Sandy Kemsley has a few good updates on these topics.

In the first, she releases a review on IBM’s BlueWorks online community for BPM.  Some of the interesting tidbits:

• IBM BlueWorks uses Flash.  Interestingly, Lombardi started with a flash interface (and it was a very slick prototype) and scrapped it for GWT/Ajax.  Why?  Because Flash was just not stable enough to support what they wanted to do (even in the early stages), and they could see that they were going to run out of “room to run” with Flash, whereas in GWT they felt the sky was the limit in terms of layout and functionality over time.  Quote from her blog: “The process designer is Flash-based, and it only took me about 5 minutes to crash it; luckily, it saved as I worked, so I didn’t lose any work.”
• She gives pretty good marks to the content they included, which might form the basis or significant contribution to a CoE.

Speaking of BPMN modelers in the cloud… Sandy followed up with a good post about why locating your hosting services in different locales matters (a lot) to customers.  Although I can point anecdotally to data points (companies) that don’t have an issue with the location of servers (unless it affects performance), I can also attest that quite a few customers in other geographies *do* have an issue with hosting location.

Hopefully as these services mature they can offer more options for their customers.  Certainly IBM has the global reach to put its cloud / community offerings in as many geographies as it needs to to be sufficient for its customers.

The news hit the wire this morning (early for me, as I’m sitting in San Francisco this morning).  I got a phone call at about 5:20am PST to give me the news (thanks, I think?!).

The Lombardi press release touts a shared belief in customer success, a good product and culture fit, as well as good ole market opportunity:

“Any discussion on business improvement inevitably leads to improving the processes that are at the heart of every company,” said Craig Hayman, general manager, IBM Application and Integration Middleware. “Recognizing this, IBM has strengthened its presence and investments in business process and integration software to meet these growing client demands. Lombardi fills out our company’s portfolio in this key area.”

Lombardi already supports Websphere, and  was an early adopter of the app server in the BPM space (I can testify, I was there with Lombardi’s first Websphere clients).  In Austin, we’ve certainly seen a history of IBM successfully acquiring and expanding software companies that were acquired (Tivoli and Webify come to mind).

I’m sure there will be more news as the day(s) go on, I’ll try to just keep this post updated with the latest, unless something comes up that deserves an entire post on the subject.

Congratulations to the Lombardi team, who have been breaking ground in the BPM space for years now, and yet staying focused on making customers successful, not just on the latest bell or whistle on the product road map.  I think there’s a good chance, depending on the structure of the takeover, that some of Lombardi’s DNA will rub off on the BPM-focused parts of IBM.  I can see the effect Webify has had on IBM’s efforts, and I always thought Lombardi’s and Webify’s products would make for an interesting combination. Now we’ll get to find out, I guess!

More to come…

IBM press release here.

UPDATE: 12/16/2009 7:20am PST
Keep up to date with what the analysts (and others) are saying on Twitter:

And then we have a post from Phil Gilbert on “The Second Decade of BPM“. Phil’s take on where BPM is headed, with an interesting look back:

I can’t begin to convey the impact this will have on how and where BPM will be practiced, going forward. In the blurb above on this blog site (which was posted when I started this blog in 2005), I said that by 2010 process will be the primary prism through which large companies view themselves; and that by 2020 the management of process will be “second nature.” The first of those milestones has come to pass: process is not simply the way business operates itself, but manages itself.

Phil has a pretty good sense of the big picture.

Second, because Lombardi has focused on the business user, we have also focused on how to engage and support the business user. The work we’ve done on culture, change management, governance and BPM methodology is the best in the industry. Lombardi University and its role-based curriculum, along with tiered certifications and advanced mentoring, means that Lombardi can help IBM scale their business customers more quickly into the world of BPM. Lombardi’s On-Demand Assistance program is also built from the ground up to allow fledgling BPM teams built on business-first principles to still have a technical safety net under them.

This quote illustrates for me what I hope Lombardi can bring to IBM. A better understanding of how to support the business and help them achieve success via BPM, and a better sense of what BPM really could mean for the business world.

UPDATE 12/16/2009 8:45am PST
Austin Startup is carrying the standard press release.

And ebizQ has already launched a forum topic on the subject.

UPDATE 11:35am PST: More great coverage and viewpoints:
Dennis Byron discusses the acquisition, and is focused primarily on eliminating one more option from potential customers, and the inexorable force of consolidation.

Redmonk gives props to the Austin software and enterprise scene, as well as to the deal-making by IBM. The big question is how well IBM can incorporate Lombardi without losing its DNA.

Miko Matsumura posits that this might have been a firesale based on the language of the press release. Could be, Miko has more experience with this than I do. Regardless, I think the timing was good for IBM because I expect 2010 to be a big year for BPM software.

Sandy Kemsley chimes in with the best run-down of the analyst call.

Update EOD 12/16/2009:
David Moser of Australia weighs in. He points out which communities might win or lose, based on this deal going through, in particular which customers. But he also points out:

And with what should be a significant boost to their market, some of the biggest winners could be Lombardi service providers. Watch out for skills shortages.

I happen to agree, that service providers (e.g. BP3) could be well positioned to benefit because, no doubt IBM can sell more of the same product with its much larger sales channel. It takes time for people to ramp up on a BPM product. For a time I expect there will be exacerbated shortages of Lombardi BPM skills, but of course we’ll try to help as best we can!

Bruce Silver also comments on the deal. The tone of Bruce’s post (and some others) is a bit somber – I think some of the folks out there were rooting for a Lombardi IPO or for a deal that made it more clear that Lombardi would still be providing leadership in the BPM space from a “vision” perspective. There is an emerging consensus among outsiders that “departmental” is a losing strategy. I think if it is a pricing/marketing strategy it has legs – potentially target lots of smaller installations to service departments, but if it is reflected in technical direction of the product it could be a real problem. There’s no reason the tech can’t scale much bigger than a department, but its still up to IBM-Lombardi to decide what the market positioning and pricing breakpoints are.

Tony Baer’s take on the acquisition titled “Early thoughts on IBM buying Lombardi“. His emphasis on Lombardi’s chief advantage to IBM is its simplicity – making it possible to address the business directly within the enterprise. He’s looking for the integration of Blueprint and Blueworks to be a good indicator of how this purchase is going to work out.

UPDATE 12/17/2009: Well the blogs keep rolling in with new thoughts or analysis.

Jaisundar’s take is that blueprint is a key piece of the puzzle by widening the user base for BPM and creating a demand funnel. So much comes down to how IBM handles it and whether they keep the Lombardi DNA, while adding to it their massive sales channel synergies.

Meanwhile, Richard Watson has a couple of witty posts on the subject of showers (listing the # of bpm products and related products IBM has purchased as an embarrassment of riches and portfolio overlaps – but also, market clout. In a previous post, he makes the best statement about this subject: “If IBM wants to become the leader in BPM, they need to get out of the data center and start thinking like business people.” – This is exactly why people are excited about the merger, and why they’re worried. Lombardi is not stuck in the data center mindset. Will that business-focus be lost in the merger? That’s the real fear.

And Derek Miers, well-respected for his thoughtfulness on business process and business improvement, took a look at this merger and concludes:

While the choice of dance partner was a little surprising, the desire for a liquidity event in the Lombardi management team was there to see long ago. They touted an IPO around this time, but in the current market that was always going to be difficult.

IBM brings the broad base and ability to grow. Lombardi brings market cachet / credibility that is hard to quantify – but everyone in BPM knows Lombardi and they’re well-respected. Derek’s take on Lombardi’s success:

As I have said to many other vendors, when people buy BPM products, they buy the promise of success. And I am sure Lombardi’s success in the market is as much down to that aspect as it is their leading technology stack. They help their customers understand how they will succeed in meeting their business objectives (rather than touting the beauty of their technology stack).

That’s exactly the point – the culture that Lance and I (and execs at Lombardi) tried to create in the services organization was around business objectives and customer success. Something we’ve endeavored to continue at bp3.

Update EOD 12/17/2009:
Clay Richardson of Forrester Research writes up his analysis, which includes:

Ultimately, this deal centers on the need for IBM to develop a more compelling story for the business. In many ways it is further validation of the IT-to-BT transition that we are seeing within the enterprise.

IBM already had their story down for the CIO and needed to develop a more compelling story for the VP of Operations, and the VP of Customer Service, and the VP of Procurement – in other words IBM needed to establish a stronger voice into the business. And this is what Lombardi does best as a leader in the human-centric BPM space.

If he’s right, this is good news for Lombardi and its customer-base (and prospective customers). He follows up his points with Phil Gilbert’s plan to push the envelope with Blueprint even further “to collaborate on scoping and discovery for enterprise process initiatives.” As he says, IBM is weak in that area, and there’s little overlap. His basic take is that this is a capability buy as much as a technical buy. If he’s right, it bodes well for the future of BPM, or at least the future of IBM BPM!

Update EOD 12/18/2009: You thought we were done with the updates? you were wrong!

Dr. Diaz, on the IBM BPM Blueworks Blog, gives another IBM angle on the acquisition – conveying a sense of confidence and positivity in the IBM strategy.

John Reynolds, of Lombardi and soon IBM, writes a pretty good defense of the “Department” positioning – after all, what is “bottom-up” BPM if it isn’t a department level solution that scales up to meet your enterprise strategy, vs. the top-down BPM approaches that IBM has been using so far:

It’s not really a technology issue – Lombardi’s solution scales quite nicely. It’s a methodology issue… Some tools really enhance the “Top Down” (Enterprise) approach, while others really enhance the “Bottom Up” (Departmental) approach. Offering both seems like a pretty good idea when you think about it.

Update 12/21/2009:
Jennifer Dubow (@jennifer_dubow) posts a link to an IBM F.A.Q. on the Lombardi acquisition. Hits all the high points with no muss, no fuss.

Update 12/22/2009
Neil Ward-Dutton of MWD Advisors recaps the responses of vendors, which generally provide for fun reads. Of course, if you read their blogs without, somehow, realizing their corporate affiliation you might fall for their bias without correcting for it. Its only natural for competitors to see this as an opportunity to try to steal a march while IBM / Lombardi are distracted by integrating two companies – but having been on the other side of this – it didn’t often work as well as we would hope – often the buyer was able to keep the momentum going in the 12-18 month timeframe.

Update 12/29/2009 Jim Sinur weighs in with Power Vendors vs. Pure Plays, positing that the Power Vendors are catching up. I don’t see the catch-up that Jim is mentioning, but I do see catch-up-by-aggregration and the question is whether any of the remaining pure-plays have enough heft to out-innovate the big guys. Obviously small vendors with a tight focus can continue to outpace bigger players in their niche, but the wide Pure Play field has been thinned with this acquisition…

Update 12/30/2009In the ProcessMaker Blog, Brian makes one of the most compelling statements about why IBM bought Lombardi (and although he didn’t address why IBM bought other Business* companies – e.g. iLog, FileNet, Cognos, Webify, etc. – the same logic applies quite well). The short version: it is about addressing markets, not technology. And if Lombardi addresses a particular market, and is scaling, then IBM can plug that into their vast sales and partner channel and really wring value out of it. The thesis rests on the assumption that the BPM market is hot – but that’s a safe one.

Update 01/06/2010 The debate spills over into 2010. Neil Ward-Dutton reprises his previous review with a more considered analysis and the summary is that perhaps IBM really is buying Lombardi to get a better “business-facing” solution – but that they just don’t want to admit that blatantly in their external positioning. Its an interesting read.

Update 01/08/2010Gartner’s Janelle Hill and Jim Sinur report on the acquisition for Gartner. Basically they advise getting ready for a move to Websphere if you aren’t on it already, in a timeframe of two years, and tout the BPM DNA acquired in the Lombardi acquisition.

Lombardi just released the December update, and it takes the previous enhancements a bit further:

• More analysis visualization work was done to make this more intuitive.
• Better printing options (print to PDF is actually even more useful than printing to a printer in most cases)
• More user administration options (this will get increasingly important as the number of Blueprint users and collaborators continues to grow.  I wonder at what point it will make sense for Lombardi to look at incorporating something like Conformity into the solution.

Having used blueprint a fair amount lately with some more complicated models (not large, mind you, but more complicated), I can see a need for the process diagramming portion of Blueprint to get some help to make those diagrams more readable.  The models occasionally get to a point where they aren’t readable because of crossing lines or all the interesting points of reference being off-screen.  This is a problem in any modeling environment, but the reason it is so noticeable in Blueprint is because it has all this auto-draw functionality that does the layout for you – so when it doesn’t do what you want, you really notice it. Not sure if smarter layout algorithms or just more user-control is the answer.

Also it would be nice if comments were more obvious (visually) on the map, rather than requiring clicking on an item’s Details to find out if it has any comments.

Also, I recently used a brainstorming tool that a customer was using to model business entities and business entity lifecycles.  Although it is a completely different style of modeling than Blueprint, I believe it would fit in the mission of Blueprint to supply a good modeler for Business Entity Lifecycle.  Why?  Because often a process is working hand-in-hand with entities that have state, lifecycle, etc.  But BPMN and Process Maps are not good at accurately capturing what those states are (not just the states that trigger something in the process, but the whole universe of states).

There was a pretty interesting case study for process collaboration shared on the Lombardi wiki recently.  Worth a quick read.  Tools like Blueprint are going to make this kind of story increasingly common.  Mostly people think of these BPM SaaS Collaboration tools as internal consensus builders, but in this case they’re using Blueprint to create consensus outside the four walls of the company, and to communicate or broadcast information as well.

With the new notification features in Blueprint, this will be an even easier use – I get quick summary emails of changes made in processes or projects that I’m watching.  Its a quick way to keep tabs on what’s going on, and fits SEARHC’s use case perfectly.

Also, I note on Lombardi’s blog that they have two finalists in the 2009 Global BPM Excellence Awards.   Congratulations to Lombardi and their customers on the achievement.

Lombardi’s October 2009 Blueprint Update was just announced.  Seemingly minor changes, but with interesting implications…

I would list them in reverse of the order Lombardi has listed them in their announcement:

First, increased notification options to keep you abreast of process modeling updates in your domain.  Of course, I’d like to see an RSS feed as an option rather than just email-focused options, but combining the email notifications with a good email filter and you can get about the same result.

Second, additional properties to track against the activities of your process.  Identifying systems, cycle time, cost, etc. That’s great… but by itself it is just documentation…

Third, leveraging those properties for heat-mapping and analysis of your process.  This is actually the whiz-bang feature of the release, and shows how a small incremental improvement on a good foundation can really change the way you look at a tool.  Prior to the analysis/heat-map, odds are you might just enter the data because it is “the right thing to do” to document the process for posterity (or for yourself).  Now you have a reason to do it that is for the analysis of improvement opportunities. I’ll point out, however, that without reading the release note, it would have been easy to open Blueprint and not even notice the “Analyze” button, and the fact that you can choose which attribute to base your heat map on is easy to miss.  But analysis mode works equally well on the process mapping view as well as the BPMN diagramming view.

What’s exciting about this release is that it offers a real reason to capture valuable data about your process… and it also opens the door for feeding information from your executing processes in Teamworks back to Blueprint for analysis (technical challenges remain, but it becomes increasingly obvious that this can be done).

We’ve covered Blueprint updates before.  For a summary, click here.

Over the weekend, Lombardi pushed out their August, 2009 Blueprint update.  This release continues Lombardi’s track record of pushing releases out every 6-12 weeks with significant improvements (and yet, without so many changes that current users get lost).

In the current revision, additional export options were added.  I was able to easily export my processes in an Excel summary format, as XPDL, and as BPMN 2.  The hardest part about doing this was just finding/remembering where the export feature was hidden within Blueprint (hint: instead of just opening your process, open a “project” and then you’ll get a view that lists each of the processes and gives you export options for each).  The help and/or forums will benefit from an update to guide users to this very useful page.

I always assumed that Lombardi would make it easier to import than to export from Blueprint, and admittedly the import features were rolled out first (from Visio and Teamworks for example).  But the export / publication features have caught up – to Powerpoint, Word, Excel, XPDL, BPMN2.  The last two representing the kind of structured export I wasn’t confident that Blueprint would support because those are also opportunities for other BPM tools to pick up the models for execution.  Clearly Lombardi feels confident that their end-to-end user experience and tooling will cause customers to use Blueprint and Teamworks in combination rather than Blueprint and other tools.  Lombardi claims this is the first shipping implementation of the BPMN 2 specification.

Earlier this year, I wondered out loud about the future of BPMN 2.0 as an exchange format given that Lombardi and a couple of other hold-outs had finally adopted XPDL 2.1 as a supported exchange format.  Lombardi reassured me that they still fully intended to support BPMN 2.0, and I recently had a conversation with Signavio (another vendor which supports XPDL -look for more on this in another post), who also stated their preference for BPMN 2.0 as an exchange format.

Full-text search is another feature that was added to Blueprint.  Not sure what technology they use behind the scenes but it seemed to do the trick for my searches.  The what’s new feed has been updated as well, but those and other refinements are a little more subtle – the kind of things you might not explicitly notice as being different, but you’ll appreciate being able to find things just a bit easier, in general (and *thankyou* for the longer process names – mine always seem to be a bit verbose, like my blog posts).

I prefer to call them BPM Collaboration tools.  Recently we’ve seen updates to Lombardi’s Blueprint, the release (into Beta at least) of IBM’s Blueworks (interesting choice of names, IBM), and the release of SAG’s AlignSpace.

Sandy Kemsley recently reviewed both the latest release of Blueprint, and the latest from SAG Alignspace.  I believe at least the latter was based on a Webex or walk-through, rather than on actually having hands-on-access.  Good capture of the strengths and weaknesses of each.  It sounds like Alignspace is more focused on community and less on modeling, and Lombardi comes at it from a collaborative modeling “point of view”.

I’m interested to see Sandy’s take on IBM’s offering as well, since she’s getting a good look at more than one tool in close proximity. This is a really valuable service the independent voices like Sandy and Bruce give us.

One interesting comment on Sandy’s Blog was from Terry Schurter of Global360.  He claims that these social sites are a recipe for disaster.  Well, certainly they won’t all succeed equally.  But to claim that the feedback from the user community on these sites won’t be useful misses the boat.  Lombardi and SAG won’t need to ask their users what they think (although I’m certain they will do so), they’ll be able to see for themselves how users are using their respective sites – which features are laying fallow and which ones are drawing attention and usage.  They’ll be able to introduce a new feature and observe whether it enhances user perception or utility. Terry discounts these benefits out of hand, which I think is a mistake.  It is a mistake to think that just a few experts at each of these vendors have all the answers for what should go into a product.

Having led sessions much larger than the one Terry describes (3 people), I can say definitively that there is a technique for adapting to larger groups of stakeholders and still driving progress – and two of the key ingredients are having a clear decision maker, and having an outside consultant or facilitator (someone who can’t be tarred with any particular internal politics or biases).  There are, of course, a whole host of minor adjustments to the process as you get a larger (or smaller) participation group. These social / collaborative tools should just give us better technical tools to augment what we’re already doing in conference rooms and videoconferences.

Bruce Silver has posted another update on model portability.  This is related to the previous discussion regarding XPDL, Lombardi Blueprint support, and model portability.

In this round, Bruce has time to really dive into the couple of aspects of the import that were not working, and tries to address them through some XSL judo.  Judging by the end-product screenshots he’s posted, he did a pretty good job at that.  The main issues were around losing lanes and XY coordinate mapping.

Bruce was generous enough to not only share the narrative of his efforts, but to share the end-product XSL as well (link available on his blog posting).  I think it shows (a) how close we are to real BPMN-level portability, (b) the fact that products still have a ways to go to support it properly (really, I have to write XSL to convert the models!?), and (c) how much harder accurate portable execution models would be given that these tools have different ideas about how steps in the process should be executed…

Thanks again Bruce!

UPDATE:  Bruce has an update on the model portability issues based on Diagram Interchange (DI) and BPMN 2.0.  He points out that some of the decisions made for supporting diagram interchange make it impractical to implement, despite being technically possible.  As usual, he provides good insight into the standards process for BPMN, and exposes some of the warts in the outcomes – hopefully it will result in some remedies in minor revisions to the specification.

I’ve been a skeptic of XPDL as the pre-eminent format for BPMN-drawn Models, but I’ve also been encouraged by Keith Swenson’s efforts to prove that it could be the de facto standard for BPMN model exchanging.

But it looks like my judgment that XPDL would only catch on with vendors like Lombardi (who have been beating the drum for BPDM and BPMN2 for some time) only if BPMN 2.0 didn’t sufficiently address the interchange problem might be a little off.  Lombardi just announced that its Blueprint July ‘09 release supports XPDL!  It could be that Lombardi is voting with its feet – perhaps BPMN2 doesn’t seem to solve the problem(s) they were hoping it would with regard to model interchange.  Or, perhaps they see XPDL interchange as the Right Now solution, and don’t see an advantage in waiting on BPMN2 support. After all, not only would Lombardi have to build the BPMN 2 export/import functionality, they would then have to wait on myriad other modeling tools to pick up the baton in order for there to be anyone to “interchange” with.

By picking up XPDL support, Lombardi Blueprint can now exchange models with a host of other modeling tools listed on the XPDL vendor site (perhaps Lombardi will now be added to the site).  Bruce Silver has already assessed portability between Blueprint and Process Modeler for Visio.

Update:  more info from Keith Swenson on his blog, regarding exporting from Blueprint and importing into Fujitsu’s Interstage BPM.

Bruce Silver wrote up a quick, thorough review of Signavio, a new BPM in the cloud offering.  Looks like it is primarily focused on modeling rather than execution, which makes comparisons to Lombardi’s Blueprint perhaps the most relevant comparisons.

As usual, Bruce’s sense of humor is on display (“You have to sign a click-through agreement in German to get started.  Oh well, who reads those things anyway?”).

One really good shot against Lombardi’s Blueprint in his review:  Signavio can export an XML document that represents the model.  There’s no such facility in Blueprint (though it can “publish” to Teamworks, that isn’t the same thing as exposing an XML output).  Bruce also points out that they have full support for BPMN 1.1 (whereas Blueprint only supports a subset), but Lombardi would argue that they’re providing a reasonable subset to keep the diagramming from distracting from the process at that level.  (Still, like Bruce, I’d like to have the full set of diagramming options for power users).

At any rate, its  a good read, and from the comment thread, Signavio is already working on some of the issues.

Lombardi just announced Blueprint’s spring release.  Looks like the key features are around Sharing and Linking, as well as controlling participant and author access.  Since the release doesn’t drop til Saturday, we’ll have to wait til next week to do a review of the new functionality, but once again it looks like the Lombardi team has managed to make significant strides forward in a quarterly-release format.

Simultaneously, they’ve launched the marketing for Teamworks 7.   In that marketing push they claim a 50% advantage in productivity over Teamworks 6, better visibility, and the ability to manage every aspect of the deployment through the Teamworks Process Center.  On the Features page, they have videos that really drive home the point of how well the new approach in Teamworks 7 should work.  I’ve seen demos of Teamworks 7 before, as this has been in the labs for a long time.  They’ve made a lot of progress in the last year on this platform, and they clearly weren’t trying to hit singles or doubles, but home runs.

Snapshots and Back-in-Time are features I just haven’t seen on other BPM platforms.  The fact that two authors can edit the process at the same time, while preserving every single change as a restore-point, really removes constraints from collaboration scenarios.  Traditionally you version things in files and check them into VSS, CVS, Perforce, etc.  But Teamworks 7 takes an approach to “Versioning” that follows the Blueprint example:  snapshots, change-history, audit-trail, etc.  Its much more robust than previous versioning options.  You can even run the process “as it was” at some point in time, rather than as it currently is.  The fact that all of this is baked into the authoring environment makes it much easier for process development teams to take advantage of it.

They’ve also amped up the re-use opportunities by making re-usable toolkits easier to access.  These toolkits are separately versioned, and a process can be configured to use a particular version of a toolkit, rather than being forced to use the most current toolkit version at each point in time, or forcing the process author to micromanage the connections between processes and toolkits.

Of course, I’d like to see Teamworks make the UI still more flexible – perhaps by exposing more AJAX-oriented tools for building mashups that include Teamworks processes.  The portal is still a bit too monolithic for my taste.  But this is perhaps one area where stood pat with essentially what they already have.  Reporting also didn’t get as much attention as I might like – Teamworks already provides great support for tracking data, but some out-of-the-box toolkits for connecting to various visualization technologies would make this data more accessible.

In the new website launch, one of the features are the videos interlaced with the header of each page, featuring various folks at Lombardi giving 1-2 minute explanations of their programs.  Its cool, but it is almost disturbing when they come to life without some kind of video bounding box!  (okay, maybe that’s just me).

The only thing I wasn’t clear on for Teamworks 7 was the General Availability date – Blueprint’s release (Saturday) was published and sources tell me Teamworks 7 will be available in some form in just a few weeks…

UPDATE : wow, quite a few more articles about Lombardi’s new releases lately.
From ebizQ, CBR on Lombardi Revs is Product Suite, and the PR release on Lombardi University, and another article on the UK Register, and yet another reprint of the Teamworks release on Intelligent Enterprise, with one on Blueprint here.

Looks like I wasn’t the only one who noticed that IBM picked a name for their new “social BPM” site that sounds suspiciously like the most familiar name in that space – Lombardi’s Blueprint.  In my previous post, I noted that the naming seemed a bit suspicious (IBM’s BPM Blueworks) in that there’s no particular reason to include the word “Blue” in the name…

Meanwhile, Jim Rudden, VP of Marketing at Lombardi, responded on their blog:

In particular, we could not help but notice the name similarity with Blueprint — our cloud based process mapping and modeling application that has been on the market for two years. Now, before you call me paranoid, know that we average several thousand hits to our website per quarter from IBM labs in China, Italy, Germany, Canada and the US. And we get dozens of requests for Blueprint accounts from IBM Labs across the world every quarter. So, at the very least, the IBM team was aware of Blueprint — if not imitating it. They are not the first to follow Blueprint’s lead — and won’t be the last.

Jim doesn’t pull too many punches in his response to IBM’s announcement.  It is certainly interesting that IBM labs are hitting Lombardi’s Blueprint so frequently, and requesting so many accounts. He has some substantive arguments about whether IBM’s release will really “democratize” process modeling the way Lombardi’s Blueprint purports to do (its a good read whether you agree or not).

Meanwhile, Forrester’s business process blog has made note of the IBM announcement as well, in a post titled “Not Your Daddy’s IBM” by Robert Richardson. He accurately describes IBM’s participation in the BPM market circa 2006, and concludes from the announcements at their annual user conference that IBM now “gets it”.  I think it is reasonable to assume that IBM picked up some new BPM-related “DNA” with some of its acquisitions – notably that of Webify here in Austin, TX.  But IBM is a big company, and change comes slowly.  Although I think BPM makes even more sense for IBM to focus on than SOA, they have, instead, been beating the SOA drum for the last 5+ years.  So I think we’re justified in taking a wait-and-see attitude about announcements, and wait to see the shipping products.

IBM is due to release BPM Blueworks on June 26.  Lombardi is about to deliver a new version of Blueprint as well (they ship new versions approximately every quarter, and Blueprint has been live for over two years now).  Hopefully IBM will offer trial versions so we can do a bit of a comparison at that point (and maybe a few more fireworks).

Bruce Silver just posted a review on IBM’s BPM BlueWorks.  It doesn’t “ship” til end of June, so we can’t play with it yet but apparently Bruce has had a sneak preview.

It sounds like  interesting stuff, and surprising (to me) coming from IBM.  I can’t help but think that people will be especially interested in IBM’s cloud/hosted offerings because anyone who has had to install IBM’s software will be happy to avoid either doing it or paying IBM to do it for on-premise installation. I can also see some instant name confusion with another SaaS offering in the BPM space:  Lombardi’s Blueprint. One wonders if there just weren’t enough adjectives for this kind of software so “Blue” just had to be used…

We’ll have to take a look once it goes live and see if it lives up to the high expecations Bruce has set!

I don’t have a lot to add to Forrester’s review of Blueprint, but I thought it would be worth linking to here.  First, Lombardi’s blog includes a reference to it, and if you want to get directly to the article just click here.

We’ve had several previous posts about blueprint and its reviews, which you can find right here.

Lombardi’s Blog includes links to a couple new Blueprint reviews.  Just thought we’d provide relevant links here:

Lombardi’s post about Forrester’s review here.

And then a post about the BPMInstitute.org’s review of Blueprint here, and the actual review by BPMI.

Finally, Lombardi posted an entry about the February update, which has a few good, minor tweaks while apparently saving the good stuff for an April/May update.

I ran across Colin Canfield’s blog entry “First impressions of Lombardi Blueprint” today and thought I’d share the link for two reasons – one, it reads like they are fresh impressions from just having used the product, and two, he has some experience with other tools (specifically he mentions Aris).  Unfortunately his blog only posts once in a great while, which explains why I hadn’t found it before.

Among the strongpoints from his point of view:  being SaaS and well-suited to collaboration, smooth transitions from a process listing view to a process flow view (BPMN) to a process documentation view.  And he compares it favorably to Visio, which is always a good start.

Among his complaints: lack of support for XPDL, requirement for named users for collaboration, and the re-use of artifacts within the diagram (for example, inputs and outputs).  (To this latter point, one could argue that sometimes tools get too much in the way of the user in order to force re-use, and that blueprint avoids this trap.  However, there’s a good argument for supporting both types of editing in a tool – one that encourages/requires re-use and one that allows more free-flowing editing).

Lombardi just announced the latest release of Blueprint, their SaaS process mapping / documentation software.  I just read through their announcement, and logged in to check out some of the features for myself.

The attachments work just as described in the video included in their announcement.  Pretty easy to do, and they stay “in context” in your process, which is also nice.

The password management is a good feature for those who have group accounts, and its one of those “of course” features once you see it (as in, of course we should have this!).  However, what I really want to see is still a better way for two licensed blueprint users to share content, and possibly revoke that access later.  This would allow, for example, a customer to add a consultant to their blueprint access list for a period of time, and then remove them when the project is over.  Or vice versa – I might want to share a process template in Blueprint but then revoke access later.

Unfortunately, this kind of cross-account sharing needs to be fine-grained, I’ll want to pick-and-choose which processes are being shared, rather than having an all-or-nothing approach (or just the nothing approach for now!).

Still, as they say in the announcement, the next release is 6 weeks or so away, so maybe next time! There’s a forum in which you can suggest and discuss features, but I can’t make out from looking at it which features are being planned next, and I don’t see a mechanism for voting features up or down the priority list except in free-hand text commentary. Lately the theme has clearly been around more robust documentation.  I wonder if attention is starting to turn to user administration, or what the next direction might be.

Note:  We previously did a review of Lombardi Blueprint here, and if you want to see all of our posts related to blueprint, this link should do the trick.

Overview and What’s New

We had a chance to see Lombardi’s latest Blueprint release at Driven last week.  We’ve used Blueprint before in earlier versions, but after revisiting it this time around, there are definite, significant improvements.  I thought we’d share our early experiences with Blueprint here, and specifically our reaction to some of the new features added.  What’s new? Visio import and a good export/import into Teamworks are big pluses. Word export is another new feature, and of course PowerPoint generation has been there from virtually Day 1.  Archiving and a revamped project screen were also introduced.

The New Stuff

Visio importing has long been the “holy grail” for process modeling tools.  If I had a dollar for every time someone asked me if a particular BPM product could import Visio models directly I would be rich!  However, Visio import into a process execution environment isn’t always all its cracked up to be.  Visio diagrams tend to be quite unstructured, whereas BPMN is very structured, and executable BPMN is even more structured in form.  Moreover, Visio models don’t have enough information attached to them to be immediately executable.  It is possible to run into issues of “who owns this model” once you import the Visio (the business may have the expectation that they can keep making modifications and “reimport” into Teamworks, for example).  At some point, the implementors must take over the model and own it to produce something executable.  I’ve been working on some models for OMG certification and I thought they would be a fun (albeit simple) set of examples to import into Blueprint for a test drive.  Blueprint imports these easily and accurately.  I went back to the archives and tried importing some really awful process diagrams circa 2004.  The results weren’t pretty (the original wasn’t pretty), but Blueprint imported the models nicely (a visio diagram with 10 tabs and one process per tab).  Going to the Diagram View I was able to sort out the diagram into swimlanes and go from there.  Interestingly, when I imported a diagram WITH swimlanes defined, Blueprint created those swimlanes and participants for me.

Word export works great, but didn’t work so well on my Mac.  On Windows it produces a professional document that is a good appendix or a good starting point for the doc.  It also eliminates the need to maintain two separate documentation formats – you can use Blueprint as your source and export when you need a Word doc snapshot.  Moreover, you can “snapshot” the process in Blueprint as well, so that if you need to reproduce the Word export later, you can…

The diagramming is much improved, from process mapping to actual BPMN
diagramming.  The new clickable controls are more intuitive (though I had to unlearn some previous notions because I’ve been using Blueprint since the early Betas).  As before, quick double-click on any item takes you to a pretty robust editing interface for adding participants, owners, experts, inputs, outputs, problems, documentation…  Its the Process Diagram (BPMN) view that has really changed over time.  Clicking on any line allows adding a new activity, gateway, subprocess or event.  Blueprint successfully removes the need to obsess over placement of each item in the diagram. It tends to organize things in neat right-angles, taking care of horizontal and vertical placement within a lane (you pick the lane though). 

Project Details Page – This page is so different as to feel like a new page.  You can export powerpoint, word, excel process data, and BPDM all from a simple project page.  From this page you can also move a process to a different project, archive it, or copy it.  The value of these things is more obvious after you import ten processes from Visio!

The Tried and True

The PowerPoint generation is a nice whiz bang feature (only available in the paid-for version).  It lays out the first section nicely: goals, followed by process mapping, followed by opportunities. I’d like to see it turn out a process-diagram view as well, but that may be a little tricky to squeeze into a small space.  The appendix is aptly named for its content, which is a blow-by-blow layout of participants, inputs, outputs, and problems with each step of the process.  I found the color scheme in this section a little jarring compared to the relatively slick look of the rest of the powerpoint.  All-in-all, its a great timesaver.  It ran so fast for me that I thought it hadn’t actually done anything the first time I ran it, ad I can pull together a reasonably professional presentation out of it using the generated slides as a starting point, and putting my own slides referencing ROI or Business Case up front, along with some concluding slides about the opportunities presented and how to tackle them.

BPMN Diagramming.  I actually like the diagramming portion better than
Teamworks!  And collaborating on the same process isn’t just possible,
its actually cool.  You almost look for an excuse to try to be logged
into the same process at the same time so you can try to step on each
other.  Blueprint handles all the conflicting edits really well.  I’m
impressed!  And I understand a good deal of the diagramming techniques
in Blueprint may be adapted for Teamworks in Teamworks 7, which is an
exciting development for Business Process implementors. 

The handling of Revision History is a clear advantage over Visio or any other tool I’ve worked with.  As far as I can tell, every change I make is tracked as a revision, such that I can recover lost work if I accidentally delete something important by restoring from those automated snapshots.  But I can also create my own Snapshot and name it, a point in time to be easily remembered going forward.  This takes the risk out of collaborative authoring, and out of revisions in general, because you don’t have to be worried about version history.  Cycling between versions is simple and fast, so finding the right one isn’t too stressful.

Room for Improvement?

The product has a clean interface and a good look overall.  But there are a few parts I’m not too excited about (yet) that mostly have to do with teeing up projects.  First, when prioritizing problems, you can select severity (low medium high) and frequency (low medium high) but you don’t have the ability to track how observable the problem is.  A problem that is very difficult to detect is much more serious than a problem that is easy to detect, and implies a different type of solution approach.  It might seem too complicated for some, but no reason you can’t ignore the third column by leaving it always at “low” if the notion of detection/observing is too complicated.

Second, the overall analysis screen leaves something to be desired.  It wasn’t immediately obvious to me that the impact scores I was looking at were the impacts of solving one problem across the set of higher level business goals I had established.  Once that was clear, I found myself wondering how these impact scores were derived.  To the layman it doesn’t appear that there is any structural relationship between a timing problem and my goals, but if I give them both high weight then the impact score will be higher against that goal…. So it isn’t immediately clear to me if the idea is to look at this page and then revisit your scores, or if it is really supposed to guide me in determining which parts of the process to look at.  But as long as the correlation is a black box, I don’t trust it.

Third, a process as we know has multiple dimensions to it; it’s not just the activities and relationships. Blueprint would benefit from adding Lean Flow data elements like WIP, Cycle Time, Throughput Time, Takt Time, Lead Time, and Number of Operators to each activity and to the process as a whole and have these values actually calculated, not just string values (perhaps an advanced user view or analysis view). Blueprint would then be much more effective in prioritizing and triaging process improvement, i.e. It would close the loop on the qualitative aspects (Severity, Frequency, and the missing Detection) and now provide quantitative elements as well such as time and volume. Again, this would really address the need to represent the many dimensions of business processes.

But for the primary purpose of capturing process maps and diagrams and capturing living documentation about those processes, Blueprint looks like a great tool.  Its come a long way in one year, and I look forward to seeing what else is coming down the pipeline. The progress so far is encouraging for what is to come.