• Process People » Blog Archive » Drive the Path (process and data flow)
  How to start your BPM implementation. I’ve been doing it this way for a long time, good to see that others are finding the same works for them.
  (tags: bpm software)
• A mortal’s guide to initiation « TINAG - This Is Not A Guide 2 Intalio
  This is great: Intalio for Dummies (my name, not theirs), or how to get Intalio up and running, as told by an outsider. If you’re running Intalio (or thinking about it), you might want to check out this blog.
  (tags: bpm)
• Blueprint Spring ‘08 Release
  On-demand webinar on Lombardi’s spring 08 release of Blueprint.
  (tags: bpa)

• Process transformation - perspectives on “Business Process Management”: New BPMS feature: process mining
  Process mining: using existing ERP system logs to generate business process models. Roeland Loggen talks about a system from Pallas Athena doing this, and Fujitsu is also doing this.
  (tags: bpm bpa)
• WYDIWYE: The Answer to BPEL Transform Problems « Go Flow
  Keith Swenson on BPMN and BPEL: “I often get asked: ‘do you convert this diagram to BPEL?’ My response is ‘Why should we want to do that?’”
  (tags: bpmn bpel)

• InfoQ: What can we expect from BPMN 2.0?
  Some comments on the alternative for serialization formats to be included in the upcoming BPMN 2.0 specification.
  (tags: bpmn bpel bpdm xpdl)

SAPPHIRE is only a half day today, and there’s really only one session that I wanted to attend: Cheryl Mascaro, Enterprise Architect at Intel, and Thomas Volmering, BPM product manager at SAP, talking about BPM in Action.

Volmering started with the now-familiar SAP positioning of BPM that I’ve seen earlier in the week: BPM evolving from human-facing workflow and EAI into today’s process composition environments that allow for the orchestration of both human and system tasks. They’re seeing that business is now driving integration projects, even if they’re mostly system-to-system: it still comes down to filling a business need.

Mascaro is on SAP’s design partner council, who work with SAP (including have access to early versions of the software) during early product development in order to validate the goals, concepts and technology, and influence the product roadmap by identifying their own scenarios and expected patterns of usage. This also helped SAP to set priorities on what features to implement in what order, driving product releases.

She told us a bit about Intel first: with 86,500 employees in 146 locations, they have had to look at standardization and improvement of processes in order to maintain operational excellence. Their BPM efforts are owned by IT, but there’s a business process leadership team across the organization, and many business architects/analysts. They have a strategic enterprise plan — effectively a fully-developed enterprise architecture — in order to align business and IT, and have a BPM model based on Rummler-Brache that they use for driving the BPM enterprise-level strategy down into specific process improvement projects.

She sees NetWeaver BPM as filling in the gaps that aren’t serviced by core SAP applications, and orchestrating heterogeneous systems including SAP. She showed a screen snapshot of the Process Composer with a version of their development service request process (that is, someone requesting that a specific service be developed for use in another project, which includes attempting to locate an existing service, and approving and logging the development request if not), and walked us through the process design. We then saw the form used to kick off the process — where we did see some calendar and drop-down widgets but still no information on how this form is created — then the UI that a process participant would see at a task in the process. There are some human-facing steps in here, but also steps that interface directly with the development request database.

Volmering rejoined the conversation, and they discussed creating the user interface based on the process data and context. Mascaro wasn’t really clear on how that was done, just that the developer who worked on it found it “not hard”; I hope to see more on this in a more in-depth demo at another time.

• Idee’s TinEye next frontier in Web searches
  My friends at Idee make a public launch of their innovative image search application. I’ve seen this demoed, and it’s pretty amazing stuff.
  (tags: search torcamp)
• TinEye Image Search Engine - Idée Inc. - The Visual Search Company
  Direct link to Idee’s image search launch (to accompany the Financial Post article link)
  (tags: search torcamp)
• Weblog Tools Collection » Blog Archive » Woopra and WordPress: Unofficial Coolness Guide
  Just installed this, and can’t figure out if it’s the most amazing thing that I’ve ever seen or the biggest time suck ever. Or both. Of course, this won’t all be free when they exit beta.
  (tags: blogging tools wordpress)
• SAP - SAP Business ByDesign: Complete, Adaptable, On-Demand Solution
  SAP’s hosted solution for midsize companies, announced this week at SAPPHIRE. I don’t think that it includes any of the new BPM functionality, however.
  (tags: saas sap erp)

Wolfgang Hilpert, SVP of BPM for SAP, must be tired of seeing my face by now: an accidental lunch encounter and an interview yesterday, his session at the NetWeaver theater this morning, and I ended my day with his panel on SAP and BPM that also included Benjamin Salter of Valero Energy, Janelle Hill of Gartner, Mandar Nagle of Accenture and Peter Graf of SAP, moderated by Harald Nehring of SAP.

The panel started with a short bit by Hill on the BPM marketplace and how it’s driven by the search for operational excellence. She showed the current hype cycle that has business process platforms just at the technology trigger stage, BPM as a discipline about halfway up the slope towards the peak of inflated expectations, BPMS approaching the top of that peak and BPM pure-play tools just crawling out of the trough of disillusionment towards the slope of enlightenment. She also talked to their projections of BPMS market size, which still uses a 2006 actual figure of $1.7B to project $5.6B by 2011. Given the entry of SAP into this marketplace, we’ll start to see growth that may actually approach this, although I think that this is still a bit aggressive.

It then moved into more of a panel format, with Nehring asking questions of the panelists, starting with Graf talking about how SAP has always been process-oriented (true, although those processes were embedded opaquely in their core applications and could only be changed through coding), and the value of composing processes from services.

Salter’s company has been an influencer during the development of NetWeaver BPM. They’ve grown rapidly through mergers and acquisitions, which has resulted in a patchwork of systems held together with duct tape and string. They’re using BPM to bring discipline into their integration techniques, although it’s not clear that they’ve actually done much to date: he talked about their first BPM process in the future tense. It sounds like a good test case for BPM, covering product quality testing including both automated collation/analysis of test results and human approval steps.

Hlilpert walked us through the process of designing the BPM product over the past two years, and how both ecosystem partners and customers have been involved through much of the process in order to make the product as functional and usable as possible. He also mentioned the how they’re starting to work with the Business Objects team to really bring together BPM, BRM and BI and build actionable process analytics.

Hill sees SAP as being in a position to leapfrog IBM and Oracle in the platform vendor end of the BPM market, and feels that they have more of the tools that will allow customers to actually close the gap between strategy and execution in terms of operational excellence. This is a significant statement to hear from a Gartner analyst in the wild.

There was a discussion about standards (my favourite topic ): the chief architect on the SAP BPM team is on the OMG BPMN 2.0 standards committee, including the efforts to include a serialization format, but Hill pointed out that standards are “just specifications” and all vendors have their own particular flavour of standards, making interoperability more of a philosophy than a reality. She sees BPMN as a notational standard to be valuable so that everyone can visually understand the same diagrams the same way, but seemed to imply that not a lot of people were actually moving the process models from one tool to another — something that I’ve also seen in practice. Salter said that his business analysts really like BPMN because it’s so much more business-friendly than UML use cases, and agree that the visual notation has been key for them.

Before Nehring opened up the panel to audience questions, he said that he has read that “BPM is the killer app for SOA” and asked for the panel’s opinion on that; I almost laughed out loud at that one, since Ismael Ghalimi wrote that a couple of years ago, and I’ve unabashedly stolen it in several presentations and blog posts that I’ve done (crediting Ismael, of course).

The question came up about using IDS Scheer for process modeling versus using NetWeaver BPM; Graf made a fuzzy non-statement that “this does not mean the end of the relationship” and that “standards will strengthen the link between the tools”. Having had to deal with a flurry of communications from IDS Scheer’s PR this morning about my comments on this yesterday — who, like many other vendors, refuse to post a comment on the blog post but prefer to lobby me to change the post — I’ll just point out how customers of other (non-SAP) BPMS products use those products with ARIS: they do their enterprise modeling in ARIS, including some level of business processes, then may or may not have a method for transferring those process models directly from ARIS to their BPMS, depending on the support for specific standards and other interchange formats.

With a conference of this size, SAP can arrange a pretty awesome “conference night out” for us: we’re all going to see Eric Clapton tonight. I’ll be back for a couple of BPM sessions in the morning; the conference finishes midday and I’ll be home in time for the last two hours of my other half’s birthday tomorrow night.

This afternoon, we heard from the other co-CEO of SAP, Léo Apotheker (I think that I forgot to mention Henning Kagermann’s title of co-CEO in my post this morning), starting with some fairly general comments on the nature of competitive differentiation in business, and the power of collaboration.

He was joined on stage by a couple of customers:

• Proctor&Gamble, who discussed how they’ve used SAP as essential infrastructure for innovation and growth in the consumer products industry; P&G has become well-known in social media circles for crowdsourcing their R&D after being featured in the book Wikinomics.
• Harley Davidson, who are using SAP to provide the information necessary to enrich their customers’ experience, further deepening the relationship and increasing loyalty in order to increase revenues.
• Coca-Cola, through a really funny sequence using voice-activated ordering, picking and delivery, ending with a real person from their warehouse delivering two Cokes to the stage, then giving a short (and rehearsed) bit on how it helps his day-to-day work. A Coca-Cola executive was there to help serve the drinks. And, oh yeah, talk about how SAP and a service-oriented architecture have improved their warehouse operations.

All of this is about business processes, and I don’t mean just the narrow view of process that we have in BPM: this is about the business processes embedded within every business application, from legacy ERP to agile composite applications.

Apotheker talked explicitly about NetWeaver BPM and what it brings in terms of process agility; this product announcement is obviously a big deal for SAP, since it’s mentioned in both of the CEO keynotes today. He talked about the power of picking and choosing components from the core SAP applications and assembling them into composite applications for new functionality and increased agility, while maintaining the power of the underlying ERP functionality.

I took a guide dog and a GPS, and ventured out onto the show floor to visit the NetWeaver Theater to see Wolfgang Hilpert discuss SAP NetWeaver BPM (that’s the official name) in more detail. Since this is my first real exposure to the product, I’m trying to get as many views of this as possible over the couple of days that I’m here, both to learn about the functionality of the product and hear the messaging and positioning around the product.

He started with similar material to Ginger Gatling’s presentation yesterday, looking at the key dimensions of business processes — structured versus non-structured, human-centric versus system-to-system, and business versus IT driver/focus — and how business processes (and the systems that support them) need to cover all of these dimensions. He also covered key process metamodel concepts — events, rules, data, roles, workflow/task and UI — and why they’re important.

He moved on to talk about the goals and value proposition of NetWeaver BPM, including model-driven development and business-IT collaboration. BPM is an integrated part of the NetWeaver composition environment, which makes it an easy transition for existing NetWeaver developers, although the Eclipse environment needs to provide a simplified perspective for business analysts who are involved in modeling.

There’s three parts to the BPM suite:

• Process Composer, which is the modeling environment;
• Process Server, where processes are executed;
• Process Desk, the user interface that is integrated into the portal environment and becomes part of the Universal Worklist.

I have a huge amount of respect for anyone who talks and demos at the same time, and particularly so when they have a title to the north of VP; Hilpert falls into this category, and he fired up the demo and showed us what this actually looks like.

There’s a nice graphical interface for projects that shows a hierarchy of processes, user interfaces, business logic and services and how they interact, which makes it possible to detect dependencies of reusable components. As I mentioned yesterday, the process modeler is a pretty standard BPMN modeler, although I really like the context-sensitive mini-icons that are displayed around the selected object on the process model for creating the next connected object — nice usability feature. He also showed an interesting feature for creating a data/document artifact with automatic mapping from a process step to the artifact.

The NetWeaver BRM integration is nice, since the rules and processes are designed within a common environment and can be linked up by dragging and dropping a rule onto a process condition instead of having to specify a web service call to the rules engine (although that could be what’s happening under the covers).

We then moved on to the process participant’s user interface, using the NetWeaver Business Client portal. He filled out a simple (text fields only) form — although we didn’t see how this form was designed — which kicked off a business process that appears in the appropriate person’s Universal Worklist. There is a fairly standard task UI once the process is opened from a person’s inbox, which allows adding attachments (files or links), setting parameters using a variety of UI widgets (calendars, drop-down lists), viewing the current step in the graphical context of the entire process, and completing the work step.

Update: found some screenshots from Ginger Gatling’s presentation deck and dropped them in.

Moving away from the demo and back to presentation/discussion, he looked at the personas/roles within an enterprise that are involved in BPM, specifically the process architect (just on the IT side of the line), the business analyst (just on the business side of the line) and the business expert/SME (deep within business-land). Although this product release will address the needs of the process architect and business analyst, they are planning for other tools to expand business collaboration supporting the needs of the business analyst and the business expert. Part of that will be runtime visualization tools, such as dashboards, but it sounds like there’s also consideration of some design collaboration that will happen in the business area.

He went through the architecture that Gatling covered yesterday, and reinforced that the process integration layer is a rebranding of their current XI integration layer. The language around the future versions, where there will be a common process platform and SAP application core processes will be extended using the composition environment, is still a bit fuzzy, but we’re talking about things that will happen more than a year away.

There is nothing earth-shatteringly innovative about the SAP NetWeaver BPM suite: this is a perfectly ordinary BPMS. That’s not a criticism, especially considering that this is the first released version: it’s a reasonably full-functioned BPMS out of the box, and that’s all that SAP needs in order to compete within its existing customer base. They’re not trying to be the best BPMS on the market, they want to be the best BPMS for SAP customers.

I watched the general keynote this morning from the press room rather than finding my place amongst the 15,000 attendees; the first hour covered other announcements, but we did see about 10 minutes on the upcoming BPM product. Since a lot of the audience was likely unfamiliar with BPM, this was a pretty high-level architectural view plus a quick demo of the process modeler and services/rules integration, accompanied by the proclamation "you can change the process without changing code!" This message on the benefit of BPM would be have been fresh 5 years ago, but although it’s likely new to a lot of SAP customers, it shows that SAP is definitely playing catch-up in BPM. As I mentioned yesterday, this year’s release of SAP’s BPM will offer little advantage over using a more established BPMS with SAP (and in fact might be less functional), but they’ll hit the sweet spot with the future releases that have a tight integration with SAP core applications.

The demo theme throughout the keynote was feeding information to a portal/dashboard from multiple sources, including their core applications and BPM.

The message across the keynote is one that resonates with what we’ve been seeing in BPM for a while: transparency into business operations, agility in business processes, collaboration amongst stakeholders, and less coding required for implementation. Add this to the strength that SAP has in building software for running enterprises, and it’s pretty powerful. Whether they can shift from a legacy of highly-customized rigid ERP applications to this new world of flexible composite applications remains to be seen.

• Comparing Amazon’s and Google’s Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) Offerings | Enterprise Web 2.0 | ZDNet.com
  Not really a comparison, but several good links to references on both platforms
  (tags: google software web2.0)
• Mashups: The next major new software development model? | Enterprise Web 2.0 | ZDNet.com
  Missed this one the first time around: enterprise mashups
  (tags: enterprise2.0 mashups web2.0 development)