So Jim Sinur really opened a can of worms the other day with his missive on BPMN, literally calling for it to burn baby burn – nothing like a gentle start like that to initiate a moderate discussion of the finer points of BPMN.  I couldn’t help but respond both within his blog as well as on our own blog.  I feel like Jim is letting the business off the hook – as he puts it – they don’t care about process, and they’re too busy making money to worry about process.  I think this is a cop out.  There is a comment thread on Jim’s blog that I’d recommend reading for the follow up discussion, and the original “burn baby burn” statement got walked back somewhat.

But the debate didn’t stay contained there.  Keith Swenson chimed in, taking advantage of the opportunity to pile on BPMN.  I can’t accept the black-and-white approach he is taking to the discussion, and so of course we had a bit of back-and-forth about whether BPMN is appropriate for no one in the business (his contention) or at least some people (my contention).  I was challenged to name people within the business who read or write BPMN, which was quite easy to do, because this is the kind of stuff we do every day for work.  I think the comment thread on his blog, and on Jim’s, or incredibly telling.

But there was also a great post from Neil Ward-Dutton on the subject, that captures my perspective perfectly:

Or – in other words perhaps – surely it’s not too much to ask non-IT participants in BPM initiatives to take a little time to learn some fairly straightforward modelling technniques?

From our case study work here I think what Scott is saying leads to a sensible, middle-ground answer – which is, that the applicability of BPMN depends on a number of factors; saying that BPMN (especially BPMN 2.0) either is, or is not, suitable for “the business” is too simplistic and black/white. It’s like saying Cloud Computing is the future of IT. Firstly it supposes that we have to talk about BPMN as an all-or-nothing proposition; secondly it supposes that “the business” is some kind of homogeneous organisation with one set of skills, experiences and inclinations.

I literally could not have said this better myself. He goes on to make another important point I agree with:

At the same time, though, there’s significant evidence to suggest that a core subset of BPMN symbols are absolutely usable by business analysts with experience in high-level analysis and design and provide great results in terms of delivering a common language across multi-disciplinary teams. I’ve come across many BAs who know and use (aspects of) BPMN as part of their armoury. They’re not “IT people” – they have business backgrounds and they work in line-of-business departments.

Great read from Neil.

In the comments on this one, Keith takes a nice shot at my assertion that understanding just a few BPMN shapes will allow you to read someone else’s thoughts on a process, or to communicate your own basic processes to others:

Also funny is the comment that learning six (or 7) shapes means that you understand the non-trivial interactions between those shapes at run time without needing the programmer’s insight into how systems function. That would be a little like saying that learning 26 letters makes you a Shakespeare, or able to read all western European languages. (But I must avoid use of similes since this apparently is sometimes confusing.) BPMN certainly is useful is some situations, it simply isn’t useful in all situations.

For the record, I don’t find Keith’s “similes” confusing at all.  I find them inaccurate, misleading, and misrepresentative.  And when we turn the analogy on its head, I think that proves how pointless they are.  In practice, when people read Shakespeare they’re usually in school and get help from cliff’s notes, teachers, and fellow students.  Not unlike those working with business processes and BPMN … and other tools (six sigma, lean, value stream, etc.  ).  Once again, I’ll point out that analogies are illustrative, they simply don’t constitute proof or refutation.

Jakob Freund of Camunda commented on Keith’s blog and summed up a reasonable reader’s interpretation of both Jim’s post and Keith’s post:

I think the main problem is that in both blog posts (Jim and yours) this very important distinction between “all” business professionals and “business (process) analysts” was not made. Analysts are not programmers but very often part of a business department, therefore a subset of “business professionals”. To throw all “business professionals” in one pot judging there skills in working with BPMN (or whatever) makes a good headline, but does not say anything useful.

Furthermore, there has not been made any distinction between “creating” and “reading” BPMN diagrams, and between the extremely different grades of complexity a process diagram can bear (please excuse my bad English).

But those are exactly the parameters you always have to look at when judging modeling approaches (no matter whether they are control flow – based, grids, prosa or what ever).

I guess it just comes down to this: BPMN is quite useful.  It is even useful to people most of us would consider as “business professionals”.  But there are other quite useful tools in our business process management space, and there’s no reason not to use each one when appropriate.  I also recommend as practical reading, this post on practical application of BPMN by Jakob on his own Camunda blog.  I liked how he closed his last comment:

cheers from my customer’s office in Germany (currently introducing BPMN in a 80k-people company, and huh, it works for Business people, but it’s bloody hard work to make that happen  ).

Similarly, as I was writing on the same comment thread, I was about to head in to visit my customer, which also uses BPMN to communicate broad requirements between business stakeholders and IT.  Regardless of what the theory says, the practical reality is our customers’ businesses are using this stuff.

An article in the Austin-American Statesman, not long ago, posited that there was, in 2010, a dearth of ‘camps, after a flurry of them in 2008 and 2009.  However, a quick followup was penned by Omar Gallaga, about the fact that ProductCamp was still going strong.  Mostly, Camps are free events sponsored in someone’s corporate offices or in a bar (thus the early “barCamp” labeling), and generally only target local attendees.  But these events are hard work to put on:

Paul Young, who founded ProductCamp Austin, said many events modeled after the same concept simply petered out for lack of interest or organization. “They show up, run their cycles, then die out,” Young said. “I think the reason that happens is that people are surprised for an ‘unconference’ how much coordination it actually takes to put an event on.

I think people are also surprised how difficult it is to pull off a free event!

We’re proud to be having bpmCamp in Austin as well. While we couldn’t pull it off as a free event, we are keeping it as affordable as possible, while still making the event attractive enough for people to travel to Austin to attend.  We also freely admit that we need to produce some of the content up front for similar reasons, rather than doing it all on the fly – but we’ll also keep time (and rooms) available for impromptu sessions that weren’t thought of ahead of time.

If you are interested, the registration page is right here. You just need to be a Lombardi BPM practitioner to attend.

So the new Forrester Wave is out.  What’s that? you hadn’t heard?  If not, you haven’t talked to anyone in the analyst or BPM vendor community in the last 24 hours!

As usual, there are a raft-load of vendors declaring victory:

Appian: “Appian Still Leading the Pack”

Pega:  “Pegasystems ranked #1 as one of two BPM vendors that ‘lead the pack with the best overall combination of modeling, design and development features for business and technical roles driving process improvement’ “  (bonus, their article includes the image of the Wave graphic itself)

Metastorm: “Metastorm Recognized as a Leader in Business Process Management Suites Report…”

IBM has several congratulatory tweets about being in the leader quadrant, but I haven’t seen a press release yet.

Judging by the wave, I should be able to add links to Progress and Software AG press releases or blog posts by this time tomorrow.

Every one of these vendors will crow that the analysts have confirmed that they’re as smart as they thought they were – that they’re leaders (or even, “number 1″).

So, I’ll let you in on a little secret.  The Wave won’t tell you which BPMS makes the most sense for you.  Some of these offerings are actually so different that they rarely, if ever, compete for the same customer projects, and often corporations own more than one product because they aren’t viewed as doing the same thing.  For example, Appian’s strength in SaaS means that will compete more often for SaaS deployments – the decision “to SaaS or not to SaaS” was probably made before any vendors were called.   Metastorm’s strength in EA may play well with customers who are doing a lot of modeling, but for projects that are more focused on implementation, or who already own other EA tools, that offering won’t be as compelling as something more targeted at executing processes.  Even Pega (apparently depicted as #1 on the Wave), isn’t as often in competition for general-purpose BPM platform purchases – they tend to be in the finals for more vertical processes, where their investment in specific templates or verticals or applications can really pay off.  A friend once described Pega as more a company that sells rules- and BPM- enabled applications, rather than BPM itself (it wasn’t a criticism, my friend thought it was good strategy for the company).

Of course the meat of these things is in the written words inside the report, but it is hard to get there when there is that tasty graphic that everyone can look at.  I wonder what would happen if Forrester withheld the scoring and the graphic for a couple of weeks, and just revealed the more in-depth analysis.  Another interesting data point would be the number of times (that Forrester can determine) any two vendors were finalists in the same evaluation – which would allow for a 2×2 grid/heatmap that shows you who is competing with whom.  I was happy to see Forrester give up on separating BPM into various different flavors of BPM – that approach never really worked for me, personally.

So everyone is happy now.  But in the morning, we’ll humbly get back to work and get some processes built and deployed, and improve some processes.  Which is, after all, the whole point of BPM.

Update: as expected, a few announcements today:

Software AG announces their leadership status here.

And Progress’ blog entry can be found here.

Austin Startup has just run a piece on the 2nd Annual Capital Factory Demo Day:

The 2nd Capital Factory Demo Day is coming on September 8th. We will have 300 investors, press, and technology entrepreneurs in attendance to watch the launch of the 5 companies from our 2010 program. This is an invitation-only event, and we’re keeping the quality of the content and the networking as high as possible.

I went last year, and I found it interesting to witness, essentially, part of a process for bringing new companies to market.  The event was surprisingly good, the startups were surprisingly good, and the discussions were pretty interesting.  It sets a high bar for the second event.  I think there’s no doubt that Capital Factory and the Demo Day event have been good for the Austin startup scene, though the organizers will be the first to admit that this approach isn’t for every startup, or every entrepreneur.

I plan to be there again this year, schedule willing.

bpmCamp is back, and it is coming to Austin, Texas!  We’re very proud to announce that we’re holding the second bpmCamp here in Austin.  Time is short – only 52 days until the event starts!  It is an aggressive time frame but with urgency comes creativity.  Following is the F.A.Q. with all the most important questions addressed.

F.A.Q.

Why bpmCamp?

We really think the BPM community/ecosystem needs events like this to foster growth, success, and maturity.  We believe maturity requires:

• technical breadth and depth
• project methodologies to support the roll-out of processes and improvements to those processes
• process improvement techniques and strategies that can actually be implemented and maintained in BPM suites

Also, we actually want to learn something new.  When we get the right  practitioners in a room, we’re going to learn from them, and help propagate those best practices into the BPM ecosystem.  We’re also going to share what we know from prior experience directly with the conference.  This cross-pollination is good for everyone.

Finally, we decided to put action behind our words.  We’ve long agitated politely for more tactical, focused topics at BPM conferences, but we’ve reached the point where it is time for us to contribute back to the community by creating an intimate event that fosters that kind of discussion.

When is bpmCamp?

We’ve selected a date for the Austin bpmCamp:  October 14-15, 2010. Mark your calendars.

We hope to host additional bpmCamp events in the future.  The first was at Stanford. This one, in Austin, should be special because of its proximity to ground zero of the Lombardi ecosystem (Lombardi’s headquarters was Austin, and IBM has a very large operation in Austin, including the Lombardi team).  It is also the headquarters of BP3.

If you have any questions in the meantime, contact us at:
bpmCamp at  bp-3.com

How Much Does it Cost to Attend?

bpmCamp Austin does not benefit from the free space that Stanford provided to the inaugural event.  Still, we’ve managed to find an affordable venue with great food, and therefore the impact on event costs was reasonable.  We’re charging $150 to attend the two-day conference (early-bird) from now until September 17, 2010.  Regular pricing will be $200 -  and the last day to register is October 7, 2010.

How Do I Register for bpmCamp?

Please go to:  http://bpmcampaustin.eventbrite.com/ to register! ( Early Bird Rates apply until January 1, 2010).

Where is bpmCamp Austin? Who is hosting?

Having the right host for any activity is a plus.  And having the right setting can really frame an event and set a backdrop for a good collaborative and rejuvenating experience.  BP3 will be the hosts for the event.  We’ve been working with BPM and Lombardi’s products for more than 7 years, and we’re looking forward to hosting the kind of informal conferences we always wanted to attend, right here in our home town.

We’re having our bpmCamp 2010 @ Austin event at III Forks Austin – one of Austin’s finest restaurants, but also a space that has a great historical Austin vibe to it, even while housed inside one of the more modern “Austin Architecture” buildings in town.   Importantly there is a lot of informal gathering space available, as well as a main room and at least two break-out rooms. III forks has been great collaborating menu options and space with us.  We’ll be a stone’s throw from Town Lake (aka Lake Lady Bird), right across the street from City Hall, and within walking distance of many restaurants and other venues.  Austin itself is home to Lombardi, and the base of operations for Lombardi as a part of the larger IBM campus here.

Travel Logistics

Please refer back to this page for travel logistics.

Where is the Landing Page?

UPDATED:  www.bpmCamp.org

Who’s Invited to bpmCamp?

The goal is to have a high-quality gathering of people who know the products well and are looking to collaborate and exchange ideas with peers and colleagues.  We’re inviting customer / users of Lombardi products (Teamworks/Lombardi Edition and Blueprint) who participate in deployments to attend, and we’re extending an invitation to IBM/Lombardi to participate as well.  If you’re a Lombardi or bp3 partner interested in attending/sponsoring the unconference / bpmCamp, please reach out to us at the email address below (there are limited sponsorship slots).  If you’re an analyst or blogger and you think bpmCamp would benefit from your attendance, contact us.  If you don’t fit any of the above descriptions but still want to attend, drop us a line with your thoughts.  All attendees will need to register, once the registration site goes live.  If you’re interested in receiving an invitation to register, send us email at the bpmCamp email address.

How do I Contact the Organizers?

The best way is via the bpmCamp email address:

bpmcamp at  bp-3.com

I want to Sponsor bpmCamp – how can I help?

If you think your organization would be interested in being a sponsor for bpmCamp, please contact us at the above email address and let us know you’re interested.  Please respect that we are keeping sponsorships limited to prevent over-commercializing and to make sure the sponsorship is worth something.

What will bpmCamp Cover?

We will beat the drum for topics and themes that we think will resonate.  However, we want this conference to cover topics that YOU care about.  In particular, we want to crowd-source topics for the event so that we can make sure we cover topics that attendees really care about.  The expectation is that the setting will be ripe for interaction among attendees during the sessions – that very few of the sessions will be presentation form rather than a loosely-moderated-discussion format.  However, we think it likely that attendees will be interested in a keynote address or two with Q&A to follow.  What kinds of things are fair game, you may be asking?  How about:

• Building Teamworks Coaches with YUI or GWT?
• Actual use of Optimizer in the wild?
• How to make Teamworks scale Really Big?
• Design reviews of actual Teamworks Processes?
• Making my Waterfall organization more Agile/Iterative?
• Tools for managing BPM projects (something better than MS Project??)
• Incorporating A/B testing into my process
• How much requirements gathering is too much?

We’ll have room for breakout sessions to accommodate more than one interest at a time.

Go HERE to add your ideas to the Agenda Wiki.

Who is Coming?

We’ll release information about attendees and speakers as we get closer to the event date.  Expect the bp3 team to be there!

Why focus on a single vendor? Why not another BPM product? Is this a Lombardi- or IBM-sponsored Event?

In short, we want the specificity and detail that we can get from a single-vendor conference, but the independence of a crowdsourced event.  bpmCamp isn’t sponsored nor endorsed by Lombardi.   We chose Lombardi Edition and BPM Blueprint because it is the BPM suite, and community, that we have the most extensive contacts with (and because we had already decided that a single-vendor conference could be interesting).

While we’ve worked with other tools and vendors, our network is not as deep in those communities.  If you work with another software vendor or geographic location and you’d like our help to run a similar event with you, get in touch with us, perhaps we can help.

The merger of two airlines has been used as an example of something BPM is not well-suited for, that ACM would be well-suited for.  I gave this argument a bit too literal a reading, based on Keith Swenson’s response (thought exercise vs. demonstration).  But having worked on quite a few BPM projects that were born of mergers (not the act of deciding to merge, but the after-affect of the merger), I found this article on the Wells Fargo and Wachovia merger to be just the kind of external, public information I was looking for to better explain my own views about how mergers happen – and the fact that there really is method (dare I say, process) to the madness.  When you are a big financial institution, or a big tech company (e.g. Cisco), you don’t do just one or two acquisitions in your history.  You might do one or two acquisitions a quarter.  Not all of them will be as big as Wachovia of course… These institutions are constantly reinventing themselves through acquisitions and spin-offs and joint ventures. Any time you do something so valuable, so often, you’ll want to understand it as a business process.

So how do you handle something massive like Trust conversions from Wachovia to Wells Fargo?

This year, Wells Fargo and Wachovia completed one of the biggest trust conversions ever; 81,000 trust accounts and $150 billion in assets were transferred to a common platform. Wells Fargo is now one of the largest U.S. trust providers in the U.S. with 233,000 accounts and $1.3 trillion in assets.

There was a big analysis effort to understand the processes operating at both firms, and to pick and choose best practices from both. After that they modeled these processes, simulated some of them, and implemented.  Some interesting ancillary benefits:

Another benefit is that the use of business process modeling helps the business and IT people communicate with each other. Instead of exchanging Word documents about requirements and technical specifications, where each side typically had trouble understanding the other, they’ve transitioned to graphical process models where both parties can look at the diagrammed process flow and exceptions. Watkins says this has saved thousands of hours of time in writing requirements documents and interpretation time for the technology developer.

So… is BPM low hanging fruit or was it hard work?  Sounds like it was hard, but valuable, work.  Is Wells Fargo really committed to BPM?

“Processes are pervasive whether you’re facing your customer or in the back office, and there’s been a recognition over the last couple of years among business leadership and IT that we should start focusing on more opportunities around process improvement, where we can leverage BPM technology we already own,” he says. “We’ve trained more than 400 people on BPM technology and technical standards like BPMN (business process modeling notation) as a common language for communicating process improvement,” he says.

Well, what do you think?

We now have our venue chosen for bpmCamp 2010 @ Austin, October 14-15, 2010.  We’ll be at III Forks Austin, right in the heart of downtown, next to City Hall and the Lake.  III Forks is one of Austin’s best steakhouses, but it also has a great interior space for meetings of our size, and they have agreed to open their doors during the day (when they are normally closed for business), to host bpmCamp!

I want to thank III Forks Austin for allowing us to u

se their space.  We’re looking forward to some fantastic food and snacks during the day.  Moreover, thanks to Red Velvet Events for helping connect us with III Forks along with other finalist locations.

We’ll have more announcements on this space, regarding bpmCamp, as we get the wiki, mailing list, and other travel logistics sorted out.  Please let us know if you have any questions – either in the comments here, or on our various email addresses.

Matt Harding of Aurora Energy just posted this on the SAP community blog:

Within business process modelling (from a detailed requirements and process design perspective), I believe the best option for business users is to use BPMN.  But the question is: Are we just waiting for the iPhone of Business Process Modelling to come along.

I think Matt has a point – BPMN isn’t the best for requirements elicitation – it is the best for firming up an agreement between “Business” and “IT” as to what the process execution looks like.  When we’re in the discovery/elicitation/collaboration efforts, we find it more useful to use simpler mapping approaches:

1. value stream mapping
2. outlines
3. process mapping a la Six Sigma (inputs, measurable outputs, of a linear view of the process)
4. mind mapping tools for doing associations or nested structures

Right now some of the best tools for doing this – besides white boards – are tools like IBM’s Blueprint, which doesn’t force you into a BPMN notion of things.  It has separate views of process mapping and process modeling – and my main critique of the modeling section is that it needs to be more exact, whereas what I love about the process mapping side is precisely that it doesn’t require being exact.  Another useful tool for brainstorming topics related to BPM: MindMeister.   It let’s you brainstorm ancillary ideas to the process: how business objectives and values drive the objectives for the project.  There are other tools that are useful for brainstorming project plans, etc.

Keith Swenson has announced a case management mentor meeting (or ACM Mentor Camp) following the BPM 2010 conference, at the same venue:

The “Adaptive Case Management Mentor Camp” has just been announced.  This will be a meeting of minds for people interested in learning effective techniques for using case management for knowledge work.  It is right after the BPM 2010 conference, at the same venue, symbolically representing ACM as the next thing after BPM.

I think it is a great idea to put something like this together – these informal gatherings are often more valuable than more formal conferences – the only danger is conference burn-out!  At BP3, we’re looking forward to bpmCamp in Austin.   Sadly, I can’t make BPM 2010 this year unless my schedule changes, and therefore I also can’t attend the ‘camp.  Its a great gathering of people, definitely recommend attending to anyone who can make it.  Keith argues that the symbolism is that ACM is the “next thing after BPM” – but I’d argue it also supports my point of view – the same vendors, practitioners, and customers are going to be interested in BPM and ACM…  Keith and I just draw different conclusions about what that means for what will be defined as the “BPM” market.

IBM has put out the latest BPM Blueprint update today.  It isn’t the most exciting update they’ve ever made to Blueprint, but of course I’d rather see incremental and frequent updates than one big overhaul for a service like this.  The August release seems to focus on adding avatars (aka pictures), and has a security model tweak, and a much-needed update to the Word export.

I’m still looking for more support for expert features (not necessarily their target audience yet, but I think the time has come to include more expert functionality in a tool that also appeals to more general collaboration).  Part of the reason I think this support is needed is so that users can import or export BPMN2 XML.  Not that the users will care that it is XML, but this is the modeling format that they’re going to expect BPM tooling to support.

According to the Kansas City Business Journal, 40% of US Professionals want to quit.  Wow.

But lets turn out attention to why so many professionals want to quit: their employers view them as a liability rather than an asset (read the article, it is there, between the lines). And with all the layoffs over the last 18 months, there’s more work spread across fewer employees.  In an environment of more work and stress, and fewer bonuses and benefits, we can understand why people might want to quit.  I’ve heard people say that someone should feel lucky to have a job- but equally, the employer should feel lucky to have their employees stick with them through hard times. It is, after all, your best employees who can still leave when the economy is down, and find a new job.

In another post, I tried to explain the dark side of the staffing service “body shops” out there: BPM experts are not a commodity, despite their best efforts to treat us so.  The big staffing firms I previously wrote about are also not committed to their people in any meaningful way.  When a project kicks off, the firm staffs up via hiring and contracting. But what happens when the project is over?  At these big firms, they just let go of all the people that can’t immediately place on another project.  People aren’t an asset to these firms, they’re a liability:  An obligation to pay salary and benefits. This is especially true of firms based outside the US who  leveraging local resources on a temporary basis (the locals are staffed up and down for each project independently in many cases).

We recently reached out to colleagues from a previous project – and we weren’t going to be surprised if they weren’t still working with the same customer.  But you could say that we were surprised they didn’t work for the big consulting company any more.  You might be thinking, sure, some low-level programmers got let go when the project finished. But no.  We’re talking about the people who were entrusted with running the project and managing the customer relationship.  Rather than leveraging their talents in another project, they were shown the door.

It must, at times, be hard for people who work at Fortune 500 companies, with a wealth of people walking their halls that have worked more than 10 years at the firm to understand the amount of turnover that happens at a typical big consulting body shop.  Or to understand how these firms put their teams together on short notice, and disband them equally quickly.

As a small firm, we sometimes have to hire talent to meet the demands of a project, but we’re hiring talent to reach a new plateau, and we’re taking on a commitment to continue their employment beyond just the project (otherwise, we’d just offer a contract).  We just celebrated a colleague’s one-year anniversary at BP3, and he’s about to embark on his 4th project with us.   And it isn’t a burden to pay salary to these employees. They’re our only real asset as a firm – their knowledge, experience, and commitment to our customers.

I hope in this time of economic turbulence, more employers will realize how much their people mean to their success.  And I hope we never forget that at BP3.

We’ve set our dates for bpmCamp 2010 @ Austin:  October 14-15, 2010.

Watch this space for additional announcements about bpmCamp 2010 @ Austin.

The Death of Google Wave is interesting.  We’ve written about Wave before, several times, but in particular when SAP put out its “Gravity” demonstration.

The official Google Blog blames the closure of Wave on a lack of user adoption:

But despite these wins, and numerous loyal fans, Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked. We don’t plan to continue developing Wave as a standalone product, but we will maintain the site at least through the end of the year and extend the technology for use in other Google projects. The central parts of the code, as well as the protocols that have driven many of Wave’s innovations, like drag-and-drop and character-by-character live typing, are already available as open source, so customers and partners can continue the innovation we began. In addition, we will work on tools so that users can easily “liberate” their content from Wave.

So, there’s a bunch of open source code, it looks like, that partners and customers might leverage.  But most of us, I think, would prefer to just use a finished product.  There are many other unofficial takes, here and here are two examples.  I had a few others linked, but no need – you can find such commentary easily!

When Wave was announced last year, I spent some time discussing with others what it meant for BPM.  Some thought it was a game-changer, some thought it was a non-event.  The thing that became clear to me: collaboration tools like this are going to tend toward being free, or extremely inexpensive.

Starting last fall, the discussion in BPM circles had often turned to “ACM” (A variant on Case Management).  Some in BPM circles would call this unstructured process. Some would call it “chaotic” or unpredictable processes/work.  Keith Swenson and colleagues even penned a book about managing such unpredictable work.  Google Wave was, to this crowd, a great example of where “knowledge work” is headed – into collaboration spaces, not into BPM software.  To me, it was just proof that email and lightweight project management tools were not going away.   If Google Wave accomplished anything, it showed:

1. Separating yourself from email divorces you from a knowledge worker’s daily routine (some might say, process).
2. If it isn’t trivial to involve the right people in a collaboration, then users give up
3. Collaboration is going to be free or nearly free.  Even if it has pretty amazing features.
4. It is really hard to do a “big bang launch” successfully.  It makes me even more impressed that Apple seems to pull this off with such regularity.

So what does it mean for BPM?  Not much.  Wave was never really about structured interaction, it was about ad-hoc interaction.  Although ad-hoc interaction is important to a good BPM strategy, no one (maybe except for SAP) was really leveraging Wave for this.  If they were, they can probably leverage the open source bits to get a jump on the development effort.  For the ACM crowd, its both good news and bad news.

First, the good news:

1. A free competitor to your products, supported by a major software company, has gone away.
2. Hm. I think that’s it.

The bad news:

1. If you were counting on convincing users to leave email to use your product for knowledge work, it is time to change gears.
2. If you were expecting that being good and free was good enough… Maybe it isn’t.  Although Wave was panned in the press, it really was pretty good at what it did, though perhaps it tried to do too much.
3. If you were expecting to charge a lot of money for general-purpose collaboration software… I think those days are over.
4. If Wave was your favorite example of how ACM was really relevant to what people are doing… time to find a new example.

Silver lining:

1. Collaboration software for very specific purposes will live on (aka process modeling, or services like tripIt).
2. Some of Wave’s features will likely get absorbed by Gmail.
3. Some of Wave’s features will likely show up in other products.

I think Keith Swenson summed it up best for the ACM folks on Twitter:

“nooooo. It can’t beeeee. :-( RT @jpmorgenthal: Google waves goodbye to Wave: http://bit.ly/bg3ixC”

Well, fans of Wave and its approach were bound to be disappointed.  I saw quite a few more comments on twitter with a more positive spin on Wave being shut down.  Google found Wave squeezed inbetween email and all the other things we do in life.  It apparently couldn’t live on its own.  I’m not sure the future of ACM, per se, is anything different.  Yes, the ACM proponents will have their analogies, and they sound compelling.  And we could even agree that a large percentage of work is not addressed by BPM today, or by, more specifically, structured process.  But what ACM proponents fail to mention is that even less work is currently addressed by purpose-built ACM software.  It *could* be, but isn’t.  It is still likely to be addressed by email, project management tools, telephone, hallway conversation, and more email.

Note, I’m not arguing against ACM as a description of work, I’m just looking at the software market and not seeing it as an independent market, yet.  Willing to be proven wrong.  And I think there are a couple vendors that have the right strategy or tactics, but we’ll see if they can execute.

Working on a longer collaborative post on ACM and the marketplace.  Watch this space.

I know Kevin’s article was targeted at web analytics, rather than, more generally, business analytics – but the points he makes are entirely valid for business analytics – and business process analytics:

We analyzed each promotion code, using “A/B” test panels. Customers were randomly selected from the population, and then assigned to one of two test panels. The first test panel received the promotion, the second test panel did not receive the promotion. [...]

In almost all cases, the segment receiving the promotion generated more profit than the control segment. [...]

Being a huge fan of “A/B” testing, I decided to try something different. I asked my circulation team to choose two customer groups at random from our housefile. One group would receive promotions for the next six months, if the customer was eligible to receive the promotion. The other group would not receive a single promotion for the next six months. At the end of the six month test period, we would determine which strategy yielded the most profit.

At the end of six months, we observed a surprising outcome. The test group that received no promotions spent the exact same amount of money that the group receiving all promotions spent. After calculating the profitability of each test group, it was obvious that Eddie Bauer was making a significant mistake. [...]

In 1999, we backed off of almost all of our housefile promotions. At the end of 1999, the website/catalog division enjoyed the most profitable year in the history of the business.

This is a classic cautionary tale for anyone measuring business processes and looking for improvements.  In process improvement, often an efficiency gain comes at the cost of customer satisfaction – which is why many businesses now manage to a “double bottom line” or use extremely customer-focused culture to counter-act that tendency.  In the case above, they’re looking at how incentives shape behavior. The thought process is equally valid for customers as it is for internal staff incentives. Do the incentives actually drive better behavior or just more short-term-optimized behavior?

Kevin goes on to recommend several remedies, most of which revolve around having a longer term view of things.  Well. Imagine that.  Good read.

We had a great success with the original bpmCamp @ Stanford in January, this year.  We’re now ready to start the ball rolling for a bpmCamp in Austin.  We’re just at the formative stages, but we are targeting dates in October, and currently scouting locations in Austin.  We’ve also had tentative discussions with Stanford about having another bpmCamp at Stanford, but a bit later in the year 2011 (maybe even in the summer of 2011). Our goals and thought process are much the same as last time:

1. BPM Conferences are good, but BPM Conferences are (usually) too general, too big, too expensive, and stuck on platitudes because of the above.
2. bpmCamp is intimate. It was 40 people (max capacity) at Stanford.  We’ll figure out our max capacity for Austin, it might be just a tad bigger.
3. bpmCamp is specific.  We will be focused on the Lombardi Software products acquired by IBM earlier this year, and now known as IBM BPM Blueprint (aka Blueprint), and Websphere Lombardi Edition (aka Lombardi Edition aka Teamworks).  (We would welcome the chance to organize a bpmCamp for another product offering – but we need a partner to help)
4. bpmCamp is affordable.  Exact price is TBD, but it won’t break your budget.
5. bpmCamp is focused on what attendees care about.  Topics are crowd-sourced, so anyone attending can help shape the agenda.

If you’re interested in attending, watch this space, or keep an eye on posts with the tag bpmCamp. If you’re interested in sponsoring bpmCamp, we’ll have more details about that soon.

If you have any questions in the meantime, contact us at:
bpmCamp Email:

(editor’s note: bpmCamp is not affiliated with or sponsored by IBM.  bp3 is not acting on IBM’s behalf, nor is bp3 an affiliate nor subsidiary of IBM. )

I’ve previously written about Apple’s need to step up their level of service, using luxury car service shops as an example.  Apple Insider has a story about Apple rolling out business-friendly, or at least small-business-friendly, services to its retail stores:

Apple is said to have at least one salesperson dedicated to managing accounts with local businesses, and has also recently begun recruiting within its sales staff to create a team that negotiates leasing and pricing terms for business clients. People familiar with the company’s plans said the strategy has proven successful, as some stores have seen their revenue more than double after implementing the program.

Well, it is brilliant to leverage the retail outlets as a differentiator for small-business-owners, who might prefer to just pop into the Apple store for something rather than ship their laptop off to a repair center. However, if that is going to be a differentiator, Apple still needs to address services like in-store repair rather than shipping off your laptop, or else provide reasonable loaner programs.  Providing discounts to small businesses is a smart way to get some buyers off the fence, who might have only been holding back over pricing concerns.

But the real value is value-added services for businesses: that’s what creates lock-in.  And, if possible, leveraging the install base of Apple Stores to differentiate.  Given how crowded these spaces are already, however, it may require rethinking how much square footage is needed in a typical Apple Store to provide the full range of services.

Congratulations to local Austin Software company Zilliant, which just raised $13M in a Series G financing round.  Zilliant was founded in 1999 by a group of people that includes a few former colleagues.  And I still have some friends working there. Thanks to Austin Startup for breaking the story (for me at least).

Zilliant’s software helps companies optimize their pricing.  If there is a process for pricing – and I’m confident there is – it is folks like Zilliant and Mimiran that will figure it out in specialized software. At the very least, they’ll figure out the hard part (optimum price).  It looks like the surrounding process of signaling, proposing, refining, approving, and rolling out pricing changes is also being targeted by these packages.  You might call it BPM for Pricing…

In a previous post, I argued that (contrary to Alain Breillatt’s expert perspective) Apple’s approach to product actually saves money rather than “wastes” money.  What most people would look at as waste, I would look at as costly-wrong-turn-avoided.  If you understand the arguments behind technical debt or process debt, the idea that a bad design (or more than the minimum necessary number of designs) is expensive makes perfect sense.  This argument was an exercise in looking at the R&D process around one future product – the 10:3:1 ratio of product design weed-outs, for example.  In another post, we looked at the big picture R&D spending versus revenue and profit growth – and in this wide angle lens, it is hard to argue with the idea that Apple’s R&D is quite efficient.

Recent events and a few good blog posts bring some additional data and perspective to bear on this.  First, we have the Tyner Blaine post, The High Costs of Building the Wrong Product, which is a fantastic explanation of the concepts discussed between myself and Alain Breillatt.  As Scott Sehlhorst writes for Tyner Blaine:

There’s an analog to the market dynamics of making poor product decisions – executing with poor quality. Many research studies and articles have identified the market impacts of poor quality.  This has become so well accepted that people today cite it like a law of physics (one example here based on this 1988 IEEE research by Barry Boehm and Philip Papaccio) as the “1-10-100 rule.”  The primary conclusion of that research is that ten dollars spent on fixing bugs:

• Costs and saves $10 when you catch (and fix) the bug during implementation.
• Avoids $100 in costs when you catch the bug during QA and send the product back to development (then test again).
• Avoids $1,000 in costs versus waiting until your customers catch the bug in the field, causing the team to remedy the problems, rush out a patch release, and/or go to heroic lengths to manage a PR problem.

This is an opportunity in front of your product team – a 100x payback from investing in quality during the development process.  Of course, be pragmatic about it – if the cost of testing exceeds the cost of bugs, don’t test.

We just recently witnessed the cost of a “bug” in the final version of a very popular product.  Apple has taken it on the chin in PR because of this.  Imagine the launch coverage absent this issue – the press and blog coverage would have found something to complain about, but this issue was almost too easy for them to focus on.

Now, imagine that Apple had developed, say, one of the many bad Android phones.  There are Android phones that review well.  But had Apple wasted the resources to build one of the ones that wasn’t good – that is quite a cost, isn’t it?  To reputation for one.  But there are marketing costs, support costs, potentially recall costs (analysts were estimating north of $1B in recall costs to Apple if it came to that). The Droid X is already getting criticism for its bad User Interface (allegedly, worse than the default Android 2.1 interface – though I don’t claim to be an expert on that).  What is the cost to Moto’s business to develop “a bad product” or, a product with a few really bad bugs?  People often compare Apple to “Android” – but actually each Android handset maker is a separate competitor.  Each one has to invest significant energy into developing their handsets.  As long as Apple has significant volume advantages over any single competitor, they should enjoy economies of scale that the other manufacturers don’t.

TechCrunch has an excellent article detailing Apple’s surprising vertical integration benefit. I say surprising, because in economics we’re generally taught that vertical integration is less efficient than specialization.  Apple seems to buck that trend.  Steve Cheney writes:

Perhaps the best example of this so far is FaceTime, Apple’s take on video-calling. FaceTime makes video-calling on the Android-based Sprint HTC EVO look silly, because the EVO awkwardly requires users to sign up and download a third-party app, then launch it every time they want to talk. Normal people simply won’t do this.

Apple eliminated this friction by innovating at the confluence of hardware and software—hit one button mid-call and the feature just works. It really is amazing (yes, I am channeling Steve Jobs).

Once Apple does release a product, they really know how to market it.  In this FaceTime ad compaign, they do a great job of not marketing technical specs and instead marketing human value.  This is what makes the difference between evangelizing your product and just geeking out.  Not every body likes it – but think back to when the iPod commercials were ubiquitous.  They didn’t market the # of songs so much, nor the quality of the build (though it was high), nor the RAM, nor the CPU speed.  They marketed people dancing in their heads while going about their every day life (the shadows are dancing while the person calmly walks to the subway).  Sell the benefit, sell the humanity.

Back to the TechCrunch article… the author argues that Apple actually benefits from feature bloat in component vendors.  For one, they get to strip out unnecessary features from their designs (which aids battery life, for example).  For another, Apple gets an inside track view of what is coming down the pipeline in these components that their competitors depend upon.  And then Apple has degrees of freedom to decide how to respond.

Good food for thought for anyone running a product business.

Well, I just read an article I really found agreement with:

Jeff Kaplan of Think Strategies writes “Yes – the SaaS Experiment is Over“, in response to an article asking if the SAAS experiment was over, and a second one on ebizQ that asked “Is SaaS Dead?”

The fact is that the SaaS ‘experiment’ is definitely over. It is now a mainstream movement.

Just take a look at the growth of Salesforce.com and SuccessFactors. Or, check out how NetSuite and Workday are encroaching on SAP. Listen to CIOs who are frustrated with being in the server business and want to shift into the services business.

And, pay attention to the major moves which the ‘legacy’ hardware and software players–led by IBM, HP, Microsoft, Oracle and SAP–are taking to transform and even cannibalize their traditional business to respond to rapidly escalating customer demands for change.

Yes, the SaaS experiment is over. It is now for real.

I agree. SaaS is past the “experiment stage” and on to the implementation stage across nearly all forms of software.  Hardly dead.

Meanwhile, last year there were calls for BPM’s death, and asking if our experiment with BPM is over. My personal experience with BPM argues otherwise.

A while back, Bruce Silver wrote up another thorough review of a BPM vendor’s offering, and this time it was TIBCO’s ActiveMatrix BPM.  There were a couple of nuggets that jumped out at me:

1. TIBCO is pushing task distribution as being separate from process (or orthogonal, you might say).  It is an interesting wrinkle to their product.  I’ve run into a few cases where the “process” presented to me was really a “how to distribute work to the people on this team” problem, rather than how to manage the process or lifecycle of the stuff their working on (which might extend into groups that aren’t part of the same team).  But there have been only a few, relative to the total number of processes I’ve seen.
2. Apparently they borrowed one of the best features of Lombardi Teamworks (now Websphere Lombardi Edition): “The inline preview function allows playback of running forms from within TIBCO Business Studio.   This Lombardi-ish approach is carried forward in page flow modeling as well, using BPMN to describe each step in the page flow… an advantage (in my view) over the programmer-oriented approach of most ‘enterprise-class’ BPMSs.”
3. It sounds like they’ve added performance data tracking that approaches what Lombardi does.  I’ve been surprised that this early differentiator at Lombardi (circa 2004) hasn’t been more widely copied 6 years later.
4. There was another TIBCO BPM product, but I think that’s on the way out based on TUCON coverage.  BPM vendors need to take a page from Neil Ward-Dutton’s blog.  Bring your customers with you.

Thanks again to Bruce for covering all the product releases of note.