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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gartner’s 2010 Magic Quadrant for BPM Suites is out.  As Sandy Kemsley points out, you can almost determine the contents of the report from the requisite vendor press releases (which reminds me of our previous post on the Forrester Wave):

However, three of the leaders have a lot to say about it:

• Pegasystems Positioned as a Leader in Prominent Analyst Firm’s 2010 Magic Quadrant for Business Process Management Suites (which includes a mini version of the graph)
• Software AG Named in the Leaders Quadrant for Business Process Management Suites
• IBM Lombardi positioned in the Leaders Quadrant of Gartner Magic Quadrant for Business Process Management Suites (also containing a mini graph)

At some point, you could probably reconstruct the Leaders quadrant based on press releases; many of the vendors in the other quadrants don’t bother to do a release about it (do they have to pay Gartner for that?): consider that IBM placed all three of its major BPM products in this MQ, but I only saw a press release about the one in the Leaders quadrant.

Luckily, you don’t have to reconstruct it if you are a lucky partner or customer of one of these vendors, they may be quite willing to share the report with you (presumably they’ve paid for the rights to share with their customers).  I think there were some interesting takeaways from this year’s magic quadrant. And not just that it differs so much from Forrester’s evaluation (in particular, the position of the Lombardi suite is dramatically different between the two… and if I may say so, I think Gartner has that positioning more correctly than does Forrester).

First, Gartner’s focus has shifted to four key usage scenarios, which paraphrased are:

• continuous process improvement
• industry-specific or company specific implementations
• business transformation initiatives
• process-based SOA redesign

I do like the fact that when Gartner has an opinion they go ahead and put it out there (in Gartner’s opinion, model-driven process execution, as opposed to code-based execution, is preferable).  Its refreshing to have those types of things spelled out.  You can disagree, but you know where they stand on that issue.

They also take great pains to note the difference between “market leaders” and “best product” (the two are not the same, though strong product offering is a contributor to market leader status). Gartner specifically called out an emphasis on “cohesiveness” of the suite, and support for all of the four key scenarios, above.  As Gartner puts it “The individual composition technologies are often well-proven on their own. Since we are evaluating a suite, we consider how well these technologies work together, and how easy it is for someone (a composer) to use the complete environment.” The emphasis is now on evaluating as a whole rather than evaluating the solutions in parts and then summing the scores for each part.  Experience might be harder to evaluate objectively, but this is a move in the right direction.

In light of recent discussions of why experience matters, I think this is a welcome shift in Gartner’s evaluation methodology – especially for BPM.  As I’ve noted before, BPM is typically comprised of doing many simple things right – but knowing which of the many things you can do is the trick.  With a BPMS, it isn’t a matter of brand new tech so much as it is composing existing technology in ways that really make sense at a deeper level to the composer.

The market trends that Gartner observes bode well for BPM consultancies like ours – a greater emphasis on continuous process improvement and business transformation. We observed anecdotally, and Gartner confirms, that in 2009 BPM initiatives continued to receive funding in a VERY challenging economic and funding climate.

A surprise entrant in the leaders quadrant is Adobe – under the radar (to me), Adobe has grown quite a business around BPM. The pure-play heritage BPM vendors make a strong showing in the leader’s quadrant, either independently or as the purchased solutions of large vendors (IBM, Progress, Software AG, etc. )

In describing leaders, Gartner explicitly calls out the “experience” as being a critical differentiator.

I found it interesting, as well, that Gartner concurs with my own experience vis-a-vis Lombardi customers (now IBM Websphere Lombardi Edition) – that they are the most advanced in BPM maturity.  I think this is a result of the consulting (and product) culture we cultivated at Lombardi (during the time I was there at least).  What a great endorsement of the excellent people who worked in Lombardi’s professional services group.  (it is, also, an endorsement of the sales group – whose job it is to open customers’ eyes to the possibilities, and to the customers, who have seized the opportunity of BPM with both hands and made the most of it).

Overall, this report tells me that despite the acquisitions, there is no shortage of BPM vendors in the market, no shortage of real choices for customers.  And there is still so much for these vendors to improve on – the innovations to come could make a huge difference for BPM professionals in the near future.

Congratulations to the leaders in the Gartner Magic Quadrant, I hope the increased market exposure will inspire you all to innovate BPM in ways we haven’t yet imagined (and in some of the ways we’ve imagined, but waited impatiently for!).

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

A few highlights:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Appian: “Appian Still Leading the Pack”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Update: as expected, a few announcements today:

Software AG announces their leadership status here.

And Progress’ blog entry can be found here.

bpmCamp is back, and it is coming to Austin, Texas!  We’re very proud to announce that we’re holding the second bpmCamp here in Austin.  Time is short – only 52 days until the event starts!  It is an aggressive time frame but with urgency comes creativity.  Following is the F.A.Q. with all the most important questions addressed.

F.A.Q.

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 Austin bpmCamp:  October 14-15, 2010. Mark your calendars.

We hope to host additional bpmCamp events in the future.  The first was at Stanford. This one, in Austin, should be special because of its proximity to ground zero of the Lombardi ecosystem (Lombardi’s headquarters was Austin, and IBM has a very large operation in Austin, including the Lombardi team).  It is also the headquarters of BP3.

If you have any questions in the meantime, contact us at:
bpmCamp at  bp-3.com

How Much Does it Cost to Attend?

bpmCamp Austin does not benefit from the free space that Stanford provided to the inaugural event.  Still, we’ve managed to find an affordable venue with great food, and therefore the impact on event costs was reasonable.  We’re charging $150 to attend the two-day conference (early-bird) from now until September 17, 2010.  Regular pricing will be $200 -  and the last day to register is October 7, 2010.

How Do I Register for bpmCamp?

Please go to:  http://bpmcampaustin.eventbrite.com/ to register! ( Early Bird Rates apply until January 1, 2010).

Where is bpmCamp Austin? Who is hosting?

Having the right host for any activity is a plus.  And having the right setting can really frame an event and set a backdrop for a good collaborative and rejuvenating experience.  BP3 will be the hosts for the event.  We’ve been working with BPM and Lombardi’s products for more than 7 years, and we’re looking forward to hosting the kind of informal conferences we always wanted to attend, right here in our home town.

We’re having our bpmCamp 2010 @ Austin event at III Forks Austin – one of Austin’s finest restaurants, but also a space that has a great historical Austin vibe to it, even while housed inside one of the more modern “Austin Architecture” buildings in town.   Importantly there is a lot of informal gathering space available, as well as a main room and at least two break-out rooms. III forks has been great collaborating menu options and space with us.  We’ll be a stone’s throw from Town Lake (aka Lake Lady Bird), right across the street from City Hall, and within walking distance of many restaurants and other venues.  Austin itself is home to Lombardi, and the base of operations for Lombardi as a part of the larger IBM campus here.

Travel Logistics

Please refer back to this page for travel logistics.

Where is the Landing Page?

UPDATED:  www.bpmCamp.org

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/Lombardi Edition and Blueprint) who participate in deployments to attend, and we’re extending an invitation to IBM/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 (there are limited sponsorship slots).  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 do I Contact the Organizers?

The best way is via the bpmCamp email address:

bpmcamp at  bp-3.com

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.  Please respect that we are keeping sponsorships limited to prevent over-commercializing and to make sure the sponsorship is worth something.

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??)
• Incorporating A/B testing into my process
• How much requirements gathering is too much?

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

Go HERE to add your ideas to the Agenda Wiki.

Who is Coming?

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

Why focus on a single vendor? Why not another BPM product? Is this a Lombardi- or IBM-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 Edition and BPM Blueprint 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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A while back, Bruce Silver wrote up another thorough review of a BPM vendor’s offering, and this time it was TIBCO’s ActiveMatrix BPM.  There were a couple of nuggets that jumped out at me:

1. TIBCO is pushing task distribution as being separate from process (or orthogonal, you might say).  It is an interesting wrinkle to their product.  I’ve run into a few cases where the “process” presented to me was really a “how to distribute work to the people on this team” problem, rather than how to manage the process or lifecycle of the stuff their working on (which might extend into groups that aren’t part of the same team).  But there have been only a few, relative to the total number of processes I’ve seen.
2. Apparently they borrowed one of the best features of Lombardi Teamworks (now Websphere Lombardi Edition): “The inline preview function allows playback of running forms from within TIBCO Business Studio.   This Lombardi-ish approach is carried forward in page flow modeling as well, using BPMN to describe each step in the page flow… an advantage (in my view) over the programmer-oriented approach of most ‘enterprise-class’ BPMSs.”
3. It sounds like they’ve added performance data tracking that approaches what Lombardi does.  I’ve been surprised that this early differentiator at Lombardi (circa 2004) hasn’t been more widely copied 6 years later.
4. There was another TIBCO BPM product, but I think that’s on the way out based on TUCON coverage.  BPM vendors need to take a page from Neil Ward-Dutton’s blog.  Bring your customers with you.

Thanks again to Bruce for covering all the product releases of note.

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

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

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

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

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 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.