• YouTube – Agile Enterprise – The Synthesis of BPM, SOA and CEP
  Nice animation of the synthesis of BPM, SOA and CEP
  (tags: bpm soa cep)

• BPM Model Preserving Strategy vs. Model Transforming Strategy
  Keith Swenson's recent presentation comparing Model Preserving Strategy and Model Transforming Strategy for BPM, from the recent Process.gov conference in DC on Jun 19. Slides with synchronized audio.
  (tags: bpm bpa)

• Process Anti-pattern: “One Man Show” – Process Is The Main Thing
  Summed up in Anatoly's final line: "don’t use BPMS to document a sequence of activities performed by a single person". I've seen this done a lot, particularly where process modeling/engineering types are documenting processes in detail; they often have a hard time rolling that up to the view of a process that a BPMS will actually execute.
  (tags: bpm bpa)
• SOA@Oracle BPEL & ServiceBus: Getting started with Oracle SCA, SOA, BPEL, OSB, AIA
  A set of links to Oracle online SOA/BPEL/ESB resources, including documentation.
  (tags: soa bpel esb)
• Process for the Enterprise » Blog Archive » The Case Against Window Dressing
  Keeping it simple in BPM projects in order to deploy something sooner (or at all). I'm a big fan of this approach, too: simple UIs and simple integration on the first go around, then target the ones that will have the most impact for subsequent deployments. Unfortunately, if you're dealing with an enterprise that insists on having everything in V1 because they usually don't get a V2, it will be hard to break the pattern of over-building.
  (tags: bpm software development)
• Working with Human Tasks
  Sample of how to add human tasks to an ActiveVOS BPEL process.
  (tags: bpel bpm)
• Rise of the Process Wiki « Thoughts on Collaborative Planning
  Keith Swenson's comments on the Process Wiki and the use of collaborative process modeling. As he points out, you can upload an XPDL file and it will be rendered visually on the process wiki page.
  (tags: xpdl bpa bpmn)
• Main Page – Process Wiki
  Process Wiki: best practices on business process modeling, including many industry standard business process models designed in BPMN. Everyone can upload or revise business processes. Via Keith Swenson. Unfortunately, home page is broken in Chrome.
  (tags: bpa bpmn)
• PDF or HTML? « Content Here
  Good commentary: "the most painful abuse is the case where the company has a wiki and users upload MS Word and PDF files as attachments rather than edit the content in the pages. Doing this degrades your wiki into a poor man’s shared drive". Be sure to link through to the article on PDF versus HTML for intranet content that is linked within.
  (tags: wikis ecm)
• Study: Blogs Influence Purchases More Than Social Sites – ClickZ
  Apparently, blogs are not dead. In fact, it appears that many companies have just discovered that some of them contain valuable information.
  (tags: blogging)

• BPM explained in 15 minutes (Lombardi webinar)
  Brandon Baxter of Lombardi: "Think about BPM as the layer between your people and your systems" – in other words, part of the functionality is to do things that your existing systems don't already do, plus orchestrate multi-system processes. This is positioning a unified UI capability as a primary driver for BPM; unfortunately, a lot of BPM implementations still do a lot of "swivel chair" integration with multiple applications still visible on the screen, due in part to deficiencies of the BPMS and part because of the lack of services/integration layers in the enterprise applications. Some good points on the value of BPM.
  (tags: bpm)
• Getting Organized for SOA Success « Software Reuse in the Real World
  "Ask your analysts to provide world class requirements including functional and non-functional ones. Persude them to stay away from providing technical solutions so you can figure out how to automate your firm’s processes within the context of your SOA efforts." Excellent point on what business analysts should and shouldn't be doing. I very often see BA's delving deep into design (when they have no actual skills or experience to do so) instead of sticking to where they can add real value.
  (tags: soa software development)

• First Look – IBM/ILOG BRMS 7.0 » JT on EDM
  James Taylor's very comprehensive review of the new ILOG releases. Includes a great description of IBM pulling a business person from the audience at a public product demo and having him create a decision table in the product – what better way to show that this can be done by business people with a minimum of training?
  (tags: brm)
• Socialtext: Products & Services: Free 50 Offer
  Socialtext provides a free, fully-functional hosted Socialtext account for up to 50 people in your company. Enterprise social networking, micro-blogging, personal profiles and wikis.
  (tags: enterprise2.0 collaboration)
• Video: How to Build & Revise Documentation Using a Wiki
  Good overview of building documentation collaboratively using a wiki — useful for internal enterprise documentation as well as product documentation. I especially like his comments that the end users should be able to update the documentation wiki to enhance or correct it; this would be especially good for internal documentation, although many enterprises don't trust their users to this degree.
  (tags: wikis enterprise2.0)
• Workflow Pattern Coverage in SAP NetWeaver BPM 7.11
  A paper on the support that SAP NetWeaver BPM has for the standard set of workflow patterns — they support 30 of the 43 patterns. Direct link to PDF file, authored by Sören Balko of SAP.
  (tags: bpm)
• Does BPEL matter? | Your Daily Dose Technology Injection
  Comments on the reality of BPEL portability and usage. His conclusion: "When BPEL and even BPMN are looked at from a pragmatic business need perspective the only acceptable benefit is that products that use them have similar functionality and people designing processes will find it easier to switch products. Given that with other products that low level of technology is never touched, that potential benefit becomes a moot point." Via Steinar Carlsen.
• BPMN2.0 Examined • Recording Now Available
  Robert Shapiro webinar on BPMN 2.0 and XPDL 2.2
  (tags: bpmn xpdl standards)

• Coding Horror: The Web Browser Address Bar is the New Command Line
  Nice. I already use some of these, but this gives me lots of ideas. Via Stephen O'Grady.
  (tags: productivity)
• AIIM – Five Reasons Your ECM System May Never Be Deployed
  82% of organizations have ECM shelfware that's not in production "yet". Depressingly accurate.
  (tags: ecm)
• Enterprise 2.0 Must be Aligned with Business Process | SAP Web 2.0
  Social software + traditional business processes = social innovation? Via Lee Bryant at Headshift.
  (tags: enterprise2.0 bpm)

For the last session of the day – and what will be the last session of the Enterprise 2.0 conference for me – I shifted over to the Enterprise2Open unconference for a discussion on social processes with Mark Masterson. As part of his job developing software for insurance companies, he put together a mockup of a social front end for an insurance claims adjuster’s workplace. The home page is dominated by the activity stream, which includes links to tasks, blog posts, documents and other systems that are relevant to this person’s work. It’s not just the usual social network stuff; it also includes information from enterprise systems such as ECM and BPM systems. There would be rules to set priorities on what’s in any given user’s activity stream.

There’s also more purely social features, such as a personal profile with the ability to provide status updates and indicate presence.

When the user clicks on an item in the activity stream representing an enterprise BPM task, the information from the task and its process is pulled into this environment, rather than launching the BPM system’s user interface; this becomes a unified desktop for the user, rather than just a launchpad. Information about a claim could include external data that is mashed up into the interface, such as Google maps. The right panel of the interface changes so that it always shows information to support what is happening in the main pane; when a BPM work item is open, for example, the right panel includes links to people and content that might be related to that specific case. It also includes a tag cloud that can be used to click through to information across the enterprise about that subject; for example, clicking on the “fraudulent injury” tag showed a list of people who are related in some way (that is, they are a resource with some experience) to fraudulent injury claims, and what their role in the process might be.

Masterson presents this as a vision for what he thinks is the best type of interface to present to all the participants in the claims process: no jumping around between multiple applications, no green screens, and the relationships between information from multiple systems combined in ways that make sense relative to the adjuster’s work. I see some of this type of functionality being built into some of the more modern BPM systems, but that’s not what a lot of insurance companies are using: they’re using out-of-date versions of FileNet and other more traditional BPM systems.

As with most unconference sessions, this is a small bit of presentation and a lot of audience discussion. Some in the group made a distinction between collaboration and social, and didn’t see the sort of collaboration within business processes that happens within organizations as social. Masterson (and I) disagree: whenever you deviate from the structured business process in a process such as claims adjudication, it’s an inherently social activity since people are relying on their tacit knowledge about what other people can bring to the process, and using (often) ad hoc methods for bringing them into the flow. I think that they are confusing “social” with “public”, and have been drinking too much of the E2.0 Kool-Aid that’s being passed around at this conference.

The real unique thing here is not putting a pretty front end on enterprise systems (although that’s a nice feature, it’s just a relatively well-understood integration issue); it’s the home page as a unified view of a user’s work environment – I hesitate to call it a unified inbox since it’s not just about delivering tasks or messages to be acted upon – and the information relationships that allow the right panel to be populated with relevant information and links for the specific work context. As opposed to tagging of process instances to use as future templates for exception cases, an idea that I’ve been knocking about for a while, this goes beyond that to collect information that might be related to a process instance from a variety of sources including blogs and wikis. Consider that the claims adjuster is handling a specific exception case, and someone else did a very similar case previously and documented their actions in a procedures wiki: this sort of environment could bring in information about the previous case when the user is processing the current case. The information in the right panel is replacing the user’s memory and the line of sticky notes that they have on the edge of their screen.

There’s some cool ideas in here, and I hope that it develops into a working prototype so that they can get this in front of actual users and refine the ideas. There’s a lot that’s broken in how enterprise processes work, even those that have been analyzed and automated with BPM, and bringing in contextual information to help with a specific work step (especially case management steps such as claims adjudication) is going to improve things at least a little bit.

I had a chance to meet with Cheryl McKinnon from Open Text while here at the Enterprise 2.0 conference for a briefing and a demo of Open Text Social Media, their enterprise social software offering to be released within a few weeks. This is a part of the Enterprise 2.0 market that I’m really interested in: how do we add a social layer on existing enterprise platforms, such as enterprise content management (ECM)?

Open Text already has some amount of collaboration around document management in their product portfolio, as well as web content management. Since they have a solid content management platform backing all of the content, they’re able to add the necessary aspects of governance, compliance and security that has to surround certain content without, hopefully, that getting in the way of collaboration. The Open Text Social Media product is pushing that a step further, adding more social aspects to content collaboration. Most content management – and content collaboration that goes with it – focuses on connecting people to content; OTSM also connects people to people in a content-centric manner.

They started with a few basic principles: keep the user interface simple so that there would be few barriers to adoption, while maintaining the security, auditability and records management functionality from the underlying ECM suite. They’ve removed the requirement for the content to be viewed in the hierarchical folder-type fashion that is inherent in the ECM system, and added discussions and wikis as well as maintaining a social graph of person-to-person interactions. This provides three key areas of functionality:

• The social network inside an enterprise
• A social marketplace with customers and partners
• A repository for “corporate memory”

We moved on to a demo, starting with the personal dashboard home screen that shows the status and presence indicator of people who I follow, communities to which I belong, and content that I have flagged to follow. My personal profile contains structured information, some of which can be pulled from LDAP/ActiveDirectory, plus Facebook-like status messages – this is what appears on the home screen of people who follow me – and my blog. Also, anywhere where my name appears within the site, hovering over the link pops up a mini view of my profile.

Communities are a combination of wikis, documents and discussions, and can be designated as public, public read-only, private and secret. All of these security designations are inside the firewall: “public”, for example, means that everyone inside the enterprise can see and contribute to it. Private read-only could be used for more traditional broadcast intranet content; private means that the content is hidden but the community is visible and anyone could request membership in the community; secret means that the community is hidden and available only by direct invitation. Discussions within a community appear on the “Feed” tab, and are fairly standard topic-based discussions where you can read and reply to the thread, with the additional ability to flag a topic so that it appears in my flagged items on my home screen, where new replies to the topic would be indicated: a sort of content subscription. There is no ability (yet) to include an external feed into a community, although there’s a bookmarklet to make it easy to share external links as part of a discussion. The “Documents” tab in a community is (I assume) a view into the underlying content repository, but is a flat list view rather than a folder-based hierarchy since presumably there would be a small number of documents in the community. I’m not sure how well that user interface will scale if a community has hundreds of documents on that tab, although there are filtering capabilities. The wiki tab within the community allows multiple wiki pages to be created, also apparently in a flat navigation structure which may not scale well. The wiki has pretty standard (and easy to use) edit and comment functionality, plus the ability to flag content to follow in my home page. There’s a complete revision history stored for each wiki page, and you can roll back to an earlier version if required.

All of the community content can be pushed into the ECM archive, which would enforce records retention and other governance rules, although we didn’t get into the details of how seamless that would be to community authors and readers.

The searching is where we really start to see the people-to-people capabilities: searches locate content, as you would expect, but also locate people and communities that are contributing to or discussing that content, as well as people who have the search terms in their profile or their blog posts.

They round it all out with some pretty slick applications for a Blackberry or iPhone. These are applications, not mobile versions of a website, so include persistent cache for use when you’re offline.

There’s an obvious overlap with SharePoint functionality here, and there will undoubtedly be a battle inside some organizations between these two proven enterprise platforms when it comes to social media. Open Text’s advantage is their ECM repository, which far out-performs anything that SharePoint has to offer, and can be used as the back-end content repository for SharePoint even if a customer decides to go that direction for their enterprise social networking. That’s not unique to Open Text; other ECM vendors such as IBM/FileNet also have SharePoint connectors to allow their repositories to be used to manage SharePoint content transparently. Open Text, however, goes beyond that by offering direct social networking extensions to their ECM platform that have the potential to replace SharePoint in an organization that has already standardized on Open Text’s ECM. This direct integration with a robust content repository provides them with a distinct advantage over the Enterprise 2.0 point solutions, and make them the one for the other ECM vendors to beat in the social enterprise content collaboration market.

Peter Kim moderated a panel of three people from end-user organizations – Ben Foster of Allstate Life Insurance, Greg Matthews of Humana, and Morgan Johnston of JetBlue – on social media adoption for both external as well as internal use by enterprises.

Allstate recently launched the consumer-facing Good Hands Community, including both a social site and a Twitter presence, for both traditional marketing and sales purposes, but also to maintain a relationship with ex-customers who may have left for financial reasons but still could benefit from Allstate information and potentially become a customer again in the future. It includes tools and calculators, discussion forums and other information.

JetBlue uses social media – specifically Twitter, where they have 730,000 followers as of today – to engage customers, inform customers about what’s happening at JetBlue, and even provide updates on weather and other information that impacts their service delivery.

Humana has a social site run by their consumer innovation center – a sort of center of excellence for enterprise social media – that they are using to try and transform how they interact with their customers and partners; unfortunately, my bandwidth right now won’t allow it to actually load, so I’ll have to take their word for it. This is run separately from their corporate website, and doesn’t include any private customer data.

All of these are intended to engage the consumers, both for informing and for gathering feedback. Social media can be a sort of “canary in a coal mine” about impending problems, and it’s a valuable channel to monitor in order to hear how people are talking about your products or services, potentially heading off PR and customer service disasters before they occur. It’s also a sales lead generation channel, with companies like Dell using Twitter to broadcast deals that aren’t available anywhere else, generating significant revenue from those tweeted deals.

It’s important for multiple departments in an organization to contribute their ideas and needs for consumer-facing social media. It’s not just an IT project, although IT is going to be involved in order to deploy the platform, and there’s a need for rapid prototyping and changes to the site without having to go through an old-fashioned waterfall development approach: this might dictate that the existing corporate IT not be involved, but a new team formed to support this sort of agile approach.

One of the panelists noted that you can see the trends in conferences: social media is now on the agenda at IT conferences, at marketing/PR conferences, at HR conferences and at customer service conferences, indicating that people from multiple areas within organizations that have an interest and a stake in social media.

You have to learn by doing with social media: people have to get in there and start producing content, then see what the consumer feedback is like for that content in order to tune the message and style. That’s a scary thing for most companies, but these three are setting a good example.

An eight-person panel discussed how organizations can use social messaging to improve internal and external communication and collaboration. I’m not even going to try to track who says what, since I’ve lost track of who’s who (except for the lone woman on the panel), so just random notes:

• Unified Communications vendors need to open up their products to allow social messaging to participate. Voice seems to be ignored in Enterprise 2.0 (note that there are no sessions on voice at this conference), but needs to be a part of it. This is especially true when we consider devices such as the iPhone, which is used to participate both through social media and voice. People don’t want think about what tool to use, they want to focus on the problem that they’re trying to solve.
• Enterprise 2.0 isn’t about giving people “one more thing to do”, but to help make people more effective. This is a big one that I see when trying to get people within my clients to collaborate, often because they don’t give up doing things the old way, so see the new collaboration tools/methods and an additional step rather than a replacement for an old and inefficient way to do things.
• Social messaging is about forming weak ties, not necessarily about pre-targeted recipients. The ROI may not be obvious up front, but serendipitous discovery of information and people provides unexpected value.
• We need to stop focusing on the tools and applications, and start focusing on the people and use cases. That is especially obvious in this panel, which still has too much of a tool focus – Marcia Conner from Pistachio Consulting has to keep dragging the conversation back to the people, practices and conversations.
• The same issues of information security apply to social messaging as to any other form of communications. Social messaging tools don’t equate to information leakage, they just provide another platform for what is likely already happening by voice, email and other methods if you have employees that don’t adhere to your security policies. Governance begins with individuals, and if you can’t trust your employees, you need to monitor their activities. If the corollary is true – that if you monitor your employees’ activities, that means that you don’t trust them – then I see a lot of companies with no trust in the people whom them so carefully recruit and hire. It’s impossible to completely lock down data in any organization, so there needs to be policies (and education about those policies) that lead to self-policing.
• There is insufficient granularity of presence: with most social platforms, there is a single view of you that is exposed to everyone who you choose to expose it to, and you can’t tune the experience for different audiences. In other words, don’t put anything on Twitter that you wouldn’t want your employer, your competitor or your mother to read. I’ve noticed that although platforms like Facebook are providing tools to allow you to limit what parts of your profile are available to different groups of your contacts, very few people bother to use them.
• Enterprises matter less; relationships and conversations matter more. Don’t limit yourself to just an enterprise conversation, think about a participatory culture. (I think that I won the Enterprise 2.0 buzzword bingo on that last statement)

These are just the high points; you can check out the Twitter stream for this session or the replay of the video if you want to hear the entire panel.