Process for the Enterprise » Lombardi

BlueworksLive Update – December 2011

Scott Francis — Thu, 29 Dec 2011 04:11:38 +0000

IBM has released a new update to BlueworksLive, on December 17th. We had a preview just two days before it went live to discuss some of the thought behind the features. What interests me isn’t just the outcome but the thought and direction behind it. Once again the specific features seem “small” but have interesting consequences and implications.

Starting with the shorter topics first:

The Word Export is much more pleasing to the eye than previous versions. Having the graphics of severity and the diagram itself exported are a big help to the overall readability of the document.

The expand-all/collapse-all functionality in the Process Diagram is also convenient – especially when prepping to export a large diagram.

The BPMN export API works as advertised. This is an important step to allow people to use BlueworksLive without feeling locked in. After all, in a cloud “rental” model, one of the big fears is that your data is residing on someone else’s servers. IBM needed to provide a clean way to get at that data and make it portable. Not to mention, this lets customers apply some of their more standard SDLC to their requirements production in BlueworksLive.

First, there was quite a bit of attention given the Decision Discovery feature added to BlueworksLive. I’d heard that this was coming, but I was picturing it as something that would be added to the automation features of BlueworksLive – I should have realized that the “Discovery” in the name implied that it would be part of the modeling (“Blueprinting”) part of the product.

The premise is that you set up a few Considerations (one or more). The combination of these considerations is like a truth table. However, BlueworksLive also lets you provide more than one conclusion – which is nice. When modeling, we can label the column headers smartly, allowing the contents of each cell to be concise and simple (Yes/No, >$500/<$500, etc.). Finally, we can label the conclusions well- “Adjustment Required”. If we have more than one conclusion, it gets its own column to keep ideas separate.

A couple of surprising perks: you can reorder columns and rows with a simple drag-and-drop. Look, this makes sense given the point of the tool – flexible discovery of decisions. But this is the kind of fit-and-finish often missing in enterprise software.

I also appreciated that they thought through why the cells should be free-form rather than constrained to integers or strings or a particular data type. The goal is to leave discovery unconstrained. Plenty of time for constraints when you move into modeling for execution (had this been targeted at execution, you can bet there would have been tight treatment of data types).

Like David Brakoniecki, I think BlueworksLive is showing that it will live up to its promise as a BPM discovery tool. Not because it does everything it needs to do today, but because IBM have shown that they’ll keep turning the screws until they get there. His take on the impact of tiny changes at this point in the maturity of the product:

Now, at the push of a button, the process documentation and process diagram can be exported into a single word document. Basically, this document becomes the high-level scope of any potential BPM deployment or process improvement initiative. All of the great power of Blueworks around social collaboration and process discovery now can painless produce a document to playback to the client or business teams for review and iterative improvement.

SaaS products really emphasize the benefit of incremental improvement.

The Wayback Machine on Appian’s Blog is Broken

Scott Francis — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 16:48:29 +0000

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bruce Silver Reviews IBM BPM 7.5

Scott Francis — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 17:15:26 +0000

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

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

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

Integrating a Startup

Scott Francis — Thu, 29 Sep 2011 05:16:37 +0000

I’m sure several BPM firms could comment on this article by Jacob Ukelson, as so many of them have been acquired over the last few years! Jacob gives “10″ rules for doing this successfully, and they’re all good. In particular:

Rule 5 – Pretend you are a doctor and have taken the Hippocratic oath – first do no harm. Don’t change anything until you have learned the landscape of the new company. I know successful US executives have a penchant for action – but this is a case where early action can be disastrous. Understand that it will probably take a year until the company is more or less integrated. Maybe I should have put this rule first.

Companies that are acquisitive tend to have a very well-oiled acquisition process. But companies that don’t do a lot of acquisitions likely put together a team on the spot to go make it happen. I observed the Lombardi acquisition from the outside, but even so it was obvious that IBM has done a few acquisitions before – the terminology, the process, the time taken, were all indicative of years of practice. When a company has jargon like “Bluewashing” you know they’ve integrated a few companies. In the particular case of Lombardi, you have to give IBM credit for giving expression and voice to the “Lombardi” DNA they acquired, and not just stamping it out with IBM-ness.

In-depth Review of IBM Blueworks Live

Scott Francis — Mon, 26 Sep 2011 05:01:11 +0000

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

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

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

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

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

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

TIBCO acquires Nimbus, Business DNA

Scott Francis — Tue, 30 Aug 2011 23:48:39 +0000

TIBCO has announced its acquisition of Nimbus today:

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

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

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

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

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

Clay Richardson of Forrester also weighs in on the purchase:

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

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

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

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

MWD on PegaSystems and PegaWorld

Scott Francis — Tue, 21 Jun 2011 04:10:58 +0000

Pega has has impressive financial performance over the last few years, as Neil Ward-Dutton documents:

The company is currently publishing full-year revenue guidance of around $430m for 2011 – up from $330m or so last year – which means it’s grown 30% in each of the last three years. As it digests its Chordiant acquisition and finds ways to combine the technologies it now has to hand for new customer scenarios, the company is clearly riding high and full of confidence[...]“

But Neil asks a few questions that I think are pretty interesting:

But – is it actually a BPM technology provider?

Well, it spent a lot of effort getting re-branded as a BPM provider a few years ago, when BPM was an up-and-coming tag for a category of software. But Pega was never really a pure-play BPM software vendor. This is the first time I’ve seen an analyst of any kind question whether Pega is really in the BPM business.

So onto the other question, quickly: is Pegasystems a BPM technology provider? In his opening keynote, Alan Trefler claimed that the company’s recent growth makes it more than 10 times larger than its nearest pure-play BPM rival – but in truth this comparison is a little sneaky. Pegasystems isn’t really a BPM pure-play.

It is a BPM technology provider – but in the same way that SAP’s BPM investments make it a BPM provider.

It actually does matter – the difference between the mentality of a pure play and an SAP is larger than one might think. The distance is so great, in fact, that IBM bought Lombardi to get that pure-play DNA into its veins. But Neil doesn’t find that question nearly as interesting as whether Pega is selling to IT or selling to Business. It is an interesting point:

They talk about Pega technology as a way to make the thorny tradeoff between the need for consistency in business execution, the need for competitive differentiation, and the need to specialise execution for particular markets and segments. They are fantastic advocates for the business benefits of working with Pegasystems. But these are not people who really naturally engage with the idea of ‘situational layer cakes’.

I’m sure Pega would argue that they just have to do both – sell to the business and IT. That’s not a bad recipe. But from reading Neil’s post, it sounds like Pega isn’t sure what its organizing principle is – what is the mission? Improving business processes? Improving customer service? “Driving Customer Success” is admirable but bland - it describes a whole host of companies in different industries…

IBM BPM 7.5 Released Today

Scott Francis — Fri, 03 Jun 2011 20:00:37 +0000

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

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

Great Response to our #IBMImpact Presentation: Keeping the “Business” in BPM

Scott Francis — Fri, 22 Apr 2011 23:44:33 +0000

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…

Phil Gilbert on IBM BPM 7.5

Scott Francis — Thu, 21 Apr 2011 14:38:55 +0000

Video of Phil Gilbert on IBM BPM 7.5. Personally I like the motivational background music – surprised it wasn’t something by Dylan…

I first noticed it on the BPM Socialite blog, but it is also on Youtube / embeddable.

As a fringe benefit, some of the related videos that come up after are equally interesting.