There’s a theme about management that has cropped up over the years regarding owning the outcomes, rather than the excuses (Steve Jobs’ definition of the Vice President versus the janitor comes to mind).

Ben Horowitz (of Andreesen Horowitz) captures this perfectly in his “Nobody Cares” post.  It is both great advice, a great reminder of something you should already know if you run a startup, and an admonishment that you need to be tough if you’re going to go down that road:

That might be the best CEO advice ever. Because, you see, nobody cares. When things go wrong in your company, nobody cares. The press doesn’t care, your investors don’t care, your board doesn’t care, your employees don’t care, even your mama doesn’t care. Nobody cares.

And they are right not to care. A great reason for failing won’t preserve one dollar for your investors, won’t save one employee’s job, or get you one new customer. It especially won’t make you feel one bit better when you shut down your company and declare bankruptcy.

This is so true. As consultants we see this all the time – customers don’t care about our excuses, they just want their projects and processes delivered as promised.  Sometimes there are really important mitigating circumstances but we’ve got to help them climb over those obstacles.

And at the end of the day – nobody cares about the excuses.  You have to make payroll, pay bonuses, grow your firm, and make it happen.  And if you don’t, no one will care about the excuses.

Jacob Ukelson writes:

What I think surprised me most is how little BPM is used by most development and IT shops for their own use. Even when a truly structured IT process is being implemented (like deploying an application into production) – the tools are never based on BPM suites.

Interestingly, when I worked at a BPM vendor, we used BPM to run our builds, tests, and other automated processes (with, admittedly, some human-facing steps).  We also built our support site with our BPM suite.  Both decisions were fantastic decisions from the perspective of having everyone eat our own dog food, as well as making experts out of people who might otherwise not become experts.

Recently, I was talking with a startup that is into cloud infrastructure.  And they use a BPMS to make their deployments reproducible.

Two data points don’t make for a statistically significant sample.

A third anecdote sums up what I think Jacob is running into.  A few years ago I stopped by a friend’s startup in San Francisco.  He asked me what brought me to SF – long story short, I told him that my customer was using BPM to do some A/B testing around one of their core processes (a fulfillment process).  His response: “why do they need BPM for that?” and “why don’t they just write the code for that?”

Well, the first question – this is the question one always hears – not just with BPM, but with all kinds of new software or productivity tools.  As I like to say “why not just write everything in assembly right?”  After all – the question is are we using the right tool for the job, not whether other tools could theoretically do the job.

As to the second question – why don’t they just write code?  This is a pretty typical attitude for people who are really adept at writing code.  First, they don’t see a need to learn a new tool to get their job done – unless that tool is an API or a language. Second, they don’t see why anyone else should, either.  Third, they’re often suspicious of commercial software development tools vs. open source tools.  Fourth, they overestimate how many people of their skill level any given organization has at its disposal, and what else those same folks might be working on that is even more important.  What looks easy or obvious to them, isn’t obvious or easy to someone else.

The way I try to boil this down is that the more abstract ideas and organization you have to hold in your own mind, the harder it is to do something.  A BPMS gives you the ability to let go of some of those difficult abstractions (they become models) so that you can hold the same problem and solution in mind with less abstraction – by holding only higher level abstractions in mind.

Jacob worries that this might relegate BPM to a small niche, a la 4GL in the past.  It all depends on the definition of niche.  If a multi-billion dollar market is a niche, I won’t complain.  It was a niche when I started out in BPM.  It is a much bigger “niche” now.

SXSWi has one of the more interesting content picking processes I’ve seen for a conference.  It has turned into a well-oiled machine, and it is, in my opinion, responsible for allowing SXSWi to reinvent and remain relevant (even more relevant) over time.

Recently, topics for SXSWi-2012 were released.  These are the panels and sessions that were voted on by attendees or prospective attendees (although a vote isn’t the only input into the panel picking system).

If this year is like most, some additional featured speakers or top-down content will be added, in addition to a few late-selection panels to reflect any late-breaking news or changes in the world around us.

Topic areas:

• Keynote Presentations at the Austin Convention Center
• Featured Sessions (Austin Convention Center)
• Better Tomorrow (Austin Convention Center) – a focus on economy and social issues
• Book Readings (Austin Convention Center)
• Branding and Marketing (Stephen F Austin hotel – which was also the site of the BP3 all-hands meeting!)
• Convergence (Austin Convention Center)
• Design and Development (Austin Convention Center)
• Emerging (Hilton Austin – Downtown)
• Future of Work (Courtyard Marriott)
• Government and Global Issues (AT&T Conference Center)
• Health and Education (AT&T Conference Center)
• Journalism and Online Content (Sheraton Austin)
• Latin America (Hilton Garden Inn)
• Lifestyles and Sports (Campus TBA)
• ScreenBurn and Gaming (Campus TBA)
• Social Networks (Omni – Downtown)
• Startup Village (Hilton Austin – Downtown)
• Workshops (Radisson – Town Lake)

The biggest change I notice : moving the startup events to the Hilton (which is like ground-zero, right across the street from the Austin Convention Center), rather than having them at the AT&T Conference Center, as they did last year.  Last year’s startup sessions were really high quality – and the AT&T Conference Center at UT is a fantastic facility for an event like that – but it is removed from the core action at SXSW.  My guess is that there was an effort to bring this core area back to the center of the activity at SXSWi.  The only downside is it will be much harder to park this year!

To anyone trying to organize a conference, I submit to you that you just haven’t seen crazy til you’ve been to SXSWi.  The number of people and the logistics involved in feeding them, moving them, parking them, seating them, and providing wifi and 3g cell connectivity for their 3 connected devices is an incredible challenge.  And it is impressive how well it all works.

The Startup Village has its own set of articles on SXSW’s website.  This promises to be a great conference.  The number of topics is overwhelming, but the organization into campuses and topic areas at least helps focus attention on the topics you care about.

As I was about to post this, I ran across Austin Startup’s coverage of the same subject.  GREAT tidbits they pulled out from the schedule:

Stephen Wolfram on Computation and Its Impact on the Future. Any chance to hear him speak, I will take it.

Definitely. I look at this session as being potentially as promising as the Craig Venter session from the 2011 conference.  They also pointed out panels from Dachis Group, RecycleMatch, WP Engine, and Foreca.st (local startups).  Josh Baer will reprise a topic he owns: 3 Secrets to a Killer Elevator Pitch.  Even this far in advance it looks like a very strong lineup.

I was surprised to see Lexmark acquired Pallas Athena.  I didn’t realize that Lexmark has a software unit, Perceptive Software.  The consolidation in BPM continues… Pallas had a good reputation in the market, in particular for being able to “mine” data for the emergent processes within it:

Pallas Athena is a leading provider of BPM, DOM and process mining software, with significant industry experience in the insurance, government and life sciences segments. Pallas Athena’s software products enable a broad range of BPM capabilities, which includes dynamic case management and customer communications management. Key differentiators of its software products include ease of implementation and an intuitive user interface.

I can’t comment as to how well Pallas Athena fits within the portfolio of Perceptive Software/Lexmark, I’ll leave that to others with more specific information.

Well, if Sandy doesn’t have the best coverage of the conference, it is by far the best coverage of the bloggers I follow.

First up:  IBM Case Manager, IBM Content Manager, and IBM BPM -

 

• Extend IBM BPM processes with content, using document and list widgets that can be integrated in a BPM application. This does not include content event processes, e.g., spawning a specific process when a document event such as check-in occurs, so is no different than integrating FileNet content into any BPMS.
• Extend IBM BPM Advanced (i.e., WPS) processes with content through a WebSphere CMIS adapter into the content repository. Ditto re: any BPMS (or other system) that supports CMIS being able to integrate with FileNet content.
• Invoke an IBM BPM Advanced process from an ICM case task. Assuming that this is via a web service call (since WPS allows processes to be exposed as web services), not specifically an IBM-to-IBM integration.

Next, up, transformation in the era of Big Data, perhaps a business case for “Watson”?

Some of IBM’s future of big data analytics is Watson, and Manoj Saxena presented on how Watson is being applied to healthcare – being demonstrated at IOD – as well as future applications in financial services and other industries. In healthcare, consider that medical information is doubling every five years, and about 20% of diagnoses in the US have some sort of preventable error. Using Watson as a diagnostic tool puts all healthcare information into the mix, not just what your doctor has learned (and remembers). Watson understands human speech, including puns, metaphors and other colloquial speech; it generates hypotheses based on the information that it absorbs; then it understands and learns from how the system is used. A medical diagnosis, then, can include information about symptoms and diseases, patient healthcare and treatment history, family healthcare history, and even patient lifestyle and travel choices to detect those nasty tropical bugs that your North American doctor is unlikely to know about. Watson’s not going to replace your doctor, but provide decision support during diagnosis and treatment.

And third, what’s new in IBM ECM products :

There was a question about why BPM didn’t appear in the ECM portfolio diagram, and Clayton stated that “BPM is now considered part of Case Manager”. Unlike the BPM vendors who think of ACM as a part of BPM, I think that she’s right: BPM (that is, structured process management that you would do with IBM FileNet BPM) is a functionality within ACM, not the other way around.

I think the BPM referenced here is with respect to Filenet BPM, rather than “IBM BPM”, but this is one area where Sandy and I probably agree to disagree.  I think the race between BPM and ACM was essentially over before it started.  Managing a business is going to more likely be called “BPM” than “ACM” for one thing.  I think BPM is going to win the war of acronyms.  The go-to-market strategy is going to include “ACM” functionality in a BPM offering.  This isn’t some inside-scoop at IBM, this is just my judgment on the market in general.  I may be wrong, but the market will show that one way or the other in the next few years.  So far, to me, it looks like the BPM firms are winning the argument.

(Which isn’t to say that ACM proponents haven’t influenced BPM product direction – they have.  But my feeling all along is that it just wouldn’t be hard for BPM vendors to fast-follow ACM vendors, such as they are).

Finally, Sandy covered the IBM Filenet BPM updates:

The Process Engine (PE) was ported completely to a standard Java application, with some dramatic performance increases: 60% improvement in response time through the Java API, 70% (or more) reduction in CPU utilization, near-linear growth in CPU utilization for vertical scaling (i.e., more processes on a single server), and constant CPU utilization on horizontal scaling (e.g., twice as many processes on twice as many servers).

So… one danger I see for IBM in general in the BPM space – is focusing too much on speeds and feeds.  Not that these aren’t important. They are.  Especially when you have customers the size of IBM’s customers.  But they also need to solve real business problems and value propositions that aren’t driven by IT metrics.

It reminds me of a conversation we had with a customer once.

US:  So, what reports do you think we need to support the business’ needs? There aren’t really any business-facing reports defined yet.

THEM:  I think we have all the reports we need already.

US:  You do?  Which reports do you already have that the business uses?

THEM:  Well, the timing reports on webservice performance and user interface performance, for example.

US:  hmmmmmmm.  How about measuring vendor quality, vendor response time to RFPs, and pricing estimation to final-price accuracy?  Might tell you who your best vendors are or how much it is costing you to work with a vendor that isn’t fulfilling your business on time.

THEM:  Yeah, but the business isn’t asking for that.  They really want to know how fast the webservices and UIs are running.

Needless to say, we weren’t talking to the right person, and speeds and feeds were just not the right focus.  Faced with that situation, you just have to back up and regroup and find the right focal point closer to a real business problem.

Thanks for the great coverage Sandy -

Well, this was quite a surprise for me – I didn’t expect Sam to step down from the CEO spot at IBM just yet.  But perhaps one of the signs of a strong company is not waiting for signs of trouble to initiate the transition from one generation of management to the next- but simply moving forward when the time is right.

IBM’s official announcement:

Armonk, NY, October 25, 2011 – The IBM board of directors has elected Virginia M. Rometty president and chief executive officer of the company, effective January 1, 2012. She was also elected a member of the board of directors, effective at that time. Ms. Rometty is currently IBM senior vice president and group executive for sales, marketing and strategy. She succeeds Samuel J. Palmisano, who currently is IBM chairman, president and chief executive officer. Mr. Palmisano will remain chairman of the board.

“Ginni Rometty has successfully led several of IBM’s most important businesses over the past decade—from the formation of IBM Global Business Services to the build-out of our Growth Markets Unit,” Mr. Palmisano said. “But she is more than a superb operational executive. With every leadership role, she has strengthened our ability to integrate IBM’s capabilities for our clients. She has spurred us to keep pace with the needs and aspirations of our clients by deepening our expertise and industry knowledge. Ginni’s long-term strategic thinking and client focus are seen in our growth initiatives, from cloud computing and analytics to the commercialization of Watson. She brings to the role of CEO a unique combination of vision, client focus, unrelenting drive, and passion for IBMers and the company’s future. I know the board agrees with me that Ginni is the ideal CEO to lead IBM into its second century.”

I’m also struck by the fact that Rometty arrived at IBM in 1981.  We’re talking about serious longevity at Big Blue.  Under Sam’s watch we’ve seen IBM really go through a makeover of its business – it will be interesting to see if Rometty continues this arc or changes direction over the course of her tenure.  Regardless, I don’t expect IBM to stand still.

The New York Times has coverage of the promotion as well:

The directors’ choice of Ms. Rometty, who managed a crucial merger as well as sales in fast-growing new markets, ends a competition that has been under way for years. The leading candidates were always from within the company’s executive ranks.

A leading rival to succeed Mr. Palmisano, analysts say, was Steven A. Mills, the senior vice president who led I.B.M.’s highly profitable and growing software division. But his age, analysts note, was probably an obstacle. Mr. Mills has just turned 60, the traditional retirement age for I.B.M. chief executives.

Mr. Palmisano, in an interview Tuesday, singled out Mr. Mills for praise, saying “he’s done a phenomenal job.”

Given the traditional retirement age of IBM chief executives I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised by Sam stepping down, but it just wasn’t on my radar.  Steve Mills has been a phenomenal leader in the software space at IBM and just more evidence of the deep talent at the top of IBM executive ranks.

Congratulations to IBM and Virgina Rometty!

Steve Blank’s two-part series on the iPhone is definitely “a different perspective”:

The concept of yearly “improvements”, whether styling or incremental technology improvements, every model year gave GM an unbeatable edge in the market. (Henry Ford hated the idea. He had built Ford on economies of scale – the Ford Model T lasted for 19 years.) Smaller car makers could not afford the constant engineering and styling changes they had to make to keep competitive. GM would shut down all their manufacturing plants for a few months and literally rip out the tooling, jigs and dies in every plant and replace them with the equipment needed to make the next year’s model.

The title of the series is “How the iPhone Got Tail Fins”, using GM and Ford as foils for the smart phone businesses competitors.  A fascinating way of understanding the market, and how business processes can affect strategy, or vice versa.

Jacob Ukelson has a fantastic critique of Agile Software – he lists the 4 pillars of Agile, but then points out:

These are all good, important points but they ignore the business perspective! [...]

• Business Value. Software must deliver business value, and that isn’t always completely aligned with user experience or any of the immersive points Mike lists. A application can have a great user experience but bring no value to the business, which means it will either be killed or die from lack of attention. In most cases business value needs to come first, and foremost.
• Platform. Software (even what ends up as applications software) is either a platform itself, or built on (and used to enrich) a platform. This is both a business and technical decision, and can greatly affect the long term success of any software.

He has a point.  My interest isn’t so much in critiquing Agile Software methods – they’re pretty useful to BPM efforts, particularly if you keep the business value element in mind.

But the rest of the post makes a few interesting points, as he then turns the lens on BPM platforms to see how they stack up against both the 4 pillars of Agile, as well as the 2 additional “business” pillars:

• Parallel – the modeling process is a bottleneck, but once completed things can be implemented in parallel

This is interesting.  I suppose in some BPMS environments, modeling itself is a single-threaded activity.  In IBM BPM and IBM BlueworksLive, modeling is a parallel activity.  In meetings reviewing BlueworksLive models you’ll often see multiple editors in action at once capturing feedback or updating the model in real-time.  In IBM BPM, the locking is at a very granular level, allowing for simultaneous editing. In earlier versions, the locking was more coarse-grained but still allowed for quite a bit of parallel modeling because subprocesses were not locked by editing other subprocesses or the parent process. On each of the rest of the points he makes, I agree with his assessment.

He sums up with:  “The problem is the distance between theory and practice. Most BPM suites try too hard to make themselves of value to the business side, and miss a lot of what is needed on the high-end development side.”  I don’t know if developers will ever lean toward using BPM suites independent of BPM efforts, but I do maintain hope that BPM suites will continue to add developer-friendly features as well as business-friendly features.  So far, I’m encouraged by the progress I see.

I missed this update due to a busy work schedule last month, but the September update to BlueworksLive has a few interesting tidbits:

• Better Word document export options (allows including subprocess details, and increases the amount of detail available on a given process).
• Customized Branding – so that you can have BlueworksLive reflect more of your own company’s branding rather than IBM/BlueworksLive’s branding… I’ve experimented with this for BP3 and while it does work, you have to have a really good transparent logo at a height of 45pixels… not a lot of room to work with if your logo is taller than it is wide.  But it does let you change up color scheme nicely and also customize the logos included in things like document exports (a big plus).
• And single sign on- which allows you to configure the issuer/entity ID, the email domains, login page, etc.  That’s a great feature for enterprise customers who don’t like to have to administer additional login/pwd information.  (This feature is in limited roll-out, but you can contact their support team to expedite access to it).

This blog post itself is probably just in time to pre-date the next BlueworksLive update!

About a month ago, Sandy Kemsley attended Progress Revolution – first giving an intro-to-BPM course and then blogging about the sessions she attended.  The whole series of posts is worth reading, and I thought a few highlights from her coverage might convince you to read more…

On the importance of BPM (and CEP) to Progress, from opening remarks:

In spite of Progress’ long history with their OpenEdge software development environment, it’s clear that much of their future success is based on the Apama CEP and Savvion BPM acquisitions, and the integration of these product functionalities into a comprehensive solution.

On OpenEdge development methods and how they relate to BPM:

Does the integration of BPM just relegate OpenEdge to the scripting/coding language slaved to BPM? Maybe, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Instead of layering BPM on top of a monolithic application developed with OpenEdge, it’s about having an integrated development platform that includes BPM as a part of the toolkit. It will be interesting to see how well this message is received by the OpenEdge development community, and how long it takes to actually impact their development methods.

And, we can see that Progress took a similar approach to integrating BPM acquisitions as IBM did:

Although (Savvion) BPM Studio and the OpenEdge Architect development environment are both Eclipse-based, it doesn’t appear that they’ve been integrated in any significant manner. Similarly, there are two different servers – although a BPM process can call an OpenEdge functionality, using web services at least – and two different end-user portal environments, where the BPM server functionality can be surfaced in the OpenEdge portal.

This approach drew a lot of fire from analysts covering IBM’s integration a year in, but I don’t see the same angst in coverage of Progress-Savvion after 18 months.  In fact, I’d say although Progress has the same approach it doesn’t look like they’re quite as far along implementing their strategy.  I’m not saying there should be angst – I think both companies are simply taking realistic measures to integrate different product lines.

On her realization that this isn’t a BPM vendor conference, during her coverage of Dr. Ketabchi’s talk:

…which really drives home that I’m not at a BPM vendor’s conference, I’m at an application development tool vendor’s conference where they are introducing this hot new technology called BPM. This is, of course, the stage that most of the business world is at with respect to BPM understanding; I’m just so used to being in the BPM echo chamber that I rarely hear these messages unless I’m delivering them to a client.

Great material across 7 or 8 posts! Thanks to Sandy for capturing this for those of us who couldn’t be there in person.

IBM has already an update to IBM BPM 7.5 scheduled- the first minor release, due 18th of November, 2011.  The meat of the release is reviewed in the announcement letter:

• Ability to deliver differentiating BPMN 2.0 support while keeping the user experience simple
• Simplified event management in Process Modeling
• Ability to import and export of industry models directly into or out of the Process Center using BPMN 2.0 format
• Simplified installation and configuration experience for production deployment environments
• New refactoring features for process application and toolkits
• Creation of process application documentation that can be reviewed and printed by business stakeholders
• Ability to view change management history between process application versions
• Integration with IBM Case Manager tasks to enrich case management applications
• Common inbox with IBM Case Manager V5.1

I think the key improvements for the average user of IBM BPM 7.5 will be the refactoring and difference reports.  They look like small changes separately, but together this really improves the productivity of process developers who are managing multiple versions or who are working on a new version of a process while also supporting a production version. Not to mention, better refactoring support will cut down on the number of typos. There are some additional features that are focused on supporting production instances which will also prove important over time.

I think this post by Activiti‘s Tom Baeyens reveals a blind-spot in the folks behind open source BPM tooling.

To be clear: it isn’t a bad post, and I agree with his conclusions!

Which are, summarized:

• “hosting traditional BPM engine on the cloud is a big technical challenge with a relative low value for professional consumers”
• The data manipulations required by BPM’s automated steps are too complicated to expect professional consumers to design in a webpage (the example given was getting contents from a spreadsheet into a pdf document).
• “On the other hand, the trend to Advanced Case Management (ACM) really fits well into the cloud.”
• “Dynamic management of tasks without a predefined flow matches perfect with the professional consumer needs and capabilities.” (Author’s note: whether you call it ACM or BPM, we understand what Tom is getting at here. )

So if I agree with his conclusions… what’s the problem?  Just that commercial companies have come to these same conclusions a few years earlier – and open source BPM projects have been more focused on building the engines than on exactly what the deployment architectures will be – and what the implications on product direction would be if you change those deployment choices.  So, it has been a blind spot – but that isn’t the end of the world. BPM in the cloud is still in its very early stages.  Even “ACM” in the cloud is in its infancy. Activiti (and others) have time to address the blind spot, and maybe something new and interesting will come out of new entrants to that combination of cloud and BPM/ACM. I’m looking forward to see what Tom and the team working on Activiti come up with.

Tom’s writeup also confirms another conclusion I’ve long held about “ACM” as software implementation- it just isn’t as technically difficult to produce as a BPM platform (throw out all that integration stuff for example, and any notion of structure).  That isn’t some kind of badge of honor to be “more difficult” – it just means it may not be very defensible for a software company to build around, and it tends to look like a toy to customers, rather than a serious enterprise product that stands on its own.

William Band, of Forrester, asks: “Are CRM Solutions Soon to be Displaced by Dynamic BPM?”:

Increasingly, companies are using business process management suite (BPMS) or dynamic case management (DCM) solutions as the primary point of entry for strategic, cross-functional processes and view individual CRM functions as supporting administrative processes. However, taking advantage of these solutions may require a higher level of process management maturity and skills than is typically found in many organizations.

But really, if you’re asking yourself a question in the form of: “What systems can we replace with BPM?”, you’re probably asking the wrong question.  Of course, existing systems or software categories might get displaced by BPM in your organization.  But that isn’t the starting point – it is only a side-effect.  You start and end with a process, and focusing on the best way to start it, execute it, and finish it.

If your CRM system is the system of record, and you need to layer more process, or better process, or more dynamic process on top of it, so be it. But that typically doesn’t require ripping out the old CRM system.  But what about small or medium-sized businesses?  Are small businesses going to turn to BPM instead of SalesForce or SugarCRM or other similar tools?  I don’t the CRM space is in any danger, per se, from BPM  (or its variants).

On the other hand, if Mr. Band is really asking “is BPM where the action is in CRM?” – then he might be on to something. BPM is influencing traditional Enterprise Software and approaches to managing the silo-ed business functions that it supports.

John Gruber of Daring Fireball gives, to my mind, the definitive review of the iPhone 4S.  What I love about his reviews is that he seems to peel away a bit of the culture behind the product design process, because of his long-term connections with Apple and its products and employees.   He even includes a different take on Siri, the new voice assistant:

It’s also sort of the antithesis of everything prior in iOS. iOS is explicit and visual. Everything you can do in iOS is something you can see and touch on screen. The limits are visible and obvious. Siri, on the other hand, feels limitless. It’s fuzzy, and fuzzy on purpose. There’s no way to tell what will work and what won’t. You must explore. I found it extremely fun to explore Siri — primarily because so many of the things I tried actually worked. It’s a completely different interface for interacting with your iPhone. You’re not driving or commanding the existing iPhone interface with commands. There is no syntax to memorize. You’re just, well, talking to your iPhone.

He has a point- the difference between explicit and fuzzy is really interesting… And who isn’t going to be tempted to ask Siri to jump in a lake?  Or to close the pod bay doors?

To me – the iPhone 4s looks like a continuation of Apple’s general product strategy.  They just keep iterating the fit-and-finish.  And the specs.  And if those options lose their luster, then Apple will invest more in physical design changes. But for now, there is plenty of bang-for-the-buck in hardware improvements and software updates… and perhaps surprisingly, in cloud services.

And, by the way, the numbers are in – 4 million iPhone 4S devices were sold over the Friday-Sunday period.

We’re pleased to announce that BP3 placed #11 in the “Under $10M” category of the Austin Business Journal’s 2011 Austin Fast 50 listing:

The Austin Business Journal honored the 50 fastest growing companies on Thursday at its annual Fast 50 awards ceremony at the AT&T Executive Education and Conference Center. The awards rank Austin-area companies based on compounded annual average sales growth over three years.

Numbers reflected calendar 2008, 2009, and 2010 performance – so the data is already a bit out of date!  Perhaps surprisingly, we’re growing faster in 2011 than we have in previous years, due to the great environment for BPM consulting services, and hope to be back on the list next year as a result.  Quite an array of companies and industries are represented in the Fast 50 list – congrats to all the other small firms who made it – it is these fast-growing companies that are driving employment in Austin (all the little #’s add up).  Every year the ABJ honors the “Fast 50″ – 25 fastest growing companies over $10M in revenue, and the 25 fastest growing companies under $10M in revenue.  There are restaurants,  consultancies, medical firms, financial firms, and real estate.  You name it.  For those of us in Tech, it is a good reminder that the main-street economy is alive and kicking.

The other interesting thing from our perspective: growing quickly just isn’t part of our goal-set.  We’re just trying to build the best team and capabilities in the BPM space, and provide great value for our customers.  If we can do that, then growth will likely follow as a side-effect.  I don’t think there’s a better way to do it a consulting business without taking outside capital.

Additional text in the print version of the article:

WHAT IT DOES: BP3 is a boutique business process management software consulting business.

HOW IT’S DIFFERENT:  Primarily, we differentiate ourselves with the quality of our expertise in the BPM space.  We’re the most experienced IBM BPM consulting vendor, as a result of our deep ties to its predecessor, the Lombardi BPM product line, dating back to 2003.

KEYS TO GROWTH: The key to our growth is finding more great people to join our team.  Our business is a people business.  Beyond that, the foundation of our growth is that the BPM software market in general is growing.  And, specifically, IBM BPM is growing nicely.

BIGGEST CHALLENGES: Already in 2011, we’ve added six employees to our firm.  Our big challenge will be to support our great people.  When you’re smaller, you can simply be a collection of amazing individual talent.  As we get bigger, to get the most out of this band of talent, we need to optimize our teamwork and organization.

MWD has a great series of posts entitled “Calling BS on…”

In a recent installment, the topic was calling BS on “Our technology makes your business more agile.”  Of course, it is silly to think that any technology by itself can make your business more agile:

Making a business – or at least, the parts of it that make sense – more agile requires you to review and be prepared to change people’s incentives, business measurement systems, skills and training plans, information sharing and collaboration practices, operating models and procedures, and management culture – and probably more. Even if we just confine ourselves to the technology domain then increasing business agility is likely to require you to review architecture, governance, portfolio and change management practices. If you don’t at least think about this stuff, then the most you might be able to do is increase potential technology flexibility.

It’s nice to see some of the stereotypical pitches blown up in this series…!

As Neil says:

The key realisation here is that agility is something that – if you’re serious about it – has to be sustainable and sustained for the long haul. It’s not something you can just worry about for 6 months and then forget about.

Exactly.  Which is why it is so frustrating to hear pundits or analysts say that something like “continuous process improvement” is a pipe dream.  What they’re saying is that companies should throw in the towel and just stop trying to keep up with a changing world. That’s madness for a corporation.  If a corporation wants to be agile, it takes constant attention.  This isn’t a philosophical point, it’s just reality.

Sandy Kemsley reported on a briefing with IBM regarding BPM on z/OS a few weeks ago.  It’s a great write-up of the content.

I know that it initially took Lombardi folks by surprise how much interest and momentum there would be behind a z/OS version of IBM BPM.  But they, and IBM, have jumped in with both feet.  For organizations that fundamentally rely on mainframes, this may be a more comfortable architecture / deployment model.  As Sandy points out, this isn’t just a skin-deep port, it actually leverages specific z/OS options and functionality:

From an IBM BPM architecture standpoint, the Process Server components can now be hosted on z/OS, while the Process Center and its repository stay on Windows, AIX or Linux. Process Server Advanced for z/OS is more than just a simple port: it leverages native z/OS data structures, supports languages such as COBOL, provides local adapters to other z/OS applications, and allows reusable services to be created more easily. Since the process and services are both running on z/OS, WebSphere z/OS does optimization for cross-memory local communications to improve performance and resource utilization, providing the most benefit when the processes frequently interact with DB2, CICS and IMS on the same platform, and also providing seamless integration with other facilities such as RACF.

This plugs into Business Monitor for z/OS that monitors the processes, other z/OS applications and events, and provides user-customizable dashboards for overall monitoring and some KPI-based predictive analytics.

I’m really interested to see how some of the use cases for deployments on z/OS.  Supporting z/OS is a great example of what you can do with interesting software when you have the scale of an IBM.  It may not make the “feature” velocity faster, but they can definitely tackle parallel efforts like this more easily with the breadth of engineering talent at IBM.  From Sandy’s post, you’ll also find links to whitepapers, a newsletter, webcast, and the product page.

I’m not sure it was well-known that IBM has rolled out such complete support for z/OS – thanks to Sandy for helping get the word out.

A process for golf?  Or just another analogy designed to prove the deficiencies of BPM?

Ran across a lighthearted post from Jacob Ukelson regarding the process for playing golf.  Well, the thrust of the post is that differentiating processes can not be usefully modeled by a BPMS.  I would contend, rather, that the differentiating elements of your process – people(!)-  cannot be modeled by a BPMS.  It is a subtle difference, but an important one.  The basics of the golf process are easy to model  – easier than most sports- there are, after all, 18 holes to be played in succession… 19th hole is optional :)  However, the quality of process outcomes depends upon how well the player strikes the ball, and there isn’t a good process description for that. In a sense this is the human element that really shouldn’t be addressed directly.

But what Jacob focuses on is the minutiae of golf, which I agree you would certainly not try to model:

But I noticed something about games – players adopt little rituals that they believe help their game – always starting out on their right foot, making weird hand gestures before they play a ball etc.

So what is going on? – it is clear to anyone looking on from the side that these rituals and superstitions don’t really work. What I think is happening is that people really want repeatable processes (though most don’t use the word process, and would probably balk at it). They look for some type of pattern, repeatability and inner logic even when none exists. Anytime they have an exceptionally good game, they look around for some set of steps that will let them repeat that performance. The problem is that usually what they find are some silly (to others) rituals that don’t really have any influence beyond providing confidence and the feeling of repeatability – which actually may be enough to enhance performance. The part they have standardized isn’t what truly enhances performance.

The problem with analogies is often that they rely on different assumptions.  Jacob assumes that these rituals (“superstitions”) don’t work, and therefore worries that people are focused on standardizing the wrong things…

Golf and tennis are family sports for my family.  I never took to golf, personally, but I took up tennis.  And I can tell you that there is a method to the madness of rituals.  Of course there are people with ridiculous rituals (just watch McEnroe serving in the 80′s), but there is a point to it.  By having a routine to follow – however simple or complex – you engage muscle memory and disengage conscious thought.  You give your mind a chance to focus without holding on to that focus too tightly.

Much of the accuracy of shots in tennis is due to foot work rather than the stroke. But why?  Because good footwork puts you in a position to hit a shot from the “sweet spot” of your stroke – described vertically and horizontally by the most comfortable place for you to strike the ball accurately.  If your footwork is good, you put yourself in a good position to hit well time and time again.  If your footwork is poor, you are forced to constantly adjust your stroke to account for the distance of the ball from your body, and the varying height at which the ball must be struck.  In a high quality match, a very small percentage change in your stroke can have a big effect on the # of errors (you have many opportunities to commit such errors).

In short: these rituals are often about addressing the ball at the most comfortable distance.  It isn’t just superstition.  But I wouldn’t bring a BPMS anywhere near it!

Jacob concludes:

I worry that this might happen if BPM and ACM get “melded”. You can take a truly repeatable process, model it, simulate it and optimize it. Try to do that with a case – and all you get is ritual and superstition.

Hm.  Having deployed several case management solutions, I haven’t seen any ritual and superstition yet.  It is possible to imagine all kinds of problems, but in practice I don’t see them.  You just have to realize that you can hold that “case” or process too tightly with process modeling, but in practice your BPMS will work well for case management if you find the right balance between control (governance) and flexibility.

Imagine my surprise to read an article referencing Gen X without falling back on the tired cliches of calling GenX lazy and stupid, in not so many words:

Gen-X has just 46 million members, but they continue to lead the way and set the standards in the startup world.  [...]

Gen-X is rife with entrepreneurs. In fact, they will likely make or break our country’s ability to transition to the new social Internet society. They have drive and independence. And they have a lot they can teach both the boomers and Gen-Y.

I’m not big on the generational stereotype – and this article references some of the old ones, but phrased more politely – individualistic, technologically adept, flexible, valuing work/life balance.  I don’t see that as differentiated from the previous generation, but maybe differentiated from the stereotypes of the previous generation.  At any rate, “GenX” is apparently in the sweet spot (from an age point of view) for starting companies and running companies.  Let’s hope they/we do a good job of it.

James Lawther guest-posts on Gary Comerford’s Process Cafe Blog, and it is a piece we can really relate to at BP3:

In the beginning all businesses start out as small businesses.  They start with one, two or at most a handful of employees with a vision to give customers something new and different, or just better.  They then focus like crazy on those illusive customers, doing everything that they can to find and please them.
[...]
And then the company grows.

At BP3, we’re growing.  The trick, as they say, is not to lose that focus on the customer as the company grows.  Lawther’s advice?  “It is remarkably simple.  Get your business to re-focus on the customer and optimise around them not their functions.  And that is all business process management asks you to do.”

Even better – don’t lose that focus to begin with.  Easier said than done!