Tag Archives: Enterprise

Flying Monkeys from Armonk: IBM buys Lombardi

by Miko Posted on December 16, 2009

IBM bought Lombardi this morning for an “undisclosed sum”. Having been through an acquisition by a larger company myself, I can only imagine what the Lombardi folks in Austin Texas (and elsewhere) may be thinking.

First of all, let me say that I have a lot of respect for Lombardi. Frankly anyone who can build a company from the ground up to tens of millions in revenue is a terrific success, and in particular, Lombardi was very innovative with capabilities like Lombardi Blueprint. So terrific job and hats off to the people who founded it and built the company to this stage. A magnificent effort and a truly innovative company.

The cultural fit will be very interesting. In looking at Lombardi founder and CTO @philgilbertsr Phil Gilbert’s blog, you can see a post from back in July titled “IT isn’t BPM it’s IBM”. I’ll block quote it below (my bold text added) since I suspect he will take it down momentarily:

It Isn’t BPM, It’s IBM

Yesterday, Dennis Byron of ebizQ presented a false choice between “BPM point solutions” and the stack vendors’ “BPM suites.” But this isn’t the choice at all. IBM doesn’t do BPM, not really, despite the Orwellian marketing rhetoric (although it is a delight to see them describe “Dynamic Process Edition” – a collection of four no-doubt business-friendly Websphere tools – as a “comprehensive foundation to deploy dynamic business processes in response to changing business needs.” BINGO, for goodness sake!)

With just a tweak, replacing “BPM point products” with “personal computers,” this line from Dennis’s post could have been written in 1984: “IT managers and staffers have to ask–again and constantly–do I want to bet my job and my enterprise’s success on personal computers anymore?” Those pesky business users…

The choice isn’t between pure-play vendors and stack vendors, the choice is between BPM or IBM.

What is BPM? I think it’s pretty simple: put the business back in charge of its business assets. And what is IBM? Keep that control in IT.

for some, this is an indication that IBM Lombardi will be a “good fit” since Phil seems to be saying that IBM doesn’t do BPM and Lombardi does–so it would be a smooth fitting integration. But of course it’s not that simple.

First of all, Phil Gilbert rightly points out that the IBM approach to BPM keeps BPM squarely in the IT department with products like websphere and filenet. I know this tendency very well, since my own company, Software AG webMethods for years touted the “business analyst” as someone who would be comfortable using Eclipse-based BPM tooling. We all know that this doesn’t turn out to be the case, and in Software AG’s story led to the acquisition of IDS Scheer.

. Analysts this morning were tweeting about this deal:

The insightful James Governor @Monkchips said that he sees “Lotus (Notes) integration in Lombardi’s near future… I happen to agree more with Neil Ward-Dutton @neilwd who pointed out that IBM now has 3 BPM stacks, Lombardi, Websphere and FileNet, adding to the complexity of their solution.Frankly at a pace of 50+ acquisitions a year, these mega platforms do very little imaginitive product integration. @johnrrymer and @TonyBaer both pointed out that IBM BlueWorks and Lombardi Blueprints will have to be rationalized–the type of integration through infighting that’s much more typical of large company mergers. @TonyBaer compared the positioning (Lombardi as departmental BPM, IBM FileNet and Websphere as Enterprise BPM) with Oracle BPM and BEA Fuego/Aqualogic BPM. @atmanes tweets (and @skemsley retweets) that IBM will perpetuate the division between people, system and document centric BPM with the Lombardi acquision. I happen to agree most with this perspective… with IBM doing over 90 acquisitions since 2003, the amount of proactive product integration will be minimal. Remember that CFOs in large public companies don’t look at product integration as a great source of revenue. It’s looked at as risk and cost.

Sandy Kemsley blogs about the analyst call here, which is chock full of insights. Sandy Kemsley is in general chock full of insights.

The insightful piece of the analysis is the positioning of “departmental” vs “Enterprise BPM. There is absolutely a huge difference between the two. I will be presenting at IDevNews’s BPM_CON II online conference tomorrow. If you’re interested in my perspective on Departmental vs Enterprise BPM and it should be exciting to hear from both IBM, IDS Scheer, Lombardi and Software AG all as independent presenters. The difference between departmental and Enterprise BPM is summarized by the chart below:

EnterpriseProcess

As you may notice, as soon as you connect departments in an Enterprise, you are crossing an organizational boundary. As soon as you cross an organizational boundary, you will be in danger of encountering “flying monkeys” from the other tribes in the Enterprise. They should post signs such as this one to warn people:

Now as I’ve defined before in my post “Top 5 Definitions of Enterprise“, the Enterprise is an organization whose mission requires size and longevity. This size and longevity leads to organizational fragmentation in the form of “tribes” and technology silos in the form of heterogeneous and legacy infrastructure. This produces the unique challenges for Enterprise Scale Business Transformation covered in my book “SOA Adoption for Dummies“. Fascinatingly, from this perspective, Social BPM tools such as Lombardi Blueprint, IBM Blueworks and Software AG and IDS Scheer’s AlignSpace actually help organizations collaborate across these very organizational silos. This enables process “optimization” to be defined collaboratively, for as soon as you define “optimal” process in one organizational tribe, another tribe will pop up and insist that it isnt optimal for them. I say it’s fascinating, because the kind of technology infrastructure that straddles technology silos and heterogenaety such as websphere ESB and Software AG’s webMethods ESB is rapidly being connected with technology to address the collaborative needs of Enterprise Process Optimization.

The missing ingredient is the observation that at Enterprise scale, a horizontal process needs to take on some of the provider-consumer structure that you see in SOA, and the governance of those provider-consumer relationships is one of the key aspects to executing Enterprise-Scale Business Process Improvement. So the technology silos and organizational tribes need to be interconnected and aligned, and from a runtime operational perspective, these provider consumer relationships are, in fact, Service Oriented.

IBM Global ServicesRun Dorothy! Run or the flying monkeys will get you!
Image via Wikipedia

As much as I appreciate analysts, and these folks in particular, I wanted to add the perspective of someone who has acquired and been acquired many times and look for certain cues that may be lost. In particular the code word “undisclosed sum”. For a Venture Capital backed company, the term “undisclosed sum” is almost like “left to spend more time with his family”. It essentially means the smaller private company folded. In the downturn, despite the incredible updraft of BPM, smaller companies are struggling to:

* make it past Enterprise Procurement onto the short list of vendors

* once established, struggling to rise above the departmental level

* make it past the Project Management Organization and Enterprise Architecture Standards groups

This is why standalone BPM vendors are feeling the squeeze. This squeeze should be even worse for standalone SOA vendors, as SOA is in an earlier part of exponential growth and thus has a smaller updraft. The doubling period for BPM seems to be shorter also. According to IDC, the market opportunity for BPM software will increase at a compound annual growth rate of nearly 15 percent over the next four years, from $1.7B in 2009 to $3.0B by 2013. if you remember my post on the exponential function, this is almost one doubling period. BPM is undergoing such a boom that it will cover a lot of misfires, in any event.

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The Legacy of Enterprise 2.0–Concluding thoughts from the Conference

by Miko Posted on November 9, 2009

The absolute highlight of last week’s Enterprise 2.0 conference was meeting in person and online many very bright people including Nenshad Bardoliwalla, Susan Scrupski, Michael Krigsman and many others. There’s certainly a strong discourse here about advancing the agenda for Enterprise computing.

As with many advanced topics in Enterprise computing, it’s very easy to take a potshot: as we all know:

crocky

* SOA is Dead (Anne Thomas Manes)
* Enterprise 2.0 what a Crock (Dennis Howlett) and
* Cloud is Water Vapor (Larry Ellison)

One link that got me to thinking was posted by Nenshad–Tomio Geron from the Wall Street Journal blogged about the vast number of venture backed startups that have failed this year.

Pundits aside, I think there is a very easy “Crock Test” that can definitively answer Dennis Howlett’s question. The question wont be answered by a failed panel discussion. No matter how pithy, it wont be answered by a blog post. The closest thing to the “Crock Test” came from Susan Scrupski’s “last and only response to crock-gate”, a list of organizations involved in the Enterprise 2.0 Adoption Council. The problem with the list is that the names are just names–you kind of want to be able to click on them to see the case studies, if any.

Which brings me to the “Crock Test”. Unfortunately, the test will require some degree of patience. We will definitively know if Enterprise 2.0 is a crock if in 20, 30 or 40 years we can look back on all of the Enterprise 2.0 legacy software that has been created.

As I mentioned in 5 definitions towards the maturing of Enterprise 2.0, legacy is another word for the software projects that worked. So here’s hoping we will be looking back at Susan’s list of companies and seeing a list of case studies about the depth and scope of transformation and a list of the huge successful companies built on top of Enterprise 2.0–not a list of failed ones.

To be fair, the failed companies on the list come from a large number of sectors–it’s just a sobering list, not a condemnation of #e20

My 2 cents,
Miko

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The Enterprise 2.0 Crock

by Miko Posted on November 4, 2009

I think it’s great to have a panel called “Is Enterprise 2.0 a Crock?” at the Enterprise 2.0 conference. Much like SOA conference panels addressing “Is SOA Dead?”

Crock

Dennis Howlett posed this question in his blog, entitled Enterprise 2.0: What a Crock. The summary paragraph is quoted here:

Like it or not, large enterprises – the big name brands – have to work in structures and hierarchies that most E2.0 mavens ridicule but can’t come up with alternatives that make any sort of corporate sense. Therein lies the Big Lie. Enterprise 2.0 pre-supposes that you can upend hierarchies for the benefit of all. Yet none of that thinking has a credible use case you can generalize back to business types – except: knowledge based businesses such as legal, accounting, architects etc. Even then – where are the use cases? I’d like to know. In the meantime, don’t be surprised by the ‘fail’ lists that Mike Krigsman will undoubtedly trot out – that’s easy. In the meantime, can someone explain to me the problem Enterprise 2.0 is trying to solve?

Now don’t get me wrong, I believe there are legitimate technologies that can help organizations collaborate and gain significant advantages. But the Enterprise 2.0 crowd for the most part do not show the kind of sophistication about the Enterprise that is needed. OF course there are many many counterexamples of people who are very sophistcated, @ITSinsider @Nenshad @PhilWW @Mastermark and others.

But when I hear panelists say things like:

* The way that business is organized is fundamentally changing, period
* we are breaking down silos
* I don’t know who goes into offices anymore
* Email “reply to all” costs $250,000

I really wonder if there’s enough healthy debate on this topic. It would be nice to see @dahowlett on the panel.

The concept that Silos are something that can be “broken down” shows the ignorance of the people saying it. I wont point a finger at the panelist who used the phrase, and I hear people saying this throughout the conference. But this is a completely wrong concept, and dangerous.

Silos, both organizational and technological are an emergent property of Enterprise. As I defined earlier in the week, the Enterprise can be defined as an organization whose mission requires longevity, size and growth. Longevity creates technology silos, growth creates organizational silos.

Christopher Allen cites Robin Dunbar very well in this post about the famous “Dunbar Number.” We are hitting fundamental limits to human social scalability in the Enterprise.

Until Enterprise 2.0 folks gain a deeper understanding of the day to day reality of the Enterprise, this will continue to have a superficial impact on the Enterprise. If we look back at Enterprise 2.0 in 20 years and can see lots of Enterprise 2.0 “legacy applications”, we can consider this effort to have been a success.

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Top 5 Definitions of Enterprise: focusing on the Enterprise in “Enterprise 2.0″

by Miko Posted on November 2, 2009

It’s a cool sunny day in San Francisco and there’s some bustle at the Moscone center.

Enterprise 2.0 conference.

You can tell it’s an Enterprise conference because unlike the Web 2.0 Conference there’s no free pass even to the show floor. Also the full pass is about $2500 bucks. One way to define Enterprise is:

en⋅ter⋅prise
  /ˈɛntərˌpraɪz/ [en-ter-prahyz]
–noun

5. Stuff I wouldn’t do unless you paid me.
crime scene clean up
This definition puts Enterprise squarely in the camp of crime scene janitorial services. It adds a concept of “professional” to the discussion and establishes the Enterprise as the realm of uncomfortable clothing. I recall reconnecting with Arthur Van Hoff after our adventures in Java and having him laugh at me because I was wearing (in his words) an “IQ Restrictor”, his parlance for a necktie. This definition also puts a dynamic tension between the “Suits” at the Enterprise 2.0 conference and the boho hipsters wearing the Emo Hair.

4. Software that sucks.
PHAILBOAT
This was the definition I evoked in my post “The Human Enterprise.” To be honest, I introduced the idea of “The Human Enterprise as a direct counterproposal to “Enterprise 2.0″. I think the piece that was missing from The Human Enterprise is the extent to which fragmentation plays a role in the essential nature of the Enterprise, which is a theme I’ve been addressing more lately in terms of the effect of sheer size on the Enterprise.

3. A venture requiring industriousness or courage.
Kirk
This definition deserves some attention because it in some ways captures exactly what’s missing from the current debate around the Enterprise. The extent to which courage has been slowly sapped by the ravages of the Great Recession and “job security” is to some extent disheartening. In particular, efforts to rejuvenate the complex IT System Architecture and to mitigate the effects of Entropy and the “Heat Death of IT” have been met with cries of “SOA is Dead“. So here’s a call for the restoration of courage in IT, to boldly go. Set phasers on “frappe”.

2. Dead stuff that used to matter
he's dead jim
Rumors of the death of Enterprise Software have been greatly exaggerated (nice post by David Hornik). The thing people find hard to understand about the longevity of most Enterprise IT is that “dead” software actually lives a long time. In fact dead software (nice post by James Governor) runs 90% of the economy. Another word for “legacy” is IT projects that worked. The word for IT projects that didnt work is “consolidation”. This should be especially resonant for folks at the Enterprise 2.0 conference, since 99% of the projects spawned by “Enterprise 2.0″ will fall into the latter category. We will have won when there’s “Legacy Enterprise 2.0″ apps out there.

1. An organization whose mission requires significant size, growth and longevity
I present this as the number one definition in an attempt to extract the most salient feature of the Enterprise to casual observers. The definitionis designed to be inclusive of Government organizations. I don’t want to open a can of worms (big government vs small government) but arguably some “missions” such as the regulation of interstate commerce and providing for the common defense would require a degree of size, scale and longevity. But what’s more interesting about this definition are the implications.

At this scale, the organization struggles with whether it’s “too big to fail” or “too big to succeed”.

The implications of size include fragmentation of organization into tribes.

The implications of growth include fragmentation of markets into niches.

The implications of longevity include fragmentation of technology into silos.

cracked

These forms of fragmentation is the key challenge of Enterprise, and the points that some E2.0 companies seem to miss. Trying to repackage consumer apps and peddle them to Enterprises misses the unique pain of Enterprise. I’ve spoken and written extensively about the effect of technological and organizational silos, for example in my book SOA Adoption for Dummies. But lately I’ve been thinking about the effects of market fragmentation.

There comes a tipping point in any large commercial sector Enterprise where the market for the flagship product or service becomes saturated. At this juncture, the revenue growth challenge becomes less about attracting and delighting new customers but rather about sucking as much money out of existing customers as possible. The example I will provide for you is the Apple iPod. At the risk of offending fanboys, the iPod market is saturated. I must own a half dozen iPods. Now I go running with my iPod nano 3g. When my 3g failed, I went to the Apple store to buy a new iPod. The way Apple segmented their products, they had created a low end model at $59 dollars (the clip) which had no screen, a “medium” range but portable option (the nano) at $150 and then the “platform” model, the iPod Touch at $199.

The nano costs only 50 bucks less than the Touch, but for users who want to run with an iPod, the Touch is too big. Since they overloaded the nano with features I dont want (accelerometer, video camera, FM radio) they were able to jack up the price.

ipod sucks

This kind of behavior exists in many mature markets, including cell phone plans. The cell phone companies have “package designers” who specifically design packages including SMS and email that rack up a maximum number of overcharges and fees. They design packages that exploit the gap between what users think they will use and what they actually use based on data mining in their demographics. This type of behavior makes the Enterprise essentially the “enemy” of the consumer. Of course we want successful companies to have profits so they can fuel the next generation of investment. I certainly want Apple to succeed and I bought their product even though I found it mildly distateful (it was still the best player for my purpose).

I wrote this post in the hopes that it would stimulate discussion about how people define the “Enterprise” in “Enterprise 2.0″.

My 2 cents,
Miko

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