Gartner BPM summit Day 2

The second day of the Gartner BPM summit in San Diego kicked off with a keynote from Daryl Plummer about the symbiosis between BPM and SOA. There's a lot of confusion in the marketplace about how BPM and SOA work together, or whether BPM is part of SOA, or SOA is part of BPM, or... well, you get the idea. First of all, BPM is a management discipline (according to Gartner) and a set of tools used to automated business processes, BPM suites (BPMS). SOA, or service-oriented architecture, is an architectural philosophy of creating encapsulated services that can be loosely coupled: it's not a product, it's not even web servcies, although you'll most likely create web services as part of implementing your SOA.

Ultimately, it works like this: in order to implement processes in a BPMS quickly and effectively, you need to be able to assemble services as steps in the process -- what's called service orchestration -- as well as handle things like human-facing steps, timers, and all of the other things that we expect from a BPMS. SOA provides the direction and framework for building an infrastructure of shared services for ready consumption by processes. Processes consume services: seems simple, although you can also have processes become services themselves, which can in turn be consumed by other processes or services.

We had a second keynote from Bruce Williams, author of of Six Sigma for Dummies, who spoke about innovation. Although not really about BPM, he had some interesting things to say about innovation, which is often a primary driver for implementing BPM within an organization.

The remainder of the morning was taken up by the vendor sessions, and I attended a panel of Appian's customers, then a fascinating talk by Arun Mathews of Motorola, a Savvion customer. Motorola's BPM implementation was driven in a large part by their Six Sigma efforts that led to a culture of continuous improvement. As we heard from Mathews, a focus on process within the organization is necessary, and you're going to have to do some serious change management at all levels in the organzation to make this happen: it's not just a matter of buying a BPMS. The benefits are clear, however; Motorola has reduced both project timelines and costs, which keeps them a leader in their field.

In the afternoon, I attended two sessions by Gartner analysts that were both focussed on process measurement. If you recall from yesterday's post, two key subjects here are are process visibility and process agility, and process measurement speaks to both of these. First, Bill Gassman of Gartner gave a fairly detailed discussion of business intelligence (BI) and business activity monitoring (BAM), making the distinction that traditional BI is for historical trend analysis with some degree of latency between what happens in the business process and when it is visible in the BI system, whereas BAM is real-time, event-driven representations of what's happening in the business processes. I think, however, that the line is starting to blur between these two categories as BI becomes more event-driven, and we'll see some hybrid BI/BAM capabilities from companies like Cognos, a BI vendor that just bought Celequest, a BAM vendor. In any case, whether by BI or BAM or some combination of the two, process measurement is all about providing visibility into processes.

At the end of the afternoon, Jim Sinur of Gartner came at process measurement from a different angle: given that you have the BI/BAM capabilities in place, can you feed that data back to actually control and change the process? He was discussing this in the context of continuous optimization, or "keeping a process efficient, effective and relevant under all possible and changing conditions". Although many companies are only using BI/BAM for monitoring and alerts, Sinur discussed the potential to have the processes be self-aware and self-optimizing, correcting their own behaviour based on historical events without waiting for human intervention to make changes to the process model. This ties process visibility straight back to process agility.

You can read all of my (much less structured) "live blogging" posts from the Gartner BPM summit over on my ebizQ blog.