In every review of BPM best practices you’ll ever read, you’ll see listed with extra emphasis: executive sponsorship. Actually, this criterion is listed for ERP projects, CRM projects, Security projects… It is listed for pretty much every type of IT engagement.

There is so much emphasis on this in presentations on the subject that typically speakers on the subject will take extra time to clarify that they don’t just mean an executive sponsor that signs checks, but an executive that is intimately involved with the effort and promotes the effort or mentors it.

But I believe most projects start without this higher level of true executive sponsorship.  In a sense, the team below has to earn that sponsorship.  In many cases, the executive has sprinkled a few preliminary investments along with a few well-understood big bets.  Those preliminary investments are feelers-  to see what might shake out.  They don’t have the executive’s full attention, but they have a little runway and latitude to make progress before they are accountable.  Or they’re given a specific project to tackle, a proof point to the executive that both the team and the technical stack are up to the challenge.

So, if executive sponsorship is critical… and most BPM programs don’t start out with it… are all of these projects doomed?

Dave Brakoniecki writes on his blog:

Over time, there seemed to be a bit of a pattern in the conversation. Successful initiatives were about changing or transforming the organization and tended to be driven from the top. In these cases, senior management decided the direction and the businesses had developed over time very successful human processes and technology platforms for supporting and implementing change.

And further:

There were no stories that I can recall of bottom-up change being harnessed successfully. Innovation at front line of the organization and filtered back up the hierarchy to senior management seems like a harder nut to crack. Even organizations that devolved a significant amount of decision making in their change management process struggled to let the front-line drive the strategy behind the overall program.

I believe there’s a bit of selection bias here.  Successful projects that lead to successful strategy and programs, will have executive sponsorship.  Regardless of whether they start without that executive sponsorship.  Why is that?  Because the successful teams will lobby effectively for executive support, with real data and real successes to back them up.  Executives will choose to put more money on the winning horse.  The best executives will co-opt the best ideas from the effort, find synergies with corporate objectives and strategy, and then change the emphasis of the go-forward program accordingly.

Most really interesting innovations and opportunities will bubble up from the organization – the trick for the executive team is to spot those emergent opportunities and capitalize on them.

If you don’t have your executive sponsorship lined up, think about which executive(s) are likely to sponsor your go-forward efforts.  Think about what matters to them, what their objectives are, what the company objectives are over which they have influence.  And make sure you have good arguments to support your BPM initiative along those lines. If you do it right, it will almost feel like the realization of that executive’s ideas, rather than some “not-invented-here” idea that has to be thrust upon upper management.

In an apparent bid to become tomorrow’s ERP system, Appian makes an appeal to “stop application sprawl“.

But they perked up when talk started shifting to how Appian could wrap or replace existing point solutions in addition to automating currently unstructured processes.  A few minutes later, full of excitement, they said the following before the whole group, “After we adopt Appian, we will need to be convinced why any point solution would be better than what we could create for our own needs in BPM.”

(their emphasis)

It is a little counter-intuitive for a BPM services guy like me to complain about pushing more BPM.  But I’d just say this: your BPM platform is not your application replacement platform.  It is your process -aka BPM- platform.  Your firm won’t be better off having all of its systems inside Appian (or another BPMS) if there isn’t any process improvement and rationalization happening along the way.

Rather than seeing someone say that they would adopt the BPM solution over any point solution that can’t prove it is better, the framing should be in terms of process:  before buying a point solution, we need to understand how it will fit within the overall fabric of our processes, and whether that “fitting” effort will outweigh the benefits of buying a point-solution application (presumably best-of-breed).

We’re not doing anyone favors if we just hand them the BPM hammer and let them think that all their issues are nails.

But if you do find yourself doing a “rip and replace” project, keep this in mind:

When building a BPM solution, we are often integrating with and replacing parts of legacy systems.  Often one of the first requirements from the business will be that the new system does everything the old system did in order to be accepted.  This is generally a bad false start to a project.

However, one of the best tactics is to figure out what the 2-3 key NEW capabilities your solution will bring to the business that are so compelling that some minor discomfort over less important details will not derail the project.  You can call this marketing, but it is truly understanding where the real value opportunities are in your project.  Sometimes these capabilities are things the users will clamor for, sometimes things that the management team will clamor for, and rarely, things that IT will clamor for.  Make sure that at least one of your major stakeholder groups is squarely behind a few of the wow features of your BPM project.  If you don’t have that excitement in one area, my experience is that you’ll find uncomfortable scrutiny on an exact comparison of the new solution versus the old solution.

Good post from our friend Jaisundar at BouncingThoughts:

The real key to agility will need to come from your people. Your culture.

Here is how I look at it. Technology may contribute to an agile organization, but mostly the root of agility lies in the collective consciousness of an organization.

To be fair, I think many people look at their organization and see the potential for agility, but look at the tooling available to that organization, and they don’t see the technology to support agility (e.g. working inside a monolithic ERP system to create process change…)

BPM is a contributing but not sufficient ingredient for agility.

Steve Blank’s process for teaching entrepreneurship – The Lean Launchpad – is a bit like the process for teaching the startup process.  It is a fascinating evolution to observe as it develops; and the results are impressive.

I recommend reading the whole series of posts, but if you are the kind of person that reads the last chapter first, or likes to eat dessert before the entree, then have at it.

So what is this Lean Launchpad class in his words?

Business plans are fine for large companies where there is an existing market, existing product and existing customers, but in a startup all of these elements are unknown and the process of discovering them is filled with rapidly changing assumptions. Experienced entrepreneurs realize that no business plan survives first contact with customers. So our goal was to teach something actually useful in the lives of founders.

Building a product is a critical part of a startup, but just implementing build, measure, learn without a framework to understand customers, channel, pricing, etc. is just another engineering process, not building a business. In the real world a startup is about the search for a business model or more accurately, startups are a temporary organization designed to search for a scalable and repeatable business model. Therefore we developed a class to teach students how to think about all the parts of building a business, not just the product.

Clearly the use of the business model canvas to capture assumptions and iterate over them is a big step forward compared to previous approaches (not that that was the only innovation).  We’ve used the business model canvas at BP3 to explain our business model, and we’ll likely use some of these techniques to tweak our business model in the future.

One of the key learnings:

3.  The process worked for all types of startups – not just web software but from a diverse set of industries – wind turbines, autonomous vehicles and medical devices.

I thought that was pretty telling.  A good process for a startup should work for more than just web software startups.

If you think you’re doing something that is just too damn creative for a process, read Steve Blank’s blog on startups.  The process may not be tightly bound or automated, and doesn’t need to be.  But there *is* a method to the madness and it can be repeated However, the outcome isn’t guaranteed to be successful – it is a startup after all.  Part of me wonders if the BPM community would be willing to accept that idea of following the process but still having an indeterminate outcome… interesting discussion to have!

Anatoly has posted an example regarding orchestration and collaboration, and he has two particularly good pieces of advice at the end, though the whole post is worth reading:

Rule 1. If your attempts to model a process are unsuccessful because some significant aspects are missed repeatedly then stop and think – maybe in fact it’s not a single process but two or more?

Rule 2. Do not overuse collaboration – stay within the orchestration as long as possible. Never introduce collaboration into a diagram just because you’ve recently learned how to do that.

Both of these are excellent.  Rule #1 is exactly how I approach splitting something into multiple processes.  Rule #2 is just a good rule in general for any piece of functionality you’re not overly familiar with, or any advanced functionality.  Start with the basics, and only go to the more advanced features when you clearly need to.

John Lilly (of Greylock, previously CEO of Mozilla), recently wrote a post “Recruiting DNA“, in which he wrote about how early job experience shapes how you approach the world:

One of the things I’ve been really, really struck by is how significant the first 4 or 5 years of a person’s career seems to be on how they think and how they approach the world. It’s typically very easy to tell if someone started their career at Google or Apple or Microsoft or Paypal or a bunch of others, even when they’re 15 years into their career and well removed from that first job. You can just see it in the way they approach problems. These are gross simplifications and overgeneralizations, but Googlers tend to think about things in a data and machine learning sort of way. Amazon folk (Amazonians?) tend to think in terms of testing and yield. And other companies that shall remain nameless are notable in that their alumni have absurdly good PowerPoint skills. (Which, sadly, is not actually a positive indicator.)

John has talked to enough people to put some weight behind his oversimplifications and over-generalizations… But I think he has a point.  Phrasing it differently, each of these companies has certain “DNA” that has helped them be successful in their own way.  And what they are all particularly good at is teaching that methodology or DNA to the people they hire.  The most impressionable people they hire are the college graduates, freshly minted with their Computer Science (or similar) degrees.  I’d say John’s empirical observation fits.

John wrote in particular about Trilogy:

[...] the thing that imprinted most is an insane focus on recruiting insanely talented people. As a company, we were relentless about getting the smartest, most driven, most talented people we could. We were a tiny company, but going toe to toe with giants in on campus recruiting, for example — and I think we were probably about the best tech company at recruiting anywhere in the US in the mid-90s.

As one of the people who helped (in some small way) recruit John to Trilogy, I have to agree.  He was one of my friends from Stanford who told me “I don’t think I’d ever work for Trilogy” early in the recruiting process – but Trilogy had a relentless machine once talent was identified.  It just caused the company to get more creative about how to attract talent – giving John the opportunity to found the HCI (Human Computer Interaction) team at Trilogy and transform how software was being designed there. That HCI group has left a lasting impression on its members, and even on Austin, where quite a few of them still reside.  And there are at least two or three  “software UI/UX design firms” that were formed by alumni from the HCI group (I wouldn’t be surprised if there are more).

But as he says – the thing that imprinted most, was recruiting – both the importance of the process and the focus on talent.  After all, the interview is the tip of the spear.

I don’t know if there’s a better representation of the health of a consumer business than this kind of chart found in the Asymco blog:

In the chart above, it shows that Apple derives more profit per unit than any other vendor (by far), and that RIM (another integrated platform) still derives the second-most profit per unit.  It also shows the profit per vendor by looking at the area of each rectangle.  Again, Apple and RIM look to be #1 and #2.

Similar charts for the PC business would also be interesting.  And the Auto business.  Conventional wisdom says you have to have volume (scale) to be successful – and therefore a high-margin product in a low-margin industry won’t succeed (because it won’t achieve scale).  But there are examples that show it is possible.  And in some markets (cell phones), even a single digit market share is a very large user base (platform).

Jacob Ukelson has a great post on Business Politics Management vs. Business Process Management-

I suggest that we should have a separate branch of BPM that is Business Politics Management – it is the cousin of regular BPM, but for knowledge worker tasks. These tasks are very heavily dependent on collaboration, meetings, discussions, negotiation – and yes politics (in the sense that all interactions between humans involves politics). I think using the word “politics” would cause enough of an uproar that we could actually start understanding how the two BPMs actually are different.

[...]

But realistically that is a job more suited to Business Politics Management, since it requires the kind of knowledge work that involves collaboration, meetings, discussion and negotiations – and yes, politics.

He has a great point – that one of the first processes one should set up is the meta-process for evaluating process opportunities and chartering a project, if you will.  There’s just one problem: software doesn’t solve politics.  And I’m taking the benign definition – software doesn’t help you get people to agree on the right answer, where that answer is subjective or based on human judgment and consensus.

I’ve actually used a process to model the pipeline (funnel) of demand and the actual evaluation process. But the real roadblocks are not in software – they’re in people’s heads.  And those people have to be confronted in person or on conference calls and their objections dealt with.  They won’t always write them down for you to rebut.  The point is, it takes real convincing and persuasion.  Good news folks: these are things that PEOPLE are really good at, and we won’t easily be displaced.

Another incremental update from the BlueworksLive team.  The key features:

• Tagging – generally just giving you an easier way to find things created in BlueworksLive.
• Better visibility to activity within a space
• APIs for provisioning and de-provisioning (admin).

Of course, when it comes to provisioning users, I’d like to see BlueworksLive playing ball with someone like Conformity (which we’ve covered, briefly, before), a firm that is promoting user provisioning across multiple SaaS offerings.  Longer-term that seems to be the way to go, but an API is a good step in the right direction.

The good news, unemployment has dropped to a recent low, of 6.5%:

Though the report showed a modest pace of job growth, there has been a string of recent announcements by companies planning to add jobs in Central Texas this year.

They range from startups adding five or 10 jobs to Altera Corp. , a California chip design firm that plans to open an Austin design center this year and grow to several hundred workers in the next few years.

There really have been a lot of “hiring” announcements lately.  I never know exactly how seriously to take those announcements though (after all, what really matters is how many people companies *actually* hire).

The bad news?

The region’s improving job picture is threatened, however, by proposed budget cuts at a number of school districts and state agencies. Government employment in the Austin area accounts for 173,500 jobs, more than any other sector, according to Workforce Commission figures.

The looming state budget cuts are expected to be severe, and are expected to have a significant impact on employment (including that of teachers).

Meanwhile, at a recent CEO summit in Austin, hosted by the Austin Technology Council (ATC), there were complaints of a talent shortage:

“That only gets you so far,” Favaron said. “We need to import top people, not hire them away from each other. In the past, we’ve had companies like Tivoli and Trilogy that brought in hundreds and hundreds of highly talented people. Nobody’s doing that right now. Instead, we’re recycling people.”

(Note: Rod Favaron was previously CEO of Lombardi, he is now CEO of Spredfast).

There’s some truth to that statement – we’ve had a lot of new talent injected into Austin via the college graduate ranks (thanks UT!), but we haven’t seen a company come along that is a net-importer of talent in the way that Trilogy, Tivoli, and Dell were in the 90′s.  Or perhaps the new up-and-comers (Home Away, Bazaarvoice, Solarwinds, etc.) are just going about talent-importing more quietly?  Too soon to tell.

I think the message to Austin-based CEOs is clear: be prepared to pay a little more to get and keep the people you want on your team.

Marco Arment is the creator of Instapaper, a great reading app for webpages, blogs, etc. that you want to cache for reading later on your iPhone, iPad, or browser of choice.

He recently announced an “extended vacation” for his free app:

Maintaining a second configuration of the app incurs direct, significant costs in development and support. Furthermore, the Instapaper web service that powers the app costs a good amount of money and time to operate every month. So Free users have a direct cost to me.

On the website, this cost is defrayed by ads from The Deck, but people using the iOS app might never visit the website. So Instapaper Free has an ad from The Deck in its list screen. It’s unintrusive, its advertisers are respectable, and it pays well. It’s the best ad unit I could ask for.

But it still makes far less than paid-app sales — the increase in app sales with Free’s absence exceeds this many times over. The math to explain this is simple: most Free users won’t give me anywhere near $3.50 worth of ad impressions.

Essentially, conversion rates from free to paid were low.  But without the free option, many would pay that relatively harmless cost of $4.99 – because the app has that much value to a significant number of people (including me).

I love the way he sums this up:

If you’re a developer, you’re probably talking yourself out of making a move like this because you think Instapaper is a special case.

Every app is a special case.

Maybe you think I can only do this because Instapaper is already popular. But it built its popularity while charging “a lot” for an iPhone app from the start.

Maybe you think I can only do this because my blog is moderately popular among geeks like me. If so, I assure you that my blog’s audience is smaller than you think, and is extremely insignificant relative to the size of the iOS app market.

Maybe you think there aren’t enough people willing to pay $5 for an app with no free version. I used to think that, too. But I was wrong.

The short version: don’t assume free is the only way.  People will pay for quality, and getting paid allows you to invest in quality… and the virtuous cycle ensues.

If you’re in a business other than writing apps for smartphones… you might be convincing yourself right now that you’re case is different, your market is different.  But you have only to look as far as Ning to see that sometimes charging for your service, site, or product is exactly what you need to do to focus the business and make money.

Good coverage of Progress’ analyst day by Neil Ward-Dutton:

My concern at the previous year’s event was that Progress was in danger of painting itself into a corner: by highlighting RPM as the “next step beyond BPM”, it was in danger of creating for itself a very specialised niche. It seems that the company understands this challenge, and is doing some things to try and avoid this particular trap. We heard about three specific initiatives, all of which are related.

Like Neil, I like(d) the definition of RPM, but worry(ied) that it would paint them into a corner if they became only about a special subclass of BPM.  I think this is the danger to the vendors pursuing ACM vis-a-vis BPM as well (less so to those vendors who claim to do both).  Neil’s assessment is that they’ve avoided that trap, which is good.

The biggest transformation still facing Progress is to be more business-facing in both sales and delivery.  They have a well-respected technical heritage, but appealing to the business hasn’t been the reputation historically, and sounds like something that still has room for  improvement.

From the NYTimes:

Two years ago, ad executive, Nancy Giordano, moved to Austin from Los Angeles, and within 12 months she had organized and started TEDx Austin with Jen Spencer. The idea-sharing conference had a waiting list its first year, leaving me wondering how an outsider could come into another city and pull together such an amazing gathering of thinkers and leaders. Ms. Giordano had grown up in Atlanta, and her career took her to New York City for seven years, Chicago for three and Los Angeles for 13, where she worked for Chiat Day, the ad agency, before starting her own consulting firm, Play Big, Inc.

I asked her what about the Austin culture made this doable. “There is this circle and a current that runs between the community’s business pillars that helps people do their thing,” she said. “There’s a real desire here to help people manifest whatever success they want to create. I think that’s because people are really happy. There is no sense of, ‘you win, I lose.’ Here it’s, ‘you win, I win.’”

The whole piece is pretty glowing, with an appreciation of Austin that only a fellow transplant to Austin can understand.

And speaking personally, I can’t help but feel like Austin’s vibe is reaching VC circles, as two of my friends who work in VC firms have come to visit Austin recently to touch base with companies in their portfolio.  Austin continues to hit on all cylinders.

I was asked the other day by a consultant from a large provider, “What do I need to know to get into BPM consulting?”

So you want to be a BPM Practitioner? “Great, we need all we can get!” Actually, what I did say is that “it is not a career cut out for everyone.” Besides requiring really above par intelligence and a passion for BPM, you also need to possess very strong abilities in leadership, pragmatism, observation, intuition, and adaptability. The challenges you will be engaging with businesses on are usually fairly substantial and all compounded by a fog of competing projects, limited resources, competitive pressures, politics, lack of shared vision, lack of education, paranoia, and a host of other factors. Directional clarity which would be considered “high fidelity” is usually not going to be found there. Ambiguity often rules the corporate landscape, and especially so in the business process arena.

Today’s companies have been transformed by a deluge of overwhelming change and it is up to you and your team to help the organization remediate the highest value areas you can possibly get your hands on. I’ll use the term “operator” in describing a BPM practitioner for a couple reasons. First off, you are not playing the role of a strategist unless you truly have that job and the power to effect a company’s overall direction in a major way. If this isn’t you then you are viewed as a contributor and that is exactly what organizations need, real contribution. I will take a very solid operator over a theorist any day of the week on a BPM program! Secondly, you are going to get your hands dirty and when I say dirty I mean designing, developing, and/or analyzing business processes. Companies need contributors who really know how to deliver and sort out the “should do versus could do” in critical and changing situations, serious operators.

It is not enough to be a good developer/technologist nor is it good enough to be a good business analyst. BPM is specialized and brings with it a whole new level of skill requirements. Are you considered truly excellent at what you have been doing and have those differentiating abilities mentioned? If so, then you will likely be able to enjoy a very rewarding career in BPM!

Today there isn’t a truly recognized industry standard in curriculum or certification for a BPM Practitioner. It’s not worth going into all of the whys of that here, suffice to say there just isn’t and probably won’t be for a good number of years to come, if ever. Nonetheless, that doesn’t prevent you from joining this community and being highly effective in performing the job.

So where do you start on this path? Your best bet is to try and join a boutique consulting firm or possibly a BPMS vendor (I say possibly because only a couple might actually develop skills outside of their own software focus) that has deep expertise, training, performance standards, practical application capability, opportunity to engage on initiatives, and proctor/mentors available to help develop the skills you will need. Learning never ends for anyone.

Whether your background is in IT, Operations, or Line of Business you will need to develop capabilities that are outside of your historical core competency. For example, if you are a developer it would be expected for you to also be able to understand how to perform basic process analysis, e.g. Value Stream, MSA, Pareto, and Process Capability to name a few. Likewise, if you are an analyst you should be able to understand and articulate BPMS capabilities, Enterprise Architecture concepts, Agile and other iterative based SDLC’s, and various enabling technologies surrounding BPM delivery. Moreover, in either scenario you need to wrap that with good project management functions, communications, human interaction/conflict resolution, change management techniques, adult learning, and other soft skills that will allow you to perform in the really challenging environments that are part and parcel of today’s Business Process Management world.

Again, these skills listed outside your initial competency don’t necessarily require mastery but you do need to have some solid capability starting out. Once you have these skills down, there is plenty of opportunity to become more advanced or specialized in any particular area.  Not everyone will make the cut but if you think you have what it takes and the desire, this industry sure does need you!

Marco Arment’s Instapaper could come under the Apple’s guns in the next version of Safari, which purportedly will offer a “Reading List” feature.

Marco (rightly) concludes there isn’t much to worry about.  First, what is an instapaper competitor?

• Saving articles to read later — timeshifting — like a DVR for the web.
• Synchronizing the reading list between computers and mobile devices.
• Presenting the articles in a stripped-down text format on those mobile devices for optimal reading on their screens.

If another product doesn’t implement all three, it’s not really an Instapaper competitor.

His take is that the first version is likely to implement bullet 1, and maybe bullet 3.  Perhaps the next version will be an Instapaper competitor.  As he says, Safari already has too much going on in its UI, and Apple tends to be conservative about making changes to it.  But what if Apple *does* build this Instapaper competitor?

Marco has spent time building his defenses:

• Supporting other browsers (on other platforms).  Safari features really won’t play in audiences that prefer to use Firefox or IE or Chrome (especially on non-Mac systems).
• Integration with other apps – this is analogous to putting down roots in the space that other apps can take advantage of, but which feed back into keeping Instapaper alive and relevant.

He also understands that he doesn’t need to win the market to make a fortune (he estimates 1% would be a fortune).

When you’re in this situation, you’re really rooting for more visibility.  A small market-capture or increase in publicity and attention can have a big effect on your revenues and fortunes.  It sounds a lot like the BPM world, actually.  A rising tide…

His next point is about Starbucks – the number of coffee shops has increased dramatically since Starbucks came along – and although they place their stores aggressively near other coffee shops – the *good* coffee shops actually do even better.  The less-good shops tend to go out of business or change their business model.

Marco’s words:

My biggest challenge isn’t winning over converts from my competitors: it’s explaining what Instapaper does and convincing people that they actually need it. Once they “get it”, they love it, but explaining its value in one quick, easy-to-understand, general-audience sentence is more difficult than you might imagine.

If Apple gets a bunch of Safari users — the browser that works best with Instapaper — to get into a “read later” workflow and see the value in such features, those users are prime potential Instapaper customers. And it gives me an easier way to explain it to them: “It’s like Safari’s Reading List, but better, in these ways.”

This is exactly the problem the BPM vendors have had-  it wasn’t beating the competitors so much as it was explaining what BPM can do for you and convincing people that they need this BPM thing.  This is not a zero sum game when the market is a long way from being saturated. And in that respect, the BPM market and the “Instapaper” market are very similar.

And this explains a lot about why BP3 works well with partners that outsiders would probably look at as competitors.  Philosophically, we believe we’re growing the pie rather than competing over how big each slice is.

Great stuff from Neil, debunking yet another generational myth pushed upon us by the likes of Time and Fortune:

I don’t know about you, but when I was a young adult I wanted every minute of my life to have meaning too! I was self-absorbed, narcissistic and impatient. Outspokenness, inability to take criticism and a sense of entitlement are characteristics of young people – and have been for 40-50 years. Now I’m older I hope those characteristics have lessened, and I believe there’s no reason to expect things to be different when Generation Y workers take on management positions.

If you go back and read what Fortune and Time wrote about Gen X 10-12 years earlier, it sounds suspiciously similar… As Neil says, this line of reasoning seems lazy and without any real rigor.  It doesn’t even pass the common sense test.

+1, Neil.

Score one for the “BPMN Zealots“, as Bruce Silver reports:

Today Software AG announced a tight integration between ARIS, its leading Business Process Analysis suite, and webMethods, its SOA-based BPM Suite.  The integration features roundtripping and continuous synchronization between business-oriented and developer-oriented models in those tools.  The medium of interchange is BPMN 2.0 XML.

EPC was previously ARIS focus, but as Bruce Silver says:

…and Software AG now recommends that for new modeling projects where the intent is to automate in webMethods, ARIS users model in BPMN 2.0 from the start. This move is really heartening to me, and highlights the key new feature of BPMN 2.0, which is interchange between modeling tools.

Glad to see ARIS and Software AG getting on the BPMN bandwagon.  Interestingly, they ran an April Fool’s joke about ditching EPC…Sometimes the April Fool’s jokes hit a little close to home.

Sandy Kemsley’s blog on BPMS pricing, she points out that pricing is still incredibly opaque.  There’s also a discussion on Quora that she refers to.

The problems:

1. Different vendors use different metrics to price (user, process, CPU, PVU, duration, etc. )
2. Different vendors are pricing different things (simulation, Modeling, BPMN, BPEL, XPDL, execution, integration, reporting, analytics, ESB, Messaging, Database, etc.)
3. The customers are really in different situations.  If a vendor prices only by user, a customer with a simple process but 100,000 users can’t buy that product.  They might buy a product that prices by CPU (especially if their process has very little processing overhead).  So by publishing prices, vendors run the risk of turning away business as well as the risk of selling too cheaply.  (The CPU-priced vendor might have been able to charge a higher price, but if they published a per-CPU price then the customer will take the lower price, of course).

The root of it is that the vendors are trying to make a value sale (or value-minus).  And customers are just trying to get a price that makes their ROI (value equation) work out.  In that kind of market, transparency isn’t likely.

From Sandy’s blog:

Remember the bad old days of buying a car, when you had no idea how much it cost when you walked into the showroom, and had to go through some weird pseudo-negotiation between the salesperson and his manager, where they would throw in the free floor mats if you did your financing with them, give you an extra discount if it was within a week of the end of their sales quarter, or bait-and-switch you into a more expensive model? Enterprise software has always felt a bit like that to me, and BPMS pricing and sales tactics sadly fall into that same category, at least for many of the major vendors.

“the bad old days”?  Car buying is still like this in the US (you do have alternatives, but by and large, it boils down to this same kind of experience).

Michele Cantara gave a rapid fire session on the last day of Gartner BPM 2011, covering how to leverage Services firms to gain expertise for your BPM efforts.  As with most presentations there was plenty to agree with, but I’m going to take time out to really contrast the areas in which we disagree.

First, Michele asks the audience to understand Gartner’s six-step plan:

1. Select your BPM Usage Scenario (from specific process-based solution to business transformation)
2. Select your “BPM Corner” (using Gartner’s Four Corners framework)
3. Do a gap analysis of BPM skills and roles
4. Align the motivations of sourcing roles to the process owner desired business results (this is a bit tricky, get in the weeds a bit)
5. Understand the capabilities in the BPM consulting and systems integration market (C&SI).
6. Evaluate C&SI Capabilities against criteria identified in steps 1-4.

The steps make sense, at a high level, but of course the devil is in the details, and I disagree with the assumptions underlying steps 5 and 6.

To understand where we differ, it is important to understand Step 2. Borrowing from Gartner’s presentation:

Gartner's "Four Corners" Framework for BPM

The basic point is that from left to right, processes evolve from changing infrequently to changing frequently or continuously.  Bottom to the top:  a spectrum where IT makes all the changes at the bottom, and business makes all the changes at the top. There are descriptions of typical examples in each quadrant.

So far so good.  But then Michele makes the recommendations for where the sweet spots are for different types of vendors:

Gartner Four Corners with BPM Service Provider overlay

If you just glance at it, it may not jump out at you.  But look closer.  Offshore service vendors are recommended in all four quadrants – meanwhile Boutique firms are recommended for only one.  If we’re to believe our eyes, offshore vendors are as good at assisting with continuous change processes in which the business makes all the changes, as they are at assisting with processes that change infrequently and are changed only by IT.

Does that pass the test of common sense or of what we see in the real world?  It does not.

The presentation notes imply that once upon a time, BPM consulting was the bastion of boutique consultancies (true).  However, Michele jumps to the conclusion that because customers would like to have larger consultancies assist with global delivery models- that these larger (global) consultancies actually have such skills and abilities. The “establishment” of a BPM practice by a major firm is as easy as issuing a press release and fictionalizing a number of consultants who participate in the practice.  There’s no audit of said numbers.  And if one initiates a practice with 500 people – where exactly are those people billing out?  Which customers are the victims of this 500 person experiment?  When that big firm closes a deal, they’ll come calling on the boutique BPM firms to fulfill the on-site work (or in the case of Accenture, buy the boutique firm).  I always wonder where these 500 experts materialize from – if we added them up across all the large vendors you’d think we’d have a surplus of BPM talent in our business… Something doesn’t add up.

The fundamental fallacy is the idea of scale (i.e. that large firms will have large numbers of experienced and qualified practitioners), because large does not mean effective – that large firm is only as effective for you as the team it assigns to your project(s).  Of course these big firms have a few great people of some talent.  But the question is whether that talent will be deployed to your project or not.  If you have spent a couple of decades in professional services working either within or alongside these entities you know this to be true. Now compound that with offshore companies who by and large don’t implement BPM in their local markets, and rely solely on the export of their services for their experience.  They’re missing a huge piece of the BPM experience by not being in front of customers. Ultimately, it comes down to those individual contributors who have the localized experience – with business, operational, and technical acumen.

It turns out that BPM is still led by boutique consulting firms.  It is the boutiques that still provide the thought leadership as well as the bleeding edge of technology leadership.  If I were drawing this same chart, Boutiques would have showed up in every quadrant, with qualifications – you need different boutique firms for different types of BPM initiatives.  If your organizational goal is to learn how to fish in the BPM pond, rather than to have a services provider serve you dinner, then the boutique firm will line up better with your needs.  Those big firms have big billable and staffing targets to hit and they’re going to unload the bus.  Yet, a highly skilled team of 4-6 people can make a huge impact on your global BPM efforts.

Offshore vendors are most well suited for the lower-left quadrant – infrequently changing processes, driven by IT. If I were drawing the same chart, it would look something like this:

I’m not sure why Gartner would be pushing BPM hopefuls into the arms of offshore services vendors.  Going offshore with BPM doesn’t address the most critical failure mode of BPM projects:  getting the requirements right. In fact it impedes getting to the right answers by stretching time and distance.  If you’re sending the work to a big team of offshore resources-  well no one is going to learn anything in that situation.  It doesn’t help your organization become self-sufficient in BPM – and so you’re not really getting leverage from your BPM services investment.

Michele Cantara showed another chart that shows Capabilities of the various types of vendors, in general:

Gartner: Capabilities against Criteria

I have a tougher grading scale, in general, so I’m sharing my own opinion on these ratings here:

Revised Capabilities to Criteria

I’m sorry to find myself so far out of alignment with what was presented at Gartner’s conference, but the distance on the assumptions behind these last two steps in their process was so great I just felt compelled to write about it.  Others may disagree, but this is just how it looks from our perspective – both as a boutique services firm that has done a lot of mop up operations.

Mark Cotgrove of Nimbus has recently gotten into the blogging game.  He has a fresh perspective and a great writing voice.  But out of his first 4 posts, two of them take personal shots at people I have a lot of respect for.

First, he refers to Bruce Silver (and others, not named) as “BPMN Zealots“.  Where I come from, zealot is a pretty serious insult.  I would call Bruce an advocate of BPMN.  But Bruce’s career precedes BPMN.  So it isn’t as if he’s never seen UML or flow charts or other tools.  He has.  He’s found a tool that has helped him express processes, and he’s helped teach these tools to many other people.  I find that grounds for respect, rather than derision (admittedly, Bruce and I sometimes pick on each other in blog comments, but it does not diminish my respect for his work).

Mark’s summary is that BPMN is like Esperanto.  Is it? Or is it like spreadsheets and flowcharts and whiteboard diagrams – things that lots of people have learned and put to good use (but certainly not everyone has learned them, nor has to).

In his fourth post (“Phil Gilbert’s Never Seen Process Chaos“), he takes a shot at Phil Gilbert, with a backhanded compliment about his good presentation last year at BPM 2010.  But beyond that, he says:

Here’s my thinking; If you’ve come from the world of BPA and BPMS/process automation, (which is the enormous majority of people in the process space, so I think this probably applies to pretty much every BPM commentator), then you are unconsciously incompetent to talk about massive deployment of process into an organisation.

So, you’re saying Phil is incompetent, right?  I guess I would propose back to Mark: you don’t know what you don’t know, about people in the BPM field.  Moving on…

And it might sound warm, fuzzy and attractive to western sensibilities but I can tell you it is an utter mess. You get exactly what Phil is proposing; loads of people building content, really getting into it, communicating like mad, and guess what? No value and ultimately frustrated people. This is one case where out of the chaos no beautiful order emerges…

Right, we wouldn’t want the unwashed masses to implement their own processes for things that don’t rise to the volume, scope, and $ value of the typical BPM project. What Mark is describing sounds more like what used to happen with SharePoint (or Excel).  Loads of SharePoint sites and no one knows where to go to initiate the process they want to interact with.  (But, that isn’t what Phil was proposing in his talk last year… )

I’d love to know more about what Nimbus does, and how it approaches this thing most of us call BPM (but some call ACM as well).  I read Ian’s posts regularly and follow him on Twitter.  Mark’s early blog posts show great promise for an entertaining read. But I, for one, hope his critiques will be more of others’ opinions and ideas, without demeaning their competency nor their reasoning capabilities.  I’m just not a big fan of the personal shots – maybe Mark or others won’t consider them such, but that’s how they read to me.  If there’s one thing I’ve noticed, in this BPM space, there’s more than meets the eye to most of the personalities and “BPM Commentators”.