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.

There was a post over on Lombardi’s “Process People” blog referencing all the events they’ve attended in the Fall of 2009, from Gartner BPM Summit to Forrester’s BTF to the Gartner ITxpo. Event schedules have wound down for 2009… but its a great time to start planning to attend bpmCamp on January 28-29, 2010!

Background: BPM Conferences Are Good…
Conferences are a great way for colleagues and peers to network, share best practices, and re-energize and re-motivate their efforts.  In particular we’ve enjoyed participating and presenting at Lombardi’s Driven conferences in the past, and at bp3 we’ve attended Lombardi Driven, Appian’s conference, OMG’s Thinktank, Gartner BPM, and Forrester BPM conferences (when we weren’t too busy with customers).  Conferences have some of the value of an off-site meeting within the company: recharging the batteries and motivating action.  But they also provide a chance to be exposed to much more diverse points of view, to out-of-the-box thinking, to new tricks of the trade, and to new market dynamics.  In smaller conferences, or small breakout sessions, real discussions break out that can really be illuminating (OMG’s Round Table format is a well-known example of formalizing this kind of small-discussion format, and it led to the six barriers to BPM Adoption at a very humorous and educational round table that I was fortunate to attend).

…but Missing the Mark.
There are just a couple of problems.  First, conferences run by Analyst firms and Conference organizers are often too expensive (especially with today’s budgets).  Second, vendor conferences are too focused on the sponsoring vendor’s messaging, and often neglect the real needs of attendees. Attendees to both types of conferences get value, but I often hear them expressing an interest in getting into more detail – moving past concept to tactics.  Moving past platitudes to showing real solutions.

Its our belief that it is just too hard to get into the specifics and details in a multi-vendor conference.  Even with respect to project methodology, the *right* approach to a project has to take into account the realities of the technology being used.  If you’re using a BPM tool that doesn’t provide rapid UI prototyping, you’ll need a different approach to your project than someone using a BPM tool that does provide rapid UI prototyping.  And that’s just one trivial example.  When we get down to sharing technical best practices, going cross-vendor just doesn’t make much sense- BPM execution level detail simply isn’t that portable.

…So What’s the Answer?
If we put together a conference that is focused on what attendees want to talk about, we’ll get more value for the dollar.  If we aren’t looking to clear a profit on the event, we can lower the investment barrier required to attend.  If we focus on a single vendor, we can focus all the way down to shared source code if it has value. To that end, we’re going to borrow from concepts pioneered by unconferences and barCamps, leveraging advice from folks who put on the SXSWi barcamp in the past.

With preamble aside, I’m very happy to announce what I believe to be a first:  a BPM unconference for BPM practitioners of a single product suite.  We’re calling it bpmCamp.

This first event is focused on users of Lombardi‘s Teamworks or Blueprint products.  We’re focusing on this community because it is the set of products and practitioner community that we have the deepest connections into, and because we want the event to be a single BPM product event for the reasons stated above.

Why bpmCamp?

We really think the BPM community/ecosystem needs events like this to foster growth, success, and maturity.  We believe maturity requires:

• technical breadth and depth
• project methodologies to support the roll-out of processes and improvements to those processes
• process improvement techniques and strategies that can actually be implemented and maintained in BPM suites

Also, we actually want to learn something new.  When we get the right  practitioners in a room, we’re going to learn from them, and help propagate those best practices into the BPM ecosystem.  We’re also going to share what we know from prior experience directly with the conference.  This cross-pollination is good for everyone.

Finally, we decided to put action behind our words.  We’ve long agitated politely for more tactical, focused topics at BPM conferences, but we’ve reached the point where it is time for us to contribute back to the community by creating an intimate event that fosters that kind of discussion.

When is bpmCamp?

We’ve selected a date for the first one:  January 28-29, 2010. Mark your calendars.

We hope to host additional bpmCamp events in the future, but this is the inaugural event, and it should be special.  Please watch this blog as we’ll put up an F.A.Q. as soon as tomorrow with more details.

If you have any questions in the meantime, contact us at:
bpmCamp Email: 

(editor’s note: bpmCamp is not affiliated with or sponsored by Lombardi.  bp3 is not acting on Lombardi’s behalf, nor is bp3 an affiliate nor subsidiary of Lombardi. )

Unfortunately we at BP3 couldn’t attend Gartner’s conference in Orlando this fall – we’re all busy helping customers with their BPM initiatives this year and couldn’t break free for it.  No doubt there are many BPM practitioners in the same situation.  This page is dedicated to you.

I’ll do my best to harvest good blog posts and twitter links that are relevant to the conference – but please feel free to add your own in the comments section below (no registration required).

First, Sandy Kemsley is the undisputed champ of covering BPM conferences – as previously demonstrated by her attendance at just about every conference I can think of.  For the full coverage from Sandy’s blog, this link should help.  I’ll also call out some individual articles.

• Keynote coverage by Sandy.  BPM remains at the center of focus for many companies, as a way to manage growth or create efficiencies with limited or flat budgets.  An increase in interest in the “unstructured” process space.  A list of must-haves for your software suite.
• Patterns presented by Benoit Lheureux and scribed by Sandy.
• Interesting session on the benefits of process tools and which ones to use.
• Elise Olding and Carol Rozwell’s session on the cost of unstructured processes (thx to Sandy).  I think the real takeaway from this one is that the TRUE cost of unstructured processes are all the elements within those processes that ought to be structured or streamlined out – and then what remains are those well-defined parts of the process that really can’t be put in a box.
• A Pega customer (JPM) gives a case study about Centers of Excellence (again, thx Sandy!)
• BPM Optimization and Simulation (captured by James Taylor).  Jim Sinur emphasizes using simulation and optimization to think outside the box, but in a safe environment (sandbox?).
• Bare essentials of making rules work (James Taylor), a session by Jim Sinur and Dave McCoy. Good post and I agree with his assessment on not focusing on “forward and backward chaining” and the like – its a bit like focusing on what kind of fuel injection your car has, rather than just wanting to know if it will be reliable and get you from zero to 60 in some reasonable time-frame.

Of course, check out the twitter stream if you want to see updates in 140 characters or less.

So what did I miss? Any other coverage from day 1?  I’ll add some Day 2 links here tomorrow.

UPDATE FROM DAY 2:

Almost every link I saw in the twitter feed today was referencing Sandy or James Taylor, so here are they’re blog posts that captured their thoughts on the sessions they were able to attend.  Not as good as being there, but almost! Thanks for sharing you two -

• JT’s notes from Jim Sinur’s “Dynamic BPM and Agility” session.  Deeper coverage of themes that Jim has covered in his blog.  Sandy’s take here.
• JT’s notes from Nancy Pearson’s “Business Agility Now!” session (about IBM’s initiative of that name). I guess there are some corporations that might look to IBM for advice about how to become more Agile, but it isn’t the image of IBM I have in my mind.  Lots of marketing dollars and real project results are going to be required to change that impression for most folks (or at least, anyone who has had to install Websphere before). Amazingly, they’ve announced “Version 7″ – it seems 7 is the new popular version number in BPMS suites.
• Sandy’s notes from JT’s presentation on Advanced Decisioning. A choice quote that I couldn’t agree more with: “Simpler: If you build all of your rules and decisioning logic within your processes – essentially turning your process map into a decision tree – then your processes will very quickly become completely unreadable. Separating decisions from the process map, allowing them to become the driver for the process or available at specific points within the process, makes the process itself simpler.” Good summation.
• Sandy’s notes from “The five dysfunctions of a team“.  This is a great one to read – and note the emphasis on low turnover, and “health” of the team.  And much of a successful team leads back to the qualities and behaviors of the leader.  Leadership is essential to successful BPM – and I think anyone deploying BPM solutions should think this through.
• Sandy’s notes from the Fujitsu process discovery case study, using an automated process to “discover” a process, rather than manually defining it.
• Sandy’s notes on social networks and BPM, clearly something of interest to Sandy and this is one of her best-covered sessions.

Jim Sinur wonders allowed whether you can Time Box BPM efforts effectively… and concludes that in some cases you can, in some cases you can’t.  In favor of the “yes” argument:

Benefits flow early and the project sponsors look like heroes. Success breeds success and a BPM program can take off early. Anybody want to say “no” to instant savings?

Indeed, who would want to do that!? And then Jim puts up another strawman for the “No” argument:

What sometimes happens when this approach is taken is that sooner or later a project that implemented benefits may have to give them back to help the overall process. [...]

Not only might it knock out strategic benefits, the conversion costs could wipe out a period of the savings. Why make false starts when you can do it right once?

Well, quite frankly, you can’t do it right once.  That is the false choice in the comparison.  IF you could do it right once, this would be a valid decision tree – but since you CAN’T do it right once (with any reasonable probability), this point doesn’t hold much water for me.

I don’t believe this is a six-on-one-hand, half-a-dozen-on-the-other issue.  Time boxing works – and specifically it works more often than a big-bang deployment.  The point is that since we can’t get a software release right in just one release, the goal is to approach the right answer increasingly accurately across a set of smaller, less expensive releases rather than one big release.

Yes, there is the caveat that you must keep corporate objectives in mind, and that in a future time box, some of the gains in one area may slip in order to achieve a bigger overall gain.  But in practice I have experienced that kind of “back-sliding” as a pretty unusual circumstance.

When giving back benefits did happen, it was a classic case of “squeezing the balloon” – where one group with relatively inexpensive staff optimized their process around reducing hard costs (measurable as headcount).  They neglected that their optimization created additional work for other parts of the organization, where the staff was actually more expensive – and therefore, they increased overall cost to the organization instead of reducing it.  But the increase of cost can be hidden as soft cost – a slightly decreased productivity by a large number of people is difficult to notice via anecdotal or sampling data.

Time boxing is key for creating a pattern of delivering, of being accountable, of having a delivery process that has integrity.  The alternative has a much higher probability of failure.  In this blog, we typically refer to “time boxing” as “Iterative Development” and time boxes as “Iterations”.  But both terms are valid taxonomy.  They’re also similar to concepts in the Customer Development process (generally popularized by folks like Steve Blank and Eric Ries among others).

The News

So Oracle just bought Sun.  I didn’t think this had any real bearing on the BPM market because I couldn’t think of any BPM software that Sun has been pushing.  Dennis Byron of ebizQ confirms in his article “Does Oracle/Sun Mean It’s a Horse Race for BPM?” (registration required but it’s painless, I assure you), that Sun has already pretty well “de-emphasized the BPM-related elements in the remnants of SeeBeyond, which it acquired in 2005.” The only impact I expect the acquisition to have on BPM is that it assures that Oracle’s thought leaders will be spread even more thinly as they work hard to incorporate Sun’s many software offerings, not to mention as they try to figure out the hardware business for the first time.  BPM is such a small part of what Oracle does now, that it is hard to imagine it won’t get starved for attention inside the walls of Oracle.

The Background

This is an argument I’ve been having on-and-off with Dennis Byron of ebizQ this year, and in a  previous post on the subject,  I summarized my arguments that had been scattered across a few posts on Dennis Byron’s blog.  Dennis largely took the side of the big stack vendors, arguing that they innovate as much as the little guys (in general, and in BPM).  I took the general point of view that while stack vendors bring advantages to the table, innovation is not chief among those advantages, and that the innovation in the BPM space (and in most spaces) comes from the upstarts and smaller companies.

From the Analysts’ Mouths to…

Well, not that Gartner is the final word on everything, but their statements over the last 4 years are pretty illuminating, from my perspective (thanks to the folks at the Lombardi partner conference for bringing these front of mind):

Gartner, 2005: “Current offerings from IBM, Microsoft, Oracle and SAP provide weaker support for human workflow patterns integrated into a broader process, business-user-oriented rule definition and maintenance (for decisions, re-sourcing and flows), human collaboration, and integrated document and content flow, compared with popular pure-play vendor products [...]” – “Business Process Management: Act Strategically and Buy Tactically”, Gartner Group, June 21, 2005.

In other words, in summer of 2005, the assessment was that the stack vendors just “weren’t there yet”.  But the prevailing view was that if we just gave them another 18-24 months they’d get there.  Even the pure play vendors themselves worried greatly about growing as fast as possible during this “window of opportunity” while the stack vendors were playing catch up.

But, in 2007, what did Gartner have to say? Paraphrasing, their 2007 report noted that none of the stack vendors had a good, integrated experience for people playing a role in process improvement life cycles.  They specifically called out IBM, SAP, and Oracle on this.

Again, everyone thought, if we just wait 18-24 months, these guys will catch up.  The analysts would say it, the stack vendors said it, the pure play vendors again attacked their “window of opportunity”, worried about what would happen in 2 years when the stack vendors “caught up”.

And then in 2009,

“Products from IBM, Oracle and SAP do not yet address the ideal BPMS use case – even in vision – and this can’t be overcome by sheer marketing and sales. “ – Gartner BPMS Magic Quadrant, 2009.

Side Note: Examples of the marketing are everywhere, such as the SAP/Aris positioning here… I’m not sure if the use of punctuation and capitalization are supposed to lend credibility to the offering or just make it harder for spellchecker to check your work… but Chemical.PerformanceREADY as a product name doesn’t give me a feel-good that SAP and Aris have really gone deep in the chemical business and committed to it – the name doesn’t identify what processes are covered, and is so vague that the definition of the product could be that it runs my whole business or that it runs a background check (HR) process tuned to the chemical business.  And there’s a neat set of concentric circles that try to make standard SAP implementation sound easy.  But, having said that, at least the Aris division of SAP is beating the BPM drum whole-heartedly, which is more than we can say for most BPM-related software packages acquired by stack vendors.

So, essentially we have 4 years of reports on BPMS, and the “stack vendors” still haven’t provided a unified BPMS that really addresses the use cases that pure play vendors address. Meanwhile, pureplay vendors have shown a lot of innovation in terms of deployment scenarios (hosted, on premise, SaaS), and new software features.  If, in 2005, you put off your BPM implementations for 2 years to get the latest and greatest from the Stack Vendors, you’d still be waiting today, 4 years later, and the expected wait is…. still 2 years…

Why?

This isn’t an issue of capability. Each of the stack vendors has produced world-class software in other areas, and each of them employ a bunch of world-class engineers.  But BPMS has not received the attention, focus, and thought leadership that it requires for these vendors to be successful.  The folks making product decisions around their BPMS products may still think of BPM as a check-mark on their SOA software stack, and in any case they don’t seem to understand the incredibly broad potential of BPM (and of a BPMS). It looks to me like even the analysts (e.g. Gartner) have grown weary of the posturing of the stack vendors absent any real delivery compared with the pure play vendors.  And it isn’t lost on me that in general, all of the stack vendors have acquired pure play vendors only to see their pace of innovation stall or stop as they figure out how to integrate the new software (often in this argument, it is pointed out that since stack vendors buy pureplays, they “inherit” that innovation, but it just doesn’t work out that way in most cases).  And then because they’re often giving away the BPMS on the back of a stack SOA offering, they aren’t seeing the dollars attached to BPM that would drive them to increase their investment (self-fulfilling prophecy)…

Of course, in 18 to 24 months one of the stack vendors could surprise me and “catch up” to the pure plays (through actual engineering effort, not just by purchasing one of the existing pure plays), but I’m not holding my breath just yet.  If you want to get ROI in the next 18-24 months, go pure play, and get those projects in production.  And then see where the market is after that… and which tools make the most sense for the next leg of your process improvement journey.

So Who is Going to Win?

I don’t pretend to know who is going to win the BPM/BPMS market.  However, as a customer, I would be wary of pure play vendors that sell to stack vendors, when that stack vendor is not putting all their weight behind BPM and BPMS. If the stack vendor isn’t re-aligning their business behind BPM and expecting a significant percentage of their revenues to come from BPM, then the pure play vendor will likely suffer the fates of staffware, fuego, collaxa, and others who have been absorbed and (nearly) forgotten by the market. If you’re a pure play vendor, and you want your venture to succeed within one of these stack vendors, you need to make sure they’re really aligned with BPM – that they believe it is the future of the enterprise software business.  If they don’t, I wouldn’t have much faith that they’re really going to invest in the engineering needed to succeed.

I was out earlier this week in San Diego for Gartner’s BPM Summit. Dr. John Alden and I did a workshop on Process Measurement which was a three hour session spanning measurement strategy, the culture of measurement, as well as various frameworks and tactics using BPMS to help create a solid measurement capability in the shortest time frame possible. We did this at the previous summit in D.C. last fall. Gartner seems to really like the content so we will be happy to come back as long as they will have us! This time, what we did do different was to focus much more on processes that are truly customer facing  and talked quite a bit about what those measures look like; such as Net Promoter Score (NPS). The feedback was very positive with the standard outliers. However, the other thing we did was take out a walk through of a particular technique to build KPIs from raw Voice of Customer data. In hindsight, we probably should have kept that piece in as it provided more of a “how-to” and there were several comments about wanting to see something of that nature. We will just take that feedback and refine it for next time.

The overall conference was the standard format, although I have to say the content did seem to step up a notch over the previous summit. I got in on day two thanks to a flat tire and missed Erik Keller’s case study; Erik is the CIO of Sirva and someone BP3 has worked with for some time. His talk track was about leveraging BPM to deliver mission critical applications from a CIO’s perspective. Erik is not only a fantastic CIO by all accounts but also a very personable guy and the feedback I heard about the session said as much. The other session I missed that I was really wanting to catch was Professor Jeremy Siegel’s talk on “What’s Ahead for the Economy and Markets Now?”. Professor Siegel is a very well known expert in Macroeconomics and an instructor at Wharton. The short story I heard on this was while it might have been viewed as overly optimistic to some, everyone seemed to agree that we are moving toward real stabilization sooner versus later. Whew! Glad to hear it!

One of the coolest sessions I did hit was draped in a negative connotation known as “Unconscious Incompetence and Change: Worst Practices, How to Recognize Them and How to Avoid Them”. Matthew Hotle, a Gartner VP gave this session and it it was both informative and entertaining. The theme of it was really about how workers sometimes just do bad things in such route fashion that to effect change means breaking some seriously embedded habits, which in turn causes resistance even though its the right thing to do.

I think Gartner was shooting for about 700 attendees, my guess is it came in somewhere around 300 or so (update: 500 according to Gartner). I was thinking it was going to be even less but I was surprised that many turned out with travel restrictions being what they are. Again, I think one of the best things was that the content really did come up a notch in my view and I hope that is our new baseline for these BPM Summits!

I also caught up with friend and colleague Derek Miers who always has an opinion on these things but who is also in the process of writing yet another book so he hasn’t been blogging much lately (you can catch him here at bpmfocus).  I was looking for Sandy and others but it ended up being a much faster trip than I had hoped.

We’ve been blogging about BPM and the economy since last fall.  In particular, it started with a talk by Jim Sinur at the OMG BPM ThinkTank 2008. So it seems fitting that another post by Jim got my attention today, and this time it was about the Gartner conference on BPM in London.

It reminds me that Gartner is really getting behind BPM – including publishing their Magic Quadrant for 2009 – and that the message that BPM is a key investment area for most firms (and therefore one of the most recession-proof IT sectors).  I don’t know what Gartner would typically see at a BPM conference in London, but I am guessing it is typically something less than 300 people.  Another conference is coming up in San Diego, and I expect it will be hopping.  Jim Sinur points to the fact that BPM can help your business survive, thrive, and capitalize.  We’re seeing projects that are targeted at each of these objectives – short-term survival, longer-term thriving, or capitalizing on the distraction the economy presents for weaker competitors…

I think the assumption is that conferences will have weaker attendance this year.  But I think if the conferences get the content / agenda right, and press their case with attendees, that they’ll see good attendance.  Getting it right means: focused on value and giving attendees ways to make back the investment they are putting into the conference.  BPM conferences in particular should be doing well this year, relative to the whole, I think.  More to come at the end of March…

Monday was a pretty big news day in the world of BPM.  Gartner just released a new version of its BPM Magic Quadrant for 2009.  Its been nearly 2 years since the last Magic Quadrant came out, so the interest and anticipation were a little higher than usual, and no doubt the jockeying was pretty fierce!

One of the complaints oft-voiced is the inclusion/exclusion of various vendors.  Dennis Byron contends that the language for inclusion isn’t really clear:

The companies covered are said to be “the top 22 vendors offering multiregional, cross-industry business process management suites (BPMSs) that interest Gartner clients and nonclients the most. These vendors account for most spending in the BPMS market. See (Gartner’s) Market Share: Application Infrastructure and Middleware Software, Worldwide, 2007.”

I am not sure how to parse the qualifier. Is AuraPortal one of the top 22 vendors as measured by spending-based market share? Spending may be the operative words; turn it around to revenue and I find it hard to believe that Aura is larger than Sun (nee SeeBeyond) in BPM. I also don’t see how Sun would not make the cut based on the capabilities criteria. No content maybe? That’s a little too granular for my taste.

Gartner does explain why it does not include Autonomy, Handysoft, Magic iBolt, NewGen, Vitria and a few others as well as why it dropped a few suppliers previously included in its previous BPM MQ such as Captaris and SunGard.

But I guess I give the analysts a pass on this one, as I’ve been in the BPM space for long enough to know that Gartner is already including *too many* vendors in the space, which legitimizes vendors who really aren’t in contention, rather than too few vendors.  From my time on the vendor side of the fence, most of the vendors on the quadrant were rarely involved in competitive sales cycles with the top couple of pure plays.

There are also some hidden nuggets of irony in the report, such as the note that IBM has a Smarter SOA compaign about how SOA and BPM work better together… this is a message that BPM evangelists have been expounding for years, while IBM and fellow SOA (stack) vendors argued vehemently that SOA didn’t need BPM or that BPM did not, in fact, better inform SOA efforts… (no fault of Gartner here, it is just a single bullet on a list of quick-hits on the various vendors).

I was also pleased to read the assessment that Lombardi customer references “are among the most advanced in BPM maturity. They demonstrate broad adoption of BPM across an organization that yield transformative business results.”  Process maturity is like a tree, whose seeds are planted and nurtured over a long period of time in order to yield a tree that will bear fruit (savings).  Several of us at BP3 were senior members and management of Lombardi’s professional services staff or within deployments of Lombardi’s software, and can rightly feel pride in fostering a culture of BPM adoption at a great number of Lombardi’s customers, as well as within Lombardi itself.  It is always gratifying to read that someone else recognizes the fruits of your labor (even if they don’t know of your efforts!).   Gartner also points out a few Lombardi weaknesses, around smaller deal-sizes and support for case management, and templates and frameworks.  These are weaknesses that can be addressed by working with certain independent professional services firms!

There are notes, of course, on all of the vendors, that are well worth reading.  In particular I thought the assessments of Appian and Intalio (the written part) were fairly spot-on to the feedback I’ve heard from our prospects and customers (both pros and cons).

One other thing I liked:  on the Ability to Execute axis, Gartner (appropriately) reduced the weighting of the “viability” part of the ability to execute evaluation.  I’ve always felt that that part of the quadrant received too much weight, to the benefit of very large software vendors, and to the detriment of perfectly viable, but smaller, independent vendors.  (Viable was generally synonymous with large revenues, and a bit self-reinforcing)

Sandy has a new post about Gartner’s latest webinar on emergency cost cutting in IT.  The webinar is over but likely they’ll probably allow replay of the webinar soon with registration on their site (if they haven’t already).

I think Sandy does a fantastic job of summarizing the call however, along with some excellent color commentary.

If I can sum up Sandy’s cautionary notes:

1. Be careful that your cost-cutting doesn’t cost you your long-term organizational learning and viability.  Some of the recommendations from Gartner will help you survive this year, but leave you wounded heading into the recovery.  If you’re company is strong enough, be prudent about what you cut and retain your ability to fight when the economy turns.
2. Be careful about abandoning SLA’s to the business -they’re your customer and if you aren’t living up to their expectations they may decide they can get bad service at a lower price… (Most people will believe that good service costs more… but if the service is already bad, they won’t see as much downside in trying something cheaper).

I’d add a couple of my own:

1. Make sure the projects you DO take on can be tied to ROI – real cost cuts in IT, or real business benefits that the business is signing up for (usually operational savings).
2. Make sure you bite off manageable projects – projects you can complete this year start earning a return for the business this year.  Simplify the big projects, figure out how to get 20% of the benefit this year, rather than getting 100% of it in 18 months.  Then get the next 20%, etc.  (Some call this, continuous process improvement or iterative development… I call it putting money on the table).
3. Eliminate non-essential positions if you can,
4. Do not create additional bureaucracy for your employees, for example, to get reimbursed for legitimate business expenses.  This is only going to hurt your productivity as a company – but it is a very much hidden cost.  It won’t show up as a bottom-line cost, it will show up overall as less revenue per head though… Instead, a better strategy would be to be more clear about what is reimbursable, and to take longer to reimburse (say, 30 days instead of 15).
5. Don’t stop going to conferences and consulting with experts.  These may provide just the ideas you need to save your project, team, organization, company.  In this kind of environment we need our creative energy fed.
6. Figure out how to help the business with the real problems they are faced with.  They’re your customer, figure out how to do more of what they really care about, and less of what they don’t.

David McCoy of Gartner recently commented on Elise Olding’s prediction that 50% of BPM Programs will fail.  This is initially a fairly stunning prediction when you are as aware as I am of all the BPM project successes out there, but the interpretive notes matter in this case.  As David points out:

1. The failure potential is at the program level and not at the project level.
2. The main cause of death will be failing to create a credible Business Process Competency Center (BPCC).
3. We published this research in our annual Gartner Predicts piece on BPM.

My thoughts:  item 1 is spot-on.  Project success is not enough to assure Program success.  In fact, I’m surprised the 50% number that Gartner predicts for program failure isn’t higher based on this notion alone.  In some circles the prediction of success for any one project isn’t higher than 50% (My experience with BPM projects is that the success rate is much higher).

But getting out of the “project” box and into the broader spectrum of a Program is harder.  It takes real, effective, leadership.  That leadership must be accompanied by effective tools and methods.  And these in turn have to be adequately funded for the program to succeed.  As an example in another space informs me:  I’ve seen SOA programs fail after having project success because the SOA team is underfunded, understaffed, and as a result, is perceived by the business and the rest of IT as under-responsive and ineffective (friction to project success rather than grease).

Item 2 – that the main cause of death will be a failing to create a Business Process Competency Center – I have to disagree with that assessment.  A BPCC is an outgrowth of a successful program, rather than a cause.  The causes of success are leadership, tools, method, funding, staffing.  The organizational side-effects are secondary effects.

For example, any center of competency (BPCC in this case) without adequate leadership will get pulled apart by competing demands and inability to prioritize.

A BPCC without adequate funding can’t satisfy enough of the demand – so either projects will happen without the blessing and expertise of the BPCC, or projects will be delayed for lack of support from the BPCC, or projects will go a “non-BPM” direction due to lack of BPCC support.  We can look to SOA competency center experience for guidance.  When the enterprise integration or SOA competency center couldn’t provide resources, projects would resort to ad-hoc point-to-point integrations.  When those P2P integrations weren’t allowed, projects were delayed or canceled while waiting for Competency Center support – often forgoing large Return on Investment opportunities.

A BPCC without the tools and methods will fail to deliver consistent, measureable success. Of course, one could argue that the very definition of a Center for Competency would be that it includes good method and tools!

Having said all that, Sandy Kemsley provides a very good summary of Elise Olding’s webinar on the first 100 days as BP director – and in that summary, Elise gives very sound advice on the topics of staffing, strategy, governance, and getting results.  Its a lot to chew on in 100 days, but if your title is BP Director, I think you had better figure 100 days is the time frame in which you can start reporting measurable progress as well as a plan for the remainder of the year.

After reading through Phil Gilbert’s CIO article and writing about it, what do I find via the magic of Google Reader, but an article that tells me that (potentially) all is not lost… (as if by magic)

In Dennis Byron’s post on ebizQ, he recaps the latest Gartner release, its 2009 Executive Programs CIO survey.  In which, he points out that perhaps all is not lost.  The #1 business priority in the survey, for the 5th year in a row, is “Improving Business Process”, and Business Intelligence is the top technology priority for another year.

The good news: these sound like good first-priorities.  The bad news: IT hasn’t (quite) gotten on the bandwagon with Business Process being the top priority.  And after these first two, the lists diverge pretty alarmingly.  Why alarmingly?  Because the IT list doesn’t appear to hew closely to the business needs.  The IT list doesn’t appear to hew closely to business value.  I’d like to see IT listing Business Process Improvement as the first priority as well, and I’d like to see IT focusing on improving its own processes as well…

As Dennis notes at the end of his piece:

I think I have avoided the trap of saying business process management (BPM) is key to recovery from the current recession. It definitely will not be as long as CIOs think they can accomplish BPM with ERP and standalone BI.

I would say, BPM could be the key to recovery, but it is up to our CEO’s and CIO’s to get the train out of the station.

I track Gartner’s Blog on Business Process Improvement, which on occasion has a good read, and on Wednesday David McCoy posted about their strategy vis-a-vis BPM for 2009:

Everyone knows that BPM can reduce costs. So, BPM should be a hot topic and investment area during 2009′s brutal reign, right? Well, we at Gartner think so. Elise Olding, Jim Sinur and I are going to be driving a full-court press on BPM and Cost Management this year and we are all excited about the prospects. We are so excited, we have established an internal working group to make this a weekly research topic. In fact, I am shifting my own research attention to this topic – it will be my top research focus for 2009. BPM has so much to offer. You know this. We are going to make it clear to the rest of the world.

Perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising that they are making this shift in focus, and attempting to amp up the level of coverage given to the BPM space – but I did find it refreshing disclosure of a decision made behind the four walls of the Firm.  At BP3 we welcome the full-court press on BPM because we are absolutely sold on the benefits of BPM for our customers. Perhaps some additional research and marketing support from Gartner and other analyst firms will help build the consensus and momentum around BPM and its benefits vis-a-vis cost containment.

Gartner has a couple BPM conferences coming up – the BPM Summit in London in February, and the BPM Summit in San Diego in March,  website here.  Early Bird registration ends January 30th for the San Diego event.  I expect we’ll be there – if you are going to be there and want to connect in person, drop us a note here in the comments or at info@bp-3.com (which gets forwarded directly to me, by the way).

(I should add, there are links to webinars leading up to the event here, that look pretty interesting.  )

After getting back from the Gartner 2008 BPM Fall Summit in D.C. my intention was to write up a blog about the summit, highlighting the areas I thought were the most interesting. However, instead of the many topics which were covered at the event I am going to hit just one because it seemed to have the most confusion.  In short, why are there so few cases of companies articulating the measurable business benefit in deploying BPM? In a room of about 450 people using a show of hands Michelle Cantara, a Gartner analyst, asked a series of questions that went something like this- “Who has deployed BPM solutions which use BPMS?”, “Who has deployed more than 2 or 3 process solutions with BPMS”?, “Who has or is in process of developing a center of competency?”. In those cases you saw that about 90% could answer the first, 50% could answer that they have done more than one, and lastly about 20% said they have or are working on developing a BPCC. Then the question, “How many have had measurable business benefit in their deployments?”, only about 5% kept their hands raised. Factor in some margin of error due to the audience segments (companies, consultants, vendors) on the poll and for all practical purposes you are looking at a ratio somewhere around 1:20 who can attest/verify they indeed have calculated measurable business benefit. Amazing!

First off I was not all that surprised based on my own personal experiences through the years but this continued large scale, fundamental issue of the lack of measurable business benefit in BPM deployments is a real problem for everyone; commercial enterprises, governments, vendors, consultants, you name it. Why? The short answer is that it creates a barrier to growth. At Gartner there was talk about things like Governance, Model-Driven Businesses, Transformation and the like. Truth is little of that forward looking, game changing, futuristic ideaology will matter if the fundamental concept of investment-risk-reward measurement is not attached to business process management. Very difficult to get unwavering executive buy-in to grow a substantial program if the only thing you can say is “we did a project and it felt good”. In fact, I have seen first hand the promise of BPMS be sold to some major companies who had great ambitions to roll it out “enterprise wide”, check in with them 6 months or a year later and maybe they have done one project, possibly two. What happened to that executive buy-in? For the most part, they lost interest and moved on. I could get in to the root-causes for only a project or two in a year but that’s a completely different topic, so let’s examine: where is the measurable business benefit in BPM?

The last statistic I have is from Gartner in 2004 in a report called “Justifying BPM Projects” and cites the following: 10% of projects had no less than 10% IRR, 78% had more than 15%; wild numbers included 100% to 360%. I don’t have the actual sample size used, and considering what the world looked like then there were major variations of what a BPM project really consisted of. Suffice to say I am on the hunt for broader data which is more current and where source/evidence can be provided.

When looking at the lack of widely known measurable business benefits of BPM deployments I can at least cite what I know from professional experience (consider these contributing causes, not necessarily root-causes):

• Matter of will – “as-is” process measurement was viewed too hard, untrustworthy, or even embarrassing. Usually summed in a statement “we really don’t care about that aspect”.
• Skunk works – BPMS was deployed in a very innocuous process area and used as a “prove out the tech” initiative, quite often a lot of features/benefits were not really utilized on the BPMS side
• IT Centric Replacements – BPMS used to wholesale replace custom applications or other system(s). Usually these manifest themselves as previous improvement projects which failed; now trying BPMS.
• Innovation – brand new processes with no real historical data available

I could go on but these are the big contributors as I have seen them. The more I consider this issue the more I think what would be helpful is answering the question, “How can I practically get to the baseline measures?”. At BP3 we are very measurement driven and firmly believe any company should be able to quickly get the core information so that their BPM endeavors have measurable business benefit. The next part of this blog post will focus on some basic techniques to get those core measurements with the hope that the improvements you choose will deliver the value they should.

Lance Gibbs, our CEO, was at Gartner’s conference this week.  He’ll have some thoughts to share when he returns next week, but in the meantime, once again Sandy Kemsley comes through with session write-ups on her blog.

Look to this space for more from Gartner BPM conference next week!