We are truly grateful for the opportunity to present at Impact.  It is a rare opportunity to share what you do for a living with your colleagues and peers – and I just wanted to take time out to the folks who helped us secure a speaking role for our customer, Wells Fargo’s Reid Denny.

Given our late-afternoon Wednesday time slot, I was a little worried about attendance.  About 10 minutes before start time, we had 5-6 people in the room.  By the time we started, nearly every seat was full.  Lance Gibbs kicked off our presentation, and people kept coming in … filling the room, standing in the back, and bringing in extra chairs.

My favorite part about any presentation is Q&A afterward – I wish we had a transcript from our own session.  I was surprised to see one of IBM’s BPMers in the back of the room with a Flip camera taking video of our session – certainly flattered they anticipated our session might be worth recording.  I’m not sure how well it came out in video, and how well the audio picks up, but we’ll keep everyone posted if we’re actually able to lay hands on the video or a link to it.

Finally, a few people were interested in discussing or getting a rehash of the presentation.  Of course we can’t recreate exactly what happened, but we’re including the presentation, below – and if you’re interested in voice-over or Q&A around it let me know and I’ll see if I can schedule something with you.

We heard a lot of positive feedback about the presentation, and we’d love to hear from you directly if you were able to attend – feedback is what will make us better next time!

I’ll expand on the “business driven” delivery team in another post…

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).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As Bruce Silver wrote in his rebuttal:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Neil Ward-Dutton also rebuts Forrester’s assessment:

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

He also hits on a few key points of integration:

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

Better yet:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Regarding that “two engines” argument from Clay:

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

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

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

Much has now been written about IBM BPM 7.5.  We’ve blogged about it before Impact, and we’ve obliquely referenced it since Impact.  And we’ve enjoyed reading all the other reviews out there.

So we won’t rehash the feature by feature, blow-by-blow nature of product reviews (we’ll save that for another post!).  Let’s just take a big step back and look at the big picture, and I’ll tell you how we, at BP3, really feel about it.

I’m a Lombardi Customer… Now What?

First, for Lombardi customers.  There’s no doubt that this is A Good Thing.  The Lombardi Way has prevailed within IBM in a sense – the experience of IBM BPM is going to feel a lot like Lombardi – and yet a lot of time and effort is going into things Lombardi could never afford to invest in (configuration management, integration).  ILOG baked into the product line means no more guessing how best to handle rules issues in your processes.  There’s a clear migration path up to 7.5, and clear software entitlements. But most of all, IBM BPM makes Websphere manageable for the customers who really wanted BPM rather than Websphere (in other words, the app server is behind the curtain, not in front of it).

Most of all, Lombardi Customers can breathe a sigh of relief that IBM is not throwing out the golden goose that lays the eggs. From a Lombardi point of view, it is going to look like lots of extra goodies in the bag, with very few downsides from a feature-function point of view.

But I’m a WPS Customer… Now What?

WPS Customers should also be in good shape.  While the migration to 7.5 does not automatically convey the Process Designer, they’re existing WPS efforts should migrate up just fine (the WPS engine is intact).  If you add Process Designer to the mix, you’ll find you now have a great BPM tooling for addressing use cases that might have been more challenging in the WPS environment.  The new tooling should be more accessible to your team, and make it easier to address a broader set of use cases.  Most WPS customers won’t breathe a sigh of relief because (a) they always assumed WPS would dominate the ultimate BPM solution, or (b) because they are happy to have access to the Lombardi-style version of BPM.

I was about to Buy IBM WPS or Lombardi… Now What?

Just buy IBM BPM.  Your choices got simpler.  If you need to design integration flows with clear atomicity and transactional semantics, go for the advanced version of IBM BPM.  Otherwise, you’ll probably want to start out on the Standard version if you’re a larger company, and express if you’re running a pilot or smaller organization.  You no longer have to worry about betting on the wrong horse.  This is something we can give IBM credit for – their product strategy didn’t involve abandoning either of their main BPM product lines or leaving behind either set of customers.

I Work for IBM… Is This a Good Thing?

You bet it is.  Now you can sell and deliver on one value proposition with conceptually minor permutations.  No more product conflict.  The WPS heritage assets are now defined toward a different use case (automated workflows and integrations) than the heritage Lombardi assets (Human-centric BPM, if you will).  Build your processes in process designer, and build integration flows and lights-out processing in the Integration Designer.  And integrate the two in the Process Designer.

I’m an Analyst Covering BPM… Now What?

Well, I guess your job got a little easier.  IBM really has one BPM offering you need to analyze, rather than 2-3.  And it seems to capture the best attributes of Lombardi, WPS, and ILOG.  As Phil Gilbert said to us at bpmCamp shortly after the acquisition: “IBM clearly has the assets and technology to put together the best BPM offering in the market.”  The only question was: would they?  Would they actually put those assets front and center and create the offering?

Well they have.  Adjust those magic quadrants, waves, and rankings.

I’m a Lombardi Consultant or Consulting Firm… Now What?

This is nothing but good news as far as BP3 is concerned.  We couldn’t be happier with the direction IBM took with BPM 7.5.  Including dropping all the awkward naming of previous versions.  We believe we are the best Lombardi BPM services provider, and we aim to continue that record by aiming to be the best IBM BPM services provider.  We think IBM put the right horse (Process Designer) in front of the cart (Integration Designer), and we’re really looking forward to leveraging all the new features of 7.5 (to review: ILOG rules, Integration Designer, Profile Manager, Business Monitor, etc.).  We’re incredibly relieved that they didn’t EOL Lombardi.

And I think there will be a lot of WPS customers who will want to understand, better, what this whole Lombardi point-of-view is all about.  We think they’ll want to talk to someone like BP3.

It’s All About the Experience

Importantly, this release keeps the focus on the things that matter in BPM deployments – time to market, ease of use for the 80% case, ability to go as deep as need be in the 20% case, and a focus on the “business” view of BPM, not just the IT view.

But most importantly, this release signals that the engine(s) don’t matter… What matters is the EXPERIENCE.

IBM (and specifically Phil Gilbert) is planting the flag and saying the experience around BPM matters more than which specific technologies are behind it, it even matters more than the Websphere branding in front of the old names.  In the future, if IBM resolves the offering down to a single engine, it would likely be transparent to us because that engine would be running off of the repository we have today, and running behind the user experience we have today (or, an improved version of the same).  Do I really care if the code running my Process Designer-authored process is Lombardi heritage or WPS heritage?  I don’t really care, so long as it still behaves the same way.  In other words, so long as it implements the “interface” and gives me that “WYSIWYG” feel, I’m happy.

Much has been made by Clay Richardson and others about “multiple BPM engines.”  But trust me when I say that these engines consist of a relatively small percentage of the total lines of code involved in these products.  It is like the algorithmic core of a bigger software entity.  No one is suggesting that the ILOG engine has to be consolidated with the BPM engines to save cost.  It doesn’t make any sense to do that, does it?  So why consolidate the BPEL and BPMN engines? (Again, it may just not make sense to merge these two entities in a meaningful way).  IBM feels that it has already merged them in the two ways that matter most:

1. the BPM “engines” install, run, and operate as one software process or entity, inside a single JVM.
2. the BPM “engines” are unified behind common UI treatment, and common data models, reporting infrastructure, and rules interactions.  In a sense, they “behave the same”.  Users of IBM BPM won’t think of these things as separate engines. They might think of the modeling as separate user cases, but they won’t need to care, nor will they care, about what kind of “engine” is processing the model.  The diagram and details attached to it will define all the behavioral semantics.

I also had another takeaway from Impact, on the BPM front.  ACM is going to be a subset of the BPM offering, from a product point of view.  I saw two customer presentations that covered case management style dynamic processes that were home grown on top of their Lombardi implementations.  They were very interesting, and not that complicated.  And if these scenarios can be built on top of the platform, by customers… Certainly these are use cases that IBM could include in their BPM product offering – either as part of the IBM BPM offering or as part of the BlueworksLive offering.  Or both.  That’s the thing with IBM – they don’t have to choose, they can leverage the genius of the ‘and’. And if IBM doesn’t do it, someone like BP3 will.

Where Do We Go from Here?

Nothing has validated our investment in Lombardi more than the release of IBM BPM 7.5.  I think John Reynold’s post on the subject captures how I feel as well.  This is important. As pivotal as finding out last year at Impact that IBM was truly getting behind its new Lombardi BPM software.  This year it is pivotal in that we’re finding out that the last year has been one of real investment in the platform and real results.  This isn’t just window dressing, it is substance. I understand why people unfamiliar with the workings of Lombardi and WPS might feel differently, but with respect, they’re wrong.  If you know how it works under the hood, this is significant.

…and Thanks!

Given that this is the culmination of hard work from so many people that I hold in high regard, it seems appropriate to say thanks.  I was recruited to Lombardi by Toby Cappello, Scott Bonneau,  and Phil Gilbert – not to mention Rainer Ribback and Brian Witherly.  And Lombardi allowed me to meet Lance Gibbs, and Flournoy Henry, among others.  We built the services team I wanted to build at Lombardi – geographically dispersed (localized), highly skilled, and very experienced consultants.  It was completely counter to the prevailing trends at the time: off-shore (remote), commoditized/cheap (lower skill level), and inexperienced consultants.  The results:

• a much more successful, and mature, customer base
• a better feedback loop into the product development team
• a great talent pool for pulling into other senior or leadership roles in the company
• lower financial risk to the company, at the price of somewhat lower margins on services.

Our competitors that relied on the prevailing strategies ended up with smaller companies, fewer referenceable and less mature customers.  I think the Lombardi brand, in consulting circles within BPM, will continue to be strong for years to come.  I want to thank Lombardi for giving me that opportunity to put my best ideas to work for the business.  And learning from round 1, we’re applying these ideas to BP3 as well – and earning the rewards of this long-term view.

Everyone who was a part of Lombardi, if they’re still paying attention, should feel a greater sense of accomplishment with this release, than they likely did with the original sale of the company to IBM.   Kudos as well to IBM, you have truly figured out how to leverage a fine asset on the product side, and I have no doubt about the dividends it will pay in the years to come.

OK folks. Back to work.

Joe Heller, CIO of Caterpillar, gave an outstanding lesson in lasting business partnerships at IBM’s Impact conference on Day 1 (Monday, April 11th, 2011).  Joe was highly quotable (“There is dirt in the wrong place all over the world, and we are there to put it in the right place”), but beneath these quotes is a deep sense of business value over time.

And he wasn’t shy about sharing real dollar values in savings.

I think David Brakoniecki sums it up best in his post:

83 years of Partnership – Caterpillar has had a relationship with IBM for 83 years.
From a business perspective, I find this mind-blowing.  Having worked the last 12 years in small businesses and start-ups, I’m lucky if I can point to a continuing business relationship that goes back 5 years.
In recent times, the recession has claimed several major brands so it’s easy to forget that long-term business partnerships are not only possible but also worth having.  It’s mpressive that the CIO of Caterpillar was willing to stand on stage and say that IBM has never disappointed him in his 38 years of working together.

It is a pretty remarkable partnership.

Other thoughts on Day 1′s General session:

• The video wall is truly massive.  The room itself is massive.  And I can’t imagine how they’ll fit more than 8000 people in one room next year.
• It is also interesting how cultural differences come out in a conference like this.  At one point, Marie Weick, in the middle of a very well-delivered segment, repeated some advice once given to her: “In your career you can only move forward or fall behind”.  From the perspective of someone outside the corporate ladder-climbing world, this sounds off – a career is more than two dimensions measured forward and back.  I would wish for everyone to realize that early in their career rather than late.
• Dr. Burns has one of the most compelling cases for application of technology – pediatric care.  It is well worth watching on the livestream video.
• It takes an immense amount of coffee to serve this many people.  Don’t expect to find coffee at the coffee stations right outside the main event.
• Impact Day 1 kicked off on an odd note, with the opening musical performance.  At some point three of the musicians switched from instruments to iPads to finish their musical number (and of course, you can’t tell if they’re actually playing or if it was all pre-recorded, but one wonders).  It was an interesting choice to kick off the conference.

Notes from the Rest of Day 1

After the General Session, I wanted to see what IBM was saying about “which BPM to use” in one of the early sessions of the day.  Sometimes it is good to get the official positioning so that you understand how far out of alignment your own opinions are.

IBM’s positioning of BlueworksLive is:

1. No training to use
2. Social Application, which helps scale social talk across the business
3. Doc and discovery tool that is easy to use
4. Automate simple processes

At this point, I noticed the room was full.  More than full.  This would continue in virtually every BPM session that touched on Lombardi heritage at all.  IBM’s conference organizers continue to under-estimate the demand for Lombardi-BPM-themed content – but we can hope that next year will be different under the IBM BPM branding.

Someone described BlueworksLive as “Powerpoint for process applications”.

There is an open question for IBM, which remains unanswered: How to support the partner community with this product?  IBM really depends on its partner channel to expose customers to products.  Unfortunately BlueworksLive leaves a lot to be desired from a partner point of view (one could even argue that the automation is competitive with partner service offerings).  I think the answer is to simply add a few features that will make this product more partner-friendly:

• the ability to move models from one corporate account to another (so that I can move drafts created in my sandbox to the customer’s BlueworksLive spaces).
• an expert BPMN diagramming mode that allows expert modelers to be more precise in their process definitions.
• more features like the “playback” feature that was introduced in the last BlueworksLive update.

Next, IBM positioned IBM BPM as targeted at the high volume, repeatable processes, while BlueworksLive is focused on the long tail processes.  Both products offer “tooling that is easy to use” (relatively speaking), “transactional integrity and scale”,  “unified environment for governance, visibility, and control”, and versioning.  (Of course, they achieve this in very different ways and targeted at different processes and users.)

Next up, I went to a hands-on lab for BlueworksLive. But, being a newcomer to Impact, it wasn’t what I expected, so I said hi to a few people and then went to take a certification test in another room.

Lunch was a forgettable affair in the trade show area.  We left lunch quickly and met up with the analysts and bloggers who were sequestered on the first floor of the conference getting the low-down on all things IBM.  Flournoy and I were able to meet with Neil Ward-Dutton , and then he was nice enough to call out Sandy Kemsley (nice to meet for the first time!), Clay Richardson, and Bruce Silver.  It was great to hear their early impressions on the IBM BPM 7.5 release first hand – it definitely added color to the blogs they wrote later.  We shared notes and there was, generally, consensus (except for Clay).   It is too bad they are isolated from the rest of the conference, I think it would be really interesting for them to see how other people interpret what they’re hearing in typical Impact sessions (I imagine they got some of this if they stayed through til Tuesday or Wednesday).

In the afternoon I saw the “Measuring Quality” session by Fahad Osmani and Sean Pizel, of IBM.  It was a wide-ranging presentation, best to get the presentation slides rather than rely on my notes.  They suggest some new measurements for BPM projects, and pointed out that programs that deliver value, repeatedly, almost always turn into successes.

We then went into a meeting with folks from the IBM partner enablement community.  We were impressed by how motivated IBM’s partner groups were to make sure BP3 is successful as an IBM partner.  It was an intense and productive conversation, and we left with concrete follow ups.  The quality of the meetings their partner group set up for us was quite impressive.

After the partner session, I made it to the second Lincoln Trust presentation of the day (I had heard great reviews of their first session of the day, just prior).  In this session they talked about their strategy for addressing a high volume of processes (100′s) with a small team and small budget.  The answer, of course, was to have standard lightweight process definitions that could represent more than one of these processes.  The key outcomes they were looking for were tracking (for visibility), standardization, and governance.  By implementing lightweight processes that could act more generically, they gave themselves a lot more data about each process before investing in building something more technically demanding.

The Lincoln Trust approach reminds me quite a lot of the Banco Espirito (BES) approach.  At this point, the team dove into technical details behind their implementation (great content).

We had dinner with a fellow BPM practitioner and long-time colleague, and then headed over to iTKO’s party at Tao Beach, where we were able to catch up with friends at their company and IBMers who also joined in.  iTKO was a Diamond sponsor of Impact – quite a step up from last year.  They made a big splash and they’ve had a great year.  Kudos to the iTKO team for a big contribution to the quality of the conference.

At the end of Day 1, I was motivated and exhausted. It was time to rest up for Day 2.

Day 2 of IBM Impact started off well.  I went down to breakfast and sat with a senior member of IBM technical staff, as well as a few gentlemen visiting from Farmer’s Insurance.  Good conversation over a light breakfast, followed by the keynote.

Katie Lindendoll was our emcee for Day 2.  Steve Mills followed her with a fluid, yet technical, presentation of IBM software in the context of 100 years of IBM history.   A couple of key points jumped out at me and into my notes from the session (which were light, because Steve does a good job demanding your attention while he’s talking):

• You should own your own process and your own data.  This is a theme IBM hit on several times.  It seems to support two legs of IBM’s business – on-premise software and “private clouds”.  But it also is a more philosophical point that IBM believes a move to the cloud should not give up your control over process and data.
• Your processes power your company.  (I didn’t count how many times he said the word “process” – but I should have.  It might have been a record for IBM keynotes).
• “Not lots of new things in IT, but there are lots of improving things in IT”.  Well said.
• Big focus on reducing TCO – Most IT organizations spend 80% of their budget just maintaining what they have in production.
• Hammering on atomicity – transactional accuracy – as a key underpinning to good (and accurate) processes (“We saw this problem coming, and understood what people would want to do with it”)

Next up was Phil Gilbert, formerly CTO and President of Lombardi, now VP of BPM at IBM.  He starts with the thought that we shouldn’t be talking about transforming.  We should start with “transformed” – as in, if you’re sitting in the audience, you’ve already been transformed by the economic and technical environment.  A couple of key stats:

• 50Billion devices connected to the internet by 2020 (Nokia estimate)
• 70% of businesses outsource a key process
• $488B lost to inefficiencies each year
• 20% of revenues over next 5 years will come from unknown sources

The chief argument: complexity is increasing, at an increasing rate.  And yet IT spend is flat or down over the last few years, with no sign of significant change.

The livestream is here, and embedded below (fast forward to 23:30 for Phil’s contribution):

Phil did a good job rebutting a key argument often used against BPM – putting power in the hands of the business does not mean turning business users into developers.  Just like we didn’t turn attorneys into typists when we introduced computers, and yet they all manage their own documents and have much higher personal productivity than we could have imagined in the era of typists.

Four key themes for the talks today were re-emphasized:  Visibility, Governance, Simplicity, and Power.

I liked his thought on six-sigma: “Doing improvement without assuming technology just is NOT where we are today in the real world.  We need to account for the technology as well in our work.”  Something we’ve been arguing as well, since at least 2007.

Then he introduced IBM BPM 7.5 – the joining of Websphere Lombardi Edition and WPS.  My old colleague Brandon Baxter was brought in to assist with the demo.  New branding/interface on the Integration Designer to make it match the Process Designer.  Phil lays it out afterward:  “They have to not just work together.  They have to work the same”

They also showed of revamped critical path management functionality, showing projected due dates and changes to the process and the implied affect on due date.  Projections can be optimistic, pessimistic, or historically most likely dates.

Phil ended with a note on tying many products together (paraphrasing from my notes):

It isn’t a weakness to have overlapping technical solutions for common – but not identical – problem spaces.

A 75-year partnership with Caterpillar did not just start with a computer.  Enabling a new platform for business.  And a commitment to bring along the things that came before.  We’re not dogmatic, but we are leaders.

Following Phil’s talk was a surprisingly good roundtable with two executives from Nationwide Insurance and two executives from Verizon Wireless.  Pretty good shout-outs to ILOG on this panel.

Wrapping up Day 2 was Scott Klososky.  And his first point was something I can get behind- that technology is art not engineering.  In light of this, and the changes to our lives that technology is weaving, we need leaders with new skills – and they need to add these skills at a faster rate than we’ve been seeing.  They need to be able to predict the future accurately and be visionary, accurately.  And then invest the time, money, and people to get there in time!

He then emphasized augmented intelligence, long term leadership (short term leadership is just “management”), and how to leverage social media to stay well-read in your area of expertise.

 Great way to start Day 2 at Impact.

Other Notes from Day 2

Later, I attended a session on UI-building on IBM BPM. Unfortunately so much time was spent on rehashing the normal ways of building UIs that we didn’t get enough time in the session to really see something different and new, though we did get a very deep technical dive on some of the approaches for different types of UIs.

In the afternoon, I spent some time with David Brakoniecki (of Axispoint) sharing notes on sessions we’d been to at the conference, and the market in general. It was the first time we’d met in person (previously only on Twitter) so I guess we now have to admit David is a real live person.

Then we hit Clay Richardson’s session on why BPM is hot. Though it seemed more focused on why BPM efforts are sometimes “hitting the wall”. Short version: lots of running analogies, a focus on the personality “types” you have in BPM initiatives (though I’m not fond of all the short-hand names like “Guru” and “Prodigy”). A key point of emphasis was active leadership from either the business owner, business analyst, or process architect. A process analyst cannot be an order taker – has to be more assertive and involved.

After that was a very good session on BPM Architectures by Zach Roadhouse and Karri Carlson-Neumann – in which they described how IBM BPM 7.5 now takes full advantage of Websphere’s Profile Manager. This allows much better, repeatable, control over exactly how IBM BPM is deployed, without requiring the writing of a great many scripts. They reviewed scenarios from the trivial (all-in-one-JVM) to the complex (clustering multiple services independently and layering them across your servers). It has all the advantages of Ant scripts (accuracy, repeatability), without requiring us to actually learn all the ins and outs of manipulating Websphere via Ant.

The three of us (Lance, Flournoy, and myself) finally were able to meet in the same place – at dinner.

Today’s sessions included a competitive case study session reviewing 4-5 case studies of competitive wins, and sharing techniques.

It seems to me that you could sum up winning against competition as: Don’t be a jerk. Care about your customer. Provide great customer service. And have a good product.  Oh, and if you can find an unequivocal differentiator, drive that nail all the way through the deal.

It was pretty good stuff but very anecdotal in nature and not content that I feel comfortable conveying verbatim.

Lunch + Keynote was the usual round of buffet plus happy news from the front of the room – record registration at Impact (8000), record partner registration (I forget if it was 800 or 850 business partners registered), more sessions than ever, etc. Clearly IBM is on something of a roll.  We heard from several of IBM’s execs, and then they also gave out business partner awards.

After the break, I went to listen to Dave Marquard’s discussion of the current BPM offering and the value propositions of each piece.  Good session and unfortunately I had to leave before it was over.  But I don’t think anyone minded as it was standing room only at that point and someone was happy to take my chair!  Clearly some interest in this BPM stuff.

I took a break and then, when Lance Gibbs, our fearless CEO, arrived, we headed down to the expo center for the general reception, where we were able to catch up with a few colleagues at IBM, as well as a couple partners in PrincetonBlue, Centric, and Apex.  Next, it was on to dinner… and then to meet Flournoy Henry (directly from the airport) at the Penn & Teller show.  I was suitably impressed by their act, and we were treated to great booth seating.  Thanks again to the two of them for giving us tickets to the show!

Looking forward to the keynote tomorrow morning.  Not looking forward to the early wake-up call!

Tomorrow Today is the Business Partner summit at IBM Impact, and then Monday we have the beginning of the Main Event – Keynotes and Comedians and Music and all.

I flew in early this year so that I could attend the whole Business Partner Summit.

On my flight from Austin, I gave my seat up to a guy much larger than me, who clearly needed the extra leg room on our Southwest flight.  Turns out that he, and the guy behind him, were Penn and Teller.  Small world.  And just like that, I found myself the holder of tickets to their Sunday night show.

Now that I’m here, I’m looking forward to catching up with a few friends.  I met up with two current colleagues in the BPM world who also worked with me at my first employer in Austin.  It is a small world!  One of them works in partnerships at IBM and the other helps run an IBM partner overseas.  And we all used to work together in the same building 10 years ago, for a different company.  I used the afternoon to check out the spa and decompress before things really get busy here, and then it was out to dinner with aforementioned colleagues.

The weather is cooler than expected here in Vegas, but I’m not complaining.  I already feel a bit behind the curve on sleep just trying to keep up with normal business and family communications and also get out of the room and meet up with colleagues. If you’re at Impact and you’d like to meet up, drop me a line or look for me on twitter (@sfrancisatx).

More to come from the Business Partner Summit sessions.

We’re going to share a teaser of our presentation coming on Wednesday at IBM Impact.  The session abstract just doesn’t do it justice now that the presentation is complete.  The outline:

• Business Process Improvement versus Business Process Management
• Five Major Anti-Patterns to Business Value
• Wells Fargo Case
• The Business Driven Delivery Team

You could sum this up as:

• Practical Methods for Keeping the Business in BPM
• A Case Study (Wells Fargo) revealing one good example
• How to makeover your technical team into the Business Driven Delivery Team.

If that isn’t a recipe for transforming your BPM Initiative, what is?

Since the beginning of the SXSW-interactive conference, I’ve posted a few times about the Lean Startup sessions and hinted that they might apply to BPM.

Heading into the IBM Impact conference, this feels like the right time to talk about the Lean Startup as it relates to BPM – it provides a decent segue to the topic we will speak on at Impact – “Keeping the Business in BPM“.

Let’s Review What the Lean Startup is All About

It turns out, I’ve written about this before.  But I think it is time to return to the subject with a little more perspective.  The premise behind the lean startup is embodied really well by three charts (click on this link, slides 20-22).  I’ve given each idea my own poor rendition here in the blog since I don’t see a good way to embed a single page from a SlideShare presentation.

Known Problem, Known Solution: Waterfall method

First, Waterfall development techniques were designed around situations when we know the problem really well, and we also know the solution well, and simply have to make sure we deliver a quality result.  It should be no surprise to anyone in the BPM space that this does not describe the typical BPM / Process Improvement project.

Known Problem, Unknown Solution: Agile Method

The second slide shows an innovation over the first: that when the problem is known, but solution unknown – a different technique is required to solve the problem:  Agile development. There have been many proponents of an agile approach to software development, and it is arguably the most accepted methodology among software engineers.  This does not mean, however, that it is always practiced, or practiced well, nor has it infiltrated all IT projects.

Lean Startup: Unknown Problem, Unknown Solution

The third slide shows yet another innovation: when the problem is also unknown, the solution is unknown.  At this point, we can’t rely on just documenting the requirements or interviewing the known user base.  We have to apply what Steve Blank coined as “Customer Development” – getting out of the building and talking about our problem hypotheses with customers.  When we get our hypothetical problems and hypothetical solutions in front of customers and discover we’ve “missed” the market, we “Pivot” – that is, take the lessons learned, and adapt what we’re doing to find an addressable market we can actually build a business around.  Essentially, the lean startup keeps iterating and pivoting until it finds a business that it can scale (or until it runs out of money).  Once it finds something to scale, the problem is no longer one of “searching” for a business model and solutions, but one of scaling an operation.

The coupling of the Customer Development process with the Agile Development process has been coined the “Lean Startup” by Eric Ries and others.  Why do we call the problem “unknown”? Perhaps you think of course we know what problem we’re attacking – the startup company was formed to solve this particular problem.  That sounds good – but actually startups only THINK they know what their business model will be.  Google thought their model was search.  But it was really targeted advertising delivery, based on Search and alongside search.  Small startups pivot often, but we’ve also seen large companies pivot – as IBM did when it moved to really emphasize its services business.

How is BPM Like the Lean Startup?  “Problem: Unknown”

Some readers should already be seeing a connection between the Lean Startup and BPM.  But it helps to really spell it out.  First, I propose that when you start a BPM project, you only have a hypothesis about your problem and solution.  This is what we mean when we say the problem is “unknown” – that we have a hypothesis but it isn’t proven yet.

How do we know that BPM suffers from this “unknown” Problem situation?

Because the biggest risk to budget, or even success, of BPM projects, is getting the requirements wrong.  As I often tell our team: “No, you’re not going to get good requirements up front for this project. And if you do, they’re probably wrong.” We have to approach projects with an open mind toward how requirements will evolve.

Already, most BPM practitioners approach the solution as an “unknown” or “hypothesized” solution.  This is why, for example, successful BPM projects typically have an Agile, or at the least iterative, approach to BPM development – it allows opportunities for course correction with the Business, getting closer to the “right” solution over the course of several iterations.

BPM Takeaways from the Lean Startup

But, the other side of the coin is that we BPM practitioners need to adopt some of the methods of the Lean Startup and Customer Development:

1. We need to “get outside the building”. For the IT folks developing BPM solutions, this means going outside the IT labs and seeing how the “Business” really operates.  Talk to them.  Observe them.  Read between the lines.  Get their feedback on prototypes and early releases.
2. We need to employ more A/B testing in our solutions. Don’t assume we’ve designed the right improvement to the process – prove it!  A/B testing is de riguer in software circles, but not inside IT shops, and not in process improvement methodology.  But it should be.  I’ve only seen one BPM endeavor really embrace A/B testing – and it was a great success.
3. The unit of progress is learning. This is a core principle of the Lean Startup.  While we’re searching for the right problem to solve, and the right approach to address it, learning is what we want. An A/B test that shows we didn’t move the needle as we wanted to is a success if we have learned a better path forward or avoided a costly dead-end.
4. Shift to Value-Based Delivery over Plan-Based.This means that we have to re-prioritize work throughout the project – to always keep the Delivery team focused on the highest value work.  The plan is your hypothetical plan.  Don’t stick to it when the facts dictate otherwise.
5. Get the Business and the Technical Team working together. Seriously.  Put them in the same space. Or the same room.  Make them part of the same team.  Make it the dream team.  Because when you get the leadership and team right, everything else gets easier.

There is more to it than just this… But if we can just pick up these four things for our BPM projects, we’ll make dramatic progress on improving the process of BPM. It takes leadership to drive these behaviors – but I hope that leadership just needs a little bit of encouragement through education and familiarity with the concepts behind the Lean Startup.

I’ll see many of you at Impact – in our session, I’ll touch on the whys and hows for a business-driven technical team.  And if you read this blog, you’ll have some of the underpinnings behind my part of the talk.  Of course, Lance and Reid have a few interesting points to make too!  Wednesday, April 13, 3:15PM to 4:30PM, In the Venetian – Murano 3205 room: “Wells Fargo – Keeping the ‘Business’ in BPM”

Lance Gibbs and Scott Francis, of BP3, and Reid Denny, of Wells Fargo, will be presenting at IBM Impact in April (you can find the sessions here):

Program:  Technology
Track:  BPM and Decision Management
Sub-track:  BPM: From Projects to Programs
Session Type:  Lecture, Level:  Beginner
Speaker(s):  Scott Francis, BP3; Reid Denny, Wells Fargo Bank N.A.; Lance Gibbs, BP3

Abstract:  These are practices which keep the business engaged throughout the BPM lifecyle, ensuring their value-added player role. The session will cover typical challenges companies have when it comes to getting and keeping the business stakeholders involved in their early BPM program days. Most companies are very used to a model where functional requirements are provided by the business and then handed off for IT to deliver against. In BPM, the importance of having a process focus versus a set of functional descriptions cannot be emphasized enough so the approach has to change dramatically for increased chance of success to occur, and for the organization to get the most value out of the process solutions.

We’re honored to have this opportunity to present alongside Wells Fargo’s Reid Denny.  Reid has been running an innovation group within Wells Fargo that has been doing great things for their business and we think there is a lot to learn from their story.

If you’re going to be at Impact 2011, April 10-15, look us up.  There are some great sessions planned – already over 100 sessions just around BPM.  We’d love to meet more people in the BPM space in person.

Well, I gave Bruce a hard time in our blog recently, and of course I should expect that if I do that, a fellow blogger and BPM guru like Bruce will return the favor!

Bruce writes an excellent follow-up piece with his recommendations to IBM vis-a-vis BPM. I can hardly find a word to criticize, but it was too good a read for me to ignore, either.  A few choice passages:

Scott also snickers at my statement that WebSphere Business Compass is a better BPMN tool than Lombardi Blueprint, says I’m the only one not employed by IBM to say that.  But I may be one of the only people not employed by IBM to have used both.

Ok, you got me there.  Bruce says Blueprint is dumbed down too much.  I agree – but I think the answer is to layer on the more BPMN-complaint modeling elements in Blueprint, rather than to try to make Compass more accessible.  I agree with Bruce they should merge these two. Versioning and collaborating are so much better in Blueprint that I can’t see throwing that away.

Later Bruce continues with another great insight:

IBM’s mistake was always thinking BPM and SOA were kind of the same thing.  Remember those hexagons in the IBM marketecture?  (Before they went to the layer cake?)  The labels were slightly different in a SOA presentation versus a BPM presentation, but there was always just one hexagon.  There wasn’t a BPM hexagon operating in communication with (but independent of) a SOA hexagon.  Like there is in real life.  [...]

(I kind of thought those layered cakes were coasters… )

[...] The hard part of all this is instant playback.  How do you achieve the immediacy of Lombardi’s model it, play it, tweak it, play it again experience without compromising what Process Server does well?  I have no doubt that if IBM wanted to do this, it could.

Will they go this route?  I doubt it.  But it would be a killer product.

Couldn’t have said it better myself.  Thanks, Bruce!

I was fortunate to finally meet Neil Ward-Dutton in person at IBM Impact this year.  We attended different sessions for the most part, so our one meeting was just for a few minutes by the escalators.  And I’ve often found MWD’s analysis of BPM vendors (and other adjacent markets) to be insightful and to the point. So I’ve been looking forward to seeing Neil’s writeup for MWD.

Neil starts with a little history of the IBM Impact event – how it has evolved from Websphere to SOA to BPM – and with a legitimate business track in effect now.  As Neil pointed out – BPM wasn’t the only theme getting traction at IBM Impact (though you might get that impression reading my blog posts, because that’s what I’m focused on) – but it did get its share of attention in they keynotes.

What was more telling here was not the platitudes about the importance of business processes – but the frequency with which technology from recently-acquired Lombardi was placed front and centre in those same keynote sessions (see Bruce Silver’s note). And as Scott Francis from BPM implementation specialist BP3 pointed out the Lombardi-specific breakouts were very heavily attended – this stuff clearly impressed attendees from what I heard and saw.

I agree-  the surprise was how they put Lombardi front-and-center.  It wasn’t the “what’s new” from Lombardi, it was the wholehearted adoption of the new acquisition that was surprising (and if you’re a BPM advocate, encouraging).

Neil identifies twin themes in IBM’s recent acquisitions of Lombardi and Cast Iron:  consumability of the software (ease of use), and consolidating vendor relationships that require smart competitive tactics. I’m going to write more about the first theme-  I think that ease of use will be critical for BPM success going forward.  It may be the most important factor in the end…

He goes on to say that time is of the essence in defining its go-to-market strategy – not because the customers must have an architecturally perfect solution tomorrow, but because the competition has gotten its act together, and BPM is hitting the mainstream – so firing on all cylinders now is critical for success.  I think his analysis is spot-on.

I’ve been a little remiss in reporting in on my own session at IBM Impact.  As part of Lombardi Day, I gave a short presentation on the unconference we put together, in collaboration with Stanford University, in January.

I’m embedding the presentation here – I added a couple of words and images to clarify a few points that I can’t talk to live when you view it online.

If you attended the session and have any comments or feedback, please let me know, I’d love to hear it.  If you’re interested in hosting bpmCamp where you live, let’s talk – maybe we can get one organized!

I think Bruce and I attended different conferences last week.  Actually, we kind of did (I think Derek Miers and I both attended the same conference, on the other hand).  I went to “Lombardi Driven @ Impact” – a day of sessions just focused on Lombardi.  Bruce and the other analysts didn’t, to my knowledge.  I don’t know if that is because they weren’t given the opportunity or just weren’t aware of the Lombardi sessions (they weren’t terribly well publicized at Impact… and honestly, they were so packed that the rooms were uncomfortable. ), or because they wanted to cover the wider Websphere material at the event.

Bruce says:

Not a lot of BPM news out of IBM at Impact this week.  The most surprising thing for me about it is how thoroughly Lombardi – acquired just a few months ago – has enthralled the WebSphere executives.  At the opening keynote, WebSphere GM Craig Heyman called Lombardi Teamworks, rebranded IBM WebSphere BPM Lombardi Edition, “the core BPM product.”  Really?

Yes. Really.

I would have phrased this: The most surprising thing for me about it is how thoroughly IBM has co-opted the Lombardi message and positioning.  I see that as a good thing – it isn’t clear that Bruce does from his post. If Lombardi is the core BPM product… good.  Because IBM needs to simplify the path to BPM for its customers, and the Lombardi product offering and team gives IBM its best chance to do just that. And not many organizations would benefit as much as IBM would from a simplified experience with their Websphere stack.

Bruce continues :

And at today’s keynote session, Beth Smith, another top WebSphere executive, devoted the only demo of the session to a conventional walkthrough of Lombardi BluePrint and Teamworks, I mean WebSphere Lombardi Edition.  Nothing anyone who follows BPM hasn’t seen for the past couple years from Lombardi, but to the WebSphere execs this technology seems nothing short of amazing.

My experience is that any product execs present will be presented as nothing short of amazing.  Check out the Apple presentations of apps like Keynote (hello, have we not seen powerpoint before?).  IBM had an audience of 6000 people, probably 5800 of whom had never seen Blueprint nor Websphere Lombardi Edition – good chance to make your pitch.  Not to mention, paid products usually get better billing than free products at vendor conferences… (Also, since IBM has apparently been in discussions with Lombardi from time to time for 5 years, I’m sure they’d seen it before).

The ironic thing about it is that the process discovery tools and BPMN 2.0 editor in IBM BPM BlueWorks and WebSphere Business Compass – brand new, and tools aligned with the real WebSphere BPMS – are actually better than Blueprint, not to mention free.  But no mention of them.

Don’t get me wrong — I love Lombardi.

I feel the love! First, referring to WPS as the “real” Websphere BPMS (is Lombardi the fake one?), and then stating that BlueWorks is better than Blueprint.  I would say that “better” is pretty subjective, and Bruce is the first person I’ve heard say that that didn’t work at IBM prior to the merger. They’re different tools with different agendas, but it seems obvious to everyone that a consolidation strategy is needed over time – ie, they should probably be feature-sets within a common tool, rather than completely separate things, from a technical implementation point of view.  90 days into the merger, and with full integration to be complete July 1, I think it isn’t unreasonable that they’re taking their time.  As one exec put it – this is clearly something where getting it right is worth taking a little extra time.

Bruce wraps up:

Unlike Oracle’s immediate announcement of a BPM roadmap after it acquired BEA.

For the record, there was no Oracle BPM roadmap before Oracle acquired BEA… So that was a no-brainer.

Regarding what the strategy likely is… I refer you to your first quote, Bruce.  Yes, really.

Derek Miers made the 6000 mile trip to Las Vegas to attend IBM Impact.  One could have forgiven him if jet lag dampened his enthusiasm for the material, but far from it.  I’ve been following Derek’s writing ever since Lance Gibbs introduced me to his work several years ago.  Recently he joined Forrester research, and so these days we find his blog on their site.

There was a pretty important message there. A message that was being communicated to the faithful. And whether you like it or not, IBM has a lot, and I mean a lot, of faithful followers. I didn’t do a scientific assessment of the number of IBM badges versus non IBM badges, but even if half of the attendees were internal, there were plenty of customers there too. And those internal folks were also being recruited as emissaries and evangelists for the new mantra.

Prior to attending Impact, I hadn’t realized that it was *also* a vehicle for recruiting evangelists within the IBM body politic.  Further down Derek writes:

The message was made plain and simple – that BPM was the way to run your business. That [...] process models were central to the way in which the firm operated.

This is quite an achievement for BPM – to have one of the largest software firms in the world fully get behind the BPM message. But the real punch:

The thing that really surprised me was quite how quickly the Lombardi acquisition had been “blue-washed” – taken to heart and internalized, and now, very much part of the proposition that IBM is taking to the market.

I, too, was quite surprised. I went prepared to see Lombardi pushed to a small corner of a large conference and ignored.  Instead, the day long Lombardi sessions were pushed to a corner and overflowing, and the message was coming across in keynotes and sessions throughout the conference.  And the IBM execs paid great attention to the Lombardi offering.  Derek believes that the Lombardi folks were surprised by the power and reach of the IBM brand – and I agree – the body language and interactions with IBMers spoke volumes.

The long path toward “mainstream” for BPM appears to be arriving at last.  I always said that I didn’t think independent BPM software companies need fear Oracle or IBM or SAP until they really were eating, breathing, and sleeping BPM.  I used to quip that until I heard Sam Palmisano talking about BPM, I wouldn’t be too worried.  I didn’t believe they would ever really make this switch from thinking of BPM as a checkbox feature in SOA to being actually the chief value proposition of their software stack.  IBM’s purchase of Lombardi didn’t convince me that IBM’s executives were really sold on BPM rather than just being opportunistic and optimistic about the BPM space.

Attending Impact last week, the chief value proposition sure looked like BPM.  And I have been proven wrong by one of the stack vendors: they really can learn to make process front-and-center.  I’m just glad I’m in the BPM consulting business, rather than in a competing software business to the set of players now arrayed in the BPM market.

More to come…

I came just a couple minutes late to this session, Tuesday morning.  When I opened the door, a packed house greeted me – not a chair to be seen.  I joined a row of people standing along the back row, and made my way to a corner, where I sat on the floor for a while so that I could take some notes.  Quite a few people opened the door, assessed the lack of seating and left, but several more joined us along the back row…

Erik Keller, CIO of Sirva, gave a talk titled “One CIOs Perspective”.  He painted the picture when he started on the BPM journey with Lombardi – when Sirva had CAGR of 40%, but in the face of that growth, operational productivity and effectiveness were trending downward.

The original goals of the BPM initiative were to support the growth without a loss of productivity or effectiveness as the business ramped – this was during the height of the real estate boom, and the relocation business was booming along with the economy.  But when the economy started to go south, Sirva’s business was dramatically affected.  And the goals shifted from managing growth to managing risk and cost.  Erik called out one of the big benefits of BPM was that it (or Lombardi’s software at any rate) were flexible enough to make this shift in objectives and still support the business.

Erik described the old work flow – colored folders for different parts of the process – very paper-based.  The amount of integration to legacy systems was difficult.  They were clever about their approach, but it was still difficult to get it all done.  Some of the keys to success from Mr. Keller’s point of view:

• Focus on the most critical business priorities
• Implement changes incrementally (and the capacity to do this)
• Build competitive advantage through the BPM platform
• Apply consistent technology and process across service centers
• Leverage existing components
• Full participation (everyone needs to participate to make it a success)
• Gain control and visibility with software

There were originally 7 core processes scoped for phase 1 – but they realized that it was simply too much scope (integration, process definition, etc.) and so they are now working on 3.0 to bring in the rest of the 7 core processes.  A key lesson here is, just because your initial assessment of scope is wrong, doesn’t mean you should give up – Erik and his team were able to pivot and focus on the most important processes first, and branch out from there.

Responding to a question, Erik mentioned that they had 10 people on the first project, and they have 20 now.  We at BP3 had the good fortune of working with the Sirva team on part of the 2.0 delivery, and the core team is really good – very strong technically, and they have a great understanding of the business *and* the technology to support it.

Erik reinforced that there is a huge dependency on the quality of people and the quality of their interactions.  What a great way to phrase the human capital part of the equation.

Previously in my summary of Toby Cappello’s session on COEs, I mentioned the “wall” that people hit as they roll out BPM.  Erik described such a situation as Sirva came freshly off of a rollout of APEX 1.0 to their local service center. The service center loved it and it really supported their business, so Sirva set out to roll out the process to two more service centers…. who immediately rejected it!

Sirva took a step back and incorporated changes to support the other service centers’ needs, but also to get agreement on the “right way” to execute these processes – compromise, but require standardization as well.

Some thoughts on roles: At Sirva, BAs are Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) on the business.  Sometimes the gaps aren’t obvious til you go live or to a pilot – and they had some luck bringing in outside help to mediate between IT and the business, or to find gaps in requirements.

Sirva is now rolling out enhancements every couple of months, doing good work to support the business.  Agility is tied to how big your chunks of delivery are – the bigger the chunks, the less agile you are.

Great session, with a good Q&A at the end.  Erik does a good job answering but also facilitating getting answers from members of his team who were at the session.

Rod Favoron (formerly CEO of Lombardi), Phil Gilbert (formerly CTO of Lombardi), Craig Hayman (General Manager for Websphere), and Joan Shaiman (Integration Manager for the Lombardi acquisition) took the stage to take questions from the audience.  This was purely a Q&A session with very little pre-amble except some humble thanks from Rod, Phil, and Craig to tee it up.  Once again, standing room only, despite the fact that the room was hot and stuffy at the end of the day.  The mood was pretty upbeat.  Phil and Rod had all the good lines, Craig did a good job of adding content to a couple of the more humorous responses, and generally making the Lombardi faithful feel like he wants to keep the torch lit.

I’ll paraphrase what I heard, but I’ll put in quotes statements that are relayed from the perspective of the speaker – please realize these are not, in fact, direct quotations.

So why did IBM buy Lombardi?  The first question out of the gate was perhaps the elephant in the room for most early Lombardi customers.  Craig Hayman gave a pretty good laundry list of reasons, including that Lombardi resonated with customers as best-in-class, the customer base was largely more mature in their BPM journey than other BPM vendors’ customers, and the product fairly “oozes” simplicity.  He also admitted they had to just get over the fact that they hadn’t built Lombardi themselves and go out and buy it.   Craig might have been playing to the crowd, but he sure hit all the notes that Lombardi customers would want to hear – and his answers were nuanced and thoughtful.

He also implied that when he took the job, this acquisition was on his mind immediately.  And in relaying a story about the management team – I think to indicate just how much integrity he felt the Lombardi executive team demonstrated – he pointed out that they had kept notes on what Lombardi had said 5 years earlier (that puts it at 2004-2005 – he got a laugh about the fact that IBM keeps such copious notes) and what they had said in 2009, and they had said the same [darn] thing again.  The eye opener to me is that it sounds like IBM had been eying Lombardi for some time now (longer than I would have thought).

Craig answered another question about product confusion – this is one that it would have been good for Sandy Kemsley to be in on.  Craig’s take: BPM is a huge market and growing really rapidly.  Therefore there are a lot of opinions about what you should do, and a lot of conversations happening about the right way to do BPM.  If the conversations help make decisions, that’s great, let’s do it.  But if they slow down decisions, then that’s not good.  IBM has a strategy that allows for multiple starting points for customers to engage in the BPM journey, rather than only one BPM entry point.  This is not what the market pundits think IBM should do, but they happen to be contrarian on this point.

He gave the example of Ford – cars are a pretty mature market.  When you want an SUV, they have a hard time selling you a sports car.  You self-select what you want.  IBM thinks that BPM has some similar issues – you’ve self-selected what you want based on your biases or what you’ve worked on previously.  For line of business core offerings, nothing is better than Lombardi.

Frustration for 25 years

Phil Gilbert jumped in at this point to talk about his 25-year-long frustration about our industry as a whole suffering from ADD – moving on before we go deep.  To paraphrase Phil:

The tech involved in Websphere Lombardi Edition and other BPM products has been around for a long time, but for the last 10 years, Lombardi has gone really deep on how to use technology better for business process management.  Lombardi tried to improve developer productivity radically – not because of new tools, but because of the way the tools are put together internally. We all want more clarity in the marketplace, and there are a series of conversations going on at IBM about how to get entry points clearly defined and communicated.  There’s a lot of rhetoric about today’s positioning [...] but the joint capabilities within IBM cannot be matched.  But we have to make these capabilities work together better, more seamlessly  We’ll get clarity on where to start with 3-4 questions in the near future.

Phil further emphasized that the Websphere Lombardi Edition team intends to go very deep on the use cases and make it all a lot better in the future.

A question asking about short term product roadmap came up – likely someone who missed Damion’s session earlier in the day.  Phil clarified that Lombardi Edition would have Teamworks and Websphere (and DB2 Express) in the box from the get-go.  He repeated the commitment to make this a black box so you don’t have a bunch of ramping to do.  June 30: only Websphere, but all the DB’s will be supported.  In the near-term after that, the custom installer will be more open about app server.  But, Phil’s commitment to the audience was that they would make the longterm administrative experience with embedded Websphere much better and less expensive because you’ll spend less managing the middleware.  Craig added that support for Lombardi Edition includes support for the app server tier as well – if you go with another app server, you have to get that app server support somewhere else.  You’ll have one source of support if you go with the embedded approach.

Phil added that there was a common misunderstanding in the market: that the reason Teamworks went to JBoss embedded was to get to JBoss.  In fact, he argues, it was to get a simpler experience for Teamworks (now Websphere Lombardi Edition), and it turns out JBoss had an attractive price (free).  The Lombardi motivation was to simplify administration and licensing.  To own it – “just like we own versioning in Teamworks 7. Simplify Simplify Simplify.”  Tongue-in-cheek, Phil cracks: “It turns out that now, Websphere is available to us at very affordable rates.”

Another customer asked why so few sessions at IBM Impact for Lombardi – because there were lots of sessions on BPM and SOA, but Lombardi is a small component.  Craig responded that it is a huge event, and a very large company, and we had less than 90 days to incorporate Lombardi into the event – so the number of sessions does not adequately reflect its importance in their strategy, but that no one should read into this a lack of commitment to the platform.  In fact, Craig says that in the followup events to impact-  2-3 day versions of this event, and 1 day versions of this event, all over the world – Lombardi features front-and-center in these conversations and events.  I can’t quite capture how sincerely Craig came across in this discussion, and how credible.  It would have been *very* easy for him to blow it on this question and lose the audience, but I think people were convinced.

There were a couple detailed questions about upgrading, and Phil reassured that switching app servers isn’t as hard as switching databases (but also, there’s no need to switch databases if you don’t want to).  I can attest to this – Teamworks / Lombardi Edition is easy to run across different app servers – I frequently have a Webpshere, Weblogic, and JBoss version of Teamworks pointing at the same database instance… Phil also reinforced that there is a dedicated team building the upgrade path.

Differentiated Support

Another question asked about LODA and Support and how that changes with the merger.  Craig chimed in that the expectation is that it not change.  LODA will continue into IBM, and is considered one of the best practices – on demand assistance for developers.  IBM inner circle thinks this is something IBM can learn from Lombardi.  That’s a great shout-out to the LODA team – and to a business model that was pioneered by a small number of us within professional services at Lombardi back in 2004.  Toby Cappello and Lance Gibbs and Wes Chung started selling it and had a version 1 formulated, and later, Greg Harley and I picked up the business and added technical deliverables and renewed emphasis on subscriptions to the mix, and from there the business really flourished.  Great to hear that IBM values this service as well.  The team deserves it.

Another customer asked about whether there were plans to support file level versioning.  Phil Gilbert took this one – and the answer was “No.”  As he put it:

“To the extent that you can check in your model to clear case, you can do that. We’ve been doing versioning the same way for 40 years. But in model-based development, that doesn’t work that well.  What is the workflow and process around versioning?  None of those filesystem source systems leveraged model-driven development.  Explicit linkages available are too important to throw away for versioning.  Its dependency management.[....] We’re the best process app dev environment because of our versioning paradigm…”

So no, no file-based versioning thank you very much.  “We think it is differentiating, and we think it is the right way to go.”

Do you still have the passion for BPM?

Another customer related how impressed she was with the people at Lombardi and their passion for BPM.  The business practice and technical talent is immense.  How does IBM keep that same passion going?

Criag’s response was that the Lombardi team’s passion is second-to-none.  IBM is offloading some of the work that someone else can do – and freeing up the resources Lombardi has to focus on the stuff that makes a difference in BPM.  This frees the Lombardi team to think further and deeper about BPM.  The other emphasis is on scaling, training, and generating passion in others.  And an emphasis on how to train more people to understand the business aspects of BPM.

Summing Up

I was impressed by how they handled it.  Conversations in the room carried on for some time after the talk was over.  I actually left the room last, along with Phil, as we both wrapped up other conversations we spent just a few minutes chatting about the themes from the day.  I think we both were feeling pretty invigorated by the level of interest in Lombardi, and how well the themes were resonating with customers. If I could sum up IBM’s belief:  BPM is going to be everywhere, and IBM wants in.

I’ll write more about my overall impressions of Impact, but suffice to say, this session was a great way to cap Day 1, and I felt like anyone at IBM Impact with an interest in BPM really missed out if they weren’t there for it.  Since there was no presentation or prepared material, this is probably the best coverage we’ll get of the conversation.

Editor’s Note: If you were one of the folks I paraphrased for your questions to the execs, and you don’t mind being named/attributed, drop me an email and I’ll update the text accordingly with your name and company affiliation.  I didn’t include it in this first draft because I think people asking questions in a non-recorded forum have a reasonable expectation of privacy.

This was a good session primarily to explain how WPS and iLog can integrate with and work well with Websphere Lombardi Edition.  Marc Smith showed how we could replace the typical Lombardi rules service with a call out to an iLog toolkit asset that had been developed by the iLog team.  Of course it is pretty easy drag-and-drop and it is something you can do today – it didn’t require a new release of Lombardi.  However, you’ll still develop your iLog rules in an iLog interface – not within the Lombardi authoring environment natively.

The same kind of integration was shown with lights-out processing in WPS.

We should note that this was run-time integration, and iLog, WPS, and Lombardi interfaces were all shown to model and edit the models they were each responsible for – but the demonstration showed how Teamworks can consume the assets of the other tools by a simple drag-and-drop interface at design time, presuming pre-built iLog rules or WPS models.

There was also a Blueprint-only session earlier but I missed it while I was prepping for my own session!

Toby Cappello ran through slides very quickly in his presentation, as he had a short time slot to cover a big topic.  The room stayed crowded for this talk though a few people trickled out, and people in the hall trickled in.  Felt like we needed a door man and a rope to do crowd control.

The point of the COE: drive greater business value.  Prioritize, select, and enable the highest value process improvements.  Align process measurement with business performance goals.  Ideally, reduce solutions implementation and management cost, and create a predictable and scalable operational performance experience for users.

Toby likes three-part phases, so naturally he has broken down COE into three phases, depending on where you are in your BPM journey.

BPM Journey: Validate -> Adopt    -> Transform
COE Journey: Define   -> Develop -> Execute

But, he says, something happens at some point along this journey – you hit the wall.  It looked so much easier in the sales cycle! (He gets a laugh for that one)  This is the time for an intervention – organizational drag has kicked in, as you have expanded outside your original core of believers and early adopters.  You need help to extend out into the organization and break down those barriers (note, the Sirva CIO Erik Keller’s presentation on their roll-out of APEX reinforces this – they ran into a big stumbling block as they rolled out to users in sites 2 and 3, but were able to address their concerns and bring everyone into alignment).  Filling that gap between capability and demand is hard – and that’s often when you need to bring in some outside help (consultants rejoice).

How long does it take? Toby says the truth is, the journey takes 1-2 years for organizational change and adoption.  I agree. Some orgs adopt faster -but that is because they already had the right organizational culture, they’re just adding tech to it.  But if process and improvement aren’t part of the culture, this takes a lot more time.  Someone asked if there was a good case study, and Toby’s answer was that typically we put people directly in touch with other customers who have done it (and he called out a few who were in the room).  I think if someone wants to write this case study on organizational change- go talk to Disney and Allianz, but also talk to Navin Kekane at Stubhub who does a great job describing the organizational drivers and shifts they underwent to become a process-focused organization.  Note: it isn’t 1-2 years to deploy, its 1-2 years to make organizational changes to support ongoing change.

Unfortunately there wasn’t time to get into a discussion of how social media and collaborative technologies (including Blueprint) might disrupt the traditional governance and control role of COEs.  It would have been good to give this topic a refresh based on what has changed in the last year in the landscape of technology everyday people are using.