Dave Brakoniecki’s post on Nokia, Apple, and the Commodity Trap takes issue with Henry Chesbrough’s argument that Nokia had fallen into a commodity trap – essentially that it was not thinking about its business as a service business.

But Dave argues that actually, the problem is that Nokia’s market has been commoditized at the low end by contract manufacturers around the world, and at the high end, by Apple and Android, which commoditized the app business:

While it was asleep, contract manufacturers made the fabrication of complex and high-quality products a commodity business.  As Chesbrough correctly notes this trend has eroded Nokia’s competitive advantage and their position in the market.  [...]

Ironically, at the other end of the market, Apple and Android have also commoditized the market, just a different market.

Yes, they are selling premium hardware but the handset market has always been heavily subsidized by telecom providers in exchange for long-term contracts.  [...]  First, Apple and then Android essentially commoditized application development in a way Nokia never managed.  Apple and Android have made the mobile data services market explode.

By including a usable browser and making app installation plug-and-play, suddenly anyone could build a data service.  There really isn’t that much the iPhone does that you couldn’t achieve on the Nokia N95 but the amount of effort and development pain involved simply made it pointless.  The pain outweighed the utility until Apple made it easier.

Put another way – Apple has commoditized its complements – application development, for example – more effectively than Nokia has.  And if you can commoditize your complements, then commoditizing is a good thing.

Bruce has been writing about BPMN2 model interchange for some time, and I’m a fan of the work he’s doing in this regard, and the light he’s shining on lack of vendor effort. Here’s his latest take on the status of things:

Last summer I posted on the challenge of achieving process model interchange via the BPMN 2.0 standard.  In the half year since then, vendor progress toward that goal has been about zero.  It seems that vendors, in particular the ones that drove the standard, don’t really care about this most fundamental user expectation of any standard.  Ah well, no surprise there…  But in the past couple weeks, some encouraging developments.  Activiti and BonitaSoft – both are open source startups with a BPMN 2.0-based BPMS – have begun to tout BPMN 2.0 import and export.  Neither one supports even the Descriptive subclass of the spec (what I call Level 1 in the training), but  both vendors are full speed ahead at expanding the capabilities of their process engine.

I’ve always felt (even when I worked at Lombardi) that interchange would be best served in the open source market – no single vendor has much impetus to do it – and invariably there would be bugs that the vendor doesn’t view as high priority (hey, the lombardi to oracle transformation exhibits some obscure bug, not sure whether lombardi isn’t exporting right or oracle isn’t importing right… think either vendor ever wants to fix that?  But in the open source world – even if the sources and targets are NOT open source, if the “interchange” (the spec) and the “transform” (the code that does the work) are open source, then (at least) developers who experience issues can actually attempt to fix them (even if those fixes are a temporary hardcode or hack).

Bruce goes on to comment on IBM:

It will be interesting to see if IBM takes Lombardi Edition in a BPMN 2.0 direction; I’m not sure Phil Gilbert is a believer in its value.  If not, when Activiti and BonitaSoft finish the Common Executable subclass of BPMN 2.0, the BPMS marketplace could get very interesting.

I think Phil Gilbert’s issue with BPMN2 was that it got lost in the weeds (my interpretation based on reading his blog posts at the time). For example, every BPMN2 xml I’ve seen so far has several vendor-specific extensions (which are allowed by the spec, but likely meaningless to other tools until someone writes the adapters). As BPMN2 was getting started he was a fan and wanted it to succeed, and he drove lombardi to be one of the early adopters of a native BPMN 1.0 engine (not that it covered 100% of the spec- but there was no lossy transformation to some other format to interfere with the interpretation of your BPMN – Model preserving, to use Keith Swenson’s terminology).  Certainly, BPMN2 implementations to-date have failed Phil’s test of providing tools so good that no one needs to bother to read the XML behind the model…

I don’t have any inside knowledge of IBM’s stance on BPMN2 with respect to their products, but I, too, will be interested to see what shakes out at Impact. If they don’t make progress it might be interesting to write a BPMN2 exporter or importer. But it is a fair amount of work to do as an outsider.  I can see why IBM might not view interchange as a high priority – again, a good argument for an open source implementation of interchange.

As if to underscore my feeling that open source will pave the way, Activiti releases this video of an import of BPMN2 from another editor into Activiti:

 


Pretty nice demo. I do wonder if the import/export functionality would be better off as a standalone interchange open source project…

Adam Deane on how to promote your BPM company:

Industry Analysts
I’ve explained the importance of industry analysts .
Industry Analysts listen to customers, they have an impact on vendor strategy, and can have an impact on vendor sales.

BPM Consultancy Companies
A sales lead from them is probably one of the most qualified leads you’ll ever get.  They meet customers. They are their trusted advisors.

Independent consultants and people in the field
Again. They are the customer’s trusted advisors. They are physically sitting in their offices. They are part of their team. Their voice counts.
People in the field have an enormous impact on decisions.

He then goes on to list, in his opinion, the most influential BPM industry analysts (including a couple that don’t work for Gartner and Forrester).  It is a good list, he has picked out the right people.  He mentions that BPM consultancies and independents but demurs because the list would be too long.  Actually there are surprisingly few consultancies that are really engaged in blogging and the online BPM community, relative to how many total consultancies are out there.

We’re still waiting for the killer BPM iPhone App, but in the meantime, Austin-based Spiceworks has released an iPhone app that could be the killer IT professional app, and points toward the kind of purpose-built App that might unlock value in the BPM space:

“IT professionals spend much of the day away from their desks fixing and deploying network equipment or helping employees troubleshoot problems,” said Francis Sullivan, co-founder and CTO of Spiceworks. “That’s why facilitating mobile management of IT products and services is so important. Our new iPhone app helps by allowing users to tap into the power of Spiceworks whenever and wherever they need it.”

Before you get too esoteric in your BPM efforts, make sure you tackle the basic, common problems that all BPM projects need to tackle:

• sponsorship
• functional thinking
• business change management (in addition to technical change management)
• internal communications
• consensus tooling and methodology
• expanding beyond the COE
• “how big?”
• building BPM skills

Read the article for the full scoop. These are classic BPM problems and we’ve advised many of our customers on these very issues, so I think we can attest to the relevance of the list.

Given that Launch is going on right now in San Francisco, it just seems appropriate to take up this topic that Mark Suster raised on his blog.  Maybe you think you can launch anywhere, or maybe you think you need to launch in the Valley.  But can you build a great tech firm outside the Valley?

Mark Suster‘s “Both Sides of the Table” blog has great content for any entrepreneur or investor.  Recently he asked the question: “Can You Really Build a Great Tech Firm Outside Silicon Valley?”

And of course the short answer is yes, but the interesting part of the question isn’t the yes or no, the interesting part is answering how you overcome the challenges of being outside the Valley (and conversely, how you overcome the challenges of being inside the valley).

Mark does a pretty good job of doing both.  Focusing on the challenges outside the valley:

The VC partner, somebody I greatly respect said, “Yeah, we like Gil and what they’re doing. I’m just not sure you can build a great technology firm outside of Bay Area.”

That bias is the first challenge. Mark focuses on the challenges in LA in particular, using that as a well-researched example.  I’ll take each of his points, and look at how well they apply to another “outside the Valley” origination of startups: Austin.

1.  Funding is different outside of Silicon Valley.  No argument here. Austin gets a disproportionate share of Texas VC funding, but still Texas gets about 2.74% of funding while the Valley gets nearly 40%.  There may be less competition for funding in Austin, but there is definitely less competition among the investor class.  That makes it more challenging for good ideas to get funding.  On the other hand, Austin Ventures has reasonably deep pockets to get some ideas to quite a good scale (they aren’t afraid to commit  $50M on an investment).  But like LA, Austin struggles with swing-for-the-fences funding, locally.  Having said that, there are outliers.  HomeAway is Austin-born and -based and has raised something like $500 million. Dachis Group is a well-funded startup.  And Demand Media isn’t based here but has purchased a couple of Austin-based companies which continue to operate in consolidated offices here.  In fact, if you just cruise the headlines in Austin from February Austin Business Journal articles, you’ll see quite a bit of funding going on:  CyberKnife ($850k), Movero Tech acquired, Vermillion ($21.8M), CacheIQ ($6M),  Cinsay ($40M debt financing), Firefly LED ($3M from ETF), Lion Street ($220K), Boundless Networks ($4M), SocialWare ($3M), TechSkills ($5M), uShip ($2M), LibreDigital ($4M), ReachForce ($4.6M).  Nothing compared to the Bay Area, but for Austin, this is the most I can recall since before the dot-com bust.

2.  Necessity is the Mother of Invention. Definitely we see signs of this in Austin – very few models that depend on growing without making money.  And as Mike Maples, Jr. has pointed out, there seems to be a real critical mass around the intersection of enterprise software and social software here.  Let’s not count our chickens before they hatch, however.

3. Recruiting and Retention will be different outside the Valley. Very true.  Easier to retain talent in Austin once you have it.  Mark says:  “But we do have great technology developers.  You can build a team of 100+ people in LA without needing to hire outside of LA.  If you want to scale to become a ‘huge’ company you will find it difficult to scale to the level of the Valley sized companies.  But if you grow to be that big it would be a very nice problem to deal with.”  In Austin, there are a few companies with 100+ teams.  And one reason the talent pool is so deep is the University of Texas Computer Science department (not to mention EE, and other technical majors).  But the other reason worth mentioning is that back in the 90′s, a company called Trilogy bulked up to nearly 1500 people, probably two-thirds or more with technical backgrounds.  Referring back to #2- Trilogy couldn’t possibly find enough talent locally and keep up with growth goals, so it looked outside of Austin and brought talent in – perfecting the sales pitch for Austin in the process.  It helps to be minting money in such a situation – you can afford to ramp up a huge college recruiting operation and fan out to not only the top engineering schools.  Trilogy was the top recruiter from CS programs at several top schools for a few years.  This is the kind of long bet you can make if you’re making real money.  But it is harder to make this kind of bet if you’re making it with Other People’s Money.  They’re not investing in you to reinvent college recruiting, training, and onboarding – they’re investing in your business.  But the point is, if you’re outside Silicon Valley, you have to be more creative to grow beyond the natural limits of your city.  You can argue whether Trilogy should have imported all that college talent or not, but it is hard to argue that it can’t be done.  As a result of all the imported talent in Austin, you’ll find Trilogy alumni at virtually every software company in Austin these days.

4.  There are strategic assets outside of the Valley. So true.  Austin has an interesting mix of enterprise software heritage, hardware and chip design heritage (especially analog), and music.  You’d hope to see startups leverage what “keeps Austin weird” to build differentiated businesses.

5.  Communities outside the Valley have matured. So true.  Austin has a more active and interesting entrepreneurial scene than ever, thanks to that generational development.

At BP3, we should be so lucky to worry about what happens when we need to cross the 100+ employee barrier in Austin.  But our model is already set up to be more distributed – Austin is our HQ, but more than 2/3 of our employees live outside of Austin.  We’ll have a different set of challenges as we grow.  But for startups swinging for the fences in Austin (Bazaarvoice, and HomeAway, to name two), we Austinites know it can be done right here in Austin.

Lance Gibbs and Scott Francis, of BP3, and Reid Denny, of Wells Fargo, will be presenting at IBM Impact in April (you can find the sessions here):

Program:  Technology
Track:  BPM and Decision Management
Sub-track:  BPM: From Projects to Programs
Session Type:  Lecture, Level:  Beginner
Speaker(s):  Scott Francis, BP3; Reid Denny, Wells Fargo Bank N.A.; Lance Gibbs, BP3

Abstract:  These are practices which keep the business engaged throughout the BPM lifecyle, ensuring their value-added player role. The session will cover typical challenges companies have when it comes to getting and keeping the business stakeholders involved in their early BPM program days. Most companies are very used to a model where functional requirements are provided by the business and then handed off for IT to deliver against. In BPM, the importance of having a process focus versus a set of functional descriptions cannot be emphasized enough so the approach has to change dramatically for increased chance of success to occur, and for the organization to get the most value out of the process solutions.

We’re honored to have this opportunity to present alongside Wells Fargo’s Reid Denny.  Reid has been running an innovation group within Wells Fargo that has been doing great things for their business and we think there is a lot to learn from their story.

If you’re going to be at Impact 2011, April 10-15, look us up.  There are some great sessions planned – already over 100 sessions just around BPM.  We’d love to meet more people in the BPM space in person.

The tempest in a teapot last week in the twitter-verse was all about how Twitter cut UberTwitter clients off from its API, which looked like a platform-vs-app battle between Twitter and UberMedia (Bill Gross’ company).

But as Mark Suster says in the linked article, when Twitter cut off UberTwitter clients – it wasn’t really hurting UberTwitter as much as it was hurting its own users.  Users with literally millions of followers use UberTwitter.  But many of the followers do not.  So by cutting off these clients, Twitter was implicitly (explicitly?) cutting the social connections from the glitterati to the following.  To me, Twitter ends up looking like the bad guy in these scuffles, even when it might seem that they’re right.

What does this have to do with Apple? It banned Flash preemptively  from iOS devices- putting up with the beating it took in the press – so that it wouldn’t look like even more of a bad guy later by severing users from Flash apps that it deemed either unstable or security risks (or simply, not “Apple” enough).

Because when your users depend on a particular UI candy that you don’t control, and there are enough of them, the purveyors of that UI start to get leverage on your platform – if you do things to disable that UI, or punish the vendors of the UI, you are also punishing your own users.

Of course, UberMedia could have had an alternate plumbing set up to keep users’ messages flowing during this outage – outside of Twitter.  But Adobe is in a tougher spot because developing a tablet or phone just to prove you can run Flash on it is a much more expensive end-around.  They’re still waiting on their hardware and software partners to come out with the killer combination that proves Adobe Flash will run just as well on mobile devices as HTML5 / iOS.

I can’t say I’m happy that I can’t run Flash on my phone.  But I’m not sad either.  Not as sad as I’d be if my favorite, Twitter client, say, ran on Flash and then was abruptly disabled because Apple decided to enforce rules against Flash.  (Oh wait, that’s exactly what Apple appears to be doing with its new subscription rules… )

I’ve worked chiefly for 3 companies in my career.  In each of the first two, there was quite a focus on installation being easy.  This cuts against the grain for most enterprise software companies.  They mostly get used to a nice tidy sum of installation $ coming their way for each customer they sign up.

But those with a little more vision see a hard installation as a barrier to adoption of software.  The product experience starts with the install (if there is one).  The equivalent analogy for SaaS products is that the experience starts with registration.  The harder you make the process of installing or registering, the more people you’ll lose before you even get started.

Lombardi was big on the “express install” – a single installer that would lay down everything you need to build and deploy processes.  This mindset has, thankfully, been transplanted to IBM, and so far, it has stuck, even though the installer is something well north of 1GB.

Activiti is raising the bar in this arena – and one could argue that install experience is even more important for an open source project.  After all, if you have to configure a build before you can even run software, how many people do you lose during this process?

But as Joram Barrez writes, you can get Activiti started in just one minute after downloading.  Actually he’s a bit late with getting this news out, as it was also true of the alpha and beta builds.  But they’ve made some improvements, and more importantly, they haven’t made it harder as the product has matured.  Hopefully they keep a relentless focus on keeping friction costs low – it is much easier to avoid them than to get rid of the friction once it is introduced.

To me, this is just mounting evidence that the bar for Simplicity and The Experience is being raised higher.  The points of differentiation will be the how not the what.

Sandy Kemsley has exciting news-  the PKI Wiki is up:

I’ve been a bit quiet on the Process Knowledge Initiative front lately due to other commitments, and lack of much public-facing progress in spite of the progress that we’d been making internally.

That’s about to change, because we have a public wiki up and running for the draft Body of Knowledge, and will officially be announcing it soon, along with our initial sponsors. Right now, it only contains the basic knowledge areas that are going to be expanded out into the BoK, but we felt that it was time to open it up for public commentary.

I’m really encouraged by the use of an honest-to-goodness wiki to back up the site.  This really increases the odds that we get real participation from the community on these topics.  Of course, there’s much else to be done, including setting authoring and editing and attribution guidelines, etc. But this is a good first step, and a public step.

Computer Weekly reveals an interview with IBM’s Marie Wieck, an IBM Software Group GM:

Wieck points out that right now the company has a big focus on business process management (BPM) after the acquisition of Lombardi around a year ago — and the acquisition of ILOG back in 2009. The company is also keen to talk about its work extending natural language rules to allow business people to adapt and automate business.  Wieck also talked about IBM’s Blue Works live — a cloud-based business process management tool.

Nice to hear her volunteering mentions of key BPM products!

Keith Harrison-Broninski compared Social BPM and HIMS in an ebizQ article recently.  Actually it was more of a product comparison between Blueworks Live and  HumanEdj.

HIMS is Keith’s acronym for “Human Interaction Management System”.  I’ve not heard it used outside the context of Keith’s blog, and references to his talks and blog and product.

Perhaps my favorite part of the article is that he goes back to the tired complaint of the ACM crowd against BPM:

I’ll take it as read that the functionality described above applies well to low-level, routine clerical work.

Ah yes- that low-level, routine clerical work.

The target of a product like BlueworksLive is not the routine work, but rather the somewhat non-routine work that isn’t overly complicated to describe as a task list or check list.  It looks like Keith has confused the modeling functionality with the execution functionality (the modeling functionality comes with the templates he describes… but the process execution is all around simple ad-hoc efforts, no modeling required or allowed, really).

The main criticism of BlueworksLive, as an example of “Social BPM” is that it looks like a toy, compared to the mature HumanEdj offering.  It is a fair criticism, but I’d point him to Chris Dixon’s blog post on the subject of “toys” :

The reason big new things sneak by incumbents is that the next big thing always starts out being dismissed as a “toy.”  This is one of the main insights of Clay Christensen’s “disruptive technology” theory. This theory starts with the observation that technologies tend to get better at a faster rate than users’ needs increase. From this simple insight follows all kinds of interesting conclusions about how markets and products change over time.

Chris Dixon was referring to startups but I think the idea applies equally well to lots of new ideas.  As dismissive as I’ve been of some of the “new naming” around the BPM space, I’m not dismissive of the value that the new ideas can bring (I just abhor the bandwagon acronym effect…).  Social BPM isn’t a great name to capture what is being added to BPM by social networking features.  But it doesn’t mean that these ideas, in the BPM space, won’t take root and create value despite unfortunate names…

After reading another of Derek Miers’ posts on Forrester’s site, I have to say I am once again struck by how Derek speaks (and writes) with such a clear voice.  In a recent conversation, he replayed my own words back to me, blending context from other conversations and crystallized my own thinking in the process.  It really is refreshing to have someone shine a mirror on your own ideas to help you understand them better.

Turning back to his post: in this article he paints clear lines of demarcation between two points of view that are out there in the market:

1. That BPM is defined as a narrow technical approach
2. That BPM encompasses a wider range of improvement techniques that inform and leverage the technical approach.

Well this cuts right to the heart of the divide between those firms that have successful BPM programs versus those who have projects with a BPM flavor.

Another telling comment:

But each organization needs its own subtle blend of skills, methods, techniques and tools. In a sense, the organization needs to weave its own proprietary method framework — to create its own fabric — a unique approach that reflects its special needs, the maturity of the different business units, their history of change, culture, the current and planned organizational structure (to say nothing of the political challenges).

I could sum this up another way, perhaps less elegantly:  you have to own your own methodology. A great way to do that is to customize the methodology to the particular character of your firm.

Rod Favaron was our CEO at Lombardi during my tenure there, and continued on through the transition to IBM.  The news today in Austin is that he has now joined Spredfast as the CEO.  From AustinStartup:

Spredfast today announced that Rod Favaron has joined the company as chief executive officer, effective immediately. In addition, Favaron will join the Spredfast board of directors. Favaron’s appointment caps off a year of successes for Spredfast which include aggressive customer acquisition, Series A funding from Austin Ventures in April 2010 and ongoing recognition by industry analysts as an innovative player in social media marketing and the growing social customer relationship management (CRM) market.

“2010 was a great year for Spredfast and the social CRM market. Companies now realize that social media is a crucial communication platform for engaging customers, and companies that embrace social get a great advantage,” said Ken Cho, co-founder of Spredfast. “We’re thrilled to have someone with Rod’s talent and background on board as Spredfast gears up for another year of explosive growth.

Congratulations to Rod, and to Spredfast.  They’ve had a great year, they have some great talent, and hopefully Rod can help them get to the next level.

Phil’s writing is always provocative and this time is no different:  he brings together the subjects of BPM and Egyptian revolution in a single blog post! This hits home for BP3 because one of our best business partners is based in Egypt and we’ve been keeping a worried eye on the news -and luckily finding that our friends are doing just fine so far.  From Phil:

A lot of that is fact… some is supposition. There’s one more fact I find interesting: Egypt’s army is a conscript army. Which means its army, given its size (1/2 million Egyptians) will inherently reflect all the nation’s constituencies and values – these will be internalized to an extent not possible when the army is not “democratically” selected. [Note: I'm not implying anything against a volunteer army, it also has many merits, I'm simply saying that Egypt's isn't, and therefore the demographics of the army more directly reflect the demographics, and therefore the sympathies, of the entire population.]

What Phil is driving at, is that in BPM – it might make sense for us to make sure our BPM initiatives are a cross-section of the real company we’re dealing with – not just a set of elite volunteer commandos.  Although, you know, elite volunteer commandos are nice too.

I recently visited a customer that has taken an interesting approach to BPM: they’ve sprinkled the seeds of BPM around the organization, training something like 50 people, and making sure to train both a do-er and a manager in the same group- so that the person who “gets things done” can get support of their management when they want to take a BPM spin on their work or spin up a BPM project.  They’re also taking a look at what various elements of their BPM initiatives have done that looks like best practice – and what doesn’t.  And then looking for the right blend of technical and business approaches that is most likely to yield best results in the general case.

Democratizing your BPM initiative – and allowing innovation to flourish – it isn’t a bad thing.

(Editor’s note: I’ll just apologize now for the sensational title)

Well, actually, Max J. Pucher is declaring ACM dead, and Adaptive as the worthy successor to ACM (“ACM is Dead! Long live ADAPTIVE!“).  But the article overall is curious – because it marks an official departure from the ACM camp that Max has been alluding to in comments on various blogs and forums for months.  Paraphrasing, he’s tired of fighting over the definitions of three letter acronyms, and tired of compromising and watering down the definition of the terms to suit all the various vendors who want to play in the space.

As he writes:

There was never a doubt that we all live in the ‘BPM State’, but we have different ideas how to govern it. Many ACM proponents feel that a lesser definition will allow to include more aspects and more vendors. That is a mistake. Opportunistic coalition governments of many different small fractions ALWAYS collapse sooner than later. I feel that we have missed the opportunity of truly advancing process management with the limited ACM approach. Dynamic Case and Process Management are now seen as like definitions to ACM. But it is not just about ‘unpredictable’ work items, but about a more globally encompassing technology approach that is linked to business architecture and strategy. I defined what I saw as relevant for business – and not as market segments or product categories – shortly after the ACM acronym was chosen in a post on Adaptive Processes. But so be it. I rather be Brutus and end this senseless debate to focus on what businesses truly need.

I think he has a point.  ACM has been defined thinly (broadly?) enough that it could mean Twitter or Yammer (or nearly any social tech). Or it could mean Blueworks Live, or Appian.  Or Asana.  But Max is pushing for a more definitive take on something – and giving up on redefining BPM and ACM per se – he’s going with the Adaptive moniker or paradigm:

What cannot die is the ADAPTIVE paradigm, that – much as the principle ideas of freedom and democracy – will continue to guide those who do believe that people empowerment is the way forward. Those who believe in strict governance, because they can’t believe that people can govern themselves with a limited set of guiding rules, will have to learn the hard way. The dynamics of natural evolution will create the tension that will eventually break the chains of rigid processes.

In principle I agree with Max that empowerment is the right answer.  But even “people empowerment” has different interpretations to different people – I’ll admit that although I read all of Max’ posts, I still don’t know what Isis Papyrus does, in detail.  I just know the principles that Max has in mind that his product(s) support.  (That’s probably better than knowing a set of functionality without knowing the foundational principles, however!)  Interestingly, in Jacob Ukelson’s lists of risks of ACM failure in 2011, I don’t think fraying of the ACM community was one of them.

A Cautionary Tale of Two Names

Of course, any “name” runs risks.  Working at software companies I often observed code names being assigned to releases.  The code names meant something to the people who hear them – but the problem is, they often meant two different things to two different people.  The release name implied particular features, initiatives, and bugfixes.  The names became a shorthand for the functionality.  What’s that? Waiting on support for Linux?  That’s in the kubrick release.  In the future, you just equate “kubrick” with “Linux” (and myriad other features that might be included).

But the product engineering team often has no such mind-map. The code name just ties to a release date.  The exact set of final functionality is subject to change until code freeze.  But this difference in understanding what a name means, presents all kinds of problems. One person thinks that because kubrick is shipping next week, they’re getting Linux support, and doesn’t even think to ask if it is still in, as it might have seemed like the defining feature of the release.  But the developer just knows that kubrick is shipping, thinking nothing of Linux, and doesn’t even think to mention that Linux support was dropped a month or two ago in favor of a localization effort.

When the release comes out, you can imagine what happens.

One can argue that everyone should be looking at the release plan, which is frequently updated, to see the latest “in-out” of the release-  but this just isn’t in everyone’s daily work routine. One can argue that engineering should communicate each change to the whole company – but when should that communique happen? Often these decisions are made and rescinded over a short period of time – and some of the changes are so minor that announcing to the whole company amounts to spam.   It’s a challenge, but one that has to be managed to avoid these misunderstandings.  And a good point of discipline is for Engineering to note use this codename shorthand for anything other than features that can not be dropped from the release.

What Does this have to do with ACM? or BPM?

My thought is simply that we have, already, an “all encompassing three letter acronym”.  Its BPM.  As Max says, we all live in a BPM state.  The question is how to get the most out of it.  Some say ACM.  Max says “Adaptive”.  I’d like to talk about it in more granular terms that defy a single phrase to rule them all.  Because I fear that if Adaptive becomes the term du jour, the vendors (of which Max’ company is only one) will again butcher the usage and the meaning beyond recognition, or at least, beyond consensus.

I just think all of our energy is better spent focusing on solving problems for customers, regardless of what labels analysts and vendors apply to the work and to the products.  I think I’m actually agreeing with Max on this, if I understand his posts correctly.  I hope the broader community that lives within this BPM state will agree as well.

It looks like I’m not the only one who feels this way, as the Process Cafe’s Gary Comerford writes:

There appears to be a move in the BPM world to create a whole new substrata of ‘process management’. Max Pucher appears to be one of the leading members of this cadre and – like so many before him – he tries to establish a little niche ‘fiefdom’ which he can call his own. Andrew Smith from  One Degree has posited Adaptive Process Guidance (APG) as a new paradigm too. Forrester have created Dynamic Case management

And bravo to them for doing that.

But here’s the problem I have: Why seek to split the capability of BPM down into different acronyms or niches when we don’t fully understand BPM as it stands at the moment?

Indeed.  But the lure of a fiefdom is just hard for software vendors to resist (especially after a round of acquisitions).  I’m not sure that that is what Max is trying to do – but the general tendency is there in nearly every marketing or PR release you see from a software vendor (“the leading <fill-in-a-narrow-intersection-of-attributes> vendor in the world”).  Define things narrowly enough and you can be #1.  But I prefer the approach a company like Apple uses.  Sure, they could define their market as “touchscreen smart phones” in which they likely dominate in share. But they define the market much more broadly. It encourages them to set higher sights.

Is ACM dead?  Not in the way you might think from the title.  There is an avid community promoting the acronym, and the methods, that ACM acts as a catch-phrase for.  Many an analyst paper and a vendor product announcement will discuss ACM for many moons to come.  I guess the question is how much wind is behind the sails?

This isn’t a review of Appian Tempo.  I’m a fan of what Appian is trying to do with Tempo and I hope there is more of this action in the BPM space.

Sandy Kemsley has a thorough review on her blog.  As usual, it covers the details, and the scenario of the demo quite well:

I had a chance for an advance briefing of Appian’s Tempo release last week; this is a new part of the Appian product suite that focuses on mobility, cloud and social aspects of BPM for social collaboration. This isn’t a standalone social collaboration platform, but includes deep links into the Appian BPM platform through events, alerts, tasks and more. They’ve included Twitter-like status updates and RSS feeds so that you can publish and consume the information in a variety of other forms, offering a fresh new alternative to the usual sort of process monitoring that we see in a BPMS. The free app for the iPhone and iPad requires an account on Appian Forum (the Appian user community site) or access to an Appian BPM installation (not sure if this is both an on-premise system and the cloud-based offering) in order to do anything so I wasn’t really able to check it out, but saw it on an emulator in the demo.

Sandy doesn’t pick winners and losers too often – reading between the lines she likes the indications of where Appian, and the BPM space in general, are going with mobile and social tech, but she’s seen enough demos not to get too excited.

Ann All has a further review (“I See the Enterprise Collaboration’s Future and its Name is BPM“), and is obviously impressed.  She attacks the shortcomings of products like Yammer, in that they can result in new information/communication silos rather than unifying an enterprise.  I can’t help but feel that that same fragmentation issue can be a problem for BPM-collaboration tech (How many BPM products does the average Fortune 500 company own?).  But Ann and Sandy both point out a key benefit of BPM + Social: tying interactions to real business events and outcomes.

Next up, Bruce Silver weighs in with his review, in which he not only praises Tempo but takes a few shots at the approach a few other vendors have taken (and it isn’t hard to guess which ones):

First, it’s really well executed.  Clean and smoothly integrated into the BPM environment.  Second, it seems a more reasonable implementation of the social/mobile idea than is typically offered by BPM vendors. [...] Tempo lets you create and track ad-hoc tasks, sure, but that (in my view) is not really BPM.  What’s important is it lets you also do real BPM, i.e. structured processes, within the same environment.  From your smartphone or iPad, you can perform tasks of  either type, often just by “swiping” the entry, quick and easy.   BPM vendors that insist on a separate “place” for users to do ad-hoc BPM are missing the boat.  Who wants that?

Let me take a shot at that.  The question isn’t, whether BPM users want a separate place for users to do ad-hoc BPM.  The question is, do regular users in the business want their ad-hoc stuff to be mixed in with other people’s BPM (which to them, may feel too heavy/complex so far)?  In other words, are we enhancing the existing audience’s experience with BPM (Appian’s Tempo) or are we trying to address a new audience (for example, the approach IBM has taken with Blueworks).  Both approaches have their merit, but I’ll admit Blueworks’ approach has less appeal to me as a consultant – that doesn’t mean that it won’t have *more* appeal to customers (for example, as a customer, we’re already using Blueworks internally and it took all of 5 minutes to get started). A couple other notes from his blog:

The hard part of BPM is the underlying architecture, the plumbing.  The “user experience”, not to diminish its importance, is technically easier to engineer.

Respectfully, I disagree. It *seems* like the underlying architecture is hard.  But, if it were truly hard, you wouldn’t see minimum half-a-dozen products that are pretty viable on the market.  I’ve worked in a product space where the architecture was actually hard.  We solved problems that no other vendor was even capable of solving.  Our engine would produce answers in seconds that took other vendors’ products hours, if they ever completed the computation.  That’s real differentiation in a hard space.  But in BPM engines, the differentiation is in the experience…

In fact, the underlying architecture and plumbing is becoming commoditized.  I don’t really care that much what engine is running my process… I care about the experience of developing and running my processes.  The experience is vastly more important than the plumbing.  And it is much harder to get right.  Not because it is technically difficult, but it is conceptually difficult to get right – and to say “no” to all the unnecessary stuff.  And once you get a bunch of code in place, it creates its own difficulty in changing to reflect the right experience. I’ll say it again, this is where the real differentiation is in BPM.  (And, to be fair, Bruce likes the Appian Tempo experience, which makes it differentiatingly good in his opinion).  Continuing on:

And once you face up to that, you don’t have to reconceive social/mobile BPM as something radically different, needing a totally separate product.  It becomes simply an alternative user interface that lets you extend real BPM to occasional users who wouldn’t otherwise participate, and enhance the value for regular BPM users by letting them perform process activities without being chained to the workflow inbox.  By making event streams and native smartphone UI a simple extension of the BPMS environment, not a whole “new new thing”, Tempo I think puts Appian in the driver’s seat in social/mobile BPM.

I like the idea of the alternate interface for BPM.  It was one of the first things that occurred to me looking at Blueworks (interfaces to existing BPMS installations for event feeds), but it is also so obvious that I’m sure it will happen in a future incremental release.  Actually, the technology to feed events into the stream from a BPMS (or Salesforce, twitter, or facebook) is quite easy across the products I’m aware of.  I like what Appian has done – but integration to their BPM suite isn’t going to be a selling point for customers who have already purchased, deployed, and invested in another BPM suite.  A separate, pluggable product might be preferred.  We’re watching the outcome of innovation being alive and well in BPM – surprisingly, at IBM, and less surprisingly, at smaller outfits like Appian and ActionBase, and in open source projects like Activiti.

It’s a very exciting time to be in the BPM business.  Congratulations to Appian for a great product release – I don’t mean any of my comments to denigrate their product offering – which I have not myself laid hands on – I hope their release is a success, and an indication or precursor of more interesting things to come from other vendors in our space as well.

Connie objects to the characterization by some of “BPM failures”, and has excellent advice for those who either see BPM initiatives stalling, or want to prevent them from getting stuck:

• Cut down the up-front time spent on process modeling.  There’s no reason you can’t continue to invest in modeling after your BPM initiatives are in progress.
• Knowing how to scope your effort. Getting projects that are too big to tackle, or too small to matter, can stall efforts.  Right-sizing process efforts is, unfortunately, still more art than science.
• Let business drive. Stated differently – make business drive.  My take: exactly, but don’t let them drive off the cliff.  Get them to lead, but don’t be an order-taker.  IT’s job isn’t just to implement, it is also to inform and consult.
• Develop a strong process-improvement methodology. Don’t ignore the methodology aspects as well as the technical aspects of BPM.

Interesting blog from Austin’s own Ash Maurya “The Fallacy of Customer Development“, which is really an essay to explain that if you’re developing a web application, rather than enterprise software, you need to apply a different approach to customer development to really get the valid feedback you need.

It’s an interesting adaptation of the customer development process outlined by Steve Blank in “Four Steps to the Epiphany” (I’m partly partial to Steve Blank because several of my friends went to work for epiphany).

But I also find it interesting to follow the development of processes for startups, for customer development, for the lean startup.  Following Steve Blank, Eric Ries, Ash Maurya, and Jason Cohen gets you pretty far along the path to understanding this school of thought.

Kate Leggett of Forrester’s Customer Service Myths, Half-Truths, and Total Nonsense…Continued is a great read on the myths of “Social” customer service.  But equally, these are statements that should ring true in BPM circles.

The first two myths:

• Social CRM is giving customers control. Her response “Nonsense”.  I love the candor.  Of course, she’s right.  “Social” tools are giving customer control, but social CRM and BPM is much more about regaining control of the conversation, taking the initiative, and reacting quickly.
• Twitter works for customer service. She rightly calls this a half-truth – because it works in certain circumstances and for some audiences, but not everything can be resolved in 140-character chunks.

Obviously, there is more on her blog.  I think the short take is: being honest with yourself about what your goals are with social technologies is the first step toward achieving great results with it.  And, generally speaking, when someone puts the word “Social” in front of an enterprise TLA software category, they’re talking about the company leveraging social to get control.