Bruce Silver’s blog billed this review as a way to determine which IBM product to use, but really it is a very in-depth review of the Dynamic Edition product offering. Still, well worth reading if you’re an IBM shop or considering this product offering.
Seems like just yesterday I was writing about the jobs outlook in Texas (and in Austin in particular). And just a couple days later there was an editorial in the WSJ about the jobs picture in Texas vs. California:
The September state unemployment numbers came out last Friday, and we couldn’t help noticing that three of the four states with the highest job losses were California (-63,500), New York (-37,600) and New Jersey (-20,200). The other was Massachusetts (-20,900). Texas, meanwhile, gained 4,000 jobs.
This continues a longer term trend.Over the last year, as the economy was beginning to grow again, the Lone Star State has led the nation with the addition of nearly 153,000 jobs, while California surrendered 43,700, New Jersey lost 42,300 and New York dropped 14,600. This superior jobs recovery builds on the fact that Texas also weathered the national recession better than most states. According to a new Texas Public Policy Foundation study, Texas experienced a decline of 2.3% from its peak employment, while California fell nearly four times further, with 8.7% of jobs vanishing.
I’m all for boosting Texas. But I do think that the analysis in this article misses a key point: Texas never really had a housing boom. All of the other states mentioned, did. Nevada, for example, is certainly a business-friendly state, but they’ve had a horrible time with job losses because the housing / real-estate market collapsed. Texas didn’t really have a real estate bubble to pop. When the real-estate bubble was bursting, median home prices in Austin were approximately $210,000, and have since dropped a bit to $180,000+. The market has remained robust. Even still, construction workers have struggled and hourly rates have dropped in Texas.
Second, Texas has a robust energy industry segment that is acting as a foundation for the rest of our economy. At times, the energy business is out-of-step with the rest of the economy- doing well when the economy in general is suffering, or the other way around. That energy business has acted like a low-tide limit on the Texas economy, and continues to help Texas add jobs and retain existing jobs across a range of support industries.
The article blames tax rates for the difference – but ignores the fact that Texas has an almost punitive property tax. I’m sure if we did an income analysis of property taxes we would find that the wealthy in Texas pay the lion’s share of property taxes. I don’t think the broader economic differences between the states are primarily about tax structure so much as about fundamentals at a more basic level – the balance of supply and demand of labor and real-estate.
There’s a case to be made for “slow and steady wins the race” – gradual changes in the economy can be adapted to by nearly everyone involved. Drastic changes (up or down) are really disruptive to the real people involved.
On Business Insider a few weeks ago:
Soaring healthcare costs are causing Microsoft to scale back its generous employee healthcare program.
The company told its employees today that they would have to start paying for some of their healthcare benefits in 2013, TechFlash reports.
Microsoft is one of the few companies that covered 100% of its employees’ healthcare.
We can understand why Microsoft changed their coverage policy – health insurance costs are going up much faster than underlying health care costs, and Microsoft has traditionally had some of the richest health benefits in the industry. Sadly, we’re seeing this story repeated all over. At many companies, including the ones I’ve worked for, employee benefits never approached the level of Microsoft’s benefit package. At BP3 we don’t claim to live up to Microsoft’s high standard employee benefits either – but as a small business we review our benefits package every year, and we take it really seriously to provide good benefits for our employees. This starts with running a conservative, healthy business that makes such benefits affordable. And our core values are to take care of our team.
In our first year, we added health insurance – and as the employer, we pay the whole premium for our team members’ families. In the current US system, we think this is the employer’s responsibility. But we also leverage HSA accounts – so that employees are aware how much health services really cost. It is the best balance between coverage and market forces that we can find in the market today. We’ve been able to maintain this benefit, despite the increasing costs, because our business is healthy. We also got a modest office to work from, so that we could take conference calls in peace and quiet and get together for team meetings.
Our second year, we added a 401k program, along with employer matching funds. This was a commitment we made to our earliest team members- that we would get it sorted out by the end of our second year so that we could all save for retirement. BP3 is the first company I’ve ever worked for that contributed matching funds to my 401k. Its hard to believe that most companies in high-tech (and other industries) don’t match contributions, when it is such an obviously smart move for both employer and employee.
Our third year, we moved into a nicer office – still modest, but more professional. It makes for a very nice home base.
This year, we’re adding group life and group disability coverage to our benefits (paid by BP3), because we’re finally big enough that we can get rated and get policies for this. Our team members often travel – it is important to protect them, and their families, from unlikely but unfortunate circumstances. (I remember vividly in my first winter as a traveling consultant for my first employer, one of our sales reps at that company died when his plane went down in icy weather. It was shocking to the whole company, and we all pitched in for an education fund for his children. Memories like this still shape the way we look at taking care of our people. )
I don’t know what we’ll do to improve our benefits next year. But I know we’ll keep reviewing benefits; we’ll look for opportunities to get more cost-effective benefits, but also to get materially better benefits for our team. I commend Microsoft for their progressive view on these benefits – but I fail to understand why so many startups and small companies take such a short-sighted view toward these essential safeguards.
In any business I can think of, you need people. And the people are what differentiate your business, from every other business in your space. Any advantage you have, that isn’t rooted in your people, is temporary and ephemeral. Take care of your team. Take care of your people.
Good article on BPTrends regarding BPM standardization, and what motivates it:
Anyone involved in any aspect of a process change effort understands the need for a consistent use of basic terms to describe process work. Traditions like Lean, Six Sigma, Business Process Reengineering, Information Technology, and Business Process Management often use the same terms in slightly different ways.
These different usages confuse business managers, frustrate practitioners and make any discussions regarding the nature and benefits of BPM difficult to describe and communicate. A common, basic vocabulary and agreement on the major tasks, techniques and roles involved in process work would establish a foundation for the growth of the overall BPM market and would benefit all practitioners of BPM.
The need for such agreement is underlined by the growth of BPM programs in the academic community. Many universities are establishing business process curricula and courses, and some have established advanced degrees in BPM. If we cannot define the field in a more-or- less common way and build research programs to refine and extend common practices, the field will fragment and will gradually dissipate.
The article moves to a call for action:
The time has come to create an open, comprehensive process body of knowledge. BPTrends has joined with the BPM Group at Queensland University of Technology (QUT), the International Institute of Business Analysts (IIBA), Kemsley Design, and the Object Management Group (OMG), to establish the Process Knowledge Initiative. (www.processknowledge.org)
(And yes, this is the same initiative that Sandy Kemsley has been promoting on her blog and twitter stream).
Sandy Kemsley covers IBM’s Case Manager product:
The end-user experience for Case Manager is in the IBM Mashup Center, a mashup/widget environment that allows the inclusion of both IBM’s widgets and any other that support the iWidget standard and expose their properties via REST APIs. IBM has had the FileNet ECM widgets available for a while to provide some standard ECM and BPM capabilities; the new version provides much more functionality to include more of the case context including metadata and tasks. A standard case widget provides access to the summary, documents, activities and history views of the case, and can link to a case data widget, a document viewer widget for any given document related to the case, and e-forms for creating more complex user interfaces for presenting and entering data as part of the case.
She also has coverage from another session at IOD on empowering the business analyst:
The focus in this session is on the tools for the business analyst in the design-time environment, either based on a template or from scratch, including the user interface creation in the Mashup Center environment, analytics for both real-time and historical views of cases, and business rules.
Sandy notes that the BPF (Business Process Framework) functionality is migrating into the ACM offering, and while it may not be the same code (unclear), they’re picking up key functional points from BPF. Interestingly, the ACM offering is separate from the ECM offering.
Finally, Sandy offers a write-up of her preview of the Case Management offering that was officially announced today:
he big announcement, at least to me, was the new Case Manager product, to ship in Q4 (probably November, although IBM won’t commit to that). IBM has been talking about an advanced case management strategy for several months now, and priming the pump about what “should” be in a case management product, but this is the first that we’ve seen a real product as part of that strategy; I’m sure that the other ACM vendors with products already released are ROFL over IBM’s statement in the press release that this is the “industry’s first advanced case management product”.
For some reason, everyone wants to be “first”. There’s a great children’s book called “Me First” that I think illustrates why we shouldn’t all strive to be first all the time. It sounds like IBM is addressing core use cases in ACM: a big focus on unstructured work, user-defined activities on the path to the goals. There are also reusable templates, and vertical templates, already defined or partly defined to help speed go-to-market. As Sandy points out, it still feels like too many products for the same space:
I still find the IBM ECM portfolio – much like their BPM and other portfolios – to contain too many products: clearly, some of these should be consolidated, although IBM’s strategy seems to be to never sunset a product if they have a couple of others that do almost the same thing and there’s a chance that they can sell you all of them.
I think there’s also an element of, not wanting to give up maintenance revenue streams on these existing product lines or force customers to re-evaluate their strategy and potentially, at that point, pick a different vendor. After all, once a customer is in “evaluation” mode, all kinds of possibilities come up. Probably “safer” for IBM to try to keep everyone at least somewhat happy. In a previous life I worked for a software company that killed a new product because it jeopardized the maintenance revenue of the legacy product, despite the fact that we could reduce the code base we needed to maintain by a factor of 1000, and support builds on many platforms rather than just 3-4. The concern was that maintenance revenue was in danger – of course, my take would be just label it version N+1 of the same product, and provide compatibility layer APIs and… voila! Problem solved. But my point is just that the decisions don’t always seem logical to those of us with a technical background.
Austin continues to lead the pack in Job creation among larger cities:
The Austin area continued to add jobs last month mostly in education as the school year began with a 2.3 percent growth rate compared with the same time last year.
The Texas Workforce Commission reported Friday that Central Texas gained 17,300 jobs from September 2009 to last month, for a total of 771,200 jobs.
That growth rate is the highest among major cities, according to Beverly Kerr , the Greater Austin Chamber of Commerce’s vice president for research.
Kerr, who compiles a ranking of the top 50 metro areas, said that Austin is ahead of Washington, D.C., which had a 2 percent job growth rate last month.
I don’t know exactly what Austin’s secret sauce is, but I think it has something to do with the diversity of employment (especially for a city our size), the affordability of living, the desirable arts and music community, emerging startup community, and strong organic and green movements. It doesn’t hurt to be the state capital either. Maybe we’re just lucky. Whatever it is, we’re proud of our little city for putting people to work, and being a great place to live. We hope to see the rest of the country picking up steam in the next 6-12 months as well.
On 60-minutes last night there was a truly difficult-to-watch story about long-term out-of-work people in the San Jose area. The really difficult thing about industry upheaval is when a whole job category “goes away” in a material sense – as has happened to so many real-estate-related jobs. The new “normal” in that industry is rebuilding from a much lower base of employment (and revenue). This isn’t because the industry got more efficient, it just shrank when the bubble burst. But some of the people laid off in that business were in it for 20 years. Once you’ve specialized to such an extent, it is hard to start over in another area – and the competition for open positions is pretty fierce. There are often so many applicants that businesses can’t realistically review all of the resumes – and when they do they are more likely to rely on resume-screening techniques (which don’t work very well, but do limit the pool of people to talk to) rather than taking the time to talk to all the applicants and understand why someone might not look like a fit on paper but actually is a great fit for the role. We’re going to go through a rough transition time as people with long-term investments in skills are forced to abandon their chosen fields and pursue new opportunities where their skills or experience may be less valued.
Great blog from Keith on his Q&A on being a Software Architect. In particular I liked his answers to the last two questions, but I’ll just quote the second-to-last:
3. What advice can you share with others in or entering into this profession?
Prepare to be misunderstood by the public. Most people mistakenly believe that programming and system architecture is a kind of manufacturing where basic requirements are input, and the code is produced in a left-brained factory-like way. Software development is more like the fine arts than it is manufacturing. A great programmer is better compared to Michelangelo than to Henry Ford. The reason is that every day the software developer creates something brand new that has never been invented before. Once that puzzle is solved, it never needs to be solved again. There is no repetition. Contrary to public perception, software development is an extremely creative, right-brained activity. The clearest evidence for this dichotomy is that struggle for acceptance of an Agile method for development of software. Those who understand software development know that an Agile approach is key to good software, but traditionally trained management is very uncomfortable, and want instead to run things like a manufacturing plant. My advice is to learn everything you can about the Agile approach, and avoid organizations that do not employ it.
I truly wish that journalists would understand that software “engineering” is a creative endeavor. If journalists understood and wrote about it, I feel confident more non-software-engineers would have a better appreciation for what “programming” really is. I think if more people understood the creative element, you’d see less “outsourcing” of software development to people you’ve never met or talked to. You’d want to meet the artist before you commission the work, no?
There’s an ongoing debate between “open” and “closed”. Chris Dixon has written what I consider the most thoughtful blog on the subject, as it relates to phones and desktop PCs, which I referenced here.
This argument seems to come up any time Apple’s iPhone comes up because it is often referred to as a “walled garden”. Of course, this is nothing new for Apple. They were long criticized for keeping the hardware in-house rather than licensing their software to multiple hardware vendors, a la Microsoft. This is certainly one definition of “open” – giving a channel of manufacturers the ability to leverage your OS and build hardware around it. Another definition of “open” is releasing your source code for your operating system, a la Android, as Andy Rubin points out on twitter. But for Joe Hewitt of Facebook, neither iOS nor Android are open:
How does Android get away with the “open” claim when the source isn’t public until major releases, and no one outside Google can check in?
Compare the Android “open source” model to Firefox or Linux if you want to see how disingenuous that “open” claim is
Until Android is read/write open, it’s no different than iOS to me. Open source means sharing control with the community, not show and tell.
Clearly, from an OS-developer point of view, neither Android nor iOS (nor Windows, nor Mac OSX) meets the bar. (There’s a more complete writeup from Hewitt here)
From a Telecom Carrier point of view, Android meets the “open” claim: a carrier is free to jam pre-load it with proprietary software (good or bad). The handset manufacturers consider it open because they, too, can customize to their needs. Though, as Hewitt points out, they’re at significant disadvantage because they only have source code at major release points and have no way of getting their improvements back into the main branch of code so that it will survive into the next major release.
As an application developer, both Android and iOS are open at development time. For a small expenditure ($100 or less) I can equip my laptop with the software I need to develop my own Android or iOS application. I can even load the application on my phone to test it. I just can’t hack the OS on iOS. But if I’m writing applications, I don’t particularly *want* to hack the OS because I want my OS to look like everyone else’s (my customers’) OS. Open “source” for the OS is something that developers (the Experts) want.
Interestingly, I never heard people complain that RIM’s Blackberrys were “closed”. I suspect this is because the volume of developers for Blackberry was much lower and not in the mainstream (ie, Silicon Valley), and because the approval process for apps was dictated by each carrier in each geography, not by RIM. So the complaints weren’t targeted at RIM, but at carriers. Apple’s platform was clearly more open than RIMs in that the carriers couldn’t block your apps anymore. Apple had an approval process, but this process did not have a “negotiate payments” step in it – it was all about your application, not about holding you over the barrel for financial terms.
Apple (and Steve Jobs in particular) argue that the real debate is not open vs. closed, but “integrated versus fragmented”:
We see tremendous value in having Apple rather than our users’ be the systems integrator. We think this is a huge strength of our approach compared to Google’s. When selling to users who want their devices to just work, we believe Integrated will triumph Fragmented every time. And we also think our developers can be more innovative if they can target a singular platform rather than a hundred variants. They can put their time into innovative new features rather than testing on hundreds of different handsets.
So we are very committed to the integrated approach, no matter how many times Google tries to characterize it as closed. And we are confident that it will triumph over Google’s fragmented approach, no matter how many times Google tries to characterize it as open.
I like Steve’s re-framing of the discussion, the poles in the debate. But since I’m not marketing for Apple, I think the real debate is between the Experience and the Expert. Balsillie of RIM complains that “We think many customers are getting tired of being told what to think by Apple.” But Apple and Jobs aren’t telling customers what to think, or developers. They’re explaining how Apple thinks – Apple has to defend against this notion of “closed” because the point (for Apple), isn’t to address the Expert- it is to address the Experience.
Apple is oriented around creating a user Experience that “just works”. They don’t always succeed, but that is what they’re after (if I had a nickel for every time someone at Apple, or NeXT before that, said “and it just works” I’d be a very rich man). Meanwhile, the Experts are worried. The Expert wants to be able to see the source code, compile it themselves, contribute to the project. The Expert wants to decompile and find the internal APIs and write apps that leverage those unpublished APIs. The Expert wants to be able to install unverified code and run it (perhaps his or her own code, developed on their own laptop).
I think many Experts are concerned that Apple is dumbing things down. But certainly no more than Mac OSX did – for the experts. For the Expert, I can still write my own apps and install them on my own phone. If I want to sell them, there is a walled-garden channel for doing that – but “buying” is something non-Experts do, and Apple has built a streamlined Buying process within their iOS ecosystem. Experts don’t like it, but non-Experts love it. (No viruses? I like it).
There’s also an argument that “open” proponents make, that open wins out over closed over time. But the real question is what is the target market? Open source projects have often won over experts, but there are fewer examples where “Open” has won in consumer markets where the average consumer just wants their products to work. Linux has made huge inroads in corporations as a trusted server operating system, and open source operating system cores makes up the core of many other product offerings (including Mac OS X). But Linux desktops have never made much progress (don’t believe me? read Gosling’s article “Desktop Linux: the Dream is Dead“). It is both an economic problem (free), and a user experience problem (too complicated for the average consumer).
Even in the corporate world, some industry titans are evaluating an integrated approach – in order to create a better experience for the customer. The thinking goes that they can offer better integrated products – better tested, simpler integration, and simpler maintenance. Of course, to make that strategy work, Ellison’s Oracle has to offer an integrated stack in which each component of the stack keeps pace with the industry’s cutting edge. With the ecosystem of suppliers that feed the computer industry, this is easier to do today than in the 1980′s, when the vertical components would (mostly) be manufactured in-house.
The focus on experience is something that many people understand… but that many more do not. I highly recommend reading Sachin Agarwal’s blog post about Posterous, recounting an argument with someone who thought Posterous was doomed due to smaller share, and fewer features, than some of its rivals:
I asked this person directly: do you have an iPhone? Nope. Do you use a Mac or a PC? PC. There you go. You don’t get it. Until you use an iPhone, a Mac, drive a BMW or Audi, you don’t even realize how great the experience can be or how much it can drive the success of a product.
[...] My entire life, I fought for Apple. I tried to get my friends to use Macs. But they didn’t. It’s not because they thought their PC was better than my Mac. It’s because they didn’t know something better could exist.
[...] And they don’t measure products by what they do, but by how well they do them. You won’t find a matrix where Apple compares their product to a competitor by feature. They measure products by the experience.
We’ll return to this topic again… focusing on BPM.
Max J. Pucher always writes interesting copy on his blog. And one of his latest, on BPM and the Jobless Recovery, is no exception:
Well, I propose that it is the efficiency and cost-cutting mindset also employed in BPMS justifications that is a major cause of the ongoing lack of jobs in the US. BPM implementations focused on automating work with flowcharted processes (and excuse me, the majority are!!!) are only usable for a subset of work – those repeatable, low value, high-volume admin processes that ERP can’t handle. The ROI justification is virtually always about less people needed per revenue!
I’m afraid that BPM isn’t in such common usage as to affect the staffing decisions of the local bakery, the law firm, the ad agencies, and the factory floors, which have all shed quite a few jobs in the US (and, of further note, manufacturing jobs in most countries around the world are in decline, as non-BPMS automation is displacing more and more human workers in the manufacturing process). And it isn’t relevant as an explanation for the dramatic job losses in construction, real estate, mortgage financing, and other related businesses. (Moreover, according to the New York Times, Eurozone unemployment was steady at 10% as of May 2010… perhaps the US is more volatile, but at 9.6% it doesn’t seem to be an order of magnitude off).
While I agree with Max’s frustration with companies that are so focused on cost-cutting that they’ve cut bone as well as fat – and I agree that this extreme cost-cutting actually deepened the recession and slowed the recovery (because, in this particular recession, the primary driver has been a reduction in consumer spending, rather than in corporate investment). But BPM is hardly the reason that home building, mortgage processing, loan origination, and other related fields were hit so hard. Quite simply, there was a bubble in that segment of the US economy that had nothing to do with BPM. The bubble led to over-investment, and the bubble bursting led to dramatic re-valuation and contraction in those sectors.
But there’s more meat to Max’s article, regarding the cost of BPM implementations:
Yes, I totally agree with Jim’s assessment of the complexity and substantial people effort need to get BPMS implemented. Some of the cost is also not process related, but caused by the technology stack being used and the resulting INTEGRATION work. Therefore I propose a consolidated platform rather than integration with others. Businesses who try to integrate existing ECM, BPM, CRM, BRM, E20 and BI suites will never achieve a truly dynamic, adaptive and financially sound BPM.
Not too much to take issue with there. Integration is usually one of the biggest costs… And later:
Because the BPMS skills are expensive and rare they are mostly provided by outside consultants. In effect that means that once the processes are implemented the people who know and understand them move on, leaving the business with unskilled workers and killing the ability to improve or innovate. This is the worst possible business proposition I can think of.
(Max’s emphasis). Max is blaming the wrong party here. If businesses are left with unskilled workers, then it is the business that must change – by hiring and retaining talent for improvement and innovation. Hiring consultants as part of a strategy for change makes sense. But making outside consultants the beginning, middle, and end of a strategy for change is not the answer. Like *all* human resources applied to projects, consultants will move on. But so will full-time employees. It is important to build enough critical mass and momentum in BPM efforts to create sustainable organizational learning that can survive the departure of a key team member(s).
Mainly, however, I disagree with Max’ dark view of BPM:
I hope that Jim is wrong with BPMS adoptions speeding up and that we are rather on the verge of enough people realizing that BPM as a concept that turns people in to process monkeys is a failure. In the worst case, it won’t just be the ‘jobless recovery’ that is going to crash on top of us, but it will be the inhumane, fully automated, mass-produced, market-segmented, analytically predicted process nonsense that will make even those customers walk away that still have a job.
As I’ve argued many times before, BPM can’t be about turning people into “process monkeys”. It has to be about removing the mundane, and enabling the real humans in the process to excel. Once someone’s job has been reduced to “process monkey” it is truly something that will be automated. The point is to remove the “process monkey” parts via automation and leave the judgment calls behind.
MWD Advisors’ Neil Ward-Dutton has published a quick article on Blueworks Live:
The first represents a significant departure for IBM: Blueworks Live is now not only a platform for process discovery and modelling – it’s a platform for process automation and execution. Specifically: lightweight, immediate execution of simple approval worklists and checklist-style sets of activities though the quick creation of ‘process apps’. Process apps created on the platform can be immediately shared with other members of an organisation.
Look for more from MWD after the new version of Blueworks Live goes live on November 20th.
I saw this blog post the other day, regarding a friend of mine in Austin, who has built up a career as a sought-after speaker at networking events:
Here’s what Thom is doing that is crazy brilliant – he’s establishing his subject matter expertise and thought leadership in a series of 10 posts (you can write 10 posts, can’t you??) that is — and this is key — directly communicating to the meeting planner (think: hiring manager). This is the person who will make the decision on who to bring in.
In these ten posts Thom proves that he’s the guy…. not by saying how great he is, but by sharing his subject matter expertise and thought leadership.
After reading through these posts how could a meeting planner not realize that Thom is going to “get the job done!” That is, he’s going to bring excitement and success and empowerment to each attendee.
Check out the original post for the real scoop. And check out Thom Singer if you need the right guy to speak at your conference.
Bruce Silver is the gold standard for BPMN modeling training. He also often gets the last word on subjects relating to BPMN:
All of the recent to-do from Jim Sinur and others about how business people don’t want to be constrained by no stinkin’ rules is just one side of the story. The people who come to me for training have a different view. They say, “We have lots of groups in the company doing process modeling. But everyone does it their own way, and the models can’t be shared or integrated with each other. So a lot of our investment in process modeling so far can’t really be leveraged.”
Bruce goes on to describe, quite eloquently, what I believe is one of the chief attractions of BPMN:
The value of the hierarchical style is that you can visually understand the end-to-end process (and its touchpoints with the global environment) on one page, and zoom in and out to see detail at any level… all within the confines of a single semantic model. It reflects what could be called an “architectural” approach to process modeling, the way business architects and enterprise architects like to think about it. In contrast, the traditional approach, creating separate high-level and detailed models, requires continual manual synchronization as the model(s) evolve over time.
Not everyone sees the value in the single semantic model.
I’ve also seen value in building process models for several related processes (a process cluster, if you will), and then rationalizing these individual processes with a larger conceptual process that contains and incorporates them all. The rationalizing often uncovers interesting corner cases and use cases that weren’t previously well thought-out- and also uncovers serious opportunities for re-use at the implementation level. This approach more frequently happens in BPM projects that evolve into programs, but can also happen within the context of a program that explicitly decides not to try to tackle the (admittedly) harder problem of having all the processes within a cluster participate in the larger process and so they get their feet wet with processes in isolation at first.
To our BPM/bpmCamp community:
We sincerely apologize, but we’re going to have to cancel this fall’s bpmCamp event in Austin (or, if you prefer, postpone to 2011). Notification has already been sent to all registered attendees last week, including refunded registration fees. This blog post is the last step in making sure that anyone interested in attending will know about it.
The bad news: we scheduled this mini-conference at a bad time for people who are “in the field” working on BPM deployments about to go live. While we had significant interest from all over the country, we had 3/4 of our respondents decline their invitations because of impending process roll-outs in the fall and despite keen interest on attending – and we were starting to see cancellations from previously registered attendees as roll-out schedules interfered with their ability to attend.
The good news: there are a lot of IBM Lombardi BPM roll-outs in the later part of 2010! The unfortunate side-effect is that our target audience just isn’t free to make it to a 2-day conference as a result!
In particular I want to thank Intel, Stanford, and IBM for their ongoing support for bpmCamp – with space, people, know-how, and even sponsorship. We were really looking forward to hosting everyone down here in Austin and showing off our great city, and it pains me to cancel an event like this. But we also couldn’t ask our fellow practitioners to travel all the way to Austin if we couldn’t get the right size and mix of people to make for the kind of compelling event we had at Stanford last time! So we’re going to refocus on making the next Stanford event (June/July 2011) even better, and return to the Austin bpmCamp idea next year, perhaps targeting January 2012- but this time, we’ll poll for good dates, and interest, before we set anything in stone – and perhaps set expectations accordingly as to the target audience.
I also want to thank everyone who responded for your continued support of our efforts to spur a BPM community with the kind of practical know-how that can really help individual practitioners get their job done. All registration fees have been refunded, please let us know if we have introduced any other complications for you, if you were planning on attending.
We’re going to take this opportunity to make bpmCamp even better next time around. We’re new to running conferences of any sort, and we’re still learning – especially with respect to what works in terms of lead time, and timing within the year. We *do* know what we like to see as attendees at a conference, and part of our goal is to build a conference that our own team is excited about attending (as the Stanford bpmCamp was last year). The feedback from the Stanford bpmCamp was so overwhelmingly positive that we’ll definitely do it again in 2011. We’re going to work with the Stanford folks on timing, and try to get everyone 6-months lead time on the event.
As always, I welcome your advice and input for how to get the word out and communicate the value proposition in the future, so that we can plan the best event we can possibly have, and include input from as many of our practitioners as possible.
thank you again,
the BP3 team!
Steve Blank’s excellent blog includes this post:
Strategy is Not a To Do List, It Drives a To Do List
It took me awhile, but I began to realize that the strategic part of my job was two-fold. First, (in today’s jargon) we were still searching for a scalable and repeatable business model. My job was to test our hypotheses about who were potential customers, what problems they had and what their needs were. Second, when we found these customers, marketing’s job was to put together the tactical marketing programs (ads, pr, tradeshows, white papers, data sheets) to drive end user demand into our direct sales channel and to educate our channel about how to sell our product.Once I understood the strategy, the To Do list became clear. It allowed me to prioritize what I did, when I did it and instantly understand what would be mutually exclusive.
(My emphasis added to the last paragraph)
There’s been much discussion of late on “Social BPM“. In particular, when should the magic “social” stuff happen – at design-time, or at run-time, of a process? There has also been a significant overlap with discussion around ACM (Advanced/Adaptive Case Management), wherein proponents of ACM advocate putting more power in the hands of users to dictate the flow of a “case” through their organization (if I can use the word “flow” to describe something that isn’t, in their view, a process).
If we can pull together a quick assessment of the terrain of “social” BPM tools:
The big short-coming in the first category: who wants to share their models publicly with everyone else? If I have a model, and I think it is differentiating and good, I’d hardly want to share it for free, likely with my competitors. And certainly my boss is going to look even less kindly upon sharing corporate IP. So these communities had a high inactive user count, low active counts. (low, relative to the inactives at least).
The big short-coming of the second category: why does the collaboration stop when the process model is finished? For example, in IBM’s Blueprint, I can “follow” changes to any model I’m interested in – but why does the following stop when this model starts executing in Teamworks? (ahem, Websphere Lombardi Edition).
The big short-coming in the third category is that generally the tooling for collaboration at run-time isn’t connected with the tooling for process design in a meaningful way.
However, just because each area has a short-coming doesn’t mean that there isn’t any value – we’re just acknowledging the issues in each area. You could list “traditional BPM” as a fourth category, and its shortcoming very well could have been a “lack of collaboration capabilities.”
About a week ago, I was fortunate to get a sneak peak at the new IBM Blueworks Live, the upcoming combination (culmination?) of Blueprint and Blueworks. There’s already good coverage of what is coming in the FAQ, in this IBM interview of Phil Gilbert, and in the coverage of his recent talks on the Next Decade of BPM (including Sandy’s coverage of the last talk, where he introduced the IBM Blueworks Live announcement).
Phil Gilbert set the hook nicely at his BPM 2010 keynote: software tooling has been targeted at the 6 IT people who support 240 business people. With Blueworks Liive, Phil is presenting a potential solution: software targeted at letting the 240 people in business improve their own processes, without needing to know words like BPM, or BPMN (let alone what the BPMN notation is all about).
Sandy writes: “It’s good to see IBM consolidating these social BPM efforts; the roadmap for doing this wasn’t really clear before this, but now we’re seeing the IBM Blueworks community coming together with the Lombardi Blueprint tools.” What impressed me in my session with Phil’s team is the thoughtfulness that went into rationalizing these two products. It appears to me that they didn’t sit down and map out features and figure out how to make them work together- they looked at each product and tried to identify what was most compelling, and what was most deficient – in other words, what is holding it back?
The key insights: the collaboration and sharing features of Blueworks were powerful, but the social engineering of understanding how to break down barriers to sharing just weren’t there in the Beta: you’re sharing with the whole world, and process information is sensitive. But in this case, the answer wasn’t to try to change people’s sharing behavior (a la Facebook), the answer was to create a safer environment for sharing: by limiting the audience to your own corporation (or subsets of your company), so that people will feel more comfortable sharing to begin with.
Second, the notion of “following” has been extended to all parts of the offering (this was already a key feature of Blueprint). Following is a very low-maintenance way to keep up with what’s happening in process design- and lets the business user determine what matters to them, rather than having software developers decide. There is an interface that reminds me of twitter or facebook, but moreso of yammer, because of the fact that it is private to your company.
Third, bringing “BPM” to the masses. Rather than try to dumb-down BPMN, Phil’s team has started working from the long tail up – just offering a couple of very simple process templates. You could classify them as “Checklists” and “Approvals”. A Blueworks user can create a new template from these two basic types – and then any other business user can run these templates (and configure them slightly when kicking them off). Additionally, it looked like participants could add steps to the process as needed when it got to their queue. Incidentally, this addresses a concern of John Reynolds‘, regarding making programming accessible to the occasional programmer. One could argue that the folks in the business who construct the Excel spreadsheets that run so many businesses processes are these “occasional programmers” that need this kind of tooling.
Of course, this simple execution capability is a really interesting game for IBM to be in. At $10/user/month, it isn’t prohibitively expensive. No servers to set up or software to install. And the setup of these simple processes is trivial.
But the last point, and the most interesting one, is the implication of combining simple process execution for the masses, with the newsfeed and following capabilities of social networks. In this way, we can keep a finger on the pulse of these user-generated processes running through a team or a company. With the capabilities coming November 20th, Blueworks Live may be short of game-changing, but it is very clear how to move forward in a way that *is* gamechanging.
Angela Ashenden of MWD Advisors asks “Are we seeing the dawn of the social intranet?“:
The other thing which the J.Boye event got me thinking about was the relationship between the corporate intranet and collaboration. There was a real cross-section of organisations in attendance, from those for whom the intranet is still very much a central publishing environment to those who see the intranet and their corporate collaboration strategy as one and the same thing—or at least part of the same discussion. As we move into an era where social connectivity and interaction becomes more important in a business context, it seems obvious to me that the “social intranet” concept is the natural home for both these strategies, with the focus not so much on the organisation (or particular people in the organisation) determining what information should be published for consumption for example, but on employees themselves requesting the information via a social platform whereby it can be shared with the organisation as a whole, and stored for later reference by others. Do you agree? I’d be interested in your comments.
Perhaps we are seeing the dawn of the social intranet. Twitter’s features (follow, status updates, search, etc) just make too much sense for corporations for these features to not show up in products targeted behind the firewall. But for “social” interaction to be useful, there has to be an organizing principle that makes it relevant. That’s the magic I see in the new Blueworks Live offering – the organizing principle is long-tail knowledge work processes – defined and driven by the business.
It won’t be long before the business, getting a taste of following these long-tail processes in Blueworks, is going to want to follow their “BPM” processes (perhaps running in Websphere Lombardi Edition) in Blueworks as well. Of course, if Blueworks Live were the center of IBM’s strategy, you’d expect to see APIs exposed for other business applications to register “follows” and “updates” with the Blueworks newsfeed.
Did I mention that you can see the kernels of game-changing here?
Great post from Craig Reid (aka Process Ninja) on why Continuous Improvement is needed:
If anyone is in doubt as to why improvement has to be continuous, the simple explanation is that stupid stuff happens all the time: mistakes are made, things are rushed, ideas badly conceived, ideas even more badly executed and then there are those people things – they keep making mistakes because for some unknown reason they aren’t perfect. This doesn’t even take into account the numerous amount of organisational activities that are going on on a daily basis that contribute absolutely nothing.
I think that pretty well covers it.
There’s a real interesting battle for mobile phone supremacy or “smartphone” supremacy right now. As the NYT notes,
In the six months ending August 10, Android phones accounted for 32 percent of the smartphones sold, Nielsen said. By comparison, iPhones accounted for 25 percent of devices sold and BlackBerry handsets for 26 percent. A month earlier, the three types of devices were in a virtual dead heat.
(I believe these numbers are US-only). Clearly, from a marketshare point of view, Apple needs to get out of its exclusivity with AT&T to improve its US numbers.
However, it is worth noting that Google’s share of smartphones is… pretty much zero. They don’t sell phones. But some other folks DO sell phones that run Android:
One would think, as they’re selling so many of these Android phones, they must be killing it in profit, just like Apple, right?
Not so fast.
Check out this article from Horace Dediu which reveals the velocity of profit and market-share changes in 3 simple charts:
The change in 3 years is astonishing
The dramatic nature of the change is all the more apparent looking at his last chart, which really shows the velocity of change:
Profit Share Growth is telling
So, if Android handset manufacturers are killing it in volume, surely they’re making a hansome profit as well, right?
Wrong. Over the last 3 years, none of them has profit share growth north of 10%, and it looks to me like HTC is only barely above 0%, and Motorola might be about 1%. The others are negative.
Meanwhile, Apple’s profits from the iPhone are soaring… and Nokia’s profits are plummeting. So how is Apple getting all the profit when it has such small market share, and isn’t even the leader in market share growth?
First the obvious items:
The less obvious items:
Apple benefits from laser focus – having essentially one model every year means that all the engineering focus can be on one model. All the sales focus. All the support focus. Yes, they still sell the 3GS, but this pattern of selling last year’s model at a lower price is a pretty simple model to sustain and support.
By leveraging common components and commodities across several device categories, Apple gets “scale” in certain components they might not otherwise:
By developing a few key differentiators and then leveraging them to the hilt across their product line, Apple is moving up-market at the same time that Apple is growing share. But from Apple’s perspective, quality is much more important than quantity.
A reasonable difference, however, between Apple eating Nokia’s lunch, and Apple eating “Android’s” lunch (if we can pretend for a moment that Android phones are one thing rather than dozens of companies), is that Android *does* represent a viable competing platform, whereas Nokia’s fractured smartphone strategy did not.
However, as long as Apple’s platform is seen as the premier platform, with a halo effect for those who write apps for it, Apple will continue to see the best apps first. And the platform will continue to be not only viable, but defensible. To that end, we’re already seeing Apple leverage the platform (appstore/iOS) across more devices than just phones. And they’re making these moves faster than the competition, and in a more rationalized way. I think in this market, you want to be the phone provider that is making money, rather than the one that is taking market share, if you have to make a choice.
From Silicon Alley Insider, on hiring decent engineers:
Unemployment in the United States is still at a brutal 9.6%, but for software engineers the job market couldn’t look much better.
Everyone in tech knows that there is a serious engineering deficit, but apparently no one outside tech knows about it, so new talent isn’t flooding in to fill the demand.
There’s an interesting disconnect in the economy right now. Employers think that with high unemployment, people should be desperate for work, including software engineers (and BPM experts, incidentally). But software engineers have more leverage than they’ve ever had because:
But the key issue, captured brilliantly by Evan Korth (my emphasis):
Evan Korth, a computer science professor at NYU and cofounder of HackNY, tells us that people outside of tech, and college students in particular, are largely ignorant of how lucrative the opportunities are for programmers. This partly the result of stale media narratives, he thinks. In 1999, everyone was told that becoming a computer geek was the path to riches. Then the dotcom bubble burst, and the media was writing about out-of-work coders with no options. Programming skills were in high demand again before long, but the media was more concerned with the largely make-believe narrative that programming jobs were all being outsourced to India. So opportunistic college students are still focused on Wall Street.
If you watch the news, they’re still portraying software jobs as being under great pressure from outsourcing. While that is true, supply and demand have found some equilibrium, and corporations and startups have realized that outsourcing isn’t a panacea, though some companies have clearly made it work well for their businesses (and others have not). The overall job opportunities and job security for software engineers is quite high, as is the earning opportunity.
In the BPM world, there’s another dimension that makes things more difficult. MWD Advisors’ Neil Ward Dutton captures the issue perfectly here:
And that disparity was something I saw echoed around other sessions in the conference and in conversations with those attendees who were already succeeding with BPM. Right now, success quite often depends on driven individuals who feel compelled to transcend their technical backgrounds and learn unfamiliar skills and languages.
I concur – the efforts required – cultural as well as business and technical – are so great that these individual heroics are often necessary to get an organization started. But yet, a few driven individuals aren’t enough to sustain these efforts over time. They have to transition to creating a culture of learning new skills and languages – and surmounting barriers.
Neil continues:
Increasingly, though, as the pace of business change increases and technology platforms bundle more and more high-level capabilities, the most crucial practices for IT organisations to get right themselves [...] are probably better classed as ‘art’ or ‘craft’ than ‘engineering’ – and please note that this doesn’t make them less important.
I couldn’t agree more – I’ve long been arguing that Software is more of a craft than an engineering discipline – and the way that we approach BPM is as a craft – taught by experienced practitioners to people who are still learning the ropes.
John Reynolds takes it a step further:
It’s time for a wakeup call in the world of programming… Our collective need for custom programs is growing at a much greater rate than our supply of master programmers. We can either continue to focus on tools for these master programmers – to make them even more productive – or we can figure out how to empower those occasional programmers to do it for themselves.
If we don’t build tools that are targeted at the “occasional” audience, then nothing will change. Occasional programmers will continue to suck.
John’s take is that we need to focus tooling for the “occasional” audience. I agree. And in particular, I think this is something that a tool like IBM’s Lombardi Edition could live up to (IBM is John’s employer) if the engineering team focuses on consistency (making sure that all similar functions are rationalized in a consistent fashion to the process author – inconsistencies make the experience more complicated), simplicity (make the easy cases easier, and boil away excess feature-itis ), and appealing (address the experience of both author and end-user). Interestingly, this could be done without giving up more advanced APIs and features. (Not everyone believes this).
There’s also an interesting opportunity to address the “not programmer”. If we divvy up the world into “master programmers”, “occasional programmers” and “not programmers… The latter two are clearly under-served markets- particularly in BPM, despite claims to the contrary!
Update: Looks like this topic got good treatment at Forrester’s Business Process Forum 2010, in a Connie Moore session (thanks to Sandy for blogging it!)
I didn’t actually see twelve steps in this post, but I really like the framing of the discussion. And most of it I agree with:
Don’t try to structure every process. Most of the world’s business processes are currently unstructured and executed using email and documents. Many of these just can’t be structured. Even though more and more processes will get structured over time, an even greater number of unstructured processes will be continue to be created.
I always take issue with words like “can’t” – I would say many of these processes “should not be” structured. Often the issue isn’t what can or cannot be done, but what is the right or best answer.
The other bit I would modify slightly:
Help spread the word in the process community. There are structured processes – which is where BPMS excel. Unstructured, unpredictable human processes – they exist, and aren’t just “processes that haven’t yet been structured” – that is where ACM can help.
I agree, except that I’d say “ACM techniques” because you may already have the software tools you need. If you’re doing BPM, and you aren’t applying the concepts that ACM proponents espouse as well, you should be. But don’t fool yourself into thinking these approaches are mutually exclusive, rather than mutually beneficial.
Donna Fitzgerald of Gartner has a very thoughtful post regarding whether our businesses might have cut too far in this latest economic downturn in a post entitled “Cutting to the Bone and then Some” I think she makes a few valid points for sure.
Now on to my point; I’m not seeing the increase in creativity or innovation I would be expecting as part of our changing economy and I’m not sure why. I’ve got a gut instinct that says we’ve cut too far and adopted too much of an attitude that if we have enough process than any trained monkey can do the work. The problem is that trained monkeys don’t innovate.
Part of my concern comes from a recent personal trip I took. Almost everyone I spoke with in my travels was angry, over worked and stressed almost to the point of breaking. Stress kills creativity. It also kills productivity over the long haul (though not unfortunately in the short run).
I’ve observed the same in many of my dealings with businesses. There is a lot of stress and overwork. And I agree with her instinct that too many people think that people are like nails- that you can trivially replace them with cheaper nails. As someone who grew up in Florida, where hurricanes are known to make landfall, I can tell you that there are nails, and there are nails (not to mention, how you apply them matters). And there are architects and builders that are worth the money you pay them – and you know this when your neighbor’s house survives the hurricane and the rest of the neighborhood doesn’t.
Why is it so easy for people sitting in management chairs to believe that people are fungible commodities? It is this belief that leads to endless pursuit of the lowest cost-per-hour labor, where ever it is (Too often, people mistake cost-per-hour as being the same as cost-per-unit-of-output… but the hour is not the output, it is the input).
People are the beginning, the middle, and the end of your business.