Never one to let a chance to say “I told you so” pass me by, I thought we should recap coverage of this year’s SAP TechEd 2011 in Las Vegas.  I’m not surprised by the lukewarm reactions to the BPM part of SAPs presence, because I’ve written about SAP’s lack of BPM vision before.

First, there’s Jim Sinur, of Gartner:

Bottom Line:
If the SAP BPM architects and technicians can show customer value that catches top managements eye, the wait will be shorter. Right now, it looks to be another two years. With that said, look at what SAP has done in BPM from two years ago. http://blogs.gartner.com/jim_sinur/2009/10/14/teched-09saps-bpm-and-brm-progress-to-date-watch-out-for-construction-cones/

I guess Jim and I are on the same page.  It is *always* another two years with SAP.  Two years from now you’ll be amazed.  Except you aren’t – because two years later, they tell you it’ll be another two years.

But, let’s turn our attention to Bruce Silver’s coverage.  After all, earlier this year he was pretty optimistic about SAP’s BPM.  So what did Bruce have to say?

At this week’s SAP Tech Ed conference in Las Vegas, BPM is definitely off the main track.  The only other BPM analyst here that I recognized is Jim Sinur of Gartner.  The keynote sessions were all about HANA, SAP’s new in-memory analytics platform that is the key to reinvigorating the entire SAP portfolio (at least the parts they still care about).  HANA-enabled BPM won’t come until 2012, but it should provide a significant performance boost (process transactions per hour) as well as powerful real-time process analytics.

Started out sounding pretty down on BPM… But Bruce hasn’t given up on BPM with SAP:

But it would be a mistake to say that SAP has not made significant progress in BPM.  It has, but you had to skip the analyst sessions with the execs and go to the breakout sessions from the BPM product managers to hear about it.  Those sessions were, on the whole, excellent, many of them hands-on with the tools.  In that sense, Tech Ed is the mirror image of IBM Impact, where BPM sizzle was all over the keynotes, but almost no details were available in the breakouts.

(Actually the IBM breakouts had a lot of detail – and got some coverage on our blog.  The analysts just need to break out of the special analyst sessions!)

Bruce notes: “Where conventional BPM (such as NetWeaver BPM/PI) emphasizes BPMN-based activity flow, embedded processes involve transaction events where the order of occurrence at runtime is more flexible.”  But later notes that the embedded processes can be visualized as BPMN diagrams.  Hm.  It sounds contradictory on the surface, but I’ll assume not.

Bruce also mentions “Gravity” – the Google Wave integration and BPM implementation.  But, he’s comparing a (still) “shaky” beta product with BlueworksLive, which has been in production and serving customers for more than 5 years (updating roughly every 6 weeks).

Focus matters a lot for big organizations like SAP, IBM, and Oracle.  At IBM, I’m seeing the focus (for now).  At SAP, I’m seeing some progress, but it looks uneven.  Driven from a level lower down the management chain.  It doesn’t get top billing.  Instead – top billing is HANA and in-memory analytics?  Odd.

Or it would be, if BPM were on the front burner.

I recall not long ago -oh wait, two years ago (June 2009) -  poking fun at SAP’s BPM strategy:

Your last point about the definition of BPM reminds me of a press release SAP did about 2 years ago about BPM… which, if you read their definition, was merely EAI (integration services), and a “totally new groundbreaking category of software” that they called Collaborative Application Frameworks (CAF)… which would be available in … you guessed it… 2 years… and if you read the definition slowly, you realize that CAF was describing a BPMS. Curiously, I haven’t seen a press release about CAF being released into the wild. And their attempt to rebrand EAI as BPM hasn’t taken with the market…

Well.  Based on Bruce’s blog, it looks like 2 years after my comment, and 4 years after SAP’s strategic statement on BPM and CAF, SAP has finally delivered something that approximates what some people would call BPM:

Yesterday I got a look at SAP’s BPM v7.3, now in “ramp-up” (extended beta).  I hadn’t heard much lately about SAP in the BPM area, so I was really surprised to see how far they have come.  The new offering, called the “Process Orchestration Solution”, combines NetWeaver BPM, focused on human tasks, and NetWeaver Process Integration, which provides SOA, ESB, adapters, and Enterprise Service Repository (ESR).

Sorry, I should have said that they’ve delivered it into Beta, not GA.  Bruce’s review is positive, and, I think, reflects his low expectations going into the review.  Based on his review, SAP may finally be getting their BPM act together, and if the other vendors in the space sit still or get comfortable, they’ll get lapped in capability in some areas.

However, SAP is still focused on BPM as a way to add value to their existing application suites, rather than a standalone technology/application offering.  It should be something they can sell into their install base of SAP customers (which is quite large), but I doubt it would get traction out side of that audience as some of the differentiating features are SAP-ERP specific.

Even if I were an SAP customer, I’d still be tempted to use a third-party BPMS because there are processes that simply don’t touch SAP, and if you just want one BPMS, it seems to give you more flexibility.  But for tactical SAP-focused process improvement, or simply as a cheaper way to customize SAP to your needs, this could be a big time saver.

You know I like a good discussion of simplicity, but sometimes we have to call out the lack thereof.  The charts on the Aris BPM blog illustrating how simple the SAP BPM story could be:

From this “simple” slide, we’re to infer that SAP has a more complete offering (er, vision) for BPM than just NetWeaver. I agree with the author of the article that SAP’s BPM message needs to improve – by most definitions NetWeaver is more integration than BPM.  And SAP’s “CAF” (Collaborative Application Framework) which was once described as “beyond” BPM and coming in “two years”, sounded like a subset of BPM as well. There have been some interesting demos (Gravity).  But the thing that strikes me about the chart is that I still don’t understand what SAP products are doing for my business process needs.  I can’t tell if these are the names of SAP products or just general ideas of what you would want to do if you are at the intersection of management control and strategy (financial management??).

But the prescribed solutions are listed thusly:

1. The Forrester BPMS vision of SAP is mostly based on the capabilities of the Netweaver BPM platform and not on the complete BPM vision of SAP
2. SAP does not sufficiently communicate their complete BPM vision towards the market research companies like Forrester and Gartner.
3. The SAP platform is not considered the best of breed BPMS platform by the market research firms like Gartner and Forrester
4. The BPMS capabilities framework of Gartner and Forrester could be extended in order to capture the capabilities the SAP platform can offer.

So… the problem is that Forrester (and Gartner) are only looking at one of many products to place SAP on the BPMS frameworks… and that Forrester and Gartner aren’t sufficiently taking into account the SAP platform’s many other capabilities.  And, this is mostly a problem of communication/marketing, rather than say, substance.

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

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

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

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

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

I’ve previously written about various Google Wave blogs and the SAP Gravity Demo, and continuing on that theme, Jacob Ukelson asks whether Google Wave is good enough to become a disruptive force as a “good-enough” BPMS, on the ActionBase blog.

I think there’s no question that Google’s Wave could serve as a “good enough” BPMS for many collaborative, informal, or as-yet-unstructured processes.  It could also serve as a useful collaboration companion to structured process.  One need look no further than two examples from IT history, which are still with us in many enterprises and in many processes:

• Microsoft Excel
• IBM’s Lotus Notes
• Microsoft Sharepoint

After several years of doing “kill-the-fax” initiatives, businesses turned their attention to these other bastions of bad process – Excel, Notes, and Sharepoint.  We’ve done so many projects to replace Microsoft Excel-based processes and Lotus Notes-based processes that we’ve lost count – and often we’re brought in to save a process that is running on Sharepoint.  I wish we had kept statistics on this as it would make for interesting trending data now that we have a large enough sample size.

Google Wave, if it addresses the various security concerns for storing proprietary information outside the firewall, could very well get adopted for informal processes – especially when the participants and managers of the process have not yet come to think of it as a process.  We could refer to these as emergent processes.  Perhaps the first time you do it, you don’t know if it is a one-off or a process.  After you’ve done it a few times, you have a sense that it is process.  After you’ve done it a few thousand times, you start to wonder how you can do this process more efficiently or less often…

However, Jacob goes further than to suggest that Google Wave would disrupt these more entrenched technologies’ use as a poor man’s BPMS.  He suggests that with a few minor enhancements it could fully replace a “full fledged BPMS”.  I don’t see that happening anytime soon for a few reasons:

1. It isn’t really Google’s intent to build a BPMS.  They don’t think of the problem Wave is solving as a “process”.  As a result, they’re unlikely to take it in that direction.  I don’t think you end up with a good BPMS my accident.
2. The structured parts of process are actually useful for larger organizations that actually have that kind of structure or volume.
3. There is a lot of magic under the hood of a BPMS that wouldn’t be trivial to recreate using Wave.  Not impossible, just not trivial.  More likely is a mash-up approach like the SAP Gravity demonstration.
4. It still sits outside the firewall of the corporation, and for all too many companies, that is still a regulatory problem, not to mention a security problem, for their data.

Having said all of that, Google Wave presents itself as an alternative for collaborating on processes to email, Sharepoint, Excel, and Notes.  I also think the real disruptive threat that Wave poses in the BPM space is to vendors that focus exclusively on the unstructured, user-specified processes – these seem like the lowest hanging fruit to capture in Wave.  On the other hand, I can see Wave being fertile ground for tools that inspect your systems to find out what processes you’ve *actually* been running by inspecting the data, rather than starting with a top-down design.  These tools may have a massive new datasource to mine for their customers, assuming Google makes the data available.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tips and Tricks from Techie-buzz.com.

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

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

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

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

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