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.

Another incremental update from the BlueworksLive team.  The key features:

• Tagging – generally just giving you an easier way to find things created in BlueworksLive.
• Better visibility to activity within a space
• APIs for provisioning and de-provisioning (admin).

Of course, when it comes to provisioning users, I’d like to see BlueworksLive playing ball with someone like Conformity (which we’ve covered, briefly, before), a firm that is promoting user provisioning across multiple SaaS offerings.  Longer-term that seems to be the way to go, but an API is a good step in the right direction.

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…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Bruce Silver reminds us that he has helped IBM to produce free training videos for Blueworks Live:

With the recent launch of Blueworks Live, IBM has posted an updated version of a set of training videos called Process Mapping 101.  Together with colleague Shelley Sweet of I4 Process, I created the original set for Lombardi back in 2008 , and the new version updates it to Blueworks Live.

There is a registration form to get started, but not a bad price for 2 hours of content!

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?

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.

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!