For their recent InformationWeek Analytics 2008 Tomorrow’s CIO Survey, the well-known trade publication quizzed 720 corporate managers, including CEOs, CFOs, and COOs, as well as CIOs and VPs of IT-level executives, about the attributes most desirable for future business technology leaders.

IW’s John Soat then posted an excellent write-up of the survey’s findings, and I’ve been thinking about it ever since. John writes:

“Whether they know it or not–and most do–companies need an executive leader well versed in both technology and business processes. The CIO position is tailor made to take that role. . .the question is, which CIOs will step up to it?”

This chart (also below) based on the survey’s findings isn’t surprising if you’ve been looking at things from a process point of view as long as we have, but it’s not trivial that respondents noted “Need to manage or optimize business process” as the #1 priority as the CIO continues to strive to become more of a business leader.

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Its been a week since SAP’s big BPM announcement. Not exactly an earth-shattering announcement. My summary - at some point in the future (2 years?), SAP-only shops will be able to more easily configure internal SAP application workflows. This is a SAP application workflow band-aid, not a viable BPM offering. I am not alone in this assessment - the reviews have ranged from unimpressed to downright negative.

Honestly, this is no surprise. The big software vendors - I call them Stackers - have been and continue to pursue the promise of BPM half-heartedly. Actually, they have done everything in their power to bury BPM deep in what they view as their real markets. You can’t blame them - BPM ain’t in their DNA. And it is really hard to change your DNA.

SAP wants you to buy applications from them. BPM to them is just some integration and workflow between their applications. Always has and always will be - no matter what the Netweaver BPM roadmap says. Not to get too cheeky, but SAP does not have the best reputation in this sense - see their public spat with Waste Management about non-delivery of promised functionality.

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I’ve been seeing a bit of blog postings lately on the reality of SaaS on Demand or SaaS BPM.

Last week, Jason Stamper at CBR included some commentary on a beta product that he had heard about through the Process Factory. And couple of weeks ago, Jack van Hoof - who writes on SOA and EDA, posted a well thought-out blog entry about the marriage of BPM and SaaS, including the possibilities and the complexities at hand.

I love seeing this kind of dialogue on the Web because SaaS BPM is extremely popular with our customers right now. However, despite the aspiration of many developers, SaaS and BPM is NOT an easy combination. Nor is it likely that the two will ever be completely married in the traditional integrated form.

We launched Lombardi Blueprint a little over a year ago. It’s a SaaS-based modeling tool that integrates with Lombardi Teamworks, which operates behind the firewall. What worked so well in this case was that anyone in an organization could access the modeling tool to help shape a BPM project during the discovery stage. It doesn’t need to be integrated into legacy systems and it doesn’t require IT to deliver company data to the hosted model outside the firewall.

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