The Thought Leader Summit of the WFMC at the Tibco offices in Maidenhead was quite interesting. There were 20 attendants. I was very positively surprised to hear that most see the need for a new kind of process or case management.

The day was spent with the following discussions:

• Is there a need for new concept that enables adaptive processes?
• Which different set of benefits does it deliver to the business?
• How can it be distinguished from BPM and Case Management (CM)?
• Is that difference so substantial that it is not just an extension of either?
• Is BPM for clerks and case management for ‘knowledge workers’?
• What would one call such a concept (and with it the solutions)?
• How would such a concept be received in the marketplace?

The presentations of Cordys and Global360 made it clear that the business perspective is certainly different to BPM. Global360 also made it clear that it is different from Case Management. In my presentation I tried to make understood that I see BPM as a very limited solution when compared to real-world business needs and while Case Management is a step in the right direction, it is mostly hardcoded in features towards the area of use in either healthcare or legal and thus too limited for widespread business use. All other Case Management solutions are typically custom-built by vendors or service providers from 3 to 7 individual products with lots of custom coding. Yes, there are a number of BPM products that have ad-hoc functionality, case folders, dynamic sub-process selection and process wikis, but they still require substantial upfront analysis effort.

What are the unique business benefits of such a solution?

• User work only with real-world items, such as content and people.
• There is no upfront analysis and design of business processes.
• Business entities are accessible and usable in real-time in the case.
• Processes are focused on achieving individual goals.
• Organization can be virtual with participants being added at any time.
• Business process DECISION knowledge is discovered during execution.
• Management acquires full transparency of processes and execution.
• Business users, management AND CUSTOMERS can participate.

In the end we could not agree what to name such a solution. The closest match was ‘Adaptive Case Management’ but then attendants either thought that Case Management was close enough or too different. I could go with Adaptive Case Management (ACM) and will call it that here for the time being. Typically TLAs are created by some analysts group based on a large enough market fragment. No revenue – no TLA (Three-Letter-Acronym)! If you have any suggestion for a TLA, then please let me know. I said before that I intensely dislike market fragments but it seems thats what people want.

Here is a revised, shortened list of ACM features and differentiators:

1. I proposed that the key ACM differentiator is in the template life-cycle.
2. ACM therefore requires a version-controlled, central repository of model templates that enables definition changes to be deployed using a change management life-cycle.
3. In difference to BPM, the process template is not fully analyzed and designed up front and then instantiated and executed as-is.
4. In difference to CM and collaboration, a case is not just a folder that bundles all information with some state definitions.
5. In difference to both, a case can be assembled BY THE USER from a set of predefined template elements, including content and business entities that are real-time linked to business applications.
6. In difference to both, ACM employs some means to enhance case handling knowledge from user actions on previously executed cases.
7. ACM can BOTH guide or enforce user actions.
8. ACM allows both parallel and strict sequential execution of role activities.
9. ACM controls user access to EVERYTHING based on role/policy not dependent on organisational roles or GUI/forms definitions.
10. ACM can include rule/pattern/state controlled decision-making.
11. Business entities and content are not encapsulated by a case but just referenced and therefore changes to business entities can change many cases.
12. Events can influence any process or case entity at any time or trigger rules.
13. Boundary rules can be defined by users as business-wide or case relevant.
14. .. this is not a complete list either.

So far, so good. There is a Linked-In group I created on ACM and there is a discussion about doing a symposium. I am worried that too many interests will once again conflict here. There is also a Case Management RFP at OMG in the wings. We’ll see.

While I am excited that this first step has happened, I realize that there are so many special interests of vendors, analysts and consultants that there is a long way to go until a new process management paradigm will be widely accepted. Either the technology and user acceptance will be so convincing that the market will jump at it, or some large vendor will spend billions in advertizing to make people accept an inferior solution as ‘the standard’. No, I am not jaded. I happens all the time.

On Nov. 3rd, I will be attending a Throught Leader Summit of the Workflow Management Coalition. The focus of discussion will be Case Management or Dynamic BPM. Keith Swenson, who felt I could add to the discussion, was so friendly to invite me. Given my critical stance towards BPM, I feel like walking into the Colosseum with lots of hungry lions waiting. Should this be my last post, you know what happened … just a little joke! Keith asked participants to offer a position statement upfront to enable others to prepare themselves.

Here is my Position Statement for WfMC Thought Leader Summit:

Businesses have to succeed in an economy that is a ‘complex adaptive system’ rather than a complicated system that can be decomposed into building blocks. Adam Smith’s invisible hand at work. A system of independently acting agents is not complicated but complex and is considered a complex adaptive environment that resists decomposition, see Anderson, Arrow, Pines (1988). From a planning perspective it seems ideal if businesses would not consist of independent acting agents, but whould act coherently, hence BPM to the rescue. I propose that such perfect businesses would be so foreign in a dynamic free market economy that they would fail. Thus also large companies are complex adaptive systems,  in which (like in most natural systems) successful structures emerge, adapt and evolve rather than being artificially created (think about inhouse politics for a moment!). In such systems, functions cannot be created by a methodology of analysis and design, mostly because for the lack of realistic abstraction. That does not mean that there is no process perspective but it is much less detailed than a step-by-step flowchart model. Models are only necessary to define the real-world entities for process handoff between process owners.

Before jumping into the technology aspect of complex adaptive process I need to discuss the business element of my approach. I agree that there are businesses with different management styles regarding customers service and HR. I propose that even businesses with a more ‘employee control’ approach would possibly benefit more from less process analysis and more frequent process adaptation through process owners, because of the huge amount of control structure.

I arrived at my above perspective not from an expansion of BPM to dynamic process management or from the needs of case file collaboration, but from – non manufacturing – business and human resource management for service processes. I am opposed to the idea that a business can be improved by analyzing and designing rigid processes, except for an irrelevant small percentage (as an addition to ERP). I fail to find the proof that flowchart-designed processes and the related change management bureaucracy do make a business more agile. People are (if at all) agile but never analyzed and designed processes. Frequent process changes will simply destroy whatever initiative employees might have left. I have yet to see a business that does actually automate more than 20% of its processes and currently assume that this is the maximum that can be achieved. Rather than the 80% often proposed. The more processes are controlled, the more bypass and add-on activities exist. I fail to see the sense in creating rigid processes and then define everything that does not map into it as an exception. The process spectrum is rather from straight through processing to social networking with case management in between.

Process management in manufacturing was always mostly focused on quality to reduce cost, while it seems that for business services it is reducing manpower, needed skills and thus cost. I suggest that process management must always focus on customer service quality first. But not process makes people happy, but people make people happy. Therefore we need to empower people! I disagree that it is only the knowledge workers who need more dynamics and back office clerks who need rigid BPM. Also a simple activity within a case can be strictly guided by a complex adaptive process, so why bother to waste time with expensive and inaccurate process analysis?

The most likely approach to succeed is to empower the process owner to create processes on the fly as needed and empower the users to adapt those on the job. Here the similarity to Human Focused Process, Case Management and Dynamic BPM approaches becomes apparent. A complex adaptive process is however much closer to the dynamics of social networking rather than to case file collaboration.

Another important element is ‘goal definition’. Goals are a set of RULE correlated parameters that can be verified at certain intervals or be triggered by thresholds. In difference to KPI or key performance indicators, goals can be verified during real-time processing. KPI’s tend to be accumulated, consolidated data warehouse numbers. A goal mismatch event should trigger some corrective process. Goals can be anything from simple SLAs to revenue targets.

I do not want to belabor the current technology issues with roundtrip from BPM model to execution. While it may be true that most BPM systems can offer some case management aspects, the analysis, model, implement, simulate, deploy, monitor and improve cycle remains as a huge obstacle to the promised agility.

Key functions of complex adaptive (CA) process systems:

1. Distributed (similar to grid computing) communication enablement of process systems
2. The exchange of process definitions is less relevant than meta-data and methods
3. Consolidated central repository (not archive) for change management
4. Create a business architecture model of data entities in repository.
5. Utilize an object model with state/event modeling (implementing i.e. pi-calculus)
6. Enable a 100% change roundtrip for ALL elements of a process
7. Empower users to write boundary rules in natural language accessing the object data
8. Strong distributed security with embedded access control on method and attribute level
9. Enable authenticated users to create virtual organizations of collaborators
10. Empower business users to access and use defined data entities from repository
11. Simple mapping of backend business systems to data entities. (SOA or not)
12. Simple linkage to external event creating systems
13. Empower business users to create their own data entities.
14. Enable business users to create all the necessary content linked to business objects
15. Seamless integration with all inbound and outbound content (backend archives)
16. Enable business users to define role-specific user interfaces as needed.
17. Use timeline graphs to show past activities for documentation
18. Use organization charts to show authorized roles and departments or virtual organizations
19. User authorization (role/policy) and workgroup/queue assignment are independent
20. Real-time business data are mapped into the process to measure business results.
21. Customer focused processes are setup to survey customer satisfaction.
22. Consolidating process, business and satisfaction data for the process owner
23. Business results are accumulated and dashboards and reports create transparency
24. Enable offline and mobile participation for all CA processes
25. … I certainly missed a few things!

Wish list:

• Business trained document classification and routing
• Business trained content capture and data extraction
• Machine learning agents discover user activity patterns in state space

Let me note that it is not simple to ‘utilize neural networks’ on top of an existing BPM engine, because it cannot expose the state space for time-stamped user activities. It is also difficult to empower business users to define GUIs and write rules without a deeply embedded security layer as otherwise they can define themselves unauthorized data or content access.

I look forward to the summit to meet so many interesting people and will report on it right here.

I swiped the title of this post from a Financial Times article by Robert Galliers of Bentley University, with whom I agree that it is utterly important that executives gain an understanding what technology can and cannot do. That understanding has to influence their strategic planning. Technology not just a means of cost reduction or automated execution and the internet is not just an additional marketing and sales channel. The article is related to a forum discussion I  was involved in on Linked-IN. The forum is run by a business process interest group that also organizes itself on bpgroup.com by Steve Towers. The subject of the discussion was whether the concept of ‘Outside-In’ process analysis is different or provides additional benefits over other process methodologies.

I dared to question whether inventing a new name (Outside-In) for a process management methodology that ‘makes customers happy’ would do anything beyond increasing consultancy revenue. BPGroup being a consultancy organization, I obviously disturbed a hornets nest. Soon they were all swirling around me and trying to sting me with their practitioners ‘It must be right because we have done it here and there’ arguments. I simply smiled and smacked them hard. Yellow goo smeared the windows … not true, I actually simply stepped aside as I won’t waste my time.

Once again, I don’t believe in process management methodologies. I believe that processes have to be about people and for people. Not tell people HOW to do something but simply WHAT process results they are responsible for. Then give them the ability to perform a process as they see fit, while transparency up and down the management line is the key ability for achieving consolidated results. Well, you might want to even call that a methodology.

It will have to be technology to deliver that dynamic process ability. Technology that embeds a certain methodology and worse certain processes are the reason why Nicolas Carr wrote ‘Does IT matter?’ in 2003. While Carr is right about the current state of affairs, he is wrong about technology in principle. Technology is changing the world not management methodology. Technology will be the key competitive advantage. Technology that helps people to identify strategic opportunities, as well as execute and verify … all in one place without intermediate process implementations.

What kind of technology could that be? It is a kind of killer app such as Facebook? No, because even Facebook is too rigid about processes. Let me use an example from the military. Strategy would be about which battle to fight and which to avoid lacking the better weapons. Doing business is a guerilla war because it is in reality a one-on-one of business and customer. Mass marketing with or without predictive analytics and rigid-process-faceless call centers are like using a nuke on the battlefield because that way you certainly will kill the bad guys along with some collateral damage – too bad. In a guerilla war the better weapons and better trained soldiers decide. You train soliders how to use the weapons and how to communicate as a team. You don’t tell them which step to take and when to shoot. A great platoon leader essentialy points in a direction and the rest is defined by real-time communication about the enemy situation through hand-signals. Imagine that one would try to manage foot soldiers in Irak using statistical predictive analysis. Yes, I had to laugh too at that image.

Fortunately we don’t command soldiers but manage employees who interact with customers. But the team communications need is the same except that we  are sitting at our desk working on a computer. Therefore this new technology weapon has to be a mobile collaborative IT environment that allows social network interaction on business activities and entities. It has to enable process owners to collaborate about the real world deliverables as their inputs and outputs and empower the process teams to execute as they see fit. Executives (generals) have at all times complete transparency and can offer process coaching and  guidance to process owners (platoon leaders). Customers can enjoy full transparency into the processes within the organization and fully participate. Here the military simile ends.

While being more than right in my book, Galliers fails to see beyond business information and intelligence, IT governance, and agile processes. But yes, business schools need to make students aware that without understanding of information technology their ability to manage will be dramatically impaired.

That leaves one question: Who will tell the current league of CEOs that they need to go back to school?

While researching for a post on consumer and business spending in times of a recession, Google search made me stumble upon a sales pitch for an Analytical Marketing company:

“In today’s hyper-changing market scenario companies need to invest in data-based analytical marketing without which their ability to respond to quick changes in customer behaviour will be limited!”

Excuse me? A lot of FUD – fear, uncertainty and doubt being spread.

Supposedly, Analytical Marketing will be the biggest competitive advantage enterprises will have in the next decade and that only those will be able to improve profit and growth who can organize and leverage customer information. The marketing pitch claims that ‘tomorrow’s business decisions are driven by models that encapsulate yesterday’s reality.’ Hmm, interesting. Apparently a fundamental shift in consumer behavior is taking place, which might or might not be true, but how would a model that ‘encapsulates YESTERDAY’s reality’ help tomorrow’s business decisions? If a shift is taking place then would yesterday’s model not be wrong for today and certainly for tomorrow? Yes, consumers are spending less money and some understanding who is still spending on what could help a business to market to better fitting classes of customers. I propose that the problem is much rather related to customer to business communication and not vice versa.

The sales pitch foolishly tries to present economic expertise but misquoted Keynes’ ‘Paradox of Thrift’ as an example for consumer irrationality and to prove that yesterdays analytic methods are out of date. Oops! Keynes stated that principle in 1936, therefore irrational customer behavior would not really be new, right? While Keynes’ ideas are opposed by economists such as Milton Friedmann, the ‘Paradox of Thrift’ is not about irrationality of consumers, but about the question whether less consumer spending in a recession will actually increase savings and if and how politics should deal with the consequences for the economy. The paradoxical part is not the relationship of savings to business investment but the fact that the problem of changes in consumer spending is supposed to be solved by the analytical mass marketing means that created it! Consumers are saying that they will be more careful when making buying decisions and that they won’t max out their credit cards anymore to buy stuff they don’t really need. Which means that they are buying less of the crap that has been marketed to them with the help of analytical tools.

Let me reiterate here that the problem of data mining and analytical marketing is actually threefold:

1. First, you need some kind of model – no amount of data mining can give you that. It is a theory that you have to come up with. Some propose that the best way to define those is to employ mathematicians. What? Mathematicians are the most unimaginative people on this planet.
2. Second, you need to collect data. But which data? In what intervals. From where? What do the data mean? Will a trend follow through? Do they correlate in any way? Mapping collected data to the model is pure guessing.
3. Third, most of the data are of poor quality and there actually is NO WAY of knowing how good your data are. The more you try to ‘fix the data in the mix’ meaning in the data warehouse with sampling, averaging and merging the more meaningless they get.

And to top it all off, there is the claim that being able to work with analytical data and the fitting visualization tools will be a boost for your career, because you will dazzle some board member with flashy charts. That does not portray board members as very intelligent, right? It is however in line with ‘The Economists’ observation that CEOs of many large enterprises are hopelessly inept and have no idea what is going on. All those charts may be flashy, but they will still be wrong. Even if the data are correct the model that projects them into the future is theory. Data and charts won’t improve the bottom line and growth or improve the economy. How should they? What knowledge would you gain that makes people part with money they don’t have? Supposedly, the knowledge could help your customers to be more thrifty and save money. Damn, according to Keynes that would not help the economy either! The only thing that will improve your business is a motivating leader with an intuitive mind and a customer focus.

Ebay has 5 petabytes of data stored. I have not seen any sensible marketing out of that. Walmart also has petabytes but I still wouldn’t shop there. The others all know that Walmart is cheap! Let me ask you: Would it not be better to spend the money on IT investments that improve product quality, customer communication and service rather than on analytical mass marketing?

A serious change in customer behavior IS NOT a goldmine, it is a message and businesses should better listen!

Hi everyone! After a couple of month of peace and quiet I am back to shake, rattle and roll the IT industry. Hm, I wish. Actually, the oxen of the IT industry cart seemed to be so horribly stuck in the mud that my fiercest yelling and meanest jabs didn’t do anything to move them. It was that realization that has also caused my pausing. Some of it was frustration, some of it was taking a physical pause to reload the batteries. I also wish I could replace the worn out NiCads of my body against some high tech NiMH, NiZn or possibly even Supercaps. Sigh. But here I am after some reconditioning exercises and full of fighting power.

The first thing I noticed once I got back into the loop, was a kind of changed tone on the subject of BPM. Suddenly a number of BPM vendors seem to have caught on to my long-standing request that rigid processes are not the all-encompassing salvation. Many consultants and university professors still dream on in their grand theories of total process control. Not so much the market anymore. Many IT people realize now that encoding processes is not only hard to do and expensive, but it does not really improve the way the business works. They have finally started to look over the rim of the BPM plate. They realize now the problems with BPM maintenance, scalability, enterprise wide use and system migration. There are no longer any businesses where processes can be built from scratch, but there is always some environment that exists that has to be considered and integrated one way or the other.

The disappointment that seems to finally cause a rethinking comes from the fact that these projects claim to use one or more ‘Open Standards.’ As it seems, the wished for agility of the combined functionality of custom BPM and SOA standards is nowhere near a reality. We do SOA interfaces in many projects and also I fail to see the promised Plug&Play flexibility. The effort is the same as for any other well-documented interface. Over and over again. Preloading the process landscape with LEAN or SixSigma approaches to achieve a higher reuse and quality has not sped up things but just introduced a lot of bureaucracy. Before any standard seems to bring relevant benefits … the world has changed.

Not only how we implement processes creates problems but also the lack of future opportunities. There are a lot of closed doors in terms of cost and effort. Real-time process analysis and monitoring cannot simply be added to an existing BPM product. Most already made a bad choice there. Monitoring and tuning backend SOA interfaces is more relevant to BPM performance than the process-server. SOA scalability sucks (see my previous post). Business Rules engines that some try to integrate via SOA will be even worse for high-volume applications. Standalone CRM is not a backend or front end or another form of BPM, it is no more than a failure. A silly idea that backfired. And finally, Business Intelligence has to be an integral part of BPM and neither report on process execution nor trigger processes when KPIs kick out. SOA doesn’t help you with creating new consolidated process-enabled business user interfaces but you need some other product or Java coding to do get any benefit out of widespread SOA use. So far on the state of SOA technology – but NOT so good.

What is still missing in BPM the most is the human aspect. Not ‘Human Process Management’ that no one needs, but how could process management actually help a human to utilize their skills to the max without restraints but under full audit? How can a fully automatic monitoring/update loop for processes be realized so that it empowers the business user and process owner to do what they need?

The problem is made worse by jaded business users who now want to see their applications before they are willing to go along with anything. Therefore the most successful BPM solutions are the ones that already have a large library of drop-in processes and a cutesy, flashy user interface. I am not saying that is wrong but in many ways it defeats the purpose of providing a flexible process platform. Now they sell a hard-coded BPM application.

So yes, the BPM market is finally moving in the right direction. I am also moving. I have decided to focus more on dynamic user interfaces, making the definition of processes even easier in our Papyrus Platform, and YES, I won’t waste any more time bemoaning the drawbacks of ’standards’ – XML based or not. If people don’t want to look at reality with open eyes then so be it. Given that decision, ISIS Papyrus is joining the standards organizations OASIS and OpenGroup to try its best to move the standardization processes forward and in the right direction. Sigh, more bureaucracy coming our way …

But I promise you one thing: We won’t be held back by waiting for standards in SOA, BPM or otherwise. You simply will have two choices: a) innovate by using the latest in ISIS Papyrus solutions, or b) wait for several more years to see if the standards will enable you to do what you need.

So, that is another weight off my shoulders. I actually feel FREE!