Tucon 2013 in Vegas: Tibco and Their Clients are Transforming Business Models

Tibco really gets Intelligent Business Operations(IBO) and is adding to it's business platform in significant ways. Meanwhile Tibco's clients are delivering business bang with event driven process focused applications with visual business outcomes. It was very encouraging to hear one client after another tell a story of big business impact leveraging differentiating business function.

Tibco is adding wider pipes to handle a greater level of patterns, events and big data opportunities, they are working on technologies that will help clients transform with a better mobile experience. This means Tibco is leveraging streaming real time events to search for business opportunity and threat patterns. The ideas is to assemble predictions and potential actions based on these streaming event patterns. Imagine this applied to your personal health by predicting health events. By injecting nano technology into your blood stream that could detect chemical changes, you could be notified ahead of time that your were close to a heart attack through notification. Besides this great leverage of event patterns, Tibco is rolling out better and mobile visual metrics, a combination of  big data and "in memory" data/events and a supercharged business process management capability. While there was a big emphasis on infrastructure sessions, there were great tracks around poly analytic approaches and innovative use of technology to leverage for organizations.

The impressive list of clients ready to share success included Nielsen, Royal Caribbean, Kroger and Proctor & Gamble. Each had it's own version of Tibco leverage, but it is clear there is transformation going on leveraging intelligent business operations guided by great decisions on top of a resilient infrastructure.

Net; Net: Tibco has a mature base of technology, that is positively evolving and clients leveraging that base for business transformation.

iBPMS Expo Delivers a Side by Side Comparo

I was fortunate to be invited by BPM.COM to speak at the iBPMS Expo on the trends in Intelligent Business Operations (IBO) and the characteristics of processes that make them intelligent.  This is important because organizations need to compete with speedy results. Intelligent processes have the business functions and features to help businesses deal with the pressures for profitability today. What I really liked about the iBPMS Expo was the access and ability to drill into each vendors offering using a common use case. This years use case revolved around revenue generation with an intelligent account opening process. There also awards given onsite, even though I had to leave the event before that occurred.    

Businesses are in a Battle to Lead in Revenue Per Hour Worked / The Normalized Measure

 Nearly Every Business Resource will Need to be Operating at an Ever Rising Level of Productivity

 Nearly Every Internal Action Will Need to Be Viewed in the Light of Business Outcomes

 Nearly Every Action or Pattern of Actions in the Business Context Will Be Ascertained for Opportunity or Threat

 Nearly Every Decision Will be Made in the Light of Conflicting Goals

 Nearly Every Process Will Have be More Intelligent 

 

   

BPM is Not Dead: Process Management is Alive and Well.

Every other year, someone writes an article stating "BPM is dead". Well, the facts do not support this theory, but BPM is transforming to something better. Bigger scopes and new features are happening. Might we call it a nice new name to make it sound new and shiny? I'll let others do that as this is above my pay grade.

BPM Benefits are Real:

I have been privileged to see many completed BPM projects and successful programs and the is a resounding positive track record. I have heard of few failures, so I am convinced the benefits are there and I have seen case studies that deliver multiple benefits from the list below:

Proven Revenue Lift

Proven Cost Containment

Proven Time to Market Delivery

Proven Innovation

Proven Visibility

Proven Accountability

Proven Adaptability

There is a shift going on in organizations from a cost savings push to a revenue generation set of efforts. We need to let our executives know that BPM does help lift revenue while saving costs. IT folks are way too aimed at saving costs alone. This has to change.

BPM Vendors Are Consolidating:

While the overall market is growing north of 13%, by conservative measures and estimates, the number of vendors are going down. This is normal in all markets. There a winners and losers and some of the early players get bought as the market plays out successfully. This is not a sign of problems; it is normal. In fact new players are still merging as niche geographical players.

Winning BPM Vendors are Doing Well:

I am aware of several BPM vendors with strong momentum despite not having a new and shiny label. The winners are leveraging the shiny terms inside their architectures. There are many examples of social, mobile, cloud, Internet of things, adaptive flows, real time, complex events, poly-analytic and big data features being leveraged. There are even examples of Agent Oriented BPM out in the market today.

Processes are Taking on Larger Scopes and More Complexity:

Because of these proven BPM benefits, organizations are moving forward with more ambitious process efforts that are successfully crossing organizational boundaries to the level of supply and value chains. I have seen many innovative and business model differentiating processes roll out in the last few years. I expect even more case studies.

Net; Net:

"BPM is dead" seems a shallow call to me based on the facts. BPM may not be shiny and new, but BPM and the BPM vendors deliver. Let's not be hysterical :)  IT and the IT prognosticators want shiny new names to get funds. Business professionals do not, so BPM works for them.

Magical Transformations are Scary, but Incremental Transformation Reduces Risk

Business and process transformations are not magical like in the video below, but they are now possible in an incremental way. See some interesting visual transformations here  http://vimeo.com/m/75260457 That was pretty mind blowing, but the risk of business transformation can be mitigated by leveraging the incremental aspects of business process management (BPM) and Agent technologies.



There are some real practical approaches to accomplish incremental transformation. See http://jimsinur.blogspot.com/2013/07/incremental-transformation-is-here-today.html
These are not theoretical marketing ideas, organizations have accomplished transformation using some or all of the principles documented in this blog posting. Other organizations have created innovative parallel processes in green field (new) situations to test out new transformation approaches.

How BPM Helps: 

BPM not only has adaptability features that supports incremental change, but BPM is designed to hand the keys of change to the business professionals. BPM configuration and development environments are designed to encourage business to take the lead on the business design supported by process. The collaborative nature of both the configuration and process execution environments of BPM leads to easier change. The more intelligent BPM technologies become; the more transformation will be enabled and attempted. Read more about intelligent processes  http://jimsinur.blogspot.com/2013/05/measuring-cumulative-intelligence-of.html

How Agents Help: 

Agent Oriented (AO) approaches are even more conducive to change than BPM. Combined (aoBPM) creates a more dynamic BPM. See http:/ /jimsinur.blogspot.com/2013/09/harnessing-business-complexity-with.html and some of my other posts for emerging agent capabilities. Agents, in pure form, are autonomous and self organize around business situations and dynamically create successful process patterns guided by governance policies and constraints.

Net; Net:

Organizations will no longer be able to avoid transformations, so education on coping approaches and technologies are a must. True leadership will pursue these emerging aoBPM approaches that are supported by social, mobile, big data, events, poly-analytics and cloud technologies.

Agents Can Effectively Bid for Process Activity

Agents are intelligent by nature therefore they can bid on process activity. This gives the process director more options as they seek to deliver ever increasing value and business results. In fact a process director could set up an agent to govern the bidding process for agent selection leveraging policies and constraints that could change dynamically. This encourages a competitive environment with resource performance monitoring.

Agents Provide Heterogeneity:

Agents can be software or humans See http://jimsinur.blogspot.com/2013/09/agents-have-power-of-intelligent-and.html . More importantly agents allow for more precise selection for the business goals that are in effect at any particular moment in time, assuming proper measures of success are established and captured.

Agents Free Up Investment Funds:

Since the agents leveraged are already trained for their specific tasks, organizations do not have to invest in skills development unless the organization considers the skills necessary to own in it;s own agents. This takes the idea of out-sourcing and super-charges it. This is only true, however, if proper measures are established and tracked (including quality).

Agents Allow for Better Capacity Management:

Agents can be quickly cobbled together for business expansions driven by new campaigns. Agents can be quickly dismissed as business winds down as well. Both of these actions can be accomplished in a time to market fashion.

Net; Net:

Agents allow for great flexibility for changing business conditions and can be managed dynamically through bidding. With proper performance measures we can avoid some of the downside of past sourcing models.

If You Think Process Management is Difficult, Check This Out

One of my buddies is a skater(Street name of Don Ho) that rolled with the likes of Tony Hawk and the Dog Town Boys pointed this gem out. I keep trying to explain what I do for a living and how hard BPM is to get done right. It works for about 5 minutes and then he shows me some really difficult skater/surf moves. Well he pointed me to the video below. After you watch it, you will say "BPM is a piece of cake"  :)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tSnfO15cAHE

A Wave of Distributed Intelligence is on the Horizon

I would encourage you to check out Intelligent Business Operations(IBO)  and the Intelligent Business Process Management Suite (iBPMS) in detail, if you want better business outcomes in a time to market fashion. One of the best ways to do that is to attend the iBPMS Expo in Chicago starting on October 14th. If you want a quick sound byte to explore intelligent processes and agents, listen to the interview below:

Image From www.james-sinur.com

The Future of Intelligent BPM is Now

http://bpm.com/interview-with-jim-sinur.html

You can read more by accessing Gartner research on the topic, read my blog and consider ordering the following book: http://mkpress.com/aoBPM/