Adam Deane has once against sparked a discussion in his comments – this time about BPM and BPO – and he ends with the question: “So why are BPO and BPM not talking to each other?”

I might not have commented on the post, but for reading Neil Ward-Dutton’s response, and then Evan McDonnell’s response. Neil points out that CapGemini’s BPO offering uses IBM BPM (Lombardi), Steria’s F&A uses Nimbus/TIBCO.  And AWD from DST.  So it looks like there are a few examples – perhaps not getting much press.

Evan’s comments were even more interesting to me, crediting BPO providers with some foresight.   He rightly points out that BPO has largely been “lift and shift”, and that they’re running out of steam (but trust me, there are still low wage geographies and polutions for BPO providers to exploit).  Evan goes on to describe the BPOs with foresight and the great benefits they will achieve by adopting BPM.

I have no argument with that – clearly any company with scale, and customers, will benefit from good leverage on a BPM suite/system/solution.  BPO providers are, after all, just companies like yours and mine.

But I took some issue with the idea that we aren’t hearing about their success because they’re keeping it secret, and wrote:

I file this under “I could tell you about our successes, but then I’d have to kill you” (smiley face)

BPO organizations are/were not exactly known for being innovators. I didn’t notice any of them “anticipating” the lack of cheap labor – their whole business was typically based on the premise that the cheap labor pool was virtually limitless. It is no surprise that they are late to BPM, late to process improvement (for real). And a BPO’s process improvement is not for the customer’s benefit, it is for their own. As a customer to a BPO firm you have to own your own process improvement.

You might think I’m crazy or talking nonsense. Does Apple leave it to their suppliers to figure out how to improve their processes or their manufacturing? Or do they go in there and make it happen at a detailed level? Don’t think you can just hand off and walk away. If you do, you’ll find something that went from differentiator (when you made it a core competency) to commodity (when you stopped differentiating on it), eventually turn into a weakness and a cost center (after BPO has set in for a couple years). Only by then, you’ll have lost the critical internal organizational expertise to run that outsourced process…

There are benefits to BPO, but big risks as well. Handle with care.

Of course, many people would argue that most companies don’t do this investment in process and people – but whether companies do or do not invest, it is pretty clear that they should be investing.

As for BPOs, trust me, when a company’s whole business model assumes that individual people are not valuable nor interesting, it is hard for them to suddenly retread for the world where skilled labor is more expensive, and choosier.  Instead, they migrate down the experience ladder, or the education ladder, until they find people who meet the right cost structure (often regardless of the impact on customer outcomes).

To the BPOs out there: invest in people and process, it is the best way to add value for your customers.  But to the customers of BPO vendors – own your own processes.  Improve them.  Don’t let all the benefits of process improvement accrue to someone else.

Bruce Silver reports that IBM is following through on its promises with respect to BPMN 2.0 in its next release, IBM BPM 7.5.1, which ships this week.

Not that IBM is covering EVERY corner of BPMN 2.0, but it is a significant advance – in that they are surprisingly supporting import and export of BPMN 2.0 XML from the Process Designer:

In a recent post, I talked about what “BPMN 2.0 support” really means, in both non-executable and executable model contexts.  It’s not primarily about the notation, although a few shapes and symbols – notably non-interrupting events and event subprocesses – are new in BPMN 2.0. BPMN 2.0 support is really about the XML serialization, the ability to export the process model according to the XSD and rules of the spec, and ideally import from the XML as well.  IBM BPM 7.5.1 can do both.

[...]

The important thing, though, is not just the palette of shapes but the fact that Process Designer supports export and import of the BPMN 2.0 standard XML format.  (Oracle BPM 11g has had the BPMN 2.0 shapes for a year and a half and still cannot do that.)  I haven’t seen the XML yet but I believe that the export includes data objects, data inputs and outputs, data association mappings (assignment), and other details of executable BPMN 2.0. At least I hope it does.

A few new palette items have been added as well, though as Bruce notes, we’re still missing explicit representation of message flows.  I happen to agree with Bruce that this could improve the readability of IBM BPM models. And knowing how things are implemented underneath, I believe I’m qualified to say there aren’t really any technical barriers to having this “transparently” implement message flows, except to update some of the assumptions that go into the process canvas.

Great news, and great recap from Bruce.

I got a kick out of reading Ben Farrell’s post on Appian’s blog today,  “What a Difference a BPM Software Acquisition Makes: A Look into the Wayback Machine“.  I think Ben thinks he’s really caught out Phil Gilbert, formerly President and CTO of Lombardi, now VP of BPM at IBM:

“Today one of our customers said they were told by IBM: “why spend your money with Lombardi, we’ll give you our BPMS for free.” I finally agree 100% with IBM on something: their BPMS is worth nothing. Getting a cheap BPMS is like buying a dancing elephant for a dollar: cool, but who can afford to feed it?”

That’s Phil Gilbert talking. Or rather, Phil Gilbert back when he was president and CTO of Lombardi. Today’s Phil Gilbert is head of BPM at IBM. Say it again, Phil: “Their BPMS is worth nothing.”

And then later on he takes on the new IBM-Lombardi combination, IBM BPM:

The fact is that nearly two years after its acquisition of Lombardi, IBM has still failed to outline a clear path for its BPM customers. Yes, it made a marketing-oriented announcement about a roll-up of its disparate BPM portfolio into IBM BPM 7.5, but that is a unified offering in marketing-speak only.

I wonder after reading this if the only wayback machine is Appian’s blog publishing.  Maybe this is something they wrote in 2009 when the acquisition was announced?  or in 2010 when many analysts were unhappy with IBM’s lack of communication about the plan for Lombardi and WPS integration?  Or in 2011 springtime when Clay Richardson dissented from all other analysts and customers present at Impact by referring to the integration as “a new coat of paint”? At any of these times, Ben could have piled on with his post in a (somewhat) timely fashion.  But no, two years later he’s finally hit “publish”.  Maybe he missed all the Lombardi and IBM news the last two years and is just trying to catch up?  Maybe he’s just burned about losing a deal to IBM?  (this post also reads like a “mad because we lost a deal” post) Or maybe he doesn’t like Phil.

Appian has some good things going for it, and they made a bet on mobile/cloud that was “early” in the BPM space, relative to competitors.  But this whole David vs. Goliath thing is a bit of an art.  Phil was pretty good at it, Ben still needs some work – more edge, less sour grapes.

Regardless, he clearly doesn’t understand what happened vis-a-vis IBM and Lombardi.  Lombardi was, at times, in heated competition with IBM.  Given that IBM bought Lombardi, one could infer that IBM learned a bit about BPM from Lombardi and Phil, and realized that there was another take on BPM in the market – Lombardi’s – that would be better received than IBM’s current portfolio, and would create more value with IBM’s resources behind it for both IBM and Lombardi shareholders and customers.

If you look at IBM’s BPM vision (also commented on here, and here, and here) – which Ben derides without knowing it – IBM has adopted Lombardi’s vision of BPM and added some pieces to the puzzle that create additional value (ILOG, Integration Designer, the message bus, Business Monitor, etc).  And the key thing that IBM and Phil had to do when bringing Lombardi and WPS and ILOG together was not a technical problem, it was a business problem.  They had to define the go-to-market strategy – edit the value propositions to a manageable number that IBM’s huge sales force can really leverage.  Of course lots of development effort went into creating IBM BPM – but to get the integration “right” without understanding how to take the products to market would be an utter failure to the market, customers, and shareholders.  Now, it could have gone the other way.  Lombardi might have been swallowed up by IBM, discontinued, and chalked up as a “technology buy”.  But it wasn’t.  It became the centerpiece of a new strategy and BPM go-to-market for IBM.  Phil did get the change he wanted – from the inside.  And that change is ongoing, with a few more surprises yet to come.

Customers aren’t “forced to figure out their own path” – the upgrade path is clearly defined and actually well-supported by IBM.   Unsurprisingly, Ben’s role doesn’t include knowing the real story behind IBM’s products and strategy.  That’s not corporate communications’ job.  But you’d think he’d be a little more timely with his shots across the bow, if not more accurate in his firing solution.  I tell you one thing, I know what corporate communications folks are really good at: cherry picking.

Bruce has left no stone un-turned in his review of IBM BPM 7.5.  In his words:

IBM is the big dog in the BPMS landscape.  BPM 7.5 combines the old WebSphere Lombardi Edition and WebSphere Dynamic Process Edition (aka Process Server) in a single offering.  More than two separate products in a single box, there is real integration under the covers, in the form of a shared Process Center repository.  Find out all about it in my latest Industry Trend Report, available here.  You’ll need to be registered on BPMS Watch to access it.

Registration is simple but you might miss the link in the lower right-hand corner of the site (or just search for “Registration” on the page).  It is a comprehensive report and if you’re considering IBM BPM, this is worth a read.

I missed this update due to a busy work schedule last month, but the September update to BlueworksLive has a few interesting tidbits:

• Better Word document export options (allows including subprocess details, and increases the amount of detail available on a given process).
• Customized Branding – so that you can have BlueworksLive reflect more of your own company’s branding rather than IBM/BlueworksLive’s branding… I’ve experimented with this for BP3 and while it does work, you have to have a really good transparent logo at a height of 45pixels… not a lot of room to work with if your logo is taller than it is wide.  But it does let you change up color scheme nicely and also customize the logos included in things like document exports (a big plus).
• And single sign on- which allows you to configure the issuer/entity ID, the email domains, login page, etc.  That’s a great feature for enterprise customers who don’t like to have to administer additional login/pwd information.  (This feature is in limited roll-out, but you can contact their support team to expedite access to it).

This blog post itself is probably just in time to pre-date the next BlueworksLive update!

About a month ago, Sandy Kemsley attended Progress Revolution – first giving an intro-to-BPM course and then blogging about the sessions she attended.  The whole series of posts is worth reading, and I thought a few highlights from her coverage might convince you to read more…

On the importance of BPM (and CEP) to Progress, from opening remarks:

In spite of Progress’ long history with their OpenEdge software development environment, it’s clear that much of their future success is based on the Apama CEP and Savvion BPM acquisitions, and the integration of these product functionalities into a comprehensive solution.

On OpenEdge development methods and how they relate to BPM:

Does the integration of BPM just relegate OpenEdge to the scripting/coding language slaved to BPM? Maybe, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Instead of layering BPM on top of a monolithic application developed with OpenEdge, it’s about having an integrated development platform that includes BPM as a part of the toolkit. It will be interesting to see how well this message is received by the OpenEdge development community, and how long it takes to actually impact their development methods.

And, we can see that Progress took a similar approach to integrating BPM acquisitions as IBM did:

Although (Savvion) BPM Studio and the OpenEdge Architect development environment are both Eclipse-based, it doesn’t appear that they’ve been integrated in any significant manner. Similarly, there are two different servers – although a BPM process can call an OpenEdge functionality, using web services at least – and two different end-user portal environments, where the BPM server functionality can be surfaced in the OpenEdge portal.

This approach drew a lot of fire from analysts covering IBM’s integration a year in, but I don’t see the same angst in coverage of Progress-Savvion after 18 months.  In fact, I’d say although Progress has the same approach it doesn’t look like they’re quite as far along implementing their strategy.  I’m not saying there should be angst – I think both companies are simply taking realistic measures to integrate different product lines.

On her realization that this isn’t a BPM vendor conference, during her coverage of Dr. Ketabchi’s talk:

…which really drives home that I’m not at a BPM vendor’s conference, I’m at an application development tool vendor’s conference where they are introducing this hot new technology called BPM. This is, of course, the stage that most of the business world is at with respect to BPM understanding; I’m just so used to being in the BPM echo chamber that I rarely hear these messages unless I’m delivering them to a client.

Great material across 7 or 8 posts! Thanks to Sandy for capturing this for those of us who couldn’t be there in person.

IBM has already an update to IBM BPM 7.5 scheduled- the first minor release, due 18th of November, 2011.  The meat of the release is reviewed in the announcement letter:

• Ability to deliver differentiating BPMN 2.0 support while keeping the user experience simple
• Simplified event management in Process Modeling
• Ability to import and export of industry models directly into or out of the Process Center using BPMN 2.0 format
• Simplified installation and configuration experience for production deployment environments
• New refactoring features for process application and toolkits
• Creation of process application documentation that can be reviewed and printed by business stakeholders
• Ability to view change management history between process application versions
• Integration with IBM Case Manager tasks to enrich case management applications
• Common inbox with IBM Case Manager V5.1

I think the key improvements for the average user of IBM BPM 7.5 will be the refactoring and difference reports.  They look like small changes separately, but together this really improves the productivity of process developers who are managing multiple versions or who are working on a new version of a process while also supporting a production version. Not to mention, better refactoring support will cut down on the number of typos. There are some additional features that are focused on supporting production instances which will also prove important over time.

Sandy Kemsley reported on a briefing with IBM regarding BPM on z/OS a few weeks ago.  It’s a great write-up of the content.

I know that it initially took Lombardi folks by surprise how much interest and momentum there would be behind a z/OS version of IBM BPM.  But they, and IBM, have jumped in with both feet.  For organizations that fundamentally rely on mainframes, this may be a more comfortable architecture / deployment model.  As Sandy points out, this isn’t just a skin-deep port, it actually leverages specific z/OS options and functionality:

From an IBM BPM architecture standpoint, the Process Server components can now be hosted on z/OS, while the Process Center and its repository stay on Windows, AIX or Linux. Process Server Advanced for z/OS is more than just a simple port: it leverages native z/OS data structures, supports languages such as COBOL, provides local adapters to other z/OS applications, and allows reusable services to be created more easily. Since the process and services are both running on z/OS, WebSphere z/OS does optimization for cross-memory local communications to improve performance and resource utilization, providing the most benefit when the processes frequently interact with DB2, CICS and IMS on the same platform, and also providing seamless integration with other facilities such as RACF.

This plugs into Business Monitor for z/OS that monitors the processes, other z/OS applications and events, and provides user-customizable dashboards for overall monitoring and some KPI-based predictive analytics.

I’m really interested to see how some of the use cases for deployments on z/OS.  Supporting z/OS is a great example of what you can do with interesting software when you have the scale of an IBM.  It may not make the “feature” velocity faster, but they can definitely tackle parallel efforts like this more easily with the breadth of engineering talent at IBM.  From Sandy’s post, you’ll also find links to whitepapers, a newsletter, webcast, and the product page.

I’m not sure it was well-known that IBM has rolled out such complete support for z/OS – thanks to Sandy for helping get the word out.

If you’re interested in reading a near-treatise on first impressions of IBM’s Blueworks Live, Joe Pluta has provided it on IBM Systems Magazine:

The Lombardi Blueprint tool has a different focus: it concentrates on the capability to allow members of a business community to collaboratively define business processes (see Figure 2). So where Teamworks is Rational or PDM, Blueworks is the step before that which really has no parallel in the midrange community. Well, there is a parallel; typically it’s a whiteboard. Whiteboards are huge in the midrange development world; people get together in a big conference room and start spitballing. Someone writes the group’s thoughts on the whiteboard, things get drawn, redrawn, added, removed, and hopefully a consensus emerges. Then it was usually up to someone to transcribe the whiteboard for the group. That part often didn’t get done, and instead you saw “DO NOT ERASE!” in big red letters on the board. And occasionally someone forgot that and important information got overwritten. In fact, I remember one of the biggest technological innovations we had back in the 1980s was a super-nifty printing whiteboard! It was a freestanding whiteboard on wheels with a soft plastic surface that you wrote on, and you could hit a button and the writing surface would rotate past a scanner and print on thermal paper. Whoo hoo! No notes!

If you saw a few tweets referencing “DO NOT ERASE!” – they’re referencing the paragraph above.  And I think Joe has it right – Blueworks Live has a really interesting value proposition to the mid-range company.  But unlike Joe, I always hated those whiteboards that printed- the printing never worked as well as advertised, typically wasn’t in color, and the machines didn’t work as well for just plain old whiteboarding. These days if I use a whiteboard for something important, I can just take a picture and add it to Evernote.  I’d have rather those whiteboard machines just email me a PDF file!

Finally, he picks on the pricing as being too expensive outside of a corporate context.  As he notes:

For individual users, $600 a year is a hefty price; without a truly usable free version I don’t see Blueworks being a go-to product for the casual user. On the other hand, the license fee is not terribly onerous for corporations

I think the addition of less-expensive licensing for contributors (versus process authors) has helped with the pricing issues (I believe the community members are $10/month instead of $50).  But I agree a lower price point would push more adoption – and there really are network effects at play here.

Our very own Flournoy Henry recently contributed to a new IBM Redbook: “Scaling BPM Adoption from Project to Program with IBM Business Process Manager” :

Your first Business Process Management (BPM) project is a crucial first step on your BPM journey. It is important to begin this journey with a philosophy of change that will enable you to avoid common pitfalls that lead to failed BPM projects, and ultimately, poor BPM adoption. This IBM® Redbooks® publication describes the methodology and best practices that lead to a successful project and how to use that success to scale to enterprise-wide BPM adoption.

The intended audience for this book includes all people who participate in the discovery, planning, delivery, deployment, and continuous improvement activities for a business process. These roles include process owners, process participants and subject matter experts (SMEs) from the operational business as well as technologists responsible for delivery including BPM analysts, BPM solution architects, BPM administrators, and BPM developers.

PDF and HTML versions are available (I recommend PDF version, it is just easier to read because some of the sections are short but flow well together).

This is just part of our (and Flournoy’s) commitment to give back to the BPM community we are a part of.  But it wouldn’t be possible without some of the folks at IBM organizing and bringing a group of experts together to do it.  Congrats to Flournoy, Lisa, Ines, Fahad, Wim, Jonas, and Duan for producing this (RedBooks are team effort).  Hopefully we’ll be able to participate in more Redbooks in the BPM space in the future.

IBM Impact Blog has published a guest post written by yours truly.  It is part of a four-pillar effort, and the theme for the pillar of my post was simplicity.  So why talk about upgrades if the goal is simplicity? After all, there’s no such thing as simple upgrades of in-flight process data is there?

My thought in writing this way was to focus on how to simplify your approach to upgrading, and also to cover the good work IBM has done to make upgrading easier when you can’t take some of the shortcuts we outlined.  You can find more material on the topic of simplicity on the BP3 blog using the simplicity tag.

Upgrading is also fresh on IBM customers’ minds these days.  We’re getting more requests than ever for help upgrading.  Happy to contribute back to the community a little advice about how to get from point A to point B.

TIBCO has announced its acquisition of Nimbus today:

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

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

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

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

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

Clay Richardson of Forrester also weighs in on the purchase:

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

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

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

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

Just noticed this today, thanks to Twitter:

IBM has a great BPM resource on its site: BPM for Dummies (IBM edition). It’s a mini ebook, and could prove to be what gets you on the road to leverage BPM to gain total visibility into your organization.

Unfortunately it requires registration but this is probably a small price to pay for a free book.

Ran across this blog post by Daniel Selman from April of 2011:

 For the past few months I have been leading a small, but very dedicated, team that has been improving the consumability of core ILOG BRMS components/APIs and supporting the BPM team as they perform the integration of the ILOG components within the BPM design and runtime. I believe it will lead to a considerably better rules experience for BPM customers as well as provide a smooth migration path to the full ILOG BRMS, if and when required. Of course it also just makes good engineering sense to share ILOG’s expertise and code in the business rules space with our comrades in the BPM team.

Pretty cool to see these groups working together – this is the kind of collaboration that I have to admit rarely happens outside of either an open source project (semi-rare) or a single company (semi-rare).  What I like best is the tone of his blog – he really sounds interested in seeing the best of ILOG getting up-take with those BPM customers.

Anatoly often posts the best examples and cautionary tales in BPMN2. In the latest post, he derides the limited usability of Swim Lanes in BPMN 2 – And he has a point.

On the one hand, embedded subprocesses can’t have swim lanes (the best way to think about these is simply a set of collapsed activities, for notational convenience).

On the other hand, “Reusable subprocesses introduce additional complexity because unlike embedded they are executed in a separate data context”.

Anatoly’s conclusion is that overusing reusable subprocesses is bad practice, because of this overhead.  I conclude differently:  the BPMS should minimize or optimize this overhead – and the business process designer should be able to ignore it on a robust BPMS.  To make a coding analogy:  we should be talking about the difference between an embedded block of code and a function call.  Yes there is overhead, but it should be managed by the BPMS transparently.

In fact, some BPMS authoring environments don’t even allow for the embedded subprocess- treating it as just a special case of the reusable subprocess who’s primary difference is that it doesn’t happen to be re-used. I don’t think we should optimize around the shortcomings of a particular BPMS too much, in terms of our general BPMS modeling advice.  However, I’ll concede that once you’ve chosen your BPMS, you might as well optimize somewhat around its capabilities as they become known to you, and model accordingly.

Lance wrote up a description of a BlueworksLive template we’ve shared with the IBM BlueworksLive community, and it is now published on the BlueworksLive Blog.  It is mostly just a way for us to give back a little to a community of BPM practitioners and software developers and product people that have given so much to us as well.

Ready to get your Lean Agile BPM Delivery going? When we all talk about Business Process Management, thoughts which spring to mind are “Order to Cash”, “Customer Provisioning and Servicing”, “Account Opening” and the like. Another critical business process is the actual implementation of a business process solution. BP3 is an IBM Partner and pure-play BPM consulting firm named by Gartner Research in their Who’s-Who in BPM report that exclusively works within the IBM BPM portfolio to get customers the results they need. One key aspect of getting those results is to employ an implementation process which is treated like any other critical business process. It’s a process which is managed, measured and continuously improved for the benefit of scaling from a single BPM project, to a BPM program, to ultimately a culture that competes and differentiates on process in their marketplace.

Please check out the BlueworksLive blog, and our template…

[Editor's Note:]  Gary Samuelson joined bp3 full-time in 2011, after years of collaborating on-and-off.  Gary’s been delivering BPM solutions for years, and has been deep into technology development and consulting throughout his career.  We’ll be sharing his blog posts here, republished with his permission – and we think he brings a different voice and perspective and sweet-spot for subject matter to our BPM-focused blog.  Thanks, Gary, for adding to the community!

—

Shared with permission by Gary Samuelson, click here for original blog entry.

[Author's note:]  Quick Forward: In keen interest of fewer keystrokes-per-noun, I’ll refer to IBM Business Process Manager Advanced as “iBPM”.

Think of a phat buffet – a Las Vegas buffet. All good – yes? This is iBPM Advanced: a nicely packaged collection of deep technologies spanning light-weight dojo widgets, through aggregation and hosting platforms, and on into security and high-availability.

My first impression, though honestly skeptical, is good. We’re looking at the result of serious thinking and efforts on software tools and frameworks for building out and maintaining sustainable Business Process Management.

The individual pieces within iBPM are, by themselves, point-solutions. These bits aren’t new… Together though, in their aggregate form, a composite immerges with some voice and resonance as to direction…

An example?

In the BPM space we usually end up wanting and then building several custom web-UIs (pages and widgets). String these pages together and you get a user-facing process with various back-end service integrations. Moving forward – within “corporate client” each business unit has a need and each “need” gets its own: look, feature, and function. Into this mix add the voice-of-reusability. The same web-UI is then tweaked… re-factoring, and so on until we end-up spending more time in polish.

Measuring progress against business value (not building software), BPM projects tend to lose themselves early on low-value platitudes (look-n-feel and reusability) – all good for vision and heated debate but very bad on business. This isn’t to say such topics lack importance. All must be heard…

Now let’s approach the “UI-debate” with a brick… as in building structures – one brick at a time. IBM-BPM Advanced brings in “Business Space” – this technology allows for the use and re-use of “Web 2.0” widgets and functions. Rather than losing ourselves in debate, each end-user (literally) has the tools and building blocks for assembling their own uniquely personalized look-n-feel.

The BPM team can now better specialize and deliver on re-usable components within a framework built for this pattern. The “one-off” solution is over… iBPM Advanced provides a nice framework for us to quickly bridge across a common BPM pitfall. The UI and re-usability debate ends with “drop-in” Business Space (aka Mashup).

IBM has released IBM BPM 7.5 today. We’ve already weighed in on 7.5 based on what we heard and saw at IBM Impact last month, hard to believe it is all released less than a month later.

IBM has done a great job of fusing Lombardi experience with IBM technologies (WPS, Business Monitor, ILOG, ESB, just to name a few).  This release also includes some tooling to help customers migrate from previous versions to version 7.5.

John Reynolds gives a beginner’s guide to Process Performance Reports on his blog.  Using Websphere Lombardi Edition, he shows a few diagrams and gives good advice regarding how to build up the tracked data for your process reports.

Of course, if you’re not using Lombardi Edition (or various versions of Teamworks and IBM BPM), you might not be able to relate to these diagrams- they include the tracking point metaphor that Lombardi introduced way back in 2004 to allow for a transparent snapshot of process instance data.  It really makes it trivial to capture snapshots and timing data for use in correlations in reports.

John does say one or two things I’d modify, such as:

Process Performance is all about “How long did it take?”.  If you want to know “How long?” then you have to know when “it” started and when “it” finished.

I’d say, rather, that this is one of the most common kinds of reports – and in IBM BPM, one of the easiest to produce.  There are other quite interesting reports that are similarly trivial to capture:

• How many of X did each person on the team process by month (or by week or by day, etc.)
• How many exceptions (complaints/defects/etc.) did we process by customer or by region (comparing performance)
• How much rework is happening?
• What percentage is going down the happy path versus exceptions?
• What is the typical # of exceptions per item?
• How many exceptions get “fixed the first time” (ie, once known, the issue is fixed correctly).

With some demographic data on each snapshot, we can really do interesting correlations (using the optimizer or your own custom reporting techniques). One of the uses of this data is to fine-tune the process.  A favorite demonstration of this capability was to look at the correlation between the size of a dispute in a dispute resolution process.  If 90+% of disputes under a certain $ amount (possibly in combination with other criteria) are being approved, perhaps it makes sense to insert an auto-approve decision rule in front of the manual activity that requires a person to look at the request and approve or deny.

I went to IBM Impact looking for direction and strategy around BPM.  What I didn’t expect to find (but perhaps I should have), was an extra present under the tree:  ILOG is getting embedded in more IBM products.

Quoting Integration Developer News’ interview of Pierre Haren (founder of ILOG and VP of IBM’s ILOG unit):

“IBM will only have one business rules system and that will be JRules from ILOG,”  Haren said. For IT users, JRules will be embedded into WebSphere Message Broker, WebSphere Process Server, the WebSphere ESB. For business users, JRules will be added into IBM analytics and Lombardi BPM.

“This connection between BPM and business rules has several sweet spots, and WebSphere Process Server and Lombardi are two of them,” Haren told IDN. “At both ends, we now bring BPM and rules together for heavy-duty transactions and for business-driven BPM.  Linking these two [architecture] is the way to keep the CIO, the CEO and the business users happy.”

And after seeing the sessions live, it is clear that with the new IBM BPM 7.5 offering, ILOG will be *the* rules implementation for BPM.  This is a big improvement over the previously limited rules offering inside Lombardi, and WPS.  Of course, before this integration you could always call out to a webservice to tap the rules engine – any rules engine – and this worked well.  But there are rule-like behaviors inside the BPM offering that are probably best represented inside ILOG rather than outside of it, and yet happen in the normal context of defining a process (and therefore, should be surfaced inside the BPM authoring environment).

An interesting note on the synergy of rules systems and BPM systems:

Rapid Iterative Updates—“Another thing I love about rules and BPM together is that they both are incremental programming,” Haren said. Unlike writing an application in Java or COBOL, the user doesn’t need a specification up front. “You can’t write good code without a good spec,” he said. “But, in BPM you can start with a high level vision, and you can incrementally add filters, decision-points and rules as you go along.”

So true.  And it ties in nicely with the talk we did with Wells Fargo at Impact.

Another insightful comment on BPM at IBM:

Looking it as a whole, Haren described IBM’s BPM activities in 2011 this way: “In a real way, Lombardi’s DNA is replicating itself on IBM’s BPM [offerings], and ILOG’s JRules are making all our BPM smarter BPM plus business rules will add up to be more than the sum of their parts,” Haren said.

From reading the article, Haren definitely gets how complementary these two technologies are – and at each point they intersect, you get this interesting value proposition for the process to leverage a rule set.  It was a nice surprise to see the level of integration of ILOG with other IBM products (and of course, it makes sense).