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Ah yes, it's BPM... but which BPM is it?
Arch BPM blogger-cum-analyst Sandy Kemsley references an interesting conversation she had with some webMethods customers at Software AG's Integration World event where the customers "pooh pooh the BPM vendors who don't provide the whole integration stack". To me, this is interesting because (as Sandy calls out) "these customers are coming from the traditional EAI-type usage of webMethods".
One of the challenges in the growing market for Business Process Management (BPM) technology is the fact that there are many different technology providers bringing tools to the market, and each has its own technology background and heritage customer set with its own expectations. In truth, there isn't "one BPM".
What makes things particularly challenging is that it's very difficult to find a vendor that can truly support a rich range of different types of processes from the perspective of modelling, analysis and optimisation; while at the same time supporting complicated integration requirements. The task is particularly difficult if you're looking for an elegant technology solution with no duplication (some vendors can point to good coverage of all the main functional requirements today, but they can only do this by bundling overlapping and poorly-integrated products and technologies together).
It's a bit of a simplification, but broadly speaking, vendors fall into a "business process specialist" camp, where sophisticated modelling, monitoring and optimisation tools are provided; or a "process integration" specialist camp, where the main centre of gravity is being able to orchestrate services and applications in relatively sophisticated ways. The smaller, specialist vendors (such as Lombardi, Pegasystems, Singularity, Appian) fall into the former camp; the larger, generalist vendors (such as IBM, Software AG, TIBCO, Oracle) fall into the latter camp.
Next spring we'll be launching a major research programme looking at the discipline of BPM and the technology you need to support it—but until then the most pithy advice I think that can be given to an organisation looking to purchase BPM technology is:
Understand what, exactly, you want to do with BPM. Understand the key characteristics of the processes you're trying to improve, and equally importantly, who's driving the work—is it business people, IT people or both?
Unfortunately, getting to the bottom of things is not as simple as saying "I need a human-centric BPMS" or "I need an integration-centric BPMS".
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9th November 2007: 'Phil Gilbert' said:
Neil,
I posted on this today at http://blog.lombardicto.com/2007/11/new-bpm-or-old-.html.
To summarize: You've hit the nail on the head! And, indirectly, you raised the key difference between what used to be called "the pure-play vendors" (like my company, Lombardi) and the "stack vendors" (IBM, BEA, Tibco, WebMethods). I prefer to use the terms "new-BPM" and "old-AppDev" to describe the vendors, but however you slice it, the new-BPM tooling is directly targeted at enabling new levels of participation of business people alongside IT people in the solution scoping and development processes.
As you point out, that difference has nothing to do with "human-centric," "document-centric," or "integration-centric" but whether the user is approaching use of the BPMS as a new developer tool (with, for example, the semantics of BPEL), or as a way to change the way business and IT interact during solution development. This business-centric vs. developer-centric approach is the key difference in deciding what tools you will be successful with.
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16th November 2007: 'Keat' said:
Where does BEA ALBPM fit into your analysis?
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16th November 2007: 'Neil Ward-Dutton' (Author) said:
Keat,
Thanks for your comment.
I never intended for the lists to be exhaustive!
Here's an update I posted to our own blog to cover it:
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Some folks from BEA got in touch, and asked "why isn't BPM in your list"? I had no idea I was so influential! ;-) So, for the record... BEA is an interesting BPM vendor, as it has some integration-focused history with its WebLogic Integration capabilities, but it's garnered a much more interesting position by buying former BPM specialist Fuego. It now straddles both camps - as, strictly speaking, does TIBCO (following its acquisition of Staffware).
To make things fair, I should perhaps call out some other vendors not mentioned in the original list above: Adobe, Cordys, DST, EMC Documentum, Fujitsu Software, Global 360, Handysoft, Intalio, K2, MEGA, Metastorm, Microsoft, Proforma, SAP, Savvion, Ultimus, Vitria...
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21st November 2007: 'Barry' said:
Great post. I head BPM for a large bank and the reality is for most large and complex organizations is that 'pure play' typically does not fit the bill (good for SME and startups perhaps) Why? There are too many architectural layers at play (channel technologies, multiple process technologies, line of business apps (e.g. Siebel), SOA, and large legacy back end systems). The best way to think about this stuff (for us anyway) is more about process integration (orchestraion) across the technology stack as am end-to-end business process traverses across the required layers.
I also personally hate the differentiaion btw human-centric, content-centric and integration-centric BPM - the reality is that most long lived end-to-end processes will require the management of all three 'use-cases' simultaneously - we can blame the vendors and analyst for some of these plain dumb differentiations. IBM somewhat recognised this with the FileNet purchase - their BPM strategy will get the best from WebSphere PS and FileNet if they can sort the infighting out.
As a final note - BPM and SOA convergence is the way forward so long as the technologists can get the business case over the line without boring the business to tears with tech talk and taking too long to deliver early value
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21st November 2007: 'Neil Ward-Dutton' (Author) said:
Thanks very much for your input Barry - very interesting. I agree completely about BPM and SOA btw.
Interesting that you call out the "pure plays"' lack of capability - I know that one of these companies has a customer with hundreds of thousands of process participants. However these processes aren't straight through and although they're complex and involved, the data volumes and throughput probably don't compare to a banking situation (for certain processes, anyway).
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