Until now most organizations were faced with a build or buy applications decision. It was pretty apparent that purchased applications dominated the early part of this decade. Applications were best practices that could be replicated in organizations. Application implementation times promised to be pretty quick and lower than the traditional maintenance costs of 20% of the original applications. So this put bespoke development on the sideline for a while. The fallout was that organizational change became painful and the applications were pretty inflexible. As organizations needs changed beyond the core applications, surrounding functionality has to be bought or created. I would estimate that this added anywhere from 25 – 30% custom functionality on top of the purchased applications.
Now there a couple of new choices in best and flexible best practices for the remainder of this decade and the next one. One is the notion of process templates that sit on flexible BPM platform that give an organization a 70% solution and the ability to easily customize the process for their organization. These platforms leverage explicit flows, rules and services. It turns out that these BPM platforms are pretty good at surrounding applications as well. This makes them a flexible alternative. IBM and Microsoft are taking this tack by offering a biosphere for template partners to build on going forward, but these platforms are still evolving independent BPM vendors are ready now.
The other revolves around the new emerging application platforms offered by major application vendors such as Oracle and SAP. These platforms are poised to hit the market hard in mid 2009 and leverage some of the BPM technology to be used to surround the application packages. While package vendor BPM extensions have a ways to evolve and revolve around surrounding pre-built transactions built on an old platform, they will be alternatives to templates and BPM in the coming years. I do not anticipate that application vendors will convert their applications to a common flexible platform anytime soon.
What would you prefer? Application packages surrounded by an evolving process platform due out in the next 12 months with a burn in period or a best practice template based on a flexible platform that would is available now. I would love to hear your perspective on this evolving decision.
4 responses so far ↓
1 Scott Francis // Dec 3, 2008 at 6:52 pm
Jim -
I would posit the third option… “bespoke development on a BPM platform”. Because the choice you’ve presented is, in my opinion, a false choice…
1. the applications with BPM platform due out in 12 months – well, I believe in evaluating something when it actually exists. Some of these guys have a history of being late with software releases!
2. the 70% templates… I’ve yet to see a template that was really 70% of a process solution. I think this is one of those holy grail concepts. As far as I’ve seen, the templates get gutted because they don’t reflect the real process, or if they do reflect the real process, there’s no implementation behind the pretty diagrams, so 70% of the work is not even close to what has been done…
Now, having said that – the templates might be educational. And the applications with bpm platforms – I might buy BPM from those vendors. I just think when it comes to implementation of processes, I’m going to go direct to the platforms for the next 12-24 months, and the templates are going to be nice ideas, thought provoking. And the applications are going to be too rigid for the processes we’re tackling. My 2 cents…
2 Jim Sinur // Dec 3, 2008 at 7:09 pm
Scott,
Thank you for commenting. What you propose is the common way to build processes, but it doesn’t represent buying best practices for a process jump start( the context for this post). I agree that there are few large scoped templates available, but there are plenty of smaller scoped templates that have been pretty successful offerred by pure play BPMS vendors.
Jim.
3 Scott Francis // Dec 3, 2008 at 9:27 pm
I guess my point is that I still don’t believe in the templates… I think the BPMS vendors are over-selling this… or the analyst community is… not sure about the chicken-and-egg aspect of this (which came first) but it is fairly self-reinforcing, though I have yet to see any statistics that are based on *customers* saying how many processes they’ve deployed based on templates (rather than taking vendors’ word for it).
4 Jim Sinur // Dec 3, 2008 at 9:59 pm
Scott,
This is worth adding to our survey questions to get an accurate reading. Thanks
Jim
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