So it’s a couple of weeks now since IMPACT (at least for me – I was only there for 48 hours) and the second day was when things got interesting. Whereas Day 1 ranged across a variety of topics – even featuring the unveiling of a PureApplication System box on stage (I can’t remember if dry ice was involved, but for the full ’80s effect there should certainly have been) – Day 2′s keynote focused exclusively on ‘Process Innovation’.

‘Process Innovation’ is shorthand for how IBM is pitching its portfolio of tools and capabilities related to BPM and Operational Decision Management (a unification of the WebSphere event processing and rules technologies). This past year IBM’s Phil Gilbert has been focused on further simplifying and integrating IBM’s portfolio here, and his keynote (and other sessions at IMPACT) showcased the work that’s been done – largely in v8 of Business Process Manager, but also in version 8 of WebSphere Operational Decision Management.

We’ll be publishing an updated in-depth assessment of IBM’s BPM technology offering before the end of June, so here I’ll just point out what I think are the main highlights.

In Business Process Manager v8:

• Simplified design tools. It’s now much easier to build more sophisticated ‘coaches’ (what IBM calls task user interfaces) that exhibit dynamic behaviours and include rich content, using much less hand coding.
• Better support for document management. Decent CMIS support means building processes where participants need to retrieve, manage and update documents requires much less work.
• Bringing more work context and assistance to participants. There are two key things here. First, in the context of completing a task, coaches are augmented with what I’ll call a ‘work context panel’ (not sure what the official name is, if there is one). As a participant is working on a task using a coach, Business Process Manager shows (a) the history of what’s happened prior to this task, and who’s worked on the process to this point; (b) recommends other participants who would be well-placed to assist in completion of the task; (c) enables a participant to collaborate in real time with another participant in completing the task (using real-time sharing functionality reused from Blueworks Live). Second, in the context of presenting processes and tasks to participants, in v8 the standard worklist UI metaphor is sidelined in favour of a metaphor based around rich search, filtering and lists (borrowing from popular social applications and also echoing Appian’s Tempo).
• Better support for large-scale efforts. It’s possible to federate content across multiple instances of the Process Center repository, and also possible to link Process Center instances with other enterprise repositories containing upstream and downstream assets (think requirements docs, architecture blueprints, test case definitions and so on) via OSLC support.
• Foundation for mobile process work. A published REST API for the BPM runtime environment makes it relatively straightforward to create custom native mobile applications for carrying out tasks in the context of processes.

In Operational Decision Management v8: borrowing UX and design-time concepts from Blueworks Live and BPM and going further. The Decision Center now comes with a business-facing Business Console that presents updates through an activity stream and faceted and free-text search, and a significantly more friendly rules editor. A Facebook-like ‘timeline view’ of rule versions is also provided to help people visualise change histories, which I suspect will also turn up in a future version of Business Process Manager too.

In Blueworks Live: the ability to model process decisions through in-place creation of decision tables, and the ability to model enterprise policies and relate them to processes.

So in summary: from a user perspective the industry-wide themes of mobile and social are writ large; it’s good to see IBM in particular thinking deeply about how social collaboration can be truly woven into work, rather than just bolted on. From a design-time perspective the main thrust is around simplification and integration, which is just as it should be.

Of course there’s room for improvement: the elephant in the room (it’s been there for a while, and is probably now sitting against a wall throwing a ball) is Case Manager. There’s some foundational integration points in place, but a clear roadmap would be very welcome. It’s also unclear to what extent IBM is interested in capturing more ‘upstream’ process improvement activity through process discovery and mining tools.

Still, IBM continues to show that overall it takes BPM very seriously, and it’s serious about taking a market-leading position as a technology provider.

Q 1 – “Why is a collaborative culture so important in business today?”

We collectively highlighted many issues, such as the need to do more with less, to share costs and commitment across increasingly dispersed organisations, in order to maintain the flexibility and agility to compete effectively, particularly in these tough economic conditions. There was also discussion about the added value gained by tapping into the knowledge and skills of a larger set of people, enabling the optimisation of processes through weaknesses or gaps which can be highlighted earlier if there is greater transparency and sharing of information. An interesting observation by Colin Hope-Murray noted that old, hierarchical organisation structures typically stereotype individuals into roles, whereas an open, collaborative approach allows an individual’s broader set of skills to surface, creating a much richer organisation. Similarly, while several people pointed out that collaboration is not a new concept, even for business, Chris Gibbons commented that until now the emphasis has been more on co-operating, rather than collaborating.

Q 2 – “People can be trained on tools, but how can a collaborative culture be taught?”

Here there was generally a consensus that it’s not about “teaching” collaboration, but more about leading by example; ensuring business leaders don’t just support the initiative but actively encourage participation by collaborating themselves. Instead of it being about “teaching” collaboration, many other words were suggested, such as “developed”, “supported”, “inspired”, “encouraged”, “nurtured”. What all of these words imply is the need for ongoing investment and commitment in the initiative – this type of business change won’t happen overnight, and it’s also not something you can just throw money at.

Q3 – “Not everyone readily embraces collaboration. How can these people’s fear be overcome?”

I found this a particularly interesting discussion, as it really separated the enthusiasts from the pragmatists. While some felt that it was best to take the sink-or-swim approach, others favoured engaging with those people and talking with them to understand why they may be reticent, and basing a strategy on that (yes, I was in the latter group). An interesting side discussion which came out here was whether it is necessary for *everyone* to collaborate all of the time. On the one hand, there may be a place for lone geniuses. On the other hand, “collaboration” can prolong decision-making processes, and not always for the better. Lesley Price‘s comment made me chuckle “there are times when collaboration leads to confusion….I watched the #apprentice last night”. Another point that got traction was that even introverts collaborate – “but [only] once their thinking has been done” (@insight72).  It’s certainly true that it can be more valuable to put a little more thought into an idea before throwing it into the arena. We also considered the role of incentives here, both in terms of financial or other rewards, and in terms of the value of senior (and middle) management leading by example.

Q4 – Why are companies paying more attention to internal collaboration amongst their own employees?

By this stage in the discussion, some common themes were emerging. Comments included the need to do more with less, better sharing of knowledge, creating competitive advantage, better employee retention. I think there is also a misplaced view among business leaders that this is a relatively cheap way of achieving these benefits – many still believe too strongly in the power of viral adoption of social tools, and this combined with the availability of free SaaS-based tools gives some the wrong impression. This is slowly changing, but even so, there is insufficient thought given to the long-term investment and commitment to this type of initiative.

Q5 – What impact can a collaborative culture have on innovation?

As innovation had already been highlighted throughout the discussion, there was more  consensus on this question. Fundamentally, by creating a less hierarchical, more collaborative culture, more ideas are able to come to the surface, often from discussions that cross department boundaries and ranks. Collaboration also enables these ideas to be developed using collective knowledge, and enabling flawed ideas to be exposed or refined earlier in the process.

Q7 (we skipped Q6 due to lack of time) – Email is where conversations go to die. How do you convince a company so entrenched in email to change?

By this stage we only had 7 minutes left, so discussion became even more frantic. However, we still had some excellent comments. For example, @SonicSEO tweeted “Stop answering email. ;) “. While arguably flippant, this has actually worked for some organisations, when senior sponsors actively drive staff to a collaborative platform by responding to emails there rather than via email.  It reinforces the lead-by-example message perfectly. In my opinion, it doesn’t necessarily need to be an email-or-no-email issue; we are already seeing email vendors building social features or integrations into email clients, helping to transition users to a world where email is not the only option. After all, it’s not going away any time soon.

And so there you have it – the world put to rights in an hour. ;-)

Do you agree/disagree? Did we miss anything?

*OK so maybe it’s not so easy. But it was a nice title anyway… @JulesHewett ;-)

Teradata was first out of the block this week when it announced its intention to buy eCircle, a cloud based European provider of digital market messaging. The company, based out of Munich, helps marketers create targeted and personalised digital campaigns through mobile devices, email and social media.

eCircle will sit as part of the Aprimo group (itself a former 2010 acquisition target) and form part of the group’s integrated marketing management offerings as well as being offered as a standalone capability.  This acquisition however is not only about adding additional digital messaging technology capabilities;  eCircle will help bolster Aprimo’s European presence as well as bringing core consulting expertise and experience to the team.

If not to be outdone later the same day IBM reached into its deep coffers to buy Tealeaf – a provider of customer experience analytics software that helps organisations access information about consumer web experiences. Similar to eCircle, Tealeaf will form part of IBM’s smarter commerce initiative and will get integrated into the company’s Enterprise Marketing and Management Group.

With Tealeaf IBM gets some neat technology that’s able to capture and replay digital interactions across website and mobile devices to pinpoint online customer experience problems and use this insight to resolve and optimise the experience. As we outlined in our report Analytics and the Customer Journey building a differentiated customer experience is becoming more of a competitive weapon for many organisations in face of tougher market conditions and an increasingly empowered and discerning customer base.

The digital marketer’s challenge, of course, is to make sure that every customer experience counts – whether this is in the form of a particular marketing communication (such as an offer or coupon) or an online customer interaction (such as an ecommerce transaction) – and in today’s untethered world this increasingly is happening on mobile devices too. It’s an opportunity that both IBM and Teradata, alongside other players such as Oracle, are vying for; and is part of the motivation behind other buys in this space including IBM’s previous acquisitions of Coremetrics, Unica and DemandTec and Teradata’s acquisition of Aster Data.

And it’s not difficult to see why. From a data management and analytics standpoint modern digital marketing platforms need to bring together a heady mix of capabilities including advanced and predictive analytics, the management and storage of Big Data (especially when you start to factor in social media data streams for instance) that can be exploited to support the delivery of marketing communications and online experiences across multiple channels, including of course mobile devices. These are all areas that IBM and Teradata have leadership positions in and are obviously keen to develop.

Although we’ll have to wait until close to hear the detail behind how IBM and Teradata will integrate and leverage their new acquisitions, I’d be really interested to hear what you think. Do let me know.

QlikTech’s QlikView 11 brings new and enhanced functionality to the company’s flagship BI platform in areas such as collaboration, comparative analysis, mobile BI and platform management. At the same time the release is part of the company’s overall plans to firm up its Business Discovery positioning and appeal to a broader base of customers including those in large enterprises, as a way of complementing its significant presence in mid-sized organisations. QlikView 11 represents a solid offering in support of these aims.

This report is available to paying advisory service subscribers, or can be purchased separately (see the report’s library page for more information).

To read the report’s key messages and see a full table of contents, you can find the report here in our library.

This report is available to paying advisory service subscribers, or can be purchased separately (see the report’s library page for more information).

You can find the report here in our library.

Here’s the report synopsis: Many BPM technology vendors are locked in a race to deliver the largest set of sophisticated features across the BPM activity cycle and to demonstrate scalability at the highest levels to support the broadest BPM programs with end-to-end infrastructure. However, as the market for BPM technology matures and becomes better understood by broad swathes of industry, a significant mainstream opportunity for BPM technology has developed that delivers a solid set of core capabilities at an attractive price point, packaged to solve particular line-of-business challenges. UK-based PNMSoft is taking this tack for its BPM technology business, combining strong Microsoft platform credentials with a business value-based approach to customer engagement and pricing.

This report is available to paying advisory service subscribers, or can be purchased separately (see the report’s library page for more information).

To read the report’s key messages and see a full table of contents, you can find the report here in our library.

Not surprisingly given the current market buzz this deal is being framed as a Big Data acquisition and therefore sits within the company’s Information Management division. Vivisimo is a small but nonetheless interesting player in the federated discovery, navigation and analytics space. In other words its software is good at scanning unstructured (as well as structured) data, automating its discovery and then putting it in a format that can be navigated and analysed by users to provide a single view of their disparate information. One particular use case is the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, who is using Vivisimo to discover, search, and navigate multiple federated data sources to provide its employees with a unified search tool for content, project and expertise information.

These capabilities are enabled through the software’s federated architecture that pushes out the queries, exploration and analysis of data at source in their respective repositories, rather than trying to bring data together in a centralised repository such as a data warehouse. There is of course a solid argument for federating data discovery and search, as it’s not always practical, timely or necessarily to lug large amounts of data across the network and consolidate it for analysis.

Under the hood Vivisimo’s platform includes data source connectors as well capabilities for indexing, text analytics and metadata support (such as tagging and building taxonomies), all of which underpin its application workbench for developing custom discovery applications.  As mentioned in our Outlook 2012 blog post, analytic search is one of the key technologies trends we see in the market, helping more end users gain access to and insight from their data. It’s also behind similar moves by HP and Oracle who in 2011 snapped up Autonomy and Endeca respectively for similar types of capabilities.

This is a smart move by IBM as it gives their customers flexibility in the design of specific Big Data applications. However, the big question on everyone’s lips is not necessarily why did IBM buy Vivisimo but how is it going to integrate yet another technology piece into its (perhaps one would say all encompassing ) Big Data platform. IBM already has text analytic capabilities within BigInsights (its platform for building Hadoop based applications). Not forgetting this the company already has similar search capabilities from OmniFind as part of its Content Analytics product line that currently sits outside of its Big Data technology offerings. To add to this, the company also has the challenge of trying to unify the different development environments that currently sit within its Big Data portfolio.

Despite these overlaps and integration challenges, there are some natural synergies and use cases for integrating the Vivisimo technology with other parts of its Big Data platform. For instance it can be used for the discovery and profiling of content before it’s loaded into the platform; equally it could be used as a single point of access across a range of repositories – not necessarily those only based on Hadoop – thereby helping customers get to grips with more of their Big Data in a faster timeframe by leaving it within its source system. How it will achieve these aims and how fast it can manage the integration remains to be seen. The company expects the deal to close in the second quarter of 2012.

This is a widely debated topic, and so not surprisingly it was not hard to keep the discussion active for the two-hour session. It was a good reminder for me that businesses are approaching this challenge from many different perspectives, and that there is no simple solution to the problem. By the end there was a sense that we had asked more questions than we had answered, and I think that demonstrates the scale of the challenge.

A key issue for the group related to defining the skillset required for a community manager, to enable organisations to create a job specification that will allow them to recruit an external individual. (Note that we talked about this mainly in the context of an internal online community to support knowledge sharing etc.) My view on this is that there is a particular type of person who is suited to the role, and their skills are innate, not learned. The individual is typically someone who already has a very large network of colleagues and friends both inside and outside the organisation, someone who naturally engages other people, who is liked by many, and is often very charismatic. Interestingly this type of person is often found in the role of programme management; they are good at organising others to get a job done, at getting to know others’ strengths and weaknesses, and how to get the best out of people.

To some extent they are a corporate version of a charity worker – someone who is enthusiastic about the initiative, who might give up their spare time to achieve the desired result, and – most importantly of all – is selfless about doing so. Beware those who are too keen to be seen to be carrying out this role, as typically they will be more interested in broadcasting their own view, whereas they need to be encouraging participation by others if the community is to succeed. The word “nurture” is appropriate here – it’s about sowing the seeds and encouraging others to take small steps, a little at a time. Over time, momentum grows, and the community manager’s role changes, or at least decreases in terms of involvement needed. However, it doesn’t disappear completely; there may still be a need to manage the scope of the community, and suggest potential off-shoots as required.

This post has got quite long, so I want to just mention one more thing for now: what we should call these people. “Community Manager” is the mot de jour, but some have questioned the “manager” aspect, concerned that it implies some sense of leadership or hierarchy, which is absolutely against the principle of social business. For me, “facilitator” is better, as it suggests a more back seat role, guiding rather than controlling. However, even this has issues – it suggests that the individual is to an extent an outsider, without the relevant topic knowledge, and I believe an understanding of the purpose and context of the community is vital if you are to effectively encourage participation. Without the respect of your peers in the community, it will be very hard to get people involved.

So that’s my (rather long) two penneth. Do you agree, or do you think I’ve missed anything? All comments welcome!

This report is an analysis of an online survey conducted during March 2012 to explore organisations’ perceptions and experiences of using cloud-based BPM technology.

You can find the report here in our library.

This new report forms a companion to our December 2011 report The evolving contribution of Cloud Computing to BPM.

These reports are available to paying advisory service subscribers, or can be purchased separately (see each report’s library page for more information).

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• the launch of Responsive Process Management (RPM) 2.2
• the results of a ‘BPM smackdown’ analysis that placed Savvion in a leading spot
• a case study of Apria Healthcare, based on use of Savvion’s BPM technology
• another analysis showing Actional as a leader in its space.

With the new Progress strategy outlined in a press release today, all of those four things will go away.

Progress plans to divest its Actional, Artix, DataXtend, FuseSource, ObjectStore, Orbacus, Orbix, Savvion, Shadow and Sonic product lines. So – if we take this at face value (and that’s all I can do at this stage) that means no more technology to support customers looking to implement BPM, SOA, or MDM. Instead the company will renew its focus on its heritage OpenEdge and DataDirect businesses, as well as redouble its efforts to build and market a cloud-based application platform, and increase its focus on Apama in Capital Markets (you can find out the detail the press  release).

At this stage, I have to make some assumptions. But if Progress means what people normally mean when they say “divest”, I think these divestitures could place the new growth strategy – focused in significant part around OpenEdge – at significant risk. Why? Because part of what was starting to make OpenEdge interesting to the market again was the way in which Progress was expanding the scope of the development concerns that OpenEdge could address.

There are other concerns; not least, the release highlights “Apama Analytics” and talks in other places about Big Data and analytics capabilities; but these don’t exist in any real sense today (at least, not in the sense that most people would use those terms). An intimation is made that OpenEdge will be positioned as a platform for building massive scale web applications that leverage Big Data, but that’s a long way from what OpenEdge is really doing for anyone today.

According to the release Progress expects to divest all these products/businesses by the middle to the end of 2013 – which is, any way you look at it, quite a long time away in the world of sales. I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see the pipelines for all these products to dry up very soon indeed, as prospects focus instead on potential choices with clear futures. I hope that’s accounted for in the plan!

Now of course this is a quick reaction to a significant piece of news for any Progress customer or prospect. Of course I’ll be looking for more in-depth information as soon as I can get it – and if I learn anything which adds to this or contradicts it I’ll update you all. At the moment, though, it looks like Progress is set to do a 180 degree turn, and revisit its past to try and reinvent its future.

Let’s see how it turns out… and hope that some of the very decent technologies being punted here find good homes.

I’d love to get your thoughts and comments!

UPDATE 30/4/12:

I had a briefing with John Bates and Colleen Smith of Progress on 26 April, the day after I wrote the piece above, and I learned some additional detail that I wanted to share with you.

Firstly, Bates and Smith were very clear in saying that the company needs to find a space where it can be truly different for a profitable market segment, and use this to drive growth. It’s focusing on what it calls “Application Platform as a Service” (aPaaS) and at this point, its intention is to get to be the “number 1 provider of application development and deployment platforms in the Cloud”. The current enterprise IT middleware business (combining the business from Savvion, Actional, Sonic, et al) just isn’t providing enough of a growth engine for shareholders; and the company’s leadership also feels that Progress has struggled to focus sufficiently as it’s been fighting on a large number of fronts. By adding data connectivity (DataDirect), event processing (Apama), rules (Corticon) and visualisation (Control Tower) capabilities to the work it’s already done through Progress Arcade in making OpenEdge a foundation for a PaaS offering for ISVs wanting to transition to cloud delivery, Progress believes it can find that space. It’s also planning to add support for multiple development languages, further boost analytics, and create some explicit linkages to “Big Data” management technologies.

My take is that if Progress can execute on the plan it shared with me, then it could do something really interesting – particularly for small and medium sized application vendors. But I also think it’s got a hell of a task ahead of it to get all these additional products – all of which are built for on-premise installation – and re-engineer them sensibly for PaaS. What’s more, because things are moving so fast in the PaaS world, I think its window of opportunity might prove very tight to squeeze through.

Secondly, although Progress plans to divest the product businesses as laid out above to help it focus much more clearly, it’s currently looking at ways it can continue to make use of some of the Savvion technology in combination with OpenEdge – so it can continue to offer what it currently calls OpenEdge BPM (particularly of interest to its ISV partners). I didn’t get a detailed view of what this might involve from a potential engineering and licensing perspective, and I think it’s probably too early to say. However the company is prepared to go on record to say “While [the] intent is to divest the Savvion (BPM) and Sonic (ESB) products, [Progress is] committed to supporting features that are essential for building and deploying agile, next generation applications.”. This is something that anyone interested in the future of OpenEdge needs to watch carefully.

Third, Progress is going to try to find buyers for its divested product lines as soon as possible; it understands that while there’s uncertainty in the market about what will happen next, those businesses could very easily freeze. Its business plan does assume some short term revenue decline as part of this strategy shift, but my view is that nevertheless Progress needs to work very quickly and diligently from here on; the initial communication fell some way short of a well-managed message IMO. Progress is also confident that it will find buyers quickly; my advice to any nervous customers using the to-be-divested products is to keep a very close eye on where those products go. Your strategy could be affected if a key technology you rely on ends up being owned by an outfit primarily concerned with milking maintenance revenues.