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BuzzGain
2009-02-11 19:40:00 One of the goals of our Dogfood Project is to automate our Public Relations process. In a PR 1.0 world, press releases would be sent to a handful of analysts and journalists from a Friends & Family list, and pushed on some wire service like PR Newswire. In today's PR 2.0 world, this approach simply does not scale anymore, and we need something quite a bit more powerful. Here comes BuzzGain. BuzzGain was launched by my friend Mukund Mohan, and does an amazing job at identifying influential voices on the web (from a database of 150 million entries), automatically learning about the topics they cover, and systematically engaging with them over multiple social networks. It's essentially doing what a next-generation PR firm should do, directly from your web browser, and for a tiny fraction of the cost. We're about a week away from launching our Dogfood process. While we're migrating it to Intalio|BPP 6.0 (Beta 1 shipped yesterday), we're playing with BuzzGain and will integrate it w...
Looking for Real World Process Patterns
2009-02-11 19:09:00 Much has been said or written about process patterns, but the debate usually focuses on academical theories or technical considerations, both of which get boring pretty fast. What's more interesting (to me at least) is the discovery of real-world process patterns, and their implementation into easy-to-use tools. One such tool is Zapproved.com, and it does a great job at handling the multi-party approval process. The approval process is a great candidate for process automation, for the following reasons: it's asynchronous, it usually involves more than two parties, and it requires auditing and non-repudiation. Zapproved.com is a new Office 2.0 application that does it all, and quite a bit more. Its user interface is very intuitive, and its pricing makes it affordable to virtually any organization (even by today's standards). Another process pattern that is screaming for automation is the multi-party event scheduling process. While publishing a free/busy calendar makes it easier to... More About: World , Real , Patterns , Process
A First Taste of Dogfood
2009-01-25 14:37:00 Our Project Dogfood was launched just two weeks ago, but it's running full speed ahead. Among the most active projects, the Customer Support Process lead by Gene Grell ? Intalio's new Director of Support ? and the Marketing & Public Relations Process, which I am working on with Rick Geneva and Antoine Toulme. Here is a quick update on both, plus a really cool side project that emerged from one of them. First, the Customer Support Process. It's a pretty complex one originated from a custom user interface built in Ruby on Rails, integrated with our new trouble-ticketing system (itself integrated with Salesforce.com), our knowledge database (Confluence), our legacy bug tracking system (Jira), and our original Demand Driven Development (D3) portal (itself to be migrated to a collection of processes running on Intalio|BPP). This process is only a prototype right now, but should be fully implemented within a month or two. In the meantime, feel free to downlo... More About: Taste
Looking for Acquisition Targets
2009-01-19 16:06:00 Toward the end of last year, Intalio's Board of Directors agreed to pursue an aggressive M&A strategy whereby Intalio would buy 8 to 10 Open Source companies over the next 18 to 24 months. We've started to share our strategy with some potential partners, and we've been asked to describe the kind of companies we're looking for. Here is a preliminary set of criteria (highly subject to change). We are looking for companies that have the following characteristics: Small (25 employees is a maximum, less than 10 is preferred, mainly engineers) Open Source or ready to go the COSMO way Exceptional technology that took many person-years to develop Architecture compatible with the one built for Intalio|BPP Support for industry standards (J2EE, WS-*, etc.) Active user base (the larger, the better) Committed customer base (the larger, the better, but small is OK too) Committed employee base (location irrelevant, we're in 13 locations already) Profitable or break-even Little or no debt ... More About: Acquisition
Project Dogfood
2009-01-19 02:59:00 While the current recession is forcing many companies to go through painful rounds of layoffs, Intalio is actually growing its employee base, albeit at a slower rate than in the previous twelve months. There are two reasons for this: Number one, we want to remain on the conservative side, and continue outsourcing most non-core functions, which pretty much means everything outside of architecture design and customer training. Number two, we have started to aggressively use our own products in order to improve our operations, thereby allowing us to do more with less. We call this initiave Project Dogfood. WARNING: very long article, but full reading highly recommended. Project Introduction The idea for Project Dogfood emerged at a recent company meeting, and was refined during our yearly company offsite. The idea is pretty simple: every single employee (36 out of our 60+ full-time collaborators) will develop a new process, or improve an existing one, using our products. The project i...
Intalio is Turning Ten
2009-01-17 16:35:00 This year, Intalio will turn ten. In order to celebrate in style, we just released a brand new website. It outlines the progress we've made during this first decade, and the vision we have for the next. It's a major milestone for us, in two ways: First, it's the first website we built that actually tells a clear story on what Intalio is all about. Second, it's the first Intalio website that I did not design myself. I'm a bit of a control freak, especially when it comes to content and design, and extracting myself from the process was definitely not easy, but it worked out in the end, and we gained a lot more scalability along the way. In developing this new website, we tried to better understand who we are, and what we stand for. Out of this little corporate introspection work emerged the four nucleotides of Intalio's DNA: We are an engineering-driven organization We think process We believe in the virtues of a sustainable commercial open source model We are a truly global o...
BPM is Process Engineering
2008-11-28 14:10:00 In a fairly recent article, Keith Swenson, Vice President of Research and Development at Fujitsu Computer Systems Corporation, explained why BPM is not Software Engineering . While I tend to agree with the article's provocative title, especially if one were to rephrase it as ?BPM is not just Software Engineering,? I disagree with most of the article's content. Keith's definition of ?pure BPM? as a discipline ?where a business person draws a diagram, and it is implemented without any need for Software Engineering? would be considered as naive if it were given by someone who is new to the field of BPM. But coming from an expert like Keith Swenson, it's truly misleading. Keith's core argumentation is slightly confusing, hence I won't go through it thoroughly. Instead, I'll simply refer to its strongest point, which is an analogy drawn between BPM and the spreadsheet, which I first introduced in 2000, and later got published through BPM: The Third Wave, a book I (sort of) co-autho... More About: Process
Why XPDL is Essentially Useless
2008-11-21 15:08:00 From time to time, we receive an RFP requiring support for XPDL. Even though we usually do not answer RFPs (Cf. Don?t RFP, Just DIY), I would like to comment on the need for XPDL, and why we think it's essentially useless. It has been discussed here and there, but customers seem to remain confused about what XPDL is good for, how it relates to BPMN and BPEL, and how anyone could get any value out of it. To be fair, XPDL is certainly the best specification that ever came out of the WfMC. Unfortunately, it does either too much or too little to be really useful. As Jon Pyke (WfMC's former Chairman) said, XPDL's primary goal is to: ?store and exchange the process diagrams, or specifically to allow one tool to model a process diagram, and another to read the diagram and edit, another to ?run' the process model on an XPDL-compliant BPM engine, and so on.? Unfortunately, and further quoting Jon Pyke, ?XPDL is described not as an executable programming language like BPEL, but specifical... More About: Useless
The Process Must Keep Running
2008-11-21 12:11:00 This is a copy of a newsletter sent to all Intalio users, customers, and partners today. Good morning. I hope this email finds you well, and that recent economic developments are not impacting your business too negatively. Every day that passes by seems to bring its lot of bad news. One day, we hear about the Recession. The day after, it turned into a Depression. And yesterday, news broke that the United States, France, and Japan entered into the scary phase of Deflation. Whichever way we look at it, the next few years will be extremely challenging from an economic standpoint, and all businesses must prepare themselves to hunker down in order to survive what is starting to look like the worse economic crisis of modern history. As 2008 comes to an end, I am wrapping up a worldwide roadshow during which I visited 15 countries and flew over 250,000 actual miles (equivalent to 10 around the world trips along the equator). During this tour, I met over 300 customers and partners, and hear... More About: Running , Process
Motivated Marketing Intern Available
2008-11-17 18:52:00 From time to time, I use this blog to promote a cool product or service I came across, or help a friend out. Today, this friend is actually a family member: her name is Sarah, she is my younger sister, 25 year old, studying marketing and business administration at Audencia (one of the top management schools in France), and looking for a one-year internship to start in February or March 2009. Sarah is looking for an internship abroad, ideally in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, or the United States, working for either a large or a small company, in any vertical industry, in the area of product management, product marketing, or communication. She is fluent in English (she spent six months in the U.S. last year), and very hard working ? she has been working in Denmark for three month every Summer for the past five years picking apples and strawberries to pay for school. If you know of any matching opportunity, please drop me a line. More About: Marketing , Intern
Imagine
2008-11-14 04:28:00 Imagine a BPM tool that could be used by real business people. Imagine a tool that would allow them to document business processes using the simplest notation possible. Imagine a tool that would not only show pretty pictures, but actually turn them into executable processes, at the click of a button. Imagine a tool that could be used on demand, without having to install any software. Imagine a tool that would let business people automate highly-regulated processes such as the financials closing process, without any involvement from IT. Now, imagine such a tool being tightly integrated with the most advanced standards-based BPMS currently available on the market. Such a tool exists today, it has been developed by a little company based in Germany, and Intalio acquired this company today. Before I tell you which company I?m talking about, I would like to give Intalio?s marketing team some time to finish our brand new website, and that?s going to take another week or two. In the meanti... More About: Imagine
Should We Design Processes Like Airplanes?
2008-11-11 15:15:00 As the ongoing discussion about standards for BPM continues, an interesting thread with Mr. Khan of Ultimus fame emerged. In response to his Don?t Forget the BPM Ecosystem article, I explained that standards always play a critical role in the development of mature industries, and drew further analogy to the airline industry that Mr. Khan felt compeled to challenge in a subsequent article. Unfortunately, his appreciation for the standardization that took place in both the commercial and general aviation markets seems to be fairly limited, and certainly not matched by facts that can be easily observed by any pilot today, myself included. The rest of the article is available at BPMLab.org. More About: Design , Airplanes , Processes
Developing a True BPM Ecosystem
2008-11-07 20:58:00 In a recent article, Rashid N. Khan, former founder and CEO of Ultimus, makes a case for diversity in the BPM ecosystem, comparing it to the transportation ecosystem. He then goes on concluding that ?one BPMS will not satisfy all the process needs of an organization, one BPMS vendor is unlikely to meet all the process needs of an organization, [and] one standard will not be suitable for all types of BPMS.? While I have a great deal of respect for what Mr. Khan did at Ultimus, I must disagree with both his analogy and his conclusions. The rest of the article is available at BPMLab.org. More About: True , Ecosystem
Greed is not Good
2008-11-03 18:59:00 Over the past few weeks, discussions started by the Why BPEL Matters article have gone from mildly engaged to radically passionate, bringing some clarity to otherwise arcane subjects. The need for standards was clarified, and Bruce Silver wrote one of the best analysis of the BPM marketplace I've seen in a long time. While I am thoroughly enjoying this debate, some bloggers are going from passionate to disrespectful, and this is a line I am not willing to cross. In his latest article, Jean-Jacques Dubray, who describes himself as a SOA Enterprise Architect in a large financial institution, must be feeling the impact of the current financial crisis quite acutely, and went ballistic on myself and Intalio's CTO, Assaf Arkin, for no apparent reasons, accusing us of being ?by far the people that are the most responsible for the anemic state of BPM.? In my relatively short career (I am turning 35 tomorrow, and will have worked in the industry for less than 10 years), I have been accused... More About: Greed , Good
Why Standards Matter
2008-11-02 10:52:00 A month ago, the Why BPEL Matter s article was posted on IT|Redux, and triggered a wave of discussions rarely seen in the little BPM microcosm. Initially, they focused on arcane mathematical considerations supported by pseudo-scientific arguments on both sides of the fence (here and there). But as the debate progressed, what is at stake for those opposed to BPEL as standard process execution language became clear, and the motivations for supporting their side of the argument painfully evident: disregard for the value of standards, and focus on the needs of vendors rather than the interest of customers (Cf. this article and that one). Let's take a closer look at what this healthy debate brought under the spotlight. The rest of the article is available at BPMLab.org. More About: Standards
BPMI.org Redux
2008-10-26 11:04:00 A breakthrough, finally! After almost a month of back and forth discussions started by the now-infamous why BPEL matters post, and continued on InfoQ, the Workflow Patterns Google Group, and countless posts on this very blog, we finally reached a conclusion, drawn by Bruce Silver and relayed by David French. They are calling for the industry to develop a ?Compliance Specification for BPMN? that would define the ?elements, attributes, and flow patterns that must be supported to claim BPMN support.? What a great idea! Now, let's take a look at how such a specification should be developed, and who could take the lead for such a project. As of today, several things are missing to make BPMN a true standard in the industry. First, as Bruce Silver pointed out, BPMN's semantics are ?vague? and need to be clarified, especially with respect to the elements of the specification that should drive the generation of executable processes. Second, there is no standard interchange format for BPMN ...
Why All This Matters
2008-10-24 21:30:00 Some regular readers of this blog seem to be surprised by the passion I am showing in promoting the BPMN+BPEL cause. For many, BPEL is just another execution language for processes, and what really matters is their notation. For me, it is the very embodiment of the vision I have been trying to realize for over nine years now. It has been a long and tortuous road, partially illustrated by this past article, and I need to shed some lights on some of its detours in order for outsiders to really appreciate why all this matters, to me and my team at the very least. When I started Intalio back in 1999, I had a pretty clear vision for the platform I wanted to build, but I did not know what to call it. For lack of a better term, I described it as a Transactional Workflow System. In a nutshell, it would allow less-technical people to build transactional applications by drawing simple flow charts. I presented my vision to Intalio's co-founder and CTO, Assaf Arkin, and he hated it, with a ven... More About: Matters
Some More BPEL Fun
2008-10-24 18:47:00 The more I'm writing about BPEL, the more people I seem to be annoying. The latest to date is Keith Swenson from Fujitsu, who seems to be pleased by InfoQ's recent article, and more than happy to join the BPEL bashing party. I call them legacy workflow vendors. They call us EAI folks. Touché! This is so much fun? But let's take a look at why their arguments just don't hold. In all these articles, the main argument seems to be that BPEL is a poorly-designed language for allowing business analysts to describe business processes. Well, guess what? Of course it is! For two reasons: first, it has never been designed to be used by human beings. Two, no business analyst who respect herself would ever use a programming language to begin with, be it BPEL, XPDL, or any other character-based language. So where on Earth did these self-proclaimed BPM experts read anyone claiming that BPEL was good for business analysts? The thing is, nobody ever said or wrote that. What was stated instead is...
COSMO Logo
2008-10-24 17:26:00 Since we published our original article on COSMO, we have been approached by the CEOs of several Commercial Open Source companies who expressed interest for the model and were thinking about using it for marketing purposes. We have no idea where this whole thing will end up, but we're happy to take it a few steps further, and here is the first one: a logo, courtesy of SolutionSet. If your commercially supported Open Source software follows the high-level guidelines we defined in our original article, feel free to use it and link to cosmo.itredux.com. We're also very interested to hear about your feedback regarding these guidelines, and how they could be improved upon. More About: Logo , Cosmo
BPM 2.0, Pi-Calculus, and BPO
2008-10-24 11:59:00 Two years ago, I complained that BPM had lost its appeal as a technology, acknowledging a dearth of public discussions on the topic. Well, I should have been careful about what I wished for, for I definitely got it, in droves. The partisan debate has been fueled again, ignited with this post, relayed by InfoQ with proper Intalio bashing, then followed on this Google Group, with lots of bogus pseudo-scientific statements to make for a fascinating read. To be clear: I'm loving every part of it. BPM is a topic I am passionate about, and a field I dedicated my (short) career to. But let's make no mistake: this silly discussion about BPEL and Pi-Calculus is more than a marketing spin on things most of us will never fully understand (myself included). It has been brought forth for a very important reason: true distributed process execution is of the utmost importance for BPM's killer application: Business Process Outsourcing (BPO). Let me explain why. The enterprise software industry i...
BPEL and Pi-Calculus
2008-10-23 12:20:00 Apparently, my last article on why BPEL matters ruffled some feathers. My arguments about why BPEL is better than XPDL on purely mathematical grounds are upsetting some ?academics?, and I am being portrayed as a shallow marketer for making such unsubstantiated statements. I love nothing more than a fair fight, and I am pleased to see that such discussions are finally making their way online, proving that the issues at hand really matter. So let's get back on the ring! I made the claim that BPEL leverages the Pi-Calculus model, and as a result is more suited to support the execution of distributed processes. The ?academic? refuting this claim countered that BPEL does not support the ?distinguising feature of pi-calculus compared to other members of the process algebra family,? namely channel passing. Well, I beg to differ, and Assaf Arkin, CTO of Intalio, author of the BPML specification, and co-author of the BPEL specification would as well, as can be seen on this article. My perso...
Making It All Work
2008-10-17 18:33:00 Today, I received an advanced uncorrected proof of David Allen's upcoming sequel to Getting Things Done, titled Making It All Work . The book will be released in December, so I won't tell you much about it, for I really don't like spoilers. Instead, I will just share the following opening quote, which I found amazingly insightful. The art of progress is to preserve order amid change and to preserve change amid order. ?Alfred North Whitehead Whitehead was the father of process philosophy, and one of my very many projects (currently labeled with a ?Lifetime? horizon in my Salesforce.com system) is to better understand how the work of Kurt Gödel, Alfred North Whitehead, and Ludwig Wittgenstein contributed to shape modern 20th Century thinking, redefining our understanding of Reality?a Reality defined by constant change and absolute relativism. Many thanks to David and Richard for sharing this advanced copy with me.
Updated Travel Schedule
2008-10-16 22:02:00 As of today, Intalio has user organizations in over 100 countries, and paying customers in 42 of them. Most of our deals are closed over the phone, but we like to meet our customers and partners in person from time to time. For this purpose, we're expanding our roadshow to all five continents, organizing as many cocktails as possible. Here are the places where we will have one in the coming six months. Nov 11: London, UK Nov 12: Berlin, DE Nov 12: Munich, DE Nov 13: Paris, FR Nov 18: New York, NY Dec 9-11: Tokyo, JP Jan 19 Sao Paulo, BR Jan 20 Buenos Aires, AR Jan 21 Santiago, CL Jan 22 Quito, EC Jan 23 Caracas, VE Feb 9 Beijing, CN Feb 10 Shanghai, CN Feb 11 Singapore, SG Feb 12 Kuala Lumpur, MY Feb 13 Bangalore, IN Feb 23: London, UK Feb 24: Paris, FR Feb 25: Venice, IT Feb 26: Munich, DE Feb 27: Helsinki, FI If you want to learn more about BPM 2.0, COSMO, and Intalio 6.0, meet me there! More About: Travel , Schedule
Adding Data to Processes
2008-10-16 20:02:00 Business Process Management (BPM) differs from Workflow in many ways, but its native support for data might be the most critical one. When BPML was introduced eight years ago, its most fundamental innovation (later embraced by BPEL) was to treat data as an integral dimension of processes, rather than simple parameters of workflow activities. Assaf Arkin, Intalio's CTO, deserves credit for such a major contribution to the field of enterprise computing. Nevertheless, neither BPML nor BPEL went far enough along the data axis, and never allowed developers to properly manage data objects or entities. Instead, it relied on a service model to access externally-managed entities, and only cared to carry the process' data, thereby limiting the BPMS' ability to be used as a general purpose development platform for enterprise applications. This is about to change, and once again, Intalio is on a mission to bring such innovation to the market. Let's take a look at what's coming up? At a hig... More About: Data , Processes
The Great Migration
2008-10-15 14:02:00 As we further pored through Intalio's results for the past quarter (call to be scheduled), we stumbled upon a very interesting combination of events: for the first time since Gartner's Magic Quadrant for BPM Suites was published in November 2007, at least one existing customer for every single vendor in the Leader quadrant decided to migrate to Intalio's product. Something is going on here? There were 10 vendors in the Leader quadrant, and it used to be that we'd get migrations from one or two every quarter. But this past quarter, migrations started from all of them, for a variety of reasons: failed projects (Cf. yesterday's post), reduced budgets for new projects, need for a complete stack including components such as BRE, DMS, or ESB, etc. But two reasons were invoked consistently for justifying such migrations: number one, the desire to move to a commercially-supported Open Source platform (Cf. COSMO); number two, the requirement for supporting the two standards that really ... More About: Great
Don't RFP, Just DIY
2008-10-14 10:54:00 Here is something you won't hear from many BPM vendors: more than 50% of all BPM projects fail, and the few that succeed do not lead to any repeat sales 3 times out of 4. Across the board, BPM shows one of the poorest track records of any enterprise software category. What is to blame? A broken technology adoption process. Up until now, most enterprise customers have selected BPM products through a traditional Request For Proposal (RFP) process. They compiled huge laundry lists of features suggested by analyst firms and enriched by all possible stakeholders in the organization, submitted them to a dozen vendors for initial selection, invited three of four for a bake-off, then selected the winner based on its ability to deliver a Proof of Concept in a relatively short period of time (typically three to five business days). Of the three vendors invited for the PoC, one spent the entire week trying to install the product, another managed to get the product installed in a day or two, b...
More on BPM 2.0 and CEP
More articles from this author:2008-10-13 06:03:00 My recent post on BPM 2.0 and Complex Event Processing started quite a few discussions, some online (like this one with Bruce Silver and Paul Vincent), some offline with a few prominent CEP vendors, who seemed to agree with my position. Let's give it another shot and see where this takes us. First, some external validation that BPEL is perfectly suited for describing complex event patterns: Coral8, one of the leading independent CEP vendors, recently developed a very cool BPEL to CCL compiler that takes standard BPEL code and translates it into CCL, Coral8's SQL-based programming language that offers a fast, natural way to develop CEP applications. This compiler is now being used by SAP to deploy CEP applications from BPEL code generated by their BPMN designer. Once again, the BPMN+BPEL duo is proving that standards matter (Cf. Why BPEL Matters). Second, the fact that one vendor's BPEL engine was not appropriate for CEP and led that vendor to embed a third-party CEP engine (Cf. P... 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 |
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