Adding BPMN into the fiery mix

Bruce Silver picked up on Keith Swenson's discussion about XPDL v BPEL, which I blogged about yesterday. As expected, Bruce added BPMN into the mix. And rightly so - having a portable modeling notation that describes how drawn processes should be drawn as well as run is an important way to go. BPMN helps business analysts communicate consistently, both with the business they are modeling and each other.

Now when we get to a stage of evolution where execution engines can consume these BPMN models, through XPDL or some other process language, customers will have reached a nirvana in software buying. At this point they can get commodity (cheap) BPM engines that they can plug and play, then rip and replace to their heart's desire. Microsoft is waiting in the wings for this already, though they are proving that they need a little help along the way (see their Business Process Alliance).

Fortunately, by the time complete BPM commoditization happens, some of the real talent in the BPM space will have moved on to even more pressing issues in the business, like gaining visibility across this new multitude of 'appliance' and SaaS process engines. Or providing federation and process enforcement across disparate process engines that make up an end-to-end process. Or providing some other smart system that can help businesses meet ever tougher objectives.

At this point, maybe we'll give business process back to the business, and terms like BPMN, XPDL and BPEL will just be the underpinnings of stuff real business leaders, users and analysts can understand and use to get their jobs done - better, faster, easier. Oh, and all with minimal IT involvement.

By the way, its worth checking out Bruce's post, since he has proven himself to be an expert in the BPMN realm in the past. His discussion is based around the state of play today with BPMN, and makes enjoyable reading.

Technorati tags: BPMN XPDL BPEL

Manage end-to-end processes - don't argue about standards

On the Go Flow blog, Keith Swenson rekindles the debate about the success of XPDL, and obviously draws some comparisons/distinctions with BPEL. In my view both standards have their place, and vendors should avoid trying to quash the one they don't support because their process engine or modeling tool has different objectives its trying to meet. As Keith says:

The biggest misperception in the marketplace is that BPEL and XPDL are in some kind of a war. I have already covered elsewhere how this is silly, so I won’t duplicate it here. I think Jon Pyke’s response makes it clear how these very different standards serve very different purposes.

I put my own (rather lengthy) thoughts into a comment on Go Flow. The key point of my argument is here as well:

XPDL and BPEL have separate objectives and they will overlap at times. At these times it may be better for the organization implementing human and systems BPM to look at ways of pragmatically handling end-to-end processes. Managing the 'federation' of processes, rather than trying to shoehorn everything into a ‘standard’ optimized for different objectives, seems to be the best way to go. End-to-end processes exist all across an organization, and at this point most organizations seem to struggle with gaining even the slightest visibility into what is going on, let alone attempt to model and execute that process within a process modeling or execution language.

Easier said than done? Maybe - but 'process federation' is a real concept that can be attacked from several different directions. Global 360 (my employer) does this with end-to-end process analytics and optimization. There are other approaches that customer can employ that further improve the visibility and manageability of end-to-end processes that cross the systems and human realms.

By the way, don't forget to add your comments to the discussion on Go Flow.

Technorati tags: BPM BPEL XPDL process analytics process federation

Permission to use free online services

Over on The Bankwatch blog, Colin picks up on a note on Seth's Blog about the evolution of advertising. In his discussion, Colin responds to Seth's idea that Google AdSense is effective because it is 'permission based':

Google AdSense is not permission based IMHO. Why? …. because no-one asked me if they could display those ad’s beside my search results. But lets go further … even if those ad’s are relevant, they are only relevant in the minds of the advertisers. I would consider myself a fairly active internet user, and I not only never click Google ad’s …. I don’t even notice them. Google App’s premium, which I subscribe to, does not display ad’s to me.

I think about this slightly differently. Although I wouldn't call AdSense 'permission based', it could be argued that by choosing to use any free service or information source, like Google, Improving New Account Opening, Hotmail or whatever, you are effectively giving your permission to the service to try and make some money from you through advertising.

The challenge for the service is to optimize how effective this is: balance the annoyance of the adverts against the need to get people to click through to the paying advertiser, so they can profit from running the service. This is what in my mind stops advertising becoming too much like TV and radio - with the Internet I always have the choice to go somewhere else.

This blog is admittedly an exception to the real commercial services in this respect. I do run AdSense on this blog and know I'm not going to get rich, but it certainly helps me understand the dynamics of free online services. I get a steady-ish stream of page views even when I don't post, and I get little bursts of ads being clicked some days - split between ads on my most popular posts (most last year) and the home page. My guess is that its not regular readers doing this, instead people stumbling across the site from outside, and looking for the next place to go for more relevant information. It works far more effectively than the prepaid Adify service on the right, which rarely shows anything but my own banner, and when it does mostly unrelated commercial ads that are really just fluff.

Since I started my blog last June, I think I've been credited with approximately $65 US in clicks. The value of some of the ads seem to be reasonably high, to match the business nature of things discussed here. Based on my original aim, I have donated this 65 bucks, and a lot more to Oxfam. And maybe I have helped the occasional reader find something they were looking for related to my posts.

I have posted in the past that the AdSense is a useful model for corporate intranets and knowledge worker applications, helping target user actions with other useful information that may help them complete their tasks or research faster. It was an idea that I'm sure is already offered by the information access vendors like Autonomy and FAST. I think it is almost better than pure search, since it provides a manageable list of results, that are driven by value as well as content on the page, rather than the 3 words entered into Google.

So everyone is encouraged to read my blog, and by doing so they have my permission to get mildly annoyed by the presence of AdSense adverts. I hope that regular readers do not find them too annoying, and that everyone may occasionally stumble across something related that may be of interest to them. I'm not necessarily a good linker to external stuff, and AdSense helps fill that gap!

Technorati tags: google adsense advertising related information

Back to the (account opening) future

The thing that really kicked off this blog (apart from the feeling that I was going nowhere in Vignette) was back in front of me yesterday.

A little over a year ago, a colleague, good friend and extremely smart finance guy, Rob Hill, brought a big business problem to my attention. This was perfect, as we were looking for compliance problems that were a better fit for Vignette document and records management technology than SOX. The new business / new account opening processes around annuities were being focused on by an industry association called NAVA, with unusually strong buy-in from its member financial services institutions.

Rob and I started working on NAVA standards task forces, while planning a Vignette solution to address the New Business for Annuities (NBfA) problem. And I started writing this blog a little later when I realized that we were going to get little attention from the (overloaded) Vignette marketing folks. About 9 months later, Vignette decided that the only solutions it was going to pursue were those that reflected it core web content management competencies, losing the stomach for back-office financial services business problems. I happily escaped Vignette back in October to Global 360, a company that’s bread and butter is exactly this type of problem.

Anyway, back to the future and NAVA STP for New Business for Annuities has come of age, approving a range of standards based on a legal framework for operations that support a set of technical requirements for straight through processing of new business applications. Yesterday, many interested software and services vendors met in a Dulles hotel to understand how they could play a role in helping the new standards become software and operational reality.

NAVA’s lead technology consultant, Tony Deakins, who has been central to much of the standards work, encouraged me to go along to the conference. Global 360 BPM and ECM products are a great fit for the current new business for annuities (NBfA) problem, and I was excited to be back in front of this smart group of people and interesting business problem.

Now the activity of the day has sunk in, it feels like all the requirements are being shuffled together with a bunch of technology, consultants and systems integrators and thrown up in the air. With a bit of seeding, clouds will form as pilot solutions around natural technology synergies and needy customers. And everyone hopes that these clouds are silver lined and will rain down something meaningful that actually meets the NAVA standards.

Over the last 15 months NAVA has achieved some magical results in building and approving its standards, getting regulatory approval from a good number of states, federal and self-regulating bodies. Who knows where this will go when the clouds of vendors and customers form around the pilot systems NAVA is promoting. But I have a hope that improving new account opening will be something this blog can focus on again, with real tangible solution experience to relate.

Technorati tags: Financial Services Technology New Account Opening NAVA standards

Whistler - and Case Management

I'm off for a long-awaited trip to Whistler to ski myself into happy oblivion (and sore knees).


On a final email check before packing up the PC, I spotted that Bruce's BPMS Watch discussion on 'What is Case Management?' is still going strong. It shows how industry specific the term seems to be, with valuable insights and opinions coming from all round (mine included, maybe!?). Since I'm not going to blog in a while, here's my view of the different focuses on case management:

In government, where repeatability and strict policy adherence is required, process is typically well defined up front, while allowing case managers the flexibility to ‘case manage’ within that structure. For this reason, many case management applications seem to resemble high level state or status tracking applications than BPM tools. For them, the beauty is in a UI structure that is familiar and usable by the end-user.

In commercial environments I’ve seen case management applications fit into any repeatable business process that requires some human intervention and real knowledge based decision making. A large amount of process state is based on the requirement and receipt of external documents and information, and the effective matching of this to current cases. Much of a granular BPM(N) process model could be overwhelmed with ‘rendezvous’, exeptions and representing collaboration as parallel processes, hence case management tools carry their own individual methodologies to abstract the common requirements to something repeatable and configurable.

To handle ad-hoc and collaborative process definition within structured process definitions, an easy to use approach is to present users with ‘task management’ (dislaimer: the Global 360 Case Manager application I product manage takes this approach). This is effectively a mini project plan that guides users down paths based on their decisions, tracking the tasks as they and their colleagues perform them (perhaps a little of Rafael’s project manager approach). It allows task templates to be used based on user or application control, or users to create new tasks to meet their needs on an ad-hoc basis. This way you get tracking of processes, control over tasks performed if necessary, and complete ad-hoc operation if required.

I think that dependent on industry, we’ll all have a different definition of ‘case management’. It is less of a technology definition than BPM, instead being something that seems to be borne out of real business requirements by users that focus less on technology and more on the business goals.

Have a great week everyone.

Where do you find an answer to your burning questions?

I occasionally pay some interest in the ideas that social-media websites come up with - sometimes they are plain useful, other times I just wonder who on earth thought up the idea.

Anyway, one I almost missed was LinkedIn Answers. This is a way of asking people in your network a question and getting responses that may or may not be useful. Questions range from:

How can a one-person, Milwaukee-based business increase visibility?

to:

Can you ever take someone seriously who maintains that barbeque should be a pig in a pit instead of brisket on a grill? And shouldn't a barbeque sauce be sweet and tangy, not just some hot sauce thrown into shredded pork on Wonder Bread?

Not being qualified to answer either of these questions, you'll not see an answer from me. But the concept interested me from the point of view of finding answers to your burning questions in a business setting.

How do you find out information at work when you don't really know who to ask? In an office, typically you'll shout over to the guy or girl in the next cubicle, often not for the answer, but if they know who to ask. Your personal network has just been expanded, often getting you a new point of contact. When you work from a home office this type of informal network sharing is more indirect and IM or a quick email is essential for quick questions like this to the virtual 'next cubicle'.

I'm sure that collaborative knowledge management applications provide 'expert groups' that can be leveraged. Even outside of KM, it would seem that any employee could all benefit from central FAQ and Q&A resources, backed up by a healthy dose of search capabilities. And in business processes and case management? Providing strong mechanisms for sharing knowledge and decision making information should help ensure faster ramp up times for new employees and more consistent decisions. But the challenge is knowing who is qualified to provide that advice and to get it without absorbing huge amounts of those experts' time.

Technorati tags: collaboration social media

Case management - a definition

Bruce Silver has put together a comprehensive discussion of case management that I think I largely agree with, in his article on BPMInstitute.org. This is a snippet that encapsulates much of the definition:

What is case management, and in particular, how does it differ from conventional BPM? A case, like a conventional business process, involves a collection of activities or tasks. However, unlike BPM, the process from initiation to completion of the case is not easily constrained to a process diagram, certainly not one based on a single end-to-end orchestration, even with complex nesting and chaining logic. Which activities need to be performed in order to complete the case depends on the details of each instance. Typically the case manager, or perhaps any performer of a task in the case, makes these decisions. The “rules,” so to speak, are inside users’ heads, not codified in explicit business rules.

Moreover, users can add new tasks, data objects, documents - even new processes - to the case at runtime. The “model” defined by the case designer cannot anticipate all of these in advance. Case management inherently carries with it some fluidity of structure or ad hoc-ness. This is the part that many BPM suites have a hard time with: New tasks, processes, and data can be added on the fly, but you still want the process engine to execute those processes, track deadlines for those tasks, monitor case status end-to-end, and even measure performance. It's not easy.

This discussion shows just how complex a case management use case can be. Applications that successfully implement a case methodology have to have many seamless components (content, process, metadata management), while being open and flexible enough to be extensible to a specific customer's requirements.

Its these features that I believe really make case management enabled systems very strong for addressing a wide range of common use cases in financial services, where a business analyst would otherwise struggle with a formal BPM approach.

Technorati tags: Case Management BPM

Real business solutions are more than a process

Kiran Garimella talks about The Arrogance of IT on his BPM blog on ebizQ. It made me smile, since its obvious that the disconnect of IT and the business is so wrong, but so pervasive that it makes me wonder why it always happens:

Consider that the IT-business divide is difficult to bridge precisely because IT keeps thinking of “special technical solutions” for what are essentially ‘end-to-end’ problems in business processes. Rules can’t be managed? Use a BRMS. Data can’t be managed? Use EDM. You don’t know what the data means? Use metadata. You don’t know what happened? Use BI. Need to manage customers and prospects? Use CRM. Can’t find all your documents? Use ECM. Need to comply with SOX? Buy some shrink-wrapped panacea.

Boxing things up into categories is one of the only ways that technology can be understood as it gets more complex, and there are more "special technical solutions" to more and more problems. Kiran warns of this categorization:

A few years later, this company is saddled with a BI application, an ECM suite, a CRM package, and a bunch of other applications. What’s more, there is now a huge IT staff maintaining all those applications. However, the executive is no closer to solving the original problem that brought on all this investment. To crack that problem, this hapless executive (or their equally frustrated employees) must now run to all of the above applications and try to make sense of them.

This is no surprise. We escaped the clutches of the monolithic mainframes to a world of well separate and segregated application boxes that rarely integrate, let alone do something meaningful and sensible when they do. So, Kiran suggests something better:

It is called BPM. It is the one platform that ties all these functional capabilities together and gives them a complete business context. How it accomplishes all this, and how it should co-exist or coordinate with these compartmentalized solutions and legacy systems (which do have specialized uses), are deeper issues.

I agree with Kiran that "BPM isn’t just one more application package". It certainly provides a way for the business to define what they do and how they operate, as executable and enforceable business processes, while looking back to see that its actually having the desired business effect.

Big but... BPM is not a panacea.

Sure, it can tie together the technology boxes we previously bought, but the business analyst is not going to be able to do that; these boxes present IT friendly APIs, not something a business analyst can utilize. For that we need a business view of these boxes. This is why some smart people invented SOA - it presents technical solutions as meaningful and reusable business services, within a technical framework that IT can embrace. SOA is not an application package, but your BPM platform needs to support SOA, and even better enable the backend boxes to expose business services that a business analyst can hook their processes up to.

Then of course, many critical business problems involve people working together, producing documents, communicating with customers and partners, researching data, discussing issues, checking boxes to track what they've done. And it needs to be done within the context of process activities. BPM doesn't easily model or deliver this level of collaboration or unstructured process within the structured business process previously modeled by the business analyst. In my view, Case Management is an approach to this. Not another technology box, but a combination of many of the tools required to deliver meaningful and pragmatic end-user focused applications, alongside backend systems and human-centric business processes.

Kiran's is a great post, since it highlights the disconnect between IT and business. I'd just suggest that any possible solution to a business problem still requires the underlying technology boxes to be in place, remodeled to work together to provide meaningful business services, then tied together with business processes, collaborative case management and all of the other tools that business people might interact with to do their jobs better and faster.

Real business problems are now a combination of technology boxes, business processes and knowledge workers. Don't bring in a platform that only addresses one of these. So, as a business executive, when the IT manager says to you, “Sure, what you need is a BPM platform”, make sure it can demonstrate how it solves your real business problem: make sure it gets your technology boxes to talk to your people, within processes that make your business run better.

Technorati tags: business problems BPM SOA Case Management

ECM, BPM and solving business problems

It seems that I'm leaching off Bruce Silver's great BPMS Watch blog for a second day in a row. Today I see he is generating some great discussion around the intersection of ECM and BPM.

There is always heated discussion in this area, and I believe that ECM (according to a Gartner MQ) is too broad to be palatable to many, while BPMS gets very deep. This is the natural evolution of putting products into boxes (or better said categories). The problem is that there are great software tools and suites out there that sit largely between the two magic quadrants, or Forrester Waves, that consistently and effectively address burning business problems, like how to do new account opening, fraud resolution and HR employee onboarding better.

This type of software picks up titles like Case Management, which is not broadly enough recognized to be a true market space. The thing is they need some tag to ensure they aren't just considered point solutions to a single business problem, which would be limiting to their success. Perhaps Case Management is a good term for 'one' intersection of BPM & ECM, even if its not the only one.

Technorati tags: Financial Services Technology New Account Opening ECM BPM case management

Case management on BPMS Watch

Bruce Silver nudged me towards a little discussion that had started on BPMS Watch: What is Case Management

This is great news as there is some interesting views of what case management is appearing. The view that case management can address complex and critical business problems is definitely coming out.

Technorati tags: Financial Services Technology Case Management