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BlueworksLive Update – December 2011

Scott Francis — Thu, 29 Dec 2011 04:11:38 +0000

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.

New BlueworksLive Features

Scott Francis — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 15:39:36 +0000

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!

SAP = BPM? Revisited

Scott Francis — Fri, 30 Sep 2011 03:14:24 +0000

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.

In-depth Review of IBM Blueworks Live

Scott Francis — Mon, 26 Sep 2011 05:01:11 +0000

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.

Blueworks Live Update, April 2011

Scott Francis — Mon, 04 Apr 2011 16:10:13 +0000

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.

New Blueworks Live Release Coming

Scott Francis — Tue, 29 Mar 2011 22:01:06 +0000

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.

Social BPM and HIMS and Routine Clerical Work

Scott Francis — Fri, 18 Feb 2011 04:14:56 +0000

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…

Blueworks’ January 2011 Update

Scott Francis — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 05:07:47 +0000

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.

Adding Ad-Hoc to BPM

Scott Francis — Wed, 26 Jan 2011 04:50:31 +0000

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.

Risks of ACM Failure in 2011?

Scott Francis — Fri, 14 Jan 2011 06:00:42 +0000

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:

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)
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):

It doesn’t seem to me that there’s a big technical barrier to add ACM capabilities to existing BPM platforms.
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.
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.