PBS & BPM Today:

The maturity of most organization’s, today is around continuous process improvement that is “eye ball” change driven. Process directors/managers watch the outcomes of processes and tweak the workloads and outcomes to match to the goals and policies that executive management have established.. The changes need to support the adapt portion of the PBS cycle in an optempo fashion are pretty much manual, but some BPM capabilities can model alternatives with inline simulation leveraging a “champion – challenger” method to see the impact of potential changes. This will suffice for now, but there is more to come.

PBS and BPM Tomorrow:

BPM, in the future, will be goal driven and will orient itself around goals; ergo reduce the amount of manual changes. In addition process will become more plugged into events both inside and outside the processes, so that processes will become more context aware. In addition, processes are becoming more collaborative, unstructured and plugged into the collective. We are seeing the beginning signs of each of these individually in many vendors forward looking plans. There are a few that will combine many features to support the above, starting in mid 2010. .

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/

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.

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.

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. .

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.

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 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.

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.

Best Practices Should be the Goal

It’s so much easier just to buy pre-built best practices than anything and deal with changes as they come. Sure these best practices will have to be maintained and extended over time, why not start with the best known practices and surround them as needed. Packages are getting better at up grades, so why switch to BPM? Just surround best practices with BPM extensions. The world is static enough to stick with this strategy.

Better Practices are More Practical

BPM delivers ideal approaches to sneak up on best practices by starting with a “good enough” process and have the process evolve to the best practice over time. If the target for best practices changes, because of changes in the business environment, your better practices are moldable and changeable along the way. The BPM approaches avoid “lock-in” and surround strategies. You are not stuck with major application upgrades and inflexible technology bases. If you want to start with a more solid better practice, you can model and simulate processes alternatives ahead of time. You can even leverage automated process discovery to shorten the modeling efforts and use live cases

While not all aspects of a business process are volatile, it is hard to predict where the volatility will strike precisely. This is why BPM powered by BPM technologies comes into play. They are built for change. You can make them even better by leveraging “jump start” frameworks/templates of better practices that can evolve to “Your” best practices. Keep in mind these are not mutually exclusive ideas.

http://blogs.gartner.com/jim_sinur/2009/03/03/double-your-pleasure-application-packages-and-bpm-together/