True to their word, the folks at IBM are updating Blueworks Live rapidly.  The January release brings minor modifications that continue to polish the main ideas in Blueworks:

• Blueworks introduces the concept of a “Glossary” – allowing an admin to provide descriptions of the properties that show up in Blueprint views and spaces, and to control which properties are viewed by users.  Additionally the possible values for a property can be defined.
• Enhancements to process automation – minor changes that just enhance usability of the existing functionality (due dates no longer required, comments can be added after process completion, improved search, etc.)

Now that IBM is demonstrating the regular release schedule is being maintained, we’ll have to keep an eye out for the updates that really alter the trajectory or utility of the product.  Watch this space for our thoughts when we see those kinds of updates.

Angelos Angelou is a legend in Austin.  He’s been giving the Angelou Economic Forecast for 25 years now, and it has become a real institution in Austin.  I believe over 700 people attended his forecast – occupying one of the large Ballrooms in the Austin Convention Center, and essentially filling it.  The core of the event remains two focused economic talks, one by Mr. Angelou himself, and the other by a prominent guest economist.  But around that core is an excellent opportunity to network with fellow Austin business owners, business leaders, and political leaders.  The demographics appear to lean toward law firms and financial institutions, but I was hardly the only consultant in attendance.  I sat next to the assistant City Manager from Waco (the city management of several local cities were represented at the event), a couple of bankers, two lawyers, and a microsoft solutions partner.  Representatives of several politicians were also in attendance, along with our emcee, Kirk Watson.  At the forum, you sit at round tables over breakfast – encouraging a little discussiong before the talks get started.  As we introduced ourselves, I explained how Lance and I started BP3 back in 2007, and a bit about our trajectory to this point.  Only a few minutes into the first talk, Mr. Angelou made a comment about unemployment being under-reported because many people drop out of the job market and become “consultants”.

Mr. Angelou led off with a discussion of the Austin economy – how his previous forecast fared against reality (pretty well – directionally correct, and he correctly captured the “perception” of the growth), and his forecast was going forward.  First the overall context of the US:

• losing 650,000 jobs in 2010 (compared to losing north of 800,000 jobs in just January of 2009),
• an increase in GDP of 3.6%,
• an influx of 4.3 million people into the US,
• 6 quarters of consecutive growth
• household net worth is up
• consumer debt declining
• direct foreign investment is up
• US exports are up quite a bit

And yet, the gray lining:

• Likely, 200+ banks will fail this year
• Commercial loans are coming due for refinancing in large numbers.  Unclear how many of these will successfully emerge.
• Lower rents and lower occupancies – good for businesses generally, bad for the landlords and the banks.
• Significant cuts are coming in State, City, and County budgets as they confront mounting deficits amidst declining revenues

So how is Texas doing?

• Added 26,000 jobs in 2010.
• 8.2% unemployment
• Added 363,000 people.
• VC funding up nearly 30%
• Gross state product was down
• Retail sales down
• State deficit for the next two years: in the neighborhood of $20B.

Austin, in particular, is looking good compared to other tech hubs.  But, ironically, that is largely because of Austin’s non-tech work (government, for example).  Austin is forecast to have:

• 2.8% annualized growth rate
• 5.8% unemployment by end of 2012
• Might cross 1.9million residents in the metro area by 2012.  25 years ago: 500k.  We’ve come a long way.
• Estimated 125,000 new residents over the next 2 years.

The trends are basically all “up” over the next three years, but there is room for improvement.  Tech has been underperforming based on the statistics, and the median wage has been stagnant as more jobs enter the market but the new jobs are largely service sector, lower wage, jobs.

However, being an observer of Austin myself, I see some silver lining that may not show up in the numbers yet:

• Known as a “great place to start up“, the employment of startups is largely hidden from the statistics until the companies become established enough.
• VC investment doubled from 2009 to 2010 – $344MM in 2010.  That’s great news.  But Austin is home to one of the most active boot-strapping and lean-startup ecosystems.  These companies won’t show up as VC investments – but many of them are growing, or at least sustaining.

After Mr. Angelou finished, Greg Ip gave a talk about the financial crisis – how we got there and how we’re getting out of the mess.  His first argument was that a decade or two of great moderation typically leads investors and business leaders (and political leaders) to take on great risk.  This risk is primarily measured by the amount of leverage businesses are engaging.  One of the charts he showed was breathtaking in terms of how fast leverage grew relative to the modest economic growth.

Current account balance was highly symmetric with respect to the rest of the world.  As our balance went increasingly negative, the rest of world went increasingly positive.  There’s been a big correction back, but it is still a wide gap.

A key point in Ip’s analysis is that deleveraging recoveries take longer to take hold and get the economy back to the size it was when the crisis started.  People are still increasing savings, banks are continuing to sit on their capital.  The value of collateral (and therefore the ability to borrow or lend) has declined.  Ip discussed Quantitative Easing (aka “printing money”) – and why this makes sense to do.  Because at the moment, it doesn’t raise much risk of inflation – after all, Banks aren’t lending enough to create the multiplier effect you would normally worry about, and wages aren’t increasing, which prevents a wage-price spiral from taking hold.

Of course, as the US arrives at a more realistic view of what we can afford (both within government and personally), who will buy all our stuff?  Well, Mr. Ip proposes that Quantitative Easing has the effect of putting downward pressure on the dollar, as does our historically low prime rate.  The Rest of World is growing quickly.  China, India, and Brazil are all expected to grow north of 4% annually over the next 3 years.  When exchange rate changes and trends stick, over a long period of time, they start to really affect trade, because it affects the investments of corporations.

For the first time in a long time, the emerging markets now consume more than the US.

Of course, this blog only scratches the surface of the two talks.  I appreciated the opportunity to step outside the BPM bubble to hear how other people perceive the economy.  Sounds like things are looking up.

The unofficial Stanford blog is making the case that “Our Athletes are Better than Your Athletes” – and when I started reading it I was rolling my eyes. But Stanford is my alma mater so I read the whole thing – painful as it might be.

Yes, Stanford wins a lot of NCAA championships (last year Stanford won its 16th consecutive Director’s Cup – a string it started while I was in school, and look like they’re on pace to do it a 17th year with the finish the football team had).

But the article really focuses on the quality of scholarship of the athletes Stanford produces and attracts.  And it really is quite amazing.  The part that really got my attention was the story of Jake Vandermeer, a Men’s Volleyball player, who also just happened to help develop a potential cure for Legg-Calve-Perthes disease, which is a degradation of the hip.

I was pretty stunned, reading this.  It turns out I’m something of an expert on Legg Calve Perthes disease, because I had this disease as a child and learned all about it first-hand.  It was a six-year physical therapy recovery, during which I gave up running, kicking, jumping.  I learned to swim differently (no freestyle kick); I kicked left-footed; I learned to walk with a crutch;  I learned to skip-hop-step with a brace on one leg; and I learned what it was like to be seen as an oddity.  I was told I might not run again, and it was obvious that it would be challenge to compete in sports.

Although I still have significant discomfort (sometimes pain) in my hip, I’ve often been told that it is the best example of a recovery that my doctors have ever seen (the orthopedic ones, who actually are familiar with the disease in the first place).  I went on to play varsity tennis in high school in Florida.  I played Ultimate Frisbee at Stanford, a club-level sport (my high school tennis exploits were not going to get me onto the Stanford Tennis team, needless to say).  An Ultimate Frisbee legend by the name of “Truth” Knuth (Don Knuth‘s son, for those of you CS geeks out there) recruited me to the game of ultimate.  In turn, I recruited many of my friends to the sport.

The idea that you could overcome Legg-Calve-Perthes disease has been part of me since I was 6 years old.  But the idea that you could cure it, never even crossed my mind.  It never seemed like the kind of thing you could cure.

So, it might have been easy to take this Stanford blog post lightly.  But you can imagine my shock to have this lighthearted article strike to the heart of my childhood experience.  Maybe Stanford does have the best scholar-athletes.  Mr. Vandermeer, I just want to say thanks for your work – 1200 children a year may not sound like a lot, but I can tell you what a difference this would have made in my life – I hope it can make a difference in the lives of children to come.

I missed this post from Keith Swenson the other day, as he responds to Anatoly’s post on ACM.

Keith cuts to the chase:

Anatoly Belychook asks the question: “is ACM a Paradigm or a Feature?” I could not resist responding because I like the post, and his logic is flawless, but it is based on false assumptions.  I think there is a lesson here on why so many BPM experts feel the way he does.

First, his summary of Adaptive Case Management (ACM) is one of the best I have seen.  There is no doubt that Anatoly understand the motivations behind ACM.

What he does next is quite surprising; he analyzes whether ACM meets certain requirements of BPM.  That is the flaw in his thinking: there is no reason to believe that ACM should meet the requirements of BPM.  Many BPM experts  start with an assumption that ACM should have BPM-like features, and then move on to conclude that ACM is really just a type of BPM.  Those wanting to understand the subject should be wary.

Hm.  I would have phrased this differently- it isn’t that Anatoly’s assumptions are wrong – its just that the exercise Anatoly takes on is looking at how to satisfy BPM-style problems with ACM-style claimed feature-sets.  Anatoly would state it differently: How to satisfy enterprise level problems his customers are asking him to address, with ACM-style claimed feature-sets.  And, to consider whether you can solve enterprise style case management problems without paying attention to key issues of architecture, data entities, process architecture, etc.

The comments section reveal a very interesting discussion between Keith and Anatoly – well worth reading (thankfully BPM and ACM posts do not get cluttered with 100′s of comments like tech crunch articles!).

In one of his comments, Keith wraps with:

Hopefully this clarifies my point: while ACM capabilities may be a feature of a BPMS, ACM in general is not JUST a feature of a BPMS. To say the latter would be misleading.

Given that ACM describes an “approach” rather than a technology, of course this is true.  Likewise, BPM capabilities are not just a feature of a BPMS… I’d consider this a tautology.  I think what Anatoly was exploring is whether ACM software will survive as a standalone / separate market, or whether it will be collapsed with BPM software as a market. (Thus, feature vs. paradigm)

I might be projecting my own impressions onto his writing, however.

Interesting conclusions in Keith’s post, first this bit:

• BPM needs process architecture, ACM has no such need
• In BPM the person who designs the process needs to be a data architect, but in ACM these are different roles.  The person who designes the “process” does not need to be a data architect.
• BPM needs strong capabilities for integration, but in ACM there is little or no need for field-level integration.  ACM can work well with documents,  reports, and links to other application user interface.

And Keith asks: isn’t this enough to make it different?  Well, in technical terms, no.  But in terms of “approach”, yes. You can implement (and I have implemented) processes that required no “architecture”, “data architecture”, nor “integration”.  Typically those aren’t the kinds of processes people pay consultants to help them develop however, so I haven’t worked on that many of them. But it is definitely a different approach to start with the assumption that you won’t do these things.

Keith wraps with:

BPM systems will gain ACM-like features, but few doctors, policemen, and lawyers will use that.

Social Business Software like Jive, SharePoint, Quad, Chatter, and Connections will gain ACM-like features as well, and will be far more successful than the BPM systems, because those are systems that the doctors, policemen, and lawyers will use.

How funny.  I end up agreeing it is a feature of something, just not a feature of BPM.  :-)

I, too, find it ironic that Keith finally agrees ACM is a feature of something else (from a technical perspective)!  I think, by extension, ACM can be considered a (potential) feature of BPM.  And Keith may be right- that doctors, policemen, and lawyers will be using one of these other products (SharePoint? I doubt it) – but I wouldn’t jump to the conclusion that they won’t see BPM in their lives given all the government investment in process that’s happening.

Update: the discussion has moved to ebizQ now, thanks to Peter Schooff.

Forrester is running a survey that is about to close, that attempts to determine how many organizations are ready for sustainable BPM Change.  The preliminary conclusions are, unsurprisingly, that the majority of organizations are NOT ready for sustainable BPM Change:

To date, 124 business process pros have kindly answered my survey. My conclusion? The majority of organizations are not ready for sustainable BPM change. A few data points supporting this:

• 63% of participants view business process change as a strategy to implement cross-functional optimization through common best practices, standards, and shared insights.
• In 52% of the surveyed organizations, business process change initiatives pursue different objectives and are executed without coordination.
• 59% of participants admit that most business process change projects are measured through project timeliness and budget, but only some provide operational measures.
• Only 34% of the organizations apply architecture frameworks for business processes, insight, and decision-making to help structure and prioritize business process change targets.

I’m not arguing with the conclusions – I don’t have enough data points to do so.  However, I’ll say this:  you’re not ready for Sustainable BPM Change until you are.  In other words, get to work. Figure it out.  Start aligning your organization around BPM and the change it incurs.  But if you put off BPM until you’re ready, you never will be.  Show some leadership.

I’ll relate one of our early BPM projects at BP3.  We did an assessment for a customer as to their BPM readiness.  Our assessment found them wanting – quite a few things for the customer to address before they were “ready” for BPM.  They went ahead and got started on their BPM projects despite the lack of “readiness.”  Lo and Behold, three years later they had taken 10 processes to production, with good ROI on the whole program.  So what happened?

Well, first, they didn’t give up on the basis of the analysis.  They treated the gaps as areas of improvement, and got started on the project-level.  They created a lot of value for the company, developed internal skills, improved their customer service. They beat the odds by creating a small, cross-functional, focused team – and aligning them with business value.

But there was two gaps that they weren’t able to close:  the first was convincing senior IT leadership to treat BPM differently from other IT applications; the second was convincing the business to continue to own BPM beyond the “pilot” stage where it had resided for 3 years.  When BPM went over to IT, and the business stopped owning it, IT management wasn’t interested in BPM, per se – just in managing the applications that were running on top of a BPM platform.

So – one could view this as a failure of BPM to take root.  Or one could view it as planting the seeds of future success.  Either way, the company achieved a lot of return on investment across a series of processes.  Had they deferred starting on BPM, they would have left a lot of money on the table, and sacrificed a lot of customer satisfaction in their customer service processes. (Or, they would have had to try to achieve those objectives without the aid of a BPMS.  )

Ready or not, our recommendation is to get started.  Sometimes the journey is the destination.

Demand Media (NASDAQ:DMD) isn’t based in Austin, but a few years ago it bought an Austin-based company, Pluck, and has maintained (and grown) its presence in Austin ever since.  By all accounts the IPO today exceeded expectations – both in initial pricing and in how it finished the day (up 33%).

This is great news for the Livestrong foundation (previously known as the Lance Armstrong Foundation), and great news for Austin, rewarding some hard-working software engineers and friends of ours here in Austin.  Hopefully the business and stock will do well for employees and investors – it will certainly help the local economy.  And who knows what additional startups might sprout from their success.  From the Austin-American Statesman this morning:

The Santa Monica, Calif.-based company, run by former MySpace Inc. Chairman Richard Rosenblatt, raised $151 million, 34.5 percent more than it had expected, with shares going to institutional buyers at $17 each — $1 more than the expected high price.

Joram Barrez recently announced that the Activiti team has added the ability to define and run ad-hoc processes on Activiti.  The processes are directly deployable, so they’re first class citizens to Activiti.  This goes along with what I’ve said before, on many occasions: the use cases for ACM-style delivery don’t require a high technical hurdle.  There’s really not much keeping the leading BPM vendors from adding these concepts to their products, as Activiti has done with Kickstarter.

Joram makes the claim that with continued community involvement, the commercial vendors won’t be able to keep up.  However, the announcement of Kickstarter comes a few weeks after IBM’s relaunch of Blueworks, which included a similar “ad-hoc” process automation capability.  So I think the commercial vendors will still have their chance, especially in SaaS delivery modes. Regardless of who leads, the competition is clearly pushing state of the art.

Regardless, I’m gratified to see some of my thoughts pan out in terms of real, concrete software, delivered to the market.

Anatoly uses an example of a cross-functional process to show how one can dramatically oversimplify how an actual business works – and as a result, write a really “broken” process.

The key insight he offers is this:  a BPM isn’t a workflow.  It is multiple processes and inter-process communications.  As a result, modeling a business process is an exercise in modeling multi-threaded systems (parallel programming).  The problem:

• Some people doesn’t see this barrier. They hit it but doesn’t realize what’s the problem really.
• Others instinctively bypass the barrier by implementing BPM pilot projects aiming at processes like “Vacation Request”. A pilot like this is going to be successful but does it have any value for business?

I believe this is the sources of most of the disappointment in BPM: those who narrow it down to the workflow end up with predictable failure.

Technically, multithreading is what distinguishes BPM from workflow. Remove the interaction between asynchronously executable processes via data, messages and signals and what you’ll get would be “workflow on steroids”, not BPM.

Unfortunately, this is the case with many software products marketed aggressively as BPMS. For me, the main BPMS criterion is the support of BPMN-style messages. There are other criteria indeed but this is the most useful at the moment. Everything else – graphical modeling, workflow engine, web portal, monitoring – is implemented ususally, better or worse, but many products totally miss inter-process communication. Most likely not because it’s that difficult but rather because no one has explained how important it is.

Agreed-  in fact, in some cases it is useful to model the entity lifecycle (process, you might say) of a critical element – like an Order – as well as the various processes that interact with orders (e.g. production process).  We’ve taken this approach before with product returns and dispute resolutions, for example – and I often refer to the processes as “orthogonal” – they intersect, but they have different purposes and objectives.  Of course, as Anatoly points out – much of the complexity is the business, not BPMN.  BPMN isn’t making the business more complex, after all – it already was that complex.  Anatoly explains:

The name of complexity is business, not BPMN!
Whoever promises a simple solution to business issues, whether it’s BPM or something else – do not believe it. Business is a human competition by nature: smart people are competing for living better than others. Therefore business has been and will remain a complex matter.

The complexity of BPMN isn’t excessive, it’s adequate to the complexity of the business. Students of my BPMN training have no question about why there are so many events: no one is excessive. And by the way, note that BPMN 2.0 is practically no different from 1.x at workflow part – the standard evolves in supporting more sophisticated multithreaded programming: choreography, conversation.

But what really grabbed my attention is seeing a different perspective on the “routine work” argument that we hear so much about from the ACM camp (and I’d be interested to read more from Anatoly on this subject):

They say the percentage of knowledge work vs. routine work is constantly growing. But exactly where is it growing? Mostly at US companies that offshore routine activities to Asia. A predictable observation for analysts located in US. But as soon as the amount of knowledge work grows at one place, the amount of routine work grows in another. And managing routine procedures running on the other side of the globe is the best task for BPM that one can imagine.

He’s pointed out a US-bias I hadn’t noticed myself (one of the benefits of reading blogs from other countries – increased perspective!).  What he says makes sense – the routine work in the US hasn’t gone away – its just been (largely) reassigned to people in other timezones or countries.  With all the benefits and costs associated.

I’m a fan of MWD and their coverage of BPM and related topics.  They have a bit of edge to their analysis, and aren’t afraid to go out on a limb.

So it was with great interest that I clicked on the link to read the 2011 outlook for BPM.  Right off the bat, MWD notes that the BPM value proposition is holding strong even as the economy improves (something, I’ll note, that we at BP3 predicted in early 2010).  MWD reminds us of four value propositions from BPM:

BPM has four ways it can add value: driving operational efficiency and quality; driving product and service innovation; driving business model innovation; and lastly, driving improved collaboration between IT and business teams.

Typically everyone gets stuck on the first two.  Or, we dismiss the last one as not a value proposition in and of itself, but a constraint that needs to be addressed in order to achieve the value of BPM.

The one prediction MWD makes that I disagree with: the decline of the BPM Suite.  While the arguments MWD makes in this regard make sense and hold together, the force for consolidating SKUs among large software vendors is just too strong.  The labeling (BPM Suite) may change, and the specific components may change (perhaps BI, reporting, etc. will be split out… while rules and the like might be more explicitly included – we’ll find out!).  And bundling vertically in the stack (for example, including the application server with the BPM product) will likely continue.

I found MWD’s take on ACM interesting:

Adaptive case management (ACM) – Most importantly, perhaps, a group of vendors has spent significant marketing money and effort through 2010 attempting to “break away” from the BPM technology market segment, at least in part as a response to the impact in the market of activity from software platform vendors like IBM, Oracle and TIBCO.

That aligns with what I felt was going on with the ACM movement over the last year – more marketing and positioning than substantive differentiation.  Although, one can hardly blame them for trying to change the terms of debate, and the terms of product selection.  If you can create a new market segment you have a chance to be evaluated by every company in that segment. If you’re competing for the same market segment, many customers have already bought “one of those” and may not want to buy another one.

MWD also turns their attention to consultants and integrators, noting that their market momentum is increasing.  As MWD notes:  “Until a couple of years ago, almost all the activity from systems integrators and consultants associated with BPM practice was carried out by small, local specialist firms rather than the big players.”  MWD sees the big players finally getting serious about BPM practices – and he’s right.  But it is still the case that the most capable firms are these small, local, specialist firms – some might even say boutique(!) firms.  (As an example in the IBM Lombardi niche, I believe BP3 represents both the biggest and the most experienced firm for Lombardi BPM deployment.  We would definitely be considered a smaller firm, despite our ability to cover the US geography.)

Read the report – and get used to reading MWD’s analysis – it is among the best out there, and they often put out free or registration-only reports that can help keep you informed.

Sandy once again puts her product review hat on and takes on HandySoft:

To be clear, WebMaker is not a tool for non-technical people: although a trained business analyst could probably get through the initial screen designs, there is far too much technical detail exposed if you want to do anything except very vanilla static forms; the fact that you can easily expose the MVC execution stack is a clue that this is really a developer tool. It is, however, well-integrated with BizFlow BPM, allowing the process instance variables to be used in WebMaker, and the WebMaker forms to be assigned to each activity using the Process Studio.

She moves on to a more general point about the market:

HandySoft is one of the small players in the BPMS market, and has focused on ad hoc and dynamic processes from the start. Now that all of the BPMS vendors have jumped into the dynamic BPM fray, it will be interesting to see if these new BizFlow tools round out their suite sufficiently to compete with the bigger players.

So, not the most stunning headline.. but Forrester predicts that IT will continue to deploy business process capabilities…

Author Alexander Peters points out two formal processes IT will need to implement, in addition to COEs in the near future, to be successful:

I believe that IT organizations that want to sustainably contribute to enterprisewide business process optimizations need to implement two formal processes, in addition to deploying COEs:

1. BT governance, which ensures that business process executives, not IT, ultimately decide how to prioritize the development and use of BT services across lines of business.
2. BT demand management, which architects and monitors the enterprise portfolio of BT services and provides recommendations on how to optimize its performance.

I’d add a third “activity” to the mix:  BT consulting services.  Too many IT departments prefer to act as order-takers, or don’t see their mission as including advising the business.  But experience tells us that large businesses with rich IT heritage need the IT groups to consult to them.  Why?  Because IT personnel generally know the business logic that is hard-coded in software applications (or, hopefully, configured or encoded in rules systems).  IT personnel are generally more knowledgeable about the capabilities of the software that is in use to support various business initiatives.  IT has a real information advantage over “Business” in many corporations.

This information advantage can be leveraged to the benefit of the business as a whole if wielded properly.  Just as outside consultants can really help a business understand how to take advantage of new software packages (or deep capabilities of more established products, such as RDBMSes), IT personnel can better explain how to take advantage of long-running systems.

When you combine the pace of change in business, with the pace of change in software capabilities, with the pace of adoption of social technologies… Access to the IT experts is likely to increase.  The opportunity for IT to leverage their deep knowledge of systems and process is one of the best opportunities IT has to add value to their business.
It is also one of the likely greatest missed opportunities.

The argument over what a process is continues.  As well, the argument over what is BPM and what is ACM.  Two articles recently on the subject.  First, Michael Poulin argues that all process is structured, and that ACM is not about process at all, but about managing the unknown or unexpected:

ACM is not about process management due to the absence of the process, it is rather about a management of consequences of unpredicted events, which itself is very important business task.

Well, look.  It is an interesting attempt to define ACM – it just happens to be a different definition than all the other ACM thought leaders have been using as an operating model.  Maybe the ACM folks will take up his definition – maybe not (I feel that, as someone not classified as a proponent, I shouldn’t be the one to define the term.  Though I did suggest what I think ACM is about, vis-a-vis BPM, at one point… and at an earlier point).

Then Keith Swenson weighs in – and seems to largely agree with Michael’s discussion – I think for two reasons: first, it has a very narrow interpretation of process, and second, Michael provides justification for arguing that even well-understood processes may not be as well-understood as people think (and therefore perhaps they need to be re-examined as being ACM!):

He says “But, wait a minute, do we know what/why we do things? Do we really know the logic of our actions?”   Truth is, we do thing[s], and then later rationalize why we did them.  However, it is not clear that that rationale is in fact the cause of the actions.

So, now the argument seems to be that we’re just rationalizing a set of actions after the fact, rather than contemplating a plan in advance. The ability to see the structure and organization of what we do is a good thing – a key organizing attribute of businesses and people.  Somehow Keith has made this sound like a deficiency instead of a beneficial attribute (it might not have been his intent, but that’s how it comes across). Being able to describe a complex interaction as, instead, a smaller set of high-level actions, is a huge benefit to humanity’s ability to understand the world.  And the fact that BPM leverages that capability is hardly a deficiency, for example.

Moreover, Keith uses an art metaphor:

When an art student first attempts to draw an outdoor scene involving a tree, they commonly will start by drawing a line around the tree.  That line does not exist in reality, but it is a construct of the mind which automatically classifying what you are seeing.  The tree “looks” separate from the surrounding, because we understand that the tree is a separate entity from the mountain behind it.  The art student must “unlearn” this habit of drawing in the borders between conceptual things.  Such unlearning is not trivial.

There is a fair amount of “unlearning” when learning to draw (or paint).  But there IS a process for sketching landscapes, versus sketching portraits.  Growing up, I observed that my sister could take a picture of something and sketch a photo-realistic copy of the same thing scaled up or down in size (I thought that was quite amazing, being the little brother).  It was hardly assigning method to the madness after the fact – she had a plan before pencil touched paper.  There were even a standard bag of tricks for incorporating or correcting any mistakes.

If you read our blog regularly, you might have picked up on my displeasure, in general, with stereotypes based on generational differences – especially when people are asking you to make these stereotypes actionable. Recently a post on Forrester’s blog started off along a line of thinking that made me think it would be another stereotype-pandering post (emphasis on “emerging adulthood”), but Claire Schooley actually steered a reasonable course:  identifying some general trends, and neither condemning “Millenials” nor their predecessors:

In summary, I firmly believe that today’s Millennials will be very effective adults. They will use their 20s to explore, just hang around, travel, communicate on Facebook, Twitter, and other social media. Just as the “play” process is very important for young children’s development, I believe Millennials are in the “play” process within the much broader adult world. In the end, this “messing around” phase will prove beneficial. The majority will find where they want to be and focus their energies. But they won’t be workaholics like their Baby Boomer parents. They will demand a balance between having fun and working. Money and tangibles are important, but not as important as having life/work balance. When these Millennials commit themselves to a task, they do great things. They are our future.

Well, except for one thing: there are still a lot of workaholics in this so-called “Millenial” generation.  I’ve worked with quite a few of them.  What I appreciate is that Claire didn’t fall into the usual trap of trying to tell us why the Millenials are better (or worse) than their predecessors on the basis of some of these broad generalizations.

Anatoly’s blog is one of my favorites, and his post on Star Wars only reinforces it. And yes, you can model just about anything:

Alberto Manuel argues against the idea of a process body of knowledge on his blog.  The basic themes seem to be:

• frustration with overly-complicated standards
• concern about standardizing a book of knowledge before the area is mature enough
• enforcement of immature “standards”.

The general responses are along the lines that this is an education, rather than an “enforcement” effort.  I think if the PBoK had been characterized instead as a process wiki, perhaps the connotations would be more “open” and sound less like an effort to put the stamp of approval on only certain things (and, in time, connotations won’t matter as much as reality).  In fact, wikipedia remains one of the best places to go for process-information (because they often have clear attribution, or acknowledgment of the lack thereof when they don’t have the references).

There’s always a tension between those that want to document the work we do (or capture it in process), and those who are already expert in that work – who find the act of defining to be too constraining. They’ll feel that the constraints are too much – and that if you lived by the constraints, you could never make the correct human judgments that they are able to make because of the wealth of experience they have.

I fully sympathize with both view points – there just isn’t as much conflict between the two as people might think.  Nothing the BoK will do will prevent Alberto from exercising his expertise.  Hopefuly the concerns of folks like Alberto are addressed by the PBoK team by keeping access (and editing) of the information open to a wide community.

Bruce Silver has periodic updates on his training offerings, and when we pick up on them I’ll reference them here, because I think his courses offer a good opportunity for people to get a better sense of BPM. The latest update is a bit of an F.A.Q. for BPMN Training, and includes information about certification, standards, etc.:

I provide BPMN training through a variety of channels.  Right now, the only one that offers certification is BPMessentials, which is a joint venture of Bruce Silver Associates and itp commerce, maker of the Process Modeler for Visio BPMN tool.  The standard BPMessentials online training (wtc.01), private on-site 2-day classes, and the 2-day public classes offered four times a year through Brainstorm/BPMInstitute all include certification.  An abridged BPMessentials Level 1-only class (wtc.l1.01) and classes based on Microsoft Visio Premium 2010 do not come with certification.

Jacob’s post on what could cause ACM to fail in 2011 is interesting, especially in that it comes from an ACM proponent.  A couple of statements jumped out at me:

Here is the catch – business folks don’t really understand or buy platforms, they buy applications.

[...]

The biggest issue with ACM is that business process management suites, which for many are the platform of choice  for process implementation, are sold to IT. The IT department understands platforms but doesn’t understand unstructured process. On the other hand, the business understands unstructured processes but doesn’t understand platforms.

To me, this is interesting – because BPM also is (typically) sold as a platform as well.  Pega is probably the only BPM vendor of note that seems to take an application-first, platform-second approach to selling BPM.  It seems to have worked out all right for them overall.

Jacob’s concerns about the risks to the ACM market remind me of some of the risks I’ve pointed out myself over the last year in various forums, because his concerns are complementary:

1. It needs to be a platform sale more often than an application sale (I’m sure there are a few applications that might fit ACM, so I won’t conclude that there is no such thing)
2. IT people aren’t bought into ACM – perhaps just aren’t bought into it yet. You could say this is because the IT people don’t understand (the ACM-advocates’ argument), or you could say that it is because the ACM arguments aren’t compelling (the IT side of that argument)… of course, even the ACM advocates are IT folks, so that muddies the waters a little bit!

My concerns are around whether ACM is a market or a feature-set (as far as the software side of ACM goes – there’s also an approach to managing “unstructured” work):

1. It doesn’t seem to me that there’s a big technical barrier to add ACM capabilities to existing BPM platforms.
2. The BPM platforms that I’ve worked with are Turing Complete.  Meaning, within the context of the BPM platform, I can “program” anything another software program can do.
3. IT may not assign much $ value to something they perceive as being technically straightforward.

As a result, given Jacob’s business-side concerns (Businesses don’t often buy platforms), and given its proximity to BPM software, and given a real lack of a real technical barrier to delivery (the BPM firms certainly have the resources to invest to add ACM to their platforms if they desire)… it looks to me that one possible outcome is a very short market window for ACM to catch on as an independent software category.  We already see vendors like IBM adding ACM-style capabilities to their process execution in the cloud (Blueworks).  I think we’ll start to see these capabilities added to the open source BPM products like Activiti as well.

I can sympathize with the difficulty of selling a business proposition to IT, or a platform to the business – because this is exactly the space good BPM vendors have been straddling for the last decade.

My advice to ACM advocates – don’t worry about purity of your arguments and methodology, just be pragmatic.  If people think that all work fits into an overall structure (largely an argument about abstraction and organization – an IT argument), then explain that ACM may help address those parts of the work/process that can’t be easily structured, and explain how it can augment a structured approach.  Don’t worry about which fundamental principle of work is supreme.

First, this announcement from Verizon.  The 90million+ customers of Verizon now have access to the best smart phone on the market. Previously, there were a lot of pundits saying that Verizon wouldn’t “cave” to Apple’s terms.  According to Verizon, it wasn’t even hard for them to “cave” on those terms – they knew what they were getting into and the financial numbers make sense so it wasn’t really an issue.  (Well, maybe it was an issue 2 years ago, but I guess it wasn’t now!)

Second, there’s this update from IDC on the state of the PC market.  Apple has now captures 8.7% of the market according to IDC, up 15.2% from Q4 last year. It has all the momentum, in an environment where the PC market in the US declined more than 5%.

Third, Gartner confirms the general trend in their report: 9.7% market share in Q4 with a 23.7% growth rate year-over-year.  An interesting tidbit in the Apple Insider article is that the iPad is noticeably absent from any of the analysis or figures:

Under its published charts, Gartner notes that its “data includes desk-based PCs, mobile PCs, including mini-notebooks but not media tablet such as the iPad.” Apple sells more iPads than all of its Macintosh computers combined, so including iPad tablets within PC sales would dramatically boost the company’s market share at the expense of generic PC makers, much like the balloon of netbook sales from Acer and Asus skewed the PC market in 2008 and 2009.

Neither Gartner nor IDC have explained why they gerrymander their PC sales data to exclude the iPad, even as they count limited functionality netbooks, scramble to invent non-iPad explanations for contracting growth in the PC market outside of Apple’s own sales, and describe Apple’s tablet as part of a distinct “media tablet” market that simply does not exist.

Gartner previously invented arbitrary definitions of “smartphone” that excluded devices from some makers (notably Palm) in order to flatter sales of Windows Mobile, formerly included PC servers (but not competing servers using non-Intel chips) in its PC sales reports to flatter Microsoft, and more recently has invented tens of millions of devices it says are probably using Android in order to dramatically skew its modern reports on the smartphone industry and fulfill its own predictions on mobile platforms.

I find the blind spot kind of interesting.  I guess it lets everyone pretend that the iPad *isn’t* eating their lunch for another year or so… but the gig is going to be up soon. Investing in the Experience seems to be the right way to go.

UPDATE:  I should have caught this excellent article from Marco Arment (of Instapaper fame).  He makes the point that although Android has a ton of volume, it hasn’t really been in proper competition in the US with iPhone:

Whenever I’ve overheard conversations about smartphones in real life, by “normal people” (not geeks like us), it has always been clear that the true battle happening in the U.S. phone market wasn’t iPhone versus Android, but iPhone versus Verizon.

The decision that people were discussing wasn’t “Do I get an iPhone or an Android whatever?”

It was always “Do I get an iPhone or do I stay on Verizon?”

I get the feeling that very few people except anti-Apple geeks really care about Android itself. The buying decision for most seemed to be, “I’m on Verizon and don’t want to switch, so which of the phones in the Verizon store looks best? They say this one is just as good as an iPhone. I guess I’ll get that.”

I get this same feeling as well.  Looking forward to seeing if I’m right.

Just read the first (last) post from the planetjBPM blog:

It has been over a year now since I posted here.  Any of you who have been following development of opensource bpm solutions and jBPM in particular might have a clue about why it took so long (at least partially). Not that long ago, I made the ‘formal’ decision to not use jBPM anymore. It has to do with a new job, things within the project and alternative solutions.

It seems Activiti has stolen jBPM’s thunder. Folks like Ronald were critical to jBPM’s community.

There have been a lot of posts about Google’s “broken” search function lately.  Oh, if only I had a business as broken as Google’s!  But, quite seriously, there has been an erosion of the value proposition.  Not because the information we want isn’t out there, and indexed by Google.  But because it is buried in an avalanche of less relevant and less authoritative information.

So, when someone used to approach me with a general technical question – the process went something like this:

Me:  “Did you Google that?”

Them: “uh, no.”

Me (typing into google search for the answer)… : “there ya go.”

However, these days I increasingly find myself going to more targeted sources – wikipedia, for example.  And if the subject isn’t technical in nature (product-related, lets say) – then I’m heading to twitter, facebook, or other channels to get the opinions of peers.  Of course, you can still use Google and constrain the search to particular domains or sites – but many Google users simply don’t do this or don’t know that they can.

The “Just Google It” process is broken.

If this isn’t an example of how Process Debt can sneak up on you, what is?!