Process for the Enterprise » BPMS

Great Case for BPM?

Scott Francis — Wed, 07 Sep 2011 04:29:18 +0000

George Lawrie of Forrester recently wrote:

One pioneer that I interviewed was immensely proud of his lightning roll out of a guerilla app to support his firm’s front office in advising clients on complex product choices. I asked him about future plans and sheepishly he admitted they would be starting again from scratch because the guerilla app was unable to leverage enterprise services exposing critical data about product offerings. He remarked ruefully that sometimes you do have to follow the IT standards “yellow brick road” rather than just head for the hills, but wouldn’t it be great to have the best of both worlds, with both agile deployment and full advantage taken of enterprise assets and data?

Well this practically sounds like a call-out for how to approach BPM the right way – roll-out the guerrilla app (usually these are around a specific process) with a BPMS. But when you’re ready to leverage enterprise services and data, you simply add those features to your process, a bit like a layer cake. In fact, this avoids one of the key failure modes of BPM projects: trying to cement integrations to early, instead of focusing on getting the actual process right first.

Sandy Kemsley Reviews CloudExtend

Scott Francis — Fri, 02 Sep 2011 16:03:04 +0000

Sandy has published a review of Active Endpoints’ CloudExtend, an extension of the SalesForce platform that ads some BPM capabilities to the SalesForce platform. Interestingly it looks like it is deployed “alongside” SalesForce as opposed to being “on” the SalesForce platform. Apparently they’re not the only vendor interested in this type of use case:

We’re starting to see client-side screen flow creation from a few of the BPMS vendors – I covered TIBCO’s Page Flow Models in my review of AMX/BPM last year – but those screen flows are only available at a step in a larger BPMS model, whereas Cloud Extend has encapsulated that capability for use in other platforms. For small, nimble vendors who don’t need to own the whole application, providing embeddable process functionality for data-centric applications can make a lot of sense, especially in a cloud environment where they don’t need to worry about the usual software OEM problems of installation and maintenance.

It is an interesting approach, and perhaps comfortable to Active Endpoints as they previously OEM’ed their BPMS engine to other vendors. I can’t picture IBM or SAP or Oracle following this approach, for example.

I’m curious about whatever happened to Salesforce’s Visual Process Manager and whether it will end up competing with Cloud Extend; I had a briefing of Visual Process Manager over a year ago that amounted to little, and I haven’t heard anything about it since.

As I was reading Sandy’s review, I was thinking the same thing. What did happen to Visual Process Manager? Is it just not fitting the bill? Maybe we’ll hear more from Dreamforce.

If You Need to Open Visual Studio to Build a Workflow…

Scott Francis — Tue, 09 Aug 2011 16:34:19 +0000

Adam Deane on Business Users and Programmers:

But the best differentiator pitch that I’ve heard being used is the “business user oriented” vs “programmer oriented”.
The claim is that business users can use the tool. I think it’s a great differentiator. Although it usually doesn’t have much truth to it – it’s still a great market positioning pitch.

You see.. (and I’m trying to hide my sarcasm here..) BPM tools that use programming are bad for you.

If you need to open Visual Studio to build a workflow – it means you need skilled programmers, which means high salaries, and they need to write code, which means you need a tester, a team leader and a project manager (more salaries).

Every time the customer wants to change the business process you need the programmers to recode, recompile, retest (long deployment, or no changes – you can pick). Sophisticated code means that you need to rely on the IT team which means that you are tied in with that programmer/team. If the programmer leaves – no one will dare to change their code (who wants to be responsible for code that someone else wrote.)

“If you need to open Visual Studio to build a workflow” – then you’re doing it wrong. A good bpm tool doesn’t require you to build your workflow in C++/C# or the like.

Of course if you’re opening visual studio to do an integration – have at it. To build something custom that will plug into your BPM solution – have at it. BPM should make certain things easier than traditional development tools (and a “workflow” sounds like one of those things to me). It doesn’t mean that you won’t still need traditional development tools for a BPM deployment, but you shouldn’t have to write your process flow in assembly language any more than you should have to write it in C++.

Incidentally, I don’t agree that “business can do everything” is a good pitch, though I do agree with Adam that it is horribly oversold. The business and IT have to work together to make BPM successful (or, arguably, nearly any long-term IT or business investment). Vendors oversell this all the time, which accounts for Adam’s sarcasm. But, conversely, companies purchase tools that bring too much complexity to the simple stuff, or tools that start simple but don’t scale with complexity. What do I mean? I mean that as you add more process intelligence to your tooling, complexity should increase at a linear (or less) rate. If you experience complexity increasing at a greater than linear rate, you’ll hit a point where the system can’t be maintained – the interconnectedness and interdependency of the system is too complex for someone to properly understand, modify, and maintain.

That’s why it is important for the “workflow” to be simple. Because it can be.

OpenText Picks up Global360

Scott Francis — Thu, 14 Jul 2011 12:50:18 +0000

In a surprise (to me) move, OpenText has acquired Global360:

Waterloo, Ontario – 2011-07-13 – OpenText (NASDAQ: OTEX, TSX: OTC) announced today it has acquired Global 360 Holding Corporation, a leading provider of process and case management solutions. The acquisition continues OpenText s expansion into the fast growing business process management (BPM) market, adding to its technology, talent, services, partner and geographical strengths, as well as giving the company important new capabilities in dynamic case management.

Merger Agreement
The transaction purchase price is approximately $260 million (1), subject to customary purchase price and holdback adjustments. Global 360 has generated approximately $90 million in trailing twelve months revenue and is profitable. The transaction has closed in the first quarter of fiscal 2012 and is not part of the fiscal 2011 fourth quarter and year-end results of OpenText. The management team of OpenText will provide further information regarding the future plans of the combined company when it provides fiscal year-end results on August 10, 2011.

A press release in June 2011 claims 30% revenue growth YoY for Global360′s BPM unit for the quarter, but I can’t find any references to the baseline revenue # for either the company or the BPM unit.

So, given that OpenText just acquired MetaStorm, what will they do with Global360? The press release points to leveraging their strengths in Dynamic Case Management and the Microsoft BPM ecosystem.

OpenText says they’ll continue on with roadmaps for MetaStorm and Global360. But the questions flying on Twitter yesterday were references to indigestion, concern over merger issues, and doubt about how these products fit together.

The question I have is whether this is truly a software acquisition or a financial management acquisition. In the latter, you simply acquire the company to capture their customer base and maintenance revenue stream – and then cross-license and work off the maintenance while slashing all costs. In the former, the new acquisition not only benefits from your bigger sales channel, but also helps you sell more of the product you already have into a new customer base. Too early to tell what the real rationale is, or whether it is simply that they didn’t get what they were looking for in the MetaStorm acquisition.

Others commented that Global360 was one of the last of the original pioneers of the space (actually, it was the successor organization to eiStream, which was one of the original pioneers). The number of viable commercial BPM suites seems to be declining even as the market is growing, which seems counter-intuitive. I think that partly this is a function of lower ASP (average selling price) in enterprise software, and lower valuation multiples (these companies aren’t getting big multiples on revenue and growth as they might have in the 90′s). That leaves them vulnerable to being acquired by someone big enough or determined enough. Not to mention, these firms have taken big VC or PE stakes, and those guys want their money out so they can put it back to work elsewhere.

We’ll keep an eye out for updates on this acquisition and report back. But given how little coverage the OpenText-MetaStorm combination received, I’m not sure how much coverage to expect this time around.

MWD on TIBCO and ActiveMatrix BPM

Scott Francis — Mon, 27 Jun 2011 23:42:48 +0000

Neil Ward-Dutton and MWD have published a brief piece about TIBCO and ActiveMatrix BPM. There’s a more in-depth assessment available as well, coming down the pike.

A couple highlights from his write-up:

Revenue was up 25% year-on-year

License revenue up 32% year-on-year

Non-GAAP operating profit up 31% year-on-year.

TIBCO is now rapidly approaching $1 billion in annual revenue; and its acquisitions have helped it broaden its market footprint into healthcare, retail and other industries.

But specifically the BPM part of the business doesn’t seem to be standing out (the growth doesn’t look that different from the company as a whole):

Q2 BPM license revenue was 9% of the total $83m; that’s around $7.5m. TIBCO declares that this is up 33% year-on-year – which is a good sign – but I’m guessing that at the moment, the company hasn’t yet seen a return on its very significant redevelopment investment.

From what I understand ActiveMatrix BPM was a “start over” rewrite of their BPM offering… and from what we’re seeing/hearing anecdotally, it is taking acts of heroic proportions to make big deals happen.

Incidentally, wholesale rewrites of a product are rarely the right thing to do. They open up all the existing customers to re-examine their go-forward choices… and then they have a new, less mature product to go pitch against entrenched competition. Let’s suppose you build a better mousetrap that scales better (in theory). Prospect A says “can you show me the three references where it scales to x million transactions per time unit?” and… well you can’t, can you? It is a new product after all. And then if you get a customer to buy into it – maybe it scales, maybe it doesn’t. Scale is just one dimension- there’s feature-fit, UI/UX, production support, etc. So many unknowns to answer, that the old product had answers for (maybe bad answers, but answers nonetheless). But, ironically, a company does have to have the courage to rewrite pieces of their software – or to acquire new pieces of software (as Tibco has done). Sometimes the difference between a product rewrite and a “module” rewrite is one of perspective, but one rule of thumb is that the product is a SKU – something you sell. A module isn’t sold independently.

I think the move to ActiveMatrix BPM was more problematic than it appeared on the surface. Putting the $7.5M in perspective… if that is up 33% over prior year, they were as low as $5.625M the year before… This is about the scale of pure-play BPM vendors… but TIBCO + Staffware used to be much bigger than those vendors at the time of their merger… Their momentum seems to have been in the wrong direction… (when I worked for one of those pure-play vendors, we always looked forward to competing against Tibco in a BPM deal cycle…)

On The Direction of IBM’s Business Process Manager – Advanced

Gary Samuelson — Wed, 15 Jun 2011 05:00:50 +0000

[Editor's Note:] Gary Samuelson joined bp3 full-time in 2011, after years of collaborating on-and-off. Gary’s been delivering BPM solutions for years, and has been deep into technology development and consulting throughout his career. We’ll be sharing his blog posts here, republished with his permission – and we think he brings a different voice and perspective and sweet-spot for subject matter to our BPM-focused blog. Thanks, Gary, for adding to the community!

—

Shared with permission by Gary Samuelson, click here for original blog entry.

[Author's note:] Quick Forward: In keen interest of fewer keystrokes-per-noun, I’ll refer to IBM Business Process Manager Advanced as “iBPM”.

Think of a phat buffet – a Las Vegas buffet. All good – yes? This is iBPM Advanced: a nicely packaged collection of deep technologies spanning light-weight dojo widgets, through aggregation and hosting platforms, and on into security and high-availability.

My first impression, though honestly skeptical, is good. We’re looking at the result of serious thinking and efforts on software tools and frameworks for building out and maintaining sustainable Business Process Management.

The individual pieces within iBPM are, by themselves, point-solutions. These bits aren’t new… Together though, in their aggregate form, a composite immerges with some voice and resonance as to direction…

An example?

In the BPM space we usually end up wanting and then building several custom web-UIs (pages and widgets). String these pages together and you get a user-facing process with various back-end service integrations. Moving forward – within “corporate client” each business unit has a need and each “need” gets its own: look, feature, and function. Into this mix add the voice-of-reusability. The same web-UI is then tweaked… re-factoring, and so on until we end-up spending more time in polish.

Measuring progress against business value (not building software), BPM projects tend to lose themselves early on low-value platitudes (look-n-feel and reusability) – all good for vision and heated debate but very bad on business. This isn’t to say such topics lack importance. All must be heard…

Now let’s approach the “UI-debate” with a brick… as in building structures – one brick at a time. IBM-BPM Advanced brings in “Business Space” – this technology allows for the use and re-use of “Web 2.0” widgets and functions. Rather than losing ourselves in debate, each end-user (literally) has the tools and building blocks for assembling their own uniquely personalized look-n-feel.

The BPM team can now better specialize and deliver on re-usable components within a framework built for this pattern. The “one-off” solution is over… iBPM Advanced provides a nice framework for us to quickly bridge across a common BPM pitfall. The UI and re-usability debate ends with “drop-in” Business Space (aka Mashup).

Application Sprawl?

Scott Francis — Fri, 27 May 2011 15:18:30 +0000

In an apparent bid to become tomorrow’s ERP system, Appian makes an appeal to “stop application sprawl“.

But they perked up when talk started shifting to how Appian could wrap or replace existing point solutions in addition to automating currently unstructured processes. A few minutes later, full of excitement, they said the following before the whole group, “After we adopt Appian, we will need to be convinced why any point solution would be better than what we could create for our own needs in BPM.”

(their emphasis)

It is a little counter-intuitive for a BPM services guy like me to complain about pushing more BPM. But I’d just say this: your BPM platform is not your application replacement platform. It is your process -aka BPM- platform. Your firm won’t be better off having all of its systems inside Appian (or another BPMS) if there isn’t any process improvement and rationalization happening along the way.

Rather than seeing someone say that they would adopt the BPM solution over any point solution that can’t prove it is better, the framing should be in terms of process: before buying a point solution, we need to understand how it will fit within the overall fabric of our processes, and whether that “fitting” effort will outweigh the benefits of buying a point-solution application (presumably best-of-breed).

We’re not doing anyone favors if we just hand them the BPM hammer and let them think that all their issues are nails.

But if you do find yourself doing a “rip and replace” project, keep this in mind:

When building a BPM solution, we are often integrating with and replacing parts of legacy systems. Often one of the first requirements from the business will be that the new system does everything the old system did in order to be accepted. This is generally a bad false start to a project.

However, one of the best tactics is to figure out what the 2-3 key NEW capabilities your solution will bring to the business that are so compelling that some minor discomfort over less important details will not derail the project. You can call this marketing, but it is truly understanding where the real value opportunities are in your project. Sometimes these capabilities are things the users will clamor for, sometimes things that the management team will clamor for, and rarely, things that IT will clamor for. Make sure that at least one of your major stakeholder groups is squarely behind a few of the wow features of your BPM project. If you don’t have that excitement in one area, my experience is that you’ll find uncomfortable scrutiny on an exact comparison of the new solution versus the old solution.

No related posts.

The BPM “Operator” Profile

Lance Gibbs — Wed, 18 May 2011 02:48:36 +0000

I was asked the other day by a consultant from a large provider, “What do I need to know to get into BPM consulting?”

So you want to be a BPM Practitioner? “Great, we need all we can get!” Actually, what I did say is that “it is not a career cut out for everyone.” Besides requiring really above par intelligence and a passion for BPM, you also need to possess very strong abilities in leadership, pragmatism, observation, intuition, and adaptability. The challenges you will be engaging with businesses on are usually fairly substantial and all compounded by a fog of competing projects, limited resources, competitive pressures, politics, lack of shared vision, lack of education, paranoia, and a host of other factors. Directional clarity which would be considered “high fidelity” is usually not going to be found there. Ambiguity often rules the corporate landscape, and especially so in the business process arena.

Today’s companies have been transformed by a deluge of overwhelming change and it is up to you and your team to help the organization remediate the highest value areas you can possibly get your hands on. I’ll use the term “operator” in describing a BPM practitioner for a couple reasons. First off, you are not playing the role of a strategist unless you truly have that job and the power to effect a company’s overall direction in a major way. If this isn’t you then you are viewed as a contributor and that is exactly what organizations need, real contribution. I will take a very solid operator over a theorist any day of the week on a BPM program! Secondly, you are going to get your hands dirty and when I say dirty I mean designing, developing, and/or analyzing business processes. Companies need contributors who really know how to deliver and sort out the “should do versus could do” in critical and changing situations, serious operators.

It is not enough to be a good developer/technologist nor is it good enough to be a good business analyst. BPM is specialized and brings with it a whole new level of skill requirements. Are you considered truly excellent at what you have been doing and have those differentiating abilities mentioned? If so, then you will likely be able to enjoy a very rewarding career in BPM!

Today there isn’t a truly recognized industry standard in curriculum or certification for a BPM Practitioner. It’s not worth going into all of the whys of that here, suffice to say there just isn’t and probably won’t be for a good number of years to come, if ever. Nonetheless, that doesn’t prevent you from joining this community and being highly effective in performing the job.

So where do you start on this path? Your best bet is to try and join a boutique consulting firm or possibly a BPMS vendor (I say possibly because only a couple might actually develop skills outside of their own software focus) that has deep expertise, training, performance standards, practical application capability, opportunity to engage on initiatives, and proctor/mentors available to help develop the skills you will need. Learning never ends for anyone.

Whether your background is in IT, Operations, or Line of Business you will need to develop capabilities that are outside of your historical core competency. For example, if you are a developer it would be expected for you to also be able to understand how to perform basic process analysis, e.g. Value Stream, MSA, Pareto, and Process Capability to name a few. Likewise, if you are an analyst you should be able to understand and articulate BPMS capabilities, Enterprise Architecture concepts, Agile and other iterative based SDLC’s, and various enabling technologies surrounding BPM delivery. Moreover, in either scenario you need to wrap that with good project management functions, communications, human interaction/conflict resolution, change management techniques, adult learning, and other soft skills that will allow you to perform in the really challenging environments that are part and parcel of today’s Business Process Management world.

Again, these skills listed outside your initial competency don’t necessarily require mastery but you do need to have some solid capability starting out. Once you have these skills down, there is plenty of opportunity to become more advanced or specialized in any particular area. Not everyone will make the cut but if you think you have what it takes and the desire, this industry sure does need you!

No related posts.

Pricing a BPMS: It is Still the Wild West

Scott Francis — Thu, 12 May 2011 17:04:51 +0000

Sandy Kemsley’s blog on BPMS pricing, she points out that pricing is still incredibly opaque. There’s also a discussion on Quora that she refers to.

The problems:

Different vendors use different metrics to price (user, process, CPU, PVU, duration, etc. )
Different vendors are pricing different things (simulation, Modeling, BPMN, BPEL, XPDL, execution, integration, reporting, analytics, ESB, Messaging, Database, etc.)
The customers are really in different situations. If a vendor prices only by user, a customer with a simple process but 100,000 users can’t buy that product. They might buy a product that prices by CPU (especially if their process has very little processing overhead). So by publishing prices, vendors run the risk of turning away business as well as the risk of selling too cheaply. (The CPU-priced vendor might have been able to charge a higher price, but if they published a per-CPU price then the customer will take the lower price, of course).

The root of it is that the vendors are trying to make a value sale (or value-minus). And customers are just trying to get a price that makes their ROI (value equation) work out. In that kind of market, transparency isn’t likely.

From Sandy’s blog:

Remember the bad old days of buying a car, when you had no idea how much it cost when you walked into the showroom, and had to go through some weird pseudo-negotiation between the salesperson and his manager, where they would throw in the free floor mats if you did your financing with them, give you an extra discount if it was within a week of the end of their sales quarter, or bait-and-switch you into a more expensive model? Enterprise software has always felt a bit like that to me, and BPMS pricing and sales tactics sadly fall into that same category, at least for many of the major vendors.

“the bad old days”? Car buying is still like this in the US (you do have alternatives, but by and large, it boils down to this same kind of experience).

New Websphere Lombardi Edition Announced

Scott Francis — Mon, 06 Dec 2010 05:04:37 +0000

A few days ago, IBM announced the release of two new versions of Websphere Lombardi Edition:

WLE 7.1 for Linux on System z – so you can run the (nearly) latest Lombardi portfolio on a mainframe! (Note: Phil Gilbert points out that earlier versions of Lombardi also supported System z, but it wasn’t widely known)

WLE 7.2 – which includes expanded globalization and translation capabilities (including the authoring application itself). But 7.2 also ships with better integration to WPS (Websphere Process Server), iLOG, FileNet, and DB2 (as well as optional integrations to Outlook and Sharepoint – SKUs formerly known as Teamworks for Sharepoint and Teamworks for Office).

Its a good incremental step for incorporating Lombardi BPM into IBM’s Websphere application family – and given IBM’s global focus the focus on globalization/localization makes a lot of sense. But existing customers are still looking for an in-place upgrade path for production databases, to get from Teamworks 6.x and Teamworks 7.x to WLE 7.x.