Gartner BPM Summit
February 26-28, San Diego California

On February 26-28, 2007, I attended the BPM Summit in San Diego, California, along with approximately 1100 other attendees. I attended the conference as a guest of Singularity. In addition, I spent altogether about a full day at the BPM Technology Showcase. I made a short appearance at the BPM Summit’s Hospitality Suites. I spent a short amount of time with e.POWER chief technologist Steve Kruba. And I found that one of the most impressive speakers was Sonya Sepahban from Northrop Grumman. According to Gartner, Sepahban is the Sector Vice President of Mission Excellence and a Chief Engineer for the Northrop Grumman Space Technology organization. I loosely following track D of the conference, titled “Managing the BPM Technology Environment”. Following is the list of sessions I attended. Below this list I provide some of my observances and impressions of the conference.

Monday:
Welcome and Introduction
Keynote: Business Processes: The Foundation Linking Business and IT (Simon Hayward, Gartner)
Process Modeling for Profit (Marc Kerremans and Robert Jirgal, Gartner)
BPMS: A Change from Business as Usual (Janelle Hill, Gartner)
Lunch Address (Pegasystems)
BPM in the Real World: Linking BPM and SOA Delivers Long-Term Flexibility (IBM)
The Power of BPM and SOA for Human and System-Based Process Optimization (Metastorm)
Mission Excellence in a Process Management Culture (Sonya Sepahban, Northrop Grumman Space Technology)

Tuesday:
Keynote: The BPM and SOA Elixer (Daryl Plummer, Gartner)
Keynote: What BPM Means to Business Innovation (Bruce Williams, CEO of Savvi International Corporation)
Build for Change Winning Through Business Agility (Pegasystems)
Best Practices and Methods (Appian)
Lunch Address (Appian)
The Service Repository Enables BPM (Daryl Plummer, Gartner)
Collaborative BPM: A New Way to Think (Toby Bell, Gartner)
The Bigger Picture—Embedding BPM into Enterprise SOA (SAP)
Building the Business Case for Business Process Management (BEA)
Securing BPM (Neil MacDonald, Gartner)

Wednesday:
Business Applications Through 2010: Major Changes Will Affect Your Process Environment (Yvonne Genovese, Gartner)
People Ready Processes on the Microsoft Platform (Microsoft)

My favorite speakers were Daryl Plummer, Bruce Williams, Sonya Sepahban, Neil MacDonald, and Janelle Hill.

Daryl Plummer is hilarious. For instance, at one point in his talk he had us chanting “POLY-MORPH-ISM”. He wanted us to do that, he said, just because it was such a cool word. He said that even if one doesn’t understand the meaning of the word, they sound smart just by including it in their vocabulary. Plummer told us straight-up that we were all wasting our lives if we did not use TiVo. And I don’t really remember what he said but he gave some kind of analogy of COBOL programmers liking beer while Visual Basic programmers liking wine and Assembly programmers liking whiskey. I don’t really remember exactly what he said but it was funny at the time. He also said that it was a very sad day in America when we were all terrified of Y2K and treated COBOL programmers like they were Gods. At one point he said that he had been a geek throughout his life but that he was also cool because he was a musician. Then someone from the audience yelled out that it didn’t matter – he was still a geek.

On a somewhat more serious note, he gave an analogy that I am sure Dr. Bob Ellinger would appreciate. He said that people are service oriented and event driven. Every morning we hop into a shower and use a water "service" to clean ourselves. If the phone rings, or the neighbor's cat somehow gets cornered by our Rottweiler, we hop out to handle the "event." If we answer the phone-ring event, we are using a phone "service"; and, he figured that our neighbor (the cat lover) would consider it a "service" if we saved Fluffy from becoming Rottweiler kibble. So, he exclaimed that people are service oriented and event driven and that our systems should be service oriented and event driven too.

On an even more serious note, he said that Business Process Management and Service-Oriented Architecture each have significant contributions to business agility, cost reduction, and speed to market -- but combined, their power multiplies. He said that BPM will be one the largest consumers of services, and will take on aspects of service creation through linking to standard Service Oriented Development of Applications (SODA) environments:

The subtitles in his talk were:
The Business Case for BPM & SOA
Why is There SOA in My BPM and BPM in My SOA?
“Don’t Come to the SOA/BPM Picnic without the SODA”

He summarized the results of Gartner's 2006 CIO survey (he said that "CIOs are programmers that manage to pass for normal folk"), where it was found that the top business trend and concern is improvement of business processes. He said that there is a lot of pressure to automate processes and improve them and that this is going to happen only with SOA and BPM complimenting one another. He said that processes need services to be implemented quickly and effectively, and services aren't of much use unless they are consumed by processes. He said that SOA allows us to build an infrastructure of shared services for ready consumption by processes.

He said that one of the key reasons for SOA and shared services is that legacy applications are still hanging around, in spite of all our efforts to get rid of them. Adding a service layer over the legacy applications allows us to create higher-level services and processes that consume these services without having to know how -- or even knowing what platform they use -- to access the data directly on its original platform.

Plummer said that SOA is an architectural style: not web services (although web services can be used to implement SOA), and is not a particular product but is encapsulated functionality accessed through a standardized interface that allows for loose coupling of services and applications. (He also had us chant “EN-CAP-SU-LA-TION”.)

He continued with a discussion of event-driven processes (he refers to them as event-driven services in counterpoint to BPM-driven services). He said that services, properly implemented, can be combined into event-driven processes rather than structured, pre-defined processes in order to be able to respond to events that happen in an unexpected order or manner. His view of the "new" application container is user interface and navigation via portal, security and management as part of the network, and logic and data via collection of services. Explicit orchestration ties all this together, which provides agility in the process model.

He then pointed out that SOA is never finished: in fact, it's designed to never be finished. He used the analogy of the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, Spain, a cathedral that's been under construction for more than 100 years, and continues to change even as it is built. He covered some things about development techniques to be used when developing services within an SOA infrastructure, and highlighted the business service repository as a centerpiece for BPM's use of SOA.

He introduced the Agility Quotient, which is "...calculated by measuring the things that inhibit agility and examining how willing one is to overcome them", which someone said striked them as being a new age-y business measurement that did more to increase Gartner's consulting revenues than any customers' agility.

Another point he made was that agility and speed were not synonymous. He said that you can very quickly create another legacy environment (he said in fact you probably already had).

Bruce Williams of Savvi International is the author of Six Sigma for Dummies (and the accompanying workbook) and Lean for Dummies. Williams pointed out one view of BPM: that of a faster, better treadmill, but everyone was still doing the same old things. He said that BPM is more than that. He said that it was not just operational efficiencies and defect reductions, but measurements and activity monitoring, process controls, and integration between systems and services. Furthermore, he said that the biggest value from BPM was in business innovation, not process improvement. He asked us why innovation was important. The answer was pretty obvious, although ignored by many traditional organizations: the lifecycle of every product or service eventually comes to an end, often because someone else introduces a disruptive product or service to the marketplace that obsolesces the old way of doing things. He said that ultimately, innovation always trumps optimization.

Williams continued with a lot of stuff about why the innovation cycle looks like it does. He talked about classic reasons for why products or services pass their peak: fatigue, customer demands, market redirections, competitive pressures, technological changes, globalization effects, organizational changes, demographic shifts, regulatory constraints, economic effects, supply drifts and many other factors. He pointed out, however, that most US firms have no program in place for fostering innovation, and don't even have a clear idea of how to become more innovative. He said that most companies are focused on product innovation, and mostly ignoring things like business model innovation, business process innovation, and things such as innovation in accounting practices and risk management.

He went through some of the different dimensions of innovation -- reactive versus proactive; incremental/sustaining versus radical/disruptive; formal versus informal -- and looked at how these dimensions mapped onto some specific cases. When he referred to Americans as the kings of innovation, however, it made some doubt his world view overall and I am sure left many with a bit of a bad taste: it came across somewhat as ethnocentric flag-waving that probably has no place at a business conference. While Americans lead innovation in a number of areas, there are many other countries in the world that are leaders in their own areas of innovation. He said that most people in the world lived in cities and that they all wanted the same things as those of us at the conference. He showed a slide of things such as SUVs, dogs, large houses, etc. and tried to give the impression that everyone in the world wanted what many Americans seem to treasure: an SUV full of consumer goods and a monster-sized home in the suburbs. He pointed out with some pride that he had completed a survey which concluded with the prediction that if everyone in the world lived like he did, we would need over 7 planets worth of resources to accommodate them.

At the end of it all, he had very little to say about BPM, but a lot to say about innovation and suggested that was one of the prime motivators for why one might be considering BPM.

Alan Trefler, the CEO of Pegasystems spoke. He was engaging with amusing graphics but one phrase that really grabbed me was "you have to get away from the poisonous import/export environment so that BPM doesn't become the next CASE". He said that the one word that will kill organizational agility is “export”. What he meant by both of these statements is that by modelling in one tool, then exporting it to an execution environment where there is imperfect round-tripping, there's a danger of having the processes caught in the execution environment where one is stuck maintaining it in a more code-like environment: presumably, the execution environment has imperfect modelling, or you wouldn't be using another modelling tool in the first place. This makes the modelling tool useless except for the initial design process, and therefore hinders the future agility of the process. He says that CASE (think back to the 80's and 90's) introduced nice-looking tools which generated code that could then be "tweaked", but one then ended up doing further code maintenance in the code environment rather than the CASE environment because there wasn't proper round-tripping between the environments. He said that in the world of BPM, this is not what we want.

At both Gartner BPM Summits that I have attended, there has been a lot of talk on Six Sigma. I, for one, don’t have a clue what Six Sigma really is. I guess I need to pick up that “Six Sigma for Dummies” book. In fact, that was the focus of Sepahban’s discussion.

Jim Sinur introduced the idea of a BPM Maturity Model. The following paragraphs describe the five levels of this model. I also brought back a poster summarizing these levels. Perhaps I will hang it in my new work area since the walls are so badly banged up and in dire need of a paint job.

Level 0: Acknowledge operational inefficiencies, with potential for the use of some business intelligence technology to measure and monitor business activities. Maybe be need a -1 level wherein the organization is in complete denial about their operational inefficiencies. In CMM (the Capability Maturity Model for software development processes), for example, level 0 is equivalent to having no maturity around the processes; level 1 is the "initial" stage where an organization realizes that they're really in a lot of trouble and need to do something about it.
Level 1: Process aware, using business process analysis techniques and tools to model and analyze business processes. Think Visio with some human intelligence behind it, or a more robust tool such as those from Proforma, iGrafx or IDS Scheer.
Level 2: Process control, the domain of BPMS, where process models and rules can now be executed, and some optimization can be done on the processes. They admitted that this is the level on which the conference focuses, since few organizations have moved very far beyond this point.
Level 3: Enterprise process management, where BPM moves beyond departmental systems and becomes part of the corporate infrastructure, which typically also opens up the potential for processes that include trading partners and customers. It is important to have BPM (and BRE and BI) as infrastructure components, not just embedded within departmental applications, because it is nearly impossible to realize any sort of SOA vision without having these basic building blocks.
Level 4: Enterprise performance management, which starts to look at the bigger picture of corporate performance management and how processes tie into it.
Level 5: Competitive differentiation, where the business is sufficiently agile due to control over the processes that new products and services can be easily created and deployed. Personally, I believe that competitive differentiation is a measure of how well that you're doing right from level 1 on up, rather than a separate level itself: it's an indicator, not a goal per se.

We started the last day at the Gartner summit with a keynote by Yvonne Genovese, Business Applications Through 2010: Major Changes Will Affect Your Process Environment. Early in her presentation, she made an important statement: "the technology keeps breaking our processes". Her focus is on business applications, not specifically BPM, but she's looking at trends of what's happening with enterprise applications like ERP and CRM systems. Her point is that these business applications have, in the past, forced businesses to use rigid business processes implemented within those systems. However, the current trend is towards unbundling some of this functionality, exposing it through services, and then consuming those services using a BPMS. This allows one to not only call specific functionality from their business applications at any point in a process that one now controls, but actually replacing or augmenting the functionality of those applications by calling other services. This also provides an opportunity to more easily integrate between business applications if one has multiple ones in their environment. Although the business application vendors have been pushing suites for some time now, that packaging model will be less compelling to their customers as organizations start to slice and dice the atomic functionality of the business applications and compose their own processes using BPM rather than use the suite in its monolithic form.

Business applications aren't going away: there's still a huge amount of good functionality available in them, and as long as that commoditized functionality can be consumed as services, one isn’t going to be writing a replacement themselves. What I think will happen, however, is that the amount of the functionality used from any given business application platform will begin to erode as other internal or external services replace some of that functionality. This frees organizations from the vendor lock-in that they're subjected to now, and adds a new possibility for creating business applications: instead of just "buy" or "build", you can now also "compose". And if the megavendors in this field are going to stay competitive, they need to embrace and encourage an ecosystem that allows smaller vendors to provide services that can easily be integrated with their larger platform. This isn't going to be the old model of the vendor controlling the ecosystem by annointing their favorite technology partners, however: the customer organizations are going to build their own ecosystem from their preferred vendors in a truly best-of-breed fashion.

At the end of the day, BPM is an essential part of all this, since it will be used as a composition framework for combining functionality from business applications, along with internal and external services, into the processes that the business really needs.

Microsoft is honing in on business process management with the formation of the Microsoft Business Process Alliance and the release of a BPM roadmap that will include a key standard—Business Process Execution Language—in the Windows Workflow Foundation. The company announced that it has formed this alliance and it consists of about 10 companies dedicated to building out BPM functionality on Microsoft's platform.
These companies include IDS Scheer (a key process modeling partner with SAP and Oracle), Fair Isaac, Global 360, Metastorm, Ascentn, SourceCode Technology Holding, AmberPoint, InRule, PNMsoft and RuleBurst. The goal of the alliance is to break down barriers to BPM deployment—particularly for small and midsize businesses—by providing a less expensive BPM technology deployment option for companies, Microsoft officials said. Microsoft also announced that it will provide further support of the Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) standard in a pending update of a key business orchestration tool. Furthermore, Microsoft plans to provide further integration between WWF and its BizTalk Server product as part of the BizTalk Server 2006 R2 release, which the company said will be generally available in the third quarter of 2007.

Another observance of the conference is that within the next few years, Gartner predicts that businesses will demand an entirely new mix of expertise within their IT organizations -- but technical skills aren't likely to top the list. Gartner says that by 2010, the demand for IT infrastructure and services expertise will shrink by 30% or more. Meanwhile, demand for business process and relationship management skills will double.
By 2010, 40% of staff members within IT organizations will have substantial business and non-IT experience. This prediction was foreshadowed by the makeup of attendees at the conference, 40% of who were from business units rather than IT organizations. One of the speakers said that IT organizations will become increasingly automated and outsourced. As a result, IT employees will be asked to fill multiple roles, rather than just focus on a single job. And one of their most important roles will be managing "points of interface" with other parts of the business. IT employees will need to speak the same language as business stakeholders. This means less demand for specialists (IT employees with a deep understanding of specific technology) and more demand for generalists (IT employees who have a broad set of relatively shallow technology skills). IT will still need technical skills, but the most valuable technical employees will know how they can apply those skills to different situations in different parts of the business. IT organizations will need to cultivate versatile employees, what Gartner has coined as "versatilists." These versatile employees will have broad experience in business and will be well-known and recognized as being credible high performers by other people outside that specific business domain.

EMC Corporation announced the availability of the EMC Documentum Process Suite, a comprehensive BPM solution for analyzing, modeling, orchestrating and optimizing a wide range of enterprise processes involving people, systems, content and data. EMC claims that the Documentum Process Suite is the only offering on the market that delivers a complete BPM suite leveraging EMC's comprehensive portfolio of information infrastructure offerings to provide organizations with the ability to manage both processes and the information that drives them. This introduction of the Documentum Process Suite marks the integration of the process analysis and business activity monitoring software gained from EMC's June 2006 acquisition of Proactivity Inc., with EMC's existing Documentum business process management capabilities.

Simon Hayward said that the 1980s were about quality and process improvement; the 1990s were about Business Process Reengineering; and the 200s are about BPM. I have other presentations that I have previously put together that highlight the similarities and differences between BPM and BPR.

Hayward said that the problem (or limitation) with those approaches were that it was assumed that if one could only correctly capture the requirements that the IT project would be successful. Still today the Systems Engineering disciplines put a lot of emphasis on the Requirements phase of any project. The problem with this is that there was a basic assumption that the requirements wouldn’t change. And of course it was also assumed that one could know and articulate their requirements. BPM is about agility and focuses on the metrics and ability to adapt in a dynamic and rapidly changing environment.

Hayward mentioned some common entry points for the introduction of BPM: corporate performance management, packaged application upgrades, application integration, deployment of applications supporting collaborative and informal work processes, and fulfillment of compliance measures.

Hayward stated that Gartner predicts that by 2010 process modeling will be adopted on a scale half as big as spreadsheets. Gartner also predicts that by 2010 the artificial separation of OLTP and decision support will be obsolete, replaced by case management as the preferred design pattern. And by 2012, technologies to support BPM will have been absorbed into other products and will no longer be a distinct category.

Other things I noted were:

SAP advertised their Business Process Expert Community via their website. They said that there is information and resources that will be of interest to all persons interested in BPM, whether or not they are an SAP customer.
In addition to BPM, other uses for modeling include: project validation, administration reorganization, costing, Quality Management, application development, reference architecture, enterprise architecture, risk management, and implementation of business applications.
Some best practices for modeling are: leveling, top-down approach, gradual progress, simple tools, and focus on documenting what really happens in an organization as opposed to focusing on what’s documented. Other best practices are: modeling work in parallel, embracing a culture of constant reevaluation and validation, and use of reference architectures.
From the security session, I picked up that SPI Dynamics and Watchforce have about 80% of the web application security vulnerability scanner and source code scanner market.
Three top reasons for BPM are productivity, visibility, and innovation.
IBM has bought FileNet and Webify.
The number one BPM modeling tool used today is PowerPoint.
IBM has a SOA Readiness Assessment on their website
Receive, route, report = procedural automation; research, respond, resolve = declarative automation
Other best practices are: hire a cyberlibrarian; identify, buy, or build searchable registry; reward engineers for reuse; and provide a reuse feedback loop

Books to read are:
Reengineering the Corporation
Medici Effect
Creative Destruction
Power of Process
The Faces of Innovation
Extreme Competition

Sites to review are:
ibm.com/soa/soabusinesscatalog
ibm.com/software/innovate
myfootprint.org
innocentive.com
bijonline.com
bpm.com
bpmg.org
bpmi.org
bpminstitute.org
bpm-today.com
bptrends.com

Things to think about are:
genchi genbutsu