Mike Gammage on Sourcing Shangri-La:

To avoid continually tripping up, to be able to implement Management 2.0 thinking, the enterprise needs a cortex, a way of pulling it all together:  an integrated management platform.  And its language has to be end-to-end business process because that can be universally understood across the enterprise. So it’s a BPM platform.

In the BPM platform, business process becomes the key by which we describe what the enterprise does, and how it all fits together – and how we analyse what the impact of change will be.

But it goes way beyond this. The BPM platform integrates process with real-time metrics, risks and controls, compliance and quality management – all within one governance framework. It deploys process to every desktop and mobile device as a personalized intelligent operations manual.  It also provides the collaborative framework that enables a culture of continuous improvement.

Worth reading the whole thing.  I’m still digesting it.  Well, partly I’m still getting over the use of “2.0″ on yet another word.  But Mike makes good points about balancing the need for autonomy and innovation with the need for predictability or compliance.  In fact, a similar discussion broke out on ebizQ recently, with Ian Gotts and Theo Priestley representing two ends of the spectrum quite well.  As I noted in my own comment: “you want innovation, but not in *every* aspect of your business.”

Interesting post from Mike Gammage on the current “Cloud” mania overtaking IT:

There’s a similar sense of mass delusion, and nowhere more than in the world of outsourcing. A.T. Kearney’s Arjun Sethi created a stir last year with The End of Outsourcing As We Know It, arguing that Cloud services will replace existing IT outsourcing within five years. HfS published Cloud Will Transform Business As We Know It, quoting results from its research collaboration with the LSE on Cloud in outsourcing.

The hype about Cloud is obscuring some truths that won’t go away. Many of these clouds are going to precipitate as tears before long.

At Nimbus, we’ve seen a lot of systems implementation failures. Often we’re the first process paramedics on the scene. The consultation with the distraught exec usually ends: “So let me get this right – you set about this ERP implementation without a clear understanding of your end-to-end processes, or of how automation would impact them, or a means of effective collaboration for the stakeholders, or a means to publish the new processes in a way that would make it easy for the end users who would execute them, or a governance framework?”.

The truth is, of course, that whether it’s a Cloud service or on-premise, a successful implementation requires exactly the same rigor.

Ouch.  Definitely a heavy dose of reality.

We’d been waiting for Blueworks Live to go live ever since we first heard about it in November.  Now that it is actually live… well, now what?

Why, review the reviews, of course!

First up: Sandy Kemsley:

Lombardi has always been at the forefront of the integration of social and BPM, although previously focused purely on the process discovery/design phase, and the IBM acquisition has allowed Lombardi’s social process discovery to be combined with IBM’s online BPM community to create something greater than the sum of the parts. For all my criticism of IBM, they have some incredible pockets of innovation that sometimes burst out into actual product.

and later:

Overall, although there’s nothing really new about this sort of easy sequential workflow design and execution, the user interface is clean and uncluttered, and pop-up tips on the fields assist the user on what to enter. Assuming that you can wrench your users away from using email for these processes, there won’t be much of a learning curve for them to create new processes on their own, and even less to use processes created by others. If you want to see this in action, there’s a Blueworks Live YouTube channel with a couple of videos on creating and participating in a process.

But she’s not convinced that Blueworks truly addresses the community goals that Phil Gilbert set out to address, nor that the different functions are well-integrated enough. Interesting comment thread where IBM explains why the tooling is different between process execution and “modeling”.  I actually agree with the justification, and I don’t see a reason to view the separation of complexity from simplicity as a negative.  I like doing to one place for process, rather than more than one…

Next up:  Mike Gammage:

Sandy Kemsley has a characteristically sound review on her Column 2 blog, and her verdict on Blueworks Live is downbeat.  She’s underwhelmed by the Twitter integration, the public and private streams, and the level of integration with the Blueprint BPMS engine.

I think Sandy’s blog comes across as downbeat because she starts with the positive (check my quote above) and finishes with the criticisms, rather than the other way around.  Mike’s central criticisms:

It’s Overly Democratic. Every enterprise wants its people engaged with process excellence and continuous improvement. But it’s a step too far to simply say that everyone should therefore be able to create and automate process.  [...]

Well, first of all – these Luddites (tongue-in-cheek) already define, and execute processes today!  Using email, spreadsheets, and word documents.  Since they already do it today, Blueworks Live isn’t making it worse – it is rather attempting to give those users more appropriate tools for the job.  He continues with point #2:

It’s a Governance Headache. I don’t see how governance, compliance, risks and controls can be efficiently managed in a world where an organization’s processes are automated in such a decentralized way by people who may be experts in their field but are novices in process design and management.

Again, given that these folks are doing this today, we’re not worse off.  In fact, we’re better off because the processes defined and executed in Blueworks Live are actually tracked, keep audit trail, and feed into reports in a centralized, governable space.  And if someone is abusing it, you (as site administrator) can revoke their access or reduce their permissions.

There is a real danger that IBM’s and Phil’s messaging could in a sense “devalue” the process improvement expert-  or even IT experts.  But having talked to Phil about this at length- the point isn’t to devalue the expertise or discipline of process improvement or IT – if the community functions well, those experts will actually become:

• more accessible
• more leveraged
• more valuable

Because it is easier for those with process knowledge to share it.  The processes that can be executed in Blueworks Live today are so simple that they simply don’t require process design expertise.  And that’s intentional.

I love Mike’s closing argument:

In that context, it’s difficult to see how Blueworks Live helps at all.  Would you dine at a restaurant where each chef did their own thing? A good menu has coherence.  A good restaurant creates the perfect customer experience by harnessing the genius and creativity of each chef de partie and their team together with the skills of the maitre d’ and his or her team. I don’t want beetroot for a pudding, or filet be boeuf Wellington served Thai style and with popcorn.

Actually, I’ve been dining at that restaurant my whole adult life.  Email, Lotus Notes databases, Excel spreadsheets, ad-hoc website forms.  Sharepoint “processes”.  Each “chef” doing their own thing – with the exceptions being a few excellent process-oriented software applications.  Blueworks may not be filet mignon, but perhaps it is fast-food?

My own summary:  For “version 1″ of the new vision for Blueworks Live, it is pretty good.  No one is completely satisfied, but the potential for something greater is there, and I have no doubt they’ll keep beating the drum by releasing updates every 6-9 weeks.  We’ve already “toyed” with it, using it for a vacation request process, for example.  I was a little disappointed the reporting was buried on the admin page, for example.  But otherwise it is clean and easy to use, with a LOT of room for improvement.  The key thing will be which improvements to say no to, not which ones to say yes to.  IBM is going to have to edit itself if this product offering is going to succeed.

(Side Note: interesting response from Phil in the comments section of Mike’s blog: execute to get documentation)

UPDATE:  In writing this, I omitted two other blog entries of note that I intended to include.

First, Phil Gilbert’s own blog:

The arc of history is clear: technology advances always insert specialists to use new technology, taking control from the original worker. Then, as the technology matures and becomes more accessible, people with more general skills gain access to the technology and regain control over their work. From farming to manufacturing to computing this has been the case. We’ve spent the past half century digitizing the assets of the business and that required, in essence, that control over those assets were assumed by IT. But now it’s shifting back, and BPM is the mechanism by which that move is most fully realized today. IBM Blueworks Live is a major step in that evolution. It doesn’t solve every BPM problem – by design! But it does solve a set of problems that have eluded IT for decades: how do we give our businesses the tooling to continue the flexible ad hoc processes they need in a changing world, while normalizing the information so that those processes are more efficient, more transparent and easy to build and deploy.

Meet IBM Blueworks Live: the new face of BPM.

And from David Moser:

All very worthy, but much less interesting than the next piece of news, which was the launch of Blueworks Live. This combines three elements – the Blueworks BPM collaboration community (blogs, wikis); the highly successful (Lombardi) Blueprint process discovery and definition environment; and a new workflow execution engine. All running in the Cloud and, apparently, available through your browser for a test drive from November 20th. (Yes, that’s this Saturday – perhaps one of the software world’s most specific launch dates ever…!).

In the comments Ian Gotts frets that some users won’t be happy only having access to “automated” processes and not to the modeled processes in Blueworks, but this strikes me as an unlikely problem for the real users.  Second, it is better to start with too little, than too much, in your product.  Wikipedia contains excellent links and content explaining Minimum Viable Product.

Mike Gammage posts the question:  is BPM ethical?

Against this background, the hard reality is that the business case for any significant BPM project is almost invariably based on job losses.

The jobs may be lost through automation, or through productivity increases.  The BPM project will typically enable the same work to be done by fewer people.  More positively, the BPM project may enable the same people to do more work – that is, there are no jobs lost immediately.  But, even so, the societal effect is not dissimilar because economic growth will now create fewer jobs.

Put crudely, and for the sake of this argument, BPM seems to be a job-killer.

Now I believe, as will many of you, that work is about far more than simply generating wealth and meeting basic needs. Work provides each of us with a role in the community, it enables us to develop our talents in service to others, and to contribute to the advancement of society.

So it’s a serious question that deserves attention: Is BPM – my work– ethical?

I commend Mike for undertaking a post on this subject.  I have a few thoughts for him to consider when he returns:

1: Competition is the Job Killer.

The first thing to realize, is that BPM isn’t the job killer.  The job killer is the competition for your customers. If you can’t win that competition for customers, you will have a massive dislocation of jobs.  That competition is faceless and unrelenting, unfortunately.  You don’t get to look into the whites of your competition’s eyes and try to agree on a reasonable pricing model – if you do in the US, it is called collusion or anti-competitive behavior (there are similar rules in other locales).

So you have to invest in improving the cost structure and performance of your business, in order to remain competitive.  BPM is a tool to do that.  Just like Microsoft Word and computers put a generation of typists/secretaries out of work, BPM and other software will put a generation of manual paper-movers out of work (or copier repairmen perhaps?).

2. BPM can Save the Jobs of the People you know

A Good BPM implementation can save the jobs of the best people in your company.  By making each unit of work more valuable, it is easier to justify paying them, even increasing their pay.  You’re increasing their economic value add to the system.

Moreover, if the people doing the work become the people improving the work, they can really maximize their positive effect on the business. It also frees up labor to focus on other value-adding areas of the economy (though, I’ll grant, that is an easier macro- than micro- argument – individually not everyone can make the shift, and not everyone has the savings to bridge the gap – which is why I’m a big fan of unemployment benefits and insurance).

Finally, if you can sell the value of these process improvements to your customers, you can actually use process improvement as a way to increase your top line, not just your bottom line.

3. Manage for More than one Bottom Line

BPM and the like can help you achieve more than just cost savings – BPM can help you more reliably achieve any outcome you set out to achieve – higher customer sat, a higher net promoter score (NPS), reducing impact on the environment, increasing customer lifetime value, etc. This is sometimes called the “Double Bottom Line” or “Triple Bottom Line”.  But realizing that your business is about more than just money, why shouldn’t you use process improvement to increase your odds of hitting ALL your business goals rather than just some of them?

Although BPM causes us to examine what we do, and second-guess the positive outcome, I believe overall it is not only ethical but necessary.

Mike Gammage points out that a recent Gartner report touts BPA for the masses, but fails to understand how absurd that sounds:

Within this context, how can BPA possibly be an activity for the masses? This kind of analysis is understood and undertaken by a small group of IT specialists.

Each kitchen has only a small cadre of pastry chefs. Diners, waiters, the maitre d’ – they may all be involved in continuously improving the mille feuille aux amandes – but it’s the pastry chefs alone who sift the flour and need the rolling pin.

I think Gartner may have, in this instance, gotten tools and work confused.  Some of the tools they are reviewing (BPM Blueprint, and ARISalign) are designed for the masses – but not to turn the masses into BPAs.  The goal is to turn the masses of business users into real participants in continuous process improvement.  Of course, they have features to support BPA activities – but those particular features are primarily intended to support the analysts, not the “masses”.

I read a lot of BPM coverage and commentary.  I also read a lot of software industry news and startup news, and Apple-related commentary, because of my personal interests and because of cross-pollination.  Sometimes a theme will emerge that cuts across these interests and it just jumps off the screen.

Right now, that theme is simplicity. Neil Ward-Dutton touched on it when he mentioned the new focus IBM has on “consumability” in its acquisitions. But lets take a quick diversion to talk about some articles that make the same point.

Television

First, this hilarious post by Mark Cuban: “The Future of TV is… TV” (Now, why didn’t I think of that?!). In a world run amok about streaming video and TV going away, Mark points out:

You know what is AMAZING about VOD  ? It gives you thousands of choices and its already connected to your TV. It just works.

You don’t have to buy another box. You don’t have to figure out how to connect it to your TV. You don’t have to stream from another device over your WIFI netork and get all confused about how to pull video from the internet. It just works.  That’s what you want when you unbox that great big flat screen TV. You want it to work…. like a TV. Easily. Quickly.

That isn’t to say money won’t be made streaming video.  But TV isn’t going away – and people aren’t shelling out for new HDTVs for nothing.  Interestingly, Mark has a followup on this article because of the Google TV news – and his answer for the future of TV is still… TV (however, he sounded like he liked the Google offering as announced).

Twitter

Not long ago, SAI covered Twitter’s announcement of a new product called “Blackbird Pie“, a product for “embeddable tweets”. I guess the idea was that you could quote someone more reliably.  But it is something like a 7 step process – and one of those steps is to go to this twitter url and paste in the URL of a tweet that you want to embed/quote.  Of course, most people use twitter clients, so they’re not looking at a tweet URL to begin with.  What people typically do is just quote someone.  Or if they really want to get clever, take a screenshot of the tweet so that the wording isn’t as likely to be questioned.  Simple.  For a service that prides itself on “simplicity”, it isn’t clear that Twitter still realized how crucial simplicity is to its service when they roll out unnecessarily complicated features like this. Worse yet, according to SAI:

Besides being WAY too complicated, here’s what else is wrong with Blackbird Pie.

• Twitter justified its existence by saying that it would prevent people from being misquoted. Problem is, it’s very easy to manipulate Blackbird Pie code to misquote its source.
• If tweets are supposed to be embeddable, THEY SHOULD ALL HAVE AN EMBED BUTTON JUST LIKE YOUTUBE VIDEOS, EGAD.
• There’s no easy way to customize the code Blackbird Pie pumps out. What if you want the tweet to be 640 pixels wide?
• We tried using the embeddable tweets. Didn’t work. Didn’t work on TechCrunch either (see below).
• Blackbird Pie has already crashed.

That criticism stings because it reminds us of other false starts from Twitter.  The article goes on to skewer the @anywhere feature as well, and the fact that it co-opted the “Retweet” but didn’t implement it the same way… and yet decided to use the same name (adding to the confusion).  Not content to be a simple status and notification service with a lightweight footprint, Twitter is overcomplicating things as it tries to extend its control.

Apple

Meanwhile, in Cupertino, Apple puts out a product that simultaneously elicits rave reviews and dismissals.  It is so easy to focus on what it doesn’t do. Amy of the “Cheerful Software Manifesto” has a wonderful way of putting this, I just had to quote it verbatim:

The iPad, though, unlike the Newton, is going to win, and win on an epic scale.

Nevertheless, the shortsightedness of punditry is evergreen. Instead of praising the iPad, critics express their disappointment, because they expected more. They expected a genre buster. They expected something they’d never seen before, something beyond their imagination. Something revolutionary.

They’re disappointed that the iPad is so… well… unsurprising.

Therein, of course, lies the genius.

THE IPAD IS BARELY A SURPRISE AT ALL
The design, delivery, and timing of the iPad couldn’t be more different than the Newton. The iPad wasn’t a surprise at all. It’s the capstone in a family of devices.

There’s a cozy, pre-existing slot in people’s brains that the iPad fills quite nicely.

“Oh,” they say. “It’s a big iPhone.”

It doesn’t matter if they utter that phrase in distaste. That little sand grain of dismissal becomes the core around which will form a pearl of understanding.

“Trying to deal with email on the iPhone is tough. The screen’s too small.”

“I wish we could both work on this at the same time.”

“I’d like to sketch concepts with touch, but I keep running off the borders.”

Ding ding ding.

(The emphasis was hers)

Her point: rather than change everything, or revolutionize (as the Newton attempted to do), we need to prepare the ground, and build on what went before.  The iPhone has laid the groundwork for the App Store, and the developer community, which in turn prepared us for the advent of the iPad.  Jon Gruber takes this point further with “This is how Apple Rolls“:

Next, consider the iPod. It debuted in the fall of 2001 as a Mac-only, FireWire-only $399 digital audio player with a tiny black-and-white display and 5 GB hard disk. The iTunes Store didn’t exist until April 2003. The Windows version of iTunes didn’t appear until October 2003—two years after the iPod debuted! Two years before it truly supported Windows! Think about that. If Apple released an iPod today that sold only as many units as the iPod sold in 2002, that product would be considered an enormous flop.

Today you can get an iPod nano for $179 that’s a fraction of the original iPod’s size and weight, with double the storage, a color display, video playback, and a built-in video camera. Apple took the iPod from there to here one step at a time. Every year Apple has announced updated iPods in the fall, and every year the media has weighed in with a collective yawn.

There’s never been one iteration of the click-wheel iPod platform that has completely blown away the previous one, and even the original model was derided by many critics as unimpressive.

The same thought process applies to Mac OS X, and (so far) to the iPhone… and likely it will apply to the iPad.  Where each year (or so) a significant improvement will be made to the platform, but perhaps never blowing us away as compared to the previous version.  But comparing versions across 2-3 years, we’ll see improvements across the board.  A big part of this is starting as simple as possible.

There’s a simplicity to the Apple ecosystem and products that really makes it easier to engage with their products as users.

Business Process Management (BPM)

Mike Gammage talks about “Cracking Complexity” – and how BPM creates strategic value:

Institutional complexity stems from strategic choices about organizational and operating systems. It’s a consequence of the number of nodes and interactions within an organization. It’s about geographies, customer segments, business units, products, regulatory jurisdictions and manufacturing locations.

Individual complexity is defined by McKinsey as “how hard it is to get things done”. It’s the complexity that the vast majority of employees face – typically due to poor processes, confusing roles, or unclear accountability.

Apparently most execs focus on institutional complexity, but individual complexity can really impact the bottom line (negatively).  If individuals can get their job done more easily, and more importantly have visibility as to how to get their job done, then you’ve really increased your organization’s efficiency.  As Mike puts it: “There are jaw-dropping hidden costs arising from confusion in roles and accountability across end-to-end processes. And similarly enormous costs of IT failure where IT and the business are not speaking the same language. ”

If BPM is defined correctly, then it’s a C-Level issue. BPM is not about new ways to automate, it’s a far broader canvas. Process excellence goes way beyond just standardising and automating. BPM is about the management, adoption and continual improvement of every process, whether automated or not. And it’s about wrapping in compliance, risks and controls so that it becomes possible to manage the business in 3D.

Framed in this way, BPM is the key to reducing individual complexity – “making it easy to get things done” – whatever the level of institutional complexity.

So, if BPM is about simplifying the individual’s experience of the business – managing for the complexity inherent in any large organization, rather than just trying to oversimplify – then what is, exactly, the role or mission of the BPM software vendor?

Phil Gilbert commented on one of our posts recently:

The shame in all this is that what gets lost in all this scope creep is the original goal, the original promise: BPM technologies should focus on reducing the technical barriers to the definition, creation and maintenance of business information. Instead, we seem to be paying for the Original Sin of BPM which was to focus on BPEL (or BPML before it) as anything to do with any of this. We defined BPM properly, then the industry and some of its early proponents corrupted the delivery.

[...] The beauty of BPM, though, is that it’s about HOW existing technical capabilities can be exposed to a broader audience, an audience more directly connected to the business outcomes than ever before.

Phil goes on with a very good example, versioning… something that literally everyone can do.

“HOW do you version artifacts in a way that’s easy for less technical people to understand?”. Versioning is something everyone can do… so the interesting question isn’t “do you allow versioning” but, rather, HOW do you expose this core capability so that it is accessible to a broader audience and can scale technically.

And the how is important because, as Phil points out, it translates into lower costs and better outcomes.  And honestly, it makes it more likely that you can envision those outcomes in the first place if the how is well thought out – and simple.

It is why installation should be easy, and why we shouldn’t have to hunt for myriad third party libraries and their appropriate hotfixes and fixpacks.  It is why the “checkbox” method of software evaluation doesn’t really cut it (at the very least, use a 1-10 or 1,3,9 scoring methodology so that you can weight things that really *work* versus things that barely get a nod from analysts – but better yet, really understand the depth of the product).

Some argue that BPM is too complex, and therefore shouldn’t be used. For some this is a theoretical argument, but for others they are putting their money where their mouth is and building product that starts with a simple core.  But that is the long road to building out a BPMS.  However, not all vendors are making their BPM offering more complex – as Phil points out above, they’re working hard to make previously complex issues, like versioning, transparent to the user.  It is also why cloud computing will be come increasingly relevant – simplifying (to the user) the task of allocating computing and networking resources to applications.  This is the real magic of software development done right – making previously complicated activities more accessible.

Software companies, and in particular BPM vendors, need to continue to invest in the deep thinking and deep investments to create tools that simplify complicated work; and they need to realize that this is an iterative process – we don’t need the whole thing on a platter 5 years from now – a little progress every year would be great.  Similarly, BPM practitioners need to really think through the processes they build for their participants- providing advanced functionality in a highly consumable package is what BPM is all about.

Mike Gammage on reducing individual complexity in an institutionally complex organization:

Framed in this way, BPM is the key to reducing individual complexity – “making it easy to get things done” – whatever the level of institutional complexity.

Which is why savvy CIOs see BPM as the strategic issue that it really is.

I like this turn of phrase- it aptly describes what we’ve done in several BPM projects, though we’ve had less elegant ways to articulate it.  Making it easier for the everyman/everywoman to get the job done – rather than only enabling the heroes in the organization.