What it must have been like when instant gratification wasn't so instant...

I have been trying to find the exact quote that's attributed to Bill Gates about how technology always takes longer to catch on than you first expect, and then has a bigger impact than you expected. It's very true. It turns out that in order to really change something... to introduce a new thing... takes hard work and more time than you thought for everyone "to get it" (I used to use that phrase so much... and it's such crap...). A good idea, sure, but then it requires a lot of self-criticism, change and relentless execution. For longer than you want or expect, sometimes.

A couple of days ago, Ismael Ghalimi wrote a piece that said, basically, "SOA's Google numbers are up and BPM's are down. BPM sucks." He then goes on in a weird sort of way to suggest that BPM sucked because it has the wrong word in its title, or that it wasn't "cool." We need "Web 2.0" or "Office 2.0" to make "BPM 2.0" the Next Big Thing. Heck, if we mash it up enough and make it really, really cool maybe it'll even score a 2.1... maybe a 3-pointer from the half-court of Google's Calendar!!!! LeBron would endorse "BPM 3.0 Maaaasssshhhhhhhh-UPPPPPPPPP!!! I can hear Joe Tait screaming now. Or that soccer announcer... GOOOOOOLLL GOOOOOOLLL... BEEEEEEEPEEEEEE-EMMMMMMMMMMM THREEEEEEEEeeeeeee.

To fully tie off the pretzel, Ismael's logic then was something to the effect of how no vendor in the space has crossed the $20 million chasm, therefore the space was dead or dying or, well, who knows.

I don't know where he gets his financial data, but it's wrong. I don't know where he gets his "cool" data, but it's irrelevant (SOA isn't "cool", either. Most business folks I know think ROI is pretty cool, though). I don't know how he interprets his BPM data, but he's interpreting it wrong.

For example, I did my own Google analysis. Search for "service oriented architecture" you get about 80+ million linked items. But search on "business process management" and you get half a billion. Um, BPM 5x the size of the SOA market? Wow, SOA sure does suck... These numbers, like any other, have little relevance on the markets of SOA and BPM... they just show that data from Google is very difficult to turn into information without a LOT of other context.

That is why a man with numbers
Can put your mind at ease
We've got numbers by the trillions
Here and overseas

Two times two is twenty-two
Four times four is forty-four
When numbers get serious
They leave a mark on your door

- Paul Simon, When Numbers Get Serious

We Don' Need No Stinkin' MISO!
The competition is tough. The large stack vendors have lot's of marketing cash to throw at a problem, and it's sometimes in their interest to confuse the market. They do this by doing what they do, the triple-double of marketing: "we're almost there and by the way you don't need it anyway." So what? I assume that we're not going to actually argue over whether a company can effectively compete against a bigger company solely because it's hard.

Because, what if the market does need the new thing?

Look, this is not simply about technology. If it were, then regardless of his faulty facts, Ismael could be right. If this were a technology-led problem, then this market would not take off.

So let's not lose sight of what's really driving all this, which has nothing to do with any technology vendor or product per se (although it is largely about change writ large by the internet build-out). It takes no great insight to predict that over the next 10-20 years all of the following will be true:

• Companies will manage to their capabilities (i.e. "processes") more than to their functions. Functions will continue to play the HR role they play today, but the business will be run based on metrics against capabilities. This means massive investment in new tools to reflect this change must occur, new tools will be built. Why do you think Microsoft and Oracle have BI tooling so high on their list of strategic areas of investment? Because new business insights are needed to support the new business supply and delivery capabilties. But they are beginning to understand that it's not just the front end tooling... it's the data on the back end that also must be aligned to the new way of thinking. And that data is generated from a BPM-driven point of view (which, therefore, also requires tooling).

• Companies will build for CHANGE, not for a given product or service. And in order to change, companies will require massive new real-time VISIBILITY. Some so-called BPM companies, and all the big companies, would have you believe that BPM is about a computer language. Or about a "service orientation." Or about some other technology-based depiction. Wrong! The basis for the company of the 21st century is about gaining VISIBILITY into the levers of the business, so that CHANGE can be effected faster. The technology portion of these two demands, with twists and turns along the way, will largely play out as the pure-play BPM vendors see it playing out. There will be integrated environments with graphical views of discovering, developing and executing processes, and round-tripping of real-time process data fed back into those views. The key enablers here are CHANGE and VISIBILITY. If you're hung up on BPEL, or any other technical thing, you're onto the wrong thing. BPM is about CHANGE, and it's about VISIBILITY.

• Change is the result of faster visibility, even more than faster technology. There's a big debate about BPEL and BPMN round-tripping. This will become irrelevant as BPEL becomes known for what it is, which is, at best, the SOA orchestration language. Nothing to do with BPM. The real interesting BPM-based round-tripping will be about round-tripping real-time process instance data into modeling simulation and optimization tools. That's interesting because it serves the business, not the technologists. It sheds light on the real purpose behind BPM... to change how we manage processes! This is where ROI will be defined, measured, and improved. The whole hubbub around process tools is ultimately a means to the end-game: the real TLA that's driving BPM is ROI, not SOA.

• Companies will incorporate technology much more heavily in the business, while also erecting more defined interfaces into the part of the business's technology that is complex. Think of the telephone network as an analogy. All the infrastructure will be in place and maintained by technologists, like today (the technology won't be like today's, but the management of it will). While at the same time, tools, like phones, will be given to the business to do with "as they please." That is, as the tool allows.

An Analogy Worthy of Tom Friedman
In this world, BPM is the phone, and SOA is the infrastructure. BPM must provide a highly agile "device mentality" upon which the "last mile" of enablement is given to the business. You might think this sounds trite, for example you have a simple device (say, an Outlook-based way to define a process flow)... and that's feeding your BPM-based process intelligence system. It's like a telephone that can easily be configured to take high res pictures or low res pictures. The telco doesn't care what you do with that phone, because the interfaces to the hard bits are defined and locked down.

But it can also get very complex there in the last mile. For example, Blackberry is a huge platform yet RIM has no access to telco infrastructure... it just uses standards-based pipes. BPM isn't a toy any more than the BlackBerry and its BlackBerry Enterprise Server is a "phone."

The point of this is simple... Business Process Management is the technology piece of a long-term shift in how businesses run themselves AND how they embed technology into themselves. SOA isn't "the answer" any more than one of today's pure-play BPM vendors is "the" answer. We are all pieces in a puzzle, and the puzzle's a long way from being finished. We're on a journey, but even at this early stage, it is clear that SOA and BPM have two very different goals: SOA is about the [re-]orientation of technology to reflect today's (and hopefully tomorrow's) consumption patterns. BPM is about defining that consumption. You can choose to do SOA, but if you choose not to do BPM, you'll not get that last mile.

People in the blogosphere are way too impacted by the raw data of some random Google statistic. But the world at large isn't. At Lombardi, we're seeing a healthy interest in learning about how technology can help with the change that's coming. Our customers don't really buy into a lot of the mumbo jumbo of "the market;" they're more interested in the real world, as it is. They ask: How do your tools help us deal with the changes we're faced with? How does this "new" model play out when tested against the immutable business principles demonstrated from Adam Smith to Peter Drucker, through Al Sloan and up to Welch? Where does today's BPM fit in that? And what does tomorrow's BPM - whatever it's called - look like?

It takes a long time to change the world. But it's a lot of fun. And it's pretty cool.

So wrap me, wrap me
In the shelter of your arms
I am ever your volunteer
I won't do you any harm
I will love you innumerably
You can count on my word
When times are mysterious
Serious numbers
Will always be heard

- Paul Simon, When Numbers Get Serious
(recorded at about 72 BPM) (oops, I just skewed another statistic, didn't I....)

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