The tough business process improvement problems often require a good handle on queuing theory, statistics, etc. which typically come from industrial engineering, operations research or other disciplines like Six Sigma, LEAN, etc.

I would like to see more IT folks certified in LEAN/Six Sigma before they start playing key positions in field of the business process improvement.

Sincerely,
Another cranky guy.

As to your other various points about fitting into infrastructure, appealing to architects, engaging IT, these are all interesting discussion points. In fact, they are all core points in any enterprise BPM evaluation. If you (customers, prospects) feel we have left those points out, then add them in. But lets not lose sight of the fact that the goal here is success with better process management. That is the reason to invest in BPM. And you owe it to yourself to do the due diligence.

1. How easily can you identify which of the vendor’s product(s) you need for your project?
>> It’s called SAP NetWeaver BPM – should be OK for the average guy to remember ;-) Oh yes, you’ll also need an app server. Every SAP biz suite licensee has one anyhow, if you don’t, just order it with your BPM.

2. How hard is it to install the product?
>> I’m a marketing guy – took me about 30min. OK with me.

3. How efficiently can you create and deploy a complete process?
>> More subtle – when is it complete? I e.g. love being able to pull time-tested best practices, app-implemented process steps in from my services repository (think governance, auditability, consistency, …) to speed up process implementation and avoid having to re-do the tough parts.

4. How complex is it to change a process?
>> OK – how about pulling up a model, modifying it, testing it, deploying it with a push of a button or submitting it for deployment when governance is more strict?

5. How easy is it to find and fix process inefficiencies?
>> Absolutely important – and I would agree that our 1st release doesn’t focus on this enough. But by the time the first installations go live we’ll have very nice integration with Business Objects tools for this.

The good thing in my opinion is that this market is not as homogeneous as people think. There’s a big infrastructure piece which is probably better addressed by “stackers” over time, reducing the cost of tool integration. But there’s also a more application-like market, where I see most of the best-of-breeds in today. Because they’re selling less to the IT folks they have to have a direct business-problem-solving story to tell.

Danger is that over time packaged apps with better built-in flexibility than today will encroach on this segment too, if there’s enough repeatability in the solution to make it a worthy business.

One thing we should never forget – business functions HATE having to run software themselves. You’ll never have a substantial, org-wide process support software without IT involvement in place in the long run. So you better make friends with the architects, otherwise they’re going to squeeze out any “non-standard” solution over time, no matter what its individual merits are.

The “stackers” vs specialists is a fascinating dynamic that I believe (and hope) will play out for many years to come. I for one believe that much of the noise about vendor consolidation in the BPM space is mistaken – because it mistakes BPM for an infrastructure market.

I’ve blogged about your post, and your new Lombardi-vs-IBM tool, here:
http://services.mwdadvisors.com/bpm/news/?p=8

1. I didn’t write this post because the Stackers are winning. This post is about BPM winning. It is now top of mind with virtually every global CIO… And their teams are scrambling to understand what’s out there. Many will start with their incumbent Stacker. Since we see this market exploding, we want them to know there is a substantive difference between the offerings, if not the rhetoric. We want everyone thinking about bpm to give us a try, alongside your Stacker! This is about capitalizing on the growth of the market, not simply on positioning some zero- sum game. After all, BPM is the fastest growing enterprise software segment.

2. The argument that the Stackers are just a year or two away is as old as the BPM market itself. If you go read Gartner reports from 2003, you will find the claim that IBM is just 18-24 months from a strong “Human to Human” BPM offering. Five years and a Filenet acquisition later, it is now just a matter of IBM getting their BPMN 2.0 spec proposal through and all will be well with IBM, Oracle and SAP BPM? I think this is probably the point that makes me most cranky – the constant presumption that the Stackers will get it soon, all past evidence to the contrary. Fortunately, there is a solution …

3. Just test your Stacker BPM solution and us at the same time. It won’t take long and it can save you 12 months of misery and cost. You be the judge on whether the BPM offering you are testing is going to give you a new ability to discover, build, control and improve processes .. Or is it just same old application development with a new acronym. While you are at it, test us on how well we run on Stacker SOA offerings. I am confident you will find that we are already enterprise BPM that runs on enterprise SOA stackery in all the right ways.

Do I sound less cranky now? I hope so. Have I mentioned that we have a test we want you to run?