Day 2 kicked off with deeper BPM-specific content.  Lance and I split up for most of the day, going to different sessions.  But we both came back from sessions with good content.  I attended the DoD session on Semantic data.  Somehow I knew it would be beyond the beginner content of the day before, from the title: “Primitives Based Process Modeling in a Vocabulary Driven Enterprise Architecture (EA)”.

Vocabulary-Driven Enterprise Architecture

What Dennis Wisnosky really addressed was how standards like BPMN and URIs and other W3C standards were really allowing the DoD to deal with its vast troves of data (indexed and/or unstructured) and to get to a better leveraging of semantic data.

He started with a video, that to me was right out of the Lost TV series (think the videos with the Doctor introducing the purpose of each station – the audio slightly off).  He then continued with a live presentation.  The problem he was attempting to address with BPM-related technology, was one of stovepiping:

• Redundancy of data and function and work
• Data (where does it live, how do we find it, index it)
• Infrastructure – cost is too high relative to industry norms

Showing that some of the BPM / Agile messages are getting through to big government, he said they break their 4-year (!) plan down to 90-day “pods”, with 14-30 day sprints within those pods.  His goal was to get the team used to a different cadence and style of work – a cultural change, essentially.

There was a lot more depth about how they combined the use of various standards to pull the right data to work on given where they are in a process.  It is a more technical view of BPM and BPMN than you normally see. But Wisnosky demonstrates that if your organization needs to “go there” on the technical front, it can.  These aren’t toys, these are serious standards and technologies and his team has shown that with what they’ve built, and how they built it.

Adobe’s Moment of Truth

Adobe had a presentation, along with L’Oreal, on User Experience: “Adobe Systems: Experience Matters- shift your process focus to user moments of truth”… The Adobe rep, Rob Pinkerton, gave a good presentation, no complaints.  Really focused on “Moments of Truth”… Which is a marketing-esque way of saying: user experience matters.

I happen to agree with the messaging.  But The delivery missed a huge opportunity for Adobe.  Stanley Zaykaner gave a very good presentation on behalf of L’Oreal and Adobe.  However, the User experience was represented by a few screenshots, not a moving video or demonstration.  And worse, those screenshots showed UI that would make green screens proud.  Or Netscape circa 1995.  Grey on Grey.  With a little bit more grey.  I have friends at Adobe who’ve been telling me about their great advantage in UI/UX and I was hoping to see evidence of it in this talk, but I just didn’t see it.

This was a really well-attended session, and they had a great opportunity to differentiate against all other BPM product suites on the market – but they didn’t.  And the modeling didn’t look like BPMN at all – a point of negative differentiation for most BPM professionals.  The other products will differentiate on transactions and integration to back-end systems… Adobe really needed to differentiate on these User Moments of Truth.  Maybe next year.

There were a couple tidbits I took exception to – like the idea that no one in marketing was thinking about the Return Goods Authorization process, or the cost of returned goods with a liberal return policy.  But I would disagree- people in marketing (and execs) are typically acutely aware of return policies at their stores and market them aggressively as a point of credibility and trust with their consumers.  Good marketing groups use numbers and statistics to justify their actions.

Rob Pinkerton also talked about the idea that 60% of consumers provide post-purchase reviews or commentary online.  This has to be good news for Bazaarvoice if true, but I’m not sure what the precise relationship to Adobe was (I might have missed the connection).

He had one little tidbit that will help everyone:  GetHuman.com – the cheat sheet for how to get to a real human on lots of different businesses’ IVR systems…

Other Sessions

The CME group had a presentation about their journey, beginning last June and now almost a year old.  They have their first process in production and were offering advice to the rest of the audience, reflecting how they did their vendor selection and also how they tackled their projects.  There are a few interesting notes:  they said they brought 4 vendors in (at least) for a full-on bake-off.  That’s an expensive way to pick vendors these days – and guarantees it will be hard to get maximum discounts from your vendors (from the vendor side, the “cost of sale” is quite high).  Also, they went with a cloud solution which may be attractive to some and not to others.  It made me wonder how they coped the one day a week ago when Amazon Web Services (AWS) were down, given that this isn’t a slow moving business, this is the CME Group we’re talking about.  My other caution would be that they’re one process into this journey – the fun stuff is just beginning.

The Great Case Management debate was another session to discuss, but I’ll save that for a separate post.

I briefly attended a Microsoft Visio and Sharepoint session: Practical customer examples from Exxon and TECO Energy.  I wanted to see the sharepoint version, but after watching someone draw proceses on Visio for 15 minutes I couldn’t take it anymore and left.  This may sound rude, but drawing something in visio was pretty cutting edge in 1994.  BPM tools have been providing better modeling tools for process for several years now.  The big innovation displayed was a set of Visio “targets” that extended visio to make it easier to draw a process map, instead of a BPMN process.  Of course, you could draw something in BlueworksLive faster, it’ll look better, collaborate with your team more easily, export to a PowerPoint presentation, and allow you to collect inputs, outputs, etc. as you gather them.  Visio is a great product.  But it is undercut in the BPM space by purpose-built technologies that are more efficient (and often less expensive) for the user.  Watching the drawing in Visio was cumbersome.  In BlueworksLive I would have simply typed the name of each process or activity and hit return or tab appropriately.  10 minutes tops, for what they were showing. And there are other good modeling tools out there like BizAgi and Signavio, etc.  There are options.

Wrap up

At the end of the day I had a really good heart-to-heart conversation with a customer.  We know quite a few people in common in the BPM space but met ourselves for the first time.  They’re faced with a challenge that many big corporations are faced with – very expensive approved vendors, or offshore approved vendors.  And there’s a significant gap in the middle – where real experts are available at a more affordable price.  There are times when Vendor Management offices or purchasing offices actually cost companies money rather than saving them money – not to mention effectiveness.

Following that, I checked out the vendor hospitality suites, which staved off starvation, and then we headed to a nearby Italian restaurant for dinner.  It was another long day, packed with moments to catch up with colleagues and see what other people are thinking in the BPM space.

Jacob Ukelson, in his post Time for a Process Manifesto? , picks up some ideas from the Agile Manifesto:

• Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
• Working software over comprehensive documentation
• Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
• Responding to change over following a plan

So far so good.  But then he draws the following conclusion:

I think that traditional BPM does less well on the first two principles – it is pretty clear that comprehensive documentation (the process model) is still a basic requirement. Probably because of the mindset – process and tools take precedence over individuals and interaction. So not so good on those fronts.

I guess people have different notions of what “traditional BPM” is.  The traditional BPM I’m familiar with is not about documentation, it is about working software (and so it is not clear that comprehensive documentation is a basic requirement).  The diagram is the process, and the diagram actually runs.  Although, I’ll admit I came into the BPM world via Lombardi, and brought with me software and consulting approaches learned from other jobs.  So I might have missed out on the specific traditional BPM Jacob is referring to.  But in our (BP3) world of BPM:

1. People are the focus
2. Document if it reduces risk or adds value.  Don’t document just to pass gateways.
3. We emphasize working software and feedback loops.  Luckily the software tools we use reinforce this approach and support it.
4. We use the term “value-driven vs. plan driven” but I think it substantially has the same spirit as “collaboration over contract negotiation”.
5. Responding to change over following a plan: of course, see the previous point.

I realize not everyone tackles BPM this way.  And I also realize there’s no One True Way that is always the best way.  But these principles gird every project we do. I agree with the principles in the manifesto, but BPM practitioners should already be abiding by these principles.  If that’s not “traditional” BPM, so be it.  I may not be able to convince everyone to define BPM the way I would, but I can still advocate for our approach.

Side note- I like another point Jacob makes:  “Though many position ACM as a way to respond to change, for me it is a process oriented way to focus on individuals, interactions and working software (which make it more amenable to change).”

We’re attending Gartner’s BPM 2011 conference in Baltimore, and this is the first time we’ve taken two people to one of their conferences and are in full-on attendee mode rather than speaking or participating in a panel.

Some general observations:

I have to admit, content in day 1 seemed pretty elementary regardless of which “track” we attended.  Not that it was badly delivered, or bad content – just fairly elementary if you’ve been doing this “BPM” thing for a while.

It was immediately apparent that the crowd is a different mix than something like, IBM Impact.  The business attendees appear to outnumber the technical attendees.  At lunch we sat down with 5 people from an insurance company – only one of which was from IT.  That would be extremely a-typical at most conferences I’ve been to around BPM.  And it seems like A Good Thing.

The keynote was crisply delivered.  But it was also more about general IT trends rather than specific to BPM.  Of course, you can’t get through a keynote these days without the word “Cloud” showing up. Reminds me of 2002-2007 when you couldn’t get through a presentation without seeing a big call-out to offshoring or “outsourcing”.

Despite the overall beginning tone of the content, it was a good first day and we had time to meet with several vendors and partners in the solution center – including reuniting with customers (Intel, Allianz), and colleagues (at IBM’s booth).  Had a really interesting discussion with Denis Gagne of the Process Incubator – as we discussed whether case management was really something customers are asking for or just something buried in their requests for process improvement.  I hadn’t seen Denis since an OMG ThinkTank meeting in 2008, so it was nice to catch up in person. He continues to do interesting things at the process incubator…Also had the chance to catch up with Bruce Silver and Sandy Kemsley, two of my favorite bloggers – and Ian Gotts of Nimbus (another twitter-acquaintance I can put a face to!).

It is sometimes the synergistic meetings that make these trips interesting.  Just happened to catch the same flight as Phil Gilbert of IBM, and shared a cab to the hotel.  Great time to catch up on business and Impact.  Phil is as interesting to talk to one-on-one as he is when he’s up on stage.

We’re already part-way into Day 2, and the content so far has been at a more intermediate level, which is encouraging for the value of the sessions today.  Hoping for more good stuff.

If you’re following along at home, once again Sandy Kemsley has the best session coverage / blogging so far.

I just got two emails on the same day regarding two of my favorite services.

First, SlideRocket has been purchased by VMWare:

Dear SlideRocket User,

Amazing news! I am excited to share with you that SlideRocket has been acquired by VMware. VMware’s groundbreaking virtualization technology has deeply influenced the way we work. They’ve built the software that powers cloud computing, have an unparalleled record of innovation, are used and trusted by just about everyone, including 96% of the Fortune 1000 companies — and they’re just getting started.
Today marks the next stage in SlideRocket’s mission to reinvent presentations. Joining VMware’s world-class team means we’ll be able to bring you, our customers, even more innovations at an accelerated pace. We could not have gotten this far without you, our fantastic customer community – over a quarter of a million strong.
To learn more about VMware and the acquisition, please click here
Thank you again, we can’t wait to show you what’s coming next!

Sincerely,

Chuck Dietrich
CEO, SlideRocket

I met Chuck at SXSW-interactive in 2010.  I just happened to be standing next to him in line for coffee.  We struck up a conversation and he ended up winning two new customers as a result (our company and another company I talked into using their service).  It was nice getting this email rather than seeing it in a news article first.

Later that same day – I got an email from another service, Tungle.me – selling to RIM.

Hopefully both these services will remain excellent and continue to innovate.  Thanks to both of these firms for helping me keep our presentations organized, and my calendar organized, respectively.

I like it when people can borrow concepts from other fields or areas of computer science and apply them to BPM.  End to End BPM has a nice case of just such cross-pollination.  Or perhaps I just like it because the first example centers around espresso…

Good review of Bruce’s training:

There are few people who have this depth of BPMN knowledge, and Bruce is the only one who I know who is doing this as a professional trainer: his is the only BPMN course that I recommend to my clients. He needs to work out a few bumps in how the online course works, but in general, I thought this was a great course, perfect for a business analyst who is already doing some process modeling but doesn’t know any BPMN, but also informative for those of us with some prior knowledge of BPMN.

Sandy’s review is quite an endorsement of Bruce’s training.  Of course, any online training environment is a bit of a challenge compared to on-site or in-person delivery.  Sandy’s isn’t the only endorsement he’s had – many BPM product vendors have also implicitly or explicitly endorsed his training over the years.

The “P” is for Process.

I think Mihnea Galeteanu coincidentally gives us a great anecdote for why it doesn’t make sense to try to change the terms of the discussion or debate from “process” to “case”, or from BPM to ACM:

Once you’re done reading this blog post, I dare you to stand up and look for wherever people congregate in your office, perhaps around water coolers or coffee machines.

Not only will it be good to get that much needed exercise (just saying) but I’m also confident you’ll confirm my theory: whether in English, French, Spanish or whatever other natural language, your colleagues will be talking/complaining/debating about a process. What a company does, how it differentiates itself in the marketplace, how it orders everything from paper clips to engine parts, can all be expressed in terms of a process.

Process is the language of business

When something goes wrong, it’s either because there is too much process, too little process or the wrong process. Likewise, when something goes right, it’s because the right resources (people or systems) were engaged at the right time. What dictates that is again a process.

I’m not enamored of the idea that Watson might actually understand nuance and context well enough to help with process improvement – but I do think he hits on the right point that process is the language of business today. That’s our opportunity in BPM – we just have to keep delivering on it.

John Reynolds gives a beginner’s guide to Process Performance Reports on his blog.  Using Websphere Lombardi Edition, he shows a few diagrams and gives good advice regarding how to build up the tracked data for your process reports.

Of course, if you’re not using Lombardi Edition (or various versions of Teamworks and IBM BPM), you might not be able to relate to these diagrams- they include the tracking point metaphor that Lombardi introduced way back in 2004 to allow for a transparent snapshot of process instance data.  It really makes it trivial to capture snapshots and timing data for use in correlations in reports.

John does say one or two things I’d modify, such as:

Process Performance is all about “How long did it take?”.  If you want to know “How long?” then you have to know when “it” started and when “it” finished.

I’d say, rather, that this is one of the most common kinds of reports – and in IBM BPM, one of the easiest to produce.  There are other quite interesting reports that are similarly trivial to capture:

• How many of X did each person on the team process by month (or by week or by day, etc.)
• How many exceptions (complaints/defects/etc.) did we process by customer or by region (comparing performance)
• How much rework is happening?
• What percentage is going down the happy path versus exceptions?
• What is the typical # of exceptions per item?
• How many exceptions get “fixed the first time” (ie, once known, the issue is fixed correctly).

With some demographic data on each snapshot, we can really do interesting correlations (using the optimizer or your own custom reporting techniques). One of the uses of this data is to fine-tune the process.  A favorite demonstration of this capability was to look at the correlation between the size of a dispute in a dispute resolution process.  If 90+% of disputes under a certain $ amount (possibly in combination with other criteria) are being approved, perhaps it makes sense to insert an auto-approve decision rule in front of the manual activity that requires a person to look at the request and approve or deny.

We are truly grateful for the opportunity to present at Impact.  It is a rare opportunity to share what you do for a living with your colleagues and peers – and I just wanted to take time out to the folks who helped us secure a speaking role for our customer, Wells Fargo’s Reid Denny.

Given our late-afternoon Wednesday time slot, I was a little worried about attendance.  About 10 minutes before start time, we had 5-6 people in the room.  By the time we started, nearly every seat was full.  Lance Gibbs kicked off our presentation, and people kept coming in … filling the room, standing in the back, and bringing in extra chairs.

My favorite part about any presentation is Q&A afterward – I wish we had a transcript from our own session.  I was surprised to see one of IBM’s BPMers in the back of the room with a Flip camera taking video of our session – certainly flattered they anticipated our session might be worth recording.  I’m not sure how well it came out in video, and how well the audio picks up, but we’ll keep everyone posted if we’re actually able to lay hands on the video or a link to it.

Finally, a few people were interested in discussing or getting a rehash of the presentation.  Of course we can’t recreate exactly what happened, but we’re including the presentation, below – and if you’re interested in voice-over or Q&A around it let me know and I’ll see if I can schedule something with you.

We heard a lot of positive feedback about the presentation, and we’d love to hear from you directly if you were able to attend – feedback is what will make us better next time!

I’ll expand on the “business driven” delivery team in another post…

I went to IBM Impact looking for direction and strategy around BPM.  What I didn’t expect to find (but perhaps I should have), was an extra present under the tree:  ILOG is getting embedded in more IBM products.

Quoting Integration Developer News’ interview of Pierre Haren (founder of ILOG and VP of IBM’s ILOG unit):

“IBM will only have one business rules system and that will be JRules from ILOG,”  Haren said. For IT users, JRules will be embedded into WebSphere Message Broker, WebSphere Process Server, the WebSphere ESB. For business users, JRules will be added into IBM analytics and Lombardi BPM.

“This connection between BPM and business rules has several sweet spots, and WebSphere Process Server and Lombardi are two of them,” Haren told IDN. “At both ends, we now bring BPM and rules together for heavy-duty transactions and for business-driven BPM.  Linking these two [architecture] is the way to keep the CIO, the CEO and the business users happy.”

And after seeing the sessions live, it is clear that with the new IBM BPM 7.5 offering, ILOG will be *the* rules implementation for BPM.  This is a big improvement over the previously limited rules offering inside Lombardi, and WPS.  Of course, before this integration you could always call out to a webservice to tap the rules engine – any rules engine – and this worked well.  But there are rule-like behaviors inside the BPM offering that are probably best represented inside ILOG rather than outside of it, and yet happen in the normal context of defining a process (and therefore, should be surfaced inside the BPM authoring environment).

An interesting note on the synergy of rules systems and BPM systems:

Rapid Iterative Updates—“Another thing I love about rules and BPM together is that they both are incremental programming,” Haren said. Unlike writing an application in Java or COBOL, the user doesn’t need a specification up front. “You can’t write good code without a good spec,” he said. “But, in BPM you can start with a high level vision, and you can incrementally add filters, decision-points and rules as you go along.”

So true.  And it ties in nicely with the talk we did with Wells Fargo at Impact.

Another insightful comment on BPM at IBM:

Looking it as a whole, Haren described IBM’s BPM activities in 2011 this way: “In a real way, Lombardi’s DNA is replicating itself on IBM’s BPM [offerings], and ILOG’s JRules are making all our BPM smarter BPM plus business rules will add up to be more than the sum of their parts,” Haren said.

From reading the article, Haren definitely gets how complementary these two technologies are – and at each point they intersect, you get this interesting value proposition for the process to leverage a rule set.  It was a nice surprise to see the level of integration of ILOG with other IBM products (and of course, it makes sense).

Video of Phil Gilbert on IBM BPM 7.5.  Personally I like the motivational background music – surprised it wasn’t something by Dylan…

I first noticed it on the BPM Socialite blog, but it is also on Youtube / embeddable.

As a fringe benefit, some of the related videos that come up after are equally interesting.

The early reviews of IBM BPM 7.5 were out last week, while IBM Impact was still in full swing.  It seems that the analysts in attendance were of differing opinions about the strength of IBM’s update to 7.5 – with Clay Richardson disappointed, and the other analysts ranging from reassured to impressed.

Clay’s review (“IBM Adds Fresh Coat Of Paint And New Tires To BPM Offering, But Still Needs To Rev Engine“) starts off:

So far, IBM is following the product integration roadmap John Rymer and I laid out in our report published immediately following IBM’s acquisition of Lombardi.

I’m sure IBM looks at it as, they were following their own roadmap and some of the points just happen to coincide with what analysts were clamoring for. One thing that the analyst community doesn’t seem to be comfortable with is that IBM doesn’t say much about future releases – they cite disclosure rules – and they only announce releases within the same quarter they’re to be released.  But beyond that, I think it is quite right that the decision about *how* to integrate Lombardi and WPS had not been finalized at this time last year.

With today’s announcement, IBM checks off the first point of integration on our list: establishing a single repository across Lombardi Teamworks and Websphere Process Server. With Business Process Manager V7.5, IBM will deliver a single repository for process assets that leverages Lombardi’s impressive “snapshot” version management and governance capabilities, providing a unified approach to administering and reusing process and integration assets.

I imagine that this retrofit to WPS and integration designer was actually quite a lot of work – and likely addressed the hardest technical parts of the integration of these two products.  But Clay goes on to say:

Although IBM has done a great job of delivering a unified repository, the core BPM engines and development environments will continue as standalone and separate entities — at least for BPM V7.5. While this is not surprising — we predicted that it would take three to four years for IBM to completely integrate Lombardi and WPS into a single unfied environment — we expected IBM to communicate a strategy or vision for merging the engines as part of this announcement.

I think this is a distinction that won’t matter to users.  It might surprise Clay to know that Lombardi, since 2005, effectively had two engines under the hood.  But it certainly never felt that way to users.  And with the integrated rules engine in IBM BPM 7.5, you could say it has 4 engines.  The point is – as long as the functionality works well together, this distinction won’t matter to process authors.  There’s also an option to deploy the whole stack into a single VM – particularly useful for developer machines.  Most people won’t quibble over different sections of code running inside a VM.  After all, an engine is just a body of code that transforms inputs into outputs based on current state plus a model which provides context.  A good BPMS will have more than one such body of code.  Even a good rule suite will have more than one engine.

So the issue in the future isn’t how many engines IBM will have embedded in its BPM suite.  The questions to ask are:

1. Will future versions feel like one product or two or more products.  Clearly the direction is to make IBM BPM feel like one product.
2. Will new versions of IBM BPM provide the same transformations of input to output given the same state and model context.

Information Week ran a story that reads very much like Clay’s:

IBM’s approach can be contrasted with that of Oracle, which took a decisive step in 2010 when it integrated the AquaLogic BPM system it acquired with BEA with its own legacy BPM product. That move yielded a single product and a clear roadmap, but it also forced existing customers of both products to do considerable migration work to move forward.

Except that when their article contrasts IBM and Oracle, it fails to mention that Oracle bought BEA in January 2008, nearly 3 years earlier (Clay, however, was more fair in his comparison).  And yet the expectation is that IBM provide this transformation in a year.

But while Clay was focused on the need to consolidate engines, others focused on the market signals IBM was sending.

As Bruce Silver wrote in his rebuttal:

Some have called it just “a new coat of paint” on the existing offerings, because the (Lombardi) Process Designer and the (WPS) Integration Designer tools are both still there, and both runtime engines are still there as well.  But that misses the point.  Where IBM last year was pushing separate fit-for-purpose BPMSs – something nobody really wants – they now can offer a single BPMS that has the combined functionality of WPS and WLE.

I agree with Bruce – at a detail-level, it also ignores the interface makeover WPS Integration Designer got, to match the repository unification (which added significant versioning functionality to WPS).   At a big picture level, it misses the point, which Bruce makes:

Beyond that, this announcement represents a major shift in IBM’s strategy for addressing the BPM marketplace.  You might even call it a palace coup:  the Lombardi/human/business-centric value system overthrowing the old WebSphere/integration/developer-centric value system, or even a BPM perspective rising above the SOA perspective.  Given the existing installed-base investment on the two sides, this is truly a wag-the-dog moment.

I think this represents IBM’s move to capture the business-oriented perspective of the BPM market – something that was part product functionality, part product design, and partly go-to-market.  Bruce’s summary:

And here’s the thing:  it’s ONE product.  You get it all.  Business-empowered design, what-you-see-is-what-you-execute, and instant playback.  SOA and integration services.  Powerful business rules. [...] but I think everyone is surprised they got it done already.

Bruce has another post on the BPMS Endgame which predicts that IBM will focus on BPMN2 engine work for the 8.0 release timeframe.

Neil Ward-Dutton also rebuts Forrester’s assessment:

However when you look deeper, the release of Business Process Manager marks a significant departure for IBM, and warrants a thorough reappraisal of IBM’s competitive position.

He also hits on a few key points of integration:

1. Unified repository toolset
2. Unified governance toolset
3. Single Deployment runtime foundation (no more copying EAR and WAR files around)
4. Single Administration environment

Better yet:

Business Process Manager makes the relationship clear: Process Designer is aimed at business-facing teams collaborating to optimise business processes; Integration Designer is aimed at IT teams working to orchestrate the integration of systems to support the optimisation of those processes. Again – these two environments work together through the use of a shared repository and governance toolset.

Tony Baer also humorously commented on the Lombardification of IBM BPM.  Unlike David Brakoniecki, I couldn’t resist revisiting the analyst reviews.  David points out a few of the “unsung features” in the 7.5 release:

• A powerful REST API which in theory should allow better and richer user interfaces to be built
• A new charting technology (based on iLog jViews, I think)

I’d add to that the deployment characteristics – the fact that we will be able to build solutions with both the Process Designer and the Integration Designer – and then manage and deploy them from the same repository, to the same run-time clusters – is a big improvement over the state of the art in the previous versions.  And it appears to be a big improvement in how both WLE and WPS previously managed deployments.

Sandy Kemsley took more time to write her analysis, and it demonstrates her extra time to reflect.  I liked the shout out to our sleuthing out the announcement ahead of time (maybe IBM should include me on their analyst briefings so that we’ll be embargoed as well!…).  She writes:

It’s important to look at how the IBM organization has realigned to allow for the new product release: Phil Gilbert, former president and CTO of Lombardi, now has overall responsibility for all of WebSphere BPM – including both the former Lombardi and WebSphere BPM products – plus ILOG rules management. Neil Ward-Dutton referred to this as the reverse takeover of IBM by Lombardi; when I had a chance for a 1:1 with Phil at Impact, I told him that we’d all bet that he would be gone from IBM after a year. He admitted that he originally thought so too, until they gave him the opportunity to do exactly what he knew needed to be done: bring together all of the IBM BPM offerings into a unified offering. This new product announcement is the beginning of that unification, but they still have a ways to go.

When the buyout happened I often heard this argument that Phil would be gone within a year.  But, living in Austin, I’ve seen a few promising startups purchased by IBM in my day (Tivoli and Webify just to name two), and I’ve also known Phil for… 10-12 years now.  My sense was that IBM has the scope and opportunity on the big stage that Phil would really relish taking advantage of.  IBM is big enough to make the right role for someone like Phil – in a way that very few companies can.  If they were willing to do it, I felt like they had a chance to hang on to Phil.  I felt the same way about most of the people acquired with Lombardi – some would leave, but IBM has the reach and size and money to keep people if it chooses (and if it acts in time).

Regarding that “two engines” argument from Clay:

However, from the customer/user standpoint, it’s wrapped into a single Process Server, so if IBM ever gets around to refactoring into a single engine, that could be made fairly transparent to their customers, but would likely have the benefit of reducing IBM’s internal engineering costs around maintaining one versus two engines.

I think Sandy hits it just right.  The issue isn’t how many engines are under the hood – it is what does it feel like to the customer.  Regarding the lack of a cloud offering for BPM: “They need to rethink their strategy on this, and stop offering expensive custom hosted or private ‘cloud’ platforms as their only cloud alternatives.”  Again, I think Sandy’s right. It is hard to tell in what time frame it really starts to hurt, but the trend lines are there, and they’re plain to see.

Great reviews and perspectives to soak up.  Nothing I like more than reading these competing perspectives and conclusions and then reconciling with my own opinions and the impressions of the BP3 team.

Much has now been written about IBM BPM 7.5.  We’ve blogged about it before Impact, and we’ve obliquely referenced it since Impact.  And we’ve enjoyed reading all the other reviews out there.

So we won’t rehash the feature by feature, blow-by-blow nature of product reviews (we’ll save that for another post!).  Let’s just take a big step back and look at the big picture, and I’ll tell you how we, at BP3, really feel about it.

I’m a Lombardi Customer… Now What?

First, for Lombardi customers.  There’s no doubt that this is A Good Thing.  The Lombardi Way has prevailed within IBM in a sense – the experience of IBM BPM is going to feel a lot like Lombardi – and yet a lot of time and effort is going into things Lombardi could never afford to invest in (configuration management, integration).  ILOG baked into the product line means no more guessing how best to handle rules issues in your processes.  There’s a clear migration path up to 7.5, and clear software entitlements. But most of all, IBM BPM makes Websphere manageable for the customers who really wanted BPM rather than Websphere (in other words, the app server is behind the curtain, not in front of it).

Most of all, Lombardi Customers can breathe a sigh of relief that IBM is not throwing out the golden goose that lays the eggs. From a Lombardi point of view, it is going to look like lots of extra goodies in the bag, with very few downsides from a feature-function point of view.

But I’m a WPS Customer… Now What?

WPS Customers should also be in good shape.  While the migration to 7.5 does not automatically convey the Process Designer, they’re existing WPS efforts should migrate up just fine (the WPS engine is intact).  If you add Process Designer to the mix, you’ll find you now have a great BPM tooling for addressing use cases that might have been more challenging in the WPS environment.  The new tooling should be more accessible to your team, and make it easier to address a broader set of use cases.  Most WPS customers won’t breathe a sigh of relief because (a) they always assumed WPS would dominate the ultimate BPM solution, or (b) because they are happy to have access to the Lombardi-style version of BPM.

I was about to Buy IBM WPS or Lombardi… Now What?

Just buy IBM BPM.  Your choices got simpler.  If you need to design integration flows with clear atomicity and transactional semantics, go for the advanced version of IBM BPM.  Otherwise, you’ll probably want to start out on the Standard version if you’re a larger company, and express if you’re running a pilot or smaller organization.  You no longer have to worry about betting on the wrong horse.  This is something we can give IBM credit for – their product strategy didn’t involve abandoning either of their main BPM product lines or leaving behind either set of customers.

I Work for IBM… Is This a Good Thing?

You bet it is.  Now you can sell and deliver on one value proposition with conceptually minor permutations.  No more product conflict.  The WPS heritage assets are now defined toward a different use case (automated workflows and integrations) than the heritage Lombardi assets (Human-centric BPM, if you will).  Build your processes in process designer, and build integration flows and lights-out processing in the Integration Designer.  And integrate the two in the Process Designer.

I’m an Analyst Covering BPM… Now What?

Well, I guess your job got a little easier.  IBM really has one BPM offering you need to analyze, rather than 2-3.  And it seems to capture the best attributes of Lombardi, WPS, and ILOG.  As Phil Gilbert said to us at bpmCamp shortly after the acquisition: “IBM clearly has the assets and technology to put together the best BPM offering in the market.”  The only question was: would they?  Would they actually put those assets front and center and create the offering?

Well they have.  Adjust those magic quadrants, waves, and rankings.

I’m a Lombardi Consultant or Consulting Firm… Now What?

This is nothing but good news as far as BP3 is concerned.  We couldn’t be happier with the direction IBM took with BPM 7.5.  Including dropping all the awkward naming of previous versions.  We believe we are the best Lombardi BPM services provider, and we aim to continue that record by aiming to be the best IBM BPM services provider.  We think IBM put the right horse (Process Designer) in front of the cart (Integration Designer), and we’re really looking forward to leveraging all the new features of 7.5 (to review: ILOG rules, Integration Designer, Profile Manager, Business Monitor, etc.).  We’re incredibly relieved that they didn’t EOL Lombardi.

And I think there will be a lot of WPS customers who will want to understand, better, what this whole Lombardi point-of-view is all about.  We think they’ll want to talk to someone like BP3.

It’s All About the Experience

Importantly, this release keeps the focus on the things that matter in BPM deployments – time to market, ease of use for the 80% case, ability to go as deep as need be in the 20% case, and a focus on the “business” view of BPM, not just the IT view.

But most importantly, this release signals that the engine(s) don’t matter… What matters is the EXPERIENCE.

IBM (and specifically Phil Gilbert) is planting the flag and saying the experience around BPM matters more than which specific technologies are behind it, it even matters more than the Websphere branding in front of the old names.  In the future, if IBM resolves the offering down to a single engine, it would likely be transparent to us because that engine would be running off of the repository we have today, and running behind the user experience we have today (or, an improved version of the same).  Do I really care if the code running my Process Designer-authored process is Lombardi heritage or WPS heritage?  I don’t really care, so long as it still behaves the same way.  In other words, so long as it implements the “interface” and gives me that “WYSIWYG” feel, I’m happy.

Much has been made by Clay Richardson and others about “multiple BPM engines.”  But trust me when I say that these engines consist of a relatively small percentage of the total lines of code involved in these products.  It is like the algorithmic core of a bigger software entity.  No one is suggesting that the ILOG engine has to be consolidated with the BPM engines to save cost.  It doesn’t make any sense to do that, does it?  So why consolidate the BPEL and BPMN engines? (Again, it may just not make sense to merge these two entities in a meaningful way).  IBM feels that it has already merged them in the two ways that matter most:

1. the BPM “engines” install, run, and operate as one software process or entity, inside a single JVM.
2. the BPM “engines” are unified behind common UI treatment, and common data models, reporting infrastructure, and rules interactions.  In a sense, they “behave the same”.  Users of IBM BPM won’t think of these things as separate engines. They might think of the modeling as separate user cases, but they won’t need to care, nor will they care, about what kind of “engine” is processing the model.  The diagram and details attached to it will define all the behavioral semantics.

I also had another takeaway from Impact, on the BPM front.  ACM is going to be a subset of the BPM offering, from a product point of view.  I saw two customer presentations that covered case management style dynamic processes that were home grown on top of their Lombardi implementations.  They were very interesting, and not that complicated.  And if these scenarios can be built on top of the platform, by customers… Certainly these are use cases that IBM could include in their BPM product offering – either as part of the IBM BPM offering or as part of the BlueworksLive offering.  Or both.  That’s the thing with IBM – they don’t have to choose, they can leverage the genius of the ‘and’. And if IBM doesn’t do it, someone like BP3 will.

Where Do We Go from Here?

Nothing has validated our investment in Lombardi more than the release of IBM BPM 7.5.  I think John Reynold’s post on the subject captures how I feel as well.  This is important. As pivotal as finding out last year at Impact that IBM was truly getting behind its new Lombardi BPM software.  This year it is pivotal in that we’re finding out that the last year has been one of real investment in the platform and real results.  This isn’t just window dressing, it is substance. I understand why people unfamiliar with the workings of Lombardi and WPS might feel differently, but with respect, they’re wrong.  If you know how it works under the hood, this is significant.

…and Thanks!

Given that this is the culmination of hard work from so many people that I hold in high regard, it seems appropriate to say thanks.  I was recruited to Lombardi by Toby Cappello, Scott Bonneau,  and Phil Gilbert – not to mention Rainer Ribback and Brian Witherly.  And Lombardi allowed me to meet Lance Gibbs, and Flournoy Henry, among others.  We built the services team I wanted to build at Lombardi – geographically dispersed (localized), highly skilled, and very experienced consultants.  It was completely counter to the prevailing trends at the time: off-shore (remote), commoditized/cheap (lower skill level), and inexperienced consultants.  The results:

• a much more successful, and mature, customer base
• a better feedback loop into the product development team
• a great talent pool for pulling into other senior or leadership roles in the company
• lower financial risk to the company, at the price of somewhat lower margins on services.

Our competitors that relied on the prevailing strategies ended up with smaller companies, fewer referenceable and less mature customers.  I think the Lombardi brand, in consulting circles within BPM, will continue to be strong for years to come.  I want to thank Lombardi for giving me that opportunity to put my best ideas to work for the business.  And learning from round 1, we’re applying these ideas to BP3 as well – and earning the rewards of this long-term view.

Everyone who was a part of Lombardi, if they’re still paying attention, should feel a greater sense of accomplishment with this release, than they likely did with the original sale of the company to IBM.   Kudos as well to IBM, you have truly figured out how to leverage a fine asset on the product side, and I have no doubt about the dividends it will pay in the years to come.

OK folks. Back to work.

Joe Heller, CIO of Caterpillar, gave an outstanding lesson in lasting business partnerships at IBM’s Impact conference on Day 1 (Monday, April 11th, 2011).  Joe was highly quotable (“There is dirt in the wrong place all over the world, and we are there to put it in the right place”), but beneath these quotes is a deep sense of business value over time.

And he wasn’t shy about sharing real dollar values in savings.

I think David Brakoniecki sums it up best in his post:

83 years of Partnership – Caterpillar has had a relationship with IBM for 83 years.
From a business perspective, I find this mind-blowing.  Having worked the last 12 years in small businesses and start-ups, I’m lucky if I can point to a continuing business relationship that goes back 5 years.
In recent times, the recession has claimed several major brands so it’s easy to forget that long-term business partnerships are not only possible but also worth having.  It’s mpressive that the CIO of Caterpillar was willing to stand on stage and say that IBM has never disappointed him in his 38 years of working together.

It is a pretty remarkable partnership.

Other thoughts on Day 1′s General session:

• The video wall is truly massive.  The room itself is massive.  And I can’t imagine how they’ll fit more than 8000 people in one room next year.
• It is also interesting how cultural differences come out in a conference like this.  At one point, Marie Weick, in the middle of a very well-delivered segment, repeated some advice once given to her: “In your career you can only move forward or fall behind”.  From the perspective of someone outside the corporate ladder-climbing world, this sounds off – a career is more than two dimensions measured forward and back.  I would wish for everyone to realize that early in their career rather than late.
• Dr. Burns has one of the most compelling cases for application of technology – pediatric care.  It is well worth watching on the livestream video.
• It takes an immense amount of coffee to serve this many people.  Don’t expect to find coffee at the coffee stations right outside the main event.
• Impact Day 1 kicked off on an odd note, with the opening musical performance.  At some point three of the musicians switched from instruments to iPads to finish their musical number (and of course, you can’t tell if they’re actually playing or if it was all pre-recorded, but one wonders).  It was an interesting choice to kick off the conference.

Notes from the Rest of Day 1

After the General Session, I wanted to see what IBM was saying about “which BPM to use” in one of the early sessions of the day.  Sometimes it is good to get the official positioning so that you understand how far out of alignment your own opinions are.

IBM’s positioning of BlueworksLive is:

1. No training to use
2. Social Application, which helps scale social talk across the business
3. Doc and discovery tool that is easy to use
4. Automate simple processes

At this point, I noticed the room was full.  More than full.  This would continue in virtually every BPM session that touched on Lombardi heritage at all.  IBM’s conference organizers continue to under-estimate the demand for Lombardi-BPM-themed content – but we can hope that next year will be different under the IBM BPM branding.

Someone described BlueworksLive as “Powerpoint for process applications”.

There is an open question for IBM, which remains unanswered: How to support the partner community with this product?  IBM really depends on its partner channel to expose customers to products.  Unfortunately BlueworksLive leaves a lot to be desired from a partner point of view (one could even argue that the automation is competitive with partner service offerings).  I think the answer is to simply add a few features that will make this product more partner-friendly:

• the ability to move models from one corporate account to another (so that I can move drafts created in my sandbox to the customer’s BlueworksLive spaces).
• an expert BPMN diagramming mode that allows expert modelers to be more precise in their process definitions.
• more features like the “playback” feature that was introduced in the last BlueworksLive update.

Next, IBM positioned IBM BPM as targeted at the high volume, repeatable processes, while BlueworksLive is focused on the long tail processes.  Both products offer “tooling that is easy to use” (relatively speaking), “transactional integrity and scale”,  “unified environment for governance, visibility, and control”, and versioning.  (Of course, they achieve this in very different ways and targeted at different processes and users.)

Next up, I went to a hands-on lab for BlueworksLive. But, being a newcomer to Impact, it wasn’t what I expected, so I said hi to a few people and then went to take a certification test in another room.

Lunch was a forgettable affair in the trade show area.  We left lunch quickly and met up with the analysts and bloggers who were sequestered on the first floor of the conference getting the low-down on all things IBM.  Flournoy and I were able to meet with Neil Ward-Dutton , and then he was nice enough to call out Sandy Kemsley (nice to meet for the first time!), Clay Richardson, and Bruce Silver.  It was great to hear their early impressions on the IBM BPM 7.5 release first hand – it definitely added color to the blogs they wrote later.  We shared notes and there was, generally, consensus (except for Clay).   It is too bad they are isolated from the rest of the conference, I think it would be really interesting for them to see how other people interpret what they’re hearing in typical Impact sessions (I imagine they got some of this if they stayed through til Tuesday or Wednesday).

In the afternoon I saw the “Measuring Quality” session by Fahad Osmani and Sean Pizel, of IBM.  It was a wide-ranging presentation, best to get the presentation slides rather than rely on my notes.  They suggest some new measurements for BPM projects, and pointed out that programs that deliver value, repeatedly, almost always turn into successes.

We then went into a meeting with folks from the IBM partner enablement community.  We were impressed by how motivated IBM’s partner groups were to make sure BP3 is successful as an IBM partner.  It was an intense and productive conversation, and we left with concrete follow ups.  The quality of the meetings their partner group set up for us was quite impressive.

After the partner session, I made it to the second Lincoln Trust presentation of the day (I had heard great reviews of their first session of the day, just prior).  In this session they talked about their strategy for addressing a high volume of processes (100′s) with a small team and small budget.  The answer, of course, was to have standard lightweight process definitions that could represent more than one of these processes.  The key outcomes they were looking for were tracking (for visibility), standardization, and governance.  By implementing lightweight processes that could act more generically, they gave themselves a lot more data about each process before investing in building something more technically demanding.

The Lincoln Trust approach reminds me quite a lot of the Banco Espirito (BES) approach.  At this point, the team dove into technical details behind their implementation (great content).

We had dinner with a fellow BPM practitioner and long-time colleague, and then headed over to iTKO’s party at Tao Beach, where we were able to catch up with friends at their company and IBMers who also joined in.  iTKO was a Diamond sponsor of Impact – quite a step up from last year.  They made a big splash and they’ve had a great year.  Kudos to the iTKO team for a big contribution to the quality of the conference.

At the end of Day 1, I was motivated and exhausted. It was time to rest up for Day 2.

Day 2 of IBM Impact started off well.  I went down to breakfast and sat with a senior member of IBM technical staff, as well as a few gentlemen visiting from Farmer’s Insurance.  Good conversation over a light breakfast, followed by the keynote.

Katie Lindendoll was our emcee for Day 2.  Steve Mills followed her with a fluid, yet technical, presentation of IBM software in the context of 100 years of IBM history.   A couple of key points jumped out at me and into my notes from the session (which were light, because Steve does a good job demanding your attention while he’s talking):

• You should own your own process and your own data.  This is a theme IBM hit on several times.  It seems to support two legs of IBM’s business – on-premise software and “private clouds”.  But it also is a more philosophical point that IBM believes a move to the cloud should not give up your control over process and data.
• Your processes power your company.  (I didn’t count how many times he said the word “process” – but I should have.  It might have been a record for IBM keynotes).
• “Not lots of new things in IT, but there are lots of improving things in IT”.  Well said.
• Big focus on reducing TCO – Most IT organizations spend 80% of their budget just maintaining what they have in production.
• Hammering on atomicity – transactional accuracy – as a key underpinning to good (and accurate) processes (“We saw this problem coming, and understood what people would want to do with it”)

Next up was Phil Gilbert, formerly CTO and President of Lombardi, now VP of BPM at IBM.  He starts with the thought that we shouldn’t be talking about transforming.  We should start with “transformed” – as in, if you’re sitting in the audience, you’ve already been transformed by the economic and technical environment.  A couple of key stats:

• 50Billion devices connected to the internet by 2020 (Nokia estimate)
• 70% of businesses outsource a key process
• $488B lost to inefficiencies each year
• 20% of revenues over next 5 years will come from unknown sources

The chief argument: complexity is increasing, at an increasing rate.  And yet IT spend is flat or down over the last few years, with no sign of significant change.

The livestream is here, and embedded below (fast forward to 23:30 for Phil’s contribution):

Phil did a good job rebutting a key argument often used against BPM – putting power in the hands of the business does not mean turning business users into developers.  Just like we didn’t turn attorneys into typists when we introduced computers, and yet they all manage their own documents and have much higher personal productivity than we could have imagined in the era of typists.

Four key themes for the talks today were re-emphasized:  Visibility, Governance, Simplicity, and Power.

I liked his thought on six-sigma: “Doing improvement without assuming technology just is NOT where we are today in the real world.  We need to account for the technology as well in our work.”  Something we’ve been arguing as well, since at least 2007.

Then he introduced IBM BPM 7.5 – the joining of Websphere Lombardi Edition and WPS.  My old colleague Brandon Baxter was brought in to assist with the demo.  New branding/interface on the Integration Designer to make it match the Process Designer.  Phil lays it out afterward:  “They have to not just work together.  They have to work the same”

They also showed of revamped critical path management functionality, showing projected due dates and changes to the process and the implied affect on due date.  Projections can be optimistic, pessimistic, or historically most likely dates.

Phil ended with a note on tying many products together (paraphrasing from my notes):

It isn’t a weakness to have overlapping technical solutions for common – but not identical – problem spaces.

A 75-year partnership with Caterpillar did not just start with a computer.  Enabling a new platform for business.  And a commitment to bring along the things that came before.  We’re not dogmatic, but we are leaders.

Following Phil’s talk was a surprisingly good roundtable with two executives from Nationwide Insurance and two executives from Verizon Wireless.  Pretty good shout-outs to ILOG on this panel.

Wrapping up Day 2 was Scott Klososky.  And his first point was something I can get behind- that technology is art not engineering.  In light of this, and the changes to our lives that technology is weaving, we need leaders with new skills – and they need to add these skills at a faster rate than we’ve been seeing.  They need to be able to predict the future accurately and be visionary, accurately.  And then invest the time, money, and people to get there in time!

He then emphasized augmented intelligence, long term leadership (short term leadership is just “management”), and how to leverage social media to stay well-read in your area of expertise.

 Great way to start Day 2 at Impact.

Other Notes from Day 2

Later, I attended a session on UI-building on IBM BPM. Unfortunately so much time was spent on rehashing the normal ways of building UIs that we didn’t get enough time in the session to really see something different and new, though we did get a very deep technical dive on some of the approaches for different types of UIs.

In the afternoon, I spent some time with David Brakoniecki (of Axispoint) sharing notes on sessions we’d been to at the conference, and the market in general. It was the first time we’d met in person (previously only on Twitter) so I guess we now have to admit David is a real live person.

Then we hit Clay Richardson’s session on why BPM is hot. Though it seemed more focused on why BPM efforts are sometimes “hitting the wall”. Short version: lots of running analogies, a focus on the personality “types” you have in BPM initiatives (though I’m not fond of all the short-hand names like “Guru” and “Prodigy”). A key point of emphasis was active leadership from either the business owner, business analyst, or process architect. A process analyst cannot be an order taker – has to be more assertive and involved.

After that was a very good session on BPM Architectures by Zach Roadhouse and Karri Carlson-Neumann – in which they described how IBM BPM 7.5 now takes full advantage of Websphere’s Profile Manager. This allows much better, repeatable, control over exactly how IBM BPM is deployed, without requiring the writing of a great many scripts. They reviewed scenarios from the trivial (all-in-one-JVM) to the complex (clustering multiple services independently and layering them across your servers). It has all the advantages of Ant scripts (accuracy, repeatability), without requiring us to actually learn all the ins and outs of manipulating Websphere via Ant.

The three of us (Lance, Flournoy, and myself) finally were able to meet in the same place – at dinner.

Sandy Kemsley has good coverage of the other conference going on this week in the BPM space: AppianWorld.

Unlike Sandy, we weren’t about to try to do two conferences in one week!

Three of her blogs on the conference:

• Gartner Keynote
• Matt Calkins, future direction of Appian, and
• Malcolm Ross with a product update

I think where Appian is making their bet is obvious:  SaaS deployment in the cloud, and a new mobile-compatible interface, Tempo.  Tempo is certainly better than any of the other BPM interfaces I’ve seen on an iOS device.  Hopefully other BPM vendors will wake up to the need to really innovate on the mobile interfaces.  I worry that companies like IBM, in particular, worry too much about being cross-platform on all the mobile devices, rather than taking a more Evernote strategy of being device specific with the edge, and either in the cloud or highly compatible on the server. (The important part is the re-use on the server, not the re-use of UI bits on the client).

Bruce Silver is still carrying the torch for BPMN2 interchange – thank goodness someone is- and has yet another update to explain the ins and outs of “valid” models.

That means an interoperability validation tool needs to test, in addition to the normal semantic rules of BPMN, rules that relate the semantic and graphics elements.

For example, the rule in question here might be something like this:  In a diagram (i.e. page of the model), if a process is represented by a pool then all elements of that process on the page must be enclosed within the pool shape.

It is going to be a long road to get there but Bruce is, at least, making progress and uncovering some of the semantic (as well as syntactic) issues.

And since it took me a while to publish this post, we have an update from Bruce regarding BonitaSoft:

I have run across 5 BPMS vendors interested in my BPMN-I work: Activiti, BonitaSoft, Oracle, SAP, and IBM.  Of the five, BonitaSoft is so far the most successful in actually implementing BPMN 2.0-based model interchange.  Not only that, they are the only one so far that has implemented any of my suggestions for conforming to the xsd and BPMN-I.

I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again: when it comes to interchange, I think open-source offers the best alternatives.  Activiti was probably first occupied by providing an upgrade path to folks running JBPM3 and 4, rather than from other BPMN2 tools (very few of which yet export proper BPMN2 XML).

I’d agree with Bruce’s assessment that so far, BonitaSoft does the best job importing someone else’s BPMN2. In a project last summer we exported JBPM4 to BPMN2 (via an xsl transform) and then loaded that into BonitaSoft, and while we ran into a few issues, we could only get BonitaSoft and Oracle to import BPMN2 at the time. Unfortunately for Oracle we had to add quite a bit of custom Oracle decoration to the XML to get the diagram to show up decently.  (BonitaSoft has an auto-layout feature that helped).

(note: another update from Bruce)

Anatoly is one of the clearest communicators on the subject of BPM today, from a practitioner’s viewpoint.  A few choice quotes:

AB: First of all, there is a kind of a general understanding of how to do BPM right. But the problem is that there are many small factors that can dramatically affect your BPM initiative and actually ruin it.  [...] if you do it in a waterfall-like approach, then there is no room for agility, so it’s not BPM, actually.

Couldn’t have said it better myself.

I would like to add that there may be one key factor for success, but there are always several key factors for failure. This is the problem. You must know a lot and be careful about many things at once. This is why BPM professional services are in demand.

Again, true words.  It is one of many reasons why BPM professionals are in demand, but maybe most of the other reasons boil down to this one.

AB: Well, I believe that this BPMS-ACM debate you referred to at the beginning was very productive and, in the end, we will see most BPMSs enabled by ACM capabilities. This is a great thing because there is really a full spectrum of structured, half-structured and unstructured processes and cases. We need to cover all of this spectrum.

I definitely recommend the whole podcast.

Today’s sessions included a competitive case study session reviewing 4-5 case studies of competitive wins, and sharing techniques.

It seems to me that you could sum up winning against competition as: Don’t be a jerk. Care about your customer. Provide great customer service. And have a good product.  Oh, and if you can find an unequivocal differentiator, drive that nail all the way through the deal.

It was pretty good stuff but very anecdotal in nature and not content that I feel comfortable conveying verbatim.

Lunch + Keynote was the usual round of buffet plus happy news from the front of the room – record registration at Impact (8000), record partner registration (I forget if it was 800 or 850 business partners registered), more sessions than ever, etc. Clearly IBM is on something of a roll.  We heard from several of IBM’s execs, and then they also gave out business partner awards.

After the break, I went to listen to Dave Marquard’s discussion of the current BPM offering and the value propositions of each piece.  Good session and unfortunately I had to leave before it was over.  But I don’t think anyone minded as it was standing room only at that point and someone was happy to take my chair!  Clearly some interest in this BPM stuff.

I took a break and then, when Lance Gibbs, our fearless CEO, arrived, we headed down to the expo center for the general reception, where we were able to catch up with a few colleagues at IBM, as well as a couple partners in PrincetonBlue, Centric, and Apex.  Next, it was on to dinner… and then to meet Flournoy Henry (directly from the airport) at the Penn & Teller show.  I was suitably impressed by their act, and we were treated to great booth seating.  Thanks again to the two of them for giving us tickets to the show!

Looking forward to the keynote tomorrow morning.  Not looking forward to the early wake-up call!

Tomorrow Today is the Business Partner summit at IBM Impact, and then Monday we have the beginning of the Main Event – Keynotes and Comedians and Music and all.

I flew in early this year so that I could attend the whole Business Partner Summit.

On my flight from Austin, I gave my seat up to a guy much larger than me, who clearly needed the extra leg room on our Southwest flight.  Turns out that he, and the guy behind him, were Penn and Teller.  Small world.  And just like that, I found myself the holder of tickets to their Sunday night show.

Now that I’m here, I’m looking forward to catching up with a few friends.  I met up with two current colleagues in the BPM world who also worked with me at my first employer in Austin.  It is a small world!  One of them works in partnerships at IBM and the other helps run an IBM partner overseas.  And we all used to work together in the same building 10 years ago, for a different company.  I used the afternoon to check out the spa and decompress before things really get busy here, and then it was out to dinner with aforementioned colleagues.

The weather is cooler than expected here in Vegas, but I’m not complaining.  I already feel a bit behind the curve on sleep just trying to keep up with normal business and family communications and also get out of the room and meet up with colleagues. If you’re at Impact and you’d like to meet up, drop me a line or look for me on twitter (@sfrancisatx).

More to come from the Business Partner Summit sessions.