Here's the link to Bruce Silver's post on "BPM 2.0".

Hi Bruce,

Nice post although why do we need another "2.0" moniker? I'll bet Tim O'Reilly is kicking himself... for what it's worth, I agree with most of your post... but there is one area I'd like to challenge and comment on now.... item 6 (price as a component of BPM 2.0).

(Now, of course, since Lombardi doesn't give away free software, I am open to the attack that I write this because I don't qualify... but I'll let 'er rip anyway...)

Web 2.0 doesn't mean "free!" Neither should any so-called BPM 2.0. Beyond simply looking at the "manifesto for all 2.0 namespaces," or this article in Slate, look at the great business models and tools that define the term. Salesforce.com is a great example of a Web 2.0 application... it's not free. It's not free to sell something on eBay, but I'd argue that the selling experience is clearly Web 2.0. And what about Google? We buy ad words at Lombardi, and it is definitely a Web 2.0 business model and experience... but it's not free. (As a sidebar, these Web 2.0 solutions aren't open-source, either. But that's another fallacy to blog about another day...)

I believe the internet-generation of BPMSs should mean "low barriers to entry." And while a barrier may be price, it is not the barrier that B/W 2.0 should remove. Software license price isn't even a principal barrier to entry into business process management.

In fact, I've been in enterprise software for almost 25 years and I have _never_ had a client or customer say that price was even the main barrier to their ability to adopt, use and extend any piece of software. I've heard them say that the value received didn't exceed the cost but, as I have argued to Ismael, this is true for cheap software wholly as often as the expensive kind - maybe moreso.

The costs of adoption, use and extension are almost trivially impacted by the license fees paid for software. The costs of outlay lie in human services required to build and maintain the solutions. And the costs of opportunity are in the time forfeited due to a wrong choice. Business understands this.

So, while I agree with your bullet "BPM 2.0 eliminates barriers to get started," I disagree that this translates primarily to "price," or that price is even an important barrier faced when trying to make a BPMS deployment successful.

Picking the right BPMS for your needs will eliminate more barriers to success than simply choosing a cheap one.

The principal barriers to entry that Web 2.0 has removed are (a) access and (b) ease-of-use. If there is such a thing as "Web 2.0," then I'd submit that there really hasn't yet been a "BPM 2.0" platform released. None of the current offerings truly embrace the internet as a delivery vehicle - which is the key innovation of Web 2.0 - despite the use by many of us of internet technologies. The next breakthrough in BPM will address this, and we will begin to see the promise of BPM fulfilled: Business users designing, controlling, optimizing and changing their businesses en masse. It's a non-trivial problem, because of the integrated nature of processes and behind-the-firewall systems, but initial solutions are coming.

Cheers.... and glad to see your new, dedicated blog!

Phil

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