Brave New World, My Foot

I listened in on an interesting webcast this morning hosted by Tibco and titled, "BPM Modeling and Simulation: Empowering the Process Owners." It was quite popular. At one point I noticed that 280 people had tuned in besides those speaking.

The star was Connie Moore, Forrester VP and Research Director, who provided the rundown on the current state of modeling and simulation in business process management and what we have to look forward to.

She made some interesting points.

First, she said, "Many people use BPM for process automation and execution. Not nearly as many people use BPM for process management or optimization." I think her point here was that most BPM efforts are fairly rudimentary. We use the tools we have to map out the processes and generate code in order to automate certain steps, but we haven’t moved up the "value stack," to use the tools to run our businesses better.

Second, she said when evaluating BPM suites, you want to make sure you get strong modeling features. On the simulation side, it should be data driven. "You can see data from executing processes and see your bottlenecks and start to make improvements."

If you have process models with confusing maps -- you’re not sure where a process starts or stops -- it’s not a good process model, because it won’t help you get agreement among process stakeholders.

Another checklist feature to watch for is the collaborative aspects. Some modeling products have one environment for the analysts, who then throw it over the wall to the developers, who work in their own environment. This is a sure route to getting outdated models.

So what can we expect in future versions of our favorite BPM tools? Moore says to watch for innovations in products whereby there’s a stronger link between strategic planning at the top executive level and process modeling. In other words, vendors will move up the organization to support senior stakeholders.

Also, most modeling tools are "pretty formal," she says. "You have to be trained how to think in terms of modeling." But there’s a use for non-formal modeling as well -- mindmapping, blue-skying, collaboration.

Likewise, she says, there’s a "whole other level of work in the collaborative world not being linked to process -- doing research, making decisions." BPM products of the future will support all of this.

She ended her part of the webcast, and that’s where things began to unravel. Tibco Director of Product Strategy Dan Ternes did a demo of Tibco Business Studio that focused on the modeling aspects of the product.

What lost me was how complicated it all was. (Who knows? Maybe I have too short of an attention span to learn this stuff.) Here’s a screenshot I captured to give you an example.

Huh? Parameters? Process values? Standard deviation? If Tibco or any other vendor thinks executives are going to pick this up and become nimble masters of their organization’s processes, they’re truly out of touch with the skillsets of typical business people.

I’m sure that Tibco has a remarkable suite of products with truly amazing features. But BPM will be relegated to a niche category until modeling a process becomes as easy as matching up Lego pieces.