’s global focus the focus on globalization/localization makes a lot of sense.  But existing customers are still looking for an in-place upgrade path for production databases, to get from Teamworks 6.x and Teamworks 7.x to WLE 7.x.