In the Fujitsu briefing last week, I also heard about their cloud BPM offering. Interstage BPM has supported multitenancy for some time, allowing them to provide private BPM cloud infrastructure, most commonly used by business process outsourcing firms. Multitenancy is a key feature of true software as a service: a single software instance supports multiple clients by virtually partitioning the application and data, rather than setting up an independent instance of the software for each client.

Multitenancy is also key when you want to productize it on the web, since it allows for fast and easy provisioning of new accounts, and that’s exactly what Fujitsu is doing with the launch of InterstageBPM.com, which puts the full power of their BPM suite on the web. They have two free versions: a trial version allows for unlimited applications and process instances for five users, but only lasts for 30 days; and a team version, that allows for unlimited applications but only 250 process instances per month on an ongoing basis. Presumably, the team version is for developers, while the trial version is for a full production test or proof of concept. Above that is a single tier of paid licensing: $50/user/month for unlimited applications and 10,000 process instances per month. There’s another tier for solution providers, but pricing and details aren’t spelled out: that would more of a BPO or application development offering. All versions provide 99.88% availability – you’re not going to run your trading systems on this, but that’s fine for many human-facing business processes – and the paid enterprise version is supported by email and phone but currently only during US Pacific business hours. They also make it simple to move applications between the cloud and on-premise versions, similar to what Appian is doing, by providing an easy method to create an application package and move it between different instances and versions.

I find the cutoff of 10,000 process instances per month in the enterprise version interesting: that must be where Fujitsu feels the tradeoff is between cloud and on-premise systems. For smaller organizations, the usage model will likely be to use the free team version for development, then deploy on the enterprise version; larger organizations will more likely use either the team or enterprise edition for development, then deploy on premise. The cloud versions are also appropriate for third-party application developers, developing process applications on the Interstage platform that can be sold in the online marketplace to end-user organizations.

Aside from the usual arguments for cloud-based offerings, BPM in the cloud makes a lot of sense when you’re participating in processes that originate with multiple organizations. Having an RSS feed for any task list in the cloud-based BPM means that you can consolidate your view on multiple BPM instances from different organizations into your feed reader, for example, or push multiple feeds to a dashboard for monitoring. And although cloud-based BPM isn’t a prerequisite for large-scale federated processes, it can help to make things integrate more smoothly.

There’s a few reasons why this sort of offering makes sense from a company like Fujitsu. First, they’ve served the BPO market for quite a while, so they understand the practical issues of multitenancy in a way that few other BPMS vendors do. Second, this all runs on their own data centers, which also provide managed data center services for many customers in many countries. That means that they have a proven track record at keeping systems up and running, and they’re running on their own gear so there can be no finger-pointing in the event of a failure. Third, with 85 Fujitsu data centers around the world, they won’t be making the mistake of many other US-based cloud vendors by offering US-only data centers, which is an unacceptable solution to many non-US organizations (including all of my Canadian financial customers): although the initial version of their cloud offering is running in their US data center, they’ll be rolling it out to the others around the world.

I had a briefing this week on Fujitsu’s just-released Interstage BPM version 11 as well as an update on their cloud platform. I’ll cover the cloud platform in another blog post, since this one is getting a bit long.

Version 11 has a lot of new features for handling ad hoc, collaborative, knowledge-intensive work; this isn’t surprising, since the analysts and many of the vendors have woken up to the fact that not all processes (or all parts of all processes) are structured, and sometimes people need to be able to create their own processes or just find the right person to which to send a task. In fact, Fujitsu, like many others, consider that the bulk of the processes done today are ad hoc, collaborative and knowledge intensive, with a much smaller portion structured people-centric work, and an even small portion purely automated system-centric processes.

Fujitsu is calling this “sense and respond”, where the “sense” part is about finding the right person for a task, and “respond” is about being able to dynamically create an ad hoc subtask. There’s a lot in the “sense” part that I haven’t seen in other products, such as making recommendations/selections of a person to perform a task based on their past performance at this task; this reminds me somewhat of the research that Ben Jennings is doing on establishing reputation within a social network by examining past behaviors, in addition to just doing assignments based on a predefined skills matrix or assigning tasks to people who you know. In addition to past performance, it also takes into account future tasks assigned to people in order to predict workload, and makes recommendations on due dates based on historical data.

The key functionality for what Fujitsu is calling “dynamic BPM” is the ability for process participant to add subtasks at a point in the process, or create any entirely new process by specifying the tasks involved. This allows a process participant to stretch the process to fit their needs by creating one or more subtasks from any task that is assigned to that user, specifying a task name and description, assigning it to one or more users, and specifying a priority and due date. Control is passed to the subtask(s), then returned to the calling task when all subtasks are completed, after which the process can continue on its previously defined structured path. The status for the subtask is shown along with the task status, which provides the necessary transparency and auditing: the big problem with the way that ad hoc tasks are done now is that users typically just send an email, or make a phone call, in order to involve another person, and that deviation from the structured process is never captured.

A user can also create an entirely new process dynamically, too: they just give it a name, description, priority and due date, then add subtasks to that process in the same manner as adding an ad hoc subtask to a structured process. There is no routing or flow management, however, in either dynamic task creation scenario: subtasks are independent from each other and run in parallel, and the calling task (or dynamic process) waits for all subtasks to complete before proceeding. The recipient of a subtask can further divide it into more subtasks, and assign them as they see fit. The expected use case for a completely dynamic process, then, is for one person to create subtasks for the high-level activities and assign them, then have the recipients of those subtasks create their own subtasks required to complete the block of work assigned to them. If you’re in an environment where the activities don’t have dependencies, this would work well; however, if there are dependencies between the subtasks, it would have to be manually coordinated.

If you need to have more flow control in the processes, you can step up to the Process Outline tool intended for non-technical process analysts and business users. This shows the tasks in a tabular representation with timelines, and allows the creation of dependencies between the tasks. It wasn’t clear, however, the degree of control offered here, and the interoperability with the simpler subtask creation method.

The really cool thing, however, is what happens behind the scenes with these dynamic processes during execution: the automated discovery engine, which is now part of the analytics, tracks all the ad hoc subtasks, and can make suggestions on improving the process based on how the process was actually executed including the user-created subtasks, rather than how it was originally designed. Just as with the desktop application, this bit of Flash allows you to view how many times each path was traversed in the process, and dial it back so that only the most common paths are shown. I think that Fujitsu has done some very interesting things with their process discovery tool – which they can use on the system logs of pretty much any system, not just a BPM system – and it’s a natural fit integrated into their BPM suite. Working together with the dynamic subtask creation, this allows you to see how a process really executes, rather than how your process analyst thinks that it works.

There are some other collaborative features that have been highlighted in this version: discussion threads on process instances (really just a nicely-formatted comment feature, and it would be nice to add tags here to allow for searching the history based on the text within process instance discussions), and wiki pages within the community to allow process documentation. The community portal pages can also link to external portals such as MyYahoo, and incorporate a feed such as a Twitter stream. Users can also get an RSS feed of their tasks, which allows them to consume them in a different interface, if they don’t want to use the Interstage BPM portal.

A few other vendors are starting to think about processes as projects, and Fujitsu has added some of this to Interstage as well, by allowing a process to be viewed as phases and milestones – although not, from what I saw, in a standard GANTT chart representation that allows easy visualization of the critical path – then see which milestones were met or missed.

They’ve added some new dashboard and analytics features, too, but the big win for Fujitsu in this version is the combination of ad hoc task creation and automated process discovery.

• BPMN Business Process Modeling Notation – Das Buch zumStandard für die Geschäftsprozessmodellierung
  Thomas Allweyer's book on BPMN 2.0, in German.
  (tags: bpmn)
• Process for the Enterprise » Blog Archive » Set the Date: A #BPM Unconference #bpmCamp
  Almost 4 years after I first suggest a BPM camp, someone is actually going to do it. Scott Francis of BP3 is planning one that is limited to Lombardi customers, but intended to be a true unconference. I'm very interested in how this will work out, since I think that it could be a model for user conferences and non-vendor-specific conferences in the future, even for enterprise attendees who find this all a bit too new-age-y and weird.
  (tags: bpm conference)

Almost four years ago, I wrote a post about how we needed a BPM unconference. Today, Scott Francis of BP3 announced that they’re organizing one, although it’s focused on Lombardi customers and products. As I said on my comment on his post:

I believe that there is a place for a vendor-independent BPM camp, but using a single vendor’s clients to kick things off is a promising start to test the format. The biggest challenges, I believe, will be encouraging people who are accustomed to being spoon-fed at typical conferences to create and facilitate their own sessions, as well as get the corporate approval necessary for attending an unconference.

I’ve attended a lot of unconferences over the past few years, and the format can really work well if the right framework is in place and attendees are willing to participate [note that by “unconference”, I mean the self-organizing type that use something like Open Space as an organizational framework, not the fake unconferences that are actually pre-scheduled webinars].

I’m very excited to see what happens with this; the time could be right for unconferences to make an impact on the enterprise.

• Design Review Checklist for Service Capabilities « Art of Software Reuse
  A "checklist for performing design reviews when building service capabilities that are part of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) initiatives." Some good pointers here.
  (tags: soa)
• SAP Community Network Blogs
  SAP releases NetWeaver BPM sample apps, including Approve Sales Order Change Request, Approve Purchase Requisition and Create Purchase Order, Manage Leave Request, Unexpected Returns Handling, and Phase In Equipment.
  (tags: bpm)

• The Questionable Value of PM and BA Certifications « The Business Process Improvement Journal
  This came up in the panel that I was on at BRF last week: I think that PM/BA certifications provide some value by enforcing a standard set of knowledge, but I agree with Jim that it's not the only indicator of whether someone is competent at the job. I see too many people put into the role of BA, especially on BPM projects, who have inadequate experience or skills to properly do the job: is it a surprise that we have such a high failure rate on these projects if the critical link between business and IT is broken?
  (tags: bpa)
• 45 Reasons to Model Business Processes « The Business Process Improvement Journal
  Even if you're not automating processes, there's still a lot of potential ROI in modeling them for documentation purposes. Here's 45 places to look for that ROI.
  (tags: bpa)

• Integration Dogfight in the Clouds | The Intelligent Enterprise Blog
  SnapLogic creates an online marketplace for web-based ETL components.
  (tags: etl esb)
• SAP Community Network Blogs
  Some interesting speculation on what BPM will look like in 10 years.
  (tags: bpm)

• Process Antipattern: One-Way Activity – Process Is The Main Thing
  A great pointer for process modeling: "as a minimum, put the checks after activities where the free will is clearly visible"
  (tags: bpa)

Bill Craig, a consultant with Service Alberta, discussed their journey with process and rules to create agile, business-controlled automation for land titles (and, in the future, other service areas such as motor vehicle licensing) in the province of Alberta. They take an enterprise architecture approach, and like to show alignment and traceability through the different levels of business and technology architecture. They used a number of mainframe-based legacy applications, and this project was driven initially by legacy renewal – mostly rewriting the legacy code on new platforms, but still with a lot of code – but quickly turned to the use of model-driven development for both processes and rules in order to greatly reduce the amount of code (which just creates new legacy code) and to put more control in the hands of the business.

They see 21st century government as having the following characteristics:

• customer service focus
• business centric
• aligned
• agile
• assurance
• management and controlled
• architected (enterprise and solution)
• focused on knowledge capture and retention
• collaborative and integrative
• managed business rules and business processes

BPM and BRM have been the two biggest technology contributors to their transformation, with BRM the leader because of the number of rules that they have dealing with land titles; they’ve also introduced SOA, BI, BAM, EA, KM and open standards.

In spite of their desire to be agile, it seems like they’re using quite a waterfall-style design; this is the government, however, so that’s probably inevitable. They ended up with Corticon for rules and Global 360 for process, fully integrated so that the rules were called from tasks in their processes (which for some reason required the purchase of an existing “Corticon Integration Task” component from Global 360 – not sure why this isn’t done with web services). He got way down in the weeds with technical details – although relevant to the project, not so much to this audience – then crammed a description of the actual business usage into two minutes.

One interesting point: he said that they tried doing automated rules extraction from their mainframe applications to load into Corticon, but the automated extraction found mostly navigation rules rather than business rules, so they gave up on it. It would be interesting to know what sort of systems that automated rule extraction works well on, since this would be a huge help with similar legacy modernization initiatives.

I facilitated a breakfast session this morning discussing BPM in the cloud, which was a lot of fun, and now I’m in the keynote listening to James Taylor on the role of decision management in agile, smarter systems. Much of this is based on his book, Smart (Enough) Systems, which I reviewed shortly after its release.

Our systems need to be smarter because we live in a time of constant, rapid change – regulations change; competition changes due to globalization; business models and methods change – and businesses need to respond to this change or risk losing their competitive edge. It’s not just enough to be a smarter organization, however: you have to have smarter systems because of the volume and complexity of the events that drive businesses today, the need to respond in real time, and the complex network of delivery systems by which products and services are delivered to customers.

Smarter systems have four characteristics:

• They’re action-oriented, making decisions and taking action on your behalf instead of just presenting information and waiting for you to decide what to do.
• They’re flexible, allowing corrections and changes to be made by business people in a short period of time.
• They’re forward-looking, being able to use historic events and data to predict likely events in the future, and respond to them proactively.
• They learn, based on testing combinations of business decisions and actions in order to detect patterns and determine the optimal parameters (for example, testing pricing models to maximize revenue).

Decision management is an approach – not a technology stack – that allows you to add decisioning to your current systems in order to make them smarter. You also need to consider the management discipline around this, that will allow systems to not just become smarter, but begin to make decisions and take actions without human intervention.

James had a number of great examples of smarter systems in practice, and wrapped up with the key to smarter systems: have a management focus on decisions, find the decisions that make a difference to your business, externalize those decisions from other systems, and put the processes in place to automate those decisions and their actions.