Jim Sinur has thrown in the towel on BPMN in his latest post:

BPMN for business professionals is just not up to a business level of need. Some folks think that BPMN is good enough for IT and it should be good enough for business professionals. I think the former is true, but the latter is way off the mark.

BPMN really stands for “Business People May Not…understand”

IT professionals can’t really expect business folks to understand cryptic/standard formats when they really want to see a real representation of their processes with desirable icons; not engineering Icons. It’s kind of like someone saying “let them eat cake”. It is this IT arrogance that could sink BPM technologies.

Respectfully, I think Jim is letting the business off the hook.   No need to learn any new skills over there on the business side, just draw something on a napkin and hope it turns into a process.  Just make up any old iconography you want, no problem if no one other than you can understand it (you know, the value of standards is that more than one person or team can understand what is produced).  Don’t bother to learn something that is about 10% harder than standard flowcharting (Bruce Silver has helpfully identified a subset of BPMN that is more appropriate for new-to-BPMN business users).

At a time when we’re asking IT to learn new skills and to be more business oriented, is it too much to ask Business to learn new skills to support process improvement?  This isn’t unique to BPM – if the business is going to support ACM, they’re going to have to learn new tools for that as well.  If the full BPMN icon set is too much for someone, use the subset that you understand and like to document your ideas, and make use of annotation.  If someone shows you a diagram with more icons in it that you don’t follow, it should be straight forward to get an explanation or to look up the new notations you aren’t familiar with.  While Jim may not be a fan of standardization of notation – business folks are plenty used to standards of notation (not just in BPMN).  I use BPMN basic diagramming shapes to whiteboard processes for businesses all the time (literally on the whiteboard or in collaborative tools) – and they don’t have any trouble following what’s going on.

The problem isn’t that BPMN, as a notation, is too hard. It is that too many people think that BPM starts and stops with BPMN!  There is so much more to managing business processes, and improving them, than BPMN.  By way of comparison, think about search.  Search is a highly technical subject with a very rigorous syntax.  But nearly everyone can take advantage of its more simplistic forms – just typing in a few keywords into a Google search field.  It doesn’t mean that they can’t understand a more complex query string when they see it, nor guess at the meaning of a phrase surrounded by quotes… nor understand the resulting page of search results (the outcome). In fact, if they find their need for search becoming more complex, they can actually endeavor to learn the more advanced forms (domain filtering, exclusion, wildcards, etc).

So let’s all agree that there is much that must be done in the world of BPM to address businesses better, but tossing out BPMN and letting business off the hook is hardly the solution.  One need look no further than a tool like IBM’s BPM Blueprint to see that you can ease the business into BPMN style notation by first having them engage in process mapping or value stream mapping.  You don’t have to throw out BPMN to do this.  At the first company I worked for, we used to like to quote a line from a business book: “Genius of the ‘And’” – as in, why can’t I have both a simpler mapping notation, and a more detailed process execution notation that make sense together – instead of only one or the other?

It is time for everyone to step up to the plate in BPM, not just the software vendors.  BPMN is part of the answer, but only part.

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

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

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

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

However, Ann goes further in her post:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

bpmCamp is back, and it is coming to Austin, Texas!  We’re very proud to announce that we’re holding the second bpmCamp here in Austin.  Time is short – only 52 days until the event starts!  It is an aggressive time frame but with urgency comes creativity.  Following is the F.A.Q. with all the most important questions addressed.

F.A.Q.

Why bpmCamp?

We really think the BPM community/ecosystem needs events like this to foster growth, success, and maturity.  We believe maturity requires:

• technical breadth and depth
• project methodologies to support the roll-out of processes and improvements to those processes
• process improvement techniques and strategies that can actually be implemented and maintained in BPM suites

Also, we actually want to learn something new.  When we get the right  practitioners in a room, we’re going to learn from them, and help propagate those best practices into the BPM ecosystem.  We’re also going to share what we know from prior experience directly with the conference.  This cross-pollination is good for everyone.

Finally, we decided to put action behind our words.  We’ve long agitated politely for more tactical, focused topics at BPM conferences, but we’ve reached the point where it is time for us to contribute back to the community by creating an intimate event that fosters that kind of discussion.

When is bpmCamp?

We’ve selected a date for the Austin bpmCamp:  October 14-15, 2010. Mark your calendars.

We hope to host additional bpmCamp events in the future.  The first was at Stanford. This one, in Austin, should be special because of its proximity to ground zero of the Lombardi ecosystem (Lombardi’s headquarters was Austin, and IBM has a very large operation in Austin, including the Lombardi team).  It is also the headquarters of BP3.

If you have any questions in the meantime, contact us at:
bpmCamp at  bp-3.com

How Much Does it Cost to Attend?

bpmCamp Austin does not benefit from the free space that Stanford provided to the inaugural event.  Still, we’ve managed to find an affordable venue with great food, and therefore the impact on event costs was reasonable.  We’re charging $150 to attend the two-day conference (early-bird) from now until September 17, 2010.  Regular pricing will be $200 -  and the last day to register is October 7, 2010.

How Do I Register for bpmCamp?

Please go to:  http://bpmcampaustin.eventbrite.com/ to register! ( Early Bird Rates apply until January 1, 2010).

Where is bpmCamp Austin? Who is hosting?

Having the right host for any activity is a plus.  And having the right setting can really frame an event and set a backdrop for a good collaborative and rejuvenating experience.  BP3 will be the hosts for the event.  We’ve been working with BPM and Lombardi’s products for more than 7 years, and we’re looking forward to hosting the kind of informal conferences we always wanted to attend, right here in our home town.

We’re having our bpmCamp 2010 @ Austin event at III Forks Austin – one of Austin’s finest restaurants, but also a space that has a great historical Austin vibe to it, even while housed inside one of the more modern “Austin Architecture” buildings in town.   Importantly there is a lot of informal gathering space available, as well as a main room and at least two break-out rooms. III forks has been great collaborating menu options and space with us.  We’ll be a stone’s throw from Town Lake (aka Lake Lady Bird), right across the street from City Hall, and within walking distance of many restaurants and other venues.  Austin itself is home to Lombardi, and the base of operations for Lombardi as a part of the larger IBM campus here.

Travel Logistics

Please refer back to this page for travel logistics.

Where is the Landing Page?

UPDATED:  www.bpmCamp.org

Who’s Invited to bpmCamp?

The goal is to have a high-quality gathering of people who know the products well and are looking to collaborate and exchange ideas with peers and colleagues.  We’re inviting customer / users of Lombardi products (Teamworks/Lombardi Edition and Blueprint) who participate in deployments to attend, and we’re extending an invitation to IBM/Lombardi to participate as well.  If you’re a Lombardi or bp3 partner interested in attending/sponsoring the unconference / bpmCamp, please reach out to us at the email address below (there are limited sponsorship slots).  If you’re an analyst or blogger and you think bpmCamp would benefit from your attendance, contact us.  If you don’t fit any of the above descriptions but still want to attend, drop us a line with your thoughts.  All attendees will need to register, once the registration site goes live.  If you’re interested in receiving an invitation to register, send us email at the bpmCamp email address.

How do I Contact the Organizers?

The best way is via the bpmCamp email address:

bpmcamp at  bp-3.com

I want to Sponsor bpmCamp – how can I help?

If you think your organization would be interested in being a sponsor for bpmCamp, please contact us at the above email address and let us know you’re interested.  Please respect that we are keeping sponsorships limited to prevent over-commercializing and to make sure the sponsorship is worth something.

What will bpmCamp Cover?

We will beat the drum for topics and themes that we think will resonate.  However, we want this conference to cover topics that YOU care about.  In particular, we want to crowd-source topics for the event so that we can make sure we cover topics that attendees really care about.  The expectation is that the setting will be ripe for interaction among attendees during the sessions – that very few of the sessions will be presentation form rather than a loosely-moderated-discussion format.  However, we think it likely that attendees will be interested in a keynote address or two with Q&A to follow.  What kinds of things are fair game, you may be asking?  How about:

• Building Teamworks Coaches with YUI or GWT?
• Actual use of Optimizer in the wild?
• How to make Teamworks scale Really Big?
• Design reviews of actual Teamworks Processes?
• Making my Waterfall organization more Agile/Iterative?
• Tools for managing BPM projects (something better than MS Project??)
• Incorporating A/B testing into my process
• How much requirements gathering is too much?

We’ll have room for breakout sessions to accommodate more than one interest at a time.

Go HERE to add your ideas to the Agenda Wiki.

Who is Coming?

We’ll release information about attendees and speakers as we get closer to the event date.  Expect the bp3 team to be there!

Why focus on a single vendor? Why not another BPM product? Is this a Lombardi- or IBM-sponsored Event?

In short, we want the specificity and detail that we can get from a single-vendor conference, but the independence of a crowdsourced event.  bpmCamp isn’t sponsored nor endorsed by Lombardi.   We chose Lombardi Edition and BPM Blueprint because it is the BPM suite, and community, that we have the most extensive contacts with (and because we had already decided that a single-vendor conference could be interesting).

While we’ve worked with other tools and vendors, our network is not as deep in those communities.  If you work with another software vendor or geographic location and you’d like our help to run a similar event with you, get in touch with us, perhaps we can help.

The merger of two airlines has been used as an example of something BPM is not well-suited for, that ACM would be well-suited for.  I gave this argument a bit too literal a reading, based on Keith Swenson’s response (thought exercise vs. demonstration).  But having worked on quite a few BPM projects that were born of mergers (not the act of deciding to merge, but the after-affect of the merger), I found this article on the Wells Fargo and Wachovia merger to be just the kind of external, public information I was looking for to better explain my own views about how mergers happen – and the fact that there really is method (dare I say, process) to the madness.  When you are a big financial institution, or a big tech company (e.g. Cisco), you don’t do just one or two acquisitions in your history.  You might do one or two acquisitions a quarter.  Not all of them will be as big as Wachovia of course… These institutions are constantly reinventing themselves through acquisitions and spin-offs and joint ventures. Any time you do something so valuable, so often, you’ll want to understand it as a business process.

So how do you handle something massive like Trust conversions from Wachovia to Wells Fargo?

This year, Wells Fargo and Wachovia completed one of the biggest trust conversions ever; 81,000 trust accounts and $150 billion in assets were transferred to a common platform. Wells Fargo is now one of the largest U.S. trust providers in the U.S. with 233,000 accounts and $1.3 trillion in assets.

There was a big analysis effort to understand the processes operating at both firms, and to pick and choose best practices from both. After that they modeled these processes, simulated some of them, and implemented.  Some interesting ancillary benefits:

Another benefit is that the use of business process modeling helps the business and IT people communicate with each other. Instead of exchanging Word documents about requirements and technical specifications, where each side typically had trouble understanding the other, they’ve transitioned to graphical process models where both parties can look at the diagrammed process flow and exceptions. Watkins says this has saved thousands of hours of time in writing requirements documents and interpretation time for the technology developer.

So… is BPM low hanging fruit or was it hard work?  Sounds like it was hard, but valuable, work.  Is Wells Fargo really committed to BPM?

“Processes are pervasive whether you’re facing your customer or in the back office, and there’s been a recognition over the last couple of years among business leadership and IT that we should start focusing on more opportunities around process improvement, where we can leverage BPM technology we already own,” he says. “We’ve trained more than 400 people on BPM technology and technical standards like BPMN (business process modeling notation) as a common language for communicating process improvement,” he says.

Well, what do you think?

Keith Swenson has announced a case management mentor meeting (or ACM Mentor Camp) following the BPM 2010 conference, at the same venue:

The “Adaptive Case Management Mentor Camp” has just been announced.  This will be a meeting of minds for people interested in learning effective techniques for using case management for knowledge work.  It is right after the BPM 2010 conference, at the same venue, symbolically representing ACM as the next thing after BPM.

I think it is a great idea to put something like this together – these informal gatherings are often more valuable than more formal conferences – the only danger is conference burn-out!  At BP3, we’re looking forward to bpmCamp in Austin.   Sadly, I can’t make BPM 2010 this year unless my schedule changes, and therefore I also can’t attend the ‘camp.  Its a great gathering of people, definitely recommend attending to anyone who can make it.  Keith argues that the symbolism is that ACM is the “next thing after BPM” – but I’d argue it also supports my point of view – the same vendors, practitioners, and customers are going to be interested in BPM and ACM…  Keith and I just draw different conclusions about what that means for what will be defined as the “BPM” market.

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.

Max J Pucher has written recently that BPM is, essentially, common sense management that could be gleaned from dozens of management books:

In these times I would call BPM common sense management. It is no longer new or a mystery! We are rather going backwards with BPM to Tayloristic management concepts. Is there really anyone left in a management position in larger than SMBs who does NOT KNOW what the idea behind process management is? If yes, he/she shouldn’t be there. And once someone understands the acronym does he really need more than a day to understand what the idea is and how to implement it as a management approach? There are numerous books that will tell you how to do it.

Respectfully, Max is both right and wrong.  Yes, BPM is “common sense management” – but, you can read about the Himalayas and look at pictures all you want – it will not prepare you for BEING THERE.  You can read about playing tennis all you want, but playing it well requires practice, practice, practice… and… coaching.  You need a good coach to become a good player.

The point is, many things can be read about and understood in principle.  You can understand the what.  You might understand the how.  Or the when.  But the magic happens when you know what to do, you know *how* to decide what to do, and how to do it.  And you know when the time is right to do it – and you know why.  Business requires not just common sense but practice, and a good feedback loop as well.

Having said all that – the rest of his blog post is quite an interesting read, as usual.

The Process Cafe posits that Humans are your Process’ Greatest Failure Point:

Humans are your most crucial failure point in a process. When ever you are designing processes (or systems to support processes) you should ensure you try and minimise the ability of the human to cause a failure. Google Mail now, for example, can scan your email and look for the words such as ‘attached’ which might indicate that an attachment is expected. If you send the mail without an attachment it will warn you. But how many other email systems have that functionality?

Of course, it is process-improvement 101 that anywhere a human touches a process you expect to find various failure modes there.  Even the process of finding process failures can be error prone because it is performed by humans.  Often these failures are couched as “measurement error” (a  euphemism for human error or variation in that case).

But I prefer to take a more positive view of the human condition.  The humans in your process are your greatest opportunity for improving your business:

• By personalizing service for your customers
• By creating a personal relationship with your customers
• By leveraging their experience to make difficult decisions that can’t be trusted to algorithms alone
• By identifying opportunities to make their own work more effective, as well as that of those they work with (improving the process)
• By identifying new sales opportunities via direct communication with customers

And the list goes on and on.  Your humans are the critical element in your processes.  They’re your differentiating advantage.  So by all means, give them all the automated assistance you can.  Tee up all the information they need.  Double check their work and make sure it appears to be consistent in action and word.  But this is, to me, a bit like applying 5s to office work.   Sure, the knowledge worker doesn’t have to have their desk identical to their neighbors’.  Because they’ll have the same desk tomorrow.  But we can “clean up” the spaces around their process interaction, so that they’re more consistent, more useful, and more pleasant to work with.

I think BPM and process improvement proponents need to take a more positive view of human involvement in their processes.  It isn’t all about raw efficiency or cold accuracy.  Borrowing from a recent “Process Ninja” post:

So when thinking about automating processes, think about the number of moments of truth that are occurring in the process, and look to eliminate or improve them. Process is not just about time and cost, it is fundamentally about the customer experience.

True words…

A few weeks ago I had a call with Intalio’s Ishmael Ghalimi.  It was right before vacation, and the unfortunate side-effect is that I’m only now catching up with writing the post I meant to write when I got off the phone with him.

For the last couple of years, many of us in the BPM world have wondered what exactly Ishmael and his crew at Intalio were up to.  They made a series of acquisitions and investments, the purpose of which wasn’t quite clear to much of the BPM community, because it included a CRM solution and a focus on cloud computing.  But when we finished talking, it was clear to me that Ishmael has simply made a different bet than most of the rest of the BPM community.  While the mainstream of BPM innovation has been focused on BPMN2, modeling and collaborating in the cloud, and tweaks to the method and thought process like ACM… Intalio has gone a contrarian route-  retooling and refocusing on BPM in the cloud – but not by dabbling, by jumping with both feet, so to speak.  This is the long game rather than the dink-and-dunk short game.

It is a bold move, and Ishmael makes the argument that if you really want to play with the big boys, you need to make the investments that Intalio has made in a vertically integrated stack for cloud computing.  Rather than writing all the code from scratch, of course, Intalio is relying on a bevy of open source software.  A quick look at this page reveals just how many open source projects are involved in Intalio’s offering (and that’s just on the application engines side).

A heavy focus on open source software might cause you to wonder how Intalio makes money.  Intalio contributes to some of these projects, and just leverages some others.  the distinction that Ishmael made is that while the open source project for, say, the process engine (Apache ODE and Drools Flow), is free and open source… The entire integrated solution that Intalio is offering is commercial.  You are, essentially, buying a professionally prepared 10 course meal, instead of just getting all of the ingredients for free, so to speak. As Ishmael points out, customers do not mind paying for commercial software today that includes open source parts (nearly all of the commercial BPMS offerings today include at least some significant open source project code).

Ishmael went into great detail about the investment required to make Intalio’s PAAS offering virtualization- ready – the upfront investment to natively leverage SpringSource and the like is significant. But once there, it is much easier to scale application deployments.

We walked through a pretty compelling demonstration of the authoring tooling – which was browser-based, and he scored bonus points with me by running the whole stack on a Mac (attention commercial BPM vendors: your users and developers want Mac, iPad, and iPhone support).  The ability to model data, leverage it in user interface and process diagrams, and deploy it quickly, is compelling.  It doesn’t *feel* like a BPM tool, it feels like an IDE for building apps in the cloud.  Perhaps that is the intent.  To make BPM a feature of the environment, so to speak, rather than the centerpiece of the environment.

I asked Ishmael, given that this seems like both a horizontal and global strategy and a great number of component projects that make up their product offering, how does Intalio decide what NOT to do?  We had discussed why he had made the investments he’d made, but how do they decide what not to do?  Ishmael’s take is that they are throwing the long ball – seeing themselves as a much smaller version of a Microsoft of the 90′s, where:

• The operating system is the cloud instead of Windows
• The “development studio” is Intalio Studio instead of Visual Studio
• The productivity suite is Intalio Docs instead of or in addition to Microsoft Office

Another analogy he gave is RedHat – providing the glue to pull together open source projects into coherent commercial offerings.  There are many execution challenges, but if you pull it off and execute, you’re in very good shape because most competition is either too small to deliver, or too big to abandon their existing commercial software business (or not nimble enough). His example of too large:  he argues it would be very hard for IBM to come to market with an integrated product that is also virtualized for the cloud, because there are different P&Ls within IBM’s software group, who aren’t going to work together on one seamless offering. Others might argue these points differently, but given Ishmael’s thinking, the strategy he’s pursuing makes sense in that context.

The pricing model is free up to 5 users, and then scales up in price as you expand the solution.  This makes it easy to prototype solutions, and scale cost relative to the benefit achieved.

In some respects, what Ishmael and Intalio are trying to do is offer a compelling software stack for process applications in the cloud, but also removing many of the barriers to entry companies would normally face.  One could argue that they are trying to make BPM in the cloud simple enough that mere mortals can attempt it.  And Ishmael claims it isn’t just a superficial attempt to band-aide these projects together – that they’ve thought and worked hard on every level of the stack – from hardware, to virtualization, to Infiniband networking, to the more obvious software layers that developers interact with.  The conversation with Ishmael about these topics reminded me of my conversations with Phil Gilbert of Lombardi about making versioning relevant to BPM authoring (that it isn’t enough just to check things into subversion, that real versioning requires a much deeper understanding of process authoring).  Versioning was Lombardi’s long pass in the last couple of years leading up to the acquisition by IBM. And the point of this kind of deep investment in both cases is to create simplicity out of complexity – to provide truly useful abstractions to the customers of your software.

Three is risk that Ishmael and Intalio may have made this investment “too early”.  I recall in the 90′s a firm that made a bet on server-side Java runtime environments a bit too early – betting on JRun, which was a pretty immature platform.  A year later, when the product suite was ready, the whole thing could have been accomplished in 3 months on top of newer commercial application servers (e.g. Weblogic).

Time will tell if Ishmael’s long pass pays off – he’s either stolen a march on the competition, by getting “fully cloud-enabled” early, or he’s made the march too early and paid too heavy a price to get there.  If he’s too early, we’ll know because other “mainstream” BPM vendors will quickly follow with fully cloud-ready BPM stacks.  If he’s stolen a march, then Intalio will use its technical advantages (perceived and real) to drive more business at the expense of others.

Mike Gammage posts the question:  is BPM ethical?

Against this background, the hard reality is that the business case for any significant BPM project is almost invariably based on job losses.

The jobs may be lost through automation, or through productivity increases.  The BPM project will typically enable the same work to be done by fewer people.  More positively, the BPM project may enable the same people to do more work – that is, there are no jobs lost immediately.  But, even so, the societal effect is not dissimilar because economic growth will now create fewer jobs.

Put crudely, and for the sake of this argument, BPM seems to be a job-killer.

Now I believe, as will many of you, that work is about far more than simply generating wealth and meeting basic needs. Work provides each of us with a role in the community, it enables us to develop our talents in service to others, and to contribute to the advancement of society.

So it’s a serious question that deserves attention: Is BPM – my work– ethical?

I commend Mike for undertaking a post on this subject.  I have a few thoughts for him to consider when he returns:

1: Competition is the Job Killer.

The first thing to realize, is that BPM isn’t the job killer.  The job killer is the competition for your customers. If you can’t win that competition for customers, you will have a massive dislocation of jobs.  That competition is faceless and unrelenting, unfortunately.  You don’t get to look into the whites of your competition’s eyes and try to agree on a reasonable pricing model – if you do in the US, it is called collusion or anti-competitive behavior (there are similar rules in other locales).

So you have to invest in improving the cost structure and performance of your business, in order to remain competitive.  BPM is a tool to do that.  Just like Microsoft Word and computers put a generation of typists/secretaries out of work, BPM and other software will put a generation of manual paper-movers out of work (or copier repairmen perhaps?).

2. BPM can Save the Jobs of the People you know

A Good BPM implementation can save the jobs of the best people in your company.  By making each unit of work more valuable, it is easier to justify paying them, even increasing their pay.  You’re increasing their economic value add to the system.

Moreover, if the people doing the work become the people improving the work, they can really maximize their positive effect on the business. It also frees up labor to focus on other value-adding areas of the economy (though, I’ll grant, that is an easier macro- than micro- argument – individually not everyone can make the shift, and not everyone has the savings to bridge the gap – which is why I’m a big fan of unemployment benefits and insurance).

Finally, if you can sell the value of these process improvements to your customers, you can actually use process improvement as a way to increase your top line, not just your bottom line.

3. Manage for More than one Bottom Line

BPM and the like can help you achieve more than just cost savings – BPM can help you more reliably achieve any outcome you set out to achieve – higher customer sat, a higher net promoter score (NPS), reducing impact on the environment, increasing customer lifetime value, etc. This is sometimes called the “Double Bottom Line” or “Triple Bottom Line”.  But realizing that your business is about more than just money, why shouldn’t you use process improvement to increase your odds of hitting ALL your business goals rather than just some of them?

Although BPM causes us to examine what we do, and second-guess the positive outcome, I believe overall it is not only ethical but necessary.

We’ve set our dates for bpmCamp 2010 @ Austin:  October 14-15, 2010.

Watch this space for additional announcements about bpmCamp 2010 @ Austin.

The Death of Google Wave is interesting.  We’ve written about Wave before, several times, but in particular when SAP put out its “Gravity” demonstration.

The official Google Blog blames the closure of Wave on a lack of user adoption:

But despite these wins, and numerous loyal fans, Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked. We don’t plan to continue developing Wave as a standalone product, but we will maintain the site at least through the end of the year and extend the technology for use in other Google projects. The central parts of the code, as well as the protocols that have driven many of Wave’s innovations, like drag-and-drop and character-by-character live typing, are already available as open source, so customers and partners can continue the innovation we began. In addition, we will work on tools so that users can easily “liberate” their content from Wave.

So, there’s a bunch of open source code, it looks like, that partners and customers might leverage.  But most of us, I think, would prefer to just use a finished product.  There are many other unofficial takes, here and here are two examples.  I had a few others linked, but no need – you can find such commentary easily!

When Wave was announced last year, I spent some time discussing with others what it meant for BPM.  Some thought it was a game-changer, some thought it was a non-event.  The thing that became clear to me: collaboration tools like this are going to tend toward being free, or extremely inexpensive.

Starting last fall, the discussion in BPM circles had often turned to “ACM” (A variant on Case Management).  Some in BPM circles would call this unstructured process. Some would call it “chaotic” or unpredictable processes/work.  Keith Swenson and colleagues even penned a book about managing such unpredictable work.  Google Wave was, to this crowd, a great example of where “knowledge work” is headed – into collaboration spaces, not into BPM software.  To me, it was just proof that email and lightweight project management tools were not going away.   If Google Wave accomplished anything, it showed:

1. Separating yourself from email divorces you from a knowledge worker’s daily routine (some might say, process).
2. If it isn’t trivial to involve the right people in a collaboration, then users give up
3. Collaboration is going to be free or nearly free.  Even if it has pretty amazing features.
4. It is really hard to do a “big bang launch” successfully.  It makes me even more impressed that Apple seems to pull this off with such regularity.

So what does it mean for BPM?  Not much.  Wave was never really about structured interaction, it was about ad-hoc interaction.  Although ad-hoc interaction is important to a good BPM strategy, no one (maybe except for SAP) was really leveraging Wave for this.  If they were, they can probably leverage the open source bits to get a jump on the development effort.  For the ACM crowd, its both good news and bad news.

First, the good news:

1. A free competitor to your products, supported by a major software company, has gone away.
2. Hm. I think that’s it.

The bad news:

1. If you were counting on convincing users to leave email to use your product for knowledge work, it is time to change gears.
2. If you were expecting that being good and free was good enough… Maybe it isn’t.  Although Wave was panned in the press, it really was pretty good at what it did, though perhaps it tried to do too much.
3. If you were expecting to charge a lot of money for general-purpose collaboration software… I think those days are over.
4. If Wave was your favorite example of how ACM was really relevant to what people are doing… time to find a new example.

Silver lining:

1. Collaboration software for very specific purposes will live on (aka process modeling, or services like tripIt).
2. Some of Wave’s features will likely get absorbed by Gmail.
3. Some of Wave’s features will likely show up in other products.

I think Keith Swenson summed it up best for the ACM folks on Twitter:

“nooooo. It can’t beeeee. :-( RT @jpmorgenthal: Google waves goodbye to Wave: http://bit.ly/bg3ixC”

Well, fans of Wave and its approach were bound to be disappointed.  I saw quite a few more comments on twitter with a more positive spin on Wave being shut down.  Google found Wave squeezed inbetween email and all the other things we do in life.  It apparently couldn’t live on its own.  I’m not sure the future of ACM, per se, is anything different.  Yes, the ACM proponents will have their analogies, and they sound compelling.  And we could even agree that a large percentage of work is not addressed by BPM today, or by, more specifically, structured process.  But what ACM proponents fail to mention is that even less work is currently addressed by purpose-built ACM software.  It *could* be, but isn’t.  It is still likely to be addressed by email, project management tools, telephone, hallway conversation, and more email.

Note, I’m not arguing against ACM as a description of work, I’m just looking at the software market and not seeing it as an independent market, yet.  Willing to be proven wrong.  And I think there are a couple vendors that have the right strategy or tactics, but we’ll see if they can execute.

Working on a longer collaborative post on ACM and the marketplace.  Watch this space.

A colleague of mine pointed me to an interesting McKinsey Quarterly article, which relates the tale of a service automation effort gone awry.  As I started to read it, I was sure that the author would take the tactic of implying workflow and automation were a waste of money.  Surprisingly, the article takes a turn midway through to show how, in this case, the company turned around their project by getting back to basics:

1. Don’t allow limitations of paper- and manual-based processes to continue into an automated world
2. Test drive process changes before cementing them in software.
3. Field test for important success factors
4. Build a minimalistic solution
5. Work on changing culture at the same time that you work on the Information Technology.

These are good tenets for any BPM project to incorporate – but Items 1, 2, 4, and 5 run against the grain for many organizations.  If the project team “goes with the flow”, they’re likely not to challenge assumptions in these four key tenets, and failure for the whole project is a likely result.

Recently Bern Ruecker’s article on “A Collaborative Approach for Real-World BPM” appeared in InfoQ. It is a good read, with much I agree with and just a few things I don’t.

We have been working in the business process management (BPM) space for years already, and it is very interesting to see the recently growing attention for it. Catalysts for this interest may be the growing maturity of the tools, the new 2.0 version of the BPMN standard, better understanding caused by more publications or improved preconditions for BPM approaches, to name only a few of the most important developments within BPM.

Couldn’t have said it better myself. Bern goes on to criticize tools that they’ve worked with:

Vendors offer more and more high-sophisticated graphical tools, which promise automation of business processes without any coding or even developers; however, we see a problem with these “traditional” vendor centric approaches: They don’t deliver on these promises!

Agreed.  But of course, most vendors don’t promise “no code” – but they do often claim that someone less than a true “developer” can deliver the solution.  In my experience, while these tools do enable personnel with less technical training to participate in the process development effort, there is no such thing as someone “too technical” for a BPM project.  Good technical help is important in any project involving information technology.  He goes on:

Without naming the concrete tool, which wouldn’t be fair since most of them share the same basic problems, a colleague had to implement an easy process with a small web GUI. The tool introduced an own magic Drag and Drop GUI designer, which seemed to be handy in the beginning, but when we almost finished the project, there were some small data validation requirements in the form, which the magic tool wasn’t designed for. In an attempt to get around these limitations, we spent more time futzing with the designer than we needed to implement the entire GUI in plain JSF, which we did in the end anyway.

I can understand his feeling here.  However, I have worked with at least one tool that has such a drag-and-drop GUI designer.  It is great for prototyping UI, as it requires no code to marshal data into and out of the the process context on the server.  There is also a validation framework that does just about everything imaginable for validation (but, admittedly, this validation framework is something only experts on the platform would know about).  There’s also an option to validate forms after submitting (in the event that validation can only be accomplished with server-side checks or more complicated business rule evaluation).   My concern with the statement above is, though it may be true for a single tool – a good understanding of the BPM software being employed, combined with good understanding of requirements, and with healthy value-based prioritization of work – should allow one to avoid rewriting the entire GUI in something like JSF.  Of course, in Bern’s specific situation it may have been necessary, but I believe that on the whole we’re better of leveraging the baked in capabilities of a BPM suite rather than writing custom interfaces in JSF (or other UI tech).  The exception being, if the customer is already an expert in the custom interface technology (already using JSF in their organization? great).

We, as BPM practitioners, have to keep in mind that it is not about the technology we’re most comfortable with, it is about technology our customers can consume, maintain, nourish, and build on.

Bern goes on with another anecdote:

For another customer, one developer told me, “It took more than two days to try to model some special requirements, which he could have written in Java directly in half an hour!”

I’ve heard this thousands of times.  9 out of 10 times, the developer is wrong, or missing the point.  Once in a while, they’re right.  But the point isn’t to bury the business model in Java code (wrong), or to put what should be Java code into the business model (missing the point), it is to use the model to represent what is significant to the business process, and to use code to represent (primarily) what isn’t.

Another customer tried to get transactions and stateful services running, which unfortunately required calling services as Web services. After experimenting with WS-Addressing, WS-AtomicTransaction and trying to patch several frameworks, he basically gave up and dumped the whole BPM tool.

I wish I knew which tool so that I can avoid it!  A decent BPM tool should include good coverage of web services scenarios.  And a Java API.  Bern’s article is a cautionary tale of products that don’t live up to the promise of BPM.

Bern goes on to argue that a BPM tool should be making the developer’s job easier, not harder.  While that may be true, I think the framing is wrong. The framing we would use is that a BPM tool should allow a model that accurately portrays the process to the business and also accurately represents the execution context required to run the process.  If it is harder for the developer to provide visibility to the business, that’s secondary to producing something that has high-fidelity between business model and IT reality.

Bern goes on to describe a solution that he calls “Camunda Fox” – which pulls together various other technology, including JBoss, jBPM, Signavio, and a glue layer created by Camunda.  It seems like a reasonable approach for a very technically competent team to tackle – especially a team that is intimately familiar with the technologies in question.  But it is a model-transforming approach with several inputs and outputs.  And this approach isn’t going to address the needs of a smaller business or smaller team that doesn’t have these technical skills, nor the budget to pay outside consultants to build and leverage this glue – I think Bern might argue that the “simpler” BPM tools won’t address these customers well either.  As Bern says, Camunda Fox isn’t a silver bullet, but it addresses projects that are pretty Java development focused.

I prefer to use BPM tools with a model-preserving approach (as described by Keith Swenson) because it is a higher fidelity mapping of business process to running software.

Sandy has a good review of Metastorm’s M3 offering on her blog, posted on 7/30/2010. From her review, it sounds like Metastorm is focused on a Microsoft-platform strategy (Azure), which at this point is mostly collaborative business modeling, but as Azure matures, they plan to move the BPM engine to Azure as well.  Sandy compares the model types favorably to IBM’s BPM Blueworks.

I’m not sure that basing strategy on the Microsoft stack is ideal, but someone has to win the BPM space on their platform.  I think the more interesting integration with the Microsoft stack is actually on the desktop (an approach some other BPM vendors take).  The review is another sign that collaborative BPM modeling is becoming common – some might say commoditized.

We had a great success with the original bpmCamp @ Stanford in January, this year.  We’re now ready to start the ball rolling for a bpmCamp in Austin.  We’re just at the formative stages, but we are targeting dates in October, and currently scouting locations in Austin.  We’ve also had tentative discussions with Stanford about having another bpmCamp at Stanford, but a bit later in the year 2011 (maybe even in the summer of 2011). Our goals and thought process are much the same as last time:

1. BPM Conferences are good, but BPM Conferences are (usually) too general, too big, too expensive, and stuck on platitudes because of the above.
2. bpmCamp is intimate. It was 40 people (max capacity) at Stanford.  We’ll figure out our max capacity for Austin, it might be just a tad bigger.
3. bpmCamp is specific.  We will be focused on the Lombardi Software products acquired by IBM earlier this year, and now known as IBM BPM Blueprint (aka Blueprint), and Websphere Lombardi Edition (aka Lombardi Edition aka Teamworks).  (We would welcome the chance to organize a bpmCamp for another product offering – but we need a partner to help)
4. bpmCamp is affordable.  Exact price is TBD, but it won’t break your budget.
5. bpmCamp is focused on what attendees care about.  Topics are crowd-sourced, so anyone attending can help shape the agenda.

If you’re interested in attending, watch this space, or keep an eye on posts with the tag bpmCamp. If you’re interested in sponsoring bpmCamp, we’ll have more details about that soon.

If you have any questions in the meantime, contact us at:
bpmCamp Email:

(editor’s note: bpmCamp is not affiliated with or sponsored by IBM.  bp3 is not acting on IBM’s behalf, nor is bp3 an affiliate nor subsidiary of IBM. )

Ben Farrell of Appian notes on their blog recently:

Dealing with varying levels of security requirements in ramping up new federal employees and contractors is a common pain. It is usually handled through manual, paper-based processes involving lots of documentation to be passed around, verified and tracked across multiple systems. This means major time and effort for the staff performing the processing, and delays in getting new hires into a productive work mode.

Other process areas common across government organizations include things like Procurement and Sourcing, Program Planning, Budgeting and Management, Grants Management, and a variety of HR processes. Not coincidentally, these are areas where Appian is seeing great success.

BPM software helps the federal government solve pervasive cost and productivity problems – and not in the “tried-and-failed” approach of commercial off-the-shelf software packages that cause as many headaches as they solve thanks to rigid coding. While attacking an area of common concern, BPM solutions are easily configurable – by business users – to the unique requirements of an individual agency.

I’m not an expert on which BPM vendors have market share in the Government space (it is hard to measure this kind of “market share”), but being based in or near DC doesn’t hurt Appian’s chances.  And as probably every BPM practitioner has noted, BPM is what the government needs – processes that don’t get lost in the paper stack on someone’s desk, processes that proactively notify participants about progress within the process, and processes that have consistent performance.  Ask anyone who has gone through the green card application process and you will get a story of broken processes – or at the very least, broken visibility (the applicants rarely have any sense how far along they are in the process).

One interesting note from Ben’s post on cloud computing:

There will be more to come on government adoption of BPM in the Cloud. For now, I’ll close with a reminder about why BPM in the government really matters: every one of us, as taxpayers and consumers of government services, benefits when government operations are conducted more efficiently and effectively.

Government adoption of cloud computing is interesting.  I think most people assume that most government functions won’t be in the cloud – but clearly some could be.

BPM Guide has some examples of BPMN 2.0 diagrams, on the heels of Stephen White’s blog post that the BPMN 2.0 spec has been ratified by OMG.  Thanks to Jakob Freund for publishing them.There are a couple of key points that Jakob makes throughout the article, that I’d like to call attention to:

Creating process models for both business AND it is actually one of the absolutely main topics of our consulting business. And it is a very big struggle, of course. For us it was important to show in the document that BPMN is not necessarily “too complicated for business”, because it totally depends on how you actually use the standard when process modeling. That’s why we always need a Framework around BPMN if we want to apply it in bigger modeling engagements.

This is a well-said point – BPMN doesn’t have to be too complicated for the business. But drawing diagrams that are not more complicated than they have to be takes some skill and practice.  I often tell people who aren’t familiar with BPM that it takes a reasonable degree of abstract thinking to really do well.  It is the abstractions and generalizations afforded by a process and its subprocesses that comprise the solution.

Apparently they built these examples with Trisotech’s tools:

The diagrams in the examples document however are all made with Trisotech’s Visio-based BPMN Modeler, provided for this purpose by Denis Gagné. The cool thing is that we could directly serialize the diagrams into BPMN 2.0 XML with that tool.

Denis, where is this tool! Sounds interesting!

Jakob also gives interesting examples of how to take advantage of collaboration diagrams.  His final thoughts:

Make a “strategic” process diagram (Figure 6.1), just a simple sketch for a quick understanding

Make an “operational” process diagram (Figure 6.2) for analyzing the collaborational aspects

Enrich the diagram with the aspects of a process engine, therefore adding a pool for the process engine

Take that process engine pool into your technical environment and enrich it for execution (make a “technical” process diagram).

Good advice for how to approach modeling in BPMN.

Well, I just read an article I really found agreement with:

Jeff Kaplan of Think Strategies writes “Yes – the SaaS Experiment is Over“, in response to an article asking if the SAAS experiment was over, and a second one on ebizQ that asked “Is SaaS Dead?”

The fact is that the SaaS ‘experiment’ is definitely over. It is now a mainstream movement.

Just take a look at the growth of Salesforce.com and SuccessFactors. Or, check out how NetSuite and Workday are encroaching on SAP. Listen to CIOs who are frustrated with being in the server business and want to shift into the services business.

And, pay attention to the major moves which the ‘legacy’ hardware and software players–led by IBM, HP, Microsoft, Oracle and SAP–are taking to transform and even cannibalize their traditional business to respond to rapidly escalating customer demands for change.

Yes, the SaaS experiment is over. It is now for real.

I agree. SaaS is past the “experiment stage” and on to the implementation stage across nearly all forms of software.  Hardly dead.

Meanwhile, last year there were calls for BPM’s death, and asking if our experiment with BPM is over. My personal experience with BPM argues otherwise.

This seems like a great BPM Thought for the Day from John Reynolds:

Just came across this short but sweet posting from David Novick:
BPM consultants should be SME’s in… well BPM

David’s “point” is that it’s our skill at approaching problems from the Process Perspective that provides true value to our clients.  The details of the business problems are known by our clients – Our skill is in knowing how to develop solutions for those problems through process analysis and process management.

Its a great thought.  Be a subject matter expert in BPM.  That is, after all, what our customers are asking from us.