AIIM have released their annual report on the state of the BPM industry which is based on the experiences of over 450 BPM users within the AIIM community, this report details how long the payback period might be and the likely return on investment (ROI) across a number of potential process types.

 The study also covers the biggest project issues and critical factors for success. Users told us where they prefer to buy their BPM tools and what features and functions they have found to be most useful.  

It also goes on to reiterrate the point that most practitioners of BPM and Enterprise Architecture have known for many years and I have seen with most customers I have worked with over the years. 

Business Process Management (BPM) is not widely recognized as a single software product or even as a suite of related software tools. It is, more accurately, a business management practice which might utilize a number of dedicated software mechanisms. 

…BPM takes on both broader and deeper aspects. Broader in the sense of integrating with other enterprise applications, taking in electronic forms and edocuments, populating transactional databases and providing a single point of interface for users. Deeper features include process modelling and simulation, reusable process modules, and process monitoring and optimization. 

By its nature, BPM is an intrusive technology. It has an excellent track record of investment return largely achieved by changing and re-shaping business processes for higher performance. As an agent of such change, the implementation of BPM presents many challenges, particularly when a process crosses departmental boundaries, or when the proponents of the BPM project are not from within the Line of Business affected. 

Key findings from this BPM report include: 

• 63% of responding organizations consider the importance of BPM to be significant or imperative.
• Hard-dollar savings from “Improving process throughput” and “Reducing process steps” are the two biggest drivers for BPM, followed by “Improving accuracy and repeatability”.
• 49% of organizations achieved payback of their investment in BPM tools within 18 months and a further 23% within two years. Additional projects are taking around 8 months on average to complete.
• 62% of those polled consider they have only addressed 1/5th of the potentially profitable BPM projects.
• Accounts payable and accounts receivable processes showed the strongest success factors, followed by customer support cases, proposals and contracts, and claims processing.
• In a third of organizations, BPM projects are likely to be initiated by Line of Business managers, whilst in another third, IT take the lead.
• Integration with other systems is the biggest technical challenge faced by our respondents.
• The strongest indicator for successful BPM processes is the presence of an existing process owner.
• 35% report that they have applied BPM to scanning all incoming mail.
• 6% are currently extending managed processes across the supply chain, but 19% have plans to do so.
• Just 4% of organizations are currently outsourcing BPM-enabled processes but this is set to rise to 18% in the future.
• In this sample, organizations are most likely to use BPM functions within DM/ECM systems (26%), followed by those using specific BPM functions in enterprise suites. Third is custom development and middleware, ahead of dedicated BPM suites (13%).
• 11% of organizations currently use BPM functions in SharePoint, and this is set to treble to 34% in the future, largely from new BPM users, and particularly in mid-sized organizations.
• Spending on BPM licenses looks set for a net increase over the next 12 months, with spending on BPM services and consultancy set to increase significantly.
• 36% look to buy their BPM tools from their existing ECM supplier, with 25% buying best-of-breed tools, and 23% preferring dedicated BPM suites.

With the current economic pressures, investment projects that show near-term payback are likely to be favoured. BPM scores very well, with 49% showing return in 18 months or less, and 72% within 2 years. These returns are most likely to be from a first project, with additional projects likely to show an even faster return. As is common when we ask specific ROI questions, many organizations do not measure improvements (31%), limiting their ability to justify future projects. 

Click to Enlarge

 The 2009 report can be downloaded from the AIIM site  (© AIIM 2009, www.aiim.org). My analysis of the 2008 report can be found here for comparison. 

- 

Earlier in the year I posted about how EA and BPM are merging in both the practioner and tools space. This was also highlighted by evidence  from reports by Gartner and Forrester.

Gartner has released their latest analysis of the Enterprise Architecture vendor market.

Their overall assessment is favourable and in summary states the following:

• EA tools adoption has increased despite economic challenges
• Tools vendors have increased the richness of the features and functionality of their tools sets
• Merger and aquisition activity (Software AG buying IDS Scheer) has provided momentum for 2009/2010.
• Most tools seem to be more well rounded and now include, modelling, business intelligence and analysis capabilities that use a single data repository.
• Open source and entry level tools have emerged and are seen to be gaining acceptance and interest but it is too early to tell what type of adoption there will be by a wider audience.
• There is recognition in the market that entry level and no cost offerings can pose a longer term threat to vendors. This is as a result of vendors not listening to customers and not not aligning themselves with customer needs and their associated adoption of a fit for purpose EA tool.

Click to Enlarge

A copy of the report can be downloaded here.

-

A recording of the recent IASA E-Summit focussed on raising the understanding of MOA….

IASA has recently identified the need for an industry level education in Model Oriented Architecture which includes related concepts of Model Driven Architecture, Domain Specific Languages, code generation, Model Driven Development, Domain Driven Design and other architectural approaches that put the model at the center of IT initiatives. Conceptually this includes any process or framework that focuses on model as more than simply text and documentation.

As a part of this E-Summit series you will hear from practiced experts throughout the industry on MOA topics and concepts. This is the type of training you and your team can only get from practicioner based organizations like IASA.

The recording can be found here (may require registration)

_

There has been a lot of talk in the press recently about SOA and BPM and convergence. In a recent article from Joe McKendrick entitled ‘Will vendors finally force SOA and BPM to mingle?‘ the following observation was made wrt BPM and SOA convergence:

  It may take time for the SOA and BPM worlds to come together anyway. It’s like the separate Francophone and Anglophone cultures that exist in Canada; the Scotts, Welsh, English, and Irish in the UK; the Flemish and Francophones in Belgium; or the residents of North and South New Jersey. They’ll all agree to exist under one roof, but that’s about it — they still want their own ways of doing things.

 As a result, I thought it may be useful to share some of my resources on SOA and BPM…. 

Gartner who have made 2 complimentary BPM webinars available:

• Using BPM to Survive, Thrive and Capitalize in a Turbulent Economy
• How to Use Process as a Competitive Weapon

Free registration for both can be found here

The following free SOA webinars are from soalib.com:

• Basic Concepts of SOA Project Planning
• Essentials of SOA Security

Free registration is required for both.

Forrester talking to SearchSOA.com about how to navigate the market for BPM products and learn how applying SOA principles can enhance BPM:

• SOA and BPM

Enjoy!

 -

In the recent Worldwide Business Process Management (BPM) Market Opportunities Strategies, and Forecasts, 2009 to 2015, WinterGreen predict that:

Business process management (BPM) and services oriented architecture engine markets at $1.8 billion for licenses, maintenance, and services in 2008 are expected to reach $6.2 billion by 2015. Products have a dashboard that supports ease of use for business analysts. The automation of process is what drives profitability for the enterprise.

The authors state that BPM is going to be at the heart of most organisational transformation initiatives and that:

Business process management promises to drive enterprise markets going forward by implementing automated process more efficiently. Automation of business process must be balanced with human exception management, which is managed by workflow. Business processes are enhanced by the ability to interconnect a range of different applications systems including general ledger, order entry, inventory, process control, and human resources.

Also considered is the increased adoption of SOA and combined with BPM they will drive ongoing efficiencies in various areas:

Services oriented architecture SOA is occurring in the context of corporate adoption of best-of-breed BPM strategies. Mergers, acquisitions, and reorganizations are increasing. The driving force is the need to leverage economies of scale brought by the Internet. A desire to develop closer links with customers, suppliers, and partners is also evolving. These events all drive demand for BPM. Applications, databases, operating systems, and hardware platforms depend on integration infrastructure and middleware messaging. Application servers blend seamlessly into networks supporting mainframes, client/server platforms, and PCs.

According to Susan Eustis, lead author of the study, “innovation drives market growth in every industry, and innovation depends on implementation of automated business process in every instance. IBM, Oracle, and Adobe are among market leaders. IBM is able to leverage its SOA market dominance to support innovation, providing software that supports flexible response to changing market conditions.” SOA reaches into every industry and every segment of the economy. SOA drives innovation for the very large enterprises, now the mid range size companies and very small organizations are adopting technologies similar to what the enterprise use, creating automated process to replace manual process.

Further more, they think that:

Cloud computing, an increasing part of BPM initiatives, will help provide organizations with up-to-date information in a usable format. So, the report predicts that off-premise SOA and cloud-based deployment options for BPM will grow in number and variety.

Their assessment and basis for the pricitions is founded on the following:

All the BPM vendors have the capability to combine and recombine SOA components to create new processes using various aspects of model driven development tools. This use of SOA component driven architecture is set to spawn a new era of business optimization bringing massive amounts of productivity improvements.

As the productivity improves, fewer people are needed to perform jobs and the economy depends on innovation. Innovation is likely to come from renewable energy products that provide virtually free, virtually ubiquitous solar and wind generated energy.

With virtually free, universally available energy, the economy will enter a new era of innovation. In this instance, the culture of the US will provide enormous competitive advantage, because people are free to try new things without the fear of failure. Electric vehicles will proliferate, with every individual buying 3 or more personal vehicles. Just as a few years ago it was impossible to think about a person have more than one TV per household and now people have a TV in every room, so also people will have road cars, commuting cars, and family vehicles. All this will drive economic growth.

Solar and wind energy installations will require automated process for the smart grid. While thin film batteries proliferate to store the locally generated energy for personal vehicles, appliances, and lighting, the grid will provide significant amounts of energy as it does now, but from many different energy sources. Personal responsibility for healthcare will be a significant innovation in the automation of process for medical care, providing significant change to the electronic patient record.

I would be interested to if readers share this opinion.

-

I have made a couple of posts on approaches to process modeling and how benefits can be derived from using itterative methods over the last few months. Here is another one that I find very interesting as it explores the eternal question of  ‘BPM Model Preservation vs Model Transformation’.

The recent presentation (with embeded audio) given by Keith Swenson at the  2009 Process.gov conference in Washinton DC on June 19, explains how a process model may or may not change over its lifetime i.e. static business model to execution in a BPMS and what the various considerations and trade offs are.

Keith identifies 3 kinds of change that a process may undergo:

• Business Process Enactment: – the business process as it moves from the beginning to the end of handling a single case. The process definition does not normally change here, only the process instance or context that records the state of a particular case changes.
• Business Process Lifecycle: – these are the changes that a business process goes through from initial concept, to modeling, to integration, and finally to deployment into an enactment environment.
• Business Process Improvement: – the change to a business process that occurs over time through repeated use of the business process lifecycle followed by analysis of how well that version of the business process worked.

-

While researching BPM Process Modeling tools recently (see post here),  I also came across a few Enterprise Architecture tools that I thought I would share with readers.

iteraplan, the Essentials Project and the Togaf Customiser are all Open Source initiatives and are briefly summarised below:

iteraplan

Claimed to be the first open source tool for enterprise architecture management (EAM), iteraplan is based on the IT landscape modelling method developed by the consulting company iteratec.

It is available in two editions: Community Edition (CE) and Enterprise Edition (EE). A feature comparison table can be found here. 

The Essential Project

The Essential Project was conceived by Enterprise Architecure Solutions (EAS) Ltd, a specialist consultancy in enterprise architecture since 2000.

It is a set of open source, enterprise architecture support tools developed to be used with a variety of EA approaches and frameworks. It has been described as ‘Essential’ because these tools are focused on providing capabilities that are essential to maximising the value of enterprise architecture; helping organisations manage and analyse the knowledge needed to make decisions that impact or are impacted by the enterprise architecture.

It comprises of the following components:

• The Essential Meta-Model, a framework-independent set of semantic definitions for knowledge related to the building blocks and relationships of an enterprise.
• The Essential Architecture Manager, a knowledge repository and reporting tool for capturing and then querying information based on the Essential Meta-Model.

TOGAF 9 Customiser

The TOGAF Customiser was recently realeased by the Open Group to be used to implement TOGAF version 9 more easily. The new tool has been donated to The Open Group by Capgemini.

Based on the Eclipse Process Framework (EPF), an open source project that is managed by the Eclipse Foundation, the TOGAF Customizer contains all the content of TOGAF 9 in a structured and editable form, including guidelines, concepts, and checklists, as well as detailed work breakdown structures for the framework’s new and improved Architecture Development Method (ADM).

They anticipate that with the new tool, users can more easily and quickly align their Enterprise Architecture practices with TOGAF 9 and create organization-specific versions of the standard that represent the concerns of their unique business and technology environments. In addition, the new tool supposedly makes it much easier for Enterprise Architects to integrate TOGAF with other common EA frameworks, such as Zachman, FEAF and DoDAF.

For more information:

• TOGAF Customizer, please visit http://www.opengroup.org/togaf/epf_intro.html.
• TOGAF 9, please visit http://www.opengroup.org/togaf or download the “Introduction to TOGAF 9” whitepaper at http://www.opengroup.org/bookstore/catalog/w094.htm

-

I have worked with various organisations to implement BPM solutions at both Enterprise and Departmental levels. A common challenge that I often come across is that both Business and IT don’t always understand how to apply itterative development approaches to support a BPM implementation.

As practitioners, I find we tend to take these types of approaches for granted but customers often need some education, especially if they have not used anything but Waterfall. The most common issue I find with Waterfall is that it instills a mind set of “Big Bang” project/solution delivery i.e. ‘know it all the build it and finally test it all’.  

With greater pressure on both Buisness and IT to show value and returns quicker and more consistently, itterative approaches have demonstrated their value with much better ROI and a lower unsuccessful implementation risk ratio, especially if an organisation is new to BPM. 

Various itterative approaches exist and the more commonly known one in my experience is SCRUM, XP, Agile and RUP. To help educate novices what its all about I thought the following resources may be useful.

Ken Schwaber co-developed the Agile process, Scrum. He is a founder of the Agile Alliance and Scrum Alliance, and signatory to the Agile Manifesto. Ken has been a software developer for over thirty years. He is an active advocate and evangelist for Agile processes.

 Further Reading (oldies but goodies):

• Iterative development requires a different perspective
• Development Methodologies Compared
• NewMethodology

-

I recently was asked by a customer if I know of any free process modeling and automation tools. This got me thinking of how many vendors provide a free edition of their software for unlimited use i.e. no trial basis or try before you buy editions. After some research I came up with the following short list:

 Free BPM and Process Modeling Tools:

• BizAgi Process Modeler
• Questetra BPM Suite
• Tibco Business Studio
• Aris Express (soon to be released)
• Process Maker
• Open ModelSphere
• Visual Paradigm – Smart Development Environment (Community Edition)
• Visual Paradigm for UML (Community Edition)

I have not evaluated each application so could not comment on their strengths and weaknesses but would be interested to hear about other free BPM and/or Enterprise Architecture tools so I can add them to my resource list. 

-

As someone who works with customers to deliver business value through BPM, I have definitely noticed an increased interest from organisations exploiting existing BPM investments as well as those that are new to BPM trying to determine its potential.

Lombardi Software recently released this 15 min (more like 30 but who’s counting) introduction to BPM. Thought it may be informative for those of you trying to understand the value of BPM.

Quoting Lombardi marketing:

…let us help you share the BPM vision with your co-workers. ‘How To Explain BPM To Your Co-workers In 15 Minutes or Less’ is an informative webinar to help you discover what to present and how to answer the most frequently asked questions.

To view, click here.

-