Jim Sinur

Here we are in the middle of this economic adventure and it’s time to celebrate our independence from the Brits. I never understood why we did this because they are so cool and have great beer. I guess it was independence and taxes. Never mind. I think it is time to take stock in what we have (yes recently we have lost some heroes) and move forward to create a boom.

BPM is one of the main ingredients as efficient processes are the stuff that productivity is made out of going forward. Productivity has been the driver for economic progress in the past and will still be a factor for the bottom line and BPM helps here significantly. Not only does BPM manage processes well, it manages the resources of people and information fairly well in this real time “up tempo” world. What will be different in the new economic order, going forward will be he need for several bottom lines. In addition to the traditional bottom line, there will be a green bottom line and a people bottom line. BPM will be able to help here as well with the kind of visibility necessary for keeping things on track in a volatile world. See the following posts;

http://blogs.gartner.com/jim_sinur/2008/09/26/can-bpm-save-a-way-of-life/

http://blogs.gartner.com/jim_sinur/2009/04/27/business-process-management-grows-value-while-saving-costs/

Over the weekend, I will be thankful for all my blessings including family, friends, co-workers, co-collaborators and a very gracious boss. I will also ponder how BPM can help balance people processes and the information necessary to keep productivity on track without the anticipated overheating and uncontrolled boom that might occur. Happy Fourth of July!! My apologies to the rest of the world who do not celebrate, but find a way to have a tall cold one anyway.. Peace  

There is an interesting trend that I have detected in my recent inquiries. In the beginning of the downturn, my clients were looking for coping mechanisms only, but something is different in this down turn. I am old enough to remember the pain of the 70s down turn and it was purely sticking to basics and tactics for a long time. It wasn’t until the early 80s that strategy made sense again. This down turn is different. Here are two observations for you to ponder and comment on going forward. First my clients want to be prepared to sense shifts ahead of time to be proactive. Secondly, my clients are looking to have a strategy that allows them to go beyond just thriving.

Sensing a Wobbly Top:

I have been with Gartner for over 15 years now and I am getting a repeated set of questions around being proactive that I have not heard before. I think it is more than organizations preparing themselves for recovery. I believe we are in the early pre-recovery stages with organization progress despite higher levels of unemployment.. Many organizations were blind-sided by the events of the last year or so and want to avoid big surprises. I have had more calls on scenario planning and sensing signals of change and responding to them. There is an increased interest in scenario planning and identifying the early signals and patterns. See the following posts

http://blogs.gartner.com/jim_sinur/2009/01/02/scenario-planning-is-no-longer-optional/

http://blogs.gartner.com/jim_sinur/2009/04/22/finding-the-blue-candy-is-like-discovering-germane-business-events/

http://blogs.gartner.com/jim_sinur/2009/03/31/processes-enable-early-warning-for-emerging-business-scenarios/

Beyond Surviving and Thriving:

I am getting a sense that organizations want to make improvements, so that they are hitting full stride when the turnaround gets significant tractions. I am seeing companies doing strategy planning and business optimization leveraging business planning services and tools that can support business sensitivity. Examples include Business Genetics, Decision Management Solutions, The Hobson Group, Nimbus, Process Master and Vision Wave. If I left someone else out, I’m sure I will get comments. See the following posts:

http://blogs.gartner.com/jim_sinur/2009/01/09/downturns-are-an-opportunity-to-make-businesses-better/

http://blogs.gartner.com/jim_sinur/2009/05/21/the-power-of-visibility-with-bpm-enabled-processes/

http://blogs.gartner.com/jim_sinur/2008/10/14/is-anyone-thinking-about-managing-agility/

There is something brewing out there that is putting a premium on right thinking and strategy planning in many circles. While I have seen this kind of thinking in the EU in the past, I am also seeing it in the U.S, and Asia. This is encouraging to me and I hope this becomes a habit that keeps going and gets updated consistent with the tempo for change that agile processes support,

On one of my early BPM projects, we had to create specific workbenches by skill level. Initially we had specific workbenches for underwriters, advanced underwriters and underwriter managers. The idea was to aggregate and customize a workbench with all necessary work lists, applications and specialty content/tools easily available in predetermined areas on an interface. This gave the workers an ideal and consistent environment from which to complete their cases and daily tasks. This idea was so successful we had business folks asking for workbenches for the medical folks such as nurses and disease specialists and doctors.

Of course, we had to hand craft those work benches back in the day. Today, of course, there are more alternatives. Two that come to mind are portals and BPM technologies. I would like to explore each of those alternatives.

Portal Based Work Benches:

Portals allow high degrees of customization including the look and feel. That look and feel can be packaged into patterns and propagated. Each individual can them customize their own environment. Portals are great aggregators of content from many websites and can notify the user of changing conditions that might impact their work environment. It is hard to argue that portals are not essential, so what’s missing? They treat each process and application as a separate entity.

BPM Based Work Benches:

BPM allows for the aggregation of several sources of work into one work list and allows individuals to track their work in one space, In addition, process cases/instances can be routed and work activities customized around skill levels of the individuals sitting at the workbench. Since the core work for an individual is likely to reside in one work list, resource optimization/schedulers can look in one place to find the present workload.

It’s not a zero sum game when it comes to purposed workbenches, but neither is sufficient alone. I would have settled for either, back then, but the combination would have put me in heaven. .

I have had a chance to reflect this past week as I’ve been on holiday in the Boston area on the Cape and attending my sons wedding this last weekend. It occurred to me that BPM has reached a critical juncture where is going to really take off or shrink back for another day. We saw receding of process twice before; once during the workflow days and once during the re-engineering days. I personally believe that BPM is in a perfect position to accelerate and succeed. I am hoping that the BPM marriage works well as I do my sons.

Meghan and Dave Hope for the Perfect Marriage

The Case for the Perfect Marriage:

The reality of today’s economy requires significant underlying savings. After the downsizing of people costs through cuts, processes are the next likely source of time and cost savings. The practice of process disciplines can also be applied to new and creative processes that can be used for competitive differentiation and pleasing the collective constituency base (customers, employees, partners, vendors and owners). Business and IT relationships flourish in the wake of process improvement efforts and the business professionals feel enabled by the visibility, tenability and agility of the resulting processes. The BPM technologies have fused nicely into platforms and the vendors have sorted out well, so the remaining players look to hang around a long time and the skills bases are growing. .

The Case for the Perfect Storm:

Sure BPM is succeeding during difficult times, but when things turn back positive, process disciplines will be left on the sidelines just like in the past. There are those that believe that business professionals can’t really manage the agility that BPM give them and IT will still be stuck in the middle of the change process. In fact, because it is early in the life of BPM, the real melt down examples are about to appear in the market. There has just been too much good news with BPM and the process efforts have not been that encompassing. Some poor unsuspecting organization is going to go for process in a big way with a “big bang” approach and will create a big failure. Folks looking at the resulting crater will run away from BPM for a long period of time.

Nobody starts something new and exciting thinking it will fail, but there will be some failures. I think there are enough evolving best practices and skills for a normal marriage. Normal marriages require adjustments and learning.

Quite often process managers find them selves in situations where they have to deal with changing conditions that may require optimizing resources across a business process. For instance a manager might face more cases than expected that require more senior people to deal with them in a narrow time window.. This means that the process manager has to balance timing and cost goals quickly or lose the opportunities offered by the moment. This is a difficult dilemma, hence the tightrope analogy.

Let’s say your marketing and sales folks design some enticing cost savings opportunities for potential new customers. Even in down times, the right offers can motivate potential customers. Let’s say that these new prospects generally have deeper pockets and require more attention. This puts a premium on highly skilled individuals. Processes that have the ability to tap into the skill levels of the individuals supporting the process will allow managers to correctly direct these cases. Skills sensitive processes can schedule these scarce resources around the anticipated and unanticipated peaks of process activity enabling success. Skills sensitive processes can be leveraged in a number of ways. I’ve identified three possible uses so far:

Skills Selection:

Some folks would call this skills based routing. This is where the process has enough intelligence to select the route of a case to the properly skilled resources. Quite often the process employs a separate work list to handle these cases. It can work in a “push mode” where the most difficult cases are given to the most qualified resources. It can also work in a “pull mode” where a group of highly skilled and motivated folks can pull in cases that need attention.

Skills Stretching:

In the case where the highly skilled people can’t keep with the demand, the processes can identify the next most likely skilled resources. This may include people that have been trained, but never have supported complicated and/or difficult cases. Processes can also identify workers with high potential “High pots” and automatically route the intense cases.

Skills Scheduling:

One emerging approach is to link resource optimization technologies with BPM. These technologies keep track of the calendars of the individual workers and know when they are available thus making the resource pool accurate to the second. Managers can even simulate with live data to train the resource optimization efforts.

I’m sure there are more resource skill based opportunities and look forward to hearing from you.

Being on holiday gives me different perspectives. I’m in New England getting ready for my sons wedding this coming weekend. As part of the trip we decided to stop at a theme park and get a good jolt of adrenalin. I always enjoy roller coasters, so I thought I would take on a few. As I was waiting in line with nothing to do except look at people, my mind wandered to how much roller coasters have changed so radically over the last several decades. It seems that there is a reasonable parallel for the managers that have to make decisions in today’s world. In the past, old wooden roller coasters basically had ups and downs with a few corners to boot. Today roller coasters whip you upside down, twist you, barrel roll you and do contortions that were unimaginable in the past. It’s because of a shift in technologies and a driving need for more thrills

Well today’s business environment is providing thrills that one could hardly imagine in the decade before and there is more to come. The timing and sophistication of decisions is going to change radically. I would also predict that the technologies employed will become more advanced and combined in new ways. We all know that we have been under serving the decision makers for a long period of time and we have been very reactionary in the process.

The History:

We have given business professionals some support, but look at what’s been done In reaction to waiting on IT, we have given business folks data marts, spread sheets and limited business intelligence tools. Since the latent demand for better decisions will always be there, the BI camp has been flourishing, though the vendors keep consolidating in the BI arena. BI is a commodity and need to step up to the plate. Looking in the rear view mirrors in helpful, but no sufficient. Reactionary is helpful, but is no longer a luxury in today’s business world.

The Future:

Business activity monitoring (BAM) is picking up the need for making decisions in a more timely fashion and complex events processing (CEP) is adding a new an valued information stream that helps in to time to market decisions and/or actions. These efforts can be process focused or not. These efforts can be reading traditional sources or scanning for weak pulses. I see a day when organizations will have to proactive. This will mean more scenario plans for unexpected scenarios, but also projected unexpected and even weird twist and turns in the light of history. Look for new combinations of methods and technologies including prediction, optimization, simulation, business rules management, BAM and CEP

I am excited about the future of decisions, going forward, like I get pumped for a new roller coaster. What is your favorite roller coaster?

Additonal Reading:

http://blogs.gartner.com/jim_sinur/2009/04/22/finding-the-blue-candy-is-like-discovering-germane-business-events/

http://blogs.gartner.com/jim_sinur/2009/03/31/processes-enable-early-warning-for-emerging-business-scenarios/

http://blogs.gartner.com/jim_sinur/2009/02/23/transforming-bi-to-optimize-organizations-leveraging-processes/

http://blogs.gartner.com/jim_sinur/2009/01/29/bpm-needs-to-add-more-intelligence-to-decisions-surrounding-processes/

http://blogs.gartner.com/jim_sinur/2009/01/02/scenario-planning-is-no-longer-optional/

This is always a Catch-22.  Those getting started with BPM want to know about the pitfalls.  Those who have made mistakes don’t necessarily want to air their dirty laundry.  So how about this?  Tell us about the worst practices a “friend in another company” has made.  What did the “friend” do, what was the consequence? What happened to the BPM program?  In hindsight, what would have been a better practice?  How could you recognize this might be happening to you?  Respond to this blog or feel free to contact me directly at elise.olding@gartner.com – just in case your “friend” might be sensitive about their context!

Elise Olding

Gartner

Research Director, BPM

510-339-1963 office

Today there is a strong emphasis on BPM because good processes enable the people in an organization regardless of the business functional area they reside in at the moment. Not only do processes enable functional excellence while saving time and money, they can easily traverse functional silos and engage people through a repeatable and somewhat standard and competitive process without forcing everything through a single application. Today’s BPM driven process take into account the organizational structures and the skills of the job classes and people involved with handling a process (opposed to forcing organizations to reflect applications).

Processes and applications working together in concert across the organization leveraging compliant best practices with the help of SOA and workflow is a big step forward, but there is more to the story of running a competitive business today. Organizations need to be agile and adaptable as well because of outside forces, the behavior patterns of people and shifting conditions. Processes will have to handle this kind of agility for both the systems with dynamic service involvement, but for people as the have evolving workloads and processing needs.

Processes Need to be Unstructured:

In order to keep up with dynamism of change, processes will have to become more indeterminate in nature. Today processes usually require complete process models that are pre-planned with most all of the exceptions baked into their flows and subtasks. Most BPM tools are wired toward fixed processes with variability handled through rules, but the trend is towards having more dynamic and unpredictable processes. These processes take fixed process snippets and/or business services and use them more dynamically bounded by business constraints and policies. This is a must for supporting knowledge workers. This means that BPM has to handle multiple process patterns even some that are indeterminate in nature. The processes will also direct based on best skills available at the time.

Processes Need to Support Best Practice Discovery:

In order to take chaos and expense out of processes, BPM will need to support process discovery. There are a couple of aspects of process discovery. One is to watch the high performers and see how they operate within fixed processes/applications. This may mean analyzing how activity behaves within the bounds of a fixed and maybe legacy application. The other is to observe patterns of collaboration between organizations and individuals in evolving knowledge work to find suitable patterns for fixed/standard processes. This might generate best practices and/or better rules for straight through processes. This practice is handy for driving out costs and taking evolving processes to their next step of productivity. This could be driving out the very indeterminate portion of a process as policies evolve towards determinate processes..

Processes Need to Widely Inclusive:

The problem with most BPM capabilities is that they only understand their own process language and are generally focused on a primary technology platform. As process cross functional stove pipes and/or organizational boundaries, they must include process snippets and compete process that run on foreign engines and/or platforms. This is particularly true for supply and value chain processes. The problem with most platform giants and BPM vendors is that they are self focused and are not inclusive in their attitude. We live in an environment where we assume that standards will lag need, so BPM will have to handle multiple process platforms easily. The process models have to portable and the process should be able to be started on one platform and finished on another with many potential intermediate steps on other platforms.

Processes Need to be Intelligent:

In the new world of BPM, processes will have to have levels of intelligence beyond BPM today. One facet of intelligence would be a self awareness in the terms of identifying work progress in an established process, identifying extraordinary conditions in an established process, identifying best practice of participants in an established process, identifying extraordinary conditions in the context of a process and discovering work paths selected in indeterminate processes. This kind intelligence is leveraged in process discovery and process visibility.

The other form of intelligence is related to notifying process owners and operators of evolving conditions that may require a future intervention such as a rule change or a new process path. In an advanced world, the process might suggest the answer to an evolving set of conditions or an emerging business scenario.

Processes Need to be Goal Driven:

In the ultimate scenario for BPM, the process would be able to take multiple conflicting goals and drive towards a set of outcomes that balance the best results amongst these conflicting goals. These goals will likely be tied to corporate performance plans and desired operational outcomes. BPM might also automatically try various alternative forms of predictive behavior to suggest goal and resource adjustments.

BPM affords a very different kind of process than what we know today. This will be a long journey before this is pervasive, but expect leading BPM providers to add features that will allow the processes to take more agility guided by context skills levels and intelligence. .

In the BPMS, today, agility mostly appears in the ability of adjusting decision points in a fixed process usually visible through a process flow. There is more to agility than what is delivered in most of the BPMS engines today. Agility is defined as the ability to think and draw conclusions quickly to exercise nimble movements easily. Having a broader view of agility allows for more opportunities to expand the dynamic behavior of business processes.

While I think that an agility opportunity around decision making in the flow of processes is extremely important, there are additional opportunities around business actions, people optimization and technology fluidity that can play in the next generation of BPM.

BPM Expands the Tweak Points in a Process:

Today most agility is aimed at process control flows, but there are many more opportunities to impact process behavior. BPM will help control outcomes by adding coordinated agility around goals and tolerances. Process managers will be able dynamically change the goals and their balance to create outcomes that meet conflicting goals while staying efficient by allowing coordinated tolerances to be set to match the new goals given to the process.

In addition, processes will recognize relevant events that might change a course of action on a specific case and/or a class of process instances. At a maximum, the recognition of certain events and/or tolerance statuses might suggest an opportunity for a new round of optimization and/or a change in goals. So goals, tolerances and event recognition are some of the new tweak points that enable a new dimension of agility added to the traditional decision nodes in a process.

BPM Adds More Intelligence to Complex Decisions:

Today process decisions tend to be simplistic and process engines can handle these natively. BPM will require more sophisticated decisions that will require a deeper integration of heuristics and other forms of decision making. Intelligent processes should be recognizing conditions that will require intervention. This means recognizing the effect of aggregated and/or complex events that might be of interest to a process manager and giving advice on the likely hood of making some kind of adjustment. In advanced capabilities, the process might suggest alternative courses of action with a likely success percentage for each course of action.

BPM Puts SOA Concepts on Steroids:

In the ultimate scenario for BPM, would not only orchestrate services and pseudo services (impure wrapped legacy services and/or composite flows), but BPM would also perform dynamic orchestration that would change the sequence of invocation depending on conditions. The conditions could be sensed dynamically by event recognition and/or agent/flocking agent behaviors. Process snippets and composite flows would be available and treated as service assets. In addition to the ability to swap services dynamically based on positive/negative business and/or technical outcomes, BPM will dynamically orchestrate services.

We will see this concept leveraged to content and micro content in dynamic aggregation for the creation of proper content for clients and other process participants. This approach would also be appropriate in creating a dynamic set of people and skills to face the incoming workload in a dynamic fashion thus yielding a people orientation never seen before.

BPM Rules Outside the Actual Process:

Today most of the rules are contained inside the process context itself, but in the new world of BPM, there will be rules outside the process in the form of constraints and distributed agents. When process can be ultimately flexible, there needs to be boundaries that processes should not go beyond without some form of notification to the process manager and/or process worker. In addition agents should be snooping for conditions of interest to the process manger.

BPM Has a Better Handle on Process Context:

BPM takes advantage of process intelligence. Even though a process may be as optimized as possible, there are changing conditions in the market place and your client base that need to be brought to light. The clues for these trends are seen in the process and it’s outcomes as well as complex events detected and/or alerts emitted by agents employed by the process managers .Many processes are evolving and need to be goal directed and collaborative in nature. Process Intelligence can help identify patterns for governance.

BPM leverages agility in supercharged way to deliver processes that can adapt and adopt in an instant, if needed. As we enter the kind of complexities that evolving processes bring, I expect more rapid evolution of agility leverage. .

Related Blog Postings:

http://blogs.gartner.com/jim_sinur/2009/04/20/oh-process-how-do-you-flow/

http://blogs.gartner.com/jim_sinur/2009/03/17/rule-guided-processes-are-the-way-of-the-future/

http://blogs.gartner.com/jim_sinur/2009/01/29/bpm-needs-to-add-more-intelligence-to-decisions-surrounding-processes/

http://blogs.gartner.com/jim_sinur/2009/01/19/the-rule-enabled-bpms-and-agility-the-real-deal/

http://blogs.gartner.com/jim_sinur/2008/10/14/is-anyone-thinking-about-managing-agility/

Here is a guest post from our BPM Best Practices person; Elise Olding

I couldn’t help having my interest and imagination peaked yesterday when I hear the announcement Microsoft made at E3 – Electronic Entertainment Expo in LA.  http://tinyurl.com/m9qhld  In summary “a motion sensing device that allows you to control video games and Xbox 360 menus with your body instead of a peripheral controller. Natal gives you voice and full-body motion control over your on-screen avatar using an RGB camera, depth sensor, multi-array microphone, and custom processor running proprietary software.”

My vision of the future for BPM is that we will be able to digitize the environment and ourselves, to have a 3D experience of the work, in the context of the environment as well.  This environmental awareness is something missing from today’s 2D models.  I envision giving a warehouse worker a “miner’s helmet” with a camera mounted, that records and digitizes the work process that his/her role is doing.  An avatar represents the role.  (A while back I saw some interesting work in this area done by a healthcare provider.) 

With this announcement I see that future a lot closer.  Who will be first to make this vision a reality?  

PS – if you aren’t watching the gaming world, suggest you do.  About E3: http://www.e3expo.com/content/1146/exhibitor-list/

Elise Olding

Gartner

Research Director, BPM

510-339-1963 office

510-384-9621 cell