I keep hearing the hype around processing standards and I find myself a bit skeptical about the reality versus the hype. While most folks believe that industry standards are a better vehicle for clients than being dependent on several default standards established by the market presence of power vendors, this is a more difficult feat than one would expect. I laud the efforts of the standards groups, but it is an uphill grind that rarely keeps up with the market need.

I believe that business process models should be commonly understood through a visual standard that meets the need of the role of the process professional participating in the creation and execution of a process. I also believe that process models should be interchangeable across platforms and vendors. I believe that processes should be able to execute across multiple process execution engines and it would be best to do that through a common approach.

Where are Standards Right Now?

BPMN is not ideal for business professionals or for technical developers, but it is good enough to gain a common view of a process and its process paths/streams and some detail. I believe that process modelers and process collaborators view their models in what is comfortable to them at the moment. This means a BPMN view and/or a native tool view should be available. BPMN is good enough, but not desirable for most audiences. BPMN does not deal with transport specifications, so the model sharing goal is not quite within the grasp.

XPDL is the most practical transport mechanism available today that can easily support the BPMN model as well as others. I would bet on XPDL as a process model interchange standard, but I am closely watching BPDM to see if it gains traction and is practical enough to use. The combination of BPMN and XPDL is certainly a hopeful combination, but it requires two competing standards groups to work together (OMG for BPMN and WfMC for XPDL). There are a number of industry luminaries like Robert Shapiro, Bruce Silver, and Keith Swenson who are trying to make this a reality. I hope this movement gathers momentum.

UML is quite popular with the developers, but is way over the heads of most process designers. BPMN is the only remnant of UML that makes sense when applied to business process. I view this standard moving deeper into the technical realm.

BPEL is basic in its present state and only handles system activities today, so it is really not what the market ultimately needs. Recent activities have bolstered its capabilities compensating systems transactions to preserve the logical unit of work being completed by a process or a portion of a process. In the real world, processes include human activities and are not necessarily fixed in nature. BPEL is evolving and it will take years before it is truly ripe for anything but system to system process snippets.

Bottom Line:

Process standards are inching along, not as fast as anyone would want, but good enough to visualize and exchange process models. I would heed the advice from Gartner that identified the top five myths of standards.

• Believing something is a standard when it’s not
• Believing a vendor supports it when they don’t
• Believing it’s ready for prime time when it’s late
• Believing everything works together when it doesn’t
• Deciding to wait until everything is final to get started

In the BPMS today, agility mostly appears in the ability of adjusting decision points in a fixed process usually visible through a process flow. There is more to agility than what is delivered in most of the BPMS engines today.

Agility is defined as the ability to think and draw conclusions quickly to exercise nimble movements easily. Having a broader view of agility allows for more opportunities to expand the dynamic behavior of business processes.

While I think that an agility opportunity around decision making in the flow of processes is extremely important, there are additional opportunities around business actions, people optimization and technology fluidity that can play in the next generation of BPM.

BPM 2.0 Expands the Tweak Points in a Process:

Today, most agility is aimed at process control flows, but there are many more opportunities to impact process behavior. BPM 2.0 will help control outcomes by adding coordinated agility around goals and tolerances.

Process managers will be able to dynamically change the goals and their balance to create outcomes that meet conflicting goals while staying efficient by allowing coordinated tolerances to be set to match the new goals given to the process.

In addition, processes will recognize relevant events that might change a course of action on a specific case and/or a class of process instances.

At a maximum, the recognition of certain events and/or tolerance statuses might suggest an opportunity for a new round of optimization and/or a change in goals. So goals, tolerances and event recognition are some of the new tweak points that enable a new dimension of agility added to the traditional decision nodes in a process.

BPM 2.0 Adds More Intelligence to Complex Decisions:

Today, process decisions tend to be simplistic and process engines can handle these natively. BPM 2.0 will require more sophisticated decisions that will require a deeper integration of heuristics and other forms of decision making.

Intelligent processes should be recognizing conditions that will require intervention. This means recognizing the effect of aggregated and/or complex events that might be of interest to a process manager and giving advice on the likelyhood of making some kind of adjustment.

In advanced capabilities, the process might suggest alternative courses of action with a likely success percentage for each course of action.

BPM 2.0 Puts SOA Concepts on Steroids:

In the ultimate scenario, BPM 2.0 would not only orchestrate services and pseudo services (impure wrapped legacy services and/or composite flows), but BPM 2.0 would also perform dynamic orchestration that would change the sequence of invocation depending on conditions.

The conditions could be sensed dynamically by event recognition and/or agent/flocking agent behaviors. Process snippets and composite flows would be available and treated as service assets.

In addition to the ability to swap services dynamically based on positive/negative business and/or technical outcomes, BPM 2.0 will dynamically orchestrate services.

We will see this concept leveraged to content and micro content in dynamic aggregation for the creation of proper content for clients and other process participants.

I would call this content oriented architecture (COA). This approach would also be appropriate in creating a dynamic set of people and skills to face the incoming workload in a dynamic fashion, thus yielding people oriented architecture (POA).

BPM 2.0 Rules Outside the Actual Process:

Today, most of the rules are contained inside the process context itself, but in the world of BPM 2.0, there will be rules outside the process in the form of constraints and distributed agents. When process can be ultimately flexible, there needs to be boundaries that processes should not go beyond without some form of notification to the process manager and/or process worker. In addition agents should be snooping for conditions of interest to the process manger.

BPM 2.0 Has a Better Handle on Process Context:

BPM 2.0 takes advantage of process intelligence. Even though a process may be as optimized as possible, there are changing conditions in the market place and your client base that need to be brought to light. The clues for these trends are seen in the process and it’s outcomes as well as complex events detected and/or alerts emitted by agents employed by the process managers. Many processes are evolving and need to be goal directed and collaborative in nature. Process Intelligence can help identify patterns for governance.

Bottom Line:

BPM 2.0 leverages agility in a supercharged way to deliver processes that can adapt and adopt in an instant, if needed. As we enter the kind of complexities that evolving processes bring, I expect more rapid evolution of agility leverage.

It is pretty easy to settle for the short term and what appears to be a good deal. Today you can find content-focused vendors that will just throw in some free software when you buy their hardware. Then there are those that will sell you content management software without the hardware, but will claim a strong BPM story. They will tell you that they have true content enabled BPM, but “buyer beware.”

It’s easy to justify this to the purchasing types and the accounting dudes, but there is a “devil in the detail” when one is headed towards differentiating business process (the foundation of the future).

The devil of “one sourcing content” is prevalent in these approaches in that these vendors only work with their proprietary content formats. A good content provider would allow for the integration of multiple content streams regardless of the content source/vendor.

This is what I call content integration and some of the large vendors can’t even integrate their own multiple offerings, much less another vendor’s content. If you have multiple content sources or can leverage SharePoint at the low end, you will be disappointed with your purchase in the long run.

There is also the devil of “limited process patterns.” Most of these giant vendors support only “light weight” workflow, but do not support strong human interaction. In addition, few can easily provide straight through processing process patterns along with human-to-human BPM without a large scale and expensive service contract. Few support collaborative processes as well. If your processes are a combination of process styles, you are headed towards disappointment. (See Prevalent Process Patterns Enable BPM Benefits Differently)

Leverage Content with Process:

Content is just data that is static by nature and can be more interesting with embedded meaning and recognitions, but content truly becomes kinetic and potent when combined with rich processing options. This is particularly true when you combine content with collaborative case management and rules. Process adds the innovation needed to accelerate benefits. An example would be mobile building inspections with immediate results posted to a shared content site.

Leverage Content with Collaboration:

Some BPM vendors support more collaboration during the process execution phase to allow knowledge workers to tap each others knowledge. This requires a different kind of process that supports process snippets and includes workers outside the native environment. Good collaborative BPM supports and captures discussions around work in progress, goals, targets, policies, rules and deadlines while accessing knowledge nets, shared work lists, shared calendars and shared case information, including unstructured information/content. An example would be the handling of complex medical requirements in life insurance underwriting where multiple medical professionals might have to collaborate on a decision to underwrite a policy within standard risk parameters.

Leverage Content with Rules:

It is well known that combining rules with process can deliver business agility that is unprecedented (see What’s the Big Deal about Agility in BPM? ). Few organizations have combined micro content with rules and can be short sighted when dealing with content. For some surprising results, consider the idea of creating dynamic content based on rules, late-bound data and constraining policies. An example would be creating customized legal contracts around products and services thus by-passing the legal department log jam.

Bottom Line:

It’s pretty easy to take the easy way out by picking a power vendor that flashes the BPM term. The sharp organizations are asking the tough questions about “What type of BPM am I getting here?” What kind of differentiating process and products can be put together with agile process-driven kinetic content. Perceptive managers are asking about limits of the content vendors or any other independent BPM vendor.

In the last blog entry on drivers for BPM, I indentified drivers around process outsourcing, package implementations and process standardization.

In this blog entry, I will explore people automation, value chain enablement, optimization, and compliance and process scenarios.

When deciding what processes should go into a “human-to-human” or “system-to-system” process flow, process models can be analyzed for candidates. I believe that process models will start momentum toward automating the management of human activities through facilities found in BPM suites.

These are normally processes visible to humans (above the water line), but the models can also illustrate processes captured in computing systems (below the water line) and identify tasks that would economically move from human hands to system components or service-oriented business activities.

Additionally, human-centric processes implemented in a BPMS engine can be studied to determine if the process steps can be replaced with rules or even services. If you expect that the logic is volatile, then a rules engine might make sense. If not, hard coding might be a good alternative. So you can automate pure manual processes into a BPMS and take certain tasks below the water line when it appears that the human tasks managed by the BPMS are too mundane and repeatable.

Value/Supply Chain Creation/Maintenance

This is much like new process creation, but the process model serves as a crucial input to the partner negotiation process. Through methods that are “swim-lane oriented,” process models can help determine which partner/party is responsible for what portion of the process. BPM tools can also simulate interactions and outcomes for value chain behavior under unanticipated conditions.

There are even system dynamic models available for supply chain design and management. The models can be used to plan and manage partner/party impacts implied in pending changes. Much the same processes can be applied to internal process fusion, but the internal organization negotiates roles among the human and systematized processes.

Modeling can also be the gateway for the fusion between the business process and the supporting technical infrastructure. Care must be taken to make sure all parties agree on the meaning of the data underlying the shared process model when going across functions and legal entities.

Do Things Better With Optimized Processes

Processes can easily be managed for optimized cost, time to market, resource loading, risk and quality through the use of process models for initial design and ongoing improvements. This can work in conjunction with methods such as six-sigma and round-trip engineering.

Process models are no longer just logical/theoretical representations. They can accept near-real-time input from the real process flows and be re-simulated for incremental improvements. I have even seen BPM tools that can perform “champion-challenger” and “surround simulation” that automatically drives the process solution towards pre-determined business targets.

Stay Out of Trouble by Staying Ahead of Compliance

Typically, compliance is focused in a reactive matter where the actions are caught by auditing history after the fact. BPM allows one to build the compliance constraints into the process, so things get done properly. Process models can be helpful for instrumenting processes with compliance controls. As the costs of remaining compliant go up, and as governing boards and societies require more-responsible behavior, modeling changes in compliance with the business process will increase in importance.

Stay Hungry: Move Faster Through Scenario Building for Agility and Policy Management

Process models can be used to create reactions to opportunistic and threatening scenarios. Obvious process strengths can be applied in a model to different business, market and geopolitical conditions. The same would apply to obvious or subtle weaknesses. The accepted planning scenarios could be waiting for out-of-tolerance conditions or threat markers, with associated policies linked to ready-to-implement and pretested packages of rules that can be plugged into business processes.

These initiatives will serve as the foundation for these enterprises’ improved capabilities to cut costs and boost competitive advantage. Simulation can also be used to try out good or bad scenarios and explicit rules will allow the agility needed to adjust to a scenario as it is sensed in near real time with BPM.

Bottom Line:

Good business leaders understand that process disciplines can be applied in multiple directions, but care must be applied to set priorities and stay focused. Rome wasn’t built in a day, but a solid understanding of the real process goes a long way in helping guide results.

In my first blog entry on drivers for BPM, I identified drivers around current process understanding, creating new processes, and process activity around mergers and acquisitions. In this blog entry, I will explore process outsourcing, package implementations, and process standardization.

Get Someone Else to Do the Dull Stuff with Business Process Outsourcing

Business process outsourcing (BPO) activities require enterprises to document their current processes, so they can ensure that the BPO provider will handle their processes properly. The process models will also be crucial in identifying opportunities for crafting service-level agreements (SLAs).

The side benefit to the BPO provider will be having a process road map for accurate servicing of the business process. Everybody wins with an accurate process model done at the appropriate level of detail. If the BPO provider identifies an industry best practice, a process model will be a strong way to communicate the effect on constituency relationships.

No enterprise wants to lose clients because of a bad process fit. This way everybody understands the process and/or has an opportunity to question this explicit process and the governing rules.

Another opportunity revolves around how some BPM players leverage explicit processes and rules. Most organizations outsource commodity processes that do not differentiate them. The implications here are that organizations do not want their unique and profit producing processes and rules available for others to copy and/or leverage with competitors of any kind. If the originating organization controls the flows and rules so that they are invisible, even the operation of differentiating processes can be run in an outsource mode. I have seen a few organizations take this next step.

Implement Packages Better

There are many examples of the effects of failing to understand the implied business processes contained in the package and the effects of taking those implied processes directly into an organization without understanding their long-term impact on the organization, the constituencies and the employees.

Although a “force fit” may work, the amount of pain and cost is sometimes so high that it takes years for an organization to regain momentum. Understanding the potential “pain points” and corresponding customization necessary to implement packages is a natural application of process modeling. An increasing number of organizations are attempting this process match activity with great success.

There is emerging availability of vertical and horizontal process templates. Patterns and frameworks are becoming available as package alternatives, and they are best evaluated through BPM (which are quicker, less expensive and more standardized than packages). I have found that larger organizations are attracted to these kinds of process templates and patterns because they have many habits that can be molded into a process that is 70% defined and be quite happy filling in the rest of the details.

Even if the packaged alternative is chosen over the BPM-based templates, process patterns and reusable process frameworks, BPM can help surround the standard package system transactions to allow for the customization and extension of standard package function. This surround strategy will allow for the processes to ideally customize applications around organizations and individuals.

This is a definite “win - win” combination that even the package vendors see as an opportunity. The problem with their offerings is that they are likely to be early versions of BPM; not the new forms of BPM (sometimes called BPM 2.0 or Human Interaction Management - HIM).

Get Control of Proliferating Processes by Consolidating to Core Processes

Enterprises often create separate, but similar, business processes to enter new markets for anticipated revenue lifts. This usually includes copying a process at a point in time and enabling the copied process to evolve into something that has a life of its own. Although this lifts the careers of the revenue gleaners who cloned the process, the total cost of ownership (TCO) tends to eat away at overall profitability. It’s hard to reconcile these processes/system variants without some business process representation to help normalize them back into a core process with local variations for product type or region.

Many organizations are trying to standardize on core processes with variations added for local customization. These unique customizations are easier to manage than multiple copies of the core processes that have to be maintained in a duplicity fashion. This is a much more economical way of dealing with customizations for unique countries, legal frameworks and/or constituents.

Bottom Line:

Good business leaders understand that process disciplines can be applied in many directions. The above money makers also leverage the individuality of processes, organizations and constituents.