There’s been a lot of coverage of what it means for IBM to buy Lombardi.  Jaisundar proposed that this would upset the balance of power and cause more acquisitions… But perhaps the side effect he (and others) didn’t foresee was the positioning of the remaining BPM vendors (pureplay or otherwise) for the benefit of their suitors.

First we have Appian’s CEO posting here.  I don’t blame him for putting a stake in the ground that Appian is going to win, and positioning that the only two vendors left that matter are Appian and Pega.  Savvion might disagree, as would a few others, but nevermind.  He states that they’re the only ones strong enough to survive (by which, I would suppose he means financial strength, but he leaves that as an exercise for the reader’s imagination.  I don’t blame him for slagging IBM as killing innovation – in any acquisition like this, that is a very real possibility, and will determine whether this is a successful buy or not (at least, for folks who don’t work for IBM).  But methinks he doth protest too much, and may be trying to make sure that potential suitors remember that Appian still exists in case they want to get in the game by buying something.

Next, we have ActionBase, one of my favorite non-traditional BPM offerings.  In a previous post Jacob Ukelson made the argument that Sharepoint should be a better BPM tool than it is.  Now he argues that Sharepoint + Actionbase is that BPM dream team:  unstructured content + unstructured process… If that isn’t a pitch for Microsoft buying a nice Sharepoint add-on I don’t know what is.  Analysts are frothy thinking about how Microsoft or SAP might want to counter IBM’s move, and this is one option.

I’m not sure that unstructured process + unstructured data is the dream of every IT shop, but it is certainly a combination prevalent in many processes and organizations.  And of course those two offerings could work well together.

So it looks like everyone is putting on their finest Holiday Sweaters and looking to make a good impression for their potential sweethearts.  It’ll be interesting to see if there really is a wave of acquisitions or if this is it.

Its the creative destruction process of capitalism at work.  I just hope BPM doesn’t get lost in the woods in the process.

Interesting post from ActionBase’s Jakob Ukelson, positing that we need a process warehouse to store all the process data we produce.

As he puts it:

That led me to start thinking about the notion of a process warehouse – something to akin to a data warehouse but for processes. This would seem to be the next thing up the food chain (from a business perspective) from a data warehouse. It would essentially be a system-of-record of actual business process usage in an organization. It would keep actual data on process execution (in other words not just a static process catalogue). That would provide the actual business context of data usage – valuable stuff especially in this day and age of increased regulation (and with the increased focus on Business Intelligence and Operational Excellence).

In fact, this is very much the line of thinking that led to Lombardi’s introduction of the “Performance Server” in its BPMS- a capability for tracking interesting process data in context of the process.  It is a really powerful feature of Lombardi’s offering, and one that I’m surprised I don’t see in other vendors’ offerings.  Which also speaks to the fact that Lombardi could be pushing this message harder and investing more obviously in this key, differentiating aspect of its Teamworks suite.

Jakob notes that he couldn’t find references to “process warehouse” in the literature, despite the obvious relationship to a Data Warehouse – perhaps because Lombardi decided not to position the performance server as a “data warehouse”, and because other vendors just focused on the reporting side of the equation.  And it isn’t a data warehouse in the traditional sense – but maybe it should be.  Many customers feed the data from the performance server to their data warehouse for analysis, and the data is very high quality precisely because of its close correlation to the actual executing process.

Good to see someone else in the market thinking about these issues.

I’ve previously written about various Google Wave blogs and the SAP Gravity Demo, and continuing on that theme, Jacob Ukelson asks whether Google Wave is good enough to become a disruptive force as a “good-enough” BPMS, on the ActionBase blog.

I think there’s no question that Google’s Wave could serve as a “good enough” BPMS for many collaborative, informal, or as-yet-unstructured processes.  It could also serve as a useful collaboration companion to structured process.  One need look no further than two examples from IT history, which are still with us in many enterprises and in many processes:

• Microsoft Excel
• IBM’s Lotus Notes
• Microsoft Sharepoint

After several years of doing “kill-the-fax” initiatives, businesses turned their attention to these other bastions of bad process – Excel, Notes, and Sharepoint.  We’ve done so many projects to replace Microsoft Excel-based processes and Lotus Notes-based processes that we’ve lost count – and often we’re brought in to save a process that is running on Sharepoint.  I wish we had kept statistics on this as it would make for interesting trending data now that we have a large enough sample size.

Google Wave, if it addresses the various security concerns for storing proprietary information outside the firewall, could very well get adopted for informal processes – especially when the participants and managers of the process have not yet come to think of it as a process.  We could refer to these as emergent processes.  Perhaps the first time you do it, you don’t know if it is a one-off or a process.  After you’ve done it a few times, you have a sense that it is process.  After you’ve done it a few thousand times, you start to wonder how you can do this process more efficiently or less often…

However, Jacob goes further than to suggest that Google Wave would disrupt these more entrenched technologies’ use as a poor man’s BPMS.  He suggests that with a few minor enhancements it could fully replace a “full fledged BPMS”.  I don’t see that happening anytime soon for a few reasons:

1. It isn’t really Google’s intent to build a BPMS.  They don’t think of the problem Wave is solving as a “process”.  As a result, they’re unlikely to take it in that direction.  I don’t think you end up with a good BPMS my accident.
2. The structured parts of process are actually useful for larger organizations that actually have that kind of structure or volume.
3. There is a lot of magic under the hood of a BPMS that wouldn’t be trivial to recreate using Wave.  Not impossible, just not trivial.  More likely is a mash-up approach like the SAP Gravity demonstration.
4. It still sits outside the firewall of the corporation, and for all too many companies, that is still a regulatory problem, not to mention a security problem, for their data.

Having said all of that, Google Wave presents itself as an alternative for collaborating on processes to email, Sharepoint, Excel, and Notes.  I also think the real disruptive threat that Wave poses in the BPM space is to vendors that focus exclusively on the unstructured, user-specified processes – these seem like the lowest hanging fruit to capture in Wave.  On the other hand, I can see Wave being fertile ground for tools that inspect your systems to find out what processes you’ve *actually* been running by inspecting the data, rather than starting with a top-down design.  These tools may have a massive new datasource to mine for their customers, assuming Google makes the data available.

The concept of “Dynamic BPM”, when explained, is certainly useful.  But I’m not much of a fan of the term itself.  First, it is yet another buzzword that means whatever the vendor du jour says it means.  So all the vendors immediately do “Dynamic BPM” and incorporate it into their messaging.  IBM says that they do “Dynamic BPM” by automatically configuring the process in real-time (or read their own words here).  Oracle says they do “Dynamic BPM” by incorporating rules-driven process flows, dynamic service binding, and task management.  At recent BPM conferences, Dynamic BPM has been used to refer to “knowledge worker processes” or pieces of the process that can not be well-defined in advance (Anatoly Belychook’s blog describes this interpretation quite well, as well as a couple of useful design patterns within it).

Here’s where I see problems:

1. This name “Dynamic BPM” doesn’t really mean anything – each vendor can make up a definition that suits their software, or their competitive positioning needs in current sales cycles.  This just extends the already ambiguous use of the term “BPM”.
2. IBM’s notion of “dynamic” is really more about configuring the process based on early inputs to the process instance about its requirements.  A process that can’t do this doesn’t seem worth much to me.  BPM tools have been doing this sort of thing (in abstract) for at least 7 years.  However, they do have some technology to handle more complex factors (especially with respect to health care related industries).  My favorite part about IBM’s description of “previous BPM solutions” is that they “weren’t designed with agility and dynamicity [sic] in mind”.  That’s the kind of presumption you hear from someone writing product marketing content who hasn’t worked with those “previous BPM solutions” in the field (which, I can assure you, were often designed to be agile and dynamic).
3. Oracle seems to think if you have rules then you have “dynamic BPM”.  Last I checked, rules aren’t the future of BPM, rules have been around for decades as a business-enabling technology.  Applying rules to BPM isn’t exactly a new idea.  Just ask any of the former rules vendors, or Pega.
4. Dynamic BPM as a substitute name for “unstructured process” or unstructured subprocesses is more along the lines of Anatoly’s blog.  Its also the positioning of ActionBase and a few other vendors.  The issue here isn’t a “can you or can’t you” model unstructured process as part of an overall structured process – the question is how much does the BPM vendor’s software help you model or execute such processes.  Some BPM solutions help quite a bit (e.g. ActionBase), some help a little, some just don’t get in the way, and some don’t allow for this style of subprocess at all.

I think BPM Vendors need to keep focused on what their products do for business. A term like “Dynamic BPM” doesn’t tell me anything about what this feature or product will do for my business.  That’s not a surprise when the tail is wagging the dog (selling software to IT with IT benefits, rather than selling IT to business with business benefits).  Let’s drop the IT buzzword bingo and focus on what the business needs, shall we?

Recently read the post (and watched the screencast) on Intalio’s blog about their new “Process Table” feature.  The basic idea is that you use a spreadsheet to define your process, and then have the software “auto-magically” produce a running, executable process for you (screens and all). Interestingly, I saw something similar in Lombardi’s labs when I was an employee there, one of the “science fair” projects that one of my colleagues was showing off.  Not sure what happened to it as far as a shipping product idea, but it sure made for a neat demonstration.

I think in this family of product ideas, however, ActionBase (Click on the “take the tour” link) has a better answer.  At least, if you’re going to the depth of comparing one web video demonstration to another (admittedly not up to Dennis Byron’s standards of research!).  ActionBase proposes using Word and Email to create processes “on the fly” and relies on the software to manage the hand-offs for you.  However, ActionBase also appears to let the process adapt as it is running, if someone is assigned a task and needs to add additional items to the process flow.

Both of these ideas address processes that have lightweight technology requirements but very real process requirements.  Both pure-play and stack vendors would do well to provide better support for such scenarios, but its even more important for the pure-plays because they’re more concerned with directly assessing and meeting the needs of the business, rather than just IT.  IT-led projects won’t be as interested in “process-lite” style approaches like this, but in reality it is a great way to start extracting process out of the email stream or the spreadsheet-hand-off scenario…