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

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

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

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

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

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

On OpenEdge development methods and how they relate to BPM:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Which are, summarized:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If you’re interested in reading a near-treatise on first impressions of IBM’s Blueworks Live, Joe Pluta has provided it on IBM Systems Magazine:

The Lombardi Blueprint tool has a different focus: it concentrates on the capability to allow members of a business community to collaboratively define business processes (see Figure 2). So where Teamworks is Rational or PDM, Blueworks is the step before that which really has no parallel in the midrange community. Well, there is a parallel; typically it’s a whiteboard. Whiteboards are huge in the midrange development world; people get together in a big conference room and start spitballing. Someone writes the group’s thoughts on the whiteboard, things get drawn, redrawn, added, removed, and hopefully a consensus emerges. Then it was usually up to someone to transcribe the whiteboard for the group. That part often didn’t get done, and instead you saw “DO NOT ERASE!” in big red letters on the board. And occasionally someone forgot that and important information got overwritten. In fact, I remember one of the biggest technological innovations we had back in the 1980s was a super-nifty printing whiteboard! It was a freestanding whiteboard on wheels with a soft plastic surface that you wrote on, and you could hit a button and the writing surface would rotate past a scanner and print on thermal paper. Whoo hoo! No notes!

If you saw a few tweets referencing “DO NOT ERASE!” – they’re referencing the paragraph above.  And I think Joe has it right – Blueworks Live has a really interesting value proposition to the mid-range company.  But unlike Joe, I always hated those whiteboards that printed- the printing never worked as well as advertised, typically wasn’t in color, and the machines didn’t work as well for just plain old whiteboarding. These days if I use a whiteboard for something important, I can just take a picture and add it to Evernote.  I’d have rather those whiteboard machines just email me a PDF file!

Finally, he picks on the pricing as being too expensive outside of a corporate context.  As he notes:

For individual users, $600 a year is a hefty price; without a truly usable free version I don’t see Blueworks being a go-to product for the casual user. On the other hand, the license fee is not terribly onerous for corporations

I think the addition of less-expensive licensing for contributors (versus process authors) has helped with the pricing issues (I believe the community members are $10/month instead of $50).  But I agree a lower price point would push more adoption – and there really are network effects at play here.

John Gruber on Daring Fireball refers to this as “The New Apple Advantage“:

But now that Apple’s products are more popular, we’re beginning to see another benefit to Apple’s lesser degree of configurability: greater scalability. Apple needs larger quantities of fewer different components to manufacture the same number of computers as other companies. It’s not just the economies of scale that all companies get when they sell 3 or 4 million laptops in a quarter — it’s greater, because Apple’s 3 or 4 million laptops sold share a larger number of the exact same components.

In other words, the old advantage was the “it just works” advantage… but the new advantage is the scale gained by having fewer products and configurations and still having high volume.

But it isn’t new.*  It just sneaked up on industry analysts, Apple watchers, and Apple skeptics alike.  When Tim Cook pointed out that all of Apple’s products would fit on a single table, that was an allusion to this advantage.  Last year I wrote about this in response to an article by Allan Breillatt:

Second, what struck me most is that Apple’s design process doesn’t consider these throw-away prototypes as waste – it considers these prototypes as a valuable part of the creative process – and that the TRUE waste is producing less than the best product design.  Or worse, producing multiple products that are inadequate.  Imagine if Apple had released 4 iPhones instead of 1 in the first run.  That would have been the real waste – because each of those products would require significant production costs, engineering costs, support costs, and marketing costs on into the future. So Apple is making a trade-off of design-cost against production-waste, from this point of view…

Allan characterized 9 of 10 prototypes being discarded as waste – but from the point of view of production, waste would be producing products that don’t increase sales, or disproportionately increase costs.  The benefit of this focus was apparent in the MP3 market – and it was apparent as Apple entered the smart phone market by introducing the iPhone.  Apple was already (if I recall correctly) the largest buyer of NAND flash memory chips.  Apple already had a pricing advantage on this critical component over every other handset manufacturer in the world (except perhaps Samsung).  And it showed.  The iPhone shipped with more flash memory than the other phones (and still seems to ship with more storage). John writes:

This realization sort of snuck up on me. I’ve always been interested in Apple’s products because of their superior design; the business side of the company was never of as much interest. But at this point, it seems clear to me that however superior Apple’s design is, it’s their business and operations strength — the Cook side of the equation — that is furthest ahead of their competition, and the more sustainable advantage. It cannot be copied without going through the same sort of decade-long process that Apple went through.

One thing I’d point out – the supply chain advantages Apple currently enjoys are much like the supply chain advantages that Dell once enjoyed.  These advantages can be copied, but it takes time, and it takes a different organization and mindset.  Dell had a successful model and Lenovo and HP were eventually successful in equaling Dell’s supply chain efficiencies.  But they all gave up much of their design prowess in the process…

Apple’s approach retains design prowess, and embeds that prowess deep into the component and supply chain.  So John’s right – it takes years (maybe a decade) to adapt.  And the reason that these firms will have trouble adapting isn’t so much a supply chain management problem as a cultural problem.  It is like a blind spot for these firms, and until they demonstrate that they’re aware of the blind spot and are addressing it, I don’t expect them to find the right adaptations to compete effectively.  If I had to guess, Samsung is closer to adopting (copying) the right model than the other firms, and this is part of the contentiousness between the two firms.

* I think you could argue that the advantage was less apparent in the notebook lineup because the volumes were smaller – but there was still a benefit to the focus that Apple already had – and a cost to the lack of focus that the other vendors already had.

George Lawrie of Forrester recently wrote:

One pioneer that I interviewed was immensely proud of his lightning roll out of a guerilla app to support his firm’s front office in advising clients on complex product choices. I asked him about future plans and sheepishly he admitted they would be starting again from scratch because the guerilla app was unable to leverage enterprise services exposing critical data about product offerings. He remarked ruefully that sometimes you do have to follow the IT standards “yellow brick road” rather than just head for the hills, but wouldn’t it be great to have the best of both worlds, with both agile deployment and full advantage taken of enterprise assets and data?

Well this practically sounds like a call-out for how to approach BPM the right way – roll-out the guerrilla app (usually these are around a specific process) with a BPMS.  But when you’re ready to leverage enterprise services and data, you simply add those features to your process, a bit like a layer cake.  In fact, this avoids one of the key failure modes of BPM projects:  trying to cement integrations to early, instead of focusing on getting the actual process right first.

Sandy has published a review of Active Endpoints’ CloudExtend, an extension of the SalesForce platform that ads some BPM capabilities to the SalesForce platform.  Interestingly it looks like it is deployed “alongside” SalesForce as opposed to being “on” the SalesForce platform. Apparently they’re not the only vendor interested in this type of use case:

We’re starting to see client-side screen flow creation from a few of the BPMS vendors – I covered TIBCO’s Page Flow Models in my review of AMX/BPM last year – but those screen flows are only available at a step in a larger BPMS model, whereas Cloud Extend has encapsulated that capability for use in other platforms. For small, nimble vendors who don’t need to own the whole application, providing embeddable process functionality for data-centric applications can make a lot of sense, especially in a cloud environment where they don’t need to worry about the usual software OEM problems of installation and maintenance.

It is an interesting approach, and perhaps comfortable to Active Endpoints as they previously OEM’ed their BPMS engine to other vendors.  I can’t picture IBM or SAP or Oracle following this approach, for example.

I’m curious about whatever happened to Salesforce’s Visual Process Manager and whether it will end up competing with Cloud Extend; I had a briefing of Visual Process Manager over a year ago that amounted to little, and I haven’t heard anything about it since.

As I was reading Sandy’s review, I was thinking the same thing.  What did happen to Visual Process Manager?  Is it just not fitting the bill?  Maybe we’ll hear more from Dreamforce.

IBM Impact Blog has published a guest post written by yours truly.  It is part of a four-pillar effort, and the theme for the pillar of my post was simplicity.  So why talk about upgrades if the goal is simplicity? After all, there’s no such thing as simple upgrades of in-flight process data is there?

My thought in writing this way was to focus on how to simplify your approach to upgrading, and also to cover the good work IBM has done to make upgrading easier when you can’t take some of the shortcuts we outlined.  You can find more material on the topic of simplicity on the BP3 blog using the simplicity tag.

Upgrading is also fresh on IBM customers’ minds these days.  We’re getting more requests than ever for help upgrading.  Happy to contribute back to the community a little advice about how to get from point A to point B.

Ran across this blog post by Daniel Selman from April of 2011:

 For the past few months I have been leading a small, but very dedicated, team that has been improving the consumability of core ILOG BRMS components/APIs and supporting the BPM team as they perform the integration of the ILOG components within the BPM design and runtime. I believe it will lead to a considerably better rules experience for BPM customers as well as provide a smooth migration path to the full ILOG BRMS, if and when required. Of course it also just makes good engineering sense to share ILOG’s expertise and code in the business rules space with our comrades in the BPM team.

Pretty cool to see these groups working together – this is the kind of collaboration that I have to admit rarely happens outside of either an open source project (semi-rare) or a single company (semi-rare).  What I like best is the tone of his blog – he really sounds interested in seeing the best of ILOG getting up-take with those BPM customers.

So no sooner had I written about Google’s unnecessary surfeit of enemies than Google goes out and acquires Moto, likely creating a few more difficulties in the marketplace.  On the surface it seems to:

1. confirm how weak Android’s patent position really was
2. validate what Apple’s execs and fans have been saying about the value of integrated over fragmented (“open”) at least in the mobile space.
3. calls into question the whole android venture.

Maybe #1 and #2 are obvious and don’t need further explanation.  But for #3, Horace Dediu of Asymco asks the question I’ve been asking: “Is Android profitable? The debit column just increased by $12 billion. Good luck with those ads.”

Seriously.  Google has been saying Android is profitable.  But I think you have to measure the credit part of the ledger as revenues accrued by Android that would not have otherwise been accrued:

• Ads on Android that arguably would not have otherwise been sold on another platform
• Licensing fees (I don’t think there are any)
• Etc.

Horace Dediu goes on to give a better explanation than I did as to the perils Google has entertained:

The lesson (and warning) was that a licensor that is also a licensee makes other licensees uncomfortable. The supplier is also a competitor. This is classic channel conflict and never ends well.

Apple and Microsoft have to be pleased that their patent strategy just caused Google to spend $12B.  Android is certainly no longer free to Google – whether it is free to handset OEMs or not.

John Gruber’s Daring Fireball really digs into all the details, and if we’re wondering whether there was a real cost to Google for taking the path of aggressively pursuing Android:

Look at Google’s financial results. They reported $8.5 billion in net income this year, and $6.5 billion last year. That’s for all of Google. They’re offering $12.5 billion for Motorola. So Google just spent almost two years of its profits to buy a second-rate phone maker that itself is unprofitable,1 almost went bankrupt, and is arguably only the third-best maker of Android devices, behind HTC and Samsung.

That definitely puts $12B into perspective.  Nearly 2 years of profit.  I’m not sure that Google wouldn’t have been better off, financially, just partnering with Apple and other OEMs and taking a more passive approach to Android.  Still, acquiring Moto may be the right thing to do given where Google finds itself today – the best path forward may be to double down on the Android investment.  But an alternate path would be to make Android more open – by opening up the development process and assets and scaling back Google’s own financial commitment to it while letting the community drive (making Android a bit more like Linux in the process).

This article in TechCrunch hit a chord with me – because I have picked up on some of the same issues with Google:

But why? Why is Google now a villain to many in the industry? I don’t believe it’s because they’re evil, I believe it simply relates to the Plainview quote. Increasingly, Google is trying to do everything. And they have the arrogance to think that they can. And it’s pissing people off.

Actually, it doesn’t piss me off, personally.  But, I want to put the Steve Jobs question to Google:  what are you going to say “No” to?  And how do you know that you’re doing the right thing when you say No?

Right now it feels like Google says “yes” to a lot of projects.  But they say “no” to very few markets.  I’ll take Android as an example.  Google had a strong ally in Apple (and vice versa).  They had common market interests, common competitors (e.g. Microsoft).  If Apple spurred on a new generation of phones that consumed more Google ads, that’s good for Google (and doesn’t require Google to launch its own phone OS).  If Google’s great apps (maps, gmail, search) worked well on iPhones, Apple sells more phones.

But by betting the farm on Android, Google lost a great partner and ally.  Not that any of these relationships is guaranteed forever, but I certainly expected the alliance to last longer than a year or two.  And I’m not convinced that Google gets more revenue per device from Android than it does from iPhones – I’ve yet to see someone break those #’s out so that we can understand if their Android investment *actually* makes sense.

The TechCrunch article covers lots of other areas where Google is competing with major industry titans or at least category killers in the niche areas.  My takeaway from this is that perhaps Google hasn’t learned the power of “No”.

At BP3, we’re all about BPM.  That’s it.  When we get asked to build a custom app, if it isn’t BPM, we politely decline.  If it is a big integration project – politely decline.  Saying no has power.  Our branding is focused on what we actually do, and do well.  It doesn’t get diluted by a less-than-stellar performance on something outside our core competency.  It also allows us to partner effectively with companies that can really help our business – they know what we do, what we do well, and what we don’t do.  And therefore they can shape their partnering strategy accordingly without worrying about whether we’ll be interested in the food on their plate and not just happy with what is on our BPM plate.

Maybe it is too late for Google to put the genie back in the bottle – but we can look back and think about how things might be different.  They could have taken a bit more “hands-off” approach to Android  – sponsoring the project but not getting too invested in pushing it to vendors and carriers – let those vendors do more of the heavy lifting, and not getting involved in positioning against Apple or any other specific phone vendors.  A bit more hands-off approach might have preserved their relationship to Apple without undermining their goal of having the lowest common denominator phones capable of browsing the web or running a Google Search (and seeing a Google ad).  Would the value of good partnerships with firms like Apple outweigh the benefits of an Android?

When you’re looking at your own business, what is it you don’t do?  What would you say no to?

An interesting developerWorks blog about the benefits of customer engagement via Twitter. The title says it all:  “developerWorks Twitter account saving over $600k per month: what uplift will Google+ provide?”

Interestingly the $600k/month claim comes from what they would have to pay for 200,000 clicks per month through other channels (e.g. paid search).  Of course, this under-estimates the value to IBM, because twitter accounts like @developerWorks build rapport and trust with customers and partners (I’d call that engagement, but marketing professionals might disagree). I’d not have even thought of quantifying the value of a twitter account in this fashion, but I’m going to change my calculus in the future.

When I worked at a BPMS vendor we added partners and some customers to an internal technical mailing list.  The level of engagement with these techies was much improved, and helped convert skeptics into advocates of our company and products.  This was in pre-twitter days.  I’m not sure the effect on twitter is quite as strong per person, but like the mailing list, it can humanize a company and a product, and it exposes customers to your professionals and experts.  That has to be a good thing.

Adam Deane on Business Users and Programmers:

But the best differentiator pitch that I’ve heard being used is the “business user oriented” vs “programmer oriented”.
The claim is that business users can use the tool. I think it’s a great differentiator.  Although it usually doesn’t have much truth to it – it’s still a great market positioning pitch.

You see.. (and I’m trying to hide my sarcasm here..) BPM tools that use programming are bad for you.

If you need to open Visual Studio to build a workflow – it means you need skilled programmers, which means high salaries, and they need to write code, which means you need a tester, a team leader and a project manager (more salaries).

Every time the customer wants to change the business process you need the programmers to recode, recompile, retest (long deployment, or no changes – you can pick). Sophisticated code means that you need to rely on the IT team which means that you are tied in with that programmer/team. If the programmer leaves – no one will dare to change their code (who wants to be responsible for code that someone else wrote.)

“If you need to open Visual Studio to build a workflow” – then you’re doing it wrong.  A good bpm tool doesn’t require you to build your workflow in C++/C# or the like.

Of course if you’re opening visual studio to do an integration – have at it.  To build something custom that will plug into your BPM solution – have at it.  BPM should make certain things easier than traditional development tools (and a “workflow” sounds like one of those things to me).  It doesn’t mean that you won’t still need traditional development tools for a BPM deployment, but you shouldn’t have to write your process flow in assembly language any more than you should have to write it in C++.

Incidentally, I don’t agree that “business can do everything” is a good pitch, though I do agree with Adam that it is horribly oversold.  The business and IT have to work together to make BPM successful (or, arguably, nearly any long-term IT or business investment).  Vendors oversell this all the time, which accounts for Adam’s sarcasm.  But, conversely, companies purchase tools that bring too much complexity to the simple stuff, or tools that start simple but don’t scale with complexity.  What do I mean?  I mean that as you add more process intelligence to your tooling, complexity should increase at a linear (or less) rate.  If you experience complexity increasing at a greater than linear rate, you’ll hit a point where the system can’t be maintained – the interconnectedness and interdependency of the system is too complex for someone to properly understand, modify, and maintain.

That’s why it is important for the “workflow” to be simple.  Because it can be.

The phrase “It just works” didn’t first come into use during Apple’s WWDC 2011 keynote in June.  I first heard the phrase with respect to software when I was taking a NeXT programming class (cs193e) at Stanford – Julie Zelenksi, our lecturer, had three phrases that stuck with me for life:

• “Right?!” – affirmation, agreement, eliciting agreement, filler, etc.
• “That’s a feature” – when confronted with a bug or lack of a feature… obviously meant in jest.
• “It just works” – describing the magic of many of the object oriented techniques we used in class – reflection that just worked, prototypes, messages, Interface Builder and AppKit.

(I wouldn’t even claim to be there near the beginning – these phrases had the well-worn comfort of years of personal use even the very first time I heard them.)

At WWDC, Steve Jobs trotted out the phrase again, as a worthy successor to recent superlatives like “magical” and “amazing”, and it caught the attention of journalists (Philip Elmer-DeWitt has a great collection of quotes from some of the best articles covering the WWDC). But as MG Siegler notes, it isn’t an accident when Jobs picks a catchphrase like this.  It is intentional choosing and repetition to enforce a message.  I don’t doubt for a second that the *internal* messaging behind the scenes at Apple was similar, with Steve Jobs demanding that iCloud services “just work” without requiring explanation as to why or how.  Its a perfect kind of demand – no, don’t tell me the 15 reasons something doesn’t quite work the way I want – just make it work.

This contrasts harshly with the Android ecosystem, as noted by John Gruber, and fully expounded upon by Harry McCracken in Time (John captured the money quote perfectly):

But there’s never been a time when so much of the new stuff I look at is so very far from being ready for mass consumption. Sometimes it’s a tad quirky; sometimes I can’t get it to work at all. And when I call the manufacturers for help, they’re often well aware of the problems I encountered.

The pressure Apple is putting on other handset and computing manufacturers is causing them to release buggy, beta product.  And their primary software partner this time around is a company that mostly ships products in Beta status (Google):

One notable example was Motorola’s Xoom tablet, which arrived back in February with rain checks for three of its notable features: 4G support, Flash, and support for its MicroSD slot. Today, some owners have the update that enables MicroSD, others don’t, and everyone’s still waiting for the overdue 4G upgrade. Sounds like a beta product to me.

Contrast to what Apple is attempting to do – “it just works.”  As MG put it with respect to iCloud:

With iCloud, Apple is transforming the cloud from an almost tangible place that you visit to find your stuff, to a place that only exists in the background. It’s never seen. You never interact with it, your apps do — and you never realize it. It’s magic.

Exactly.  The cloud is in the background rather than front-and-center.  And while Google provides for a good cloud experience for technophiles like myself, the cloud *is* the experience, via the browser.  Apple wants the cloud to be invisibly supporting what you do with your devices – devices Apple sells.

This focus on simplicity has benefits.  iTunes may not be the prettiest software from a firm known for good design, but “it just works” – and it appears to be the first platform approaching 1 billion users in a logarithmic way even as it passes the 220 million mark. iOS’ growth curve is following an even steeper trajectory.  The market seems to be saying that “it just works” matters.

MG Siegler follows up with:

And the truth is that this is the point where we may really start to see some truly fundamental differences between Google and Apple after the past few years going head-to-head with feature matching. Apple is going after consumers who have absolutely no idea what the cloud is, and don’t care. Apple is saying they shouldn’t care. It all just works.

Actually, it isn’t just targeting consumers who have no idea what the cloud is.  It is also targeting technophiles who just frankly are tired of dealing with everyone else’s beta software.  At some point we want tools that “just work” so we can get our own, more interesting, technical work done.  If anything, the most advanced technical people I know are even *more* appreciative of the magic behind the black box.

But lest you think that Apple has given off the feature-matching in favor of the iCloud, Marco Arment reminds us that actually, the feature completeness efforts of Apple are like a steamroller:

Every time iOS or the iPhone is updated, Apple picks away at that list. They started with the big ones: purchase price, 3G, GPS, copy and paste, advanced security features, Exchange, multitasking. More recently, they added Verizon support, and it wouldn’t surprise me to see them quietly hit Sprint and T-Mobile in the future, picking away at that list even further.

With iOS 5, they’ve hit tons of relatively minor shortcomings. Notifications. Quick camera access and a hardware shutter button. Wireless sync and backup. They’ve even added a preference to have the camera-flash LED blink on new notifications, supposedly as an accessibility feature, but also conveniently to appeal to BlackBerry owners addicted to that blinking LED.

Apple has steamrolled over almost every meaningful advantage that competitors have. And they’re not stopping.

I think Marco is right.  Apple started with the differentiating NEW features (integrated iPod functionality, and touch screen interface) and then rapidly added to its arsenal (3rd party apps, cut-copy-paste, multi-tasking, etc.).

This is just further evidence, if that was required, that Simplicity is a great design principle.  If calling it “it just works” helps drive the point home and make it an easier rallying point, I’m all for it.  BPM and enterprise software vendors take heed-  we all need a bit more “it just works” in our software experiences.   This logic also needs to inform consulting firms – we need to treat usability and user design as a first class citizen – but failing that, we consultants need to ensure that our processes “just work” for our audiences…

I’m with Stephen White on this one:

The process above is not an extremely complex or hard to understand BPMN Process, but it is a perfectly valid one. BPMN was fully intended to support such modeling. So what is the problem? Why are there complaints about BPMN?

Look, BPMN has more complexity than it needs to have for many uses, and less complexity than it needs for other uses, but I’m with him on this one.

Is it too complex to use for simpler models? No.

Do these simpler processes require too complex a BPMN model to be understandable? No, they do not.

To me, the focus on complexity is a bit off.  The issue is expressiveness.  I don’t think that BPMN is too complex for the expressiveness it provides.  What makes one tool better than another has a lot to do with its expressiveness.

Stephen has it right when he says “The burden, then, is not on BPMN as a specification, it is on companies that develop process modeling tools or methodologies to help their users effectively create business processes – using the BPMN language.”  (Of course, it would help if the spec writers don’t get too carried away, and actually take a break for a while to see how BPMN2 shakes out before starting on a new version).

He has it right because often these simpler conceptual models evolve into more complex executable models (or just more detailed models), and it is reasonable that the same people who understood the simpler model want to be able to see and grasp how the more complex versions relate to the original simple model.  As we’ve commented before, most business users can get by on just a fraction of the BPMN language.

We have some contrary data points.  Pega’s last quarter was good.  So was IBM’s.  But they’re both big companies with too much complexity for outsiders to easily carve out BPM revenue.  However, what I hear on back channels from more than one vendor is that the big vendors are taking dollar share from the smaller vendors, and that the market is also growing nicely. I’ll be interested to see what Gartner and Forrester have to say in their reports on the subject when those are updated.

Jacob Ukelson reports that ActionBase is retrenching in the Israeli market and focusing on professional services operations.  With today’s ASPs for small enterprise software companies, this isn’t surprising – likely much (all?) of the real profit comes from the professional services operation.  Cost of sales for enterprise software is high – but yet there is downward pressure on Average Selling Price (ASP).

Appian reports good results from the first half of 2011 as well:

• “The company signed 34 new-name customers across government, financial services, healthcare, energy and other industries” – Unfortunately, it isn’t clear to me what “new-name” customers means.  Perhaps special terminology withing Government purchasing circles.
• “Sales orders for the Appian BPM Suite grew 158 percent over 1H 2010.” – Unfortunately, it isn’t clear if this is the # of orders, or the US Dollar value of orders… Obviously one interpretation is much better than the other interpretation.
• “… with Appian Cloud orders growing 181 percent over 1H 2010.” – Again, number of orders or Value in US Dollars?

They also call-out some of their accomplishments in cloud and mobile BPM – well deserved pats on the back.  But I do wish I could get to the bottom of the numbers they’re reporting.

Dave Brakoniecki is also a little frustrated with Appian’s specificity: 

The problem is:  Those three numbers are all the information in the release.

No information on absolute customer growth or way to extrapolate into any actual financial performance. I’d love to know how many developers they currently employ and how many salespeople.  What is the trend on all these metrics?

As one of the last pure play vendors standing, a full set of Appian results might have provided interesting insight into the trajectory of the sector.  Tibco, IBM and Pega all have all sorts of other product lines to complicate the picture. Appian might have provided a pure proxy for the BPM market generally.

Still, 34 new customers is more than 1 per week in 2011 so I guess we should expect some good case studies in the coming months.

Unfortunately, this private company specificity isn’t anything new… even with the Appian results in 2009.  In fact, if you look back at those results, there was talk about international expansion (which, as I noted back then, is more challenging than it looks).  Subsequent reports I haven’t noted any discussion of international, and the numbers aren’t apples to apples. The only thing that is truly clear from the release is that Appian is acquiring customers at a rapid rate.  We can’t tell if it is a good business, but it is a good growth rate of named customers.

Speaking as another private company, I’m not sure we want to release revenue numbers publicly either.  But then, I’m not sure anyone is trying to extrapolate from our numbers to determine if the BPM market is healthy or not.   Directionally, things are good for services firms across several vendors.

I’d love to hear from people about what they think the real #’s are for BPM software for all of the BPM vendors out there – IBM, Pega, Oracle, Tibco, Progress, Appian, and the other independents / pure plays.  Drop me a line if you think you have a read on any of these.  Or comment anonymously!