I had a short day on the final day of Gartner’s BPM conference in San Diego this week, since I had to catch a flight back to Toronto in the afternoon, but I managed to attend the morning sessions.

The morning started with a keynote by Yvonne Genovese of Gartner on changes to expect in enterprise business applications over the next 3-4 years, primarily ERP systems such as SAP and Oracle. Although at first glance, this doesn’t seem to have much to do with BPM, it really has everything to do with BPM: as customers stop accepting the monolithic world view and pre-determined workflows of the business application vendors, they want these systems to expose their functionality as services, then orchestrate the services using BPM. Instead of using the business application directly to do, for example, an order-to-cash process, a more agile and visible order-to-cash process created using BPM will invoke some of the business applcation’s functionality as services, as well as consuming other internal and external services as part of the process.

This isn’t going to be on the business application vendor’s terms any more, either: Gone are the days of the vendor picking a small set of software vendors which which they integrate, and restricting a customer’s options to working only with those products, customers will be able to create their own ecosystem of vendors. They’ll continue to use their large business application vendor for many of the core services, but more like a large toolbox of services rather than a monolithic application; then they’ll pick and choose other services from any vendors that they choose to work with to round out their business processes. And with the processes implemented using a BPMS, all of the related tools come into play, such as modelling, simulation and monitoring. This falls in line completely with the themes that I noted on the previous two days of the conference: the growing importance of both visibility and agiilty in processes.

I spent most of the rest of the morning in sessions about business rules: first, a presentation by a Fair Isaac customer, Discover Financial Services, and then in a panel hosted by Jim Sinur of Gartner with two other end customers discussing their use of complex rules systems. It’s well understood by now that business rules -- or decision management, in the current vernacular -- are a critical part of BPM to help both with automating decisions and suggesting courses of action to a human participant. The focus of these two sessions was more directly on the use of decision management across the organization, both as part of BPM and for other decisioning.

Discover’s case study was particularly interesting, since as a credit card company with 50 million cardholders, there’s a lot of things to make decisions about, and many areas of risk to juggle while doing so. They actually use three different rules engines, then combine the results in different ways depending on the situation. All in all, they’re starting to automate -- and optimize -- decisions in everything from individual purchase approvals to customer contact strategies to portfolio scoring, with the ultimate goal of reducing losses and increasing revenue.

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

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.

This year’s -- or should I say, this half-year’s -- Gartner BPM summit is squarely focussed on strategy and organizational change. I say half-year because Gartner announced this morning that they would be holding another BPM summit in September in Orlando, Florida, which seems to me to be a bit of an oversaturation of the market. Certainly they’ll get almost no overlap in attendees between here and Orlando, and the vendors might get a bit weary of this twice a year, plus once in the UK and once in Asia.

The BPM summit kicked off with a keynote by Simon Hayward, one of my favourite Gartner speakers. He had a couple of major themes: what is it about this point in time that is making BPM so important and relevant, and what are the advantages of being a process-centric organization? The interest in not just the Gartner BPM summit but everything to do with BPM, SOA and integration technologies in general certainly indicates a strong interest in BPM right now, and I think that this is becoming relevant because we’re reaching some sort of tipping point with respect to complexity of applications: we need BPM and related technologies in order to easily assemble new applications rather than resorting to the coding practices of old. As for why it’s important to be process centric, Hayward highlighted the two key benefits: agility and visibility. To simplify, almost everything to do with business improvement these days is related to agility and visibility, and process/BPM is right in the thick of that. He also touched on another major theme of this conference, that of having the right process-oriented people on BPM project teams and that same process focus rippling up through management layers.

Janelle Hill echoed some of these same sentiments in her presentation later in the morning: the need for agility due to globalization pressures, and how information transparency accelerates the commoditization of products and services. Again, we’re back to agility and visibility as the key issues around process improvement. She took a closer look at some of the technologies, and made some key recommendations around the process training and skills required by BPM project members: you’re not going to be successful at your BPM projects if you just recycle the same old architects and analysts; you need to have people who have a process orientation and can leverage the impacts that BPM technologies could have on the organization.

Jim Sinur took a very different tack by discussing business rules and BPM: how rules affect processes, and when the ability to change rules for in-flight processes can have a strong positive impact on process agility. Most organizations understand the benefits of externalizing rules from enterprise software into busines rules management systems; this takes it a step further by looking at both benefits and risks to allowing business rules to be changed frequently. The key is to understanding both sides of this equation in order to select the rules that should be readily changeable, potentially directly by the business community.

At the end of the day, it still all comes down to agility and visibility. BPM (and business rules) can bring both of these to an organization if properly implemented, and if the right process-focussed people are put in place to support the BPM initiatives.

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

Sandy Kemsley is an independent analyst, architect and blogger, specializing in business process management, enterprise architecture and business intelligence. In addition to her technical background, she has significant knowledge about business operations and is often involved in end-customer projects from business requirements and analysis through technology design and deployment.

During her career of more than 20 years, she has started and run successful product and service companies, including a desktop workflow and document management product company from 1988-90, and a 40-person services firm specializing in BPM and e-commerce from 1990-2000. During 2000-2001, she worked for FileNet (now IBM) as Director of eBusiness Evangelism during the launch of their eProcess BPM product, and was a featured speaker on BPM and its impact on business at conferences and customer sites in 14 countries during that time.

Since 2002, Kemsley has returned to private practice as a BPM analyst and architect, performing engagements for financial services end-user organizations and BPM vendors across North America, and writes the popular "Column 2" blog on ebizQ at www.column2.com. She also creates and delivers BPM and related training courses. Her company is Kemsley Design Ltd. and you can reach her at sandy (at) kemsleydesign.com.

She holds a B.A.Sc. in Systems Design Engineering from the University of Waterloo.