Kate Leggett of Forrester’s Customer Service Myths, Half-Truths, and Total Nonsense…Continued is a great read on the myths of “Social” customer service.  But equally, these are statements that should ring true in BPM circles.

The first two myths:

• Social CRM is giving customers control. Her response “Nonsense”.  I love the candor.  Of course, she’s right.  “Social” tools are giving customer control, but social CRM and BPM is much more about regaining control of the conversation, taking the initiative, and reacting quickly.
• Twitter works for customer service. She rightly calls this a half-truth – because it works in certain circumstances and for some audiences, but not everything can be resolved in 140-character chunks.

Obviously, there is more on her blog.  I think the short take is: being honest with yourself about what your goals are with social technologies is the first step toward achieving great results with it.  And, generally speaking, when someone puts the word “Social” in front of an enterprise TLA software category, they’re talking about the company leveraging social to get control.

What is Social?

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:

1. Those tools that offer an online community, a la SAG’s AlignSpace, or IBM’s Blueworks Beta, for process professionals.
2. Tools that allow for collaboratively building process models, a la IBM’s Blueprint.
3. Tools that allow for more collaborative run-time process execution (e.g. ActionBase).  It is this third category that has overlap with the ACM space, by virtue of putting users in control of the process execution, rather than process designers.

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.”

So What’s Changed?

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.

Is This the Social Intranet that Matters?

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?

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

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

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

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

Keith has an excellent post in the form of a Q&A session, as a followup to an ebizQ recorded session that didn’t have time to address all the questions that came in.

Some choice quotes:

The knowledge worker supporting “planning by doing” approach is less about up front definitions of a process.  In general it seems to me that rule sets are primarily useful in order to clearly specify an automated response, and must be prepared ahead of time.  It is hard to see how you would use such rules when directly performing the work.

I can imagine someone defining fairly trivial rules – such as requiring approval above a certain $ threshold after delegating some work to someone else, and deciding that “on the fly”.  But as he says, “in general” the whole point of rules is to address rules at design time, rather than on the fly at run-time (other than by executing the rule)…

4. HOW DOES THE CONCEPT OF A SERVICE ORIENTED BUSINESS APPLICATION(SOBA) RELATED TO SOCIAL BPM, IF AT ALL?
SOA is an orthogonal concept to BPM in general — although there is a widespread misunderstanding about them being similar or the same thing.

Agreed.

Q&A #7 was particularly well-done, as it relates to something Keith has been thinking or writing about a lot lately – unpredictable work and how to track it or measure it – too long to quote here, but please link over to Keith’s page and read it.  He breaks down at least 4 approaches to tracking unpredictable work for the purpose of better understanding it and improving it.

Keith has one more anecdote I had to quote because it is mind-boggling in hindsight:

I remember a friend who was at a company that was acquired by Computer Associates in the 1990′s.  At that time, CA ran an email system, but they allowed access to it only at lunchtime and after hours.  You see, nobody was allowed to access email “during working hours”.

Well, I think it is safe to say that “social” is facing some of the same challenges in the workplace today.  But 15-20 years from now people will look back and wonder that companies weren’t more encouraging of tools like Twitter and others to get work done.

Neil Ward-Dutton of MWD Advisors has written up Tibco’s ActiveMatrix BPM Announcement:

Now of course the next challenge is the execution challenge. Can TIBCO’s field personnel explain and sell ActiveMatrix BPM effectively? Although the company’s European salesforce has always had success selling iProcess Suite as a “standalone” BPM proposition to customers (thanks in part to the UK heritage of Staffware), the company has found this more difficult to do in North America. Here, BPM has been more likely to be sold as an add-on to a SOA infrastructure deal. This is something that TIBCO is going to have to work on.

I can certainly vouch for the characterization of the North American sales efforts.  Back when I was actually supporting BPM software sales on a regular basis, we loved to compete with Tibco.  ActiveMatrix BPM is getting a decent amount of positive press coverage, so it is at least getting a fair hearing, whereas iProcess had already been essentially defined out of the top tier of BPM solutions.

Neil goes on to say:

As I mentioned upfront, ActiveMatrix BPM is definitely TIBCO’s new strategic BPM technology platform – but isn’t the only process management platform that TIBCO has in play; and in fact, iProcess isn’t the end of the story either. TIBCO also supports two other workflow technologies: InConcert and BusinessWorks Workflow. TIBCO has committed that iProcess will continue to be maintained and supported for the foreseeable future: however it’s likely (in my opinion) that InConcert and BusinessWorks Workflow will soon be end-of-lifed.

Looks like IBM isn’t the only one with a surplus of BPM tools in-house…

Earlier in the piece was something curious, especially given the recent discussions around “Social” BPM…

According to TIBCO’s head of BPM product management, “we’re just not seeing demand for social BPM in our customer base right now”. This is interesting: perhaps TIBCO’s customers have different interests than other enterprises.

Neil, you are too kind!  This makes me think they don’t have many BPM customers, aren’t talking to them, or aren’t asking the right questions and then listening. When I see the adoption numbers from Blueprint and Blueworks, and when I listen to people who run SaaS BPM software (Appian, process maker, Signavio), all the data I get tells me that there is quite a bit of demand for social BPM.

Also, Sandy Kemsley has pretty comprehensive coverage of the event.

Keith Swenson weighs in on Social and BPM:

Similarly, proper use of social software will be about individuals producing, publishing and running their own processes. Not collaboration on the design phase, but designing individually, and collaborating with a completed process.  This won’t just be the BPM lifecycle using social software, it will be the elimination of the BPM lifecycle, the elimination of a design phase, the elimination of the separation between designers and workers.

How our expectations have changed in just a year – I read the above statements and agreed.  And yet, I remember a year ago even getting people to buy in to the idea of social features around designing BPM was a stretch (here’s a post from barely 9 months ago on the subject).

One thought-  social collaboration on structured processes will be important, just as Keith argues that collaboration on “user-designed” processes will be important.  As Keith put it “collaboration on the finished product” (his emphasis).  Social collaboration of users within a process could result in best practices bubbling up – much like some of the improvements discovered on factory floors by the people who work the line – but you have to have support for collecting and acting on that feedback over time.

The only part I really couldn’t agree with:

“This won’t just be the BPM lifecycle using social software, it will be the elimination of the BPM lifecycle, the elimination of a design phase, the elimination of the separation between designers and workers.”

The work will change, but I don’t believe process design goes away.  I think it just means that a rising tide lifts all boats- making more processes accessible from an ROI and skills point of view – not eliminating the need for design on a significant number of processes.  In other words, I don’t think that process collaboration turns process designers into typists whose job has become obsolete because everyone does their own word processing and typing.  I think it is a bit more like introducing productivity tools that make something that would previously have been difficult, easier.  Lowering the barriers to entry, rather than eliminating the whole discipline and process of process improvement.  However, I reserve the right to disagree with myself in a year or two as we see what the future holds! We’re still learning what “social” can mean for our businesses – too early to close our minds to a range of possibilities.

Theo Priestley on Social BPM (vs. Traditional):

“The simple answer is that hierarchy is good for repeatability and measurability, whereas self-organizing networks are better at invention,” Gabe said, “There are a lot of side effects and consequences. The lack of titles (roles) is primarily an internal signaling tool.”

“The alternate answer is that organizations that think they are hierarchical actually don’t gain advantage by it (they actually have hidden networks), and that the hierarchical appearance is the result of rent-seeking.”

So can we not design and define an enterprise on the same principles and see the same effect but on a much grander scale ? Is there a half-way house where both ideals can co-exist until we are ready to throw the shackles away for good?

Why not?

Interesting reading about Social Tools within Intuit on the Dachis Group’s site, as they discuss engaging with social tools in their business and the new processes they have to embrace.  Christine Morrison responds to questions from Dachis Group, and I’ve quoted the exchange that caught my attention:

Getting diverse constituents to agree on process changes, or new processes can be difficult. Any tips you can share on bringing people together?

The answer is, it depends.

If the goal is to just make a new, first-ever process that’s never been attempted before in your organization happen (and it doesn’t have to be large-scale right off the bat), I recommend a skunkworks operation: prove your case in a limited, low risk way, and use that data to drive adoption across the organization. The overhead in this scenario is a lot easier to achieve: you usually just need one well-placed promoter who is willing to take a risk on a new way of doing things. Some of TurboTax’s most long-term, strategically important social initiatives were launched this way (Live Community and Inner Circle, for example). [...]

Call me a BPM geek but I like seeing people outside of the BPM world thinking about process, and in this case realizing that social tools don’t get you out of having to think about process – but they do have implications for change in your processes as they exist today, if you’re open-minded enough to allow for it.

Richard Hirsch of Siemens IT Solutions and Services has a post in the SAP community network about “Social BPM“.  Richard states that the goal is to present previous research, opinion, and analysis, before going on to present his own view in a future post.

Based on his ability to synthesize the current buzz around BPM and Social network features or community/collaboration features, I’m interested to see what conclusions he’s drawing of his own.

I’ve recently had my eyes opened to a theme within the Austin startup community, where companies are attacking the markets defined by the intersection of enterprise and web 2.0 ideas – applying community and social features to enterprise software, and applying cloud/SaaS business models to these software packages.  So perhaps my view on “Social BPM” is colored positive by that exposure.