I saw a tweet today, and while I don’t remember it exactly, it went something like this: “You must be successful with SOA to be successful with the cloud.” My first thought was to write up a blog about the differences between infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), and software as a service (SaaS) and how they each relate to SOA until I realized that I wrote exactly that article a while ago as part of my “Ask the Expert” column on SearchSOA.com. I encourage you to read that article, but I quickly thought of another angle on this that I wanted to present here.

What’s the first vendor that comes to mind when you hear the words “cloud computing”? I’m sure someone’s done a survey, but since I don’t work for a research and analysis firm, I can only give you my opinion. For me, it’s Amazon. For the most part, Amazon is an infrastructure as a service provider. So does your success in using Amazon for IaaS have anything to do with your success with SOA? Probably not, however, Amazon’s success at being an IaaS provider has everything to do with SOA.

I’ve blogged previously about the relationship between ITIL/ITSM and SOA, but they still come from very different backgrounds, ITIL/ITSM being from an IT Operations point of view, and SOA being from an application development point of view. Ask an ITIL practitioner about services and you’re likely to hear “service desk” and “tickets” but not so likely to hear “API” or “interface” (although the DevOps movement is certainly changing this). Ask a developer about services and you’re likely to hear “API,” “interface,” or “REST” and probably very unlikely to hear “service desk” or “tickets”. So, why then does Amazon’s IaaS offering, something that clearly aligns better with IT operations, have everything to do with SOA?

To use Amazon’s services, you don’t call the service desk and get a ticket filed. Instead, you invoke a service via an API. That’s SOA thinking. This was brought to light in the infamous rant by Steve Yegge. While there’s a lot in that rant, one nugget of information he shared about his time at Amazon was that Jeff Bezos issued a mandate declaring that all teams will henceforth expose their data and functionality through service interfaces. Sometimes it takes a mandate to make this type of thinking happen, but it’s hard to argue with the results. While some people will still say there’s a long way to go in supporting “enterprise” customers, how can anyone not call what they’ve done a success?

So, getting back to your organization and your success, if there’s one message I would hope you take away from this, it is to remove the barriers. There are reasons that service desks and ticketing systems exist, but the number one factor has to be about serving your customers. If those systems make it inefficient for your customers, they need to get fixed. In my book on SOA Governance, I stated that the best way to be successful is to make the desired path the path of least resistance. There is very little resistance to using the Amazon APIs. Can the same be said of your own services? Sometime we create barriers by the actions we fail to take. By not exposing functionality as a service because your application could just do it all internally, in-process, we create a barrier. Then, when someone else needs it, the path of least resistance winds up being to replicate data, write their own implementation, or anything other than what we’d really like to see. Do you need to be successful with SOA to be successful with the cloud? Not necessarily, but if your organization embraces services-thinking, I think you’ll be positioning for greater success than without it.

Happy 2012..

Appian recently released our biggest update yet to the Google Android platform.  We have seen interest in Android surge from our clients and we are happy to announce that our Android mobile client is now at parity with our Apple iOS mobile offering.

For clients who use Appian’s Android version, you will notice that the interface is different from the Apple release and optimized to be friendly and familiar for Android users.  In addition, Appian Forms support has been updated on Android to support all the great features Apple users have enjoyed, such as intelligent pickers and rich media capture from the mobile camera and mic.

Appian has seen interest in Mobile BPM continue to surge with a growing list of expanded use cases and potential for process optimization.  Some Mobile BPM examples we are currently implementing include:  field engineering support, break-fix, field inspections, at home healthcare and nurse management, and mobile spend requests and approvals.

Demand for mobile access to critical business processes will grow for many more years as we all come to depend upon our mobile devices to perform more and more tasks previously only possible on our desktop/laptop computers.

For Appian customers, you can download and start using the latest version of the Appian Android mobile client from the Google Android Market.  For just the curious, try signing up for a free Appian trial and explore the Appian BPM Suite as well as this Android mobile client update.

Thanks,

Malcolm Ross

Director, Product Management

Gartner’s Jim Sinur recently predicted that 2012 will be “The Year of Intelligent Business Operations (IBO),” and stated that Intelligent Business Process Management Software (iBPMS) is the central enabling technology. Appian customers are among the vanguard of “leading edge organizations” Jim mentioned that are making IBO a reality today. This is because the innovations Appian has pioneered (Mobile BPM, Social BPM, Cloud BPM, real-time event architecture, in-memory analytics, extreme ease-of-use) are all crucial components to enacting an IBO strategy.

Click here to read a paper by Appian Principal Consultant Glenn Smith on “Intelligent Business Operations: BPM & Analytics in the Event-Driven Enterprise.”

Gartner first outlined the tenets of IBO in a mid-2011 report called “The Trend Towards Intelligent Business Operations.” The report says, “Intelligent business operations are a style of work in which real-time analytic and decision management technologies are integrated into the transaction-executing and bookkeeping operational activities that run the business. Intelligent business operations are becoming increasingly practical because of the growing amount of data generated by sources inside and outside the company, and because of the wide availability of software tools to process that data immediately.”

To be sure, comprehensive IBO requires more than an iBPMS exclusively. But by combining process, events, data and analytics, masking their collective power and complexity behind a simple social interface, and making it all universally accessible on any device platform, Appian gets you further down the IBO road than any other technology. And not just farther – we get you there faster, too. The rapid and broad BPM user adoption enabled by Mobile and Social is complimented by the delivery speed made possible by Cloud BPM and Appian’s drag-and-drop, zero-code development/composition.

Companies that have been using Appian software for years are evolving to programs and use cases that look exactly like Gartner’s IBO vision. We’re also finding that Mobile/Cloud/Social is helping “BPM newbie” organizations leap-frog to cutting edge deployments much more easily than in the past. Read Glenn’s article for a more thorough examination and some food-for-thought on what IBO might look like in your organization.

-Ben Farrell, Director, Corporate Communications

Global IT industry analyst firm Ovum has published its annual “Decision Matrix: Selecting a Business Process Management Vendor” report, a comparative evaluation of the top BPM software vendors. Appian has been named the #1 vendor on Ovum’s prestigious “Shortlist.” This is based on unmatched scores across Technology criteria (including a call-out of our innovation around Mobile BPM, Cloud BPM and Social BPM) and User Sentiment (i.e., making sure customers are happy and successful with our software).

The report places the top vendors in the “Shortlist” category, with others placed in “Explore” or “Consider” categories. We’ll have the report available as a download on our site shortly, but in the meantime, here are some stand-out quotes:

“Exceptional Technology and User Sentiment scores lead us to assign a ‘Shortlist’ rating to Appian, the only BPM specialist in the top Decision Matrix category.”

“Appian scores the highest for the technology dimension, beating behemoths such as IBM.”

“Appian’s User Sentiment score is remarkable, and unmatched by any other vendor with a ‘Shortlist’ rating.”

“Appian has made good use of contemporary user interface constructs and smartphone applications.”

“Cloud-delivered BPM is the other notable aspect of Appian’s portfolio.”

Being the innovation leader can sometimes be tricky, because while customers experience the real-world value, industry pundits can be slow to pick up on it. The BPM team at Ovum clearly understands how Appian is driving BPM software to new heights of enterprise value in the mobile and social age.

-Ben Farrell, Director, Corporate Communications

On the Forrester Enterprise Architecture Community site, Randy Heffner asked the question, “What should EA do for business agility?” In my two responses in the discussion, I emphasized that EA is all about decision support. Yes, you may create a future state roadmap, but what the organization winds up with is completely dependent on what projects the organization decides to execute, and then on how those efforts are executed. EA influences those decisions, but we’re not the ones making them.

So why is this post titled, “Deciding ‘Yes’ on EA”? In that same discussion, William El Kaim added the following:

Let me be real provocative, and state: EA is dead … It has been killed by architect themselves leaving in their ivory tower and their beautiful EA drawing tool that nobody uses and that contains outdated data when they are published.

You can read the rest of what William had to say on the Forrester site, but I don’t think it’s anything any of us practicing EA’s haven’t heard before. But there’s a very important point in William’s statement. If nobody uses what EA produces but EA themselves, that’s a big problem. Put simply, if we provide poor decision support, the organization will ultimately decide against EA.

Like most things in this world, there are far more ways to fail than there are to succeed. So what are some best practices for providing excellent decision support so that the organization will decide “yes” on EA?

1. Figure out who makes the decisions. Sounds simple, right? Not quite. I’d love to see a Forrester or Gartner survey on this one, but I’m willing to clarity and consistency on the decision making process is not a strength for most organizations. Regardless of the state of your decision making process, if you don’t have access to the people making the decisions, you have little to no chance of influencing them.
2. Figure out how they make their decisions. Note that I didn’t add, “and make them better.” Remember that they’re the one making the decisions, not you. Your role is to give them added information so that they can make the best decisions possible. In some cases, the whole reason for having the discussion may be so you can learn and incorporate that decision maker’s information into your guidance for other decision makers.
3. Make your information relevant to them. Don’t give them a bunch of models that are only meaningful to another EA. In the case of upward decisions, this usually means that the architecture implications have to have financial ties, or clearly alignment with business objectives. I’ve had success using capabilities in these discussions, and I think the current research would back that up. You must tailor your information to their needs. If they don’t understand it, it’s your problem, not theirs. They’re making the decision, not you.
4. Emphasize added insight, not oversight. This is very important for interactions with project teams. All too often, EA is positioned as the enforcer. Come before the review board and we shall assess your worthiness. I’m sorry, but a guy who spends 80% of his time writing code each day should be far more aware of the latest frameworks than the average EA. The role of the EA is bring enterprise and/or domain perspective to the effort. As soon as the project gets established, the project blinders go up, and it’s the job of EA to remove those blinders and add enterprise insight into the effort.
5. Don’t rely solely on artifacts, and where you must, make sure they are easily digestible. While many factors in an organization lead us toward email-based interactions of documents, try to have a face-to-face conversation about the guidance whenever possible. At a minimum, by walking someone through it, you at least knowing they’re actually reading some part of it. When you create the artifacts, get them to the point.
6. Be cautious about consulting models for EA.A consulting model for EA is great, right? When someone needs more information to make a decision, what do they do? They hire a consultant. So EA should be internal consultants, right? Well, not really. That may work in the short term, but it is a “I’m here when you need me” model, when you really want to always be a part of the process. Don’t turn down the consulting approach, as it can get your foot in the door, but make sure you turn it to something more systemic.

What other best practices (or worst practices) do you recommend in firmly establishing EA as a valuable resource in the decision making processes in the organization?

Discussions around customer service strategies have shifted from “customer management” to “customer engagement.” A recent piece in InformationWeek on  “Seven Ways IT Can Improve Customer Service” highlights this shift. The article, by Forrester Research senior analyst Kate Leggett, pays a lot of attention to process improvement and process consistency. Kate is a leading expert on customer service strategies, and a member of Forrester’s Business Process team, so this comes as no surprise. What is a little surprising is that she didn’t call out Mobile BPM and Social BPM more directly in her analysis. These components of Appian’s BPM software are playing a huge roll in the strategies our customers are rolling out to engage with their customers.

In the article, Kate talks about the importance of knowing your customer, knowing how they like to communicate, and providing a consistent experience across all possible channels. BPM software’s value in stitching together disparate enterprise silos is well established, but Social BPM extends that value to the new world of social media. One powerful aspect of the Appian Tempo social interface is that is can incorporate social channels like Twitter into a business event feed. This gives companies an easy way to know when its customers are talking about the company – and that knowledge can be fed directly into process so that appropriate action can be taken in real-time. With peer-to-peer social dialogue on the rise, corporate marketing is no longer the generator and controller of the message. What matters now is knowing what conversations are happening, and having the business agility to participate.

Social BPM is more than just “social” because in addition to enabling direct customer conversations and collaborations – which any social enterprise platform can do – it also provides the means to track those interactions, keep them as an audit trail in the customer case, and learn from them to improve the product and service experience.

Disintermediation of the message is only one part of the equation. There’s also the proliferation of media platforms. As Kate points out, “Your service experience should let customers start an interaction over one communication channel and complete it over another. To make this happen, CIOs must ensure that channels are not implemented in silos, but are integrated so that agents have a full view of all customer interactions.” We’re past phone and email. Consumers are increasingly using new channels – particularly mobile platforms. This is where Mobile BPM becomes vital to an integrated strategy. By providing a native mobile app to consumers that is tied to enterprise process – the same processes running the call centers and web service platforms – consistent cross-platform service becomes a reality, not a pipe dream.

This holistic process and data exposure is equally key to another of Kate’s main points: making sure service reps are armed with the data they need to deliver a stellar customer experience. “Customer service systems must be more than just the front end of a database of customer information and cases,” she says. “They should also be integrated with back office applications so that agents can retrieve real-time answers to questions such as ‘when did my order ship?’”

This is where real-time data access within mobile and social process is crucial. And not just for reps in the call center. Field service personnel need it. The field sales force needs it. Any employee who comes into contact with a customer needs it.

Mobile and Social BPM are integral to the customer service strategies of the future. They are lynchpins in moving from a “system of record” mentality to a “system of engagement” mindset that will exceed customer expectations.

-Ben Farrell, Director, Corporate Communications

You can download the artefacts here.
Documentation can be found here.

Have fun!

Release notes

On top of some optimizations, bug fixes and small improvements, these are the most important new features in jBPM 5.2.0.Final.

Core engine

• domain-specific service repository: the ability to import domain-specific services from a repository so you can immediately use them in your processes, e.g. twitter integration, FTP, web or REST service, etc. This is ideal for non-technical users to integrate with external services
  
• improved persistence support for multiple databases and backwards compatibility
• jbpm-test: new module that offers improved support for JUnit testing of processes, including the automatic setup of the necessary datasources and services on the fly
  
• support for Java7

Installer

• added support for JBoss AS7, which is now used as the default application server in the jbpm-installer

Web-based designer

• Integration with the domain-specific service repository
• Visual Process Validation: new features allows users to visually validate their processes at edit time
• Ability to view the process in ERDF, JSON, PDF, PNG, BPMN2, and SVG formats
• New Process Information section: contains information about the process, such as name, creation date, version, etc
• jBPM 3.2 Process Migration: new feature allows users to migrate existing jBPM 3.2-based processes to BPMN2
• Ability to import existing bpmn2 processes straight into designer
• Ability to create “sharable” process image, PDF, and ability to generate code for embedding designer in custom applications
• Support four boundary events
• Visual support for Text Annotations, Groups, and Lanes
• Support for sub-processes
• Update to latest Guvnor
  

Human task service

• introduction of the task service interface, and interface to interact with the (default) human task service (independent of the underlying communication pattern and technology)
  
• user group callback: easily integrate with your own service for user / group validation and user-group-management (which users are part of which groups)
  
• local task service: a local implementation of the task service that runs locally, next to the process engine, and (re)uses the same transaction of the core engine
  
• human task service war: deploy the human task service as a service on your application server
  

jBPM console

• updated to latest version of the JBoss BPM console
• console synchronizes with the process definitions (and other assets) from all packages in the Guvnor repository
  
• updated BIRT reporting to latest version

Eclipse plugin

• jBPM perspective: Eclipse perspective that simplifies workspace configuration
  
• more advanced jBPM project wizard

Packt, the folks publishing the JBoss ESB Begineers’ Guide later on this month, have a new survey for JBoss users and books.

The survey is here: http://snipurl.com/21212r0

Packt is overseeing a community survey for JBoss users to find out what support they need to aid and enhance their JBoss experience. Packt want to make sure they are making the right offers to all JBoss users and are providing what they need and want.

The survey is about all of JBoss projects (Drools, AS, jBPM and more). The questions will help to provide a snapshot of how the community finds support, how they self-educate, help each other and what information they need now.As Packt think the results will be of genuine interest to the JBoss community, the results of the survey will be published.

Not only that but every JBoss user that completes the survey will receive a 25% discount off their next JBoss eBook purchase from Packt

Appian is the sponsor of the Process Management track at IQPC’s Process Excellence Week Orlando, January 16-20 at the Buena Vista Palace, Lake Buena Vista, FL. On Day 2 of the conference, Appian Matt Calkins will deliver a presentation that should not be missed by anyone looking to understand how to make Mobile BPM, Cloud BPM and Social BPM work in their organization.

Matt’s presentation will illustrate the game-changing opportunities that mobile, cloud and social present for process innovation. He will also outline how Appian BPM customers are tapping the power of these emerging – and inevitable – technology models today to transform processes across their enterprise, through the supply chain, and out to customers.  Malcolm Ross, Appian’s Director of Product Management, will also be on-hand to give a short demonstration of the Appian BPM Suite in action.

Process Excellence Week, Orlando is not only the original but the largest annual meeting as part of PEX networks Global Summit Series. Running for over 13 year’s the meeting has a longstanding history in bringing together the Process Excellence community for exceptional networking, knowledge share and benchmarking. This year’s format is designed to enable you to bring together all of your process strategies as well as embed and execute them within your business. The conference will focus on the key themes of Process Improvement, Process Management, Process For Innovation, Strategy & Execution, Culture, and The Customer.

We hope to see you there!

-Ben Farrell, Director, Corporate Communications

Ellen Carney, lead insurance industry analyst at Forrester Research, has just published an insightful report on the changing tide for insurance companies. You can read an excerpt here. “Tech Opportunities in the North American Insurance Industry” details the transition from “business-as-usual” to what Ellen calls a “business-as-unusual” model where the customer experience takes precedence over the products and services an insurer provides. BPM software, particularly Mobile BPM and Social BPM, are key technology enablers for this transition.

The report uses data from a Forrester survey of insurance IT decision makers that highlights revenue growth as the #1 industry priority. Ellen cites that “innovation is viewed as a channel to revenue” because harnessing mobility and social into insurance business models will directly impact the customer experience. She says, “Mobile has changed the way we envision an insurance company…This change means that initiatives to deliver sales and customer service business capabilities must be mobiled. Social media are also maturing into a means to improve collaboration within the insurance ecosystem.”

This is precisely what Appian BPM is enabling our insurance customers to do. By putting full-featured process solutions as native apps on all popular mobile platforms, and utilizing a modern social interface, we are helping transform the industry. As Brian Flynn, global CIO at Crawford & Company has said, “The Appian BPM Suite, with its mobile and social capabilities, is truly an enabler that will change the way we work with our business partners and ultimately how we service our clients.”

What’s more, Appian also helps achieve the persistent objective of cost reduction by delivering those native mobile and social apps with ZERO additional development cost. This is above and beyond BPM’s traditional value in delivering, as the report says, “faster and cheaper processing of claims and disbursements, while ensuring that they’re paying claims the right way.”

Appian BPM precisely fits Ellen’s definition of the changing insurance IT landscape, where CIOs are moving from a limited focus on operations and cost containment to one in which “the role of technology is integral to support these new business disruptions.”

-Ben Farrell, Director, Corporate Communications