There’s been a lot of coverage of what it means for IBM to buy Lombardi.  Jaisundar proposed that this would upset the balance of power and cause more acquisitions… But perhaps the side effect he (and others) didn’t foresee was the positioning of the remaining BPM vendors (pureplay or otherwise) for the benefit of their suitors.

First we have Appian’s CEO posting here.  I don’t blame him for putting a stake in the ground that Appian is going to win, and positioning that the only two vendors left that matter are Appian and Pega.  Savvion might disagree, as would a few others, but nevermind.  He states that they’re the only ones strong enough to survive (by which, I would suppose he means financial strength, but he leaves that as an exercise for the reader’s imagination.  I don’t blame him for slagging IBM as killing innovation – in any acquisition like this, that is a very real possibility, and will determine whether this is a successful buy or not (at least, for folks who don’t work for IBM).  But methinks he doth protest too much, and may be trying to make sure that potential suitors remember that Appian still exists in case they want to get in the game by buying something.

Next, we have ActionBase, one of my favorite non-traditional BPM offerings.  In a previous post Jacob Ukelson made the argument that Sharepoint should be a better BPM tool than it is.  Now he argues that Sharepoint + Actionbase is that BPM dream team:  unstructured content + unstructured process… If that isn’t a pitch for Microsoft buying a nice Sharepoint add-on I don’t know what is.  Analysts are frothy thinking about how Microsoft or SAP might want to counter IBM’s move, and this is one option.

I’m not sure that unstructured process + unstructured data is the dream of every IT shop, but it is certainly a combination prevalent in many processes and organizations.  And of course those two offerings could work well together.

So it looks like everyone is putting on their finest Holiday Sweaters and looking to make a good impression for their potential sweethearts.  It’ll be interesting to see if there really is a wave of acquisitions or if this is it.

Its the creative destruction process of capitalism at work.  I just hope BPM doesn’t get lost in the woods in the process.

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.

Like the hydra, Sharepoint is a beast with many heads.  You chop one off and three more grow in its place!  A recent posting by Jim Sinur posits that Sharepoint starts many processes.  As Jim indicates, the use of Sharepoint is pretty pervasive.  Interestingly, in a previous post, Jim Sinur referred to Sharepoint as a virus (for good or ill).  In this article, Jim asks two key questions:

1. Will the SharePoint Processes be Upward Compatible?
2. Will the SharePoint Content be Managed Well?

I think the answer to both is essentially no.  Oh there may be upgrade paths defined, but the ability of the average firm to execute those adequately is probably not high. This isn’t upgrading from Word 97 to Word 2003. All those customizations you’ve made will probably need to be redone/rewritten.

Sharepoint is a bit of the wild west of process.  Slightly better than the random collection of spreadsheets that often are just as pervasive within organizations as the best way they have available to manage their processes.  The proliferation of Sharepoint is, to my mind, a reaction by business users to not having the right tools and training available to deliver real business process solutions to their business.  Often they aren’t allocated IT budget for the applications they need, and so they cobble together solutions in Excel, Access, and Sharepoint.

A few things I’ve noticed about sharepoint “processes” though:

1. Usually very few people understand what the process is supposed to be.  You kind of have to know what it is to leverage it.
2. There are lots of deadwood Sharepoint sites/sections/processes. More than live ones… Making it harder to find the stuff that is “active” – nothing worse than thinking you’ve submitted your vacation form only to find out that the vacation request process has moved!
3. There is a tension between control and chaos that is particularly problematic on Sharepoint.  To get wiki-like collaboration benefits, you need to open up the gates for users to do their own designs/layouts/etc.  But when you do that, you lose the control and policing necessary to make sure that everything in Sharepoint is “managed” in an enterprise sense.

For a more amusing take on Sharepoint and BPM, see a previous post on this blog, noting the 6 major barriers to BPM adoption.  Quoting directly:

The Sharepoint Effect. This is almost the opposite of the Bus Brake Effect.  Where the bus brake effect concerns too many vetos and not enough yes-votes, the Sharepoint Effect represents the unbridled proliferation of ungoverned, adhoc processes using unmanageable technology.  Sharepoint becomes a substitute for process, or a substitute for the Excel-based or Access-based processes of the past.  However, there’s no way to find the appropriate Sharepoint site for the appropriate process or process task. [...]

It isn’t that enterprises shouldn’t use Sharepoint, but the business and IT should be careful not to let the tail wag the dog with the proliferation of such sites… otherwise you run the risk of Excel/Access purgatory part 2.

Appian has just recently announced updated Sharepoint support on their website.  Support for wikis, and other bottom-up IT technology like Sharepoint, is likely to gain relevance in BPM deployments, in my opinion.  ActionBase takes one approach – allowing more adhoc processes to be defined in Microsoft Office documents.  It looks like Appian is enabling task lists to be treated like process steps in Sharepoint.  From Appian’s release:

Of course, many other BPM companies offer their own version of SharePoint integration, but I would like to think Appian has offered a unique spin on this integration that raises the bar for all other BPM vendors.  Appian not only allows SharePoint users to easily publish task lists and process reports in native SharePoint dashboards as webparts, but also Allows process designers to control and orchestrate all objects in SharePoint in an Appian process model.

Some of the other features discussed, such as creating a sharepoint site to support a process or process instance, are more similar to offerings from Lombardi, which also offers a Sharepoint integration.  I’m curious which BPM package offers the best Sharepoint integration capabilities, but I haven’t the time and resources to do the research on that front!  Opinions welcome in the comment section -