But when you’re doing business activities like B2B integration, e-commerce or Cloud computing, understanding context is important – lest you get distracted by technology (“Web 2.0 — wow, cool”) and your day-to-day tasks (“please send me that file!”) and you lose sight of the whole point of why you’re doing such things.

Which brings me to my take-away observations from the Gartner BPM Summit here in Orlando that’s just winding down. I gave two presentations on the role of BPM technology in B2B / Ecommerce projects. Here’s a few bits of wisdom from conversations with our attendees:

Consume B2B in the form of processes!

Whatever you think you’re doing – “B2B integration”, “e-commerce”, “Cloud computing” – remember that you’re implementing PROCESS. Thus, if you’re implementing the procure-to-pay process for a supply chain look for solutions that are process-aware, e.g., pre-configured with the right B2B documents, maps for translation, process visibility rules and dashboards. One way of consuming B2B processes directly is in the form of “business process networks” (BPNs) – in his own blog David McCoy briefly mentions BPNs and here’s our formal definition of BPN’s for Gartner clients (login required). Though not available for all projects, BPNs are a direct way to implement B2B processes, increasingly available for e-procurement, financial services, logistics, etc.

Selectively model B2B processes!

Janelle Hill and I had a great conversation with some nice folks of an international B2B / Ecommerce services provider that attended my session and wanted to explore options for their increasing need of BPMS technology (including process modeling and a rules engine) specifically so they could deploy configurable ecommerce projects with scale for their customers. We agreed that for complex, high-value and fast-changing processes that can be leveraged across multiple B2B communities, BPMS technology would be a great addition. But that for more static, less-complex processes that traditional application development is still fine. Its important to apply BPMS technology judiciously — I’ve blogged before on the issue of when — and when not — to use BPMS technology.

Instrument the process!

Once you’ve automated a B2B process across your community don’t miss out on the opportunity to “mine” that flow of messages and transactions to expose key performance indicators and drive process improvement. I had great discussions with a few clients about its benefits – such as sharing multienterprise process insight amongst your B2B peers – and challenges – such as plugging a potentially CPU-intensive BPM rules engine on top of your high-throughput B2B traffic! But regardless, nearly everyone agrees that one way or another IT users are long overdue to benefit from the decade-long oft-failed promised of “mining” B2B / ecommerce (and now Cloud) traffic! I have recently spoken to a few reference customers that specifically cited the valuable impact that process visibility has on their B2B projects.

I welcome your thoughts on all this!

As I post this I’m preparing to head back from the BPM Summit. The event has come to a close, but its impact will endure. Look to me for more on the role of BPM technology and discipline in the domain of B2B, e-commerce and Cloud computing!

One take-away from all these discussions is that despite cautious spending in this economny companies across all industries are still investing in B2B modernization projects. Investments include simplifying and improving the way they do B2B integration — for example, using community management and visibility to drive B2B process improvements (to reduce costs and drive growth).

On Friday I was chatting with Greg Faubert – CEO of Messageway Solutions – about the barriers to successful implementation of B2B integration projects and – shooting from the hip – I claimed that “the only barriers to successful B2B projects are politics and ignorance”.

Pithy, indeed.

But my point was that technology itself isn’t usually a barrier anymore. It might have been five years ago, but not anymore. Whether you’re still using EDI or SOA, doing traditional ecommerce or Cloud computing, there are plenty of B2B products and services availabile to help. Rather than technology, the barriers to success for B2B projects are usually non-technical, such as internal politics (IT group in-fighting and no shared B2B strategy), unrealistic expectations (trying to force one method of B2B onto customers — good luck), or simply ignorance (unaware of innovations like Cloud governance or packaged integration).

Similar barriers to success impact higher-order IT initiatives such as SOA and BPM initiatives, so perhaps its no surprise that B2B integration projects have similar challenges. Yet I still have quite a few conversations with companies who aren’t aware of the opportunity to succeed in B2B. No, not every technical challenge has been resolve (e.g., ubiquitous authentication – *sigh*), but, really, your challenges are less likely technical and more likely politics and ignorance — no friends of B2B.

I welcome your comments.

The result: consider using a BPMS for processes with the following characteristics:

·       The process is distributed, i.e., spanning multiple applications

·       The process involves complex rules

·       If the process is complex overall

·       If you have a need to monitor the process

·       The process requires improvement

·       If many instances of the process will be deployed

·       If you have sufficient availability of legacy interfaces to support the process 

We concluded that the way to use this list is to apply these criteria to your own list of internal company processes, using the criteria to eliminate processes that don’t fit the criteria, and thus are unlikely to produce a sufficient ROI when deployed via a BPMS versus other approaches. We also concluded that ETL (extract transform load) and other point-to-point style of integration projects were not very good candidates for BPMS technology.

Some form of these guidelines have no doubt been produced many times before, and likely often have been more rigorously vetted (see Gartner’s own Two Factors That Help Identify the BPMS ‘Sweet Spot’ – login required). But having advised clients pretty often on “When to Use (or Not Use) a BPMS” in the past, I thought this was a pretty reasonable set of guidelines. If we missed anything obvious, please post your thoughts.