And this is where it gets interesting. If you think on it, it’s actually an admission of failure (and of lessons learnt) because both are squarely pitched in the separate worlds of Business and IT. [...]

It’s also interesting because TIBCO had a ‘social’ element to it’s suite with TIBBR, does this mean they think got the social collaboration functionality wrong ?

I think the likely answer is “yes”.

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1. TIBCO acquires Nimbus, Business DNA
2. Tibco’s ActiveMatrix BPM Announcement
3. Bruce Silver Reviews TIBCO ActiveMatrix BPM

My favorite quote:

The article starts with “If you have not yet heard the term “business architect”, you soon will…”

I’ll end with “If you have not yet heard the term “business architect”, you’re not missing much…”

Roles are better when they emerge organically than when they are handed down from the mountain.  Better to talk about them as hats you put on or take off as needed, rather than titles you will put on your business card…

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1. Derek Miers on Roles
2. Pragmatism vs. The Next New Thing

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.

Related posts:

1. Activiti 5.6 Released
2. Activiti 5
3. Alfresco’s Business Case for Activiti

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 :)

Related posts:

1. A Couple of Notes on the Economy
2. Is a lack of Business Process Management imperiling our economy?
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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.

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1. The End 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.

Related posts:

1. Whither Social BPM?
2. Good Process Collaboration Case Study
3. BPM Redux on TIBCO-Nimbus

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

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1. Not Sold on “Dynamic #BPM”
2. Whither Social BPM?
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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.

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1. Bruce Silver Reviews Another BPMS
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“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?

Related posts:

1. Whither Social BPM?
2. Quick Review of “Social #BPM”
3. Social Myths

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!

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