Intelligent Enterprise

Given that BI thought leaders are wrestling with the notion of events, perhaps we will see a BI-mainstreaming of event processing in the not-too-distant future. Myself, I was way ahead of the game in my expectations of demand for BI access to stream sources. While a combination of legacy database and analytical technology has held BI back, lack of perception of need has been a far greater factor, especially given the under-utilization of conventional BI decades after the term first became popular.

Interest in streams and events has definitely picked up in the last few months -- I've reported on novel applications for "continuous transformation" and otherwise done a bit of writing to promote awareness -- and next year could very well be the break-out year for BI on data and event streams.

The vote on BPMN 2.0 is not the only thing on the agenda at this week's Object Management Group (OMG) meeting in Costa Rica. There is also the release of an RFP for a new Case Management standard, authored by Henk de Man of Cordys.

The RFP asserts that BPMN is inadequate for case management but that case management should leverage BPMN for the "process" part, and I agree with that. It also seeks to tie in to OMG government task force efforts on records management for the case folder part. That might be useful as an option, but I hope it's not a requirement.

At this week's Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston, Lee Bryant of Headshift looked at the adoption challenges for 2.0 technologies in companies that have grown up around a centralized model of IT, particularly for the second wave adopters required to move Enterprise 2.0 into the mainstream within an organization. He points out that we can't afford the high-friction, high-cost model of deploying technology and processes, but need to rebalance the role of people within the enterprise.

External tools are subject to evolutionary forces and either adapt or die quickly, whereas we are forced to put up with Paleolithic-era tools inside the enterprise because it's a captive market. 21st century enterprises, however, aren't putting up with that: they're going outside and getting the best possible tools for their uses on demand, rather than waiting for IT to provide a second-rate solution, months or years later.

"Cool" is not a word I would normally apply to IBM's business process management (BPM) software, but for the new BPM BlueWorks offering announced at the company's Impact 2009 event early this month, the term is appropriate. IBM bills BPM BlueWorks as a BPM community in the cloud, and it is that, plus a lot more. Actually, I think its greatest immediate impact could be to transform the market for business process analysis (BPA) tools.

The essence of BPA is a suite of tools for modeling the business and a repository for those modeling artifacts: not just processes, but strategies, goals, and metrics; value chains and capability maps; process models, from high-level maps to detailed BPMN diagrams; organizational entities and roles; policies and rules. All of these models are linked through the repository. Such suites are central to business process management at the enterprise level, and historically they have been aimed at a small priesthood of architects who don't mind the 5-figure cost per seat, mind-numbing complexity, and three weeks of intensive training. But you can't really create a culture of BPM within an enterprise, or move from isolated projects to an enterprise BPM program, without democratizing modeling and analysis. BlueWorks does that.

Last week a major outage affected 14% of Google users and caused widespread panic. Okay, it caused frustration, as users could not access their free search engines, free document management systems, and free e-mail systems. Perhaps they should ask for their money back. The comment that I kept hearing was "I had to use Yahoo." Priceless.

Still, the timing could not have been worse, considering that the US Government began discussing how cloud computing fits into their $78 billion IT budget for 2010. Many in the private sector are looking at cloud computing as well. The hype leading them there is the possibility of saving some money.

When I last had an in-depth look at NetWeaver BPM (business process management) late last year, it was in late beta; since then, it's been through the SAP ramp-up (early ship) process, and was released for unrestricted shipment last week. SAP's Wolfgang Hilpert and Thomas Vollmering briefed me at Sapphire on the current release and what's coming later this year. I'll be finishing up my review of the current release in an upcoming post, and as soon as Thomas forwards on the material that he promised to send (hint, hint), I'll be able to post a bit more on the future directions.

The newly released version is still lacking a lot of expected BPMS functionality, but has focused on the features that SAP's customers said that they needed the most: human-centric BPM (since there are existing products in the SAP suite that cover lower-level orchestration) and an integrated composition environment that can eventually be used for process composition across all layers -- human-facing tasks, Web services and core ERP processes.

When James Taylor and I wrote Smart Enough Systems: How to Deliver Competitive Advantage by Automating Hidden Decisions we knew it was going to be a lonely outpost for a while. It isn't easy for two guys to insert such a big idea into the collective consciousness. We didn't really have a natural sponsor for the whole picture to walk with us. The business rules community more or less understood it as a Business Rules Management System, which is a key component of the architecture. The predictive analytics crowd was interested as PA was prominent in the architecture, but in reality, very few really grasped EDM in its entirety. It was certainly easy to describe:

Thus, with unintended irony, did our former president illustrate the consequences of low expectations in the debate over No Child Left Behind. No Child's insistence on achieving a minimum competence in reading and arithmetic was scorned by many as too demanding, even "elitist," even though we all know that without those things both the child and the nation as a whole will suffer.

Today, as BPMN 2.0 rumbles toward finalization, we're seeing the same bogus charge again from those who should know better. This time it's posts from assorted dead-enders saying that BPMN is too complicated for business analysts. Usually they have their own proprietary notation which they say is far superior. They invariably take comfort from the conclusion by Michael zur Muehlen and Jan Recker, based on their survey around a year ago, that "all the BPMN you need" is the part that is unchanged from 1990s-era swimlane flowcharts. The rest, they say, is overkill.

BPMN 2.0 is almost here. If all goes as planned, it will be voted on by OMG members in June. Assuming it passes, that doesn't mean BPMN 2.0 is officially adopted and available in commercial tools, just that it has entered the "finalization" phase when tool vendors can start building it in. Even though the diagram notation of BPMN 2.0 appears little changed from previous versions, it represents a big step forward.

Most of the effort put into BPMN 2.0 has focused on making the diagrams executable on a process engine. That will be huge for customers of Oracle, IBM, SAP, and other vendors who elect to go that route. But even for the majority of today's process modelers, who are just thinking about BPMN as a diagramming tool for documenting, analyzing, and improving – not necessarily executing – their business processes, version 2.0 offers a lot to love.

Here's my pick of the top-five improvements:

I pledged to write a blog post for today, Ada Lovelace Day, in honor of a woman in technology who I admire. Although there have been some great women in technology throughout history -- Grace Hopper comes to mind, and is the subject of many blog posts today -- I wanted to write about someone who I know personally, and who I feel has contributed to my personal or professional development.

I didn't have any women mentors in the early part of my technology career. I went to a high school in suburban Toronto during the mid-70's where I had to fight to be admitted to the technical courses, and my mentors there were two male teachers who helped get me gain entry into the courses, then taught me the right (and wrong) way to wire circuits and design mechanical gearboxes. I moved on to engineering at University of Waterloo, where I recall one female professor and one woman teaching assistant during the entire time, neither of whom had a lasting impact. I did my work terms at mines, pulp mills and oil companies in northern Ontario and Alberta: again, not many women around. I came to believe that I didn't need to have other technical women in my life, since I was doing just fine with male mentors (a convenient belief, consider that was my only choice).

Gartner's had a good webinar series lately, including one last month with Alexa Bona on software licensing and pricing (link to "roll your own webinar" download of slides in PDF and audio in mp3 separately), as part of its series on IT and the economy. As enterprises look to tighten their belts, software licenses are one place to do that, both on-premise and software-as-a-service, but you need to have flexible terms and conditions in your software contract in order to be able to negotiate a reduction in fees, particularly if there are high switching costs to move to another platform.

For on-premise enterprise software, keep in mind that you don't own the software, you just have a license to use it. There's no secondary market for enterprise software: you can't sell off your Oracle or SAP licenses if you don't need them anymore. Even worse, in many cases, maintenance is from a single source: the original vendor. It's not that easy to walk away from enterprise software, however, even if you do find a suitable replacement, you've probably spent three to seven times the cost of the licenses on non-reusable external services (customization, training, ongoing services, maintenance), plus the time spent by internal resources and the commitment to build mindshare within the company to support the product. In many cases, changing vendors is not an option and, unfortunately, the vendors know that.

The stock market reaches a 12-year low... GM threatened with bankruptcy... this week's news presents fresh evidence of the fragile state of the US and global economies. But it has been abundantly clear since late last year that companies need to hit the reset button when it comes to setting enterprise information management and applications priorities. In the face of new economic realities, what would you still cite as top priority?

In an Intelligent Enterprise/InformationWeek Analytics survey conducted in January, we surveyed more than 300 information technology and business professionals about their attitudes and imperatives in five key areas of enterprise technology: information management, business intelligence, enterprise applications, performance management, and process management. In this post-economic-meltdown survey, readers shared their opinions on the squeakiest wheels requiring continued investment over the coming 12 to 24 months.

Keith Swenson's Go Flow blog continues to produce thought-provoking discussions of BPM issues. Check it out if you are not a subscriber. His latest concerns simulation, one of my hot buttons. A couple years ago I wrote that simulation was a "fake feature" -- one of those things vendors put in the tool to tick off the Gartner checklist but that don't do anything useful. Since then the situation has not improved to any great degree. This is too bad, because, as Keith suggests, simulation can be of great value in projecting the expected performance improvement from a process change before committing the resources needed to make that change.

But it would be better to say it could be of great value, if the tools were any good. I recently did a small consulting project for a BPMS vendor on what was good and not so good about their product. They really hyped their simulation tool, but I had to tell them it was, in my opinion, mostly useless, because it did not distinguish between the active time of a process activity, which consumes the assigned resource, and wait time (sometimes called lag time), which does not. It considered the total time to be active time.

Just in time for Valentine's Day and your C-Suite of CEO, CFO, COO and CIO budget review, SAP has announced SAP Business Suite 7, which is the latest version of the company's on-premise enterprise-level application suite. This application suite, which encompasses CRM, ERP, PLM, SCM and Supplier Relationship Management, is now brought out in a uniform product release that include everything from a newer version of their SAP NetWeaver application and integration platform and user interface capabilities in their applications that can support their vertical industries and demands of line of business. Now SAP has worked for many years to bring this major version to market but of course the economic environment and difficult time by companies using SAP has complicated the usual opportunity for organizations to upgrade. There are many business technology priorities for 2009 that have to be reconciled with the examination of SAP Business Suite 7 as a purchase this year and next. At the same time SAP is also trying to advance separately new solutions for priorities in business like enterprise performance management and for finance, risk management, and governance, risk and compliance with BI and information management that are also key priorities for many organizations using SAP today.

As explained in this story, TIBCO today made a splashy announcement about its first-ever hardware offering, the TIBCO Messaging Appliance P-7500. Well detailed are all the important facts about this appliance-based implementation of TIBCO's venerable Rendezvous messaging software: 10 times higher message volume capacity, a 50-percent reduction in message latency, and better predictability than message bus deployments on general-purpose hardware. What's more, the 4U box will bring data centers comparable message processing capacity with one tenth the physical footprint and one tenth the power consumption of conventional deployments (and even better if you're replacing really old servers).

What's missing from the story is competitive context. To wit, TIBCO's biggest competitor, IBM, entered the appliance-based message bus market way back in 2006. But that's not to say that TIBCO doesn't have something to crow about – at least for now.

Today Autonomy announced it intends to buy Interwoven.

It was a surprise move for sure. Not that I was surprised that Interwoven was acquired, far from it; I expected that. But I did not expect them to be acquired by Autonomy. Autonomy has grown by acquisition and is one of the few firms that recently announced good revenues and a bullish outlook for 2009.

In keeping with other recently installed change agents, Elise Olding of Gartner offers this Webinar on your first 100 days as a business process (BP) director. As she points out, you have 100 days to make some key first impressions and get things rolling, and although you may not necessarily deliver very much in that time, it sets the tone for the ongoing BPM efforts.

She breaks this down into what you should be doing and delivering in each of the first three months:

Continue reading "The First 100 Days: Set the Tone, Get Results"

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Microsoft's Big BI Ads... and About Those Editors' Choice Awards

Posted by Cindi Howson
Tuesday, January 13, 2009
11:44 AM


I know business intelligence is becoming mainstream when my husband asks me about it in the midst of a Giants' football game (note, we are in NJ, but my son has converted me to a Packer's fan, so our real misery was last week. Go figure). It seems Microsoft has launched a new advertising campaign where business intelligence gets top billing. You and your business users will be seeing the ads in print and TV. That's great for business people who need to be the driving force behind BI. It's also great news for IT people who needs the business to care about BI.


I applaud any efforts that raise the awareness of BI, particularly in this tough economy when making better decisions – based on facts – and operating efficiently is a matter of survival for many.

Continue reading "Microsoft's Big BI Ads... and About Those Editors' Choice Awards"

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SAP 'Fully Integrates' Business Objects

Posted by Doug Henschen
Thursday, January 8, 2009
10:47 AM


Earlier this week, I joined a few colleagues at InformationWeek to take part in an exclusive interview with SAP's Bill McDermott, President and CEO of Global Field Operations and an Executive Board Member. The two-hour discussion was broad ranging, but I honed in on the state of Business Objects and demand for performance management and process management. McDermott called the Bobj acquisition "one of the greatest moves that SAP ever made," and he also detailed a few ways in which the business intelligence vendor is being more closely integrated into SAP.

Never one to sound downbeat, McDermott said the acquisition has "turned out so well" because "Business Objects is platform agnostic, so when you're operating in a heterogeneous environment and you want to unify a management team on a common platform approach, you have to be able to extract data from any source. You have to be able to process that data very quickly and you have to be able to pop that data up to each role in the value chain based on the attributes that they care about. Before Business Objects, we couldn't talk to CEOs, CFOs and other executives about that as intelligently as we can today."

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Satyam's Stunning Offshore Fiasco

Posted by Rajan Chandras
Thursday, January 8, 2009
9:18 AM


In news that is still unfolding, the founder and chairman of Satyam Computer Services, India's fourth largest offshore services vendor, has made a stunning admission of massive financial fraud. Are you impacted? If so, how do you react?

First, the event, in case it's news to you: Satyam co-founder and chairman Ramalinga Raju has just admitted to cooking the books... for years. In his words...

"What started as a marginal gap between actual operating profit and the one reflected in the books of accounts continued to grow over the years. It has attained unmanageable proportions as the size of company operations grew. It was like riding a tiger, not knowing how to get off without being eaten."

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Who Loves the Incumbent Vendor?

Posted by Alan Pelz-Sharpe
Friday, December 26, 2008
10:00 AM


One of my favorite little phrases is "double edged sword," and I found a perfect application for it recently: the discussion of "incumbent vendors" — those whose product(s) you're already using.

Imagine you have been using a particular vendor's technology for the past five or ten years. It could be EMC|Documentum or Open Text or any one of the 197 other products CMS Watch evaluates. I'll just call them Vendor X. But now it's time for an upgrade, or even a replacement of that technology. It did what it was supposed to do at the time, but now technology has moved on and it's time for a refresh. So you're kicking off a major project and starting up the RFP and shortlisting process.


Continue reading "Who Loves the Incumbent Vendor?"

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BPMN's Three Levels, Reconsidered

Posted by Bruce Silver
Tuesday, December 23, 2008
9:38 AM


Several months ago, I got an urgent request from OMG – the organization responsible for BPMN and other BPM standards – to give a short blurb I had written a permanent URL on my Web site. The blurb was a promotional piece for my BPMessentials training called "Three Levels of Process Modeling with BPMN." OMG proudly proclaims that BPMN assumes no particular methodology, but the notion of using it at three specific "levels" was just something I made up when I launched my BPMN course, to describe its value to different audiences. Now OMG needed it as a "reference" for their OCEB certification exam? I protested. "That's just ad copy! It's not in the standard. You can't make that a reference." But they did, and you can still find it here.

I've now been doing BPMN training for two years, and only recently have I begun to appreciate the true nature of BPMN usage levels. This reconsidered view may help you better understand what is rapidly becoming the one significant standard in BPM.


Continue reading "BPMN's Three Levels, Reconsidered"

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Will IBM Add Analytics to its Toolbelt?

Posted by Doug Henschen
Thursday, December 18, 2008
12:30 PM


The gist of Ambuj Goyal's message in this Q&A interview is that predictive and statistical modeling — key offerings for the likes of SAS and SPSS — are overrated. IBM has what Goyal describes as better, cheaper alternatives in a mix of techniques developed for industry- and domain-specific challenges. Okay, I'm fine with challenging conventional wisdom and seeking the simplest possible solutions, but I also believe there's good reason SAS, SPSS, and a few other analytics specialists have grown large and stable businesses. What's more, I won't be surprised if and when IBM acquires one of these analytics vendors.

Continue reading "Will IBM Add Analytics to its Toolbelt?"

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What Makes a Good Business Analyst?

Posted by Rajan Chandras
Friday, December 12, 2008
3:28 PM


Good business solutions begin with good business analysis. But what's needed to excel as a business analyst and to get projects started on a good footing?

Much has been (and will continue to be) said about the set of skills that go to making a good business analyst. Forrester Research, for example, has published a spreadsheet (called the Business Analyst Assessment Workbook -- Note: subscription required) that lists more than 150 attributes of a good business analyst, grouped into categories such as Core Capabilities, Business Knowledge, Job-Specific Skills, Technical Knowledge etc. (I was particularly pleased to see this last category: It is important but not quite obvious that business analysts should also have a rudimentary general understanding of technology environments and architectures… mostly built up through seeing past analysis engagements fructify into delivered solutions).


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Surround the Warehouse: Prediction for 2009

Posted by Neil Raden
Thursday, December 11, 2008
1:31 PM


The data warehouse has been positioned as the sole source of analytical data in organizations, but that is changing. Rather than trying to remodel the data warehouse to accommodate fresher and more detailed operational data (near real-time activity in operational systems, process logs, etc.), these data sources will operate in parallel (or horizontally, whichever word you like) as complementary feeds to analytics. It takes too long and is too expensive to expand the data warehouse concept to do this.

BI tools like Microstrategy have to retool to be able to query multiple sources to satisfy a single query (they are doing that in the upcoming release 9, I believe). All of the other BI vendors will do the same.


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Build Your Social Network Before You Get Laid Off

Posted by Sandy Kemsley
Wednesday, December 10, 2008
10:30 AM


I know, this advice is completely obvious advice, right? Wrong.

I recently received an email from a friend who works in telecommunications sales with the subject line "Networking," informing her list of contacts (I assume; at least she was polite enough to BCC us all) that she had been laid off and was looking for work, and listing her qualifications. I immediately emailed back to ask if she had a profile on LinkedIn or any other sort of online resume that I could look at to see if I knew of anything that might fit, and she responded "What is LinkedIn? Is it similar to Facebook?" Needless to say, she's not on either of those two very popular social networking sites.

That prompted me to do my quarterly LinkedIn maintenance: import the email addresses from my contact list, see who's on LinkedIn that I'm not already connected to (LinkedIn shows you if a person has a profile if you enter their email address), and connect to them — if you just received a LinkedIn invitation from me, that's why. What amazed me in doing that exercise was how many of my business contacts don't have a LinkedIn profile, or at least don't have one linked to their business email address. Do they think that they can never lose their job, or are they just not convinced of the power of online social networks? Both are dangerous opinions to hold in today's economic climate.


Continue reading "Build Your Social Network Before You Get Laid Off"

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'Soul of the Web' At Stake

Posted by Doug Henschen
Monday, November 17, 2008
5:08 PM


I'm here at Mashup Camp in Mountain View, CA, where weighty topics including "the most exciting development environment ever" and "a battle for the soul of the Internet" are being debated. The environment being discussed, of course, is the mashup, which Camp co-founder David Berlind predicted will "trump all other development ecosystems" because it's focused on quickly and easily knitting together the meat of the functionality rather than all the system-level code required in conventional development and computing.

"Just as the spreadsheet enabled all sorts of people to become number crunchers, mashups are going to enable a much larger community to become Web developers," Berlind said in his kickoff keynote.

The battle for the Web is forming between Adobe Flash and Microsoft Silverlight, on the one hand, and OpenAjax on the other. The topic came up during a panel discussion on "Why Ajax Standards Matter," which didn't sound too promising going in. Things started getting really interesting when Christopher Keene, CEO of WaveMaker Software, warned, "there's a struggle for the soul of the Web," where rich Internet and Web application development is concerned, and "proprietary engines like Adobe Flash and Microsoft Silverlight are coming on strong."


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ChoicePoint Blends BPM, BAM and BI

Posted by Sandy Kemsley
Thursday, November 13, 2008
7:32 PM


I attended a session at Software AG's recent Innovation World 2008 conference in which Cory Kirspel, VP of identity risk management at ChoicePoint (a LexisNexis company), described how the company has created an external-facing solution using business process management (BPM), business activity monitoring (BAM) and an enterprise service bus (ESB). ChoicePoint screens and authenticates people for employment screening, insurance services and other identity-related purposes, plus does court document retrieval. There's a fine line to walk here: companies need to protect the privacy of individuals while minimizing identify fraud.

Even though the company only really does two things — credential and investigate people and businesses — it had 43+ separate applications on 12 platforms with various technologies in order to do it. Not only did that make it hard to do what they needed internally, customers were also wanting to integrate ChoicePoint's systems directly into their own with an implementation time of only three to four months, and provide visibility into the processes.


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Process Intelligence, CEP and Operational BI

Posted by Neil Raden
Tuesday, November 11, 2008
7:49 AM


In case you haven't heard it yet, here comes a new product category: Process Intelligence. But what does it mean? All of these terms overlap: Operational BI, Pervasive BI, Operational Intelligence, Process Intelligence, BAM, CEP (Complex Event Processing), Decision Management, Decision Services. Arguments over definitions tend to be vigorous for two reasons. First, the taxonomy of product classes tends to be pretty leaky and second, the stakes are so low.

The reason it is important to get some clarity on the definitions is that the wider BI industry (and I don't know what to call it) is driven by marketing, not by function or requirements. Software vendors invent things, acquire or get acquired by other vendors and give names to the combined capabilities they possess. Then it's packaged and sold to companies.


Continue reading "Process Intelligence, CEP and Operational BI"

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Put BPMN and BPEL in Perspective

Posted by Bruce Silver
Wednesday, November 5, 2008
10:06 AM


Anyone interested in the history of business process management (BPM) technology (brief as it is) should not miss Ismael Ghalimi's recounting of it, "Why All This Matters." As a seminal figure in that history, Ghalimi's discussion of the relationship between BPMN and BPEL, the two important standards in BPM, is especially notable. Neither standard is perfect. But while BPMN has succeeded in the BPMS world in spite of its shortcomings, BPEL's shortcomings have largely confined it to the SOA/integration space, where "business-empowerment" does not have especially high priority. And in spite of the fact that BPEL was originally conceived by IBM and Microsoft as an Intalio/BPML-killer — Ismael does not say that directly, but I will — his post insists that BPEL remains central to BPM's (and Intalio's) larger mission.

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Taylor and Raden Define Decision Management

Posted by Sandy Kemsley
Thursday, October 30, 2008
3:42 PM


Opening the second day of the Business Rules Forum, James Taylor and Neil Raden gave a keynote about competing on decisions. First up was James, who started with a definition of what a decision is (and isn't), speaking particularly about operation decisions that we often see in the context of automated business processes. He made a good point that your customers react to your business decisions as if they were deliberate and personal to them, when often they're not; James' premise is that you should be making these deliberate and personal, providing the level of micro-targeting that's appropriate to your business (without getting too creepy about it), but that there's a mismatch between what customers want and what most organizations provide.

Decisions have to be built into processes and systems that manage your business, so although business may drive change, IT gets to manage it. James used the term "orthogonal" when talking about the crossover between process and rules; I used this same expression in a discussion with him yesterday in discussing how processes and decisions should not be dependent upon each other: if a decision and a process are interdependent, then you're likely dealing with a process decision that should be embedded within the process, rather than a business decision.


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From Here to Agility: Ron Ross on Rules

Posted by Sandy Kemsley
Wednesday, October 29, 2008
9:25 AM


The good news is that it's a lovely sunny, breezy and cool day: perfect fall weather for Toronto. The bad news is that I'm in Orlando, and was hoping to wear shorts more than sweaters this week. However, I'm here to attend — and speak at — the Business Rules Forum, not sit by the pool.

Ron Ross, executive editor of BRCommunity.com, kicked off this week's Business Rules Forum with a keynote called From Here to Agility; agility, of course, is one of the key reasons that you consider implementing business rules, whether in the context of BPM or other applications. It's pretty well attended — probably 200 people here at the opening keynote, and likely a lot of vendors off setting up their booths for later today.

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8 Things You Should Tell Your CEO

Posted by Sandy Kemsley
Thursday, October 23, 2008
2:11 PM


When Pegasystems invited me to attend this week's PegaWorld conference outside of Washington, D.C., I took a quick glance at the agenda and thought that it said that George Clooney would be speaking. I immediately accepted. On second look, I noticed that it was actually George Colony, founder and CEO of Forrester Research.

The somewhat-less-famous George talked about business technology (BT) in the format of eight things that he would tell your CEO over coffee:


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Pegasystems Bows Platform as a Service

Posted by Sandy Kemsley
Friday, October 17, 2008
9:55 AM


Earlier this month, Pegasystems announced a "Platform as a Service" (PaaS) business process management offering, and I had a chance prior to that to chat with Kerim Akgonul, VP of product management. My first thought on reading the phrase "internal cloud" was that they were just hitching a ride on the cloud bandwagon — check out James Governor's 15 Ways to Tell It's Not Cloud Computing for all the reasons that this isn't cloud computing — but there are definite cloud-like capabilities to what they're offering from the viewpoint of the individual projects, although not to the organization as a whole.

A problem that I see in many large customer organizations is that BPM projects end up being departmental, and even if the vendor manages to sell enterprise-wide licensing, it often ends up only deployed in one department. In many cases, this is because departments don't want to share BPMS instances, and it's just too hard to go through the effort of deploying another separate server and instance for every project. There's also the need for multiple instances for development and testing, usually hand-installed at some cost. This is exacerbated in large organizations with a variety of geographically-dispersed business units, where they may have several different independent BPM projects on the go at the same time, and have difficulty in applying successes in one area to another.


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Be My Guest at BPM New York

Posted by Bruce Silver
Thursday, October 16, 2008
9:24 AM


I will be chairing an all-new BPMS Track at BPMInstitute.org’s upcoming BPM Conference in New York City at The Roosevelt Hotel (November 5-6). This track analyzes the latest generation of BPM Suites, and features an extended panel on November 5 in which leading vendors show how their offerings address key topics such as business-IT alignment, agility and time to value, end user experience, and optimizing business performance. We did this in San Francisco and it worked very well. The discussion was lively and open, and I learned things about each product that I didn’t know before.

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Tech Investment Advice for Tough Times

Posted by Tony Byrne
Wednesday, October 15, 2008
9:46 AM


As bailouts become a global phenomenon, it's time to review what this all means for you, the technology buyer.

I think there are two main issues here:

1. The immediate liquidity crisis and any lingering effects that may lead to longer-term financial sclerosis
2. An enduring recession — which previously left much of the enterprise and web software space unscathed — getting deepened and extended


Continue reading "Tech Investment Advice for Tough Times"

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Oracle 'Interoperates, Integrates and Unifies' Business Process Management

Posted by Bruce Silver
Friday, October 3, 2008
10:33 AM


At Oracle Open World last week, industry analysts got a good look at Oracle's BPM strategy and roadmap in the wake of the BEA acquisition. Overall, my conclusion is Oracle is showing the rest of the world the right way to do software acquisitions. BPM is progressing along the path of "interoperate, integrate, unify" that Oracle claims it tries to follow with all of its acquisitions.

Before the BEA deal there was the Oracle BPM solution comprised of SOA Suite (in particular BPEL Process Manager) and BPA Suite (rebranded ARIS with a BPEL roundtripping extension), and there was BEA's AquaLogic BPM. For details on those, see my BPMS Report series on BPMInstitute.org. Now there is the Oracle BPM Suite, which includes both Oracle BPM (rebranded from ALBPM) and BPEL PM. They "interoperate" in the sense that each can call the other as a subprocess. (Not a big deal, but Oracle did this in 100 days whereas WebSphere-FileNet took a year.) BPA Suite is still there, but more off to the side where it belongs; Oracle now calls it "enterprise modeling."


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Is Business Activity Monitoring a BI Application?

Posted by Seth Grimes
Monday, September 29, 2008
12:33 PM


A question I posed to a LinkedIn group — Is Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) a BI Application? — sparked interesting discussion. I noted and asked, "BAM involves dashboards and analyses for business processes, and BI isn't typically very processy. If not BI, who 'owns' BAM?" There have been 9 responses to date, including two from Howard Dresner, who has done as much as anyone to shape current-day BI. The responses speak to growing interest in operational BI, and they hint at the impact that complex event processing (CEP) will have on enterprise analytics.

BAM displays operational performance indicators in numerical and graphical form, often backed by rules-based alerting capabilities. BAM monitors execution of business processes and is part of operational-performance management solutions. It can be incorporated in line-of-business and operational interfaces, for instance for contact-center management, and in automated control systems. As the speed-of-business accelerates, BAM is more important than ever.

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Can Roles and Agility Coexist in Oracle Fusion Middleware?

Posted by Neil Raden
Monday, September 29, 2008
9:10 AM


I got so many letters (isn't that a quaint way to say "email messages?") about the Hy Minsky posting that I wanted to pass along a fairly readable paper he wrote that spells out his Financial Instability Hypothesis.

Back to the topic. I listened carefully for the better part of two-and-a-half hours last week to Thomas Kurian, Sr. VP of Oracle, present the entire product set and positioning of Oracle's Fusion Middleware. He didn't crack any jokes and more or less stuck to the slide deck; nevertheless it was amazingly interesting. I liked almost everything I heard, especially the parts that were user-centric, such as unified metadata, common business semantics with shared logical models, single development environment, etc.


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Dashboards, Decisions and Wall Street

Posted by Doug Henschen
Tuesday, September 16, 2008
2:12 PM


Today I'm at the Gartner Event Processing Summit in Stamford, Conn., and much of the buzz here is about what's going down on Wall Street. That's no surprise given that about 70 percent of the attendees here are from financial institutions. There have been plenty of jokes about not being able to buy paper clips, let alone enterprise technology. That said, I did see at least some tire kicking in the exhibit hall, and among the 15 vendors exhibiting at this smallish, 150-attendee hotel event, almost every one of them seemed to be showing off a dashboard-style interface.

As Gartner analyst Roy Schulte's observes in this week's in-depth Q&A interview, dashboards showing current (or at least near-real-time) business metrics have never been hotter. We're seeing these types of interfaces from BI vendors, BAM vendors and complex-event-processing (CEP) vendors alike. It's a healthy sign of a meeting of the minds between business and IT.


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Gartner Sums Up SaaS-Based BPM Options

Posted by Sandy Kemsley
Friday, September 12, 2008
9:58 AM


Is software as a service a viable option for process improvement projects? Michele Cantera covered some of the same material here at this week's Gartner BPM Summit in Washington DC, as the SaaS and BPM session in February, but there was some new information as well. For example, based on 2007 estimates, she segmented the BPM SaaS adopters into four categories:

• Pragmatists, forming 49% of the market, are replacing departmental on-premise applications but don't have an enterprise-wide scope.
• Beginners, 40% of the market, are replacing low-end software tools with simple utility applications. These are often small or medium businesses who don't want to grow an IT department.
• Masters, 10% of the market, are weaving SaaS applications into their enterprise-wide application portfolio.
• Visionaries, a mere 1%, are actively replacing on-premise applications with SaaS wherever possible.


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Customers Say the Darnedest Things

Posted by Sandy Kemsley
Thursday, September 11, 2008
10:45 AM


At yesterday's lunch presentation at the Gartner BPM Summit in Washington DC, Alan Trefler (CEO of Pegasystems) discussed how it's necessary — and possible — to put business process management right in the hands of the business users and let them do it themselves. There will be some IT architectural oversight and support, of course, but you just have to convince the users, Tom Sawyer-like, that they really want to paint this fence.

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The Future of BPM: Flyin' With Eagles or Scratchin' with Chickens?

Posted by Sandy Kemsley
Tuesday, September 9, 2008
11:29 AM


Peter Dadam of University of Ulm helped wrap up last week's BPM 2008: Milan conference with a keynote on the future of BPM: Flying with the Eagles, or Scratchin' with the Chickens? He went through some of his history in getting into research (in the IBM DB2 area), with a conclusion that when you ask current users about what they want, they tend to use the current technology as a given, and only request workarounds within the constraints of the existing solution. The role of research is, in part, to disseminate knowledge about what is possible: the new paradigm for the future. Anyone who has worked on the bleeding edge of innovation recognizes this, and realizes that you first have to educate the market on what's possible before you can begin to start developing the use cases for it.

He discussed the nature of university research versus industrial research, where the pendulum has swung from research being done in universities, to the more significant research efforts being done (or being perceived as being done) in industrial research centers, to the closing of many industrial research labs and a refocusing on pragmatic, product-oriented research by the rest. This puts the universities back in the position of being able to offer more visionary research, but there is a risk of just being the research tail that the industry dog wags.


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Will Open Text Suffer Acquisition Indigestion?

Posted by Alan Pelz-Sharpe
Friday, September 5, 2008
10:43 AM


Yesterday I got a call from my friend Paul Steep at Scotia Capital regarding this announcement from ECM vendor Open Text. Yes, you guessed it, Open Text is acquring again. Just as I predicted in July the firm has announced its intentions to buy Captaris.

At first glance it appears to be a good deal for Open Text, as it provides them with capture technology (image and text recognition, a' la Kofax) that they previously lacked. Captaris themselves acquired Oce Document Technology (ODT) a German-based forms recognition firm in January 2008 and absorbed its DOKuStar product range.

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Social Software Supports BPM: Let Us Count the Ways

Posted by Sandy Kemsley
Friday, September 5, 2008
10:09 AM


I've been excited about attending this weeks' BPM 2008: Milan conference for months since it's focused on the research that's happening in the field of BPM, rather than the usual vendor and analyst conference that I attend. As a prelude to the conference, there was a full-day workshops on various BPM topics, and I attended a session on BPM and Social Software.

The workshop was chaired by Selmin Nurcan of the University of Paris and Rainer Schmidt of Aalen University, and will consist of discussion of the various research papers contributed by the attendees — in fact, I seem to be one of the few people in the (small) audience who has not contributed a paper.

Before we got into the individual papers, Rainer Schmidt gave an overview of the issues in BPM and social software. I gave a presentation two years ago at the BPMG conference in London on BPM and Web 2.0 (the terms Enterprise 2.0 and social software were just starting to be used back then) that covers some of the same subject matter.


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Just a User

Posted by Neil Raden
Tuesday, September 2, 2008
1:26 PM


When you sign up for a Webinar, or even just register to download a white paper, you can be sure that you will shortly get a follow-up phone call. The caller almost never has any inkling what you or their client does, so the questions are sometimes amusing, other times pretty dumb. I haven't gotten so old and cranky yet that this ruins my day, but I got a call last week that was notable.

After the brief introduction, the question was, "I want to ask some questions about your database."

"Excuse me," I said, "I'm an analyst."

"A what?"


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Business Objects Summit Q&A

Posted by Sandy Kemsley
Wednesday, August 13, 2008
12:53 PM


At the conclusion of Business Object's Influencer Summit yesterday, Jonathan Becher hosted a wrap-up Q&A with Doug Merritt, Marge Breya and Sanjay Poonen. Rather than attributing quotes to each executive, I've consolidated the responses on five topics:

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Business Objects Says 'Look Beyond BI'

Posted by Cindi Howson
Wednesday, August 13, 2008
11:56 AM


"It's a case where one plus one equals three." Speaking at the first-ever Business Objects Influencer Summit in Boston this week, this is how Sanjay Poonen, SVP and GM of Performance Optimization Applications, explained an increase in BI revenues at the company since it became a unit of SAP.

Normally, following an acquisition, sales decline for the first year or so. Not so with SAP's acquisition of Business Objects, with Poonen claiming sales were 30% higher in the first half of the year compared to 2007. He explained that there is a difference in market dynamics when a market leader acquires another leader versus a niche player. Surprising as well is that company officials estimate half the sales came from new accounts, so the strong performance is not only from Business Objects tapping existing SAP customers.

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Business Objects Keynote: BI Meets Process

Posted by Sandy Kemsley
Wednesday, August 13, 2008
9:39 AM


I was in rainy Boston yesterday at the Business Objects Influencer Summit, which was kicked off with Jonathan Becher, SVP of Marketing for Business Objects. It's a very process-oriented message (which explains why I'm here): using business intelligence to drive process efficiency, improve insight to close the gap between strategy and execution, and add flexibility to create new business processes that align operations to strategy.

Becher was joined by Doug Merritt, EVP and GM of Business User Global Sales (moving from a product role), who continued with the message of how total insight allows organizations to optimize business performance. Merritt discussed a number of customer case studies, focusing on how their easy-to-use end-user tools are being used to solve real business problems.


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Five Key Questions About the IBM-ILog Deal

Posted by Doug Henschen
Tuesday, July 29, 2008
12:50 PM


With apologies to Gertrude Stein, there's not enough "there" there in the business rules management system market, what with only a handful of players, but yesterday's announcement by IBM that it will acquire ILog will certainly spark aftershocks. I came across a few particularly keen questions from a former industry insider.

To go straight to the source, I first spoke to an ILog exec yesterday who shared this bottom-line assessment of why the timing for this deal: "The market is maturing, and business rules are taking a legitimate position in infrastructure," said Jean-Franηois Abramatic, Chief Product Officer. "It's clear now that business rules are an essential part of business process management/services-oriented architecture platform."


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