Connie Moore’s (of Forrester) recent posting on collaboration and BPM got my attention primarily for the following quote:

But I’ve been a voice crying in the wilderness. I’m not kidding.  Whenever I would talk about collaboration with BPM vendors, they would somehow think I was talking about straight through processes between companies. That’s collaboration, right???  And whenever I would talk about BPM with content and collaboration vendors, they would look at me blankly and mumble something about using simple workflow for approving documents.  It felt like two disconnected worlds that desperately needed to find each other.

I can very well imagine this conversation with these vendor communities.  Connie sees reason for optimism, and I agree – but we still have a long way to go on this front.  Keep fighting the good fight!

Appian has just recently announced updated Sharepoint support on their website.  Support for wikis, and other bottom-up IT technology like Sharepoint, is likely to gain relevance in BPM deployments, in my opinion.  ActionBase takes one approach – allowing more adhoc processes to be defined in Microsoft Office documents.  It looks like Appian is enabling task lists to be treated like process steps in Sharepoint.  From Appian’s release:

Of course, many other BPM companies offer their own version of SharePoint integration, but I would like to think Appian has offered a unique spin on this integration that raises the bar for all other BPM vendors.  Appian not only allows SharePoint users to easily publish task lists and process reports in native SharePoint dashboards as webparts, but also Allows process designers to control and orchestrate all objects in SharePoint in an Appian process model.

Some of the other features discussed, such as creating a sharepoint site to support a process or process instance, are more similar to offerings from Lombardi, which also offers a Sharepoint integration.  I’m curious which BPM package offers the best Sharepoint integration capabilities, but I haven’t the time and resources to do the research on that front!  Opinions welcome in the comment section -

“Window Dressing” can kill your project.  It can even kill your BPM project.  Keith Swenson wrote a humorous but educational piece on an in-house BPM project gone awry.  Anyone who has deployed an internal application can relate to his story, but if you’ve deployed your own technology (or your own BPM technology) it hits especially close to home!

My favorite point made in the post is that flashy or pretty UIs don’t add value in-and-of-themselves.  That the focus should start with function and value, and apply the Keep It Simple Stupid (KISS) principle.  The extra UI “features” are break-even, if not value-detracting, from a value proposition.

Interestingly, Keith’s very next post was about the same kind of window dressing… but this time on the “back end” of integration/services:

I was asked “What common mistake do people make that causes unnecessary delay in BPM projects?”  The answer: Many projects have a goal to implement too much at once.  Some projects attempt to turn a manual process into a completely automated “straight-through” processes where there is no human interaction at all.

It is true that the more you can automate a process, the lower the cost or running the process.  But the cost of automation can vary greatly from activity to activity.

As he points out, integration is expensive.  Wrapping that legacy application as a service, is expensive.  It often makes sense to start with more easily attainable goals as a fallback position – by enabling the process without integrations first.  A technique that we’ve found effective on our projects:

• Start by modeling the process flow (which includes steps such as process mapping, inputs/outputs, etc.)
• Get the right level of logical abstraction in the second pass (re-organizing the original process)
• Get rudimentary UIs in place to allow running the process with as few integrations as possible – fewer integrations even than what the project requirements are.  Make sure the happy path works.
• Build test services to mimic the behavior of the integrations where possible – this allows you to test the various outcomes, exceptions, etc.
• Now prioritize and build the integrations that improve the process, based on the value of the improvement as compared to the cost of the improvement.

In fact, a process can be deployed with substantially all of the integrations yet to be completed, if the business users and IT professionals can be pragmatic rather than idealistic.  As Keith himself states:

There is an emotional side.  Some people are shocked when I suggest that we simply assign a task to a user, and have that user manually update the information in the third party system.  It just seems wrong to automate the process so that people can manually do a task.  This group-think often pushes a project to an all-or-nothing stance in process automation.  Striving to automate that last 5% causes most of the delay and cost of a process automation project.

This is best-practice process improvement as enabled by BPM.  It adheres to some of the principles that folks in the Lean school of that would espouse: namely, that you don’t let technology get in the way of your process.  Figure out the process, then use technology to improve it as the process stabilizes.

(As an aside, on one of my recent projects, rather than wrap batch scripts as synchronous transactional web services, we just continued to trigger them the old fashioned way:  by inserting records into their job-scheduling tables and polling for results.  It isn’t a particularly exciting method of integration, but these batch jobs already supported it, and it gave us better velocity toward production deployment. )

I’m a big fan of videoconferencing.  As a process guy, It is hard not to look at the time spent traveling (on the plane, going through security, etc) as a “non-value-added activity” as they say in Value Stream world.  But, its also the case that a phone conversation is generally greatly enhanced by video – in terms of quality, content, and focus.

Recently I held a videoconference with a few senior members of another company’s staff.  We had never met in person, and travel logistics to get us all into the same city in a reasonable amount of time were not practical.  But we could schedule a teleconference or videoconference about 4 day out that would capture everyone who needed to attend.  I suggested a videoconference, and after a quick followup with their staff, we determined that we could both do IP-dialing (please, if you still use ISDN, get IP videoconferencing enabled!  you are still in the dark ages of connectivity otherwise!) Our system is a LifeSize system, and theirs was Polycom, and they connected seamlessly.  Sadly, we didn’t have high-def videoconferencing because their Polycom system doesn’t support it.

Regardless, we had a good productive video conference, and we could finally put faces to names, and see people smiling at jokes.  Sure, you could argue it saved us the travel costs to meet in person. But really, the decision to not travel was made before the videoconference decision was made.  The real benefit was improved communication.  And anyone who has worked with a virtual team will tell you – the quality of communication is the key to success or failure.

Given all this, it was a nice surprise to see that Lifesize has released a new desktop version.  I first saw the story on Austin Startup (Lifesize was started in Austin):

LifeSize pioneered HD video communications to enable remote communications as naturally as in-person meetings, and the availability of LifeSize Desktop provides an ideal solution to extend video communications to the individual, often mobile user. LifeSize Desktop delivers HD video decode at 720p, 30 frames per second, in full 16:9 format, as well as HD audio with echo cancellation for productive collaboration. Designed for performance and efficiency, LifeSize Desktop’s low CPU utilization enables HD video calls even with multiple concurrent applications running on the PC. Remote users can easily connect and receive high quality video at any bandwidth, over the corporate VPN or through LifeSize Transit, for secure NAT/Firewall traversal.

Sure sounds good.  You can register for the free trial (and learn more about all the technical specs) here.  Of course, I’m hoping more people will get into the videoconferencing mode because that will mean more people I can connect with virtually! I’ve signed up for the trial, looking forward to giving it a test run soon. Also, if you’re interested in keeping up with the world of videoconferencing, check out their CTO’s blog.

If you’re having a call with us, and you have access to videoconferencing, ask us to videocon instead of telecon.  Its great!

No, this isn’t a political posting!

I just read Steve Blank’s blog on Faith-Based versus Fact-Based Decision Making, and it resonated really well with my experiences at prior startups.  As he points out, starting the company is an article of faith.  The first company I worked for was started by 5 Stanford undergrads, most of whom dropped out of school to start the company.  That is certainly an act of faith.  However, as the company grew, there was more and more data available with which to make good decisions. Steve Blank’s post focuses primarily on the product development, customer development, and marketing aspects.  But it is true of every facet of your business.  And the transition from faith to fact is important.  Not doing it can lead to some pretty bad decision making down the line.  At the company referenced above, 10 years after its founding, veterans often referred back to faith-based decisions in the past as articles of proof that the right way to make a decision was based on faith rather than based on facts.  “If we had relied on your facts, we never would have <insert action here, that gleaned millions of dollars for the company, or brought a key person into the organization>”.

Well, it is often hard to counteract this sort of discussion.  But let’s take another aspect that most people can relate to:  hiring.  The first time you hire someone for your startup, it is an act of faith.  Oh sure, you have the resume, you check references.  You interview. You interview again.  You have lunch, dinner.  You meet for coffee.  You spend a lot of time with that person.  And it is still an article of faith when you hire them.  Why?  Because the role you’re hiring for isn’t well-defined (almost by definition in a startup).  Because you don’t have enough other interviewers to compile feedback from.  Because you don’t have enough candidates who are willing to work for peanuts and equity (or even for cash for a risky proposition).

It turns out, at a larger company, every time you open a new position (role), you run into this problem again.  You don’t know exactly what the job description is. You don’t have anyone else to compare the candidates to in terms of “this guy is good at that job”.  You don’t even have consensus on what it means to *be* good at the job.

At a previous employer we needed to hire someone to run our recruiting operation.  The first person our HR director brought in, came highly recommended by an executive at another local company. Our HR director was confident they would pass the executive interviews with flying colors. But the candidate bombed across the board.  I told the HR director we’d likely have to interview 10 candidates before we would figure out what we really wanted out of the job, and if we were lucky, one of those first 10 would fit the bill – but if not we’d have to be prepared to interview and additional 5-10 people at least.  She was mortified at the idea of doing that kind of work for “just hiring a recruiter”.  But we wanted someone who would really make the recruiting process run smoothly and help us source good candidates.  Sure enough, we churned through 10 candidates… and then made our compromise, by realizing that we needed a different style of recruiting for engineering than we did for our professional services team.  Our engineering hires were heavily dependent on the local networking capability of the recruiter – we needed someone with deep Austin connections who could get people who weren’t looking for a job to pick up the phone, and help us make the sale.  But for professional services, we needed someone who had a process for finding people all over the country, and screening them before they got to us so that we didn’t waste too many cycles interviewing people who were obviously not a fit.  (Our professional services group had a regional staffing model)

But once you get big (as my first employer did) and you’re hiring for a well-understood role, you can establish really interesting hiring machinery.  Everyone goes through 4-6 interviews with specific goals.  You track statistics on each interviewer, and on the folks that you hire, to correlate interviewers positively or negatively with good hires (note: you have to have a review system for this to work).  You correlate job performance with GPA, previous job titles, industries, etc.

We were doing a lot of hiring of people from college.  The data said that people with above a certain GPA, who also passed our rigorous interviewing process, generally did quite well.  There wasn’t a lot of additional correlation of higher GPA to higher performance, surprisingly enough (some, but not much).  However, the data also said that we rejected something like 99% of the folks with less than that cut-off GPA who were granted a first round interview… And worse, most of those we hired with less than that GPA didn’t perform as well as those with a higher GPA.  My read on the data was simply that our GPA cutoff reflected more about commitment than smarts.  After all, the people who passed our interview process were smart. So why would they get a bad GPA?  Mostly, they weren’t committed during college.  I’ve known people like this all my life – and most of them eventually find what moves them, get committed, and go forward with much success from that point onward (sometimes in highschool, sometimes in college, sometimes graduate school or the first or second job).  But there is no way to predict what will trigger their inner mojo.  And there is no reason to assume that your company is the secret ingredient that will unlock their motivation!   Our recruiters, however, had it as an article of faith that some of the most outstanding employees had crummy GPAs (or even dropped out as the founders had!).  They were arguing that we should continue to make these leaps of faith.  But outside of the founders, every other successful anecdote with the low GPA was someone who had previous industry experience where they had demonstrated excellence.  In other words, once someone has had a real job, GPA is pretty irrelevant as a predictor of performance, compared to data from their previous work history.  We did NOT have a compelling case based on the facts, for college hires with low GPAs achieving success at our firm.

I think the key lesson is:  when you don’t have enough data, you still have to make a decision, make the best decision you can.  But when you have enough data, let that data inform your decision-making.  Don’t confuse good fortune with a good process.

BPMN Method and Style, a new book by Bruce Silver.  Its going up on Amazon sometime in June Its already up on Amazon, and has some great endorsements already (check out the link for details).  Looking forward to giving it a good read myself!  Congratulations Bruce, in getting this new book out there!

My google alerts recently turned up a reference to a new blog post from Aditya Tuli, Too Cloudy, in which he engages in a very thoughtful critique of Intalio’s roadshow, as well as his experiences with Intalio.

First, there is the natural (at this point almost knee-jerk among us techies) skepticism toward anyone flouting that “cloud” buzzword.  After all, most of the “cloudiness” (is that appropriate?!) comes from virtualization technologies, and not from the software vendors.  In a sense, the software vendors have to “get out of the way” of the virtualization.  This is similar to what I used to say about a good J2EE application – if it does its job right, it “gets out of the way” of the J2EE container and let’s it do the clustering, transaction management, messaging, etc. (or, at least, the configuration of all of the above).

Second, Mr. Tuli praises Intalio’s acquisition strategy.

Third, he expresses concern about the nature of the sales pitch – that it might be too focused on the big enterprise clients, rather than on the open source community which is using various Intalio products.  If I can take the liberty to quote his best passage:

And I found myself concerned about Intalio’s early open source community users (there are some 50,000 companies in that crowd), but there was no mention of what was unique in the new Intalio for them. With these upcoming acquisitions Intalio would soon have some 10-15 million customers, and with this so called Boxing I just felt that perhaps the Bazaar was being boxed neatly into a Cathedral.

Finally, he finished with a critique of the maturity of their support of the open source community that uses Intalio’s software, including a lack of documentation.   In the comment stream, an Intalio developer responded to the lack of documentation, pointing out: “As I say from time to time on the forum, we need to eat at some point, and training, helping people is where the most painful part of our job is.”  And this is where you find the sticking points with software companies – when the simple analysis might be that improved documentation would undermine training revenue.  It isn’t true, actually, but it is easy for software companies’ personnel to come to this conclusion.  Specifically in the case of an opensource company, it might be reasonable to accept small payments for improving documentation on behalf of customers, much as they might accept payments for fixing bugs or adding features to product specifically for a particular customer (I’m not sure if Intalio does this, but certainly it has been done on other platforms, like oscommerce, by developers who contribute to that project).

Overall it will be interesting to see how Intalio’s strategy plays out and where it leads for the company.  It is, at the least, a different strategy than what we’re seeing from other BPM vendors, which makes it interesting to read about and interesting fodder for blog posts!

We previously addressed the newest generation of iPhones in the iPhone 3.0 (now, iPhone 3G S … however, the iPhone OS is going to version 3.0, so perhaps the title is still ok).  Now that Apples’ WWDC has come and gone, and the dust has settled (for the most part), the press coverage makes it pretty clear that Apple has been able to pretty effectively execute on its differentiation strategy:

First, the major complaints leveled against the iPhone have been addressed (a series of fairly commoditized features such as cut-n-paste, MMS, opening .ics files, etc.)

Second, if we revisit the product revision options open to Apple pointed out in a previous post on Apple and BPM, it looks like they fired on multiple cylinders:

• Lower the price on the existing units – the iPhone 3G’s price has been reduced from $199 to $99.
• Release a new, improved unit with the old (high) price – the iPhone 3G S has more memory, faster processing, better graphics, a better camera, somewhat improved battery life, tethering, MMS, etc.
• Release more varied looks with approximately current technical specs (e.g. the colored iPod Nanos, for example) – Nothing done on this front, this time around.
• Create new pricepoints with low-cost components – e.g. RAM.  The new, improved iPhone carries higher pricepoints for a 16Gb and 32Gb version, which represent profitable upgrades for Apple, along with a fairly inexpensive camera upgrade (they are trailing the state of the art for phone cameras by enough that they aren’t paying much for innovation in that particular area).
• Improve the platform by adding new services or functions – the new iPhone offers the “find my phone” feature, video recording and editing, voice activation, etc.
• Change the pricing of services on the platform – Not too many changes on this front.
• Any combination of the above.  Check.

In particular, by lowering the pricepoint of the 3G, it appears that they’ve taken the oxygen out of the room for the competition (Palm Pre, for example).  So Apple retains the high end of the market with the new iPhone 3GS, while robbing profitability of the also rans by deploying the iPhone 3G at $99 (which itself is being upgraded by most of the improvements present in the iPhone OS 3.0).  And due to reduced component prices and volume negotiating, likely all of these phones are reasonably profitable for Apple when you include the carrier subsidies.  They’ve had time to recoup the R&D costs that went into the iPhone in previous years and are likely finding it increasingly easy to invest in future R&D against a growing revenue and profit stream.

Moreover, they’ve managed to really build consensus and focus on their key differentiating points – the platform (Appstore and OS), and applications (50,000 and counting).  While there was some coverage of specifications which indicate that the new iPhone is an even better gaming platform, Apple steered clear of focusing on easily commoditized hardware components.  One article on TechCrunch bemoans the fact that upgrading from the iPhone 3G doesn’t qualify for the subsidized prices (yet), but it definitely appears to be the minority view in the press.  Another TechCrunch article paints a bleak picture for the rest of the smartphone market.

In the immediate aftermath of the iPhone 3GS announcement, many wondered if Apple would sell as many as they had in previous summers.  Early signs are that all the pre-orders are sold out-  so while there may not be long lines on release day, there will be waits for the channel to fill.

Apple has executed the differentiation strategy brilliantly – as they should – they’ve had a lot of practice with the iPod releases over the last several years, and it looks like a well-understood process.

(I’m still looking for the rainbow color options next year… )

Several sources have reported and commented on American Airlines‘ decision to end the Nerd Bird, an iconic flight (if ever there was such a thing) between Austin and San Jose, the respective tech capitals of Texas and California. This direct flight has tied these two tech communities together in ways that are hard to explain, but a quote from the Statesman’s article today does an admirable job if you read between the lines of these statistics:

In 1996, Fast Company magazine surveyed passengers on one Nerd Bird flight and found that 75 percent carried a laptop, 56 percent carried a pager, 52 percent carried a cell phone and 12 percent carried a personal digital assistant. Thirty-five percent said they took the flight at least once every two weeks, and 58 percent had a favorite seat.

If you take a minute to think back to your life in 1996, I think you’ll realize how remarkable these statistics are.  I was one of these laptop-toting high-tech travelers back then, but even I didn’t have a cell phone yet.  And in 1996, you might pay $1000 for 16MB (yes, MegaBytes) of RAM in your laptop… Laptops were not cheap.  I flew the route so often that I recognized the crew and pilots more often than not, and many of the passengers.  One pilot’s friendly banter got a little stale when he woke me up with the PA system to tell us that if we looked out the left side of the plane we could see the grand canyon… on a clear day.  It was cloudy.

The Austin-American Statesman drew 44 comments to their posting online, most of them irate or reflecting disbelief.

The official line is that the route is unprofitable.  Although I don’t fly the route regularly anymore, I’ve never been on this flight and not had every seat filled.  I think the level of frustration expressed in the comments reflects the common sense most consumers would apply to this problem:  if you’re flight is full, and you’re not making money, raise your prices.  I think, instead, AA is looking at their system-wide profits and they see removing this flight as a way to increase utilization on Austin to Dallas flights that aren’t all filled to capacity, as well as Dallas to SJC flights that aren’t filled to capacity – in other words, this change is likely not about the AUS->SJC flight.  It is likely about the other network effects of the change.

But all is not lost.  While there is now no direct flight to the San Jose Airport (SJC), it seems ripe for Southwest to start running that route given that they are both the largest carrier in and out of Austin (in terms of flights and passengers), as well as the largest or second-largest carrier out of San Jose (in terms of flights and passengers).  And in the meantime, JetBlue flies a great flight between Austin and San Francisco (SFO), with 2 spacious seats on each side of the aisle, a DirecTV tv on every seat, and brand-new planes.  The only problem is that they need to add a second flight per day – currently they only run an evening flight from AUS to SFO, and a morning flight from SFO to AUS, which cuts down on travel options if you originate in Austin.

I used to fly American quite a bit out of Austin, and one of the big reasons was that they provided a lot of nonstop flights, plus the ability to get almost anywhere through DFW.  However, over the years the numer of nonstop flights offered by American actually decreased, while the total number of nonstop flights from Austin has increased (reaching a peak of 39 out-of-state nonstop destinations in 2008).  A few of those flights have been cancelled since then, so the number might be 35 or so now.

But as American has pulled back from direct flights, others have stepped up.  For example, American cancelled their direct flight to Seattle (adding 2 hours to a 4 hour flight by switching in Dallas).  But Alaska Air has picked up that route.  American cancelled direct flights to Boston when the tech bubble burst.  But nonstop flights picked up on JetBlue, using the same great Embraer jets that JetBlue flies to San Francisco.  My next trip is a nonstop flight from Austin to Baltimore on Southwest. There were reasonably priced flights on American and Continental, but they required layovers in Dallas and Houston, which add 2 hours to flight time with no extra value for the traveler.  I just believe the future of flying from Austin will be nonstop flights, and American (and Continental) are going to miss out on the growth in travel in and out of Austin by pulling back from their direct flight commitments.

Business week recently put out a 4-page (on the web) article entitled “The Failed Promise of Innovation in the US“.

But after reading it, I can’t help but feel the failure was in the promises more than in the innovation.  The author (Michael Mandel) takes us back to 1998, and recounts some of the great expectations of that year – across a great number of industries – and then examines reality 10-11 years later.  The author finds our progress over the intervening years to be quite wanting, relative to the promises made in 1998.

Essentially I don’t find fault with his depiction of expectations (the Promise) in 1998, nor his description of the current-state reality.  But I think his assignment of “blame” or cause, is misplaced.  He seems to be saying that, in some fashion, the US has lost its “innovation mojo”, with some not-quite-determined cause for that.  The consequences of less innovation could be severe, as he rightly points out…

Here are a couple of the aspects of the last 10 years that the author has overlooked, which I think have a profound affect on the perception of innovation on the one hand, and on the actual pace of innovation on the other.

Is Perception Reality?

First, on the perception front.  I believe that the expectations of progress (Innovation) have a tendency to outstrip what reality can produce.  The reality is, innovation takes longer than people expect it to take to go from a successful lab experiment to something that we can connect with in daily life.  And the media is particularly focused on “lab” innovation, rather than the innovations that affect our daily lives.  I think this bias is because the innovations rampant in our daily lives don’t seem as dramatic and futuristic as the innovations that are bubbling in beakers in a cleanroom.  There’s something the big media companies love about showing footage of lab-coated or bunny-suited technicians titrating liquids in a gleaming lab. There’s a tendency to overlook more gradual innovation that is, in some cases, more remarkable.

Let’s take an example.  Look at Google’s iPhone and Android applications… you pick up your phone, ask it a question, it interprets your voice to understand what you’re searching for, and returns to you locale-based results, followed by more general results.  So if you pick up the phone and say “Italian Restaurants” the Google phone app will find Italian restaurants that are near you based on GPS coordinates.  The concept that SEARCH would yield this kind of innovation, in 1998, was unthinkable.  It certainly wasn’t part of our expectations for phones or for search at the time.  And so this kind of innovation gets short shrift from the author of the article.

The author spends a lot of his column discussing biotech – an area that requires an enormous amount of clinical trials before going to market.  In other words, regardless of how fast the “innovation” part of the engine is churning, there will be an enormous lag time between the lab and the real world.  Why?  Because of safety concerns.  Because we had some unfortunate drug safety mishaps with a whole category of drugs (pain relievers) that had side effects that could be deadly (heart problems primarily).   As the author points out toward the end of the article, there is a glut of biotech drugs about to hit the market – so it may appear that the next few years have an unusually high degree of biotech innovation, but in reality most of that work happened over the previous decade…

Another example from the author was Apligraf, with a skin replacement tissue that seemed groundbreaking.  Apligraf had problems with delivery, despite the fact that the product worked:  getting production ramped up, getting delivery of live tissue right, and getting costs down to make it competitive.  What the author failed to point out is that, during this same timeframe, another company, Lifecell, was achieving quite a bit of success with its products, in particular with AlloDerm and Strattice.  Lifecell was sold to KCI, but not before having a successful run as a public company (I should know, I made a little bit of money off of my Lifecell stock, thanks for the recommendation, Dad). The point here, is that even in specific categories we can cherry pick our data to argue either that innovation was great or that innovation was slow…

Other examples of how perception may not match reality?  Most Americans probably believe that American manufacturing is on the wane.  Employment in manufacturing is down year after year after year.  That part is true. But what most people don’t realize is that the US still is the largest manufacturer in the world… And that we actually manufacture more “stuff” now than we did in 1998.  We’ve just gotten less labor-intensive in our manufacturing businesses.

Even so, why wasn’t the reality of Innovation better?

Returning to the “actuals” front… to the extent that more innovation didn’t happen, why is that?

The author points out several valid reasons.  However, I think he overlooked something really important, specifically as it relates to one of the “innovation metrics” he uses: productivity.  Historically, innovation and improvement in productivity is a reaction to pressure.  The pressure that drives increased productivity might be competition- the company with the lowest cost often wins in the long run – and lower cost is either achieved by having cheaper labor or a more efficient (productive) operation.  When labor is scarce, companies focus on improving productivity.  But something happened between 1998 and 2009.  Large US-based multi-nationals discovered that, rather than improving internal processes and investing in productivity-enhancing capital equipment or software, they could move massive numbers of jobs from the US to Asia (India and China, largely).  A certain amount of innovation was enabled by the opening of labor markets overseas in combination with better (cheaper) telecommunications and internet connectivity – outsourcing of callcenters, IT, radiology, etc.

But it also stymied innovation at large corporations.  Largely they outsourced swaths of business (often IT), that were previously sources of innovation.  The quick win was to swap out expensive personnel for less expensive personnel (taking advantage of exchange rates, cost of living, etc.). This was true for skilled labor and for manufacturing.

However, we’re now seeing the glut in labor overseas evaporating.  Exchange rates are working against offshoring as the US Dollar gets weaker.  Skilled labor costs in India and China are considerably higher than they were in 1998, while labor costs in the US are relatively flat. Shipping costs are going up with higher prices of oil and gas.  All of this makes local production more important, and regardless of locale, a lack of additional units of cheap labor means that efficiency starts to look more important (as an aside, the author noted that lack of productivity improvement might have been a factor in why wages didn’t rise – but wages didn’t rise primarily because of a change in the supply/demand ratio more than because of a lack of productivity growth, in my opinion).

From where I’m sitting, BPM is the right way to focus our attention on where the efficiencies will come from.  Other technologies may be the keys to unlocking some of the efficiencies (for example, new capital equipment), but BPM techniques and process improvement techniques generally, can help us focus on the keys to the ROI kingdom.

Recently read the post (and watched the screencast) on Intalio’s blog about their new “Process Table” feature.  The basic idea is that you use a spreadsheet to define your process, and then have the software “auto-magically” produce a running, executable process for you (screens and all). Interestingly, I saw something similar in Lombardi’s labs when I was an employee there, one of the “science fair” projects that one of my colleagues was showing off.  Not sure what happened to it as far as a shipping product idea, but it sure made for a neat demonstration.

I think in this family of product ideas, however, ActionBase (Click on the “take the tour” link) has a better answer.  At least, if you’re going to the depth of comparing one web video demonstration to another (admittedly not up to Dennis Byron’s standards of research!).  ActionBase proposes using Word and Email to create processes “on the fly” and relies on the software to manage the hand-offs for you.  However, ActionBase also appears to let the process adapt as it is running, if someone is assigned a task and needs to add additional items to the process flow.

Both of these ideas address processes that have lightweight technology requirements but very real process requirements.  Both pure-play and stack vendors would do well to provide better support for such scenarios, but its even more important for the pure-plays because they’re more concerned with directly assessing and meeting the needs of the business, rather than just IT.  IT-led projects won’t be as interested in “process-lite” style approaches like this, but in reality it is a great way to start extracting process out of the email stream or the spreadsheet-hand-off scenario…

Unfortunately Dr. Rajeev Motwani, a great professor at Stanford University, is no longer with us.  I first learned of the news on VentureBeat and GigaOm.  This is sad and shocking news, because my memory of him from CS154 (automata and such) about 16 years ago was of a vibrant professor in his prime, physically and mentally, and you just can’t imagine something will happen to someone like this.  From the comments on GigaOm, he was much the same to his students who saw him just this past Tuesday.

I was never on a first-name basis with Dr. Motwani, and I was far from the star student in our class.  In fact, some of the graduate students who were TA’s in my other Computer Science classes were taking this class alongside me, as well as one of the lecturers at the time who was lecturing, working, and pursuing her PhD or Master’s degree simultaneously.  I remember taking this class with a friend from my hometown in Missouri, and we struggled mightily to keep up, but thanks to the help of Mike Oswald (Oz) studying for the class, I got through it. This was the class where I discovered that intuitively understanding the theories and being able to write good proofs are simply two different things!

One of my favorite turns of phrase of Dr. Motwani occurred nearly every lecture.  He would start a proof on the board of the next concept we needed to understand (something about  Turing Completeness, for example).  At a certain point, feeling that he had explained the critical part of the proof, he would wave his marker at the board and say “… and the rest is relatively easy.”  And for him, I never once doubted that it was!  But for the rest of us mere mortals we found the remaining proofs to be a bit more substantial in nature.  I often wondered how many theses and careers had been built around these proofs that he could so easily call “relatively easy”.

Suffice to say, he was one of the professors who left a mark on everyone who took his class, and he was more than willing to help those of us that were not about to found a Google.  And the things I learned in his class have been incredibly relevant and helpful to the work I’ve done since, and likely the same can be said of most every student that went through his class.

Our condolences to his family, friends, colleagues, and students.

Bruce Silver wrote up a quick, thorough review of Signavio, a new BPM in the cloud offering.  Looks like it is primarily focused on modeling rather than execution, which makes comparisons to Lombardi’s Blueprint perhaps the most relevant comparisons.

As usual, Bruce’s sense of humor is on display (“You have to sign a click-through agreement in German to get started.  Oh well, who reads those things anyway?”).

One really good shot against Lombardi’s Blueprint in his review:  Signavio can export an XML document that represents the model.  There’s no such facility in Blueprint (though it can “publish” to Teamworks, that isn’t the same thing as exposing an XML output).  Bruce also points out that they have full support for BPMN 1.1 (whereas Blueprint only supports a subset), but Lombardi would argue that they’re providing a reasonable subset to keep the diagramming from distracting from the process at that level.  (Still, like Bruce, I’d like to have the full set of diagramming options for power users).

At any rate, its  a good read, and from the comment thread, Signavio is already working on some of the issues.

Just giving a shout-out to Keith Swenson, who has changed his blog’s title from “Go Flow” to “Thoughts on Collaborative Planning”, and he explains why in this post.  I think its a bit like when you start writing a book, a page at a time, and at some point you realize you have the wrong title, or you can think of a better one.  Keith’s blog is more about quality than quantity, and every time he posts I’ve found it to be a valuable, thoughtful discourse, and maybe more importantly, he’s been thought-provoking.  Here’s hoping there’s at least another 3 years and 90 more posts on your blog, Keith!

The Process Maverick (aka Theo Priestley) wrote a pretty interesting blog titled “Calling time on the BPM Conferences“.  In it, he points out:

In the last 6 months there’s a growing trend towards offering massive discounting or 2-for-1 deals (is this a professional meeting or a team huddle at Wal-mart ?!!) to try and attract the numbers. And it’s not working.

Lombardi pulled its famous Driven events from being physically located to purely Online now following a call from its members stating they could no longer warrant traveling and the expenses that incurred. Rumblings from the recent Spring Gartner BPM conference suggested that there was nothing new to warrant actually going. And more worryingly, a recent european conference had only 20 attendees….including the speakers ! It would seem the majority attending came from the Middle East and they understood a little about BPM and process initiatives but did they need to come all that way to learn ?

In fact, I’ve been hearing these rumblings about conferences in general, not just BPM conferences.  And there is reasonable evidence to show that BPM conferences are generally doing better than non-BPM-themed conferences (if you believe Gartner’s attendance numbers, their spring events were quite well attended).

Still, Theo’s criticisms are well-noted.  I think there is some consensus among those who regularly attend such conferences that there is not enough net-new content for a Gartner BPM Conference every 6 months, for example.  The beauty of a “Lombardi Driven” conference in past years was that it had a pull on different audiences for different reasons, and could satisfy their interests:

• Technical practitioners looking for practical help, tools, shared experiences
• Technologists looking at the road ahead, from a technical perspective, and for best practices from a technology perspective
• Business Process specialists at firms using Lombardi’s software, who wanted to get a little better understanding of the company and the products they would be employing
• Process owners looking for ideas for improvement, and inspiration and motivation to go get the budget they need to invest in their processes
• Executives looking for partners to help them expand from project to program.
• Implementation and ISV Partners looking for business opportunities
• Customers looking for help

I think what made Driven interesting was its focus on the practical. In a multi-vendor conference, not all the conversations can cross-pollinate as easily. Speakers at the more general conferences will tend to be more business centric, but perhaps at the expense of really drawing the right audience.  The format tends to be more presentation oriented than discussion (in fact, Driven was heading down that presentation/podium-focus as well, and the video-only version of Driven was completely devoid of the normal discussion that makes these events so worthy of attending).

But the real criticism of Theo’s that sticks:

“Isn’t it time the conference organisers woke up and realised that CONTENT is king and not the turnstiles?”

Yes, it is.  I propose a more barcamp-oriented solution (dare I say, crowdsourced).  Topics should be proposed by the community of attendees and presenters and voted on with feet (and web browsers).  The emphasis should be less about turning a profit from the conference, and more about breaking even, and creating value for everyone who attends, sponsors, speaks, or reads the notes later.  We have a tradition of this kind of conference in Austin, with Mr. Hurley being the driving force behind it.  I think there are some lessons to learn from this approach, that could result in a really effective BPM conference.

A wonderful example of looking at the same glass and seeing it as half-empty rather than half-full, here’s the headline from an article I just read:  “Just 15% of Companies that Implemented a BPM System are Realizing End-User Productivity Gains of More than 50%”

(or should I say, 15% full or 85% empty? )

Its a good read of an article, but let me write the headline differently using the same statistics:

“15% of Companies implementing a BPM System realize end-user productivity gains of more than 50%”

That sounds, actually, pretty good.  Presumably some larger percentage of these companies implementing BPM Systems achieve some smaller end-user productivity gains.  It also seems that these statistics are being reported in a vacuum.  Are end-user productivity gains the *only* goal of such implementations?  What about better customer service?  Lower defect rates?  Higher throughput without a loss of quality?  Faster turnaround time?  etc.

Reading into the (slightly) more detailed stats at the bottom of the article, only 1.4% of BPM Projects had negative end-user productivity impact, and 46% fell into the “don’t know” category.  That’s the real problem:  too many of the companies implementing BPM Systems really had no effective way to measure worker productivity *prior* to implementing BPM.  So often the better apples-to-apples comparisons are other statistics that are affected by end-user productivity but are secondary indicators:

• Throughput of your process (# of instances of the process in a given timeframe)
• Average and Median completion time of a process instance
• Number of defects (customer complaints, inaccurate orders, etc) per million (for example)
• Customer Service scores
• etc.

Another question asks how often end-users are involved in designing their own workarounds to get around the system.  46.5% said often, and 38.4% said occasionally.  This is a great argument for why a BPM initiative needs to be a program, and not just a one-and-done project.  Those workarounds that end users are designing need to be sussed out, examined, discussed, and incorporated into future BPM iterations… In other words, we want continuous process improvement.

I’m looking at the same statistics and seeing the glass half-full…

Intalio’s Ismael Ghalimi is crowing about some new offerings that are at least partly as a result of some acquisitions they’ve done recently.  The press release announces the new branding that is prevalent on their website.  They are now advertising themselves as the “Enterprise Cloud Company”, and essentially trying to ride the coattails of two big buzzwords- BPM and Cloud.  This isn’t that different than what some other companies are doing, though it may be a bit more aggressive on the branding side than those other efforts.  I’m not sure that I follow the strategy of moving into the CRM space (which, as anyone following that space knows, has a couple of strong competitors in Salesforce, SugarCRM, and Oracle/Siebel, among others). And it also concerns me when I read a press release that quotes an anonymous customer from “one of the World’s largest banks” – its hard to get attributed quotes from customers in time to hit press release or marketing deadlines – but that is precisely why they are so valuable.  Anyone who knows how hard it is to get them understands that you have to actually be delivering value for the customer to even have a hope of getting such a recommendation.

We’ll have to see how the acquisitions shake out for Intalio, but none of this sounds like bad news for the BPM space.   Its a very ambitious play for Intalio.  On this page, Intalio announces its utility pricing for on-premise solutions.  Again, they’re painting a pretty ambitious picture for what they’ll set up, including VMWare vSphere as the hypervisor.  The pricing at first glance looks a little high to me- but that is based on my thumbnail cost+ consideration, rather than comparing to what other solutions cost when priced the same way (at $10/GB of memory, paying $0.10/hour/GB means that you’re paying $10 for 100 hours of 1 GB, and you keep paying going forward).

UPDATE: In another page, Intalio rolls out their new slogan and messaging, answering my question above as to “why enter the CRM market?” to some degree- they’ve given their view of the value-play in that space, but haven’t fully explained the rationale behind their move into the space from a strategic point of view.  The three limits Intalio targets:

1. Deployment options – Intalio offers their CRM package on-demand, on-premises, and managed on-premises.
2. Programming language (for customization and custom extensions) – Intalio claims Salesforce only supports APEX and Visualforce, while Intalio supports a number of standard languages.
3. Capacity and Performance – Intalio appears to be offering bigger file sizes, etc. than Salesforce.

Again, interesting stuff from Intalio, and aggressive positioning.  I’m curious to see how it plays in the marketplace, and definitely interested in reading any comments, emails, or posts from folks who are using the Intalio cloud offering!

Sandy Kemsley posted a good recap of a webinar on BPMN 2.0 by Robert Shapiro.  Its a good writeup, and must have been a pretty good webinar.

Another link from Sandy – I’m not sure how I feel about this – a book on BPMN, that (I think) is intended to read like a novel… I don’t know whether to be afraid, or very afraid…

Interesting post on ignoring data by Pete Warden.  The fascinating part about his post is that he argues (with evidence gathered from some other experts) – that sometimes you have to go beyond what the data tells you, or ignore the data, or do something in spite of what the data tells you.

It reminded me of many conversations I’ve had over the years about making “informed decisions”.  My emphasis is always that you should be aware of the data out there (especially when it is readily available) before making your decision.  Often I have run into resistance from the audience receiving this advice because, I think, they’re assuming that I think the data will prove them wrong – or that if the data indicates they should do something different, they won’t be able to do what they want.

Quite the contrary!  The point of making informed decisions can be spelled out quite simply:

1. When the data confirms the decision you were about to make, you have more ammunition to rationally explain your actions to your superiors, your customers, or your team (or yourself!).
2. When the data contradicts the decision you were about to make, and the data surprised you (different than your assumptions), you may want to do some further analysis to find out why the data wasn’t what you expected.
3. When you decide to act contrary to what the data tells you, you’ll be doing it from an informed perspective – aware of the risks, and able to articulate why you’re taking those risks.

The point isn’t to replace human decision-making, it is to inform human decision-making.  If you don’t get informed decisions, you don’t get “some” decisions made with the gut, you get all of them made with the gut – something we humans aren’t that good at – and you lose the opportunity to learn from historical data (even those early gut calls).

SolarWinds just went public today after being fully subscribed in their pricing range.  Reuters reports on the debut, including (at the moment) a 16% rise in the stock on the open market.  This is not only good news for the markets and the venture investors, but good news for Austin, which hasn’t seen an IPO in approximately 3 years, despite having quite a few companies in incubation here.

We have some good friends working over at SolarWinds, and we’re very happy for them for being able to capitalize on all the hard work so far to retire debt and have money to invest in growth.  Of course, as anyone who has worked at a recently-public company will tell you – now the real work starts!

(editors note: SolarWinds is not a green energy play… check out their website to learn more about their business in network management)