Author: Leonor Ciarlone (Page 10 of 13)

$25 billion.
That’s the cost of compliance in the U.S. Securities Industry for 2005 according to the Securities Industry Association (SIA).
59 percent.
That’s the percentage of respondents to a SearchStorage.com poll that did not know if they were in compliance because they could not figure out what they have to do.
$15 million.
That’s the amount Morgan Stanley was fined for failing to produce tens of thousands of e-mails during SEC investigations from December, 2000 through through July, 2005.
No wonder compliance issues today = fear. They don’t have to.
Compliance is about recordkeeping. The core issue is surprisingly clear — focus on the lifecycle of paper and electronic communications – how information is created, routed, managed, accessed and archived.
Join us tomorrow, November 9, 2006 at 11:00am EDT for my panel discussion with Omtool CTO Thaddeus Bouchard and HP Financial Services Solutions Manager Joseph Wagle to discuss how to make compliance practices a seamless part of your business processes. Register here.

Every organization, regardless of size or market, shares a common set of goals: generate and grow revenue, satisfy customers, and operate at optimum levels of efficiency. In recent years, executives and boards of directors have put another critical mandate on the plate for management: regulatory compliance ranging from Sarbanes Oxley to SEC mandates to HIPAA. This mandate is daunting. The number and scope of worldwide laws, regulations and standards is staggering and continues to expand. Overlay geographic and industry-specific regulatory environments, and it’s easy to understand the frustration and concern within all global companies.
Implementation deadlines, audits, and high-profile non-compliance prosecutions have created a “culture of fear” in organizations that is counter-productive to standard corporate goals. Many regulations are complex, subject to interpretation, and lack best practices.
A culture of compliance strives to bring “order to disorder” by focusing on three tenets for overcoming corporate challenges: focus on people, process and technology. Shared, enterprise-wide understanding, business process optimization, and infrastructure content technologies are some of the key components to this approach. Join us on Thursday, November 9, 2006, 11:00am EDT for my panel discussion with Omtool CTO Thaddeus Bouchard and HP Financial Services Solutions Manager Joseph Wagle to discuss how to make compliance practices a seamless part of your business processes. Register here.

For those of you interested in the conversation about defining more than simple workflow, the WS-BPEL 2.0 Specification public review period started on September 10 and ends November 9. (HTML version)

Microsoft architect John Evdemon is the co-chair of this OASIS committee and has all related links for the specification on his Loosely Coupled Thinking blog. Bruce Silver’s BPMS Watch, Ismael Ghalimi’s IT/Redux, and the BPEL section of ITtoolbox Blogs are good sources for perspective.

The summer of ’06 gave credence to the notion that multiple ECM and BPM suite vendors are preparing for the business buyer at the ECM/BPM intersection. Examples include:

June’s announcements included EMC/Documentum’s acquisition of ProActivity, Metastorm’s integration with Documentum, Hummingbird, Interwoven and Meridio — quickly followed by a major upgrade of its BPMS suite, which includes a strong focus on strengthening its Sharepoint integration. Not to be outdone, Ultimus announced its iBAM Suite, targeting non-technical business users who need visibility into BPM-enabled business processes. The tagline? “Go from Zero to BAM in less than 10 minutes.”

July’s announcements included one from the open source community, a hot arena across all content technology categories. Describing its offering as the first Zero-Code BPMS, Intalio describes its BPMS 4.2 product as ideal for “complex business processes that include Web Services orchestration and web-based human workflow.”

August’s IBM-FileNet merger got lots of press and continues to focus on “synergistic BPM technologies.” Although this news seemed to overshadow the Oracle-IDS Scheer partnership, this announcement also deserves attention for those following the chase between Oracle, IBM and Tibco Software (who seems to have finally made significant progress in 2006 on maximizing its 2004 Staffware acquisition.

These “catch up” summer activities are strong signals to competing vendors already traveling the path toward meeting the requirements of complex business processes that must combine data-centric BPM integrations (including SOA) with content-centric, human-driven interactions. Players with earlier investments or partnerships supporting this roadmap include BEA’s Fuego acquisition in March, the Vignette-Lombardi alliance in April, Interwoven’s strategy to bolster visibility for its Fujitsu partnership, and Global 360’s steady progress toward “bridging the islands of process automation across BPM, transaction management, ERP and content management systems” by integrating its G360 EX and G360 BOS products.

Now comes the fall and expectations for 2007 products that are not simply infrastructure-ready, but rather solution-specific ready. It is our belief that applying integrated ECM/BPM solutions to real-world issues requires the ability to handle hybrid, complex, and high-volume processes in a manner that enables rapid deployment through ease of use and pre-packaging of vertical or horizontally-specific capabilities including workflow, modeling objects, business rules, and end-user dashboards for monitoring and analytics. This will be critical to vertical uptake in industries such as Banking, Insurance and Telecommunications as well as horizontal arenas such as compliance, claims processing, accounts payable, and human resources.

Some vendors can already point to these capabilities, which ultimately cross the unstructured content and structured data worlds; Others are well on their way to demonstrating them. The fall of 2006 should be an interesting quarter.

Update: Promoted from comment to Frank’s one-liner.

Big news indeed, and in fact IBM’s fourth largest acquisition of any kind – ever – according to the AP. One of the more compelling takeaways from the analyst conference call is the effect on the market’s ability to deliver cohesive vertical and horizontal solutions in the ECM-BPM intersection. (blog archive)

FileNet and IBM reps repeatedly stressed their ability to “provide content-centric BPM in the context of business processes.” Not hard to envision. FileNet’s historical investment in its BPM modules is a large part of its competitive differentiation. On equal par from a SOA/BPEL-driven perspective, IBM’s v6 Websphere BPM products provide the STP/integration capabilities for the sibling requirements. The opportunity for a technology merge is intriguing. Fully preparing for the intersection is clearly a primary goal; as per the call, “the timing is good for a combination of forces.” I wouldn’t call it a smooth road however, despite the promises of “nothing but goodness for everyone.”

Although the two former partners and competitors stress the “preservation and enhancement” of both ECM platforms (the ECM divisions will become one), the holy grail of post-acquisition integration (culture, technology & strategy) could be quite significant in this case.

The acceptance by Hummingbird’s Board of Directors of the Open Text offer closes the door on this summer saga, albeit with less drama than I predicted.

I do find it surprising that even a ripple of a bidding war never occured since the agreed-upon Open Text bid remains at only 10 cents more per share than the preceeding Symphony offer. Plus, there’s that $11.7 million termination fee payable to Symphony. Still, Hummingbird reports that the offer represents a 4.1 percent higher bid than Symphony and a 20.5 percent premium over the company’s May 25 share price.

Now that the saga is over, the real effects will surface. There is clearly redundancy between the two companies, and that can only mean some amount of layoffs. We would be surprised however, if that prediction extends to the RedDot division, as Open Text fills a hole with this solid WCM solution. In addition, the merger creates a larger competitor to the platform players in the ECM market but also bolsters the “foes can be friends” theory in terms of Open Text’s June decision to provide Oracle-based solutions as well as to continue strong SAP and Microsoft Sharepoint integrations.

Finally, the acquisition forces Open Text to continue proving that numerous acquisitions equal strong, integrated vertical and horizontal solutions while simultaneously pleasing longtime Hummingbird customers.

We’ve been talking with users lately on what the promise of “technology for the masses” really means for the BPM suite market. And more specifically, how BPM technologies will evolve to compliment ECM strategies and implementations. The flavor of many of these discussions comes down to transitioning “x” amount of design, control and execution from IT into the hands of “process-savvy but less-technical” corporate domains.

In other words, transferring capabilities into the business — thereby creating BPM environments that eliminate throwing applications over the wall and then spending precious resource dollars to manage the inevitable boatload of change requests thrown back. According to Howard Smith and Peter Fingar, authors of Business Process Management: The Third Wave, the challenge for leading corporations is not to bridge the business-IT divide, but rather to obliterate it.

These conversations are familiar to content specialists and information architects who demanded the evolution of content technologies such as WCM from programmer-centric environments to business-driven applications that required little IT maintenance. In fact, “non-IT” buyers became more and more important on the radar screens of WCM vendors during the mid to late 90’s as content management went mainstream. Budgeting, evaluation, and approval teams were a mix of marketing, sales and IT personnel. C-level executives were primary decision-makers and had efficiency, cost reduction, and revenue generation on their checklists. The corporate desire to move from centralized control to decentralized collaboration was paramount. Desktop features, Web-based interfaces, templates, and coaches/wizards were hot.

The content technologies market learned simple but undeniable truths during this period that drive sales and deployments in the ECM suite market to this day. Usability matters. Usability drives adoption. Adoption drives the ROI, whether the desire is efficiency and cost savings or revenue generation and customer satisfaction. Vendors: know your buyers! Buyers: know your users!

As the BPM suite market evolves, it will face technology convergence, vendor consolidation, and the need to decentralize capabilities to achieve the enterprise sale — as did the ECM suite market before it. Complex, hybrid business processes, i.e. those that merge data + content + straight-through processing + human-driven interaction requirements, require collaboration and interactions that “cross the divide” between IT and the business.

How can business managers — the compliance officer, the human resources manager, the account manager, the underwriter — work with technologies for modeling and rules management, business intelligence, performance management, and analytics within familiar environments? Complex, hybrid processes increase the need for the business to create, view, interact with, and optimize the process through its execution and inevitable exceptions.

Debates on whether savvy Excel business users can “do modeling” aside, increased BPMS vendor messaging on providing common, “Visio-like” interfaces for process modeling, “zero-code” BPMS, integrations with Microsoft Office, and collaborative “business user-oriented” dashboard environments point to a market that is evolving to answer one of the more critical business buyer questions: — What does it look like and how easy is it to use?

Putting the business in BPM underscores the “usability matters” mantra. A solution that cannot demonstrate it to the savvy business buyer at the ECM/BPM intersection — who envisions an environment where ECM and BPM are seamlessly complimentary — should probably think twice before the demo.