Intelligent Enterprise

Regarding the BPMS Watch Ratings report I released last month, each of the 11 BPM Suites evaluated was scored on the same set of capability categories, based on a weighted list of features/attributes, including "Strength of Execution," representing a subjective catch-all attribute (the individual reports on each vendor are available here at BPMInstitite.org. Three process types described in the report — production workflow, case management, and integration-centric — apply different weightings to the various capability categories, but use the same score for each category.

I have been looking for a way to publish the details of the scoring, and at the same time allow users to apply their own weightings to the features in each capability category, as well as to create custom process types with their own capability category weightings. I wanted to do it online, not as an Excel download, but had no idea how to do that.

At a recent conference, Neil Ward-Dutton showed me his solution for his own BPM research — all written in PHP by the man himself in his spare time. (Dude, get a life!) No way I could match that, but I was able to do something respectable using DabbleDB, a hosted database service that is part of Ismael Ghalimi's "Office 2.0″ suite. Dabble costs about $10/month, and so far the customer service has been great: when I inadvertently trashed my database, they restored it in 10 minutes.

I was pretty happy with the results, which are available on the BPMS Watch site to logged-in subscribers (if you're not logged in, the link will return "File Not Found"). The custom feature weightings and custom process type weightings allow users to modify values one at a time, but there is no way to enforce a total of 100 percent. Also, all users are editing the same list of user weightings, so there is the risk that one user will overwrite another's values. I added a Last Modified field to help a user know if that might be happening, but it just shows the date not the dateTime.

So it's not perfect. Also, I need to work on my Wordpress theme to allow a bit more width to some of the charts. But hey, unlike Gartner, Forrester, or Neil's own thing, it's free (for now) to BPMS Watch subscribers. All you have to do is register and log in.

Once again, I need to remind readers that the ratings are based on evaluations done from July 2007 to March 2008, so products evaluated last summer may have improved their capabilities considerably since then. I will be starting a new round of evaluations this summer, and will update the ratings as I go along — in a more timely manner this time.

Comments welcome.