BPM / SOA Consortium Insights

March Symposium in Jacksonville: BPM, SOA & Carving a path to Business-IT Integration

The Business Ecology Initiative and BPM / SOA Consortium are co-hosting a two-day symposium, March 23-24, 2010, in Jacksonville FL.  The Symposium will feature invited speaker talks and group discussion on Business Ecology, BPM and SOA drivers, successes and enablers.  The program will focus on the connection between business and technology, with a particular emphasis on practices to carve a path to business-IT integration. 

Invited speakers include:

Faisal Hoque, Founder and Chief Executive Officer, BTM Corporation, on The Power of Convergence: Why Bringing Business and Technology Together Matters

Unifying the management of business and technology will sooner or later involve everyone in an organization, from the chairman of the board to the newest hire on a project team. Convergence requires not only new roles and responsibilities but also a new mindset and new skills. In converged companies, business-unit and technology leaders operate almost interchangeably: every manager is accountable for some business-related aspect of technology. One sign of a converged company is that the people making decisions have mastered the skills needed to articulate their business objectives and use the appropriate technology required to achieve those objectives.

Faisal will illustrate the hallmarks of a converged organization according to the Business Technology Management Framework and define a set of organizational competencies that enable an enterprise to manage business and technology together, as well as outline how maturity in these capabilities is achieved through the implementation of well-defined processes, appropriate organizational structures, timely information and appropriate technology automation.

Dr. Don Belles, Boeing on IT: Transformative or Transformer?

In this session Dr. Belles will offer his insights on why previous approaches to business and IT integration have failed to provide a complete systemic picture of what happens to the business environment from changes in the field of IT.  Building on the work of the Alvin and Heidi Toffler, it becomes apparent the relationship between Business and IT will remain tumultuous at best.  But each of these IT perceptual changes has only reinforced the existing structure and maintained a business dependent paradigm.  Technology ceased as a tool, partner, or an enabler, it is a transformer, not merely transformative.  The business environment is transformed by the way technology interacts with existing environmental transformers such as politics, societal wisdom, global financial activity, legal decisions, etc.  Currently we are on the cusp of a dramatic change in thinking.  This evolving business environment demands rethinking; not only how to apply the new technology, but also how to integrate the near-term-emerging and soon-due-technologies with the social constructs appearing within the new, transitional, and old consumer bases.  Distinctions between technology use and social application are disappearing.  Web2.0 is merely the leading edge of the transformation. 

William Ulrich, President, Tactical Strategy Group, Inc. on A Proven Collaborative Governance Model for Business and IT

Business and IT have increasingly grown apart over the past decades and this has resulted in a misalignment of strategic and tactical goals and a communication breakdown between these two distinct, yet highly intertwined worlds. Business and IT largely communicate through a complex web of intermediaries that includes business analysts, IT analysts, IT architects, designers and a labyrinth of management tiers. Collaboration has been replaced by more and more costly efforts to create new techniques, technologies, communication languages and a variety of panaceas.

This session will provide a collaborative governance model to address the business / IT alignment and communication gap. We will also review a case study from a telecommunications company where the business / IT communication gap was closed and collaborative governance became a solution in practice – not just in name.

Alexander Samarin, Author of Improving Enterprise Business Process Management Systems, on Achieving synergy between BPM, SOA and EA

In this talk Alexander will share his experience with an architectural framework, which combines several modern methodologies and technologies [Enterprise Architecture (EA), Business Process Management (BPM) and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA)] for the improvement of enterprise business performance.  He will present the description of the architectural framework and examples of business cases.

Joe Raynus, Principal Consultant, ShareDynamics, Inc., on Business Ecology: Leveraging the Innovation Curve to Achieve Balance and Alignment in the Ever-changing Environment

To stay competitive, organizations have to have a high level of agility to adapt rapidly and cost efficiently to complex environment challenges such as customer demands, competition, markets, compliance requirements and economic conditions, to name a few. Is there a "method to the madness"? Can we ever achieve the level of flexibility, balance and technology alignment to effectively support the enterprise? This presentation will examine the concepts of Business Ecology, Innovation Curve and Measurement Framework that will help better understand, monitor and measure critical processes, analyze challenges and proactively take action.

In addition to the invited speaker sessions, Gail Raynus of ShareDynamics will lead a roundtable discussion on technology and business architecture, Brenda Michelson of Elemental Links, will lead a roundtable discussion on raising IT professionals’ business IQ, and representatives of the EA2010 group will discuss their recent Business Architecture Paper and the community response.

The Symposium is open to the public.  Review the agenda.  Register for the event.

Forrester: Business Process Professionals Tweet Jam on Wednesday, Feb 10, 2010

Our friends at Forrester are hosting a BPM-related “Tweet Jam” on Wednesday the 10th.  Forrester analysts will be tweeting answers to top challenges faced in process improvement initiatives.  As posted on the Forrester Business Process & Applications Professional blog, the questions to be discussed during the Tweet Jam include:

    1. Which role(s) should lead your business process initiative?

    2. What are the best practices for establishing your BPM COE?

    3. Do your traditional business analysts have what it takes to drive BPM initiatives?

    4. How heavily should you rely on your software vendor for project implementation?

    5. How should you connect your EA and BPM initiatives?

    6. Which process improvement methodology (Six Sigma, Lean, TQM) is best for your initiative?

    7. How should you incorporate BPMN modeling into your process initiative?

    8. How should you measure the progress or success of your process initiative?

    9  What’s the typical size and composition of process improvement teams?

    10. How should process improvement connect to master data management?

    11. How do you think Social BPM will impact your organization?

Participating analysts are Clay Richardson, Connie Moore, Craig Le Clair, Alex Peters, John Rymer, and Ken Vollmer.

You can follow the conversation using the #bpmjam hashtag.

BPM and SOA: Connected for Business Optimization

In October, the SOA Consortium announced the successful completion of its mission as well as plans to merge with the BPM Consortium.  Since January, the organizations have been working together to formalize the merged consortium’s mission, goals and objectives, identify some early projects, plan the March Symposium, and combine web properties. 

In this post, I want to share the newly combined BPM / SOA Consortium’s mission, goals and objectives.  But first, the context. 

Who is the BPM / SOA Consortium? 

The BPM / SOA Consortium is an advocacy group comprised of practitioners, service providers and technology vendors dedicated to promoting the business value, and enabling the successful adoption, of Business Process Management (BPM) and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) by the Global 1000, major government agencies and midmarket businesses.

The BPM / SOA Consortium is a practice area community under the Business Ecology^TM Initiative (BEI).  BEI provides education, advocacy and member programs to enable organizations to achieve Business Ecology success, employ Actionable Architecture^TM, and carve a path to business-IT integration.

Business Ecology is a business-technology imperative focused on streamlining business processes, removing waste from technology portfolios, and adjusting resource consumption, to optimize business operations and foster business innovation.

The BPM / SOA Consortium is a newly expanded community, connecting the members and sponsors of the SOA and BPM Consortiums, to focus on business optimization.

Why did the BPM & SOA Consortiums merge?

The 2010 merger of the SOA and BPM Consortiums is based on the following premises:

• When the SOA Consortium began, Service Oriented Architecture was more of a fringe methodology that only a few organizations were doing with any great success, rather than an accepted part of an overall business strategy. Three years later, corporations large and small use the principles of SOA to enhance their overall business and technology strategies.
• A well-implemented Service Oriented Architecture leads to streamlined technology portfolios, improved resource sharing, better defined business capabilities, and ease of capability introduction or change.
• A well-implemented Business Process Management initiative leads to greater business agility, faster productivity and improved customer interactions for all stakeholders.
• The combined use of Service Oriented Architecture and Business Process Management results in an optimized business environment that is change-friendly, and poised for business innovation.
• Business and information technology professionals must collaborate to realize the highest yielding benefits of Business Process Management and Service Oriented Architecture.
• Enterprise and government practitioners would benefit greatly from a vibrant practitioner community to exchange insights on use cases, challenges and techniques, related to Service Oriented Architecture and Business Process Management, used individually, or combined.
• Business Process Management and Service Oriented Architecture, individually and combined, enable Business Ecology.

And now, the go forward organization.

BPM / SOA Consortium Mission

Promote the value and adoption of Business Process Management and Service Oriented Architecture as a means for organizations to optimize business operations, increase agility and streamline portfolios.

BPM / SOA Consortium Goals

The BPM / SOA Consortium is working to achieve the following goals by 2013, that:

• 75% of the Global 1000 and 50% of mid-sized businesses combine Business Process Management and Service Oriented Architecture to optimize business operations, streamline portfolios, and create a change-friendly business-technology environment.
• 75% of Major Government Agencies combine Business Process Management and Service Oriented Architecture to optimize mission operations, streamline portfolios, and create a change-friendly business-technology environment.

BPM / SOA Consortium Objectives:

• Shift the conversation from competing strategies to combined business value (business optimization)
• Provide education on business analysis, process design, governance, performance measurement and implementation techniques to combine Service Oriented Architecture and Business Process Management for business optimization
• Showcase Business Process Management and Service Oriented Architecture success stories, benefit realization, best practices and lessons learned
• Raise the Business IQ of information technology professionals and Tech-Savvy of business professionals to realize the greatest business value from Business Process Management, Service Oriented Architecture and business-technology
• Create a vibrant practitioner community for the exchange of insights on use cases, challenges and techniques, which will assist in value attainment, and spur broader, industry-wide Service Oriented Architecture and Business Process Management adoption.

Visit our website to learn about BPM / SOA Consortium membership and sponsorship.  Check out the agenda for our upcoming public symposium in Jacksonville Florida.

2009 Year in Review with Richard Soley: SOA, BPM, Cloud Computing and more

SearchSOA’s Rob Barry interviewed Richard Soley, CEO of the OMG, and Executive Director of the BPM / SOA Consortium, on hot topics at the close of 2009, including SOA, BPM, Cloud Computing and the future of information technology.  See what Richard has to say on 2009 and beyond in this 8:00 minute video interview.

SOA Consortium EA2010 Working Group’s Business Architecture Paper Now Available

The SOA Consortium’s EA2010 Working Group – a group of “street-smart” enterprise architecture practitioners – has been actively discussing the domains, services, practices and skills required for a thriving, business relevant enterprise architecture practice in the 2010s. 

A critical finding of these discussions is the emphasis of technology concerns at the expense of business understanding, and ultimately, true business enablement, in most enterprise architecture practices today. Successful enterprise architecture practices in the 2010s must give equal emphasis to technology and business concerns. The means for this re-balancing is the elevation, and in some cases initial adoption, of business architecture practices.

Typically, the business architecture practices and artifacts in enterprise architecture frameworks focus on business processes and business uses cases. This is not surprising, since these artifacts and practices are a prerequisite to IT-based business solution delivery. However, this is not sufficient.

To reap the benefits of business architecture – business visibility and agility – the business architecture must reflect the entire business design, from the point of view of business designers and owners, rather than IT solution delivery. This point of view begins with business motivations, includes key business execution elements – such as operating model, capabilities, value chains, processes, and organizational models – and transcends information technology representations, such as business services, rules, events and information models.

While we strongly believe that business architecture is a business domain, the Chief Information Officer (CIO), given his/her unique position to view business plans, business processes, information flows, and technology portfolios across the organization, most often champions business architecture formalization. 

In this discussion-oriented paper, the EA2010 group shares their findings on the following questions:

•    What comprises business architecture? 
•    What is the purpose? 
•    Who participates? 
•    How do you make business architecture accessible? 
•    How does business architecture facilitate business decision-making and change? 
•    How do you keep business architecture current?
•    How does business architecture relate to BPM, SOA and IT solution delivery?

To read the paper please go here.

If you have comments on the paper and/or insights on the discussion questions, please leave a comment here or email us.

SOA Consortium Declares Mission Success, Announces Future Plans

  Today, the SOA Consortium declared success on its advocacy mission to help the Global 1000, major government agencies and mid-market business successfully adopt SOA by 2010.  The SOA Consortium’s declaration is supported by recent industry research, the high value case studies submitted to its case study contest, and industry momentum around business and technology strategies that are dependent upon a SOA foundation.

From today’s press release:

“When the SOA Consortium began, SOA was more of a fringe methodology that only a few organizations were doing with any great success, rather than an accepted part of an overall business strategy. Three years later, we see corporations large and small using the principles of SOA to enhance their overall business and technology strategies,” said Richard Mark Soley, executive director, SOA Consortium. “As we move forward in the drive towards Business Ecology, the combined BPM/SOA Consortium will continue to engage with the business community to show how SOA can be a valuable part of their business optimization efforts.”

According to Gartner Vice President and Distinguished Analyst W. Roy Schulte, “the term ‘SOA’ was coined by Gartner, and Gartner published the first reports on it in 1996. However, widespread mainstream adoption only appeared after 2005. SOA is a durable change in application architecture, like the relational database and graphical user interface. It is the natural evolution of distributed computing — it is distributed computing done right. SOA is already the dominant architectural style for business applications. Virtually all CIOs are somewhere on the road to SOA, either starting or far along. SOA principles are timeless; no replacement is in sight.”

In a recent conversation with Joe McKendrick, Forrester’s Randy Heffner spoke of SOA adoption levels that match the SOA Consortium’s goal of 75% adoption rates by the Global 1000 by 2010.

“By the end of this year, 75% of the global 2000, that’s folks with 20,000 or more employees, say that they’ll be using SOA,” Randy continues. “When we asked, ‘Are you satisfied?’ roughly 25% says that SOA has provided most or all of the benefits that they expected. There’s another 30 to 40% that said, ‘It’s provided less than we expected, but still enough benefit that we’re expanding our use of SOA.’”

Interestingly, in that conversation, Heffner pointed out the greatest success comes from business-driven SOA approaches, exactly what the SOA Consortium has been advocating from the onset.

“What do the 25% moving full force into SOA have in common? “They’re treating SOA as a business-design concept,” Randy says. “That sets a whole different perspective on how you view the kinds of services that you’re building, the methods that you put around it.””

In addition to declaring victory, the SOA Consortium announced its future plans to merge with OMG’s BPM Consortium:

“The SOA Consortium will be continuing its advocacy efforts as part of the new BPM/SOA Consortium, which also ties in with the Business Ecology™ Initiative. The Business Ecology Initiative is focused on erasing the constraining lines between business and Information Technology (IT) so that IT becomes a ubiquitous, integral and vital asset to the company and leads decision-making, structural change and enterprise-wide quality initiatives, drives efficiency and revenue, and provides measurable, clear return on investment.”

SOA Consortium Activities and Transition

Timing:  The merger between the SOA and BPM Consortiums will be completed by 2009 year end.  The first event of the merged BPM/SOA Consortium is the BPM and SOA in the Clouds Symposium, to be held December 8-9, 2009, in Long Beach, CA.  Organizations and individuals interested in participating in that program should refer to this open call for participation.

Working Groups:  With the completion of the 2009 SOA Consortium | CIO magazine case study contest, the Executive Suite SOA working group has completed its charter. 

SOA Community of Practice is working on an “Everyday SOA” paper that describes the key concepts in our services, portfolios, management units and IT landscape diagram.  The group intends to deliver the paper in December 2009.

The Enterprise Architecture in the 2010s working group is working on a discussion oriented position paper on how a formalized business architecture contributes to Business and IT success.  

SOA Consortium Publications:  All SOA Consortium publications (papers, podcasts, presentations, blog posts) will remain available to the public at their current locations.  This includes the forthcoming working group papers.

Consortium Leadership: The joint BPM / SOA Consortium will be managed by Karen Larkowski, current program director of the BPM Consortium and General Manager of the Business Ecology Initiative.

Thank You!

On a personal note, I’d like to thank everyone who has contributed to the success of the SOA Consortium.  This long list starts with our members and sponsors, and includes all invited speakers, executive summit and symposium attendees, our pundit friends (analysts, press, bloggers, thought leaders), the OMG team, and every SOA practitioner who raised the bar (and value) in his/her organization from SOA as “just a bunch of web services” (JBOWS) to SOA Means Business.

What are real people doing with SOA?

A frequent question to the SOA Consortium is “What are real people doing with SOA?”.  Sure, folks see and appreciate the winning case studies.  But, what about the “every organization”.  What problems, or opportunities, are being resolved using a SOA approach?  What’s the best place to start?  Top-down from business strategy?  Bottoms-up from IT projects? Somewhere in the middle? 

This is best answered in three parts, starting by level-setting on business-driven SOA. 

By “business-driven SOA”, we mean three things:

1. Creating a portfolio of services that represent capabilities offered by, or required of, your organization.  Those capabilities may represent business, information, or technology concepts.

2. Composing, or orchestrating, those services along with events, rules and policies, into business processes and solutions that fulfill business scenarios.

3. Never proceed without a business outcome in mind.  That “business outcome” could be cost and complexity reduction via a rationalized IT portfolio.  In other words, “business-driven” doesn’t require a business person tapping you on the shoulder, it means executing for business reasons.

Next, our take on “SOA initiatives”, which is, there shouldn’t be any.  Rather, there should only be business initiatives that (when appropriate) use a SOA approach.  Sure, it sounds like semantic nit-picking, but in actuality it’s a lesson from the trenches.  Focus on the business problem, not the SOA grand challenge. 

As you know, business initiatives can arise from strategic decisions, business architecture/design decisions, and/or operational results.  And since SOA can be applied to a variety of business situations, it only makes sense that SOA can appear at point, from strategy to operations.  In other words, there is no best starting point, only the best starting point for you.

As these business initiatives are further refined in planning and execution, business and implementation details are surfaced, which also may call for a SOA approach.  For example, Joint Business and IT Planning activities may surface common process, function and/or information needs, across projects.  These are potential drivers for a SOA approach.

This business and IT activity continuum is expressed by the blue, green and yellow boxes, and grey arrows and boundaries, in the diagram below.  While blue represents business activities, and yellow represents IT activities, we’ve learned that the most successful organizations spend their time in the green, where business and IT continuously collaborate.

Finally, the business scenarios.  Referring to the diagram below, in each column of the continuum, we’ve listed real world SOA approach drivers.  For example, strategic business initiatives that have benefited from a SOA approach include introducing new business capability, entering a new or adjacent market, integrating mergers and acquisitions, and introducing multi-channel strategies. 

We captured these drivers during interactions with practitioners (real people) over the last three years.  These interactions included our executive summit series, our community of practice discussions, invited speakers at our events, case study contest submissions, and the thousands of practitioners we’ve met via industry events, private forums, and in their conference rooms.

SOA Approach Drivers Diagram, October 2009 version

[Click on diagram to enlarge]

SOA Case Study Contest Special Recognition Winner: FINRA for NYSE & NASD Member Regulation Merger

Earlier this week, we announced that Financial Industry Regulatory Agency (FINRA) is the special recognition winner for Regulatory in the SOA Consortium | CIO magazine case study contest.  Highlights from the FINRA Case follow. 

Organization Background

The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) is the largest independent regulator for all securities firms doing business in the United States.  Created in July 2007 through the consolidation of NASD and the member regulation, enforcement and arbitration functions of the New York Stock Exchange, FINRA is dedicated to investor protection and market integrity through effective and efficient regulation and complementary compliance and technology-based services.

Business Scenario

Merger/Consolidation: The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) SOA project consolidated the New York Stock Exchange Member Regulation systems with the NASD Member Regulation systems. FINRA is the largest private independent regulator for all securities firms doing business in the United States. FINRA oversees nearly 4,850 brokerage firms, about 173,000 branch offices and approximately 649,000 registered securities representatives.

The primary challenges:

1. Consolidation of the two organizations’ application portfolios that support the member regulation business.  Each application portfolio was sizable and heterogeneous. At the onset FINRA had ~160 applications and NYSE Member Regulation was supported by 86 applications.
2. Reconciliation of two sets of legacy business processes into a final-state business process.
3. Final-state business processes must seamlessly integrate new systems and existing systems from both legacy organizations. The existing systems required enhancements.
4. Business teams were distributed across the United States in district office locations.  The development team was located in New York City and the Washington D.C. area.

The objectives:

1. The final-state business processes of the merged company required seamless operation.
2. The team needed to ensure a continuity of business operations while transitioning in phases to the new final-state business processes.
3. Performance and reliability of the systems was a key requirement in maintaining core mission success.

Why SOA:

1. The size and complexity of the project required multiple teams in different locations working effectively in parallel to meet the aggressive schedule.
2. A SOA approach reduced risks presented by the large team size.
3. The end-state systems had to be flexible and provide the ability to quickly deploy changed and new business process without breaking the architecture.
4. It was anticipated that the approach would deliver significant savings in both cost and time when compared to competing approaches.

ROI

The Member Regulation function of FINRA (the new, merged regulator) benefited greatly from the new system.  Broker regulation tasks were simplified and accelerated, and delivered cost savings for the business.

The key business values achieved are:

Time to Market – Project delivery was greatly accelerated by allowing development teams to conduct parallel development of 10 major services with minimal interaction and dependencies. The service oriented approach and detailed overall vision allowed each team to rapidly deliver individual services that were seamlessly integrated and tested by the system team.

Reduced Risk – The SOA approach mitigated many of the risks associated with large development teams (100+ staff) by facilitating parallel development while minimizing team interdependencies and setting clear team responsibilities. The key to reducing risk is the early definition of business service interfaces and responsibilities.

Cost Savings – The modular SOA architecture of the new system consolidated business functions into a common set of business services that are leveraged across many business processes, resulting in cost savings for construction, deployment and maintenance of the system. 

Improved Agility – The business-centric service design and modularity of the SOA approach provides flexible deployment to support current business processes and to rapidly adapt to support future business process. Current business centric services include data sourcing, analytic surveillance and case management.

Resilience – Fault tolerant business-continuity is achieved using guaranteed message delivery, as individual business services are moved off-line for maintenance and restored.

Process Optimization – Technology duplication is eliminated through the consolidation of functionality into discrete standardized business services. This also provides a uniform approach and consistent results across all the business processes.

Project Organization

FINRA used a three-tier approach to organize the project:

Tier 1 was comprised of business analysts that spanned the various business processes.

Tier 2 consisted of 10 distinct service teams that defined the function of their service based on the business analysis and under the supervision and guidance of architecture and program management.

Each service team was individually sponsored by the organization and was a cross-functional team comprised of business analysts, architecture, development, and testing. The collaboration and alignment of technology and business staff on each individual service team was key to their success.

Tier 3 was comprised of the system architecture team and program management who provided overall vision, governance, and timeline. The overall vision provided business-centric services spanning many business processes. This naturally created emphasis on major business functions such as analytic surveillance and case management.

Lessons

1. The single most important lesson from this SOA project is that extremely large, time critical applications can utilize a SOA approach to segregate and compartmentalize common services and allow for massively parallel work by independent teams. Not only does this approach increase organizational productivity but also mitigates some of the risk presented by a large project.
2. The SOA approach gave the teams a measure of insulation, helping ensure decisions on one component did not negatively impact other components or the project.  The de-coupling allowed teams to deliver well-defined components on an aggressive time line required for project success.
3. Understanding the underlying business problems and processes is crucial to creating well-defined services that are reusable and exhibit the correct level of granularity.  The payoff for this is a flexible business process that can change and grow without changing the architecture
4. A concise architectural vision shared between system architects and application architects is key in large projects. Effective governance, along with well-defined services with clear functions and interfaces, is essential. Since the interfaces will change over time, it is important to develop a plan to handle this early.
5. For projects that use process orchestration, identify and document those processes early in the project.  This will help ensure that they operate in conjunction with the business function they automate and avoid problems that would be more costly and difficult to solve later in the project.
6. The combination of an ESB and BPM is a robust and powerful enterprise pattern. This combination greatly simplified several of the tasks of adapting existing capabilities into a new unified SOA system.

@ SOA | BPM Symposium: David Broadbent, Parity Solutions on Overcoming Resistance in Change Programs

Session Abstract:

David Broadbent, Business Process Consultant, Parity Solutions on How to Overcome Resistance to Change in Change Programs

There have been many papers written about how business process management can yield benefits to organizations but not enough about dealing with the people aspects of change. David Broadbent presented a case study at the OMG BPM Think Tank in Putten Holland in November 2008 looking at the aspects of culture on change programs, describing culture as the ‘forgotten variable’ in change programs. Following ongoing work with a number of clients this talk will take some of the thoughts he presented to the next stage, namely how to resolve the ‘Resistance to change’.

After the lunch break, David Broadbent is up, talking about the cultural implications of change.  David picks up on the engineering theme from this morning, says his engineering background led him into process focused work.

David opens with the black cloud (recession) that is over industry.  The pressure for efficiency, survival.  This is driving BPM.  David believes culture is often the forgotten piece to change.  Frequent issues: lack of communication, lack of end-to-end ownership, lack of understanding of end-to-end process, resulting in “blame culture”.

David introduces the “doom merchant”, the guy who spreads fear in response to change.  The doom merchant’s actions incite resistance. 

Classic types of resistance: Refusal (verbal and non-verbal), Denial, and Obstruction (deliberate and non-deliberate).  New type, brought out by this recession is Apathy.  David likens apathy to being punch-drunk.  After going through 2-3 rounds of cuts, people just don’t care.  In fact, they’d like to leave, but can’t because jobs aren’t available.  Another aspect is fear of being next.  People with time (or interest) to help, won’t volunteer to help, because they don’t want to call attention to having free time.

David is transitioning to approach.  He calls out that there isn’t one methodology for BPM.  Not every method will work in every situation.  For example, you can’t apply a manufacturing oriented approach for a highly variable environment such as an emergency room.

Approach:

1. Preparation: 5-10% of program time. 

-- gain senior management buy-in (sponsorship, funding, communications plan).  Want to attain a mandate to change.

-- Scope: realistic goals, CSF (performance, cost, quality, speed or service), identify which business processes / scenarios are being tackled

-- Resources: subject matter experts, business analysts, project support (IT and such); Asking for people is the first indicator of management buy-in.  Did you get time of the superstars?

David has put up The Inter-Change Cycle by Salerno & Brock; calls out the danger zone, as the pivotal point where people decide if they will move forward with change, or not.  Reasons why not, too big, too overwhelming.

Important to break problem down into smaller pieces, pieces that can be incrementally delivered and positively impact the people in the organization.  Important that the change team (insiders) deliver the change to the people.  Need to build confidence in the change team.  David cites agile approaches. 

Another key here is communication.  Constant communication from the change team.  The people from the organization (insiders) doing the work.  Not communication from the change consultants. 

In addition to the change team, the executives must continue to communicate.  Executives need to continuously show commitment.

The audience took David on a bit of a tangent, but an important point came out, the assignment of executive process owners.  This is often a big deal in organizations because executives typically have vertical (function & organization) control, not horizontal (process) control.  Process ownership forces end-to-end control and visibility, and executive collaboration (in this together).

Tackling resistance:

Refusal: People refusing don’t want to be seen as “getting in the way”.  Quotes Jack Welch, you either change the people, or change (out) the people.

Obstruction: Dedicate staff to BPM/Change program

Denial: Make “not changing” not an option

Apathy: Make people part of the solution.  Active role in the change.  Don’t impose change upon them.  Create momentum.

You need to silence the doom merchants.  These actions will drown them out.

Theme from the day, continuous improvement. 

Summary:

- Senior Management Buy-in (ask them 3 times)

- Really serious mandate

-- dedicated resource

-- fixed scope

-- process ownership

- Agile delivery of change products

- Communication (I think, flashed by)

David cites Gartner CIO Agenda for 2009: #1 is Improving Business Processes, expected to remain #1 until 2012, when replaced by Product Introduction (post recession)

@ SOA | BPM Symposium: Marc Redemann, IDS Scheer

Session Abstract:

Marc Redemann, Director of BPM Consulting, IDS Scheer on Survival of the Process Fittest

In times of turmoil, change, and volatility – people and technology are in flux, but business thrive on the processes they run on. The consistency, speed, and quality of processes are what drives the delivery of products and services to customers and improves the bottom line. The companies surviving the economic storm have been process oriented all along. But becoming “process-fit” is more than applying BPM technology; it’s a cultural mindset. This presentation focuses on what it takes to effectively use BPM to better survive troubling economic circumstances with a process-oriented mindset, culture, and technology.

Redemann opens up talking about BPM market evolution over last 10 years.  BPM market in US, for IDS Scheer, is very IT driven.  Redemann reminds us that IDS Scheer is being acquired by SoftwareAG.  Focus of today’s talk is Enterprise BPM. 

Case Study: Business Process Transformation in the Banking Industry

Large brokerage, wealth management, private banking, investment management company.  Leading provider of global corporate and investment banking services.

This case is IT driven, Redemann speaks of building central repository prior to making technology decisions.  Enterprise Architecture process going from business processes to systems

EA in this case has four dimensions: Business Architecture, Information Architecture, Application Architecture, Technology Architecture.  Need to consider all dimensions to do effective enterprise BPM. 

Redemann emphasizes that EA understanding is required for BPM, but BPM framework is broader than the EA.

The underlying technology is ARIS, so all information (business strategy, process design, execution, management) is stored in the central ARIS Repository.

Business Process Transformation – Roadmap Steps: Strategy, Design, Implementation, Controlling (management)

Redemann has a lot of detailed slides on the business process transformation methodology, difficult to capture on the fly.  The slides will be available when the podcast is published.

The aspects analyzed in the method are: Products, Value Chains, Processes and Organizations.  Since the repository is centralized, all models created in analysis are available in implementation and controlling.  (In response to question on organization model to execution roles).

Processes are decomposed into Event-Driven Value Chain (EPC).  EPC describes the detailed sequence of the process activities.  Weak points are identified to definite root-cause and improvements.  The EPC includes capturing metrics, such as how long a step takes.  (which is not the same as what it should take)

Tons of information comes out of the analysis.  Contrasting the Appian talk, you can definitely see Clay’s keynote point about picking the right tool and method for the business problem at hand.  There isn’t one “tool” or “method”, but “one solution for a specific problem” (or set of problems).

Now, Redemann is showing us examples of the “as-is” versus “to-be” processes.  An interesting piece is the “what-if” financial projections of as-is to to-be.  This examples shows a 30% improvement (cost based) and was selected for implementation. 

Over the last year, IDS Scheer has focused on new capabilities for automating BPM governance.  BPM governance is process centric, so implementing BPM governance starts with process definition.  BPM Governance also includes performance management and monitoring.

In summary: Process Analysis to Process Improvement to Process Management

Redemann touches on some innovations from ARIS, including ARIS Express (free BPM software).  Suggests all of us Visio users replace our “painting tool” with a real BPM tool.