Intelligent Enterprise

I'm picking and choosing my sessions here at SAPPHIRE carefully, in part because I have some prearranged meetings specifically about BPM. I had a chance one-on-one meeting with Wolfgang Hilpert, SVP of NetWeaver BPM, this afternoon; funnily enough, just after I attended Ginger Gatling's session this morning, I had lunch in the press area, and when I mentioned that I'd seen the session on the new SAP BPM, three pairs of ears at the table swiveled around. These three, who I didn't know (nametags, unfortunately, hang below the level of the table when seated), gave me a light grilling on my opinions of what I had seen; although I figured that they worked for SAP, it wasn't until they stood up that I saw Hilpert's name tag.

By the time that we had our prearranged meeting, then, he knew that I'd seen a product overview, and he'd already heard my views on it, so we could jump right to some of the good stuff.

It's my first time at SAPPHIRE, and I have one initial impression: this conference is huge. For me, 1,500 people at a conference is big, and this one is ten times that size. The press room is the size of a regular conference's general session ballroom. I just hiked 15 minutes to get to a session. More sessions run simultaneously than you'll find in total at most conferences. There are 30 official conference hotels. Wow. And I have to report that there are five bars of free wifi coverage everywhere in the conference center.

After a review of the massive schedule, I finally made it to a session: Ginger Gatling, SAP NetWeaver BPM Product Manager, giving an overview of the business process management (BPM) component in SAP, including a demo and some thoughts on the future functionality. She started with a discussion of the evolution of BPM, including the drivers that have moved us from the old-style workflow and EAI to the present-day collaborative design environment where multiple people might be working on modeling different components, from human-facing processes to rules. For SAP, however, a lot of this is future-state, not what they have now in the shipping product.

Speaking at this week's "TUCON 08" TIBCO user conference in San Francisco, Christopher Ahlberg, founder of Spotfire and now president of that TIBCO division, discussed the capabilities of the technology and what's been done to integrate Spotfire into other TIBCO products.

Timely insight — the right information at the right time — is a competitive differentiator for most businesses, and classic business intelligence (BI) just doesn't cut it in many cases. Consumer applications like Google Finance are raising the bar for dynamic visualization techniques, although most of them are fairly inflexible when it comes to viewing or comparing specific data. In other words, we want the data selection and aggregation capabilities of our enterprise systems, and the visualization capabilities of consumer Web applications. Ahlberg sees a number of disruptive BI technologies transforming the platform — in-memory processes, interactive visualization, participatory architecture, mashups — and starting to be able to link to the event-driven world of classic TIBCO.

I attended IT360 this week, mostly to hear Matthew Glotzbach, director of product management for Google Enterprise. It's a sad commentary on the culture of Canadian IT conferences that this session is entitled "Meet Matthew Glotzbach of Google" in the conference guide, as if he doesn't need to actually talk about anything, just show up here in the frozen north — we Canadians need to work on that "we're not worthy" attitude!

Google's Enterprise division includes, as you might expect, search applications such as site search and dedicated search appliances, but also includes Google Apps, which many of us now use for hosting email, calendaring and document collaboration functions.

Last week, Lombardi held its second analyst update by teleconference; I found the first one back in January to be informative, and obviously Lombardi had sufficient positive feedback to continue. Strangely enough, we were instructed to embargo information about the new Blueprint until today, although the Blueprint team blogged about it on the weekend.

Phil Gilbert started out with a high-level corporate update, including growth — both new hires and through the channel — and some of the new sales where they continue to compete successfully against larger vendors. However, most of the information was about products and services.

I attended Experience!Tech 2008 last week at the MaRS Centre in Toronto — nice to attending a conference in my hometown for a change. The opening day's sessions are beamed to us live from the IDC Directions conference in Boston, so although we have the timeliness of seeing the speakers present, it's not quite the same as seeing them in person.

Unfortunately, it appears that I missed the only good presentation of the opening morning, given by Grover Righter of iMobileInternet, but apparently the slides are online and a number of my peeps were Twittering about it. The rest of the morning's presentations, all provided by IDC executives, sound like guys who are either scrambling to figure out what Web 2.0 is, think that they're teaching Web 2.0 101 to some of the suits in the audience, or inadvertently loaded a 2006 slide deck. Honestly, if I hear one more middle-aged guy talk about how his kids shop/watch TV/live their lives on the Internet (implying, of course, that he still has his executive assistant print out his email for him), I will not be responsible for my actions. Obviously, I'm living in Middle Age 2.0, because I'm sitting in the audience Twittering with the people who are sitting directly beside me, and creating this blog post.

Philip Bierhoff, Systems Manager at Procter & Gamble, spoke at last week's FASTforward conference about strategies to increase user adoption as business intelligence goes mainstream [Editor's note: it's a topic very much at the center of Cindi Howson's recent feature on "Pervasive BI"]. P&G;'s Symphony project creates "decision cockpits": dashboards based on specific roles and corporate divisions, and including information ranging from traditional BI reports to documents to news.

The underlying data landscape has moved from their first iteration of a common data warehouse in the mid-'90s with regional servers plus ETL, storage and aggregation, where BI was driven by stored aggregations; to the current atomic data warehouse with a central server plus ETL and storage, where BI is driven by query rewrite — effectively, aggregation on the fly. They also have SAP generating data into SAP/BW; altogether, they have about 65 TB in the data warehouse and 50 TB in SAP/BW.

David Weinberger, author of Everything is Miscellaneous, spoke at last week's FASTforward conference (ostensibly the user conference for FAST Search & Transfer) about the power of digital disorder, and how we need to unlearn what we think that we know about the best ways to organize information. He feels that we're approaching the end of the age of information — by which he means a focus on rigidly structured information — and a move away from being "informationalized," where we consider everything to be information even if they're just symbolic representations of reality.

He looked at how many projects, typically physical projects, require a much greater degree of control as they increase in size, but contrasts that with the web, which has growth only because of the lack of control. Control doesn't scale; we just thought that it did, and managed to scale with control by eliminating information.

At last week's Gartner BPM Summit, Elise Olding moderated a panel on weaving BPM into the enterprise, with Eric Abecassis, Architecture and Integration Manager with Schlumberger, Jim Boots, Enterprise Architect at Chevron, and Kevin Morgan, Program Manager at Dolby.

Abecassis started with the process-related problems that they had at Schlumberger: processes had to be standardized in order to effectively manage growth and improve execution, reduce the administrative burden on the field people, and improve alignment between business and IT. Their approach was to focus on three main types of activities:

Speaking at this week's Gartner BPM Summit in Las Vegas, Jay Simons, VP of Marketing for BEA, presented the company's recent research results on the state of the BPM market, including a survey of 200-plus BEA customers, mostly IT people but spread across vertical markets and geographies. They've also gathered information through their online BPM Lifecycle Assessment.

The results show a number of interesting trends indicating that CIOs and business leaders are focused on improving their processes. Existing customers described how they expect to get their ROI from their BPM implementations, and most expect to see ROI over the next three years.

I'm here in Vegas for Gartner's 5th BPM Summit, and they're reporting about 1,000 attendees (though I'm not sure if that includes Gartner and vendors). For those of us who attend business process management events religiously, I'm hoping it's not a complete replay of September's BPM Summit in Orlando.

Janelle Hill gave us Gartner's big-picture view of BPM, which will be covered in detail in other sessions throughout the conference. Hill seems to be hitting her stride as Gartner's face of BPM since Jim Sinur left almost a year ago. She started with the now-familiar view of process improvement over the ages, from Deming and Taylorism through TQM, BPR, Six Sigma and a variety of other methodologies and tools since the 1920's. This has changed from a focus on scientific management, to computerized process flow, to package applications as best practice, to flexible and adaptive process.

Lombardi held an analyst conference call last week in advance of today's press releases — a relatively new format for them — to discuss their executive reorganization against the backdrop of their 2007 results and 2008 strategy. Rod Favaron, CEO (and, until last week, President) and Phil Gilbert, President (formerly CTO) gave us the update. The press releases are here and here.

I sat in on a presentation by Michael zur Muehlen on business processes and rules at the recent IIR/Shared Insights BPM conference. Michael is responsible for Business Process Management courses at Stevens Institute of Technology. He started out with the bottom line on why you want to integrate process and rules:

• Simpler processes
• Higher agility
• Better risk management

Who wouldn't want this? However, he points out that users don't like processes, since they find them abstract (or possibly requiring a more analytic view of the organization) and restrictive (that is, not able to capture all the actual business cases). He also points out the obvious problem with Eclipse-based process modeling tools: they're not friendly to business types, so you end up with technical people maintaining business processes, which usually results in a lot of code and the next generation of legacy systems.

I'm sure that James Taylor has almost given up on me ever writing a book review of Smart Enough Systems: I wrote a brief advance review back in April that's printed in the book, but nothing since it was released. Recently, I had a chance to finally meet James face-to-face after a couple of years of emailing back and forth. Also, James' situation has changed since the book was released: he left Fair Isaac and is now an independent, working (I think) with his co-author, Neil Raden. Neil, who also I met briefly recently, is an independent consultant and analyst who has been focused on business intelligence for quite a while; James refers to his work as "BI 2.0″ (a term that I think that I invented in my blog in early 2006). The two of them met through James' blog and started the conversation about how someone needed to write a book about this crossover area between business rules and business intelligence.

Just to get started, here's my pre-release review:

At last week's Business Rules Forum, Kathy Long of the Process Renewal Group talked about how to derive rules from processes and use them as guides to the process. There are a number of process-related problems that can occur when the rules are not explicit: assumed policies, activities with experience as the only guide, and inconsistent (and therefore likely non-compliant) processes.

The key things to consider when analyzing the guides for a process can be focused around what happens at a given activity (and what knowledge is required, what decisions are required, what reports have to be generated) as well as a number of other factors. Long presents a number of questions to ask to drive out the rules and make them explicit.

David Straus of Corticon gave an engaging presentation here at this week's Business Rules Forum about business rules and business intelligence, starting with the Wikipedia definitions of each. He characterized BI as "understanding" and BR as "action" (not unlike my statement that BI in BPM is about visibility and BR in BPM is about agility). He started with the basic drivers for a business rules management system — agility (speed and cost), business control while maintaining IT compliance, transparency, and business improvement (reduce costs, reduce risk, increase revenue) — and went on to some generalized use cases for rules-driven analysis:

• Analyze transaction compliance, i.e., are the human decisions in a business process compliant with the policies and regulations?

• Analyze the effect of automation with business rules, i.e., when a previously manual step is automated through the application of rules

• Analyze business policy rules change (automated or non-automated)

After a brief intro by Gladys Lam, the executive director of the Business Rules Forum, the conference kicked off with a keynote from Ron Ross, the driving force behind this event and a big name in the business rules community. A couple of things are distracting my attention from his talk: I'm up directly after him, and I'm presenting in this room, which is the main (read: big) conference hall. Let me make my ever-present complaint about passworded wifi in the meeting room and no free wifi or wired internet in the hotel, since I know that my regular readers would be disappointed without that news from the front lines.

Ron and I have exchanged email over the years, but this is our first opportunity to meet face-to-face; I'll also have the chance to meet James Taylor and a few others who I only know from afar. Today, Ron's talking about the shift from business rules to enterprise decisioning. This is the first business rules conference that I've ever attended, which means that most of the attendees likely know a lot more about the subject matter than I do, and most of the sessions will be new material for me.

A few months ago, I blogged about the unexpectedly good experience I had at the Canadian passport office, where the process actually worked the way it was supposed to, and rewarded the consumer (me) by accelerating my wait time since I did my own data entry online. I recently had two other government business process experiences: one good, one bad.

The good experience was with NEXUS, a joint program between the Canadian and American governments to allow frequent travelers to replace the long immigration line-ups in both directions with a retinal scan for authentication and a few questions on a touch-screen kiosk. Since I travel across the border fairly regularly, I decided to apply for this, especially after being stuck in a line of 500 people waiting for immigration checks a few times. Friends warned that it took six to seven weeks for the preliminary approval, and that the follow-up interviews were already being scheduled for December. Wrong.

I'm attended a panel discussion here at the Forrester Technology Leadership Forum on the convergence of the three Bs — business intelligence, business process management and business rules — featuring Mike Gilpin (EA and application development), Boris Evelson (BI) and Colin Teubner (BPM). I covered a tiny bit of this topic in slides 22-24 of my presentation this morning, and will be doing a full-length presentation on this same topic at the Business Rules Forum next month in Orlando, so I'm interested to see if the Forrester analysts have the same thoughts on this subject as I do.

They start with the statement that "design for people, build for change" will drive the convergence of the three B's. Interestingly, although a few people in the room stated that they use BPM and BI together, almost no one raised their hand to the combination of BPM and BR — a combination that I feel is critical to process agility. Gilpin went through a few introductory slides, pointing out that almost no business rules are explicitly defined, but are instead buried within processes and enterprise applications. He sees BI as driving effectiveness in businesses, and the combination of BPM and BR as driving efficiency.

Analyst Connie Moore offered the opening keynote, entitled "Design for People, Build for Change: Transforming the Nature of Work," at this week's Forrester Technology Leadership Forum. Her focus is on how business and IT have to work together in order to achieve this, but she likes the term "blended business-IT" rather than "business-IT alignment" because she wants them to be seen as a single entity rather than two separate bodies that need to be aligned in some way. I've heard Moore speaking at other conferences and on webinars previously, usually on the topic of BPM, and it's significant that Forrester puts a BPM analyst in the keynote position at this forum: it really drives home that the key focus here is on process.

She posed three questions about this sort of transformation: why now, what underpins this trend, and how will it unfold?

Analyst Michael Smith had a session here at the Gartner BPM Summit on using performance metrics to align business processes with strategy. His area of expertise is performance management, and he's found lately that business process improvement is a growing theme in that sector.

Smith started out by quashing the notion of best-practice business processes: processes are so different between different types of companies that there isn't a single best practice. [I think that there are best practices within industry verticals, but he didn't seem to consider that.] He went on to say that business strategies are, in general, poorly defined, poorly understood and poorly executed, then went on to outline a process for developing a business strategy:

• Define strategic intent
• Define strategic objectives
• Identify performance metrics
• IT strategy and objectives
• Measures of IT performance

A session presented by analyst Bill Gassman here on day two of the Gartner BPM Summit was on measuring processes in real time, namely business activity monitoring (BAM), and how it needs to be considered up front as processes are being design and implemented.

Gassman started off with a few definitions — BAM, real-time BI, operational BI, and process-driven BI — with some pretty fuzzy distinctions between some of these, especially in these days of converging functionality in the BI products. He then defined the goals of BAM: to monitor key objectives, anticipate operational risks, and reduce latency between events and actions.

My third time today for hearing Janelle Hill speak, but I usually find her to be pretty interesting. This time, her topic is "BPM: A Change from Business as Usual", taking a look at what's really new in BPM, how BPM can change the way a company operates, and some BPM use cases.

She started out with a great chart showing what's new and the implications of each of these points; for example, the fact that processes must be effective and transparent, not just efficient, implies that processes must be explicit and not embedded within applications. In discussing the harmonization of incremental improvement and transformative change, she comes back to the phrase "design for change", which I've heard several times today already; interestingly enough, the subtitle of the Forrester IT Leadership Forum where I'm speaking next week is "Design for People, Build for Change", indicating that the analysts are really setting the focus on this concept. This is, of course, the heart of business agility: if something isn't designed and built with the intention that it would be changed frequently, then you're not going to be changing it much.

Scrambling down to the opening of the Gartner BPM Summit in Orlando this morning — I arrived late last night and didn't get enough sleep, much less a chance to register — I struck up a conversation in the elevator with someone who was already wearing a Gartner conference badge and asked him where the registration area was. He pointed me in the right direction, and said that he hoped that the process was faster than last night, saying that he didn't know what they were running on their systems but that it was very slow. I tossed off my usual comment about systems that don't work well — "probably Windows" — then turned to him and saw the Microsoft logo on his shirt. Great, I'm not even at the conference yet, and I've made my first enemy.

The conference kicked off with a welcome from Daryl Plummer, Bill Rosser and Pascal Winckel [all speakers that I reference at this conference are with Gartner unless otherwise noted]. Plummer started off with an audience vote that showed that there are way more business than technical people here, a great (and fairly unusual) thing for a BPM conference. Like most business-focussed conferences, however, the logistics are not blogging-friendly: there's no wifi, only an Internet area where I can plug into a physical cable, and there's no power at the tables to keep my laptop juiced. In fact, when I ran into Jesper Joergensen from BEA at the break, the first thing that he said to me was "uh oh, no wifi — the conference is going to get a bad review!"