BPM service news

Today Appian announced that it’s formalised a partnership with Enterprise Architecture and Process Analyst tools vendor MEGA where the two companies will jointly sell and market each others’ technologies, and also work to integrate the MEGA tools and Appian Enterprise and Appian Anywhere.

This is a sensible move from Appian and also not entirely unpredictable - MEGA has existing partnerships with Lombardi and Software AG. Along with IDS Scheer, it’s one of the leading suppliers of architecture and analysis tools (both vendors are Open Group Silver level members, primarily aiming to influence the direction of TOGAF). As organisations get further down the road with EA and process improvement initiatives, we expect enterprises to look to increase collaboration across the boundaries of these disciplines.

Just before I went on holiday I got a note from Mike Lees, Senior Director of BPM Product Marketing at Software AG. He’s one of the authors of BPM for Dummies, alerting me to Ed N. Sand. Ed is a caricature COO being used by Software AG to help promote the BPM for Dummies book that was written by Mike and two colleagues - and, by association, Software AG’s BPM and other technology offerings.

Creating fictional characters to promote products is hardly new, of course, and it even has precedence in the enterprise software world - look at Greg the Architect. Greg was a pretty big hit for TIBCO in 2007, with one of the spoof videos receiving over 70000 views on YouTube. A pretty successful attempt at creating a social object in a niche space, if you ask me.

It can hardly be a coincidence, given Greg’s success, that one of its major competitors has now created Ed. However right now, Ed needs some love. At the moment, Ed’s LinkedIn profile still has 0 connections…

As part of our BPM Continuous Advisory Service, we’re carrying out twice-yearly research studies which capture information about the state of maturity and practice of BPM in European businesses. We’ve finally finished analysing the results of our first study, and published the report.

For me, the most interesting insight was that given the state of BPM in Europe today, industry figures promoting BPM as “the killer app for SOA” appear to be well wide of the mark - at least for now.

The report is only available to service subscribers (although you can request a free service trial if you’d like to see more), but here’s a few highlights:

• Most European organisations are closer to BPR than they are to BPM. Most organisations are concentrating on process modelling to discover opportunities for process improvement. Those actively working to build the kind of continuous process improvement framework that’s a hallmark of BPM are very much in the minority.
• Process improvement is heavily business-driven and use of specialised tools is low today. Use of specialised process modelling tools and BPM platforms is low, with (for example) a significant proportion of our study participants actively using pen and paper for process modelling. Given the levels of interest in driving more effective collaboration between stakeholders in process improvement initiatives, this represents a huge opportunity for improvement through the targeted application of more specialised technology.
• Take care when trying to “sell” SOA internally through BPM. Our study throws up a number of crucial pieces of evidence that together suggest that trying to simplistically link BPM and SOA initiatives together, particularly in the minds of non-technical business teams, is likely to be risky. You should be careful of assuming that business teams will find it straightforward to make the conceptual links between these two initiatives.
• If you want to get ahead with BPM, identify the business champions first. By looking at the responses of participants furthest down the line in adopting BPM, we find that successful process change is about organisational change: it requires both new skills, and real attention to detail in ensuring that people affected by process improvements are comfortable accepting the changes to their working practices.

The study was carried out in May and June 2008 and involved 210 telephone interviews. 70 respondents were based in the UK; 70 in France; and 70 in Germany. The respondents were also evenly split across seven industries – financial services, government, insurance, retail, telecommunications, travel & transport, and utilities. We didthe research in conjunction with our partners at Freeform Dynamics.

Today IBM announced that has signed a Memorandum of Understanding with ILOG that states IBM’s intention to acquire the French business rules and software development componentry provider. It’s subject to all the relevant legal and shareholder approvals of course, but ILOG’s board of directors has approved the sale.

IBM has been an ILOG partner for some years, so as BPM and SOA become ever more central to IBM’s enterprise pitch, it’s no surprise that it wanted to buy into the specialist business rules management market rather than continue partnering. There’s potential for ILOG’s JRules technology to fit alongside the “business event processing” technology it acquired from AptSoft early in 2008, and also of course nestle into its BPM Suite offering.

What’s less clear at this point is how and where the rest of ILOG’s technologies (specialist operational programming and scheduling software, advanced GUI components and supply-chain applications that accounted for 67% of ILOG’s revenue in its financial 2007) will fit into IBM’s portfolio.

With small tech companies these days, it’s easy to assume they’re VC funded to some degree. Appian, on the other hand, has managed for its first 9 years completely self funded. Today it announced that it’s taken on a $10m investment from VC firm Novak Biddle.

You can check out a lot of the detail in Appian’s own press release but here’s some extra info that was given on an analyst call last week:

• This is a big investment from Novak Biddle - the company normally takes smaller positions in its portfolio companies. There are no other investors involved.
• Ramping up marketing is a big focus for the invesment. Matt Calkins, Appian CEO, said on the call that he wants the company to be one of a couple of pure-play BPM providers leading the market segment. To do this he needs to up the visibility of the company. Appian is doubling its marketing spend as a result.
• Whereas the company used to hire gradually and organically, it’s now able to hire to drive business growth and is already in the process of hiring 15 extra professional services staff.
• Growing the footprint outside the US is a priority. So another use for the funding is to build a network of channel partners in Europe and Asia, by bringing niche application and integration providers to the Appian platform and encouraging them to build and deploy customer solutions on the Appian technology.

As Sandy points out, in these post dot-com days $10m sounds like nothing - the kind of money a VC funded startup might consume without even noticing. But as a 9-year self-funded small company, Appian certainly has the ability to use money wisely.

I just listened (a little belatedly) to an informative Oracle podcast featuring David Shaffer (Senior Director of Product Management, SOA), who talks about where Oracle’s planning to go with its newly-enlarged BPM technology portfolio. He’s refreshingly honest about Oracle’s strengths and weaknesses, and pretty clear about what he expects to happen as the Oracle and BEA technologies come together.

The podcast is here. (I would point you to the podcast on the Oracle site directly, but I have big problems accessing www.oracle.com 90% of the time, for some strange reason).

Here smart chap Bruce Silver picks up one of my favourite bloggers, Microsoft’s Nick Malik, on a recent post on Nick’s view of how BPM technology has often been marketed. I’m not as extreme as Bruce on this, but I do think that Nick has oversimplified things way too much here. I don’t believe BPM technology has ever been marketed as some kind of magic that takes process diagrams and turns them into working systems. Certainly no vendor I’ve ever come across says anything like this.

Maybe Nick had a bad experience with an unscrupulous (and stupid) BPM technology salesperson?

Readers of the general MWD blog will probably know by now that I frequently call out Nick Malik’s posts as real thought-provokers.

With Blame the Computer: a BPM Anti-Pattern, he’s done it again. Here, he shows how different approaches to modelling processes can perpetuate the troublesome cultural rift that can separate IT and business teams. Nick’s is a very specific example of how modellers should represent roles and responsibilities in process models, but his point works much more broadly: the language we use defines how the world sees us. This can work well or work badly.
Process modellers need to use models carefully when using them in collaboration with other stakeholders to explore opportunities or problems - used the right way, models can introduce new concepts gently and lead people to new appreciation of how things work (or could work). Used the wrong way, they can reinforce poor IT-business relationships.

I recently received confirmation that I’ve been accepted as a speaker at IRM’s Business Process Management Conference Europe 2008, which will be staged 29 September to 1 October in London. I’m planning on discussing the findings of the enterprise research study we’re just in the process of completing: it looks like I’ll have some really interesting stuff to say about market maturity, best practice, and so on. It looks like being a good event: there’ll be case studies from Shell, Scottish Life, the BBC, Royal KPN and more, and also presentations from Howard Smith (Mr. Third Wave himself), Keith Harrison-Broninski, and Roger Burlton (among others, including me).

The conference organisers have told me that anyone who mentions my name when registering for the conference will receive a £100 discount on conference fees (the full price is £1169, or £1639 if you want to go to the pre-conference workshop too). You can register here.

After months of tweaking and review, our coverage of IBM’s BPM technology offering is now live.

The delay is mostly due to the breadth of IBM’s portfolio (the assessment report runs to 33 pages, whereas most of the others come in around 20 pages) - combined with the fact that, just as we were about to finalise the report, IBM changed its portfolio positioning, introducing the BPM Suite. Anyhow the effort has been worth it - we think the result is pretty comprehensive and definitely worth reading if you’re in the process of selecting a BPM technology vendor.

The assessment report is available as part of our Guest Pass library, here; the detailed comparative scoring information is in the vendor comparison tool that’s part of our BPM continuous advisory service. Although the service isn’t free, you can get a 7-day free trial, so you can use the tool to see how IBM stacks up in the context of your own environment and preferences - just fill in this form.

Next up is Pegasystems - the assessment process is already underway.