This isn’t a review of Appian Tempo.  I’m a fan of what Appian is trying to do with Tempo and I hope there is more of this action in the BPM space.

Sandy Kemsley has a thorough review on her blog.  As usual, it covers the details, and the scenario of the demo quite well:

I had a chance for an advance briefing of Appian’s Tempo release last week; this is a new part of the Appian product suite that focuses on mobility, cloud and social aspects of BPM for social collaboration. This isn’t a standalone social collaboration platform, but includes deep links into the Appian BPM platform through events, alerts, tasks and more. They’ve included Twitter-like status updates and RSS feeds so that you can publish and consume the information in a variety of other forms, offering a fresh new alternative to the usual sort of process monitoring that we see in a BPMS. The free app for the iPhone and iPad requires an account on Appian Forum (the Appian user community site) or access to an Appian BPM installation (not sure if this is both an on-premise system and the cloud-based offering) in order to do anything so I wasn’t really able to check it out, but saw it on an emulator in the demo.

Sandy doesn’t pick winners and losers too often – reading between the lines she likes the indications of where Appian, and the BPM space in general, are going with mobile and social tech, but she’s seen enough demos not to get too excited.

Ann All has a further review (“I See the Enterprise Collaboration’s Future and its Name is BPM“), and is obviously impressed.  She attacks the shortcomings of products like Yammer, in that they can result in new information/communication silos rather than unifying an enterprise.  I can’t help but feel that that same fragmentation issue can be a problem for BPM-collaboration tech (How many BPM products does the average Fortune 500 company own?).  But Ann and Sandy both point out a key benefit of BPM + Social: tying interactions to real business events and outcomes.

Next up, Bruce Silver weighs in with his review, in which he not only praises Tempo but takes a few shots at the approach a few other vendors have taken (and it isn’t hard to guess which ones):

First, it’s really well executed.  Clean and smoothly integrated into the BPM environment.  Second, it seems a more reasonable implementation of the social/mobile idea than is typically offered by BPM vendors. [...] Tempo lets you create and track ad-hoc tasks, sure, but that (in my view) is not really BPM.  What’s important is it lets you also do real BPM, i.e. structured processes, within the same environment.  From your smartphone or iPad, you can perform tasks of  either type, often just by “swiping” the entry, quick and easy.   BPM vendors that insist on a separate “place” for users to do ad-hoc BPM are missing the boat.  Who wants that?

Let me take a shot at that.  The question isn’t, whether BPM users want a separate place for users to do ad-hoc BPM.  The question is, do regular users in the business want their ad-hoc stuff to be mixed in with other people’s BPM (which to them, may feel too heavy/complex so far)?  In other words, are we enhancing the existing audience’s experience with BPM (Appian’s Tempo) or are we trying to address a new audience (for example, the approach IBM has taken with Blueworks).  Both approaches have their merit, but I’ll admit Blueworks’ approach has less appeal to me as a consultant – that doesn’t mean that it won’t have *more* appeal to customers (for example, as a customer, we’re already using Blueworks internally and it took all of 5 minutes to get started). A couple other notes from his blog:

The hard part of BPM is the underlying architecture, the plumbing.  The “user experience”, not to diminish its importance, is technically easier to engineer.

Respectfully, I disagree. It *seems* like the underlying architecture is hard.  But, if it were truly hard, you wouldn’t see minimum half-a-dozen products that are pretty viable on the market.  I’ve worked in a product space where the architecture was actually hard.  We solved problems that no other vendor was even capable of solving.  Our engine would produce answers in seconds that took other vendors’ products hours, if they ever completed the computation.  That’s real differentiation in a hard space.  But in BPM engines, the differentiation is in the experience…

In fact, the underlying architecture and plumbing is becoming commoditized.  I don’t really care that much what engine is running my process… I care about the experience of developing and running my processes.  The experience is vastly more important than the plumbing.  And it is much harder to get right.  Not because it is technically difficult, but it is conceptually difficult to get right – and to say “no” to all the unnecessary stuff.  And once you get a bunch of code in place, it creates its own difficulty in changing to reflect the right experience. I’ll say it again, this is where the real differentiation is in BPM.  (And, to be fair, Bruce likes the Appian Tempo experience, which makes it differentiatingly good in his opinion).  Continuing on:

And once you face up to that, you don’t have to reconceive social/mobile BPM as something radically different, needing a totally separate product.  It becomes simply an alternative user interface that lets you extend real BPM to occasional users who wouldn’t otherwise participate, and enhance the value for regular BPM users by letting them perform process activities without being chained to the workflow inbox.  By making event streams and native smartphone UI a simple extension of the BPMS environment, not a whole “new new thing”, Tempo I think puts Appian in the driver’s seat in social/mobile BPM.

I like the idea of the alternate interface for BPM.  It was one of the first things that occurred to me looking at Blueworks (interfaces to existing BPMS installations for event feeds), but it is also so obvious that I’m sure it will happen in a future incremental release.  Actually, the technology to feed events into the stream from a BPMS (or Salesforce, twitter, or facebook) is quite easy across the products I’m aware of.  I like what Appian has done – but integration to their BPM suite isn’t going to be a selling point for customers who have already purchased, deployed, and invested in another BPM suite.  A separate, pluggable product might be preferred.  We’re watching the outcome of innovation being alive and well in BPM – surprisingly, at IBM, and less surprisingly, at smaller outfits like Appian and ActionBase, and in open source projects like Activiti.

It’s a very exciting time to be in the BPM business.  Congratulations to Appian for a great product release – I don’t mean any of my comments to denigrate their product offering – which I have not myself laid hands on – I hope their release is a success, and an indication or precursor of more interesting things to come from other vendors in our space as well.

Ann All poses the question: “Is CIO the Right Person to Champion Process Improvement?” on the ITBusinessEdge Blog:

I’ve written about this idea several times. It’s hard to argue against the need for a chief process officer. Yetmany organizations do not designate a specific function for process improvement. What’s less clear is who is best positioned to fill this role. Vizard writes it “may be the chief operating officer or even the CIO.”

I think a good case can be made for the CIO. Because IT touches the entire business, the CIO has a high-level, cross-functional view of the organization shared by few other executives. IT also tends to have more hands-on experience modeling and mapping processes than other areas of the business. CIOs clearly recognize the need for process improvement. They named business process improvement their top priority for 2010 in Gartner’s annual survey.

Honestly, I’ll take anyone at the C-level or just below who is passionate about process improvement and empowered to make a difference.  Having *someone* take the lead is better than no one at all.  And in some organizations, which are heavy on IT to support the business, the CIO may be particularly well positioned (as his or her staff may know many of the business processes as well or better than the business folks who use the software, because the processes are already “encoded” in legacy systems).

However, Ann goes further in her post:

Samir Gulati, vice president of marketing for business process management software provider Appian, is another believer that a CIO or other senior IT executive is the right person to champion BPM throughout an organization. Business leaders tend to focus narrowly on the needs of their own divisions and opt for point solutions, he said when I interviewed him recently.

A lot of software companies prefer for BPM to be led by IT.  Why? Because when it is led by IT they can go for the strategic sale:  buy this software and you can apply it to all of your processes that come up!  Many IT organizations look at this a bit like setting up a utility:  we’re providing “electricity” (BPM), so that the business can turn on the lights, computers, etc (improve process). Its a comfortable relationship for software folks to build with IT organizations.  Speeds and Feeds, features, bells and whistles.  Comfortably avoiding too much discussion of business-oriented ROI.  Proving that the current topic is an emerging meme, Mark McDonald of Forrester has written about this subject as well, advocated for an expanded role for the CIO:

Well because no other executive is responsible for the long term operating model and no other executive has the resources that determine company productivity in the long run.  IT is now a significant source of leverage across the enterprise as information spans operational groups and fuels processes, communications connects people and processes and technology offers new service channels and methods. and throng time.

But this doesn’t mean that the CIO is the ideal candidate in most organizations to lead process improvements.  First of all, the most important criteria are not which three letters make up the title.  The most important criteria are specific to the person:  passion, empowerment, and capability.  Put another way, the most important criteria is leadership, and these three elements tie into the ability to lead an organizational change.

I believe a broader study of BPM would support the empirical data that we have at BP3 that organizations that lead BPM initiatives from the business generally yield higher ROI, tackle more processes, and roll them out more quickly.  Perhaps the secret sauce is that the projects are initiated out of such a close relationship to a business need, combined with accountability to that same business organization.

Having said that, we will take leadership on process over none at all any day.  And if the right person happens to be the CIO, COO, CMO, President, CEO, VP of Sales – it matters not as long as they have the passion, empowerment, and capability.

Update: Even before publishing this, Ann has added to her own thoughts on her original piece:

Of course not just any CIO can lead a BPM effort. It would have to be a CIO who is well-versed in the overall business, not one suffering from technology tunnel vision. In addition, he or she will need great communications and change management skills, since introducing BPM requires folks to make fundamental changes to the ways they work. A CIO without those skills shouldn’t be the go-to person on BPM. But guess what? A CFO or COO lacking those skills probably won’t fare any better.

Like most questions, I think there might be no one right answer to who should lead a BPM effort. lt will vary from organization to organization, depending on the skill sets of their executives.

This sounds much more in alignment with our own thinking at BP3.

(Thanks to Sandy Kemsley for this link.)

Ann All writes that companies are increasingly opting for automation over outsourcing:

Is process automation the new offshoring? I made that case several months back, noting that companies may increasingly opt for automation over outsourcing as a cost-saving measure.

I cited a New York Times interview with Infosys CEO S. Gopalakrishnan, who shared his belief that advanced automation eventually will eliminate many of the labor-intensive, back-office functions now being performed in India and other lower-cost countries, and my interview with The Hackett Group’s Erik Dorr who told me “the biggest competitor to globalization is automation.”

In my opinion, outsourcing (off-shoring) delayed the adoption of many automation technologies and projects.  Quite simply: for a while, it looked cheaper to get less expensive labor, than to increase the productivity of the existing workforce through automation (or, more generally, cap-ex).

But, inevitably, as the cost of human capital around the world gradually averages upward – especially for skilled functions – and the cost of automation is, in many ways, declining – thanks to SaaS, BPM, SOA, etc. – attention is turning to automation.

Growing businesses focus on automation as a way to free their scarce, knowledgeable workers to focus on value-added activities.  Mature businesses focus on automation as a way to reduce headcount or reduce the skills required to perform a specific function.

In the short-to-medium term, this is going to hurt employment.  But in the long run, these advances will make each unit of labor more efficient, and at least offer the possibility of more hiring in the future.  Past experience in the US has shown that while employment may decline in one area, new job markets open up as human capital (people) is freed up for mundane work to do more specialized work.

The bulk of the jobs HP is eliminating will likely come from operations it acquired from EDS in 2008, a purchase that made HP the world’s second-largest provider of commercial technology services, behind rival IBM. HP has already cut nearly 25,000 former EDS jobs. HP’s services division is now one of its biggest sources of revenue and profit, accounting for $8.7 billion in sales and $1.4 billion in operating profit in 2010′s first quarter.

Sadly for those involved, those 25,000 jobs are unlikely to come back.  But the economy in similar situations, historically,  provides other opportunities that mean the overall output of the economy grows faster than the number of people employed.

Unfortunately many people assume that BPM is all about workforce reductions.  But BPM is just as much about planning for growth or peak loads, better customer service, regulatory compliance, visibility to operational data, elimination of errors and defects.