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.
The early reviews of IBM BPM 7.5 were out last week, while IBM Impact was still in full swing. It seems that the analysts in attendance were of differing opinions about the strength of IBM’s update to 7.5 – with Clay Richardson disappointed, and the other analysts ranging from reassured to impressed.
Clay’s review (“IBM Adds Fresh Coat Of Paint And New Tires To BPM Offering, But Still Needs To Rev Engine“) starts off:
So far, IBM is following the product integration roadmap John Rymer and I laid out in our report published immediately following IBM’s acquisition of Lombardi.
I’m sure IBM looks at it as, they were following their own roadmap and some of the points just happen to coincide with what analysts were clamoring for. One thing that the analyst community doesn’t seem to be comfortable with is that IBM doesn’t say much about future releases – they cite disclosure rules – and they only announce releases within the same quarter they’re to be released. But beyond that, I think it is quite right that the decision about *how* to integrate Lombardi and WPS had not been finalized at this time last year.
With today’s announcement, IBM checks off the first point of integration on our list: establishing a single repository across Lombardi Teamworks and Websphere Process Server. With Business Process Manager V7.5, IBM will deliver a single repository for process assets that leverages Lombardi’s impressive “snapshot” version management and governance capabilities, providing a unified approach to administering and reusing process and integration assets.
I imagine that this retrofit to WPS and integration designer was actually quite a lot of work – and likely addressed the hardest technical parts of the integration of these two products. But Clay goes on to say:
Although IBM has done a great job of delivering a unified repository, the core BPM engines and development environments will continue as standalone and separate entities — at least for BPM V7.5. While this is not surprising — we predicted that it would take three to four years for IBM to completely integrate Lombardi and WPS into a single unfied environment — we expected IBM to communicate a strategy or vision for merging the engines as part of this announcement.
I think this is a distinction that won’t matter to users. It might surprise Clay to know that Lombardi, since 2005, effectively had two engines under the hood. But it certainly never felt that way to users. And with the integrated rules engine in IBM BPM 7.5, you could say it has 4 engines. The point is – as long as the functionality works well together, this distinction won’t matter to process authors. There’s also an option to deploy the whole stack into a single VM – particularly useful for developer machines. Most people won’t quibble over different sections of code running inside a VM. After all, an engine is just a body of code that transforms inputs into outputs based on current state plus a model which provides context. A good BPMS will have more than one such body of code. Even a good rule suite will have more than one engine.
So the issue in the future isn’t how many engines IBM will have embedded in its BPM suite. The questions to ask are:
Information Week ran a story that reads very much like Clay’s:
IBM’s approach can be contrasted with that of Oracle, which took a decisive step in 2010 when it integrated the AquaLogic BPM system it acquired with BEA with its own legacy BPM product. That move yielded a single product and a clear roadmap, but it also forced existing customers of both products to do considerable migration work to move forward.
Except that when their article contrasts IBM and Oracle, it fails to mention that Oracle bought BEA in January 2008, nearly 3 years earlier (Clay, however, was more fair in his comparison). And yet the expectation is that IBM provide this transformation in a year.
But while Clay was focused on the need to consolidate engines, others focused on the market signals IBM was sending.
As Bruce Silver wrote in his rebuttal:
Some have called it just “a new coat of paint” on the existing offerings, because the (Lombardi) Process Designer and the (WPS) Integration Designer tools are both still there, and both runtime engines are still there as well. But that misses the point. Where IBM last year was pushing separate fit-for-purpose BPMSs – something nobody really wants – they now can offer a single BPMS that has the combined functionality of WPS and WLE.
I agree with Bruce – at a detail-level, it also ignores the interface makeover WPS Integration Designer got, to match the repository unification (which added significant versioning functionality to WPS). At a big picture level, it misses the point, which Bruce makes:
Beyond that, this announcement represents a major shift in IBM’s strategy for addressing the BPM marketplace. You might even call it a palace coup: the Lombardi/human/business-centric value system overthrowing the old WebSphere/integration/developer-centric value system, or even a BPM perspective rising above the SOA perspective. Given the existing installed-base investment on the two sides, this is truly a wag-the-dog moment.
I think this represents IBM’s move to capture the business-oriented perspective of the BPM market – something that was part product functionality, part product design, and partly go-to-market. Bruce’s summary:
And here’s the thing: it’s ONE product. You get it all. Business-empowered design, what-you-see-is-what-you-execute, and instant playback. SOA and integration services. Powerful business rules. [...] but I think everyone is surprised they got it done already.
Bruce has another post on the BPMS Endgame which predicts that IBM will focus on BPMN2 engine work for the 8.0 release timeframe.
Neil Ward-Dutton also rebuts Forrester’s assessment:
However when you look deeper, the release of Business Process Manager marks a significant departure for IBM, and warrants a thorough reappraisal of IBM’s competitive position.
He also hits on a few key points of integration:
Better yet:
Business Process Manager makes the relationship clear: Process Designer is aimed at business-facing teams collaborating to optimise business processes; Integration Designer is aimed at IT teams working to orchestrate the integration of systems to support the optimisation of those processes. Again – these two environments work together through the use of a shared repository and governance toolset.
Tony Baer also humorously commented on the Lombardification of IBM BPM. Unlike David Brakoniecki, I couldn’t resist revisiting the analyst reviews. David points out a few of the “unsung features” in the 7.5 release:
- A powerful REST API which in theory should allow better and richer user interfaces to be built
- A new charting technology (based on iLog jViews, I think)
I’d add to that the deployment characteristics – the fact that we will be able to build solutions with both the Process Designer and the Integration Designer – and then manage and deploy them from the same repository, to the same run-time clusters – is a big improvement over the state of the art in the previous versions. And it appears to be a big improvement in how both WLE and WPS previously managed deployments.
Sandy Kemsley took more time to write her analysis, and it demonstrates her extra time to reflect. I liked the shout out to our sleuthing out the announcement ahead of time (maybe IBM should include me on their analyst briefings so that we’ll be embargoed as well!…). She writes:
It’s important to look at how the IBM organization has realigned to allow for the new product release: Phil Gilbert, former president and CTO of Lombardi, now has overall responsibility for all of WebSphere BPM – including both the former Lombardi and WebSphere BPM products – plus ILOG rules management. Neil Ward-Dutton referred to this as the reverse takeover of IBM by Lombardi; when I had a chance for a 1:1 with Phil at Impact, I told him that we’d all bet that he would be gone from IBM after a year. He admitted that he originally thought so too, until they gave him the opportunity to do exactly what he knew needed to be done: bring together all of the IBM BPM offerings into a unified offering. This new product announcement is the beginning of that unification, but they still have a ways to go.
When the buyout happened I often heard this argument that Phil would be gone within a year. But, living in Austin, I’ve seen a few promising startups purchased by IBM in my day (Tivoli and Webify just to name two), and I’ve also known Phil for… 10-12 years now. My sense was that IBM has the scope and opportunity on the big stage that Phil would really relish taking advantage of. IBM is big enough to make the right role for someone like Phil – in a way that very few companies can. If they were willing to do it, I felt like they had a chance to hang on to Phil. I felt the same way about most of the people acquired with Lombardi – some would leave, but IBM has the reach and size and money to keep people if it chooses (and if it acts in time).
Regarding that “two engines” argument from Clay:
However, from the customer/user standpoint, it’s wrapped into a single Process Server, so if IBM ever gets around to refactoring into a single engine, that could be made fairly transparent to their customers, but would likely have the benefit of reducing IBM’s internal engineering costs around maintaining one versus two engines.
I think Sandy hits it just right. The issue isn’t how many engines are under the hood – it is what does it feel like to the customer. Regarding the lack of a cloud offering for BPM: “They need to rethink their strategy on this, and stop offering expensive custom hosted or private ‘cloud’ platforms as their only cloud alternatives.” Again, I think Sandy’s right. It is hard to tell in what time frame it really starts to hurt, but the trend lines are there, and they’re plain to see.
Great reviews and perspectives to soak up. Nothing I like more than reading these competing perspectives and conclusions and then reconciling with my own opinions and the impressions of the BP3 team.
Much has now been written about IBM BPM 7.5. We’ve blogged about it before Impact, and we’ve obliquely referenced it since Impact. And we’ve enjoyed reading all the other reviews out there.
So we won’t rehash the feature by feature, blow-by-blow nature of product reviews (we’ll save that for another post!). Let’s just take a big step back and look at the big picture, and I’ll tell you how we, at BP3, really feel about it.
First, for Lombardi customers. There’s no doubt that this is A Good Thing. The Lombardi Way has prevailed within IBM in a sense – the experience of IBM BPM is going to feel a lot like Lombardi – and yet a lot of time and effort is going into things Lombardi could never afford to invest in (configuration management, integration). ILOG baked into the product line means no more guessing how best to handle rules issues in your processes. There’s a clear migration path up to 7.5, and clear software entitlements. But most of all, IBM BPM makes Websphere manageable for the customers who really wanted BPM rather than Websphere (in other words, the app server is behind the curtain, not in front of it).
Most of all, Lombardi Customers can breathe a sigh of relief that IBM is not throwing out the golden goose that lays the eggs. From a Lombardi point of view, it is going to look like lots of extra goodies in the bag, with very few downsides from a feature-function point of view.
WPS Customers should also be in good shape. While the migration to 7.5 does not automatically convey the Process Designer, they’re existing WPS efforts should migrate up just fine (the WPS engine is intact). If you add Process Designer to the mix, you’ll find you now have a great BPM tooling for addressing use cases that might have been more challenging in the WPS environment. The new tooling should be more accessible to your team, and make it easier to address a broader set of use cases. Most WPS customers won’t breathe a sigh of relief because (a) they always assumed WPS would dominate the ultimate BPM solution, or (b) because they are happy to have access to the Lombardi-style version of BPM.
Just buy IBM BPM. Your choices got simpler. If you need to design integration flows with clear atomicity and transactional semantics, go for the advanced version of IBM BPM. Otherwise, you’ll probably want to start out on the Standard version if you’re a larger company, and express if you’re running a pilot or smaller organization. You no longer have to worry about betting on the wrong horse. This is something we can give IBM credit for – their product strategy didn’t involve abandoning either of their main BPM product lines or leaving behind either set of customers.
You bet it is. Now you can sell and deliver on one value proposition with conceptually minor permutations. No more product conflict. The WPS heritage assets are now defined toward a different use case (automated workflows and integrations) than the heritage Lombardi assets (Human-centric BPM, if you will). Build your processes in process designer, and build integration flows and lights-out processing in the Integration Designer. And integrate the two in the Process Designer.
Well, I guess your job got a little easier. IBM really has one BPM offering you need to analyze, rather than 2-3. And it seems to capture the best attributes of Lombardi, WPS, and ILOG. As Phil Gilbert said to us at bpmCamp shortly after the acquisition: “IBM clearly has the assets and technology to put together the best BPM offering in the market.” The only question was: would they? Would they actually put those assets front and center and create the offering?
Well they have. Adjust those magic quadrants, waves, and rankings.
This is nothing but good news as far as BP3 is concerned. We couldn’t be happier with the direction IBM took with BPM 7.5. Including dropping all the awkward naming of previous versions. We believe we are the best Lombardi BPM services provider, and we aim to continue that record by aiming to be the best IBM BPM services provider. We think IBM put the right horse (Process Designer) in front of the cart (Integration Designer), and we’re really looking forward to leveraging all the new features of 7.5 (to review: ILOG rules, Integration Designer, Profile Manager, Business Monitor, etc.). We’re incredibly relieved that they didn’t EOL Lombardi.
And I think there will be a lot of WPS customers who will want to understand, better, what this whole Lombardi point-of-view is all about. We think they’ll want to talk to someone like BP3.
Importantly, this release keeps the focus on the things that matter in BPM deployments – time to market, ease of use for the 80% case, ability to go as deep as need be in the 20% case, and a focus on the “business” view of BPM, not just the IT view.
But most importantly, this release signals that the engine(s) don’t matter… What matters is the EXPERIENCE.
IBM (and specifically Phil Gilbert) is planting the flag and saying the experience around BPM matters more than which specific technologies are behind it, it even matters more than the Websphere branding in front of the old names. In the future, if IBM resolves the offering down to a single engine, it would likely be transparent to us because that engine would be running off of the repository we have today, and running behind the user experience we have today (or, an improved version of the same). Do I really care if the code running my Process Designer-authored process is Lombardi heritage or WPS heritage? I don’t really care, so long as it still behaves the same way. In other words, so long as it implements the “interface” and gives me that “WYSIWYG” feel, I’m happy.
Much has been made by Clay Richardson and others about “multiple BPM engines.” But trust me when I say that these engines consist of a relatively small percentage of the total lines of code involved in these products. It is like the algorithmic core of a bigger software entity. No one is suggesting that the ILOG engine has to be consolidated with the BPM engines to save cost. It doesn’t make any sense to do that, does it? So why consolidate the BPEL and BPMN engines? (Again, it may just not make sense to merge these two entities in a meaningful way). IBM feels that it has already merged them in the two ways that matter most:
I also had another takeaway from Impact, on the BPM front. ACM is going to be a subset of the BPM offering, from a product point of view. I saw two customer presentations that covered case management style dynamic processes that were home grown on top of their Lombardi implementations. They were very interesting, and not that complicated. And if these scenarios can be built on top of the platform, by customers… Certainly these are use cases that IBM could include in their BPM product offering – either as part of the IBM BPM offering or as part of the BlueworksLive offering. Or both. That’s the thing with IBM – they don’t have to choose, they can leverage the genius of the ‘and’. And if IBM doesn’t do it, someone like BP3 will.
Nothing has validated our investment in Lombardi more than the release of IBM BPM 7.5. I think John Reynold’s post on the subject captures how I feel as well. This is important. As pivotal as finding out last year at Impact that IBM was truly getting behind its new Lombardi BPM software. This year it is pivotal in that we’re finding out that the last year has been one of real investment in the platform and real results. This isn’t just window dressing, it is substance. I understand why people unfamiliar with the workings of Lombardi and WPS might feel differently, but with respect, they’re wrong. If you know how it works under the hood, this is significant.
Given that this is the culmination of hard work from so many people that I hold in high regard, it seems appropriate to say thanks. I was recruited to Lombardi by Toby Cappello, Scott Bonneau, and Phil Gilbert – not to mention Rainer Ribback and Brian Witherly. And Lombardi allowed me to meet Lance Gibbs, and Flournoy Henry, among others. We built the services team I wanted to build at Lombardi – geographically dispersed (localized), highly skilled, and very experienced consultants. It was completely counter to the prevailing trends at the time: off-shore (remote), commoditized/cheap (lower skill level), and inexperienced consultants. The results:
Our competitors that relied on the prevailing strategies ended up with smaller companies, fewer referenceable and less mature customers. I think the Lombardi brand, in consulting circles within BPM, will continue to be strong for years to come. I want to thank Lombardi for giving me that opportunity to put my best ideas to work for the business. And learning from round 1, we’re applying these ideas to BP3 as well – and earning the rewards of this long-term view.
Everyone who was a part of Lombardi, if they’re still paying attention, should feel a greater sense of accomplishment with this release, than they likely did with the original sale of the company to IBM. Kudos as well to IBM, you have truly figured out how to leverage a fine asset on the product side, and I have no doubt about the dividends it will pay in the years to come.
OK folks. Back to work.
Day 2 of IBM Impact started off well. I went down to breakfast and sat with a senior member of IBM technical staff, as well as a few gentlemen visiting from Farmer’s Insurance. Good conversation over a light breakfast, followed by the keynote.
Katie Lindendoll was our emcee for Day 2. Steve Mills followed her with a fluid, yet technical, presentation of IBM software in the context of 100 years of IBM history. A couple of key points jumped out at me and into my notes from the session (which were light, because Steve does a good job demanding your attention while he’s talking):
Next up was Phil Gilbert, formerly CTO and President of Lombardi, now VP of BPM at IBM. He starts with the thought that we shouldn’t be talking about transforming. We should start with “transformed” – as in, if you’re sitting in the audience, you’ve already been transformed by the economic and technical environment. A couple of key stats:
The chief argument: complexity is increasing, at an increasing rate. And yet IT spend is flat or down over the last few years, with no sign of significant change.
The livestream is here, and embedded below (fast forward to 23:30 for Phil’s contribution):
Phil did a good job rebutting a key argument often used against BPM – putting power in the hands of the business does not mean turning business users into developers. Just like we didn’t turn attorneys into typists when we introduced computers, and yet they all manage their own documents and have much higher personal productivity than we could have imagined in the era of typists.
Four key themes for the talks today were re-emphasized: Visibility, Governance, Simplicity, and Power.
I liked his thought on six-sigma: “Doing improvement without assuming technology just is NOT where we are today in the real world. We need to account for the technology as well in our work.” Something we’ve been arguing as well, since at least 2007.
Then he introduced IBM BPM 7.5 – the joining of Websphere Lombardi Edition and WPS. My old colleague Brandon Baxter was brought in to assist with the demo. New branding/interface on the Integration Designer to make it match the Process Designer. Phil lays it out afterward: “They have to not just work together. They have to work the same”
They also showed of revamped critical path management functionality, showing projected due dates and changes to the process and the implied affect on due date. Projections can be optimistic, pessimistic, or historically most likely dates.
Phil ended with a note on tying many products together (paraphrasing from my notes):
It isn’t a weakness to have overlapping technical solutions for common – but not identical – problem spaces.
A 75-year partnership with Caterpillar did not just start with a computer. Enabling a new platform for business. And a commitment to bring along the things that came before. We’re not dogmatic, but we are leaders.
Following Phil’s talk was a surprisingly good roundtable with two executives from Nationwide Insurance and two executives from Verizon Wireless. Pretty good shout-outs to ILOG on this panel.
Wrapping up Day 2 was Scott Klososky. And his first point was something I can get behind- that technology is art not engineering. In light of this, and the changes to our lives that technology is weaving, we need leaders with new skills – and they need to add these skills at a faster rate than we’ve been seeing. They need to be able to predict the future accurately and be visionary, accurately. And then invest the time, money, and people to get there in time!
He then emphasized augmented intelligence, long term leadership (short term leadership is just “management”), and how to leverage social media to stay well-read in your area of expertise.
Great way to start Day 2 at Impact.
Other Notes from Day 2
Later, I attended a session on UI-building on IBM BPM. Unfortunately so much time was spent on rehashing the normal ways of building UIs that we didn’t get enough time in the session to really see something different and new, though we did get a very deep technical dive on some of the approaches for different types of UIs.
In the afternoon, I spent some time with David Brakoniecki (of Axispoint) sharing notes on sessions we’d been to at the conference, and the market in general. It was the first time we’d met in person (previously only on Twitter) so I guess we now have to admit David is a real live person.
Then we hit Clay Richardson’s session on why BPM is hot. Though it seemed more focused on why BPM efforts are sometimes “hitting the wall”. Short version: lots of running analogies, a focus on the personality “types” you have in BPM initiatives (though I’m not fond of all the short-hand names like “Guru” and “Prodigy”). A key point of emphasis was active leadership from either the business owner, business analyst, or process architect. A process analyst cannot be an order taker – has to be more assertive and involved.
After that was a very good session on BPM Architectures by Zach Roadhouse and Karri Carlson-Neumann – in which they described how IBM BPM 7.5 now takes full advantage of Websphere’s Profile Manager. This allows much better, repeatable, control over exactly how IBM BPM is deployed, without requiring the writing of a great many scripts. They reviewed scenarios from the trivial (all-in-one-JVM) to the complex (clustering multiple services independently and layering them across your servers). It has all the advantages of Ant scripts (accuracy, repeatability), without requiring us to actually learn all the ins and outs of manipulating Websphere via Ant.
The three of us (Lance, Flournoy, and myself) finally were able to meet in the same place – at dinner.
Phil’s writing is always provocative and this time is no different: he brings together the subjects of BPM and Egyptian revolution in a single blog post! This hits home for BP3 because one of our best business partners is based in Egypt and we’ve been keeping a worried eye on the news -and luckily finding that our friends are doing just fine so far. From Phil:
A lot of that is fact… some is supposition. There’s one more fact I find interesting: Egypt’s army is a conscript army. Which means its army, given its size (1/2 million Egyptians) will inherently reflect all the nation’s constituencies and values – these will be internalized to an extent not possible when the army is not “democratically” selected. [Note: I'm not implying anything against a volunteer army, it also has many merits, I'm simply saying that Egypt's isn't, and therefore the demographics of the army more directly reflect the demographics, and therefore the sympathies, of the entire population.]
What Phil is driving at, is that in BPM – it might make sense for us to make sure our BPM initiatives are a cross-section of the real company we’re dealing with – not just a set of elite volunteer commandos. Although, you know, elite volunteer commandos are nice too.
I recently visited a customer that has taken an interesting approach to BPM: they’ve sprinkled the seeds of BPM around the organization, training something like 50 people, and making sure to train both a do-er and a manager in the same group- so that the person who “gets things done” can get support of their management when they want to take a BPM spin on their work or spin up a BPM project. They’re also taking a look at what various elements of their BPM initiatives have done that looks like best practice – and what doesn’t. And then looking for the right blend of technical and business approaches that is most likely to yield best results in the general case.
Democratizing your BPM initiative – and allowing innovation to flourish – it isn’t a bad thing.
There’s been much discussion of late on “Social BPM“. In particular, when should the magic “social” stuff happen – at design-time, or at run-time, of a process? There has also been a significant overlap with discussion around ACM (Advanced/Adaptive Case Management), wherein proponents of ACM advocate putting more power in the hands of users to dictate the flow of a “case” through their organization (if I can use the word “flow” to describe something that isn’t, in their view, a process).
If we can pull together a quick assessment of the terrain of “social” BPM tools:
The big short-coming in the first category: who wants to share their models publicly with everyone else? If I have a model, and I think it is differentiating and good, I’d hardly want to share it for free, likely with my competitors. And certainly my boss is going to look even less kindly upon sharing corporate IP. So these communities had a high inactive user count, low active counts. (low, relative to the inactives at least).
The big short-coming of the second category: why does the collaboration stop when the process model is finished? For example, in IBM’s Blueprint, I can “follow” changes to any model I’m interested in – but why does the following stop when this model starts executing in Teamworks? (ahem, Websphere Lombardi Edition).
The big short-coming in the third category is that generally the tooling for collaboration at run-time isn’t connected with the tooling for process design in a meaningful way.
However, just because each area has a short-coming doesn’t mean that there isn’t any value – we’re just acknowledging the issues in each area. You could list “traditional BPM” as a fourth category, and its shortcoming very well could have been a “lack of collaboration capabilities.”
About a week ago, I was fortunate to get a sneak peak at the new IBM Blueworks Live, the upcoming combination (culmination?) of Blueprint and Blueworks. There’s already good coverage of what is coming in the FAQ, in this IBM interview of Phil Gilbert, and in the coverage of his recent talks on the Next Decade of BPM (including Sandy’s coverage of the last talk, where he introduced the IBM Blueworks Live announcement).
Phil Gilbert set the hook nicely at his BPM 2010 keynote: software tooling has been targeted at the 6 IT people who support 240 business people. With Blueworks Liive, Phil is presenting a potential solution: software targeted at letting the 240 people in business improve their own processes, without needing to know words like BPM, or BPMN (let alone what the BPMN notation is all about).
Sandy writes: “It’s good to see IBM consolidating these social BPM efforts; the roadmap for doing this wasn’t really clear before this, but now we’re seeing the IBM Blueworks community coming together with the Lombardi Blueprint tools.” What impressed me in my session with Phil’s team is the thoughtfulness that went into rationalizing these two products. It appears to me that they didn’t sit down and map out features and figure out how to make them work together- they looked at each product and tried to identify what was most compelling, and what was most deficient – in other words, what is holding it back?
The key insights: the collaboration and sharing features of Blueworks were powerful, but the social engineering of understanding how to break down barriers to sharing just weren’t there in the Beta: you’re sharing with the whole world, and process information is sensitive. But in this case, the answer wasn’t to try to change people’s sharing behavior (a la Facebook), the answer was to create a safer environment for sharing: by limiting the audience to your own corporation (or subsets of your company), so that people will feel more comfortable sharing to begin with.
Second, the notion of “following” has been extended to all parts of the offering (this was already a key feature of Blueprint). Following is a very low-maintenance way to keep up with what’s happening in process design- and lets the business user determine what matters to them, rather than having software developers decide. There is an interface that reminds me of twitter or facebook, but moreso of yammer, because of the fact that it is private to your company.
Third, bringing “BPM” to the masses. Rather than try to dumb-down BPMN, Phil’s team has started working from the long tail up – just offering a couple of very simple process templates. You could classify them as “Checklists” and “Approvals”. A Blueworks user can create a new template from these two basic types – and then any other business user can run these templates (and configure them slightly when kicking them off). Additionally, it looked like participants could add steps to the process as needed when it got to their queue. Incidentally, this addresses a concern of John Reynolds‘, regarding making programming accessible to the occasional programmer. One could argue that the folks in the business who construct the Excel spreadsheets that run so many businesses processes are these “occasional programmers” that need this kind of tooling.
Of course, this simple execution capability is a really interesting game for IBM to be in. At $10/user/month, it isn’t prohibitively expensive. No servers to set up or software to install. And the setup of these simple processes is trivial.
But the last point, and the most interesting one, is the implication of combining simple process execution for the masses, with the newsfeed and following capabilities of social networks. In this way, we can keep a finger on the pulse of these user-generated processes running through a team or a company. With the capabilities coming November 20th, Blueworks Live may be short of game-changing, but it is very clear how to move forward in a way that *is* gamechanging.
Angela Ashenden of MWD Advisors asks “Are we seeing the dawn of the social intranet?“:
The other thing which the J.Boye event got me thinking about was the relationship between the corporate intranet and collaboration. There was a real cross-section of organisations in attendance, from those for whom the intranet is still very much a central publishing environment to those who see the intranet and their corporate collaboration strategy as one and the same thing—or at least part of the same discussion. As we move into an era where social connectivity and interaction becomes more important in a business context, it seems obvious to me that the “social intranet” concept is the natural home for both these strategies, with the focus not so much on the organisation (or particular people in the organisation) determining what information should be published for consumption for example, but on employees themselves requesting the information via a social platform whereby it can be shared with the organisation as a whole, and stored for later reference by others. Do you agree? I’d be interested in your comments.
Perhaps we are seeing the dawn of the social intranet. Twitter’s features (follow, status updates, search, etc) just make too much sense for corporations for these features to not show up in products targeted behind the firewall. But for “social” interaction to be useful, there has to be an organizing principle that makes it relevant. That’s the magic I see in the new Blueworks Live offering – the organizing principle is long-tail knowledge work processes – defined and driven by the business.
It won’t be long before the business, getting a taste of following these long-tail processes in Blueworks, is going to want to follow their “BPM” processes (perhaps running in Websphere Lombardi Edition) in Blueworks as well. Of course, if Blueworks Live were the center of IBM’s strategy, you’d expect to see APIs exposed for other business applications to register “follows” and “updates” with the Blueworks newsfeed.
Did I mention that you can see the kernels of game-changing here?
Jacob Ukelson posed this question the other day:
So where does all this leave us? I think that in 2011 we’ll start seeing business user backlash to BPMS – they will want more participant control over process, faster start up time, better end-user usability. That will lead them to ACM (or to continue using email+excel). It also probably means that the BPMS growth rate will slow.
Having been in BPM, and remembering how many times a break-out year was predicted… I prefer not to make these kinds of predictions. BPM has been a steady grower, however, which may actually be more appropriate for enterprise technology- giving technology time to catch up to some of the hype (although, admittedly, the hype always seems to lead!).
Regarding BPMS growth rate slowing – I don’t think any slowing of growth rate will be caused by ACM, nor by a “backlash” as Jacob calls it.
I see the trends Jacob is pointing too, but these are trends that play out over many years or even decades, not 12-18 months. I often agree with Jacob – and 2011 may well be a “break-out” year for ACM – but I disagree with some of the arguments he proposes to make his case:
“1. BPMN is becoming more complex because it is primarily a tool for IT professionals.”
BPMN is not becoming more complex. The standard (BPMN2.0) is out. BPMN is unlikely to now change for some time. Whether BPMN is primarily a tool for IT professionals or not, this hasn’t suddenly changed. If ACM is successful, it will not be because of BPMN. It will be because of ACM’s unique, value adding, capabilities. If those capabilities are subsumed by existing software packages that have market presence, then it will be difficult to determine what is ACM separate from what is BPM.
“2. IT departments like the centralized control most BPMS give them.” Actually, many IT departments push back against BPM, and against the methods that make BPM most likely to succeed. In many cases it requires cultural change in IT departments to be successful. This accounts for some of the slow-and-steady growth I referred to (not that 20% CAGR is bad). On the other hand, in many cases the business is championing BPM – somehow I can’t accept that this is a bad thing. Naturally IT can feel threatened in some cases when business takes the lead with respect to software, but it isn’t always that way.
“Paraphrasing Phil Gilbert – it enables 1 Java programmer to control the productivity of 250 business users, and makes those business users completely dependent on IT.” I don’t agree with this paraphrasing. Phil Gilbert was, if I read correctly, arguing that Java programmers are highly leveraged, not highly controlling. The implication of intent to control isn’t really accurate or appropriate. It is simply an implication, on Phil’s part, of a limitation to agility because this 1 Java programmer is overloaded.
“This is reminiscent of the mainframe era in the 60, 70, and 80’s – which generated the client-server backlash of the 80’s, 90’s, and 00s.” I normally think of backlashes as things that happen faster than over 3 decades. Also, I recall IT departments being pretty high on client-server and MS Office roll-outs… and *not* fighting them.
“4. IT, the CIO and most vendors hated that trend and tried to fight it. The more they fought it, the more people found ways to get around IT and use the systems that gave them back control.” I don’t remember this at all. We had different experiences with this (and, admittedly, both experiences probably happened, depending on which companies you were working with at the time).
Having said that, I think that products that address the “other 75%” of process work will find an audience. I just don’t think that they’re competitive with BPM products – in fact, they’re highly complementary. Just as email and Excel spreadsheets aren’t competitive with BPM…
I really like Phil’s talks on “the big picture”. Of course, given his investment in process, his talks on BPM are particularly compelling stuff (even if you disagree with him).
In his latest blog post, which is, essentially, an excerpt from his presentation at the BPM2010 Conference, Phil really drives home the point about how leveraged the IT resources at our major corporations are. That for every true software developer, there are 5 people supporting their work (maintenance, deployment, requirements, management). For those six people, 240 people are in “the business”.
He could have added an additional dimension: outsourcing. By outsourcing, the # of IT employees relative to business employees has been reduced even further.
And both of these trends have a cost: reduced agility.
One answer would be to have more software developers – therefore increasing the throughput of the current 6:240 ratio. Another answer is to provide better software to the 6 IT folks. Phil argues that BPM is, essentially, just better tooling for these same 6 people. An argument could be made that BPM extends its reach a bit further, allowing 7, 8, 9, or 10 people to get more directly engaged. But the point remains – a shockingly small number of people are the bottleneck to business agility.
So the other answer is to address this larger community of “the business”. Addressing the 240. Increasing the scale from 240 to 480. This is the challenge that Phil is calling on BPM to address:
So the next great challenge is before us: how do we turn the notion of scale on its ear? How do we gain the involvement of the 240 real business people so that without training they can contribute their knowledge of how things work, their requests for how things should work into the explicit, unambiguous conversations required for automation? And, by doing so, how can we increase the velocity of communication for everyone, so that requirements can be more exact, more quickly and communicated more effectively, so that the scale of software can be enhanced even further.
Good stuff. Nick Malik elaborates from his perspective in a followup post. But rather than dig into that, we can jump straight to Phil’s response to Nick:
And then once you are on the cloud, the technologies of Social are, in essence, free. I think if Social is your value prop you will lose inside the enterprise. People have no time for abstract notions of “community” at work, any more than they have time for abstract notions of “process.” But if the value prop is unleashed via the cloud, then Social becomes possible. And Social then can become, in essence, your Center of Excellence. This is the ultimate democratization: a Social network that enables the communication that is your Center of Excellence.
This will never happen with someone buying a “Center of Excellence in the Cloud” package. It will happen because they use a set of tooling that solves personal or small group problems… and that technology has as a secondary value prop the ability to communicate via the new Social.
Which then, finally, leads to this: my Center of Excellence isn’t defined by expertise but, rather, by the velocity of communication that speeds through it. Expertise is so highly distributed and, for most interesting breakthroughs, so specialized, that the main hurdle to breakthrough isn’t knowing everything, but rather, knowing where the pointer to any one thing is. A Center of Excellence should not contain experts with answers but, rather, should be a vehicle through which I can pretty easily get to any answer. It is about communication. And the faster and more robust that communication can be, the quicker the person or artifact with the answer can be identified and reached, then the better the CoE is.
I would argue, it isn’t knowing everything- it is knowing how to get to the answer. This concept is familiar to me, as the son of a librarian, who could seemingly find any bit of information or research paper the son desired to find. As computing resources evolved, the key improvement in “finding the answer” was search. The difference with “the new Social” as Phil calls it is, not only can I use search to find answers, I can use my network of experts to find answers. Phil calls this dis-intermediating the experts, but I would instead say that it is removing the official distinction between experts and non-experts. Whoever has the answer can be the expert. True experts will still be immensely valuable in “the new social” as they’ll be even more leveraged than they ever were in the old systems, and access to these experts are not likely to be as limited by governance and chains of command and project charters.
That’s probably a good thing.
Phil leaves us with one last thought:
By the way… we may be closer than you think on some of this stuff :-)
I think I mentioned before that I suspected Phil might be priming the pump with his talk at BPM2010, while working on the answers back at the lab :)
We’re looking forward to seeing the outcome.
Phil gave the keynote at BPM 2010 yesterday, and Keith Swenson had the early coverage ready before EOD yesterday. In this talk, it sounds like Phil has continued his main themes (since I can remember) of making BPM more and more accessible to the business. As he often put it in the past, the IT folks are a small minority of the total population in a business (2%?), and “we want to focus on the other 98% of the people in the business”.
Every year this theme gets some tuning, based on technology and cultural developments. This year the stats were updated a bit:
For every one 1 java programmer developing applications, there are 5 IT people supporting the technology infrastructure, to support the work of 240 business people. Tools to date have all focused on the 6 people.
And the suggested general direction is evolving to include the idea of “following” elements of the business. I’ve used the follow feature in Blueprint, and love it – sometimes simple features are compelling. But I’d like to see “follow” functionality throughout the IBM Lombardi BPM solution – within the Lombardi Edition authoring environment, as well as in the run-time environment.
It sounds like Phil also took some shots at the standards effort behind BPMN. This isn’t new – Phil has long been a proponent of having a standard, and having a standard storage for the notation. But he’s also expressed his frustration in the past that the folks working on the standard were getting bogged down, taking too long, and getting too far into the weeds. Fair criticisms that I think Keith and Bruce Silver and others would echo (including myself). I’m glad to have BPMN, but I hope the standards folks take some time off and let it bake.
The central argument (quoting directly from Keith’s blog):
Citing an IBM study of customers, 2.5% of the processes are complex, 22.5% are somewhat complex (less than 200 steps), 75% are not complex at all. This last category is done today by excel over email.. At Banco Espirito Santo the complex processes impact zero people, moderately complex effects 2000 people, and the non complex effect 8000 people. This organization has moved forward to allow business users to be “100% empowered to automate the non-complex processes”. If your business is based on people (and there are very few companies today that are not) where is the value being delivered by your BPM? Everyone is way too focused on the really complex processes. IT was clear he felt that is what lead BPMN standards astray, and this research crowd should be mindful not to fall in the same trap.
BPM is a cultural issue, not a technical one.
(Neil Ward-Dutton focuses on the same part of Keith’s summary, with an emphasis on the cultural).
Keith comments that Phil stopped short of prescribing a solution to empowering business users to increase the support for business work… but I think he’s priming the pump. He’s giving us a sense of what we’re missing today. But if I know Phil, he has people working on it right now.
The future is focusing on the “B” in BPM – not the “N” in BPMN – and the vendors that can offer the most compelling solutions are going to reap substantial rewards.
A few weeks ago I had a call with Intalio’s Ishmael Ghalimi. It was right before vacation, and the unfortunate side-effect is that I’m only now catching up with writing the post I meant to write when I got off the phone with him.
For the last couple of years, many of us in the BPM world have wondered what exactly Ishmael and his crew at Intalio were up to. They made a series of acquisitions and investments, the purpose of which wasn’t quite clear to much of the BPM community, because it included a CRM solution and a focus on cloud computing. But when we finished talking, it was clear to me that Ishmael has simply made a different bet than most of the rest of the BPM community. While the mainstream of BPM innovation has been focused on BPMN2, modeling and collaborating in the cloud, and tweaks to the method and thought process like ACM… Intalio has gone a contrarian route- retooling and refocusing on BPM in the cloud – but not by dabbling, by jumping with both feet, so to speak. This is the long game rather than the dink-and-dunk short game.
It is a bold move, and Ishmael makes the argument that if you really want to play with the big boys, you need to make the investments that Intalio has made in a vertically integrated stack for cloud computing. Rather than writing all the code from scratch, of course, Intalio is relying on a bevy of open source software. A quick look at this page reveals just how many open source projects are involved in Intalio’s offering (and that’s just on the application engines side).
A heavy focus on open source software might cause you to wonder how Intalio makes money. Intalio contributes to some of these projects, and just leverages some others. the distinction that Ishmael made is that while the open source project for, say, the process engine (Apache ODE and Drools Flow), is free and open source… The entire integrated solution that Intalio is offering is commercial. You are, essentially, buying a professionally prepared 10 course meal, instead of just getting all of the ingredients for free, so to speak. As Ishmael points out, customers do not mind paying for commercial software today that includes open source parts (nearly all of the commercial BPMS offerings today include at least some significant open source project code).
Ishmael went into great detail about the investment required to make Intalio’s PAAS offering virtualization- ready – the upfront investment to natively leverage SpringSource and the like is significant. But once there, it is much easier to scale application deployments.
We walked through a pretty compelling demonstration of the authoring tooling – which was browser-based, and he scored bonus points with me by running the whole stack on a Mac (attention commercial BPM vendors: your users and developers want Mac, iPad, and iPhone support). The ability to model data, leverage it in user interface and process diagrams, and deploy it quickly, is compelling. It doesn’t *feel* like a BPM tool, it feels like an IDE for building apps in the cloud. Perhaps that is the intent. To make BPM a feature of the environment, so to speak, rather than the centerpiece of the environment.
I asked Ishmael, given that this seems like both a horizontal and global strategy and a great number of component projects that make up their product offering, how does Intalio decide what NOT to do? We had discussed why he had made the investments he’d made, but how do they decide what not to do? Ishmael’s take is that they are throwing the long ball – seeing themselves as a much smaller version of a Microsoft of the 90′s, where:
Another analogy he gave is RedHat – providing the glue to pull together open source projects into coherent commercial offerings. There are many execution challenges, but if you pull it off and execute, you’re in very good shape because most competition is either too small to deliver, or too big to abandon their existing commercial software business (or not nimble enough). His example of too large: he argues it would be very hard for IBM to come to market with an integrated product that is also virtualized for the cloud, because there are different P&Ls within IBM’s software group, who aren’t going to work together on one seamless offering. Others might argue these points differently, but given Ishmael’s thinking, the strategy he’s pursuing makes sense in that context.
The pricing model is free up to 5 users, and then scales up in price as you expand the solution. This makes it easy to prototype solutions, and scale cost relative to the benefit achieved.
In some respects, what Ishmael and Intalio are trying to do is offer a compelling software stack for process applications in the cloud, but also removing many of the barriers to entry companies would normally face. One could argue that they are trying to make BPM in the cloud simple enough that mere mortals can attempt it. And Ishmael claims it isn’t just a superficial attempt to band-aide these projects together – that they’ve thought and worked hard on every level of the stack – from hardware, to virtualization, to Infiniband networking, to the more obvious software layers that developers interact with. The conversation with Ishmael about these topics reminded me of my conversations with Phil Gilbert of Lombardi about making versioning relevant to BPM authoring (that it isn’t enough just to check things into subversion, that real versioning requires a much deeper understanding of process authoring). Versioning was Lombardi’s long pass in the last couple of years leading up to the acquisition by IBM. And the point of this kind of deep investment in both cases is to create simplicity out of complexity – to provide truly useful abstractions to the customers of your software.
Three is risk that Ishmael and Intalio may have made this investment “too early”. I recall in the 90′s a firm that made a bet on server-side Java runtime environments a bit too early – betting on JRun, which was a pretty immature platform. A year later, when the product suite was ready, the whole thing could have been accomplished in 3 months on top of newer commercial application servers (e.g. Weblogic).
Time will tell if Ishmael’s long pass pays off – he’s either stolen a march on the competition, by getting “fully cloud-enabled” early, or he’s made the march too early and paid too heavy a price to get there. If he’s too early, we’ll know because other “mainstream” BPM vendors will quickly follow with fully cloud-ready BPM stacks. If he’s stolen a march, then Intalio will use its technical advantages (perceived and real) to drive more business at the expense of others.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
A tweet from Phil Gilbert hints that this may not be the only innovation surprise from the Lombardi team at IBM’s Impact conference this week, but for now we’ll have to settle for a teaser: an update to Blueprint, just in time for the IBM Impact conference.
The Blueprint team released an update to its collaborative modeling software on May 1. The update includes a batch of process templates (no doubt leaning on some of IBMs templates) and process patterns. The interface for browsing templates is attractive, giving you a graphical sense of the shape of the process, rather than just a description of it. Clicking on any template brings up a more detailed view of the process diagram. My first thought was that there are enough templates, we’ll need to be able to search them. And then I noticed the search prompt in the upper right actually is labeled “Search Templates”. Not bad.
The other important change is the addition of a REST API. At first blush, this API should be pretty useful for pulling back information about processes in Blueprint. I’m a big fan of exposing APIs because it gives practitioners supported ways to innovate on top of the platform. And it is good for the software vendor because they can’t anticipate all the useful purposes their software might be put to if they enable others to build on it. The API seems like a great first step in letting people expose Blueprint data in other applications.
Just prior to the Blueprint release announcement, on Friday, IBM announced the new names for the Lombardi product lines:
Blueprint becomes: IBM BPM Blueprint
Teamworks becomes: IBM Websphere Lombardi Edition
Now I just have to get used to saying the new names!
Jacob Ukelson of ActionBase once again writes an intriguing post on complex business processes, referencing a Clay Shirky article on the collapse of complex business models.
Ironically, while I share Jacob’s optimism about the future of products like ActionBase, I don’t agree with some of the points he makes in his post even though they are in support of a conclusion we both agree on. First, in areas of agreement: whether you call it case management or ad-hoc processes or knowledge work – software products are increasingly going to target what Phil Gilbert used to call “the 98% of the business that isn’t in IT”. Different vendors will tackle this differently. A few interesting examples:
However, part of Jacob’s post I don’t find myself agreeing with. Jacob makes the argument that BPM-targeted products are becoming more complex – by adding rules, simulation, event processing (and by adding to the modeling notation itself). I’ll agree that the BPMN notation has evolved to become more complicated – and that is a concern – but mitigated by the fact that you aren’t required to use the most complicated elements to get the job done.
As Jacob notes, supporting rules, simulation, and complex (or even simple) event processing is valuable, but I think he overstates how much complexity is added by including these elements in a BPM offering. For one, processes often leverage rules and events regardless of whether these features are integrated into the BPM offering. For another, transparently supporting events and the way they interact with your processes actually reduces complexity of the software solution being built. If you have a simple process that doesn’t require events, you don’t pay a complexity penalty for those features existing – but if you need to deal with events interacting with your process, then having a well-integrated event model actually helps quite a bit. Finally, simulation is almost a completely separate function – it doesn’t complicate execution or building the executable model, but it does give analysts a way to model behavior before they go live.
An interesting example. One of the things you often want from a process is to be able to report on what’s happening within the process, or to do analysis on the aggregate data. If data tracking capabilities aren’t baked into the process software you use, then you’ll have to build the data tracking capabilities (and likely, the reporting capabilities). But if the data tracking capability is built seamlessly into your process software, then you’re more likely to track the data you need, and at less expense and complexity (as measured by lines of code written, or by just about any other measure you choose).
I guess my point, with regard to complexity is this: a given process is easier to describe and translate to execution today than it was before these features were added to BPM suites, not harder. Of course, with increased efficiency for previously mundane but time consuming tasks, the difficulty of problems being tackles is growing – but that’s just the way the software business works – the goal posts are always moving. There is an opportunity for BPM solutions to differentiate by providing a better overall experience- making sure the various parts that Jacob describes work together as “one” product rather than feeling like they were bolted on with duct tape and bailing wire. Some product teams have done a better job than others in this respect… in part leading to the conclusion that BPM is “too hard” or “too complicated” by some, while others think BPM is the best thing since sliced bread (and all points inbetween). A fair amount of this variance in perspective can be traced to early experiences with specific BPM suites.
I think it is healthy for ACM (adaptive case management) advocates to hash out what ACM truly is in their own discussions and forums (as WfMC has separated it from bPM), but I think ultimately organizations are going to see ACM as a necessary component of their Business Process Management initiatives, rather than something separate from their process initiatives. Jacob is right – many of the BPM software vendors won’t “get” the unstructured world of ACM, until it has a chance to mature and coalesce around what the key features and benefits are.
bpmCamp's patio
Last week Stanford hosted the first “bpmCamp” for Lombardi Teamworks and Blueprint practitioners. By all accounts the event was a success – sold out at 40 participants – and with some truly great interactive sessions and discussion that is hard to have at a bigger forum. Our Stanford hosts did a wonderful job hosting, including all of the little details like name badges and maps, but also helping organize logistics around lodging, transportation, parking, and providing an excellent facility in which to have our meetings. Encina Commons is one of the older buildings at Stanford – sandstone and arches and wide covered patios, surrounded by lots of green – a perfect atmosphere for sharing. We were lucky to get a reprieve from the rain for 2 days so that we could really enjoy the surroundings (and make the occasional trip for espresso). Thank you to Lombardi, and Apex (and bp3) for sponsoring the dinner on Thursday night at Pampas – an all-you-can-eat Brazilian feast.
The lawn outside Encina Commons / bpmCamp
And thanks most of all to everyone who came and led a session, contributed their opinions, reached out to their colleagues and made new friends and contacts. What a great experience.
We’ll follow-up with a series of blog posts based on bpmCamp to share some of the content with a chance to step back and editorialize a bit. The biggest takeaway that I had was that the community needed an event like this to step out of the daily grind of delivering processes and process improvement – to see what others are doing, to see the forest for the trees. Sessions ranged in size from 5 people to 40, and discussions were often lively…
bpmCamp in Session
Meanwhile, we’ll start with a short session from Friday morning, when we had a cameo appearance from Phil Gilbert, giving his impressions of the acquisition and the plans for Lombardi products for the next 6 months. There’s a clear focus on proving that they can deliver and innovate “even faster” after the acquisition, as Phil put it. And they have set themselves some very high, but relevant goals. In particular, making it as easy to install Teamworks on Websphere as it is to install Teamworks on JBoss today (cur
Phil Gilbert holds forth @ bpmCamp
rently JBoss is your option if you want an embedded appserver), and making upgrades to Teamworks 7 a truly good experience. The goal is to bring the ease of use of Teamworks to IBM’s customers, and to leverage key IBM technologies but expose them in ways that let you cut through the noise and focus on delivery. It was a motivating message for our bpmCamp crowd because clearly Phil’s attention is still on the BPM game, and this prioritization will keep Teamworks relevant for the audience. Knowing the developers that IBM/Lombardi are putting on this project and upgrade paths, I also know that this is a crack team of some of the best engineers at Lombardi, which says something about the commitment from the executive team.
Someone in the audience noted afterward that this was a more tactical set of goals than they expected to hear from Phil- who usually talks in terms such as “the Second Decade of BPM“… but if the focus on the tactical reveals that they believe the tactical may BE the strategic right now, I think its a welcome shift- because truly, what’s holding people back from BPM is not the knowledge that it has value – the press and blogs are full of information on that score – but rather, its the “getting started” effort required that slows things down. The easier a software company can make the transition from “business problem conceived” to “BPM project underway” the more likely it is that BPM software is applied to that problem instead of sticky notes and a change order on an ERP system scheduled for 2 years out.
There were so many more great sessions to report on, so there will be more posts here about the sessions. One thing anyone reading this can do for me that will help – is let us know if you’d be interested in attending a future bpmCamp, and if you would travel to attend, or if not, where you’re located so we can judge where we have critical mass for another event.
Thanks again to everyone who participated, and watch this space for more information!
Also, lest you think that BPM was the only educational opportunity at Stanford last week, I stopped by the Cantor Museum for Visual Arts and took a few photos of Rodin sculptures – the collection is the second largest in the world and nearly every piece was on display:
the infamous "Gates of Hell"
Phil Gilbert writes provocatively, as usual, in When Process is Your Product. Fresh from a trip to India to meet with some of the world’s top outsourcers/offshorers, Phil asserts that these are the new strategic partners to the Fortune 500 and:
To put it bluntly, a great outsourcer may be better at quickly improving your business than you are. Why is this? Because, these companies are quickly achieving the cultural maturity required for BPM that eludes even the most progressive companies in the world. [...]
If change is so hard, then why is it moving faster at outsourcers than at beleaguered companies? I think it is because process is their product.
I’m not going to debate his assertions, but that last sentence got my attention: … because process is their product.
Well, at some level, isn’t process everyone’s product? Maybe not process generically – but the specific processes that make your business work?… This concept gained a lot of traction when Dell was taking the PC market by storm with a better process than the competition, rather than a differentiated product (notebook, desktop). But in some sense, the process of acquiring the hardware is part of the what Dell was selling – the lower cost structure, taking ownership of inventory at the last possible second, the customization, the quick turnaround.
So, aren’t the processes that your customers interact with part of what you sell? And isn’t what you sell your product? So, if it isn’t quite accurate to say that process is your product, is it fair to say that it is inextricably entangled with your product and with your customers’ perceptions of your product? And with your company or brand? And then haven’t we come full circle?
I think the answer is essentially yes. Therefore, whenever you consider outsourcing your product, you have to be careful. You don’t want to forgo outside expertise at the expense of speed or quality. But you want to make sure that you absorb expertise and culture internally that will nurture and sustain your Product (your Process!).
Does this mean you don’t leverage outsourcing? If I rephrase this to take away the locality aspect- does this mean you don’t leverage vendors? of course not. But I think it will be increasingly natural to demand a better process (product) from your vendors – you are, after all, their customer. Phil writes:
But what if you could simply augment your business people in order to graft the culture of change? Is this a new value prop for the Indian companies?
I’m not sold that the IT outsourcing firms will lend you a BPM culture. Too much time and distance and competing interests between staff for that. But again, it doesn’t mean that you can’t demand good process of any vendor you work with, and long term contracts that imply more efficient delivery over time.
So if your “product” includes the processes that affect your customers, are you investing adequately in the process? Are you investing as much in the processes that delight your customers as you are in the nuts and bolts of your product? Are you investing in the processes that create repeat business? In the processes that help customers extract more value from your product over its lifespan, or extend its useful lifespan?
If you’re not, it may be time to re-evaluate that.
A quick recap of the stack vendor vs. pure play debate:
Round I occurred primarily on the ebizQ BPM In Action blog moderated by Dennis Byron, in the following posts:
I think Round I essentially ended with Dennis and I agreeing to disagree – but I think the majority of comments that got past moderation supported my view. He asked me for specific examples of stack vendors engaging in this behavior of giving away BPM while charging for, say, Websphere – before he would believe my assertion that stack vendors will give away a component against a pureplay vendor to win a deal (not just in BPM, but in any space). Well, unfortunately any information I have along those lines is not something I’m able to disclose except in the most general way, which wouldn’t fit his definition for specific data point.
Round II is captured best in two blog posts on the BP3 blog – (and I welcome comments on our site, as they are only moderated after the fact – your comments will show up right away, and you’re only subject to moderation if they are viewed to be spam by askimet).
First, there was Stack Vendors vs. Pure Plays, and then there was a followup about Oracle’s acquisition of SUN. In the latter post I focused on why stack vendors don’t have enough focus to really innovate… In the former post, I focused more on the overall debate:
[...] if a vendor is giving a piece of software away, you should be suspicious- anything a vendor is giving away for free (or nearly so) isn’t likely to get a lot of investment of R&D dollars going forward. Software companies tend to invest where they see a competitive edge, and they tend to discount and under-invest where they don’t. It isn’t irrational behavior, and it isn’t a question of good/bad or good/evil – its just the trade-off of stack versus pure play.
For some reason, others doubt these basic laws of Software physics, but I don’t. As you can imagine, I was quite pleased to be vindicated at least partly by a recent post from Phil Gilbert, President of Lombardi, entitled with the usual flair: “Flash: Free IBM BPMS Worth Exactly What it Costs” (for the humor impaired, he’s saying it is worth exactly the zero dollars it costs to buy it… ). Phil rips IBM pretty good in his post, and I couldn’t resist quoting him…
So, here it is, quoted for you Dennis:
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?
I particularly like the dancing elephant line… but for Dennis Byron, I think you have your specific example. Let’s take that elephant line again though. Right, someone has to feed the elephant. This isn’t just you, the customer. Yes, Phil argues that the customer will have greater development and maintenance costs, and fewer process benefits, using IBM’s BPMS than by using, say, Lombardi’s. But it is also about IBM. How will they afford to pay their development staff on their BPMS if they are giving it away? Someone has to be paying for software in order for IBM to maintain their development team – they have to feed the elephant. If they can’t explain how many developers they have, how much that costs, and how their zero price solution will pay for those developers, you have to wonder how long Big Blue will keep making that investment, no? This same logic applies to smaller stack vendors, only moreso – they don’t have the financial resources of an IBM.
How else to Stack vendors use undue leverage to get a sale in a software category they aren’t really any good at:
But this notion of getting “free” or highly-discounted software from strategic vendors has currency. How many times has your company picked up some crap from some vendor because it’s on a discount schedule and you have to buy x amount of software each year to “maintain your discount.” So let’s discuss the cost of software, and the value of software.
Yep, that’s right. They get you to buy into the notion of “maintaining your discount.” Wow. I sure hope my local car mechanic never learns that trick.
I have another example. The McDonald’s near my office started giving away McCafe drinks earlier this year – to get people to try them. I tried my free McCafe – and it was so bad I went screaming back to Starbucks. The difference between a McDonald’s and Stack Vendors is that at McDonald’s their food/drinks have to be good enough to get my return business – I tasted the drink, and rejected the free value proposition. At a big Stack vendor, they’re hoping you don’t actually “drink” that free drink – they just want to book the revenue, prevent a “competitor” from getting a toehold in their turf, and help you “maintain your discount.” If you don’t taste the software, you may never know you’ve been had.
As long as IBM is giving BPM away for free, maybe its time to ask why Websphere isn’t free… after all, JBoss is… Maybe they can explain why Websphere is worth some coin and JBoss isn’t? And then maybe you can ask IBM why that same logic might not apply to the BPM space?
Phil, thanks for re-opening the subject and thanks for a very entertaining read!
Quick update: from a more recent Dennis Byron post on Open Source vs. Licensed Software:
The IBM-sponsored speaker is Matthew Brown of Forrester and the subject is portals rather than BPM but the findings and the underlying thought process can be applied to any project. The message is simple: open source Ts&Cs are like any other license Ts&Cs. And license Ts&Cs are only a small fraction of your IT project costs whether it be for BPM or anything else. And sometimes open source Ts&Cs can dramatically increase the rest of the IT project costs. To the caution of “pay me now or pay me later,” add the caution “what I give you with one hand, I take away with the other.”
Let me put this in context… IBM came to this conclusion: License costs are a small fraction of your IT project costs. Apply this to the debate above – that free BPM software can incur costs that far outweight the licensing costs of the paid BPM software – whether it is opensource or just free. And you’re actually more at risk if it is free, but not open source because you can’t modify or improve the source code yourself…
No, Phil Gilbert all by himself isn’t the second decade of BPM. But he wrote a blog post yesterday that certainly paints a great vision for the road ahead. Phil has a great “voice” in his writing and speaking, motivates his topics really well, and I like the fact that he really thinks “big”. No small dreams for this BPM company!
You could sum up his call-to-arms in three words:
And then he goes on to point out how Blueprint addresses point #1 (although it is a bit of oversimplification because there are communication/collaboration features in Teamworks 7 as well, but the point is that Blueprint’s “reason for existance” is all about communication, collaboration, and consensus, whereas Teamworks’ bread-n-butter is automation/execution). And then how Teamworks 7 addresses point #2, Automation, with a set of new capabilities and designs. And finally, attempt to address the lack of available BPM talent with Lombardi University (#3: Educate).
Its a good read, and as with some of his other missives, it will no doubt affect how people think about BPM in the future.