A funny thing happened the other day on the way to the hotel.

I’m commuting to San Francisco for a really interesting application of BPM technology to customer service scenarios for a company that doesn’t sell product – they sell an experience – a process, if you will – to both sellers and buyers of certain goods.  Just working with a company that thinks of their process as their product is refreshing enough, and makes this a very interesting project to me.

Because this project is in San Francisco, there’s really no need to have a rental car to drive around.  Its about $45/day for parking, and if you don’t mind walking a few blocks, and taking BART up from the airport, everything is essentially walking distance.  On Monday I had plans to meet up with an old friend from Stanford, who coincidentally also worked with me at our first employer, Trilogy.  With plenty of time to spare I was walking from the customer’s office to my hotel, which takes me past the headquarters of Vast, where several other friends from Austin and Trilogy work.  As I walk by, I notice an old colleague in the window, so I knocked and he invited me in and we had a great conversation about life, business, the future.  Along the way another gentleman in the office walked over and asked if we could give him some feedback on a pitch he was planning, to promote a creative-commons approach to user-data management.  And we then spent the next 30 minutes hashing out what this meant in the context of Facebook, iTunes playlists, and other types of user-generated content that, he contends, users should have the right to port, move, export, share. The next day he was headed to a conference to try out these ideas on a broader, critical audience. I was really impressed by the depth of thinking on the subject, and how well he could turn our questions into opportunities to clarify the pitch. Good stuff.

After that conversation, I headed back up to the hotel, and met my old friend for dinner.  We walked right past Vast again on the way to the restaurant, and had a good 3-hour discussion over dinner at Town Hall Restaurant (highly recommended, I might add).

I relay this story not because it is that relevant to the world of BPM, but because it touches on something immensely important – the value of your network.  The odds of me running into someone and having such an educational discourse on identity and user data management in the new world order is pretty low outside of the Bay Area.  And coming into contact with new and different ideas and perspectives is part of what makes the software scene so vital in San Francisco.  I’m convinced that at least part of that is due to the “walkability” of the city.  Although you can get similar effects in any city with good gathering spots – be it a coffee shop, a burrito joint, or a local pub.  And in South Bay, it isn’t so walkable, but there are great meet-up spots like Hobee‘s, and clusters of companies in Palo Alto or in other parts that provide this same walking-distance effect.  But it isn’t just a story about the network effect in the Bay Area.  After all, the folks I was meeting up with are transplants from my current home town, Austin.  The power of networking in software circles in Austin is pretty incredible to me.  Very small degrees of separation, and a high degree of willingness to share, cross-hire, cross-promote.  Even tighter than the Austin network, that Trilogy Alumni network is quite cohesive.

If I may offer some perspective that 15 years in the business world has given me… Building your network of valued friends, coworkers, colleagues, peers – this is part of the process of building a career.  It is so important to nurture the people you are connected to, and to be open to the opportunities, insights, and perspectives they will offer you over time.  If your old firm doesn’t have an alumni network or mailing list, start one.  I’ve been managing one of these lists for 8 years now, and the personal satisfaction has far exceeded the investment of my time.

Also, when you travel for work as much as I do, you get a chance to refresh your relationships in person, and not just over email and phone and twitter.  It is so important to take advantage of those opportunities.  Meeting with my old friends and colleagues and hearing about their lives and careers is part of what recharges me and inspires me to keep working on the vision of bp3 – “a business process company”.  It’s also part of what helps you establish place and belonging when you are away from home for too long.

I just want to take a moment to thank good friends who take time out of their lives to meet with me on short notice – or even when I just knock on their window passing by – and please allow me to return the favor and entertain you in Austin, Texas if your travels bring you our way.

Search CIO posted a good podcast about two weeks ago on the topic of selecting BPM tools / vendors, interviewing Mike Kravis.  There were a couple points I wanted to pull out from the transcript and expand on:

• Mr. Kravis says the first step is to determine the requirements, which of course is true. But the real trick is to make sure that the requirements actually make sense.  Often requirements are proposed that are actually designed to make it hard for any vendor to succeed – this can happen when the Business or IT want to keep using the tool they have, or are worried about job security or skills.  Just make sure that the requirements are related to increasing business value or decreasing implementation cost, and not just Enterprise Architecture decoration or Buzzword Bingo.
• Mr. Kravis points out that when he was choosing vendors previously, they really worried about the pure play vendors being acquired – but in fact it was the big vendors that got acquired while the pure plays stayed independent.  This was a pretty interesting trend a few years ago- several potential customers of pure play vendors were advised by BEA that they were takeover targets… but in fact BEA was the company that was acquired and swallowed up by Oracle.  The pure plays are still out there, and still look like the best options for those still in the buying process.
• Kravis describes a good evaluation process, but it is an expensive process.  If you’re a smaller corporation, you need to push for a faster decision.  My recommendation is to push for a contingent license with a vendor you feel comfortable with, rather than doing extensive evaluations with 3-4 vendors (including onsite demonstrations, etc.).  The on-site demonstrations will help – but it will also drive up your licensing costs because it drives up the cost-of-sale for the vendors (It may not be obvious, but if you make it *easy* for a software vendor to sell you software, they’re likely to be more forgiving on price).

Overall its a good interview, and some good tips.

The concept of “Dynamic BPM”, when explained, is certainly useful.  But I’m not much of a fan of the term itself.  First, it is yet another buzzword that means whatever the vendor du jour says it means.  So all the vendors immediately do “Dynamic BPM” and incorporate it into their messaging.  IBM says that they do “Dynamic BPM” by automatically configuring the process in real-time (or read their own words here).  Oracle says they do “Dynamic BPM” by incorporating rules-driven process flows, dynamic service binding, and task management.  At recent BPM conferences, Dynamic BPM has been used to refer to “knowledge worker processes” or pieces of the process that can not be well-defined in advance (Anatoly Belychook’s blog describes this interpretation quite well, as well as a couple of useful design patterns within it).

Here’s where I see problems:

1. This name “Dynamic BPM” doesn’t really mean anything – each vendor can make up a definition that suits their software, or their competitive positioning needs in current sales cycles.  This just extends the already ambiguous use of the term “BPM”.
2. IBM’s notion of “dynamic” is really more about configuring the process based on early inputs to the process instance about its requirements.  A process that can’t do this doesn’t seem worth much to me.  BPM tools have been doing this sort of thing (in abstract) for at least 7 years.  However, they do have some technology to handle more complex factors (especially with respect to health care related industries).  My favorite part about IBM’s description of “previous BPM solutions” is that they “weren’t designed with agility and dynamicity [sic] in mind”.  That’s the kind of presumption you hear from someone writing product marketing content who hasn’t worked with those “previous BPM solutions” in the field (which, I can assure you, were often designed to be agile and dynamic).
3. Oracle seems to think if you have rules then you have “dynamic BPM”.  Last I checked, rules aren’t the future of BPM, rules have been around for decades as a business-enabling technology.  Applying rules to BPM isn’t exactly a new idea.  Just ask any of the former rules vendors, or Pega.
4. Dynamic BPM as a substitute name for “unstructured process” or unstructured subprocesses is more along the lines of Anatoly’s blog.  Its also the positioning of ActionBase and a few other vendors.  The issue here isn’t a “can you or can’t you” model unstructured process as part of an overall structured process – the question is how much does the BPM vendor’s software help you model or execute such processes.  Some BPM solutions help quite a bit (e.g. ActionBase), some help a little, some just don’t get in the way, and some don’t allow for this style of subprocess at all.

I think BPM Vendors need to keep focused on what their products do for business. A term like “Dynamic BPM” doesn’t tell me anything about what this feature or product will do for my business.  That’s not a surprise when the tail is wagging the dog (selling software to IT with IT benefits, rather than selling IT to business with business benefits).  Let’s drop the IT buzzword bingo and focus on what the business needs, shall we?

In a Forrester blog that usually focuses on more “process” and “application” issues, Claire Schooley recently blogged about Telepresence and Video Collaboration.  It might seem a little off-topic, but we at BP3 have written a few posts about video conferencing ourselves (here and here), because we’re fans of the technology (and in particular, of the solution we use from Lifesize). And in fact, good video collaboration may be a key to more efficient business processes in the future.

What Schooley describes is the expensive high-end solution, with purpose-built-and-equipped rooms.  However, most of the same benefits can be achieved with less expensive solutions from a firm like Lifesize: high definition video, high-quality full duplex audio, IP-connectivity, and interoperability with standards that enable cross-vendor calls (with, for example, Polycom and Tandberg).

When friends ask me about our video conferencing setup, I often tell them if I could get the cost down to $1000 per location, we’d have a system in every office – because it is worth that much to us.  The high-fidelity connections are just better than a skype video chat (though that is certainly better than nothing!).  The price keeps getting closer – LifeSize just came out with a unit that brings the price down to approximately $2500, and then with the Desktop solution there’s a bit lower-fidelity option that’s even cheaper.

I don’t think it won’t be long before the quick trip on an airplane for a meeting will be a memory (or a luxury), but before that happens, we need to get high fidelity videoconferencing to be nearly as ubiquitous as instant messaging.