Archive for the 'BPM 2.0' Category
Miscellaneous Updates
Between Intalio, which staff doubled in size over the past six months, extensive traveling around the world (over 50,000 qualifying miles flown so far this year), the occasional extreme productivity seminar, my training for the commercial pilot license, and the time spent with my family (Cf. Father Pride), I found it difficult to maintain a regular blogging schedule lately. I’m hopeful that I’ll find the right pace eventually, but in the meantime, here are some noteworthy updates on various fronts. [Continue…]
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Process Discovery
While I’m putting together the liquid cooling system for my new computer, I’d like to share with you some details about the digital asset management process I am planning to manage with it, using Intalio|BPMS as development platform. Doing what most business analysts do when documenting business processes for the first time, I fired my spreadsheet editor of choice (Google Docs in this particular instance), and started filling cells up with lots of information that only human beings can understand. We’re at the process discovery stage here, and it really does not matter which tool you use for it. Nevertheless, using an online tool such as Google Docs will make it easier to share your ideas and requirements with others, and to track changes over time. So let’s take a look at what we’ve got. [Continue…]
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Pushing the Envelope
If you’re a test pilot, pushing the envelope is what you do to discover an aircraft’s performance limits. I’m just a private pilot, therefore I try to stay away from the boundaries of my aircraft’s envelope as much as possible. But there are other envelopes I can play with, and Office 2.0 is one of them. Over the past two years, I have conducted many experiments, attempting to do everything online. I followed the Rules for Office 2.0 religiously, and eventually made it work. Today, using an iPhone and a MacBook Air equipped with a Franklin CDU-680 3G modem, I can get online pretty much anytime and anywhere. I built an Office 2.0 Setup around Gmail and Salesforce.com, and I must say that it’s working pretty well. So, what’s next? Well, all this works when you’re managing megabytes of structured data and gigabytes of documents. But what about hundreds of gigabytes of structured data and tens of terabytes of documents? Can you make the overall workflow scale by three or four orders of magnitude? This is one of the questions I will try to answer over the coming months, and I will make sure to share my progress on this blog. [Continue…]
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On The Road Again
Intalio recently released Intalio|BPMS 5.0, and the feedback we got from our customers and partners was phenomenal. Today, we’re getting ready to unveil our vision for our next product release, and we’ve decided to share it with customers and partners first, then analysts and the press second, through two road shows. The first will take place in late November and early December this year, and the second will be organized in the first half of Q1 next year. Please join us at the following locations if you would like to learn more about what we are up to. [Continue…]
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From Vision to Execution
Eight years ago, I moved to the United States with one goal in mind: building the first open source transactional workflow platform. I had drawn its architecture on a napkin — literally, and found some people on Google who could help me put it together. Today, Intalio released Intalio|BPMS 5.0, or what I really consider to be the first working implementation of the original vision. While I will keep the full story of this incredible journey for future articles — or a book maybe — I would like to share some of its highlights with you tonight. [Continue…]
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iPhone Experiment
When Steve Jobs first unveiled the iPhone back in February, I was immediately convinced that this device would turn into a great tool for Office 2.0. This belief got reinforced when Apple decided to use the built-in web browser as main development platform, thereby adopting a pure Office 2.0 approach for all application developments. My first impressions after using the device for a couple of days exceeded my original expectations, and when time came to select a device that could be given to every attendee of the Office 2.0 Conference, our first choice naturally went for Apple’s latest creation. There were a couple of problems though: First, could we buy that many devices, knowing that we are expecting anywhere between 500 and 750 participants this year? Second, could we get the devices activated before people show up for the conference? Today, I am pleased to report that both problems have been solved, and that every participant to the Office 2.0 Conference will receive a shiny new iPhone. Here is what we will do with them. [Continue…]
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Office 2.0 Japan
Many readers of this blog are from Japan, and several of them have recently expressed interest for an Office 2.0 meeting to be organized there. After some preliminary investigations, we have decided to organize such an event, albeit at a small scale, to take place in Tokyo on June 26th. [Continue…]
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Get Your BPMN Schema Today
In a recent article published by Intelligent Enterprise, my friend Bruce Silver laments that BPDM is essentially useless, and that the BPM industry badly needs an XML schema for BPMN. I could not agree more with him, and I am happy to report that Intalio recently donated such a schema to the Eclipse Foundation, complemented by a ridiculously-good-looking object model for it. Not only did we give the schema away for free, but we also donated a complete implementation for it. [Continue…]
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Clearspace Could Bring Office 2.0 to BPM 2.0
As indicated last week, the Under The Radar event brought its fair share of discoveries, and I am still trying to find some time to play with some of the applications I saw there. One got me seriously thinking beyond the realm of Office 2.0 though — Clearspace, which is developed by Jive Software. [Continue…]
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How To Outsource Product Management
Product Management is one of the most critical functions for any enterprise software companies. As a product gets used by more and more customers, requests for new requirements start to pile in, and the job of a Product Manager is to prioritize them in order to meet customers’ needs, while avoiding feature creep. During Intalio’s early years as a company, we found it very difficult to manage this process. Too many resources where allocated to the development of features that very few customers actually needed, while features that could have made a significant difference on the market did not get developed, for lack of available resources. We only managed to solve this problem when we decided to outsource it, and selected an unlikely outsourcing partner for it: our customers. [Continue…]
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Sharing the BPEL Love
Assuming that everything goes as planned, the WS-BPEL 2.0 specification will be approved by OASIS later this month. This will mark the end of a four year long process for taking the BPEL specification to a level where it can be used in production for managing virtually any kind of business process. Intalio is a co-author of the specification, and has been supporting early drafts since February 2006, giving us some invaluable experience regarding its use within the most demanding production environments (Cf. performance numbers). But because the development of this specification was a collaborative effort, it’s time to share the love, and I could not think of a better recipient for it than one of our competitors—Oracle. [Continue…]
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BPEL Works
You know that a standard works when you can go from one implementation to another, without too much effort. BPEL has been promising such interoperability for quite some time, but to the extent of my knowledge, it has never been demonstrated at a large scale in a production environment. Until now. Over the weekend, Coghead went from one BPEL engine to another, and it worked without a glitch. Today, we can safely say that as an industry standard, BPEL really works. [Continue…]
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BPM 2.0 Epiphany
Earlier today, I participated in a lively ebizQ panel organized by Sandy Kemsley, with Phil Larson, Director of Product Strategy for Appian Corporation, and Phil Gilbert, Executive Vice President and CTO for Lombardi Software. We discussed about BPM and Enterprise 2.0, and had lots of fun arguing whether it was important for a process modeling tool to be web-based or not. But what I will remember from this call is the epiphany I got about BPM 2.0, and what makes Intalio’s vision for BPM so different from the one of our competitors, Lombardi first among them. [Comments…]
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The Temptation of Reinvention
Today, there is not one week that passes by during which I do not hear the CEO, CTO, or Vice President of Engineering of a software company or online service provider complaining about the fact that some years ago, his or her company embarked on the development of a proprietary workflow engine, and today, its maintenance has become a pure nightmare. When no meaningful standard for workflow was available, and off-the-shelf products were quite specific and very expensive, such a custom development might have found some elements of justification. But today, with the adoption of well-established standards for BPM, and the availability of commercially-supported open-source platforms, there is absolutely no reason why you should reinvent the process wheel. [Continue…]
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Who Needs BPM as a Service
Two weeks ago, a couple of independent BPM vendors announced plans for the release of BPM platforms to be offered as a service. This got the BPM digerati all excited, and for a day or two, the most enthusiastic commentators were raving about the prospect of getting BPM on tap directly from your web browsers. Then, some cared to read the small prints, and quickly realized that they would have to wait a little bit more for their newfound dreams to come true. [Continue…]
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What is Wrong with BPM
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. [Continue…]
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Where BPM and BI Intersect
The BPM acronym means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. If you’re into techno music, it’s all about beats per minute. If you’re a fan of Business Intelligence (BI), you know all about Business Performance Management. And if you’re a regular reader of this blog, you must have a strong interest for Business Process Management. Today, we will focus on the later topic, and try to outline where it intersects with BI. [Continue…]
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BPM, ECM, ESB, and Security
What makes enterprise architecture both difficult and fascinating is that it’s all about dealing with a multi-dimensional problem. Focus on one or two dimensions, and the others quickly become orthogonal considerations, usually relegated to a later time, actually never really implemented. More often than not, security is one of these dimensions that does not get the attention it deserves. Dealing with security is a little bit like cleaning your house: when its clean, nobody can really tell how much work had to be done for getting there, and only when things get dirty do people start noticing. This post from security architect James McGovern is a good summary of the problem at hand, and gives me an opportunity to answer a question that was asked following the publishing of this post on the intersection of BPM and ECM: what about security? [Continue…]
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Man vs Machine
In the little world of Business Process Management (BPM), most vendors like to create confusion in customers’ minds as a way to slow down the relentless commoditization process they are facing. For this purpose, many tricks can be used, ranging from the development of incompatible standards, to the segmentation of the market into meaningless categories. Recently, this later form of FUD has gained some momentum, with the sparkling of a debate around human-centric BPM vs integration-centric BPM. This distinction makes absolutely no sense, and is yet another contributing factor to the delay in the mainstream adoption of BPM technologies in the enterprise. Here is an attempt at providing some much-needed clarification. [Continue…]
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Open Source Relationships
When it comes to enterprise software, most partnerships established between vendors tend to be asymmetrical: a large vendor would embed some piece of technology developed by a much smaller one, or a small System Integrator (SI) or Value Added Reseller (VAR) would distribute the products of a larger, well established vendor. Commercial Open Source business models are slowly but surely changing the parameters of the equation, and giving birth to more equalitarian and fruitful relationships. Here is why. [Continue…]
