I am giving a workshop on Advanced Decisioning for Process Excellence at the Gartner BPM event in Las Vegas.

Got a quick update today from the new co-CEOs of SAP – Bill McDermott and Jim Hagemann Snabe.

Jim focused on their innovation strategy – making significant steps into on-demand business applications, aiming to support a hybrid approach allowing customers to mix on-demand and on-premise software. In addition they aim to increase support for running the applications on new mobile devices – this, of course, requires a separation of decision-making business logic from front-end logic. Hopefully this will see SAP investing more in its business rules capabilities (described under the SAP tag on the blog). All of this requires that processes and MDM can be orchestrated across this increasingly complex environment, even when non-SAP application components are involved. They are also rolling out more agile development methodologies (like those being described in the new SAP BPM book on which I am working with various other SAP folks).

Lots of interesting questions got asked and here are some of the responses that seem most interesting from a decisioning perspective:

• In memory analytics will change the way high end analytics are deployed. Focused on a variety of partners to bring new approaches, new techniques into high-end analytic space. Still expect to work with SPSS in this regard but also looking for new technologies that take advantage from the ground up of in-memory analytics.
• Business by Design, SAP’s easy to configure on-demand (SaaS) offering, is coming out this summer. Will be interesting to see the extent to which business rules are used to make it configurable.
• Interesting challenge for a company like SAP is that different product lines, different deployment options have a different cycle. On premise software, for instance, cannot be updated too often as customers don’t want to constantly re-install. On-demand software, however, gets updated more often and on-device software is driven by a very dynamic consumer technology market. This is a large scale change, ensuring that different parts of the company can operate on the right timescale while remaining part of the same company. Personally I think that rules-based decision evolution is a key element of this and I hope to see some sign that SAP thinks this way too.
• Asked about mergers and acquisitions – the point was made that Oracle has been much more aggressive – Bill and Jim acknowledged that they are going to be more aggressive going forward while remaining focused on innovation and an integrated, coherent business application suite rather than generating growth through acquisitions. As more and more established customers have been acquired (up to the acquisition of Chordiant by Pegasystems today) this is an interesting topic – increasingly SAP will have no option to grow through acquisitions but this may suit their corporate culture better anyway.
• Asked about the trend (Oracle, IBM) to mix hardware and software they replied that they see a heterogeneous world that is in constant flux – customers never own one vendor’s complete set – so being good at working in this environment is key. Eliminating layers using hardware is good but they see working with multiple partners not owning their own. This requires collaboration with a mix of hardware partners rather than acquiring and integrating their own hardware. Customers don’t want vendor lock-in, they buy a business outcome not a “stack”.
• SAP is not worried about the ownership of Java by Oracle – they see a vibrant, open, multi-company ecosystem around Java and don’t expect Oracle’s ownership to impact this. Interestingly they made the point that programming languages come and go and that Java is not therefore the be-all and end-all.

Interesting conversation, nice degree of openness and responsiveness – much improved over SAP TechEd where avoiding questions was the order of the day.

The news today is that Pegasystems (rules-based business process management) is acquiring Chordiant (decision-centric CRM). This is interesting news as it merges a company (Chordiant) with a very decision-centric/decision services separate from process mindset with one (Pega) that has mixed rules and process together much more.

Chordiant have been one of my companies to watch for a while, with a great decisioning platform. Their clear separation of decisioning, their support for rules and analytics in combination, their strong adaptive analytics engine for self-learning models, their recent integration of real-time conversations with decision management and their powerful business simulation tool (Visual Business Director, see below) are enough to put them at or very near the top of the decisioning vendors.

Pega, of course, have been best known for their business process management focus. They have always addressed this from a rules-centric perspective and we have had some active disagreements about the role of decision services and the value of a clear separate of processes and decisions (see this post and comment thread, for instance). Nevertheless we agree on the power of business rules to drive more agile and smarter systems and Pega has been one of the rules vendors active in supporting PMML (Predictive Model Markup Language) to allow the integration of business analytics with business rules.

The potential of this merger is real. Clearly the merged company will be larger, important as the big players (IBM, SAP especially) get more serious and rules and decisioning. Chordiant’s decision management and simulation components are, in my estimation, better than Pega’s for specific purposes but not as general purpose. An intelligent combination of the two is therefore potentially very powerful. In particular, bringing Chordiant’s adaptive analytics and simualtion capabilities to the broader rules-based platform that Pega offers could be great. In addition both are very focused on CRM or at least on customer treatment decisioning, and this should help give the merged company a clear focus.

The risk, of course, is that the fairly serious difference of perspective between decision-centric / decision management on one hand and rules-driven BPM on the other will derail the technical integration or cause the merged company to merge its operations without merging its products. Either will ensure that the talented people behind the products will not stay and that would be a pity. The merged company must figure this out and make some clear statements on product direction and positioning in this respect – though I appreciate that this can’t be done right now, as it must wait for regulatory clearance etc. There is a lot of overlap in technology. This could be good – giving the merged company enough of a common vocabulary to build a powerful solution – or bad, resulting in lots of infighting about which version to keep.

Check out these posts on Chordiant for more details. The folks at Pega have never seemed to want me to blog about them so I don’t have anything about them on the blog. Hopefully this will change…

• First Look – Chordiant Decision Management
• First Look – Chordiant Recommendation Advisor
• First Look – Chordiant’s Visual Business Director
• Chordiant Decision Management Update

Disclosure: Chordiant was a customer of mine in 2008/2009

Syndicated from ebizQ

I am working with some folks at SAP on a new BPM book – Applying Real-World BPM in an SAP Environment. I am working on chapters about the role of decisions in processes (check out this post for some help on this topic) and on the use and management of business rules in automating decisions. For those of you working with SAP NetWeaver or BRFplus I think and hope you will find the book really useful.

If you want more information, download the RealWorldBPMPostcard.pdf

Syndicated from ebizQ

The folks at BPTrends just published an article I wrote on advanced decisioning for process excellence. Advanced decisioning makes processes simpler, more agile, and smarter. Advanced decisioning allows for the effective application of business rules and advanced analytics. Making decisions explicit and managing them in concert with processes ensures an effective separation of concerns and a more streamlined design.

If you are interested in this topic you should consider coming to the Gartner BPM Summit and attending my workshop on it.

The Gartner Business Process Management Summit, March 22-24, at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, promises to be great with some good keynotes, lots of Gartner analysts and plenty of sponsors. The early bird rate for the event ends this Monday – register by 5 p.m. EST February 15 and save $300. I can get 5 people $400 off the price as my guest so drop me an email if you would like to attend and use my discount code.

The workshop series has grown into a dedicated track this year and includes a workshop by yours truly – Advanced Decisioning for Process Excellence. Explore the proven how-to’s for developing smarter, simpler and more agile processes. Speaker: James Taylor, CEO, Decision Management Solutions

Pre-registration for the workshops is required. To register: www.gartner.com/us/bpm or call 866-405-2511. And don’t forget to sign up for my workshop.

Syndicated from ebizQ

This week I am discussing the characteristics of a decision-centric platform.

Not only must the platform support complex and potentially long-running cases, it must do so in a decision- and automation-centric way. It is not enough for the platform to support the definition of complex cases and their tracking and management over time. It must allow dynamic assembly of processes based on decisions made with the information available at any stage and it must return to automated, straight through processing as soon as is practicable rather than handing over cases to a completely manual process.

Bruce Silver wrote a couple of interesting posts on this topic – Integrating Process and Rules – Part 1 and Part 2. Reading Bruce’s posts, and thinking back on the various posts I have written about business process and business decision management (Risks of pursuing BPM without decisioning, Adding decisioning to your BPM initiative or this webinar recording), it seems to me that there is an emerging consensus on how to bring these things together. This is important as Bruce points out:

in decision-intensive processes like lending or claims, process and decision modeling are separate large-scale activities performed concurrently, usually by independent teams.

Bruce goes on to say that

Integrating BPMN and decision modeling ultimately comes down to properly representing decisions and their constituent rule families in the context of BPMN subprocesses and tasks.

To understand this you need to know a little about The Decision Model – an approach for analyzing and modeling the business rules in your decisions (check out my blog post here and this webinar by Barb von Halle for more detail). Each Decision Model describes the rules that derive a single, business conclusion in a purely declarative way – there is no procedural logic in one. Rules and rule families make up a Decision Model and there is a notation and modeling approach to ensure these are complete and accurate. If you want to think about this in terms of a Business Rules Management System, each Decision Model specifies the logic requirement for a single Rule Set (see this post for more on rules, rule sets and decisions).

While some, perhaps many, operational business decisions require only a single rule set to execute and a single Decision Model to describe them, many are more complex. Because each decision model is a single declarative “space” and maps to a ruleset, you need to be able to group multiple Decision Models into an operational business decision definition. Such a business decision definition is going to be a collection of steps, most of which will correspond to a ruleset (implementation) or Decision Model (specification). The overall decision should be stateless and should have no side effects (allowing it be implemented as a Decision Service that can be both part of a process and available to other processes and systems.

A number of business rules pureplays support something called a Rule Flow (I prefer Decision Flow) to do this – FICO, IBM/ILOG, Corticon and InRule, for instance, all have such an artifact. This defines a series of steps and simple branches where each step could be a call to a function but is most likely to be the invocation of a rule set. A number of the newer players are heading down the same path, with SAP already offering a flow in its SAP Netweaver BRM product and Savvion discussing it. What is interesting is that the representation and capabilities of these flows is converging on a common set of elements:

• Using a subset of BPMN notation to describe them
• Mapping tasks to a single rule set or decision table
• Supporting most of the common branching artifacts
• Allowing for simple looping e.g. to invoke rules for each order item on an order
• Allowing for calls to sub flows
• Accessing additional data besides that being passed in from the calling process
• NOT handling most of the time out and exception handling that should be done by the calling process

While I like Decision Flow as a name for this I am beginning to think that Decision Process is a better one – essentially acknowledging that it is a kind of process. Unlike Bruce, I don’t think it is useful for the internal structure of a Decision Model or of an executable ruleset to be shown in the process diagram. Instead I would like to see these declarative objects to be represented as Tasks with the Decision Process flow collecting them into a single, stateless, side-effect free sub-process that can be called and used whenever necessary. Such a Decision Process could be deployed as a stateless, side-effect less Decision Service for use beyond processes as well as re-used across multiple processes. Rules, rule families, rule sets and decision models could all be reused across Decision Processes too, allowing for granular re-use and other rule analysis techniques (such as those described by Ron Ross or by the various BRMS vendors) could also be used.

What do you all think?

I got a briefing from my friends at Savvion and their new colleagues at Progress Software (Savvion is being acquired by Progress).

Progress has been positioning itself around operational responsiveness – responding to opportunities and threats in real time, to what’s happening right now: What are competitors doing right now and can we adjust pricing, what are customers doing and how does that impact our retention plans for them etc. Progress’ customers have been increasingly asking them for responsive business processes and this drove the acquisition.

A survey they did in October 2009 seems to show that this idea of operational responsiveness has gone from being a nice to have to a competitive necessity – 94% for instance saw the ability to respond in real time as critical to their business – but remains very difficult – only 8% currently respond to information in real time and most hear about problems in customer service, for instance, from customers themselves. When customers say what they need for operational responsiveness they ask for things that Progress has broken down into 3 buckets:

• Real-time business visibility
  Understanding what is happening in existing processes and systems despite a complex, messy existing architecture) – maps to Business Transaction Assurance (Progress-Actional)
• Immediate send-and-respond
  E.g. when a high value customer is on the website or when risk hits a certain level – maps to Business Event Processing (Progress-Apama)
• Continuous business process improvement
  Closing the loop – maps to Business Process Management (now Savvion BPM)

In other words Savvion BPM completes the three key building blocks for Progress’ vision of operational responsiveness. Savvion was selected for their event-centricity, the breadth of their capabilities (including their work on BRMS and document management for instance), their vertical industry solutions and the overall business-centricity. They also liked the enterprise-class customers and projects they saw in the Savvion client base as well as the cultural fit.

We had a good discussion about their plans to integrate the products, bringing process management, event management and decision management (business rules) together. Hopefully I will get an update on the core Apama product at some point and I will blog about it when I do.

Overall I think this is a good thing – the need for a platform that combines Process Management, Decision Management, Event Management and Performance Management is clear and this announcement moves Progress/Savvion closer to this vision.

Savvion was a client of mine in 2009 and I have reviewed their BRMS product.

I have been out this week visiting clients and prospective clients on the east coast and so not blogging much. While I was gone IBM announced its acquisition of Lombardi. Now I don’t have much to add to Sandy Kemsley’s excellent post on the topic except to say that Lombardi has also been virulently anti-business rules/business rules management system for some time. I have to wonder how this will play with an increasing business rules-centric story from IBM.

Personally I think IBM has to take a much more aggressive stance on integrating and clarifying its process management portfolio. I felt customers were already struggling to separate out when to buy FileNet and when to buy Process Server. At least ILOG’s rules product was already integrated with both, as were some other IBM components. Now with Lombardi this conversation becomes more difficult and the lack of a rules focus continues to undermine, as it has always done, Lombardi’s view of itself as business user centric. Business rules are the best way for business users to have a say in the underlying logic of their applications. They need to manage the workflow of their processes and the logic of their decisions.  Hopefully joining IBM will push Lombardi to recognize this and their undoubted focus on making it easy for business users to define their business will result in some new, higher level rules capabilities in the IBM stack.