Should you give away your BPM secrets ?
First of all, I am extremely excited about the launch of AlignSpace and I have to admit I am a fanboy already. It makes my head spin when I think about the possibilities with a service like that. Forget about the buzz words like “Social BPM” for a minute and imagine the scenarios that will be possible. From the point of view of a company or someone that runs or participates in BPM projects the following comes straight to my mind:
- Discover, analyze and optimize business processes in your company with *all* the people that need to be involved, no matter which department, role or geographical location
- Work together on process automation projects that span not just departments, but companies (think process chains that involve your partners)
- Find external experts that match your project background and requirements and collaborate with them online on the very same platform
There is a different angle to AlignSpace for BPM professionals. Their interest is not necessarily in starting their own little process project (even though they could!), but they are here for making business. This is how the platform will help them:
- Post your profile, your references, your product - your expertise, so that projects find you
- Get rated by others who have worked with you. Your ability to deliver quality solutions won't be a secret anymore
I am describing the core use cases of AlignSpace with my own words and I can't help it that the above sounds like marketing speak. So let me point you to someone else who has expressed initial thoughts - Neil Ward-Dutton from MWD writes in his blog:
"With AlignSpace, […]: this is not principally about technology, engineering or rocket-science values. It’s about people and communication. The idea is to create an open platform that can interoperate equally well with tools from many vendors, keep the barriers to participation low, and drive interest and adoption virally."
Besides this positive response I have also seen a few concerns being expressed with regards to AlignSpace. In my opinion the most interesting one is about the question why someone would be willing to make their business processes public. After all, business processes are valuable company assets that represent competitive advantage. Making these assets openly accessible for public collaboration would be commercial suicide and someone who does not understand this should not be in the BPM business.
This is true. But here we have the first fundamental misunderstanding with regards to the concept of AlignSpace. Let me try to clarify it:
No one forces you to make your business processes publicly available. Only share them with the people that you want to participate. Typically these people will be your colleagues, your partners or external consultants. Maybe you also just want to share the parts of your process project that are relevant for the partner or consultant that you are working with? Just because AlignSpace enables collaboration does not mean that it forces you to put your assets in front of everybody.
Back to the concern stated above, I don’t fully agree that every business process is automatically a confidential company asset. Think about process templates or reference processes. I can certainly see people making those publicly available - i.e., for the purpose of promoting BPM expertise.
We’ll talk about concepts, concerns and possibilities a lot more in the coming months. This is going to be fun!
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07.03.2009 09:48
Thomas,
First of all, bringing Web 2.0 technologies with the spirit of social community to the BPM business is a great approach from SAG.
My concerns for reference models are differentiated. Refernence models are frameworks or methodologies like SCOR, DoDAF or VAC, developed over the years and published through standard comities or pushed by vendor initiatives (like the ARIS reference model and methodologies). As far as I can see, specifc industry reference models are developed by SI´s parties to optimize the business of their clients. They are gathering and collectinmg the business knowledge of many projects in special business domains and are licensed to clients as a specific value working with the SI. I can´t believe that this knowledge will be discussed on an open platform right now.
Although Alinspace is a really great approach to setup a BPM network and discussion platform, it is driven by a specific vendor. If I am remembering the hot discussion two weeks ago about Facesbooks GTCs, I can understand those concerns you mentioned above, using an external platform to share knowledge. This is more a general concern about the usage behaviour of such a platform, not to become a technical forum discussion e.g. specifc matters of BPMN notations and BPEL transformations.
Very interessted I’am in the announcment of Alinspace, how this universal business model transformation will be provided. As we know, XML as a great standard to exchange data and information. The initiatives of the vendors to agree to new exchange formats are running years for years. This is not a specific problem in the EA/BPA/BPM market, same this CAD /CAM, architecture or other markets. But only the case using XMI to exchange UML models between tools is a real nightmare. I’m excited how meta-data management we be handeld in future by Alinspace to exchange real busines models between varios tools, methodologies and implementations.