IBM has released a new update to BlueworksLive, on December 17th.  We had a preview just two days before it went live to discuss some of the thought behind the features. What interests me isn’t just the outcome but the thought and direction behind it.  Once again the specific features seem “small” but have interesting consequences and implications.

Starting with the shorter topics first:

The Word Export is much more pleasing to the eye than previous versions.  Having the graphics of severity and the diagram itself exported are a big help to the overall readability of the document.

The expand-all/collapse-all functionality in the Process Diagram is also convenient – especially when prepping to export a large diagram.

The BPMN export API works as advertised.  This is an important step to allow people to use BlueworksLive without feeling locked in.  After all, in a cloud “rental” model, one of the big fears is that your data is residing on someone else’s servers.  IBM needed to provide a clean way to get at that data and make it portable.  Not to mention, this lets customers apply some of their more standard SDLC to their requirements production in BlueworksLive.

First, there was quite a bit of attention given the Decision Discovery feature added to BlueworksLive.  I’d heard that this was coming, but I was picturing it as something that would be added to the automation features of BlueworksLive – I should have realized that the “Discovery” in the name implied that it would be part of the modeling (“Blueprinting”) part of the product.

The premise is that you set up a few Considerations (one or more).  The combination of these considerations is like a truth table.  However, BlueworksLive also lets you provide more than one conclusion – which is nice.  When modeling, we can label the column headers smartly, allowing the contents of each cell to be concise and simple (Yes/No, >$500/<$500, etc.).  Finally, we can label the conclusions well- “Adjustment Required”.  If we have more than one conclusion, it gets its own column to keep ideas separate.

A couple of surprising perks:  you can reorder columns and rows with a simple drag-and-drop.  Look, this makes sense given the point of the tool – flexible discovery of decisions.  But this is the kind of fit-and-finish often missing in enterprise software.

I also appreciated that they thought through why the cells should be free-form rather than constrained to integers or strings or a particular data type. The goal is to leave discovery unconstrained.  Plenty of time for constraints when you move into modeling for execution (had this been targeted at execution, you can bet there would have been tight treatment of data types).

Like David Brakoniecki, I think BlueworksLive is showing that it will live up to its promise as a BPM discovery tool.  Not because it does everything it needs to do today, but because IBM have shown that they’ll keep turning the screws until they get there.  His take on the impact of tiny changes at this point in the maturity of the product:

Now, at the push of a button, the process documentation and process diagram can be exported into a single word document. Basically, this document becomes the high-level scope of any potential BPM deployment or process improvement initiative. All of the great power of Blueworks around social collaboration and process discovery now can painless produce a document to playback to the client or business teams for review and iterative improvement.

SaaS products really emphasize the benefit of incremental improvement.

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!

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

First, there’s Jim Sinur, of Gartner:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

The new Blueworks Live update came out over the weekend, and we took it for a test drive.  My impressions were pleasantly positive – this is a more substantial improvement than the last go ’round, and in this case there is something for the user as well as something for the process consultant.

First off, moving the reporting functionality to the forefront (Work Stats) helps a lot.  We can now see how our processes are being used and the performance of those processes, without going to the administrative screens and digging into them.  Nice to know our process on-time performance is in excess of 90%.  Probably especially nice for our employees as the most commonly executed process is the vacation change/request process!

Getting the more mundane out of the way:  Being able to mark any page as your “startup” page is also helpful – because this is the kind of thing that changes depending on what you’re doing.  There’s also a handy “Items I’m Following page” which adequately does what it says.  The Glossary update was utilitarian, not too exciting for me personally.

The two updates that really shine to me are the new Process Templates, and the new Process Playback functionality.

The Playback Arrives

In the Playback functionality, you can outline different scenarios (paths) through your process, so that you can play it back a bit like a slide deck, except directly from Blueworks instead of exporting it to something like MS PowerPoint.  A big part of BPM is telling stories about the process, and getting engagement from the business as to whether those stories are right, valid, complete, irrelevant.  It gives us a chance to set up context, to explore issues, and get them on the table.  I think the playback feature is going to be very popular and powerful for facilitators of process improvement sessions.

To me, it is interesting that this feature parallels investments that Lombardi once made in its UI functionality in Teamworks (pre-dating Blueprint, Blueworks, and the IBM acquisition).  At the time, the product team had observed our professional services methodology of “the Playback” and how we would quickly stand-up storyboard screens in our process and play them through live for customers to get their feedback.  The development of UI Coaches and the Coach Designer was a direct outcome of building product to fit the methodology of BPM deployment.  It was a great fit and enhanced our ability to use that methodology.

I see the Process Playbacks in Blueworks much the same way:  it is especially powerful in that people doing process mapping and modeling previously didn’t have a good way to tell their story other than to put it on the projector and use their finger to point.  This approach will work much better over a Webex, for example.  This is the first improvement to Blueworks Live in quite a while that helps the process consultant as much as it helps a novice process modeler.

More Automation

Oh I know automation sounds like a bad word but trust me, it isn’t THAT kind of automation.  The 4 new process automation templates provided by IBM are great.  Truly, I’m impressed by what they’ve done.  My one complaint:  They’re hiding in the library.  As a user of Blueworks, I had no idea that new templates had been introduced (other than by reading press releases  and blog posts).  Moreover, I had to go to the template library and then filter / sort by “New” to find them.  There’s really no separation between templates of Automation, and templates of Blueprinting. That’s unfortunate because templates of Blueprinting are interesting, but not as interesting as the Automation templates.

Of course, the new templates aren’t doing anything you couldn’t have done for yourself using Blueworks Live.  Maybe that’s the point – to give you a sense of what you could do with it.  I customized the HR Onboarding process, and it is likely that we’ll use it going forward as our checklist for compliance (or possibly even for assigning to the new hire).

Taking a step back, what I find curious is that these lightweight processes are particularly appropriate for small companies like BP3 – I wonder how bigger firms will make use of these processes.  My guess is that they have even more lightweight processes to take on, but theirs won’t be HR onboarding or expense reimbursement.  Instead they’ll be taking some other lightweight processes (lightweight may not be the way to describe HR onboarding at some firms!)

Overall, a very solid improvement to IBM Blueworks Live.  You can definitely see the results of Lombardi DNA in this product group, but also the change in direction that was fostered by merging the Blueworks and Blueprint teams is evident.

On April 2nd, IBM is releasing another Blueworks Live update.  From the description on their blog, it sounds interesting, but we’ll be back on this space with a hands-on review once it is live.  From the blog, they’re introducing a few new features:

• Process Playback.  Looks like a better way to present scenarios that leverage the process you’ve defined.  This should be a fun one to play with, and it is an interesting use case that you wouldn’t get from a purely execution-oriented point of view.
• Glossary.  They’ve had this feature for a while, but apparently they’re updating the glossary with a few new features to improve upon it.
• Process Automation.  4 new process templates sounds intriguing, and a better interface for reports and finding work sounds good too.
• Navigation improvements. Well, this is the kind of thing where beauty is in the eye of the beholder. I’ll have to see how I feel about the navigation changes after they’re released.  Watching a video doesn’t really do it justice.

More info coming by Monday.

Keith Harrison-Broninski compared Social BPM and HIMS in an ebizQ article recently.  Actually it was more of a product comparison between Blueworks Live and  HumanEdj.

HIMS is Keith’s acronym for “Human Interaction Management System”.  I’ve not heard it used outside the context of Keith’s blog, and references to his talks and blog and product.

Perhaps my favorite part of the article is that he goes back to the tired complaint of the ACM crowd against BPM:

I’ll take it as read that the functionality described above applies well to low-level, routine clerical work.

Ah yes- that low-level, routine clerical work.

The target of a product like BlueworksLive is not the routine work, but rather the somewhat non-routine work that isn’t overly complicated to describe as a task list or check list.  It looks like Keith has confused the modeling functionality with the execution functionality (the modeling functionality comes with the templates he describes… but the process execution is all around simple ad-hoc efforts, no modeling required or allowed, really).

The main criticism of BlueworksLive, as an example of “Social BPM” is that it looks like a toy, compared to the mature HumanEdj offering.  It is a fair criticism, but I’d point him to Chris Dixon’s blog post on the subject of “toys” :

The reason big new things sneak by incumbents is that the next big thing always starts out being dismissed as a “toy.”  This is one of the main insights of Clay Christensen’s “disruptive technology” theory. This theory starts with the observation that technologies tend to get better at a faster rate than users’ needs increase. From this simple insight follows all kinds of interesting conclusions about how markets and products change over time.

Chris Dixon was referring to startups but I think the idea applies equally well to lots of new ideas.  As dismissive as I’ve been of some of the “new naming” around the BPM space, I’m not dismissive of the value that the new ideas can bring (I just abhor the bandwagon acronym effect…).  Social BPM isn’t a great name to capture what is being added to BPM by social networking features.  But it doesn’t mean that these ideas, in the BPM space, won’t take root and create value despite unfortunate names…

True to their word, the folks at IBM are updating Blueworks Live rapidly.  The January release brings minor modifications that continue to polish the main ideas in Blueworks:

• Blueworks introduces the concept of a “Glossary” – allowing an admin to provide descriptions of the properties that show up in Blueprint views and spaces, and to control which properties are viewed by users.  Additionally the possible values for a property can be defined.
• Enhancements to process automation – minor changes that just enhance usability of the existing functionality (due dates no longer required, comments can be added after process completion, improved search, etc.)

Now that IBM is demonstrating the regular release schedule is being maintained, we’ll have to keep an eye out for the updates that really alter the trajectory or utility of the product.  Watch this space for our thoughts when we see those kinds of updates.

Joram Barrez recently announced that the Activiti team has added the ability to define and run ad-hoc processes on Activiti.  The processes are directly deployable, so they’re first class citizens to Activiti.  This goes along with what I’ve said before, on many occasions: the use cases for ACM-style delivery don’t require a high technical hurdle.  There’s really not much keeping the leading BPM vendors from adding these concepts to their products, as Activiti has done with Kickstarter.

Joram makes the claim that with continued community involvement, the commercial vendors won’t be able to keep up.  However, the announcement of Kickstarter comes a few weeks after IBM’s relaunch of Blueworks, which included a similar “ad-hoc” process automation capability.  So I think the commercial vendors will still have their chance, especially in SaaS delivery modes. Regardless of who leads, the competition is clearly pushing state of the art.

Regardless, I’m gratified to see some of my thoughts pan out in terms of real, concrete software, delivered to the market.

Jacob’s post on what could cause ACM to fail in 2011 is interesting, especially in that it comes from an ACM proponent.  A couple of statements jumped out at me:

Here is the catch – business folks don’t really understand or buy platforms, they buy applications.

[...]

The biggest issue with ACM is that business process management suites, which for many are the platform of choice  for process implementation, are sold to IT. The IT department understands platforms but doesn’t understand unstructured process. On the other hand, the business understands unstructured processes but doesn’t understand platforms.

To me, this is interesting – because BPM also is (typically) sold as a platform as well.  Pega is probably the only BPM vendor of note that seems to take an application-first, platform-second approach to selling BPM.  It seems to have worked out all right for them overall.

Jacob’s concerns about the risks to the ACM market remind me of some of the risks I’ve pointed out myself over the last year in various forums, because his concerns are complementary:

1. It needs to be a platform sale more often than an application sale (I’m sure there are a few applications that might fit ACM, so I won’t conclude that there is no such thing)
2. IT people aren’t bought into ACM – perhaps just aren’t bought into it yet. You could say this is because the IT people don’t understand (the ACM-advocates’ argument), or you could say that it is because the ACM arguments aren’t compelling (the IT side of that argument)… of course, even the ACM advocates are IT folks, so that muddies the waters a little bit!

My concerns are around whether ACM is a market or a feature-set (as far as the software side of ACM goes – there’s also an approach to managing “unstructured” work):

1. It doesn’t seem to me that there’s a big technical barrier to add ACM capabilities to existing BPM platforms.
2. The BPM platforms that I’ve worked with are Turing Complete.  Meaning, within the context of the BPM platform, I can “program” anything another software program can do.
3. IT may not assign much $ value to something they perceive as being technically straightforward.

As a result, given Jacob’s business-side concerns (Businesses don’t often buy platforms), and given its proximity to BPM software, and given a real lack of a real technical barrier to delivery (the BPM firms certainly have the resources to invest to add ACM to their platforms if they desire)… it looks to me that one possible outcome is a very short market window for ACM to catch on as an independent software category.  We already see vendors like IBM adding ACM-style capabilities to their process execution in the cloud (Blueworks).  I think we’ll start to see these capabilities added to the open source BPM products like Activiti as well.

I can sympathize with the difficulty of selling a business proposition to IT, or a platform to the business – because this is exactly the space good BPM vendors have been straddling for the last decade.

My advice to ACM advocates – don’t worry about purity of your arguments and methodology, just be pragmatic.  If people think that all work fits into an overall structure (largely an argument about abstraction and organization – an IT argument), then explain that ACM may help address those parts of the work/process that can’t be easily structured, and explain how it can augment a structured approach.  Don’t worry about which fundamental principle of work is supreme.

So far IBM is keeping to their word that they’ll keep the updates rolling with Blueworks Live.  Another update just went live over the weekend, and IBM’s summary of it is posted here.  As one might expect, with an update coming a bare 4 weeks after the initial launch of Blueworks Live, there isn’t a lot of meat on the bone to this update, but there are implications if IBM continues the trajectory.

What was added is simply the ability to post updates to one’s private feed (presumably, to specific “Spaces” within your company space).  I tested it out in the BP3 domain and it works nicely and offers the opportunity for others in our space to respond.

With this change (and, no doubt, changes yet to come), Blueworks Live is picking up more of the features found in a tool like yammer.  Of course, for these discussion-style features to be meaningful, the usage has to reach critical mass within a team or company.  It will be interesting when one can comment on a process update in the feed, and have that comment also appear alongside the actual process instance (or model) as well.  (There is already a commenting feature within process execution screens – the ideal place to put those comments).

David Brakoniecki’s blog post echoes some of my own thoughts – IBM is showing signs of learning from the MVP (Minimum Viable Product) school of thought, quite a departure from the usual software development process at companies their size. In the comments on my previous post, Marco Brambilla has wondered aloud if it is “too minimum”… but I think it is just a matter of giving it time – and seeing what IBM comes out with next.

We’d been waiting for Blueworks Live to go live ever since we first heard about it in November.  Now that it is actually live… well, now what?

Why, review the reviews, of course!

First up: Sandy Kemsley:

Lombardi has always been at the forefront of the integration of social and BPM, although previously focused purely on the process discovery/design phase, and the IBM acquisition has allowed Lombardi’s social process discovery to be combined with IBM’s online BPM community to create something greater than the sum of the parts. For all my criticism of IBM, they have some incredible pockets of innovation that sometimes burst out into actual product.

and later:

Overall, although there’s nothing really new about this sort of easy sequential workflow design and execution, the user interface is clean and uncluttered, and pop-up tips on the fields assist the user on what to enter. Assuming that you can wrench your users away from using email for these processes, there won’t be much of a learning curve for them to create new processes on their own, and even less to use processes created by others. If you want to see this in action, there’s a Blueworks Live YouTube channel with a couple of videos on creating and participating in a process.

But she’s not convinced that Blueworks truly addresses the community goals that Phil Gilbert set out to address, nor that the different functions are well-integrated enough. Interesting comment thread where IBM explains why the tooling is different between process execution and “modeling”.  I actually agree with the justification, and I don’t see a reason to view the separation of complexity from simplicity as a negative.  I like doing to one place for process, rather than more than one…

Next up:  Mike Gammage:

Sandy Kemsley has a characteristically sound review on her Column 2 blog, and her verdict on Blueworks Live is downbeat.  She’s underwhelmed by the Twitter integration, the public and private streams, and the level of integration with the Blueprint BPMS engine.

I think Sandy’s blog comes across as downbeat because she starts with the positive (check my quote above) and finishes with the criticisms, rather than the other way around.  Mike’s central criticisms:

It’s Overly Democratic. Every enterprise wants its people engaged with process excellence and continuous improvement. But it’s a step too far to simply say that everyone should therefore be able to create and automate process.  [...]

Well, first of all – these Luddites (tongue-in-cheek) already define, and execute processes today!  Using email, spreadsheets, and word documents.  Since they already do it today, Blueworks Live isn’t making it worse – it is rather attempting to give those users more appropriate tools for the job.  He continues with point #2:

It’s a Governance Headache. I don’t see how governance, compliance, risks and controls can be efficiently managed in a world where an organization’s processes are automated in such a decentralized way by people who may be experts in their field but are novices in process design and management.

Again, given that these folks are doing this today, we’re not worse off.  In fact, we’re better off because the processes defined and executed in Blueworks Live are actually tracked, keep audit trail, and feed into reports in a centralized, governable space.  And if someone is abusing it, you (as site administrator) can revoke their access or reduce their permissions.

There is a real danger that IBM’s and Phil’s messaging could in a sense “devalue” the process improvement expert-  or even IT experts.  But having talked to Phil about this at length- the point isn’t to devalue the expertise or discipline of process improvement or IT – if the community functions well, those experts will actually become:

• more accessible
• more leveraged
• more valuable

Because it is easier for those with process knowledge to share it.  The processes that can be executed in Blueworks Live today are so simple that they simply don’t require process design expertise.  And that’s intentional.

I love Mike’s closing argument:

In that context, it’s difficult to see how Blueworks Live helps at all.  Would you dine at a restaurant where each chef did their own thing? A good menu has coherence.  A good restaurant creates the perfect customer experience by harnessing the genius and creativity of each chef de partie and their team together with the skills of the maitre d’ and his or her team. I don’t want beetroot for a pudding, or filet be boeuf Wellington served Thai style and with popcorn.

Actually, I’ve been dining at that restaurant my whole adult life.  Email, Lotus Notes databases, Excel spreadsheets, ad-hoc website forms.  Sharepoint “processes”.  Each “chef” doing their own thing – with the exceptions being a few excellent process-oriented software applications.  Blueworks may not be filet mignon, but perhaps it is fast-food?

My own summary:  For “version 1″ of the new vision for Blueworks Live, it is pretty good.  No one is completely satisfied, but the potential for something greater is there, and I have no doubt they’ll keep beating the drum by releasing updates every 6-9 weeks.  We’ve already “toyed” with it, using it for a vacation request process, for example.  I was a little disappointed the reporting was buried on the admin page, for example.  But otherwise it is clean and easy to use, with a LOT of room for improvement.  The key thing will be which improvements to say no to, not which ones to say yes to.  IBM is going to have to edit itself if this product offering is going to succeed.

(Side Note: interesting response from Phil in the comments section of Mike’s blog: execute to get documentation)

UPDATE:  In writing this, I omitted two other blog entries of note that I intended to include.

First, Phil Gilbert’s own blog:

The arc of history is clear: technology advances always insert specialists to use new technology, taking control from the original worker. Then, as the technology matures and becomes more accessible, people with more general skills gain access to the technology and regain control over their work. From farming to manufacturing to computing this has been the case. We’ve spent the past half century digitizing the assets of the business and that required, in essence, that control over those assets were assumed by IT. But now it’s shifting back, and BPM is the mechanism by which that move is most fully realized today. IBM Blueworks Live is a major step in that evolution. It doesn’t solve every BPM problem – by design! But it does solve a set of problems that have eluded IT for decades: how do we give our businesses the tooling to continue the flexible ad hoc processes they need in a changing world, while normalizing the information so that those processes are more efficient, more transparent and easy to build and deploy.

Meet IBM Blueworks Live: the new face of BPM.

And from David Moser:

All very worthy, but much less interesting than the next piece of news, which was the launch of Blueworks Live. This combines three elements – the Blueworks BPM collaboration community (blogs, wikis); the highly successful (Lombardi) Blueprint process discovery and definition environment; and a new workflow execution engine. All running in the Cloud and, apparently, available through your browser for a test drive from November 20th. (Yes, that’s this Saturday – perhaps one of the software world’s most specific launch dates ever…!).

In the comments Ian Gotts frets that some users won’t be happy only having access to “automated” processes and not to the modeled processes in Blueworks, but this strikes me as an unlikely problem for the real users.  Second, it is better to start with too little, than too much, in your product.  Wikipedia contains excellent links and content explaining Minimum Viable Product.

Sandy attended a sneak peak of Blueworks Live recently, and has reported on it in her blog:

They are trying to reinvent the public BPM community, while avoiding the problems that they perceive with other vendors’ community sites:

• They are mainly product support sites
• They have high membership numbers, but low participation
• A majority of the information is from the sponsor company
• The customer perception is that these sites are proprietary and biased, and that there’s already too many sources of information on BPM

I think they have some of the right ideas here – they’ve identified legitimate problems with the current approaches of these communities – but there’s still some work to do on defining what a healthy BPM community consists of.  I think they have a couple elements right, such as:

1.  A common thread tying it all together: BPM / Process

2.  A “safe” place to share (company spaces, or even more granular spaces)

3.  Don’t try to reinvent twitter, just leverage it

But the mechanics will take some work.  As Sandy points out, pro-level users of Twitter aren’t going to rely on BlueWorks Live to show them interesting tweets.  Having said that, however, how many people are going to add a column for “#bwlive” to their TweetDeck?  So it may be somewhat additive to the experience, but time will tell. Sandy says “It’s probably good for the Twitter newbies, since they haven’t figured out groups, hashtags or Tweetdeck yet; maybe that’s more representative of the expected user base.”  I think that’s probably right – more representative of the expected user base.  Most of the personnel I work with don’t use Twitter at all yet.

Like Sandy, I think their blog section needs to pull in content from other sources.  I think they could curate this somewhat by reaching out to prominent bloggers (like Sandy) and ask for permission to republish interesting posts (or set up a submission process for authors to bring relevant posts to their attention).

I think the real question for BlueWorks Live:  is this the Minimum Viable Product offering, to be improved upon in future releases, or do Phil and IBM believe that it is fully baked?  I believe it is the former, and that the intention is to keep releasing frequent updates and improvements, as they were doing with Blueprint before.

You can see our previous coverage of this topic here (our sneak preview was a little earlier, but we’re looking forward to just laying hands on the product and taking it for a test drive on Saturday).  BlueWorks Live announcement here.

MWD Advisors’ Neil Ward-Dutton has published a quick article on Blueworks Live:

The first represents a significant departure for IBM: Blueworks Live is now not only a platform for process discovery and modelling – it’s a platform for process automation and execution. Specifically: lightweight, immediate execution of simple approval worklists and checklist-style sets of activities though the quick creation of ‘process apps’. Process apps created on the platform can be immediately shared with other members of an organisation.

Look for more from MWD after the new version of Blueworks Live goes live on November 20th.

What is Social?

There’s been much discussion of late on “Social BPM“.  In particular, when should the magic “social” stuff happen – at design-time, or at run-time, of a process?  There has also been a significant overlap with discussion around ACM (Advanced/Adaptive Case Management), wherein proponents of ACM advocate putting more power in the hands of users to dictate the flow of a “case” through their organization (if I can use the word “flow” to describe something that isn’t, in their view, a process).

If we can pull together a quick assessment of the terrain of “social” BPM tools:

1. Those tools that offer an online community, a la SAG’s AlignSpace, or IBM’s Blueworks Beta, for process professionals.
2. Tools that allow for collaboratively building process models, a la IBM’s Blueprint.
3. Tools that allow for more collaborative run-time process execution (e.g. ActionBase).  It is this third category that has overlap with the ACM space, by virtue of putting users in control of the process execution, rather than process designers.

The big short-coming in the first category:  who wants to share their models publicly with everyone else?  If I have a model, and I think it is differentiating and good, I’d hardly want to share it for free, likely with my competitors.  And certainly my boss is going to look even less kindly upon sharing corporate IP. So these communities had a high inactive user count, low active counts.  (low, relative to the inactives at least).

The big short-coming of the second category:  why does the collaboration stop when the process model is finished?  For example, in IBM’s Blueprint, I can “follow” changes to any model I’m interested in – but why does the following stop when this model starts executing in Teamworks? (ahem, Websphere Lombardi Edition).

The big short-coming in the third category is that generally the tooling for collaboration at run-time isn’t connected with the tooling for process design in a meaningful way.

However, just because each area has a short-coming doesn’t mean that there isn’t any value – we’re just acknowledging the issues in each area.  You could list “traditional BPM” as a fourth category, and its shortcoming very well could have been a “lack of collaboration capabilities.”

So What’s Changed?

About a week ago, I was fortunate to get a sneak peak at the new IBM Blueworks Live, the upcoming combination (culmination?) of Blueprint and Blueworks.  There’s already good coverage of what is coming in the FAQ, in this IBM interview of Phil Gilbert, and in the coverage of his recent talks on the Next Decade of BPM (including Sandy’s coverage of the last talk, where he introduced the IBM Blueworks Live announcement).

Phil Gilbert set the hook nicely at his BPM 2010 keynote:  software tooling has been targeted at the 6 IT people who support 240 business people.  With Blueworks Liive, Phil is presenting a potential solution: software targeted at letting the 240 people in business improve their own processes, without needing to know words like BPM, or BPMN (let alone what the BPMN notation is all about).

Sandy writes: “It’s good to see IBM consolidating these social BPM efforts; the roadmap for doing this wasn’t really clear before this, but now we’re seeing the IBM Blueworks community coming together with the Lombardi Blueprint tools.”  What impressed me in my session with Phil’s team is the thoughtfulness that went into rationalizing these two products.  It appears to me that they didn’t sit down and map out features and figure out how to make them work together-  they looked at each product and tried to identify what was most compelling, and what was most deficient – in other words, what is holding it back?

The key insights:  the collaboration and sharing features of Blueworks were powerful, but the social engineering of understanding how to break down barriers to sharing just weren’t there in the Beta: you’re sharing with the whole world, and process information is sensitive.  But in this case, the answer wasn’t to try to change people’s sharing behavior (a la Facebook), the answer was to create a safer environment for sharing: by limiting the audience to your own corporation (or subsets of your company), so that people will feel more comfortable sharing to begin with.

Second, the notion of “following” has been extended to all parts of the offering (this was already a key feature of Blueprint).  Following is a very low-maintenance way to keep up with what’s happening in process design- and lets the business user determine what matters to them, rather than having software developers decide. There is an interface that reminds me of twitter or facebook, but moreso of yammer, because of the fact that it is private to your company.

Third, bringing “BPM” to the masses.  Rather than try to dumb-down BPMN, Phil’s team has started working from the long tail up – just offering a couple of very simple process templates.  You could classify them as “Checklists” and “Approvals”.  A Blueworks user can create a new template from these two basic types – and then any other business user can run these templates (and configure them slightly when kicking them off).  Additionally, it looked like participants could add steps to the process as needed when it got to their queue. Incidentally, this addresses a concern of John Reynolds‘, regarding making programming accessible to the occasional programmer.  One could argue that the folks in the business who construct the Excel spreadsheets that run so many businesses processes are these “occasional programmers” that need this kind of tooling.

Of course, this simple execution capability is a really interesting game for IBM to be in.  At $10/user/month, it isn’t prohibitively expensive.  No servers to set up or software to install.  And the setup of these simple processes is trivial.

But the last point, and the most interesting one, is the implication of combining simple process execution for the masses, with the newsfeed and following capabilities of social networks.  In this way, we can keep a finger on the pulse of these user-generated processes running through a team or a company. With the capabilities coming November 20th, Blueworks Live may be short of game-changing, but it is very clear how to move forward in a way that *is* gamechanging.

Is This the Social Intranet that Matters?

Angela Ashenden of MWD Advisors asks “Are we seeing the dawn of the social intranet?“:

The other thing which the J.Boye event got me thinking about was the relationship between the corporate intranet and collaboration. There was a real cross-section of organisations in attendance, from those for whom the intranet is still very much a central publishing environment to those who see the intranet and their corporate collaboration strategy as one and the same thing—or at least part of the same discussion. As we move into an era where social connectivity and interaction becomes more important in a business context, it seems obvious to me that the “social intranet” concept is the natural home for both these strategies, with the focus not so much on the organisation (or particular people in the organisation) determining what information should be published for consumption for example, but on employees themselves requesting the information via a social platform whereby it can be shared with the organisation as a whole, and stored for later reference by others. Do you agree? I’d be interested in your comments.

Perhaps we are seeing the dawn of the social intranet.  Twitter’s features (follow, status updates, search, etc) just make too much sense for corporations for these features to not show up in products targeted behind the firewall.  But for “social” interaction to be useful, there has to be an organizing principle that makes it relevant.  That’s the magic I see in the new Blueworks Live offering – the organizing principle is long-tail knowledge work processes – defined and driven by the business.

It won’t be long before the business, getting a taste of following these long-tail processes in Blueworks, is going to want to follow their “BPM” processes (perhaps running in Websphere Lombardi Edition) in Blueworks as well.  Of course, if Blueworks Live were the center of IBM’s strategy, you’d expect to see APIs exposed for other business applications to register “follows” and “updates” with the Blueworks newsfeed.

Did I mention that you can see the kernels of game-changing here?

Antiamba’s Ligurio says that “BPMN can bring death to your process“:

The problem lies that BPMN is so complex to implement, that people made some workarounds, simplifying process maps. If a business process needs to be mapped (some don’t like ad-hoc) it should be done in a way everybody understands it, and it can be exchanged using multiple platforms that support process notation. Once it does not happen, there is a high risk of losing process data, because you can’t use things like intermediate message, or timer, that was represented in the process repository you need to move. Thus, you are sending your process data to oblivion (and BPEL, if used, also).

If process map is an asset, imagine re-training people that work in call centrer executing business processes by the book, telling that the decision gateway changed to something different, because process maps were updated to other tool. This has an impact in the way people perform tasks and in customer perception how the company execute. If process managers don’t have this concern they are very far from process execution where everything happens.

I can definitely relate to his criticisms of the tools around BPMN.  We have a problem in our business right now.  Almost every BPM software package supports BPMN.  But what does “support” mean?  It usually means, the BPMS uses a subset of BPMN notation standard.  Anything produced would be BPMN compliant.  However, it does not mean that ALL BPMN notation is available.  Therefore, despite two tools speaking a “common language” there may not be a 1-to-1 translation of a BPMN model in one tool to a BPMN model in another tool.

The definition of BPMN 2 will help.  By defining a storage format, it gives vendors a more concrete target to hit in terms of export/import.  And it will make missing BPMN icons feel more like a bug than an annoyance.

But Ligurio takes the criticism to BPMN, rather than, primarily, the vendors.  Vendors have got to get their act together and embrace BPMN 2 more fully. He blames BPMN for allowing you to model things so many different ways – but in a modeling world absent BPMN, this problem is worse, not better.

Earlier in his post, Ligurio criticizes Blueprint for its Visio importer being less-than-perfect.  However, keep in mind that Blueprint is importing native Visio XML.  This is not some standard BPMN XML that Blueprint is importing – because Visio doesn’t produce it, despite using a BPMN stencil.  He seems disappointed with the idea of manually choosing that one kind of gateway icon maps to a split, or a decision gateway, rather than Blueprint just guessing.  Keeping in mind that Visio can label anything a split or gateway, regardless of what it truly is, this seems to be asking a bit much.  It isn’t as if you have to choose the mapping for every occurrence of an icon – just once per type.

The more accurate criticism is that Blueprint doesn’t (yet) support things like complex gateways and attached events (and pools vs. lanes).  I know the Blueprint folks are trying to avoid these “advanced” use cases, but if they want Blueprint to stay relevant as users get more advanced or import valid BPMN diagrams from other tools, they simply have to add this functionality or risk becoming irrelevant. Having said that, Ligurio’s example diagram has a sequence flow crossing pool boundaries, which looks like a no-no according to the BPMN spec (they often get over-used in tools where they are supported).

He runs into similar issues with ARIS and ITP Commerce.  Bottom line: he has a 25-page process. It will clearly get mangled in import routines today, and require lots of manual work to clean up.

My advice:  for now, stick with one modeling environment.  Choose one that starts with modeling and lets you seamlessly add execution details.  If you use a “modeling only” environment it should stay at a very high level to work out concepts and disagreements – not to model execution-level details.

BPMN2 model portability, along with the diagram interchange format, will help these problems greatly.  But the commercial vendors have to step up their game to support a much larger subset of the BPMN specification if they want customers to consider them compliant.

Meanwhile, it isn’t BPMN killing your process.  It is BPMN exposing the problems in process definition and communication that were always there – but going unnoticed.  They’re now coming to light, and vendors have an opportunity to really address these issues.

Matt Harding of Aurora Energy just posted this on the SAP community blog:

Within business process modelling (from a detailed requirements and process design perspective), I believe the best option for business users is to use BPMN.  But the question is: Are we just waiting for the iPhone of Business Process Modelling to come along.

I think Matt has a point – BPMN isn’t the best for requirements elicitation – it is the best for firming up an agreement between “Business” and “IT” as to what the process execution looks like.  When we’re in the discovery/elicitation/collaboration efforts, we find it more useful to use simpler mapping approaches:

1. value stream mapping
2. outlines
3. process mapping a la Six Sigma (inputs, measurable outputs, of a linear view of the process)
4. mind mapping tools for doing associations or nested structures

Right now some of the best tools for doing this – besides white boards – are tools like IBM’s Blueprint, which doesn’t force you into a BPMN notion of things.  It has separate views of process mapping and process modeling – and my main critique of the modeling section is that it needs to be more exact, whereas what I love about the process mapping side is precisely that it doesn’t require being exact.  Another useful tool for brainstorming topics related to BPM: MindMeister.   It let’s you brainstorm ancillary ideas to the process: how business objectives and values drive the objectives for the project.  There are other tools that are useful for brainstorming project plans, etc.

IBM has put out the latest BPM Blueprint update today.  It isn’t the most exciting update they’ve ever made to Blueprint, but of course I’d rather see incremental and frequent updates than one big overhaul for a service like this.  The August release seems to focus on adding avatars (aka pictures), and has a security model tweak, and a much-needed update to the Word export.

I’m still looking for more support for expert features (not necessarily their target audience yet, but I think the time has come to include more expert functionality in a tool that also appeals to more general collaboration).  Part of the reason I think this support is needed is so that users can import or export BPMN2 XML.  Not that the users will care that it is XML, but this is the modeling format that they’re going to expect BPM tooling to support.

IBM’s BPM Blueprint folks recently posted a short video that shows how to create a “join” in a process.  Its a painless video to watch because it is in double-time, but it definitely exposes an opportunity for improvement in how one goes about modeling joins.

It relates to our previous post on process patterns. This video simply shows how to leverage a basic BPMN construct (the join) in a specific collaboration and modeling tool (blueprint). But this is also one of the van der Aalst “patterns”, that, as I mentioned previously, I’d rather call construct than pattern. And I think everyone would benefit if we start to discuss patterns with more useful abstractions embedded.

I don’t catch all of the updates to Blueprint, but I did see this one go past my inbox.  Once again, the folks from Lombardi (now IBM) have kept turning the crank on incremental improvement in Blueprint.  I believe this is the second update since IBM finalized its purchase of Lombardi in February.

In this iteration, attention to the news feed and the “follow” feature have been added, along with other minor fixes and enhancements.  The follow feature in particular is useful across a bigger organization with a lot of modeling and collaboration going on.  It is a great example of a “social” feature making it into a design environment:  you can now “follow” just about anything in Blueprint, to keep up to speed with changes in processes that you care about.

Of course, my first thought when I see this is – I want this in Websphere Lombardi Edition – the process implementation product suite that goes with Blueprint and came along with Lombardi in the acquisition.  I want this kind of functionality for the runtime as well – the ability to “follow” just about anything I might interact with – processes, tasks, users…

Overall I like the changes, looking forward to more improvements…