bpmCamp's patio

Last week Stanford hosted the first “bpmCamp” for Lombardi Teamworks and Blueprint practitioners.  By all accounts the event was a success – sold out at 40 participants – and with some truly great interactive sessions and discussion that is hard to have at a bigger forum.  Our Stanford hosts did a wonderful job hosting, including all of the little details like name badges and maps, but also helping organize logistics around lodging, transportation, parking, and providing an excellent facility in which to have our meetings.  Encina Commons is one of the older buildings at Stanford – sandstone and arches and wide covered patios, surrounded by lots of green – a perfect atmosphere for sharing.  We were lucky to get a reprieve from the rain for 2 days so that we could really enjoy the surroundings (and make the occasional trip for espresso).  Thank you to Lombardi, and Apex (and bp3) for sponsoring the dinner on Thursday night at Pampas – an all-you-can-eat Brazilian feast.

The lawn outside Encina Commons / bpmCamp

And thanks most of all to everyone who came and led a session, contributed their opinions, reached out to their colleagues and made new friends and contacts.  What a great experience.

We’ll follow-up with a series of blog posts based on bpmCamp to share some of the content with a chance to step back and editorialize a bit. The biggest takeaway that I had was that the community needed an event like this to step out of the daily grind of delivering processes and process improvement – to see what others are doing, to see the forest for the trees.  Sessions ranged in size from 5 people to 40, and discussions were often lively…

bpmCamp in Session

Meanwhile, we’ll start with a short session from Friday morning, when we had a cameo appearance from Phil Gilbert, giving his impressions of the acquisition and the plans for Lombardi products for the next 6 months.  There’s a clear focus on proving that they can deliver and innovate “even faster” after the acquisition, as Phil put it.  And they have set themselves some very high, but relevant goals.  In particular, making it as easy to install Teamworks on Websphere as it is to install Teamworks on JBoss today (cur

Phil Gilbert holds forth @ bpmCamp

rently JBoss is your option if you want an embedded appserver), and making upgrades to Teamworks 7 a truly good experience.  The goal is to bring the ease of use of Teamworks to IBM’s customers, and to leverage key IBM technologies but expose them in ways that let you cut through the noise and focus on delivery. It was a motivating message for our bpmCamp crowd because clearly Phil’s attention is still on the BPM game, and this prioritization will keep Teamworks relevant for the audience.  Knowing the developers that IBM/Lombardi are putting on this project and upgrade paths, I also know that this is a crack team of some of the best engineers at Lombardi, which says something about the commitment from the executive team.

Someone in the audience noted afterward that this was a more tactical set of goals than they expected to hear from Phil- who usually talks in terms such as “the Second Decade of BPM“… but if the focus on the tactical reveals that they believe the tactical may BE the strategic right now, I think its a welcome shift-  because truly, what’s holding people back from BPM is not the knowledge that it has value – the press and blogs are full of information on that score – but rather, its the “getting started” effort required that slows things down.  The easier a software company can make the transition from “business problem conceived” to “BPM project underway” the more likely it is that BPM software is applied to that problem instead of sticky notes and a change order on an ERP system scheduled for 2 years out.

There were so many more great sessions to report on, so there will be more posts here about the sessions.  One thing anyone reading this can do for me that will help – is let us know if you’d be interested in attending a future bpmCamp, and if you would travel to attend, or if not, where you’re located so we can judge where we have critical mass for another event.

Thanks again to everyone who participated, and watch this space for more information!

Also, lest you think that BPM was the only educational opportunity at Stanford last week, I stopped by the Cantor Museum for Visual Arts and took a few photos of Rodin sculptures – the collection is the second largest in the world and nearly every piece was on display:

the infamous "Gates of Hell"

Lest there be any doubt that BPM skills are in demand, Tom Baeyens has pointed out that SimplyHired stats claims the average jBPM salary in CA is US$114,000.  Not bad.  Lombardi BPM shows similar numbers.  It supports what we’ve been saying all along – BPM skills are in demand, and it should be a great career for the next decade (or two, or more).  Its just hard to see “process” going away as an important concept in business. So what the SimplyHired stats tell us is that the technical side of BPM is in demand – regardless of the tool set, there is a mismatch between supply and demand right now that is going to take time to fill – and knowing the technical side of the coin is only half of it – the other half being the business process side of things.  I can tell you from experience that not all great technical people have an interest in business process, and not all of them can make the adjustment to focusing on the process over the technology.

In the meantime, your best bet to get up to speed is to get a job that will let you learn on the job, attend training, etc.  There really aren’t any formal education programs at universities that are widely recognized (although there are a small number of universities that have a small number of opportunities to learn about business processes).  There are classes you can take from the software vendors or the likes of Bruce Silver, and there are certification programs-  but no sense paying for certification until you know what you’re doing.  Once you get started, then try to take advantage of the many resources on the net, and resources like bpmCamp.

Well, as Sandy Kemsley pointed out, this deal closed fast.

Equally quickly, Lombardi shows how a SaaS product can catch up to the news (or at least start to), by releasing Blueprint to Websphere Business Modeler integration today.

Good start to the new relationship – I just wish all the products were as easily rationalized!

We’re partners of Lombardi, and we’re avid users of their BPM software, as it is one of our preferred tools.  And we use the coach designer all the time, but I’d like to take a moment to propose a “Top Ten” list for improvements I’d like to see in the coach designer and UI generally.  The coach designer was originally conceived to have the product better support the agile methodology of the professional services team at Lombardi – and it succeeded in that.  It makes building UIs that display, edit, and leverage process data trivial to build.  However, like any good old friend, it also has room for improvement, and as friends, we’d like to put our ideas down on paper (bytes?) for what Lombardi/IBM should consider in their roadmap for the Coach Designer.

1. Either adopt a 3rd party standard UI framework for component-izing UI controls, or add component-building capabilities to the Coach Designer.  Presently, you can build template controls, but they aren’t first order library components (Teamworks authors will know what I’m referring to).
2. Provide controls and control-flow for building mashup UIs.  This is already possible via a html controls in Teamworks, but too much of the code ends up inside the coach, rather than abstracted in the service layer.  Intalio’s mashup editor is one example to look at, but there are lots of others (including inside IBM), which could be leveraged. I think the key is to consider how to make this interact with the service layer in Teamworks, because the end-product to display in the UI may depend on a series of external calls rather than just one client-side javascript call-out.
3. Ajax as a native capability.  Sure, there are a couple of controls that can be populated or pre-populated via Ajax calls to Teamworks services.  But the Ajax calls need to be modeled in a way that can be seen in the Activity/Service modeler.  The way to make really rich Ajax interfaces currently obscures a lot of what is going on in javascript code.
4. If you look at some of the open source solutions out there- they are working to support existing forms development frameworks, rather than developing their own.  This might be the path of the future.
5. Perhaps easy integration of GWT, YUI, etc. so that they can be first class components in the Coach Designer.  After all, GWT is heavily used by blueprint, so we know Lombardi has the in-house talent on the toolkit to put it to work.
6. Access to tasks should be opened up considerably – available via RSS feed, or via twitter. SMS text to my phone.  Give me options.  No more notification-by-email or go-to-the-browser-page.
7. The process instance could be viewed more as a stateful webservice, which I can manipulate through web services calls even more than I can today through the external activity interface.  These external mechanisms of advancing the process should interact seamlessly with internal mechanisms (for example, if I push a close-activity event from a webservice, it shouldn’t require the model to be different than if a user closed that activity from a Teamworks Coach – and I should be able to force the process to soak up the outputs from the active activity rather than ignore them).
8. Break the portal up into component pieces that are accessible as UI fragments or as webservices.  But don’t just replicate the exact portal functionality for each of those pieces – because some of that functionality really doesn’t make sense once you separate from the portal at large.  Really think about the API someone would want, not just the API required to support the portal/coach functionality today – there is a gap there. (technically the portal isn’t a coach… but maybe it should be)
9. Make it easier to skin the Coach Designer with whatever look and feel makes sense.  Currently its easy to change color scheme, but not very easy to change structure and size of elements, etc.
10. Keep investing.  If you make the right investments, you can get a multiplier effect – meaning, the investment will give process authors more power over the UI, at less development and maintenance cost, to the development team.  If you make the wrong investments, coach designer will become a closed system incapable of building the right kinds of UI the processes require.  But no investment could be worst of all – as no investment in the Coach Designer could mean that customers and consultants abandon it altogether as the cost of building UI’s outside of Teamworks continues to decline as the tech improves.  The right investments will let Teamworks ride on the coattails of these outside technologies at minimal cost.

I’m sure other people have their own ideas.  And I could write a similar list for other products.  Maybe at bpmCamp next week other attendees will have better ideas than mine for their top ten!  Welcome your top-ten comments below!

Hint: it wasn’t about tech, or product overlap, or filling product gaps.

Brian proposes that the acquisition is actually about market, channel, and the great unknown (the end game).  The market is big and growing fast, and the companies within this market are small and growing fast (even the laggards).  This inevitably ends in some kind of merger frenzy or pileup (check out what happened to the EAI vendors 10 years ago, or CRM vendors 10-15 years ago).  Brian claims none of the technical issues matter – I’m not sure they don’t matter at all, but he makes a pretty strong claim that they might be irrelevant next to the market and business forces at play.

Second, he points out that the channel strategy is key.  As a Lombardi partner, we can attest that Lombardi was putting a fair number of partners into the field, and doubling down on that strategy in 2009.  We attended a very diverse partner conference in April that was affirmation of the strategy for both Lombardi and the partners.  But the bigger issue is – IBM has a massive channel of sales and partnerships through which to push product and solutions.  In the 90’s I saw IBM acquire Tivoli, which I believe was about $100M in revenue at the time, and in less than two years, it was generating $700M in revenue out of that business unit.  IBM can definitely turn the crank on certain software categories (past performance being no guarantee of future returns).  If Lombardi BPM gains a certain mindshare within that channel, then IBM will reap huge returns off of this acquisition.  Brian argues that this is the key driver of the acquisition.

Third, the end game – Brian argues that because no one knows what it will be, it makes sense to place more than one bet.  Again, he makes a compelling business argument for why investors (and companies) won’t be satisfied with just one offering that touches on the BPM space.

Its a good read, highly recommended, and I’ve also cross-referenced it in my running blog post on the acquisition.

Lombardi just posted a thankyou to their customers on their blog. Kudos to Lombardi for a 10 year run in which they had an out-sized impact on a big, emerging market.  Best of luck to IBM and Lombardi moving forward.

I’ve long been familiar with server-side Javascript because, while at Lombardi, we used Rhino’s javascript engine on the server for all kinds of server-side computing tasks.

Why would we use server-side javascript?  Well, recently Read-Write Web has produced an article about the “return” of Server-Side Javascript.  As the article proposes, this idea was often derided in years past, but it makes a lot of sense for BPM, and for applications in general:

Point 1: “Given that you’re already using it in the browser, why not stick it in the server too? One language all the way down makes it easier for a single programmer to work on either side of the wire; there’s less of a mental shift.”

Point 2: “There’s also a promising reuse story for this “dual-side Javascript” scenario. Take form validation for example. Right now, it’s common to write the same logic in two different languages. In Javascript, you write a validator to give the user immediate feedback inside the browser, and in a language like PHP, you write a validator to ensure data integrity once the form data has been uploaded to the server. But once you switch to Javascript on the server, you just need to write a single validation routine at both ends.”

Point 3:  “Javascript performance has also moved forward in leaps and bounds, thanks to browser competition.”  Seriously, javascript performance has improved about 40x over the old days.

Point 4:  “Server-side Javascript also dovetails nicely the new breed of NOSQL databases. Being web-native, these databases tend to communicate in HTTP, and in some cases JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) is the message format.”  In other words, you can already do these things with Javascript libraries rather than rolling your own code… HTML 5 just furthers this confluence.

Point 4:  its browser roots make Javascript well-suited for responding to events and manipulating the DOM… We didn’t use this in our BPM solutions but there are interesting implications for the core technology: “With Comet, the server holds on to the connection for a while, and continues to stream out information intermittently to the browser. The typical example is a two-way chat – as soon as one guy says something, the Comet server sends the message to the other guy. This is event-driven programming all over again, and compared to the usual suspects on the server, Javascript is well-placed to support this paradigm.”  Node is another example of this kind of design pattern of keeping a stream open for future events, and writing out new information to the browser.

Finally, Javascript solutions are well-suited for porting to the cloud – they can be generally easily isolated from the OS, hardware, etc., and replicated across identical server instances or virtual instances (or even run in a multi-tenant mode).

Its interesting that a language that was once only deemed suitable for doo-dads in the browser, is now becoming the primary language of interesting web applications (in many cases, thanks to underlying tech like GWT, extJS, YUI, etc.).  In some cases Java is the primary language and the javascript is generated (GWT) but that isn’t always the case.

It is a little known advantage of Lombardi’s approach to BPM that javascript is the server-side scripting language-  the integration to Java is trivial, as is access to XML, and XML-based APIs.  And its convenient that most everyone knows Javascript and there are easy online resources to use to pick up syntactic details (e.g. www.w3schools.com ).

There’s been a lot of coverage of what it means for IBM to buy Lombardi.  Jaisundar proposed that this would upset the balance of power and cause more acquisitions… But perhaps the side effect he (and others) didn’t foresee was the positioning of the remaining BPM vendors (pureplay or otherwise) for the benefit of their suitors.

First we have Appian’s CEO posting here.  I don’t blame him for putting a stake in the ground that Appian is going to win, and positioning that the only two vendors left that matter are Appian and Pega.  Savvion might disagree, as would a few others, but nevermind.  He states that they’re the only ones strong enough to survive (by which, I would suppose he means financial strength, but he leaves that as an exercise for the reader’s imagination.  I don’t blame him for slagging IBM as killing innovation – in any acquisition like this, that is a very real possibility, and will determine whether this is a successful buy or not (at least, for folks who don’t work for IBM).  But methinks he doth protest too much, and may be trying to make sure that potential suitors remember that Appian still exists in case they want to get in the game by buying something.

Next, we have ActionBase, one of my favorite non-traditional BPM offerings.  In a previous post Jacob Ukelson made the argument that Sharepoint should be a better BPM tool than it is.  Now he argues that Sharepoint + Actionbase is that BPM dream team:  unstructured content + unstructured process… If that isn’t a pitch for Microsoft buying a nice Sharepoint add-on I don’t know what is.  Analysts are frothy thinking about how Microsoft or SAP might want to counter IBM’s move, and this is one option.

I’m not sure that unstructured process + unstructured data is the dream of every IT shop, but it is certainly a combination prevalent in many processes and organizations.  And of course those two offerings could work well together.

So it looks like everyone is putting on their finest Holiday Sweaters and looking to make a good impression for their potential sweethearts.  It’ll be interesting to see if there really is a wave of acquisitions or if this is it.

Its the creative destruction process of capitalism at work.  I just hope BPM doesn’t get lost in the woods in the process.

Rashid Khan, formerly of Ultimus, asks the question:  is BPM the jack of all trades and master of none?

It is certainly a fair question.  As he points out, BPM is broad, maybe overly broad.  And he also points out that based on the punditry, you would expect BPM to be a much bigger market than it is today.  Of course, part of the problem is that many companies, wanting to leverage the BPM banner, will relabel what they do as “BPM” and this can help stifle the growth of the real BPM providers.

He then outlines four challenges for vendors:

1. The market, defined as the sum total of all the things BPM can address, is very large.
2. No single vendor or product can address the entire market. And if they try to do so the product becomes bulky, expensive and hard to maintain or upgrade.
3. Customers have a very hard time discerning what BPM solution is best suited for their needs. And if there is one product that will suit their needs, it is unlikely to meet some other needs in the same organization.
4. Vendors are unable to say no to opportunities that potential customers define as BPM but do not fit in the profile of what the vendor can deliver. BPM products always have recourse to customization via programming which theoretically can be made to do anything, albeit at the cost of agility. So vendors pursue opportunities that may not make sense.

Its hard to argue with these points – points 1, 3, and 4 I can agree with without much reservation.  And #2, I would say it is actually a tough choice for the vendors:  either bulk up the product to address these markets, or keep the product more focused but leave a lot of work for the customer to adapt the product to their needs. Either path is risky.

Rashid proposes that vendors focus on horizontal slices of BPM (e.g. modeling, or workflow automation) and interoperability, in order to solve the focus problem, and in order to help customers answer the “what does it do” question…

But this conundrum affecting BPM affects the software business as a whole.  CRM companies wonder if they should also be sales process companies, and vice versa.  MRP companies became ERP companies.  ERP companies became “Stack” vendors.  And before ERP was well-defined, there was a lot of jockeying for what was “in” or “out” of ERP.

The key economic forces compelling software companies to broaden their offerings are:

1. The need to avoid getting flanked by a competitor who does your focused product, but also does other products.
2. The need to flank your competitors in similar fashion.
3. The need to get the most value out of your sales force overhead that you can – more products to sell means that the sales rep has more opportunities to take advantage of their good relationships by selling more software.

These are essentially sales-efficiency arguments-  you have spent a lot of money on your sales force.  So what you can you do to extract more expected revenue from them?  Either:

1. Increase the odds of winning a deal (flanking/positioning)
2. Increase the lifetime revenue per customer (more software products/licenses to sell)
3. Increase average sale per transaction (more software products/licenses to sell)

So these forces are pushing software companies to broaden their offering with either features or products. Simultaneously, the approach of having a narrow focus is risky:  if you can’t create a compelling differentiating advantage for your horizontal slice, then you can get disintermediated quite rapidly and easily.  But if you CAN build this sustainable competitive advantage, and get the market to recognize it, then you can build a nice moat around your product line and really benefit from your focus.

The other trick is – say you only sell the optimization piece – and it is designed to work with various BPM tools – if you are early in a market’s development, you could face the very real risk that the customer isn’t even sold on BPM software yet, let alone your specific tool.  You still have the problem of explaining BPM to them, and getting them to realize that it could be of benefit.

I think as the BPM market gets larger, there will be interesting horizontal and vertical opportunities for software companies to say “look, here is the better mousetrap for optimization” and to then show how it is better than the existing solutions and get it sold as a value-added piece of the puzzle.  This is (roughly) how scheduling software was briefly the darling of enterprise software in the 90’s – before all of the fast-growing scheduling companies hit the wall and were acquired by larger ERP companies.

It looks like BPM may already be big enough for a good horizontal BPM modeler to come along and steal the show – but one wonders if that play will be a commercial or an open source play?  Similarly, a process engine could OEM into other BPM software vendors, if the market gets big enough.  But I think that expecting customers to piecemeal these solutions together is asking too much these days of their lean and mean IT departments.  The integration will still have to happen with the vendors.

What’s really interesting is, if BPM vendors have trouble with the broad scope of BPM… what does that say about the vendors who consider BPM only a checkbox on their list of 1000 products?  They’ve got to compartmentalize if they’re going to realize the focus they need.  Or, I guess you could buy Phil Gilbert and Lombardi to get that “vision and focus” thing you’ve been missing… I’ve always thought the main barrier to stack vendors “getting” BPM was (a) a lack of focus, and (b) lack of believing that such focus was necessary or worth it, and really it isn’t a lack of technical know-how or capability.

So, any BPM vendors out there following Rashid’s advice and getting more focused, more narrow?  or staying narrowly focused?

I’m pleased to announce that Apex Consulting and bp3 will be co-sponsoring a free dinner for attendees of bpmCamp 2010 @ Stanford on Thursday, January 28, 2010. We want to welcome anyone who can attend bpmCamp to also join us for dinner and conversation afterward.  Thanks to Dave Knapp for offering to co-sponsor dinner with us, we’re looking forward to it!

Location and logistics will be announced before the event.

And if you’re reading about the news that IBM acquired Lombardi, not to worry:  bpmCamp is on, and there’s even more reason to be attending now, to keep abreast of the latest developments and make connections with a broader community of practitioners.

The news hit the wire this morning (early for me, as I’m sitting in San Francisco this morning).  I got a phone call at about 5:20am PST to give me the news (thanks, I think?!).

The Lombardi press release touts a shared belief in customer success, a good product and culture fit, as well as good ole market opportunity:

“Any discussion on business improvement inevitably leads to improving the processes that are at the heart of every company,” said Craig Hayman, general manager, IBM Application and Integration Middleware. “Recognizing this, IBM has strengthened its presence and investments in business process and integration software to meet these growing client demands. Lombardi fills out our company’s portfolio in this key area.”

Lombardi already supports Websphere, and  was an early adopter of the app server in the BPM space (I can testify, I was there with Lombardi’s first Websphere clients).  In Austin, we’ve certainly seen a history of IBM successfully acquiring and expanding software companies that were acquired (Tivoli and Webify come to mind).

I’m sure there will be more news as the day(s) go on, I’ll try to just keep this post updated with the latest, unless something comes up that deserves an entire post on the subject.

Congratulations to the Lombardi team, who have been breaking ground in the BPM space for years now, and yet staying focused on making customers successful, not just on the latest bell or whistle on the product road map.  I think there’s a good chance, depending on the structure of the takeover, that some of Lombardi’s DNA will rub off on the BPM-focused parts of IBM.  I can see the effect Webify has had on IBM’s efforts, and I always thought Lombardi’s and Webify’s products would make for an interesting combination. Now we’ll get to find out, I guess!

More to come…

IBM press release here.

UPDATE: 12/16/2009 7:20am PST
Keep up to date with what the analysts (and others) are saying on Twitter:

And then we have a post from Phil Gilbert on “The Second Decade of BPM“. Phil’s take on where BPM is headed, with an interesting look back:

I can’t begin to convey the impact this will have on how and where BPM will be practiced, going forward. In the blurb above on this blog site (which was posted when I started this blog in 2005), I said that by 2010 process will be the primary prism through which large companies view themselves; and that by 2020 the management of process will be “second nature.” The first of those milestones has come to pass: process is not simply the way business operates itself, but manages itself.

Phil has a pretty good sense of the big picture.

Second, because Lombardi has focused on the business user, we have also focused on how to engage and support the business user. The work we’ve done on culture, change management, governance and BPM methodology is the best in the industry. Lombardi University and its role-based curriculum, along with tiered certifications and advanced mentoring, means that Lombardi can help IBM scale their business customers more quickly into the world of BPM. Lombardi’s On-Demand Assistance program is also built from the ground up to allow fledgling BPM teams built on business-first principles to still have a technical safety net under them.

This quote illustrates for me what I hope Lombardi can bring to IBM. A better understanding of how to support the business and help them achieve success via BPM, and a better sense of what BPM really could mean for the business world.

UPDATE 12/16/2009 8:45am PST
Austin Startup is carrying the standard press release.

And ebizQ has already launched a forum topic on the subject.

UPDATE 11:35am PST: More great coverage and viewpoints:
Dennis Byron discusses the acquisition, and is focused primarily on eliminating one more option from potential customers, and the inexorable force of consolidation.

Redmonk gives props to the Austin software and enterprise scene, as well as to the deal-making by IBM. The big question is how well IBM can incorporate Lombardi without losing its DNA.

Miko Matsumura posits that this might have been a firesale based on the language of the press release. Could be, Miko has more experience with this than I do. Regardless, I think the timing was good for IBM because I expect 2010 to be a big year for BPM software.

Sandy Kemsley chimes in with the best run-down of the analyst call.

Update EOD 12/16/2009:
David Moser of Australia weighs in. He points out which communities might win or lose, based on this deal going through, in particular which customers. But he also points out:

And with what should be a significant boost to their market, some of the biggest winners could be Lombardi service providers. Watch out for skills shortages.

I happen to agree, that service providers (e.g. BP3) could be well positioned to benefit because, no doubt IBM can sell more of the same product with its much larger sales channel. It takes time for people to ramp up on a BPM product. For a time I expect there will be exacerbated shortages of Lombardi BPM skills, but of course we’ll try to help as best we can!

Bruce Silver also comments on the deal. The tone of Bruce’s post (and some others) is a bit somber – I think some of the folks out there were rooting for a Lombardi IPO or for a deal that made it more clear that Lombardi would still be providing leadership in the BPM space from a “vision” perspective. There is an emerging consensus among outsiders that “departmental” is a losing strategy. I think if it is a pricing/marketing strategy it has legs – potentially target lots of smaller installations to service departments, but if it is reflected in technical direction of the product it could be a real problem. There’s no reason the tech can’t scale much bigger than a department, but its still up to IBM-Lombardi to decide what the market positioning and pricing breakpoints are.

Tony Baer’s take on the acquisition titled “Early thoughts on IBM buying Lombardi“. His emphasis on Lombardi’s chief advantage to IBM is its simplicity – making it possible to address the business directly within the enterprise. He’s looking for the integration of Blueprint and Blueworks to be a good indicator of how this purchase is going to work out.

UPDATE 12/17/2009: Well the blogs keep rolling in with new thoughts or analysis.

Jaisundar’s take is that blueprint is a key piece of the puzzle by widening the user base for BPM and creating a demand funnel. So much comes down to how IBM handles it and whether they keep the Lombardi DNA, while adding to it their massive sales channel synergies.

Meanwhile, Richard Watson has a couple of witty posts on the subject of showers (listing the # of bpm products and related products IBM has purchased as an embarrassment of riches and portfolio overlaps – but also, market clout. In a previous post, he makes the best statement about this subject: “If IBM wants to become the leader in BPM, they need to get out of the data center and start thinking like business people.” – This is exactly why people are excited about the merger, and why they’re worried. Lombardi is not stuck in the data center mindset. Will that business-focus be lost in the merger? That’s the real fear.

And Derek Miers, well-respected for his thoughtfulness on business process and business improvement, took a look at this merger and concludes:

While the choice of dance partner was a little surprising, the desire for a liquidity event in the Lombardi management team was there to see long ago. They touted an IPO around this time, but in the current market that was always going to be difficult.

IBM brings the broad base and ability to grow. Lombardi brings market cachet / credibility that is hard to quantify – but everyone in BPM knows Lombardi and they’re well-respected. Derek’s take on Lombardi’s success:

As I have said to many other vendors, when people buy BPM products, they buy the promise of success. And I am sure Lombardi’s success in the market is as much down to that aspect as it is their leading technology stack. They help their customers understand how they will succeed in meeting their business objectives (rather than touting the beauty of their technology stack).

That’s exactly the point – the culture that Lance and I (and execs at Lombardi) tried to create in the services organization was around business objectives and customer success. Something we’ve endeavored to continue at bp3.

Update EOD 12/17/2009:
Clay Richardson of Forrester Research writes up his analysis, which includes:

Ultimately, this deal centers on the need for IBM to develop a more compelling story for the business. In many ways it is further validation of the IT-to-BT transition that we are seeing within the enterprise.

IBM already had their story down for the CIO and needed to develop a more compelling story for the VP of Operations, and the VP of Customer Service, and the VP of Procurement – in other words IBM needed to establish a stronger voice into the business. And this is what Lombardi does best as a leader in the human-centric BPM space.

If he’s right, this is good news for Lombardi and its customer-base (and prospective customers). He follows up his points with Phil Gilbert’s plan to push the envelope with Blueprint even further “to collaborate on scoping and discovery for enterprise process initiatives.” As he says, IBM is weak in that area, and there’s little overlap. His basic take is that this is a capability buy as much as a technical buy. If he’s right, it bodes well for the future of BPM, or at least the future of IBM BPM!

Update EOD 12/18/2009: You thought we were done with the updates? you were wrong!

Dr. Diaz, on the IBM BPM Blueworks Blog, gives another IBM angle on the acquisition – conveying a sense of confidence and positivity in the IBM strategy.

John Reynolds, of Lombardi and soon IBM, writes a pretty good defense of the “Department” positioning – after all, what is “bottom-up” BPM if it isn’t a department level solution that scales up to meet your enterprise strategy, vs. the top-down BPM approaches that IBM has been using so far:

It’s not really a technology issue – Lombardi’s solution scales quite nicely. It’s a methodology issue… Some tools really enhance the “Top Down” (Enterprise) approach, while others really enhance the “Bottom Up” (Departmental) approach. Offering both seems like a pretty good idea when you think about it.

Update 12/21/2009:
Jennifer Dubow (@jennifer_dubow) posts a link to an IBM F.A.Q. on the Lombardi acquisition. Hits all the high points with no muss, no fuss.

Update 12/22/2009
Neil Ward-Dutton of MWD Advisors recaps the responses of vendors, which generally provide for fun reads. Of course, if you read their blogs without, somehow, realizing their corporate affiliation you might fall for their bias without correcting for it. Its only natural for competitors to see this as an opportunity to try to steal a march while IBM / Lombardi are distracted by integrating two companies – but having been on the other side of this – it didn’t often work as well as we would hope – often the buyer was able to keep the momentum going in the 12-18 month timeframe.

Update 12/29/2009 Jim Sinur weighs in with Power Vendors vs. Pure Plays, positing that the Power Vendors are catching up. I don’t see the catch-up that Jim is mentioning, but I do see catch-up-by-aggregration and the question is whether any of the remaining pure-plays have enough heft to out-innovate the big guys. Obviously small vendors with a tight focus can continue to outpace bigger players in their niche, but the wide Pure Play field has been thinned with this acquisition…

Update 12/30/2009In the ProcessMaker Blog, Brian makes one of the most compelling statements about why IBM bought Lombardi (and although he didn’t address why IBM bought other Business* companies – e.g. iLog, FileNet, Cognos, Webify, etc. – the same logic applies quite well). The short version: it is about addressing markets, not technology. And if Lombardi addresses a particular market, and is scaling, then IBM can plug that into their vast sales and partner channel and really wring value out of it. The thesis rests on the assumption that the BPM market is hot – but that’s a safe one.

Update 01/06/2010 The debate spills over into 2010. Neil Ward-Dutton reprises his previous review with a more considered analysis and the summary is that perhaps IBM really is buying Lombardi to get a better “business-facing” solution – but that they just don’t want to admit that blatantly in their external positioning. Its an interesting read.

Update 01/08/2010Gartner’s Janelle Hill and Jim Sinur report on the acquisition for Gartner. Basically they advise getting ready for a move to Websphere if you aren’t on it already, in a timeframe of two years, and tout the BPM DNA acquired in the Lombardi acquisition.

Travel logistics have been updated, click here for details.  The short version:  we’ve secured a discount to the Stanford Guest House, which has the advantage of being on shuttle routes and being on campus… and being highly affordable.  But there are lots of other options in the area as well.

We’ve also posted some directions from the airports, and recommendations on trains and shuttle routes.

See you at bpmCamp!

Lombardi just released the December update, and it takes the previous enhancements a bit further:

• More analysis visualization work was done to make this more intuitive.
• Better printing options (print to PDF is actually even more useful than printing to a printer in most cases)
• More user administration options (this will get increasingly important as the number of Blueprint users and collaborators continues to grow.  I wonder at what point it will make sense for Lombardi to look at incorporating something like Conformity into the solution.

Having used blueprint a fair amount lately with some more complicated models (not large, mind you, but more complicated), I can see a need for the process diagramming portion of Blueprint to get some help to make those diagrams more readable.  The models occasionally get to a point where they aren’t readable because of crossing lines or all the interesting points of reference being off-screen.  This is a problem in any modeling environment, but the reason it is so noticeable in Blueprint is because it has all this auto-draw functionality that does the layout for you – so when it doesn’t do what you want, you really notice it. Not sure if smarter layout algorithms or just more user-control is the answer.

Also it would be nice if comments were more obvious (visually) on the map, rather than requiring clicking on an item’s Details to find out if it has any comments.

Also, I recently used a brainstorming tool that a customer was using to model business entities and business entity lifecycles.  Although it is a completely different style of modeling than Blueprint, I believe it would fit in the mission of Blueprint to supply a good modeler for Business Entity Lifecycle.  Why?  Because often a process is working hand-in-hand with entities that have state, lifecycle, etc.  But BPMN and Process Maps are not good at accurately capturing what those states are (not just the states that trigger something in the process, but the whole universe of states).

Interesting post from ActionBase’s Jakob Ukelson, positing that we need a process warehouse to store all the process data we produce.

As he puts it:

That led me to start thinking about the notion of a process warehouse – something to akin to a data warehouse but for processes. This would seem to be the next thing up the food chain (from a business perspective) from a data warehouse. It would essentially be a system-of-record of actual business process usage in an organization. It would keep actual data on process execution (in other words not just a static process catalogue). That would provide the actual business context of data usage – valuable stuff especially in this day and age of increased regulation (and with the increased focus on Business Intelligence and Operational Excellence).

In fact, this is very much the line of thinking that led to Lombardi’s introduction of the “Performance Server” in its BPMS- a capability for tracking interesting process data in context of the process.  It is a really powerful feature of Lombardi’s offering, and one that I’m surprised I don’t see in other vendors’ offerings.  Which also speaks to the fact that Lombardi could be pushing this message harder and investing more obviously in this key, differentiating aspect of its Teamworks suite.

Jakob notes that he couldn’t find references to “process warehouse” in the literature, despite the obvious relationship to a Data Warehouse – perhaps because Lombardi decided not to position the performance server as a “data warehouse”, and because other vendors just focused on the reporting side of the equation.  And it isn’t a data warehouse in the traditional sense – but maybe it should be.  Many customers feed the data from the performance server to their data warehouse for analysis, and the data is very high quality precisely because of its close correlation to the actual executing process.

Good to see someone else in the market thinking about these issues.

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

There was a pretty interesting case study for process collaboration shared on the Lombardi wiki recently.  Worth a quick read.  Tools like Blueprint are going to make this kind of story increasingly common.  Mostly people think of these BPM SaaS Collaboration tools as internal consensus builders, but in this case they’re using Blueprint to create consensus outside the four walls of the company, and to communicate or broadcast information as well.

With the new notification features in Blueprint, this will be an even easier use – I get quick summary emails of changes made in processes or projects that I’m watching.  Its a quick way to keep tabs on what’s going on, and fits SEARHC’s use case perfectly.

Also, I note on Lombardi’s blog that they have two finalists in the 2009 Global BPM Excellence Awards.   Congratulations to Lombardi and their customers on the achievement.

Following up on yesterday’s announcement of bpmCamp, here are the most crucial details for bpmCamp, to answer the most obvious questions you might be asking.  There are many more details to come, and all of this information will find its way into a bpmCamp landing page soon enough.

When is bpmCamp?

We’ve said it before, but it bears repeating.  We’ve selected a date for the first one:  January 28-29, 2010. Mark your calendars.

We hope to host additional bpmCamp events in the future, but this is the inaugural event. 

Where is the First bpmCamp? Who is the host?
Having the right host and location for any activity is crucial.  And having the right setting can really frame an event and set a backdrop for a good collaborative and rejuvenating experience.  I think that we have scored on both counts with our hosts for the inaugural bpmCamp.

I’m very proud to announce our host for bpmCamp:  Stanford University -  specifically, the Stanford SeRA BPM team. I’ve previously blogged about their potential contributions to the BPM community.  We share a vision of a more collaborative and communicative practitioner community and this is our collective attempt to initiate something that can really improve all of our efforts with BPM.

Lee and his boss Minh Nguyen are graciously donating the use of a beautiful conference setting for this event,* including A/V and wireless Internet.  We’ll send out exact location details as we get closer to the event, but our tentative location includes a fully equipped room and two fully-equipped breakout rooms.  The outdoor space surrounding is beautiful, and Stanford isn’t the kind of place that gets snow in January.  We couldn’t be happier about the location, and we couldn’t be happier about the spirit of collaboration and community our hosts and location will help foster for this event.

We’ll follow up with information about transportation logistics, hotel options, and other sundry details as we get closer to the event date, but in plenty of time to make plans with that information. Stanford has excellent transportation and lodging facilities surrounding it, so we’ll have some top notch options available to us.

*The free space is limited, however, and if we outgrow it based on interest, we’ll have to either limit attendance or explore other options on campus that will cost a bit more. Also, bpmCamp is not *sponsored* by Stanford – but Stanford is hosting the event, donating use of facilities, and Stanford BPM community members will be full participants in the event – Stanford is not endorsing the products or services of any of the sponsors or attendees of bpmCamp.

Where is the Landing Page?
The landing page for bpmCamp will be coming soon.  We’ll send out pointers to it when it is up.  In the meantime, you can keep up with announcements by following the RSS feed for the bp3 blog, or by bookmarking posts tagged with bpmCamp.

Who’s Invited to bpmCamp?
The goal is to have a high-quality gathering of people who know the products well and are looking to collaborate and exchange ideas with peers and colleagues.  We’re inviting customer / users of Lombardi products (Teamworks and Blueprint) who participate in deployments to attend, and we’re extending an invitation to Lombardi to participate as well.  If you’re a Lombardi or bp3 partner interested in attending/sponsoring the unconference / bpmCamp, please reach out to us at the email address below.  If you’re an analyst or blogger and you think bpmCamp would benefit from your attendance, contact us.  If you don’t fit any of the above descriptions but still want to attend, drop us a line with your thoughts.  All attendees will need to register, once the registration site goes live.  If you’re interested in receiving an invitation to register, send us email at the bpmCamp email address.

How to contact us:
The best way is via the bpmCamp email address:

I want to Sponsor bpmCamp – how can I help?
If you think your organization would be interested in being a sponsor for bpmCamp, please contact us at the above email address and let us know you’re interested.

How Much Does it Cost to Attend?
We do expect to charge an attendance fee, which I believe is a departure from typical unconference protocol, but we’re doing so for a couple of reasons.  First, we have limited space, and we want to make sure attendees are serious about coming.  Second, if we need to go to a larger back-up space, that may require additional expenses (which attendance fees would defray).  We have a nominal fee in mind – primarily to cover catering meals- and are in the process of proving out the budget.  As soon as that process is complete, we’ll update with pricing information.  I don’t want to publish tentative numbers, but if you need to know ballpark just drop us a line and I’ll tell you privately what our working numbers are.

What will bpmCamp Cover?
We will beat the drum for topics and themes that we think will resonate.  However, we want this conference to cover topics that YOU care about.  In particular, we want to crowd-source topics for the event so that we can make sure we cover topics that attendees really care about.  The expectation is that the setting will be ripe for interaction among attendees during the sessions – that very few of the sessions will be presentation form rather than a loosely-moderated-discussion format.  However, we think it likely that attendees will be interested in a keynote address or two with Q&A to follow.  What kinds of things are fair game, you may be asking?  How about:

• Building Teamworks Coaches with YUI or GWT?
• Actual use of Optimizer in the wild?
• How to make Teamworks scale Really Big?
• Design reviews of actual Teamworks Processes?
• Making my Waterfall organization more Agile/Iterative?
• Tools for managing BPM projects (something better than MS Project??)
• <fill in the blank!>

We’ll have room for breakout sessions to accommodate more than one interest at a time.

Who is Coming?
We’ll release information about attendees and speakers as we get closer to the event date.  Expect the bp3 team and the Stanford SeRA team to be there!

Why focus on a single vendor? Why not another BPM product? Is this a Lombardi-sponsored Event?
In short, we want the specificity and detail that we can get from a single-vendor conference, but the independence of a crowdsourced event.  bpmCamp isn’t sponsored nor endorsed by Lombardi.   We chose Lombardi products because it is the BPM suite, and community, that we have the most extensive contacts with (and because we had already decided that a single-vendor conference could be interesting).

While we’ve worked with other tools and vendors, our network is not as deep in those communities.  If you work with another software vendor or geographic location and you’d like our help to run a similar event with you, get in touch with us, perhaps we can help.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why bpmCamp?

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

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

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

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

When is bpmCamp?

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

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

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

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

Lombardi’s October 2009 Blueprint Update was just announced.  Seemingly minor changes, but with interesting implications…

I would list them in reverse of the order Lombardi has listed them in their announcement:

First, increased notification options to keep you abreast of process modeling updates in your domain.  Of course, I’d like to see an RSS feed as an option rather than just email-focused options, but combining the email notifications with a good email filter and you can get about the same result.

Second, additional properties to track against the activities of your process.  Identifying systems, cycle time, cost, etc. That’s great… but by itself it is just documentation…

Third, leveraging those properties for heat-mapping and analysis of your process.  This is actually the whiz-bang feature of the release, and shows how a small incremental improvement on a good foundation can really change the way you look at a tool.  Prior to the analysis/heat-map, odds are you might just enter the data because it is “the right thing to do” to document the process for posterity (or for yourself).  Now you have a reason to do it that is for the analysis of improvement opportunities. I’ll point out, however, that without reading the release note, it would have been easy to open Blueprint and not even notice the “Analyze” button, and the fact that you can choose which attribute to base your heat map on is easy to miss.  But analysis mode works equally well on the process mapping view as well as the BPMN diagramming view.

What’s exciting about this release is that it offers a real reason to capture valuable data about your process… and it also opens the door for feeding information from your executing processes in Teamworks back to Blueprint for analysis (technical challenges remain, but it becomes increasingly obvious that this can be done).

We’ve covered Blueprint updates before.  For a summary, click here.

A pretty compelling demonstration of Google’s collaborative features in this article about “Gravity”, which is essentially a mashup of the ARIS modeler and Google’s Wave.

Its a great demonstration.  The biggest surprise, I think, was that this was something built by SAP- not exactly known for pioneering things like this.  There was a lot of buzz over twitter and blogs about how cool this is and how impressive it is – and I agree the demonstration is impressive – but maybe not for the reasons people think.  It isn’t, for example, an impressive bit of software engineering.  Mashups are, technically, relatively easy to execute compared to many other software applications – which is why there are so many mashups with Google Maps, for example.   I imagine Google has similar designs for Wave – and this is actually what I find impressive…but more on that in a minute. Right at this moment, Google Wave integration won’t help much – its not even in public Beta yet, so it isn’t something most companies or users could take advantage of.

If I’m not mistaken, what we’re seeing in this demo is that some folks at SAP have added collaborative features to their modeler (ARIS), by mashing with Google Wave.  That’s a great idea, and we can see how simple/straightforward it looks to be.  I can imagine other tools – Blueprint, Signavio, Appian Anywhere, Blueworks – can easily replicate this from a technical perspective.  There are some issues – like security- that these tools would have to consider if Google was going to be the means for collaboration – but at least one of these tools already has collaboration features at least as good as those shown in this demonstration (live chat, invitations, mutual simultaneous editing) – just not using Google Wave to do it.

What impressed me was Google Wave.  If one of the ideas behind Google Wave is to make it easy to add collaboration to enterprise applications – that could really enhance the quality of work going on in many collaborative business applications and processes – and it strikes at the heart of what Microsoft Sharepoint does for organizations, without the infrastructure requirements and “administrative” requirements.  And whereas Sharepoint is difficult to integrate into your business applications, Google Wave has an opportunity to lower the barriers and steal a march.  If anything, watching this demonstration made me hope our beta for Google Wave arrives sooner than later-  can’t wait to try it.

UPDATE 10/4/2009: Well I know I’ve been submitted for “consideration” for getting a Wave account, but I haven’t received an email yet from the Wave team inviting me to join.  There are some interesting early comments from people who have gotten access, however.  In particular Oscar Berg had an interesting and thoughtful take on Google Wave.

Update 10/6/2009: I just saw this article and youtube video. The article’s premise is that SalesForce is here demonstrating the value of Google Wave.  But it also proves the limitations… Good read..

Update 10/13/2009: A few more websites/ pages are up with useful and interesting Google Wave info.  Although, I have to admit, some of it sounds pretty funny like, “11 tools for Google Wave you’ve never heard of”  – well, that would be about any 11 tools for most people, wouldn’t it?

Google Wave 101 – this is a list of shortcuts, etiquette.  Its pretty basic, and a bit premature for my taste.

ActionBase Blog (have to add that to my reader) had a good post about how the BPM community has largely ignored the impact Wave could have on end-users… however, I’d point them to this post for evidence to the contrary… as well as mentioning the needed enterprise features to make this reality for large enterprises. ActionBase takes a different approach to process,  which I think is highly complementary to the traditional structured process approach.  I’d love to see them paired up with other BPMS offerings to really complete the picture.

Tips and Tricks from Techie-buzz.com.

Update 11/8/2009: More thoughts from ActionBase about Google Wave; primarily with regard to Wave potentially being a disruptive BPMS-like force in the BPM market.  I’ll post some more thoughts on that possibility this week, but I don’t see it as likely to disrupt established BPM vendors so much as the unstructured or user-driven vendors, as well as to further fragment the market currently served by Excel, Sharepoint, and Notes.

Update 11/30/2009:  The creator of Gmail chimes in with his view on Google Wave – and his best point is that it just isn’t ubiquitous like email, and therefore is unlikely to displace it.  He also has some good suggestions about preserving linearity or compartmentalizing some of the threads inside a wave.  Read on right here.

Update 1/24/2010: Anatoly comments on Google Wave, concluding that it is useful, and listing pros and cons. The cons he points out are interesting:

• No email/RSS notification of wave changes.
• No permanent address for the wave
• No numbered lists
• The requirement to register for google wave to participate. This last one is a big barrier to adoption because it means that you can’t arbitrarily include people in your waves. If you can’t include them, then you’re not likely to use Google Wave to collaborate with them…

Please feel free to add additional google wave links in the comment section… I’ll try to keep a compilation without working too hard at it.