Jacob Ukelson has run a blog post espousing BPM for “business process management” and ACM for “best practice management” (reporting from the BPM2010 conference):

One participant (I didn’t get his name) summarized the conversation by the intriguing statement”So BPM is for processes, ACM is for best practices” – from earlier comments he made it was clear he was a management consultant.

I think his statement is a good way of looking at ACM – especially if you come from a management consulting background. According to wikipedia “A best practice is a technique, method, process, activity, incentive, or reward which conventional wisdom regards as more effective at delivering a particular outcome than any other technique, method, process, etc. when applied to a particular condition or circumstance.” also “A given best practice is only applicable to particular condition or circumstance and may have to be modified or adapted for similar circumstances. In addition, a “best” practice can evolve to become better as improvements are discovered”.

Now, referring back to a previous post on this blog, it is no wonder that Jacob and I agree so often:

… If BPM is focused on optimizing the aggregate of many process instances, Case Management is focused on optimizing the outcome of an individual run of a process by providing better information and tools to the case worker.  To take the medical example – case management would philosophically try to help improve the outcome for a single patient.  BPM would philosophically try to improve the overall outcome of health care provided by the facility across all patients.

(Note, I used the word process but could have just as easily substituted the word “case” or “issue” or “patient”).

So, I once again find myself in violent agreement with Mr. Ukelson.

Sandy has great coverage (as usual) of the BPM2010 conference:

• Research on Business Process Design – several presentations on informal process design and machine-assisted process design.
• Research on People and Processes
• BPM and Social Software Workshop
• Research on BPM in Practice – how novices model, and IT requirements of BPM in practice (room for improvement apparently ; )
• Research on BPM in Education – professionalizing BPM with a BoK for BPM. Sandy includes a call to action for building this process BoK.  And another session on building a BPM and SOA education community.
• A real call to action on process knowledge.  Very interesting effort Sandy and others are undertaking.  We at bp3 will have to take a closer look as well.
• And of course, the wrap-up notes.

Thanks again for tracking this conference for those of us who couldn’t be there, Sandy!

I really like Phil’s talks on “the big picture”.  Of course, given his investment in process, his talks on BPM are particularly compelling stuff (even if you disagree with him).

In his latest blog post, which is, essentially, an excerpt from his presentation at the BPM2010 Conference, Phil really drives home the point about how leveraged the IT resources at our major corporations are.  That for every true software developer, there are 5 people supporting their work (maintenance, deployment, requirements, management).  For those six people, 240 people are in “the business”.

He could have added an additional dimension: outsourcing.  By outsourcing, the # of IT employees relative to business employees has been reduced even further. 

And both of these trends have a cost:  reduced agility.

One answer would be to have more software developers – therefore increasing the throughput of the current 6:240 ratio.  Another answer is to provide better software to the 6 IT folks.  Phil argues that BPM is, essentially, just better tooling for these same 6 people.  An argument could be made that BPM extends its reach a bit further, allowing 7, 8, 9, or 10 people to get more directly engaged.  But the point remains – a shockingly small number of people are the bottleneck to business agility.

So the other answer is to address this larger community of “the business”.  Addressing the 240.  Increasing the scale from 240 to 480.  This is the challenge that Phil is calling on BPM to address:

So the next great challenge is before us: how do we turn the notion of scale on its ear? How do we gain the involvement of the 240 real business people so that without training they can contribute their knowledge of how things work, their requests for how things should work into the explicit, unambiguous conversations required for automation? And, by doing so, how can we increase the velocity of communication for everyone, so that requirements can be more exact, more quickly and communicated more effectively, so that the scale of software can be enhanced even further.

Good stuff.  Nick Malik elaborates from his perspective in a followup post.  But rather than dig into that, we can jump straight to Phil’s response to Nick:

And then once you are on the cloud, the technologies of Social are, in essence, free. I think if Social is your value prop you will lose inside the enterprise. People have no time for abstract notions of “community” at work, any more than they have time for abstract notions of “process.” But if the value prop is unleashed via the cloud, then Social becomes possible. And Social then can become, in essence, your Center of Excellence. This is the ultimate democratization: a Social network that enables the communication that is your Center of Excellence.

This will never happen with someone buying a “Center of Excellence in the Cloud” package. It will happen because they use a set of tooling that solves personal or small group problems… and that technology has as a secondary value prop the ability to communicate via the new Social.

Which then, finally, leads to this: my Center of Excellence isn’t defined by expertise but, rather, by the velocity of communication that speeds through it. Expertise is so highly distributed and, for most interesting breakthroughs, so specialized, that the main hurdle to breakthrough isn’t knowing everything, but rather, knowing where the pointer to any one thing is. A Center of Excellence should not contain experts with answers but, rather, should be a vehicle through which I can pretty easily get to any answer. It is about communication. And the faster and more robust that communication can be, the quicker the person or artifact with the answer can be identified and reached, then the better the CoE is.

I would argue, it isn’t knowing everything- it is knowing how to get to the answer.  This concept is familiar to me, as the son of a librarian, who could seemingly find any bit of information or research paper the son desired to find.  As computing resources evolved, the key improvement in “finding the answer” was search.  The difference with “the new Social” as Phil calls it is, not only can I use search to find answers, I can use my network of experts to find answers.  Phil calls this dis-intermediating the experts, but I would instead say that it is removing the official distinction between experts and non-experts.  Whoever has the answer can be the expert.  True experts will still be immensely valuable in “the new social” as they’ll be even more leveraged than they ever were in the old systems, and access to these experts are not likely to be as limited by governance and chains of command and project charters.

That’s probably a good thing.

Phil leaves us with one last thought:

By the way… we may be closer than you think on some of this stuff :-)

I think I mentioned before that I suspected Phil might be priming the pump with his talk at BPM2010, while working on the answers back at the lab :)

We’re looking forward to seeing the outcome.

Phil gave the keynote at BPM 2010 yesterday, and Keith Swenson had the early coverage ready before EOD yesterday.  In this talk, it sounds like Phil has continued his main themes (since I can remember) of making BPM more and more accessible to the business.  As he often put it in the past, the IT folks are a small minority of the total population in a business (2%?), and “we want to focus on the other 98% of the people in the business”.

Every year this theme gets some tuning, based on technology and cultural developments.  This year the stats were updated a bit:

For every one 1 java programmer developing applications, there are 5 IT people supporting the technology infrastructure, to support the work of 240 business people.  Tools to date have all focused on the 6 people.

And the suggested general direction is evolving to include the idea of “following” elements of the business.  I’ve used the follow feature in Blueprint, and love it – sometimes simple features are compelling.  But I’d like to see “follow” functionality throughout the IBM Lombardi BPM solution – within the Lombardi Edition authoring environment, as well as in the run-time environment.

It sounds like Phil also took some shots at the standards effort behind BPMN.  This isn’t new – Phil has long been a proponent of having a standard, and having a standard storage for the notation.  But he’s also expressed his frustration in the past that the folks working on the standard were getting bogged down, taking too long, and getting too far into the weeds.  Fair criticisms that I think Keith and Bruce Silver and others would echo (including myself).  I’m glad to have BPMN, but I hope the standards folks take some time off and let it bake.

The central argument (quoting directly from Keith’s blog):

Citing an IBM study of customers, 2.5% of the processes are complex,  22.5% are somewhat complex (less than 200 steps),  75% are not complex at all.  This last category is done today by excel over email..  At Banco Espirito Santo the complex processes impact zero people,  moderately complex effects 2000 people, and the non complex effect 8000 people.  This organization has moved forward to allow business users to be “100% empowered to automate the non-complex processes”.  If your business is based on people (and there are very few companies today that are not) where is the value being delivered by your BPM?   Everyone is way too focused on the really complex processes.  IT was clear he felt that is what lead BPMN standards astray, and this research crowd should be mindful not to fall in the same trap.

BPM is a cultural issue, not a technical one.

(Neil Ward-Dutton focuses on the same part of Keith’s summary, with an emphasis on the cultural).

Keith comments that Phil stopped short of prescribing a solution to empowering business users to increase the support for business work… but I think he’s priming the pump.  He’s giving us a sense of what we’re missing today.  But if I know Phil, he has people working on it right now.

The future is focusing on the “B” in BPM – not the “N” in BPMN – and the vendors that can offer the most compelling solutions are going to reap substantial rewards.

Welcome news: the academic-oriented BPM2010 will be in the US, according to BPM Research. We haven’t attended in previous years because it has never been in the US, and getting enough time out to go to Europe to attend hasn’t been possible so far for us.  Perhaps next September we’ll be able to attend.  But if history is any guide, the fall season will be quite busy with conferences.