Bruce Williams at webMethods Wants to Unite IT and Process Pros

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By Dian Schaffhauser

On April 5, 2007, Software AG announced it was going to be acquiring business integration software company webMethods. This news came two days after BPMEnterprise.com had interviewed new webMethods hire Bruce Williams, VP and general manager, BPM Solutions. Williams served as president of consulting and solutions firm Savvi International and co-founder of the Six Sigma Management Institute. In this Q&A, Williams explains why companies are struggling to integrate their enterprise IT initiatives with their process initiatives and what's going to begin to unite the differences between the IT community and the business side.

Why join webMethods? Weren't you having enough fun running your own consulting firm?

Bruce Williams: I was having fun. But a couple of interesting things have happened in the last five years. I was much more directly focused on the methodology side – Lean and Six Sigma and that sort of thing. I'm the author of Six Sigma for Dummies and most recently Lean for Dummies. I've been writing and training and talking and preaching about those things for the last several years. But those markets have matured considerably. The low hanging fruit era is long over. It really needs to move forward.

The area that has really fascinated me for the last several years is the lack of integration between the methodology community and the enterprise technology community. As you work with Black Belts or Lean, they're acting as individual practitioners. Their connection to the enterprise IT world is very tenuous and in most cases non-existent. Meanwhile, you go talk to the enterprise IT guys, and here they are struggling with all sorts of issues. What do they know about Lean and Six Sigma? That's going on in some other part of the business. The two worlds never meet.

I've been fascinated and frustrated by that dichotomy. As the BPM industry started several years back and was starting to get a toehold, I looked at it as an opportunity for these two worlds to come together and form some synergies and unite in a way that could be mutually beneficial...

I'm an old project guy. I like getting in and getting big, important things done and seeing the results. I worked on the Hubble telescope project. It's when you make the big things happen that's the most fun... I found in webMethods a company that was 1) already well established in the market, [with] a very good customer reputation, very well liked, very strong in an important part of the play, which is the whole integration and services architecture in all this... [and 2)] their commitment to BPM was: Hey, we recognize BPM as more than technology. There's methodology. There's change management. There are issues with companies embracing it that are not just a question of workflow, technology and integration.

What will you do at webMethods?

The BPM space for webMethods is a whole line of businesses in addition to its other core businesses – from workflow stuff to activity monitoring to analytical capabilities and the integration pieces. Then there are the professional services groups [and] the partners working on large-scale projects or [that] have industry vertical knowledge. Then our whole field teams that engage with customers. My job is to bring the right communities together to make sure the customers are benefiting... What I've discovered right away, when we go talk to our customers or those interested in our BPM solutions, invariably they are interested or engaged in a methodology like Lean or Six Sigma or TPM or balanced scorecard or something like that. And they want to know, how do we bring these things together?

We transcend the technology story. Two weeks ago, we were in Seattle, meeting with a multi-billion shipping company. It was with the president of the company. They have a Lean initiative underway. They want to understand how the Lean initiative and BPM technology is going to work together to make this happen. There we are with the methodology people, the chief of R&D, the CIO, the COO, and the president of the company. This is strategic for them. They recognize that BPM is not a technology initiative. But when combined with a methodology framework like Lean, this becomes a strategic platform for the company to execute going forward.

I bring all those things together both on the customer side as well as on the vendor and practitioner side.

So BPM is gaining speed?

I think it's gaining quite a bit of traction. It's moving forward quite expeditiously. It's rare to go into any company of any size over $100 million in revenue and somebody's not talking about BPM. It's one of those top three CIO issues right now...

Take business activity monitoring. Somebody says, "Let's monitor the right KPIs." How do you go about choosing those? If you have no underlying framework like Lean or Six Sigma, a bunch of smart people get together and say, "Let's monitor this and this and this." Smart people tend to make good guesses, but [they're] still guessing. However, if you're a Six Sigma company and you understand cause and effect, and you've got the fishbone thing mapped out, you look at KPIs and you can say, "This is the critical outcome we're tracking. Yet we know the key cause and effect elements that make that thing go." You're automatically and with much more strategic force looking at all the right elements of [business activity monitoring]. You understand what to track, so you understand what key outcome is being properly managed by the cause and effect indicators that you are able to track. It's much more strategic.

Why aren't companies making this connection between strategic initiatives and these methodologies?

People get in their own worlds and do their own things. The way that Six Sigma is deployed, you have these individual practitioners called Black Belts with these highly analytical skills and statistical tools at their disposal. The software side of that is desktop tools – iGrafx for process modeling and Minitab for doing statistical analysis or maybe they're using Excel. They may have a little simulation tool. And that's it.

They go out and measure and characterize a process by observing it and getting their hands on the data by hook or crook. If they go to IT, and say, "I need this data," IT says one of two things: a) "Get in line; we've got a lot of projects"; or b) "If you're going to swing that Six Sigma/top-down/CEO-driven clout at me, you're going to get what you're going to get."

You've got this barrier between practitioner and IT people that's very tough to crack. The IT people can't get them the data they need easily. It's a project to get at data they want. So they go out and get data for other processes. There's so much low-hanging fruit at a company that you can go across the company making money and making hay that don't involve cracking the enterprise IT situation. Furthermore, Black Belts are compensated by the number of projects they get done. For them to sit and wait for IT to get data for them is not in their best interest. They're going to go find what they can do and get it done.

IT hasn't been enabled or well tooled to get these guys what they need quickly. Very few shops are able to get what they want on demand. At best, they may have business intelligence tool. They say, "OK, You run your SQL queries." All of a sudden, the Black Belt, who knows nothing about IT, glazes over, and says, "I'll see you later."

BPM affords the ability through the services layer, through real time tracking components to quickly deliver to the independent analyst or end user like a Six Sigma Black Belt access to the data they need... It facilitates getting underway and getting through the analysis and improvement phase much more directly.

But aren't these tools being sold to the CEO, not the CIO?

Yeah. It's kind of this arm wave: "Oh, these are business tools." I've yet to see [the] ordinary process owner sit down with a process modeling tool and say, "OK, let's define what we're going to do." They don't do that. That is still a hurdle to be crossed by this whole movement to make the process modeling tool ubiquitous.

However, the process practitioner, someone like a Lean player or Black Belt or Green Belt, they process model all the time. They use iGrafx or Visio or whatever to do process models. For them to use BPM process modeling tools is not a big leap. We actually coined a term about this: WYMIWYR [pronounced "wimmy-wear" – Ed.], what you model is what you run. Hey, if I'm modeling this and later when we're in operation and things are running, I can look at a running system, and it's the same thing I modeled, so I've got this closed loop, end-to-end-lifecycle-captured way of looking at what we're doing. That's a natural, very easily facilitated step for the methodology practitioner to take. That's not in the CEO office at all. However, it's in the business camp, which is using these practitioners to facilitate process improvement in their business. That's naturally going to begin to unite the difference between the IT community and what is going on on the business side.

Do you have any advice for companies that want to cross this business and IT chasm that may not have process improvement experts in-house?

That's particularly a big problem for small and medium businesses. The issues for them will continue until this stuff becomes ubiquitous. I see everybody from SAP on down trying to figure that out.

For anybody who's a couple of hundred million and up in revenue, two thirds of them are already practicing Six Sigma. The ones that aren't either have methodologists in them. Or they have a Lean initiative underway. Or they're doing balanced scorecards. Almost 60 percent of global companies do balanced scorecards.

But if you're in one of these camps that doesn't do anything – you're a trailing player – then, what I'm looking to do and one of the initiatives we're pursuing at webMethods is to help put some of this stuff in a "box," to "TurboTaxify" going through a process. In the course of implementing some of the BPM stuff, you're automatically following rules and guidelines of best-in-class practices. Once you look at modeling a process, how are you going to pick KPIs? Hey, do cause and effect. Have you done that? Yes or no. If you haven't, here are tools to do cause and effect stuff. Now that you've done that, go forward and identify the causal elements that contribute to this...

Our CIO here, [BPMEnterprise.com blogger] Kiran Garimella, and I have an initiative to work with academia... We don't want to see BPM knowledge – knowledge about how to model the business process, how to optimize it, how to analyze it – we don't want to see that driven solely into the corporate domain. We want to see this stuff early on get into the graduate school and university environment. Right now there are only a handful of universities offering it – Michigan State, Arizona State University, Villanova. But there are quite a number interested in how to get business process management, optimization, and analysis into their graduate curriculum. We want to help fuel that.

It's important that corporations don't find that the only way to get the knowledge is to pay to train people; because that's a killer for small/medium businesses. People have to come to work knowing something about this stuff.

Useful Links

BPMEnterprise.com blogosphere coverage of the acquisition of webMethods by Software AG:
http://www.bpmenterprise.com/blog/archive/software_ag_to_buy_webmethods.html

Software AG
http://www.bpmenterprise.com/blog/archive/software_ag_to_buy_webmethods.html

webMethods
http://www.webmethods.com/

iGrafx
http://www.igrafx.com/index.html

Minitab
http://www.minitab.com/

Kiran Garimella's blog on BPMEnterprise.com
http://www.bpmenterprise.com/blog/index.asp?ui=Kiran%20Garimella&s=bloggers

Bruce Williams' book, Six Sigma for Dummies
http://www.bpmenterprise.com/jpB

Bruce Williams' book, Lean for Dummies
http://www.bpmenterprise.com/gnz

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