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.

Gartner’s Business Process Maturity Model is not for the faint of heart.  I’ve heard a couple of talks on the subject and read a couple of papers, and never found it terribly useful or informative to our action plans with customers.  Apparently Anatoly Belychook agrees based on this blog post:

Phase 0. Functional management. Organization has yet to realize that its performance as a whole depends not only on how certain functions are performed, but also on how well these functions coordinate with each other, i.e. the quality of business processes interconnecting them.

Phase 1. Business processes awareness. The organization explores itself through the prism of business processes. End-to-end business processes are discovered and process owners are appointed. Everyone draw process diagrams. Gaps and bottlenecks are identified and eliminated, without investments into processes automation (BPMS).

Phase 2. Automated execution and control of business processes. The organization learns to manage business processes in a continuous loop model – execute – analyze and seeks to improve their effectiveness, mostly on a separate processes basis.

Phase 3. Execution and control of end-to end business processes. Process boundaries are expanded under the control of BPMS, inter-process communications are worked out and end-to-end processes are established connecting the company to its customers/partners and/or their business processes.

Phase 4. Explicit and automatic link between business goals and business processes. With the help of simulation and dynamic business rules, business goals changes trigger automatic rebuilding the network of business processes.

Phase 5. Adaptive business structure. The ability to quickly react to changing business environment, anticipate these changes and create opportunities through deeper integration into various markets and partner ecosystems.

I would offer a simpler set of maturity levels, which is what I proposed at Lombardi when I was still employed there:

0. Process Ignorance: No organized process per se
1. Process Awareness: Documented processes
2. Process Discipline: Processes both documented and consistently adhered to
3. Process Proficiency:  Processes implemented in software
4. Process Excellence: Ongoing investment in process improvement is cultural in the organization.

As Anatoly says, in Gartner’s 5 phases, phase 0, 4, and 5 aren’t really interesting for discussion in today’s business climate.  But he points out a key trap in pursuing process maturity the way Gartner envisions it:

The key words are “for all processes.” Trying to evenly raise the maturity of all processes is a recipe for disaster. In accordance with Pareto’s law, 20% of processes are responsible for 80% of the company’s performance. Wouldn’t it be wiser to focus on these 20%?

Sure the BPM-3 grants much more control over the processes than BPM-1. But it’s much more expensive as well! Complete BPMS implementation of an end-to-end business process is a custom IT development, apart from other considerations. And cheap custom IT development just doesn’t happen.

This isn’t just true for BPM – it is true for QA, for CMM, for all kinds of organizational and technical efforts.  Failure to apply the Pareto principle is to fall into the sins of either waste or overproduction (depending on how you look at it).  When we tackle even one process for an improvement and/or implementation effort, we try to focus in on the most important 20% – the changes that will really move the needle in terms of process performance, rather than expending our work equally across each stage of the process.

There were several reports about BPM spending going into next year, mostly based on the Gartner report to that effect.  Much of the commentary around this report seemed to be to treat it with cynicism:

“I think this is the 10th anniversary of Gartner predicting hockey-stick growth in BPM. Sure to happen some day…” – Sandy Kemsley

Of course, part of the problem is that, if a market has CAGR (compounded annual growth rate) of 15% or more, EVERY year is going to look like the bend in the hockey stick when you plot it out on a linear graph.  And it appears that that is what we’re seeing in the BPM market today.

There are other interesting signs of a change afoot.  Lately, when I tell people what I do for a living in social settings, sometimes people actually know what BPM is.  Or they do when I start to explain it.  More surprising: sometimes they’re actually interested in it.  A few years ago I’d get looks like I was doing something incomprehensible or foreign.  So when gartner says “Spending on business process management (BPM) projects will increase significantly in 2011” I believe them.  Gartner considers 5% increase significant (54% of respondents) and 10% even more significant (20% of respondents).  That actually doesn’t sound like predicting hockey stick growth to me, but maybe the compounded charts into the future make it look that way.

I can relate to this somewhat just looking at the historical growth rate at BP3. We’re already having our best year yet in 2011, and setting up for an even better 2012 with the hiring we’re doing.  To anyone in the BPM services or product market, it anecdotally feels like a hockey stick growth curve.

Appian’s take:

The hockey stick growth that BPM analysts continue to predict year after year is achievable. But it will not come from the minority of people already focused on process. Neither will it come from incremental updates to old BPM paradigms or from the resolution of debates over BPMN minutiae, for examples. Exponential BPM growth will come through the majority and its rapid adoption of Mobile, Social and Cloud technology.

Well, no one was really talking about “exponential” growth were they? I think they were talking about 15% compounded growth, at most.  And while mobile and social may provide an exponential growth (for a time) in usage, they’re not likely to provide exponential growth in revenue, which is what Gartner is attempting to estimate.  Most users’ expectations is that these social apps are free.

(Appian goes on to mention that they’re hiring.  So are we!)

Jim Sinur raises this question in a non-confrontational way in his recent blog post.  It’s good to see him back at blogging on the subject of BPM after a short hiatus.  The trend he predicts:

As BPM matures it will have to reach to groups of knowledge workers that can easily work together for the common good of process outcomes, improving processes and recognizing unexpected patterns of behavior in processes plus participating constituents(clients, partners, employees etc.). Enabling good feedback mechanisms and encouraging “early warnings”. will be behavior that will be encouraged, going forward.

Reading between the lines – he asks if Social BPM is only communication/collaboration or if there is also some structure required to deliver the benefits.  To me, a short-hand way of describing his cautionary note is:  if there’s no Design, then you’re just Doing. 

I’m not sure that just Doing is better than Doing with a little bit of Design thrown in for good measure (or, in the case of highly structured processes, a lot of Design).

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.

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.

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.

Jim Sinur has listed his top 10 BPM Developments for 2010, and a few choice bits:

[...]

9.  There are several vendors exhibiting spectacular growth rates (north of 60%) even with the power vendors making an impact.

10.  BPM is enabling greater leverage of existing application / package portfolios

I don’t have great access to the growth #’s for the software vendors, but I’ll bet Jim does.  And the growth rates don’t really surprise me – we’ve seen a lot of activity in our sphere, so to speak.  BPM is clearly going more and more mainstream.  The other day I mentioned BPM to someone at a social event and they actually knew what I was talking about.  (Please, don’t judge me for mentioning BPM in a social context – someone asked me what I do for a living!)

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!).

Donna Fitzgerald of Gartner has a very thoughtful post regarding whether our businesses might have cut too far in this latest economic downturn in a post entitled “Cutting to the Bone and then Some”  I think she makes a few valid points for sure.

Now on to my point; I’m not seeing the increase in creativity or innovation I would be expecting as part of our changing economy and I’m not sure why.  I’ve got a gut instinct that says we’ve cut too far and adopted too much of an attitude that if we have enough process than any trained monkey can do the work.  The problem is that trained monkeys don’t innovate.

Part of my concern comes from a recent personal trip I took.  Almost everyone I spoke with in my travels was angry, over worked and stressed almost to the point of breaking.  Stress kills creativity.  It also kills productivity over the long haul (though not unfortunately in the short run).

I’ve observed the same in many of my dealings with businesses.  There is a lot of stress and overwork.  And I agree with her instinct that too many people think that people are like nails- that you can trivially replace them with cheaper nails.  As someone who grew up in Florida, where hurricanes are known to make landfall, I can tell you that there are nails, and there are nails (not to mention, how you apply them matters).  And there are architects and builders that are worth the money you pay them – and you know this when your neighbor’s house survives the hurricane and the rest of the neighborhood doesn’t.

Why is it so easy for people sitting in management chairs to believe that people are fungible commodities?  It is this belief that leads to endless pursuit of the lowest cost-per-hour labor, where ever it is (Too often, people mistake cost-per-hour as being the same as cost-per-unit-of-output… but the hour is not the output, it is the input).

People are the beginning, the middle, and the end of your business.

Jim Sinur has thrown in the towel on BPMN in his latest post:

BPMN for business professionals is just not up to a business level of need. Some folks think that BPMN is good enough for IT and it should be good enough for business professionals. I think the former is true, but the latter is way off the mark.

BPMN really stands for “Business People May Not…understand”

IT professionals can’t really expect business folks to understand cryptic/standard formats when they really want to see a real representation of their processes with desirable icons; not engineering Icons. It’s kind of like someone saying “let them eat cake”. It is this IT arrogance that could sink BPM technologies.

Respectfully, I think Jim is letting the business off the hook.   No need to learn any new skills over there on the business side, just draw something on a napkin and hope it turns into a process.  Just make up any old iconography you want, no problem if no one other than you can understand it (you know, the value of standards is that more than one person or team can understand what is produced).  Don’t bother to learn something that is about 10% harder than standard flowcharting (Bruce Silver has helpfully identified a subset of BPMN that is more appropriate for new-to-BPMN business users).

At a time when we’re asking IT to learn new skills and to be more business oriented, is it too much to ask Business to learn new skills to support process improvement?  This isn’t unique to BPM – if the business is going to support ACM, they’re going to have to learn new tools for that as well.  If the full BPMN icon set is too much for someone, use the subset that you understand and like to document your ideas, and make use of annotation.  If someone shows you a diagram with more icons in it that you don’t follow, it should be straight forward to get an explanation or to look up the new notations you aren’t familiar with.  While Jim may not be a fan of standardization of notation – business folks are plenty used to standards of notation (not just in BPMN).  I use BPMN basic diagramming shapes to whiteboard processes for businesses all the time (literally on the whiteboard or in collaborative tools) – and they don’t have any trouble following what’s going on.

The problem isn’t that BPMN, as a notation, is too hard. It is that too many people think that BPM starts and stops with BPMN!  There is so much more to managing business processes, and improving them, than BPMN.  By way of comparison, think about search.  Search is a highly technical subject with a very rigorous syntax.  But nearly everyone can take advantage of its more simplistic forms – just typing in a few keywords into a Google search field.  It doesn’t mean that they can’t understand a more complex query string when they see it, nor guess at the meaning of a phrase surrounded by quotes… nor understand the resulting page of search results (the outcome). In fact, if they find their need for search becoming more complex, they can actually endeavor to learn the more advanced forms (domain filtering, exclusion, wildcards, etc).

So let’s all agree that there is much that must be done in the world of BPM to address businesses better, but tossing out BPMN and letting business off the hook is hardly the solution.  One need look no further than a tool like IBM’s BPM Blueprint to see that you can ease the business into BPMN style notation by first having them engage in process mapping or value stream mapping.  You don’t have to throw out BPMN to do this.  At the first company I worked for, we used to like to quote a line from a business book: “Genius of the ‘And’” – as in, why can’t I have both a simpler mapping notation, and a more detailed process execution notation that make sense together – instead of only one or the other?

It is time for everyone to step up to the plate in BPM, not just the software vendors.  BPMN is part of the answer, but only part.

Mike Gammage points out that a recent Gartner report touts BPA for the masses, but fails to understand how absurd that sounds:

Within this context, how can BPA possibly be an activity for the masses? This kind of analysis is understood and undertaken by a small group of IT specialists.

Each kitchen has only a small cadre of pastry chefs. Diners, waiters, the maitre d’ – they may all be involved in continuously improving the mille feuille aux amandes – but it’s the pastry chefs alone who sift the flour and need the rolling pin.

I think Gartner may have, in this instance, gotten tools and work confused.  Some of the tools they are reviewing (BPM Blueprint, and ARISalign) are designed for the masses – but not to turn the masses into BPAs.  The goal is to turn the masses of business users into real participants in continuous process improvement.  Of course, they have features to support BPA activities – but those particular features are primarily intended to support the analysts, not the “masses”.

Adam Deane noticed a change in Gartner’s BPMS Definition:

If you compare it to previous BPMS definitions by Gartner (for example in last year’s Magic Quadrant for Business Process Management Suites), you will see two major additions:
1. Document and content management.
2. Inline and offline simulation (instead of just simulation)

Good catch.  Of course, we shouldn’t be surprised that the definition of “what’s in the BPMS box” would change over time – I expect that soon it will be a given that several other features (even products, or market segments) should be included in the BPMS definition.  Why? Because too many people view BPM (or BPMS) as the the future “Business Operating System” (in the 90′s, I think most people viewed ERP as the operating system for the business… ).  Rightly or wrongly, that puts a lot of things under the umbrella.

The real progress will be when the technology becomes so good it is transparent to the business, so obvious it is as if it works by magic (see Arthur C Clarke: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”).

This isn’t particular or specific to the world of BPM conferences – there’s a general “conference malaise” going on – in which only the “best”  conferences are really tearing it up.

Outside of the BPM world, its clear that conferences like SXSW in Austin are doing just fine (and did just fine last year too, by the way).  Record attendance and a record number of panels and bands and acts is just the norm at SXSW these days (conference starts today).

But in the world of BPM, 2009 was tough for conferences, when the expectation was that people would still be attending BPM conferences due to how applicable they are to everyone’s business.  Several vendors postponed their conferences or took them virtual (Lombardi’s Driven), but the ones who waited until the fall (Appian) benefited from the beginning of the rebound in businesses planning for the future rather than businesses just living in fear of the next shoe dropping.

Sandy Kemsley has pointed out this problem with BPM conferences several times, as has Theo Priestley, and we’ve chimed in as well on the topic.  Some fresh perspectives:

• Sandy points out that 2010 looks like a rebound year for conferences.  We’ll see – Gartner’s BPM summit is in March in Las Vegas, and IBM’s “Impact” is in May – good test cases of the demand for these conferences.  Word from the London Gartner summit implied that attendance was low?  (I wasn’t there, so its second-hand to me).
• Theo Priestley and Mike Gammage hypothesize that Gartner and IQPC could merge events by 2012 – which again sounds like weakness rather than strength to me.
• Interestingly, Gammage was more encouraging about Gartner’s latest offering, while Jon Pyke’s contacts were not impressed.

Theo has a separate blog post, and while the bulk of it is about building community more broadly, at the end he makes a telling argument:

“When a sponsor at a BPM conference turns round and says he was perplexed at why there was such a low turnout given how important BPM has become according to what surveys seem to suggest the answer may be in the fact that we can’t even agree on what we’re telling clients in the first place.

For a group that practices change we’re incredibly resistant to it ourselves…..”

I’ve said before and I’ll say it again: I think BPM conferences need to do a few things:

1. Localize.  Have the conference closer to the bulk of your attendees, so that more people can come without travel costs.
2. Face-to-Face.  Tele-presence and high-def video conferencing is great.  But a virtual conference is a broadcast medium.  If attendees want one-way communication they can read the book or watch the video after the fact.  If they want interaction, then you need physical presence to really encourage that.
3. Respect budgets.  Don’t make cost of attendance a barrier – keep it reasonable. For anyone traveling, travel costs should dominate their total expenses, not registration costs.
4. Crowd-source.  Leverage the community to arrive at the topics.  There’s been too much top-down sourcing of content at conferences, without soliciting feedback from potential and actual attendees.
5. Narrow the focus. The narrower the focus, the more involved the people who attend can be.  People mistakenly think you have to broaden the audience to get more people – but the point isn’t MORE – the point is BETTER.  If the event is BETTER then you’ll get more value out of your investment of time and money.

We’ve followed this philosophy for bpmCamp and it was a great success for us – the feedback has been enormously positive, with a lot of interest in repeating the event next year.  But of course, our “unconference” was limited to 40 attendees – and its easier to organize around these principles when you keep the size of the conference smaller. Still, I think there are lessons to learn for those who would put on BPM-focused events, and the biggest one is:

It’s about the audience, not about the organizer.

For more information from bpmCamp, follow this link to our blog coverage of the bpmCamp event.  The element that I think is most crucial is the impromptu discussion that can happen in a more intimate setting.  Questions don’t wait for a microphone or a moderator – the hand goes up or the question is proposed and people can jump in and contribute.  I was really pleased with how this dynamic worked at bpmCamp and I hope we can reproduce this at other events.  I think 2010 will be a better year for conferences, but organizers need to keep in mind how to make these gatherings *more* valuable for attendees or they’re going to lose their attention next time.

Gartner Group’s Michele Cantara just published its list of “Who’s Who” in BPM Consulting and System Integration on December 14th, 2009.  17 Companies are covered, and BP3 is on the list.  Michele gives an overview of the BPM Services landscape, and rightly points out:

While many consultants and system integrators offer some form of business consulting or process optimization services, they may not have the capabilities appropriate for business process management. This report profiles the BPM consulting capabilities of 17 external service providers.  – from the abstract

The price is $995 for the report by itself, but if you have a Gartner subscription you may have ready access to it.  BPM consulting is defined as a special case of Business Operations Improvement (BOI) consulting, which is process improvement tied to downstream technology change.  Gartner plots the vendors on the “Gartner Consulting Continuum”, and then provides a synopsis of each vendor, including BP3.

It’s an honor to be included in the list, and to be able to get the word out about what we’re up to – and to get heard above the noise is even more gratifying.  It’s a small world in this particular space – we know some of the other companies on and off of this list, and we’ve had opportunity to work together to deliver solutions for customers. We just don’t believe that this is a zero-sum game, because successful BPM projects are growing the pie faster than any one service provider can accommodate, and because it takes a variety of skills to make these projects successful.

While Gartner points out that our size might limit our ability to handle large scale BPM and transformation initiatives, it turns out we’re in the middle of just such an initiative right now – leading a joint team of BP3, Lombardi/IBM, TCS, and customer personnel, more than 150 people in all.  We like to think we have impact larger than our size would indicate: the point is not so much whether all arms and legs are provided by BP3 (which wouldn’t make sense in almost any case as you want to have a variety of specialists and disciplines) -the point is where the leadership and experience base is coming from.

That leadership and experience is where we can help, and it is more specific to our value proposition, whether you’re deploying Teamworks or doing an assessment of your processes and opportunities for the first time. We’re going to continue building the most experienced, highly skilled BPM team in the business, and stay focused on our core value proposition.  Stay tuned!

Jim Sinur has his usual pro vs. con argument with himself on the issue of BPM in China.

The anti-BPM argument:  lots of cheap labor, 300k+ engineers turned out every year -so why invest in BPM when we can throw bodies at the problem.

The pro-BPM argument (presumably Jim’s take):

While I value lower labor costs, I think the battle is producing higher gross domestic product (GDP) with less hours per GDP dollar. Eventually Chinas cost have to go up. It’s already happening in India. Don’t throw out BPM; throw out the programmers !!! It’s probably different in the west where the labor costs are higher.

Actually I think this is a tension that takes care of itself.  China (more accurately, firms within China) will invest in BPM when they feel the pressure to do so, and likely not often before that point.  That pressure might be higher labor costs, higher quality standards (not all quality improvements can be fixed by more manpower), or increasing pace of change – the same kind of pressures that apply here.  But I don’t think, at this point, that China’s goal should be higher GDP with less hours of labor – that is a byproduct of other good data, not a goal in-and-of itself.

For now, labor costs are not pressuring China to explore BPM, perhaps. But that picture is likely to change as the economy grows in China at a rapid clip.  But BPM is a “pull” not a “push” sale at this point – the customer has to realize they have the need before you are likely to sell them on the virtues of BPM as the way to satisfy that need.