Business Intellegence

The Important of Intelligence for Life

2010-01-08T12:29:00.001-08:00

Business Intelligence is important for us because this is a measurement of our intellectual.
How our mind can think and remember quickly about anythings, so I wish all of the people can find the way to get high intelligence to make our life go smoothly. Many Articles that tell about Intelligence but How we can find the to increase it simply and quickly. In This site you can read many way types that I am sure you will get better for yours. My Suggestion just one " Always Focus against anythings on your face"

By: Akhmas Rohman

Five Challenges Social Media Will Bring to Business

2009-11-10T11:28:00.000-08:00

A recent survey conducted by Proofpoint found that 8% of companies had terminated employees due to social media usage (common causes including sharing sensitive information on a network). And while the statistic seems significant, it only underscores one of several upcoming challenges nearly every organization will face as changes in people, process and technology fueled by the collective movement we call social media begin to transform business. Here are a few challenges that every organization should be planning for right now:

1. Integration. Becoming a "social business" (meaning true participation as opposed to leveraging social media as a new form of marketing) can impact nearly every function of a business. Marketing, PR, communications--even supply chain and any function that deals with employees. So where does it live? Is it a department? Do organizations hire a "Chief Social Officer" much like they would a Chief Technology Officer? All organizations will eventually grapple with integrating social into their entire ecosystem adopting either centralized, distributed or hybrid approaches.

2. Governance. Many organizations now understand that anything that can and will be said about them on the internet will be. The good, the bad, the ugly. And this includes content produced not only from the general public, but also from internal constituents such as employees. Organizations will not only need to begin actively listening so that they are in the know, but they will need rules of engagement for how they deal with multiple types of scenarios from responding to a compliment to dealing with a detractor to following up with an employee who just posted something inappropriate or sensitive.

3. Culture. All organizations fall somewhere on a spectrum of being "open" or "closed" meaning that they are either more transparent with how they operate and collaborative or they hoard knowledge internally. Consider that it's probable that the Zappos purchase by Amazon had a good deal to do with their notoriously open culture. Likewise, even Apple, which can be notoriously secretive, is benefiting by leveraging a strategy that opened up their iPhone application ecosystem. Sure Apple has a great deal of control over it, but for the first time in history, they have legions of people developing applications that run on their hardware. Organizations have the potential to benefit from embracing customers and employees in new ways, but will have to manage it intelligently and with purpose.

4. Human Resources. In order to transform from a business to a social business, companies are going to have to upgrade their HR protocols, as well as legal. And it's likely to be a never-ending process as new technologies continually hit the scene. Before there was Twitter, companies scrambled to publish blogging guidelines for employees, now the wrong tweet or Facebook status can get you fired. Organizations will not only need to update guidelines but actually train their people who may be leveraging social technologies for work. Customer service in particular comes to mind.

5. Measurement & ROI. Every organization will continue to struggle with measuring results and reporting ROI. Philosophically, this question can be answered with another question: "what's the ROI of e-mail"? But it's a question that won't go away. New social constructs will be needed to measure social initiatives such as attention (the size or number of participants actively engaged) or authority (the amount of influence a participant has in the ecosystem). Because social business is enabled by technology, it is by definition measurable. However, tying it to realized revenue or savings becomes more of a challenge.

In order for business to transform into something that can function in a less formal, fast moving social space--it will need to do so at scale. These 5 issues are but a handful of the types of growing pains we'll see as this happens.

CRM Consulting Services from Salesforce.com

2009-11-10T11:21:00.000-08:00

Choosing Salesforce CRM is a strategic business decision. Our CRM consulting services are designed to assure its successful execution through a sound CRM implementation strategy tailored to your business needs.

Whether you’re creating your first CRM system, replacing an existing one, or customizing your Salesforce CRM application, our experienced CRM consultants provide the strategic guidance and hands-on know-how you need.

The goal of Salesforce CRM consulting services is to help you think through and execute all four key phases of your CRM initiative: planning, implementing, driving adoption, and optimizing. Our CRM consulting services will help you create value from features and functionality you may not be able to leverage on your own, or might have considered beyond your reach.

CRM Consultants with the Right Expertise and Experience

Salesforce CRM consulting services follow a structured and iterative methodology, developed and refined over the course of thousands of successful deployments. Based on your individual goals and requirements, we supply you with a detailed CRM implementation strategy designed to enhance your performance, drive end-user adoption, and accelerate your return on investment.

With CRM consulting services from salesforce.com, you receive sound, experienced guidance in everything from proactive discovery and planning, to project management, solution deployment, and the eventual hand-off to salesforce.com Customer Support.

CRM Implementation Strategy and Configuration Services

Customers of all sizes and across all industries benefit from the speed and caliber of both our packaged and custom CRM consulting services. We offer CRM Solution Packages and QuickStart packages for deploying Salesforce CRM applications, Force.com Platform Packages to support custom development, and Expert Review services to support customers doing their own deployment or working with partners. Many of our CRM consulting services packages provide on-site assistance and training from CRM consultants who evaluate and tune new or existing implementations, and provide your executives with a dashboard that tracks your most critical business metrics.

CRM consulting services for data management. One of the key benefits of CRM consulting services is assistance in centralizing your valuable customer information siloed in disparate systems or paper-based archives. Our CRM consultants help you extract this data from legacy systems, structure it in coherent hierarchies, clean and reformat it, and finally, import it into Salesforce CRM. This basic element of a CRM implementation strategy will maximize your productivity and smooth the transition from your old applications.
CRM consulting services for integration. Salesforce.com’s CRM solutions are already tightly integrated with each other and with the applications on the Force.com AppExchange. But our CRM consulting services can also speed the important work of blending Salesforce CRM with your company-wide business processes and back- and front-office applications—for easy sharing, updating, and maintenance of critical customer data.
CRM consulting services for best practices. No one knows salesforce.com's cloud-computing CRM solutions better than our seasoned CRM consultants. Salesforce CRM consulting services are based on many years of experience in implementing our CRM applications. When you engage us to put together your CRM implementation strategy, you profit from proven best practices that have contributed to our customers’ success.
For more information about Salesforce.com Consulting, our methodology, and how CRM consulting services can maximize your business results, please contact your salesforce.com account executive.

CRM Consulting Services Deliver Tangible Results and Faster ROI

Nothing is more frustrating than waiting months or years to see a return on a mission-critical business investment. With CRM consulting services from salesforce.com, the wait is over.

Based on customer research and thousands of successful deployments, we’ve developed our QuickStart Packages family of CRM consulting services. With QuickStart, our CRM consultants will put you on the fast path to success—you’ll begin achieving a return on Salesforce CRM in less than five days.

New Release Optimization with Salesforce CRM Consulting Services

Unlike traditional software, Salesforce CRM and the Force.com platform are Cloud-based: new and improved features are delivered frequently and automatically, without upgrade headaches. The best way to maximize the continual stream of innovations is to take advantage of salesforce.com’s CRM consulting services. Our CRM consultants have designed a New Release Optimization package that bundles expert guidance with new-features training. Highlights include a Discovery Workshop identifying new solutions for your most pressing needs, walk-through examples of new features in action inside your own Salesforce CRM environment, and a release-specific CRM implementation strategy, or roadmap, outlining further opportunities to leverage new features.

CRM Consulting Services for Data Migration and Quality Assurance

To get the greatest value from your investment in Salesforce CRM, your CRM implementation strategy needs to include a plan for consolidating and managing the
customer information that is typically spread out among various databases, formats, and data fields. This is where CRM consulting services can help. Doing the job right, and completely, is well worth it: assistance from our expert CRM can make the difference between an optimal, productive transition from your old systems, and something considerably less.

Data migration. In the real world, data migration doesn’t always find its way into a company’s overall CRM implementation strategy. Many customers engage our CRM consulting services after deployment, because multiple data sources are creating inefficiencies in their use of Salesforce CRM. Sales and customer support may be using different customer data, or worse, sales management might be working with information at odds with what sales reps are using in the field. For data management, our CRM consulting services begin with an analysis of your business drivers and processes. With this understanding, our CRM consultants then help you craft the appropriate strategy to migrate your data quickly, efficiently, and effectively, to optimize the value gained from your Salesforce CRM applications.
CRM consulting services to improve data integrity. Our CRM consulting services can help you solve the problem of inconsistent and duplicate data that impairs CRM success and hinders user adoption of CRM. When you enlist Salesforce CRM consulting services, you gain access to seasoned CRM consultants who specialize in data-integrity procedures and techniques. The process begins with a thorough assessment of your most critical customer data including leads, accounts, contacts, and opportunities. We then assist you in charting a data-specific CRM implementation strategy to boost information quality, drive user adoption, and ensure your success.

The Top 5 Business Intelligence Tool Vendors According to IDC:

2009-11-10T11:19:00.000-08:00

1- Business Objects

Business Objects continues its reign as the leading BI tools vendor. In 2006, the
company’s software revenue in this market reached $894 million. In 2006, Business
Objects experienced a slight slowdown in its BI tools license revenue growth. After
gaining half a percentage point in share in 2005, the company gave it up in 2006.
However, the latest information on the uptake of its Business Objects XI platform
suggests a pickup in growth in the latter part of 2006 and early 2007. Business
Objects is also making an aggressive push into the midmarket, where it targets
organizations with less than $1 billion in revenue. The company’s partner network is
one of its strongest assets, and this effort, which depends in large part on indirect
sales, is expected to contribute to the growth of Business Objects’ BI tools.

2 - SAS

SAS was again the second-largest BI tools vendor, with $679 million in software
revenue and a continued steady increase in market share to 11%. SAS had the
highest growth rate among the top 3 BI tools vendors and the third-highest growth
rate among the top 10 vendors. SAS still derives more revenue from its advanced
analytics tools, but its effort to revamp and more aggressively market its QRA tools
since 2004 has paid off, with QRA’s share of SAS’ total BI tools revenue increasing
from 37% in 2004 to 44% in 2006. As the leader in the advanced analytics market,
SAS holds 31% of that market segment.

3 - Cognos

Cognos maintained the third position in the BI tools market, with $622 million in
software revenue and a 10% growth rate in 2006. It is also one of only three vendors
with at least a 10% share in the BI tools market. Cognos has pursued a two-pronged
strategy of developing and marketing BI tools and financial performance management
applications, with recent expansion into other related performance management
markets such as workforce analytics. Nevertheless, BI tools remain Cognos’ largest
product line. In 2006, Cognos released several enhancements to its core BI platform.

4 - Microsoft

Microsoft had another strong year in the BI tools market, with the highest growth rate
(28%) among the top 10 vendors. IDC’s revenue allocation for Microsoft in this market
differs somewhat from other vendors in that its BI tools revenue is not only made up
of standalone software that the company acquired with its 2006 purchase of
ProClarity Software but also includes what IDC calls embedded BI tools that are
bundled with Microsoft SQL Server. These database-embedded tools include SQL
Server Analysis Services and Reporting Services. As part of its broader business
analytics offerings, Microsoft also includes SQL Server Integration Services within
SQL Server. Its other related tools that the company positions within the business
analytics stack include Microsoft Excel, with specific Excel 2007 features for BI, and
Performance Point Server, a set of performance management applications to be
released in the second half of 2007.

Microsoft’s growth in the BI tools market can be attributed to focused sales and
marketing efforts in recent years, accompanied by both internal R&D and
acquisitions. While, in the past, Microsoft considered BI to be functionality that helps
to sell databases and enhance its partners’ more extensive BI capabilities, the
company has since identified BI as a market worth pursuing directly.

5 - Hyperion

Hyperion maintained its fifth position in the market, with a 5.2% market share and a
12.3% growth rate. Since releasing its latest BI platform, which incorporates the best
of the Hyperion and former Brio components (in addition to certain new performance
enhancements), the company has improved its standing in the BI tools market.
Hyperion’s other major product line includes financial performance and strategy
management applications, where company has been the market leader for years.
In March 2007, Oracle announced its plans to acquire Hyperion. IDC sees the event
as a positive development for both Oracle and former Hyperion clients.

Business Intelligence Tools

2009-11-10T11:17:00.000-08:00

The most common tools used for business intelligence are as follows. They are listed in the following order: Increasing cost, increasing functionality, increasing business intelligence complexity, and decreasing number of total users.

Excel

Take a guess what's the most common business intelligence tool? You might be surprised to find out it's Microsoft Excel. There are several reasons for this:

1. It's relatively cheap.

2. It's commonly used. You can easily send an Excel sheet to another person without worrying whether the recipient knows how to read the numbers.

3. It has most of the functionalities users need to display data.

In fact, it is still so popular that all third-party reporting / OLAP tools have an "export to Excel" functionality. Even for home-built solutions, the ability to export numbers to Excel usually needs to be built.

Excel is best used for business operations reporting and goals tracking.

Reporting tool

In this discussion, I am including both custom-built reporting tools and the commercial reporting tools together. They provide some flexibility in terms of the ability for each user to create, schedule, and run their own reports. The Reporting Tool Selection selection discusses how one should select an OLAP tool.

Business operations reporting and dashboard are the most common applications for a reporting tool.

OLAP tool

OLAP tools are usually used by advanced users. They make it easy for users to look at the data from multiple dimensions. The OLAP Tool Selection selection discusses how one should select an OLAP tool.

OLAP tools are used for multidimensional analysis.

Data mining tool

Data mining tools are usually only by very specialized users, and in an organization, even large ones, there are usually only a handful of users using data mining tools.

Data mining tools are used for finding correlation among different factors.

The Two Most Important Management Secrets: The Pygmalion and Galatea Effects

2009-11-10T10:48:00.000-08:00

The Pygmalion Effect: The Power of the Supervisor's Expectations
By Susan M. Heathfield, About.com

Your expectations of people and their expectations of themselves are the key factors in how well people perform at work. Known as the Pygmalion effect and the Galatea effect, respectively, the power of expectations cannot be overestimated. These are the fundamental principles you can apply to performance expectations and potential performance improvement at work.

You can summarize the Pygmalion effect, often known as the power of expectations, by considering:

Every supervisor has expectations of the people who report to him.
Supervisors communicate these expectations consciously or unconsciously.
People pick up on, or consciously or unconsciously read, these expectations from their supervisor.
People perform in ways that are consistent with the expectations they have picked up on from the supervisor.

The Pygmalion effect was described by J. Sterling Livingston in the September/October, 1988 Harvard Business Review. "The way managers treat their subordinates is subtly influenced by what they expect of them," Livingston said in his article, Pygmalion in Management.

The Pygmalion effect enables staff to excel in response to the manager’s message that they are capable of success and expected to succeed. The Pygmalion effect can also undermine staff performance when the subtle communication from the manager tells them the opposite. These cues are often subtle. As an example, the supervisor fails to praise a staff person's performance as frequently as he praises others. The supervisor talks less to a particular employee.

Livingston went on to say about the supervisor, "If he is unskilled, he leaves scars on the careers of the young men (and women), cuts deeply into their self-esteem and distorts their image of themselves as human beings. But if he is skillful and has high expectations of his subordinates, their self-confidence will grow, their capabilities will develop and their productivity will be high. More often than he realizes, the manager is Pygmalion."

Can you imagine how performance will improve if your supervisors communicate positive thoughts about people to people? If the supervisor actually believes that every employee has the ability to make a positive contribution at work, the telegraphing of that message, either consciously or unconsciously, will positively affect employee performance.

And, the effect of the supervisor gets even better than this. When the supervisor holds positive expectations about people, she helps individuals improve their self-concept and thus, self-esteem. People believe they can succeed and contribute and their performance rises to the level of their own expectations.

ARIS Express - First Free Modeling Software from Market Leader for Business Process Management

2009-11-10T10:47:00.000-08:00

ARIS Express - The First Free Modeling Software from the Market Leader for Business Process Management for everybody.

With ARIS Express, IDS Scheer is offering the world’s first free business process modeling software. ARIS Express is the perfect tool for starting with Business Process Management. It’s easy to install and allows intuitive and fast process modeling. So everyone can get started and no BPM expertise is needed.

Your benefits

ARIS Express is free of charge
Perfect tool for occasional users and beginners in Business Process Management
Intuitive user interface – modelers can work productively from the start
Models for organizational structures, processes, application systems, data, and more
Study with free training material available in ARIS Community
All results can be re-used and enhanced in professional ARIS Platform products

MSc Business Systems Analysis and Design

2009-11-10T10:45:00.000-08:00

FOR PROFESSIONAL MASTERS STUDY LEADING TO CAREERS as a
Systems Analyst, IT Consultant, and Systems Integrator.

INTERNSHIPS IN INDUSTRY:
This course offers an optional internship: six months of professional IT industry experience as part of your postgraduate degree.

PROFESSIONAL RECOGNITION:
The British Computer Society recognises this course for exemption from the BCS Certificate, Diploma and Diploma Project.

OVERVIEW:
This course is designed to produce hybrid IT/business professionals who understand the role IT systems play in supporting organisations and management and can ensure that IT systems can fulfil their intended role.

On graduation, you will have specialist knowledge ranging from business systems requirements analysis and design, software systems engineering, and data modelling, to IT strategy, project management and business engineering with ERP solutions.

Practical work is emphasised throughout, to develop understanding and skills, which are strengthened by the interactive teamwork approach.

The course has an excellent track record in producing highly employable graduates in roles such as systems analysis and IT consultancy. The course is also excellent preparation for doctoral (PhD) study.

YOU WILL GAIN:
- skills in business awareness, design and consultancy to facilitate the alignment of IT systems and services to business objectives;
- the specialist understanding of theoretical principles in business systems analysis and design;
- technical skills, through practical laboratory work, to enable you to apply your knowledge of IT and how it affects business competitiveness.

MODULES
For the current list of modules, visit the School of Informatics website at www.soi.city.ac.uk/pgcourses/

ASSESSMENT
Students successfully completing eight modules and the dissertation will be awarded 180 credits and a master’s level qualification. Modules are assessed through a combination of coursework and examination.

ENTRANCE REQUIREMENTS
The usual minimum entry requirement is a good second-class honours degree from a UK university, a recognised equivalent from an accredited overseas institution or an equivalent professional qualification. Applicants should have good professional English. For students whose first language is not English, an IELTS score of 6.5 or TOEFL score of 600 (250 computer-based version) is required. Previous academic and commercial experience will also be considered.

BURSARIES AND SCHOLARSHIPS
The School of Informatics offers a number of scholarships for well-qualified full-time home and overseas candidates.

ACADEMIC EXCELLENCE
The School of Informatics is at the forefront of international excellence and leadership in education and research for the information and computing professions. In the 2001 Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) over 85% of the School’s academic staff were ranked at 4 or 5, indicating research of international and national excellence in almost all areas.

INNOVATIVE ONLINE LEARNING:
We are one of the few universities in the UK where every module on our Informatics postgraduate courses is supported by the University’s online learning environment.

SPECIALIST TECHNICAL SUPPORT:
The University houses over 700 Windows and 90 Linux workstations, and the labs offer a wide variety of programming environments. In addition, the School of Informatics provides additional labs and file servers with applications specific to our postgraduate courses. Students also benefit from the School’s dedicated Technical Support Team.

EXTENSIVE LIBRARY FACILITIES:
Several subject-specific libraries and specialist collections complement the extensive stock held by the modern and well-equipped main University Library at Northampton Square, and a wide range of online resources is available, many of which are accessible from off-site.

LOCATION:
City University’s central London location is well served by public transport. All the University’s buildings are easily accessible by underground (tube), buses and rail services.

Meet Our Contributors

2009-10-28T09:12:00.000-07:00

Jon Pyke was the Chief Technology Officer and a main board director of Staffware Plc from August 1992 until October 2003. He demonstrates an exceptional blend of Business/People Manager; a Technician with a highly developed sense where technologies fit and how they should be utilized. Jon is a world recognized industry figure; an exceptional public speaker and a seasoned quoted company executive.

As the CTO for Staffware Plc, Jon was responsible for a team of 70 people, geographically split into two countries (USA and the UK) and four locations. Jon's primary responsibility was directing the product development cycle. Furthermore, Jon had overall executive responsibility for the product strategy, positioning, public speaking etc. Finally, as a main board director he was heavily involved in PLC board activities including merges and acquisitions, corporate governance, and board director of several subsidiaries.

Jon joined Staffware in 1992 as the Technical Director. At that time Staffware was a privately held company employing approximately 18 people with an annual turnover of £1.2 million – during Jon's tenure with the company, it was taken public by floating on the London Alternative Investment Market (AIM) in 1995 followed by a full listing on the London Stock Exchange in 2000. The company has achieved year on year growth of more than 50% (CAGR) and now employs some 350 people in 16 countries with £40 million turn over. Profitable every year.

Jon was personally responsible for the re-design of the product from a Unix only “green screen” system supporting around 20 users to a full client server 3-tiered application supporting many thousands of users. Furthermore Jon personally designed the world’s first full Java workflow client and designed and implemented the "eProcess" initiatives.

When Staffware acquired a CRM company in the USA Jon was appointed Chairman of Staffware eCRM Inc. until the integration was complete.

A Significant amount of Jon's time is spent giving high level presentations to the boards of potential customers (both business and technical) as well as business and technical partners. Jon is recognized as an excellent public speaker.

Keith Ayers is the President of Integro Leadership Institute LLC, a leadership consulting group based in West Chester, PA. Originally from Australia, Keith joined Integro as a consultant in 1977 and took over the ownership of the organization in 1982. Demand for his programs and expertise in the United States led him to move to Pennsylvania in August 2001. The U.S. division of Integro now has over 60 certified associates across North America.

Keith's first career was as a Navigator in the Royal Australian Air Force which included a term of active duty in Vietnam.

His expertise is working with CEO's and senior executive teams to help them create a high performance culture... one that is based on a high level of trust and personal responsibility. Keith has worked with executive teams in Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong, China and the U.S., and has also been a speaker at conferences in Germany, Finland, the U.K. and throughout North America.

A long held view that "training events" do not produce business results, led Keith to author the Leadership Development Process™ and Senior Team Alignment Process™. These integrated "processes" include before and after measurement and application projects that help executive teams and managers take their company culture "head on", and get all employees committed to achieving outstanding results.

Keith is the author of the book Engagement Is Not Enough: You Need Passionate Employees to Achieve Your Dream, published by Advantage in October 2006.

In addition to his heavy travel and speaking schedule Keith continues to work with senior executive teams.

Terry Schurter is a Director of the nonprofit International Process and Performance Institute, former CEO of Bennu Group, Research Director for Process with Bloor Research and CIO of the BPM Group. An internationally recognized thought leader in Business Process Management, Performance Management, and Customer Expectation Management he received the Global Thought Leadership Award in 2007 from the 20,000+ member BPM Group.

As a Director of the International Process and Performance Institute (IPAPI) I am helping to lead the way in the improvement approach on process for personal, organizational and customer success. To achieve that I have worked with the rest of the Institute's team to develop the IPAPI CEM Method™ (the de facto standard for delivering sustainable business process optimization and improvement), the theory and practice behind the 21st Century Value Chain, the Process Innovation Landscape, and the Certified Process Professional Program.

Keith Swenson is Vice President of Research and Development at Fujitsu Computer Systems Corporation, as well as Chairman of the Technical Committee of Workflow Management Coalition (WfMC). He is known for having been a pioneer in web services, and has helped the development of standards such as WfMC Interface 2, OMG Workflow Interface, SWAP, Wf-XML, AWSP, WSCI, and is currently working on standards such as XPDL and ASAP. He has led efforts to develop software products to support work teams at MS2, Netscape, and Ashton Tate. He is currently the Chairman of the Technical Committee of the Workflow Management Coalition. In 2004 he was awarded the Marvin L. Manheim Award for outstanding contributions in the field of workflow.

PETER FINGAR is an internationally recognized expert on business strategy, globalization and business process management. He's a practitioner with over thirty years of hands-on experience at the intersection of business and technology.

He has held management, technical and advisory positions with GTE Data Services, American Software and Computer Services, Saudi Aramco, EC Cubed, the Technical Resource Connection division of Perot Systems and IBM Global Services.

He has taught graduate and undergraduate computing studies at business schools in the U.S. and abroad, and has given keynote talks worldwide (including London, New York, Washington, Munich, Paris, Brussels, Tokyo, San Francisco, Montreal, Chicago, Denver, San Diego, Las Vegas, Miami, Cairo, Johannesburg, Riyadh, Dubai, and Milan).

In addition to numerous articles (including CIO Magizine, Optimize, Computerworld, Intelligent Enterprise, Internet World (columnist), SiliconIndia, FirstMonday, EAI Journal, Logistics, Information Age, and the Journal of Systems Management), he is an author of nine books, including the landmark books Extreme Competition: Innovation and the Great 21st Century Business Reformation, The Real-Time Enterprise: Competing on Time, and Business Process Management: The Third Wave (www.mkpress.com).

Max. J. Pucher is the Founder and current Chief Architect of ISIS Papyrus Software, an independent software vendor focused on business content (documents?) and process management. Our speciality is to utilize Machine Learning technology to reduce the amount of programming needed to analyze and create content and related processes. Our key concept is that there are no processes without content and content without process is irrelevant. Of course there is documentation and marketing content that is not related to a business process instance, but still needed to perform a certain process. I challenge anyone here to provide me with proof that content and process are not the same. It is not a one-to-one relationship as multiple content may make up a single process or mulitple processes may use the same content. I also claim right here that processes are always in the need of working with inbound and outbound content, except odd processes such as vacation authorization. The need for complex process links disappears when content state controls process progression. I therefore do not see the need for standalone BPM products that only create substantial integration and programming efforts. I propose that businesses need a consolidated approach for ECM, BPM, CRM, as well as business rules and operational business intelligence which Forrester Research calls a DBA or Dynamic Business Application. Read his blog here.

David Wiltz has a Bachelor of Journalism degree from University of Texas, Austin. He has written numerous articles for newsletters and newspapers including the Dallas Morning News. Currently a consultant with SIBRIDGE Consulting, David has more than 25 years of experience in IT in the roles of Manager, Application Architect, Enterprise Architect, Business Analyst, Mentor and Developer. His major consulting focus is helping companies more effectively utilize Enterprise Architecture concepts and deliverables for operational improvement, cost savings and strategic enablement. With this focus, a major percentage of engagements involve process improvement and/or re-engineering and mapping IT systems to business processes. David also assists clients with improving their systems development processes, especially the up front steps of taking business strategy and objectives and transforming those into projects, requirements and architectural solutions.

BPM State of the Nation 2009

2009-10-28T09:11:00.000-07:00

Written by Terry Schurter

From it’s beginnings in the early 90’s to the boom in the early 00’s – where is BPM at in 2009?

While BPM stands for “Business Process Management” the definitions of Business Process Management in use in the marketplace have dramatic differences in their meanings. So the term itself does not define a specific problem, approach or set of activities. That definition comes from the person or organization using the term as they place “BPM” within the context that they care about.

The biggest disparity exists between the commercial software market and the business pundits who define BPM in completely different ways. On a historical note, BPM did indeed start as a management practice, coming directly out of the more experienced practitioners of Business Process Reengineering. From these people, Business Process Management was originally conceived of as a way to better manage the business operations of large commercial entities.

Early entrants into the BPM software market created new “work flow” tools that often required little code development to express “business processes” heavy with human interaction. The belief within the early BPM software community was that by providing business users a simple set of tools with which they could model these human-centric processes, the processes could then be “orchestrated,” dramatically improving the process efficiency and quality for these business operations.

Early adopters of these products often applied them to a unique subset of business processes indeed heavy with human interaction, where little technology was in place, and where consistency in the process was poor at best. The case studies that arose from using BPM software on these processes were very, very compelling.

As the market began to gain widespread attention and mainstream media coverage the larger software vendors began to eye the market with interest. Between acquisitions, product development and repositioning of existing products a fundamental shift started to take place.

That shift is almost complete now. What was the shift? The BPM market shift is the move from the original definition of business processes to one that focuses almost exclusively on IT systems and IT operations. The shift occurred for several reasons.

The most important reason is that the BPM tools in the market, at least those with work flow engines, were found to be ill suited for most human-centric processes. They weren’t the right tools and they still are not the right tools. If we have learned anything, we have learned that BPMS products are actually the wrong tool to use for improving business processes heavy with human interaction.

Now if you’re a software vendor what are you going to do? Focus on where you can be successful, where you can sell your products, and just make sure your “story” is properly prepared for your audience. This is exactly what has happened and the messaging from this market segment has purposely redefined the term “Business Process Management” on a broad basis to fit what is effectively nothing more (or less) than the next iteration of Application Integration software and intimately linked to another IT-centric concept – Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). This is where the vast majority of vendors and market share in the BPMS market exists today, and is the basis for revenue, market growth and market predictions cited by industry analysts.

The one hold-out in the software market is Business Process Analysis software. Many of these products still provide value-added capabilities for improving human-centric business processes although the technology is used by people to identify opportunities for improvement - not to implement the improvements or perform work flow functions.

Those “business” business processes have been left to the Business Process Analysis software market and even more so to the business consulting market. This is reflected in the commercial market break-down as follows:

BPM Commercial Market Segments

1) Executable BPM software:
Software that is executable, meaning it moves data (in one of a number of forms) from interaction to interaction (between any combination of systems and people).

2) Non-Executable BPM software:
Software that is used to plan, manage, architect, analyze and visualize “processes.”

3) Technical Consulting services:
Services that design, manage, implement and maintain executable BPM software and/or other software to achieve a similar result.

4) Process Consulting services:
Services that help organizations address problems from a “process” perspective; deal with the change requirements associated with “business” changes, and lead improvement initiatives.

BPM Focus Areas

The focus areas of each of these segments in the commercial BPM market sheds much light on how the different problems that people face are fulfilled by different segments of the BPM commercial market. In fact, it is the problem area commonly dealt with by each of the market segments that tells us what we should expect to “get” from expenditures in each one. Knowing what problem we are attempting to solve, what value we will receive from that, and what problems we aren’t going to solve is a critical milestone in the evaluation process.

Organizations that fail to perform this analysis have a far greater likelihood of suffering disappointment, failure to reach goals, disillusionment and an ongoing sense of frustration. To date there has been no significant increase in proper leading analysis of BPM even though the market is more mature and process initiatives are more likely to successfully complete.

While the commercial market overall continues to grow at a steady pace, there is a general frustration from “insiders” – at least within the Executable BPM software and Technical Consulting services segments – that the market just won’t seem to “pop.” The majority of third-party analytical and research markets continue to predict a sharp increase in BPM market growth. Again, it is the focus areas that help us bring this into perspective and highlights the factors inhibiting market “explosion.”

Systems-based Cost Reduction (Integration)

Commercial Market Segments: Executable BPM software, Non-Executable BPM software, Technical Consulting services

The systems-based approach to cost reduction is based on the perspective of the technology in use behind the processes in our organizations. In this approach to BPM cost reduction, the processes in the organization are looked at from the perspective of the technology that supports them and the role the process serves. Then the process is “moved” to a more organized, streamlined and updated process model to reduce the operating cost of the process.

Cost reduction benefits from systems-based BPM initiatives come from a mixture of automation, process streamlining, error reduction, elimination of duplicity, and better control over processes at both the work level (people doing work in the process) and management level.

Return on Investment (ROI) in systems-based BPM cost reduction is more often than not a workload reduction. It is extremely important that we understand this result, as in and of itself workload reduction does not translate directly into tangible ROI.

Workload reduction potentially increases capacity and it frees up resources for other work to be done but in most cases is does not reduce the actual operating costs of the business in any significant way. That gain is usually only achieved when the reduction in workload (i.e. resources now available for doing other things without increasing costs) can be used to accomplish something else of financial benefit to the organization. In most cases organizations taking the systems-based BPM approach are making this linkage at the departmental level – or not at all – limiting the real benefit the organization realizes from the BPM initiative.

Software companies that provide configurable applications with embedded processes in them (like ERP, CRM, etc) and BPMS software products are also focused on this form of cost reduction.

System-based cost reduction approaches the opportunity of cost reduction very similar to the approach taken in manufacturing. In manufacturing we make things. Those things are made using machines, and the act of making them is a process. Anything we can do that reduces our cost in making our “things” is an improvement – as long as it doesn’t reduce quality and it doesn’t create new costs.

The Executable BPM market is now predominately focused on this problem-solution. This is why Executable BPM software is more often used in back-end systems, IT, HR and customer service areas. Back-end systems and IT are really the same problem. If you think about the plumbing, electricity, networking, communication, etc. for homes as the home’s “back-end” these services have to be there and they need to work right - often times better than they do now. In our businesses, this also includes many of the “appliances “we have in our organizations including computers and the programs we use on those computers every day.

This makes a lot of sense. Back-end systems and IT “processes” are already within the ownership domain of the people who approve such software purchases.

HR processes are usually either not well understood to start with or generally not very well organized. HR and other indirect process areas that do not handle the finances of the company are generally perceived as “necessary overhead” without being of “critical dependence” in the successful operation of the organization. The low risk and perceived benefit arising from improving these areas is very hard for many managers to resist. However, benefits from these initiatives have rarely stood the test of measurable ROI as a financial impact and often times the initiatives run into change issues that compromise the original goal.

Because Customer Service is looked at by most companies as a Cost Center, there is a very strong desire to use less expensive labor, reduce inefficiencies wherever possible, and automate pretty much anything that can be automated – even if it shouldn’t be. This is the reason why customer service is often targeted in BPM initiatives although it is not a “back-end” systems issue. The vast majority of implementations in customer service where costs are reduced have the knock-on effect of reduced Customer Satisfaction – due to the emphasis on internal measures.

Process-Based Cost Reduction (Change)

Commercial Market Segments: Non-Executable BPM software, Process Consulting services

When the focus moves to changing how work gets done in the organization the commercial market immediately moves away from the IT professionals directly into the arena of Business Analysts and Business Consultants. To help place this into perspective it should be noted that the process-based cost reduction focus is where we find the various improvement methodologies such as Six Sigma, Lean, TQM, CEM, Change Management, and so on.

While these process initiatives were originally at the center of the “bulls-eye” for the Executable BPM software market segment such is no longer the case for the reasons already discussed. There are also indications of a new BPM market beginning to form that attempts to directly address the problems associated with managing and changing human-centric processes. That market will be covered at the end of this report.

Process-based cost reduction seeks to improve existing “processes” by refining how work gets done in the organization. This is why Six Sigma and Lean have quickly been “crossed over” into the process market as these improvement methods or philosophies are specifically intended to help organizations optimize existing operations heavy with human interaction.

However, this market has also fallen dramatically short of its perceived value creation. The problem again comes from the fact that like BPMS products; Six Sigma, Lean, TQM, etc. are based on taking the “AS IS” process and refining it to an improved design of the “TO BE” process definition. The reason why this approach is so limited is that in general the philosophical approach for these types of techniques accepts the basic process shape (the AS IS) as valid, seeking to refine the process shape within the current constrained model of the process.

Change Management and CEM are the two areas where this is not the case. In these approaches the incoming perspective is based on the idea that there are fundamental changes that must be made to bring business processes into alignment with the current environment. The assumption within these approaches is that how work gets done now is based on assumptions that may have be relevant at some time in the past but are no longer relevant to how we need to do business today. Change management tends to look at this from an isolated perspective that assumes succeeding in bringing processes into relevance is a complicated and lengthy endeavor that is performed periodically to “update” the organization to the modern paradigm. Approaches like CEM look at the need to change on a regular basis in very short time frames with the idea that the “approach” becomes an ongoing behavior of change in step with the changes in context as they occur.

The other impact of significance is the issue of AS IS process complexity, where understanding the “model” requires a high level of attention and focus, leaving little to the challenging of the process as a holistic entity (like the adage that sometimes we can’t see the forest for the trees). Even though Change Management does seek to challenge the “status quo” it traditional falls prey to the complexity issue. CEM is the only practice in the market that deals directly with the issue of complexity.

No Bridge for the “GAP”

Much has been said about the need to bridge the gap between business interests and the application of technology. Business Process Management was originally believed to be a means to do just that, along with the cost reduction and quality improvements expected from it.

That has not happened – not at all. While in the early days of the BPM software market there was significant effort placed on helping to address the “gap” issue, the movement by the majority of the BPM market to primarily Application Integration has dissolved any gains made by early market leaders. Now, rather than being a bridge across the business-technology gap, for most of the Business Process Management software market BPM tools have become part of the gap - and a contributor to the dysfunctional affects that having the “gap” imposes on the organization.

One of the most obvious movements in this regard is the now broad adherence to industry standards and best practices that have arisen purely out of the logical, rational, and structured approach required in the use and application of technology. What has now become for many the very “fundamentals” of Business Process Management are completely ignored by the business people on the other side of the gap due to the lack of relevance to their perspective, work activities, interests and concerns.

Another part of the change in the BPM market is the number of people involved in propagating certain beliefs. Because the software market and the adjunct markets it has spawned off (media, research, conferences, etc.) are extremely well financed there has been a tremendous amount of money spent in developing a large consensus of opinion in regards to a “BPM Market Message.” This consensus echoes the technology viewpoint and has caused many business people to back away from any technology associated with Business Process Management.

The simple fact is that the gap between business and technology is now wider than it was 10 years ago and growing. More and more business people are turning a deaf ear to any discussion around BPM that includes technology. The commercial market has solidified on the split, with one side serving IT interests and the other side serving business interests. BPM as a commercial offering is no longer part of the solution to “bridging the gap.” Depending on the type of product or service consumed from within the BPM market, Business Process Management is either addressing Business Issues or Technology issues – not the disparity between the two.

Lessons Learned

There is, however, what could be the beginnings of a silver lining in the BPM clouds beginning to emerge. From lessons learned in attempting to address business issues and bridging the business-technology gap certain things have been learned, and some steps to address these issues have begun to emerge in the software market.

1) Lessons Learned – The Need for Individual Process Orchestration

What have we learned? We have learned that business activities do not conform to the traditional work flow technology paradigm. What really happens is that the “processes” business people are engaged have a high degree of individual variance and adjustment to contextual influence that affects how work gets done on a daily basis. We now know that in general business processes (as the concept was originally defined) are fraught with the high degree of variability that occurs anytime people are the primary performers in the actions of a process.

Therefore any technology used to support these processes must also have the ability to flex and change on an as needed basis. This includes the ability of supporting technology to flex and change per individual as they are doing their work – enabling people to “orchestrate” their own behavior in the process.

We also know that for this kind of individual process orchestration to work within supporting technology the individual orchestration cannot impose additional “work” on the individual. This means that supporting software for these business processes must grant individual users the ability to “do” their individual process orchestration by simply doing their work their own way. Several niche players in the BPM software market now offer this ability in at least some form within their products, primarily from vendors that are focused on solving specific business issues faced by their target market.

2) Lessons Learned – Work Flow Queues are Extremely Limited

One of the common approaches in BPMS products is to build work flow models of processes and then present the work each person is supposed to “do” in a work queue interface. While this works well when the general concept of a task list is already part of the existing work metaphor it does not work well at all when the task list metaphor is not already in place.

What we have learned is that presenting new software interfaces to people in general creates a change issue that must be dealt with. When changing an existing interface from a design that is difficult to use and unwieldy for the people it serves - a simple, well designed and more useful interface will present a change impact that is very low.

When changing from an existing interface to a new one that is not obviously simpler and easier to use (to the people using it) the change impact increases dramatically. Basically, when we change these interfaces in a way that the people using them immediately can see the benefit, the change impact is very low. As soon as we expect people to learn something “new” before the “benefit” becomes noticeable the change impact becomes significant.

Where no task list metaphor exists, imposing a new interface on the people doing the work represents a very high change impact. Again, if the benefit to the people who must use the new interface is obvious to them then the change impact becomes low but if that benefit is not obvious the challenge in getting people to make the change will be very high, very costly, and is highly likely to significantly reduce the benefit expected from the implementation of the underlying technology.

What we now know is that somehow Business Process Management technology for business users must move away from the general concept of “work queues” and “work queue interfaces.” What business users need is something that works within their current technology comfort zone to help them stay “in sync” with their work in a way that does not impose new activities on them. Because this can take many different forms and be supported through many existing technologies already in use by the business the means by which this is accomplished is highly variable. Numerous BPM vendors have approached this as an extension of their basic concepts of queues and work flow with interfaces into email, email clients, and mobile devices but there is still a long way to go in really solving this problem.

3) Lessons Learned – The Need to “Capture” Reality

As discussed earlier, the processes business users engage in are highly personalized and variant. When we “solve” the issue of how to enable them to engage with underlying BPM technology in a way that allows them to self-orchestrate their behavior in a process (without thinking about it that way) we will have the opportunity to start capturing behaviors of our people that we can learn from to improve our overall business operations.

This is actually brushing against something entirely new in the world of business software. Rather than embedding “domain knowledge” into a process so that we can impose “best practice” on everyone in our organization there is the potential to capture significant behavioral information that can be related to both context and results.

This behavioral information related to context and results represents a wealth of learning we can tap to improve our organizations. Why did one sales person achieve such high results in a given market during a time when others did not? Why does one department, shift or group get numerous complements from our customers when others don’t? Why are certain people always on time with their work when others are not? These types of questions can start to be answered when we reach the place where our underlying BPM software is capturing individual behavioral nuance within context and in connection with results.

Again, in a few cases there are BPM software products that have touched on these kinds of benefits but only at an extremely simplified level. The problem is complex, because to actually capture this kind of information the underlying BPM software must effectively be “unnoticed” by the user. This represents a fundamental shift in how we think about BPM software although it is the future of the product genre - though it may well be called something entirely different to help distinguish it from the Application Integration message dominant in the commercial market today.

4) Lessons Learned – Unstructured or Free-forming Processes

We have also learned that a number of our highest value processes are really ad hoc processes that form within a known framework of relationships. These processes do not have a predetermined start and end point, they form where they are needed, when they are needed and exist until they complete.

For example, a new product offering may start in a number of places such as product development, marketing, research, strategy or executive planning sessions. Depending on what the new product is and how it relates to the other products of the company the “process” may involve any number of functions, departments and activities many of which can be performed in parallel.

From a business perspective what we want is for these processes to operate as smoothly as possible, with timely communication, information sharing and event awareness. Because the relationships behind these ad hoc processes can be identified there can also be structure placed behind these kinds of processes that simplifies both the creation and execution of these ad hoc processes. The challenge though is that these types of processes do not fit the classic BPM work flow perspective of process and are ill suited to BPMS products. While there are a number of interesting technology twists that can help address this issue already in the market they are seldom even given the label of “BPM” and generally do not address all of the challenging aspects these kinds of processes create for the organization.

5) Lessons Learned – The Customer is Nowhere in Sight

The final lesson learned is that the BPM market (except for CEM) has abandoned the customer. What is meant by this is that those processes which represent what the customer experiences (the processes that are the customer experience) are not being dealt with by any of the commercial BPM market segments as end-to-end customer processes.

What we have learned is that these customer processes – the end-to-end processes that are what the customer experiences – are the relationship with the customer. It’s hard to believe that anyone would not consider these processes as the most important processes of the organization. Yet very few organizations have actually documented these end-to-end customer experience processes and even fewer have taken the steps to own them by shaping these processes to produce a known and desired experience for the customer that is specifically optimized to make the customer’s life simpler, easier and more successful.

Considering that these experiences are the business – from the customer’s point of view – and that these processes directly impact our ability to grow customer loyalty and expand the customer relationship it seems obvious that these processes would be first and foremost on our agenda for Business Process Management. That is not the case in the BPM commercial market with the exception of CEM and specific one-off consultancy practices.

BPM Practice Guidance

While this report exposes a number of misconceptions about the BPM market including a significant amount of industry hype that is being used to promote sales, it also recognizes the value of each segment of the BPM commercial market.

The use of Executable BPM products is appropriate for Application Integration and existing practices that include the concept of “job-tickets” and “to do lists.” It can also create value in some cases where an existing process is very costly due to poor management that has failed to successfully address a known and costly issue in the organization.

Non-executable BPM software can certainly be used to document existing processes and to help improve them just as professional services can using any of the techniques available in that market.

Some Executable BPM products are focused on improving repeatable processes that truly are business processes. While these products are likely to create real value when applied in this way they are still limited to a pre-defined way of thinking about the process and their value creation potential is tightly constrained.

Executable BPM products can play a value-add role in agility (this is the BPM-SOA connection technologists’ care about) if the right decisions are made as to how that systems-based agility will break down within the organization. Tying this systems-agility initiative to strategic plans of the business through explicit milestones is a very compelling way to move this technology opportunity forward successfully.

Considering the economic challenges faced on a world-wide basis entering into 2009 it is imperative that decisions on BPM at every interest level in the business be considered clearly and thoughtfully. Knowing what we are using a given commercial offering for, why it will create value and what it isn’t going to do for the organization are the necessary ingredients of successful BPM strategy. Employing a BPM strategy that does not include these ingredients is foolhardy in the extreme. And in an economic slowdown like we are experiencing now that kind of mistake can literally take a business “out of the game.”

About the Author:

Terry Schurter is a Director of the nonprofit International Process and Performance Institute, former CEO of Bennu Group, Research Director for Process with Bloor Research and CIO of the BPM Group. An internationally recognized thought leader in Business Process Management, Performance Management, and Customer Expectation Management he received the Global Thought Leadership Award in 2007 from the 20,000+ member BPM Group.

Terry has founded, co-founded and served as an executive officer for multiple technology startups, won international awards for Thought Leadership and Engineering Excellence (George Westinghouse Signature of Excellence Awards – 1990; 1991) and is an author – contributing author of several books including "Customer Expectation Management - Success without Exception".

Terry Schurter
Global Thought Leader
Director International Process and Performance Institute
www.ipapi.org
www.tschurter.com

BPM Architecture Considerations

2009-10-28T09:09:00.000-07:00

Written by Mukanda Mbualungu

BPM Architecture Considerations

Introduction

This paper outlines three sets of key architecture considerations required for a successful configuration of an enterprise Business Process Management (BPM) implementation and deployment. These considerations are:

Deployment Environments
Architecture Options
Hardware and Database Sizing

In addition to architecture considerations, another important success criteria for BPM implantations is ensuring the organization’s IT group be involved in the early stages of the BPM tool selection process. This is due to the fact that many decisions made and issues uncovered in early stages will have long-term consequences and will be much more difficult to resolve after the BPM tool has already been selected. When IT is involved at the early stage, there is a much better opportunity for ensuring balance between both business and technology factors.

I. Deployment Environments

Although this issue may seem obvious for any software deployment, it is important nonetheless to address how the BPM architecture will be configured in order to get out of the way any preconceived ideas. Typically there are four distinct (yet related) environments that need to be configured during the course of a BPM implementation. These environments are:

Development: This is used primarily for developing the BPM solutions. All the unit tests, bug fixes, and R&D type of work is done on the Development (or Dev) environment. This environment is not as robust as the others. Sometimes, the Dev environment may end up being the developers and analysts workstations depending on the type of BPM tool selected as outlined in subsequent sections.
Test/QA: The environment is used primarily for deployment of solutions for testing the features and overall functionality and user-acceptance of solutions. There is no development taking place on the Test/QA environment. Sometimes this environment is as robust as the Staging and/or Production environments.
Staging/QA: Depending on the IT infrastructure and governance, this environment is a duplicate of the Production and/or Test environments. This environment may be considered optional depending on the scope of the implementation.
Production: This environment will be used primarily as a live environment. The final, time-stamped solution is deployed to Production.

There are subtle differences in the way the #3 and #4 environments above are configured. Each will have its own architecture options and sizing as discussed in the next sections.

II. Architecture Options

Depending on the BPM tool selected, there multiple architecture options to be considered. Below we have identified the four most commonly used options and typically most appropriate for BPM implementation. The selection of these options for each environment depends on different factors such as existing IT infrastructure, budget, and solutions to be deployed.

Single-tiered or Standalone: This option provides a single and simple deployment for all the BPM components (BPM Engine, Application Server, and Database Repository) on a single machine. In addition, this option provides a simple administration, less overhead, and limited transactional capabilities. This option is for simple to moderate BPM deployments.
Double-tiered: This option provides a two-tiered architecture deployment where on the one hand, the BPM engine and the App Server are installed on one server and on the other hand the database repository is installed on another server. This usually happens when the IT infrastructure already has some database instances that can be leveraged. This is a mid-level architecture option where there is a little more overhead and more transactional capabilities. This option is for moderate BPM deployments.
Three-tiered: This option provided dedicated services for all BPM components. In addition, this option provides more complex deployment and administration; there is much more overhead but it is scalable.
Multi-tiered: This is the most complex architecture where BPM components are divided into multiple dedicated servers for large-scale BPM deployments in an established IT infrastructure that includes clustering, load-balancing, and/or fail-over.

III. Hardware and Database Sizing

In addition to the architecture options, other considerations for architecting a BPM solution relate to calculating and estimating hardware and database sizing. These considerations are:

Number of Process Instances per Year/Month/Week/Day
Number of Users
Number of Participants per Process Instance
Number of Activities per Process
Number of Attachments per Process
Number of Notes per Process
Third-party systems that will integrate with the BPM Engine (including identity management, enterprise content management, portal for displaying work lists)
Benchmark Test results
Vendor experience with other customers who have implemented similar architectures
Current IT infrastructure

The considerations above relating to specific quantities directly relate to hardware performance – the more users and process instances involved, the greater the computing capacity is for the BPM Engine orchestrating the process. The benchmark results will determine the hardware (CPU, Memory and Hard Disk) and database sizing recommendations for the BPM tool.

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The author, Mukanda Mbualungu, is the Technical Director for SRA's Business Process Management Group (http://www.sra.com/bpm)

BPEL: Who Needs It Anyway?

2009-10-28T09:05:00.000-07:00

Written by Keith Swenson

Reexamining the Limitations, Expectations, Capabilities and Misunderstandings of BPEL, as well as Executing BPMN Directly It seems that conventional wisdom has been for a while that "Business Process Execution Language" or "WS-BPEL4WS" is the standard for execution in the BPM space. At the same time, the majority of BPM and workflow products on the market today work successfully without using BPEL. Some say that those products that don't implement BPEL are simply dragging their feet in the mud. Others say it is not possible to do what their product does in BPEL. Whom are we to believe? It is after all, a complex subject. Recently an article was written on InfoQ which took a particular process scenario drawn in Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN), and investigated in detail why it can not be implemented using BPEL. That process can, however, be run on a system that directly executes BPMN. This article explores exactly how this is possible, giving a step by step example of a running system executing the process in question. Since you can execute the BPMN directly, it begs the question: why translate to BPEL at all?

Finally a well considered and detailed article on the limitations of the approach to BPEL.

There are a few vendors who promote BPEL as as the one-and-only-true-way to support BPM. In fact, it is good for some things, but fairly bad at a large number of other things. It is my experience that BPEL is promoted primarily by vendors who specialize in products we might rightly call “Enterprise Application Integration” (EAI). These companies have recently taking to calling their products “Business Process Management”. Potential users should be asking the question “Is BPEL appropriate for what I want to do.” In that aim, there should be a large number of articles discussing what BPEL is good for, and what it is not, but there are very few articles of this nature.

The article “Why BPEL is not the holy grail for BPM” explores the promises and claims of the BPEL proponents and find some serious gaps in what BPEL delivers.

It starts by citing a reference that every should know from the BPMN FAQ: “By design there are some limitations on the process topologies that can be described in BPEL, so it is possible to represent processes in BPMN that cannot be mapped to BPEL”.

In my experience, fans of BPEL make the following assumptions:

The people making the processes are programmers
The activities in a process only need to send, receive, or transform XML data
Any standard will be better than no standard

Assumptions (1) and (2) are valid in some situations; the product category that we call EAI is in fact configured primarily by programmers, and need only to send, receive, and manipulate bytes of data. So for EAI, BPEL might be a reasonable choice. But many BPM products are designed to be configured by non-programmers; by the business people themselves (and that is indeed why we call them business processes in the first place). Non-BPEL approach exist that allow non-programmers to draw up and execute processes, safely and reliably. Those processes are qualitatively different from the processes a programmer might draw up, and many people familiar with EAI-style “BPM” are incredulous, but that basically circular reasoning based on the assumption that the process designer is a programmer. To be fair, some believe that business people will draw up initial process diagrams, that will then be fixed up by programmers. But there are other situations where there is a no programmer at all, and that in those situations BPEL would be a poor choice.

Assumption (3) drives people to think that since there is overwhelming “magazine” evidence that BPEL is the right standard, then anyone not supporting BPEL is simply too lazy or trying to disrupt the marketplace. Unfortunately for these people, the process world is inherently more complex than they realize; the variations among approaches are not simply the randomness of vendor whim, but in fact an appropriates response to the variations in the needs for process support. People should keep in mind real requirements: if BPEL meets the need, then fine, but don’t blindly assume that one size will necessarily fit all.

We need more good articles on the situations that BPEL is, and is not, useful. And let us view with great suspicion any report that states that BPEL is unconditionally the right architecture for all processes.

The article “Why BPEL is not the holy grail for BPM” presents a scenario for implementation which is difficult for BPEL based products to actually execute. It presented a particular product based on BPEL that was not able to execute this diagram. What about products that are based on executing the BPMN directly without conversion?

Fujitsu Interstage BPM is such a product. You draw the BPMN diagram, and submit the diagram to the server, and the server executes it directly. It has no problem executing the diagram as drawn. Here is the diagram as drawn in the Fujitsu Studio:

Some slight modifications: Instead of an “activity” receiving the start message, I use a start-event which receives the message. I don’t understand why people draw processes that start and then immediately go to an activity that waits for something — a start event does this much more clearly. There are many who feel that waiting for a message should always be done by an event node, and never an activity node, and that certainly seems to make sense to me. Using the start node to be triggered by the incoming message is the same semantics. Similarly, the original diagram had a final activity which was not really an activity

This is saved as XPDL. I do not say that this is transformed to XPDL, because there is no transformation. The diagram above is expressed directly, one-for-one, into XPDL which is simply a file format for storing BPMN diagrams. When you read the XPDL back in, the same BPMN diagram as you see above is displayed. XPDL is simply used as a file format to transfer BPMN diagrams around. The XPDL file is imported into the server through a web form:

Then in the server the process definition is displayed as BPMN using the Flash based process diagram viewer:

Step 1

The worklist has two workitem on it, “Provide Office” and “Fill HR DB”:

And this can be visualized graphically as:

Because these steps are in parallel, they could be completed in either order. To demonstrate how the AND node holds up the progress until both inputs are received, lets complete the “Provide Office” first.

Step 2

One work item available:

And this can be visualized graphically as:

The the “Fill HR DB” has not been completed, and so that task is still on the list. The Provide Computer step can not be started before the Fill HR DB step is completed, because the AND node requires input from both direction. There is only one active activity (indicated with green) and so we have one workitem. The AND node is colored green here to show that it has received one, but not both inputs. We complete the “Fill HR DB” workitem:

Step 3

This has two workitems available again:

And this can be visualized as:

Completing the “Fill HR DB” sent an event to the “Medical Check” activity to activate it, as well as to the AND node, satisfying that, and causing “Provide Computer” to be activated as well. So we have two activities active at this time. Again, these are in parallel, and so they could be completed in either order, so lets choose to complete the “Medical Check” workitem.

Step 4

We are left with only one work item:

And this can be visualized as:

Step 5

Now we have completed the process, there are no workitems:

And this can be visualized as:

Summary

So you see, the BPMN can be executed directly. There is no need to translate into any other form. The process is transferred to the server as a BPMN diagram, using XPDL as a file format. The diagram is interpreted directly without conversion to another model. You can execute diagrams that are not possible with BPEL. And the advantage is that you can directly see how the process is running.

Why again do analysts recommend BPEL? It seems to me in this scenario to be nothing but a limitation.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Keith Swenson is Vice President of Research and Development at Fujitsu Computer Systems Corporation, as well as Chairman of the Technical Committee of Workflow Management Coalition (WfMC). He is known for having been a pioneer in web services, and has helped the development of standards such as WfMC Interface 2, OMG Workflow Interface, SWAP, Wf-XML, AWSP, WSCI, and is currently working on standards such as XPDL and ASAP. He has led efforts to develop software products to support work teams at MS2, Netscape, and Ashton Tate. He is currently the Chairman of the Technical Committee of the Workflow Management Coalition. In 2004 he was awarded the Marvin L. Manheim Award for outstanding contributions in the field of workflow.

Innovation, Customers and your Moment of Truth

2009-10-28T09:04:00.000-07:00

Written by Terry Schurter

This paper looks at the importance of the “processes” that are created by every organization as experienced by that organization’s customers.

These “customer processes” are rarely documented, designed, managed or controlled as “end-to-end” processes even though they represent our entire relationship with our customers. Lead by the insights of Richard Normann, there has evolved a way to “look” at these processes, design them, manage them, control them and innovate on them to dramatically increase perceived customer value and to move the organization “up” into a higher level customer value chain.

At the heart of every customer experience are Moments of Truth. Richard Normann first articulated them; Jan Carlzon turned SAS around with them and subsequently wrote the book “Moments of Truth.” Innovation on Moments of Truth is fertile ground for building customer loyalty, expanding market share, and remaking entire market places.

Sir Richard Branson of Virgin uses this type of innovation on a regular basis. The largest Tire Retailer in the US built their $1.5 billion business using it. State Farm lives and breathes it every day. What’s stopping us from doing the same? Nothing but ourselves...

The innovation I am talking about is how some businesses are able to look at the experience the customer has when interacting with the business and challenge it. They challenge the shape of that interaction at a fundamental level, seeking a way to make the interaction simpler, easier and more successful in the eyes of their customers. They do it by challenging the Moments of Truth in the process and eliminating as many as they possibly can.

Moments of Truth

You’ve probably heard the term “Moments of Truth.” You may even use the concept in your own process work. You may even attribute the concept to someone in recent times. But the term Moments of Truth was first articulated as part of a management philosophy by a man named Richard Normann.

Though not nearly as well known as other management thought leaders, Richard Normann holds a special place in the hearts of those you do know about him. Considered by many that do know him to be one of the most visionary business luminaries of our time, Richard Normann developed the foundation of customer-centric value chain thinking with Moments of Truth as the central idea around which his insights were built.

It was Richard Normann that inspired Jan Carlzon. It was Richard Normann who brought to our attention the fact that the experiences we provide to our customers are primarily formed by these Moments of Truth, and that by owning and managing them we can transform the customer relationship into something that delights our customers, astounds our competitors and enthuses our employees.

Our Context is our Limiting Framework

People are motivated by their personal drive and character or by the context that surrounds them. While an economic “downturn” is unneeded motivation some, for others it’s these bumps in the road that get us up and out of our chairs moving, thinking and acting differently. In many ways a challenging business market is the business leader’s Moment of Truth.

But Moments of Truth with our customers are what really matters and innovating around Moments of Truth in customer interactions represents the greatest opportunity to improve business success, create customer loyalty and expand market share.

What are Moments of Truth? Moments of Truth are any – and every – interaction with the customer. First articulated by Richard Normann (considered by many to be one of the most profound and sophisticated management thinkers of our time) in the mid 1970’s, Moments of Truth are the heart and soul of the experience customers have with the businesses they patronize. They are also the singular most influential source of customer dissatisfaction. As a general rule that applies to virtually any industry, excess Moments of Truth are the number one limitation to businesses achieving their full potential.

You may recall the SAS turnaround led by Jan Carlzon back in the early 1980’s. This is the most popularized use of Richard Normann’s customer value chain insights using Moments of Truth to challenge the way the business interacts with its customers. Where Normann theorized, Carlzon implemented and the astounding turnaround results led to Carlzon’s publication of the book Moments of Truth.

The basic principle goes like this. When customers engage with a business for any reason they end up participating in a “process.” That process, as the customer experiences it (from their point of view), is the customer relationship. From the customer’s point of view there is nothing else.

Each and every customer interaction in all of these “customer processes” will leave an impression on our customers and every single interaction is a potential point of failure. Customer dissatisfaction comes from two places, interactions the customer deems unnecessary and interactions the customer deems inappropriate or unsuccessful.

In all of these interactions the customer is judge, jury and when needed, executioner. The business is not an equal partner in this relationship. The customer has all of the power simply because the customer can take their business elsewhere anytime they choose to do so.

Sounds like our customers aren’t very reasonable and that we are at their whim or fancy however that may take them doesn’t it? That’s not how it works though. Customers are generally reasonable and they also act on comparisons. In its simplest form providing an experience that is better than our competitors is usually enough to tip the scales in favor of increased business success. Yet understanding the concept of Moments of Truth and the customer experiences we create can be very empowering to business leaders as a way to create significant differentiation.

For example, if we asked the question “How might we innovate to increase the value of what we offer to our customers?” what might come of that? There are a number of companies that have done just that. Here are several examples.

Discount Tire

Looking at the market from the customer point of view, in the 1960’s Discount Tire decided to run its business by creating a definition for success (customer success) that fulfilled an unmet need in the market. This led to Discount Tire running its business with low prices without up-sell, the employment of staff trained to give objective advice on tire selection appropriate to the needs and goals of each customer and prompt, courteous delivery of services. Those Moments of Truth in the typical up-sell and cross-sell “process” were suddenly gone.

How do you get to $1.5 billion in revenue in a crowded, low-margin business like retail tires as a start-up? Not by adding in extra services. That is another big difference with Discount Tire. The company became an organization of tire experts. It only does tires and tire related services. You can’t get your oil changed at Discount Tire because oil changes are not related to tires.

Another interesting move by Discount Tire was the decision to deliver flat tire repair to customers for free. Again, focusing on the customer and customer success, Discount Tire decided to give away a high-value (to the business) industry service - the repairing of customers’ flat tires - for free. Now having a flat tire is certainly a Moment of Truth for customers, but having those flats fixed for FREE is a Moment of Magic – eliminating the additional Moments of Truth we would normally encounter in attempting to get our flat tire fixed.

Discount Tire is the company that fixes its customers’ flat tires for free, doesn’t up-sell, offers very low prices on a broad selection of tires, has objective tire experts for employees, and gets you in and out fast.
That value proposition and delivery of success has turned the tire sales and service industry upside-down.

Virgin Mobile USA

Virgin Mobile entered the US market with a bang, by offering a newly defined cellular service value proposition - pay as you go (and more).

Certainly the number one customer expectation that Virgin identified as a competitive differentiator was the elimination of the onerous “cellular service contract.” The service contract is a characteristic of the existing cellular service market loosely disguised as a “customer benefit.” This “benefit” is created by making non-contract service unattractive from a pricing standpoint. Why does the service contract exist in this form? It exists as a mechanism for cellular service providers to “push” a product of predetermined customer lifecycle duration because the industry as a whole has been unable to establish profitable customer lifecycle duration due to consistent failure on customer expectations.

The practice (and product) exists as a mechanism to ensure some profit to the cellular service provider. Virgin saw this as an opportunity to define a new customer value proposition that would place it at a competitive advantage for a meaningful portion of the cellular service market. Virgin introduced a new service, pay as you go that requires no service contract. You simply pay as you go.

If you documented the “process” you go through as a customer in “buying” cellular service in the traditional form you would find it fraught with Moments of Truth. It was not that long ago that most people experienced a “process” that took in excess of 30 minutes to complete just to get a cell phone and service.

With Virgin Mobile USA’s approach it can literally take 5 minutes or less. Buy a phone, any phone you want, and go. Charge it any number of ways. No contracts, no credit history, no credit cards, very few Moments of Truth.

The results of the strategy are compelling with Virgin Mobile USA touting an averaged growth rate of 1 million new customers per year.

State Farm Insurance

Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there... and the company takes that motto very seriously.

While it may be surprising to find that State Farm as a company believes very strongly in the unique and important purpose of insurance – the ability to mitigate the impact of unforeseeable and uncommon events by aggregating the risk over a large “pool” of people – this is exactly what they do believe. It makes sense, is a valuable service and stands alone as a business case, yet few insurance companies operate that way anymore.

So for State Farm customers, when something “bad” happens State Farm is “there” with incredibly simple “processes” for getting whatever happened put to rights.

You know the whole “good neighbor” thing comes from times past when a family would suffer a tragedy such as their house burning down. Their neighbors would take the distraught people into their homes then organize a “house raising” to get the family back into a new home quickly through the combined efforts of many.

State Farm still retains much of that mindset, and their customer processes are very streamlined – often imposing no extra activity on the customer or even taking steps to reduce the activity the customer must do to restore things back to the way they were. When contrasted to one competitor, State Farm’s homeowner claims policy had 3 Moments of Truth while the competitor had 13. Which process do you think you would want to “experience” when you’re trying to get something fixed on your home?

Virgin Money

Not surprising to find another of Sir Richard’s companies on the list of companies that have innovated around the customer value chain and Moments of Truth. The most recent venture, Virgin Money, dramatically changes several customer processes and one interesting company process.

The new offering goes like this. There are people who have extra money. There are also people that need extra money. Some of these people from these two groups know each other. Yet lending between “friends and family” is fraught with high risk on the investor’s side – because “friends and family” are NOT good at paying back loans.

Enter Virgin Money. Need a loan from rich Aunt Bessie? Sure. Virgin Money will provide the service that initiates the loan to you just like any other Virgin loan. You get your money, Aunt Bessie actually gets paid back (with interest by the way) and Virgin Money makes money by seamlessly providing the financial services needed to make this work just like a loan from a bank.

That completely changes the customer process for anyone getting a loan from a family member because the interest rate, terms and approval process are whatever the family member says it is... that’s quite a twist.

For the family member with the money, they suddenly have a clearly priced service that makes it easy to put their extra money to work for them while it helps someone they want to help. So Aunt Bessie can now put her money to work for her without the fear of never seeing a penny of it again.

It’s interesting too because this kind of service is likely to bring more working capital back into the economy that would otherwise be set back - protected. So depending on the uptake of this service it could have a positive impact on the global economy by increasing available capital in the marketplace. While that may not happen in any directly observable way it is likely to make some impact which is the final point – real innovation creates a value proposition that has positive knock-on effects.

ROI Times Two

Of course it’s not just the increased value to the customer that drives these companies to do what they do. One of the biggest reasons they do “it” is because improving customer experiences (really improving them) has a double benefit. It decreases the cost of operations while improving the customer experience.

That statement can start some arguments by people who believe that improving the customer experience requires more employees, more work and (heaven forbid) the willingness to give more to customers without increasing what the customer is charged. But consider this, when we are really improving the customer experience we are eliminating the reasons the customer needs to contact us and the Moments of Truth (interactions) that occur when we do. There’s only one way to do that, sophistication.

Sophistication follows from the inspiration by Leonardo da Vinci (“simplicity is the ultimate sophistication”) where he was very intrigued by the challenge of resolving complex matters to their simple – shall we say quintessential – form. It’s like the chipping away of the unneeded parts of a stone to reveal the art form hidden underneath, refining by removing the “dross” if you will.

That kind of refinement will dramatically reduce the work of the processes behind the “customer processes” – and that means they cost less for us to operate and maintain them.

So when we really start improving these customer processes our operating and maintenance costs will also decrease – sometimes as much as 200 or 300% from where we started over several refinement iterations.

How much do you think it costs Virgin Mobile USA to facilitate the sign-up of a new customer? Compared to say AT&T or Verizon? How much do you think it costs State Farm to implement the homeowners small claim process with 3 Moments of Truth compared to the competitor’s process with 13 Moments of Truth?

We are hard pressed to get the return on investment of EITHER of these values that can be derived from innovation on the customer experience let alone both from the same set of actions!

Eliminating Moments of Truth

Discount Tire changed the after-market tire industry in the United States by offering good quality tires at a low price without any up-selling or add-on services. Taking a customer process where people at the front lines of the tire sales business were participating in their company’s internal process of “selling more to every customer,” Bruce Halle changed that process with Discount Tire by participating the customer’s process by helping his customers get the tires they needed as simply, directly and inexpensively as possible. That move, that shift from the company’s process to the customer’s process, was a big enough deal to customers for Discount Tire to become the undisputed 800 pound gorilla in the after market tire industry. Most of the entrenched competitors don’t even exist any more. They were eliminated along with the Moments of Truth Discount Tire eliminated in the customer process.

Steve Jobs and Apple have been very busy lately eliminating Moments of Truth in the interactions people have with Apple products. From notebook computers to music to phones – Apple is changing what people expect in regards to the device interaction they will have when they use Apple products. Simpler, easier and more successful. Elimination of every Moment of Truth we can possibly figure out how to eliminate. This is the difference that has catapulted Apple into suddenly being a serious market contender in entrenched, high-volume markets.

Sir Richard Branson is very good at both eliminating Moments of Truth and giving front line employees the authority and responsibility to own successful customer relationships. Both activities actually eliminate many Moments of Truth, as the initial interaction with many of the Virgin companies is much simpler and giving authority and responsibility to front line staff enables them to resolve customer needs without spewing internal business rules out to customers or engaging in a lengthy internal process that leaves customers angry and frustrated.

Why Can’t We Do That?

So the question is, why are only a handful of companies able to do things like this? What is stopping the rest of us from following suit?

Why can’t we do that?

More than anything else it is a question of perspective. When we view our world from our own perspective we will act in accordance with our own wants and needs. When we place our (our organization’s) wants and needs first the customer experience will always suffer.

Yet that will challenge our ability to get and keep our customers. The two are inextricably interlinked. They cannot be separated. Customers are either an object we are attempting to manipulate for our own desires or they are the reason we exist and we orient everything we do to making their lives as simple, easy and successful as possible.

So while we can all understand that orienting on our customers is obviously the most opportunistic way for us to create business success the vast majority of organizations still manage themselves against their own wants and needs. They may have employees that champion the customer experience, making it be less onerous that perhaps it would be otherwise, but the mindset is a “me, me, me” mindset and that introduces a fundamental limit on the organization’s ability to move up the customer value chain.

What are the Limits?

Using innovation on Moments of Truth and the customer value chain really doesn’t have any limits. Being integral to our customers’ lives at new levels of value is only maxed out until the next innovation comes along. Like many things, because innovation is not a simple thing (nor is it something you just do every so often) we will continually reach plateaus where our thinking stymies for a while. The most innovative ideas come from questioning why something is “that way” – challenging ever assumption “that way” is based upon. Where did these assumptions come from? Often times we act on assumptions that have no firm foundation we can find, they are simply our “set of assumptions.” Innovation roots all of these assumptions out into the light of day to see if they are valid. For customer experiences the “assumptions” that must be challenged are each and every Moment of Truth that exists in every single customer process we create.

The only real limits we face come from our limited observational perspective (more commonly referred to as “not being able to see the forest for the trees”) and our fear (translated as “perceived risk”) of the unknown.

What if GM suddenly implemented a program that allowed customers to buy a new vehicle for a certain monthly price, with a new car of their choice every two years, and all maintenance, upkeep and repairs included? Just one low monthly price? How much would that change things? Could they do that?

It’s like asking the cellular service providers, can we sell our service without contracts – just pay as you go? Before Virgin Mobile USA did it, they would have answered no.

But even when we take ownership of those customer end-to-end processes we have to be brave, because once we own them we are responsible for making them “right” for our customers. Do you know what your customers experience now? Do you really know? Be careful how close you look, because once you look closely you will own them – and you will need to deal with their inadequacy.

Limits to this kind of innovation come from us, the people who must do the innovating. Some people with turn away from the very idea (actually, many people will) because it’s just too different from what they already know.

Any of us can bring innovation into our strategic activities and any of us can improve customer experiences, increase our value, and even raise ourselves up to a higher value chain. Any of us can, some of us will, and a few of us (like Sir Richard) will use it over and over and over again.

Your Moment of Truth

What would you do if you could take this concept to heart? What would change in your organization? How would this play out in the customer experiences your organization provides to its customers?

Could you revolutionize customer value if you were given that opportunity? I hope that you could.

Because for many of us that is where it starts. When we can’t get a corporate mandate to do what we obviously should do to help our organization succeed we can still challenge as many Moments of Truth as possible. We can still eliminate Moments of Truth whenever the opportunity arises. We can find opportunities to do this that wouldn’t find if we are looking for them. We can begin to change the customer experience from within one Moment of Truth at a time.

And that, my friends, may lead to the opening of the door that will grant us permission to challenge all of the Moments of Truth around us.

Terry Schurter
Director International Process and Performance Institute
Terry.schurter@ipapi.org

The Process Imperative

2009-10-28T09:02:00.000-07:00

Written by Jon Pyke

Situational Applications Provisioning and the Cloud

Everyone’s Having Cloudy Thoughts!

The economic turmoil, globalization and the changes in the New World Order means that organizations cannot afford to waste time, human and financial resources on processes that can rapidly and easily be automated and managed. Businesses need to transform themselves into agile operations capable of turning a constantly changing business environment into opportunities. Process innovation and speed of change are the key opportunities for competitive differentiation moving forwards. Traditional IT solutions are finding themselves under stress as the struggle to meet the demands of the business leaders and customers they serve.

Unfortunately the IT organization, responsible for facilitating changes demanded by the business, often falls short of being able to do just that. Many studies and surveys show that changes to IT infrastructure and applications are fraught with complexity, costing much more and taking much longer than initially anticipated. It is not uncommon for an IT organization to take 5 or more years to make significant enterprise-wide changes; this pace just doesn’t support the business initiatives required in today’s business climate.

So it is inevitable the Businesses leaders are looking for new ways to use computing power to meet their needs and fortuitously two trends are beginning coalesce to provide a new way of delivering applications as services; These two are:

1. The Cloud
2. Process Centric Situational Applications.

The Cloud.

The entire field of Computing is fast becoming a “cloud”—a collection of disembodied services accessible from anywhere and detached from the underlying hardware.

There will be many ways in which the cloud will change businesses and the economy, most of them hard to predict, but one theme is already emerging. Businesses are becoming more like the technology itself: more adaptable, more interwoven and more specialized. These developments may not be new, but the advent of cloud computing will speed them up.
A recent analysis of Cloud computing in the Economist stated that there were a plethora of data centers worldwide and estimated that 7,000 data centers existed in America alone. Most of these data centers were one-off designs that had grown over the years. Many surveys show that these data centers are highly inefficient. According to a study by McKinsey, a consultancy, and the Uptime Institute, a think-tank, on average only 6% of server capacity is used. Nearly 30% are no longer in use at all and many organizations are unaware of which application is running on which server. What a waste and think of the impact on the environment!

According to IDC a quarter of corporate data centers in America have run out of space for more servers. For others cooling has become a big constraint and often utilities cannot provide the extra power needed for an expansion. IDC believed that many data centers will be consolidated and overhauled. Hewlett-Packard used to have 85 data centers with 19,000 IT workers worldwide, but expected to cut this down to six facilities in America with just 8,000 employees by the end of this year, reducing its IT budget from 4% to 2% of revenue. HP is not alone and the Perfect Storm will speed up this trend as companies strive to become more efficient.

This Cloud of computing resources will not only effect the number of data centers and the number of people employed in them – it will have profound implications for the organization. On one level the cloud will be a huge collection of electronic services based on standards. Many web-based services are built to be integrated into existing business processes. IT systems will permit organizations to become more modular and flexible and this will lead to further specialization. In the Cloud it will become even easier to outsource business processes, or at least those parts of them where firms do not enjoy a competitive advantage. This also means that companies will rely more on services provided by others.

Furthermore, there will be not just one cloud but a number of different sorts: private ones and public ones, which themselves will divide into general-purpose and specialized ones. People are already using the term “intercloud” to mean a federation of all kinds of clouds, in the same way that the internet is a network of networks. And all of those clouds will be full of applications and services.

There will be many ways in which the cloud will change businesses and the economy, most of them hard to predict, but one theme is already emerging. In the current economic environment businesses will have to become more like the technology itself: more adaptable, more interwoven and more specialized.

Situational Application Provisioning

Situational Application Provisioning is a very different proposition from what we think of as applications it therefore represents a very different opportunity and is a mechanism whereby a user can put together an “application” based around normal working patterns, using readily available services.

This means that is possible to handle any sort of business problem usually tackled by enterprise solutions by being able to leverage the capability to associate virtually any number of web services within the context of an application. Process Provisioning is effectively an application generator within a process and is inherently more flexible, easier to provide, easier to manage and easier to use than traditional “ERP” type products.

But What Do We Mean By “Situational Applications”?

According to Wikipedia, a situational application is software created for a small group of users with specific needs. The application typically has a short life span, and is often created within the group where it is used, sometimes by the users themselves. As the requirements of a small team using the application change, the situational application often also continues to evolve to accommodate these changes. Significant changes in requirements may lead to an abandonment of the situational application altogether – in some cases it is just easier to develop a new one than to evolve the one in use.
According to IBM situational applications describes applications built to address a particular situation, problem, or challenge. The development life cycle of these types of applications is quite different from the traditional IT-developed. SAs are usually built by power users using short, iterative development life cycles that are measured in days or weeks, not months or years. As the requirements change, the SA often continues to evolve to accommodate these changes. Significant changes in requirements may lead to an abandonment of the used application altogether; in some cases it's just easier to develop a new one than to update the one in use.

The idea of end-user computing in the enterprise is not new. Development of applications by amateur programmers using IBM Lotus® Notes®, Microsoft® Excel spreadsheets in conjunction with Microsoft Access, or other tools is widespread. What's new in this mix is the impressive growth of community-based computing coupled with an overall increase in computer skills, the introduction of new technologies, and an increased need for business agility.

Why is This Approach Different?

Most software companies think on-demand applications (SaaS) are a replacement for traditional business software. They couldn’t be more wrong. Sure, these software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications are sold as a service and paid for per-transaction, but they are developed, sold and delivered in the same manner as traditional licensed software.

The most successful software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies do not think of themselves as software companies selling software on-demand, but as Web companies with business users accessing a service over the Internet. These companies realize that to effectively start and grow a SaaS business, they need to act more like a consumer-based Web company than a traditional enterprise software company.

Why do we need process technology to deliver Situational Applications?

There are two clear reasons for needing process technology to underpin the provision of these applications:

1. Rapid Innovation – Ra-In Clouds
The cloud is, as discussed above, the ideal mechanism for utilizing extensive computing power – be that storage or specific applications such as SalesForce.com. As it stands it saves you money. It doesn’t help you innovate – the cloud does not enable you to simply build applications to meet the needs – process technology, in its broadest sense, lets you do this in a easy and flexible way – the processes orchestrate the interaction and integration of services.

2. Compliance
Situational Applications can be very disruptive and lead to anarchy and a breakdown of corporate governance and compliance. Think of all those Excel spreadsheets – situational Applications – that are used to run most businesses – no control no compliance no ownership. Process enablement of these types of applications will provide ownership, control and auditablity – making the compliant with the corporate demands without stifling innovation and change.

The Application Target

The initial thrust for the cloud is data center and “standard” applications such as SalesForce.com and Google Apps. But this is just the start – the cloud has significantly more potential than simply being able to provide specialized applications and flexible data storage.

Gartner defines cloud computing as a style of computing where massively scalable IT-related capabilities are provided “as a service” using Internet technologies to multiple external customers. “During the past 15 years, a continuing trend toward IT industrialization has grown in popularity as IT services delivered via hardware, software and people are becoming repeatable and usable by a wide range of customers and service providers,” said Daryl Plummer, managing vice president and Gartner Fellow. “This is due, in part to the commoditization and standardization of technologies, in part to virtualization and the rise of service-oriented software architectures, and most importantly, to the dramatic growth in popularity of the Internet.”

Plummer said that taken together, these three major trends constitute the basis of a discontinuity that will create a new opportunity to shape the relationship between those who use IT services and those who sell them.
As we have seen, Business Process management has a key role in enabling the cloud to deliver applications – more importantly situational applications, in a new, flexible and cost effective way – and we call this Application Service Provisioning. The cloud then has the potential radically change the way the small to medium sized business market operates and at the same time disrupt the enterprise software market making it redundant and obsolete – almost overnight.

The Cloud as a Delivery Mechanism

According to Gartner, The types of IT services that can be provided through a cloud are wide-reaching. And include:

Compute facilities to provide computational services that use central processing unit (CPU) cycles without buying computers.
Storage services to store data and documents without having to continually grow farms of storage networks and servers.
SaaS such as CRM services through multitenant shared facilities so clients can manage their customers without buying software.

The advent of the cloud means that the focus has moved up from the infrastructure implementations to mechanisms that access to the capabilities provided. This means that the ultimate measure of success will be how the services are consumed and whether that leads to new business opportunities.

Gartner predicts that the impact of cloud computing on IT vendors will be huge. Established vendors have a great presence in traditional software markets, and as new Web 2.0 and cloud business models evolve and expand outside of consumer markets, a great deal could change. “The vendors are at very different levels of maturity,” said David Cearley, vice president and Gartner Fellow. “The consumer-focused vendors are the most mature in delivering what Gartner calls a ‘cloud/Web platform’ from technology and community perspectives, but the business-focused vendors have rich business services and, at times, are very adept at selling business services.”

How do business take advantage of low cost, on demand, computing power to drive their business growth, make them more efficient and better able to compete in a global market economy?

This is where SaaS enabled BPM platforms comes into play by providing an environment where business users and developers can work together to build new applications from scratch or by mashing up services that are widely and readily available in the cloud. These applications will almost certainly start out as situational or ad-hoc applications. These applications are important to the company but are not ones that are strategic line of business requirements. These applications are ideal for process centric deployment in the cloud. Why is this so?

Despite the fact that these Situational Applications are not strategic they do have to be properly controlled. That means they have to be compliant, auditable, recorded and controlled. Furthermore there is every possibility that they will have to be fully integrated into some “on premise” applications or even outsourced processes – therefore they need to show proper and full corporate governance. For most, deploying these applications in the cloud is too radical unless they can be properly controlled and managed. Furthermore even though they do not involve large IT investment or involvement they cannot be allowed to flaunt corporate standards – building situational applications based on proper process control in the cloud is by far and away the only way to do it.

Fig 1. Typical Cloud/On Premise set up

The above diagram illustrates the promise of the cloud in two areas; Service/App Cloud and the Infrastructure Elasticity Cloud. At the Service /App Cloud the promise is that the Cloud will deliver Business Driven Value, a subscription model based on either “Pay as you Use” or through subsidy and the ability to outsource costs and or troubles. At the Infrastructure Cloud the promise is that the Cloud will deliver Capacity as needed, a usage model based on “Pay as you Grow” and the ability to outsource costs and or troubles.

In addition the organization will require access to On-premise Enterprise applications such as SAP, Oracle etc and these will be accessed through both Private and Public Business Application Clouds. The combination of the high availability of Cloud infrastructure at a low cost and innovative Cloud services means that the organization needs an Assembly and Orchestration layer in the Cloud to fully deliver useful business advantages.

Benefits of this approach to the business users:

No significant IT investment
Low start up cost
Addresses annoying needs in a controlled way
All Operational expenditure – no capital outlay
Solutions are compliant with corporate standards of governance
Easy to change
Pay per use – no idle investments laying around
Provides real and tangible cloud benefit without the risk

Application Provisioning in the Cloud

The following situational applications might be considered to be the minimum requirement for true office administration type services that one might expect Application Provisioning to deliver.

Help Desk Management
Project Management
Travel Approval
Requirements Management
Expense Reporting
Payment Requests
Budget Approval
New Hire Setup
Training

What Do We Do Differently?

In order to truly leverage the power of the SaaS model, we need to reconsider the SaaS BPM proposition – we shouldn’t think of this as BPM as a Service, more a platform as a service, a redefined application server if you will.
SaaS applications that emulate consumer Web sites in the way they are developed and sold tend to achieve much more success than those that emulate traditional enterprise software. Therefore we need to put the application in the hands of the consumer not the technician.

Software companies that cast a blind eye to the Web-based model, whether originating online, migrating to SaaS or taking a hybrid approach, will find that the ever-winding road to success will be a frustrating excursion on the road to nowhere.

Trust or Bust

2009-10-28T09:01:00.000-07:00

Written by Keith Ayers

Why Senior Executives and Leaders Must Earn, Not Expect, Trust from Their Employees ---

Larry is the President of NuParts, Inc., a small manufacturing company that makes components. The business has enjoyed good relationships with its customers over the 25 years it has been operating. Similar to many manufacturing firms in the United States, however, increasing competition from overseas suppliers has required the company to reduce their prices over the past two years. Larry was brought in by the owners to reduce costs so that pricing could be more competitive and profitability maintained.
Larry and his management team did an apparently excellent job. They retained all of their key customers and their rigorous cost-cutting program maintained previous levels of profitability. The owners placed a lot of trust in Larry, and they certainly saw him as trustworthy.

Beneath the surface, the picture at NuParts was not so rosy. One of the decisions made by Larry and the senior team to reduce costs was to lay off 10 percent of the workforce. They felt existing production levels could be maintained by the reduced workforce if they worked harder and smarter. Quality suffered a little since the layoffs, with defective parts increasing by 6 percent and staff turnover increasing to 20 percent, up from just 5 percent two years ago.
Larry was aware of morale problems and decided that an employee survey might help identify what could be done to boost morale, employee engagement, and hopefully solve the quality and turnover problems. The results of the survey provided valuable feedback, but the management team was shocked and disappointed that the worst scoring area was trust for management.
How can they not trust us? ranted Larry at the next management team meeting. Look at the results we have achieved against some pretty stiff competition. They still have their jobs dont they?
What Larry did not understand was that being trustworthy does not guarantee that you will be trusted. Building trust and trustworthiness are two different things. Trust is a feeling you have towards someone else. Have you ever trusted someone whom you later found out was not trustworthy? Have you ever not trusted somebody and then, later on, discovered that person was in fact trustworthy? Whether you are trusted is not just a factor of your trustworthiness. It is based primarily on your ability to build trust. Leaders must understand the distinction between building trust and being trustworthy.
Larry did not think about the need to build trust with the employees at NuParts. He was too focused on being trustworthy to the owners and in the process he had in fact seriously diminished trust with the employees. Somewhere along the way, his team members became alienated. If things had kept up as they were, many more employees would have left. To understand the difference between trustworthiness and building trust and discover what went wrong for Larry, it is necessary to understand the elements that must be present for trust to develop.

The Four Elements of Trust

The Elements of Trust emerged out of research conducted by one of the founders of the consulting group of which I am president, Integro Leadership Institute. The founder, Ralph Colby, determined what needed to be present for trust to develop in a relationship:

1. Congruence: I say what I mean and mean what I say. I walk my talk. I am honest and ethical.
2. Openness: I am receptive to others ideas and opinions. I am willing to disclose whats on my mind.
3. Acceptance: Who you are is fine with me. I do not judge other people.
4. Reliability: You can count on me to keep my commitments. I do my best at everything I do.

Lets explore each of these a little more closely.

Congruence

You may remember what congruent triangles are from geometry class. Congruent triangles have angles of the same measure; even though their size may vary, the shape remains consistent.
Congruence means the same as: what I say is the same as what I really mean. It is walking the talk, or practicing what you preach. Congruence is about principles. Honesty, ethics, and integrity come under the element of congruence. It is through your congruent behavior that your team learns about your honesty and integrity.
When you are not congruent, other people tend to pick up on it. They will see it in your body language, your facial expressions, or in the inconsistency in the tone of your voice. Its a gut feeling that tips us off to how other people are feeling. Sometimes, we feel the need to sugarcoat things or tell white lies so we do not hurt someone elses feelings. But this can dilute your message as well as diminish the trust the other person has for you now and in the future.

Openness

Nobody likes to operate in the dark. Team members want and, in most cases, need to know about their performance and welcome feedback. How open are you with the members of your team? Do you encourage them to share their ideas, feelings, concerns, and, most importantly, what they expect of you as their leader?
The openness you create directly reflects your teams involvement. Openness engages people; they want to know more about what is going on. When openness is high between you and your team, they are more interested in what the organization does and how well the team and the organization are doing. And remember, openness is a two-way street.

Acceptance

This is the least obvious of the Elements of Trust, and yet it is the element that allows the other three elements to flourish. When people know they are accepted and respected, they are willing to be more open and are more committed to being congruent and reliable.
At a seminar a few years ago, I heard a manager say, When I go to my friends place to visit with him, I know I can check my ego at the door. This is a great way to look at acceptance; when you know that you are truly accepted for who you are, you are more likely to say whats on your mind.
Can your team members check their egos at the door when they are with you? Or do they need to be on guard, wondering when the next judgment or criticism is going to come?

Reliability

Reliability is more than keeping commitments and following through on projects or meeting deadlines. It means committing to those things that you do not necessarily say, but know you must do anyway, like being punctual for meetings.
As a leader, it is extremely important to your success that you can rely on your team members to deliver the results they are capable of and, in turn, that your team members can expect the same of you. How often have you been in a meeting where the start time is pushed back, waiting for people to arrive? Are you the cause of these delays? It is not only your reliability that suffers when you do that; you are also sending an arrogant message that your time is more important than theirs. It is a lack of acceptance as well. Yes, you may be the boss, and what you have to do is really important, but so is what your team members have to do. When you keep them waiting, you diminish their trust.

Belief in People

Several years ago on an executive coaching assignment in Sydney, Australia, I came across one of the worst 360-degree reports I had ever seen. At Integro, we offer a variety of diagnostic tools to assess leadership competencies, one of which is a 360-degree assessment. In a nutshell, the report compares how managers perceive their own leadership competencies against how their team members, peers, and immediate supervisors rate them. Our clients like the 360-degree report because managers who are aware of how their behavior is perceived are better able to adapt and create a responsibility-based work environment.
In this instance, the managers team members were, at times, brutal in their assessment of him, particularly in his lack of interpersonal skills. They commented that he had a tendency to micromanage, constantly checking up on employees. This manager rated his own performance very high in every category. The huge discrepancy obviously troubled him.
I met with this manager to debrief his 360-degree report, and ask him to think about whether the results may have something to do with why his staff turnover had increased significantly over the previous year. During the debriefing, he admitted to micromanaging people, so I asked why he felt he had to be so controlling. He said, To make sure everyone does what they are supposed to do. He operated under the assumption that unless he controlled his team and their situation, they would do the wrong thing. So I asked, What do you really believe about the people youve got working for you here?
He thought deeply about his answer for a good thirty seconds in silence, then glanced up at me and said, Ive got some really good people working here. Before the results of the 360-degree report, believing in his people had not really occurred to him. He knew they were trustworthy, but he had not demonstrated this trust. In fact, he had demonstrated the opposite. He also realized he had lost some of his best people because they refused to work for someone who did not trust them.
Even self-directed people who embrace accountability resent constant surveillance and control by authorities. Ask yourself how you feel when you are being watched and checked on all the time. If you dont like it, why would your team members?
Control-based leaders send a clear message to their staff that they dont trust them to do a good job unless they are controlled. At some point, these managers convince themselves their teams results would be worse if they did not control them. Pretty soon, the most worthwhile employees begin to switch off and stare out the window like bored students in an uninspiring class, occasionally glancing at the clock and waiting for it all to be over.
If that situation were to continue, you would have resignation letters from most of your best people. The 360-degree report was the catalyst that convinced this particular manager that his outlook on both leadership and his team was not working for him.
Everything I know from personal experience working with many different clients tells me that when employees are asked what they think they can achieve, they set their goals higher than management could have ever set for them. It comes back to that basic decision about whether you believe in people or not.

Do You Believe in Your People?

Trust is the essential foundation for creating a responsibility-based culture. When you really trust, believe in, and partner with people, and when you get them more involved and give them more responsibility, then you not only get more self-directed behavior, but they also become more passionate about what they do. You get people who really want to make a difference.
If you believe in people, you lay the foundation for an open and honest work environment in which employees feel switched on, engaged, and prepared to be passionate about their work. People really do want to make a difference; they want to do their best. Only when you believe this will you be able to build the kind of trusting relationships necessary to get the best performance out of your team and ignite their passion.

Keith Ayers, 2009

About Keith Ayers

Keith Ayers is president of Integro Leadership Institute, an international consulting group with offices in the U.S. and Australia that works with CEOs and senior executives to build an adaptable, innovative, and engaging work environment with trust as its foundation. His new book Engagement is Not Enough: You Need Passionate Employees to Achieve Your Dream (Elevate, 2008) is now available in all major bookstores and online. Keith has recently developed the Passion Index, a web-based assessment that measures the level of passion you have for your work. To take the assessment, or to find more information on Keith Ayers and Integro Leadership Institute, log on to IntegroLeadership.com.

The Demise of Any Company

2009-10-28T08:59:00.000-07:00

Written by Jon Pyke

The demise of any company, especially innovative ones such as COGHEAD is always a sad event, and in the never ending quest for new business there has been a raft of vendors (me included through Cordys, via The Process Factory) has made offers of a safe harbor for those customers left stranded. But I think there’s a problem.

The market for defining and developing situational applications is going to be very competitive, make no mistake. Unfortunately most of the vendors vying for the Coghead business have completely missed the point. This market is not about mash ups, it goes much deeper than that. Situational Application Provisioning is a very different proposition from what we think of as applications it therefore represents a very different opportunity and is a mechanism whereby a user can put together an “application” based around normal working patterns, using readily available services.

This means that is possible to handle any sort of business problem usually tackled by enterprise solutions by being able to leverage the capability to associate virtually any number of web services within the context of an application. This results in an approach which could be called Process Provisioning – this is effectively an application generator within a process and is inherently more flexible, easier to provide, easier to manage and easier to use than traditional “ERP” type products. Most software companies think on-demand applications (SaaS) are a replacement for traditional business software. They couldn’t be more wrong.

Sure, these software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications are sold as a service and paid for per-transaction, but they are developed, sold and delivered in the same manner as traditional licensed software.

The most successful software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies do not think of themselves as software companies selling software on-demand, but as Web companies with business users accessing a service over the Internet. These companies realize that to effectively start and grow a SaaS business, they need to act more like a consumer-based Web company than a traditional enterprise software company.

There are two clear reasons for needing process technology to underpin the provision of these applications:

1. Rapid Innovation – Ra-In Clouds (CapGemini term)

The cloud is the ideal mechanism for utilizing extensive computing power – be that storage or specific applications such as SalesForce.com. As it stands it saves you money. It doesn’t help you innovate – the cloud does not enable you to simply build applications to meet the needs – process technology, in its broadest sense, lets you do this in an easy and flexible way – the processes orchestrate the interaction and integration of services.

2. Compliance

Situational Applications can be very disruptive and lead to anarchy and a breakdown of corporate governance and compliance. Think of all those Excel spreadsheets – situational Applications – that are used to run most businesses – no control no compliance no ownership. Process enablement of these types of applications will provide ownership, control and auditablity – making the compliant with the corporate demands without stifling innovation and change.

SaaS applications that emulate consumer Web sites in the way they are developed and sold tend to achieve much more success than those that emulate traditional enterprise software. Therefore we need to put the application in the hands of the consumer not the technician.

Software companies that cast a blind eye to the Web-based model, whether originating online, migrating to SaaS or taking a hybrid approach, will find that the ever-winding road to success will be a frustrating excursion on the road to nowhere.

How (not) to Fail at BPM

2009-10-28T08:57:00.002-07:00

Written by Glenn Smith, Appian

Many good articles have been written on how to succeed with BPM, particularly related to an enterprise’s first projects. They often cover project selection, tool selection, project team composition, deployment preparation and organizational change. All of these are important factors, successful BPM implementations change the way you do business. Any individual beginning with BPM would be well served by reading several of these.

In this article we will look at BPM project development from the other side and discuss factors most likely to cause failure. By enumerating some of these, we hope to help organizations avoid some of the most common mistakes. These are the issues that we have seen most often, but we are sure that other practitioners could produce different lists. As you read through this you will note that very few of the issues are technical, one of the main benefits touted by BPM vendors is that their product reduce the complexity of building custom business applications. We find that this is largely true. The organizational obstacles are much more significant; particularly while the approach is still unproven. While implementing your first project you will have some supporters, probably a larger number of skeptics who need to be convinced and a few people who oppose or feel threatened by the initiative. The attitudes and actions of these people will have a significant impact on the outcome and acceptance of your early BPM projects. By avoiding these common obstacles, you can give your project much better odds of success.

The rest of this article is a top-ten list of things to avoid.

1. BPM is a new toy bought by IT without a solid business sponsor. IT is forced to search for projects to justify the expense, but the business owners aren’t convinced that they need it. If the business users were not involved in product selection, the chosen tool may not match their needs. The business units don’t have budget or resources for BPM projects. They may resist a new approach being pushed on them. In some cases, IT uses it within their organization in an effort to claim success, but the savings are unlikely justify the expense, or lead to wider adoption.

2. The business decides to implement BPM without support from IT. Note, this is the opposite of the previous item. Success requires engagement from both the business owners who will reap the benefits and IT who will implement and support the solution. BPM is never truly a standalone solution, it is a layer on top of existing applications and infrastructure. Without proper consideration from IT before selection, the tool may not fit well into existing infrastructure.
3. Selecting projects without sufficient benefit. Despite what you hear from the vendors and consultants, implementing BPM is expensive. The BPM suite, hardware to host it and implementation costs quickly add up to several hundred thousand dollars. We define success from the viewpoint of a shareholder. A process can be implemented and operate exactly as planned, but still be a failure if the ROI is negative. This is the most common failure which we have observed.
4. Over-reaching on the first project. If BPM is a new approach for your organization, it is best to start with a relatively simple project. This risks violating the previous item, but there are often high value low risk projects. Look for projects with narrow organizational impact, preferably a single department, but which have high volume or high cost of errors. These can produce significant value while avoiding many of the cross-organizational problems. A variation of this is starting several projects in parallel before completing any. The few knowledgeable resources are stretched across multiple projects, and each project makes similar mistakes without the opportunity to learn from prior activities.
5. Too many dependencies outside of the BPM project. While most BPM projects require interfaces to existing systems and infrastructure try to minimize external dependencies. Look for projects which can be implemented with existing interfaces. If possible, defer some of the integration to a second release. It will be much easier to get the budget and cooperation needed to modify existing systems after you have proven the value of BPM. If your organization has a mature SOA architecture, leverage that for all of your external interfaces. This will simplify your development task, and win key allies.
6. Poorly defined measures of success. Before starting any process improvement initiative, it is essential to measure the current performance, and the expected benefits. At the end of the project, management will expect a proper accounting of costs and benefits to determine whether to continue with additional BPM projects. Reduced cost is often the most obvious benefit, but also consider expanded business opportunities, better ability to respond to change and other improvements. Expanding revenue is often more beneficial than reducing costs.
7. Lack of high level, high visibility measures/reports. Too often, BPM developments do not include reports/dashboards/measures that can easily speak to senior management and decisions makers. These items are usually simple reports or charts and can include individual user/team performance metrics, statistics of use per product/product line, overall completion time of processes, etc... Taking the time to define these key metrics before starting the BPM implementation and designing the processes around the collection of these metrics is crucial in proving the added value and ROI of BPM.
8. Absence of an executive sponsor. We have suggested keeping the scope of the early projects narrow both organizationally and in terms of IT impact, but it is inevitable that any BPM project will require resources outside of the core project team. These will include IT resources as well as business experts to define the correct processes. An executive sponsor at a sufficiently high level to ensure timely availability of these resources is critical.
9. Underinvestment in training. BPM is a fundamentally different style of application development than traditional approaches. In particular it brings Business Analysts and other less technical people deep into the development process. Many companies skimp by training just a few core resources and expecting them to train the rest. But these resources are just developing their first BPM solution and do not have the expertise necessary to effectively train others.
10. Absence of proper in-house resources to develop and maintain the BPM software and applications. Contracting out the implementation of the first BPM projects is usually the fastest and more reliable way to start using BPM. However, without in-house resources that actively participate in this process and take ownership of BPM from both the functional and IT standpoints, the project may experience issues that are not properly and timely handled; resulting in undermining the end users confidence/buyout into the application and destroying the reliability/reputation of the project

We have described a number of factors which we have observed to be common causes of failure in initial BPM projects. Awareness of factors that have caused others to fail may help you avoid these common mistakes. It is critical that the first project be perceived as successful or subsequent projects are unlikely to be funded. Take these suggestions and adapt them to the specifics of your organization. We have found that avoiding these common mistakes significantly improves the odds of project success. The potential benefits of enterprise wide adoption are enormous. We hope that this article helps some of you achieve them.

About the Authors
Glenn Smith is a Principal Consultant with Appian. He has more than 20 years of software development experience including more than 10 years implementing enterprise BPM solutions. He can be contacted at glenn.smith@appian.com. Sylvain Furt, Senior Consultant at Appian, co-authored this piece, and can be contacted at sylvain.furt@appian.com.

First Impression: Serena Lean BPM

2009-10-28T08:57:00.001-07:00

Written by Nathaniel Palmer

Should you follow a pragmatic approach with BPM initiatives? After nearly a decade of market research on what drives BPM implementations, we have found the most common answer for what prevents BPM projects from advancing is consistently “lack of sponsorship” by upper management (cited by 25% of respondents to our most recent survey -- more than twice the frequency of any other answer, and consistent with similar studies we have performed over the last 10 years.)

Why the lack of sponsorship? The basic requirement and typical challenge in achieving project sponsorship (true of BPM as with another area) is building a credible argument that demonstrates value while keeping risks in check. This can prove a daunting task for any project of substantial size. The answer is to take a pragmatic approach, demonstrate positive results, and use these proof-points to build a business case.

One of the core advantages of BPM is that it need not require “boiling the ocean” to deliver positive results. Proof-points can and should be demonstrated early, by focusing on discrete business area. In the words of management sage Peter Drucker, “Continuous process improvements in any one area eventually transform the business. They lead to innovation. They lead to new processes. They lead to new business.”

In other words, to realize long-term, transformational results, start with a pragmatic approach. Use short-term project wins to show proof-points and build credibility, and then to leverage this into large projects areas. Leverage the incremental and measurable qualities of BPM to achieve repeatable success.

Knowing this about business process management and which factors correlate closet to the best chances for BPM success, we were particularly impressed by Serena Software’s Lean BPM solution. Does “Lean” mean simply de-scoping traditional BPMS capabilities? No. Serena’s Lean BPM provides a full set of capabilities for building and deploying process-based applications, including of course a GUI-based designer for process flows as well as forms and user interface, in addition to reporting tools and auditing capabilities.

What the Serena Lean BPM framework lacks compared to some other BPMS platforms is the infrastructure components common to large system, transactional deployment environments, such as an ESB, preconfigured application connectors, document/records management repository, ETL tools, or a separate rules engine.

These capabilities have their place, but are not necessarily consistent (or at least not required) with a pragmatic approach to business process management.

What you will find, however, a set of capabilities uniquely tuned to creating quick, effective and repeatable BPM applications. This includes subtle nuances, such as a strong versioning capability in the process designer, facilitating reuse of process model. It extends to a focus on wholesale application reusability, whereby any existing process or application can be used to quickly develop a new application.

The advantages of course include saving time and development resources with each additional application or automated process, however, a potentially more compelling benefit is the ability to modularize the development process in a relatively simplistic manner (read “agile”). Specifically, common process and groups of tasks can easily reused, enforcing greater governance and consistency but without imposing any particularly restrictive in the development process. This is delivered through an inherent packaging capability that stores processes as portal components, combined with an integrated ‘path-to-production’ deployment capability that allows an application to move it from test mode to live production through relatively simple, guided process.

On the Ground or In the Clouds

Serena’s Lean BPM can be deployed either 'on-premise' as a local application within an enterprise's firewall, or ‘in the cloud’ as an on-demand application. This allows greater leverage of the inherent path-to-production ease of deployment, as well as the overall notion of a pragmatic approach to BPM. On-premise deployment resolves any perceived risks or actual regulatory issues relating to data stored outside of a firm's physical control, while on-demand deployment eliminates the overhead involved with deploying and managing server infrastructure. A particular area of differentiation is ‘mashup’ functionality that uses lightweight, web protocols for integration, such as REST and SOAP. This is combined with an integrated Mashup Manager to build and manage ‘mashed’ objects or widgets combining data sources within Flash or Silverlight objects that can be drag-and-dropped into applications and processes.

Another area of differentiation, particularly in regards to building and deploying web applications, is the built-in security and session management capabilities. Session management a critical component to managing the user experience and security. It is impossible to effectively support mashups or web-based processes without a session management capability, yet this is not functionality particularly common in BPMS environments.

For example, is a web app is comprised of various third party widgets, activity occurring in one will not affect others unless they are specifically integrated, or unless there is a foundational session management capability which flows security and identity parameters between them. Another benefit of session management is that it allows web applications to behave like desktop applications, for example if communication with the web browser is broken or the user hits “refresh” then whatever has been done within the application will not be lost, as would be the case without session management.

Streamlining e-Government Through a BPM System

2009-10-28T08:55:00.000-07:00

Written by Amy Wyron

Why include BPM in an e-Government strategy?

In today’s fast paced world, e-government is widely considered the key to modernizing government operations, increasing efficiency, and eliminating waste. E-government refers to the use of information and communication technology (ICT) in government operations, involving both internal operations and external relationships with citizen constituents. Due to the growing demands of a globalized world, government services must be delivered ever more rapidly yet with increased capacity. The demands on government have never been greater, and the need for modernization has never been so necessary.

The idea behind e-government projects is that well-applied technological interventions can enable a government to do its job faster, better, and with more accuracy. And this in turn results in better outcomes for the citizen constituents that rely on the government, both directly and indirectly, for quality services.

It is too often taken for granted that technology is the best solution to the modernization and globalization issues facing government. It is important to note, however, that ICT is not a modernization solution in and of itself; the solution lies in the way that technology is applied. Just as in the private sector, any new technology adoption implies resources and expenses; thus, costs and benefits must be weighed, and concrete goals must be established and met in order to demonstrate success.

Additionally, an e-government solution should address concrete pain points in a measurable way in order to justify its existence. Much like clients, citizens pay for government through taxes and express their preferences through democratic elections. However unlike a private customer, citizens of a nation cannot easily choose another provider, or quit consuming government services. Furthermore, government also serves constituents who are unable to express preferences, such as children. Thus the responsibility of a government to its clients is even greater than that of a private entity, and the benefit to the citizen clients must always be at the forefront when implementing an e-government project.

A thoughtful e-government strategy must be about more than just adding technology to government. Efficiency, automation, and technology are all important components of a modernization strategy, but only when considering the intended benefit to the consumer. A BPM system is a powerful tool that can be used to help an e-government address specific pain points, modernizing the services that people count on while also streamlining the government’s ability to provide those services.

Business Process Management – An Integral Part of E-Government Strategy

Business process management (BPM) refers to the automation and optimization of workflow. A BPM system can help an organization to streamline processes, reducing waste and virtually eliminating the need for physical paperwork. Through the automation of paper-based processes, a BPM system closes the gaps among people, systems, and information throughout a department or agency. BPM makes it easier for people across offices and in distinct locations to share information with each other, and with systems and databases.

Transparency, efficiency, and enhanced coordination offered by a BPM fall right in line with the broader goals of e-government; thus, a BPM system is a natural choice for a government pursuing an integrated e-government strategy. A BPM system, especially an open source system, can help move a government towards open standards and provide increased accountability to citizens, thus providing a great advantage to an integrated e-government project.

A BPM system can also save a government the hassle of creating an expensive custom system by essentially creating customized applications through workflow designs. Rather than the government adapting to a rigid system, the BPM system itself can adapt to reflect the unique reality of the governmental processes. Each workflow then functions as a distinct custom-built IT application, robust enough to support critical processes yet flexible enough to respond to ever-changing demands.

Business process management and e-government are a natural match. Both aim to reduce waste, maximize efficiency, increase transparency, and simplify operations through the intelligent application of technology. Through well-designed BPM implementations, a government can enjoy efficiency gains and respond with agility to constituent demands.

Suggested Best Practices for Implementing BPM in E-Government

In considering implementing a BPM system in local or national government, it is useful to reflect and consider the lessons that can be drawn and offered to others considering an e-government BPM project. As the UN reminds, “For a public administration, there is no single established way, no ‘best practice’ that would lead to successful e-government”.Nor do the following recommendations seek to establish firm rules for a government BPM implementation.

While these guidelines are by no means binding, they do reflect best practices identified in BPM implementations in governmental projects:

Do a pilot project. Pilot projects can provide a valuable experience for organizations, and a chance to work out issues early and on a smaller scale before they are introduced to the entire organization. A pilot phase will also help achieve success that will propel the project forward. The UN Sector Report, citing the OECD, maintains that when it comes to e-government, “the risk of failure is proportional to the size of the project” and “expensive, long-term, and complex initiatives often fail”.(1) Thus, a pilot project is a concrete and less complicated trial phase that can demonstrate the feasibility of an e-government initiative.

Start with mature, well-documented processes. Though tedious, Process Discovery is a vital phase, and should be given considerable time and attention at the beginning of a BPM project. The organization must have standardized processes; otherwise it can be a very long road to standardize them in tandem with a BPM implementation. In the case of an institution where processes are immature or poorly defined, it is important to choose a BPM tool that is flexible enough to adapt to a changing environment. A flexible workflow tool makes it easier to process documents according to the needs that may arise and, little by little, incorporate the necessary routing rules for the common cases and exceptions.

Create a BPM implementation team. In addition to the presence of external consultants, there must be an internal project manager and designated BPM implementation team. Capacitate the team so they are prepared to fulfill this important role, and create regular meetings to facilitate communication within the team and between the team and management. It is wise to work with experienced external consultants, but to also foster those capacities and abilities internally.

Set measurable and concrete benchmark indicators. Benchmarks will help to measure and demonstrate the success of a BPM implementation, or of any e-government initiative. Be sure to take a baseline indicator before the start of the project, for example average completion time, average number of errors per month, average number of official complaints, average number of cases processed per day, etc. Retake these measurements at periodic intervals. Measurable indicators will not only help demonstrate the BPM system’s impact, but will also help justify the e-government initiative.

Leave time for optimization. When designing a BPM system implementation schedule, it is critical to leave time for revision and improvement (hence, the optimization and not just automation of workflow.)

Choose a BPM system wisely. When selecting a BPM system, the committee should investigate the advantages that each tool can offer. In some cases the most sophisticated system may not be the best or most practical for addressing the specific pain points felt by the organization. Additionally, select a system that will grow with the government in the long-term. Will the system facilitate integrations with other systems? Or will the system present challenges and become itself an obstacle down the road, with vendor lock-in and expensive user licenses? BPM systems offer different features and functions, and it is important to research both proprietary and open source tools to determine which best meets the needs and resources of the particular institution.

When implementing BPM as part of an e-government strategy, these best practices can help ensure the success of the implementation. Through the introduction of a BPM system, governments can steadily move towards more openness, efficiency, and responsiveness in government operations. In order to respond to the ever-growing demand for faster and more effective services, e-government capacities must be developed in order to streamline internal processes and provide enhanced services that will directly benefit the citizen constituents.

(1) quotes taken from “E-Government at the Crossroads: World Public Sector Report” United Nations, New York, 2003. p.7, p.59

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Amy Wyron is Marketing Manager for Colosa, Inc., the developer of ProcessMaker Open Source Business Process Management Software. She holds a B.A. in Public Policy from Duke University, and her research interests include the improvement of public management and policy through technology and innovation.

ProcessMaker is an Open Source Business Process Management (BPM) software that enables organizations, SMEs, and government agencies to automate document intensive, approval-based processes across systems including finance, HR and operations. ProcessMaker is an AJAX-enabled, SOA, web-based application that allows users across single and multiple sites to create and share workflows, customize forms, manage processes, and enhance reporting. ProcessMaker is developed by Colosa, Inc., and has offices in Brooklyn, NY, La Paz, Bolivia, and Lima, Peru. For more information, visit http://www.processmaker.com

Anticipating Potential Disasters and Limiting the Consequences

2009-10-28T08:52:00.000-07:00

Written by Christine Robinson

Technologies and professional disciplines exist today through Enterprise Architecture (EA) and Business Process Management (BPM) to design and implement systems that can vastly improve emergency response capabilities for responding to a potential global disaster such as a swine flu pandemic. EA and BPM accomplish this through modernized business processes, BPM software (BPMS), system-integrated solutions, consortiums dedicated to modernizing Information Technology, Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), and other improvements.

This begins with Enterprise Architecture (EA), which delivers business solutions enabled by technology, and in the case of a possible swine flu pandemic, a global health emergency response. Within EA, the discipline of BPM Business Process Management (BPM) applies continuous process improvement enabled by technologies. The US government relies extensively upon the Federal EA framework, Department of Defense Architecture Framework, and others to design EA. According to John Dodd, CSC EA consulting practice lead and chair of the EA Special Interest Group for the Industry Advisory Council, which advises the US federal government Chief Information Officer and chief architect community, says that “the strategic framework for global health care begins by aligning the EA to an organization’s strategy, budget, architecture, and performance to achieve massive improvements in the ability to deliver emergency responses for health care and other mission critical services.” A strategic framework can incorporate individual countries’ emergency processes and systems into a global emergency health response.

Implementing BPMS that automates business processes often residing in notebooks, in people’s heads, and in separate systems that don’t relate to one another can lead toward vast improvements in organizational efficiency and exponential improvements in emergency response. The most powerful BPMS programs, with institutional knowledge built into business processes and business rules that drive decision-making, can integrate with databases to collect information about the number of swine flu cases occurring in each reporting authority and automatically set in motion an emergency response.

“A robust, complete BPM solution can be a tremendous asset in coordinating activities, such as communications or tracking, around a pandemic or epidemic event,” said Dr. Setrag Khoshafian, noted BPM expert and VP of BPM technology at Pegasystems Inc. “BPM tremendously enhances the responsiveness around these situations through its automated and digitized policies and procedures. BPM supports agility and change – your disaster recovery BPM solutions can be easily changed and specialized. You can respond to the events depending upon the location, severity, the demographics, and other factors. BPM helps you achieve situational responses. The automation of policies and procedures in BPM minimizes the potential for people becoming bottlenecks in the processes and enables them to focus on tasks where they are truly needed and could have the most benefit. Using BPM around the processes and rules of such events ensures a concise and systematic approach that makes sure that proper procedures are being followed and adhered to.”

Today, a number of academic, industry, and government communities are actively seeking to improve inter-communication between a variety of sources such as government, non-profit, industry, and the public. The Health Information Environment represents one of the most visible and critical information-sharing environments. EA and BPM provide the framework for developing and managing a global health care system, defense system, or any other major system incorporating data from numerous sources.

Academic research institutions are now addressing the challenges facing those who would build, protect, and evolve large scale environments, where multiple organizations share information: for the US Department of Defense, health care, transportation, and other domains. Kevin Sullivan, a professor of Computer Science at the University of Virginia, is leading the Center for Ultra Large Scale Software-Intensive Systems (ULSSIS), with a planning grant from the U.S. National Science Foundation, the support of industry leaders such as CSC, and with additional research sites at the Vanderbilt University, the University of California San Diego, and Michigan State University. Sullivan says, “An all-out industry-university-government collaborative research effort is now essential to produce the breakthroughs needed to improve our ability to build and manage the systems of the future. ULSSIS provides a national vehicle for this work.”

From a technology perspective, SOA, which facilitates the integration and exchange between different systems that may not have communicated with one another, enables them to share within a much broader global community. The US defense community recognizes the benefits from adopting SOA. Kevin Moore, CIO of the US Military Entrance Processing Command (MEPCOM), which inducts military recruits into all of the US armed services, led efforts that dramatically improved organizational efficiency. He said, “Implementing a SOA, nearly two years ago, has been extremely beneficial to USMEPCOM. It has reduced our IT development to production costs and the amount of time it takes; it has facilitated greater integration of our systems with our stakeholders' systems; it has provided an automated business process and Workflow Management capability that supports business modeling; and has been an essential part of our overall transformation strategy both from a business perspective as well as an IT perspective.”

System integration based upon a strategic EA framework offers the foundation for automating Emergency Preparedness and Disaster Recovery as much as possible. The Senior Director for Global Public Sector Market Research at Oracle, the world’s second largest software company, Lewis Carr, stated that “the systems available today can take data from different sources around the world and, based on the policies and guidelines set by public health and government agencies tasked with detection, study and control of communicable diseases, data collection and use policies can be automated using….BPMS automated process, directing systems to sort, alert, and set in motion whole series of human and system processes, increasing the probability of averting and containing a world health or other disaster of monumental proportions.”

Today’s systems can automatically execute pre-defined processes designed into powerful BPMS integrated within and between participating organizations to plan for and respond to a global health or other imminent disaster. The trick is to find the right match of business process and technologies. This conceptual approach fits into the existing frameworks around the world that govern the design of business processes and Information Technology systems, some of which may sound familiar such as Information Technology Information Library (ITIL) that originated in Great Britain, Capability Maturity Model Index (CMMI) that originated at Carnegie Mellon University for software development, Disaster Recovery International Incorporated (DRII,) that governs international Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery, the international professional organization named Control Objectives for Information Technology (COBIT), Lean Six Sigma that addresses quality improvement, and others that may apply within individual countries or sectors.

The concept of how work is done, otherwise known as workflow, sits at the very heart of identifying and improving the business processes that health care and other organizations perform in order to provide their services to their constituencies. Professionals trained in this field can model processes and process components using standards specifically designed for this purpose such as Business Process Management Notation (BPMN), BPEL, and UML. These artifacts are governed by the BPMS lifecycle; from design time business analysis, data architecture, and other requirements to execution in a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) environment. Linus Chow, Public Sector Chair of the Workflow Management Coalition, an international organization dedicated to improving workflow and enabling technologies, states that “there is something profound in aligning the business and technology stakeholders with shared and understood goals and objectives that can vastly improve global health and other operations.”

From a technology perspective, SOA would be an enabler that can help business, government, and non-profit organizations achieve vast improvements in efficiency and cost reduction. SOA facilitates the integration and exchange between individual systems that may have only communicated within a specific community and enables them to share in a much broader base, using existing software, hardware, and data rather than having to completely redesign systems in order to modernize and save costs. The US defense community recognizes the benefits from adopting SOA. Kevin Moore, CIO of US Military Entrance Processing Command (MEPCOM), which inducts military recruits into the all of the US armed services, led efforts that dramatically improved organizational efficiency. He said, “Implementing a SOA, nearly two years ago, has been extremely beneficial to USMEPCOM. It has reduced our IT development to production costs and the amount of time it takes; it has facilitated greater integration of our systems with our stakeholders' systems; it has provided an automated business process and Workflow Management capability that supports business modeling; and has been an essential part of our overall transformation strategy both from a business perspective as well as an IT perspective.”

System integration based upon a strategic EA framework represents the foundation of making global health care, defense, and other large-scale environments as automated as possible, starting with comprehensive and efficient business processes driven by business rules. These systems can rely upon the Internet, BPM, powerful databases, state-of-the art hardware and software solutions, while thoroughly managing the life cycle and making sure that all the systems’ processes work effectively. Processes for normal operations and emergency operations built into BPMS and other automated systems help remove human intervention, or lack thereof, which is so often the cause of breakdowns in process.

The Senior Director for Global Public Sector Market Research at Oracle, the world’s second largest software company, Lewis Carr, stated that “the systems available today can take data from different sources around the world and, based on the policies and guidelines set by public health and government agencies tasked with detection, study and control of communicable diseases, data collection and use policies can be automated using Enterprise Policy Automation (EPA) and implemented by BPMS automated process, directing systems to sort, alert, and set in motion whole series of human and system processes, increasing the probability of averting and containing a world health or other disaster of monumental proportions. On the other hand, such systems can also ensure that pandemic threats do not become panics that needlessly reduce economic output through unnecessary business closures, travel reductions and school and public space closures.

A number of organizations have recognized the potential for this approach such as the US Congress, the international industry analyst IDC-Government Insights, the US Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), and other parties within industry and government.

This EA and BPM enabled approach can govern all the components required for effective 21^st Century emergency preparedness and response. Peter Andersen, CSC IT architect of one of the most advanced architectures for emergency preparedness and disaster recovery and some of the most complex technical systems in the world, said, "collaboration, coordination and communication are important components of the response to a world-wide health crisis.” All who play a part need the ability to collaborate in varying ways to facilitate timely and efficient response. “Essential collaboration capabilities need to include secure and auditable electronic or virtual meetings and secure document sharing and white-boarding. Integrated technology provides a common platform for email, fax, text messages, voice (e.g., cellular, standard telephone systems, satellite, etc.), radio, web, and disparate radio systems operating on multiple radio frequencies - both analog and digital.” All system capabilities have a permanent audit trail.

Summary

Today’s technologies and professional disciplines through Enterprise Architecture (EA) and Business Process Management (BPM) can help vastly improve emergency response capabilities for a potential global disaster such as a swine flu pandemic. Improved business processes for delivering emergency response; BPMS; system integrated solutions; consortiums comprised of participants from academic institutions, government, and industry who deliver new capabilities; SOA and other improvements together can help achieve dramatic improvements in Emergency Preparedness and Disaster Recovery to benefit the global community.

Mark Kagan, “Business Process Management Shows Solid Potential for Disaster Preparedness and Response,” IDC - Government Insights, 2009

Footnotes

Christine Robinson, (2008). Perform Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery via Business Process Management and Other Software Tools. http://www.bpm.com/perform-business-continuity-and-disaster-recovery-via-business-process-management-and-other-software-tools.html
Christine Robinson, (2009). Transforming Health Care through Enterprise Architecture and BPM. Layna Fischer, 2009 BPM Handbook. Lighthouse Point, FL: Future Strategies.
Christine Robinson, (2009). Transforming Health Care through Enterprise Architecture and BPM. Layna Fischer, 2009 BPM Handbook. Lighthouse Point, FL: Future Strategies.
Kathleen Hickey, FEMA uses Appian BPM tool to manage disaster relief work, Government Computer News, October 23, 2008

About the Author: Christine Robinson

Christine Robinson has achieved international recognition for her vision for Enterprise Architecture, BPM, and emergency preparedness and disaster recovery, receiving an award for excellence in Emergency Preparedness and Disaster Recovery in 2008. Her vision even inspired Congressional legislation and funding and government procurements beginning in 2008.

Christine’s vision has influenced industry and government. Her approach for emergency preparedness and disaster recovery led toward congressional legislation and funding for modernizing emergency preparedness and disaster recovery as well as government procurements incorporating her approach, beginning with FEMA. This is also becoming part of the Federal Enterprise Architecture and Segment Architecture. Industry analysts have also forecasted that her approach will become more widely recognized.

Christine has performed numerous senior leadership roles. As a principal consultant, Christine recently worked for CSC, which chose her approach for emergency preparedness and disaster recovery as one of eight new global cyber security offerings. Prior to joining CSC, she evaluated the US Treasury’s most critical emergency preparedness and disaster recovery plans for the systems that run the entire US monetary system and impact the world’s economy. Other roles include system engineering, information security, Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery, and BPM for SAIC and for Verizon, designing and implementing innovative domestic and international solutions.

Christine writes for international publication. International judges distinguished her paper “Transforming Health Care Through Enterprise Architecture and BPM” as one of the foremost papers featured in the “2009 BPM Handbook.” BPM.com features two of her articles, billing her most recent one as a “top story.” The “Common Defense Quarterly” will feature an upcoming article in the summer edition. She co-authored a chapter in 2009 for the World Future Society’s book “Seeing the Future with New Eyes.” The Intelligent Communities Forum will publish Christine’s chapter “Safety and Security in the Future City” in an upcoming book in September 2009, which is a prelude to her own book that Future Strategies plans to publish in 2010.

Christine has spoken at forums and conferences for the Disaster Recovery Journal, the Workflow Management Coalition, senior government officials, CSC, Capital Speaker’s Club, the Falls Church Chamber of Commerce, and others.

Arlington County appointed Christine to the Arlington County IT Technical Advisory Commission where she serves as chair of the emergency communications subcommittee.

BPM: The Next Stage of End User Programming

2009-10-28T08:48:00.000-07:00

Written by Glenn Smith

For as long as businesses have used computers, there has been a continual tension between the business end users and the IT application providers. End users are rarely satisfied that the available applications fully meet their needs. If they contract for custom development, it is often no better. By the time a custom application is deployed, the business has evolved and the new application is less than satisfactory. The major cause of this is the understanding gap between business users and IT developers. Neither fully understands the other’s domain. Users don’t completely understand technology capabilities and constraints, resulting in sub-optimal requirements and specifications and developers don’t completely understand the business.

Many business users have felt that the solution to this was to eliminate the IT dependency and develop applications themselves. Of course few business people have the skills or time to develop a modern application, but there have been a few breakthrough computing platforms which allowed ordinary business people to develop their own tools, without IT support. This gave them the freedom to implement exactly what they wanted and to modify at will as circumstances changed. In this article, we consider whether BPM tools can provide another step in satisfying this desire.

The first breakthrough in end user programming was Visicalc, the original spreadsheet. More than any other category of application, spreadsheets made the PC an indispensable business tool. Today nearly all businesses have spreadsheets which they use to model and manage their businesses. Most could not imagine life without them. For the first time, ordinary business people could create exactly the tools they needed. The next breakthrough was 4GL database tools such as PowerBuilder. These allowed non-programmers to access corporate databases and create quality user interfaces and reports. They could quickly develop and deploy new applications to meet new demands. They represented a big step up from spreadsheets, since they provided access to the assets in existing databases. Of course, these required a little cooperation from IT for database access, but functionality and schedule were completely in the end user’s control. Unfortunately nearly 20 years have passed with no significant additional progress. If anything the barriers have been raised by the internet and the expectation for browser based access from any location. The PC is no longer a suitable platform for hosting most business applications.

Business Process Management Suites have evolved as a powerful platform for enterprise change. One of the primary advantages of BPM platforms over other forms of application development is the very high level of abstraction. BPM systems model the solution directly in terms of the business activities, not programming constructs. This allows non-technical business people to understand, and even develop process solutions.

There are several necessary requirements which a platform must satisfy to be viable for end-user programming. Perhaps the most important is that it must work directly with concepts from the business domain, and hide computer implementation details. Business users will not invest the time required to master low-level programming constructs. Spreadsheets were immediately accepted because users were accustomed to using paper based tabular calculations. Visicalc made those activities both more powerful and productive. The 4GL development tools used graphical layout and declarative definitions to allow construction of rich user interfaces without knowledge of the underlying event model and graphics sub-systems. Users defined the result, rather than the process for achieving the result.

A second requirement is that it be sufficiently expressive. It should include in a single package, tools for all of the required components of a complete application. Traditional programming tools are general purpose, and able to solve problems from many different domains, but their richness creates a large barrier to learning them. On the other extreme, tools with too little functionality fail to solve many important problems and become applications rather than development platforms. A platform for end-user programming should be targeted at a specific class of problems. Domain specific tools can achieve sufficient expressiveness while remaining accessible to non-experts.

A third requirement is that it be able to be developed, deployed and managed with little or no IT support. Most IT departments are reluctant to take support responsibility for applications developed by people that they consider to be amateurs. IT may help install Excell, but they are not expected to debug the business formulas. Finally, it must be cost effective. It is not possible to justify a million dollar enterprise platform for personal productivity.

Modern BPM suites can score well on all of the above criteria. The primary programming element is the process. This is a graphical representation of the flow of activities and information through an organization. It is represented directly in business terms, and typically configured by filling in a few properties in a dialog box. The user does not realize that they are actually programming. Supporting elements such as users, groups and documents also directly correspond to real world artifacts that business people use to describe their work. They also score well on expressiveness. They have evolved over many years and the current generation of systems include a sufficient set of standard activities to support a wide range of applications. The support and cost issues will be addressed shortly, but more context is required.

BPM platforms have been primarily designed to support enterprise wide, mission-critical applications. Clearly these are not candidates for end-user development. However, one of the central tenets of the BPM community is that everything that a business does should be thought of, and if possible implemented, as an explicit process. For an organization to fully achieve a process-centric culture, process modeling tools must be available for any legitimate business purpose, not just strategic initiatives.

Just as it is not appropriate for end users to develop enterprise solutions, it is often not cost effective for IT to develop departmental level solutions. One of the most common failure modes of BPM solutions is the negative ROI that results from applying enterprise level tools and development methodologies to small local problems. In most organizations, these problems are never addressed. Individually, the value of each solution is too small to justify automation, but collectively they present huge opportunities for improvement.

There appear to be several characteristics which make a problem a candidate for a user developed BPM solution. First, it must be a human-centric problem. Solutions which require system integrations require professional developers. SOA tools have made integration much easier, but it still remains in the domain of professional programmers. Second, the organizational and geographical scope should be limited. The ideal case is that all actors are in a single department at a single location. Although all current BPM systems have web based interfaces, deployment across multiple locations will require involvement of the network and security experts. In most organizations, it would not be allowed for any application not owned by IT. A third desirable characteristic is that it not be expected to be the system of record for any regulated data. It is good to automate a current manual document approval process, but the result should still be maintained in the same repository as with the current manual process. Finally, there should always be the possibility of reverting to the previous procedures if the system fails or is not available. It is not acceptable to put the enterprise at risk based on an end-user built solution.

Having narrowed the problem scope, it is now appropriate to revisit the key platform obstacles, support and cost. Process applications, are by definition, multi-user solutions. The activities within a process need to flow from one participant to the next. This suggests that some type of server based solution with a web interface is necessary. The typical BPM suite is a multi-tier application with a database, a BPM server and a web server. For enterprise solutions, they are typically deployed on different servers. None of these are things that a typical business user can or wants to support. Because of the operational complexity, many BPM platforms are clearly not appropriate for small scale projects.

A better alternative is a SaaS solution such as Appian Anywhere. With this model, the platform support is outsourced to professionals, without involving corporate IT. Support and availability will match traditional IT supported applications. This completely mitigates the third and fourth constraints listed above. With a SAAS model, there is no up-front cost, and the monthly fee can be much lower than the cost of owning a system. As more solutions are deployed and more users added, it can scale seamlessly and at a cost directly proportional to the benefits.

In this article, we have explored the possibility of using BPM suites for development of local solutions by end users without IT involvement. We have demonstrated that at least in some cases it can be both technically and economically feasible. In a follow-up article we will consider whether or not it should be done.

About the Author
Glenn Smith is a Principal Consultant with Appian. He has more than 20 years of software development experience including more than 10 years implementing enterprise BPM solutions. He can be contacted at glenn.smith-at-appian.com

BPMI

2009-10-28T08:41:00.000-07:00

Standards Work in Progress

The BMI’s combined activities continue BPMI’s and OMG’s groundbreaking work and focus on all aspects of Business Process Management. BPMI’s widely used standard for business modeling, Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN), and the Business Motivation Model (BMM) contributed by the Business Rules Group, have been adopted as official OMG specifications.

The BPMN final adopted specification is available for download, while the draft adopted BMM specification is downloadable. Both specifications are in the finalization phase. The specifications are available for download from OMG's specification catalog, http://www.omg.org/technology/documents/spec_catalog.htm. Separately, a new standard defining the Semantics of Business Vocabulary and Business Rules (SBVR) has been adopted. The Final Adopted Specification may be downloaded from OMG’s Domain Specifications Catalog web page.

Anyone interested in participating in the BMI’s standards development efforts is invited to attend an OMG Technical Meeting; check here for the dates and locations of upcoming meetings. Non-members may apply for a guest registration. For more information on attending the technical meeting, visit http://www.omg.org/meeting-info.htm.

BPMI Steering Committee

BPMI’s Board of Directors, along with the leadership of the OMG’s Business Enterprise Integration Domain Task Force, form the core of the BPMI Steering Committee, which provides Business Process Management thought leadership and expertise for the entire industry through education programs, public advocacy, and advice to the combined BPM standards work at OMG. Phil Gilbert, Lombardi Software, phil.gilbert@lombardi.com is the current chair of the Steering Committee.

Who is Involved

BPMI members who have joined OMG or were already members of OMG include: Adobe Systems, Inc., Axway Software, BEA Systems, Inc., Bluespring Software, Inc., British American Tobacco, BroadVision, Casewise Systems, Inc., CommerceQuest, Inc., ConceptWave Software Inc., DST Systems, Inc., Exigen, Inc., Embarcadero Technologies, Inc., Fair Isaac, Inc., FileNET Corporation, Flowring Technology Corporation, Fuego, Global 360, Inc., Graham Technology, PLC, IBM Corporation, IDS Scheer, Inc., iGrafx, Inc., ILOG, Inc., Infosys Technologies, Ltd., Insession Technologies, Intalio, Lombardi Software, MEGA International, Oracle USA, Inc., Meridea Financial Software, Ltd., Pegasystems Inc., Proforma Corporation, QoS Labs, LLC, SAP AG, Select Business Solutions, SeeBeyond Software, Singularity, Ltd., Sterling Commerce, Inc., Telcordia Technologies, TelelogicUnify Corporation, Vignette Corporation, Vision Software S.A., Vitria Technology, Inc., and webMethods, Inc. as well as the many active OMG members of the Business Enterprise Integration Domain Task Force.

Business Intelligence (BI) Governance

2009-10-24T15:33:00.000-07:00

BACKGROUND

Governance became a critical concept in the after “IT bubble” days, as IT faced the challenge of dealing with diminishing budgets, without demand on its services being reduced proportionally. There were many initiatives and projects in the pipeline, but not all of them could be executed, given the limitations on people, infrastructure and budget. As companies looked for a way to properly classify and then prioritize the requests coming from the business, the concept of implementing a formal IT Governance process went from being a “nice to have” to a “must have” very quickly. Committees were formed to oversee the process and make sure all business areas had adequate representation when making decisions as to which projects to fund, and how much money to allocate for infrastructure capital investments. While difficult to accept at first, as many organizations operated with no rules for decades, Governance happened to be very successful aligning the IT organization to the strategic objectives of the company. The Governance process forced a discussion among the stakeholders and make sure the projects with the highest contribution to the company were executed first.

The IT Governance process worked very well for individual projects or initiatives, but it did not focus on making sure particular programs, such as Business Intelligence, were successful across the Enterprise. In order to close this gap, leading-edge companies decided to take the Governance concept down a level and focus entirely on the programs, thus giving born to the BI Governance concept. Some of these organizations defined BI Governance as the process they followed to prioritize BI requests along different criteria such as: Project ROI, Organizational Budget, Expertise of the team, People Availability, Infrastructure capacity and Organizational Politics.

This article will focus on defining BI governance, and detailing a good BI Governance process must go beyond the basics of approving and prioritizing initiatives.

DEFINING BI GOVERNANCE

BI Governance can be defined from three different, unique perspectives (Figure 1):

a) As a resource rationalization exercise. This is the traditional definition of BI Governance, a prioritization mechanism by which projects can be approved, rejected and sequenced based on specific criteria. Many companies today have some kind of process to prioritize BI requests; however most of them still rely on subjective factors to determine how a project should move forward.

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Business Intelligence (BI) Governance

2009-10-24T15:31:00.000-07:00

b) As a series of guidelines/rules /recommendations. This is a relatively new way of defining BI Governance. Traditionally IT has been solely responsible for defining the Architecture, Standards and Best Practices to follow in Business Intelligence, however as business starts realizing the significant impact that these decisions may have in BI Projects there has been a trend to make these topics part of the BI Governance process.

c) As the definition of roles and responsibilities for both IT and Business stakeholders. As Business Intelligence projects are by nature highly complex, establishing the proper interaction and outlining areas of responsibility between and IT and the Business becomes critical for a project to succeed.

Figure 1 - The three dimensions to BI Governance

UNDERSTANDING THE NEED FOR BI GOVERNANCE

Even despite the apparent benefits that implementing a properly defined BI Governance process can bring to the organization, there is still a significant number of companies in the market place who have yet to start similar efforts. When interviewing people from these companies, one of the most frequent reasons that they give to justify the inaction is the perception that implementing BI Governance is a costly and complex exercise that does not provide any value, as management has already decided which projects to execute first.

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Business Intelligence (BI) Governance

2009-10-24T15:28:00.000-07:00

While it is true that a good management team should have already a general understanding of the priorities of the organization, and how the company strategy(ies) translate into a series of BI initiatives, establishing BI Governance provides a framework by which the proper resources can be aligned to the Business Priorities. In order for the initiatives to be successful they need to be executable. Only by aligning people and resources to a particular project and documenting a project plan is that initiatives become ready to be executed.

Furthermore, a good, solid BI Governance process will establish proper Change Management (CM) and Training policies that facilitate the user adoption process and promote the overall use of BI minimizing the amount of fear and resistance to new technologies from the business users.

The proper BI Governance process will also drive the infrastructure and technology decisions. As both perspectives, IT and Business, are considered when making these decisions the likelihood of choosing the right vendor/platform significantly increase; thus reducing the risk that one of the parties chooses a platform without considering the implications that it will have over the other party (Figure 2).

Figure 2 - Business and IT collaborate to align the BI resources to the organization priorities

The fist step to establish an organizational structure of the member of the BI Governance is identifying the stakeholders within the organization. A stakeholder can be defined as someone who has some “skin the game”. Stakeholders usually come three areas:

a) Business: Every business area/department should nominate who their representative is going to be for the BI Governance committee. This will enable equal representation from business across the organization, and thus provide the right forum to make decisions that might impact the revenue and thus budget for a particular business unit. The business area representatives will be responsible for sponsoring particular projects for their home units, explaining to the committee the benefits of the initiatives. At the same they outline a high level impact and change management plan that allows the committee to understand the project being proposed from many possible angles. Part of their responsibilities will include identifying people in their functional areas to support the Data Modeling, Data Integration and BI-Front End efforts from a business perspective.

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