Bpms

Santa Clara RFP

A recent client, Santa Clara County, asks that I post on the issuance of their RFP for a BPMS to handle the assessor department processes. A bit unusual, but why not. It's a nice project, a variety of human-centric processes with a bit of custom integration (Vignette, TurboImage database). Interested vendors should look for RFP#605 from www.rfpdepot.com.

Automated, Human-Centric, Collaborative Processes - What's the Difference?

Forrester tries to shove BPMS offerings into pigeonholes: human-centric, integration-centric, document-centric, Microsoft-centric.... Yikes. That's bogus. Most BPMS vendors are trying to make their tools applicable across a broad spectrum of process types. But it's true that today each BPMS offering is probably stronger in some process types than in others. In my 2007 BPMS Report series, now getting off the ground, understanding this is fundamental to the evaluation methodology. If you want to get a sneak preview of the issues involved, including the views of a few other panelists, check out the ebizQ webcast Automated, Human-Centric, and Collaborative Processes next Wednesday March 7 at 2pm ET/11am PT, part of their BPM in Action event.

Be My Guest at Brainstorm BPM

BPMS Watch invites you to join me at BPMInstitute.org's Business Process Management Conference, April 10-11 at The Drake Hotel in Chicago. As part of my participation in the event, I have secured a limited number of Complimentary 1-Day Conference Passes (a $995 value) for BPMS Watch readers. (Note: this is for the conference events, not the BPMN training, and there is some fine print to note at the bottom... but a great deal nonetheless.

Not Quite Live from Gartner BPM - Day 1

I'm not going to try to compete with Sandy's wall-to-wall coverage of this event. Mine will be more impressionistic.

Simon Hayward keynote. Gartner likes to sell futures on technology. It's what they do. Simon has a chart of the value realization from BPM over time, with 3 curves. Today the "productivity" curve is highest. In 2012 (safely over the horizon) the "visibility" curve overtakes it. In 2017 (I'll be dead by then) the "innovation" curve reigns supreme. After that, I don't know, maybe global warming wipes out the earth. Does this kind of chart really advance the ball?

An interesting difference between the Gartner and Brainstorm BPM conference is that at Gartner the keynoters assume and universally assert that if you're not going through the whole model-design-deploy-execute-monitor-analyze-optimize thing you're not really doing BPM. At Brainstorm the keynoting class generally advances the notion that BPM ends with modeling and "process thinking"... although the vendors who sponsor the thing really wish they would stop saying that. I like the Gartner approach, but which one is addressing the "real" BPM marketplace?

What Makes a BPMS "Good"?

I'm in the process of updating my 2006 BPMS Report series on BPMInstitute.org to the new and improved 2007 version. A major change from last year is a beefed-up evaluation scoring. I've discovered that many users (and most vendors) are happy to skip the 25-page walkthrough of the product and go straight to the scorecard at the end. Which product "won"? I haven't figured out the presentation - it will probably be some 2-dimensional thing like the Forrester Wave or Gartner MQ - but I'm close to having a finished scoring methodology. It's probably asking for trouble, but I'm publishing it right here so that you can comment upon it.

BEA State of the Market Survey

BEA recently completed a "thorough analysis" of the BPM market, based on analyst reports, articles, and customer surveys. Some highlights, with my thoughts: BPM is one of the fastest-growing software markets, projected to go from $500 Million in 2006 to $6 Billion in 2011. When I see $6 Billion I have to wonder what they're counting, but yeah, it's definitely moving. Rapidly consolidating, from 150 vendors in 2006 to 25 in 2007.

BPMN and the Business Process Expert

Over the past several months I've been doing a lot of work with SAP to beef up the modeling-related content on their BPX community site. BPX stands for Business Process Expert, a term intended to describe a new role in the organization, straddling the line between business and IT. I see BPMN as a critical enabler of this role, because it for the first time allows process modeling, a business function, to be directly integrated with process implementation design.

Metastorm-Proforma Sidebar

BPMS vendor Metastorm acquired BPA vendor Proforma today, kind of a surprise to me, since the last thing most business analysts want is to have their modeling tool funnel them into some proprietary runtime. Sandy as usual has it covered. I bring it up only because a graduate of my BPMN training pinged me about a white paper on the Metastorm website that disses BPMN big-time while at the same time admitting that the company probably needs to adapt its proprietary "

Oracle Making Strides in BPM

Yesterday I got a briefing from the BPM folks at Oracle, as part of my BPMS Report series, and I came away surprised at both the completeness and, in many ways, coolness of the offering. A few things stand out (for the rest you'll have to wait for the report, later this month): Oracle provides a unique solution to the problems of business-IT interaction and round-tripping. For modeling, Oracle OEMs IDS Scheer ARIS, rebranded Oracle BPA Suite, and has added to it Oracle SOA Extensions that link it to the executable process design and runtime environment, called Oracle SOA Suite.

BPM Hall of Fame

[My April column for BPM Institute. Please add your own nominees in the comments.] Is there a BPM Hall of Fame? I don?t think so, but there should be, to recognize the true pioneers and innovators in the field. BPM?s core ideas and technologies come from several divergent fields, and my list would include those who first introduced them ? ideas about what a business process is, and what managing one really means.