So John Gruber of Daring Fireball fame picks up on Seth Weintraub’s report that two-thirds of Google’s mobile search revenue comes from iOS devices.  John’s analysis echoes our own thoughts on the subject:

I’ve speculated for years that by making Apple into an enemy, Google could wind up losing money with Android, long-term, compared to a hypothetical world where they’d kept Android as a BlackBerry-ish OS rather than an iPhone-ish one. iPhone users are the cream of the crop, demographically.

It isn’t at all clear that Android is a net-positive for Google’s bottom line given the relative marketshare of Android devices vs. iOS devices, and the relative search share (which is where Google’s revenue comes from), and the costs of supporting and defending Android (not to mention, buying a manufacturer).

It just feels like Google hasn’t been editing itself enough.  And prematurely it is taking on more fights than any company would rightly be interested in taking on.

To put it in perspective, right now Google is likely making twice the revenue from search on iOS than it is for search on Android.  I would have guessed at (and have always assumed) rough parity between Android and iOS devices, but that doesn’t seem to be the case.  With competitors like these, who needs friends?

http://www.bp-3.com/blogs/2011/08/its-also-about-what-you-dont-do/

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!

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.

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.

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.

Sad news today.  Not too much to say today that we haven’t said before.  Better writers, with stronger ties to Steve, and better stories to tell, have written and spoken about Steve more eloquently:

Walt Mossberg: The Steve Jobs I knew

AppleInsider recaps Bill Gates, Bob Iger, Barack Obama, Eric Schmidt, Michael Dell, Mark Zuckerberg, Carol Bartz, Jerry Brown.

GigaOm covers a similar list of celebrity reactions.

Steve on Steve, at the Stanford Commencement Address in 2005 (yes, I’m very jealous about that one).

And that, as they say, is just the tip of the iceberg. Thanks, Steve.

Neil Ward-Dutton is following up on previous work he’s done looking at BPM practices at big firms. We’ll start with this, wherein Neil tells us Capgemini are lining up their ducks:

Top Line Initiatives within Capgemini are identified where a need is seen for an internal ‘accelerator’ (my word) that can place the company to play in high-growth market sectors – and furthermore, where the potential is seen for the company to grow at twice the overall market growth rate. In line with BPM having been identified as a Top Line Intiative, Capgemini is looking to grow its BPM project delivery business 40% per year for the next 4-5 years.

Well, this is both what is right and wrong about the big consulting firms.  What’s right: they’ve realized BPM is a growing market opportunity and worth investing in.

What’s wrong:  that’s the only motivation behind these companies getting into BPM.  There’s no passion for business improvement, process improvement, or business process management.  There’s no raison d’être.

But there are a few other positive notes here to pick out:

The company has realised that the traditional body-shopping approach doesn’t work; and it’s also realised that trying to push a significant proportion of project work offshore is also going to be difficult – particularly in the early stages of engagement with a customer. Rather, it aims to create small project teams of between 6 and 12 consultants, working onsite with customers and getting business and technology representatives from the customer’s side collaborating with them as much as possible. It’s aiming to structure projects to deliver results in 3-6 months, and its goal is to build relationships with clients so that it can set up sequences of such projects that overall create engagements that last 2-3 years.

It is encouraging to hear that some of the big consulting firms are finally coming to grips with this – the project work for most BPM projects needs to be local.  Now if only customers will come to the same conclusions…

What Capgemini sees as small teams (6-12) would represent large BPM teams if they’re only focused on the BPM parts of the business (and not supporting aspects, e.g. technology integrations, etc.).  CapGemini is focused on the right time-frames:  3-6 months for results. The “2-3 year’s” for overall engagements however- when you’re a smaller firm like BP3 that longer term relationship has to be earned, we don’t go in assuming it will be there.  We execute the project, and try to acquit ourselves well enough that if there are additional projects we’ll be invited into planning discussions – or better yet, invited to help funnel additional project ideas into funded projects.

Great read on Capgemini – and instructive for other companies looking at BPM services…

Never one to let a chance to say “I told you so” pass me by, I thought we should recap coverage of this year’s SAP TechEd 2011 in Las Vegas.  I’m not surprised by the lukewarm reactions to the BPM part of SAPs presence, because I’ve written about SAP’s lack of BPM vision before.

First, there’s Jim Sinur, of Gartner:

Bottom Line:
If the SAP BPM architects and technicians can show customer value that catches top managements eye, the wait will be shorter. Right now, it looks to be another two years. With that said, look at what SAP has done in BPM from two years ago. http://blogs.gartner.com/jim_sinur/2009/10/14/teched-09saps-bpm-and-brm-progress-to-date-watch-out-for-construction-cones/

I guess Jim and I are on the same page.  It is *always* another two years with SAP.  Two years from now you’ll be amazed.  Except you aren’t – because two years later, they tell you it’ll be another two years.

But, let’s turn our attention to Bruce Silver’s coverage.  After all, earlier this year he was pretty optimistic about SAP’s BPM.  So what did Bruce have to say?

At this week’s SAP Tech Ed conference in Las Vegas, BPM is definitely off the main track.  The only other BPM analyst here that I recognized is Jim Sinur of Gartner.  The keynote sessions were all about HANA, SAP’s new in-memory analytics platform that is the key to reinvigorating the entire SAP portfolio (at least the parts they still care about).  HANA-enabled BPM won’t come until 2012, but it should provide a significant performance boost (process transactions per hour) as well as powerful real-time process analytics.

Started out sounding pretty down on BPM… But Bruce hasn’t given up on BPM with SAP:

But it would be a mistake to say that SAP has not made significant progress in BPM.  It has, but you had to skip the analyst sessions with the execs and go to the breakout sessions from the BPM product managers to hear about it.  Those sessions were, on the whole, excellent, many of them hands-on with the tools.  In that sense, Tech Ed is the mirror image of IBM Impact, where BPM sizzle was all over the keynotes, but almost no details were available in the breakouts.

(Actually the IBM breakouts had a lot of detail – and got some coverage on our blog.  The analysts just need to break out of the special analyst sessions!)

Bruce notes: “Where conventional BPM (such as NetWeaver BPM/PI) emphasizes BPMN-based activity flow, embedded processes involve transaction events where the order of occurrence at runtime is more flexible.”  But later notes that the embedded processes can be visualized as BPMN diagrams.  Hm.  It sounds contradictory on the surface, but I’ll assume not.

Bruce also mentions “Gravity” – the Google Wave integration and BPM implementation.  But, he’s comparing a (still) “shaky” beta product with BlueworksLive, which has been in production and serving customers for more than 5 years (updating roughly every 6 weeks).

Focus matters a lot for big organizations like SAP, IBM, and Oracle.  At IBM, I’m seeing the focus (for now).  At SAP, I’m seeing some progress, but it looks uneven.  Driven from a level lower down the management chain.  It doesn’t get top billing.  Instead – top billing is HANA and in-memory analytics?  Odd.

Or it would be, if BPM were on the front burner.

I’ve been getting tired of reading about “The Melt” – the new company / concept from the folks behind the Flip camera company.  Press like this quote from the interviewer: “You’re not just trying to build a restaurant, you’re trying to build… an empire…”  Wow.  Well that makes it a tech company right?  Well, actually, all of the big restaurant chains have become technology companies to varying degrees.  They’re also process-centric businesses (though they use specialized software and hardware, not general purpose BPM software).

Tons of name dropping in the video below (which only makes me more skeptical):

This should be my dream come true – I love grilled cheese sandwiches, and I make a pretty good one myself.  Their focus on process would be really interesting if we already knew they were a success (we don’t yet know this).  It is nice to see process and process tech getting top billing, in a sense.

And despite my visceral negative reaction to the coverage of The Melt, it *is* a tech company.  Comparisons are made to McDonald’s, Starbucks, Chipotle.  These are all process and technology companies that happen to be pretty good at producing food and coffee.  But extra emphasis is given to the processes and technology that go into the restaurant chain:

The same thing goes with The Melt. Kaplan went with grilled cheeses because he found machines that press and grill a grilled-cheese sandwich in record time, which ensures fast turnover, which improves profitability. The grilled cheese comes with soup because it’s cheap, and easy to store and manufacture. You can order from your iPhone, again, because this improves turnaround time.

Let’s hope they don’t forget to make a grilled-cheese sandwich that is absolutely better than what I make at home – and the soups better be good too.  If the food isn’t great, they won’t need fast turnover because they won’t have enough customers to eat the food.  Fast turnover only matters once you have volume.  Descriptors like “cheap”, “easy to store and manufacture”, “record time”, “fast turnover” – these aren’t encouraging adjectives at this stage of the enterprise.

The article closes with:

It’s a manufacturing and technology process. It’s really not that different from making portable cameras.

At the end of the day, you can’t taste a Flip camera.  You’re customers are going to eat these sandwiches – they better taste good.  I hope the folks at The Melt understand that better than the Business Insider.

Keith has posted a summary of his notes from Forrester’s BPM Forum – great read and good insights into several topics – in particular he has a great writeup of Derek Miers’ session on designing your BPM engagement program around the customer experience:

He draws a correlation between process maturity and focus on customer experience. Maturity level 1-2 cost reduction is the top category (74%). Level 2-3 customer experience is the biggest. levels 3-4 and 4-5 customer experience remains high but value innovation becomes most important. Waste elimination remains that the same levels at all levels. The “ah-ha” moment was that if at level 2-3 you don’t focus on customer experience improvement, you will never get to level 3-5. (Survey is mostly business people, not IT – Forrester/QPC business process maturity survey)

Looks like a great day of sessions, but I agree with Keith that 7:30am is inhumane in any timezone.

Momentum for Austin startups continues – with news that Austin startup Spredfast has raised a $12Million round of funding.  Rod Favaron, our Lombardi CEO, is running the company:

The company, which launched its service last year, received the funding from InterWest Partners of Menlo Park, Calif., and Austin Ventures. It has raised a total of $16 million.

Spredfast’s software lets clients manage campaigns and conversations on social media sites, including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and blogging platforms. Rather than going to each social site, Spredfast lets users publish and monitor social activity from one central platform.

[...]

“This is a big step for us, and we’re ready for the next stage of growth,” said CEO Rod Favaron, who joined the company in February. Favaron was previously CEO of Lombardi Software Inc., which was acquired in 2010 by IBM Corp. for an undisclosed price.

It is both a vote of confidence in Spredfast, and in Austin.  In 2010 it was common to read about the dearth of funding in Austin, but almost ever since then, we’ve been seeing more news about funding in Austin than I can remember since the ’90s.

In a followup to the previous post about recruiting talent to Austin, I think news like the above fundraising does more to recruit industry veterans to Austin than the recruiting trip they recently embarked on.  The coverage on MarketWatch wasn’t flattering:

In fact, I have to report that the Austin group’s recruiting night in San Francisco was something between a bust and a learning experience for the group.

It sounds like the two main events were, basically, a tough learning experience.  But hopefully the CEOs took advantage of the trip to prearrange a bunch of meetings with likely recruits rather than just depending on the group events.  Still, the target and the optics are all wrong.  Instead of getting a story about what a great place Austin is to work, and that people are coming here to work at our high tech companies, we got an article essentially about indifference in the Bay Area and how hard it is to find talent in Austin (which isn’t quite as dire as the article makes it out).

Imagine if these same CEOs had gone on a tour of Universities in California (or other states) to recruit talent?  To put the idea out there for college students to think about Austin as a destination.  University is the right place to strike.  The experienced industry veterans don’t need to go to a job fair to find companies in Austin – they’ll leverage their connections to find a job.  Its the college kids who need some help discovering Austin and Austin companies as a place to land.

The rest of the article focuses on “solutions”… and here’s one perhaps the 30 tech CEOs could get behind – an Austin-funded scholarship at several universities – giving us some press out there on the coasts.

Update:  This article on Austin startups finding funding via Angel List is probably relevant as well.  It just speaks to how the world of fundraising is changing, and there are fewer barriers than ever for Austin entrepreneurs:

Even for Austin startups that aren’t actively raising money, AngelList is becoming a way to get on the radar of potential investors, partners and customers.

Bill Boebel, an Austin entrepreneur and angel who has invested in 15 companies, calls it the “LinkedIn for startups.”

“It’s a startup’s resume,” he said. “Just like when you’re recruiting an employee and want to learn a little more about that person, it’s a great way to find out more about a company.”

And further, Ravikant says:

“Entrepreneurs inside Silicon Valley already have access to investors here, but it can be harder for a promising startup in Austin to break in,” he said.

“We have helped Austin startups get exposure to Silicon Valley and New York investors, and we also give those investors the lay of the land in Austin.”

Has there been a better time to invest in people and talent?

Hard not to revisit this subject when there is so much material out there right now.  Vivek Wadhwa in the Washington Post:

American companies must be provided with the incentives to invest in their workers as they used to. As recently as the 1970s, America’s most respected companies would make significant investments in workforce training. IBM, for example, took non-technical workers and taught them technical skills. They then trained these technicians to be computer programmers, sales reps, or product managers. New recruits received a year or more of training before they were expected to become productive.

I don’t know any company doing this anymore.

Today, nearly all American companies, including IBM, expect new hires to be productive on day one. These employees are given a day or two of “orientation” at best. Companies routinely fire people whose skills are obsolete and hire replacements with the right skills to maximize quarterly revenue and profits. Employers often fear that if they spend too much on skill development, employees will become more marketable and leave.

I’m afraid we are guilty as charged.  At a small company, I can understand this problem more than at a larger company.  At a small company one might not have the resources to invest in training in the early days.  And yet, it is precisely at these small companies that many people investments are made.  Are being made. Right now.  If you’re one of those small companies making excuses about investing – stop.  Stop making excuses.  Just start figuring out how to invest.

Our very own Flournoy Henry recently contributed to a new IBM Redbook: “Scaling BPM Adoption from Project to Program with IBM Business Process Manager” :

Your first Business Process Management (BPM) project is a crucial first step on your BPM journey. It is important to begin this journey with a philosophy of change that will enable you to avoid common pitfalls that lead to failed BPM projects, and ultimately, poor BPM adoption. This IBM® Redbooks® publication describes the methodology and best practices that lead to a successful project and how to use that success to scale to enterprise-wide BPM adoption.

The intended audience for this book includes all people who participate in the discovery, planning, delivery, deployment, and continuous improvement activities for a business process. These roles include process owners, process participants and subject matter experts (SMEs) from the operational business as well as technologists responsible for delivery including BPM analysts, BPM solution architects, BPM administrators, and BPM developers.

PDF and HTML versions are available (I recommend PDF version, it is just easier to read because some of the sections are short but flow well together).

This is just part of our (and Flournoy’s) commitment to give back to the BPM community we are a part of.  But it wouldn’t be possible without some of the folks at IBM organizing and bringing a group of experts together to do it.  Congrats to Flournoy, Lisa, Ines, Fahad, Wim, Jonas, and Duan for producing this (RedBooks are team effort).  Hopefully we’ll be able to participate in more Redbooks in the BPM space in the future.

I missed this in the news cycle on TIBCO acquiring Nimbus, but Theo Priestley of BPM redux posted on the acquisition as well:

And this is where it gets interesting. If you think on it, it’s actually an admission of failure (and of lessons learnt) because both are squarely pitched in the separate worlds of Business and IT. [...]

It’s also interesting because TIBCO had a ‘social’ element to it’s suite with TIBBR, does this mean they think got the social collaboration functionality wrong ?

I think the likely answer is “yes”.

Martin Zwilling’s post on 7 startup co-founders that can lead to conflict reads like a greatest hits of imminent failure.  Not that there aren’t notable exceptions to every problem cited, but at this level we’re talking in generalities.

His advice?

If you think about it, you should realize that not everyone is ‘ideal partner material.’ Most of us learn that in other partner relationships, like dating and marriage. First you have to be clear on who you are, and who you can co-exist with, what complementary skills and resources you need, and what decisions in the business you are willing to relegate.

Lance and I are often asked how we make our partnership work at BP3.  We’re different.  Different personality types and different kinds of career experience and skills.  Martin addresses this neatly:

4.  “We are so alike, we finish each other’s sentences.” You really need a partner who is complementary, and can tackle the operational roles, like marketing, finance, and sales. A partner who is a carbon copy of you will likely mean two people working on every problem, rather than a natural separation of duties. Most startups can’t afford that.

I couldn’t agree more.  Lance and I are good complements.  And we each respect the other person’s strengths.  And we know how to step in for each others’ weaknesses.  I really think respect is the foundation for people who are truly different to have a good working partnership.  Without the mutual respect, conflict is inevitable.

Lance and I were fortunate (in a sense) – we had the opportunity to test our partnership while we were still working at Lombardi.  We had a 13 week assignment – with 8-hours of travel required each way, and traveled 5 days a week for 13 weeks.  We spent 2 hours in the car each trip, we ate three meals a day together, and we worked together with our customer for 8-12 hours a day.  And that was just the MINIMUM amount of interaction we had for 13 weeks.  In this environment, you either earn mutual respect or you never want to work together again.

At BP3, it hasn’t all been roses.  2008 and 2009 were tough years for the US economy.  We grew in those years – but we had to scratch and claw are way through it.  Our previous experiences of trial-by-fire prepared us to get through those tough years as well – we didn’t give up or play the blame game, we just got to work.  And it prepared us to be able to tell each other tough truths.  I recall taking a call, the day our son was born, about taking a new assignment for BP3 – one which I needed to personally handle and travel to – at what we might say is a sensitive family time.  But we talked about it and we knew what the right decision would be for the business.  Lance has similarly taken tough assignments in Europe and other places hard to travel to – when it was what the business needed.  Sacrifice is required to build the business up.  Make sure you’re in the hole digging with someone you respect.

Our point of view – that co-founders who really do have different backgrounds are a better fit – is actually backed up by research done by the Startup Genome project, which shows that co-founders with a mix of business and tech background are more likely to succeed than co-founders with the same background (I’m paraphrasing badly – but that’s the implication of the research so far).

Well this is interesting news – it isn’t every day you see a major BPM announcement on TechCrunch after all!

BonitaSoft has raised $11M in an effort to take on the big software vendors with their open source BPM solutions:

BonitaSoft, a provider of open source business process management (BPM) solutions, this morning announced that it has landed $11 million in funding in a Series B round led by Serena Capital. Existing investors such as Ventech and Auriga Partners also participated.

It makes me wonder if Alfresco (Activiti) or others will be exploring more funding in the current environment.  It seems inevitable to me that an open source vendor or project would emerge as an interesting alternative to the commercial vendors.  I just wonder which one it will be – or is it possible that I’m wrong and it will be more than one?