"***** FIVE ASTERISKS! Brokeback Process redefines the corporate genre! 40 years in the wilderness and, now, a path has been illuminated. Business and IT can collaborate, openly, for the first time!"

-Robert Eger, Duluth Register

[IN HIS OFFICE - ENNIS IS STARING AT HIS COMPUTER WALLPAPER, A PICTURE OF HIMSELF, JACK AND THEIR TEAM FROM A COMPANY OUTING FOUR YEARS AGO...]

It had been four years since they'd seen each other. Four long years. In that time, Ennis had walked the straight and narrow, using the traditional techniques. Techniques that wouldn't get him fired, he told himself. Techniques that technologists would, in fact, honor him for using. Java. C#. PERL. He'd even tried mixing them up, using many of these at once. But still he remembered the words Jack used the last time they saw one another. "The world's not ready for it yet, but there's a day coming, soon, when you and I can work together."

And, now, Jack had sent word. Ennis received the Outlook invite three days ago. And today was the meeting.

Jack! Even the name sent shudders up Ennis' spine. What a heady time that was. "Was it only four years ago?" he wondered. Yes, only four years...

[FOUR YEARS EARLIER]

"It's not right, Ennis. I know, I know. Everyone's saying we shouldn't do this. They say that I've got my MBA from Stanford GSB, and you went to MIT, but, darn it! We can work together!"

"Jack, it can't be. You'll be CEO one day and I'll be, dare I dream, CIO. These are different jobs. We have to work with different people and the tools we use just don't fit each other! We won't speak the same language. I'll be working with people who write Java and you'll be working with people who only drink the stuff.... your people just won't understand what it takes to design a process, and improve it. Not really improve it. Sure there will be PowerPoints and Visios and some of your people might even know what SQL is, but, gosh, then during your presentation of all this I know that my guys' eyes will roll and they'll be laughing at us, Jack. Laughing!"

It was a symptom of the times that "laughing" meant something much more nefarious.

Jack was upset and lashed back. "Oh yeah, like you know everything Ennis! I'll "only" be figuring out our strategy to survive in the 21st century, but you, with your EAI and little rules engine and big bad stack vendors will be doing the "hard" work!" The minute he said it, he wished he hadn't.

Jack and Ennis had only met a few months before this spat, in October 2001. They met because both had a dream.... but they didn't know the other had also had the same dream. "Look" Ennis had said at their first meeting, "I think there's actually a way to change the way our company is run. Technology isn't separate from the business, and it shouldn't be managed that way. OK, OK, you're probably thinking I'm nuts, but hear me out. What if the role of today's IT was split. The centralized IT group could do the heavy lifting. Keep the applications running. Keep the dial-tone on. It is non-trivial to build, maintain and continuously improve the infrastructure. And what if that infrastructure enabled the other part of IT to be highly distributed? Call them "embeds" because they are embedded in the business. And it would be this embedded group that would drastically alter the way business-facing technology is delivered."

Jack looked into Ennis' emerald eyes. Deeply. And he saw a soul mate.

Later that month they met each other, again, at the company outing. It was at a water park and the main attraction was a big splash machine called "The Third Wave." It was broken, though, because the code running its computer was in a language nobody knew or, frankly, cared much about. Jack and Ennis used the time to flesh out their thoughts, and talk about their past.

Jack's Master's thesis in 1998 was based on the question "whatever happened to the AI movement of the '80's?" In that paper he found that the promise of AI, to move programming and rules maintenance to the business, was unfulfilled. He concluded it was because the technology was, in fact, the anti-business implementation. Although it achieved some of its promise (no way we could have the online answers to credit requests and insurance ratings), it had failed miserably at providing the basis for organizational change. It was the wrong way to go because the business couldn't participate deeply enough in the development process. In fact, during this time, Jack ran into Jeff Hawkins who concluded exactly the same thing in his studies of the brain. Like Ennis, he knew that the technical approaches up to then were all wrong. A new model was needed, a process-centric model and tool suite akin to the data-centric model of ERP. Putting lipstick on old pigs, while fun when he was at his weekend ranch, wasn't going to be fulfilling to Jack.

So Jack had been searching for some answers and here was Ennis, with a new hypothesis. "If you look at the history of distributed computing," Ennis said, "every important advance in usage has been because of the advance in visualization, and the direct manipulation of objects in a visual manner. There are some new tools available that purport to do this. I think if we embed these tools and these people into the business, we can change things."

Jack agreed and they set up their project, using the latest in EAI technology and process diagramming tools. They were based on pi-calculus and therefore everything should have been very flexible and business-friendly.

They failed. The Word document that the business developed to describe the project was mostly implemented, but by the time the work was finished, 5 months later, the business had moved on. Heck, they'd forgotten about the project it had taken so long. "Just like the old days," they said. The Director of that group had moved to a new product line, and almost all of the other people had left or lost interest.

Jack and Ennis were distraught and embarrassed. Whispers about what they were doing added to their low feelings and, as these things go, they broke up. It wasn't acrimonious, but it was.... final. The world - indeed, even each of the two of them - simply weren't ready for this type of relationship. It got so bad that they had to move. Jack took a job in Del Rio, Texas, managing a border radio station the Old Man had bought, adding to the company's communications assets. Ennis was sent off to do a one-year SAP conversion. And now he's almost finished...

[BACK TO TODAY - IN A CONFERENCE ROOM]

"Ennis, it's great to see you. Really. I mean that."

"Same here Jack." They shook hands firmly, and held the handshake for a long time.

"I have news," Jack said. "I was sitting on the plane the other day catching up on reading, and there's this article I ran across about how software has caught up to our dream. I think, maybe, we were..."

Ennis interrupted. "Hold on there, pardner! Not even a 'how de doo'? What have you been doing? Have you thought of our dreams at all these past few years? Is it possible for business and IT to not just 'be aligned' but to really work together, side-by-side, day and night?"

Embarrassed and somewhat tongue-tied, Jack stammered "um, yeah. Yes, I mean... well a lot's happened. Can you believe it? I married a rodeo queen. We live in Texas. We have a son."

Ennis was taken aback at this. He hadn't even received an invitation and he was KNOWN for his wedding gifts. I mean why, he wondered, wouldn't Jack have invited me?

Instantly, Jack was back on message though. "I know how we can make this happen... This new thing is called a Business Process Management Suite and it allows business people and technologists to share drawings of our processes - executable drawings! - with one another. It allows me to analyze my processes with the latest in visualization techniques - imagine applying my analytic skills directly with the same tool suite that you use to build out the integrations and have all of our thoughts captured, versioned and secured! It allows me to see everything that is happening on this process, and all processes, directly on the process drawing. It's not like that old stuff where you would have code and rules everywhere and only one or two people could understand the whole system..." And on and on and on. Jack must have talked about processes and the company and how this was going to make them able to compete in new markets, with new suppliers and it was all going to be enabled by embedded technologists and, well, there was so much that Ennis's brain started to hurt.

"I think, Ennis, we can make it real this time. The world has moved on... we don't have to sweep this under the rug or hide it in a closet anymore. A product exists that combines advanced technology with easy-to-share and understand business objects. We can actually have every single person in our company participate in this process understanding - and technology will be at the heart of it, making it cost effective and scalable. Sort of like Google's scale - and they're generating over $700,000 revenue per employee!" Jack was finished. He looked, expectantly, at Ennis.

But, Ennis wasn't so sure. "It takes a village to raise a world, Jack. And I don't see villages using this stuff yet."

"You're wrong, Ennis." Jack approached Ennis and put his right arm around him, pointing with his left arm, expansively, out the plate glass window overlooking the Rio Grande. "I can show you many companies who are changing the way they are run - in fact, that's part of the deal... we'll have to make organizational changes. But it's being done. The tools just weren't there four years ago, and now they are. These are new tools, not glossed over versions of the failed ones. The key to these tools is the visualization of the process, and because EVERYTHING is expressed in the 'picture.' This means that we have a shared view of our world... when anyone speaks about the process, we all know what we're talking about! Everyone now has a role to play, making the development and improvement process a LOT more interactive. You're not gated by having to know about integration or rules ontologies in order to make meaningful contributions."

Ennis gasped at the breadth of Jack's impassioned plea. Nonplussed, the two stood there, looking out on the Mexican border. "I hope you're right, Jack. Hey! Look! Look over there. It's a rainbow."

And, sure enough, outside the conference room the clouds were breaking, the rain was letting up, and a rainbow was clearly visible, spanning the sky directly above the spot where Jack and Ennis stood.

[PAN FROM CLOUDS TO BIG SKY VISTA, THEN FADE TO BLACK...]

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