This morning, the August ’09 update went live on blueprint.lombardi.com! The team has been hard at work over the past month and I think you’ll be very happy with the latest improvements. We’ve improved the portability of your processes with the first shipping implementation of the BPMN 2.0 export format, added full text search across all of your process data, and made substantial usability improvements to Blueprint’s activity feeds based upon your feedback.

Let’s take a look the enhancements in detail:

• BPMN 2.0 Exports: We’re committed to ensuring that you can use your processes in whatever way you’d like with whichever system that works best for you. To that end, we’re delivering the first shipping implementation of the BPMN 2.0 export format. We expect BPMN 2.0 to quickly become the de facto standard for exchanging process diagrams among modeling tools. The BPMN 2.0 specification just reached beta status, and as Bruce Silver pointed out there are areas where it still could be improved. We hope that our implementation can help further the discussion and serve as a reference for others in the industry. We think that well designed and supported standards are hugely beneficial for our customers and we’re committed to making BPMN 2.0 just that.

  And don’t forget: Blueprint also supports XPDL 2.1 to give you the maximum flexibility with your models today.

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On Friday, KMWorld Magazine announced that Teamworks 7 received a 2009 “Trend-Setting Product of the Year” award. I’m pretty excited about this award, as is our development team.

The innovations that Teamworks 7 offers customers is really helping them expand their BPM adoption exponentially throughout the organization. It increases their collaboration, governance and reuse abilities, and it helps them simplify nearly every task that they need to do across the entire process development lifecycle.

We’re proud to receive this recognition. But we certainly won’t stop here. Thanks to all of you for nominating Teamworks 7 as a winner.

Yesterday, Phil Gilbert spoke about the human aspects of BPM as an invited guest on the well-known Internet talk radio show, CIO Talk Radio.

It’s obvious BPM has come of age when mainstream media programs are starting to weigh-in on the topic.

The hour-long show featured ‘HIM: Handling the Human Side of BPM,’ and focused on whether the new Human Interaction Management (HIM) framework  is necessary given that BPM already addresses most of the same issues and is a mature discipline. 

In addtion to Phil, the other invited guests were Clay Richardson (senior analyst at Forrester) and Howard Smith (BPM author and CTO of CSC’s European Group).

If you are interested in hearing how BPM can help your organization,  or if you need a better way to explain its benefits to your executives, you should listen to the replay. You can access the replay here (not required to register).

In the spirit of our “How To”  blog, I found a very useful article that Kristen Caretta from SearchCIO Midmarket wrote that discusses some of the steps that organizations can take to evaluate BPM vendors!

“Evaluating a Business Process Management solutions vendor: What to ask” offers suggestions from analysts at Forrester and Gartner about what questions people need to ask BPM vendors up front to ensure we are providing a good technology fit for them. 

The article recommends that people check into the vendor’s industry experience, understand their service and technology offerings and provides a number of other useful tips.

We especially appreciate the suggestion for companies to use cloud-based collaboration tools like Blueprint to help with strategic mapping and planning, as well as to help them build their business case for BPM.  In fact, we have a series of whitepapers that further explain how to get started quickly with your process documentation and prioritization, as well as what to do next. You can access them here

Information Age magazine in the UK recently published an interesting article about how social software is changing the way companies design and execute business processes.

The author, Pete Swabey, points to the dramatic events of late as proof that collaboration software and online social networks are rewiring the fabric of society.

Here at Lombardi we agree, and have spent a lot of time and effort looking at ways to further expand the role of BPM to more people through social technologies. They are manifested in Lombardi Blueprint and Teamworks in many ways. You can learn how each incorporates social capabilities here and here respectively. 

The article also interviewed both Phil Gilbert (Lombardi’s President), and Aviva’s CIO, Toby Redshaw. It is a very good article – I encourage you to read it here

I’m pleased to announce that the Blueprint July ’09 Update is now available on blueprint.lombardi.com! This release has addressed some of the top requests we’ve heard from you. We’ve expanded the ways you can leverage the models you create in Blueprint, given you additional ways to secure and control access to your account, and tackled several other improvements that you suggested in the Blueprint Forums.

Let’s take a look the enhancements in detail:

• Model Portability With XPDL: We’re committed to ensuring that you can leverage the processes you create in Blueprint in anyway you like. That includes giving you the ability to seamlessly execute the processes in Lombardi Teamworks, but also any other tool that you choose. To that end, we’re committed to supporting the BPMN 2.0 specification when it is released. However, we know that you need a way to use your models today, so we’ve introduced the ability to export your processes to XPDL 2.1 format in this release. You never need to feel “locked in” when using Blueprint — you can get your information out in any format you’d like, whether that be as a PowerPoint presentation, Word document, or in XPDL.

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Last week, UK analyst firm Butler Group published their latest Technology Audit report on Lombardi. In it, analyst Mike Thompson reviewed the capabilities of Teamworks 7 as they relate to Butler’s product assessment methodology in the areas of building, optimizing and managing processes faster and smarter in this Technology Audit.

It’s a good report for you to send to those colleagues in your company who are interested in 3rd party takes on BPM technology.

The bottom line – excerpted from the report:

“Teamworks 7 is a full-featured BPM solution, with all the functionality expected of a market-leading solution. It really differentiates itself from its competitors in two distinct areas, one technical and one non-technical. By using a shared-model architecture, Teamworks ensures that the process model is always up to date, regardless of where and when changes to the model are made. Thus, changes to a running process instance can be reflected back to the high-level model. From a non-technical point of view the major focus has been on ensuring ease of use for any and all of the participants of process lifecycle management. This ensures that the people involved in the process are able to help in optimising the process, which makes far more sense than handing off the task to a ‘process expert’.

Allied to Teamworks is the Blueprint solution which creates a collaboration and communication environment that further empowers the process participants in all aspects of process management. A final factor worth highlighting is the graphical nature of the product – not just in process design terms, but in having the ability to graphically represent KPI and/or SLA non-compliance on the process map.”

We couldn’t agree more!

Butler customers can access the full Technology Audit report here, or you can also get it compliments of Lombardi here (if you have not registered with us before, you will be asked to do so).

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)