Janelle B. Hill
Research VP
8 years at Gartner
25 years IT industry
Janelle Hill is a vice president in Gartner Research. Her current research area is business process management disciplines (such as modeling, analysis, measurement, process ownership/governance, etc.) and new, BPM-enabling technologies. Read Full Bio
by Janelle Hill | November 8, 2010 | Comments Off
Submit Now: Application Deadline December 1st 2010
WHAT
Gartner Business Process Management (BPM) Excellence Awards program is all about highlighting world-class BPM programs and projects that deliver business results, and broadly sharing their successes, challenges and insights.
If you have recently implemented a successful BPM program or project with resulting business impact, don’t miss out on the opportunity to publicize this accomplishment and honor those responsible for its success. Whatever your industry, or government sector and no matter the focus of your BPM program or project we want to hear your story. Apply today!
Gartner is now accepting nominations for the 2011 BPM Awards program and the winners will be announced at the Gartner Business Process Management Summit, April 27-29, 2011 at the Baltimore Marriott Waterfront, in Baltimore, Maryland.
One overall winner will be selected as the “BPM Project/Program of the Year,” based on the compelling business results achieved with BPM. Awards in other sub-categories will also be made to award finalists.
Evaluation Criteria
Business results are the first requirement for any successful BPM program. The preferred threshold is that the resultant net benefits should be at least two time the costs. Costs include: resources, technology, training, etc. Your case study must include specific results and a detailed list of the project/program costs. Baseline metrics for the before process will also be helpful. Submissions that highlight competitive advantage or future benefit can also be submitted and should include projections.
Applicants will be further screened on:
Advancing BPM Competency
Sustaining BPM in an organization requires building the competency and having a vision about how BPM will function within the enterprise. This will help create enterprise adoption.
Furthering BPM as a Discipline
Spreading the benefits of BPM on a large scale requires demonstrating success and reinvesting returns in deepening the level of process improvement habits and skills.
Leveraging BPM Technology
While process improvement is not solely dependent on BPM technology, many implementations utilize BPM technologies.
Attaining BPM Metrics and Performance
The bottom line for process improvement is surrounded by solid goals and metrics to measure end-to-end process improvement, as well as functional excellence.
Delivering Innovative Solutions
Many organizations leverage process improvement for cost cutting and this is a staple for continued existence; however the best processes exhibit innovation for organizations and constituents.
Preference will be given to solutions that address organization, technology, and process improvement issues. These projects will showcase the applicant’s mastery of business process disciplines and technologies to manage process change across organizational boundaries.
WHO
Who Can Participate?
All organizations that are not vendors or service providers are eligible and encouraged to apply including:
Large enterprises, and small to midsize businesses
All vertical industries, including private sector, government and non-profit
US or international organizations
All business models: business-B2B, B2C, B2B2C…
Note: Although vendors and service providers are not eligible, we encourage them to assist their customers in submitting an application.
HOW
Applicants need to work within a case study framework to describe their BPM project and highlight why it demonstrates the value of BPM.
Applicants may download the Word-based sample questionnaire to prepare their submission. Award submissions will only be accepted via the online form. All completed entries must be submitted online. No other forms of entry submission (such as emails or courier packages to Gartner analysts) will be accepted.
A review team from the Gartner analyst community will evaluate and rate each entry based on how clearly the entrant demonstrates excellence in their BPM project.
Five winners will be selected and subsequently asked to present their BPM case studies to the conference participants at the Gartner Business Process Management Summit, April 27-29, 2011 at the Baltimore Marriott Waterfront, in Baltimore, Maryland.
Award Submission:
Click here to download the BPM Award Submission Form
Click here to enter: BPM Award Submission Online Form Award submissions will only be accepted via the online form.
The entry deadline for submissions is December 1st 2010.
Questions:
Please email questions to: juan.p.fernandez@gartner.com Or call +1 203 316 6783
Juan P. Fernandez
Program Director
Gartner
WHEN
Application Deadline is Wednesday, December 1st 2010 (5:00 PM EST).
Notification to finalists will be made on or before Monday, February 1st 2011.
If you are selected as a winner or an award finalist you must confirm no later than Friday, February 11th that you will participate in the Gartner Business Process Management Summit, April 27-29, 2011 at the Baltimore Marriott Waterfront, in Baltimore, Maryland.
For the Gartner Business Process Management Summit, the winners and Award Finalists must be prepared to:
Create a short MS Powerpoint presentation and deliver a talk as part of a case study session or group panel during the Gartner Business Process Management Summit 2011.
Provide a 3-5 sentence summary of their BPM project for use in a Gartner press release.
Note: BPM service providers and technology vendors may not present on behalf of a winner or award finalists.
Awards will be presented to winners and award finalists at the Gartner Business Process Management Summit, April 27-29, 2011 at the Baltimore Marriott Waterfront, in Baltimore, Maryland.
Category: Uncategorized Tags: BPM, Symposium
by Janelle Hill | June 3, 2010 | Comments Off
As travel is difficult these days, here are links to two virtual BPM conferences coming up. Our very own Elise Olding is keynoting at the first one listed below. Learn and enjoy!
June 23 http://www.ebizq.net/eventsv2/bpminaction2010.html
JUNE 29 https://www.idevnews.com/registration?event_id=95&code=ref_press
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by Janelle Hill | May 4, 2010 | 3 Comments
Jim Sinur (http://blogs.gartner.com/jim_sinur/) and I are hard at work updating our BPMS Magic Quadrant. Part of the research process is reference checking. I’ve been doing alot of them lately. (Some even with simultaneous translation as yours truly is the ‘stupid American’ who only speaks English! Ugh!) Having completed somewhere near 15, I am astounded by my findings.
So far, most of the references I’ve checked are incredibly weak! The disappointments I’ve experienced include erroneous contact information, individuals that decline our request for a confidential conversation, references who are technology partners testing the tool or implementing it on behalf of an end user rather than the end user speaking first hand about their experience with the product, references that aren’t even using the product yet, references that arent experiencing the value from their BPMS that we would expect or who are just using it as ‘yet another development tool’ rather than a platform to empower business roles to better manage their processes, and references who receive tons of free products and professional services that wouldnt normally be available to any buyer.
Having worked in Marketing myself at both large and small software technology providers, I have a good idea of how much work it takes to maintain quality references. And it’s alot! Plus it requires constant attention! I have assumed that this effort is far better managed at larger software companies that have large marketing departments with plenty of resources to support their sales efforts. From my experience this year, I’ve concluded that this assumption is astoundingly wrong! There is no correlation between the size of the vendor and the quality of the references!
We always recommend that buyers check vendor references before finalizing their technology product and vendor selections. I sure hope you have better results than me! I wonder…..Do the providers give prospects real, valid references? Are they just being sloppy and casual about our request for references because I’m just an industry analyst rather than a prospective buyer?
We ask the vendors for multiple references with a committment that we will call at least two as part of the MQ process. We also tell the providers that showing us more references is always better than just a few. (It’s more impressive if a provider can quickly give me a list of 20 references, including links to their own write ups!) Is it possible that they think we wont actually call their references??
What is the value of reference checking? Why do we do it and what are we looking for? Upon providing feedback to a vendor about a particularly poor reference, I discovered that the provider didnt really understand what I look for in a reference.
The whole point of reference checking is to find another customer, ideally in your own industry, who is using the product you are considering in a fashion very similar to your own use case. You want to learn about their experience in order to increase your confidence that you too can be successful in your project with this product and vendor. I look for an experience that is likely to be replicated in other buyer situations. So if the provider provides the software for free, provides free professional assistance, installs and configures the product themselves for their customer, and delivers other examples of value that are not part of the “normal” offer, then this is not a good reference. With so much assistance, of course the buyer is likely to have a more positive experience than they might have otherwise. If the provider is doing everything, then the buyer likely has little feedback about weak areas of the product, challenges they’ve had with the product or even their project, and overall little to offer in the way of lessons learned. Buyers want to learn from each other’s mistakes and successes. A reference that says, “the product is missing X feature” or “it seems like it should be easier to do X,” is a far better reference than one who says, “I dont know” to every question I ask.
Having been a buyer myself, even if I spoke to a reference who told me about their challenges, I was still likely to buy the product. I just went into the deal more educated. By the time most buyers actually conduct reference checking, they are pretty darn sure they want to buy vendor X’s product. Only an absolutely terrible reference would have deterred me from my product selection.
Tell me about your experiences. Please. Restore my faith in this worthwhile effort!
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by Janelle Hill | April 22, 2010 | 9 Comments
After almost 10 years of steady growth and increased experience with BPM disciplines and technologies, it still amazes me that so many (too many!) IT professionals still think “BPM” is just another name for workflow. (As if the term “workflow” is well understood! NOT!) Are you in-the-know ? Or are you still trying to figure out the difference?
To learn more, I recommend you attend our next FREE webinar on BPM technologies. Michele Cantara will present, “What’s New in BPM Technologies and Why Business Leaders Should Care”. Click here to learn more and register: https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/825512017
Meantime, here’s a sneak preview of the answer…
Workflow is a form of flow management technology that coordinates interactions between people and software systems. It coordinates the flow, the interaction patterns across manual and systemetized tasks. As a technology, it has existed for at least the last 20 years. Of course it has evolved over the years from being technology that is embedded within individual applications to being a middleware-like technology, shared as a utility across multiple applications.
Furthermore, workflow technology comes in specialized forms. For example, human workflow technology offerings (older products such as InConcert, early Metastorm and Ultimus products, Staffware, IBM’s MQ Workflow and newer products like W4 Global) that put software controls around human tasks to better coordinate and manage them. This form of workflow has been distinct from document and image-centric workflow, which primarily enables routing and interactions with such semi-structured content. These days, there are only a handful of pure workflow technology providers (many newer ones designed to complement Sharepoint!)
BPM disciplines emphasize a holistic approach to coordinating work across all resources – people, information, machines and systems. Coordinating the interactions across this broader set of resources requires a different approach to workflow. BPM Suites, the leading form of BPM-enabling technologies, coordinate work across all resources in the same manner; there isnt a specialized language for human performed work vs machine performed work. There is one workflow technology, embedded in the suite, that coordinates the interactions between all resources – human, machine and information – doing all forms of work including routine tasks, decisions, collaborative activities, research, case work, etc. Thus, a BPMS includes a more advanced form of workflow. Furthermore, workflow is just 1 of 10 technologies found in a BPM Suite. Some of the other critical technologies in a BPMS are BAM, rule engines, UI generation, and a graphical authoring environment ideally based on Explicit Process Models.
Below is our depiction of the full functionality found in a good BPMS. The workflow technology is found in the gear labeled “Process Execution and State Management Engine”. This gear is often called the “BPM Engine”. And voila! This is the source of confusion!
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by Janelle Hill | April 6, 2010 | 7 Comments
My thanks go out to Paul Buhler, Chief Scientist at Modus21, LLC (www.modus21.com ) who alerted me to blowback from a comment I made at our recent London BPM summit (http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=928017) . In my presentation on best practices for selecting a BPMS , I remarked that the right answer is often more than one BPMS, matching the BPMS’ capabilities to the needs of your process improvement project. Sandy Kemsley heard of this remark second hand (http://www.column2.com/2010/03/but-customers-dont-want-three-bpmss/ ) and erroneously concludes 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.”
Since Sandy has picked up the quote second hand, it is no surprise that the quote is taken out of context and that Sandy is misinterpreting it. Therefore, I thought I’d take the opportunity to clarify here.
In fact, our view is quite the contrary to Sandy’s assumption! My comment was made in the context of my discussion of the weaknesses in conventional and recent approaches to categorizing processes, (including Tom Davenport’s in Thinking for a Living). Most categorization approaches tend to oversimplify the endless variety of interactions between human, system and information resources that happen in any process. Processes range from the routine — which tend to be those that are highly structured and can often be automated with applications — to processes that progress in unpredictable ways and often require the interpretation and judgment of experienced individuals in order to be successfully completed. My research finds that different styles of processes still need different technological implementation approaches because of the inherent complexity in the work interaction patterns themselves. Even when the buyer’s needs are appropriate to a BPMS implementation approach – in other words, he/she requires visibility into the work in the process pipeline, adaptability of both work items and the process design and accountability for state changes to the work (all key indicators for a BPMS approach) – few BPMSs on the market are proven yet for handling multiple process styles.
Consider the broad range of unstructured processes. There is no BPMS that is well-proven at handling the full range of unstructured styles – including case management, network optimization, dynamic task management and content collaboration - equally well. For example, Singularity, Pallas Athena, Global360, Appian and EMC handle case management especially well, whereas Metastorm, K2, Agilepoint, Handysoft, and Fujitsu handle dynamic task mgt especially well and Adobe handles content collaboration especially well! Furthermore, of the over 70 BPMS vendors we follow at Gartner, Pegasystems is the most-proven BPMS for handling a broad range of process styles spanning structured and unstructured processes, with Lombardi and Savvion not too far behind.
In a market that is still in the “early majority” stages (reference G. Moore’s Crossing the Chasm), it is no surprise that mainstream buyers will not be happy with my recommendation that “3 BPMSs may be the best choice”. This reluctance underscores the work still to be done by BPMS vendors to deliver the “whole product” that will appeal to a mainstream buyer and drive this market across this last chasm. Yet even as BPMS products move to the mainstream, I predict that no vendor will deliver the “be all, end all” platform solution for every process challenge, especially as process challenges are addressed through dynamic composition rather than new application development to automate prescribed behavior.
Readers should note that I do not mention the largest software infrastructure vendors at all in this position……….Happy BPMS shopping!
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by Janelle Hill | March 25, 2010 | 1 Comment
Spring is here and everything is starting to grow again, including me!
My personal need to grow, to learn, to experience new things, to have a bigger impact on our clients and the business world at large motivates me to finally join my Gartner colleagues in blogging. Blogging for me is simply another channel to influence and to be influenced. I like the informality of it and that it will enable me to reach beyond the Gartner subscriber base. I hope this blog becomes an outlet for my passions – whether I’m feeling passionate about my research focus on BPM, my tennis game, my experiences from traveling the world, my family or something else!
If you’d like to know me better, influence me more, share my passion, or just grow with me, join in! Let’s see what happens!
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