It all started Monday evening at the Austin Music Hall with an interesting presentation by Phil Gilbert at the Opening Reception.  This was followed by the 2010 Lombardi Science Fair, an event that has been at Lombardi for 5 years now and is something we hope IBM will continue well into the future.

Phil's presentation during Science Fair

Science Fair Passport and Program

Science Fair is a place where innovation is really unleashed throughout the company.  This year, 20 creative and talented teams competed for a $1,000 cash prize and the honor of winning the most votes from their colleagues.  The rules are simple - teams of up to 3 people can join forces to build something bigger and better, and projects can be anything that isn’t in our product road-maps for the next 12 months.

Gathering and admiring projects

Matt Howitt placing his vote via iPhone

We all had the chance to vote electronically for whom we thought presented the best new idea.  Voting took place at laptop stations or on smartphones – the electronic voting system was designed using Teamworks of course!  There were definitely a lot of really cool projects to choose from.  Congratulations to this year’s winner – Team BAM (Bryan Campbell, Allison Lura and Morten Moeller).  Hopefully we’ll see their project in a future release of Teamworks, but for now they hold the coveted Golden Beanie.

Science Fair Winners!

The night ended with a fantastic live performance by The Band of Heathens.

The Band of Heathens

The rest of the week, events were  held at the Hyatt Regency in downtown Austin. There were many different sessions including keynotes by:

• Rod Favaron – CEO of Lombardi
• Craig Hayman – GM Application & Integration Middleware at IBM Software Group
• Phil Gilbert – President and CTO of Lombardi

We also had breakout sessions for the whole company, as well as for each division, in which Lombardi and IBM came together as a team to discuss joint strategies moving forward.  In addition, the Networking Cocktail Reception and the Awards Dinner was a great way to unwind, spend time with friends and make some new ones!

Fahad Osmani receiving his award from Rod and Phil

Enjoying the Awards Dinner

Overall, it was an awesome week – one that I’m sure we will all remember.  Thank you to everyone who put Kickoff and Science Fair together, as well as to everyone who attended for making this year’s event truly remarkable.

Todd Plunk receiving his award from Rod

The Golden Beanie.

• First, Paul Swinson, CREWS Programme Manager, Homeloan Management Ltd. (HML) will present a solution provider session detailing how the Company used BPM to improve the control and efficiency across its customer’s Credit Management Processes.  Attendees will discover how organisations can get the most BPM value from the 2009 ‘Global Excellence in BPM & Workflow’ award winner.

 Time: Monday, March 1, 14:30 – 15:00 in Westbourne 3

•  Next, Tukka Heinonen, Head of Business Process Management, Business Services Finland(part of TeliaSonera) will share his BPM experiences in an end-user case study – “Implementing BPM to Streamline Sales Process in TeliaSonera Finland.”

 Time: Monday, March 1, 15:25 – 16:05 in Westbourne 1

• Also,  Neil Francis, Head of Business Operations Support Services, Euler Hermes UK, will present an end-user case study entitled: “Beware – BPM Tools Are Very Seductive!” 

Time: Tuesday, March 2, 11:50 – 12:30 in Westbourne 1

Additionally, Jim Rudden, our global VP of marketing, will be participating in a Premier Sponsor panel discussion on the main stage. That panel, entitled “Speed Predicting,” is being moderated by Daryl Plummer, Managing VP and Gartner Fellow & Jim Sinur, Research VP, Gartner. The panel format is guaranteed to be unlike any you’ve seen in the past, so you won’t want to miss it.

Time: Monday March 1, 11:30 – 12:00 in Wesbourne 3. 

While you are at the conference, come by to meet the Lombardi team as well as our new IBM brethren in the Solution Showcase located in the Nine Kings Suite on the ground floor of the hotel.  As an added treat, we will be serving a sampling of Champagne, Chocolate and Strawberries on Monday night.

We hope to see you there!

1. Expert instructors, who are actively working in their field.
2. A curriculum with a strong practical focus.
3. Perspectives drawn from a broad range of real world experience.

These same 3 key factors were core design principles for our Level 2 BPM Developer course – which takes good BPM Developers and helps them transform into master BPM Developers.

Most of our customers have learned how to build successful process applications, but they are still unclear on how to best leverage Teamworks to address their more complex application requirements.  They want to know how to design, architect and implement very robust process applications … how to master the use of Teamworks. 

That’s why Lombardi field mentors lead the instruction of our Level 2 class.  Lombardi mentors are highly experienced implementation consultants that work shoulder-to-shoulder with customers – but as mentors their focus is on teaching the customer how to build the solution, rather than building it for them.  Their mission is to build self-sufficiency in our customer teams and transfer knowledge about BPM best practices and implementation techniques.

Our mentors and consultants helped design a Level 2 BPM Developer curriculum with a strong practical focus.  Through 6 half day instructional modules, we teach the most common complex requirement patterns encountered in the field and the best practices for addressing those patterns.  The course topics and hands-on exercises are based on experience gained by Lombardi field delivery teams across hundreds of customer projects.

This unique blend of BPM best practice and deep hands-on implementation skills enables us to create a new educational experience where participants sharpen their advanced technical skills while internalizing proven BPM engineering discipline.

We don’t expect everyone in your organization to become a master BPM developer, but our experience has shown that having several key individuals with this level of expertise is critical.  They provide essential development and architecture leadership for your company.  Having individuals with this level of advanced skill leads to higher levels of self-sufficiency, productivity and overall business impact for your BPM team.

• NACCO Materials Handling Group – 2009 CIO 100 Award for automating several processes and introducing the capability to track core processes in real time, eliminating the risk of defective designs entering production.
• WE Energies – Honorable Mention – Gartner “Out of the Box BPM Delivery” Award for improving efficiencies and customer service of their Low Income Pilot Project which helps low income customers change their long term approach to managing their energy consumption and their energy bill.
• Homeloan Management Ltd. UK – 2009 Silver BPM Excellence Award for Europe for their Credit Management Project which has significantly improved the efficiency of the process and also added a much greater level of control.
• Lincoln Trust Company – 2009 Gold BPM Excellence Award for N. America for delivering the most tangible results and benefits to its users which have generated firm metrics including reduced staffing costs, reduction in cycle-times for internal and external stakeholders, and substantial increase in employee productivity.

Congratulations to these and all of our customers for their continued success with BPM – As Lombardi joins the IBM family, we certainly look forward to another remarkable year of customer successes in 2010!

Aviva currently has 23 live BPM projects. One, the “Joiners, movers and leavers” system, tracks staff across their time with Aviva, from both an HR, and an information and systems access point of view. It was built in less than 12 weeks using Lombardi’s BPM tools.

In the podcast, Mr. Redshaw claimed that BPM is the single-most important technology he has seen for helping to improve the business in his 28+ years. We couldn’t agree more!

To listen to the entire interview (7:05), go here

The first customer is Homeloan Management Limited (HML), a UK-based mortgage lender. They were selected for the strong case study results achieved while using BPM to streamline their Credit Management Processes. The second customer, Lincoln Trust Company (LTI), is based in Denver, CO. They achieved finalist status for implementing an enterprise wide BPM program that manages all strategic processes within the organization. LTI is especially proud of the measurable results of their program in the areas of driving processes to the web, reducing costs and risks, improving customer satisfaction, and completely turning around a damaged relationship between their IT and business organizations.

The prestigious Global Awards for Excellence in BPM, sponsored by WfMC, BPMFocus and BPM.com, are now in their 16^th year and recognize user organizations that have demonstrably excelled in implementing innovative business process solutions to meet strategic business objectives.

We are proud to congratulate both HML and LTI for their achievements and for being named 2009 BPM Excellence Award finalists!

FCE, which is a subsidiary of the Bank of Ireland Group, provides a broad range of currency conversion products and services to wide range of industries and uses both Blueprint and Teamworks as an alternative to traditional application development. Using BPM lets them deliver projects an eye-popping 50% faster than traditional  approaches.

Some important take-aways discussed in the webinar include:

• How they became self sufficient after their very first project
• How they gather business requirements in a much more collaborative way
• How they recevied valuable feedback during development, not waiting until after it’s 80% built
• How to engage the business to take ownership in their business applications

To listen to the FCE webinar, go here (you will need to register) or alternately you can listen to a podcast version of the interview here.

The article, “MUSC cuts error rates and improves efficiency with automation” discusses the financial grants management process that MUSC implemented in Lombardi Teamworks. It also points out the reasons why they elected NOT to go with an ERP system to accomplish this project, and and how they incorporated some legacy systems into the process.

Some nice ROI figures that MUSC achieved:

• [Teamworks] has reduced the per-grant error rate dramatically, from 85 – 90 percent down to just 20 - 25 percent initially, then finally 2 percent to 3 percent as users learned to use more efficient processes.
• “human touches” during the grants allocation process, traditionally a source of errors in any process, have dropped 65 percent.

You may read the whole story here

The article, entitled “BPM tools help firms bridge communications gaps in supply chains,” provides some interesting insight into how manufacturers can receive value from BPM. 

One of the customers is El Araby, an air conditioner manufacturer based in Cairo, Egypt. They had this to say:

 “Before Lombardi Software [BPM] was in place, all we could do for a customer was recommend them to the nearest service center and that was the end of it… We had no clue what happened next until the monthly report came out afterwards. Now, the Lombardi BPM software system handles all of the details of the repair process, even down to what technician is working on what appliance in what service center.”

We’re pretty proud that Teamworks customers around the world like to share such great testimony!

You can read the whole story here.

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).

The 2009 CIO 100 Awards honor 100 companies that are creating new business value by innovating with technology.

We are especially proud that Teamworks was the only BPM product specifically mentioned by CIO as delivering customer value in the awards, and that it has saved NACCO approximately $2 million, while improving their customer satisfaction and time to market.

Congratulations to the NACCO team!

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.

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.

Using their existing processes, complying with the new rules would have required hiring over 12,000 new employees.

Recently SearchCIO reporter Kristen Caretta wrote an excellent piece on how UCLH met this challenge using BPM.

The piece is especially helpful as a case study in how to evangelize BPM internally, and getting buy-in from senior management on the business side.

To read more about executive-level buy-in, you can check out this post too, by VP of Services Toby Cappello.

Gartner positions vendors in the magic quadrant based on their completeness of vision and ability to execute. Delivering on both of these axes is the big challenge. Good quote from Rod Favaron – our CEO – on exactly this point: “From my perspective, leaders in this analysis must not only have a vision for BPM – they need to demonstrate success in executing that vision.”

2008 was the best year in Lombardi’s history.  In 2009, execution is going to be more important than ever – not just for us. Our customers and partners need BPM now more than ever. We are looking forward to the challenge.

Specifically, we were called out for our human-centricity and exception management:

“Business process management systems knit together the people and systems involved in end-to-end processes. Lombardi Teamworks shines in both styles of integration, but human-centric-workflow and event and exception management are its strong suits. Lombardi always seems to be on our short list for BPM.”

More on the awards from Editor-in-Chief Doug Henschen:

“Technology complacency is not an option if you expect to outsmart the competition; nor is this a time for heedless investment without specific goals for competitive advantage or return on investment. To guide you to vendors that have been leading the way in innovation and business optimization, we present our 10th Annual Intelligent Enterprise Editors’ Choice Awards. We considered scores of companies that are helping organizations move toward the ideal expressed by our publication’s name, Intelligent Enterprise.”

Congrats to everyone involved. You can read about all of the winners here.

Hasbro recently won the Service and Technology Innovation Award for their e-Connect application, which is built on Teamworks. The award was presented by the Hong Kong Trade Development Council (HKTDC) as part of the Hong Kong Logistics Awards.

We wanted to take the time to congratulate the Hasbro team, and particularly the Far East division, on this important recognition of their work. The Logistics Awards are a major accolade for manufacturers doing business in Hong Kong and China.

This also represents the latest in a long line of awards for Hasbro, going all the way back to 2006, when they were named to their InfoWorld 100 for their first implementation, which also marked the very beginning of the e-Connect project.

But more importantly, here’s what won Hasbro the attention of their peers.

Hasbro Far East Limited has 800 employees and an incredibly diverse and complex supply chain. Every year, they manage upwards of 8,000 SKU’s, which are in turn manufactured by over 100 suppliers with factories in South China. They produce 45,000 containers of product, which are shipped to 24 affiliates and 600 direct importers in 46 different countries.

The e-Connect system is what holds it all together; it delivers a platform that connects manufacturers, suppliers, and logistics providers by enabling self-service transactions and seamlessly integrating them into Hasbro’s ERP system.  The end-to-end process is impressively streamlined and has resulted in a significant reduction in cycle times. It also allows all of the company’s business partners to be integrated intro the logistics and supply chain from the very core of operations.

Congrats again to the Hasbro team.

To learn more about their BPM strategy and implementation, click here for access to a case study, an analyst report by Forrester, and several news articles detailing their ongoing accomplishments.

The great news is we were just informed that the attendees rated Lombardi as one of two “Best-In-Show” vendors at the event!

Our very own Brandon Baxter delivered the presentation that won. He participated in the “BPM Product Shoot-Out” where each vendor was allotted 10 minutes to demonstrate how they would address one of two possible scenarios with their products. Brandon picked the loan approval process scenario to demonstrate Lombardi’s end-to-end BPM capabilities. In it, he highlighted how to use the Lombardi Solution discover and document processes, deploy and manage them, and to analyze and measure their performance and continuously improve their performance.

Judging by the votes, Brandon clearly demonstrated how our product separates itself from the rest.  We’re really pleased to be named “Best-In-Show” by the attendees.

]]> http://blog.lombardi.com/lombardi-is-best-in-show/feed/ 0 http://blog.lombardi.com/blueprint-october-08-update/ http://blog.lombardi.com/blueprint-october-08-update/#comments Sat, 25 Oct 2008 14:00:25 +0000 Dave Marquard http://blog.lombardi.com/?p=201 The latest monthly refresh of Blueprint went live this morning, and I’m excited to give you the scoop on the changes. Over the past 6 weeks, we’ve focused on addressing the top pieces of feedback that we’ve heard from customers. With this release, you’ll find it much easier to keep track of who’s currently using Blueprint, to collaborate with new users, and to print out your process diagrams in exactly the right format. We use your feedback to drive our release schedule, so make sure you give us your thoughts!

Let’s take a look at the improvements in detail:

• User Management: In today’s business environment, it’s more important than ever to ensure that you’re getting maximum utilization of your software. One of the great benefits of Blueprint’s SaaS model is that you can add users to your account just in time when they need access to the tool. When they’re done, you can remove or reuse their license so you’re not paying for software that isn’t being used. This can save you a ton of money compared to traditional desktop tools like Visio that require a big upfront investment and then only get used a few times a year by many people.

  In this release, we’ve greatly enhanced our user management capabilities. You can now see at a glance who has access to your account, when they last used Blueprint, and how many seats you have available. If someone doesn’t need access anymore, it’s just one click to archive them and make their license available to someone new.

  

• Invitations: Blueprint’s greatest strength is facilitating collaboration around process discovery and documentation. We think your team will have a great experience inside the product working together on the process. But what about stakeholders that don’t yet have access to Blueprint? It’s now a lot easier to get them involved. With this release, it’s just one click to have Blueprint send an email to invite someone new to join you.

  

• Instant Upgrades: In the previous release, we made the initial signup experience for new Blueprint accounts far quicker and easier. Now we’ve brought the same improvements to the upgrade process. Need to upgrade your free account to the professional edition? Or add more seats to your pro account? It’s never been faster or more painless.



• Perfect Printing: Once you’ve documented a process, you’ll almost always want to print out your process diagram so that you can share it with all of the other stakeholders in your organization. We often see customers use a plotter to print their diagrams on one large roll of paper and previous releases of Blueprint enabled that. But what if you don’t want to go through the hassle of running to the nearest plotter in the next building or driving to the neighborhood Kinko’s? Now you can have Blueprint format your diagram to print on standard paper sizes. Shrink it down to one page or tile it across many: the choice is yours.



• Word Export of Process Documentation: We’ve made some nice improvements to the Microsoft Word documents that can be created from the Documentation View. All of your inputs, outputs, problems, and stakeholders are now included in the generated Word document. We’ve also made some tweaks to make the formatting look even better. It’s a great way to share training material and processes and procedures with the end users of your processes.

Make sure you log in now to check out the new release. If you don’t have an account yet, you can sign up now for free.

Please contact us if you are a current Blueprint or Teamworks customer and are willing to participate in a product usability study. Most sessions last between 30 and 60 minutes and can be done remotely using Web conferencing software. During the sessions, you will be shown aspects of the product and asked to provide feedback. Your comments are valuable ways we ensure we’re building tools that fit your needs.

For those of you who have been using the product for a while, you’ll remember that our first design for adding items to the process diagram was very Visio-like, with drag and drop capabilities from an application menu:

Technically the solution worked, but we found a few key problems:

• The drag and drop design was influenced by more traditional thick clients, leaving the experience feeling a bit out of place inside a modern Web application such as Blueprint
• The control menus were hard to find – they sort of blended in with the rest of the UI
• Several of the more advanced modeling shapes were being overlooked since many users didn’t think to expand the menus, or completely missed the grayed-out chevron
• Users found it confusing to drag from a menu, it required several clicks to get this just right
• Dragging in milestones and swimlanes seemed unintuitive and hard to align
• The drop zone target was too small, you had to drop EXACTLY on an existing line for it to work properly

Our initial thought was to create a better drag and drop interface, making the menus more obvious and the drop zones bigger, and to use color to reinforce the interaction. We created a quick prototype and tested it.

The new design helped a bit, but we still found users were having the same general issues. The user had to click to expand the menu, but select and drag was still too difficult. Also, because the interaction model was so similar to other thick client modeling tools, we were constantly being compared against these (and their features). We knew it was time to find a better way, so we decided to scrap the entire approach and go back to the drawing board. The first step was to do some usability testing with current users to really understand the problem and what they were trying to accomplish. For me, the “a-ha” moment came when one user told me “I just want to put my new activity here”, pointing at a line on the diagram. If we could find a better way to interact directly with the model, we could avoid the cumbersome drag and drop interaction all together.

We quickly stepped through a series of low-fidelity mockups which were tested and refined:

Taking some to higher-fidelity to iron out the kinks and test out potential visual styling:

The final design incorporated pieces from several of the early protoytpes – resulting in the “+” insert menu that we’ve all come to love! Click below to see a brief clip of it in action.

The day began with CEO Rod Favaron’s keynote, which was all about how we are now at “the end of the beginning.” The secret is out about BPM, attention and visibility are soaring to new heights, and we are now entering a new phase of adoption and maturity.

A big part of this progression is the move from Project to Program to Culture, as Rod put it — in the early days of course it was all about getting your first BPM project up and running successfully, and then it became all about growing that project into a full-fledged program. But the next phase that Lombardi customers and partners are moving into right now is one in which BPM begins to truly impact the culture of any and every part of the organization that it touches, indeed the organization as a whole. This is the true value proposition of BPM ultimately — the idea that BPM becomes part of your DNA, that process becomes an integral part of what your company does every day.

Rod also went on to share some awesome momentum numbers and growth metrics, including:

• Lombardi now has 225 Teamworks customers
• There are now over 3,000 Blueprint accounts
• Lombardi has a corporate presence in 24 countries
• Blueprint is now being used in more than 95 countries
• And Lombardi now has over 50 partners worldwide

The photo below is of a display in our offices that has a flag from every country in which Blueprint is actively being used — the growth has been phenomenal, and we’re really excited continue taking the product to new and exciting places (and to this end, Dave Marquard has a piece up today about the Summer 2008 release).

Additionally, Sandy Kemsley has been here blogging the individual sessions, and her posts are well worth checking out:

• Lombardi Driven: Rod Favaron and Phil Gilbert Keynote
• Lombardi Driven: Executive Roundtable
• Lombardi Driven: Blueprinting Business Processes
• Lombardi Driven: BPM Project Delivery Panel
• Lombardi Driven: Day 1 Wrapup

And finally, here are some photos from throughout the day for your viewing pleasure!

• Rich Wiki Editing Of Process Documentation: Blueprint now provides a rich, wiki-style experience for filling out the details of your process. You can link to external documents, embed images, and format your documentation any way you please. Already have something written up in Microsoft Word? No problem. Just paste it in and we’ll leverage what you’ve already done.

• Printable Documentation View: Once you’ve gotten all of your standard procedures entered into Blueprint, you need to be able to effectively leverage them. You can now generate an attractive printed version of your documentation with a click of the “print” button.

• Improved Process Details: We’ve take the process details pop up windows and completely revamped them to improve their usability. We think you’ll find them much easier to both edit and use to present your content. And they look great too!

• Process Data Export to Excel: Once you’ve entered your data into Blueprint, it’s important to be able to leverage it in any way you see fit. Now you can export your process data in a tabular format to Excel so you can slice and dice it, create PivotTables, or just share it with your friends in the finance department.

• Improved Diagram Layout: In the past, we wasted countless hours in Visio making sure our boxes and lines were all straight on our process diagrams. With Blueprint all of that tedious layout work is handled for us automatically. In this release, we’ve made some tweaks here and there to make your diagrams look better than ever.

We’re constantly working to improve Blueprint. Try out the new release and send us some feedback. Your input helps us shape our future releases and enables us to build the best tool possible for your needs. And if you don’t already have an account, make sure you sign up today!

This should be a very interesting deployment that we’ll review later after their initial playback and first round of results.

The company will use Lombardi to support sales of business services in Finland, as well as its activation and provisioning and other core business processes. We expect to be able to help them increase their service levels and improve customer satisfaction by designing and automating their business processes so they can be easily controlled and managed.

We expect to be able to show measurable benefits in operational efficiency by eliminating re-work, reducing hand-offs and shortening time delays. As part of the deployment, the company will implement process scoreboards and performance metrics that will deliver visibility across operations, including sales volume, activation efforts and provisioning backlog.

Bottom line, management will be able to easily identify when and where delays are occurring, as well as refine the processes as needed. As soon as we can, we hope to be able to share TeliaSonera’s successes with you.

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.

Oracle is really no different. OK, they are a little different. They have a BPM product that is buried in a portal product that is bundled with an app server from BEA. And that BPM product (formerly called Fuego) is sure to die a near-term death to serve the greater good of Fusion. What is the Fusion vision? Wait for it. . .simplify integration and workflow between Oracle applications. I am not alone in questioning the Oracle BPM strategy.

Which brings us to IBM. No, they don’t just sell applications. They want you to buy their SOA stack and pay them to integrate their products so they can build you an application. BPM? Just another part of the SOA stack. Actually, it is about 11 different parts of the SOA stack. More if you count Filenet. Which do you need to meet your BPM needs? It will take 20 people from 10 groups at IBM to tell you – and you can bet you will need about 20 different IBM products to make it all work. This mess despite the fact that leading industry analysts have been promoting IBM as only 18 months away from having a viable BPM offering .. since 2004.

OK, so I am cranky with the Stackers. After all these years, they are finally getting the BPM pitch down. It is all about Agility. Business Agility. Change processes without changing code. Respond rapidly to changes in business. This is a new paradigm of collaboration between business and IT. Continuous process improvement. Every website from every company that provides BPM – including us – promotes these benefits and opportunities.

If you are sitting in an Oracle, IBM or SAP shop, you might just think that you can use the BPM tools from your Stacker. You can’t. You probably can’t even get them installed – without some serious effort. Or time-travel if you are an SAP shop.

Seriously, please stop and run your Stacker’s BPM offering through the following 5 tests:

1. How easily can you identify which of the vendor’s product(s) you need for your project?\
2. How hard is it to install the product?
3. How efficiently can you create and deploy a complete process?
4. How complex is it to change a process?
5. How easy is it to find and fix process inefficiencies?

You will find complexity, lack of integration, high learning curve. All the things that will kill your BPM initiative. To contrast that with us, just click here for a preview of how we score on the tests. This provides a specific IBM example – but it will work for any of your Stackers. Or just ask a few of our customers how they’re doing. When you walk into a playback, is there love in the air?

Process People: Describe in as much detail as possible the problem or need on a project level that first made you consider BPM and/or Lombardi as a viable solution.

Rachel Aukes: Our BPM program came about as a solution to organizational level needs – in fact we selected our BPM solution (Teamworks) and began to implement it before deciding on a specific project. We were challenged with increasingly complex, paper-intensive processes that had a large number of manual steps and handoffs. That was obviously inefficient and meant there was room for errors (such as bad typing, misplaced files, etc.). The idea of what BPM offers became prevalent in 2006 when most of our development staff was focused on maintaining our legacy systems while building our future systems of record. This effort was strategically important to our company; however, the business had immediate tactical needs that must continue to be met. We asked ourselves what we should do to best support our business partners, and we determined that BPM was a good solution for this. We haven’t looked back.

Process People: Where did the BPM program originate – IT or the business? Who leads it today?

Rachel Aukes: Our BPM program originated within IT and has over time evolved towards the business. Through the experience we’ve gained through delivering process solutions using BPM, we determined that the business people are excellent at determining where the BPM program should focus – that is what helps us to get the best value. When we started, IT “cherry-picked” projects that looked like a good fit for BPM, because they offered us sizeable savings in terms of money, effort, etc. After several projects, we realized that even though we were achieving good results, cherry picking is not always the best approach to remain aligned with the long-term business vision. We are now putting the Business behind the steering wheel for the directional planning, project prioritization, and solution review efforts related to our BPM program.

Process People: What were some of the surprises along the way? What was the most unexpected thing that happened during your first project?

Rachel Aukes: We have learned a lot as we went through our BPM projects, and the first one was full of surprises! The most unexpected event was midway through the project. We had told our business partners we’d be back in one week ready for them to begin testing – this was about three weeks into the project. When we showed up, they were stunned to see us back so soon, saying they thought we were joking. From that we learned we must set (and continuously reset) expectations throughout the project. A second lesson that we learned from our first project came from a predictable event. Using Teamworks gave us an iterative approach towards our projects, which drastically cuts development and testing time, but we quickly learned that iterative development also leads to infinite scope. Because changes can be made so easily in the BPMS, we found that our business partners continuously wanted to add “just one more thing.” From that point on, we began to plan for interventions in each of our projects – a break in the project for IT and business management to reset expectations and scope.

Process People: Describe the reactions during the first process playback.

Rachel Aukes: Simply stated, there was love in the air. When we conducted our first playback it began with skepticism – how could we have something to show them already without having all the requirements? As the playback progressed, our business partners began to understand how they really do get to have a hand in designing their solution; no, they get to drive the design. By the end of the playback, they couldn’t wait for the next one so they could watch their process evolve seemingly before their eyes. Needless to say, playbacks have become the special niche for our BPM team.

Bruce Silver’s recently published BPMS report provides one of the most thoughtfully composed product rankings in BPM. I would also like to quote and commend him on his methodology for the research, which I think is an admirable approach:

“The ratings measure all the suites in 11 categories of capabilities, which are weighted differently based on the process type. The ratings are just for the product itself — nothing for “completeness of vision” or other nonsense like that. We plot the aggregate rating for integration-centric vs. human-centric, integration-centric vs. production workflow, and production workflow vs. case management. The idea is that the market is moving beyond point solutions, and you might want a good compromise between multiple process types.”

BPM is a very broad topic, and it can be tough to make sense of it all if you are tasked with managing the vendor selection process. This report is particularly useful if you would like to be able to make “apple to apple” comparisons of BPM suites. The report is geared towards helping people make sense of what can seem like a very complicated technology decision.

Take a look at the report, and feel free to check back in and let us know what you think!

In this Process People interview, we welcome Jeremy Kraybill, CIO for Boundless Network.

Process People: Describe in as much detail as possible the problem or need on a project level that first made you consider BPM and/or Lombardi as a viable solution.

Jeremy Kraybill: At Boundless Network, we were undergoing a business process re-engineering project at our business. We initially set out to document and analyze manual process changes that would reduce our company’s cash cycle and help us scale our back office. After the first couple weeks of the project, we realized that there were a whole set of business processes held in individuals’ heads that we could benefit from automating. Nobody at the company had previous BPM experience, but after looking at the first BPM vendor’s demo we knew that a BPM solution had great potential for our business pains. After a 3-month evaluation process we selected a BPM solution and have been very happy with the decision and how the implementations went.

Process People: How did you initially present the idea and to whom? Who did you need permission from to proceed?

Jeremy Kraybill: The initial idea was presented to our COO and co-founder. The decision to move ahead was approved by our company’s executive team. It was a fairly easy sell based on what we had uncovered in the manual process re-engineering efforts.

Process People: What were some of the surprises along the way? What was the most unexpected thing that happened during your first project?

Jeremy Kraybill: We were most pleased with how quickly we were able to get self-sufficient on the Teamworks modeling environment. The first phase of our implementation was achieved with 1 full-time person focused on modeling, 50% of my time on modeling and integration, and 25% of one of our Java developers on integration and web services work. We completed phase 1 of our project in under 6 weeks with 12 hours total of services help from our vendor and their product training up-front. Since then we have completed 5 additional project phases and have used about 4-8 hours of services work per phase.

Process People: How closely did the IT and business sides work together initially, and how closely do they work together today? Any recommendations for effectively facilitating this interaction?

Jeremy Kraybill: I think the most important role on a BPM project is selecting the right person to be the person who interprets business requirements into the design of the business process implementations in the BPM package. If it’s a small project or team, and one person does both the requirements gathering and the implementation (as was the case on our project), that person’s skill set is even more critical. The person requires good analytical abilities, as well as the process/technical background to be able to match the capabilities of the BPM package with the needs of the business.

Process People: What would you do over if given the chance?

Jeremy Kraybill: Our first phase went extremely smoothly, much more smoothly than expected. So for our second phase, we got more ambitious than originally planned, and rolled out a number of processes that were pretty radical changes to the way in which our sales support team did business. Because our first phase had been so smooth, we actually scaled back the amount of training and education we provided the users as compared to the first phase. We ended up with a number of our most experienced sales support staff, who were not receiving many BPM tasks from the first project phase, having some significant growing/adoption pains in the second phase. They just were not ready for how much of a daily change to their way of doing business it was. We addressed this through providing them with more education and training, and also with some business process changes in the third phase. It took a good 3-4 weeks of education and calls with the staff to get the second phase fully accepted.

Jeremy manages the Boundless Network technology group in Austin, TX. He has spent eleven years managing web application and enterprise IT projects. Prior to Boundless Network, Jeremy managed an eBay subsidiary, worked for two enterprise software startup companies, and had an independent web consulting practice in Australia. Jeremy’s professional interests include open source, intelligent web applications, usability, and the application design process.