Process for the Enterprise » ebizQ

Will ACM eclipse BPM?

Scott Francis — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 22:50:10 +0000

Peter Schooff once again asks the provocative question: “Will case management eclipse BPM in importance this year?”

The answers were pretty interesting. I guess I should first own up to my own:

Short answer : no.

More thoughtful answer : When people have trouble listing which products are ACM, and which are BPM, and which are both, the “ACM” tag has some work to do to eclipse BPM. Even as it grows, it is perceived as part of BPM, not separate.

Of course, BPM took a decade or more to come into its own. I don’t think it comes undone overnight.

Perhaps some take this as tongue-in-cheek, but I’m serious. The market perceives ACM as a part of BPM. So do I. Even as case management gains traction in some sectors, the customers are reaching out to BPM vendors to solve those problems. Because case management is a good fit for BPM as well.

Keith Swenson posits that BPM is just “tactical” and ACM is “strategic” – in the long run BPM will automate all of the routine processes and ACM will increase in importance as work inevitably shifts there.

First, I don’t see anything inevitable about it. Second, my response to this argument: “There will always be new, evolving processes (even “routine” processes). Enhanced productivity just means that less valuable routine processes can also be addressed (lower I to get the lower R).” But of course the other part of the argument is that word-choice is so important. The word routine might merely imply “repeatable”. But the word choice implies other judgments as well: routine sounds less valuable, less interesting, less problematic, less valuable. In fact it is none of those. These routine processes are what allow large companies to function at scale. The really large scale routine processes aren’t even handled by BPM, they’re handled by specialized software for those functions, because they are so valuable.

So don’t let the use of the adjective “routine” fool you. The routine processes are typically where the money is.

Christopher Taylor sums it up well at the bottom of the thread: “I predict that it [ACM] is like the lone rider out in front in the Tour de France… it causes the peloton to speed up and take the breakaway back into the pack.”

Still, good perspectives to think through on this thread, from all corners.

How Big a Role for BPMN?

Scott Francis — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 15:15:00 +0000

Peter Schooff of ebizQ asks: “How big of a role does BPMN play in today’s projects?” And the responses were interesting to me. Most of them took the line that BPMN isn’t that important, or that they don’t typically use it. That someone who fails to understand BPMN will fail to understand the process, just as surely as you might get false agreement in a process by being vague in its description. My response:

We use BPMN all the time in our projects, but we do a lot of process implementation projects, and it is a good fit for the tooling we use. Craig makes a good point about someone not understanding BPMN precisely – but at least BPMN has a precise definition – unlike the usual whiteboard drawings.

I like to get on the whiteboard and build out the diagram and explain and talk as we do it. By seeing and hearing the build-out, there’s much less chance of confusion about the interpretation. And when you’re done, the diagram is actually accurate for someone who reads it “after-the-fact” if they know BPMN.

Having said all that, BPMN is a means to an end. It isn’t the goal, it is a tool. There are other tools and in the right time-place each one is useful.

Whenever there is a standard there’s inevitably a bit of back-lash against the standard from experts – almost as if it is a badge of honor to buck the industry standard. I say this knowing full well that I’ve done it before myself! But with experience comes a little wisdom and perspective and I don’t hand out badges of honor for either obeying doctrine or bucking it. The badges of honor come for delivering great results.

BPMN isn’t perfect. In fact, to misquote Churchill, it is the worst form of process modeling that has been tried… except for all the others that have been tried from time to time.

BPM and Healthcare

Scott Francis — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 01:50:26 +0000

ebizQ has an interesting two-page article on BPM and Healthcare titled “BPM: The healthcare industry’s prescription for serving patients better“, which uses the label BPM broadly (not specifically meaning “BPMS”):

For example, Nunn says, one facility used BPM to reduce the number of patient falls—a common problem among elderly people and those recovering from surgery. After analyzing data, the facility changed the layout of its beds so nurses could better keep an eye on patients when they got up at night to use the bathroom, which was when most falls were recorded.

In another case, Nunn worked with a hospital trying to pinpoint why many of its heart-surgery patients were getting infections. By examining the entire process of surgery from admittance to discharge, Nunn’s team was able to determine that an autoclave, a machine for sterilizing instruments, was not working properly, even though its gauges indicated that it was reaching the proper temperatures. After the hospital replaced the machine, infection rates plummeted.

As I’ve said at other times, there’s a place for more “case” oriented approaches in hospitals and healthcare, but the case approach would *never* address changing the layout of beds, nor determining that the autoclave isn’t sterilizing sufficiently.

To those that think that examining aggregate outcomes is irrelevant in patient care, I’m telling you, you are missing the boat. Note that the above two examples I picked out don’t necessarily require BPM (six sigma analysis likely would turn this up), BPM can be the instrument for collecting and analyzing the data that allows the six sigma (or other experts) to determine root cause – or failing root cause, at least to identify correlation.

This isn’t the first time we’ve pointed to good work by others, documenting the benefits of BPM to the healthcare business, and I’m sure it won’t be the last.

Forrester’s Business Process Forum 2011: Customer Engagement

Scott Francis — Wed, 05 Oct 2011 05:11:23 +0000

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!

ebizQ Podcast with Anatoly

Scott Francis — Mon, 22 Aug 2011 03:14:23 +0000

Anatoly recently did a podcast with ebizQ’s Peter Schoof. The transcript was posted on Anatoly’s blog, and well worth reading, but something he said in the pre-amble really caught my attention:

My activities in BPMN got me a reputation of an expert in process modeling. Let it be so; yet I believe it’s rather the basics of the craft than its top and personally I’m more interested in issues arising at BPM and performance consulting intersection and business process BPMS implementation methodology. It’s a common story: the public is more attracted to what an expert considers almost trivial while what he treats as an achievement may come unnoticed. As an example, the most popular posts at this blog are those tagged “FAQ”.

I added the emphasis in the second sentence, and included the whole paragraph for context. One of the most difficult things to explain to novices and newcomers to BPM is that although the basics sound easy in black and white, a lot of judgment and experience comes to bear in making subjectively good decisions about how to leverage BPM techniques. Rightly, this is not what people want to hear. They want to hear that it is a science, an engineering discipline, if not a mathematical formula. But it is not so.

I’ve often said what makes the difference between the average BPM practitioner and a really good one is that the best practitioners have a sense for how all the individual simple things will come together into a cohesive outcome – each individual action being pretty easy, but the combination of actions, and knowing which action to execute when, and under what circumstances- that is the secret sauce of BPM.

What Anatoly’s blog largely provides is an insight into how he thinks through these basics – the subtleties that are like lego bricks – individually sort of simple (2×4, 2×2, etc. ) but in combination quite interesting business problems can be addressed. And it is the basics you need to master first.

Is the Future of Management BPM?

Scott Francis — Thu, 11 Aug 2011 14:43:23 +0000

Mike Gammage on Sourcing Shangri-La:

To avoid continually tripping up, to be able to implement Management 2.0 thinking, the enterprise needs a cortex, a way of pulling it all together: an integrated management platform. And its language has to be end-to-end business process because that can be universally understood across the enterprise. So it’s a BPM platform.

In the BPM platform, business process becomes the key by which we describe what the enterprise does, and how it all fits together – and how we analyse what the impact of change will be.

But it goes way beyond this. The BPM platform integrates process with real-time metrics, risks and controls, compliance and quality management – all within one governance framework. It deploys process to every desktop and mobile device as a personalized intelligent operations manual. It also provides the collaborative framework that enables a culture of continuous improvement.

Worth reading the whole thing. I’m still digesting it. Well, partly I’m still getting over the use of “2.0″ on yet another word. But Mike makes good points about balancing the need for autonomy and innovation with the need for predictability or compliance. In fact, a similar discussion broke out on ebizQ recently, with Ian Gotts and Theo Priestley representing two ends of the spectrum quite well. As I noted in my own comment: “you want innovation, but not in *every* aspect of your business.”

Anatoly on ebizQ: Doing BPM Right

Scott Francis — Tue, 12 Apr 2011 14:05:54 +0000

Anatoly is one of the clearest communicators on the subject of BPM today, from a practitioner’s viewpoint. A few choice quotes:

AB: First of all, there is a kind of a general understanding of how to do BPM right. But the problem is that there are many small factors that can dramatically affect your BPM initiative and actually ruin it. [...] if you do it in a waterfall-like approach, then there is no room for agility, so it’s not BPM, actually.

Couldn’t have said it better myself.

I would like to add that there may be one key factor for success, but there are always several key factors for failure. This is the problem. You must know a lot and be careful about many things at once. This is why BPM professional services are in demand.

Again, true words. It is one of many reasons why BPM professionals are in demand, but maybe most of the other reasons boil down to this one.

AB: Well, I believe that this BPMS-ACM debate you referred to at the beginning was very productive and, in the end, we will see most BPMSs enabled by ACM capabilities. This is a great thing because there is really a full spectrum of structured, half-structured and unstructured processes and cases. We need to cover all of this spectrum.

I definitely recommend the whole podcast.

ebizQ: Lean and BPM

Scott Francis — Mon, 14 Mar 2011 05:39:32 +0000

ebizQ has a two part series on BPM and Lean – something we’ve written about in the past and our own Lance Gibbs is a proponent of:

Lean is actually a process of experimentation, rapid iterative cycles of learning and testing, where the next step, the next future state, is a hypothesis waiting to be tested before it is adopted. This is significantly different from implementation, where you select a “known” target state and budget time and resources to achieve it. Many traditional IT budgeting and governance processes resist this incremental, experimental approach – it feels risky and uncertain. But the reason so many projects disappoint is that it is impossible to truly know what the final end state will be.

Exactly – it isn’t about the end-state, it is about the journey. Very appropriate for the BPM mindset. The first part hits on a few other key points as well, including the idea that Lean is not just about cost-cutting (which sounds familiar to the BPM advocates out there).

ebizQ Revisits BPMN 2.0

Scott Francis — Fri, 04 Mar 2011 17:43:49 +0000

I was surprised to find this piece on ebizQ, covering the “emerging star of business process modeling“, BPMN 2.0. BPM and BPMN get a lot of coverage in the forums on ebizQ, but don’t as often show up as topics for articles (at least, that hit my radar screen). Of particular note is Jon Siegel’s concise separation of three key business process concepts: conversation, orchestration, and choreography:

The underlying idea is that “a set of processes form choreography if they communicate and there is no overarching process in charge of it,” explains Jon Siegel, OMG’s vice president for technology transfer. He says BPMN is fantastic at modeling, but the addition of choreography represents a major step forward in version 2.0. He says choreography was inserted belatedly because BPMN was first designed and came into widespread use a time when there wasn’t as much Internet-based commerce and choreographic processes were unusual, if they happened at all.

In contrast, Siegel says, “orchestration” is the BPMN word for conduct of a process internal to a business entity. “These days, a substantial fraction of e-commerce is choreography-based rather than conversation-based or orchestration-based,” he notes. “So the language had to be upgraded to take this into account, particularly for business users to help them to model their systems.”

I don’t think I’ve seen such a concise description, if you just take the first sentence of the first paragraph, and then the second paragraph, that neatly puts each type of interaction in its place.

Another take on ACM: Feature or Paradigm

Scott Francis — Thu, 27 Jan 2011 17:16:53 +0000

I missed this post from Keith Swenson the other day, as he responds to Anatoly’s post on ACM.

Keith cuts to the chase:

Anatoly Belychook asks the question: “is ACM a Paradigm or a Feature?” I could not resist responding because I like the post, and his logic is flawless, but it is based on false assumptions. I think there is a lesson here on why so many BPM experts feel the way he does.

First, his summary of Adaptive Case Management (ACM) is one of the best I have seen. There is no doubt that Anatoly understand the motivations behind ACM.

What he does next is quite surprising; he analyzes whether ACM meets certain requirements of BPM. That is the flaw in his thinking: there is no reason to believe that ACM should meet the requirements of BPM. Many BPM experts start with an assumption that ACM should have BPM-like features, and then move on to conclude that ACM is really just a type of BPM. Those wanting to understand the subject should be wary.

Hm. I would have phrased this differently- it isn’t that Anatoly’s assumptions are wrong – its just that the exercise Anatoly takes on is looking at how to satisfy BPM-style problems with ACM-style claimed feature-sets. Anatoly would state it differently: How to satisfy enterprise level problems his customers are asking him to address, with ACM-style claimed feature-sets. And, to consider whether you can solve enterprise style case management problems without paying attention to key issues of architecture, data entities, process architecture, etc.

The comments section reveal a very interesting discussion between Keith and Anatoly – well worth reading (thankfully BPM and ACM posts do not get cluttered with 100′s of comments like tech crunch articles!).

In one of his comments, Keith wraps with:

Hopefully this clarifies my point: while ACM capabilities may be a feature of a BPMS, ACM in general is not JUST a feature of a BPMS. To say the latter would be misleading.

Given that ACM describes an “approach” rather than a technology, of course this is true. Likewise, BPM capabilities are not just a feature of a BPMS… I’d consider this a tautology. I think what Anatoly was exploring is whether ACM software will survive as a standalone / separate market, or whether it will be collapsed with BPM software as a market. (Thus, feature vs. paradigm)

I might be projecting my own impressions onto his writing, however.

Interesting conclusions in Keith’s post, first this bit:

BPM needs process architecture, ACM has no such need

In BPM the person who designs the process needs to be a data architect, but in ACM these are different roles. The person who designes the “process” does not need to be a data architect.

BPM needs strong capabilities for integration, but in ACM there is little or no need for field-level integration. ACM can work well with documents, reports, and links to other application user interface.

And Keith asks: isn’t this enough to make it different? Well, in technical terms, no. But in terms of “approach”, yes. You can implement (and I have implemented) processes that required no “architecture”, “data architecture”, nor “integration”. Typically those aren’t the kinds of processes people pay consultants to help them develop however, so I haven’t worked on that many of them. But it is definitely a different approach to start with the assumption that you won’t do these things.

Keith wraps with:

BPM systems will gain ACM-like features, but few doctors, policemen, and lawyers will use that.

Social Business Software like Jive, SharePoint, Quad, Chatter, and Connections will gain ACM-like features as well, and will be far more successful than the BPM systems, because those are systems that the doctors, policemen, and lawyers will use.

How funny. I end up agreeing it is a feature of something, just not a feature of BPM. :-)

I, too, find it ironic that Keith finally agrees ACM is a feature of something else (from a technical perspective)! I think, by extension, ACM can be considered a (potential) feature of BPM. And Keith may be right- that doctors, policemen, and lawyers will be using one of these other products (SharePoint? I doubt it) – but I wouldn’t jump to the conclusion that they won’t see BPM in their lives given all the government investment in process that’s happening.

Update: the discussion has moved to ebizQ now, thanks to Peter Schooff.