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Remaking BPM in the Cloud Agile business practices and social media—along with increasingly powerful cloud suites—are refocusing business process management in the cloud. Primarily used as a way to confront infrastructure expenses, the technology has found a new home in application development.

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The New Normal

Business process management in the cloud is no longer seen as a new, perhaps even frightening way to manage important business processes. By now, it’s widely considered the new normal. Organizations have already ben-efited from the technology, using it to more effectively access and contribute to company information.

Mobile devices and social business develop-ments have proven the benefits of BPM in the cloud don’t end there. In this three-part guide, explore trends in the BPM market and learn how to use open source BPM in the cloud while avoiding unnecessary blunders.

Maxine Giza, site editor for SearchSOA, discusses the agile business practices push-ing organizations toward the cloud. While concern about infrastructure costs was the original business driver, BPM suites over time have come in handy in other areas too—like in application development environments.

Vendors intend to take advantage of this by providing services for mobile, cloud environ-ments, according to experts.

Adoption of open source BPM platforms and the cloud services that leverage them contin-ues apace. According to IT journalist George Lawton, vendors are rolling open source BPM frameworks into cloud-based services in the hopes of lowering common business process management hurdles.

Steve Weissman puts the kibosh on any expectations that cloud BPM is a one-stop business process resolution in the final story in this guide. He lays out guidelines for ensuring BPM success and offers up a list of important dos and don’ts for moving to business process management in the cloud. n

Brein MatturroManaging Editor

SearchSOA

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Agile Business Marks Shift in Cloud BPM

Enterprise architects first used the cloud to mitigate business process manage-ment infrastructure expenses. Nowadays they are finding ways to use it for other things, too, such as application development, automation, collaboration and dynamic case management.

Organizations from small to large have ben-efited from BPM in the cloud already, but a change in just what those perks are is taking place, according to Craig Le Clair, an analyst at Forrester Research. A shift in cloud platforms is emerging as a driver toward business agil-ity, the practice of taking a flexible approach to operations.

“It’s a movement toward Salesforce, Google Cloud and Microsoft Office 365,” Le Clair said. “These [vendors] are creating really robust ecosystems” that boast capabilities designed to make businesses more agile. In such environ-ments, it’s possible to download and try busi-ness applications before buying them. This

allows for easier data integration and helps avoid headaches associated with on-premises work streams, he added.

“The first phase of the move to the cloud was really around avoiding infrastructure cost, but now it’s business agility,” Le Clair said. In a cloud platform, data is more available than ever, he said, noting that organizations don’t have to worry about scalability and data integration as much.

TRENDING IN BPM

Once an organization has decided to go with a certain cloud platform, it is more inclined to use the tools available in that ecosystem, according to Le Clair. “The question is whether the traditional BPM players, the Pegas and the Appians and so forth, will have as much value in helping coordinate that inevitable movement toward cloud platforms,” he added.

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That isn’t the only change taking place with BPM suites. Carl Lehmann, analyst at 451 Research, has noticed that companies buy a BPM suite to solve one problem and then real-ize it also serves as a good application devel-opment environment. “Within a year or so of

acquiring the suites, they [companies] would build six, 10, 12 business process applications,” he said. “BPM suites are replacing internal application development environments within enterprises.”

Some vendors have taken note of this move-ment. One of the early vendors to attempt to reach a broader community of developers and users heading toward the cloud was IBM, which began to offer BPM as a service more than a year and a half ago, Lehmann said. Smaller vendors, such as Nintex and Apperian, are also considered players in the market.

Another trend taking place is the move toward automation, said Susan Eustis, presi-dent, CEO and co-founder of WinterGreen Research. “When you think of BPM you think of manual process, but in fact, an awful lot of manual processes are being automated,” she noted. Some automation has taken place for things like invoice processing.

THE LEFTOVERS

While a lot of the cost savings from BPM have been the result of outsourcing people, those who are left at an organization have to handle more problems they might not be familiar with, Le Clair said. That is why some BPM vendors are moving toward dynamic case management, which is designed to streamline and automate work on a case-by-case basis. “While there are a lot of processes out there needing automation, the drivers are more around creating the kind of agility needed to deal with potential disruptors that are coming,” he said.

What is pushing the interest in how employ-ees work together? Organizations are revisiting

“ BPM suites are replacing internal application development environ-ments within enterprises.”

—CARL LEHMANN, analyst at 451 Research

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collaboration and collaborative work models because of mobile devices and social media, said Lehmann, who refers to this as social busi-ness. “Social business is driving application design, SaaS services, and the way in which companies automate both structured processes and unstructured collaborative relationships,” he said.

It’s not enough just to know what the indus-try trends are; IT professionals need to take advantage of new use cases. Some companies place an emphasis on operations while others

zero in on the customer, for example. “It’s good to understand the context in which all of these investments are being made,” Lehmann said. “That context is represented by a company’s business strategy.”

Le Clair concurs, noting technology manage-ment teams need to help businesses govern the cloud. “[They need] to reallocate the resources from managing infrastructure to helping the business impose solutions with apps from the more service-orchestrated cloud environment,” he said. —Maxine Giza

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Open Source BPM Offers Mixed Blessings

Today, more domain experts with exper-tise in a particular industry or process are tak-ing open source tools and building on top of them to sell their capabilities as a third-party service. Open source business process manage-ment frameworks like Colosa’s ProcessMaker, Bonitasoft’s Bonita BPM, Red Hat’s JBoss BPM, Intalio|bpms and Eclipse’s Stardust are being rolled into cloud-based services. This open source approach, and the power of the cloud, can lower the barriers to entry for working with BPM concepts.

The vision is that this will allow experts in a particular domain, such as medical insur-ance billing, to create a business process for a specific industry. The end users only have to pay for use of these services, rather than the high startup costs typically associated with BPM platforms. “Those guys would never have installed a BPM solution because the tooling was too expensive and complicated,” said Marc

Gille, vice president of product management at SunGard Financial Systems, which is sponsor-ing the Stardust platform.

An expert in a field like dental billing could develop an underlying template for this kind of process in the cloud that can be offered as a service for a nominal fee. In this way, the hur-dle can be low enough that the process will be adopted by a much larger audience, Gille said. In SunGard’s case, the goal is not so much to make money off the BPM technology directly but to build out the underlying infrastructure that integrates with other SunGard services.

THE CASE FOR CUSTOMIZATION

Other sponsors of open source BPM plat-forms are focused more squarely on deriving revenues directly from the BPM platforms and cloud services that leverage them, said Brian Reale, CEO and co-founder of software

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company Colosa. The attraction to process experts is that open source platforms, like Colosa’s ProcessMaker, are more extensible than proprietary BPM tools.

In the case of ProcessMaker, the underly-ing tool is built on top of the Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP stack. The underlying tool can be extended by programmers familiar with PHP, which makes it easy for developers to add integrations with various applications and cloud services. “Understanding the code is a big thing and a barrier to entry for many BPM tools,” Reale said. This approach makes it easier for a company to extend a BPM tool through APIs and through PHP.

A number of domain experts are able to leverage the underlying ProcessMaker platform for a variety of domains. Furthermore, the open source nature of ProcessMaker can benefit from the shared development of the community supporting the platform.

While an organization could leverage an open source tool like ProcessMaker to offer a com-peting BPM service, most mature organizations don’t. Establishing a relationship with the open source BPM provider can put these users on a

fast track to resolving technical issues, reduc-ing internal IT staff, and then quickly turn around changes.

While open source allows more sharing of connectors and user interfaces, there is less sharing of business processes, said Mac Mc-Connell, vice president at Bonitasoft. Be sure to do research before betting on a better busi-ness process.

“Every organization thinks they have the secret sauce on a different process. In reality, most don’t,” McConnell noted. The domain expertise is not shared as widely as it could be between organizations and BPM suite vendors.

DON’T GIVE AWAY THE FARM

Process experts need to strike a balance between improving the underlying tool and integrations without giving potential competi-tors a leg up in their specific domain. In the case of ProcessMaker, the software is licensed under the Affero General Public License. Improvements to the underlying software that are commercialized are mandated to be fed back into the platform.

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However, original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) are free to create APIs to the platform outside the scope of the platform. This allows them to innovate while maintaining a lead on new entrants into their specific market. In addition, they can leverage their existing rela-tionships with suppliers in a particular process.

Getting these relationships up and running smoothly can take time to set up and keep run-ning smoothly. An OEM, for example, might develop an API for integrating ProcessMaker to an enterprise resource planning or content management system. One approach to keep an advantage is to develop custom plug-ins into the framework of the underlying tool, said Doug Lee, president of Resultares.

Resultares has developed a number of bolt-ons to ProcessMaker that makes it difficult for other companies to get into the same business. “Drug testing and background checking APIs are not difficult. However, it is difficult dealing with vendors to do this,” Lee explained. “We

have worked to make it as streamlined as pos-sible, which would make it challenging for oth-ers to make an end-run behind us.”

Adding features like credit card billing, sig-nature capture and automation to back-end office systems on its clients’ existing applica-tion set would create other barriers for poten-tial competitors.

PUTTING CLOUD CONCERNS TO REST

A good practice for those interested in sharing a domain expertise with a specific field indus-try is to provide a single point of contact for technical billing issues. Otherwise, things could grow more complicated. For example, Form-Share provides a single point of contact for educational institutions, explained Matt Ross, CEO of FormShare. The company has a license through Colosa to put the ProcessMaker soft-ware within Resultares’ own infrastructure-as-a-service instance, which is in turn carved up

“ Every organization thinks they have the secret sauce on a different process. In reality, most don’t.” —MAC MCCONNELL, VP at Bonitasoft

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and separated for its individual customers.When a problem occurs, FormShare’s cus-

tomers call the company directly for support. When these can’t be solved directly, FormShare works with Colosa staff to resolve more seri-ous technical issues. FormShare also provides a single integrated bill based on licensing and transaction fees to its users, which reflects any licensing fees and support fees paid to Colosa.

A big concern with moving to the cloud is the potential for security vulnerabilities and privacy leaks. In many cases, smaller organi-zations may not have a high level of sophis-tication in managing information on its own systems. Organizations may feel more confi-dent about these issues when the information is stored locally.

One way domain experts help allay these concerns is to open up the process and infra-structure behind its service to third-party security experts. This kind of audit trail helps put to rest concerns from users.

“A lot of their data is sensitive, and they want to make sure it is well taken care of and pro-tected,” Ross said. To address these concerns, FormShare contracts with an outside company

to audit its security practices and systems, which includes an annual security test.

A commitment to open source isn’t neces-sary to share expertise with others, however. There are opportunities to build businesses

sharing expertise on top of proprietary plat-forms as well. E. Scott Menter, vice president of business solutions at BP Logix, said his company has plenty of partners building sys-tems on top of the BP Logix platform for verti-cal markets—something he expects to become more common.

“If you can build these on top of a BPM solu-tion without coding, your life will be simpler,” Menter said. “The packaged industry apps are going to disappear except for complex special-ties. We will provide the glue between virtually anything.” —George Lawton

Organizations concerned with potential cloud security vulnerabilities and privacy leaks may feel more confident when information is stored locally.

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MIGRATION

Don’t Be Bewitched by Cloud BPM

If a company decides to move its business processes to the cloud, there are a few things that must be accomplished beforehand.

First, there’s nothing magic about cloud BPM. It improves the efficacy of business processes. If they’re crummy now, they’ll be crummy in the cloud, too.

Second, the cloud improves the quality of process data. If there are mistakes, omissions or duplications now, they will be in the cloud, too.

Third, the processes aren’t actually going anywhere—they’ll still be taking place in and around the organization, tended to and partici-pated in by employees and their collaborators. The supporting software, however, will be run on somebody else’s server, not the company’s, and the ramifications of that are potentially quite beneficial.

This means that business processes are still the enterprise’s responsibility, and there’s

nothing about offloading the execution engine to a cloud provider that will change this. How-ever, there are dos and don’ts that can ease the transition.

Here are just a few to get the project started:

■n DO spend the time and effort to study and improve the targeted business processes before executing them in the cloud. Com-panies will have to study them anyway to specify the resources and performance tar-gets required by the provider, so why not get processes to run better at the same time?

■n DON’T migrate processes just because it’s pos-sible. Figure out which ones need the most attention—consider aging technology, work-force expansion or reduction, cost control, et cetera—and make them the primary focus.

■n DO spend the time and effort to clean up

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data—process rules, user directories, et cetera—before moving it. Companies do this before migrating their data to another in-house system, so why wouldn’t they do it before migrating to the cloud?

■n DON’T move everything all at once—and don’t move everything.

■n DO test the migrated processes before going live to ensure operational goals are under-stood and, perhaps more important, to ensure that initial expectations are met or exceeded. Also, use nonessential or dummy data in case something goes awry.

■n DON’T just assume the new cloud BPM system will work with existing solutions any better than the old on-premises one did. Business processes have a nasty propensity to inter-sect and overlap, so be sure issues related to integration and interoperability are properly addressed.

■n DO communicate with users before, dur-ing and after the migration takes place. This

should be common practice with any tech-nology change effort a company undertakes. The more comfortable they are with any new interfaces or procedures they’re given, the better off the company will be in terms of its ability to meet chartered objectives.

■n DON’T forget to set some measures of success before getting started—and to collect metrics of all kinds once the migration is underway. Things like system performance, process completion time, error rates and financial returns are all fair game, and it’ll be impossi-ble to know whether the migration was worth it unless the costs and benefits are accounted for. Finally, compare the result with the pre-determined target.

Though listed with cloud migration in mind, these tips are worth heeding whether or not a company plies that route. With any luck, com-panies will already be on board with most or all of them, and will understand that there’s nothing magic about cloud BPM when it comes to doing the job the way it ought to be done.

—Steve Weissman

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ABOUT THE

AUTHORS

MAXINE GIZA is site editor for SearchSOA. Before joining TechTarget, Giza worked as a freelance Web producer for a Boston-area news station and has several years of experience managing and writing Web content. Email her at mgiza@techtarget.com or follow her on Twitter: @Maxine_Giza.

GEORGE LAWTON is a journalist based near San Francisco. Over the last 15 years, he has written more than 2,000 stories for publications about computers, communica-tions, knowledge management, business and health. Email him at glawton@glawton.com.

STEVE WEISSMAN is principal consultant at Holly Group and an instructor on process and information management best practices. He also is president of the Associate for Information and Image Management’s New England chapter and holds AIIM’s Certified Information Professional designation. Email him at sweissman@hollygroup.com.

Remaking BPM in the Cloud is an e-publication of SearchSOA.com.

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