Column 2 http://www.column2.com BPM, Enterprise 2.0 and technology trends in business. Wed, 10 Mar 2010 23:01:26 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.1 en hourly 1 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/Column2http://feedburner.google.comThis is an XML content feed. It is intended to be viewed in a newsreader or syndicated to another site. But Customers Don’t WANT Three BPMSs http://www.column2.com/2010/03/but-customers-dont-want-three-bpmss/ http://www.column2.com/2010/03/but-customers-dont-want-three-bpmss/#comments Wed, 10 Mar 2010 19:25:50 +0000 Sandy Kemsley http://www.column2.com/2010/03/but-customers-dont-want-three-bpmss/

In my Links post last Friday, I linked to a post on Mike Gammage’s blog that quoted Janelle Hill of Gartner speaking at the recent Gartner BPM Summit in London:

The right answer in selecting a BPMS is often three BPMSs, based on the particular projects’ needs.

I commented that this seemed to indicate that Gartner is bowing to pressure from platform vendors that have multiple fragmented BPM offerings (e.g., IBM), and that it’s not a good thing for customers.

Just before midnight that night, I received a reply from someone who I met at a conference last year:

<begin rant>

Regarding your links today – and the Sourcing Shangri-La post featuring the Janelle Hill/Gartner quote :  "The right answer in selecting a BPMS is often three BPMSs, based on the particular projects’ needs." 

Couldn’t agree with you more on how disappointing this is.  This is a very unfortunate message that I seem to be hearing more and more lately.  For those of us out there getting muddy in the trenches, who use and implement a BPMS for business processes executed by [humans] that have [document] and line of business system [integration] inputs and outputs required for most activities within a single business process, this "three different BPMSs " reasoning doesn’t make any sense at all.  It does make a convenient pitch, however, if you’re a vendor trying to explain why you’ve acquired products that overlap in a confusing way and perhaps don’t want to lay out the money to integrate them.   Maybe I’m missing something, but I’m a little stunned that it seems to be so widely accepted. 

As long as vendors (and research VPs) continue to put this out there, the vendors (like Pega) who would never punish their end users or application support teams in a single organization with three different BPM suites to deal with will continue to see results like this (in a severe recession, no less):

“Feb. 22, 2010 – Pegasystems Inc. (NASDAQ: PEGA), the leader in Business Process Management (BPM) software solutions, today announced financial results for the year and fourth quarter ended December 31, 2009. Revenue for 2009 increased 25% to $264 million compared to 2008. Net income for 2009 nearly tripled and increased to $32.2 million.” (http://money.cnn.com/news/newsfeeds/articles/marketwire/0589312.htm)

<end rant/>

Couldn’t have said it better myself.


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]]> http://www.column2.com/2010/03/links-for-2010-03-09/feed/ 0 Progress Analyst Day Wrapup http://www.column2.com/2010/03/progress-analyst-day-wrapup/ http://www.column2.com/2010/03/progress-analyst-day-wrapup/#comments Tue, 09 Mar 2010 15:19:19 +0000 Sandy Kemsley http://www.column2.com/2010/03/progress-analyst-day-wrapup/

I just found the last of my Progress analyst day notes from last week, scrawled in a paper notebook (which is why I usually write directly to keyboard at conferences). These were from one-on-one meetings that I had with John Bates and Dr. Ketabchi after the end of the formal presentations, where I had a chance to ask about product directions.

It’s probably good to do some writing after the fact, when I’ve had time to reflect a bit, review the presentation slides, and read posts by other attendees such as John Rymer, who sums up Progress’ mission, customer case studies and product positioning. I particularly like his description of the two new suites that Progress is offering:

Enterprise Business Solutions tracks existing transactions and services interactions to discover and verify implicit business processes, defines, senses, and responds to real-time events, automates business process flows, and provides SOA infrastructure. Core to this business unit is a new suite that brings together Progress Actional, Apama, and newly acquired Savvion. Think of the new Responsive Process Management Suite as BPM and transactional systems wrapped in real-time event management.

Enterprise Data Services maps primary information sources into a new real-time model managed by DataXtend Semantic Integrator, including integration, aggregation, data delivery, and ultimately, analysis.

To sum up my discussions with Bates and Ketabchi (these were separate, but covered related topics, so I’ve combined them) on what’s happening with the products, particularly the integration of Savvion into the Responsive Process Management suite:

  • The first version of the Control Tower monitoring application is ready, or nearly so. This is based on the Savvion process monitoring portal (which already allowed for external data sources), and constitutes the primary piece of integration between the products.
  • The existing event-handling structure in Savvion will be used to feed events from Apama. Although there will be some tightening of this integration, there are no major changes required to make this happen.
  • Currently, the modeling for CEP (Apama) and BPM (Savvion) are separate tools. However, they are both Eclipse-based, so it’s likely that they will be combined in some way and given a consistent look and feel, even if only as separate tabs within the same modeling environment. Since they both have business-facing perspectives using graphical models, this makes sense.
  • Savvion’s current event processing capabilities – the only overlap in the Savvion and Progress product portfolios prior to the acquisition – will eventually be replaced by Apama, which will have an impact on Savvion customers who use that functionality. There is no plan for an immediate rip-and-replace, and the Savvion EP will be supported for some time, but customers should start thinking about migration.

Progress RPM with product names

I asked about runtime collaboration within the products, but was not left with a clear picture of the future for Progress products here. Currently, Apama supports some threshold type of changes, and Savvion allows reassigning a task to another user but not changing the process model, which seems to represent a bare minimum in this emerging functional requirement.

You can find all of my coverage of the Progress Software Analyst Day here.


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]]> http://www.column2.com/2010/03/links-for-2010-03-08/feed/ 0 BPM Conferences Start To Come Out Of Hiding http://www.column2.com/2010/03/bpm-conferences-start-to-come-out-of-hiding/ http://www.column2.com/2010/03/bpm-conferences-start-to-come-out-of-hiding/#comments Mon, 08 Mar 2010 13:17:53 +0000 Sandy Kemsley http://www.column2.com/2010/03/bpm-conferences-start-to-come-out-of-hiding/

2009 was not a stellar year for BPM conferences: many vendors cancelled or moved to an online format, and even Gartner decided that two North American conferences per year is too much. Although many organizations budgets are still tight, conference organizers are betting on a bit more available travel and education budget being available this year.

I just saw a post about Leonardo Process Days coming up in July in Sydney, and added it to the BPM events calendar that I maintain here, as I do with most other BPM-related events that I hear about. If you have an event that you want added, let me know; if you want to add a lot of events, then I can make you a contributor to the calendar. If you use Google Calendar and want to add this to the list of “Other calendars” that you can overlay on your own calendar, there’s a button at the bottom right of the calendar that will do that.


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  • WebDAV Still Going Strong « ECM Missives
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]]> http://www.column2.com/2010/03/links-for-2010-03-06/feed/ 0 Paper on Runtime Collaboration and Dynamic Modeling in BPM http://www.column2.com/2010/03/paper-on-runtime-collaboration-and-dynamic-modeling-in-bpm/ http://www.column2.com/2010/03/paper-on-runtime-collaboration-and-dynamic-modeling-in-bpm/#comments Fri, 05 Mar 2010 19:36:04 +0000 Sandy Kemsley http://www.column2.com/2010/03/paper-on-runtime-collaboration-and-dynamic-modeling-in-bpm/

I recently wrote a paper for the February Cutter IT Journal called Runtime Collaboration and Dynamic Modeling in BPM: Allowing the Business to Shape Its Own Processes on the Fly. It’s available on the web to Cutter subscribers, and in the printed journal.

In the article, I deal purely with the topic of runtime collaboration, not collaboration during process modeling: how users participating in a process can add new participants for the purposes of collaborating on a step in a structured process, or even create their own subprocess at that step. I look at why you would want to do that (mostly auditability of processes) and how the results of that can be rolled back into process design rather than just being changes to a single process instance.

Disclosure: my payment for writing this paper was a year’s subscription to the journal, plus bragging rights.


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]]> http://www.column2.com/2010/03/links-for-2010-03-05/feed/ 1 John Goodson on Informational Integrity http://www.column2.com/2010/03/john-goodson-on-informational-integrity/ http://www.column2.com/2010/03/john-goodson-on-informational-integrity/#comments Thu, 04 Mar 2010 17:32:31 +0000 Sandy Kemsley http://www.column2.com/2010/03/john-goodson-on-informational-integrity/

John Goodson, who heads up the Enterprise Data Solutions group within Progress, had the last timeslot before lunch to present on the role of informational integrity in operational responsiveness. Problems occur because business needs data faster than IT systems can deliver it, and inflexible methods can’t adapt to the fast-changing business conditions. Batch ETL just can’t keep up with this: data needs to be available from any system at any time as required to support real-time operations. We need to get rid of the overnight batch jobs that (for example) don’t allow me to see my banking transactions online until the following day, or can’t get my package tracking number until the package is already delivered.

Progress already provides Data Exchange for model-based data transformation and exchange; next month, they’re launching Progress Data Virtualization Server, providing real-time data access, integration and delivery from almost any data source, application and service. The key to their Enterprise Data Services is a common model – a sort of Babelfish for data – that allows access to multiple applications and data sources. They’ll leverage key industry-standard data models, such as ACORD in the insurance industry, with the goal of providing the right information in the right form at the right time.

Stepping back from just the information side, he pointed out that they’ll be providing responsive process management together with responsive information management; otherwise, data issues will impede responsiveness even if process improvement is undertaken.

Tom Aubuchon of Panhandle Energy (gas pipeline) joined Goodson on stage to discuss their data integration strategy: they used a customized supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) system to monitor and control their 17,000 miles of pipeline, but need to integrate that with all of their other distribution and billing data. They have approximately 1,200 different applications, and a “hairball” of connections between them. They decided to replace their SCADA with a more generic ESB, and selected Progress because the common data model allowed them to tame all of the point-to-point connections between the applications, especially the new Data Virtualization Server.


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