There is one question one should always ask in software, and in particular when designing a BPM solution:

How do you do that now?

In Jason Cohen’s blog, his framing is “What did they do before you came along?” – which is the way I would phrase the question to one of my colleagues at BP3 if they were describing a BPM solution to me without explaining the current approach to the process first. But when I’m speaking with customers, the framing I ususlaly use is “How do you do that now?” And you really do get interesting answers.

Jason’s post mostly discusses how to apply this question to the expert users and niche users within a market segment – the folks who can become real evangelists for your product if you make their lives better – and who can give you a beachhead into selling to the masses.  But the point of understanding how things work today is critical in BPM:

1. Often BPM implementations are asked to do things that are nice-to-haves – not directly related to the business process nor to business value.  For example, “This process needs single sign-on.”  The appropriate response: “How do users sign in today?” If they use single-sign-on today, then you probably have a user expectation to either manage or live up to.  If they don’t – do they have SSO for other applications, or is this the first application with SSO?  (You don’t want to be first).
2. Often BPM projects are asked to implement an existing process exactly – with the technology platform being the only change.  But this misses the chance for really leveraging software to provide process benefit.  By asking how they did this before BPM came along, you can tell whether they’re just papering over an existing process, or whether they’re really re-thinking things.
3. If an integration can’t be completed on schedule or under budget, a BPM practitioner might legitimately ask “well, how do they get this integration done today?” If it is manual, or swivel chair, then continuing that approach at least is no worse than status quo, and can buy some time (via Process Debt) for the right solution to be built.

Just a few examples…

One of my favorite industry thought leaders to spar with is Jacob Ukelson.  His company, ActionBase, has released ActionBase 6.5, which sports a new web interface and better support for best practices.

ActionBase deserves credit for not only pursuing a different approach to “process” (some would prefer to say “knowledge work” or “ACM” – I leave it to the reader to choose the term they think fits best), but also ActionBase deserves credit for being explicit about how their products address ACM, rather than theoretical.  You don’t have to imagine how it works; they make it clear through their blog, website, and demonstrations.

That being said, check out Jacob’s brief presentation on the subject.

Anatoly’s excellent blog turns its attention to ACM:

Adaptive Case Management was one of the most discussed BPM topics in 2010. It transformed from fuzzy marketing noise into a more or less consistent concept over the past year.

Why “more or less”? Because even the authors of “Mastering the Unpredictable” – probably the most authoritative book on ACM to date – say in the preface that there is no consensus among them, so the book in essence is a collection of articles. Nevertheless there are more similarities than differences in their positions, hence the consistent concept.

He goes on to give his take – an admittedly different perspective from many of the other authors on the subject and an interesting read.  He challenges the orthodoxy of both ACM thinking and BPM thinking in his blog, which is part of why I find it a refreshing read.

OpenText is buying Metastorm.  As soon as I saw this announcement, I could guess what transpired.  At first glance, Metastorm has some assets that don’t really fit with the OpenText direction as I’ve understood it (in the recent past, OpenText bought Vignette, formerly a content management powerhouse in Austin).

But if you follow the content management space, you might be aware that in general, the ECM vendors are targeting BPM as a way to stay relevant to their IT and Business buyers.  It is about wallet-share and mind-share.  But there’s more than just the general trend, there are specific data points to look at:

• IBM bought Filenet, along with a BPM software vendor (Lombardi, our coverage under the link).
• EMC owns Documentum. I‘m not aware of a BPM product in their portfolio, but now that all the content management companies seem to be paired up with bigger vendors, it creates some pressure on the remaining players in the space. Looks like they have their own BPMS as well.
• Alfresco has sponsored the Activiti project – an open source BPMS, started by the leaders of the jBPM effort, which has been getting traction and is already in GA.  Activiti is already a key to Alfresco’s value proposition.

I think OpenText was feeling a need to round out its portfolio and the options in the BPM world are a bit more limited than they were a few years ago.  Metastorm has some good product assets, however, and I expect OpenText will find new ways to leverage them, and it will help them stay relevant.

As a BPM services vendor – we see a lot of BPM projects that involve documents, and managing processes relating to key documentation assets.  There’s clearly an overlap at a project or solution level.  But I have to admit I liked the more old-school approach of having clean implementation and interfaces for document management systems, rather than baking the two products into a single offering with a more “UI-driven” integration.  Having said that, the UI-driven integration of ECM and BPM is clearly going to make it easier to build hybrid process solutions.

Side Note:  I can see BPM capabilities being rolled into other products in other horizontal and vertical niches, and improving the value proposition of those products.  That future is coming.

In a recent update on Evernote’s experience on the Mac App Store:

A strike against lowest common denominator

If Evernote’s desktop clients were written in Adobe AIR, I’d be worried right now. The immediate popularity of the Mac App Store, and the iPhone App Store before it, reinforces my belief that in a world of infinite software choice, people gravitate towards the products with the best overall user experience. It’s very hard for something developed in a cross-platform, lowest-common-denominator technology to provide as nice an experience as a similar native app.

As the CEO of a software company, I wish this weren’t true. I’d love to build one version of our App that could work everywhere. Instead, we develop separate native versions for Windows, Mac, Desktop Web, iOS, Android, BlackBerry, HP WebOS and (coming soon) Windows Phone 7. We do it because the results are better and, frankly, that’s all-important. We could probably save 70% of our development budget by switching to a single, cross-platform client, but we would probably lose 80% of our users. And we’d be shut out of most app stores and go back to worrying about distribution.

Does this mean that web apps are doomed? Not at all, but the most successful web apps will be the ones that emphasize unique benefits—sharing, communications, integrations—that are better implemented on the web than in native code. This is the main design goal for the next version of the Evernote web client, by the way.

This is a really eloquent explanation of why techies pursue cross-platform, and why he’s decided to, instead, focus on native applications.  As a user of iOS applications on the iPhone, as well as web applications, the difference between the two is stark. I’d like my Google apps much better if they weren’t just sad HTML5 apps.

BPM vendors, please take note: a great user experience matters more than pandering to the technical experts.  Well, the technical experts are likely to appreciate a good experience as well, but they might complain a bit about loss of configuration options.