Process Rising: Q&A With IDS Scheer's Dr. Mathias KirchmerProcess Rising: Q&A With IDS Scheer's Dr. Mathias Kirchmer

Business process management (BPM) is becoming very closely associated with services-oriented architecture (SOA), and several top vendors are bundling their related technologies together with SOA infrastructure. Do see that as a positive development?

If you have an SOA in place, that means you can assemble your software components in a flexible way according to your process needs. But you can only do that if you really know your processes. So you really need a business process management system or at least a very systematic process design in order to use that new architecture. There is a very close interrelation between BPM and SOA, but that doesn't mean that you don't need an SOA-independent BPM approach. If you look at the design environment of organizations, I'd say that 90 percent of the companies we work with don't have only one SOA or integration platform. They have several, perhaps in part due to acquisitions. So above those execution environments, they need something like a repository with all the process knowledge that really makes the SOAs work. There is a consolidation in general in the IT market, and that will also affect BPM vendors. But there is a space for independent vendors that offer open components that can work across all of these execution environments.

Speaking of "open," IDS Scheer has touted the concept of "open BPM" and adherence to standards. How will that benefit end-user organizations?

Reliance on business and technology standards leads to a highest level of flexibility and a lowest cost, and it's pretty easy to see why. If all the environments used to manage your processes can work together, based on industry and business standards, then you can have your process designs and all your process knowledge in a repository and you can continuously improve on those processes. You also can load those assets into whatever execution environment you select. If you make an acquisition and the acquired company adheres to this open BPM notion, you can link together processes and integrate within an overall process view. And when you want to measure those processes, it's important to be able to measure across execution environments. This is only possible if you interconnect the components based on open standards [such as BPEL, BPEL4 People, BPMN, EPC (event-driven process change in ERP), SCORE (for supply chains), and frameworks (such as Zachman, ARIS or the DOD Architecture Framework)].

There's certainly a lot of buzz about BPM in the technology industry, but how would you rate receptiveness to process-oriented thinking in the corporate world today?

When I moved to the United States [from Germany] 11 years ago, I was very excited because I had read those books by Michael Hammer and I was really expecting that everybody was talking about processes. I was kind of shocked when I had my first customer meeting here and our client looked at me as said, "Well, you can help us get this system implemented, but don't waste our time, money and resources talking about your process ideas." We reacted by doing a lot of educational work here with prospects and clients as well as with Universities. Then about six years ago when all this e-business hype came up, companies were suddenly forced to talk process because they had to decide how to work together. They saw that the idea of end-to-end processes makes sense. They also started applying it internally.

Nowadays I can say that it's very rare that companies don't accept the general idea of process. Whether they are really ready and willing to implement that in their work is a different question, but the general idea is accepted.

Would you agree that many enterprises still bank on application-oriented thinking, with the latest manifestations being composite apps and SaaS-based apps — neither really representing end-to-end approaches?

That is something I see especially here in the U.S. where very often when people talk about processes they're really talking about applications. However, we do see the process focus more and more driven through operational departments, and these people aren't really close to technology. They think about and define processes in a much broader way, and they're putting pressure on IT departments to go in that direction. I meet more and more CIOs who are really starting to move away from a heavy technology focus in favor of a business process focus.

What do you see ahead for BPM?

When I look to the future, I think the idea of openness will be even more dominating than it is today if you then think about the trends around Web 2.0. Today you have You Tube, a place where you exchange videos. In the future we'll see similar environments in which we exchange [standards-based] process reference models and best practices within industries or across industries. You'll download them from a community page, use them in your BPM environment, develop additional good ideas and put them back into the community. It's very exciting. If you go a step further, everything that is happening now with virtual worlds, like Second Life, will enable you to live your processes up front [before you run them in the real world], and there will be integrations between your process design and these virtual environments. Promising prototypes already exist, and this will open up opportunities for new companies.

And if you think about knowledge-intensive, less-structured processes, like those in research and development or executive management, there's very little today that helps you capture, manage and optimize those environments. That is something that may be resolved with Web 2.0 communities in which you can structure the knowledge-creation and knowledge-sharing processes. In short, I think there are many developments that are leading toward the idea of open BPM.

Outtakes:

What's your hobby?

I have three key hobbies. The first one is jazz. I love listening to it, but I also own a little part of jazz club and I have been the executive producer of jazz CDs.

My second hobby is art, especially pop art. I collect the works of pop artists including Romero Britto, Burton Morris and Jeff Schaller.

My third hobby is food and fine cooking. For example, in New York I have been in the 12 top restaurants, I've spoken with all the chefs and I have their cookbooks. I have even toured many of the kitchens to see how they're organized.

How do you go about meeting chefs and arranging for kitchen tours?

It's much easier than you would think. I started that about 12 years ago when a good friend in Germany who's a chef started introducing me. He told me, "Just ask for the chef; they're usually very happy to talk to anyone who is really interested." It works everywhere I go.