A new blog post from Forrester‘s Frank Gillett inadvertently illustrates why it makes sense to focus on iOS first when building mobile apps for the enterprise.  Already 1 in 5 (20%) of the global workforce is using Apple products (for work)!

Have you noticed an increased presence of Apple products in public spaces and workspaces in the last few years? Turns out that 21% of information workers are using one or more Apple products for work. Almost half of enterprises (1000 employees or more) are issuing Macs to at least some employees – and they plan a 52% increase in the number of Macs they issue in 2012.

But that’s just Macs.  The numbers are actually more stark for iPads and iPhones. 11% of the workforce using iPhones, 9% using iPads, and 8% using Macs.  The trends are most highly supported by execs and managers – who use Apple products at twice the average rate (over 40%), and with the youngest workers, who also use Apple products at twice the rate.  Great trends for Apple products in the work place.  Think about that – you can reach the most influential members of business – 40% of them and growing – via Apple product-focus.

So the debate of which mobile OS to target first for your mobile app has been an interesting one.  Last year (actually late 2010) Fred Wilson came down on the side of Android first.  But while this might have been a good “by the numbers” recommendation, there are some subtleties that I would have argued made iOS still the place to start for most mobile apps:

• iOS device owners spend more money on apps (and content in general).
• iOS device owner demographics trend toward higher income brackets ( desirable demographics to sell to and advertise to )
• Apple’s iPhone and iPad had healthy halos around them that made them attractive “launch” vehicles for an app.  Wherever you look at ads for an institutions “mobile app” the premier imagery features a prominent iPhone.  Later on these institutions started including Android phones that look… well, they look just like iPhones anyway.

Finally, regardless of which OS you target first, or even if you’re cross-platform from the beginning, you might as well release on each platform one at a time – and get the press release mileage out of it.

Articles like the Forrester article, and of course Apple’s amazing Q4 performance, are reminders that the iOS platform is still the one with cachet, with the halo.

William Band, of Forrester, asks: “Are CRM Solutions Soon to be Displaced by Dynamic BPM?”:

Increasingly, companies are using business process management suite (BPMS) or dynamic case management (DCM) solutions as the primary point of entry for strategic, cross-functional processes and view individual CRM functions as supporting administrative processes. However, taking advantage of these solutions may require a higher level of process management maturity and skills than is typically found in many organizations.

But really, if you’re asking yourself a question in the form of: “What systems can we replace with BPM?”, you’re probably asking the wrong question.  Of course, existing systems or software categories might get displaced by BPM in your organization.  But that isn’t the starting point – it is only a side-effect.  You start and end with a process, and focusing on the best way to start it, execute it, and finish it.

If your CRM system is the system of record, and you need to layer more process, or better process, or more dynamic process on top of it, so be it. But that typically doesn’t require ripping out the old CRM system.  But what about small or medium-sized businesses?  Are small businesses going to turn to BPM instead of SalesForce or SugarCRM or other similar tools?  I don’t the CRM space is in any danger, per se, from BPM  (or its variants).

On the other hand, if Mr. Band is really asking “is BPM where the action is in CRM?” – then he might be on to something. BPM is influencing traditional Enterprise Software and approaches to managing the silo-ed business functions that it supports.

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.

George Lawrie of Forrester recently wrote:

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

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

TIBCO has announced its acquisition of Nimbus today:

Nimbus provides a strong complement to TIBCO’s event-enabled infrastructure software platform. Whereas TIBCO has traditionally focused on the automation of data, systems, and processes, Nimbus allows business users to collaboratively describe and document all aspects of a business – from operational best practices to organizational and system models. These are combined with robust governance capabilities that can deliver a process-focused “Intelligent Operations Manual” across the enterprise, linked to supporting data and systems. Nimbus focuses on the vast majority of processes that are often not captured in enterprise applications and automated workflows, and it has found particular traction with business transformation, compliance-led, and continuous improvement initiatives.

On the face of it it seems like a very complementary acquisition – I don’t see a lot of overlap between the market needs Nimbus addresses versus the market needs TIBCO addresses.  This might be seen as a move by TIBCO to inject some more business-friendly DNA into its veins, as right now TIBCO is seen as more of a speeds-n-feeds vendor than a business process management vendor.

Neil Ward-Dutton was first to the presses with his analysis of the buy:

Nimbus is happy to point out that historically it’s had a hard time selling to IT, and this has slowed down sales cycles; part of the challenge for it has been that Control doesn’t fit neatly into any mainstream product category (including BPA). TIBCO can help with the IT selling angle; but it’s important to recognise, too, that Nimbus can potentially give TIBCO a massive leg-up in terms of developing a more business-engaged field sales capability.

It sounds like a good synergistic match.  Neil characterizes Nimbus as a company with “annual revenues of around £10m and around 100 employees” – which implies the purchase price was easily digestible for a company the size of TIBCO.  Still, as we’ve seen with the IBM acquisition of Lombardi, sometimes a small (relatively) acquisition can have an outsized impact on the buyer.

Clay Richardson of Forrester also weighs in on the purchase:

So, why did TIBCO acquire Nimbus?  In many ways this deal is a nod to the “Empowered BT” trend, where more technical capability is being moved into the business.  For vendors like TIBCO, this means building – or buying – functionality that puts business stakeholders in the driver’s seat.  Over the past six months, one of the top inquiry topics I’ve seen from clients is around “models for increasing business engagement within BPM suites”.  In short,  I’ve fielded numerous calls from business stakeholders scratching their heads saying “I wrote the check for this BPM suite, but the IT guys are the only ones that can touch it.”

Empowered BT trend is a great way to sum up with the Nimbus folks (Ian Gotts in particular) have been preaching in their blogs and sales pitches.  Clay wraps up with this note:

TIBCO’s acquisition of Nimbus will be welcomed news to existing TIBCO customers looking to improve business engagement and – if executed effectively – should allow the developer-centric vendor to compete more effectively against more business-oriented players such as Appian and Lombardi  (i.e., IBM BPM 7.5).

I got a chuckle out of the last line.  But Clay is right – TIBCO needed something to help them compete with more business-oriented products on the market – what isn’t clear is whether Nimbus also needed to partner up with someone to keep going (as one person on twitter put it – is the lack of execution for one just as bad as the lack of business-focus for the other?).  I’m looking forward to seeing how well Nimbus is integrated, what role Ian Gotts is taking on, and how the analysts view on this acquisition evolves over the coming weeks.  So far no one is arguing that this is a bad fit… but we’re only a few hours in!

Lubor Ptacek comments on the Global 360 acquisition on his blog:

With the combination of Metastorm and Global 360, we are now the largest provider of BPM solutions for the Microsoft ecosystem. The BPM solutions complement our existing information governance and archiving solutions for SharePoint and Exchange. But what’s more important, Global 360 increases the critical mass of process management focus inside of OpenText.

(I didn’t know anyone was still blogging on blogger…)

Being the biggest Microsoft BPM partner is sort of like being the biggest Microsoft Cloud partner.  There are bigger players in both markets, with more traction, momentum, and ecosystems.  But being the biggest in the Microsoft ecosystem is probably better than not being the biggest.

Lubor continues:

The Global 360 acquisition is unique, though, as it allows OpenText to not only expand its offerings, but also reach a critical mass needed to establish itself as a serious contender in a new market. This is not a minor matter.

I think this is the key point.  The ECM vendors need the BPM market to revitalize their growth and increase their addressable markets.  It isn’t a bad thing to be strong in both content and process.  Of course, this isn’t just three companies, OpenText + MetaStorm + Global 360.  MetaStorm and Global 360 each had acquired several companies as well, so this is a roll-up of roll-ups and integration challenges are going to be many and diverse.  The interesting questions will be about a year from now-  what is the roadmap for BPM at OpenText, the roadmap for innovation, etc.

Forrester has a quick summary of the acquisition as well:

OpenText is at it again — and another independent BPM provider is gone. This time it’s Global 360. But Global 360 was more than BPM; it had done a good — no, great — job revitalizing what was at its core an ECM rollup of midrange and questionable solutions (remember Kodak, Keyfile — I actually met an original Keyfile developer there — and ViewStar?). But it nurtured this account base well and  built a fast-growing BPM and case management business. It’s now been purchased by the ultimate ECM rollup, OpenText.

Craig Le Clair’s article emphasizes even further what a monumental integration challenge this will be.

The early reviews of IBM BPM 7.5 were out last week, while IBM Impact was still in full swing.  It seems that the analysts in attendance were of differing opinions about the strength of IBM’s update to 7.5 – with Clay Richardson disappointed, and the other analysts ranging from reassured to impressed.

Clay’s review (“IBM Adds Fresh Coat Of Paint And New Tires To BPM Offering, But Still Needs To Rev Engine“) starts off:

So far, IBM is following the product integration roadmap John Rymer and I laid out in our report published immediately following IBM’s acquisition of Lombardi.

I’m sure IBM looks at it as, they were following their own roadmap and some of the points just happen to coincide with what analysts were clamoring for. One thing that the analyst community doesn’t seem to be comfortable with is that IBM doesn’t say much about future releases – they cite disclosure rules – and they only announce releases within the same quarter they’re to be released.  But beyond that, I think it is quite right that the decision about *how* to integrate Lombardi and WPS had not been finalized at this time last year.

With today’s announcement, IBM checks off the first point of integration on our list: establishing a single repository across Lombardi Teamworks and Websphere Process Server. With Business Process Manager V7.5, IBM will deliver a single repository for process assets that leverages Lombardi’s impressive “snapshot” version management and governance capabilities, providing a unified approach to administering and reusing process and integration assets.

I imagine that this retrofit to WPS and integration designer was actually quite a lot of work – and likely addressed the hardest technical parts of the integration of these two products.  But Clay goes on to say:

Although IBM has done a great job of delivering a unified repository, the core BPM engines and development environments will continue as standalone and separate entities — at least for BPM V7.5. While this is not surprising — we predicted that it would take three to four years for IBM to completely integrate Lombardi and WPS into a single unfied environment — we expected IBM to communicate a strategy or vision for merging the engines as part of this announcement.

I think this is a distinction that won’t matter to users.  It might surprise Clay to know that Lombardi, since 2005, effectively had two engines under the hood.  But it certainly never felt that way to users.  And with the integrated rules engine in IBM BPM 7.5, you could say it has 4 engines.  The point is – as long as the functionality works well together, this distinction won’t matter to process authors.  There’s also an option to deploy the whole stack into a single VM – particularly useful for developer machines.  Most people won’t quibble over different sections of code running inside a VM.  After all, an engine is just a body of code that transforms inputs into outputs based on current state plus a model which provides context.  A good BPMS will have more than one such body of code.  Even a good rule suite will have more than one engine.

So the issue in the future isn’t how many engines IBM will have embedded in its BPM suite.  The questions to ask are:

1. Will future versions feel like one product or two or more products.  Clearly the direction is to make IBM BPM feel like one product.
2. Will new versions of IBM BPM provide the same transformations of input to output given the same state and model context.

Information Week ran a story that reads very much like Clay’s:

IBM’s approach can be contrasted with that of Oracle, which took a decisive step in 2010 when it integrated the AquaLogic BPM system it acquired with BEA with its own legacy BPM product. That move yielded a single product and a clear roadmap, but it also forced existing customers of both products to do considerable migration work to move forward.

Except that when their article contrasts IBM and Oracle, it fails to mention that Oracle bought BEA in January 2008, nearly 3 years earlier (Clay, however, was more fair in his comparison).  And yet the expectation is that IBM provide this transformation in a year.

But while Clay was focused on the need to consolidate engines, others focused on the market signals IBM was sending.

As Bruce Silver wrote in his rebuttal:

Some have called it just “a new coat of paint” on the existing offerings, because the (Lombardi) Process Designer and the (WPS) Integration Designer tools are both still there, and both runtime engines are still there as well.  But that misses the point.  Where IBM last year was pushing separate fit-for-purpose BPMSs – something nobody really wants – they now can offer a single BPMS that has the combined functionality of WPS and WLE.

I agree with Bruce – at a detail-level, it also ignores the interface makeover WPS Integration Designer got, to match the repository unification (which added significant versioning functionality to WPS).   At a big picture level, it misses the point, which Bruce makes:

Beyond that, this announcement represents a major shift in IBM’s strategy for addressing the BPM marketplace.  You might even call it a palace coup:  the Lombardi/human/business-centric value system overthrowing the old WebSphere/integration/developer-centric value system, or even a BPM perspective rising above the SOA perspective.  Given the existing installed-base investment on the two sides, this is truly a wag-the-dog moment.

I think this represents IBM’s move to capture the business-oriented perspective of the BPM market – something that was part product functionality, part product design, and partly go-to-market.  Bruce’s summary:

And here’s the thing:  it’s ONE product.  You get it all.  Business-empowered design, what-you-see-is-what-you-execute, and instant playback.  SOA and integration services.  Powerful business rules. [...] but I think everyone is surprised they got it done already.

Bruce has another post on the BPMS Endgame which predicts that IBM will focus on BPMN2 engine work for the 8.0 release timeframe.

Neil Ward-Dutton also rebuts Forrester’s assessment:

However when you look deeper, the release of Business Process Manager marks a significant departure for IBM, and warrants a thorough reappraisal of IBM’s competitive position.

He also hits on a few key points of integration:

1. Unified repository toolset
2. Unified governance toolset
3. Single Deployment runtime foundation (no more copying EAR and WAR files around)
4. Single Administration environment

Better yet:

Business Process Manager makes the relationship clear: Process Designer is aimed at business-facing teams collaborating to optimise business processes; Integration Designer is aimed at IT teams working to orchestrate the integration of systems to support the optimisation of those processes. Again – these two environments work together through the use of a shared repository and governance toolset.

Tony Baer also humorously commented on the Lombardification of IBM BPM.  Unlike David Brakoniecki, I couldn’t resist revisiting the analyst reviews.  David points out a few of the “unsung features” in the 7.5 release:

• A powerful REST API which in theory should allow better and richer user interfaces to be built
• A new charting technology (based on iLog jViews, I think)

I’d add to that the deployment characteristics – the fact that we will be able to build solutions with both the Process Designer and the Integration Designer – and then manage and deploy them from the same repository, to the same run-time clusters – is a big improvement over the state of the art in the previous versions.  And it appears to be a big improvement in how both WLE and WPS previously managed deployments.

Sandy Kemsley took more time to write her analysis, and it demonstrates her extra time to reflect.  I liked the shout out to our sleuthing out the announcement ahead of time (maybe IBM should include me on their analyst briefings so that we’ll be embargoed as well!…).  She writes:

It’s important to look at how the IBM organization has realigned to allow for the new product release: Phil Gilbert, former president and CTO of Lombardi, now has overall responsibility for all of WebSphere BPM – including both the former Lombardi and WebSphere BPM products – plus ILOG rules management. Neil Ward-Dutton referred to this as the reverse takeover of IBM by Lombardi; when I had a chance for a 1:1 with Phil at Impact, I told him that we’d all bet that he would be gone from IBM after a year. He admitted that he originally thought so too, until they gave him the opportunity to do exactly what he knew needed to be done: bring together all of the IBM BPM offerings into a unified offering. This new product announcement is the beginning of that unification, but they still have a ways to go.

When the buyout happened I often heard this argument that Phil would be gone within a year.  But, living in Austin, I’ve seen a few promising startups purchased by IBM in my day (Tivoli and Webify just to name two), and I’ve also known Phil for… 10-12 years now.  My sense was that IBM has the scope and opportunity on the big stage that Phil would really relish taking advantage of.  IBM is big enough to make the right role for someone like Phil – in a way that very few companies can.  If they were willing to do it, I felt like they had a chance to hang on to Phil.  I felt the same way about most of the people acquired with Lombardi – some would leave, but IBM has the reach and size and money to keep people if it chooses (and if it acts in time).

Regarding that “two engines” argument from Clay:

However, from the customer/user standpoint, it’s wrapped into a single Process Server, so if IBM ever gets around to refactoring into a single engine, that could be made fairly transparent to their customers, but would likely have the benefit of reducing IBM’s internal engineering costs around maintaining one versus two engines.

I think Sandy hits it just right.  The issue isn’t how many engines are under the hood – it is what does it feel like to the customer.  Regarding the lack of a cloud offering for BPM: “They need to rethink their strategy on this, and stop offering expensive custom hosted or private ‘cloud’ platforms as their only cloud alternatives.”  Again, I think Sandy’s right. It is hard to tell in what time frame it really starts to hurt, but the trend lines are there, and they’re plain to see.

Great reviews and perspectives to soak up.  Nothing I like more than reading these competing perspectives and conclusions and then reconciling with my own opinions and the impressions of the BP3 team.

Before you get too esoteric in your BPM efforts, make sure you tackle the basic, common problems that all BPM projects need to tackle:

• sponsorship
• functional thinking
• business change management (in addition to technical change management)
• internal communications
• consensus tooling and methodology
• expanding beyond the COE
• “how big?”
• building BPM skills

Read the article for the full scoop. These are classic BPM problems and we’ve advised many of our customers on these very issues, so I think we can attest to the relevance of the list.

After reading another of Derek Miers’ posts on Forrester’s site, I have to say I am once again struck by how Derek speaks (and writes) with such a clear voice.  In a recent conversation, he replayed my own words back to me, blending context from other conversations and crystallized my own thinking in the process.  It really is refreshing to have someone shine a mirror on your own ideas to help you understand them better.

Turning back to his post: in this article he paints clear lines of demarcation between two points of view that are out there in the market:

1. That BPM is defined as a narrow technical approach
2. That BPM encompasses a wider range of improvement techniques that inform and leverage the technical approach.

Well this cuts right to the heart of the divide between those firms that have successful BPM programs versus those who have projects with a BPM flavor.

Another telling comment:

But each organization needs its own subtle blend of skills, methods, techniques and tools. In a sense, the organization needs to weave its own proprietary method framework — to create its own fabric — a unique approach that reflects its special needs, the maturity of the different business units, their history of change, culture, the current and planned organizational structure (to say nothing of the political challenges).

I could sum this up another way, perhaps less elegantly:  you have to own your own methodology. A great way to do that is to customize the methodology to the particular character of your firm.

Connie objects to the characterization by some of “BPM failures”, and has excellent advice for those who either see BPM initiatives stalling, or want to prevent them from getting stuck:

• Cut down the up-front time spent on process modeling.  There’s no reason you can’t continue to invest in modeling after your BPM initiatives are in progress.
• Knowing how to scope your effort. Getting projects that are too big to tackle, or too small to matter, can stall efforts.  Right-sizing process efforts is, unfortunately, still more art than science.
• Let business drive. Stated differently – make business drive.  My take: exactly, but don’t let them drive off the cliff.  Get them to lead, but don’t be an order-taker.  IT’s job isn’t just to implement, it is also to inform and consult.
• Develop a strong process-improvement methodology. Don’t ignore the methodology aspects as well as the technical aspects of BPM.

Kate Leggett of Forrester’s Customer Service Myths, Half-Truths, and Total Nonsense…Continued is a great read on the myths of “Social” customer service.  But equally, these are statements that should ring true in BPM circles.

The first two myths:

• Social CRM is giving customers control. Her response “Nonsense”.  I love the candor.  Of course, she’s right.  “Social” tools are giving customer control, but social CRM and BPM is much more about regaining control of the conversation, taking the initiative, and reacting quickly.
• Twitter works for customer service. She rightly calls this a half-truth – because it works in certain circumstances and for some audiences, but not everything can be resolved in 140-character chunks.

Obviously, there is more on her blog.  I think the short take is: being honest with yourself about what your goals are with social technologies is the first step toward achieving great results with it.  And, generally speaking, when someone puts the word “Social” in front of an enterprise TLA software category, they’re talking about the company leveraging social to get control.

Forrester is running a survey that is about to close, that attempts to determine how many organizations are ready for sustainable BPM Change.  The preliminary conclusions are, unsurprisingly, that the majority of organizations are NOT ready for sustainable BPM Change:

To date, 124 business process pros have kindly answered my survey. My conclusion? The majority of organizations are not ready for sustainable BPM change. A few data points supporting this:

• 63% of participants view business process change as a strategy to implement cross-functional optimization through common best practices, standards, and shared insights.
• In 52% of the surveyed organizations, business process change initiatives pursue different objectives and are executed without coordination.
• 59% of participants admit that most business process change projects are measured through project timeliness and budget, but only some provide operational measures.
• Only 34% of the organizations apply architecture frameworks for business processes, insight, and decision-making to help structure and prioritize business process change targets.

I’m not arguing with the conclusions – I don’t have enough data points to do so.  However, I’ll say this:  you’re not ready for Sustainable BPM Change until you are.  In other words, get to work. Figure it out.  Start aligning your organization around BPM and the change it incurs.  But if you put off BPM until you’re ready, you never will be.  Show some leadership.

I’ll relate one of our early BPM projects at BP3.  We did an assessment for a customer as to their BPM readiness.  Our assessment found them wanting – quite a few things for the customer to address before they were “ready” for BPM.  They went ahead and got started on their BPM projects despite the lack of “readiness.”  Lo and Behold, three years later they had taken 10 processes to production, with good ROI on the whole program.  So what happened?

Well, first, they didn’t give up on the basis of the analysis.  They treated the gaps as areas of improvement, and got started on the project-level.  They created a lot of value for the company, developed internal skills, improved their customer service. They beat the odds by creating a small, cross-functional, focused team – and aligning them with business value.

But there was two gaps that they weren’t able to close:  the first was convincing senior IT leadership to treat BPM differently from other IT applications; the second was convincing the business to continue to own BPM beyond the “pilot” stage where it had resided for 3 years.  When BPM went over to IT, and the business stopped owning it, IT management wasn’t interested in BPM, per se – just in managing the applications that were running on top of a BPM platform.

So – one could view this as a failure of BPM to take root.  Or one could view it as planting the seeds of future success.  Either way, the company achieved a lot of return on investment across a series of processes.  Had they deferred starting on BPM, they would have left a lot of money on the table, and sacrificed a lot of customer satisfaction in their customer service processes. (Or, they would have had to try to achieve those objectives without the aid of a BPMS.  )

Ready or not, our recommendation is to get started.  Sometimes the journey is the destination.

You know I like a good discussion of simplicity, but sometimes we have to call out the lack thereof.  The charts on the Aris BPM blog illustrating how simple the SAP BPM story could be:

From this “simple” slide, we’re to infer that SAP has a more complete offering (er, vision) for BPM than just NetWeaver. I agree with the author of the article that SAP’s BPM message needs to improve – by most definitions NetWeaver is more integration than BPM.  And SAP’s “CAF” (Collaborative Application Framework) which was once described as “beyond” BPM and coming in “two years”, sounded like a subset of BPM as well. There have been some interesting demos (Gravity).  But the thing that strikes me about the chart is that I still don’t understand what SAP products are doing for my business process needs.  I can’t tell if these are the names of SAP products or just general ideas of what you would want to do if you are at the intersection of management control and strategy (financial management??).

But the prescribed solutions are listed thusly:

1. The Forrester BPMS vision of SAP is mostly based on the capabilities of the Netweaver BPM platform and not on the complete BPM vision of SAP
2. SAP does not sufficiently communicate their complete BPM vision towards the market research companies like Forrester and Gartner.
3. The SAP platform is not considered the best of breed BPMS platform by the market research firms like Gartner and Forrester
4. The BPMS capabilities framework of Gartner and Forrester could be extended in order to capture the capabilities the SAP platform can offer.

So… the problem is that Forrester (and Gartner) are only looking at one of many products to place SAP on the BPMS frameworks… and that Forrester and Gartner aren’t sufficiently taking into account the SAP platform’s many other capabilities.  And, this is mostly a problem of communication/marketing, rather than say, substance.

Anytime Derek publishes, it is worth reading.  This time, it is on the subject of “roles” – and how they are employed by BPM vendors and BPM solutions.  Unfortunately the answer is that each product and each solution just approaches the definition and use of Roles differently.  As Derek says, it probably reflects how they view organizations, as to how they enable one to leverage roles.

Derek calls attention to a real problem for BPM (and those who adopt it):

The central issue I want to highlight is one that many folks just do not see coming in their BPMS and Dynamic Case Management implementations. Very often, there is only a loose concept of “role” within an organization. When the word “role” is used, it is usually equated to an existing job title (part of the organization structure), rather than responsibility (at least initially). It is further complicated by the fact that within a given job title, there are usually wide variations in the skills and expertise levels of those that work in that area. And while this is not a problem where people manually coordinate their work, when it comes to automating work routing (to the most appropriate person to deal with a given work item or case), there are often major complications.

The problem with using the job title is that it is a poor approximation for the richness of the real situation found in many firms. Job titles alone do not help you deal with responsibility for action, versus accountability and control. [...]

It is a problem because this disconnect around how to handle roles can act as a barrier to adoption, and a barrier to acceptance, of BPM solutions.  It also can lead to mis-set expectations for BPM solutions – requirements misunderstood and badly implemented.

Many small organizations eschew job titles because they sound more limiting than enabling.  And that is potentially the problem for BPM solutions that rely on LDAP repositories that define titles and roles – they may artificially limit the range and scope of a person’s activities and influence on a process.

Gartner’s 2010 Magic Quadrant for BPM Suites is out.  As Sandy Kemsley points out, you can almost determine the contents of the report from the requisite vendor press releases (which reminds me of our previous post on the Forrester Wave):

However, three of the leaders have a lot to say about it:

• Pegasystems Positioned as a Leader in Prominent Analyst Firm’s 2010 Magic Quadrant for Business Process Management Suites (which includes a mini version of the graph)
• Software AG Named in the Leaders Quadrant for Business Process Management Suites
• IBM Lombardi positioned in the Leaders Quadrant of Gartner Magic Quadrant for Business Process Management Suites (also containing a mini graph)

At some point, you could probably reconstruct the Leaders quadrant based on press releases; many of the vendors in the other quadrants don’t bother to do a release about it (do they have to pay Gartner for that?): consider that IBM placed all three of its major BPM products in this MQ, but I only saw a press release about the one in the Leaders quadrant.

Luckily, you don’t have to reconstruct it if you are a lucky partner or customer of one of these vendors, they may be quite willing to share the report with you (presumably they’ve paid for the rights to share with their customers).  I think there were some interesting takeaways from this year’s magic quadrant. And not just that it differs so much from Forrester’s evaluation (in particular, the position of the Lombardi suite is dramatically different between the two… and if I may say so, I think Gartner has that positioning more correctly than does Forrester).

First, Gartner’s focus has shifted to four key usage scenarios, which paraphrased are:

• continuous process improvement
• industry-specific or company specific implementations
• business transformation initiatives
• process-based SOA redesign

I do like the fact that when Gartner has an opinion they go ahead and put it out there (in Gartner’s opinion, model-driven process execution, as opposed to code-based execution, is preferable).  Its refreshing to have those types of things spelled out.  You can disagree, but you know where they stand on that issue.

They also take great pains to note the difference between “market leaders” and “best product” (the two are not the same, though strong product offering is a contributor to market leader status). Gartner specifically called out an emphasis on “cohesiveness” of the suite, and support for all of the four key scenarios, above.  As Gartner puts it “The individual composition technologies are often well-proven on their own. Since we are evaluating a suite, we consider how well these technologies work together, and how easy it is for someone (a composer) to use the complete environment.” The emphasis is now on evaluating as a whole rather than evaluating the solutions in parts and then summing the scores for each part.  Experience might be harder to evaluate objectively, but this is a move in the right direction.

In light of recent discussions of why experience matters, I think this is a welcome shift in Gartner’s evaluation methodology – especially for BPM.  As I’ve noted before, BPM is typically comprised of doing many simple things right – but knowing which of the many things you can do is the trick.  With a BPMS, it isn’t a matter of brand new tech so much as it is composing existing technology in ways that really make sense at a deeper level to the composer.

The market trends that Gartner observes bode well for BPM consultancies like ours – a greater emphasis on continuous process improvement and business transformation. We observed anecdotally, and Gartner confirms, that in 2009 BPM initiatives continued to receive funding in a VERY challenging economic and funding climate.

A surprise entrant in the leaders quadrant is Adobe – under the radar (to me), Adobe has grown quite a business around BPM. The pure-play heritage BPM vendors make a strong showing in the leader’s quadrant, either independently or as the purchased solutions of large vendors (IBM, Progress, Software AG, etc. )

In describing leaders, Gartner explicitly calls out the “experience” as being a critical differentiator.

I found it interesting, as well, that Gartner concurs with my own experience vis-a-vis Lombardi customers (now IBM Websphere Lombardi Edition) – that they are the most advanced in BPM maturity.  I think this is a result of the consulting (and product) culture we cultivated at Lombardi (during the time I was there at least).  What a great endorsement of the excellent people who worked in Lombardi’s professional services group.  (it is, also, an endorsement of the sales group – whose job it is to open customers’ eyes to the possibilities, and to the customers, who have seized the opportunity of BPM with both hands and made the most of it).

Overall, this report tells me that despite the acquisitions, there is no shortage of BPM vendors in the market, no shortage of real choices for customers.  And there is still so much for these vendors to improve on – the innovations to come could make a huge difference for BPM professionals in the near future.

Congratulations to the leaders in the Gartner Magic Quadrant, I hope the increased market exposure will inspire you all to innovate BPM in ways we haven’t yet imagined (and in some of the ways we’ve imagined, but waited impatiently for!).

I’m reminded of The Graduate:

I want to say one word to you. Just one word… Plastics.

BPM is apparently going mainstream.  And now we’re seeing analysts (Connie Moore) and the industry note that there’s a career in BPM:

All of this background points out one major trend: A new career field is emerging for business process professionals, fueled by the growth of business transformation, business improvement, and business optimization projects.

What do the individuals in this new field need most? Process architecture skills, process analysis skills, process modeling skills, change management skills, Lean and Six Sigma skills — the list goes on. More than anything, the skills gap or skills shortage keeps BPM projects from scaling throughout the organization.

This comes as no surprise to me – as it seems, looking back, that most of my career has been focused on process technology of one sort or another (initially, supporting sales processes for complex products, and later, actually working for a BPM vendor… and now, working with our own practice realizing business processes in production software).

Those of us at BP3 have already made a career out of BPM as business process professionals.  It looks as though most of us on our team fit most closely to the “Prodigy” cohort, as defined by Connie.  An appropriate place to start for a boutique consulting firm – though we have our Gurus and Change Agents.

Connie Moore has specific advice for picking up the necessary skills.  She advocates “two in a box” for training new process professionals.  This is something I’ve advocated for a long time.  BPM is more craft than anything else – you learn from others, and give it your own spin based on what you bring to the table.

Connie also advocates employees attending training, and leveraging external resources.  Couldn’t agree more (hello, bpmCamp!)

I’m not aware of a conference labeling itself an “un”conference prior to bpmCamp 2010 @ Stanford, in january of this year, but that doesn’t mean that there wasn’t one that I’m unaware of.  Our first attempt was a big success, based on feedback from attendees at the event.  I was asked recently by one customer if we could have the next conference focus on more “customer-oriented topics” – to which I responded “of course! which ones?!” because after all, it is a crowdsourced agenda. I should have also asked him if the big industry conferences are more “customer focused” on agenda than bpmCamp?  I find it doubtful.

At any rate, Forrester has announced their own “unconference”.  This has caused some criticism from those who’ve been to unconferences (and from those who simply don’t think an analyst firm can do this).  Although I’m a little skeptical of Forrester’s particular approach, I’m glad that they’re trying to incorporate more attendee-input into their conferences. I’ve previously advocated for conferences to do a better job of this.  It feels like Forrester is dipping a toe in.  I’d encourage them to jump in further.

I’m also just not a purist.  So I try not to attack restaurants for not being “authentic” rather than just for not being “good”.  I try not to attack conferences for not being “pure” – but I will criticize if I don’t think they’re valuable or effective (there is something odd about testing the pureness of the un- in unconference).  I do think that in-person communication and being able to step away from the daily grind is critical to how people synthesize new information and recharge the batteries. And I think crowdsourcing topics and presenters can greatly increase the value of a conference.

Typically, unconferences seem to be free, and have very little agenda planned up front (one coming up in Austin has a featured speaker and a panel discussion to kick off and end the conference, but the middle is unplanned so far as I know)- the idea being that you want to let the wisdom of crowds shape the event.  Being free, and local, makes this a palatable approach.  But for conferences with people traveling from all over the country (or the world), some kind of agenda is necessary to help them make value decisions.  And for conferences that aren’t free – typically some agenda is necessary to help justify the event to the boss, or to the education division.

While I wouldn’t describe SXSW-interactive as an “unconference”, the organizers work harder than any conference I’ve attended before to shape the agenda around what attendees want.  Topics are proposed by the hundreds, if not thousands, and then voted up or down by all the possible attendees.  It seems like barely controlled anarchy at the conference – topics are all over the map.  But there’s a certain beauty to the organization – because the conference shapes itself over time, and renews itself.  It has grown from a conference largely focused on blogging, to one that includes a distinct mobile agenda, and a distinct startup agenda.  This year, looking at topic ideas, geolocation is high on the list.  By allowing the agenda to change, SXSWi stays relevant to a changing technical and business landscape. And it stays relevant to Austin.

While I can’t hope for bpmCamp to compete with SXSW-interactive, or the broader interest ‘camps like ProductCamp, I did feel that bpmCamp needed an identity a bit different from the typical conference in the BPM space, to make it clear that attendees can drive the agenda.  It isn’t perfect, but we’ll keep iterating on the concept and try to develop it.  That’s why we adopted some of the techniques of unconferences, while charging a modest fee to cover costs, and allowing some of the topics to be prepared before-hand by some of the experts in our field.  Let’s face it, some topics deserve preparation time.  As BPM goes more mainstream, the kind of events that can be supported by reasonable populations of people will increase, and we can broaden the focus.

So the new Forrester Wave is out.  What’s that? you hadn’t heard?  If not, you haven’t talked to anyone in the analyst or BPM vendor community in the last 24 hours!

As usual, there are a raft-load of vendors declaring victory:

Appian: “Appian Still Leading the Pack”

Pega:  “Pegasystems ranked #1 as one of two BPM vendors that ‘lead the pack with the best overall combination of modeling, design and development features for business and technical roles driving process improvement’ “  (bonus, their article includes the image of the Wave graphic itself)

Metastorm: “Metastorm Recognized as a Leader in Business Process Management Suites Report…”

IBM has several congratulatory tweets about being in the leader quadrant, but I haven’t seen a press release yet.

Judging by the wave, I should be able to add links to Progress and Software AG press releases or blog posts by this time tomorrow.

Every one of these vendors will crow that the analysts have confirmed that they’re as smart as they thought they were – that they’re leaders (or even, “number 1″).

So, I’ll let you in on a little secret.  The Wave won’t tell you which BPMS makes the most sense for you.  Some of these offerings are actually so different that they rarely, if ever, compete for the same customer projects, and often corporations own more than one product because they aren’t viewed as doing the same thing.  For example, Appian’s strength in SaaS means that will compete more often for SaaS deployments – the decision “to SaaS or not to SaaS” was probably made before any vendors were called.   Metastorm’s strength in EA may play well with customers who are doing a lot of modeling, but for projects that are more focused on implementation, or who already own other EA tools, that offering won’t be as compelling as something more targeted at executing processes.  Even Pega (apparently depicted as #1 on the Wave), isn’t as often in competition for general-purpose BPM platform purchases – they tend to be in the finals for more vertical processes, where their investment in specific templates or verticals or applications can really pay off.  A friend once described Pega as more a company that sells rules- and BPM- enabled applications, rather than BPM itself (it wasn’t a criticism, my friend thought it was good strategy for the company).

Of course the meat of these things is in the written words inside the report, but it is hard to get there when there is that tasty graphic that everyone can look at.  I wonder what would happen if Forrester withheld the scoring and the graphic for a couple of weeks, and just revealed the more in-depth analysis.  Another interesting data point would be the number of times (that Forrester can determine) any two vendors were finalists in the same evaluation – which would allow for a 2×2 grid/heatmap that shows you who is competing with whom.  I was happy to see Forrester give up on separating BPM into various different flavors of BPM – that approach never really worked for me, personally.

So everyone is happy now.  But in the morning, we’ll humbly get back to work and get some processes built and deployed, and improve some processes.  Which is, after all, the whole point of BPM.

Update: as expected, a few announcements today:

Software AG announces their leadership status here.

And Progress’ blog entry can be found here.

Someone had to do it, and I’m glad it was Theo Priestley, and not I!

Theo’s written up a summary of the Forrester-initiated BPM Jam on Twitter (thanks Connie!), and did a pretty good job of it.

Key points from his summary, where the idea that education needs to standardize (a la ABPMP), but also needs a more mature, comprehensive approach (a la Lombardi University). I missed this part of the discussion so I’m not sure how people felt about the OMG OCEB examination – of course, since that is a cert only, not a full educational curriculum, that may be why it was overlooked.

Another key point was the idea that a business architect requires 20 yrs of experience with Six Sigma, Lean, TQM under the belt.  As Theo put it:

I disagree somewhat on that point, whilst those methods are ‘nice to haves’ they shouldn’t be prerequisites of a Biz Arch and certainly not as steeped in the skills that they can’t accept outside influences. I’ve seen this among a lot of Master Black Belts and I don’t think they have what it takes to be a Biz Arch on this alone. Needs to be cross-skilled and understand architecture on a wider scale outside of process alone.

I think the key point Theo makes is that if you have adopted the religion of Six Sigma, or Lean or <fill-in-your-favorite-improvement-methodology>, you may be too inflexible to solve BPM problems in the most effective way.  A simple example I’ve seen of this is the Lean and Six Sigma ideal of ignoring technology while improving the process.  As with most doctrines, there is a kernel of a good idea there, but too often it is taken too far – to the point where many six sigma and Lean practitioners seem to be saying that technology can’t inform process improvement approaches – which any software engineer can disprove.  The real point of course is to not let technology slow down the process improvement, which is a very different thing altogether, and something I very much agree with.