Jim Sinur

I had the pleasure to speak at the Business Rules Forum in Las Vegas this week as the opening keynote. I spoke on the linkage of Patterned Based Strategy (PBS) to Business Rules Management (BRM) and Business Process Management (BPM). The audience seemed to be challenged to start thinking how to link the grass roots business rules efforts to the bigger need of organizations keeping sharp in the light of a constantly changing business environment.

I also did a couple of breakout sessions on “Business Rules Management” and “The First 100 Days of a BPM Effort”. Due to the increased interest in cost reduction and revenue generation, these topics seemed appropriate for the times. With organizations looking for good ROI with low investment, the combination of BPM and rules combines some impressive paybacks. Gartner has been advising it’s clients to “double down” on process improvement. Business rules certainly get dragged into the fore with BPM and decision management.

The overall number of attendees was flat from last year which is pretty good considering the economy. There were rumored to be 300+ there on the peak day and it looked to be true. There was an increase in the number of business focused folks, which was an improvement over last year. There were four tracks. One track was for Case studies and had some interesting success stories even in a down economy. There were also BPM, rules and decision management tracks chocked full of interesting sessions.

The vendor participation was strong with a number of interesting new vendors for me to follow up with down the road. IBM was on the only power vendor to show up. Microsoft, Oracle and SAP were missing in action, but all of the up comers were there (Convergys, Corticon, Decision Management Solutions, Delta R, Equifax, Experian, FICO, IBM, Idiom, InRule, Innovations, Pega, Open Rules, Red Hat, Rule Arts, and Savvion)

I would recommend a deeper dive by looking at Sandy Kemsley’s blog

http://www.column2.com/

A good number of BPMS vendors are setting up process exchange mechanisms, but the jury is still out as to their values to clients. I have not had many inquiries on this topic, so I am sensing that the vendors are building these exchanges in advance of the demand. I would like to start a conversation on these process exchanges by proposing a debate.

Process Exchanges are Valuable:

Why reinvent the wheel? There are likely processes and/or process snippets that can be shared and reusable from organization to organization. This is particularly true within like industries for non-differentiating processes. Assuming the shared process can be used as a “jump start”, it makes sense that an inventory of reusable processes would be an asset for most organizations. This just helps organizations taste the benefits of BPM earlier than if they had to build these process/process snippets from scratch. Process exchanges will be valuable to those who use them. Most organizations would not mind sharing some of their processes as well.

Process Exchanges are No Big Deal:

They are just a mirage. This is a way that a BPM vendor can keep you captive and make you think that there is an advantage to their offering. Sure there might be some reusable techniques and small simple snippets to leverage, but real business benefit? Get real. No organization is going to build anything of real business advantage and give it away for free. Maybe the vendor may contribute some process snippets, but if they were of any value, wouldn’t they sell them to you? Wake up Alice, wonderland is in your head.

So what do you think? I think these exchanges will be moderately helpful, but not a boon to the business in any significant way. .

We are at a significant point in the maturity of BPM as a management discipline. The organizations that have been leading the charge in BPM are taking it to a new level, hence my previous posting on What’s Hot in BPM? http://blogs.gartner.com/jim_sinur/2009/10/22/whats-hot-in-bpm/

There is also a new wave of fast followers that are lined up to jump on the BPM bandwagon and they have been the dominant question askers at our most recent BPM and Symposiums here in the U.S. I’d like you to see the top 5 hot question areas for BPM that I have sensed.

1 What are the Benefits of BPM?

This question is popping up from the next wave of organizations wanting to attempt BPM and we have good news. Based on surveys, award programs and inquiries, we are seeing rates of return north of 20% and payback periods less than one year for larger efforts and less than 90 days for more scoped efforts.

2. How Should I Get Started?

We have been advising not to just jump into buying BPM technologies, spend time either educating your folks or trying a proof of concept. Process discovery is a great place to start and benefits can flow early even if the discovery efforts start with butcher paper and pencil. Process modeling tools can help, but are not necessary unless the scope is wide and deep.

3 How do I set up Organizational Supports?

Establishing a process competency center is first prize, but you might have to sneak up on it by getting a small group of skilled process folks to work on a number of small projects before you put together a process program with clearly defined roles.

4. Which BPM Technologies Should I Use?

I would suggest that technologies with good enough process modeling tools be used initially, but some times setting up “a good enough process model” plus iterating in a BPMS simply will work as well. Keep in mind that looking wide for context and drilling deep for benefits in a time boxed way works well.

5. How do Business Rules Help BPM?

Business rules afford better agility when certain parts of the process are volatile. By determining likely change points in your process ahead of time, a business rules capability can help agility. IN some cases business professionals can change the rules themselves. In advanced situations, business rules can help with advanced decisions and goal directed flows. The business rules act as constraints.

In the last few weeks we have completed a successful BPM conference and a rousing Fall Symposium/IT Expo. While BPM is not yet scorching the earth yet, there are some hot trends and questions I have been sensing by listening to my clients and team mates. I would like to give you a quick run through the sizzling trends first. Questions to follow in another posting

A Better Work Experience:

While BPM has proven itself easy to use on the modeling and measurement sides, but there is an increased demand for logical workbenches that are designed by work role with personal customizations. This work experience goes beyond the typical portal experience, but extends that experience to include skills, workload, resource availability and cross process work status in various formats (visual, text, worklists, score card etc.)

Unstructured Processes:

BPM is moving to more aggressively support knowledge workers whose work tends not to be predictive in nature. There is a need to include more collaborative behaviors in process management that will likely leverage social design and processes that can’t be easily modeled. While there may be snippets of modeled process in the end to end process, the overall process will tend to be indeterminate for the knowledge worker.

Discovering Better Practices:

The agility found in BPM is a natural for delivering better practices in its journey to best practices (even if BPM is surrounding a back plane of best practice application services/components). This capability becomes essential in discovering the better behavior of knowledge workers as they drive to desired outcomes in a collaborative fashion.

Pattern Seeking/Sensing Tied to Near Real Time Agility:

The agility usually built into BPM execution technology begs for better management and use. One such method is business rules management that can link scenarios to policies to logical and physical business rules, limitations and tolerances. The other is tying process executions to pattern seeking methods and technologies to keep processes sharply tuned to the context it is running in at any given moment.

Inclusion of Optimization in Seek, Model and Adapt behaviors:

Business Pattern Strategies (BPS) needs to leverage various optimization algorithms in seeking opportunities for decisions to adjust resources including processes. Predictive analysis is an example of one of these algorithms that play well in the seek cycle. Modeling and adapt alternatives also use optimization capabilities such as inline simulation> Interest is growing in how to apply the right optimization technique at the right time.

Oracle wants to engage the business user in BPM. With that as goal, Oracle has set out to have a more business friendly BPM experience at several levels. First the modeling environment is greatly improved, secondly the BAM environment is usable plus somewhat seamless and finally the integrated rules environment is finally usable by non-IT types. I would say that it is a good start and can compete for business with those organizations that do not use any of the Oracle applications. In other words, Oracle can compete with IBM and the independents on platform and with SAP on applications. This makes Oracle unique and dangerous to other vendors. The good news for the other vendors is that Oracle BPM 11g R1 is not generally available today, so only beta users have the experience to prove my points above or not.

To that end, Oracle put me face to face with three Oracle BPM 10g users. One was an example of an integration driven approach (did not prove business use at all), another was a reticent recent purchaser of Oracle BPM with no experience waiting for other users to pioneer use of Oracle BPM, but the third was interesting. This aerospace company was using Oracle BPM to link systems together at the business flow level. In their case they used Oracle BPM for workflow and Oracle BPEL to link legacy systems together (Oracle BPM 10g has two pieces; brought together with business rules in Oracle 11g R1). This was interesting in that the business folks were heavy users, but not heavy developers of the process flow. This client was looking forward to Oracle 11g because it was more business friendly. While the proof points for BPM 11g are not there yet, there is hope.

Oracle does have a vision and an architecture for unstructured and goal driven processes, so I was encouraged for clients that buy Oracle BPM will be carried forward. Where Oracle falls down a bit is in allowing business users to find reusable services. The SOA environment is very programmer centric in my view. I do not see Oracle leveraging their legacy application service (pseudo services really) like SAP is at the moment. Oracles complex event environment is an extra bonus for driving processes. If Oracle BPM 11g R1 works as advertised (to be determined), Oracle is ahead of the other power vendors. The BPMS independents still have an 18 month lead, but the gap is closing from 24 months. .

I arrived on Wednesday during the mega rock concert featuring Aerosmith, Roger Daltrey of the Who and the Whalers. Unfortunately I was dining the Oracle BPM folks, but my tastes run more European these days with the likes of Stratovarius and HIM from Finland. You knew it was going to be Larryriffic with Ellison’s racing boat in the front of a closed Howard Street for party tents for other networking activities. I was hoping to see Larry’s custom Sliver Porsche or the Bentley, but I was either in the wrong place or they were not there. What I wouldn’t do to ride in that Porsche. I only have a mere 556 HP in my ride. Larry’s Porsche would blow it away.

The banners smelled of hardware; not software, which was a disappointment to me. There was barely a mention of BPM in the hallways, though there were sessions for the BPM type folks. What I don’t understand is Oracles lack of understanding of what it has.in Oracle BPM 11G version. It is ahead of the other power vendors of IBM, Microsoft and SAP. With Larry’s competitive nature and his desire to crush the competition, why isn’t he pressing the advantage he has at the moment? Why does Oracle bury BPM in the middleware sector? Oracle BPM is businessware; not middleware. I don’t get it. Larry never backed out of a fight. Maybe he has his hands full with the Sun deal (a lot of stock equity linked to that puppy), but Larry can multi-task with the best of them. I’m scratching my head and wondering if Oracle really powers that much business innovation.

While the numbers were down, Oracle Open World was a great place to congregate and learn. I had great sessions with clients and the BPM team. More to come from this author.

The road to BPM is now usable with the SAP offerering, but get ready for some steerage. Like anything in this world there is “good news” and “bad news”. On balance, I would say that there is more good news than bad for current SAP customers. Until recently SAP was struggling to convince folks that they had a solid Business Process and Business Rules story, but I think things have turned in a pretty good direction.

Current SAP Customers will be pleased that SAP has provided a reasonable BPM offering that is able to leverage existing SAP assets. This will allow customers extend SAPs best practices to site specific best practices. Most SAP customers have had to add functionality without the assist of SAP BPM/BRM, which made the management and connection of this functionality was left to every customer. SAP has now provided a good enough BPM, BRM and a composition environment that will make things easier for their customers. With that, the BPM facility still has some rough edges and is not consumable by business professionals. While the process models are easy to read, an eclipse environment is not conducive to user development. The BAM facility is not seamless and is more report like than real time and animated. On the other hand the process model supports event recognition in addition to state management. The business rules are graphic in nature and support multiple rule representations.

Good news; bad news.

For those considering SAP for BPM/BRM without employing SAP application assets, the story is quite different currently. The technology is far from sophisticated today and business types will not find a usable development, work place environment and process visibility set of features. It is a programmer environment mostly today with some exceptions. There is a glimmer of hope in the way architecture has been designed. The process engine can support unstructured processes and has a significant service repository available to the developer. The BRM has the ability to group rules by self defined groups, but not fully tapped yet. Over time SAP will make the BPM/BRM environments easier to use and more powerful.

Good news; bad news

SAPs BPM/BRM is good enough to make progress for most SAP clients, but I would not recommend the features for others at this time. Time will tell.

I have never been to TechEd before and I have not been to the new Phoenix Civic Center since a recent redo. Even though the PCC is in my home town, I have not had a reason to visit it until now. I was quite impressed with the expansion. It is certainly a top flight conference destination now and doesn’t have the “sin city” taint that some organizations try to avoid. It’s quite handsome as well

I plan on writing another blog tomorrow about SAP’s progress and vision on BPM and Business Rules because I have more sessions today to absorb, before I commit to something in writing. Today I will stick to the opening sessions and say there has been some progress in both BPM and rules. I will let you know how significant as soon as I gather all the facts I can.

The opening session, by Zia Yusuf cut to the strategy of SAP quickly. SAP plans on extending their clients investment in SAP by surrounding the SAP “best practices” with useful extensions to leverage the investment that clients have made. This was no surprise, but I secretly wish SAP would extend that strategy to include other needs of my clients. This is an inside out surround strategy.

Vishal Sikka worked hard to demonstrate that SAP had its finger on the major trends and were contemplating extensions with coolness. .There were demonstrations of cool layers over SAP transactions. There were cloud and Google extensions. There were new UIs, RFID and presences demonstrations. SAP wanted folks to know that they had the modern spin surrounding their solid best practices SAP accomplished it’s mission of how to make legacy look cool in a demo mode. Delivery is forth coming?

The coolness factor was bumped another notch when futurist and trend-meister, Ray Kurzweil, took stage with his jaw dropping “order of magnitude” trend charts for where information technology had been and where it would be going. Ray is convinced that we will see many “wow” factors as technology and software combine to extend life and make it better for all. It was very interesting and entertaining. Though Ray seemed to be mad at everyone who questioned his genius and predictions, he had many great points. . .

If you were not convinced that SAP was cool, at least they hung around with cool people like Ray. Maybe SAP might just be morphing into being and delivering cool? SAP has opened that door, now delivery is the proof of the pudding. Remember the management cockpit in the early 2000s? I’m still waiting.

While BPM might just be one of the easiest classes of software to use ,besides business intelligence, the demand for better work experiences will continue to drive BPM vendors. Right now BPM is good at easy to develop process flows and the visibility of work on those flows, but that is not good enough for the long haul.

See past posting  :http://blogs.gartner.com/jim_sinur/2009/07/29/bpm-not-only-saves-money-it-is-visually-appealing/

There are two additional areas of usability that go beyond the suite spot of today’s BPM providers. In order to continue mining BPM benefits, which are attaining benefits in the multiple millions for the early adopters, new features that enhance the work experience and unstructured processes will need to emerge going forward.

Enhancing the Work Experience:

BPM has to go beyond just the worklist paradigm to create a better work experience. Yes combining BPM with a portal is a good thing, but there is more expected of the BPM vendors, There is an expectation that the work in a worklist have context and options. This mean that the actual activity scheduled can be viewed in context of the process and all the options available to the worker are pictured in a visual sense. This means that all of the reliable helpers necessary to collaborate on activity is visible in a priority order. This also means that any support videos, forms, available resources with skills/experience profiles, better/best practices, training and help be available in an easy to digest fashion. Managers should also visually understand resource loading, productivity and quality ratings of the resources brought to fore for any activity or groups of activity. There is a ton of opportunity for making the work experience easy and superior.

See a previous posting on the workbench experience :http://blogs.gartner.com/jim_sinur/2009/06/25/bpm-based-workbenches-a-notch-above-portals/

Including Unstructured Activity:

Today BPM is really into preplanned and rigid process models. While the underlying technologies are agile and explicit rules and processes are being leveraged, process models need to move from fixed to variable behavior. This will probably start with collaboration points in a mostly fixed process, work to loosely bound process snippets to dynamically created and executed flows that are bound by governance constraints. These kind of processes allow for BPM to extend its benefits to a larger group of work activity that is not so predictable. This will likely include collaboration across organizations and into value chains that touch different legal entities.

See for a previous posting on unstructured processes http://blogs.gartner.com/jim_sinur/2009/08/06/getting-painted-in-a-corner-by-structured-business-processes/

In order to reach to new heights, BPM will have to evolve have better and unstructured work experiences.

The BPM conference dust has settled and I am thinking back on what a great conference we had. While the numbers were not record setting, the quality of the event was high. Of course, we are planning our March 22 -24^th Conference and we are planning a significant amount of new material. I’d just like to extend my gratitude the great number of folks that helped pull off this successful event.

First and foremost, I’d like to thank those that spent their extremely rare travel funds to come and partake of our BPM agenda. The amount of people networking at this conference was impressive. I’d also like to thank the vendors who worked hard to help our clients understand what unique value they bring to the BPM market place. Certainly Juan Fernandez, our fearless event leader, deserves much credit for pulling this BPM event off with near perfection. The folks who supported the actual event are too numerous to list, but events marketing, event sales, event operations and the hotel staff made this one of the smother events I have seen.

For the great content, I am thankful to the keynote speakers outside panelists, award winners and partners. Certainly it goes without saying that the analysts did their very best to make the content stellar. I heard great comments on all the speakers. When I asked what were the highlights of conference, there were many different answers and different sessions named. I would like to thank the blogger’s, who did a fantastic job. I would like to thank the tweeters who kept us informed about things. I could not ask for a higher quality event. It was fun to participate at full speed and watch others shine with enjoyment.

Thank you, thank you, thank you