Business Process Improvement

19 June, 2009 01:58 PM EST
David McCoy Is New Role Service Director for Business Process Improvement
Posted By: Brian Hellauer, Managing Editor, Gartner.com

Beginning June 22, David McCoy will be the new Role Service Director (RSD) for the Business Process Improvement (BPI) offering. David's background in BPM is well-established. He was the analyst who developed Gartner's initial BPM vision back in 1999 and who predicted the transformation of the application integration and workflow markets into one focused on BPM. David is currently the manager of the BPM team and - with his additional role as RSD - returns to his roots in influencing the BPM research vision. David's first set of research Analyst Picks will be delivered this week. Thanks much to Elise Olding who has been serving as RSD for the past several months and who now returns to full-time analyst support of our clients.

06 April, 2009 07:38 PM EST
Join the LinkedIn Gartner BPM Xchange
Posted By: Elise Olding, Research Director

Share best practices and get input from your peers on the new Gartner BPM Xchange on LinkedIn. You can post questions and get answers, validate ideas and share relevant articles. We launched the The Xchange at the BPM Summit in San Diego and already have a lively following.

If you are a LinkedIn member, search for the group and request to join. Here are the links:

http://www.linkedin.com/groupsDirectory to search, or go directly to Gartner Business Process Management (Xchange).

If you are not a LinkedIn member, you will need to create a profile first at LinkedIn.com.

Our goal is to reach 2,000 members by our Fall BPM Summit. Let’s meet that challenge! We look forward to your contributions.

19 March, 2009 11:57 AM EST
Join Our Twitter at the BPM Summit
Posted By: Elise Olding, Research Director

For those of you who use Twitter, we will be sharing our tweets at the upcoming BPM conference in San Diego March 23-25. If you want to post something at the event use this format:

#GartnerBPM your tweet here

We will also be re-tweeting (RT) these to our Gartner twitter for those followers.

If you want to sign up for Twitter see www.twitter.com.

We look forward to your interaction and building our community so we can continue to share after the Summit.

06 March, 2009 02:50 PM EST
London BPM Conference a Hit - Get Ready San Diego!
Posted By: Elise Olding, Research Director

The results are in - the BPM conference held in London received stellar feedback from the conference participants. Despite the challenging economic conditions, we achieved our forecasted attendance of 300 attendees. They represented 34 countries – so you can imagine the challenge to please this crowd. But we did! Our theme or "Survive, Thrive and Capitalize" resonated as a strong one for our European audience.

What does this mean for our upcoming conference in San Diego? MORE, MORE, MORE! Not only are we going to present research from London, but we have more tracks and analysts. New material will be presented.

So, don’t miss this opportunity. Help your organization – survive this economy, position it to thrive and come away with a vision of how BPM can position you to capitalize on new and innovative opportunities. Network with your peers and gain insights for actionable steps you can take now.

We look forward to seeing you there.

04 March, 2009 12:55 PM EST
BPM Champion: Playing the Game
Posted By: David McCoy, VP and Gartner Fellow

As a kid, I played a mean game of neighborhood softball. You know the story: 1960s to very early 70s, red mud fields, wooden bats, marginally-stitched softballs, bases made out of left-over building material, neighborhood friends, neighborhood bullies, no uniforms, shoes optional. Yeah! You played it too? Do you remember how we determined which team batted first? "Flip a coin?" You guys had a coin to flip? Wow! Not us. We used a much more aggressive approach.

Who's On First? One team tossed the bat - upside down - and the big cheese on the other team caught the fat part of the bat where you normally would smack a ball. Then, taking turns, you each raced hand-over-hand up the bat to see who got to the very top (er, bottom?) of the handle. The top guy (the guy holding the end of the handle) was then declared the winner or had to defend your one attempt to knock the bat loose. If you remember this, you know how hard it was to defend when your top grip was basically three knuckles and a bruised thumb. If you have no idea what I'm talking about, it's probably because you grew up ATS - After Tang's Supremacy. Also, my reference to guys is not sexist. We didn't have any girls on the team - ever. They weren't interested and neither were we, I think. Well, they weren't interested, ok?

That little back-and-forth with the bat was probably good training for you BPM Champions, and a pretty good metaphor, too. It goes like this: If you're a senior executive and the BPM Champion, your life is pretty good, unless someone higher in the food chain is anti-BPM. Then - hand-over-hand it goes - they trump you and make your life and mission miserable. Better to have the higher-ups be neutral, but if there's a vocal anti-BPM opponent, you either have to let him/her bat or you try to knock the bat from his/her grip. A good Champion will always try to knock the anti-BPM forces back.

This is a pretty good metaphor isn't it? So, while we always advise that BPM success requires a Champion, I think you need to remember the corollary. Just having a Champion doesn't assure success. A Champion is necessary, but not sufficient. If the Champion is overshadowed by a naysayer from a better perch on the org chart - an Overlording Anti-BPM Champion - it might be like having no BPM Champion at all; like matter and anti-matter unless you offer a challenge.

I knew there were good reasons we all played ball during the summer when Gilligan was in re-runs. You play ball too. Take on your top naysayer, knock the bat from his or her hands. I can assure you of this: Anyone who is an anti-BPM Champion in 2009 is holding on with a lot less of a grip than three knuckles and a bruised thumb. He or she hasn't got a chance. Take your best shot, and batter up! And, when you win, celebrate with a glass of Tang. It's never to late to take up the habit, you Champion you!

03 February, 2009 04:40 PM EST
BPM: The First 100 Days
Posted By: Elise Olding, Research Director

Gartner is often asked about the best ways to begin a business process management (BPM) practice within an organization - where to start BPM, how to organize BPM, who to engage and what to communicate. This presentation provides guidance for the BPM director's first three months on the job. These first few months are an important time for the BPM director to create the BPM vision, cement the concepts and deliver initial results to prove the value of the BPM program. In addition, it is vital to define the tactics that the BPM program will follow during the next few years and to set expectations about the outcomes and the significant work effort and cultural shift that will be required.

The presentation is relevant to those who are tasked with launching a BPM program and also of value for established programs by providing a comprehensive step by step guide. BPM champions and business executives who are exploring and considering hiring BPM resources and will also benefit from the insights provided here.

21 January, 2009 11:18 AM EST
Do You Have a BPCC? Mangling Cartoon Quotes to Make Point
Posted By: David McCoy, VP and Gartner Fellow

Elise Olding has picked up some nice press in Computerworld UK for her prediction that 50% of BPM Programs will fail.

Interpretive notes:
1. The failure potential is at the program level and not at the project level.
2. The main cause of death will be failing to create a credible Business Process Competency Center (BPCC).
3. We published this research in our annual Gartner Predicts piece on BPM.

50% sounds scary, but it rings true. We all know of successful BPM projects - they're all around us. But a BPM PROGRAM is something much more. A program is the overlord of the projects; it is the unifying BPM effort for the entire enterprise and its full range of BPM interventions. A program is not just a single, isolated BPM intervention. A single program has many potential projects underneath it.

But 50% failure? Sure. Consider the following analogy. Many of you want to establish programs for better health. These programs would include lots of related "projects" - exercise, better eating habits, smoking cessation, etc. This is the program level concept - macro-thinking. Guess what? I'm willing to bet that most of you have tried these program-level activities before and most have failed. I know I've tried and failed. I bet the world-wide failure rate is greater than 50%, much to the chagrin of your doctors. While we can point to a few health-related project-level wins such as eating more broccoli, or drinking green tea, or taking brisk walks, our health programs as a whole have often failed. Programs are bigger than projects. A win at the project level does not mean your program is winning. To misuse an old cliche, "You can win the battle (project) and lose the war (program)."

So do you expect to be among the BPM dead and wounded? Is your BPM program going to make it? Do you have a BPCC? And, to be clear and fair, a BPCC is not Mary or Tom or Raj and their trial download of Microsoft Visio. To quote and completely mangle Dr. Seuss:

"Maybe a BPCC," he thought, "doesn't come from a store. Maybe, a BPCC…perhaps…means a little bit more!"

While on the subject of mangled cartoon quotes, Woody from Toy Story said it well, "If you don’t have one… GET ONE!" He was talking about moving buddies, but we know he really meant "a BPCC."

19 January, 2009 12:16 PM EST
Scenario Planning is No Longer Optional
Posted By: Jim Sinur, VP Distinguished Analyst

Am I imagining things, or are all of our institutions getting surprised by conditions and behaviors? Leadership seems stunned and unable to respond to these seemingly surprise conditions. When leadership does respond, it's completely reactionary and not well thought through. Well, we can change leaders and it should help some, but I think there is more to it than what meets the eye. Not only are problems larger than individuals, but for scores of collaborating teams supporting those leaders. It's more than competing in a Global economy. It's disasters, power shifts, unheard voices breaking through, it's responding to changes in consumer attitudes, and it's about keeping conflicting goals in balance to optimize as much as possible for all.

Why are these things surprising? Why are responses feeble? I think it is because there is little effective scenario planning and response optimization going on. The world, unfortunately, has been practicing war for as long as people have been around and there are war scenarios with practiced responses. Why can't we do the same for economic interactions and business management in all contexts? We have been practicing isolated and reactionary response to conditions as they occur and this will continue, but larger problems need a better solution. There is a grave need for lateral thinking to identify good bad and ugly scenarios and the ability to predict, simulate and optimize responses before "the matter hits the fan."

We have all these high paid leaders who can't plan very well in the context of a world growing in complexity and changing fairly fast. I think scenario planning is a skill that leaders had better learn instead of believing in their own past success and current corporate and power base mantras. These leaders have to have an attitude that does not punish lateral thinking when surfaced, but looks to see if the scenario response has been planned and in some cases practiced. These leaders need to communicate that they have completed these crucial plans. It's a new year, let's make a resolution to plan alternative outcomes and have core responses ready for reactive variation when needed.

14 January, 2009 01:24 PM EST
The Business Rule Management Tutorial: Hot off the Presses
Posted By: David McCoy, VP and Gartner Fellow

In an earlier post on my personal blog (http://blogs.gartner.com/dave_mccoy/), I ask for the topics that the readers would like to see in a Business Rule Management tutorial. Jim Sinur and I have now finished the tutorial and Jim will present it at our upcoming BPM conferences in London and San Diego. The presentation looks really nice! I have included this outline below, showing the topics that will be discussed on each page of the tutorial. If you are trying to understand business rules, this presentation was built for you.

Tutorial: Business Rule Management — The Misunderstood Partner to Process

David McCoy and Jim Sinur - Gartner

Outline
1. Opening slide on the proliferation of business rules and the wisdom of using BRM
2. Gartner Key Issues slide
3. Distinguishing business rules from business processes, and the challenges of managing implicit rules
4. Example of BRMS-to-application interaction showing segregation of responsibilities
5. A spectrum and guideline for selecting which business rules should be managed by BRM and which are likely overkill
6. Key BRM definitions and concepts
7. Business Process Management hype cycle showing rules topics and where they are on the cycle
8. Examination of BRM maturity and benefits
9. Three different kinds of business rule technologies and their primary use cases
10. Business rule market evolution overview
11. Business rule representation techniques and “value/complexity” tradeoffs
12. Business Rule Management System (BRMS) technology stack - what’s in it according to Gartner?
13. How BRM can address BPM process proliferation
14. BRM technology trade-offs - how much do you really need?
15. BRM roles and skills and how they overlap BPM
16. BRM and Agility: awareness, productivity, flexibility and adaptability
17. Key Takeaways
18. Recommendations

13 January, 2009 01:28 PM EST
BPM and Cost Management - Hot for 2009
Posted By: David McCoy, VP and Gartner Fellow

Everyone knows that BPM can reduce costs. So, BPM should be a hot topic and investment area during 2009's brutal reign, right? Well, we at Gartner think so. Elise Olding, Jim Sinur and I are going to be driving a full-court press on BPM and Cost Management this year and we are all excited about the prospects. We are so excited, we have established an internal working group to make this a weekly research topic. In fact, I am shifting my own research attention to this topic - it will be my top research focus for 2009. BPM has so much to offer. You know this. We are going to make it clear to the rest of the world.

You also know that BPM has more going for it than hard-core cost reduction. BPM has plenty of intangible benefits. Intangibles are great, but they tend to be downplayed when cash is King and the King has abdicated his throne. There is a bit of a Maslow’s Hierarchy at work when it comes to BPM benefits. Call it a BPM Hierarchy of Benefits. When times are good and cash is flush, the intangibles at the top of the pile - employee satisfaction, greater flexibility, etc - are sweet and honored in their own right. But, when times are tough, you see a resurgence of interest in the hard, cold, tangibles that reside at the foundational layer of the hierarchy. And nothing is more tangible than Euros, Dollars, Pounds and Pesos. Everyone looks at the bottom of the BPM Hierarchy and wants to see bottom line tangible results. If they can’t see those, then their eyes do not even bother looking any higher at the intangibles. At least, that’s been my experience in this space.

Both classes of benefits - tangible and intangible - are available from BPM. Our working group is going to nail the storyline on tangible benefits and remind our clients of the importance of the intangibles. In short, we are going to have our cake and eat it too. Tangible and intangible - both are available from BPM and both are needed during 2009, like never before.

13 January, 2009 09:49 AM EST
BPM is a Winch Out of the Economic Ditch
Posted By: Jim Sinur, VP Distinguished Analyst

I remember my days in the winters of Wisconsin. The roads could become treacherous with weather systems moving in dumping ice and snow. One night while I was delivering pizzas (my college investment trust fund was sweat equity), I managed to get into a deep ditch packed with snow. Along came a guy with a winch-equipped Jeep. He slowly dragged my wheels out of the ditch. I was very grateful and the pizzas were delivered warm, at least. I survived to thrive to another day and eventually progressed to my end goals.

Here we go again. I am having that in-the-ditch feeling again (maybe there is a song brewing there). Fear is knocking at the door. Along comes BPM with the winch of leverage to help us pull out of the ditch. The fear of taking risks really limits organizations. When the economy is creaky, this fear phenomenon is magnified. The melancholy cost cutters rule the day, but it does not have to be that way. The entry cost of BPM is low and the proven rates of return make BPM a great jump start for cost savings. As organizations gain confidence in BPM's ability to generate savings, some of the more savvy organizations use BPM savings as way to fund process efforts instead of just looking for blood-letting opportunities.

It really doesn't matter if you are looking to survive, thrive or capitalize on the economic weather facing us - BPM can be of great help. The telecom industry used BPM as a tourniquet in the mid 2000s, so we know BPM works. It's a new year that will spawn some optimism. Let's parlay some of this energy to get forward momentum to pull ourselves forward to the lip of the ditch. Once we see the top, it should inspire an adrenalin rush for the push out.

The content for the spring BPM conference in both London and San Diego revolves around "survive, thrive and capitalize" themes. I and the others on the BPM team would love to help you shape some of your process decisions going forward. We hope to see you there.

09 January, 2009 03:01 PM EST
President Elect Obama Names Performance Officer
Posted By: Elise Olding, Research Director

The first ever governmental performance officer was named yesterday by President Elect Obama. Nancy Kellifer will be charged with tracking how well government programs are working. She is touted as an expert in "streamlining policies and wringing out inefficiencies." What a brilliant move - and one that has the potential to yield some impressive results. Any ordinary citizen can cite pages of opportunities. The first challenge for Kellifer may be where to focus. The second and much bigger challenge will be shifting the governmental culture.

A methodical approach, a tireless enthusiasm and a careful attention to communicating will be tools that can move the governmental mountain of inefficiencies one rock at a time. Research such as "The First 100 Days of the BP Director" provides a toolkit and outline to jumpstart any performance improvement effort.

Do you think that private enterprise will more readily adopt the idea of a performance officer given the visibility it will be receiving? Will this help those of us who already work in the area of business process management to gain better traction throughout our organizations? I for one certainly hope so.

I wish Kellifer all the best.

[See: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090107/ap_on_go_pr_wh/obama_newser_performance_auditor]

06 January, 2009 11:13 AM EST
Making Progress in Healthcare: Visible Process = Predictable Results
Posted By: Elise Olding, Research Director

A warranty from your healthcare provider? Not only has Geisinger Health System moved to a flat fee for their coronary artery bypass surgery, but they offer a 90 day warranty. If a complication arises within 90 days, they will cover the cost.

How did they make this quantum leap? By turning healthcare on its ear! According to its CEO they shouldn't get paid if they don't do it right and have adopted a pay for performance strategy. Seems to be a concept that is gaining popularity these days.

By looking at this specific surgery, it identified 40 steps that must be performed. Much like a checklist, these steps guide the process - they are for conscious consideration, not rote following. What they found with the original process was that different surgeons had their own variations, with variable results - most of the time because they missed one or more of the 40 steps. While the patient group is still small - only 181 patients in this study - the results have been significant: a 45% decrease in readmission rates.

I often think about the tension between structured and unstructured processes and the connection between work that can be standardized and that which is knowledge work. It seems that Geisinger is on to something here by creating an overall framework that guides the surgery with the 40 steps, but obviously doesn't get into excruciating detail and enables surgeons to perform their "art." And it's working!

This seems a good example of using BPM to manage at the strategic level and produce big results - all things that Dr. Geary Rummler envisioned - BPM as a strategic management discipline. I believe that if you look at your organization, there are many opportunities to apply the strategy Geisinger has adopted. In these tough economic times, customers will be loyal to the companies that can promise to get things right. If this can be done for something as complicated as surgery, the sky is the limit for your organization. What better time to deploy BPM?

(Article in Fast Company: "The Cure," October 2008)

22 December, 2008 01:03 PM EST
Want More Blog?
Posted By: Elise Olding, Research Director

Did you know that Gartner has external blogs too?

Two esteemed analysts from the BPM team have external blogs. David McCoy and Jim Sinur write entertaining blogs about all sorts of interests.

The links are:

http://blogs.gartner.com/dave_mccoy/

http://blogs.gartner.com/jim_sinur/

These are personal blogs and do not constitute Gartner research but they are always entertaining! You are encouraged to leave comments.

Enjoy!

19 December, 2008 10:50 AM EST
BPM Initiatives Don't Seem to Be Getting the Axe
Posted By: Michele Cantara, Research VP

Over the past few months I've been sure to include the following question in every customer interaction. "Are you being pressured to reduce your BPM budget or disband your BPM initiative as a result of economic pressures?"

I've talked to scores of customers during this period. And so far, those that have BPM initiatives underway have escaped the axe. In fact, most have reported that there is even more management support for BPM than ever. Here's what they had to say.

• One executive sponsor from a global discrete manufacturing company, said "The current economic downturn is BPM nirvana."
• An enterprise architect at a large investment company, said "BPM is not a luxury."
• A CIO at a large insurance company, said, "We're going to reduce costs by 30%, but triple output, and BPM is key to making this happen." He also noted, "I don’t have to budget extra for BPM. BPM is actually a better way for me to reach my IT goals."

What do these customers have in common? They all have successful BPM projects to point to as successes.
• These projects were tied to solving critical business problems; they were not just skunk-work pilots to test out technology.
• Most of the business benefits related to eliminating process redundancies or automating manual processes and saving on labor costs.
• Business users were actively involved in constructing and validating models. Active involvement did not necessarily mean that the business users were actually constructing business process models on their own. Instead, something akin to a "pairs modeling" approach was used. Business analysts or process architects from IT worked closely with specific business stakeholders when developing the models. The process models made the solution tangible to business users. As result, business users were as committed to the solution as IT was.
• IT made heavy use of the "playback" capabilities of various BPMS tools in order to get business user input and validation. Playback lets users walk through the process using the process model as a visualization tool. Users can see process steps, paths, and the user interfaces they would encounter if they were using the solution in production. This greatly speeded up development and reduced the gap between IT's solution design and business expectations.

What's going on with your BPM projects?

17 December, 2008 08:36 AM EST
Gyokuro, Sencha, Matcha and Me: The Ritual of Process
Posted By: David McCoy, VP and Gartner Fellow

Green tea: One of the few essential elements of life. After decades of toying with tea in little bags - the American way - my taste buds have staged an oral coup. Over the past few months, I've dived deep, deep, deep into the rarified world of high-end green teas - teas prepared from whole leaves; teas in their most natural form. The flavors and feel are phenomenal, the caffeine can be sense-jolting, but is somewhat muted by theanine (see here for details), the catechins will make me live longer, and the complex processes for harvesting and preparing the teas are amazing.

There are two points to this post:

1. If you drink from little tea bags, you should really experience tea that hasn't been funneled through a little doll-house throw pillow. The quality of a cup of gyokuro - made from pristine leaves - is far superior to the already wonderful tea you can get from a dip-and-dunk approach. Try it.
2. We humans love ritual. We love to use language, semiotics, nuance, mystery and repetition. I believe that the "tea culture" that has been around for centuries is a good example of a refined and rarified ritual. Ritual is powerful. Ritual transcends simple understanding. Ritual cannot be ignored.

Drink your green tea. Experience the ritual. And as you do, keep in mind that your organization is chock full of ritual. Ritual is a manifestation of your culture and your culture will make or break your processes. So, if you don't respect ritual, you'll damage your process efforts. If you don't acknowledge ritual, you'll run into walls - walls you can't see.

Ask yourself a question: Is "ritual" an inhibitor to progress, or is ritual a way to incorporate process into the culture? If you answer correctly, you will have to say, "It's both." The trick is to find out what to keep and what to throw away. What part of ritual is critical for adoption and what part is just a legacy of mythology and habit?

Look at your organization and ask one more question:

Which portion of our process culture represents the rich, colorful tea and which represents the leaves? Which portion do we want to savor and which do we need to discard after it has served its purpose?

16 December, 2008 12:23 PM EST
Among Triggers to Launch BPM - Add One More: Value
Posted By: Bill Rosser, VP Distinguished Analyst

"Don’t pave the cow paths" has been a good guide for application developers for many years. This implies that there are generally much better ways for getting from A to B than to follow an existing ad hoc approach - certainly a sound idea. This guidance comes up whenever an application becomes a candidate for a new implementation. The stimulus may be a simple legacy upgrade (such as a new platform), or replacement by a packaged application, perhaps moving to a shared service offering, or the need for an added feature. An important step prior to such a change is to review the actual business process itself in order to analyze it and make it better, prior to building the new system.

This pattern is of course smart and sensible, but has its own shortcomings. It is inherently restricted to those applications which happen come up for a change for some reason or other. It misses lots of other applications that could greatly benefit from a process view and a BPM initiative. The result of this behavior is to very likely miss those processes which: a) play an important role in delivering enterprise value, and b) are not done well and could be greatly improved. So there needs to be another trigger mechanism added that will identify and promote such candidate processes for consideration in getting BPM attention.

The concept to pursue to do this is one of "value analysis". This means a review of all the processes in an organization and determining which of them make a major contribution to the value added to the enterprise. Experience has shown that it is relatively easy to narrow down the high-value candidates to less than twenty-five percent of the total number of processes. Once you identify these, you need to determine how well they are currently being done - to justify action. As a corollary, this is also a strong message from Geary Rummler, the recently deceased BPM pioneer, who has stressed that it is best to make certain that any BPM project must be directly connected to the highest level of primary value in the enterprise. If this is not done, he said, you "get lost in the weeds" and make only minor improvements that do not earn the attention of the senior executives.

So always consider applying "value chain analysis".

15 December, 2008 11:03 AM EST
Mel Blanc and BPM
Posted By: David McCoy, VP and Gartner Fellow

I was listening to some old recordings last night - listening to one of the features on disk one of this DVD set. It was a recording of Mel Blanc reading dialogue for a character in the Looney Tunes cartoon series. Being a fan of Mel Blanc and classic cartoons, I was conflicted as I listened to the raw audio - audio that was eventually processed into final form cartoon dialogue that we've all heard.

The Exciting Part: Mel Blanc was a professional. To hear him rattle through the dialogue was to listen to an expert. I was once in radio - actually considering a career in voiceover - but my talent was nowhere near the true pros. To hear Mel at work was amazing. He was the master, and I got to hear raw audio files where he was toying with the lines, changing inflection, varying his trademark tones, and generally creating famous character traits with his voice alone. After his basic tracks were established, the studios would go to work - speeding up certain lines and, of course, adding the music and sound tweaks. This recording was just pure Mel - he spoke the lines, did some basic sound effects, and gave instructions to the production guys.

The Depressing Part: There was something depressing about the entire experience. The best cartoons are works of art. Yet, to hear Mel rattling off the lines one by one, doing retakes and alternate voicings, stole a lot of the beauty. He was just recording tracks to tape, but he was also stripping the art down to the bare metal. He had to give directions to the guys who would process the dialogue. He had to offer multiple takes since there were multiple ways to interpret a line (inflection points, etc.) It made the whole cartooning process seem like a production factory and Mel just another worker on the line. Of course, that's exactly what cartooning is... but I didn't need to be reminded. I don't like to think that art is sometimes manufactured; that cartoons and lawnmowers share a common heritage on the production line.

This is the price we must pay for intimate process knowledge. When we look behind the curtain and see how things actually work, it's not always nice. Sure, it's exciting to figure out how business processes actually work - examining the innards and watching the gears and cogs in action. There's nothing more educational and this is the joy of doing BPM. However, the innards and gears are not always pretty. Sometimes, the details mar the beauty. Sometimes, you wish you had never seen inside the black box.

Sometimes, I wish I didn't know how things actually worked. Sometimes, I wish I were ignorant of the details (and sometimes I wish I could be ignorant of the subjunctive voice that forces one to use "were" over "was"). But you can't be in BPM and be ignorant of the innards. "Ignorance is bliss" does not apply to process work. Unfortunately, it no longer applies to Looney Tune cartoons either. Sniff... I guess I'm a romantic at heart. What a curse. A curse of too much knowledge - of seeing behind the art and watching the gears and cogs at play.

11 December, 2008 04:23 PM EST
How BPM Could Have Saved One Man's Thanksgiving
Posted By: Michele Cantara, Research VP

After taking my son and his entourage of friends to karate practice last night, I had to drop off my car for service. One of my good friends picked me up and then launched into the trials and tribulations going on in his latest project at work. (Being an analyst is a bit like being a doctor – with one difference, instead of asking you about health problems, people ask you about IT problems.)

My buddy is a developer at a large financial services institution and he lives to code. His company has recently outsourced much of its transfer agency work, except for certain trade exceptions that the outsourcer hands off to an in-house trade control group. These exceptions are then processed manually.

Several months ago, my friend and a few others were tasked with automating the process flow for these trade exceptions. The first step involved a series of interviews with the business users in the trade control function, in order to capture requirements. Interviews were also held with the outsourcer to understand what data would be provided when the exception trades were returned to the in-house staff. The IT team designed the solution on paper and then went back to the in-house trade control group to walk through the solution and to determine whether the solution would meet business requirements. The trade control group signed off on the requirements.

This solution involved a lot of overtime on the IT team's part – particularly during Thanksgiving week, which really annoyed my friend's wife. (Let's just say my friend's wife had already clued me in on the Thanksgiving problem.) What I was not aware of was a new problem -- the solution may need to be withdrawn and totally revamped because it doesn't meet business user requirements. In other words, this guy's family Thanksgiving got squeezed for a less than effective solution. Furthermore, this all could have been avoided with BPM.

My friend, being the typical developer type, did not understand why the trade control group thought the original solution design would meet their needs. He was adamant that the solution design was not presented to them in techno-weenie terms. I patiently explained than exception handling tends to involve a great many process paths, many of which are undocumented, are handed down by oral tradition. The business users can't possibly "grok" the solution implications of all these permutations.

More importantly is lack of process context. The in-house trade control group gets these exception trades back from the outsourcer. They are accompanied by lots of data, but there is no way to tell what process steps that exception has already been through, and what the data means as a result. If ever there was a clear case of when process visibility was vital, this is it!

After hearing all of this, I launched into my BPM pitch – since I had a captive audience, stuck in the car with me. My friend insisted that neither IT or the trade control group will go for a model-driven approach. I asked him what his alternatives are? Just do it again the same way and end up in the same situation. I went on and on about the merits of BPM, and my friend turns to me and says, "well, all BPM is a better way of communicating with business users," Yep, you betcha. That's one of the biggest benefits.

Friend:. So I wouldn't be coding, I'd develop the solution via A MODEL?
Me: "yep, pretty much."
Friend: "Nobody really uses this BPM stuff for back-office processes. Give me some examples."
Me: I give him five examples from recent MQ reference check calls.
Friend: Silence.
Friend: "I need to look into this BPM thing. Send me some pointers to those reports your write."

So today, I have unleashed another BPM evangelist on an unsuspecting IT department. Let's see what happens.

10 December, 2008 01:35 PM EST
Happy Birthday to the Mouse - and I Don't Mean Mickey!
Posted By: Elise Olding, Research Director

One of the great things about being a Gartner analyst is that we get to spend time doing research and seeing some really cool stuff. I had the chance to do just that on Tuesday by attending the Program for the Future conference held in San Jose, CA. The conference was celebrating the 40th anniversary of Doug Englebart giving the "mother of all demos" (see http://sloan.stanford.edu/MouseSite/1968Demo.html). This demo was done in 1968. I would encourage you to watch this video if you haven't already.

The conference content focused on "Collective Intelligence," a concept that states that shared or group intelligence emerges from the collaboration of many individuals. Hiroshi Ishii presented his work at MIT Media Laboratory with tangible user interfaces. ("Guided by the Tangible Bits vision, we are designing tangible user interfaces, which employ physical objects, surfaces, and spaces as tangible embodiments of digital information." See http://tangible.media.mit.edu/projects/.)

He had several examples, but most interesting was a device called the I/O brush. This is a drawing tool equipped with a video camera and touch sensors that "picks up" a representation of the objects it is exposed to and lets the artist draw with it. For instance, you could hold it up to your mouth moving and then take this moving mouth image and "paint" it onto a digital canvas - in moving video (see http://tangible.media.mit.edu/projects/iobrush/).

As many of you may know, I'm not in love with the two-dimensional modeling that seems to be central to BPM. I envision a different interface and believe a more intuitive approach will drive much better adoption and collaboration. After spending the day at the conference, I believe that my vision could one day be true. Here it is:

Imagine you could capture work activities with a "brush" that digitalized the working environment. (For an example of this environment check out http://oblong.com. Their work was used in the movie "Minority Report.") The work activities would be captured and be analyzed and optimized in a truly simulated environment - where all the activities, environment, workers, information, etc. are in context. Non-value added work could be tagged by the workers and redundant steps identified. New ideas could be tried out and experimented with before implementing. The environment would be used for training and knowledge transfer. Everything would always be in the context of the whole. It would be a realistic and natural extension of work.

I was encouraged that my vision, while perhaps still a ways off, is a step closer to getting some teeth!

I know there are some examples out there of using these sorts of environments for training and design. I would love to hear from you.