The highlight (for me) of last year’s SXSW-interactive conference was the Lean Startup SXSW – a whole day of planned content, mainly in one room (in the AT&T executive center) focused on the idea of “the lean startup”.  Eric Ries and team did a phenomenal job bringing together a set of topics and speakers that you just normally wouldn’t get exposure to in a single day.

Leveraging the success of that forum, SXSW has created the Startup Village this year.  The 4th floor of the Hilton will be converted to startup mecca.  I thought the “Lean Startup SXSW” track might have gone away in favor of this modified (and bigger billing) approach.  Apparently not so.  Today SXSW.com announces that they’re bringing Lean Startup SXSW back – and some of the chief instigators are involved again – Eric Ries, Dave McClure, Steve Blank, 500 Startups, et al:

The Lean Startup SXSW will take place on Saturday, March 10th from 9:30am – 6:00pm at the Downtown Hilton (across from the Convention Center), and the most up-to-date agenda can be found here.

So, more central location, same Saturday location in the schedule (good call).  The agenda already has enough speakers identified for me to plan my Saturday schedule.

Once again, good evidence of how SXSW adapts and co-opts good ideas from the outside.  Congrats to the organizers, I’m looking forward to it.

Editor’s note: This is reposted with permission of the Author.  Gary Samuelson’s original post can be found here.

Forward

If you haven’t already done so I highly recommend you “tool up” for iOS (iPhone) or Android development. Speaking more on the Android platform with this point, but Android is based on Linux – meaning that the Android “smartphone” is a small, pocket-sized Linux computer. And, behind this tiny, touch-screen UI, we have an event-driven framework suited for wireless IO (communication) and  distributed client (end-user) services. This makes a good fit for BPM mobility as it applies focused, via platform constraints, user-to-process interaction.

So, in warming up to enterprise-scale BPM Mobility, I want to first walk through a few system architectures – this prior to diving into the details of Android computing. Goal being a build-up towards mobile device UI/IO requirements: from current state to future capabilities.

BPM Desktop Client: Web-portal, JSP Struts/Tiles

The portal has been with BPM practically from the very beginning and it exists today mostly in its original form as a JSP STRUTS/Tiles web-application.

Though somewhat dated in its technology, we must give credit as it has been and still is the BPM workhorse: delivering process execution, management, tracking, and reporting to our end-users. However, the portal leaves us wanting. Today’s users require a “rich web” experience – something beyond the reach of traditional architectures (form based: HTTP get/post). And, though the BPM Portal remains unsurpassed in features it simply cannot function as a mobile application.

For example, with the portal loaded into a 10″ tablet web-browser, there are just too many active features and UI elements for reasonable touch-screen interaction. I found myself constantly zooming in for navigation and then back out again to review effects and options. However, dashboard and charting elements do work well when broken out on their own as separate elements.

IBM-BPM v751 – Advanced: Dojo, Widgets, ReST API

Business Space enhances end-user experience with iWidgets and supporting dojo infrastructure.  Users now have rich web-applications without the downside of additional overhead costs required for custom in-house web development.

New BPM ReST APIs also opens the door to previously unattainable (within reason) web capabilities. Fully in-browser, JavaScript libraries now have direct access to process management. This leads to better performing web applications with reduced UI-interrupting side-effects caused by (legacy) HTML “post” and “get” operations.

Though very close, I’m not sure that we’re at mobile computing. I need to qualify this however because Business Space runs well on Tablets. The catch is that it requires screen real-estate, network bandwidth, and additional CPU. Honestly, these are negligible on today’s desktop/laptop computers. Even reasonably powerful tablets are fully capable of running Business Space over WIFI.

Business Space on a smart-phone though does spot-light a few problems.

Screen real estate is tight on smart-phones! Slow performance is also noticeable as the phone’s CPU just doesn’t seem to keep up and deliver on the same snappy performance previously experienced on both desktop and tablet execution.

Phones require their own native BPM application.

Mobile Applications for Mobile Process Management

Writing native applications feels counter-intuitive but it’s our only alternative given the constraints and limitations for mobile computing. Moving task services to Android (for example) significantly improves performance. Execution latency and UI “lag” disappear as timings drop into sub-second range.

With local execution, we’re looking at:

Reduced IO traffic via local application loading

• Discrete JSON server requests via ReST APIs.
• Native (java) run-time execution
• Local device data-storage. For example, Android includes a database usable for both caching and offline process execution.
• Local application services. These include: notification, document viewers, contacts, identity, and geo/mapping.

Conclusion

In working towards an architecture suitable for mobile BPM we take into account accompanying constraints and capabilities. We’re on a different path in that we’ve re-focused on building native phone applications.

Smartphones require discrete UIs, optimized coding techniques, and light-weight network IO. These challenges though are well worth the investment as mobility advances user-to-process interaction to near-personal proximity.

Acknowledging the tens of millions of new users purchasing smartphones, new expectations are set/re-set on almost a daily basis. Now’s the time to revisit our architecture and build-in these future capabilities.

I guess if we can have Technical Debt, and Process Debt, why not Management Debt?

Ben Horowitz’ post on Management Debt is a good read, but one thing that separates it from technical debt or process debt is that it seems to my own naivete that it almost never pays to pick up the management debt if you can avoid it, as described by Ben:

Like technical debt, management debt is incurred when you make an expedient, short-term management decision with an expensive, long-term consequence. Also like technical debt, the trade-off sometimes makes sense, but often does not. More importantly, if you incur the management debt without accounting for it, then you will eventually go management bankrupt.

He gives three tough examples – two in a box, overcompensation, and no feedback loop.

In the end, it comes down to leadership even more than management.  In each of his scenarios, good leadership cuts through the problems or is willing to pay the debt now rather than later.

In Brakoniecki’s post on Lean Start-ups and the idea of Entrepreneur, he delves into the apparent conflict between the Taylor “Great Man” theory, and the Lean Startup’s emphasis on leadership, and learning (all while in essence refuting the idea of the Great Man). I commented on his blog directly but thought I’d share my thoughts here as well:

The relationship between the Great Man theory and Entrepreneur is a bit of a quandary in the lean startup community.  On the one hand, many people in the startup business contend, paraphrased, that “entrepreneurs are born rather than made.”  But the lean startup seems to say that entrepreneurship can be taught, learned, rather than born inside you.

The “born with it” argument, to me, seems to be in alignment with the idea of building companies around Great Men (very Ayn Rand, in my humble opinion).  But that doesn’t make it correct.  In my experience, these things aren’t mutually exclusive.

I’d put it this way.  For some people, being a good entrepreneur *appears* to be innate.  We don’t know the person well enough to know how this talent developed, and what their experiences were – they’re a black box. To us, as if by magic, they are really good at entrepreneurship (and leading).  For others, it is more obviously a learned, thoughtfully acquired skill.

But I would argue that for literally everyone – born with it or not – if you decide to begin the journey of entrepreneurship, you can improve your chances if you learn.  And learning what Lean Startup has to offer is clearly a benefit- even if you choose not to apply lean startup methods to your efforts, at least you’re making an informed decision.  If you do apply lean startup, then of course the goal is that you also learn about your potential market and customers faster as well.

One thing clear to me is that lean startup (any startup) still requires leadership.  It’s hard to imagine any other possibility.  Critical decisions, pivots, and hires have to be made.  I just don’t see how you do that without good leadership.

And of course the other wrinkle is that not all leadership looks the same.  Contrast Tony Hsieh‘s style with Steve Jobs for example…

David Brakoniecki chimes in on ACM’s product/market fit problem, and hopefully he won’t mind me quoting liberally from his post.  On the one hand, there is the rock:  free or nearly free software from various providers that addresses the freelance/collaboration use case…

Freelance Web designers and developers need a tool to collaborate with clients and to manage projects. They simply can’t afford to pay much for it but there are thousands of them. Basecamp pretty much plays perfectly to this market. It’s SaaS delivery model and freemium pricing makes it easy for users to get started quickly.

On the other side is the hard place: difficult integrations that must be completed before something like ACM or BPM can be successfully implemented…

If your target market is hospitals or insurance companies then just setting up the integrations and data migration is a massive upfront investment. The promised business agility depends on getting the set-up right and the compelling difference with other case management and BPM technologies is less.

And in this latter market, you find yourself up against established technology companies with robust BPM and separately, robust integration offerings (often well-integrated into a single suite).

This doesn’t shoot holes in the “methodology” side of the ACM pitch, but it sure points out a problem for the technology side of the house.  And there is some market evidence to support this view.  A few of the “ACM” vendors have run into the reefs – e.g. ActionBase (which I still think had the best articulation of a product that reflects ACM values, and yet was clearly not a BPMS).

Frank Michael Kraft’s post on Taylorism is interesting, in that it is a response to Jakob Freund’s post on the same subject, but with a different perspective, and a pretty balanced view.

Since I mostly agree with his post I’ll just focus on a few of my nitpicks:

“We cannot conclude that if a management style is good for physical production that it is good for brain work as well.”  We also can’t conclude that if a management style is good for physical production it is NOT good for brain work as well.  Or vice versa.  That requires more data and analysis than has been discussed on the blog posts linked above.

Kraft goes on to say that we should use “the right type of tool for the right type of work.”  To my mind, BPM has always been about that.  In my experience it includes mind maps, BPMN, BPEL, interaction diagrams, Failure Mode Effects Analysis, and other tools of the trade.  Not to mention the data analysis, simulation, optimization side of things.   Most of what I hear about ACM sounds like tools of the trade people have been using in BPM projects for quite some time (which is why, to me, they aren’t that differentiated).

He also has a nifty graphic:

And he’s right, when he makes the point that the arguments about BPM and ACM often sound like mutual exclusivity – only one can be right.  But I think the argument between these advocates is more along these lines:

• ACM proponents: ACM is different and separable from BPM as a method, and (less consensus) a tool set. Corollary: the language used often implies it is just better and more important than BPM.
• BPM proponents:  ACM is fine. But it is clearly one of the tools in your BPM tool belt, rather than its own distinct and separate market (tooling), and methodology.

It is easy to mistake the first group’s arguments as saying BPM doesn’t matter, or that ACM is “the only thing”.  Clearly it does matter, and the staunchest proponents of ACM will also say and write that.  It is easy to read the second group’s arguments as saying “BPM is the only thing.”  But the argument is a bit more subtle, it is just that BPM is the umbrella in these advocates minds.  Maybe this is consistent with “BPM is the only thing” – but only because the BPM proponents likely have a more flexible notion of “what is BPM” than the ACM group.

Finally, we see this from Kraft:

And – what we need is a “process funnel” – as I tried to depict in the diagram. That is – a process that today is a completely unmanaged process (only by email) should become an ACM managed process. After a while – if it is a mature process – it can become a BPM managed process (for example by exporting it from an ACM system and importing it into a BPM system). After a while – if the process has further matured – it may become part of an ERP system.

I think Mr. Kraft is essentially correct, and most people would benefit from adopting some kind of funnel, just as he describes.  However, there are two small issues, which don’t detract from the main point he’s making – but the inconsistencies between these layers may not be obvious in a casual read, while they do affect how you approach the funnel:

1. ERP is a tooling (or software package), without a methodology.  In essence, the “methodology” is to standardize on a big software package.  That may also include giving up on differentiation, but it doesn’t have to.
2. ACM and BPM “methodologies” can both be accomplished with the same tool sets (software packages), even if you accept that the methodologies are distinct.
3. As a result, the transitions from one layer to the next have different degrees of friction with your IT and Business groups.

The funnel itself makes perfect sense.  In fact some of the customers and IT staff we’ve worked with prioritize their process work this way: by forcing new project ideas to go into the funnel starting with a fairly loose “ad-hoc” definition, and only with volume does it move into the more structured definitions more commonly considered “BPM”.

As usual, a strong contribution to the body of thought from Mr. Kraft, around ACM, BPM, and Taylorism.

I never considered myself a Mark Cuban fan.  But when I read his blogs and excerpts from his book I find him very convincing.  It just doesn’t translate into most of the TV appearances I’ve seen.

One Entrepreneur.com, they’ve run an expert from his book “Mark Cuban’s 12 Rules for Startups” that really hits the spot for us at BP3.  A couple of highlights for us:

1. “Don’t start a company unless it’s an obsession and something you love” – well, I’d have softened this a bit- either starting a company, or what the company is focused on, needs to be an obsession and something you love.  You need one or the other. Preferably both, but one or the other are mandatory.  When Lance and I started BP3, we were passionate about BPM and convinced we needed to start a company to achieve our vision around BPM services delivery.  But it started with passion on the subject matter for us. That said, it wasn’t the first time for either of us to venture off on our own and attempt to start something, and we’d both worked for other people’s startups.
2. “If you have an exit strategy, it’s not an obsession.” Very true.  Another bad sign: you have hobbies.  When you’re starting up, if you’re passionate about the startup and the subject matter, where is the time for hobbies? Many founders are like Lance and I – married with kids.  There’s no time for hobbies for the time being.
3. “Hire people who you think will love working there.”  Right.  If they think BPM is boring, we don’t hire them!
4. “Sales Cure All.”  Absolutely.  Almost any problem your company has can be fixed if you sell more (or more profitably) so that you have the funds to invest in fixing the problem.
5. “Know your core competencies and  focus on being great at them.”  - If you’re doing a services startup, this is a must.  Time is really precious, focus is really precious.
6. “An espresso machine?”  I think coffee is critical – for me even if it isn’t for everyone else!  But we also dig the free sodas.  And there’s a deli on the first floor.  And a small gym. It matters.

There’s more in the article, worth reading.

After all the mergers and acquisitions in the BPM space over the last 2+ years, you could hardly blame people for thinking the BPM space was going to be dead or at least lacking innovation.

However, some of us argued that innovation would continue – both within the independents that were left standing, and even somewhat among the biggest players.  We have some evidence of that today with BonitaSoft’s press release – 350% growth year over year with their open source BPM platform.

First, the positives:

1. This is a great achievement for BonitaSoft
2. It shows that there is a wider, deeper demand for BPM software than what the big commercial software packages are addressing.  This also indicates there is likely an umbrella underneath current commercial software pricing where a lot of the demand is dormant.
3. An open source package can get real adoption (200 customers+).
4. Innovation and market shifts continue in the BPM market

Now, for the questions (the answers to which might make these positives or negatives):

1. Where does the revenue come from?  The site mentions subscriptions and I assume one can get pricing but prices aren’t on the website (note: BonitaSoft manifesto includes “transparency” as a core value :)
2. Is it all open source or just some of it?  One thing I note is that BonitaSoft, while flying the open source flag, says in its overview: “Bonitasoft is already developing additional versions of Bonita with professional grade technical support and advanced features to facilitate collaborative work and to industrialize Bonita deployments.  BonitaSoft reserves the right to give access to these versions on a subscription basis to its customers only.”  That sounds like closed-source on top of open source to me.  The fact that it is subscription based is a minor tweak to the traditional commercial model.  There’s nothing wrong with this, per se, it just means that these subscription packages don’t benefit from being open source in the same way that a truly open source project might.
3. 350% year-over-year… starting from what number?  $1? $1000? $1MM?  Without context it is really hard to put this great performance in context.  According to one source, revenues were under $10MM as of June 2011.

Regardless of the answers, 350% is a great number to put up, the answers just put color around it.  It is great to see the BPM space still producing growth numbers that surprise. Looking forward to more updates from BonitaSoft in 2012!

Steve Blank consistently writes one of the best blogs.  His installment (at least 2 parts) on the National Science Foundation Innovation Corps is no exception.

Of course the knee-jerk reaction from most people is that government cannot help in such situations without screwing things up… but then you see things like this:

63 scientists and engineers in 21 teams made 2,000 customer calls in 8 weeks, turning laboratory ideas into formidable startups. 19 of the 21 teams are moving forward in commercializing their technology.

That’s a great result from what they set out to tackle.  And of course there are no guarantees that these ideas will work – odds are most of the 19 proceeding will fail. But if the NSF can get scientists thinking about commercializing the tech they produce, the economy (and the US) will benefit as a result.

And keep in mind Steve Blank’s “Secret history of Silicon Valley”:

The Scientists, the NSF and the teaching team were all going to go where no one had before.

Given that Silicon Valley had started with scientists and engineers not MBA’s, I thought this was a bet worth making.

Pretty cool.  But the crazy thing is that they’re going to keep going – doing cohorts of 25 going forward.  Have to applaud this program for trying to get the most out of government R&D dollars – and hopefully spawning some startups in the process.  Just another interesting test case for the “process” of teaching entrepreneurship (and as he put it, applying the scientific method to developing a business).

A series of articles to kick off the new year show that Austin is a bright spot still…

• Just today, OtherInbox announced it is selling to ReturnPath for an undisclosed amount.  Based on the smiles from the OtherInbox team, this was a good sale, at a good time, for the team.  Looks like a great fit with the parent company. It marks another success for Joshua Baer, who (along with a few others) has really re-energized the startup scene in Austin.  Interestingly, part of the value ReturnPath perceived in the deal was getting a good footprint in Austin, TX:

“The decision to acquire OtherInbox was based on its technology and its broad customer base, but separately we’ve been talking about where we might expand operations, and Austin was on that list,” Forman said. “The cost of living, the tech scene and the talent pool were very attractive to us. The opportunity to get that as part of the bargain with OtherInbox is awesome.”

• Socialware just landed an investment from the CrunchFund.  I’ve known Chad Bockius since ’99 and I’m impressed at how he’s been able to get visibility for the company with investors outside of Austin (note that Austin Ventures is also an investor in the company, however).
• The Austin office rental market is tightening up.  This trend has been going on for some time.  Locally, in our office building, this is noticed as I have to drive one extra floor up in the parking garage to get parking these days.  There just isn’t any vacancy.  Prices are moving more gradually but they are starting to move.  I saw a lot of growing firms in Austin reach for bigger space in 2011, with designs on growing headcount, and a belief in the stability of their businesses.
• There are IPOs on tap for Austin as well.  Bazaarvoice is the most likely candidate with a strong growth track record and a strong product offering.  Chuy’s, a Tex-Mex restaurant chain based in Austin is also planning to go public to fuel expansion (if a location comes your way, two recommendations:  DO order the “macho burrito”, and DO order the tres leches for dessert – but find a friend to share it with).  3 other companies are up to bat this year, having already filed for an IPO.
• All of this really has me looking forward to the Angelou Economic Forecast.  I took a look back at my notes from last year, and it looks like he pretty well nailed the economic forecast for Austin and Texas.  Not only does AngelouEconomics provide some of the best economic development consulting, it is also a local Austin startup-made-good story itself.  Quite a local success story.

Here’s to 2012!

I guess I’m not the only one who thinks Google is making too many enemies at once. John Gruber of Daring Fireball, riffing off of an MG Siegler post on the Serach+ announcement:

It also occurs to me that there’s no company in tech with as many enemies as Google. Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, Twitter — Google has taken the fight to all of them. In this sense they’re like Microsoft 15 years ago.

This just doesn’t seem smart.  I like Google, and I like the services I use from Google.  But they’re running the risk of alienating people who otherwise would like them – a lot.  Not to mention, they’re creating competitive risks where there might not have been any before.

I sense there will be a lot of damage as things settle out, but I expect Google will continue to reap huge profits from Search, regardless.

Peter Schooff once again asks the provocative question: “Will case management eclipse BPM in importance this year?”

The answers were pretty interesting.  I guess I should first own up to my own:

Short answer : no.

More thoughtful answer : When people have trouble listing which products are ACM, and which are BPM, and which are both, the “ACM” tag has some work to do to eclipse BPM. Even as it grows, it is perceived as part of BPM, not separate.

Of course, BPM took a decade or more to come into its own. I don’t think it comes undone overnight.

I liked Dave Brakoniecki’s analysis of OpenText’s December comments on their BPM strategy. Like Dave, I find it interesting that they think they’ll be most often running into Pega and IBM.  Dave’s thoughts:

OpenText probably need to acquire some rules technology to really compete with Pega and IBM. Shame that Progress snapped up Corticon a few days ago.

His analysis is spot-on in that without a rules engine, OpenText has a chink in the armor that the other vendors can exploit.  And they’re not exactly a pure play vendor that can appeal to the “best-of-breed” argument with their customers.  It just looks like a tough hill to climb.

Rules engines aren’t that complicated, per se.  It is thinking through the design of user interface and maintenance of these rule systems that is where the value is, and where the challenges are.  Incorporating them with a BPM suite is another interesting problem to solve, though one option is obviously to leave them loosely coupled.  I think OpenText has their work cut out for them to differentiate themselves in this market, but we’ll certainly have a chance to see how it develops.

Happy New Year to our readers!

2011 was a very good year for BP3 – again, thanks to our customers, and our team.  Our customers continued to invest in BP3 and in BPM, and we’re grateful for the opportunity to help customers achieve success with BPM.  We had some great moments this year – we spoke at IBM Impact with one of our customers, rolled out more production deployments than ever, and had our first all-hands meeting.

Our team is the other major factor in our success.  It is a really good feeling to see teammates pulling together to help each other.  The maturity and experience of our team is the best, bar none.  And yet, our team is humble enough to keep trying to get better, to be well-aware of our weaknesses and strengths.  Every day we go to work thinking about how to improve.

We also made the 2011 “Fast 50” list in Austin for the first time in 2011 (covering years 2008, 2009, and 2010).   We followed up with another banner year – we doubled revenue in 2011, above our expectations.  Without releasing the exact number, you can do the math based on previous publications.   One can argue that a rising tide lifts all boats, but it isn’t so much the big, general, service providers that I see getting traction in the market, it still appears to be the focused “pure play BPM” consultancies that are getting the most traction (and creating the most successes).  This isn’t just true in one vendor ecosystem – it appears to be true across several different OEM software vendor ecosystems.

2011 exposed several memes that were circulating among pundits and bloggers.  My summary of our learnings follows each:

• BPM is Dead.  In fact, 2011 has seen BPM achieve more mainstream success (and press coverage) than ever before.  Far from dying, it is still fostering innovation, consolidation, and customer adoption.
• BPM won’t do well as the economy improves.  I think we could all agree that the economy in 2011 was better, but not good enough to really test this theory.  I still contend that you can’t predict the next economic cycle based on the results of the last cycle – each one is just enough different to surprise you.  This one might be the one where companies continue to invest in process improvement even as growth resumes.
• BPM innovation is over.  I still see interesting innovations happening across a number of vendors-  IBM BPM’s chief innovation has been leveraging IBM’s software in an environment that still feels like Lombardi’s user-friendly BPM environment- versioning and all.  Appian continues to innovate in cloud deployments and mobile BPM.  Isus continues to blaze its own path.  Tibco has picked up Nimbus to add to its own ActiveMatrix BPM.  Activiti and Bonitasoft continue to improve open source options – and Activiti in particular is taking a few different turns as they build out their feature set.  And that really doesn’t do justice to the other folks who are testing out innovative ways to build processes – from data mining for processes to using natural language to express them.
• Austin and Texas will fare better than the US in general in 2011.  Based on Novembers statistics of a 6.6% unemployment rate in Austin, I’d say that’s true.  It appears likely to drop again for December.
• The Process Body of Knowledge effort kicked off with the aim of being the wikipedia for BPM.  These kinds of efforts take a long time to get momentum and really take on an inertia and life of their own.  But if they can get it going, it should be really interesting for the BPM community.
• We started to hear concerns from within the ACM community itself about its risk of  failure.  In fact, in February, ACM was declared dead by one of its own.
• Simplicity and Experience.  These themes just seem to be driving value in the software and consumer markets right now.  And yet many enterprise software companies still aren’t paying attention to these key value propositions.
• There is a lot to learn from startups, which can be applied to our BPM efforts. As startups examine the process of starting, and the process of product development and customer discovery, they’re exposing a lot of nuggets of wisdom about BPM, though the terminology and perspective is different.  Moreover, researchers and entrepreneurs are starting to coalesce around a set of processes for starting up companies and developing products.  It is really fascinating to both observe and participate in.
• SXSW-interactive is a monster.  The conference continues to have an impact on tech and social media.  And despite being “too big” every year, it just keeps getting more interesting and evolving in unexpected ways.  The latest transformation seems to be more startup orientation.
• BPM conferences’ attendance was up.  Both Impact and Gartner had much higher attendance in conferences closely aligned with BPM in 2011.
• We had our first all-hands meeting.  We should have done it sooner.  Leadership and people are the heart of any business, and the heart of any BPM initiative.
• There were several more acquisitions. Consolidation continues, even as new seeds are planted in new startups.

The future for BPM never looked brighter. And by implication, the future for BP3 has never looked brighter.  We see some really important opportunities in front of us, and we are, right now, making the investments that we think will position us to better help our customers going forward.

We’ll have some interesting announcements to make in 2012 as we get deeper into the year.  We have a few opportunities to really improve our value proposition to the BPM market and intend to follow through on a couple of those this year, and we’re looking forward to sharing our thoughts about the future soon.

What a great year for BPM 2011 was.  And it was also a good year of blogging for BP3!

Not that volume page views is our goal per se, but something happened in 2011 as pageviews jumped from a ~3000/month range to a 4500-5000/month range.  Hopefully this means we’re doing our job well, which is writing about BPM, startups, staffing, and other topics that affect business processes.  Our main goal is to communicate our passion for BPM and foster discussion and thought in the space.

One change in 2011 is the iPad2.  With this new device, I was able to take notes at conferences more comprehensively than before – no concerns over battery life, and it is lightweight enough to lug it around all day without needing to see a chiropractor.

Most popular posts in 2011:

1. Apple and Business Process Management
2. Penny for Your Thoughts (IBM BPM 7.5)
3. BPMN 2 Examples Courtesy of Camunda
4. IBM Quietly Updates BPM
5. The Battle of TLAs: BPM is Transforming ECM
6. Consulting Math vs. Software Math
7. Why use BPM over other workflow tools? – A succinct explanation of why you use BPM
8. Migrating to IBM BPM 7.5
9. SXSW 2011 day 2. The Lean Startup Phenomenon
10. Beauty is in the Eye of the Beholder with IBM BPM 7.5. #ibmimpact

Clearly posts about IBM’s products were well-received, perhaps because of the practical and immediate value of this kind of information.  But it is nice to see the staying power of a few other topics.  The most surprising thing about this list is that the most-read blog is from 2009.  Yes, Apple and BPM is still a hot topic in 2011… and that post still shows up regularly on our daily top-reads list.  Perhaps the reason it is still well-read is that it didn’t become quickly dated.  Similarly, I wouldn’t be surprised to see Consulting Math vs. Software Math on the list next year. Finally, “Why use BPM” is a post that is from 2008 – and still cracks our top-10 for 2011.  It is as relevant today as it was 3-4 years ago.

For a second year in a row, despite plenty of posts and comments, the ACM posts did not crack the top 10 most-read posts.

1. Search engines -> Search results
2. Twitter
3. Google
4. LinkedIn
5. Lijit
6. brsilver.com – thanks Bruce!
7. activiti.org
8. paper.li
9. Google Reader
10. BP-3.com

So search is the #1 way people find our blog posts apparently.  But what were they searching for?

1. IBM BPM 7.5
2. Apple business process
3. Apple operational processes and procedures
4. bpms definition
5. bpmn examples

Look for more guest posts from our team in 2012, and more about BPM!

Jiasundar’s post on Google Wave finally turning out the lights reminded me of our own attempt to collaborate on a blog post via Google Wave. We got reasonable far with it but ran out of steam – I think partly due to some of the very shortcomings Google Wave started with.

Basic issues of connectivity – very few of our colleagues had Google Wave accounts.  We couldn’t trivially add them even if they were Gmail or Google Apps users already.

Basic issues of control – once someone was added to a Wave you couldn’t remove them.  And anyone could add someone.  That kind of permissiveness actually reduces sharing.

Minor issues of control – the Google Maps mashup was promising.  But I found you couldn’t control the location and sizing of the map presented – to show a specific region, at a specific zoom.  Pretty well defeats the purpose.

Overall the service raised the question – if a tree falls in the woods, but no one is there to hear it, does it make any noise?  If collaboration happens in the Wave, but no one is there to see it, does it still make progress?

Ultimately Google Wave failed more because of a lack of discipline and will than because of any specific technical or usability hurdle (I’m not aware of anything that couldn’t have been fixed).  It would have made for an interesting mashup with BPM, as SAP’s demonstration of Gravity showed.  But it needed to mature before it would be appropriate for an enterprise setting.

Jaisundar recaps the BPM community’s reaction to Wave – which I would characterize as initially one of panic in some corners, but I wasn’t too concerned personally, for this reason:

It isn’t really Google’s intent to build a BPMS.  They don’t think of the problem Wave is solving as a “process”.  As a result, they’re unlikely to take it in that direction.  I don’t think you end up with a good BPMS my accident.

Intent matters.

IBM has released a new update to BlueworksLive, on December 17th.  We had a preview just two days before it went live to discuss some of the thought behind the features. What interests me isn’t just the outcome but the thought and direction behind it.  Once again the specific features seem “small” but have interesting consequences and implications.

Starting with the shorter topics first:

The Word Export is much more pleasing to the eye than previous versions.  Having the graphics of severity and the diagram itself exported are a big help to the overall readability of the document.

The expand-all/collapse-all functionality in the Process Diagram is also convenient – especially when prepping to export a large diagram.

The BPMN export API works as advertised.  This is an important step to allow people to use BlueworksLive without feeling locked in.  After all, in a cloud “rental” model, one of the big fears is that your data is residing on someone else’s servers.  IBM needed to provide a clean way to get at that data and make it portable.  Not to mention, this lets customers apply some of their more standard SDLC to their requirements production in BlueworksLive.

First, there was quite a bit of attention given the Decision Discovery feature added to BlueworksLive.  I’d heard that this was coming, but I was picturing it as something that would be added to the automation features of BlueworksLive – I should have realized that the “Discovery” in the name implied that it would be part of the modeling (“Blueprinting”) part of the product.

The premise is that you set up a few Considerations (one or more).  The combination of these considerations is like a truth table.  However, BlueworksLive also lets you provide more than one conclusion – which is nice.  When modeling, we can label the column headers smartly, allowing the contents of each cell to be concise and simple (Yes/No, >$500/<$500, etc.).  Finally, we can label the conclusions well- “Adjustment Required”.  If we have more than one conclusion, it gets its own column to keep ideas separate.

A couple of surprising perks:  you can reorder columns and rows with a simple drag-and-drop.  Look, this makes sense given the point of the tool – flexible discovery of decisions.  But this is the kind of fit-and-finish often missing in enterprise software.

I also appreciated that they thought through why the cells should be free-form rather than constrained to integers or strings or a particular data type. The goal is to leave discovery unconstrained.  Plenty of time for constraints when you move into modeling for execution (had this been targeted at execution, you can bet there would have been tight treatment of data types).

Like David Brakoniecki, I think BlueworksLive is showing that it will live up to its promise as a BPM discovery tool.  Not because it does everything it needs to do today, but because IBM have shown that they’ll keep turning the screws until they get there.  His take on the impact of tiny changes at this point in the maturity of the product:

Now, at the push of a button, the process documentation and process diagram can be exported into a single word document. Basically, this document becomes the high-level scope of any potential BPM deployment or process improvement initiative. All of the great power of Blueworks around social collaboration and process discovery now can painless produce a document to playback to the client or business teams for review and iterative improvement.

SaaS products really emphasize the benefit of incremental improvement.

Gary Comerford:

I think one of the reasons that a lot of process management projects tend to get bogged down is because they try to understand the ‘whole level of detail’ issue way too early. I sat today with one guy who had brought Visio diagrams to the meeting detailing everything he did. These diagrams had about 25 or 30 activities on each one. At the end of the sessions we had been able to simplify and condense those activities into about four boxes. For each workflow we were looking for: A trigger, A set of high level activities, any important deliverables, touchpoints to other processes and an end state. Nothing more.

So true.  BPM depends upon building the right abstractions for your business, and business processes.  Getting to the right level of detail (rather than the lowest) allows us to build solutions at the right level.  When you see flowcharts covering a wall (or more than one screen in Visio) – the yellow flags are waving.  Slow down, caution.

Yesterday’s post on the Cosmonaut has me thinking about how new products are developed and released into the wild.  We focus so much on startups and processes in the software and virtual world, but Kickstarter has exposed a new process for physical products:

1. Come up with an idea for a product that you think people will want, but you don’t see satisfactorily provided to the market.  (ideas are often for art projects or music albums, not just consumer products like this)
2. Build a prototype and put together a pitch video to sell the idea
3. Do the research to figure out how big a production run you need to do to make the object “affordable” (whatever that means for what you are pitching).
4. Put your kickstarter project page together, including a fundraising goal that supports your minimum requirements.
5. Wait to see how many people and $ show up to support your project.
6. When (if) project funds, get started building the product (or producing the benefits the contributors are entitled to).
7. Ship it.  If it sells well, consider selling more of the product online, knowing that you now have won over an early adopter fan base.

It favors small production runs, prepaid by motivated customers.  The magic is that you don’t put capital at risk until buyers have paid (up front!) for the product.  It is a great way to get pre-commits from a motivated community. And to my way of thinking, this is just a new (and better) process for finding demand when you don’t have the capital to “build it and hope they come.”

If we relate this to the Lean Startup, or specifically to Steve Blank’s incarnation the Lean Launchpad – one of the key tenets is to “get out there and talk to customers”.  Moreover, to find paying customers.  Not just customers who say they will buy it, but customers who will literally write checks to you.

And when they do this – in great dollar amounts or numbers of customers – then you move into production. Kickstarter gives the product team a chance to do this with physical goods in a way that was nearly impossible 10 years ago.  It also allows an innovative team to address niche demand in a way that they previously couldn’t.  In the same way that eBay allowed people to find markets for niche products, so does kickstarter – in one case auctioning used goods, in the other case contributions toward products that don’t yet exist!

This moves physical products into the realm of a process that looks like:

1. Design
2. Sell
3. Build

Which is much more capital efficient than

1. Design
2. Build
3. Sell

As it allows for less waste (building products that no one wants- akin to getting the requirements wrong in software and BPM projects).  And it allows for some feedback loop between design and selling, before moving into the build phase.

It feels like something that could be truly transformative for small business product development.  I have several friends in the business of producing physical objects for sale (furniture, productivity tools, gadgets), and I’m telling all of them they have to try this process and see if it works for their business, and reduces the risk for them.

As a buyer, the other thing that is really fascinating is the exposure to the process, or craft, behind the production of these objects.  The videos and written updates about the procedures are quite educational.  As a process guy, I see it all through the lens of repeatable process with, typically, an irreplaceable human component.  Gratifying craftsmanship.

(Editors note: this is part product review, part examination of a new process emerging)

Well, we know Steve Jobs was not a big fan of the stylus.  And I’m happy Apple didn’t design touch interfaces that required them.  But like many others, I still want to be able to draw my ideas on an iPad with more precision than my fingers will allow.  There are a bunch of these products on the market now, but at the time the kickstarter project for Cosmonaut was kicked off, I hadn’t seen one that didn’t look cheap yet.

Marco Arment has done us all the favor of reviewing the Cosmonaut – “I’ve tried a lot of iPhone and iPad styli, and I haven’t liked any of them before. But this one’s very different.” and also trying out lots of other products.  I haven’t personally used any other stylus for the iPad, but I agree with Marco’s general sentiments:

• First, that the packaging is excellent, and nice branding to boot.
• Second, that the wide grip of the Cosmonaut is a big advantage – because you really do use it more like a whiteboard marker than a pen or pencil.
• Third, that it is the first product I’ve used that actually feels good when you use it. The rubber tip requires just the right amount of pressure to register with the iPad, and glides effortlessly and smoothly across the surface (even if that surface has the sticky finger prints of your 2yo son on it).
• It exudes quality.  And since we were part of the kickstarter project, we know why.  The creators were meticulous about finding the right materials.  They switched manufacturers more than once.  Getting the right grip, the right aluminum core, and the right tip were all quite time consuming (to, I think, the frustration even of the creators).

Choice quotes from Marco’s review:

There’s no foam anywhere in it. The soft rubber tip gives slightly when pushed, because there’s a small air pocket between it and the solid aluminum core.

and:

It doesn’t feel like a brick of solid plastic writing on glass, and it doesn’t feel like a flimsy sponge on a stick. It feels like a marker, as designed.

I forgot to bring it with me on vacation (I switched laptop bags) and I’m actually annoyed.  I was hoping to try out additional drawing applications. I’ve used penultimate and a few others. But the feature I really want is an “infinite” canvas, or at least a canvas much larger than the screen.  That way I can use rough handwriting with the stylus, then shrink the whole thing down to fit on a screen and reduce to “normal” writing size.  Hopefully I can find an app that does this without too much trouble – it would make a perfect companion to the Evernote note-taking app (though truly, I wish Evernote would just solve both problems… a rare case where you want the app to do two things well, rather than just one).

At the end of the day, the team at Studio Neat worked hard to produce something that looks deceptively simple.  It just looks like a rubber stylus.  But it has the right heft, the right feel, the right size.  It takes a lot of work to produce the right, simple, product.

Good news, you can now buy your own here.

No doubt the Cosmonaut will come in handy for me when I need to sketch an idea or process while attending a meeting.  But my daughter’s first contribution to the blog is a bit of artwork… what surprised me is how much better it is than what she usually sketches with her finger, and the process she used to draw it.  First she colored everything blue, by hand (she could have done this by changing the background color, which I’ve seen her do before… she told me she liked the texture).  Then she drew the clouds and flowers on top… green shoots first, then flowers, then a bit of yellower grass at the bottom.  This is a process that works much better in software than it works with pen and paper, though you can do something similar (with some mess) with crayons.  But try drawing white on top of blue in almost any medium – it doesn’t work too well!  Her work is already better than some of my process drawings!