BPM expert (and BPMEnterprise.com blogger) Bruce Silver has just laid his analytical gaze upon the Appian enterprise suite of business process management software in a new report you can freely read (but not download) here:

http://www.appian.com/downloads/papers_reports.jsp

The 30-page report explains what each component within Appian Enterprise does; but along the way you’ll get a decent education in some of the key concepts and standards of BPM. If you’re more visually oriented, Silver includes plenty of screenshots.

What you won’t get is an executive summary with a buy/no-buy recommendation (which I interpret to mean that Appian funded the report, so it would have been bad form -- and professional suicide -- to offer up a no-buy vote; and it would have been disingenuous for Silver to offer up a buy vote). So, read the report and come up with your own conclusions abotu whether the Appian toolset belongs on your short list of candidates for BPM automation work.

Rusty Weston, contributor and former editor of Global Media Services, has a new blog. And his posting today touches on the topic of change agents. According to Weston, "It’s a risky career move." Apparently, in a Friday article by The Wall Street Journal, Shai Agassi, former SAP AG executive, "was characterized as a failed change agent."

Weston cites a study by Accompli, which advises in transformation endeavors, that shows change agents moving up in the organization only 28% of the time. Another 29% were terminated. Change agents need thick skins.

I was just pointed to a two-page profile by AMR Research analyst Bill Swanton of two projects in which webMethods is involved.

The first project is a brief case study of Ahold, which has 720 stores. webMethods is used to manage 5 million messages a day generated by the company’s point of sale application to drive store replenishments.

The second explains how Johnson & Johnson used webMethods BAM to monitor and ensure timely delivery of its medical devices.

One statement stood out in the write-up: "Interviewing these companies, we were surprised by how small the development teams were and how short the projects are."

BPMer Bruce Silver has posted his latest column for BPMInstitute.org onto his blog here. In it, he poses the question: What if BPMN were transformed into a language from its current modest role as a modeling notation tool? Worth a read, as are the comments that follow the post.

There are plenty of examples of processes that involve human interaction, automation, application integration and document flow. But the list doesn’t end there. Communication processes are those activities where "the word needs to get out."

I recently did an interview with Avaya’s Vice President of Emerging Technologies, Gwynne Wade, as well as Jim Su, Senior Product Marking Manager, on their new software release, Avaya Solution for Communications Enabled Business Processes (CEBP). That’s a mouthful, but it comes down to this: It enables a business process to trigger a communications event and manage that event to its conclusion.

Response services include:

• Advisory: Where the system contacts a set of users and delivers a message via phone, email or SMS; and the users confirm receipt of the message.
• Notify & Respond: Where a group of users is contacted; and they use a form or Web portal response to trigger additional workflows.
• Find & Call: To locate users by trying multiple devices, according to preset user preferences.
• Notify & Conference: Notify a set of users of an event and invite users to join an instant conference.
• Notify with Task List: Assign tasks to users and track their progress.

In the case of business, here’s how it might work. Say you run the supply chain for your organization and your ERP system has just reported a huge run on that new brand of Nikes at your stores in the Northeast. You want to get new supplies of shoes out and that’s going to require the efforts of 20 trucks in a six-state region. That alert could trigger an event that says, call this preferred list of truckers on their cell phones to report to the closest distribution centers in their area as soon as possible to pick up the load. The truckers who get the message and reply the quickest via their cell phone touchpad would get the business. Once that 20th trucker has responded, the loop is closed, and the process moves on along the process map.

Do you have a process that needs to schedule a lot of workers quickly -- say, for substitute teachers, store clerks or nurses? Your organization could instigate auto-calls until the required number of workers is reached.

Another example: Your company’s stock has just experienced a major run. A given threshold has been reached, of which currently only your financial tracking systems are aware. You could set up a business process that contacts every senior executive to participate in an emergency conference call to discuss what the company needs to do. That contact could happen by every means available -- cellphone, pager, Blackberry, email...

It could be simpler You could have your field people communicate with a system that tracks their tasks for a given job. Each time a phase is completed, they could call in via mobile device and punch a button to report that it’s done. That system could track time, move the process along to other participants, instigate billing procedures, and so on.

Whirlpool, an Avaya customer, is already experimenting with CEBP. One example of their usage is this: Avaya has integrated its software with SAP NetWeaver for supply chain management. Executives have dashboards that designate performance indicators with stoplight colors -- red, yellow and green. When something turns red, the system initiates calls among the people associated with the processes driving that given indicator.

As Su pointed out, "There’s no customer that can’t think of a use for it."

The software uses standards: Eclipse for designing the system; Web services are BPEL-compliant; SIP to integrate with other systems. This isn’t a boxed solution. You can expect to work with Avaya’s professional services team for the implementation, which means it’s targeted at medium to large enterprises. But who knows? Perhaps the company will find value in offering a hosted model at a future time.

I think this is a category we’ll hear more about with time. In the meantime, you can learn more about CEBP here.