Well, its only the second day since the Activiti news hit the wire and we have quite a few reactions.  Kudos to Theo Priestley for an unconventional take:

But there’s something else brewing under the surface. Whilst I could have focused on a review based on a powerpoint presentation, Tom’s direction made it pretty clear that he’s throwing down the gauntlet to the likes of Bonitasoft; we’re going with Apache and we’re going to win.

As Theo points out, there has been, lately, less vocal support of open source BPM – Intalio has been a bit quieter, and to the extent anyone is getting press, it is Bonitasoft – while jBPM went largely unnoticed outside of the developer community.

On our call with Tom and the Alfresco team, we specifically asked about the licensing – why Apache instead of LGPL – (honestly, I thought both were reasonably permissive) – and John Newton expressed the point of view that most software vendors were very comfortable with the Apache license, and not as comfortable with LGPL. So they believe more software vendors will be likely to take up Activiti as an embedded solution.

I think it is a good goal to make Activity embeddable.  But I advise them not to lose sight of having a good, complete, solution as well – which I believe is much of the secret sauce behind Bonita’s rise: they’re attempting to solve the whole problem, not just part of it.

ActiveVos takes a harder line view of the Activiti team throwing BPEL under the bus:

Today, Alfresco announced that it had digested the former developers of the jBPM project from JBoss. jBPM had never really made much of an impact as a BPMS because its real purpose in life was to cater to a core Java developer community. Much as hard-core coders might hate it, BPM is about collaboration among an extended development team that includes business users, analysts, developers and operations staff. jBPM was limited to developers and too proprietary to get much traction across the extended development team.

Let me be clear…we’ve got no issue with the jBPM team moving to greener pastures to try and rescue a moribund open source project. We do, however, have a very strong reaction to the transparently re-thought propaganda surrounding their new strategy. It feels like the jBPM architects have something to get off their chest about BPM in general… something they couldn’t get across inside JBoss and they’ve picked what is a rather run-of-the-mill addition of process capability to a document management system to proclaim a completely new metaphor for BPMSs.

Ouch.  I think Alex has a point: that the Activiti team could have made their announcement with no mention of BPEL at all and I don’t think it would have hurt their announcement.  However, I do think that Activiti is prioritizing correctly on BPMN2 first, and other process engine back-ends as lower priority for the core team.  If the project takes off, no doubt someone will contribute hooks to a commercial BPEL engine, or provide an open source implementation project for BPEL. There’s no reason that Tom and his core team have to provide this – at the beginning they’ll have limited resources and they need to focus on the most important bits first.

My biggest concern is how they build momentum around addressing the end-user concerns, starting from such an engineering-focused point.  It can be done – but only if really good APIs form the boundary between the BPM and the UI, and that good projects are started around the UI software that will expose BPM to the masses.

Theo Priestley wonders if an upbeat economy will be bad for BPM:

I had an interesting conversation with Ian Gotts of Nimbus Partners this week that raised a thorny question. In a downbeat economy the focus is to drive out costs and improve processes a lot more aggressively, probably more so than in ‘normal’ conditions where continuous improvement already takes place, so the attention is immediately turned to what BPM can achieve for the enterprise and can potentially account for such strong results being posted by vendors.

While it is certainly a valid concern for anyone in the BPM business to have, it is too early to tell what this turn of the wheel holds.

An example.  In 1994 a little company that sold configuration software to the makers of complex equipments (PBXs, servers, super computers, mainframes, etc) was growing like crazy in the midst of a tech downturn in the US.  Why? Because those tech companies were looking to tighten the belt on costs, and accurate configuration at sales time could help them ensure they built what they sold, reduced errors by 10x, etc.

Fast forward to 2001.  Another tech downturn. But in this tech downturn, the strategy du jour was not to cut costs by being more accurate- it was to simplify the product line dramatically and reduce cost by increasing the volume of commodity parts and sell those at lower prices.  Configuration was out, commoditization was in.

What will happen to a space like BPM if the economy improves?  Hard to say in advance – it will depend on how CEOs react to the new landscape- more hiring? more tech? more automation or capital spending?.  But in general, I think we’ll all be better off if the economy does improve :)

Theo Priestley warns against creating a new role for “organizational actors” to assist with process improvement projects:

Secondly, as highlighted above, we do not need to invent a new role or label to fulfil this kind of role-play, or indeed formalise it in any way. We were loosely composed of analysts, heads of depts, customer service reps; people who understood the process at all levels and we all understood what the purpose and goal of what we were doing. This should not be the responsibility of one particular person or a set of people but just another piece of the continuous improvement mindset which exists already.

What Theo is arguing is that to do process improvement and BPM correctly, we have to involve the business (and IT) in the effort.  Rather than further specializing roles, most organizations would likely benefit from the cross-pollination and change in the routine.  I’ve always suspected that BPM projects depend more on EQ than IQ: selecting the right people for the project is more of a judgment call, and the people who will be most effective are those with a high EQ.

Businesses will be better off  investing in the people already in the organization by giving them broadening experiences and responsibilities, that they’ll take with them back to their day job.  At the very least they’ll have a new appreciation for a broader swath of the business.

Theo Priestley once again has me thinking with this post asking “Is This the End of BPM Centre of Excellence?“:

There are two trains of thought at play. In recent interviews on Redux, Vinay Mummigati of Virtusa said “A BPM center of excellence (COE) is an absolute must for organizations planning to adopt BPM across the enterprise. As companies adopt BPM in more than a single department they often start seeing challenges in terms of standardization, scalability, performance and governance.”

And yet there was a completely different perspective taken by Max J Pucher of ISIS Papyrus who stated “…if there is one thing that Social BPM could knock down, it is the Process Center of Excellence and the related bureaucracy overhead!“

Ever a pragmatist, I would suggest that inside any firm that can adopt “social” media techniques, the Center of Excellence has to adapt its traditional role.  Instead of being primarily a governance and gatekeeping organizations, the mission should be re-defined as:

• Providing expert resources for BPM initiatives to draw on – no matter how much participation and spread of BPM skills, there will always be process improvement specialists who have more knowledge and context than the average participant.
• Providing social infrastructure for collaboration – wikis, BPM collaboration platforms, Sharepoint sites, email lists-  whatever is most appropriate for the organization. Lower the barrier to entry for collaboration among your BPM practitioners, users, and participants.
• Encouraging and Curating the content generated from “Social” BPM and collaborative activities.  Knowledge workers need positive reinforcement for their participation in social BPM, and with the greater volume of content the CoE’s role will shift to be more editorial rather than primary authorship.
• Breaking down barriers to communication and collaboration, rather than creating new chains of command and approval.

It isn’t that there isn’t a need for experts-  there is!  But the role of those experts changes from manager-governor to coach-collaborator.  Of course, being an outside consultant, this isn’t a stretch for us to see the writing on the wall -because this is the role we already play for our customers.

Adaptive, Dynamic, Social: Can These Three Emerging BPM Concepts Become Unified ?

I sure hope so!  In fact, I can’t see any other reasonable outcome.

Theo Priestly: Is the BPMS mightier than the COTS (Commercial Off-The-Shelf software)?

With the advent of similar suites such as Bonitasoft, Outsystems and Iceberg that allow organisations to build business process based applications directly, and others that offer the same web-based style workflow creation, could these BPMS tools eventually replace the more expensive COTS (Commercially Off The Shelf) software alternatives as they mature ?

Theo asks if this is Build or Buy – but I’ve seen many firms look at this as “Build vs. BPM+Build vs. Buy” – where BPM+Build is the middle-ground, leveraging several more simplistic transactional services and wrapping them into processes that make sense to the business.

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?

Theo Priestley puts the question to BPM Redux readers:

Is There A Need For An Independent “Magic Quadrant” Or “Wave” Report ?

And in the middle, a sentence caught my attention: “Or change the format entirely….”

So, Theo, here are my ideas for changing up the format:

• A plot of reality versus hype (a polite term for B.S.).  The horizontal axis represents amount of functionality “in reality”, and the vertical axis could be inverted so that the maximum plot on the vertical axis is zero false or over-hyped claims. Would be easy to compute the ratio of reality-to-hype… could plot size of dots based on the amount of Twitter spam generated by each vendor for bonus points.
• A chart or ranking of “BPM Street Cred”, versus vendor credibility with analysts.  Could be two separate lists or some form of graph.  Again, get creative with what dot-size means.
• A chart or ranking of “most quotable BPM executives”

I think a somewhat humorous take on the rankings could be pretty entertaining as well as informative.  Surprise us, Theo!

This isn’t particular or specific to the world of BPM conferences – there’s a general “conference malaise” going on – in which only the “best”  conferences are really tearing it up.

Outside of the BPM world, its clear that conferences like SXSW in Austin are doing just fine (and did just fine last year too, by the way).  Record attendance and a record number of panels and bands and acts is just the norm at SXSW these days (conference starts today).

But in the world of BPM, 2009 was tough for conferences, when the expectation was that people would still be attending BPM conferences due to how applicable they are to everyone’s business.  Several vendors postponed their conferences or took them virtual (Lombardi’s Driven), but the ones who waited until the fall (Appian) benefited from the beginning of the rebound in businesses planning for the future rather than businesses just living in fear of the next shoe dropping.

Sandy Kemsley has pointed out this problem with BPM conferences several times, as has Theo Priestley, and we’ve chimed in as well on the topic.  Some fresh perspectives:

• Sandy points out that 2010 looks like a rebound year for conferences.  We’ll see – Gartner’s BPM summit is in March in Las Vegas, and IBM’s “Impact” is in May – good test cases of the demand for these conferences.  Word from the London Gartner summit implied that attendance was low?  (I wasn’t there, so its second-hand to me).
• Theo Priestley and Mike Gammage hypothesize that Gartner and IQPC could merge events by 2012 – which again sounds like weakness rather than strength to me.
• Interestingly, Gammage was more encouraging about Gartner’s latest offering, while Jon Pyke’s contacts were not impressed.

Theo has a separate blog post, and while the bulk of it is about building community more broadly, at the end he makes a telling argument:

“When a sponsor at a BPM conference turns round and says he was perplexed at why there was such a low turnout given how important BPM has become according to what surveys seem to suggest the answer may be in the fact that we can’t even agree on what we’re telling clients in the first place.

For a group that practices change we’re incredibly resistant to it ourselves…..”

I’ve said before and I’ll say it again: I think BPM conferences need to do a few things:

1. Localize.  Have the conference closer to the bulk of your attendees, so that more people can come without travel costs.
2. Face-to-Face.  Tele-presence and high-def video conferencing is great.  But a virtual conference is a broadcast medium.  If attendees want one-way communication they can read the book or watch the video after the fact.  If they want interaction, then you need physical presence to really encourage that.
3. Respect budgets.  Don’t make cost of attendance a barrier – keep it reasonable. For anyone traveling, travel costs should dominate their total expenses, not registration costs.
4. Crowd-source.  Leverage the community to arrive at the topics.  There’s been too much top-down sourcing of content at conferences, without soliciting feedback from potential and actual attendees.
5. Narrow the focus. The narrower the focus, the more involved the people who attend can be.  People mistakenly think you have to broaden the audience to get more people – but the point isn’t MORE – the point is BETTER.  If the event is BETTER then you’ll get more value out of your investment of time and money.

We’ve followed this philosophy for bpmCamp and it was a great success for us – the feedback has been enormously positive, with a lot of interest in repeating the event next year.  But of course, our “unconference” was limited to 40 attendees – and its easier to organize around these principles when you keep the size of the conference smaller. Still, I think there are lessons to learn for those who would put on BPM-focused events, and the biggest one is:

It’s about the audience, not about the organizer.

For more information from bpmCamp, follow this link to our blog coverage of the bpmCamp event.  The element that I think is most crucial is the impromptu discussion that can happen in a more intimate setting.  Questions don’t wait for a microphone or a moderator – the hand goes up or the question is proposed and people can jump in and contribute.  I was really pleased with how this dynamic worked at bpmCamp and I hope we can reproduce this at other events.  I think 2010 will be a better year for conferences, but organizers need to keep in mind how to make these gatherings *more* valuable for attendees or they’re going to lose their attention next time.

Someone had to do it, and I’m glad it was Theo Priestley, and not I!

Theo’s written up a summary of the Forrester-initiated BPM Jam on Twitter (thanks Connie!), and did a pretty good job of it.

Key points from his summary, where the idea that education needs to standardize (a la ABPMP), but also needs a more mature, comprehensive approach (a la Lombardi University). I missed this part of the discussion so I’m not sure how people felt about the OMG OCEB examination – of course, since that is a cert only, not a full educational curriculum, that may be why it was overlooked.

Another key point was the idea that a business architect requires 20 yrs of experience with Six Sigma, Lean, TQM under the belt.  As Theo put it:

I disagree somewhat on that point, whilst those methods are ‘nice to haves’ they shouldn’t be prerequisites of a Biz Arch and certainly not as steeped in the skills that they can’t accept outside influences. I’ve seen this among a lot of Master Black Belts and I don’t think they have what it takes to be a Biz Arch on this alone. Needs to be cross-skilled and understand architecture on a wider scale outside of process alone.

I think the key point Theo makes is that if you have adopted the religion of Six Sigma, or Lean or <fill-in-your-favorite-improvement-methodology>, you may be too inflexible to solve BPM problems in the most effective way.  A simple example I’ve seen of this is the Lean and Six Sigma ideal of ignoring technology while improving the process.  As with most doctrines, there is a kernel of a good idea there, but too often it is taken too far – to the point where many six sigma and Lean practitioners seem to be saying that technology can’t inform process improvement approaches – which any software engineer can disprove.  The real point of course is to not let technology slow down the process improvement, which is a very different thing altogether, and something I very much agree with.

“I know how eggs are sucked.” – Theo Priestley, in reference to a vendor giving a 90-minute overview of BPM to someone who has been an expert in the space for years.

I personally prefer the “Teach me to suck eggs” formulation, but this one works quite well also. Theo’s blog is definitely refreshing in its candor!

The Process Maverick (aka Theo Priestley) wrote a pretty interesting blog titled “Calling time on the BPM Conferences“.  In it, he points out:

In the last 6 months there’s a growing trend towards offering massive discounting or 2-for-1 deals (is this a professional meeting or a team huddle at Wal-mart ?!!) to try and attract the numbers. And it’s not working.

Lombardi pulled its famous Driven events from being physically located to purely Online now following a call from its members stating they could no longer warrant traveling and the expenses that incurred. Rumblings from the recent Spring Gartner BPM conference suggested that there was nothing new to warrant actually going. And more worryingly, a recent european conference had only 20 attendees….including the speakers ! It would seem the majority attending came from the Middle East and they understood a little about BPM and process initiatives but did they need to come all that way to learn ?

In fact, I’ve been hearing these rumblings about conferences in general, not just BPM conferences.  And there is reasonable evidence to show that BPM conferences are generally doing better than non-BPM-themed conferences (if you believe Gartner’s attendance numbers, their spring events were quite well attended).

Still, Theo’s criticisms are well-noted.  I think there is some consensus among those who regularly attend such conferences that there is not enough net-new content for a Gartner BPM Conference every 6 months, for example.  The beauty of a “Lombardi Driven” conference in past years was that it had a pull on different audiences for different reasons, and could satisfy their interests:

• Technical practitioners looking for practical help, tools, shared experiences
• Technologists looking at the road ahead, from a technical perspective, and for best practices from a technology perspective
• Business Process specialists at firms using Lombardi’s software, who wanted to get a little better understanding of the company and the products they would be employing
• Process owners looking for ideas for improvement, and inspiration and motivation to go get the budget they need to invest in their processes
• Executives looking for partners to help them expand from project to program.
• Implementation and ISV Partners looking for business opportunities
• Customers looking for help

I think what made Driven interesting was its focus on the practical. In a multi-vendor conference, not all the conversations can cross-pollinate as easily. Speakers at the more general conferences will tend to be more business centric, but perhaps at the expense of really drawing the right audience.  The format tends to be more presentation oriented than discussion (in fact, Driven was heading down that presentation/podium-focus as well, and the video-only version of Driven was completely devoid of the normal discussion that makes these events so worthy of attending).

But the real criticism of Theo’s that sticks:

“Isn’t it time the conference organisers woke up and realised that CONTENT is king and not the turnstiles?”

Yes, it is.  I propose a more barcamp-oriented solution (dare I say, crowdsourced).  Topics should be proposed by the community of attendees and presenters and voted on with feet (and web browsers).  The emphasis should be less about turning a profit from the conference, and more about breaking even, and creating value for everyone who attends, sponsors, speaks, or reads the notes later.  We have a tradition of this kind of conference in Austin, with Mr. Hurley being the driving force behind it.  I think there are some lessons to learn from this approach, that could result in a really effective BPM conference.

All too often I see conclusions based on observable data, where the conclusion does not necessarily follow the data presented.  This doesn’t mean that the conclusion is wrong on the face of it, but that it can’t be made based on the facts presented thus far.  Sometimes the conclusion is presented as causal when it is only correlated, sometimes it is extrapolating from a really small sample to describe the whole population (over generalizing).

I recently read Theo Priestley’s post on why Six Sigma doesn’t work in the real world.  In it, he relates a LinkedIn posting from someone attempting to do six sigma analysis on a call center process.  From reading the LinkedIn posting, it is clear that the person posting is not experienced in Six Sigma or other  related process improvement technologies that would be helpful to the cause.  This person is trying to figure out how to get a bell curve from a formula related to rate of defects in the call center process, where a defect is defined as a call response being over 60 seconds.  Theo extrapolates from this that it is an example of why Six Sigma doesn’t work in the real world, and why black belts are not needed (all that is really needed, he says, is a pragmatic approach).  And he quotes a response he advocates:

“…at the end of the day if you produce a bell curve telling me the USL and LSL for my call centre, along with the number of defects per million and a sigma value of 1.727, is this really a useful measure? More to the point, what can I – as a business person – do with it?”

Well, look. The response (quoted) asks the right question – is this a really useful measure, and what can I, as a business person, do with it?  In other words, are you wasting our time trying to figure this out in the first place?

But here’s the rub.  A good Six Sigma practitioner would not need to post to linkedIn (hardly the font of six sigma knowledge in the first place) to ask how to plot a bell curve to show USL and LSL.  So the poster hardly represents the “failure of Six Sigma in the real world”.  And a good six sigma practitioner could tell the respondent quite nicely:

If we can plot the response times of your call center, we can understand whether the process is “in control” or not – by which we mean, is it predictable and does it vary in a “normal” way from the median behavior.  If it *is* in control, then we can endeavor to improve the process by decreasing overall response time if too great a percentage of responses are exceeding your 60s window.  However, if your process is *not* under control, then this means that there are one or more special cause conditions causing the process to be more volatile. Therefore your first effort has to be on stabilization before you effectively focus on ratcheting down the long-term variation (i.e. drop the average of the process down as a whole).

Not that Six Sigma is the only tool available.  Lean has several tools that are well suited for call-center style efficiencies, and so does 5s (the Japanese concepts of organizing the workplace to keep things consistent and orderly in order to keep the process consistent as well) and keep in mind just like BPM, Six Sigma is continuously evolving with new tools and techniques and while the statistics is certainly an important part it’s not the alpha-omega that many who haven’t learned Six Sigma believe it to be; certainly not the Six Sigma of the 1980′s.

My problem with the post:  using one example of someone struggling with the concept of Six Sigma, to challenge the whole notion of using Six Sigma – a bit like challenging the concept of a 100-meter dash after watching me run it, instead of Carl Lewis – at least look at how experts apply the techniques!  Six Sigma is not a religion (or at least it doesn’t have to be!)- it is simply a set of tools that can be used to pragmatically improve your process by focusing on unemotional data rather than exposition based on anecdotes.  Not all the tools are even statistical, which was a surprise to me when I first studied material at the green belt level -but even those tools are very practical process improvement tools.  The biggest problem with Six Sigma in the past has been the C in the DMAIC moniker (Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, Control).  BPM really helps address C by putting the controls in software (call center software can help with this as well), and it helps with the M by helping measure the process even when no Six Sigma blackbelts are paying attention.  This makes it a lot easier for them to drop in, interpret the data, and devise new improvements based on the data, rather than spending so much time collecting hand measurements.

Here’s a great post by Jason Cohen (of Smart Bear software) that illustrates that humans are terrible at making gut decisions that can be disproved with statistics, and how to help yourself avoid sample size errors at least when dealing with A/B tests (as in, which is better, A or B?).  Better yet, it has a cute video of Hammy the Hamster to assist.  It cuts to the point about how much data you need to get a reasonable sample size to draw conclusions, and I think it makes clear why data sets of less than 10 are just generally problematic.  Um, also, there are formulas involved, so if you don’t put much faith in mathematics, Mr. Cohen’s article may not be much comfort to you, but I promise the math required to evaluate your sample size will be easy to do!

In my view, the real problem with applying Six Sigma is usually people.  Turns out it takes skill and  judgment to apply Six Sigma tools in a way that helps the business answer questions the business cares about.  This isn’t that much different than the kind of challenge one confronts getting a business to adopt BPM, or a software package.  Let’s not condemn a whole professional practice with proven successes just because we have one example of someone who doesn’t understand how to apply it (or even 10 examples of such people).