Nobody Cares About BPM
Saturday, May 13th 2006 | Ismael Ghalimi
Last week, Google released one of the most amazing tools there is for marketers: Google Trends. The free service allows anyone to query Google Search’s query database and compare how many times a given keyword is used versus others. It also correlates search volume with news reference volume, and provides relevant news items in relation to major spikes in news reference volume. When I heard about the service, my first reaction was to check how popular the BPM acronym was. What I got from it is that nobody really cares about BPM anymore, or at least not as much as people care about SOA.
This analysis compares the trends for BPM and SOA since January 1st, 2004. As you can see on the charts, search volume for BPM as been declining over the past two and a half years, while search volume for SOA has been increasing, surpassing the one for BPM in late February 2006. News reference volume has been slightly increasing for BPM over the same period, while the one for SOA has been taking off in early 2005. What this should tell us is that interest for BPM is fading away and is being replaced by growing interest for SOA.
So far, so good. People care more about SOA than BPM? Big deal! When one puts some Service Oriented Architecture in place, one will need some kind of service orchestration platform and will become a customer for a BPEL-powered BPM 2.0 solution sooner or later. But what I find disturbing with what Google Trends is telling us is the fact that news reference volume for BPM has been increasing, while search volume for BPM has been decreasing. The first relates to journalists (articles) and vendors (press releases), while the second relates to end users. What this means is that there is some level of hype around BPM, but reality does not match it. The real question then becomes: what’s wrong with BPM? Is it that people do not care about it anymore, or is it something more subtle?
My take is that customer interest for BPM peaked sometime in 2003, but was not followed by a significant number of implementations that customers could really learn from. Some BPM vendors have had more success than others in the couple of years that followed, but if you exclude the traditional workflow vendors that added a not-so-convincing layer of BPM marketing on top of their legacy products, none of the pure plays managed to go beyond the magical $20M mark. Using Geoffrey Moore’s terminology, they could not cross the chasm. Intalio was one of these, and I have been trying to understand what went wrong since then. Discussing with customers and thinking over what I learned from Google Trends helped me develop an hypothesis for it.
If you go on any search engine and type BPM, you will get access to a lot of marketing literature developed by vendors and industry analysts, but you will be hard pressed to find very many actual customers talking about their BPM implementations. Type anything else — be it AJAX, J2EE, .Net, or SOA — and you’ll find an equal amount of marketing stuff, but you’ll also get customer testimonials, written by customers themselves, without involvement from any PR department whatsoever. Somehow, BPM is different, for mostly bad reasons, and I think I know why.
Until recently, any customer who deployed a BPM solution has been relying on the vendor’s professional services group for its implementation. In most instances, customers have not been trained to actually use the BPM product’s development tool, and will never touch them actually. Once the solution went into production, it worked in some instances, did not in others, but customers have had little to say about how it was actually built. It might have solved a business problem, but many alternative solutions could have been used to solve the very same problem, and for the lack of proper customer involvement, very little could be said about the overall exercise and what could be learned from it. So far, BPM products have been nothing more than technical frameworks used BPM vendors to develop solutions on behalf of customers. And whether vendors like it or not, nobody really cares about frameworks.
For people to care again, BPM offerings have to upgrade from the framework status to the product status. And for this to happen, customers have to use BPM products themselves. They have to try it out on their own, find what works and what does not, and come out in the open with feedback that vendors and customers alike will learn from. Only then will other customers find a renewed interest for BPM and decide to give it a try as well.
Now that standards have been established and that customers can learn about BPMN of BPEL instead of having to learn proprietary language X or Y, the stage has been set for mainstream adoption to take place. I have always felt that customer demand for BPM is huge but has not been properly addressed for the lack of the right tool and the right way for customers to procure it. Established standards are helping vendors bring the right tools to market, and Open Source business models are lowering the barrier to adoption down to a level where no excuses can be found for not trying them out. So go ahead! Give BPM a shot, talk about it loud, and come back to Google a year from now and we’ll see if we managed to reverse the trend.
Entry filed under: BPM 2.0
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Ismael,
I share the same observation as yours. We need customer testimonials and references to BPM success stories. In this sense, I am counting on you to come back with more information about the real-time BPMS developed for a telecommunication services company you referenced sometimes ago. This will be the starting point to make a great stir with this blog.
Tomoaki,
A promise is a promise, and we’re getting really close to being able to share this information with you and the rest of the IT|Redux readership. I thank you very much for your patience.
Ismael,
Google Trends is definitely a great tool, especially for a Marketing person like myself. One interesting thing I found in your analysis: try putting the filter to United States only. The picture changes a great deal. What made me think of trying this was the fact that the Dominican Republic was the top region for BPM searches in your analysis, with Columbia and Chile also in the top 5. Perhaps there is some noise in the data — BPM does also stand for beats per minute after all. Not sure if it has another meaning in Columbia or Chile.
Now, I know that the United States is only part of the discussion. However, looking at the US results, one could argue that SOA is finally taking off — in both search and press. It has been banging around with BPM for the last few years. Not surprising it is taking off if you consider the marketing dollars the big vendors are spending on SOA compared to the still modest BPM spend. Is BPM’s time yet to come? I think so. I agree very much with you that customer stories and testimonials are essential for getting people to jump in to BPM.
Jim,
I agree with you, the picture is quite different when you look at it for the United States only. Nevertheless, the conclusion remains the same: BPM is on a declining trend, while SOA is taking off.
[…] If it were anyone else but Ismael Ghalimi, I would have simply muttered “idiotic” and moved on without a second thought. But when a guy at the top of my BPM hero list declares that “nobody cares about BPM” any more, my actual reaction was dismay and mild depression. The apparent basis for Ismael’s loss of faith: the fact that Google Trends shows searches on “bpm” have declined since 2004, while searches on “soa” have gone up! […]
“Hey, that Salieri guy’s Google numbers are way up! Mozart must suck.”
What it must have been like when instant gratification wasn’t so instant… I have been trying to find the exact quote that’s attributed to Bill Gates about how technology always takes longer to catch on than you first expect, …
Ismael,
BPM adoption by System Integrators & IT Services Companies is very limited. There is lot of confusion over what BPM means, and who should own it within an IT Services firm. I agree with you to the extent that unless and until BPM vendors build a strong partner ecoystem around their products, BPM implementations at large scale will not happen. With big players like Oracle & IBM adopting the BPEL & BPMN standards in their products, we should see more implementations happening in this space in the near future though.
Sanjeev,
I agree with you. We need IBM and Oracle to validate the market, much like they did six or seven years ago with the application server market. With BPMN and BPEL now firmly established as industry standards, it seems to me that BPM is ready for prime time, finally!
Fifty stories of BPM success here. Hope it helps with the Google Trends.
The reason BPM is not so popular as a trend term has nothing to do with Ismael’s analysis. Ismael is a great guy, but on this, he is simply wrong. BPM is a MANAGEMENT discipline, and as such, won’t get attention from the Tech Press. Indeed, the whole idea of BPM, as a lifecycle improvement process, is only practiced by a small number of leading firms. Fortunately, their market valuation speaks for BPM. Here is an analogy: Great books are written by authors, not Word Processors. Great processes are written by business people, not a BPMS. A BPMS is no more important than a Word processor. It is a tool. It is a business tool. It is not a Tech Tool, like SOA or AJAX. That’s why SOA and AJAX will be hyped by the IT industry. The IT industry uses the IT infrastructure to hype its technologies. Business users don’t enjoy, or need, the same.
Howard,
I would love nothing more than being wrong on this one. Problem is, BPM is not just a methodology, it’s both a methodology and a technology that are combined to serve a specific purpose. And good technology can fail if it is not marketed properly. I believe that BPM, as both a methodology and a technology, could fail if it does not capture the imagination of business folks and technical people, hence my original post. We need to fix that.
Sanjeev says, “unless and until BPM vendors build a strong partner ecoystem around their products, BPM implementations at large scale will not happen.” And Howard says, “Great books are written by authors, not Word Processors. Great processes are written by business people, not a BPMS.”
I’m a bit biased on this topic, since I work for the Ecosystems group at SAP where we’ve just opened a sneak preview of a new community for the people who design great processes and work to implement them via (SAP and other) platforms and software, but I see anecdotal and market evidence of the rise of BPM and the importance of differentiation via business process (our own market research, a few interesting recent books, a regular CIO magazine column, discussions with customers at our user conferences, insight into the changing demographics of our online developer community, discussion with two major analyst firms…).
Maybe what we saw, and what Ismael is charting, was a hype cycle that peaked too early, when there still wasn’t enough in the way of tools, platforms, methodologies, etc. to make it real or to produce the over-hyped hoped-for results. So: a problem of timing. But now that the underlying infrastructure (not just I.T., but the “softer” infrastructure, too) is being put in place, I’m betting on a re-emergence and rise in BPM and differentiating business processes in general.
SAP — a huge and influential player — is betting on this, too. The company talks about the coming “business process platform.” And who will make this thing hum? A business process expert… Someone who can translate innovative (or simply efficient) processes into software behaviors, workflows, and the rest thru modeling tools, configuration, etc.
So, we’re building a business process expert (BPX) community now at bpx.sap.com. It doesn’t officially launch until September, but in the meantime we give BPXs an opportunity to help shape the conversation and the community, to suggest content and tools they need, interface with SAP directly, to test, to describe real case studies and experiences, to debate best practices…
We’d be happy to get feedback from Ismael’s IT|Redux readers as (free) members of this new community as we place our bets on the side of the BPeXperts who (I think) will increasingly drive strategic advantage and competitive differentiation via process innovation.
Mark,
What a great post! I could not agree more.
Ismael,
AJAX is trending way up! Unfortunately, I think AJAX is a also a football team somewhere in Spain… BPM also means beats per minute among other things. I guess we need a semantic trend analysis.
I totally agree with the argument that a methodology without an implementation tool is bound to fail. If you look at today’s trend, we have tools which supports BPEL natively and tools which can generate Web Services on the fly. What is missing is a very strong BPMN tool from a single vendor which ties all 3 (BPMN, BPEL & WS). What we need to see is a BPM suite with a BPMN modeller, a BPEL Modeller, and an execution engine and Web Services rapid development tool. I think all the big Application Server & Business Process Platform vendors are all working in this direction. If they get their acts together, we may see a major adoption of BPM in every segment of industry. An easy to use and realisticly priced BPM suite will make BPM a mainstream phenomenon adopted by both large corporations and SMEs.
Ismael,
I tend to see the current generation of BPM tools too biased towards the technical. They do provide an admirable bridge to the business world, but I would hesitate to deploy processes developed only by a Business Developer.
I think that this reflects in the trend as well, BPM sounds like a good idea; most people have become BPM aware. Too often it stops there as people struggle to see how it will work for them in their environments. SOA is a natural fit for BPM, and in some ways the cart has come before the horse. I agree with those comments that have forecast an upward trend may emerge soon as SOA is implemented more widely.
I believe that there is a piece missing that should appear above the BPM layer, one that is more native for the Business Expert. ARIS is in this space, but I don’t think that they are addressing it properly. I would hope to see some standard emerge that covers this area and interface to those around BPM. I’m convinced that will drive BPM even faster.
Cheers
I’m going to run a risk here and use an analogy — as always it can only be pushed so far. Nearly every business consumes raw materials and creates products — even ‘intellectual’ ones like software companies need consumables (paper) and produce media/documents.
The mechanism by which these arrive and depart can be regarded as a transport or logistics PROCESS. I regard BPM as the logistics strategy — end to end delivery. The VEHICLES used for transport are the equivalent of BPMS tools. Lorries and vans are a subset of the logistics process and are a means to an end — SOA & EAI are analogues here. Crude analogy, but meant to show that SOA is a subset of BPMS.
Now, to the average person, when you discuss deliveries, what springs to mind? The car/van/lorry, the need for vehicles, or the end-to-end process? Exactly! I suspect that is why there is more of a focus on technology in Google queries. Howard is right in that the real business benefit/interest is higher up the food chain in end-to-end processes.
The challenge for us is to make the process view more attractive to a wider audience — if we don’t we’ll end up with the equivalent of trying to move a house using a Ferrari. It may look sexy, it may grab the attention of a lot of people because it’s fun to drive, but it will never deliver the benefits and savings that a big van would. A company using good processes (the right size vehicle for the job) will win out, but is less likely to be featured in the news.
Sanjeev,
I could not agree more. In the meantime, take a look at Intalio.
Bob,
I agree with you. More abstraction is needed. Let’s work on it together!
BPM automation is not a perscription for process audit.
Rajeev,
I agree, but I would not call process audit BPM either.
[…] BPMS will go mainstream: Draw The concept for a Business Process Management System (BPMS) has been gaining momentum, but I would not call it mainstream yet. The ground for BPM 2.0 has been laid, and the first Open Source BPMS has been announced. Nevertheless, customers are still trying to figure out what BPM really is, and which flavor for it will best address their needs initially. Gartner recently came to the rescue, suggesting that an Open Source solution might be a good way to get your feet wet initially. But a commonly-accepted compeling event for the deployment of a BPM platform — think e-Commerce for an application server — remains to be found. SOA might very well be it, but it’s losing ground as well, as illustrated on this Google Trends analysis, also mentioned in this earlier post. Like it or not, BPM is a complex concept, and it will take time for corporate buyers to get their arms around it. In the meantime, the best way to get there is to lower any possible barrier to adoption, and this is what Intalio is all about. […]
Have you ever tried to update a swimlane implying 20 actors and more than 100 tasks? It may be why BPM has a lack of use: tools aren’t ergonomic for a human being. And I won’t even discuss about the wonderful interoperability between them!
Abdelkrim,
I think it really depends on your tool. The Dutch Grovernment used Intalio|BPMS to model a process that has 250,000 tasks, and hundreds of actors. Through proper fragmentation of the macro process into independent processes, they managed to do it in a maintainable way. As far as interoperability is concerned, there is an answer: it’s called BPMN+BPEL, and it’s up to the vendors to support it.
Best regards
-Ismael
[…] Last year, I wrote a fairly controversial post explaining why nobody cares about BPM. The main idea was that most BPM projects are implemented by software vendors and system integrators, with little participation from customers themselves. As a result, BPM products remain at the level of frameworks, rather than being promoted to the level of platforms. It has been nine months since I wrote this article, and twelve since Intalio moved to an open-source model. This time and experience gave me a better understanding of the problem at hand. […]
[…] Last year, I wrote a fairly controversial post… […]
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