When I was out at Cloud Connect a couple of weeks ago, I met Dan Woods who writes the JargonSpy column for Forbes.com.  Turns out Dan has a particular soft spot in his heart for BPM and I was able to give him a quick demo of Lombardi Blueprint.  The result was his piece that came out yesterday, “Stalking and Capturing a Business Process — We need a process for creating business processes.”

Be vewy, vewy quiet, we’re hunting pwocesses

Dan is clearly sold on the value of business processes and BPM:

For large and small firms, the business process is the right way to think of what to do and how to do it better, whether or not it is automated or supported with technology. BPM puts the focus where it should be–on what you must do to make your company successful, not on the capabilities you happen to have.

What he wants to know however is how are these processes captured in the first place?  If the processes being submitted aren’t of quality, how can you expect the BPM results to be?  Garbage in, garbage out.

Incremental and Collaborative…that’s the ticket

Dan argues that developing the processes incrementally is the only way you can be assured of solid inputs.  The three approaches he advocates are: Wiki-based process discovery, Task-based process discovery and Mash-up based process discovery.  And this is where the Blueprint shout out comes in:

Lombardi Software has recognized this trend and recently launched a Web-based service called “Blueprint” that allows for collaborative brainstorming and definition of processes. Using this service, you start with a bunch of ideas and can end up with a nice diagram. The JargonSpy imagines such a system could be used as the scratch pad for capturing and refining the processes that emerge in the other three methods.

Thanks for the mention Dan, and thanks for pointing out the importance of iterative and broadly inclusive input collection up front.  For without that, are we not building our BPM castles on diagrams of sand?

Over the the holiday break I chatted with Stacie Kenney, a Business Process Analyst with West Bend Mutual Insurance. West Bend is located in Wisconsin and has been around since 1894.  They offer property/casualty insurance for businesses, homes, autos, and personal property through independent agencies in six states.

Stacie and I discussed how she worked over the last year to help create a small commercial offering which, before BPM and process mapping, had not been practical to offer.

We also discussed the role that process mapping played in the recent IT department re-org, helping to streamline processes and breakdown silos.

My talk with Stacie (7:17)

West Bend BA, Stacie Kenney

Some of the Topics we tackle:

• West Bend’s “Smart Business” offering and how it leverages new technologies like services, content generation tool and Teamworks.
• Given that the “Smart Business” premiums were small, the goal was to de-complicate the process so that the agencies could set up the policy with very little time up front.
• Before Blueprint, the BA’s leveraged Visio for flows along with a “mammoth” spec doc in Word.  The biggest issue with this approach was keeping the content in sync.
• West Bend was drawn to Blueprint by its collaboration and document generation capabilities.
• The “Road To Excellence” and the IT re-org, breaking down silos and centralizing the BA’s.
• Using process mapping to document the flow of work coming into the BA group from the business, categorize it and then deliver it back on a monthly basis.

These days when people describe cloud computing you’ll often hear them dividing it into three basic groups:

1. Application Clouds (aka Software as a Service or SaaS)
2. Platform Clouds (aka Platform as a Service or PaaS)
3. Infrastructure Clouds (aka Infrastructure as a Service or IaaS)

Besides self-interest (a cloud-based app helps me pay my bills), I find the first group above the most interesting as well as the most tangible for the average bear.

So what does the board think?

A couple of weeks ago the Data Center Advisory board over at Searchdatacenter.com was asked to weigh in with their thoughts on cloud computing.  RedMonk analyst Michael Cote offered up his SaaSy perspective as follows:

IT managers should be looking at converting their on-premise infrastructure to what we recently called “Software-as-a-Service” and now the bucket of “cloud computing.” If your email isn’t in the cloud already, there should be a fantastically good reason, like regulations that prevent off-premises email.

Can you host your instant messaging in the cloud? How about file sharing and basic intranet functions? Even things like SharePoint look attractive. Essentially, you want to inventory all of the low-priority items you have on your intranet and ask if it’s cheaper to move them off-premise.

Although I would have chosen a less pejorative term than “low-priority items,” I think Cote’s advice is spot on.  He then goes on, while warning against irrational cloud exuberance, to clearly list the key advantages of move apps to the cloud:

Top of the list tends to be cost (both up-front and ongoing, especially when it comes to upgrading and maintenance) but also flexibility and new functionality that come with cloud-based applications.

How cloudy is your IT set-up?

Last month I posted a podcast I did with Steve Burge of Tillamook County Creamery Association talking about how this dairy cooperative launched a company-wide effort to turn nearly 100 years of “tribal knowledge” into documented processes.

Since the story was a great example of tackling a process documentation effort that involved the whole org, rather than just IT, we decided to turn it into a webinar.  We worked with ModernAnalyst.com and created a 35 minute webinar which you can check out here (note that it takes a few seconds to load).

Enjoy!

Last week, before the Thanksgiving break here in the States, I recorded an interview with Paul Bell of Dell (Paul reports to CEO Michael Dell and is responsible for all business operations for Dell in North and South America).

I had heard Paul speak at the RackSpace Customer event back at the end of September and had been impressed with his comments on Cloud Computing and the economy (two very popular topics these days).  I followed up with him afterwords and the result is the interview which you can find here.

(FYI Lombardi is a Dell customer and Dell is a Lombardi Teamworks customer)

Last week Phil Gilbert and Rod Favaron, our President/CTO and Chairman/CEO respectively, held a call with analysts.  Since Lombardi is a privately held company these weren’t financial analysts but rather industry analysts like Gartner, Ovum, the 451 group etc.  That being said, the call which is usually held twice a year, is run very much the same way a traditional financial analyst call would be run for a public company.

Lombardi’s fearless leaders, conveniently labeled.

What we talk about when we talk about Lombardi

Last week’s call, which was in addition to the normal semi-annual calls, was set up in order to address questions around the current economic downturn and what effects we may or may not be seeing.

Here are some highlights from the call that Sandy Kemsley noted in her blog

Lombardi continues to grow — 60% in license revenue and 40% overall — although their services business isn’t growing as fast as license sales since they are bringing on more partners to provide services rather than doing it all themselves, especially in geographies that they can’t cover well. They’ve increased their headcount by 25% and increased productivity (which allows them to grow revenues faster than headcount), and are in a profitable state for 2008. They believe that BPM will be counter-cyclical to the current economic crisis, and have the potential to grow in more difficult financial times due to a closer focus on ROI… (read more)

You can also check out the write-up from Dennis Byron of eBiz and get his take.

Morphis is a company that provides currency supply chain management software and counts among its customers the U.S. Federal reserve as well as central banks, ATMs and armored car companies around the world.  Process mapping was the furthest thing from their minds when they started in business but they quickly found out that if they didn’t start leading their customers in process mapping sessions they wouldn’t be able to sell their product.

Last week I chatted with Gary Faulkner of Morphis about how they found themselves unexpectedly leading process mapping sessions for customers or, as Gary likes to describe the turn of events, “A funny thing happened on the way to the software business.”

Take a listen:

My talk with Gary (6:59):

Blueprint enabled a pair-o-dime shift for this currency manager.

Some of the Topics we tackle:

• Conundrum: Morphis is meant to be customized to fit a customer’s process but if a customer can’t describe their process how can Morphis be customized?
• Being new to process mapping they were looking for something that was intuitive and easy to use.
• The power of seeing the process laid out visually and the importance of working on the exercise collaboratively.
• How Morphis’s implementations are all done virtually over Webex around the globe

There has been a lot of buzz about cloud computing lately but what exactly is it?  Everyone seems to have their own slightly different definition.

My belief is that if you draw on compute resources, be they apps or platforms, from a source you don’t own or manage and that you can scale up or down as needed and you are billed accordingly… that’s cloud computing. The biggest advantages of this as a customer are the ability to get started immediately, no software to load and maintain, expand as needed and even turn the service off if its not useful.  Also because there is not a big Capex outlay to get started, you are not bogged down in approval cycles.

What do some of the experts in the field think?  I went to the Rackspace customer event a couple of weeks ago to find out.  (In case your wondering, Lombardi Blueprint, our cloud-based process modeling tool is hosted by Rackspace and will soon be making use of its cloud files in its next release.)

This is what I learned about the past, present and future of Cloud Computing:

• My podcast with John Engates, Rackspace CTO and John’s presentation
• My podcast with Lanham Napier, Rackspace CEO
• My podcast with Jonathan Bryce, Mosso (Rackspace’s cloud division) founder

BTW, if you don’t recognize the building in the clouds above, its the Alamo located in San Antonio where the event was held.

Founded in 1899, the Tillamook County Creamery Association has had a history of passing down processes from artisan to artisan.  When a new CEO came on board about 18 months ago he realized that he needed to quickly get a handle on the company’s processes in order to move forward and compete in today’s market.

It was Steve Burge who was tapped to put together a Process Management Model to lead the collection and documentation of the company’s processes.  I gave Steve a call and we talked about his challenge and how he and a core team mapped all of Tillamook’s processes within six months.

Take a Listen:

My talk with Steve (7:06)

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