Process for the Enterprise » Driven 2008

Why use BPM over other workflow tools?

Greg Harley — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 20:51:39 +0000

An interesting question was raised at the recent Lombardi Driven 2008 Conference.

The question was (and I paraphrase):

I am new to Teamworks, but I have a number of content management, asset management, approval and other systems that all have workflow features. How do I know which workflow tool to use and where does BPM fit in the whole picture?

I got to thinking about this question, and the simple fact is.
Pretty much any enterprise class application suite that manages any business assets, will include some form of task routing or workflow feature. They must have in order to define and enforce the business rules for the assets in question.

So, it’s pretty easy to understand how someone new to BPM has a hard time determining what is special about BPMN diagrams and BPM in general. Especially if you are being introduced to BPM from the perspective of the vendor tool.

So, what is the answer?

In my opinion, the appropriate tool really depends on the domain of influence for the application.

Let’s take a portion of a simple on-boarding (everyone loves on-boarding) process.

In the above process there are at least three systems that would likely have a workflow engine as part of their feature set:

Document Management System.
Identity Management System.
Badge/Access Control System.

Likely, it would be possible to build out approval, escalation and task assignment for the entire process in any one of the above tools. It may not be pretty, or efficient, but quite possible.

So, let’s ask the question again.
What is the appropriate tool, and where does BPM fit?

I think it is obvious the management of offer/acceptance letter and employment contract should be handled using the workflow of the document management tool. This is what it is designed to do, the tool has direct access to the document repository and the rules governing the handling of the documents are likely to already exist within the system.
Accordingly, badge access and system accounts (email, login, salesforce.com etc) should be created in the badge access and identity management systems for the same reasons.

But the marshaling of these process steps, this is the role of a BPM engine.

In the process above, we don’t want to start the badge or user account process until the acceptance letter is received. Equally, we want to be able to place CSF and KPI measurements against each of these process steps.

All activities are necessary to successfully complete the on-board process.
All activities could likely be optimized
All are in the critical path.

This is the purpose of BPM, to provide end to end visibility, integration and control of a complete process, not just the pieces that make up a process.

Like I said, this is my own opinion, but I was happy to hear that this was the consensus from the other experts in the room at Driven as well.

Putting the Band Back Together

Scott Francis — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 03:40:17 +0000

The other day an old friend dropped me an email. He wanted to talk. The next day we got on the phone and and we spent some time catching up. This is someone I’d been trying to hire for years, and he tells me he is leaving his current job and looking for his next job…

Him: So before I go looking for another job, I want to find out more about what you guys are up to down there?

Me: We’re putting the band back together.

Him: Oh yeah?

Me: (listing the people we’ve hired or put on contract)

Him: Wow, sounds like it!

Me: You still got that trumpet?

Okay, I didn’t really say that last line. When I mentioned the conversation to Lance, he quoted another famous line from Blues Brothers: “We’re on a mission from God.” (picture deadpan delivery here).

So yeah. We’re putting the band back together. We’re finding people we’ve worked with over the last 5+ years that we really found rewarding to work with, but for various reasons moved on to other things or took a different path. We have a new value proposition to offer them, some additional independence, and a chance to get onto really exciting wave building in BPM. And we *are* on a mission from God (so to speak): spreading the BPM gospel is the mission and we’re dedicated to the cause, because we see the ROI.

On a related note… At Lombardi’s Driven 2008 we heard a lot of talk about “unicorns” and “heroes”. There seemed to be a concern that BPM deployments relied too much upon these mythical “unicorns” that could understand the business processes (and the business people themselves), convert them into BPM Models that the business could understand AND that could be implemented in software, and then could implement those models in software of your choice… and then they could help you with systems engineering, architecture, database work, J2EE, Java, XSL, XML, Javascript, AJAX, etc.

And we heard about Heroes. Those guys that can run a project, sling some code, mentor the team they’re working with, and deliver the project successfully. The implicit negative was that all this might happen in the absence of any adult supervision or structure.

The outcome of these two “problem statements” – not enough unicorns, not enough heroes, therefore, difficult to scale – was a hypothesis that the way to combat this problem was to refine the roles that people on BPM deployments play so that perhaps more people can participate in the process of building out processes.

We don’t fault anyone for embarking on this strategy. It makes a certain amount of sense (especially when you’re trying to get quite large, and manage that growth). However, its not what BP3 is about. We’re putting the band back together. We’re hiring those heroes, those unicorns. Those people that have the capability, accountability, and discipline to do it all. And we are hiring people that have the potential to be “heroes” or “unicorns”. We believe we know how to foster the right kinds of experiences and growth opportunities. We believe we can create the right culture, that leads to the development of these all-around players. Partly we believe this because we’ve done it before, at more than one company.

And we believe when people pay for our services, they want the best, and they want experience. Which is what they get – the most experienced team in the BPM business. We’re not interested in scale for scale’s sake. We want organic growth and quality growth. We’re putting the band back together.

Driven 2008 Update

Scott Francis — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 21:35:43 +0000

Well, Lombardi’s Driven 2008 conferences is over. We’ll be posting a few thoughts over the next few days, but we wanted to take a step back to digest what we saw, heard, and discussed. While I fully expected great content and great networking and discussions, I hadn’t anticipated those discussions lasting quite so late into the night. So we’ll be posting our observations a little delayed from the actual events!

Lombardi Driven 2008: One Week

Scott Francis — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 19:46:34 +0000

We’re one week away from Lombardi’s Driven 2008. We’re looking forward to it for more than one reason this year. Of course we’re excited to see what Lombardi has cooking in the R&D labs, and we’re looking forward to reconnecting with old friends from Lombardi and our customer base, but we’re also looking forward to having our own team together in one place for the first time, so that we can all talk and look each other in the eye for a change!

One of the challenges of a professional services company is the distributed nature of the work. Even if everyone lives in one place, we’re likely to travel a lot. And if we live in different places, its even harder to stay connected. When I was building out the professional services technical team at Lombardi, we decided early on that we needed to hire people where our customers lived, rather than hiring them all in Austin. There is real value in being closer to customers, but also in being able to access a more diverse talent pool. I believe in this strategy of following the customer, and it served us well when I was at Lombardi, at a time when everyone else was just focused on lowest-cost-resource.

One thing we realized is that if you’re spending serious money on a BPM project, and you’re going to change core business processes, saving a few dollars by going with the cheapest available talent halfway around the world was not worth the risk of having a major project blow up. Spending the extra $ on the right kind of talent and experience is well worth it to reduce risk of failure, and likely to increase the overall ROI of the project… Its that old penny-wise pound-foolish saying, I think… At BP3, we’ve continued along those lines. We’re going to build a team of really great practitioners and focus on quality over quantity, on depth over breadth, and we think the fruits of that strategy will bear over time.

See BP3 at Lombardi Driven 2008

Scott Francis — Thu, 01 May 2008 04:52:14 +0000

Lance Gibbs, Flournoy Henry, and I are going to be attending Lombardi’s Driven 2008. This was a great event every time we’ve been to it (prior to Driven 2006 it was under a different name). Its a rare event in that it really is driven by customer-presenters, and the discussion is typically fast and content-rich.

At the last Driven, we had an early look at Blueprint, a game-changing product for collaborative process mapping. We had a vigorous debate about whether SOA or BPM were (or should be) in the driver’s seat for business process transformation. There was another session on applying Six-Sigma to BPM projects. And of course there were customer keynote speakers, and a great customer panel Q&A. It was a really energizing experience.

Of course there’s usually good food too ;)

This year there are three tracks- Implementation (technical/tactical), Project Leadership (managers/leaders of BPM initiatives), and Business Champions (for executive sponsors). If you’re working with us and you’re wondering about Driven, or whether it makes sense to attend, talk to us. I think we can help you understand what you’re likely to get out of it, and how it might energize your efforts.

You can find the Lombardi Driven website here: Lombardi Driven 2008 .

You’ll find us at Driven too. June 17 and 18. See you there,

Scott