Why You (Probably) Cannot Afford to Use IBM for BPM 1
Why You (Probably) Cannot Afford to Use IBM for BPM You have a project that seems like a good fit for Business Process Management (BPM). And you re an IBM shop. Why not use tools and technology for your project? It would be a logical choice, right? If you read IBM s marketing literature, it sounds like IBM is a true leader in BPM software they deliver agility and continuous process improvement. The problem is, at the marketing level, all BPM solutions sound the same, because all vendors use exactly the same words to describe the features and benefits of BPM. But the reality is there are significant differences in how various BPM products actually work, and in the time, cost, and effort required to use them. To see the differences, you have to look beyond the marketing literature you have to work with the software. There is a relatively simple way to evaluate whether tools can work for your project. Run these 5 tests: 1. How easily can you identify what IBM product(s) you need for your project? 2. How hard is it to install the product? 3. How efficiently can you create and deploy a complete process? 4. How complex is it to change a process? 5. How easy is it to find and fix process inefficiencies? If you are on the hook to deliver a BPM project, you need to test tools on each of these points. They are critical to the success of your project and will have a dramatic impact on the time to deliver and overall cost. Fortunately, these tests can be run very quickly with limited investment. If you run these tests, we are confident that you will find that there is significant complexity, lack of integration, and a high learning curve for using IBM for BPM. You will find grey areas between what is available now and what is promised for the future. If you encounter these issues, we hope you will call us to do a comparison of BPM offerings. And in case you are wondering, we have provided a preview of how we score on these tests. Now, let s have a closer look at the tests. 2
Test 1 How easily can you identify what IBM product(s) you need for your project? Easy Hard IBM:?? IBM has well over a dozen different product components in their WebSphere 6.1 BPM Suite, counting included and required products: 1. WebSphere Business Modeler 2. Business Modeler Publishing Server (optional) 3. WebSphere Business Monitor 4. Business Monitor Development Toolkit (included) 5. Business Monitor Server (included) 6. DB2 Alphablox and Cube Views (required) 7. WebSphere Business Events 8. WebSphere Process Server 9. WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus (included) 10. WebSphere Partner Gateway (included) 11. WebSphere Business Services Fabric 12. Business Services Foundation Pack (included) 13. Business Services Tool Pack (included) 14. Industry Content Packs (optional) 15. WebSphere Services Registry and Repository (required) 16. WebSphere Integration Developer 17. WebSphere Adapters (included) Likewise, there are 8 major products in the IBM FileNet BPM Suite. Figuring out what to use is not easy. : Easy With, the choice is easy. Our BPMS product, Teamworks, is the choice for your BPM needs. Teamworks is a single, comprehensive, unified platform that excels in implementing and managing business processes no matter what the scope or complexity. Moreover, Teamworks is an easy choice for BPM even when you are a WebSphere shop, and even when you use FileNet for document management. We are certified to run on WebSphere and we integrate with FileNet. 3
Test 2 How hard is it to install the product? This is a pretty simple but highly indicative test. How hard is it to install this software in a realistic operating environment? Be sure to install and configure the selected BPM products in a robust multi-user environment to get a realistic understanding of the level of effort. Easy Hard IBM:?? As discussed in the previous point, you will first need to figure out all the different products that you will need to build an end-to-end, complete process. Then you will need to figure out how to get all these components successfully installed and configured. Our customers who evaluated IBM tell us that the plethora of products may be viewed as overengineered for typical process and workflow problems. Consequently, installation and configuration are arduous tasks some companies have told us it took them 3 days or more to install in a robust multi-user environment. And you can t ignore the ongoing pain of updating all of those products with the usual IBM service packs and fix packs that have to be applied over time eventually, cross-product dependencies and conflicts always seem to get in your way. Consider the impact of this complexity down the road when you need to upgrade your running processes on the next versions of tools. : Easy With the Teamworks BPMS, we have focused on making installation easy. Despite being an enterprise-class implementation and execution platform, Teamworks has a single install package that includes everything you need. The Teamworks server software itself can take as little as 30 minutes to install. Teamworks components easily install in your J2EE app server environment including WebSphere clusters. Configuration can be automated by installation scripting. Moreover, Teamworks is low maintenance. Minor releases and fix packs are designed to drop in easily. 4
Test 3 How efficiently can you create and deploy a complete process? Make a single pass through the process development lifecycle: model, implement, and deploy the process, with user interfaces, integrations, events, monitoring, and reports. Don t just build a Hello World process. Make sure that you build a complete, realistic process. If you don t have a sample, can provide one for you. Efficient Complex & Convoluted IBM:?? If you take a little time to build a real process, you will find that IBM s process development lifecycle is complex. For example, one starts by modeling a process in a graphical notation (similar to, but not exactly, BPMN) with WebSphere Business Modeler, and defining the associated business metrics of interest. But from there, you export BPEL to the WebSphere Integration Developer and Process Server environments, where Java code for the BPEL components is generated and carefully customized, or written from scratch. Process logic is implemented separately from the user interfaces ( web apps ), web services, and process portals that are used. Business metrics are exported to Business Monitor Development Toolkit where monitoring models (in XML files) can be configured. Testing requires getting all of the code together and deploying it to the Process Server and ESB environment. There are a lot of code components to develop and keep in synch with the original process models that are developed upstream. With IBM, your team will spend valuable time struggling up the learning curve of how to manage code exchanged between IBM products, instead of working on the process itself. : Efficient Development efficiency is a core differentiator for Teamworks in the BPM market. was a pioneer in bringing a Model Driven Architecture (MDA) to the BPM domain. Now every company in the BPM space including IBM is moving to a MDA. We have had this architecture for nearly seven years. We know that a single, integrated environment delivers unmatched simplicity and efficiency in building processes. This is one of the key elements of Teamworks that industry analysts like Gartner, Forrester and Bruce Silver call out all the time. 5
Test 4 How complex is it to change a process? Take the business process you built in Test 3, and make some representative changes to the process. For instance, delete an activity that is part of a key report, rename a process variable, add a form to one of the human activities, add a new business metric that you want to track in the process. Then roll out the process changes into production. Simple Complex IBM:?? On BPM projects, the desire for business agility drives more-frequent and finer-grained changes. You may be asked to change your processes far more frequently than traditional core applications. Making fine-grained changes to a business process is a challenge for the IBM tools. If the original business process model is changed, and exported as BPEL into the WebSphere Integration Developer environment, how does one reconcile and retrofit the Java coding and customizations with the new model? A similar situation occurs when you customize the code that was generated by the process modeler or BPEL modeler in the first place. Once you change the code, the code may no longer match the original model. Simple business changes become significant code-merging efforts. This is nontrivial, requiring considerable technical skill level to get it right. Why does your team have to bear the burden of integrating information between IBM products? : Simple The ability to change processes easily and efficiently was one of the key design points when we first developed Teamworks seven years ago. As discussed in the previous section, Teamworks is a modeldriven system, so there is no code to compile, assemble, package, and deploy. You can immediately playback a model change to see how it will behave in production, without leaving the development environment. This drastically reduces time in requirements gathering, development, testing and deployment. 6
Test 5 How easy is it to find and fix process inefficiencies? How quickly can you find and diagnose process problems in your running process bottlenecks, unexpected paths, SLA violations? Start this test by collecting baseline performance measurements from the process. Drill down to understand the root causes. Propose a fix and report on the improvement. Easy Hard IBM:?? Between IBM s Business Modeler and Business Monitor and other tools, it is possible to check all the boxes on basic simulation and analysis functionality. But it is not very easy for an analyst to understand the actual reasons why performance is the way it is when looking at simple KPI reports. Traceability is needed here from high level activities to low level event data. Unfortunately, the aggregate data that is collected in the Business Monitor and fed back to the Business Modeler for simulation is stripped of all the underlying event data that can provide great insight into process performance. All that detailed event data still sits in the Business Monitor (captured by instrumenting the BPEL implementation and the web app user interfaces), but those details can only be surfaced via separate real-time dashboards or OLAP detective sessions. It is a challenging exercise for the analyst to map high-level performance indicators (KPIs) to underlying historical events and human actions i.e., doing the traceback by hand. Very time consuming. In the end, process improvement and optimization can feel a bit like taking shots in the dark. : Easy We know that the key to long term success with BPM is continuous improvement of your processes. Our analytics and optimization capabilities are unmatched in the BPM market. What is the core reason? Teamworks shared model links everything about the process together: the process diagram, the implementation details, KPI and SLA definitions, in-flight process data, historical performance data, and so on. This linkage is critical to providing you with the visibility you need to truly understand what is happening in the process, as well as the impact of proposed improvements. Our investment in innovations like the Teamworks Optimizer saves your team time and effort in determining how to improve your processes. With Optimizer, you can visualize performance hot spots, you can directly drill down to the underlying performance facts to uncover root causes, and you can see the impact of proposed fixes, all within the same environment. 7
Assessing your results We know that these tests don t exercise all elements of a BPM offering. However, we believe that a little time spent digging into solution will help you project the true costs in time, complexity and level of effort. Let s add up the scores: 1. How easily can you identify what IBM product(s) you need for your project? Easy (Enter Rating) 2. How hard is it to install the product? Easy (Enter Rating) 3. How efficiently can you create and deploy a complete process? 4. How complex is it to change a process? 5. How easy is it to find and fix process inefficiencies? Efficient Simple Easy (Enter Rating) (Enter Rating) (Enter Rating) Can you afford to use IBM for BPM? You may think so. But we hope you will take the short time to compare tools against. We know we can help you succeed with your BPM project with less risk, time and cost. Contact us at takethetest@lombardi.com we ll get you started. And in a short web meeting, we can show you how does on each of the 5 points. 8
About is a leader in business process management (BPM) software for companies, systems integrators and government agencies of all sizes. We offer award-winning BPM technology, know-how and services to help our customers succeed with their process improvement initiatives. Our products are built on open standards, and provide ongoing prioritization, planning, visibility and control of business processes, increasing the speed and flexibility with which organizations can manage their business process activities and decision-making. Teamworks is s BPM software for designing, executing, and improving processes. Teamworks for Office makes it easy for anyone to participate in BPM using the familiar Microsoft Office System products. And Blueprint is the only on-demand, collaborative process documenting tool that enables companies to map processes, identify problems and prioritize improvement opportunities. At the core is s unique shared model architecture, which significantly reduces the time and effort versus competing solutions. is behind some of the largest, most successful BPM implementations in the world. Our customers include Allianz Group, Aflac, Banco Espirito Santo, Barclays Global Investors, Dell, El Paso Energy, FETAC, Financial Services Authority, Ford Motor Company, Hasbro, ING Direct, Intel, Maritz Travel, National Bank of Canada, National Institute of Health, Safety-Kleen, T-Mobile, UCLH, Xbridge and numerous governmental agencies. 9
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