• Inside Architecture : Leaving technology out of requirements gathering
  Good starting point for a discussion on requirements, although as Nick says, “I started with a solution and went looking to justify it”.
  (tags: bpm development)

• Intel® Mash Maker
  Via Dion Hinchcliffe. Haven’t tried it yet, but looks easy enough for anyone.
  (tags: mashups)
• Getting Started With Business Process Modeling » SlideShare
  Michael zur Muehlen’s presentation at IIR BPM this week. Good coverage of as-is and to-be modeling, plus the Great BPMN Debate.
  (tags: bpm bpmn bpa)

• BPMS Ratings - Scoring Details - BPMS Watch
  Bruce Silver discovers DabbleDB and publishes the scoring details of his recent set of vendor evaluation reports.
  (tags: bpm)
• New Google Reader for iPhone: Still Neat, Not Very Social
  Having just got an iPod Touch, I had to try this out. Nice interface.
  (tags: socialmedia)

• Process People » Blog Archive » Drive the Path (process and data flow)
  How to start your BPM implementation. I’ve been doing it this way for a long time, good to see that others are finding the same works for them.
  (tags: bpm software)
• A mortal’s guide to initiation « TINAG - This Is Not A Guide 2 Intalio
  This is great: Intalio for Dummies (my name, not theirs), or how to get Intalio up and running, as told by an outsider. If you’re running Intalio (or thinking about it), you might want to check out this blog.
  (tags: bpm)
• Blueprint Spring ‘08 Release
  On-demand webinar on Lombardi’s spring 08 release of Blueprint.
  (tags: bpa)

• Process transformation - perspectives on “Business Process Management”: New BPMS feature: process mining
  Process mining: using existing ERP system logs to generate business process models. Roeland Loggen talks about a system from Pallas Athena doing this, and Fujitsu is also doing this.
  (tags: bpm bpa)
• WYDIWYE: The Answer to BPEL Transform Problems « Go Flow
  Keith Swenson on BPMN and BPEL: “I often get asked: ‘do you convert this diagram to BPEL?’ My response is ‘Why should we want to do that?’”
  (tags: bpmn bpel)

• InfoQ: What can we expect from BPMN 2.0?
  Some comments on the alternative for serialization formats to be included in the upcoming BPMN 2.0 specification.
  (tags: bpmn bpel bpdm xpdl)

SAPPHIRE is only a half day today, and there’s really only one session that I wanted to attend: Cheryl Mascaro, Enterprise Architect at Intel, and Thomas Volmering, BPM product manager at SAP, talking about BPM in Action.

Volmering started with the now-familiar SAP positioning of BPM that I’ve seen earlier in the week: BPM evolving from human-facing workflow and EAI into today’s process composition environments that allow for the orchestration of both human and system tasks. They’re seeing that business is now driving integration projects, even if they’re mostly system-to-system: it still comes down to filling a business need.

Mascaro is on SAP’s design partner council, who work with SAP (including have access to early versions of the software) during early product development in order to validate the goals, concepts and technology, and influence the product roadmap by identifying their own scenarios and expected patterns of usage. This also helped SAP to set priorities on what features to implement in what order, driving product releases.

She told us a bit about Intel first: with 86,500 employees in 146 locations, they have had to look at standardization and improvement of processes in order to maintain operational excellence. Their BPM efforts are owned by IT, but there’s a business process leadership team across the organization, and many business architects/analysts. They have a strategic enterprise plan — effectively a fully-developed enterprise architecture — in order to align business and IT, and have a BPM model based on Rummler-Brache that they use for driving the BPM enterprise-level strategy down into specific process improvement projects.

She sees NetWeaver BPM as filling in the gaps that aren’t serviced by core SAP applications, and orchestrating heterogeneous systems including SAP. She showed a screen snapshot of the Process Composer with a version of their development service request process (that is, someone requesting that a specific service be developed for use in another project, which includes attempting to locate an existing service, and approving and logging the development request if not), and walked us through the process design. We then saw the form used to kick off the process — where we did see some calendar and drop-down widgets but still no information on how this form is created — then the UI that a process participant would see at a task in the process. There are some human-facing steps in here, but also steps that interface directly with the development request database.

Volmering rejoined the conversation, and they discussed creating the user interface based on the process data and context. Mascaro wasn’t really clear on how that was done, just that the developer who worked on it found it “not hard”; I hope to see more on this in a more in-depth demo at another time.

• Idee’s TinEye next frontier in Web searches
  My friends at Idee make a public launch of their innovative image search application. I’ve seen this demoed, and it’s pretty amazing stuff.
  (tags: search torcamp)
• TinEye Image Search Engine - Idée Inc. - The Visual Search Company
  Direct link to Idee’s image search launch (to accompany the Financial Post article link)
  (tags: search torcamp)
• Weblog Tools Collection » Blog Archive » Woopra and WordPress: Unofficial Coolness Guide
  Just installed this, and can’t figure out if it’s the most amazing thing that I’ve ever seen or the biggest time suck ever. Or both. Of course, this won’t all be free when they exit beta.
  (tags: blogging tools wordpress)
• SAP - SAP Business ByDesign: Complete, Adaptable, On-Demand Solution
  SAP’s hosted solution for midsize companies, announced this week at SAPPHIRE. I don’t think that it includes any of the new BPM functionality, however.
  (tags: saas sap erp)

Wolfgang Hilpert, SVP of BPM for SAP, must be tired of seeing my face by now: an accidental lunch encounter and an interview yesterday, his session at the NetWeaver theater this morning, and I ended my day with his panel on SAP and BPM that also included Benjamin Salter of Valero Energy, Janelle Hill of Gartner, Mandar Nagle of Accenture and Peter Graf of SAP, moderated by Harald Nehring of SAP.

The panel started with a short bit by Hill on the BPM marketplace and how it’s driven by the search for operational excellence. She showed the current hype cycle that has business process platforms just at the technology trigger stage, BPM as a discipline about halfway up the slope towards the peak of inflated expectations, BPMS approaching the top of that peak and BPM pure-play tools just crawling out of the trough of disillusionment towards the slope of enlightenment. She also talked to their projections of BPMS market size, which still uses a 2006 actual figure of $1.7B to project $5.6B by 2011. Given the entry of SAP into this marketplace, we’ll start to see growth that may actually approach this, although I think that this is still a bit aggressive.

It then moved into more of a panel format, with Nehring asking questions of the panelists, starting with Graf talking about how SAP has always been process-oriented (true, although those processes were embedded opaquely in their core applications and could only be changed through coding), and the value of composing processes from services.

Salter’s company has been an influencer during the development of NetWeaver BPM. They’ve grown rapidly through mergers and acquisitions, which has resulted in a patchwork of systems held together with duct tape and string. They’re using BPM to bring discipline into their integration techniques, although it’s not clear that they’ve actually done much to date: he talked about their first BPM process in the future tense. It sounds like a good test case for BPM, covering product quality testing including both automated collation/analysis of test results and human approval steps.

Hlilpert walked us through the process of designing the BPM product over the past two years, and how both ecosystem partners and customers have been involved through much of the process in order to make the product as functional and usable as possible. He also mentioned the how they’re starting to work with the Business Objects team to really bring together BPM, BRM and BI and build actionable process analytics.

Hill sees SAP as being in a position to leapfrog IBM and Oracle in the platform vendor end of the BPM market, and feels that they have more of the tools that will allow customers to actually close the gap between strategy and execution in terms of operational excellence. This is a significant statement to hear from a Gartner analyst in the wild.

There was a discussion about standards (my favourite topic ): the chief architect on the SAP BPM team is on the OMG BPMN 2.0 standards committee, including the efforts to include a serialization format, but Hill pointed out that standards are “just specifications” and all vendors have their own particular flavour of standards, making interoperability more of a philosophy than a reality. She sees BPMN as a notational standard to be valuable so that everyone can visually understand the same diagrams the same way, but seemed to imply that not a lot of people were actually moving the process models from one tool to another — something that I’ve also seen in practice. Salter said that his business analysts really like BPMN because it’s so much more business-friendly than UML use cases, and agree that the visual notation has been key for them.

Before Nehring opened up the panel to audience questions, he said that he has read that “BPM is the killer app for SOA” and asked for the panel’s opinion on that; I almost laughed out loud at that one, since Ismael Ghalimi wrote that a couple of years ago, and I’ve unabashedly stolen it in several presentations and blog posts that I’ve done (crediting Ismael, of course).

The question came up about using IDS Scheer for process modeling versus using NetWeaver BPM; Graf made a fuzzy non-statement that “this does not mean the end of the relationship” and that “standards will strengthen the link between the tools”. Having had to deal with a flurry of communications from IDS Scheer’s PR this morning about my comments on this yesterday — who, like many other vendors, refuse to post a comment on the blog post but prefer to lobby me to change the post — I’ll just point out how customers of other (non-SAP) BPMS products use those products with ARIS: they do their enterprise modeling in ARIS, including some level of business processes, then may or may not have a method for transferring those process models directly from ARIS to their BPMS, depending on the support for specific standards and other interchange formats.

With a conference of this size, SAP can arrange a pretty awesome “conference night out” for us: we’re all going to see Eric Clapton tonight. I’ll be back for a couple of BPM sessions in the morning; the conference finishes midday and I’ll be home in time for the last two hours of my other half’s birthday tomorrow night.

This afternoon, we heard from the other co-CEO of SAP, Léo Apotheker (I think that I forgot to mention Henning Kagermann’s title of co-CEO in my post this morning), starting with some fairly general comments on the nature of competitive differentiation in business, and the power of collaboration.

He was joined on stage by a couple of customers:

• Proctor&Gamble, who discussed how they’ve used SAP as essential infrastructure for innovation and growth in the consumer products industry; P&G has become well-known in social media circles for crowdsourcing their R&D after being featured in the book Wikinomics.
• Harley Davidson, who are using SAP to provide the information necessary to enrich their customers’ experience, further deepening the relationship and increasing loyalty in order to increase revenues.
• Coca-Cola, through a really funny sequence using voice-activated ordering, picking and delivery, ending with a real person from their warehouse delivering two Cokes to the stage, then giving a short (and rehearsed) bit on how it helps his day-to-day work. A Coca-Cola executive was there to help serve the drinks. And, oh yeah, talk about how SAP and a service-oriented architecture have improved their warehouse operations.

All of this is about business processes, and I don’t mean just the narrow view of process that we have in BPM: this is about the business processes embedded within every business application, from legacy ERP to agile composite applications.

Apotheker talked explicitly about NetWeaver BPM and what it brings in terms of process agility; this product announcement is obviously a big deal for SAP, since it’s mentioned in both of the CEO keynotes today. He talked about the power of picking and choosing components from the core SAP applications and assembling them into composite applications for new functionality and increased agility, while maintaining the power of the underlying ERP functionality.