Profile of Sandy Kemsley
News & Commentary Posts: 74
is a systems architect and analyst who specializes in BPM and Enterprise 2.0.
Articles by Sandy Kemsley
11/16/2010
Last week, I tried out the Ultimus Test Drive, a guided, hands-on session using a process application built with the Ultimus business process management system (BPMS)... The real innovation here is not the application itself, but the method that Ultimus is using to have people try it out...
10/20/2010
This week's Building Business Capability Conference kicked off with a keynote by Ron Ross, Kathleen Barret and Roger Burlton, chairs of the three parts of the conference: Business Rules Forum, Business Analysis Forum and Business Process Forum. Each of the three provided view on the challenges facing organizations today...
9/10/2010
At the recent TIBCO Now event in Toronto, one presenter pointed out that "Business is event-based. IT systems are transaction and query-based." That sums up the difference between how things happen in the real world, and the nature of the systems designed to support those things...
8/10/2010
Metastorm's M3 collaborative modeling and Smart Business Workspace are the start of a push toward a full BPM suite in the cloud, providing collaborative process modeling and an end-user runtime hosted on Microsoft Azure...
6/16/2010
There's only so much rah-rah about enterprise collaboration I can take before I fall back on three thoughts: 1. Collaboration is already going on in enterprises... 2. Collaboration is just not that interesting if it doesn't impact the core business processes 3. The millennials are not going to save us...
5/11/2010
More than just being a Wall Street messaging company with Rendezvous, TIBCO has a full stack of mission-critical event processing, messaging, process management, analytics and more that puts them squarely in competition with the big players.
5/4/2010
My biggest question for IBM at this week's Impact event in Vegas was what's happening (if anything) with consolidation of the BPM portfolio; after much gnashing of teeth and avoiding of the subject, my interpretation of the answer is that there will be no consolidation...
4/27/2010
Before a recent event-driven architecture initiative took place, London's Heathrow Airport had a depressingly low on-time departure rate of 68%... Better air-to-air management now saves 90 liters of fuel per flight and has raised the on-time departure rate to 83%.
3/17/2010
Yesterday, IBM announced its cloud strategy and roadmap; I was at the analyst update last week and had a chance to hear about it first-hand from IBM execs... To be clear, there is a predominant focus on private clouds, or what some would not consider cloud at all...
3/9/2010
Progress Software CTO John Bates showed survey results stating that companies want real-time business visibility, immediate sense-and-respond capabilities, and continuous business process improvement in a cycle of responsive process management. Yeah, and I want a pony for Christmas...
2/25/2010
At this week's IQPC Lean Six Sigma & Process Improvement conference in Toronto, David Haigh of Johnson & Johnson presented on how the company is using dashboards for process improvement efforts.
1/14/2010
BPM acquisitions must be in the air: on Monday, Progress Software announced that they've bought Savvion for $49M. Of the three mid-range BPMS-only vendors that I would most commonly name, Appian, Lombardi and Savvion, that's two out of the three announcing acquisition in less than a month...
12/16/2009
I was on the analyst call this morning to hear about IBM's acquisition of Lombardi -- a pretty significant acquisition in the BPM space. Lombardi is the best known of the mid-range BPMS vendors, and if the economic climate weren't quite so dreary, I imagine that they'd be doing an IPO rather than being acquired...
11/9/2009
We live in a time of constant, rapid change, and businesses need to respond to this change or risk losing their competitive edge. It's not enough to be a smarter organization: you have to have smarter systems because of the volume and complexity of the events that drive businesses today. Smarter systems have four characteristics...
11/4/2009
One of the effects of increased connectivity on business is that it speeds the impact of change: as soon as something changes in how business works in one part of the world, it's everywhere. This makes instability -- driven by that change -- the normal state rather than an exception...
10/12/2009
Forrester's Business Technology Forum, held last week in Chicago, focused on Lean as the new business imperative: how to use Lean concepts and methods to address the overly complex things in our business environment. Here's Forrester's take on using Lean to turn Information Technology into Business Technology...
10/7/2009
At this week's Gartner BPM Summit, Bill Rosser presented a decision framework for identifying when to use BPA (business process analysis), EA (enterprise architecture) and BPM modeling tools for modeling processes: all of them can model processes, but which should be used when?
8/18/2009
Gartner's hype cycle for 2009 was released last week, and there was a webinar with Jackie Fenn to walk through it... Gartner has 79 different hype cycles focused on individual technologies, rolled up in this special report that is free but doesn't contain the meat... There are several new hype cycles this year, including cloud computing, data center power and cooling, and virtualization...
8/4/2009
Michele Cantara and Janelle Hill hosted a Webinar last week on the timely topic of surviving and thriving with aid of business process management (BPM)... Their premise is that BPM can turn the ax-man into a surgeon: you'll still have cuts, but they're more precise and less likely to damage the core of your organization...
6/24/2009
At this week's Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston, Lee Bryant of Headshift looked at the adoption challenges for 2.0 technologies in companies that have grown up around a centralized model of IT... He points out that we can't afford the high-friction, high-cost model of deploying technology and processes...
6/23/2009
I'm at the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston watching the panel entitled "E2.0 Reality Check: What's Working, What's Not, What's Next"... The point was made that IT is no longer bringing the technology to business, but that line-of-business managers are having to make their own decisions about purchasing technology...
5/19/2009
MPx suite incorporates MapReduce architecture and parallel processing to handle up to one million records per second.
5/18/2009
The newly released version of NetWeaver BPM still lacks a lot of expected BPMS functionality, but it's focused on the features that SAP's customers said they needed most: human-centric BPM and an integrated process composition environment.
5/12/2009
Jon Schwarz, SAP Executive Board Member, gave the global press conference at SAPPHIRE this morning with a focus on SAP BusinessObjects Explorer (formerly Polestar) and how it helps customers to see, think and act clearly... Here's the strategy...
3/24/2009
Marion Cameron is a former developer, the best project manager who I've ever worked with, and was a tremendously calming and mentoring influence over my growing team of (mostly male) developers... She spent her younger years working on contract as a developer in other countries, including a stint in Vietnam while there was a little armed conflict going on there...
3/17/2009
Gartner had a good Webinar on software licensing and pricing as part of its series on IT and the economy. Software licenses are one place where enterprises can tighten their belts, both on-premise and software-as-a-service, but you need to have flexible terms and conditions in your software contract to be able to negotiate a reduction in fees...
2/16/2009
At Microsoft's FASTForward event in Las Vegas last week, Kirk Koenigsbauer outlined Microsoft's enterprise search vision and roadmap. These days, no one is making $1.2 billion technology acquisitions, but at last year's conference, the FAST acquisition was in progress; now Microsoft has had a year to work out where they're going with it.
1/28/2009
Gartner held a webinar today on emergency cost cutting in IT, featuring Kurt Potter. Gartner's been talking with a lot of their customers about the impact of the recession. Most are not in dire straits, but they are seeing some who are having to deploy emergency measures. There are lessons to be learned from the squeezing being done...
1/22/2009
In keeping with other recently installed change agents, Elise Olding of Gartner offers this advice on your first 100 days as a business process (BP) director. She breaks it down into what you should be doing and delivering in each of the first three months:
12/10/2008
I recently received an email from a friend with the subject line "Networking," informing her list of contacts that she had been laid off and was looking for work. I emailed back to ask if she had a profile on LinkedIn or any other sort of online resume... She responded "What is LinkedIn? Is it similar to Facebook?" Needless to say, she's not on either of those two very popular social networking sites.
11/13/2008
I attended a session at Software AG's recent Innovation World 2008 conference in which Cory Kirspel, VP of identity risk management at ChoicePoint, described how the company has created an external-facing solution using business process management, business activity monitoring and an enterprise service bus... The company found that BAM and BI were misunderstood, poorly managed and under-leveraged...
10/30/2008
Opening the second day of the Business Rules Forum, James Taylor and Neil Raden gave a keynote about competing on decisions. First up was James, who started with a definition of what a decision is (and isn't), speaking particularly about operation decisions that we often see in the context of automated business processes... Neil dug further into the agility imperative: rethinking BI for processes...
10/29/2008
Ron Ross kicked off this week's Business Rules Forum with a keynote called From Here to Agility; agility, of course, is one of the key reasons that you consider implementing business rules, whether in the context of BPM or other applications... He spoke convincingly about Tom Davenport's conclusion that automated decisioning will be the next competitive battleground for organizations...
10/23/2008
When Pegasystems invited me to attend this week's PegaWorld conference, I took a quick glance at the agenda and thought that it said that George Clooney would be speaking. I immediately accepted. On second look, I noticed that it was actually George Colony, founder and CEO of Forrester Research. The somewhat-less-famous George talked about business technology (BT) in the format of eight things that he would tell your CEO over coffee...
10/17/2008
Pegasystems has announced a business processs management "Platform as a Service" (PaaS) offering. My first thought on reading the phrase "internal cloud" was that Pega is just hitching a ride on the cloud bandwagon. There are definite cloud-like capabilities for individual projects, although not for the organization as a whole...
9/12/2008
At this week's Gartner BPM Summit, analyst Michele Cantera segmented BPM SaaS adopters into four categories: Pragmatists replacing departmental, on-premise apps; Beginners replacing low-end tools with simple utility apps; Masters weaving SaaS apps into an enterprisewide portfolio; and Visionaries replacing on-premise apps with SaaS wherever possible... She also presented this list of current BPMS SaaS vendors...
9/11/2008
At yesterday's lunch presentation at the Gartner BPM Summit in Washington DC, Alan Trefler (CEO of Pegasystems) discussed how it's possible to put business process management right in the hands of business users. There will be some IT oversight and support, of course, but you just have to convince the users, Tom Sawyer-like, that they really want to paint this fence...
9/9/2008
When you ask current users about what they want, they tend to only request workarounds within the constraints of the existing solution. The role of research is to disseminate knowledge about what is possible: the new paradigm for the future... You first have to educate the market on what's possible before you can start developing use cases.
9/5/2008
I've been excited about attending this weeks' BPM 2008: Milan conference for months since it's focused on the research that's happening in the field of BPM, rather than the usual vendor and analyst conference that I attend. As a prelude to the conference, there was a full-day workshops on various BPM topics, and I attended a session on BPM and Social Software. Here's the long list of potential applications...
8/13/2008
At the conclusion of Business Object's Influencer Summit yesterday, Jonathan Becher hosted a wrap-up Q&A with Doug Merritt, Marge Breya and Sanjay Poonen. Rather than attributing quotes to each executive, I've consolidated the responses on five topics:
8/13/2008
I was in rainy Boston yesterday at the Business Objects Influencer Summit... The event included a very process-oriented message (which explains why I'm here): using business intelligence to drive process efficiency, improve insight to close the gap between strategy and execution, and add flexibility to create new business processes that align operations to strategy.
7/22/2008
I was going to just link to Mike Kavis' post on the Top-10 Reasons Why People Are Making SOA Fail, but I wanted to added some of my own comments... Number 1 reason: they fail to explain SOA's business value. Kavis recommends (and I completely agree) starting with business problems first, specifically using BPM as the "killer app" to justify the existence of SOA.
7/11/2008
Here's a company that gets how marketing 2.0 works: Metastorm is publishing podcasts on iTunes (that is, you can get them without providing your personal information) and it also has a YouTube channel... More companies are realizing that blogging is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to new ways to interact with their audience.
6/25/2008
Fujitsu is releasing version 10 of its Interstage BPM, and I had a chance for an in-depth demo a few weeks ago in advance of the recent announcement. ...Most exciting, I think, is full support for multi-tenanting to allow for shared services and SaaS. Key new features in Studio V10 include...
6/18/2008
...The focus of the panel was on the adoption of micro-blogging in the enterprise (with a strong focus on Twitter)... Micro blogging allows us to exploit the power of weak ties. It changes the velocity of when we get to the value, or "a-ha", moment... Fitton live-tweeted her ideas on the advantages of micro-blogging in the enterprise...
6/11/2008
I had a great one-hour session here with Jeff Schick, VP of social networking at IBM, and Joan DiMicco who came to IBM after doing media studies at MIT and is one of the key people behind Beehive. There were only seven of us... giving us an opportunity to have an informal roundtable discussion: a sort of social networking nerd heaven.
6/10/2008
My first session here at Enterprise 2.0 is a keynote by Google's Rishi Chandra... The focus is cloud computing, and how the trends in consumer applications are starting to bleed over into the enterprise world. Chandra discussed four trends that will accelerate adoption of cloud computing among enterprises...
6/9/2008
Unlike the death-from-a-thousand-cuts method inflicted by IBM on FileNet's business process management suite, Oracle is more like the Borg: BEA is being assimilated, and fast... Oracle is doing exactly what I thought IBM should have done with FileNet: split up the product where it made sense and merge those pieces into similar teams that already exist...
5/21/2008
I recently had a chance to demo OpenSpan, which is one of the tools that you can consider for bringing those legacy apps into the modern age of composite applications. If you're like many, you have multiple, disparate apps - Windows, legacy, Web, whatever - operating as functional silos... Mashups can help you eliminate re-keying of data between apps...
5/6/2008
I had a chance one-on-one meeting with Wolfgang Hilpert, SVP of NetWeaver BPM, just after I attended an overview of SAP's BPM product... As I suspected, and wrote in my last post, SAP is not looking to compete in the general BPMS market for non-SAP customers; rather, they see SAP's tools becoming those of choice for SAP customers...
5/5/2008
I have one initial impression of SAPPHIRE: this conference is huge. More sessions run simultaneously than you'll find in total at most conferences. There are 30 official conference hotels. Wow... After a review of the massive schedule, I finally made it to a session: Ginger Gatling, SAP NetWeaver BPM Product Manager, giving an overview of the BPM component in SAP...
5/1/2008
Speaking at this week's "TUCON 08" TIBCO user conference in San Francisco, Christopher Ahlberg, founder of Spotfire and now president of that TIBCO division, discussed disruptive technologies transforming the BI platform - in-memory processes, interactive visualization, participatory architecture, mashups - and the prospect of linking those technologies to the event-driven world of classic TIBCO.
4/11/2008
Google exec Matthew Glotzbach made an analogy between SaaS applications and electricity, referencing Nicholas Carr's book The Big Switch and the shift from each factory generating its own power to centralized generation and sales of electricity as a service on the power grid... He also discussed five contributions of cloud computing...
4/8/2008
Blueprint, Lombardi's SaaS-based process discovery tool, now has 2,400 customer accounts in 88 countries. A major update was just released in which they've moved from just business mapping to a more complete BPMN modeler... clearly moving beyond the "toy" label that many other vendors have been applying...
3/25/2008
Honestly, if I hear one more middle-aged guy talk about how his kids shop/watch TV/live their lives on the Internet (implying, of course, that he still has his executive assistant print out his email for him), I will not be responsible for my actions.
3/24/2008
The model-driven approach and new SaaS-based offerings are sparking interest in business process management technology, but the recession may send demand over the top.
2/29/2008
Philip Bierhoff, Systems Manager at Procter & Gamble, spoke at last week's FASTforward conference about strategies to increase user adoption as business intelligence goes mainstream. P&G's Symphony project creates "decision cockpits": dashboards based on specific roles and corporate divisions, and including information ranging from traditional BI reports to documents to news...
2/27/2008
David Weinberger, author of "Everything is Miscellaneous," believes we need to unlearn what we think that we know about the best ways to organize information... He looks at how many projects require a much greater degree of control as they increase in size, but contrasts that with the Web, which has growth only because of the lack of control. Control doesn't scale; we just thought that it did...
2/13/2008
At last week's Gartner BPM Summit, Elise Olding moderated a panel on weaving BPM into the enterprise, with Eric Abecassis, Architecture and Integration Manager with Schlumberger, Jim Boots, Enterprise Architect at Chevron, and Kevin Morgan, Program Manager at Dolby... It was good to hear some success stories about how organizations are starting to become more process centric.
2/8/2008
Speaking at this week's Gartner BPM Summit, Jay Simons, VP of Marketing for BEA, presented the company's recent research results on the state of the BPM market, including a survey of 200-plus BEA customers... The results show a number of interesting trends indicating that CIOs and business leaders are focused on improving their processes... The top five trends are...
2/6/2008
I'm here in Vegas for Gartner's 5th BPM summit, and they're reporting about 1,000 attendees (though I'm not sure if that includes Gartner and vendors)... Analyst Janelle Hill gave us Gartner's big-picture view of BPM, and she seems to be hitting her stride as Gartner's face of BPM since Jim Sinur left... Her view of how BPM might change with any coming recession matches most views I've heard and agree with...
1/28/2008
Lombardi held an analyst conference call last week in advance of today's press releases - a relatively new format for Lombardi - to discuss their executive reorganization against the backdrop of their 2007 results and 2008 strategy. Rod Favaron, CEO (and, until last week, President) and Phil Gilbert, President (formerly CTO) gave us the update...
12/5/2007
Michael zur Muehlen of the Stevens Institute of Technology spoke about business processes and rules at the recent IIR/Shared Insights BPM conference. He started out with the bottom line on why you want to integrate process and rules: 1. simpler processes 2. higher agility 3. better risk management. Who wouldn't want this? Well, it turns out users don't like processes...
11/6/2007
Instead of simply capturing operational process statistics in a data warehouse for later analysis, Smart (Enough) Systems use that knowledge to inform business rules and adapt their guidance of decision-making process. By extracting the decisions from applications and manual procedures, and managing them within a decision management system, they can be applied consistently across the enterprise.
10/31/2007
There's a long list of verbs - adjust, approve, expedite, inspect, verify and many others - that tend to indicate that activities are non value-added and should be considered for elimination. Many of these exist because something wasn't done right the first time, and a lot of the the non-value-added activities can be cut if there are ways to reduce the error rates in the real-value-added and business-value-added activities.
10/25/2007
David Straus of Corticon gave an engaging presentation at this week's Business Rules Forum about BR and BI. He characterized BI as "understanding" and BR as "action." He started with the basic drivers for a business rules management system - agility (speed and cost), business control while maintaining IT compliance, transparency, and business improvement (reduce costs, reduce risk, increase revenue) - and then offered three use cases for rules-driven analysis...
10/24/2007
Keynoter Ron Ross predicted that no one will be talking about SOA at a major conference in 15 years, but they will be talking about business rules or decisioning; I certainly agree with the first point, and the second makes a lot of sense. When he said "we want our business processes to be smarter", it was like music to my ears... He talked about three trends toward a more balanced approach to decisioning...
10/19/2007
I recently had two government business process experiences: one good, one bad. The good one was with NEXUS, a joint program between the Canadian and American governments to allow frequent travelers to bypass long immigration line-ups... The bad experience was with the Indian consulate in Toronto and has killed my planned trip to speak at the SOA India conference in Bangalore in November...
9/27/2007
I'm attended a panel discussion here at the Forrester Technology Leadership Forum on the convergence of the three B's - business intelligence, business process management and business rules - featuring Mike Gilpin (EA and application development), Boris Evelson (BI) and Colin Teubner (BPM)... Gilpin sees BI as driving effectiveness in businesses, and the combination of BPM and BR as driving efficiency...
9/26/2007
In her opening keynote at this week's Forrester Technology Leadership Forum, analyst Connie Moore laid out four principles that 1. Business processes adapt to changing business conditions. 2. Applications evolve continuously while preserving process integrity 3. Processes, tasks and associated information always maintain context 4. Systems are unitary, information-rich and reflect the social needs of the business...
9/19/2007
Analyst Michael Smith's expertise is performance management, and he's found lately that business process improvement is a growing theme in that sector... Smith dispells the notion of best-practice business processes: processes are so different between different types of companies that there isn't a single best practice... He also asserts that business strategies are, in general, poorly defined, poorly understood and poorly executed...
9/18/2007
Analyst Bill Gassman says business activity monitoring (BAM) needs to be considered up front as processes are being design and implemented. He defines the goals of BAM: to monitor key objectives, anticipate operational risks, and reduce latency between events and actions. From an implementation standpoint, BAM is typically a real-time dashboard that's integrated with BPM in some way and provides alerts in the context of the processes within the BPMS...
9/18/2007
Her topic is "BPM: A Change from Business as Usual", taking a look at what's really new in BPM, how BPM can change the way a company operates, and some BPM use cases... She comes back to the phrase "design for change," which I've heard several times today already... This is, of course, the heart of business agility: if something isn't designed and built with the intention that it would be changed frequently, then you're not going to be changing it much.
9/17/2007
Analyst Janelle Hill started out with a great slide on the evolution of process improvement: from scientific management through computerized process flow to our current focus on flexible and adaptive BPM and the start of a focus on SOA, BAM and event-driven architecture... Interestingly, Gartner is bringing the focus back to the people in processes: putting the person-to- process interaction back at centre stage...
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