Sourcing Shangri-La

Are You Siri-ous?

Check out Siri, the revolutionary new voice recognition feature on the iPhone 4S.  As Apple says: 'Siri understands what you say, knows what you mean, and even talks back'.

It's amazing. Omniscient and with attitiude. It even has a Transcript button - here's an extract, so you can see how it works: 

...

Me: Well, that's great news. I'd completely given up on my pension fund. I thought it would never recover.  So when can I retire?

Siri:  You'll need to continue working until 16 June 2043.

Me:  Sheeesh! So I need to stay employable for another 30 years... What am I going to do? 

Siri: Stick with process. Right now, we've discovered the theory of business DNA. We cracked the double helix, we know how the base pairs work on the chromosomes. And we've pretty much done with mapping of the complete business genome.

Me: So it's all over. I should re-train as a therapist?

Siri: No, idiot, this is just the start. Process will become the universal business language. Every CEO's iPad will have a business process architecture - integrated, complete and in the language of the business, not geek-speak. It will be the startpoint for M&A and business restructuring. 

Me: Not just executive bling? Not just a fad that will leave me jobless in my early seventies?

Siri: No, Bozo.  CIOs will see it as the startpoint for every systems project.  CFOs will demand the transparency that comes when risk and controls are embedded in end-to-end processes.  COOs will leverage it to orchestrate increasingly complex and multisourced operations. 

Me: OK, I get it. Business genetics.  The enterprise grid.

Siri: Much more because it's not just for execs and stakeholders focussed on performance management. It will connect with people doing real work.  It will simplify and help people be more productive.  And make it easy to get involved in continuous improvement.

Me: So where do I want to work? Who's going to win here? The BPM vendor that offers an integrated platform, a collaborative framework and deployment as an intelligent operations manual to every desktop and mobile device?

Siri: Doh! No - whoever integrates Siri first.

.... 

 

The CIO Clinic: Dealing with Business Dyslexia

The Friday Column

Our in-house specialists help readers with their most sensitive issues. Anonymity guaranteed.

This week’s letter is from a reader in the FMCG sector:

Dear CIO Doctor,

How can I help my business colleagues deal with their dyslexia?  I have invested millions to create a process repository for the business. But no-one outside of my EA team uses it. They complained that EPC was "too difficult" to understand [I mean, are they bozos? How do they keep their jobs?]. So I invested again to translate them all from EPC into BPMN because that is designed ‘to enable understanding and communication across the enterprise’. But still they say that "can't read them". Is there a cure for their kind of dyslexia?    

Yours truly,

Ms Piazza [full name and address supplied] 

Dear Margherita,

First of all, don’t worry - this sort of situation is far more common than you'd think. And there are treatments available.

First off, it could be just that they are using earlier versions. So try dispensing the BPMN V2.0 wallposter to your business colleagues. It's a remarkable summary of the 516 page specification.  

If that doesn't work, then it's time to check that it's not a false positive: they may not actually have dyslexia. To do this, try to find a common language for process - something that's rigorous but intuitive.  We don't know why exactly, but this is a treatment that will often cure their dyslexia immediately - so when you and your team speak with the business, you can both understand each other. One day the science will catch up and we'll make sense of it, no doubt!

Thanks for getting in touch, Margherita. Good luck - and don’t forget your LinkedIn password because you might need it soon.

Yours,

The CIO Doctor

Previously on The CIO Clinic: Curing The ERP Hangover

 

And The Winner Is...Yes, It's The BPMN Awards

A Friday Column

We've all done it. In an industry like ours - scientists calculate that a small town could be warmed all winter if the hot air generated in the world of BPM could be captured -  we've all written something that we later regret.  Gone over the top. Looked back and cringed.

So it's in this spirit of joint culpability that this blog is inaugurating the BPM Nonsense (BPMN) awards.  It's an occasional feature, a time to laugh at ourselves (once we're sure it's not our own purple prose).  And it's from snippets sent in by readers.

In Third place in these inaugural Awards is this gem, forwarded by a reader who spotted it on Appian's website after being invited to attend a webinar featuring Appian's 'extreme ease of use for business users':

"Typical SOA objects such as web services and EJBs can be abstracted into a drag-and-drop configuration, making it easy for business users to understand and incorporate into their process models."

Mmm. Not the business users most of us deal with perhaps.

The award for Second place goes to a BPTrends Discussion on Linkedin that seems particularly inane.  

The discussion - "What is the most popular software used for process discovery and mapping?" - was kicked off, and I'm not making this up, by a VP at SmartDraw Software, vendor of a process discovery and mapping tool.  Most of the seven responses have a commercial ax to grind though it's not necessarily explicit. One of the 'independent' responses is actually from the CEO of a process tool vendor; another is from the author of a 740-page reference guide on a particular tool.

For those of us who feel like they've already wasted too much of our lives looking for intelligent life on Linkedin discussions, this might be the one that finally clicks the Unsubscribe button.

But the weekend beckons and so on to happier things... because the worthy winner of these inaugural BPMNonsense Awards has to be a gushing piece this week from Metastorm on 'the power of crowds in the cloud', an image which many of us might have been struggling to envision anyway, before the writer's enthusiasm finally went beserk:  

"Within our customer base, we have found that our Cloud modeling tool (Metastorm M3) is enabling business people who have not been engaged in enterprise modeling in the past to create, reference, maintain, and share all kinds of models – strategy, rule, organization, process, etc. – with no technology installation and virtually no training. We are seeing spontaneously formed crowds of business people capturing models, sharing them with their colleagues, and then using the resulting models to communicate issues, changes, and recommendations to management, business architects, and even IT."

Oh, to be able to work at Metastorm and see 'spontaneously formed crowds of business people capturing models'.  And to see that this buzz of communication about change includes 'even IT'.  Now there's an idea... 

Keep them coming! We'll have another BPMN Awards ceremony in the summer.

In Memoriam - Metastorm

A Friday Column

A guest blog inspired by E J Thribb, poet-in-residence at the London-based satirical magazine Private Eye. Lines penned on hearing of the demise this week of Metastorm.

In Memoriam

So. Farewell then Metastorm.

For most of us, from leafy Wimbledon to Waterloo is just two stops on the train

In your case, it was via a lengthy stop-over in Baltimore

In a quest for higher ethics inspired by The Wire, joshed your critics.

Staffware got away but you feasted on CommerceQuest, then swallowed ProVision

But the predator became prey.

It's been a roller-coaster ride. You fended off two patent lawsuits and pulled an IPO

To arrive at Waterloo. 

The wags are asking: But who's Napoleon and who's the Duke of Wellington?

Keith's Mum says Bob Farrell is an acquisition genius and anyway $182m doesn't go that far these days, so his exile to St Helena won't last long.

She always said it was a shame about the software because Metastorm was a brilliant name.

And an anagram of 'Smart Tome' so an easy fit with Open Text.  

H J Blouse (aged 17 1/2)

CIO Clinic: This Week - ERP Hangover

The Friday Column

We’ve finally given in to reader pressure - and launched a CIO Clinic. Our in-house specialists help readers with their most sensitive issues. [Anonymity guaranteed.]

This week’s letter is from a Leo King:

Dear Doctor,

I have a $200m ERP hangover.  The business case promised standard global processes. Two years in, it seems that the real world isn’t just vanilla?  Now the CEO wants me in his office on Friday afternoon, with all my belongings in a box.  I can’t help being worried.

Thanking you in advance,

Leo King  (name and address supplied)

Dear Leo,

First of all, don’t worry - this sort of situation is far more common than you'd think. Many companies make a complete hash of their big systems implementations. It’s a form of short-sightedness (the technical term is MyERPia) where end-to-end vision is lost due to the growth of silos. 

One part doesn’t know what the other parts are doing, or they have no common communication protocol, so the pathways are blocked. Each part works very hard but they’re not coordinated so the organization progresses at a snail’s pace.

The tragedy is that MyERPia is easily prevented. By using a collaborative framework for process management and performance improvement, organizations can design and deploy global standard processes but create and manage regional variants where they are required. They can even synchronise business and IT views so that they see properly, in stereo perspective.

As ever, there are alternative approaches.  They are unproven clinically but sworn by many to be effective. The most popular, known as ‘AvoidTheFan’, requires regular rotation between roles. Another one, known as ‘Revisionism’, involves the use of a powerful potion, which dissolves the original business case and re-writes it as a complete success.  This is best administered by a qualified systems integration partner.

There have been promising trials of a new treatment – a two-year-after pill called BlameSIandStartAgain (why do they give them these long Latin names?) -  which may work in your case.

Thanks for getting in touch, Leo. Good luck, stay cheerful and don’t forget your LinkedIn password because you might need it this weekend.

Yours,

The CIO Doctor

Doh! Tasting Humble Pie - Again

As I published my Friday Column post last week So. Farewell Then BPM, I wondered if you might have to be over 40 years old and English to find it funny.

Unfortunately, my hunch was right. Your responses have reminded me how difficult it is to write a comic piece.

I need have looked no further than Google Analytics, which shows me that visitors to this blog come from 65 countries of the world. To be funny to so wide a range of visitors is a huge challenge anyway.  To try to be funny in 65 countries by using a very English satirical form is, I now realise, more like just stupid.

So I'm calling a halt to my occasional Friday columns. Not just because this one didn't work. But also because I don't want to cause offence.  What I write as an affectionate end-of-the-week joshing could be taken by those who don't know me as something more malevolent. So Reader Respect is in.  And humour I'm going to leave to comedians and comic writers...

Google Analytics, by the way, is awesome [and free]. It tells me that visitors to this blog come from 65 countries, but I can drilldown and see that the largest number come from the USA, and that Massachusetts is far and away the top state for visitor numbers.  I can see that my popular post by far has been Process Improvement: Why BPMN Is Irrelevant.  And I can see that there is one unique visitor who visited this blog more than 201 times since January! [love you, Mum x]

So. Farewell then BPM...

A Friday Column

Our guest blogger today is inspired by E J Thribb, poet-in-residence at the London-based, and allegedly satirical, magazine Private Eye.

In Memoriam

So. Farewell then BPM...

Business Process Management, some said.

You burst in a decade ago, the Next Big Thing after Process Re-Engineering

Fed by Big Vendor marketing, feted by Big Consultants, you held the key to everything.

We all had to have a BPM strategy.  A BPMS was the ultimate corporate bling.

But Keith's Mum always said that it was unreal, like Series 4 of Lost.

Sure enough, your bubble burst too, just like your difficult sister SOA always predicted.

It wasn't just Outside-In any more. It was pear-shaped.

Everyone wanted 're-definition'. They said that really you had been BAM or ECM or KM or 'Social' BPM all along.

There was confusion. People started to think for themselves. It was dangerous.

So you were toast. And the week confirmed it was RIP BPM. 

On Monday, BPM Redux disappeared to become Redux Online, On Tuesday, Accenture announced its new enthusiasm for Lean Six Sigma. And they say Gartner will publish this year's BPM Hype UniCycle

It was all over,  Luckily, like Craig Venter creating new life in his petri dish, the Big Vendors are working feverishly in their labs on your successor.

It will sound alluring, even compelling, in the executive suite. It will be The Next Business Imperative, something for us all to get behind, thank goodness. 

They say it might all favour Nimbus but I don't think so. Their message is too simple. It's not a quick fix either.

Anyway Keith's Mum says that just because something's intuitive doesn't mean it's going to catch on. Look at the iPhone.

J. R. Forrest-Trees IV  (17½)

 

Barry Fantoni created E J Thribb in 1972, the year I first went to University. His weekly 'poems' have appeared ever since. These days I very rarely read Private Eye - but when I do, it's E J Thribb's deathless lines I look for first. 

Gartner BPM Predictions + Analyst Antics!

A Friday Column...

Wednesday's release by Gartner of its BPM predictions for 2010 was greeted with relief around the world.

CIOs could get the CFO off their backs and finalise their budgets at last, knowing what to buy this year.  And BPM vendors could publish 2010 sales forecasts with confidence.

One innovation this year, apparently inspired by the Da Vinci Code: those attending the BPM Summit will receive the rubric to unlock the meaning of the text, which has been cleverly hidden in passages in the press release.

Coincidentally, my intern colleague Jazza forwarded me an email that he'd just received from his mate Rozzer, who is working as an intern at some analyst firm.  I've pasted it below. Honestly, these young people!!

From: rozzer@hotmail.com

Date: 14 January 2010

To: jazza@yahoo.com

Subject: My Crazy Week!!

Hi Jazza - how you doing? How's your internship going? [only so much YouTube you can watch eh?]

Still trying to get my head round this place. Been here almost six months, still don't know what they do!

In late again Monday, so my douchebag boss pulls me up and puts me on a 'rush' project.

"OK, what's it about?" I ask him. [which is, like, what you'd expect isn't it? But he explodes]

"S****t!!" he says, like that guy in The Wire, "BPM predictions, you idiot! What you've been working on since before Christmas!".

Jazza, mate, it has been HELL. I've done about 47 re-drafts with the 'stakeholders' [which seems to be just about everyone] and they wanted re-write after re-write.

They all had to have some words in to keep their contacts happy, and make them feel like they'd tippped the wink to them for 2010. But it couldn't be too positive about anything, otherwise that would make some other client unhappy...

Tuesday evening I was so tired, I just came out and said it:

"Why can't we tell 'em that we just don't know?"

Which went down like Ossie breaking wind at that graduation thing.

In the end, I just copied in some of that Year 3 IT coursework that Katie did - and they loved it!!!

"Excellent! This is almost mystical" said the Marketing dude. "It's like a Rowan Williams poem  - so many layers of meaning. Totally obscure". 

Went on to say that I'd got a great future as an analyst, whatever that is - then he gave me the rest of the week off!!!!

Anyway, gotta go, Greg wants me round his crib early - got to finish off his MBA stuff before we can party.

Stay cool man - Rozzer

BPM - Are The Wheels Falling Off?

A Friday Column...

The season of goodwill may be upon us - but all is not well in BPM-land.

Business as usual did continue this week. Lombardi was acquired by Big Blue - which was something of an early festive treat, given the Lombardi President's past comments on IBM's 'Orwellian marketing rhetoric'. But a growing sense of insurrection stalks the land. How else to explain the unprecedented public pasting that Forrester received last week? Or the recent postings on Gartner analyst bias? And the launch of the scurrilous but hilarious new Cult of BPM blog?

It's often said that the marketing departments of the big software vendors, swaggering with cash after their Y2K bonanza, latched on to BPM as a gravy train for the Noughties. How the abduction was carried out, whether the Six Sigma community was complicit - this will be stuff of many future MBA case studies no doubt - but they did have the motive, and the means. And actually they cleaned up. Because a Martian landing in any business park on the planet would realise within five minutes that BPM really belonged to the whole business, not just to IT. That was always like the sauce chef claiming he was really doing the maitre d's job, instead of focussing on making a half decent bechamel.  

So let's read this market turmoil as ultimately good news: the BPM hostage is at last going back home, where it really belonged all along - to be re-united with Ma (the COO) and Pa (the CFO). 

But thoughts turn to Copenhagen because, in some ways, BPM's homecoming poses problems as (nearly) intractable as climate change.  There are no quick fixes, it's not just a system, or a project we can give someone else and forget about. 

Building process maturity, making continuous improvement everyone's day job - it's about developing new disciplines. It means changing people's behaviour and attitudes. And it's nothing if it's not sustainable. That kind of many-layered challenge takes a long time - and it needs leadership from the top to generate the commitment required to succeed. You don't get from Acme Widgets Inc to become a Toyota or GE or Coca Cola or any other process excellence exemplar overnight.  It's almost generational. 

What's a CEO to do?  Fortunately, help is at hand - the nearest thing to a BPM quick fix: outsource..;-)