developerWorks: You're listening to developerWorks interviews, where we feature conversations with technical luminaries and thought leaders from a variety of disciplines on topics of interest to technology professionals. I'm your host, Scott Laningham. Our guest today is Dr. Angel Diaz, Director of IBM WebSphere Business Integration. He's here to talk with us about business process management and some new resources on developerWorks. Thanks for doing this today, Angel.

Diaz: Thank you. And thanks for the opportunity to talk about this exciting space of BPM, Business Process Management.

developerWorks: Let's start real basic here, if we could. Why don't you talk for a minute if you would about the development climate or complexity that demands a business process management solution? Or on the other hand, is everyone doing it already and you're just going to talk about how to do it better?

Diaz: That's a really good question. You know, CEOs cite that innovation is our top priority for business. There's kind of a glass half full, half empty thing going on here, right? Sixty five percent of CEOs recognize that the organizations must make fundamental change to respond to external forces in the next couple of years. However, when you look at our history, fewer than half believe that they've actually managed this kind of change successfully in the past. So business model innovation is the new strategic differentiator. Aligning what you try to do in terms of your business models with the IT implementations and having that flexibility between the two is what's driving all of this.

Now, going to one of your points, this isn't new. We've been working on business process throughout history. Okay? Wave one kind of began in the 1890s, early 1900s, when Frederick Taylor had his theory of management. In fact, I remember there was an interesting quote for him. He says, in our scheme we do not ask for our initiative from men. All we want from them is to obey the orders we give them, do what we say and do it quick. Now times have changed a little bit. You kind of move from there to the second wave, and that's kind of more business process reengineering, right? And that's what you've seen with processes implemented via ERP software -- where business and process logic is hard coded -- and it's led to kind of what a lot of folks called EAI, application to application focused.

We are now entering and we are in the third wave, the wave of Business Process Management. And that's the ability to change. And where the ability to change is far more prized than the ability to create in the first place. Business Process Management on an SOA infrastructure is the secret sauce to actually implementing this for our customers to facilitate ultimately business innovation. If you look at this even closer, it governs an organizational cross functional and core business processes. It achieves strategic business objectives that you want to get done. And it provides value across three dimensions.

• Process insight and optimization -- Understanding what's going on. Optimizing those processes.

• Accelerated process improvement -- It's not just about improving and optimizing but it's how fast you can identify the parts of the business that will drive change and how fast it can implement those.

• Flexible design for future change -- You don't want to pour cement into a solution. You want to be able to change things so that as your business needs change, your implementations change.

So if that's the value and that's the definition of BPM, then there's really kind of five core software components or starting points for BPM:. one, modeling and simulation, design and simulate business processes; another very important one is business activity monitoring -- tracking the performance of processes and operational activities using key performance indicators, KPIs; process choreography -- being able to choreograph processes across applications and systems; prebuilt frameworks, reusable assets -- business services and the like; and being able to focus on content centric processing -- managing the process where content is used as input for a decision or produced as the output.

Those are five very clear starting points, technology entry points into your BPM solution. You don't have to do all these at once; you can start in one place and as you start getting improvements, start moving to another place and growing organically within your company. In fact, many of our customers pick one, two or three or a couple of these areas to start implementing their BPM solutions.

developerWorks: So very comprehensive, then, what we're talking about here.

Diaz: It is comprehensive, but the good news is that you don't need to do all of this at once to start seeing the value, you can start anywhere. And you can just start with modeling and simulation, and start getting a hold of, what are the processes you have and how can you optimize them. You can you start with business activity monitoring, just to know what's going on with your existing systems today in a very non-intrusive way. Right? You can get immediate value in the process choreography by orchestrating the steps that need to get done to actually execute a process and have some control and sanity over that as well.

developerWorks: What do people do without this? What happens when this is missing or is it ever missing?

Diaz: It's an interesting question. Just as I talked about the history of BPM from a value perspective, and from a process perspective, back when I went through those three phases, there's a similar history for integration that supports that, right? And we've gone through the different cycles. And where we're kind of at at this point is a lot of our customers have, I guess people call it spaghetti code, right? Code all over the place. Hard to understand how the processes are implemented, what servers are running which processes. If you were to shut down one set of applications, what would be the overall impact to the business?

A lot of the value you get by doing BPM on an SOA foundation -- taking your reusable processes out, taking your existing investments, reusing them and then orchestrating them in a kind of coherent -- way allows you to leverage those existing investments but also bring them into an architecture that's much more flexible. That's what people do today with what they've got.

developerWorks: So it gives you more of a global view and global control as opposed to a real ad hoc approach, then.

Diaz: Absolutely.

developerWorks: Okay, well, what about some examples? Do you have some examples you'd like to share of how Business Process Management turned around or helped a company?

Diaz: Yes, absolutely. There's a couple of dimensions you can think about, when I talked about the value you get from a BPM with SOA implementation. One is helping how you manage change, being able to respond quickly, and enhancing the efficiency. I'll give three examples for each one of those dimensions.

Managing change, I think the first example I'll give is IBM. In IBM, we standardized our reusable components. We used our modeling capability to help transform the Customer Order to Manufacturing Process for our systems into a dynamic environment that supports real time transaction processing. And we've increased the resiliencies with kind of using built-in performance monitoring. The benefit of all this really was we're able to reduce the time and cost of a new release, new product, a new piece of hardware, by 25 percent. That's significant.

The business logic is adaptable in real time by business users. So if a business user actually wants to kind of start to modify the process from getting a customer order to actually building a system for a customer, we're able to streamline those processes. And we've improved significantly tolerance for errors and performance for doing faster order fulfillment. So those are three tangible results where we've used BPM technology, IBM BPM technology to help manage change within IBM.

developerWorks: Any time anybody hears an improvement percentage of something like 25 percent, that's going to make them take notice obviously.

Diaz: Absolutely. Let's look at responding quickly, Danske Bank. Automation of many critical business processes affecting more than 10,000 employees while at the same time we significantly improved process task completion. We used a work flow management system there. It made it easier for Danske Bank employees to complete their tasks. Customers experiencing corporate wide increase in productivity. And they're very pleased with the WebSphere software's ease of administration and utilities that we provided there. You know, the savings there is about two million in the first year through a company-wide increase in productivity.

All right, the third one, enhancing business flexibility. Principal Residential Mortgage, Incorporated. The CIO uses a modeling tool from IBM that allows the company to reduce a 12-step loan process down to two steps. Just the ability to model and do what if analysis of the business processes that you have is powerful. Imagine the savings that he got there. The result of this and optimizing other processes, the company cut its labor and paper intensive post closing mortgage processes time by an average of 53 percent. That resulted in about 34 percent increase in efficiency and realized an estimated annualized savings of about four million. This project started and continues many ways, just like a lot of other customers in that it was a very well focused problem that we tried to solve there. And that we're now starting to apply the same techniques around modeling, optimization and process automation to other parts of the business as well.

developerWorks: That's great. Did you say 53 percent improvement with the mortgage company?

Diaz: Yes, the mortgage processing time by an average of about 53 percent or so.

developerWorks: Well, then their customer satisfaction must have gone up about 300 percent.

Diaz: That's for sure.

developerWorks: So Angel, just summarizing from the examples that you just shared, the effective use of a Business Process Management solution yields what results, kind of in a bullet type list?

Diaz: Well, you know, let me just try to bring this all together. Again, Business Process Management as we said in the beginning is a discipline for combining software capability and business expertise to accelerate process improvement and to facilitate business innovation. So this includes two things: software that enables BPM -- the ability to integrate, do modeling, monitoring, work flow, based on an SOA forms for human interaction -- as well as the expertise that delivers BPM. And this is more than just people; it's methodology, metrics, process knowledge, prebuilt models, policies and rules. Those are the things that make up a good BPM solution. And in the end it's really about bringing the line of business needs and the IT closer and closer together.

developerWorks: So I'm assuming that the market for Business Process Management solutions is large and crowded, right?

Diaz: Well, there's a lot of competitors out there and a lot of our customers are trying to do this.

developerWorks: What makes an IBM solution special or unique in your mind, then?

Diaz: Well, I think it's a combination of things. And I'll go back to a couple of things. First of all, we've been doing BPM as kind of a science and as a customer discipline, as a business discipline for many years. This is not new technology, but it's the evolution of our technology. And IBM is essentially a leader in BPM and SOA, recognized by analysts. So clearly we have the know how, both the human know how, the methodology, the precanned frameworks and the technology to do this.

But you know, it goes back also to those five starting points to BPM, around modeling and simulation, business activity monitoring, process choreography, prebuilt frameworks and content centric processing. We have products across all of those entry points, and those products are integrated with each other. So wherever you start in this kind of constellation of going into BPM there's a way from a grassroots perspective to grow. You can try to do it all at once or you can start at one particular area, one particular set of processes, and grow. That combined with our know how and our industry knowledge I think gives our customers the best opportunity to succeed and be innovative in the marketplace. And we've seen that time and time again. And that's why it's an exciting place to work, an exciting place to be.

developerWorks: So as a wrap up with all this, we mentioned at the top there's some new resources on developerWorks around Business Process Management. Maybe you could just talk a bit about those.

Diaz: Absolutely. Behind all of this is a lot of great IT. A lot of great products. I've mentioned some of the products in this podcast. We're kicking off a developerWorks page. There you're going to be able to find a clear technical description of BPM with SOA along with the links to latest articles on how to get started, best practices, reviews on the different products, quick start guides, downloadable sample code, all the things you really need to know to become a BPM expert as quickly as possible.

developerWorks: Okay. Again, covered some great stuff here, but at a very high level. And it makes me think maybe we should have you back on so we can dig a little deeper into all this, what do you say to that?

Diaz: I think that would be great. What we can do we can take these five starting points, five entry points to BPM, business model and simulation, activity monitoring, process choreography, the prebuilt frameworks and content centric processing and spend an entire podcast talking about the products and the offerings, and the know how, the industry expertise, the asset catalogs that we have available, and so forth for each one of these areas. So let's plan on doing that, and we'll get much more information on each one of those topics.

developerWorks: Angel, thank you so much for bringing us up to speed on Business Process Management today. This has been very educational.

Diaz: Great. Thank you, thanks to everyone out there who is listening.

developerWorks: Again, our guest was Dr. Angel Diaz, Director of IBM WebSphere Business Integration. Find out more about Business Process Management at ibm.com/developerworks/bpm. That's B-P-M for Business Process Management. And as always check our main podcast page for more information and links to many other interesting interviews. That page is ibm.com/developerworks/podcasts. That's it for this edition of developerWorks interviews. I'm Scott Laningham. Thanks for listening.

Resources

• Business Process Management on developerWorks
  
  
• "Exploring Business Process Management Systems and the impact of BPM on developers"
  
  
• developerWorks podcasts
  
  
• Podcast blog
  
  

About the author

Scott Laningham, host of developerWorks podcasts, was previously editor of developerWorks newsletters. Prior to IBM, he was an award-winning reporter and director for news programming featured on Public Radio International, a freelance writer for the American Communications Foundation and CBS Radio, and a songwriter/musician.

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