I’ve worked chiefly for 3 companies in my career.  In each of the first two, there was quite a focus on installation being easy.  This cuts against the grain for most enterprise software companies.  They mostly get used to a nice tidy sum of installation $ coming their way for each customer they sign up.

But those with a little more vision see a hard installation as a barrier to adoption of software.  The product experience starts with the install (if there is one).  The equivalent analogy for SaaS products is that the experience starts with registration.  The harder you make the process of installing or registering, the more people you’ll lose before you even get started.

Lombardi was big on the “express install” – a single installer that would lay down everything you need to build and deploy processes.  This mindset has, thankfully, been transplanted to IBM, and so far, it has stuck, even though the installer is something well north of 1GB.

Activiti is raising the bar in this arena – and one could argue that install experience is even more important for an open source project.  After all, if you have to configure a build before you can even run software, how many people do you lose during this process?

But as Joram Barrez writes, you can get Activiti started in just one minute after downloading.  Actually he’s a bit late with getting this news out, as it was also true of the alpha and beta builds.  But they’ve made some improvements, and more importantly, they haven’t made it harder as the product has matured.  Hopefully they keep a relentless focus on keeping friction costs low – it is much easier to avoid them than to get rid of the friction once it is introduced.

To me, this is just mounting evidence that the bar for Simplicity and The Experience is being raised higher.  The points of differentiation will be the how not the what.

This isn’t a review of Appian Tempo.  I’m a fan of what Appian is trying to do with Tempo and I hope there is more of this action in the BPM space.

Sandy Kemsley has a thorough review on her blog.  As usual, it covers the details, and the scenario of the demo quite well:

I had a chance for an advance briefing of Appian’s Tempo release last week; this is a new part of the Appian product suite that focuses on mobility, cloud and social aspects of BPM for social collaboration. This isn’t a standalone social collaboration platform, but includes deep links into the Appian BPM platform through events, alerts, tasks and more. They’ve included Twitter-like status updates and RSS feeds so that you can publish and consume the information in a variety of other forms, offering a fresh new alternative to the usual sort of process monitoring that we see in a BPMS. The free app for the iPhone and iPad requires an account on Appian Forum (the Appian user community site) or access to an Appian BPM installation (not sure if this is both an on-premise system and the cloud-based offering) in order to do anything so I wasn’t really able to check it out, but saw it on an emulator in the demo.

Sandy doesn’t pick winners and losers too often – reading between the lines she likes the indications of where Appian, and the BPM space in general, are going with mobile and social tech, but she’s seen enough demos not to get too excited.

Ann All has a further review (“I See the Enterprise Collaboration’s Future and its Name is BPM“), and is obviously impressed.  She attacks the shortcomings of products like Yammer, in that they can result in new information/communication silos rather than unifying an enterprise.  I can’t help but feel that that same fragmentation issue can be a problem for BPM-collaboration tech (How many BPM products does the average Fortune 500 company own?).  But Ann and Sandy both point out a key benefit of BPM + Social: tying interactions to real business events and outcomes.

Next up, Bruce Silver weighs in with his review, in which he not only praises Tempo but takes a few shots at the approach a few other vendors have taken (and it isn’t hard to guess which ones):

First, it’s really well executed.  Clean and smoothly integrated into the BPM environment.  Second, it seems a more reasonable implementation of the social/mobile idea than is typically offered by BPM vendors. [...] Tempo lets you create and track ad-hoc tasks, sure, but that (in my view) is not really BPM.  What’s important is it lets you also do real BPM, i.e. structured processes, within the same environment.  From your smartphone or iPad, you can perform tasks of  either type, often just by “swiping” the entry, quick and easy.   BPM vendors that insist on a separate “place” for users to do ad-hoc BPM are missing the boat.  Who wants that?

Let me take a shot at that.  The question isn’t, whether BPM users want a separate place for users to do ad-hoc BPM.  The question is, do regular users in the business want their ad-hoc stuff to be mixed in with other people’s BPM (which to them, may feel too heavy/complex so far)?  In other words, are we enhancing the existing audience’s experience with BPM (Appian’s Tempo) or are we trying to address a new audience (for example, the approach IBM has taken with Blueworks).  Both approaches have their merit, but I’ll admit Blueworks’ approach has less appeal to me as a consultant – that doesn’t mean that it won’t have *more* appeal to customers (for example, as a customer, we’re already using Blueworks internally and it took all of 5 minutes to get started). A couple other notes from his blog:

The hard part of BPM is the underlying architecture, the plumbing.  The “user experience”, not to diminish its importance, is technically easier to engineer.

Respectfully, I disagree. It *seems* like the underlying architecture is hard.  But, if it were truly hard, you wouldn’t see minimum half-a-dozen products that are pretty viable on the market.  I’ve worked in a product space where the architecture was actually hard.  We solved problems that no other vendor was even capable of solving.  Our engine would produce answers in seconds that took other vendors’ products hours, if they ever completed the computation.  That’s real differentiation in a hard space.  But in BPM engines, the differentiation is in the experience…

In fact, the underlying architecture and plumbing is becoming commoditized.  I don’t really care that much what engine is running my process… I care about the experience of developing and running my processes.  The experience is vastly more important than the plumbing.  And it is much harder to get right.  Not because it is technically difficult, but it is conceptually difficult to get right – and to say “no” to all the unnecessary stuff.  And once you get a bunch of code in place, it creates its own difficulty in changing to reflect the right experience. I’ll say it again, this is where the real differentiation is in BPM.  (And, to be fair, Bruce likes the Appian Tempo experience, which makes it differentiatingly good in his opinion).  Continuing on:

And once you face up to that, you don’t have to reconceive social/mobile BPM as something radically different, needing a totally separate product.  It becomes simply an alternative user interface that lets you extend real BPM to occasional users who wouldn’t otherwise participate, and enhance the value for regular BPM users by letting them perform process activities without being chained to the workflow inbox.  By making event streams and native smartphone UI a simple extension of the BPMS environment, not a whole “new new thing”, Tempo I think puts Appian in the driver’s seat in social/mobile BPM.

I like the idea of the alternate interface for BPM.  It was one of the first things that occurred to me looking at Blueworks (interfaces to existing BPMS installations for event feeds), but it is also so obvious that I’m sure it will happen in a future incremental release.  Actually, the technology to feed events into the stream from a BPMS (or Salesforce, twitter, or facebook) is quite easy across the products I’m aware of.  I like what Appian has done – but integration to their BPM suite isn’t going to be a selling point for customers who have already purchased, deployed, and invested in another BPM suite.  A separate, pluggable product might be preferred.  We’re watching the outcome of innovation being alive and well in BPM – surprisingly, at IBM, and less surprisingly, at smaller outfits like Appian and ActionBase, and in open source projects like Activiti.

It’s a very exciting time to be in the BPM business.  Congratulations to Appian for a great product release – I don’t mean any of my comments to denigrate their product offering – which I have not myself laid hands on – I hope their release is a success, and an indication or precursor of more interesting things to come from other vendors in our space as well.

True to their word, the folks at IBM are updating Blueworks Live rapidly.  The January release brings minor modifications that continue to polish the main ideas in Blueworks:

• Blueworks introduces the concept of a “Glossary” – allowing an admin to provide descriptions of the properties that show up in Blueprint views and spaces, and to control which properties are viewed by users.  Additionally the possible values for a property can be defined.
• Enhancements to process automation – minor changes that just enhance usability of the existing functionality (due dates no longer required, comments can be added after process completion, improved search, etc.)

Now that IBM is demonstrating the regular release schedule is being maintained, we’ll have to keep an eye out for the updates that really alter the trajectory or utility of the product.  Watch this space for our thoughts when we see those kinds of updates.

The Lombardi Blog reminded me that it has been a year since IBM announced its acquisition of Lombardi.  Minhea Galeteanu tells the story from his point of view, and it made me take a step back to think about it from mine.

I remember getting the news on a conference call and having an immediate sense that everything was about to change.

I got the news in a phone call at 5am(!) and then had to wait to confirm it by reading the press release before I really reacted – and I recall having the exact same sense that everything was about to change-  that feeling of standing at the point of the fulcrum on a see-saw, waiting to find out which end will go down and which end up. I was on-site with a customer – I remember worrying that they would have doubts about the platform because of the acquisition – but those fears were put to rest when members of their team came over to congratulate me (they knew I had previously worked for Lombardi).  My initial thoughts on the merger are in the blog.

I got a chance to meet many of my new colleagues at Impact 2010 (which happened to be not only their first trip to Impact, but also mine). Low and behold, what for so long represented “competition” were actually people and moreover nice ones. For the industry (customers and analysts) Impact 2010 was a chance to meet the new IBM Lombardi team. For me, it was a chance to meet the people with whom I now interact with on a daily basis, working together towards laying down the plumbing for the next decade of BPM.

That almost perfectly captures what Impact was like for me as well- a bit of a coming out party for Lombardi’s version of BPM, and I also remember being very impressed with the power of IBM’s “machine”.  I think the Lombardi folks were equally impressed with IBM’s reach. And everyone was impressed with how quickly IBM positioned the Lombardi BPM offering and got behind the message.  As an outsider, you just don’t expect a big company to pivot that quickly.

Mihnea then touts the achievements since the merger, in terms of product releases-  two significant releases of Websphere Lombardi Edition (7.1 and 7.2), and the relaunch of a combined Blueworks and Blueprint being chief among them.  But he’s right – mergers are even more about people and culture.

For our part – the merger has worked out better than we could have expected-  IBM’s partnership programs are more explicit than Lombardi’s were, more prescriptive.  The products Lombardi built are playing on a bigger stage, for a bigger audience.  And those products are actually being improved upon at a pace that impresses us, from the outside.  Moreover, there is the opportunity to share what we know about BPM with a whole new set of customers.

And, just as we predicted, the innovation in the BPM space isn’t over- 2010 more than delivered on the innovation front.

So far IBM is keeping to their word that they’ll keep the updates rolling with Blueworks Live.  Another update just went live over the weekend, and IBM’s summary of it is posted here.  As one might expect, with an update coming a bare 4 weeks after the initial launch of Blueworks Live, there isn’t a lot of meat on the bone to this update, but there are implications if IBM continues the trajectory.

What was added is simply the ability to post updates to one’s private feed (presumably, to specific “Spaces” within your company space).  I tested it out in the BP3 domain and it works nicely and offers the opportunity for others in our space to respond.

With this change (and, no doubt, changes yet to come), Blueworks Live is picking up more of the features found in a tool like yammer.  Of course, for these discussion-style features to be meaningful, the usage has to reach critical mass within a team or company.  It will be interesting when one can comment on a process update in the feed, and have that comment also appear alongside the actual process instance (or model) as well.  (There is already a commenting feature within process execution screens – the ideal place to put those comments).

David Brakoniecki’s blog post echoes some of my own thoughts – IBM is showing signs of learning from the MVP (Minimum Viable Product) school of thought, quite a departure from the usual software development process at companies their size. In the comments on my previous post, Marco Brambilla has wondered aloud if it is “too minimum”… but I think it is just a matter of giving it time – and seeing what IBM comes out with next.

We’d been waiting for Blueworks Live to go live ever since we first heard about it in November.  Now that it is actually live… well, now what?

Why, review the reviews, of course!

First up: Sandy Kemsley:

Lombardi has always been at the forefront of the integration of social and BPM, although previously focused purely on the process discovery/design phase, and the IBM acquisition has allowed Lombardi’s social process discovery to be combined with IBM’s online BPM community to create something greater than the sum of the parts. For all my criticism of IBM, they have some incredible pockets of innovation that sometimes burst out into actual product.

and later:

Overall, although there’s nothing really new about this sort of easy sequential workflow design and execution, the user interface is clean and uncluttered, and pop-up tips on the fields assist the user on what to enter. Assuming that you can wrench your users away from using email for these processes, there won’t be much of a learning curve for them to create new processes on their own, and even less to use processes created by others. If you want to see this in action, there’s a Blueworks Live YouTube channel with a couple of videos on creating and participating in a process.

But she’s not convinced that Blueworks truly addresses the community goals that Phil Gilbert set out to address, nor that the different functions are well-integrated enough. Interesting comment thread where IBM explains why the tooling is different between process execution and “modeling”.  I actually agree with the justification, and I don’t see a reason to view the separation of complexity from simplicity as a negative.  I like doing to one place for process, rather than more than one…

Next up:  Mike Gammage:

Sandy Kemsley has a characteristically sound review on her Column 2 blog, and her verdict on Blueworks Live is downbeat.  She’s underwhelmed by the Twitter integration, the public and private streams, and the level of integration with the Blueprint BPMS engine.

I think Sandy’s blog comes across as downbeat because she starts with the positive (check my quote above) and finishes with the criticisms, rather than the other way around.  Mike’s central criticisms:

It’s Overly Democratic. Every enterprise wants its people engaged with process excellence and continuous improvement. But it’s a step too far to simply say that everyone should therefore be able to create and automate process.  [...]

Well, first of all – these Luddites (tongue-in-cheek) already define, and execute processes today!  Using email, spreadsheets, and word documents.  Since they already do it today, Blueworks Live isn’t making it worse – it is rather attempting to give those users more appropriate tools for the job.  He continues with point #2:

It’s a Governance Headache. I don’t see how governance, compliance, risks and controls can be efficiently managed in a world where an organization’s processes are automated in such a decentralized way by people who may be experts in their field but are novices in process design and management.

Again, given that these folks are doing this today, we’re not worse off.  In fact, we’re better off because the processes defined and executed in Blueworks Live are actually tracked, keep audit trail, and feed into reports in a centralized, governable space.  And if someone is abusing it, you (as site administrator) can revoke their access or reduce their permissions.

There is a real danger that IBM’s and Phil’s messaging could in a sense “devalue” the process improvement expert-  or even IT experts.  But having talked to Phil about this at length- the point isn’t to devalue the expertise or discipline of process improvement or IT – if the community functions well, those experts will actually become:

• more accessible
• more leveraged
• more valuable

Because it is easier for those with process knowledge to share it.  The processes that can be executed in Blueworks Live today are so simple that they simply don’t require process design expertise.  And that’s intentional.

I love Mike’s closing argument:

In that context, it’s difficult to see how Blueworks Live helps at all.  Would you dine at a restaurant where each chef did their own thing? A good menu has coherence.  A good restaurant creates the perfect customer experience by harnessing the genius and creativity of each chef de partie and their team together with the skills of the maitre d’ and his or her team. I don’t want beetroot for a pudding, or filet be boeuf Wellington served Thai style and with popcorn.

Actually, I’ve been dining at that restaurant my whole adult life.  Email, Lotus Notes databases, Excel spreadsheets, ad-hoc website forms.  Sharepoint “processes”.  Each “chef” doing their own thing – with the exceptions being a few excellent process-oriented software applications.  Blueworks may not be filet mignon, but perhaps it is fast-food?

My own summary:  For “version 1″ of the new vision for Blueworks Live, it is pretty good.  No one is completely satisfied, but the potential for something greater is there, and I have no doubt they’ll keep beating the drum by releasing updates every 6-9 weeks.  We’ve already “toyed” with it, using it for a vacation request process, for example.  I was a little disappointed the reporting was buried on the admin page, for example.  But otherwise it is clean and easy to use, with a LOT of room for improvement.  The key thing will be which improvements to say no to, not which ones to say yes to.  IBM is going to have to edit itself if this product offering is going to succeed.

(Side Note: interesting response from Phil in the comments section of Mike’s blog: execute to get documentation)

UPDATE:  In writing this, I omitted two other blog entries of note that I intended to include.

First, Phil Gilbert’s own blog:

The arc of history is clear: technology advances always insert specialists to use new technology, taking control from the original worker. Then, as the technology matures and becomes more accessible, people with more general skills gain access to the technology and regain control over their work. From farming to manufacturing to computing this has been the case. We’ve spent the past half century digitizing the assets of the business and that required, in essence, that control over those assets were assumed by IT. But now it’s shifting back, and BPM is the mechanism by which that move is most fully realized today. IBM Blueworks Live is a major step in that evolution. It doesn’t solve every BPM problem – by design! But it does solve a set of problems that have eluded IT for decades: how do we give our businesses the tooling to continue the flexible ad hoc processes they need in a changing world, while normalizing the information so that those processes are more efficient, more transparent and easy to build and deploy.

Meet IBM Blueworks Live: the new face of BPM.

And from David Moser:

All very worthy, but much less interesting than the next piece of news, which was the launch of Blueworks Live. This combines three elements – the Blueworks BPM collaboration community (blogs, wikis); the highly successful (Lombardi) Blueprint process discovery and definition environment; and a new workflow execution engine. All running in the Cloud and, apparently, available through your browser for a test drive from November 20th. (Yes, that’s this Saturday – perhaps one of the software world’s most specific launch dates ever…!).

In the comments Ian Gotts frets that some users won’t be happy only having access to “automated” processes and not to the modeled processes in Blueworks, but this strikes me as an unlikely problem for the real users.  Second, it is better to start with too little, than too much, in your product.  Wikipedia contains excellent links and content explaining Minimum Viable Product.

A few days ago, IBM announced the release of two new versions of Websphere Lombardi Edition:

WLE 7.1 for Linux on System z – so you can run the (nearly) latest Lombardi portfolio on a mainframe!  (Note: Phil Gilbert points out that earlier versions of Lombardi also supported System z, but it wasn’t widely known)

WLE 7.2 – which includes expanded globalization and translation capabilities (including the authoring application itself).  But 7.2 also ships with better integration to WPS (Websphere Process Server), iLOG, FileNet, and DB2 (as well as optional integrations to Outlook and Sharepoint – SKUs formerly known as Teamworks for Sharepoint and Teamworks for Office).

Its a good incremental step for incorporating Lombardi BPM into IBM’s Websphere application family – and given IBM’s global focus the focus on globalization/localization makes a lot of sense.  But existing customers are still looking for an in-place upgrade path for production databases, to get from Teamworks 6.x and Teamworks 7.x to WLE 7.x.

If you don’t know much about Signal events in BPMN2, read Anatoly’s blog post on the subject:

In order to make the diagram work we must limit the signal propagation somehow. How it can be done?

1. The first thing that comes into my mind is an attribute that would limit signal broadcasting by the current process instance boundaries. Yet there is no such attribute in the standard. Under BPMN 1.x one may say that it’s implementation issue not covered by the standard. But BPMN 2.0 fully specify the process metamodel. Let’s look at page 281 of OMG document dated June 2010: signal has a single attribute – its name. Therefore, a signal will be transmitted to all process instances.
2. If the signal has only name then let’s use what we have. The diagram above may work if we could change signal name dynamically i.e. during the process execution. If we could name the signal “Process 999 Concept Ready” instead of “Concept Ready” then everything will be fine. But it’s a dirty hack and it’s hard to count on it. BPMS engines allow to change certain things during the execution (e.g. timer settings) but unlikely the name.

As Anatoly points out, the signaling examples given in several highly regarded books are fine, but when you think about how to make them work for the n>1 case, the logic breaks down.

It turns out that Lombardi’s BPM product (Now IBM’s Websphere Lombardi Edition) does not distinguish between Message flow and Signal events (the distinction between the two has only artificial merit).  All events include an information payload (which can be arbitrarily simple or complex).  The receivers control what they listen to by identifying a correlation key.  The correlation key has to be something in the information payload, and as you can imagine, often one element of the payload is specifically designed to be the correlation key for listeners.

So sometimes implementations get the design right in a way that the spec-writers don’t – because of what I would call over-design.  Let’s face it, writing specifications like BPMN2 goes against the principle of lean development (producing the minimum viable set of features).

So I find it interesting to see some of the challenges Anatoly has faced by facing in some cases a more pure representation of the BPMN 2 specification.

Sandy attended a sneak peak of Blueworks Live recently, and has reported on it in her blog:

They are trying to reinvent the public BPM community, while avoiding the problems that they perceive with other vendors’ community sites:

• They are mainly product support sites
• They have high membership numbers, but low participation
• A majority of the information is from the sponsor company
• The customer perception is that these sites are proprietary and biased, and that there’s already too many sources of information on BPM

I think they have some of the right ideas here – they’ve identified legitimate problems with the current approaches of these communities – but there’s still some work to do on defining what a healthy BPM community consists of.  I think they have a couple elements right, such as:

1.  A common thread tying it all together: BPM / Process

2.  A “safe” place to share (company spaces, or even more granular spaces)

3.  Don’t try to reinvent twitter, just leverage it

But the mechanics will take some work.  As Sandy points out, pro-level users of Twitter aren’t going to rely on BlueWorks Live to show them interesting tweets.  Having said that, however, how many people are going to add a column for “#bwlive” to their TweetDeck?  So it may be somewhat additive to the experience, but time will tell. Sandy says “It’s probably good for the Twitter newbies, since they haven’t figured out groups, hashtags or Tweetdeck yet; maybe that’s more representative of the expected user base.”  I think that’s probably right – more representative of the expected user base.  Most of the personnel I work with don’t use Twitter at all yet.

Like Sandy, I think their blog section needs to pull in content from other sources.  I think they could curate this somewhat by reaching out to prominent bloggers (like Sandy) and ask for permission to republish interesting posts (or set up a submission process for authors to bring relevant posts to their attention).

I think the real question for BlueWorks Live:  is this the Minimum Viable Product offering, to be improved upon in future releases, or do Phil and IBM believe that it is fully baked?  I believe it is the former, and that the intention is to keep releasing frequent updates and improvements, as they were doing with Blueprint before.

You can see our previous coverage of this topic here (our sneak preview was a little earlier, but we’re looking forward to just laying hands on the product and taking it for a test drive on Saturday).  BlueWorks Live announcement here.

Sandy Kemsley covered Janette Wong’s talk at CASCON recently. The point of the talk was to discuss applying workflow patterns to modeling business requirements, and turning those into executable business processes. A good bit of the commentary revolved around all the hard work still required to make a design pattern actually executable – in particular with respect to role-based task assignment:

She used an example of an “authorization” business requirement, where manager can create confidential requests, and transfer those confidential requests to others. This can be matched to the standard role-based distribution pattern, which is fine for modeling, but then needs to be mapped to an implementation platform: in this case, some combination of WebSphere Process Server (WPS), LDAP or other directory service for user authentication and authorization, a workflow client application for human task management, and any other data sources that include user/role information. This multi-system implementation requires not only a conceptual mapping of the process and roles, but also actual integration between the systems that house the information. WPS provides instance-based authorization roles, then needs to bind that to the other sources at runtime in order to populate those roles; it doesn’t automate the solution, and in fact only provides a small amount of assistance in getting to that mapping. This is complicated further by role and authorization information that is spread out over multiple systems, particularly existing legacy systems; the business may think of the roles as being encapsulated in one of these other systems, which then needs to be mapped into the executing process.

I feel like the patterns (like “multiple instances without a priori runtime knowledge pattern”) are more accurately described as key phrases or constructs, rather than patterns (though there are exceptions to that generalization).   Wait, what is the problem the “multiple instances without a priori runtime knowledge” solves??

I think more of something along these lines in wikipedia.  And the kind of patterns you are likely to read on Anatoly’s blog.  In wikipedia, an “observer” pattern tells me a lot about what it might be doing.  Anatoly’s “Do Redo” pattern rings true, for example.  They describe what they attempt to solve (for the most part).

Of course, many people misunderstand the point of patterns. They wonder why there is still so much work to do!   But patterns are not libraries of code – they’re patterns of design and code.  Its like knowing how to tie a square knot.  Although you know the pattern, you still have to tie the knot each time you want to use it.  Design patterns are much the same way.

The point of the design pattern isn’t that it is less work – it is that you already know you have a good solution if the design pattern fits your problem definition.  The problem with the workflow pattern site is that it lists solutions with no problem.

Anatoly’s blog actually covers design patterns quite well:

Pattern in BPM is a typical process fragment of typical way of communication between processes (some examples).

One may ask: which one is more usefull? My opinion it’s a pattern:

• Templates are specific (one process – one template), patterns are universal. A good pattern can be used in a variety of business processes regardless of the industry.
• A practical benefit of using a template may be less than expected. It usually covers the happy path only and the devil is in details – various workarounds, escalations and exceptions.
• The effect of using the right pattern can be large. For example, there was a case in our practice when the process plotted at 6 A4 sheets glued side-by-side was reduced to the elegant design with just 15 activities by using the right pattern.
• The value of the antipattern is its ability to preserve you from mistakes. The price of a mistake is unlimited in theory and sometimes it’s really big in practice.

And yet industry analysts continue to overly focus on templates… I’d rather have design patterns and useful, re-usable components.  To my mind, templates try to “automate” the process design effort – to commoditize what cannot easily be commoditized.  Design patterns “enable” the process design effort – empowering and improving the design effort (as do re-usable components).

Design patterns in BPM aren’t a lost cause- they’re a key enabler of the successful process designer.  But names matter- and in that department, Anatoly’s approach is vastly superior.

The IBM Lombardi blog has an update on their Roadshow, where they are showing off the Websphere Lombardi Edition product:

Impact 2010 proved to be a launching ground for Lombardi BPM. Since the flagship event in May, Lombardi BPM has been introduced to a global audience through 20 Impact Comes To You events.  Beyond Impact, Lombardi continues to travel and speak at conferences around the world.  Take a minute to read some highlights from a few of our most recent shows and mark your calendars for an upcoming event near you.

More info on their blog.  I’ve been impressed with how wholeheartedly IBM has adopted the Lombardi product and made it a key part of their messaging.  It really did start at Impact and it has only picked up steam since then.

I also wanted to offer a shout out to an old friend (and customer), Farrukh Humayan, of PNC.  He’s a great speaker and communicator, and he has a great story to tell about BPM.  I first worked with him during the proof of technology for Lombardi BPM at National City, before it was acquired by PNC.  Nice to see him beating the drum for BPM at an event like this, some 5 years later!

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!).

Sandy Kemsley covers IBM’s Case Manager product:

The end-user experience for Case Manager is in the IBM Mashup Center, a mashup/widget environment that allows the inclusion of both IBM’s widgets and any other that support the iWidget standard and expose their properties via REST APIs. IBM has had the FileNet ECM widgets available for a while to provide some standard ECM and BPM capabilities; the new version provides much more functionality to include more of the case context including metadata and tasks. A standard case widget provides access to the summary, documents, activities and history views of the case, and can link to a case data widget, a document viewer widget for any given document related to the case, and e-forms for creating more complex user interfaces for presenting and entering data as part of the case.

She also has coverage from another session at IOD on empowering the business analyst:

The focus in this session is on the tools for the business analyst in the design-time environment, either based on a template or from scratch, including the user interface creation in the Mashup Center environment, analytics for both real-time and historical views of cases, and business rules.

Sandy notes that the BPF (Business Process Framework) functionality is migrating into the ACM offering, and while it may not be the same code (unclear), they’re picking up key functional points from BPF.  Interestingly, the ACM offering is separate from the ECM offering.

Finally, Sandy offers a write-up of her preview of the Case Management offering that was officially announced today:

he big announcement, at least to me, was the new Case Manager product, to ship in Q4 (probably November, although IBM won’t commit to that). IBM has been talking about an advanced case management strategy for several months now, and priming the pump about what “should” be in a case management product, but this is the first that we’ve seen a real product as part of that strategy; I’m sure that the other ACM vendors with products already released are ROFL over IBM’s statement in the press release that this is the “industry’s first advanced case management product”.

For some reason, everyone wants to be “first”.  There’s a great children’s book called “Me First” that I think illustrates why we shouldn’t all strive to be first all the time.  It sounds like IBM is addressing core use cases in ACM: a big focus on unstructured work, user-defined activities on the path to the goals.  There are also reusable templates, and vertical templates, already defined or partly defined to help speed go-to-market.  As Sandy points out, it still feels like too many products for the same space:

I still find the IBM ECM portfolio – much like their BPM and other portfolios – to contain too many products: clearly, some of these should be consolidated, although IBM’s strategy seems to be to never sunset a product if they have a couple of others that do almost the same thing and there’s a chance that they can sell you all of them.

I think there’s also an element of, not wanting to give up maintenance revenue streams on these existing product lines or force customers to re-evaluate their strategy and potentially, at that point, pick a different vendor.  After all, once a customer is in “evaluation” mode, all kinds of possibilities come up.  Probably “safer” for IBM to try to keep everyone at least somewhat happy.   In a previous life I worked for a software company that killed a new product because it jeopardized the maintenance revenue of the legacy product, despite the fact that we could reduce the code base we needed to maintain by a factor of 1000, and support builds on many platforms rather than just 3-4.   The concern was that maintenance revenue was in danger – of course, my take would be just label it version N+1 of the same product, and provide compatibility layer APIs and… voila!  Problem solved. But my point is just that the decisions don’t always seem logical to those of us with a technical background.

MWD Advisors’ Neil Ward-Dutton has published a quick article on Blueworks Live:

The first represents a significant departure for IBM: Blueworks Live is now not only a platform for process discovery and modelling – it’s a platform for process automation and execution. Specifically: lightweight, immediate execution of simple approval worklists and checklist-style sets of activities though the quick creation of ‘process apps’. Process apps created on the platform can be immediately shared with other members of an organisation.

Look for more from MWD after the new version of Blueworks Live goes live on November 20th.

Topics at bpmCamp are taking shape based on feedback from attendees and prospective attendees.

A few highlights:

• A look inside the black box that is Websphere Lombardi Edition (v7) and Teamworks v6.
• Fronting Teamworks with FLEX – who says good process can’t be pretty?  Greg Harley, a BP3 and Lombardi Alumn, and currently product architect at IBM, shows off some techniques for getting the most out of your BPM platform.
• Using Ajax to spruce up more common Coach interfaces in Lombardi BPM.
• Agile Development with BPM: Revisiting Value-based delivery
• How to dig your way out of process debt.  Revisiting the process debt topic, how do we address debt and pay it down?

bpmCamp is only 3 weeks away – time is short (register here!) – and we still have room for registrants.  If you can’t make it, make sure someone on your team *does* make it to bpmCamp.  I can guarantee that they’ll take home some really interesting learning and experience.

IBM Lombardi folks – you’re invited.  Come on down.

We’d like to extend our thanks to our colleagues at IBM and specifically the folks in the BPM group, who have agreed to sponsor bpmCamp 2010 @ Austin.  Running a small, break-even event like bpmCamp requires everyone to contribute a little bit, and we really appreciate IBM’s willingness to contribute by sponsoring Thursday night’s dinner, which has been a great time for networking, following up on the day’s topics, and arguing about the next day’s agenda.

Dinner also happens to be at the Austin landmark restaurant, Lambert’s Downtown Barbecue.  Those from Austin will be familiar with it, and those visiting will have a chance to try some Austin-style BBQ (and other dining selections of course).

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

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

Appian: “Appian Still Leading the Pack”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Update: as expected, a few announcements today:

Software AG announces their leadership status here.

And Progress’ blog entry can be found here.

Matt Harding of Aurora Energy just posted this on the SAP community blog:

Within business process modelling (from a detailed requirements and process design perspective), I believe the best option for business users is to use BPMN.  But the question is: Are we just waiting for the iPhone of Business Process Modelling to come along.

I think Matt has a point – BPMN isn’t the best for requirements elicitation – it is the best for firming up an agreement between “Business” and “IT” as to what the process execution looks like.  When we’re in the discovery/elicitation/collaboration efforts, we find it more useful to use simpler mapping approaches:

1. value stream mapping
2. outlines
3. process mapping a la Six Sigma (inputs, measurable outputs, of a linear view of the process)
4. mind mapping tools for doing associations or nested structures

Right now some of the best tools for doing this – besides white boards – are tools like IBM’s Blueprint, which doesn’t force you into a BPMN notion of things.  It has separate views of process mapping and process modeling – and my main critique of the modeling section is that it needs to be more exact, whereas what I love about the process mapping side is precisely that it doesn’t require being exact.  Another useful tool for brainstorming topics related to BPM: MindMeister.   It let’s you brainstorm ancillary ideas to the process: how business objectives and values drive the objectives for the project.  There are other tools that are useful for brainstorming project plans, etc.

IBM has put out the latest BPM Blueprint update today.  It isn’t the most exciting update they’ve ever made to Blueprint, but of course I’d rather see incremental and frequent updates than one big overhaul for a service like this.  The August release seems to focus on adding avatars (aka pictures), and has a security model tweak, and a much-needed update to the Word export.

I’m still looking for more support for expert features (not necessarily their target audience yet, but I think the time has come to include more expert functionality in a tool that also appeals to more general collaboration).  Part of the reason I think this support is needed is so that users can import or export BPMN2 XML.  Not that the users will care that it is XML, but this is the modeling format that they’re going to expect BPM tooling to support.

I don’t catch all of the updates to Blueprint, but I did see this one go past my inbox.  Once again, the folks from Lombardi (now IBM) have kept turning the crank on incremental improvement in Blueprint.  I believe this is the second update since IBM finalized its purchase of Lombardi in February.

In this iteration, attention to the news feed and the “follow” feature have been added, along with other minor fixes and enhancements.  The follow feature in particular is useful across a bigger organization with a lot of modeling and collaboration going on.  It is a great example of a “social” feature making it into a design environment:  you can now “follow” just about anything in Blueprint, to keep up to speed with changes in processes that you care about.

Of course, my first thought when I see this is – I want this in Websphere Lombardi Edition – the process implementation product suite that goes with Blueprint and came along with Lombardi in the acquisition.  I want this kind of functionality for the runtime as well – the ability to “follow” just about anything I might interact with – processes, tasks, users…

Overall I like the changes, looking forward to more improvements…