Gartner’s Top End User Predictions

I love this stuff. Gartner just released their Top End User Predictions for 2010. All kinds of food for thought in this. Among other things, I’m going to have to add another category of costs to my ROI analysis for Carbon. Over all, they predict technology is becoming intrinsic to every aspect of society, not just to business. Other specific predictions are:

• By 2012, 20% of businesses will own no IT assets.
• By 2012, India-centric IT service companies will represent 20% of the leading cloud aggregators in the market.
• By 2012, Facebook will become the hub for social networks integration and Web socialization.
• By 2014, most IT business cases will include carbon remediation costs.
• In 2012, 60% of a new PC’s total life greenhouse gas emissions will have occurred before the user first turns the machine on.
• Internet marketing will be regulated by 2015, controlling more than $250 billion in Internet marketing spending worldwide.
• By 2014, more than three billion of the world’s adult population will be able to transact electronically via mobile and Internet technology.
• By 2015, context will be as influential to mobile consumer services and relationships as search engines are to the Web.
• By 2013, mobile phones will overtake PCs as the most common Web access device worldwide.

Forrester: SharePoint, On Its Own, Isn’t Cut Out for BPM

This interesting article from CMSwire summarizes a new Forrester report titled SharePoint and BPM — Finding The Sweet Spot. They reach a similar conclusion as in my What is SharePoint post regarding using it for BPM or an application framework: that while SharePoint does a lot of things well, it becomes brittle when you try to use it for managing more than simple business processes.

According to CMSwire, Forrester offers several reasons why SharePoint 2010 offers limited support for BPM, including:

• Out of the box, SharePoint processes are simple, so seamless business processes require custom coding.
• To build a real business process application, there’s a lot of custom coding you will have to do and that takes time, costs money and introduces a number of problems related to the flexibility of the SharePoint application.
• Because SharePoint can only offer procedural-based processes without complex coding, it can’t easily offer the ability to adapt processes to handle exceptions in typical BPM implementations.
• Processes are constrained by Windows Workflow Foundation (WF). When developers build process-oriented applications that leverage WF, they often find themselves hard-coding static, brittle interfaces that add to the total cost of ownership (TCO)
• Site collections, while great for helping organize content and information, can be a major problem when developing business processes that cross organizational boundaries and complicate multi-departmental processes.

To this list, I’ll add a couple more observations:

• SharePoint largely ignores BPMS functionality around:
  1. business activity monitoring (BAM) and business event support,
  2. simulation and optimization, and
  3. business rule management
• Because process configuration is done inside SharePoint Designer, it isolates the business from design that can help feed and tune execution

And this why even Microsoft encourages finding an integrated partner application to fill an Enterprise BPM requirement. Some of the vendors that offer solutions that work in varying degrees with SharePoint include AgilePoint, Global 360, K2, MetaStorm, and Nintex.  So, before launching a BPM initiative on top of SharePoint, investigate BPM vendors and how well they enhance BPM for SharePoint. You will likely end up spending less time and money and having a more rich and agile solution when all is  done.

Who are the Cool BPM Vendors?

Since they knew you wanted to know, Gartner is just out with their list of Cool BPM vendors. These are vendors that are innovative, interesting, and have or will have a business impact on the future of IT. Interestingly, none of the established players make the list. Who did? This from CMS wire:

BizAgi, based in Bogota, Colombia, focuses on handing more responsibility to business users to improve processes. Its principal products include a free BPMN 1.2-based modeler, an Express Edition and its “model once, execute anywhere” edition which have all contributed to building a wide customer base that includes 150 academic institutions.

ICCM Solutions provides an IT service management (ITSM) and service desk solution built on Metastorm BPM. Its principal product, e-Service Desk , which comes on-premises and as a hosted service, supports Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) processes across all phases of the business process life cycle using a BPMS that gives scope for continuous improvement in processes.

PNMSoft has developed processes that help business process outsourcing companies respond more efficiently and quickly to the changing process needs of their clients. It also focuses on improving end-to-end demand management processes between the business process outsourcing provider and its client organizations.

Questetra provides a cloud-based solution to manage human workflow and improve worker productivity. It offers business people, who have no programming or systems knowledge, a simple to use workable platform for process improvement running on a shared Amazon EC2 infrastructure. It charges a US$ 10 per end user per month fee for this cloud service.

WhitesteinTechnologies applies processes that have the ability to self-adapt to changing business conditions. Focusing on an agile and dynamic world, the architecture, using a multiagent approach, ensures self-adaptive behavior in processes whether those behaviors are proactive or reactive.

To me, ICCM sounds a little nerdy. The two that sound coolest (if they live up to the promise) are Questetra, which promises cloud based BPM for the masses and WhitesteinTechnologies, that claims to adapt to changing processes. Kewl.

Questetra

Business Value of BPM

Many thanks to the students of the University of Colorado, Denver Business School’s class on Business Process Management for an engaging discussion yesterday. I am glad to see that there are now college classes focused on BPM. I hope that I was able to share some experiences about how to build business cases that justify investment in process improvement and BPM technologies. The slides from my presentation are posted on this link: The Business Value of BPM.

Gartner Reveals Five BPM Predictions

With Gartner kicking off its Business Process Management Summit yesterday in Vegas, I thought this article on their predictions for BPM in 2010 and beyond would be appropriate. To summarize, five of the key predictions for BPM are:

1. By 2012, 20 per cent of customer-facing processes will be knowledge-adaptable and assembled just in time to meet the demands and preferences of each customer, assisted by BPM technologies.
2. By 2013, dynamic BPM will be an imperative for companies seeking process efficiencies in increasingly chaotic environments.
3. Through 2014, the act of composition will be a stronger opportunity to deliver value from software than the act of development.
4. By 2014, business process networks (BPNs) will underpin 35 per cent of new multienterprise integration projects.
5. By 2014, 40 per cent of business managers and knowledge workers in Global 2000 enterprises will use comprehensive business process models to support their daily work, up from 6 per cent in 2009.

These  got me excited, but left me wondering why adoption over the next 4 years is still predicted to be so low. Only 20% use BPM technologies? 35% use BPN, 40% use process models? OK, so the 20% is for adaptable processes that that “self-adjust based on the sensing of patterns” – pretty cutting edge stuff. And, while model usage will still be less than 50% in 2014, that’s almost 90% growth every year for the next 4 years. OK, I’m still excited.

Buried in #5 is the recommendation to “accelerate skill development by implementing a business process competency centre.” They must have heard me.

And, in case your wondering what’s a BPN, Wikipedia has a pretty good definition (I hope Gartner is not referring to VAN’s.) Check out the full Gartner article for more substance.

Lean BPM

According to a recent Forrester presentation, Lean is the way to promote BPM. One statistic that surprised me from that is that Agile, while the most common method for delivering BPM initiatives, still comprises only 34% of the approaches. Also surprising is that 20% still rely on Waterfall.

Forrester suggests all should use agile. I would say they should at least start with pilots, mockups and trial implementations on a limited scope and deliver value quickly. This seems obvious given the BPM tool set, yet many organizations still work with less flexible approaches.

Business Process as a Service

Despite my assumption that cloud computing will take some time for larger companies to adopt, I do believe we are eventually heading there. But can BPaaS replace BPMS’s? David Lampers has an interesting take on the idea that allows for a business process ecosystem built around cloud-based business processes. Still a few years out, but interesting to contemplate.

Don’t make Resolutions – Plan the New Year

I am deep into my annual planning process for the New Year. I just reviewed a post from Chris Guillebeau over at the ANOC blog that lays out his process for year-end planning. In short, he advises the following steps:

Step 1: Review the Previous Year
Step 2: Outline Goals and Overall Focus for Next Year
Step 3: Make Decisions in Support of the Goals and Focus

His explanation of the steps are well worth a deep read. I think, however, he misses an important step which is to prioritize the roles you hold. The role construct has helped me focus during this process. I make a list of what roles are important to me. They can be specific or generic: Father, Friend & Family Member, Self Developer, Business Owner, Writer, Leader at … I scrub the list to ensure they match my overall mission, commitments and values and to determine if any need special focus in the coming year. I like to then picture where each role will be 5 or more years out and in the next year. With this list, I then set long and medium term goals similarly to how he describes step 2. Thinking in terms of roles also helps in planning each week to ensure you make progress toward each role’s goals.

I’d love to hear what you use to plan – please share in the comments.

ROI Calculator Defines Business Value

I recently updated my ROI Value calculator. I first discussed this calculator and the approach for quantifying value in the presentation linked to in Creating Value Stories. Since then, I’ve refined some of the categories and identified additional strategies for generating benefit from process improvements. Modifications bring the benefit strategies to 29 across the categories in the benefits tree above. Process improvement from BPM, Lean, and other initiatives generate quantifiable business value through one or more of these strategies.

This calculator is currently deployed to support sales at a BPM software vendor. Three of their new customers have signed up for projects based on using it in assessing their processes. A financial services COO recently commented during a value review that process improvement was the only way they would survive going forward as their margins continue to be squeezed from every direction.  Especially in today’s environment, I suggest all sales processes start with this approach if serious about moving discussions forward.

ROI-ify Sales

I am off to Dallas again this week to help with a software sales ROI presentation to the executive team. I was browsing some other ROI sites and found Glenn Clowney’s articles particularly interesting. His articles on the topic are right in line with my experience. Among his findings:

• 81% of buyers expect vendors to quantify the business value of their product or service, meaning 60% more projects are likely to be approved (Information Week).
• According to an Ernst & Young study, only 2% of the buyers say vendors are exceeding their expectations for ROI justification during the sales cycle. This means 98% of the time sales professionals miss an opportunity to win the deal.

I hope we fall into that 2%. Keep up the good work Glenn.