Ian Gotts says nobody seems to care about BPM – on the basis of attending a conference (unnamed) in the USA, that was sparsely attended.  He has a great picture of the room, nearly empty, that presumably he was speaking in.  Of course, that picture could be taken before everyone comes in to sit down – it might not be intended to be taken for a literal head-count.  But the point is clear:

I was keynote speaker at an event billed as ‘one of the USA’s most important BPM events’ – 500 attendees.  Gartner gets fewer 1,000 at their US BPM Summit.

In contrast Dreamforce (image right), which is Salesforce’s PAID annual user event gets 25,000 delegates.

As I pointed out in a comment on his blog, this is a bit of apples and oranges.  I don’t believe any of Gartner’s conferences have 25,000 delegates.  They’re analyst-driven conferences that tend to appeal more to executives than rank and file users.  Gartner’s CRM conferences aren’t attended by 25,000 people either…

On the other hand, IBM Impact was attended by north of 8000 people last year. Appian’s user conference had record attendance, as well.  IBM’s other conferences have similarly large numbers of attendees (I believe the IOD conference is even bigger than Impact, for example).

Ian asks:

So what is it?  Perhaps BPM has been around too long and everyone knows about it, so they don’t need to attend conferences and measuring conference attendance is misleading. But the world has moved on with technology enabling fantastic advances in operational excellence, so surely there is a need for continued education. And similarly, CRM has been around 20 years or more yet Salesforce conference attendance is still climbing.

What is it?  It is vendor-focus rather than analyst focus.  As I commented in his blog, these are just different audiences.  The vendor conferences are more users as well as decision-makers.  Users don’t generally go to analyst conferences, however.  And if you’re going to your vendor’s conference- do you really need to go to one or two more analyst conferences?  Probably not.

It isn’t that BPM is too broad, any more than CRM is too broad – it is just that vendor conferences are a bit more interesting than vendor-agnostic analyst conferences.  And hey, the vendors usually bring in better bands and entertainment!

My experience is that BPM enthusiasm at conferences is running high – at software vendor conferences, that is – and so I find myself in disagreement with Ian on this one.

The highlight (for me) of last year’s SXSW-interactive conference was the Lean Startup SXSW – a whole day of planned content, mainly in one room (in the AT&T executive center) focused on the idea of “the lean startup”.  Eric Ries and team did a phenomenal job bringing together a set of topics and speakers that you just normally wouldn’t get exposure to in a single day.

Leveraging the success of that forum, SXSW has created the Startup Village this year.  The 4th floor of the Hilton will be converted to startup mecca.  I thought the “Lean Startup SXSW” track might have gone away in favor of this modified (and bigger billing) approach.  Apparently not so.  Today SXSW.com announces that they’re bringing Lean Startup SXSW back – and some of the chief instigators are involved again – Eric Ries, Dave McClure, Steve Blank, 500 Startups, et al:

The Lean Startup SXSW will take place on Saturday, March 10th from 9:30am – 6:00pm at the Downtown Hilton (across from the Convention Center), and the most up-to-date agenda can be found here.

So, more central location, same Saturday location in the schedule (good call).  The agenda already has enough speakers identified for me to plan my Saturday schedule.

Once again, good evidence of how SXSW adapts and co-opts good ideas from the outside.  Congrats to the organizers, I’m looking forward to it.

SXSWi has one of the more interesting content picking processes I’ve seen for a conference.  It has turned into a well-oiled machine, and it is, in my opinion, responsible for allowing SXSWi to reinvent and remain relevant (even more relevant) over time.

Recently, topics for SXSWi-2012 were released.  These are the panels and sessions that were voted on by attendees or prospective attendees (although a vote isn’t the only input into the panel picking system).

If this year is like most, some additional featured speakers or top-down content will be added, in addition to a few late-selection panels to reflect any late-breaking news or changes in the world around us.

Topic areas:

• Keynote Presentations at the Austin Convention Center
• Featured Sessions (Austin Convention Center)
• Better Tomorrow (Austin Convention Center) – a focus on economy and social issues
• Book Readings (Austin Convention Center)
• Branding and Marketing (Stephen F Austin hotel – which was also the site of the BP3 all-hands meeting!)
• Convergence (Austin Convention Center)
• Design and Development (Austin Convention Center)
• Emerging (Hilton Austin – Downtown)
• Future of Work (Courtyard Marriott)
• Government and Global Issues (AT&T Conference Center)
• Health and Education (AT&T Conference Center)
• Journalism and Online Content (Sheraton Austin)
• Latin America (Hilton Garden Inn)
• Lifestyles and Sports (Campus TBA)
• ScreenBurn and Gaming (Campus TBA)
• Social Networks (Omni – Downtown)
• Startup Village (Hilton Austin – Downtown)
• Workshops (Radisson – Town Lake)

The biggest change I notice : moving the startup events to the Hilton (which is like ground-zero, right across the street from the Austin Convention Center), rather than having them at the AT&T Conference Center, as they did last year.  Last year’s startup sessions were really high quality – and the AT&T Conference Center at UT is a fantastic facility for an event like that – but it is removed from the core action at SXSW.  My guess is that there was an effort to bring this core area back to the center of the activity at SXSWi.  The only downside is it will be much harder to park this year!

To anyone trying to organize a conference, I submit to you that you just haven’t seen crazy til you’ve been to SXSWi.  The number of people and the logistics involved in feeding them, moving them, parking them, seating them, and providing wifi and 3g cell connectivity for their 3 connected devices is an incredible challenge.  And it is impressive how well it all works.

The Startup Village has its own set of articles on SXSW’s website.  This promises to be a great conference.  The number of topics is overwhelming, but the organization into campuses and topic areas at least helps focus attention on the topics you care about.

As I was about to post this, I ran across Austin Startup’s coverage of the same subject.  GREAT tidbits they pulled out from the schedule:

Stephen Wolfram on Computation and Its Impact on the Future. Any chance to hear him speak, I will take it.

Definitely. I look at this session as being potentially as promising as the Craig Venter session from the 2011 conference.  They also pointed out panels from Dachis Group, RecycleMatch, WP Engine, and Foreca.st (local startups).  Josh Baer will reprise a topic he owns: 3 Secrets to a Killer Elevator Pitch.  Even this far in advance it looks like a very strong lineup.

Well, if Sandy doesn’t have the best coverage of the conference, it is by far the best coverage of the bloggers I follow.

First up:  IBM Case Manager, IBM Content Manager, and IBM BPM -

 

• Extend IBM BPM processes with content, using document and list widgets that can be integrated in a BPM application. This does not include content event processes, e.g., spawning a specific process when a document event such as check-in occurs, so is no different than integrating FileNet content into any BPMS.
• Extend IBM BPM Advanced (i.e., WPS) processes with content through a WebSphere CMIS adapter into the content repository. Ditto re: any BPMS (or other system) that supports CMIS being able to integrate with FileNet content.
• Invoke an IBM BPM Advanced process from an ICM case task. Assuming that this is via a web service call (since WPS allows processes to be exposed as web services), not specifically an IBM-to-IBM integration.

Next, up, transformation in the era of Big Data, perhaps a business case for “Watson”?

Some of IBM’s future of big data analytics is Watson, and Manoj Saxena presented on how Watson is being applied to healthcare – being demonstrated at IOD – as well as future applications in financial services and other industries. In healthcare, consider that medical information is doubling every five years, and about 20% of diagnoses in the US have some sort of preventable error. Using Watson as a diagnostic tool puts all healthcare information into the mix, not just what your doctor has learned (and remembers). Watson understands human speech, including puns, metaphors and other colloquial speech; it generates hypotheses based on the information that it absorbs; then it understands and learns from how the system is used. A medical diagnosis, then, can include information about symptoms and diseases, patient healthcare and treatment history, family healthcare history, and even patient lifestyle and travel choices to detect those nasty tropical bugs that your North American doctor is unlikely to know about. Watson’s not going to replace your doctor, but provide decision support during diagnosis and treatment.

And third, what’s new in IBM ECM products :

There was a question about why BPM didn’t appear in the ECM portfolio diagram, and Clayton stated that “BPM is now considered part of Case Manager”. Unlike the BPM vendors who think of ACM as a part of BPM, I think that she’s right: BPM (that is, structured process management that you would do with IBM FileNet BPM) is a functionality within ACM, not the other way around.

I think the BPM referenced here is with respect to Filenet BPM, rather than “IBM BPM”, but this is one area where Sandy and I probably agree to disagree.  I think the race between BPM and ACM was essentially over before it started.  Managing a business is going to more likely be called “BPM” than “ACM” for one thing.  I think BPM is going to win the war of acronyms.  The go-to-market strategy is going to include “ACM” functionality in a BPM offering.  This isn’t some inside-scoop at IBM, this is just my judgment on the market in general.  I may be wrong, but the market will show that one way or the other in the next few years.  So far, to me, it looks like the BPM firms are winning the argument.

(Which isn’t to say that ACM proponents haven’t influenced BPM product direction – they have.  But my feeling all along is that it just wouldn’t be hard for BPM vendors to fast-follow ACM vendors, such as they are).

Finally, Sandy covered the IBM Filenet BPM updates:

The Process Engine (PE) was ported completely to a standard Java application, with some dramatic performance increases: 60% improvement in response time through the Java API, 70% (or more) reduction in CPU utilization, near-linear growth in CPU utilization for vertical scaling (i.e., more processes on a single server), and constant CPU utilization on horizontal scaling (e.g., twice as many processes on twice as many servers).

So… one danger I see for IBM in general in the BPM space – is focusing too much on speeds and feeds.  Not that these aren’t important. They are.  Especially when you have customers the size of IBM’s customers.  But they also need to solve real business problems and value propositions that aren’t driven by IT metrics.

It reminds me of a conversation we had with a customer once.

US:  So, what reports do you think we need to support the business’ needs? There aren’t really any business-facing reports defined yet.

THEM:  I think we have all the reports we need already.

US:  You do?  Which reports do you already have that the business uses?

THEM:  Well, the timing reports on webservice performance and user interface performance, for example.

US:  hmmmmmmm.  How about measuring vendor quality, vendor response time to RFPs, and pricing estimation to final-price accuracy?  Might tell you who your best vendors are or how much it is costing you to work with a vendor that isn’t fulfilling your business on time.

THEM:  Yeah, but the business isn’t asking for that.  They really want to know how fast the webservices and UIs are running.

Needless to say, we weren’t talking to the right person, and speeds and feeds were just not the right focus.  Faced with that situation, you just have to back up and regroup and find the right focal point closer to a real business problem.

Thanks for the great coverage Sandy -

About a month ago, Sandy Kemsley attended Progress Revolution – first giving an intro-to-BPM course and then blogging about the sessions she attended.  The whole series of posts is worth reading, and I thought a few highlights from her coverage might convince you to read more…

On the importance of BPM (and CEP) to Progress, from opening remarks:

In spite of Progress’ long history with their OpenEdge software development environment, it’s clear that much of their future success is based on the Apama CEP and Savvion BPM acquisitions, and the integration of these product functionalities into a comprehensive solution.

On OpenEdge development methods and how they relate to BPM:

Does the integration of BPM just relegate OpenEdge to the scripting/coding language slaved to BPM? Maybe, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Instead of layering BPM on top of a monolithic application developed with OpenEdge, it’s about having an integrated development platform that includes BPM as a part of the toolkit. It will be interesting to see how well this message is received by the OpenEdge development community, and how long it takes to actually impact their development methods.

And, we can see that Progress took a similar approach to integrating BPM acquisitions as IBM did:

Although (Savvion) BPM Studio and the OpenEdge Architect development environment are both Eclipse-based, it doesn’t appear that they’ve been integrated in any significant manner. Similarly, there are two different servers – although a BPM process can call an OpenEdge functionality, using web services at least – and two different end-user portal environments, where the BPM server functionality can be surfaced in the OpenEdge portal.

This approach drew a lot of fire from analysts covering IBM’s integration a year in, but I don’t see the same angst in coverage of Progress-Savvion after 18 months.  In fact, I’d say although Progress has the same approach it doesn’t look like they’re quite as far along implementing their strategy.  I’m not saying there should be angst – I think both companies are simply taking realistic measures to integrate different product lines.

On her realization that this isn’t a BPM vendor conference, during her coverage of Dr. Ketabchi’s talk:

…which really drives home that I’m not at a BPM vendor’s conference, I’m at an application development tool vendor’s conference where they are introducing this hot new technology called BPM. This is, of course, the stage that most of the business world is at with respect to BPM understanding; I’m just so used to being in the BPM echo chamber that I rarely hear these messages unless I’m delivering them to a client.

Great material across 7 or 8 posts! Thanks to Sandy for capturing this for those of us who couldn’t be there in person.

We’re well-overdue to comment on the Forrester BPF 2011 event, partly because we weren’t in attendance this year.  To make up for lost time, we’re linking here to some of the best coverage of the event that we saw in blogging.

First, two articles by Anne Stuart on ebizQ.  The first post, early returns, focuses on this year’s theme for the event, “Customer Engagement”:

“What was good enough before is not good enough today,” Derek Miers, a Forrester principal analyst, warned in one of the event’s opening sessions. And, he added, customer-engagement approaches that work right now won’t be sufficient for long; they’ll need to continue evolving to meet changing customer needs. “We almost have to rebuild the ship while we’re at sea,” he noted.

This sounds like a riff on continuous process improvement – you don’t “arrive at the destination” so much as always take a step back and see how you can improve and then refocus your efforts.  The landscape is changing, so the same goals may not stay relevant over time.

Next up was a post of shorthand notes from a session about getting started with DCM.

Sandy Kemsley once again takes the honors for Most Complete Coverage of the event, with no less than 5 posts tagged accordingly.  In one post, “Empowering the Customer Through Process Improvement and BPM“, she notes:

They [Nokia Siemens Networks] are a big SAP customer, but find that they use Appian BPM to fill the gaps that SAP just doesn’t do without major customization, and to bridge between different systems. They’ve implemented BPM in five major business areas with more than 22,000 users. By reusing some components but adapting to each particular business area, they’re able to roll out new systems in a matter of months. They are pushing into social capabilities to facilitate faster decision-making, and mobile platforms to better support remote users.

Wait, I thought SAP = BPM? Well, layering process on top of SAP is a common BPM deployment story. In another summary, this particular phrasing rang true for me:

Looking at processes in customer experience, we need to use Lean principles to eliminate waste from the customer viewpoint, not just the company viewpoint. We need to understand the full customer journey and all of the touchpoints that need to be managed, and ensure that the end-to-end customer processes are properly defined and orchestrated. This can lead to businesses reorganizing to eliminate business functional silos in favor of process-focused organizational models.

I think the concept of eliminating waste from the customer experience as well as from the company viewpoint is critical.  All too often ill-thought process improvement exercises just “squeeze the balloon”  – moving a burden from one part of the process to another, from one group to another.  If the group you’re moving the process burden to is your customer, look out…

We hope to get to BPF12 next year – for some reason this one flew below the radar all year and sneaked up on us while we were busy making BPM projects happen!

Keith has posted a summary of his notes from Forrester’s BPM Forum – great read and good insights into several topics – in particular he has a great writeup of Derek Miers’ session on designing your BPM engagement program around the customer experience:

He draws a correlation between process maturity and focus on customer experience. Maturity level 1-2 cost reduction is the top category (74%). Level 2-3 customer experience is the biggest. levels 3-4 and 4-5 customer experience remains high but value innovation becomes most important. Waste elimination remains that the same levels at all levels. The “ah-ha” moment was that if at level 2-3 you don’t focus on customer experience improvement, you will never get to level 3-5. (Survey is mostly business people, not IT – Forrester/QPC business process maturity survey)

Looks like a great day of sessions, but I agree with Keith that 7:30am is inhumane in any timezone.

SXSW-interactive fully exposes its process for selecting panels and sessions to attendees. I’m not sure what the genesis of this crowd-sourced way of planning content was, but the effect is remarkable. It starts with nominating ideas.  Then there’s a round of voting. An expert panel also has input to the final outcome.  Amazingly, it scales.  Why does it work?

For one, SXSWi (SWSX interactive) is constantly being reinvented.  What at one point was primarily a vehicle for bloggers to gather and share, has morphed into an event that covers a range of topics:

• Blogging
• Social media
• Mobile tech
• Startups of all stripes
• Design
• Freelancers
• Social issues
• Raising capital, venture capital, etc.
• Etc.

The balance of these topics has been shifting over time.  A few years ago there weren’t really any topics on geolocation – but there were a lot of those last year.  There was even a whole day focused on lean startups.

This process for selecting sessions and panels is not only a great way to engage with the community – it is a great way to let the conference evolve and adapt with the interests of attendees.  It is impossible to imagine the organizers of SXSWi coming up with several thousand sessions over 5 days. But crowdsourced – it is not only possible to do, the attendees will create the content, give the presentations, mediate the discussions… SXSWi actually has to prune the content, and yet there are still time slots with 150 concurrent sessions.

All of this benefit is managed through their panel picking process. SXSWi is being reborn again as we speak, with round 1 of panel picking under way.  You can get a sense for the variety in sessions just from that Austin Startup link – social media, semantic web, women in Tech, elevator pitches.  And that’s a small sampling of the options.

Don’t like the sessions from last year?  Nominate and vote for your own for 2012!  I’ve voted, and I’m looking forward to see what makes the cut for next year.

We have a process improvement case study.   Someone scheduled our all-hands meeting for BP3 in the midst of a heat wave that has set records all year long in Austin, TX.

A quick analysis was performed – corrections for the next process run were clear – schedule later in the year (October), pick a different location (Minnesota for example).  But the real question is how to fix the immediate process failure.  Sure the meeting itself was in the air conditioned confines of the fabulous Stephen F. Austin… but outside was an oven.

Not to worry.  Process improvement yielded a sure-fire way to cool down, with a low probability of failure:

Sure, not everyone jumped in the lake, but many of us embraced this process improvement with gusto, as you can see.

If the lake didn’t work, we could call in reinforcements.

So we just completed our first company all-hands meeting.  Previously, the closest we’ve come was having our two co-founders meet for coffee on Sundays, and the near unanimous attendance we had at bpmCamp 2010 at Stanford University.  The short version of how I feel about this: why didn’t we do this sooner?!

We included all the crucial elements of a good company meeting:

1. Food.  We ate our way through some of Austin’s best restaurants.
2. Fun.  We carved out time for getting out on a boat on the lake the last afternoon.  But we also made time for checking out the local Austin bands playing on 6th street (a shout out to Empty-Handed Vagabonds and to the lead singer of Dysfunkshun Junkshun).
3. Location.  We held our meetings at the historic Stephen F Austin hotel.  The second floor balcony is a fantastic way to unwind and socialize after a day of business meetings, and the hotel itself oozes character and history. Often people ignore the setting of their meetings-  but this stuff matters!  The space you meet in affects how you think, how focused you are, how intimate the meeting feels.
4. Content. Sure, we reviewed important company metrics and business goals. But we also put a lot of content together individually to give everyone a chance to hear what  everyone else was up to.  I was really impressed with the quality of thought and content that was presented – and more impressed by the discussion that followed.  I learned a lot over the two days we met – about our team as well as about the topics they discussed.
5. Team.  Because we have a distributed organization, we have limited opportunities to gather in one place.  This is a really special team we’ve put together, and getting everyone in one place just made it more obvious how good they are.
6. Surprise.  We also had a surprise guest-appearance from Phil Gilbert, VP of BPM at IBM.  The Q&A session was memorable, as his take on the BPM space.
7. Shirts.  You’ve got to have shirts at a company meeting.  We rolled out fresh polo shirts and a surprise t-shirt addition to the lineup.

Often people will ask me why they should join up with BP3 instead of contracting – or why someone else would join up instead of contracting.  I guess if you don’t try it out, it is hard to understand the difference – but this sense of team, of building something bigger than any of us can do alone – it is very powerful.  I think everyone in attendance could feel how special this was.  You just don’t get that kind of validation and gratification as a solo artist.   You don’t get this sense of family.

So we’re building a company.  And investments like this are required to reinvest in community and team.  To say thank you.  And to give everyone a sense of the possible.  Our company meeting just made it clear to our team (and to me) why we’re special.   Thanks to everyone on the team!

I have been informed that “BP3 All Hands Meeting” as an operating name lacks a certain “flair”.  We’ll work on  branding for our event.  We might just call it “Getting the Band Back Together“.

A few great blog posts covering IRM BPM Europe.  This is a joint EA and BPM conference that was quite well attended by people I follow in the BPM space, but we weren’t able to attend this year.  A few of the highlights here:

It seemed that quite a few BPM practitioners were impressed with Alec Sharp’s presentation on June 9th:

The main point of the discussion is again that the human issues are the key for effective business process re-organization.And Organization Development (OD) is a perfect discipline that can complement the BPM initiatives.

Sandy Kemsley, as always, had excellent coverage of the event – and started off with an explanation of why EA and BPM conferences might be co-located:

EA provides a framework to structure for transiting from strategy to implementation. BPM – from architecture through implementation – is a process-centric slice that intersects EA at points, but also includes process-specific operational activities. They present EA and BPM as collaborative, synergistic disciplines

Sandy has great coverage of several more sessions, including “Designing a Breakout Business Strategy“, and Building a Business Architecture capability at Shell:

The EA and process design CoE have been combined (interesting idea) into a single EA CoE, including process architects and business architects, among other architect positions; I’m not sure that you could include an entire BPM CoE within an EA CoE due to BPM’s operational implementation focus, but there are certainly a lot of overlapping activities and functions, and should have overlapping roles and resources.

She also had another good reference to EA and BPM – Claus Jensen’s presentations and a recent red book.

Adam Deane has perhaps the best overall review of the event in a single post:

I was fortunate enough to attend both the Gartner EA conference and the IRM BPM/EAC conference this year.
Gartner added a BPM track to their EA conference.
IRM combined the EA and BPM conferences into one joint conference.

There were some subtle differences between the conferences:
Gartner’s message to the EAs: “Wake up and start embracing the business”
IRM’s message to the EAs: “Too late. Enterprise Architecture has already been divided into IT architecture and Business architecture. Deal with it”

Gartner focused on the future of EA: Energetic, Gamification, Business oriented.
IRM focused on the past: Trips down memory lane, The glory days of EA that have long gone, The “has been”.

Interesting dichotomy – at least that is how it struck Adam.

Michele Cantara gave a rapid fire session on the last day of Gartner BPM 2011, covering how to leverage Services firms to gain expertise for your BPM efforts.  As with most presentations there was plenty to agree with, but I’m going to take time out to really contrast the areas in which we disagree.

First, Michele asks the audience to understand Gartner’s six-step plan:

1. Select your BPM Usage Scenario (from specific process-based solution to business transformation)
2. Select your “BPM Corner” (using Gartner’s Four Corners framework)
3. Do a gap analysis of BPM skills and roles
4. Align the motivations of sourcing roles to the process owner desired business results (this is a bit tricky, get in the weeds a bit)
5. Understand the capabilities in the BPM consulting and systems integration market (C&SI).
6. Evaluate C&SI Capabilities against criteria identified in steps 1-4.

The steps make sense, at a high level, but of course the devil is in the details, and I disagree with the assumptions underlying steps 5 and 6.

To understand where we differ, it is important to understand Step 2. Borrowing from Gartner’s presentation:

Gartner's "Four Corners" Framework for BPM

The basic point is that from left to right, processes evolve from changing infrequently to changing frequently or continuously.  Bottom to the top:  a spectrum where IT makes all the changes at the bottom, and business makes all the changes at the top. There are descriptions of typical examples in each quadrant.

So far so good.  But then Michele makes the recommendations for where the sweet spots are for different types of vendors:

Gartner Four Corners with BPM Service Provider overlay

If you just glance at it, it may not jump out at you.  But look closer.  Offshore service vendors are recommended in all four quadrants – meanwhile Boutique firms are recommended for only one.  If we’re to believe our eyes, offshore vendors are as good at assisting with continuous change processes in which the business makes all the changes, as they are at assisting with processes that change infrequently and are changed only by IT.

Does that pass the test of common sense or of what we see in the real world?  It does not.

The presentation notes imply that once upon a time, BPM consulting was the bastion of boutique consultancies (true).  However, Michele jumps to the conclusion that because customers would like to have larger consultancies assist with global delivery models- that these larger (global) consultancies actually have such skills and abilities. The “establishment” of a BPM practice by a major firm is as easy as issuing a press release and fictionalizing a number of consultants who participate in the practice.  There’s no audit of said numbers.  And if one initiates a practice with 500 people – where exactly are those people billing out?  Which customers are the victims of this 500 person experiment?  When that big firm closes a deal, they’ll come calling on the boutique BPM firms to fulfill the on-site work (or in the case of Accenture, buy the boutique firm).  I always wonder where these 500 experts materialize from – if we added them up across all the large vendors you’d think we’d have a surplus of BPM talent in our business… Something doesn’t add up.

The fundamental fallacy is the idea of scale (i.e. that large firms will have large numbers of experienced and qualified practitioners), because large does not mean effective – that large firm is only as effective for you as the team it assigns to your project(s).  Of course these big firms have a few great people of some talent.  But the question is whether that talent will be deployed to your project or not.  If you have spent a couple of decades in professional services working either within or alongside these entities you know this to be true. Now compound that with offshore companies who by and large don’t implement BPM in their local markets, and rely solely on the export of their services for their experience.  They’re missing a huge piece of the BPM experience by not being in front of customers. Ultimately, it comes down to those individual contributors who have the localized experience – with business, operational, and technical acumen.

It turns out that BPM is still led by boutique consulting firms.  It is the boutiques that still provide the thought leadership as well as the bleeding edge of technology leadership.  If I were drawing this same chart, Boutiques would have showed up in every quadrant, with qualifications – you need different boutique firms for different types of BPM initiatives.  If your organizational goal is to learn how to fish in the BPM pond, rather than to have a services provider serve you dinner, then the boutique firm will line up better with your needs.  Those big firms have big billable and staffing targets to hit and they’re going to unload the bus.  Yet, a highly skilled team of 4-6 people can make a huge impact on your global BPM efforts.

Offshore vendors are most well suited for the lower-left quadrant – infrequently changing processes, driven by IT. If I were drawing the same chart, it would look something like this:

I’m not sure why Gartner would be pushing BPM hopefuls into the arms of offshore services vendors.  Going offshore with BPM doesn’t address the most critical failure mode of BPM projects:  getting the requirements right. In fact it impedes getting to the right answers by stretching time and distance.  If you’re sending the work to a big team of offshore resources-  well no one is going to learn anything in that situation.  It doesn’t help your organization become self-sufficient in BPM – and so you’re not really getting leverage from your BPM services investment.

Michele Cantara showed another chart that shows Capabilities of the various types of vendors, in general:

Gartner: Capabilities against Criteria

I have a tougher grading scale, in general, so I’m sharing my own opinion on these ratings here:

Revised Capabilities to Criteria

I’m sorry to find myself so far out of alignment with what was presented at Gartner’s conference, but the distance on the assumptions behind these last two steps in their process was so great I just felt compelled to write about it.  Others may disagree, but this is just how it looks from our perspective – both as a boutique services firm that has done a lot of mop up operations.

There were several blogs about Gartner BPM 2011, capturing overall impressions.  From ebizQ, Ann Stuart reviews the keynotes (including this quote from Daryl Plummer):

–Visibility is critical: “If you can’t see it, you can’t fix it. You probably don’t even know you have it.”

I think the highlight of the keynotes was Daryl Plummer’s closing remarks.  I found myself wishing he had opened the ceremonies, so to speak – it would have been a great way to energize the attendees about BPM and their role within their businesses.  He was the best individual speaker that I saw at the conference (great mix of humor and data and content).

Len Dorfman from Fujitsu also summarized the Gartner BPM 2011 experience in the Fujitsu Interstage blog:

What stood out for me the most at the Summit, however, was the positive vibe of the attendees.   I had the opportunity to speak to a number of them in the booth as well as between the sessions, and all of my conversations were positive and optimistic about the BPM outlook for next year and beyond.

I’d second this sentiment – the positive vibe was palpable.  And you might think that this was just among the vendors, eying a bigger attendance population – but no.  It was positive among companies attending.  I’d attribute this partly to an improving background (economy, fewer layoffs in your own company), and partly to a different posture – acting upon the world rather than waiting to find out what the world will do to you and your firm next. I think humans are hardwired to prefer to be taking the initiative over waiting and reacting.

Deb Miller wrote about the conference on her blog as well:

Cloning would have been helpful at Gartner’s BPM Conference #BPM11 last week in Baltimore.  It was hard to decide which of the multiple concurrent sessions to attend.

She should try attending SXSW in Austin.  Some of the time slots had more than 100 concurrent sessions.  At Gartner the maximum was 5 or 6 – but still, there were usually good choices of content.  She also liked the “Great Case Management Debate” format.  We’ll just agree to disagree on that one!

Clearly overall reactions from vendors attending Gartner BPM 2011 were positive.  But in the way of feedback, a few things I noticed:

1. Some of the speakers have spoken at many, if not all, previous Gartner BPM conferences in the US.  I think Gartner could be more proactive about pushing even their sponsors to bring fresh perspectives and content to the conference.
2. Some of the vendors are just now figuring out that you need to start with the business objectives and work from there toward the methods behind BPM, and the functions within a BPMS.  I found that… surprising.
3. The high variance of maturity of what different vendors are calling BPM is astonishing.  The variance of maturity of what customers call BPM is also high, but less surprising.  (If Visio and Sharepoint plugins are your idea of BPM…)
4. BPM within most companies is an island.  If you envision all the BPM efforts at these different corporations, you might think of it as an interconnected web, but it is more like a sea of islands.

It turns out, standing on one of these islands, a person doesn’t have perspective about how their BPM maturity compares to another island’s maturity.  It is only the vendors and independent consultants and analysts who really carry this news around.  Someday perhaps Twitter and other resources will also, but for now, those social domains just help keep the outside experts better informed and connected, and haven’t advantaged customers directly as much.

I’m mindful that we should all stay humble as we share our advice with the world – lest we find out our own island is small and inconsequential – perhaps more so than we thought.

I was interested to see the “Great Case Management Debate” at Gartner’s BPM 2011 conference.  After all, it has been quite the topic, ever since Keith Swenson put his weight behind the ACM moniker more than a year ago.

But right off the bat, Toby Bell reset expectations- that this wouldn’t be a debate, it would be a “live research session” (whatever that means).  Toby Bell represented ECM (content management), Janelle Hill represented BPM, and Kimberly Harris-Ferrante represented insurance…?   It would have been more interesting to have someone really representing and advocating for case management, versus someone really advocating for “BPM” – instead we had a bit of an odd triangle.   For most of the session there was no debate at all, there wasn’t even nuanced disagreement. A definition of Case Management was given:

Case management is the optimization of long-lived collaborative processes that require secure coordination of knowledge, content, correspondence, and human resources and require adherence to corporate and regulatory policies and rules to achieve decisions about rights, entitlements, or settlements.

The path of execution cannot be completely pre-defined; human judgment and external events and interactions will alter the flow.

Even Toby poked fun at the very Gartner-ness of this definition.  They talked a bit about why Case Management hasn’t caught on better in the marketplace – and there was some consensus that part of the problem is the word “case” – what is it?  To many businesses, this is sort of a meaningless term.  Kimberly proposed that Case Management would get better traction by adopting industry-specific terminology for the “objects” that are cases.

Janelle gave an example of a collaborative, content-rich process:  university applications selection.  As she put it, they want to pick from a big applicant pool (lots of people applying), pick better students, and get a higher acceptance rate. ( Well, actually these last two goals are contradictory.  The better your students are, the more options they have, and the lower the implied acceptance rate.  However, what increases acceptance rate are things outside the selection process – reputation, communications, campus and facilities, faculty, cost, financial aid, etc.  Universities have been competing for top talent for a long time, since well before terms like case management and BPM were coined. )

The closest we got to a real debate was with respect to the marketplace.  Toby took a light-hearted shot at BPM vendors by pointing out that ECM vendors were adding case management and process management capabilities as obvious add-ons to their software packages.  Janelle’s retort was well-said:  that ECM vendors were pursuing BPM functionality out of necessity, looking for a way to grow when there are only 4 or 5 vendors left.  Whereas in BPM, there are 60-70 vendors, growing in the BPM space, adding ECM functionality as a rounding function, not out of a necessity to find new growth opportunities.  I think she has a point – for some of the ECM vendors it looks a bit desperate rather than aggressive.  It doesn’t mean they shouldn’t continue with the strategy but it does look like a strategy of necessity.

As Sandy Kemsley reviews it:

Looking at the issue of products, they showed a slide that looked at overlaps in product spaces, and puts BPM in the structured process/data quadrant, with case management far off in the opposite quadrant. As Hill points out, many of the BPM vendors are extending their capabilities to include case management functionality; Bell stated that this might fit better into the ECM space, but Hill countered (the first real bit of debate) that ECM vendors only think about how changes in content impact the case, which misses all of the rules and events that might impact the case and its outcome. She sees case management being added to ECM as just a way that the relatively small market (really just four or five key vendors) is trying to rejuvenate itself, whereas the case management advances from BPM vendors are much more about bringing the broad range of functionality within a BPMS – including rules and analytics – to unstructured processes.

Not everyone shared my disappointment at the lack of debate – I thought it was a missed opportunity to really dig into one of the few controversies in BPM.  The session was still good and well worth attending – it just wasn’t what I was expecting.

Elise Olding reports on twitter stats in her latest blog post:

April 27th stats:
# tweets for the day – 637                    # unique tweeters – 91

April 28th stats:
# tweets for the day – 789                    # unique tweeters – 114

I think the delta in tweets reflects partially the stronger content on day 2, causing more people to participate. But it also probably reflects that people got on the proper hashtag bandwagon.  Since individual sessions and topics didn’t have their own hashtags, we can’t compare interest level as we might in SXSWi, for example.

Sadly, even on twitter you can’t get an accurate count of peanut-gallery comments.  Though you might get a sense of it with Ian Gotts (@iangotts) in most active, and myself in 5th.  You could probably double the # of officially tagged tweets with the side-bar @-replies and DMs.

Gartner’s BPM Summit this year in Baltimore was a little different than previous years for a few reasons. First off, almost 850 attendees were present according to Gartner’s stats which is a  non-trivial improvement over last year! Secondly, for the first time I can remember we actually ran into a larger business audience than before. Normally these conferences are highly IT represented but this year marked a shift- quite a few business professionals were also in attendance.  This is obviously a very good thing. Lastly, there was great content all around but I caught a session focused on Change Management that really hit the nail on the head and certainly left an impression with me. We have discussed how critical change management is when it comes to BPM and yet it’s something most companies have little competency in doing on their own.

Now when I say Change Management this is not your IT notion of change management and it also isn’t this idea either!

Change Management is not just:

• Communication
• Training
• Group therapy sessions
• Cheerleading
• Etc.

The talk was presented by Phil Eastman II of ProSci and you could clearly see that this subject is a passion for him. One of the key moments came when Phil cited research performed over several years that stated in essence, “Keeping the human side of process change in the forefront buys on average a six times realization in quality of solution”.  That is a big number and as we want to de-risk these initiatives to the greatest extent possible, why would we not look at the change management with a lot more diligence? He also added, “Change management is not about training”. Sure, it is a component but it is not what is most highly correlated with success – change management is about getting results! Before I get to that, here are some points Phil cited on why change management is not done more:

1. It’s hard – it requires planning, discipline and persistence to be effective
2. Poor measurement – it’s difficult to quantify benefit other than the stat above therefore, funding for it becomes a bit more of a challenge
3. It’s expensive – change management requires real resources, time, and money to do correctly

However, without appropriate focus in Phil’s words you allow ‘Chance’ to be in the driver’s seat over ‘Change’. This definitely hit home for me as a practitioner because over many years I have seen this in action as well as other key success factors being under-capitalized on programs deemed “mission critical” by organizations.  So what is Change Management about? It’s really about taking the human aspect and getting extremely serious about ensuring the crew of your ship you just built is actually recruited. In Phil’s words, “There is no such thing as organizational change; only individual change summated is organizational change. The unit of change is without a doubt the individual”. Absolutely true!

Phil then broke the idea of Change Management into two perspectives which were ‘Individual Perspective’ and ‘Organization Perspective’. Most of the focus went into the ‘Individual Perspective’ which is appropriate considering he just stated that the individual is the ultimate unit of change. The idea is to understand what it is going to take to make any given individual adopt the change successfully based on the dynamics of the new solution presented. ProSci has a model called “ADKAR” (acronym, of course) which in turn has five major building blocks of successful change:

• Awareness – Are individuals aware of the change and do they understand why it’s occurring
• Desire – (This is the hardest according to Phil), Do the individuals actually want change
• Knowledge – Are the individuals understanding of what is being ultimately asked of them and do they know what is in it for them
• Ability – (There is a major gap between knowledge and ability), can the individual successfully participate in the new world
• Reinforcement- What is being done to reinforce the behavior of individuals post change, because people are readily capable of regressing)

The ultimate idea is to understand the mechanisms that perhaps got one individual over the change hump and be able to replicate that over and over again. Phil stated, “Processing a billion transactions a month is not hard. Processing one transaction a billion times is”. One other very insightful concept to keep in mind is that “organizations are not mechanical systems, they are living systems. You cannot change a living system, you can only disturb it”.

Great session all around and it certainly kept the attendees attention. Kudos to Gartner for locking this one up!

Day 2 kicked off with deeper BPM-specific content.  Lance and I split up for most of the day, going to different sessions.  But we both came back from sessions with good content.  I attended the DoD session on Semantic data.  Somehow I knew it would be beyond the beginner content of the day before, from the title: “Primitives Based Process Modeling in a Vocabulary Driven Enterprise Architecture (EA)”.

Vocabulary-Driven Enterprise Architecture

What Dennis Wisnosky really addressed was how standards like BPMN and URIs and other W3C standards were really allowing the DoD to deal with its vast troves of data (indexed and/or unstructured) and to get to a better leveraging of semantic data.

He started with a video, that to me was right out of the Lost TV series (think the videos with the Doctor introducing the purpose of each station – the audio slightly off).  He then continued with a live presentation.  The problem he was attempting to address with BPM-related technology, was one of stovepiping:

• Redundancy of data and function and work
• Data (where does it live, how do we find it, index it)
• Infrastructure – cost is too high relative to industry norms

Showing that some of the BPM / Agile messages are getting through to big government, he said they break their 4-year (!) plan down to 90-day “pods”, with 14-30 day sprints within those pods.  His goal was to get the team used to a different cadence and style of work – a cultural change, essentially.

There was a lot more depth about how they combined the use of various standards to pull the right data to work on given where they are in a process.  It is a more technical view of BPM and BPMN than you normally see. But Wisnosky demonstrates that if your organization needs to “go there” on the technical front, it can.  These aren’t toys, these are serious standards and technologies and his team has shown that with what they’ve built, and how they built it.

Adobe’s Moment of Truth

Adobe had a presentation, along with L’Oreal, on User Experience: “Adobe Systems: Experience Matters- shift your process focus to user moments of truth”… The Adobe rep, Rob Pinkerton, gave a good presentation, no complaints.  Really focused on “Moments of Truth”… Which is a marketing-esque way of saying: user experience matters.

I happen to agree with the messaging.  But The delivery missed a huge opportunity for Adobe.  Stanley Zaykaner gave a very good presentation on behalf of L’Oreal and Adobe.  However, the User experience was represented by a few screenshots, not a moving video or demonstration.  And worse, those screenshots showed UI that would make green screens proud.  Or Netscape circa 1995.  Grey on Grey.  With a little bit more grey.  I have friends at Adobe who’ve been telling me about their great advantage in UI/UX and I was hoping to see evidence of it in this talk, but I just didn’t see it.

This was a really well-attended session, and they had a great opportunity to differentiate against all other BPM product suites on the market – but they didn’t.  And the modeling didn’t look like BPMN at all – a point of negative differentiation for most BPM professionals.  The other products will differentiate on transactions and integration to back-end systems… Adobe really needed to differentiate on these User Moments of Truth.  Maybe next year.

There were a couple tidbits I took exception to – like the idea that no one in marketing was thinking about the Return Goods Authorization process, or the cost of returned goods with a liberal return policy.  But I would disagree- people in marketing (and execs) are typically acutely aware of return policies at their stores and market them aggressively as a point of credibility and trust with their consumers.  Good marketing groups use numbers and statistics to justify their actions.

Rob Pinkerton also talked about the idea that 60% of consumers provide post-purchase reviews or commentary online.  This has to be good news for Bazaarvoice if true, but I’m not sure what the precise relationship to Adobe was (I might have missed the connection).

He had one little tidbit that will help everyone:  GetHuman.com – the cheat sheet for how to get to a real human on lots of different businesses’ IVR systems…

Other Sessions

The CME group had a presentation about their journey, beginning last June and now almost a year old.  They have their first process in production and were offering advice to the rest of the audience, reflecting how they did their vendor selection and also how they tackled their projects.  There are a few interesting notes:  they said they brought 4 vendors in (at least) for a full-on bake-off.  That’s an expensive way to pick vendors these days – and guarantees it will be hard to get maximum discounts from your vendors (from the vendor side, the “cost of sale” is quite high).  Also, they went with a cloud solution which may be attractive to some and not to others.  It made me wonder how they coped the one day a week ago when Amazon Web Services (AWS) were down, given that this isn’t a slow moving business, this is the CME Group we’re talking about.  My other caution would be that they’re one process into this journey – the fun stuff is just beginning.

The Great Case Management debate was another session to discuss, but I’ll save that for a separate post.

I briefly attended a Microsoft Visio and Sharepoint session: Practical customer examples from Exxon and TECO Energy.  I wanted to see the sharepoint version, but after watching someone draw proceses on Visio for 15 minutes I couldn’t take it anymore and left.  This may sound rude, but drawing something in visio was pretty cutting edge in 1994.  BPM tools have been providing better modeling tools for process for several years now.  The big innovation displayed was a set of Visio “targets” that extended visio to make it easier to draw a process map, instead of a BPMN process.  Of course, you could draw something in BlueworksLive faster, it’ll look better, collaborate with your team more easily, export to a PowerPoint presentation, and allow you to collect inputs, outputs, etc. as you gather them.  Visio is a great product.  But it is undercut in the BPM space by purpose-built technologies that are more efficient (and often less expensive) for the user.  Watching the drawing in Visio was cumbersome.  In BlueworksLive I would have simply typed the name of each process or activity and hit return or tab appropriately.  10 minutes tops, for what they were showing. And there are other good modeling tools out there like BizAgi and Signavio, etc.  There are options.

Wrap up

At the end of the day I had a really good heart-to-heart conversation with a customer.  We know quite a few people in common in the BPM space but met ourselves for the first time.  They’re faced with a challenge that many big corporations are faced with – very expensive approved vendors, or offshore approved vendors.  And there’s a significant gap in the middle – where real experts are available at a more affordable price.  There are times when Vendor Management offices or purchasing offices actually cost companies money rather than saving them money – not to mention effectiveness.

Following that, I checked out the vendor hospitality suites, which staved off starvation, and then we headed to a nearby Italian restaurant for dinner.  It was another long day, packed with moments to catch up with colleagues and see what other people are thinking in the BPM space.

We’re attending Gartner’s BPM 2011 conference in Baltimore, and this is the first time we’ve taken two people to one of their conferences and are in full-on attendee mode rather than speaking or participating in a panel.

Some general observations:

I have to admit, content in day 1 seemed pretty elementary regardless of which “track” we attended.  Not that it was badly delivered, or bad content – just fairly elementary if you’ve been doing this “BPM” thing for a while.

It was immediately apparent that the crowd is a different mix than something like, IBM Impact.  The business attendees appear to outnumber the technical attendees.  At lunch we sat down with 5 people from an insurance company – only one of which was from IT.  That would be extremely a-typical at most conferences I’ve been to around BPM.  And it seems like A Good Thing.

The keynote was crisply delivered.  But it was also more about general IT trends rather than specific to BPM.  Of course, you can’t get through a keynote these days without the word “Cloud” showing up. Reminds me of 2002-2007 when you couldn’t get through a presentation without seeing a big call-out to offshoring or “outsourcing”.

Despite the overall beginning tone of the content, it was a good first day and we had time to meet with several vendors and partners in the solution center – including reuniting with customers (Intel, Allianz), and colleagues (at IBM’s booth).  Had a really interesting discussion with Denis Gagne of the Process Incubator – as we discussed whether case management was really something customers are asking for or just something buried in their requests for process improvement.  I hadn’t seen Denis since an OMG ThinkTank meeting in 2008, so it was nice to catch up in person. He continues to do interesting things at the process incubator…Also had the chance to catch up with Bruce Silver and Sandy Kemsley, two of my favorite bloggers – and Ian Gotts of Nimbus (another twitter-acquaintance I can put a face to!).

It is sometimes the synergistic meetings that make these trips interesting.  Just happened to catch the same flight as Phil Gilbert of IBM, and shared a cab to the hotel.  Great time to catch up on business and Impact.  Phil is as interesting to talk to one-on-one as he is when he’s up on stage.

We’re already part-way into Day 2, and the content so far has been at a more intermediate level, which is encouraging for the value of the sessions today.  Hoping for more good stuff.

If you’re following along at home, once again Sandy Kemsley has the best session coverage / blogging so far.

We are truly grateful for the opportunity to present at Impact.  It is a rare opportunity to share what you do for a living with your colleagues and peers – and I just wanted to take time out to the folks who helped us secure a speaking role for our customer, Wells Fargo’s Reid Denny.

Given our late-afternoon Wednesday time slot, I was a little worried about attendance.  About 10 minutes before start time, we had 5-6 people in the room.  By the time we started, nearly every seat was full.  Lance Gibbs kicked off our presentation, and people kept coming in … filling the room, standing in the back, and bringing in extra chairs.

My favorite part about any presentation is Q&A afterward – I wish we had a transcript from our own session.  I was surprised to see one of IBM’s BPMers in the back of the room with a Flip camera taking video of our session – certainly flattered they anticipated our session might be worth recording.  I’m not sure how well it came out in video, and how well the audio picks up, but we’ll keep everyone posted if we’re actually able to lay hands on the video or a link to it.

Finally, a few people were interested in discussing or getting a rehash of the presentation.  Of course we can’t recreate exactly what happened, but we’re including the presentation, below – and if you’re interested in voice-over or Q&A around it let me know and I’ll see if I can schedule something with you.

We heard a lot of positive feedback about the presentation, and we’d love to hear from you directly if you were able to attend – feedback is what will make us better next time!

I’ll expand on the “business driven” delivery team in another post…

I went to IBM Impact looking for direction and strategy around BPM.  What I didn’t expect to find (but perhaps I should have), was an extra present under the tree:  ILOG is getting embedded in more IBM products.

Quoting Integration Developer News’ interview of Pierre Haren (founder of ILOG and VP of IBM’s ILOG unit):

“IBM will only have one business rules system and that will be JRules from ILOG,”  Haren said. For IT users, JRules will be embedded into WebSphere Message Broker, WebSphere Process Server, the WebSphere ESB. For business users, JRules will be added into IBM analytics and Lombardi BPM.

“This connection between BPM and business rules has several sweet spots, and WebSphere Process Server and Lombardi are two of them,” Haren told IDN. “At both ends, we now bring BPM and rules together for heavy-duty transactions and for business-driven BPM.  Linking these two [architecture] is the way to keep the CIO, the CEO and the business users happy.”

And after seeing the sessions live, it is clear that with the new IBM BPM 7.5 offering, ILOG will be *the* rules implementation for BPM.  This is a big improvement over the previously limited rules offering inside Lombardi, and WPS.  Of course, before this integration you could always call out to a webservice to tap the rules engine – any rules engine – and this worked well.  But there are rule-like behaviors inside the BPM offering that are probably best represented inside ILOG rather than outside of it, and yet happen in the normal context of defining a process (and therefore, should be surfaced inside the BPM authoring environment).

An interesting note on the synergy of rules systems and BPM systems:

Rapid Iterative Updates—“Another thing I love about rules and BPM together is that they both are incremental programming,” Haren said. Unlike writing an application in Java or COBOL, the user doesn’t need a specification up front. “You can’t write good code without a good spec,” he said. “But, in BPM you can start with a high level vision, and you can incrementally add filters, decision-points and rules as you go along.”

So true.  And it ties in nicely with the talk we did with Wells Fargo at Impact.

Another insightful comment on BPM at IBM:

Looking it as a whole, Haren described IBM’s BPM activities in 2011 this way: “In a real way, Lombardi’s DNA is replicating itself on IBM’s BPM [offerings], and ILOG’s JRules are making all our BPM smarter BPM plus business rules will add up to be more than the sum of their parts,” Haren said.

From reading the article, Haren definitely gets how complementary these two technologies are – and at each point they intersect, you get this interesting value proposition for the process to leverage a rule set.  It was a nice surprise to see the level of integration of ILOG with other IBM products (and of course, it makes sense).