I think most people would agree that BPM is bigger than SOA, in fact, SOA is simply the technology architecture that defines how any technology is designed and deployed. BPM, on the other hand, represents how you link business strategy to business implementation… with [SOA-based] technology being a part of that implementation.

Well, now there’s independent confirmation that BPM is, indeed, bigger than SOA – or at least twice as much BPM information is being searched. Google’s Keyword Tool shows that in May, the phrase “business process management” was used almost twice as many times as “service oriented architecture”, with a higher Adword value. (Too bad we don’t compete in the “consolidate student loan” space…)

I doubt if IBM or any of the other SOA stackers are in jeopardy of being bought by Lombardi any time soon, but at least with Lombardi you know you’re getting more bang for the buck. Twice as much value, in fact…

Editor’s note: The above is excerpted from Phil’s personal blog.

Next week at the BPMInstitute.org BPM Conference in San Francisco, three Lombardi customers will be on hand to share their BPM success stories. The conference is being held downtown at the Parc 55 Hotel.

Details about their presentations are below. Also, stop by to see me and the rest of the Lombardi team in the Solution Showcase.

• Paul Tazbaz, Enterprise Architect at Wells Fargo, will present the best practices keynote session entitled “Architecting BPM through a Center of Excellence at Wells Fargo Bank”

Time: Tuesday, June 30, 2009 at 9:40 – 10:25 a.m. (all times are PT)

• Cheryl Mascaro, Enterprise Architect at Intel, will present a case study discussing “BPM vs. BPM – The Discipline and the Technology.”

Time: Tuesday, June 30, 11:20 a.m. – 12:05 p.m.

• Sean Perry, CIO, and Steve Nimmo, senior manager of business process and performance improvement, from Robert Half International (RHI), will share their BPM experiences in an end-user case study – “How Robert Half International is Delivering Results with BPM.”

Time: Tuesday, June 30, 2:10 – 2:55 p.m.

Also, Brandon Baxter, Lombardi’s senior product marketing manager, will present “Clear Directions for BPM Success.” Brandon will talk about how comapnies can ensure long-term BPM success by using proven project development and deployment capabilities. He will also be on the BPM vendor panel discussing “Tips for Starting and Maintaining a Successful BPM Initiative.” Those are always fun.

Time: Tuesday, June 30, 3:50 – 4:35 p.m., and the panel runs immediately afterward.

We hope to see you there!

Last week, eWeek Magazine recorded a podcast with Lombardi’s President, Phil Gilbert. The interview discusses our strategy for the next decade of BPM, as well as explains why the next generation of enterprise application software is going to be defined by business process integration and management.

eWeek Logo

The twenty minute podcast, hosted by eWeek executive editor Michael Vizard, is entitled “Tying IT to the Business Process.” As always, it is filled with great anecdotes from Phil. I encourage each of you to listen in!

Michael’s interview with Phil (19:41) Listen (Mp3)

I’m excited to announce that the Blueprint Spring ‘09 release is now live on blueprint.lombardi.com! This update moves Blueprint from being a great modeling tool to be the place for everyone in your organization to go for business improvement conversations. We’ve leveraged social networking concepts to facilitate the discussion about how each person can make their job better. Everyone can see and be notified about changes that are relevant to their work, discover relationships between what they do and the rest of the organization, and contribute feedback and suggestions to the community.

Let’s take a look the new features in detail:

• See Changes and Discover Relationships: Social networking sites like Facebook and LinkedIn can tell you when a colleague switches jobs or a long lost friend gets married. It’s news you wouldn’t have heard otherwise, or perhaps even known to ask about. Blueprint now does the same for process in your enterprise. The new Activity Feeds show you changes happening to your processes and helps you discover relationships between what you do and the rest of the company. Now you’ll know when something changes two steps upstream from you that will affect your job, or that the person in the next building over does something similar that you leverage.

Read the rest of this entry »

This week, Phil mentioned some significant advances we’ve made to create what we consider to be the platform for BPM’s second decade.  We’re not only providing companies with the next generation of tools and technologies – we’re also enabling companies with the skills and experience they need to achieve their BPM program objectives.  That’s why we created Lombardi University.

I’m very excited about our recent launch of Lombardi University, because it provides a more mature and comprehensive kind of BPM education delivery and talent development program – one that is new to our current marketplace.

Now, we didn’t just add the word “University” to our existing training program (like so many other vendors have done).  Lombardi University reflects a fundamental change in the way BPM education is structured and delivered, and it was created based on the evolving demands of our market.

Over the last year, I have been visiting with dozens of companies undertaking BPM projects and programs.  Every company has a similar story – the “BPM journey” begins with some definite successes for the first few projects, but it is taking longer than desired for them to do BPM at scale with greater self-sufficiency.  When we researched what differentiated those customers and partners who are having the most success with adoption of BPM in their organization, it became clear it was a difference in their BPM talent – having the right number of people in the right roles with the right level of skills and experience.

So we created Lombardi University to help every Lombardi customer and partner fill the BPM talent gaps that they may encounter along their BPM journey.  There are a few key advancements that Lombardi University brings to the market that I’d like to highlight:

• Role-based Education Tracks – Enables all business and technical roles in your BPM project or program, not just yourdevelopers. This includes analysts, program managers, administrators – and executives.
• Multi-level Education - Provides a structured way to “graduate” fromfoundational to advancedto expert levels of maturity within each role.
• Certification of Skills – Utilizes exams to benchmark skill levels, annd practical skills must be demonstrated by completing actual projects.
• Mentoring – Provides hands-on guidance by a Lombardi expert to solidify practical education in the context of a real project at your company.
• Faculty Network -Expands educational offerings and expertise beyond Lombardi’s corporate boundaries through partnerships with well-known BPM experts such as Bruce Silver, Derek Miers, Andrew Spanyi and others.

Following a structured talent development program, provides the uniformity and consistency our customers require in their delivery – no matter where the resources come from; and that will reduce the risk of delivery problems.  Troy Hamlin, VP of Applications , Allianz Life Insurance Company of North America recently said, “I’m excited to see that TCS, our strategic partner, is working with Lombardi to certify their people in BPM. This helps me feel confident that when we source talent from them, we can expect those people to have a specific level of skills and those skills are easily measurable.”

We have many more details beyond what I’ve shared here on the Lombardi University website.  I hope you’ll take a moment and check it out.

It’s hard to describe how excited we are about the launch of Teamworks 7 at Lombardi, and judging from the feedback we’ve received so far, many of you are excited too. The excitement isn’t just about the big-picture value it will bring – it is about the advancements we have made in this release will make a difference to the people that are building processes in Teamworks day after day. Let me give you a few examples.

We’ve made it easier for authors that are just beginning to use Teamworks. How many times have you installed a new software product that gave you overwhelming numbers of buttons and menu options while providing no insight in how to use it? The Authoring Environment in Teamworks 7 is redesigned to remove a lot of the noise and early confusion without losing the features that power authors need. You can see this from the completely new skin, simplified menus, and the way that Teamworks automatically organizes your process assets. In addition, all authors now build their process assets within the context of one process app (project) at a time, which ensures that no one is changing assets that aren’t related to their projects.

There are a considerable number of changes we made to simplify some of the common authoring tasks while matching current best practices within the Teamworks community. For example, we simplified the way that integrations to external systems work by removing the need to create separate integration definition and connector components. We have also introduced Teamworks Service types, including Human Services, Integration Services, Rule Services, and several others. This helps authors from making modeling mistakes like placing a service intended for human interaction into a system swimlane. We have also enhanced the data mapping capabilities to allow you to change activity implementations without having to redo your input/output data mappings.

We also added a lot of great new features that help new and experienced users alike. Many of these features like back-in-time, toolkits, and automated deployment are highlighted on our website, so please take a look there to see some examples of how these work. Our focus in adding these new features was to make sure that we added them in a way that makes sense for BPM and a model-driven architecture. We didn’t just bolt-on a version control system and tools designed to manage text-based code; we completely rethought how to manage changes to your process model as your processes evolve in a way that preserves the ability to build and iterate quickly.

Many of the features in Teamworks 7 were designed and built by people that have been on implementation teams for BPM projects and understand the challenges that many of you face each day. We think this release marks a major step forward BPM and for the experience of those that build processes every day. Let us know what you think.

Yesterday was the culmination of hundreds of man years of effort and understanding here at Lombardi. Yesterday marked the end of what I call “the first decade of BPM” and sets the industry on what I think is going to be an all-new course, or more accurately, a much broader and valuable course. And so out of pride, but also because I think that the BPM industry shifted today, I want to write about it a bit more.

Lombardi announced major advances in all three areas that determine success or failure in BPM:

1. The need to communicate — you have to make business improvement personal
2. The need to automate — you have to drive productivity and re-use
3. The need for talent — you need to be able to assess risk, plan, and lead

Forget about simplistic approaches to driving transformational change based solely on whether your BPMS (or “BPP” or “PAAS”) has a given feature. The so-called “Business Process Platform” as a sole-sourced technological salvation is a hoax. It’s a solipsistic approach by technologists to once again say “if I have a better tool, I won’t be as big a fool.” Go on, stare at your image in the water and try to pawn all this off on simply another development tool or architecture. Instead, you need to take to heart what Toby Redshaw, CIO of Aviva, said a couple of weeks ago (paraphrasing here): “If you’re in IT and not doing BPM, three years from now you won’t have a job.”

He wasn’t talking about a tool. He was talking about change and changing everything: how we relate IT to the business, how we use tools, and how we manage, nay, lead, change in our businesses through the use of BPM tools and methods.

Yesterday Lombardi re-defined what a BPM platform needs to be; three specific vehicles: Blueprint (Spring ‘09), Teamworks 7, and Lombardi University.

Together, these 3 pillars — communication, automation and leadership — combine to form the basis for the platform for BPM’s second decade. Lombardi is that platform.

Editor’s note: The above is excerpted from Phil’s personal blog. Follow this link to read the full post, including a discussion of each of Lombardi’s new products.

This morning we officially announced the Blueprint Spring ‘09 update. The new release allows you to move beyond the realm of process mapping and documentation and to a place where every employee in your enterprise can contribute to process improvement efforts and actively make their jobs better.

Usually only a relatively small number of people inside an organization do real modeling of processes. The vast majority of us have “day jobs” and don’t necessarily think of things in terms of flow charts, activities, and decision points. How do we participate in the process improvement discussion?

Blueprint now leverages social networking technology similar to sites like Facebook and LinkedIn to build a community around business improvement that everyone–modeler or not–can participate in. “Participants” can reference and offer suggestions and feedback on their processes without the need to know any mapping or diagramming  techniques. “Authors” can have threaded, two way conversations with the participants in the business and leverage Blueprint’s existing easy to use modeling capabilities to rationalize and improve processes. Tying this all together is a Facebook-style activity feed that proactively notifies you when your processes or the conversation about them changes.

We’re announcing the Spring ‘09 release today and it goes live on blueprint.lombardi.com on Saturday morning. Want to see more? Make sure you attend the introduction webinar tomorrow at 10 AM central.

Last week, IBM launched a “cloud-based set of strategy and business process tools” called BlueWorks. It was clearly a soft launch – BlueWorks was announced in the 13^th paragraph of a release about Enterprise Cloud Services. So you may have missed it.

We didn’t.

In particular, we could not help but notice the name similarity with Blueprint — our cloud based process mapping and modeling application that has been on the market for two years. Now, before you call me paranoid, know that we average several thousand hits to our website per quarter from IBM labs in China, Italy, Germany, Canada and the US. And we get dozens of requests for Blueprint accounts from IBM Labs across the world every quarter. So, at the very least, the IBM team was aware of Blueprint — if not imitating it. They are not the first to follow Blueprint’s lead — and won’t be the last.

Despite this, IBM has missed the mark — at least from what we can tell from the slide pitch.

Bruce Silver has had his head in the IBM Clouds lately and wrote up an interesting post on BlueWorks. The phrase that captured my attention was that “democratizing modeling and analysis” is key to creating a culture of BPM in a company. On that point, we could not agree more.

Bruce goes on to say that “BlueWorks does that”. From what we have seen so far, I could not disagree more.

BlueWorks is still “tooling for the few”.  What I mean by this is that IBM is missing the bigger point that needs to be addressed – that the future of BPM is dependent on our ability to enable everyone within an organization to collaborate on process improvements, within a “BPM” framework and language.

Making the entry point to these conversations based on IBM’s Component Business Modeling methodology or introducing eTOM Frameworks does virtually nothing to get broad set of people in your company talking about how to improve their everyday work. No matter if the tool is free, applies new metaphors from social networking and works in the cloud. It propagates the message that unless you are steeped in process knowledge, you have no part in the conversation.

Blueprint, on the other hand is about reaching and giving voice to the many. It is about upending traditional process paradigms and giving organizations the tools to be successful both inside and outside of traditional BPM roles.

We use social features and an “Enterprise 2.0″ approach as well — and as such it’s tempting to think that these two products are more similar than they, in fact, are. The underlying philosophy of Blueprint still stands in stark contrast to that of BlueWorks and its maker, IBM.

Blueprint is, as Bruce Silver also wrote, “Process Modeling for the Rest of Us.”

IBM said that version 1 of BlueWorks will be available some time on or after June 26. The fully mature version of Blueprint is available right now. In fact, if you want to hear how companies have already used Blueprint to drive process improvement, check out podcasts from Symantec, PRC and West Bend Insurance.

Get your own little slice of democracy right now by giving Blueprint a spin.

I’m proud to share with you some results and metrics from a Lombardi customer that has done some truly amazing things with their labor distribution process, which dictates where grant monies are allocated.

The following is reported to us by Stewart Mixon, Chief Operations Officer at the Medical University of South Carolina.

MUSC is the oldest medical school in the Southeast, with 1,200 faculty members teaching more than 3,000 students and residents annually. MUSC depends upon financial grants as a primary means of funding its medical research. The university manages the post award grants allocation process where up to 3,000 requests for grant fund distribution changes are made every quarter.

Previously, this process was entirely manual; the same information was keyed into different front-end and back-end systems, resulting in significant backlogs and delays, as well as many errors and rework efforts.  Due to error rates and other contributing factors, there were more than twice as many forms submitted in the manual process than are processed using the Lombardi Teamworks product today.

This new process quickly delivered significant benefits for the university, enabling MUSC to proactively catch and eliminate errors at the point of entry, bringing the per-grant error rate from 85-90% down to 2-3%.

Through the use of Teamworks, MUSC also was able to reduce “human touches” in the grants allocation process by an impressive 65% — allowing the university to free up several staff full-time equivalents (FTEs) for other important tasks.

Moreover, through the use of Teamworks dashboards, MUSC management receives key performance indicators containing real-time status information of all of its financial grants distribution activities. This important metric was impossible to collect prior to implementation of the new process.

If you’d like to learn more, you can also watch this webinar with Stewart and Salvatore Salamone from Ziff Davis.