Quelques heures après la fin du salon du BPM à Paris, LeMagIT publie un article sur “BPM as a Service”, aussi repris ici. Le terme était le slogan de RunMyProcess, mais au-delà de la terminologie, l’intérêt suscité chez les visiteurs montre la pertinence de l’approche, et à quel point elle introduit une rupture. Il faut dire que dans le monde des solutions BPM la standardisation des solutions ne le dispute souvent qu’à leur complexité et à leur coût.

Et les fonctionnalités ? Nous amenons évidemment des nouveautés, mais il nous  manque encore quelques briques en termes de cartographie et de génération de documentation… Au rythme où progressent les solutions traditionnelles et où nous livrons de nouvelles fonctionnalités, rendez-vous dans un an

Juste une petite remarque  à propos de BluePrint de Lombardi cité ans l’article: avec tout le respect dû à l’excellente solution (traditionnelle) de Lombardi, BluePrint n’a pas grand chose à voir avec une solution de BPM as a Service. Il ne s’agit que de modélisation, l’exécution devant faire l’objet d’un export des modèles puis d’un import dans un autre outil tout ce qu’il y a de plus classique, pas du tout SaaS donc, et installé localement sur des serveurs dûment achetés.

En tous cas bravo aux rédacteurs de LeMagIT: ce sont des professionnels efficaces de la presse IT, et ils le prouvent! En ce qui me concerne ce sera dorénavant une source d’information que je suivrai avec intérêt… et vous ?

Matthieu Hug

Two architects from IBM published an interesting article about “[Taking] advantage of Web 2.0 for next-generation BPM 2.0“. In summary, this is how the authors define BPM 2.0

• Leverage the entire Web for process collaboration (mashups, SaaS)
• Convergence of BPM, SOA, and Web 2.0
• Web 2.0 as a driving force in BPM
  • Allowing for the involvement of more business process analysts
  • Faster development and content creation

Here is how they justify the first point (mashup, SaaS)

[it] means reaching out to the entire Web and encouraging collaboration to solve issues. In the context of the enterprise, it means using Web 2.0 technology cost-effectively in the underserved part of the enterprise, which couldn’t previously justify the expense.

You bet, the biggest impediment to BPM has been cost and skills required to deploy managed processes. Not to mention that most products have been built by developers for developers. This creates an overall environment that makes business-IT alignment difficult if not impossible. The key driver behind a BPM solution is serve the business and being able to adapt to its (unvoidable changes). This is really how you can reach “the underserved” parts of the enterprise. If you have to spend $1 Million (licence + hardware + technical consulting + …, nonewithstanding the ususal outrageous maintenance fees) and wait 1 or 2 years before you can deliver any value to the business, your BPM initiative will not go very far and will be seen as a major risk to the business… and it is indeed a major risk to business: it’s got no plausible return on investment.

The Convergence between SOA and BPM is nothing new. They are really the two faces of the same coin like many have said before: it is not really a “convergence”. To make a long story short, processes are high services when looked from “far away” (black box perspective on the process), processes make use of lower level services, and lastly looked at from “clse enough” services are lower processes (white box perspective on the service). It is that layered view that brings value and re-use in a BPM+SOA approach. Speaking about “convergence” of the two is somehow a misunderstanding of the whole picture.

For Web 2.0, the authors explain :

you can use Web 2.0 to bring in rich Internet interfaces and a robust user experience using Asynchronous JavaScript + XML (Ajax) and Adobe Flex

Yes, we thought a little bit (:-) about that. We also thought about faster development and content creation, as a matter of fact our tool is one of the easiest to use in the industry: we are not not using “proprietary notation”, and yes, we also thought how “Easy-to-use Web-based technology” makes it a lot easier to involve the business and business analyst during the design of the process. Since our tool can be used from any browser, anyone who is authorized to login can see the process, possibly modify it or look at the analytics reports.

The Features of BPM 2.0

• Rich user experience
• Process tagging
• Lightweight integration model
• BPMN and BPEL
• Zero code
• Dynamic process optimization
• Business performance optimization
• Industry flavour in BPM

We just commented on the rich user experience, which is critical both during design and performing task (we recently added an integration with Frevvo ). We also commented on “process tagging” and how people can collaborate on process design because RunMyProcess makes them always available to anyone that need to draft, comment or design something. Our engine also offers Web 2.0 integration points via RSS and REST services to make it easy for users to perform tasks in their favorite environment.

We also believe in the lightweight integration model. RunMyProcess can easily implement integration scenarios as subprocesses, it comes also with a large set of connectors for leading Cloud Computing Platforms like Amazon Web Services, Zoho, Coghead…

BPEL or not BPEL? If we strongly believe in BPMN, we have quite a few doubts for BPEL as an business process execution language. First we do not believe in portability, simply because there are too many issues other than the “code” to port such as integration with back end systems, or alignment of the organizations’ structures, change manageent and so on. BPEL as an execution language itself offers no compelling reasons to be used at the core of our platform. It’s missing  features that we find important, such as a proper handling of human interactions, which is “only” critical; and most of all, there is no easy transformation between a business oriented notation and BPEL. If we were to use BPEL actually, we believe we could not reach the objective of “Zero Code” which is very important to us. Zero Code is the key to bring users, analysts and developers to work in the same environment. It does not mean that developers will be out of the loop one day, they probably will always be around but they’ll be able to deliver far greater value to the business. Finally BPEL or not BPEL? Well, the technical language in use is just not the point of business process management. (incidentally, for picky techies, yes we are compatible with BPEL, any XML description of the same thing forming a “class of equivalence” ;-))

“Dynamic Process Optimization” is one of our strongest point at RunMyProcess. We are totally in line with Business Process Improvement initiatives and the approaches they use. Our tool is one of the better suited to achieve that.

“Industry Flavour in BPM” is something we have been thinking for quite some time. We are preparing industry accelerators to help you get started with your BPM initiatives and further diminish the time to ROI while reducing the risk. Most SaaS Solutions are “customizable” but the most critical aspect of customization, processes, is absent from their model.

The real problem that BPM 2.0 needs to tackle is to put an end to endless IT projects. BPM 2.0 is about promoting an agile implementation to Business Process Management and go back to very short iterations, perfectly aligned with Business Process Improvement. Why? because by definition, business needs evolve over time and are influenced themselves by the solutions that were built to support them. So, we do think the authors have forgotten a couple of items on their BPM 2.0 list:

• The Form Factor of process engines.
• Ubiquity

RunMyProcess changes dramatically the form factor of traditional Business Process Engines. You no longer need a large budget to get started, you no longer need to take risk in deploying a large and unfamiliar piece of infrastructure in your organization in several environments (development, test, production…). We have done all of that for you already. You can be up and running with your first process in 2 weeks or less, including training and with a small monthly subscription, you can probably reach the point of ROI within 3 to 6 months.

For us, 2.0 also means “ubiquity”, tools and activities need to be accessible from anywhere. Collaboration is not just for employees of your organization, it must also support collaboration with your customers and your business partners as well. With RunMyProcess, you no longer need arcane tools deployed on powerful laptops that only a few people can use.

So, this article couldn’t provide a stronger justification for RunMyProcess, our BPM-as-a-Service model and our use of Web 2.0 technologies.

Matthieu Hug

Bruce Williams from Software AG published a white paper about Continuous Process Improvement (CPI) on ebizQ. The white paper starts with a statement that should be agreeable to everyone: “Business Success is Process Centric“. We love this moniker at RunMyProcess.com ! The article explains that over the last 50 years, people have developed specific methods and tools to deal with business processes that yielded significant business productivity increases and business value. The article claims that CPI alone yielded more than $100 billion in cost savings.

Again, this should be obvious to anyone but it is important to keep this in mind as pretty much every human activity is based on a process, be it well defined and structured or ad hoc. Bruce points out that “what you get is the result of how you work”. Yes, indeed, customer satisfaction, cost, cycle and fulfillment time, differentiation… all depend on your processes.

If business success is process centric, the key to business success is continuous process improvement. A lot of organizations have adopted some kind of formal process to improving their processes. For instance, Dominique Vauquier, from the Praxeme Institute, has published recently a very simple and pragmatic way to improving business
processes.

However, Bruce explains that Process Improvement Frameworks typically fall short of addressing challenges for large classes of processes. They claim that:

• Practitioners rarely possess the enterprise information technology
  skills to understand processes that involve systems
• There is a crying lack of instrumentation
• There is a lack of access to data across the enterprise
• Project Scope is limited
• Processes are increasingly more complex spanning functions, enterprises,
  people and systems
• …

At RunMyProcess.com, we believe that our product is uniquely positioned to address these challenges and make Continuous Process Improvement effective and with it, increase value within and beyond your organization.

First and foremost RunMyProcess can address projects of any size. Very often, CPI practitioners are confronted to relatively small and fairly odd projects. RunMyProcess’s footprint and cost structure makes it ideal to improve small processes which all add up to big savings and increased customer or partner satisfaction.

Second, RunMyProcess is ideal to help with instrumentation. One of the major hurdle of the CPI is the difficulty to understand and capture accurately the As-Is model and more importantly its operational characteristics. RunMyProcess allows to rapidly create a blueprint (not connected to any back end system) of what you think is the current process and start making measurement as users perform the activities of the process and mark them complete in RunMyProcess activities. During this initial phase you can quickly reshape the process definition to match your discoveries and understanding. You can also quickly get metrics with our analytics capability. This is in itself a huge process improvement for your CPI team. They no longer have to sit down and interview a lot of people, measure the time it takes them to perform activities, collect spreadsheets of data… RunMyProcess can itself dramatically improve the
productivity and quality of your CPI initiative at virtually no cost. You can save months of data collection and reach the benefits of your process improvements move accurately and a lot quicker.

Third, RunMyProcess’s architecture and connectors make it easy to access enterprise data exposed as RESTful or SOAP Web Services.

Fourth, RunMyProcess is uniquely positioned to bring securely customers, partners and employees from different business units or geographical locations into the same workspace without complex access across the firewall, again, at a fraction of the cost compared to any on-premise Business Process Engine.

Last but not least, RunMyProcess unique’s approach to modeling provides an unmatched environment where CPI analysts and delivery teams can work together and communicate about the process definition. This also creates a dramatic productivity increase in your CPI initiative.

We’d love to hear about your CPI initiative and show you how we can help !

Matthieu Hug

Sandy Kemsley, who runs a blog on BPM, provided a detailed summary of the conference on BPM (BPM 2008) that took place in Milan this week. In her last post, she talks about the last keynote from Peter Dadam on the future of BPM.

Peter argues that:

There’s a big push to bring in BPM tools, particularly modeling tools, without considering the consequences of putting tools like this in the hands of users who don’t understand the impact of certain design decisions.

We certainly agree here at RunMyProcess: BPM tools provide a great foundation to communicate with key stakeholders of a given business process, but this tools remains principally the responsibility of “business process designers”. There are just too many aspects of a business process definition that cannot be addressed solely by business users, even from the perspective of some activity sequencing: successful process design must be a collaborative and iterative approach, with the implication of both business and IT people.

Peter continues and foresees a risk moving forward  :

Enterprises cannot take the risk of becoming less flexible through the implementation of BPM because they make the mistake of designing completely structured and rigid processes.

If we certainly agree with Peter, there is a greater risk which is totally uncontrolled processes without any kind of consistency, quality or even monitoring. And there is even a greater risk actually: BPM modelling which becomes the sole property of IT people (typically because of IT oriented tools), driving to unuseful and unused so-called business process. BPM primary goal should be to provide agility in translating ever-changing business needs into IT, quickly and reliably.

Peter sees that:

There is a significant risk that BPM technology will not develop properly, and that the current commercial systems are not suitable for advanced applications. He described several challenges in implementing BPM (e.g., complex structured processes; exceptions cannot be completely anticipated), and the implications in terms of what must exist in the system in order to overcome this challenge (e.g., expressive process meta model; ad-hoc deviations from the pre-planned execution sequence must be possible). 

We certainly agree with Peter, this is a key concern of ours and RunMyProcess has always been first to keep a strict relationship between modeling and execution. Instead of trying to fit  technical and complex  “norms”  such as BPEL with business a notation like BPMN, we are carefully using a subset of BPMN for which we can guarantee execution, executionbeing service integration, workflow or any mix of both.

Peter continues:

In particular, in dynamic environments it must be possible to quickly implement and deploy new processes, to enable ad-hoc modifications of single process instances at runtime (e.g. to add, delete or shift process steps), and to support process schema evolution with instance migration, i.e. to propagate process schema changes to already running instances. These requirements must be met without affecting process consistency and by preserving the robustness of the process management system.

These are certainly some of the key beliefs at RunMyProcess and the implementation of new processes, their deployment or changing existing process definitions has been made as easy as it could possibly be.

The other challenge we have considered at RunMyProcess is the degree of difficulty in adopting the technology. Today the vast majority of business process engines require a complex and costly implementation project ahead of any
process implementation. This is why the SaaS model is vastly superior because the time-to-ROI is much smaller and far less risky than any traditional architecture. SaaS is also a vastly superior architecture when it comes to rolling out upgrades to the platform without disrupting existing business process instances.

BPM @ RunMyProcess: a synonym for fast, evolutive and economical?

Matthieu Hug

Dans le cadre de la 3e édition du salon des solutions BPM, RunMyProcess sera présent en tant que sponsor le 1&2 Octobre 2008 au CNIT de Paris auprès des grands éditeurs classiques du domaine.

Première solution de BPM en mode full SaaS, RunMyProcess offre l’opportunité aux PME/PMI d’accéder à une plate-forme de BPM sans aucun investissement initial.

Venez nombreux nous rendre visite
 Add to del.icio.us

Macehiter Ward-Dutton is a specialist IT advisory firm which combines industry research and analysis with tailored consulting services, and is focused exclusively on issues surrounding IT-business alignment.

“This On The Radar report looks at RunMyProcess, a French technology start-up which offers a BPM toolset delivered using a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model, designed to help customers making commitments to the SaaS model for their business applications build hosted “integration hubs” for those applications. If you’re from a small-to-medium sized company and are experimenting with using SaaS-based applications and want to explore alternative ways of managing information and process flows in your organisation, you should explore what RunMyProcess has to offer. You might also find the technology useful if you’re in a larger company, but are looking for a “lightweight” way to support collaboration and co-ordination of work between your organisation and partners, customers or suppliers.”

Read more

 Add to del.icio.us

You want to integrate all your web applications or to simplify exchanges between software solutions from different providers?

Participate in the RunMyProcess Challenge and take the first step in the on-demand integration environment.

RunMyProcess, the leading specialist in the SaaS business integration, is pleased to invite you to participate in our new Challenge « Next Gen Integration ».

And take a chance to win a 1-year unlimited usage for all your applications on our web platform.

Want to participate? Just complete the online form describing your project in a few sentences. You may be selected as the 3 most innovative projects to be rewarded.

Registrations are closed by June 30th. So don’t hesitate, take the first step!

Examples of successful web applications: CRM, project management, pay, HR, invoicing, accounting, delivery, tracking, logistics, etc

 Add to del.icio.us

Vous cherchez à simplifier l’intégration de vos applications web, ou, à fluidifier les échanges entre des solutions issues de différents éditeurs ?

Participez à notre concours et faites le pas de l’intégration à la demande

RunMyProcess, le spécialiste de l’intégration d’applications en mode Saas, vous invite à participer au grand concours « Next Gen Integration »…

et à gagner un an d’utilisation illimitée à sa plate-forme pour toutes vos applications.

Pour participer, rien de plus simple. Complétez le formulaire en décrivant votre projet en quelques phrases. Vous ferez alors peut-être partie des 3 projets les plus innovants qui seront récompensés.

Vous avez jusqu’au 30 juin pour soumettre votre projet. Alors n’hésitez pas, faites le pas !

Exemples d’applications réussies : CRM, gestion de projet, paie, ressources humaines, facturation, comptabilité, suivi fournisseur, livraison, logistique …

 Add to del.icio.us

Avec près de 8 millions d’euros de fonds levés à la suite de la première édition, la Technopole Bordeaux Unitec et Finance & Technologie se mobilisent de nouveau pour accompagner les jeunes entreprises innovantes dans leur recherche de financement. Le forum national d’investissement réunit les acteurs de l’économie innovante, chercheurs, créateurs, entrepreneurs, sociétés sélectionnées, investisseurs, industriels et professionnels de la création et de la croissance d’entreprises innovantes.
Sélectionné parmi près de 150 candidatures, RunMyProcess sera au présent au salon Innovaday le mercredi 11 Juin à la cité Mondiales - Bordeaux
Pour en savoir plus, cliquer ici
 Add to del.icio.us

50% of the mergers & acquisitions deals fail because of IT. That’s a pretty striking finding that should seriously question the way IT integration challenges are still being overlooked by many organisations. With such figures, it’s needless to look for responsibilities within IT departments or to point out changing user needs. This simply reveals organisational failures, and as such, calls for a re-thinking of some of our IT habits: drop complexity, huge projects and the dream for a single, exhaustive system; focus on short time to market and agility; don’t try to avoid errors and change but accept and manage them. Huge IT projects (calculated in thousands of man days) corresponds to what I would call a “pre-industrial” way of doing IT. Industrialisation is not about becoming complex and large, it’s about answering more needs, better and faster. Hopefully, IT’s “industrial revolution” is upcoming, and it’s called “Software-as-a-Service”.

[Read more]
Add to del.icio.us