Horace Dediu’s Asymco blog yet again strikes a chord with me, as he fairly well trashes the classic “iPad is DOA” quotes from last year.  Of course, even more amusing are the follow on wave of death watch quotes from this year.  As new iPad user, I have to say the experience is better than I expected and I now understand why you would have this device that isn’t quite your phone and isn’t quite your laptop.  But at a macro level, the iPad is a huge business already, so it just seems odd to see how many people still think it is a fad:

I thought that would be that. As the success of the product would become self-evident, predictions of imminent demise would trail off. The pain of share loss would prompt a wave of challenger copycats. Imitation would be the the best form of flattery.

But no.

Critics were not silenced. One year, 15 million units, and $9.2 billion later I went back to the source of the quotes and found the following.

Great summary.

A little late to the party, as I had this stowed away in my InstaPaper account – but The Process Ninja (a.k.a. Craig Reid) gives a good review of the Nimbus product offering.  The money quote:

So without writing a 10 page blog post on Nimbus Control, here’s the executive summary: I liked it. Why did I like it? Well, the thing that stuck in my mind about Nimbus is that it’s built as a tool for end users – not business process people. That might sound disappointing for some of you out there but it shouldn’t be. Think of Nimbus as a highly evolved operations manual for staff and you are getting there. It’s for the guys in the call centre or the factory floor to use as an aid to do their work – much like the chap at the end of this video for Nimbus’s client Carphone Warehouse.

Good review, and some insight into Nimbus, a product I’m not all that familiar with.

Elliot Loh’s recent post “Management Begins at the Interview” (that link isn’t working, but this link takes you to the right page of his blog, it is the second post ) proposes that a co-founder be in every candidate’s interview process – to drive absorption of culture, mission, and philosophy of approach.  By doing this in the interview process, you achieve a few things:

1. You get their undivided attention
2. If they reject your thesis – your corporate culture and approach – they have enough information to get out before they get hired.  Help them self-select.
3. Equally, in a small company it is good for new hires to know the founder(s) are signing off on their hire.
4. Finally, it is important to have at least one consistent interview across as many candidates as possible.  It makes it easier to benchmark and pattern match good hires versus red or yellow flags that need to be explored.

Essentially, the interview is the tip of the spear for creating the kind of company you want to be a part of.  In a previous life, Elliot and I worked for a company that was maniacal about recruiting and recruiting process (and resulted in the start-up, CollegeHire, in which Elliot was a key influencer).  Where else could you do a couple hundred college graduate interviews every year, and still make time for the day job?

It was interesting to read his post and see some of the same takeaways that I have from that early experience.  At Tribe, Geni, and Yammer, it sounds like Elliot had ample opportunity to apply that philosophy.  Similarly, I had good opportunity to shape recruiting practices at Lombardi while I was there, building the technical services team from the ground up.

And now that I’m at bp3, we may not be hiring as aggressively as a venture-funded outfit would, but that just means we have all the more pressure to get it right when we make a hire.  And one thing I’ve learned: culture matters more than ability in the long run.  Some would argue the opposite.  But I can tell you – I can always find another person with the right abilities (or capabilities).  So I’ll take the one I can find that also has the right culture fit.  We tend to hire more experienced industry veterans at bp3, and so we don’t kid ourselves that we are going to remake an veteran’s work-life philosophy overnight.  We need to find people who are already in rough alignment.

One thing is for sure:  hiring great people is one of the most gratifying things you can do as a business owner.  Seeing them happy years into the job, that’s even more gratifying.

The easiest way to launch a $1B product – in year 1 – is to first have a $9B product trending toward $23B, and then sell a must-have accessory alongside it:

I’m estimating that at least 60% of iPad buyers will get one. Based on an estimate of 36 million iPads sold in 2011 and an average price of $48 (70% polyurethane and 30% leather mix), the total revenue for Smart Covers will top $1 billion this year.

I further estimate that with a very modest gross margin of 75% (average cost to produce of $12), the Smart Cover could contribute $777 million to Apple’s gross margins.

Until other innovative covers come to market (and they will), Apple is going to sell these to more than 60% of iPad buyers.  My anecdotal evidence at the pop-up store in Austin during SXSW was that everyone buying one for themselves bought a cover.  Only people buying them for others skipped it (and they were obviously not buying the iPads for friends or they would have splurged for the snappy cover).

On April 2nd, IBM is releasing another Blueworks Live update.  From the description on their blog, it sounds interesting, but we’ll be back on this space with a hands-on review once it is live.  From the blog, they’re introducing a few new features:

• Process Playback.  Looks like a better way to present scenarios that leverage the process you’ve defined.  This should be a fun one to play with, and it is an interesting use case that you wouldn’t get from a purely execution-oriented point of view.
• Glossary.  They’ve had this feature for a while, but apparently they’re updating the glossary with a few new features to improve upon it.
• Process Automation.  4 new process templates sounds intriguing, and a better interface for reports and finding work sounds good too.
• Navigation improvements. Well, this is the kind of thing where beauty is in the eye of the beholder. I’ll have to see how I feel about the navigation changes after they’re released.  Watching a video doesn’t really do it justice.

More info coming by Monday.

I was pretty surprised at how impressed Mark Suster was with SXSW-interactive.  I mean, I understand why it was such a great experience for me and many others in my shoes, but I admit to feeling that, surely for VCs and folks like Mark, SXSW is a little annoyingly out of the way or annoying in that it is such a throng of people.  Or something like that.  But no:

SXSW was magic. I can’t imagine having been at a better event. I was listening to NPR on my drive in yesterday morning. They were talking about the music portion of the show. A band was saying, “I can’t believe that at one event you could get access to the band managers of Lady Gaga, FooFighters, etc. Every night you are just hanging out with big name bands and the teams around them that brought them to their peak.”

I couldn’t have said it any better replacing music with tech.

His post has a lot of name-dropping – but you know, some of those names are friends of mine and local Austinites (more prominent in startup circles, for sure, than I am).  So there’s a certain “reality” to what he’s saying that I can relate to.  It was nice to see some Austinites make his list of people he enjoyed meeting with.  Of course, who wouldn’t enjoy the conversations he had?  Steve Blank? Dave McClure? Gary V? I was just happy to get to see some of these folks present and hold court at SXSW.

Neil Ward-Dutton of MWD recently claimed that Capgemini is pulling it together for BPM. It is an interesting area to keep track of and MWD is one of the best at covering these issues (largely because they seem to be a bit tougher on vendors than other analyst firms):

I’d come across a number of cases where BPM projects had turned out to be tougher than they might have been because the incumbent CSI provider had failed to really understand how they could add value. From what I was seeing, many smaller and more specialised local firms were doing great work supporting business’ BPM needs; but the larger players just weren’t “getting it”.

Amen.  Neil hit the nail on the head.  If anything, he was too nice about it.  Some of these bigger players aren’t just not “getting it” they’re actually destroying value in some cases.  Much of this is simply driven by the penny-wise, pound-foolish nature of business today:

In the pursuit of lower cost-per-hour, we’re seeing people staffed that simply aren’t qualified to do the work.  And then more raw numbers of people are staffed at this lower rate.  And the customer, and the big vendor, think that a large quantity of lower-skill “resources” will make up for the missing small number of experts (and not just whiteboard experts, I’m talking experts that write code and get their hands dirty).

Worse, I’ve seen companies look at a project – a team with 1-2 BPM experts and 40 Java/SOA resources – and focus on cost cutting for those 2 BPM experts.  Everyone depends on the SOA team delivering quality work on time, but the SOA team is staffed with $25-50/hour subcontractors who have never really done this stuff before, and produce about less output than 2-3 experts with Hibernate and Spring would.   But companies focus on how to get the rates down on those 2 “expensive” BPM experts – because obviously swapping out a cheaper resource there will fix the problem right? Instead of focusing on the fact that they don’t have the right kinds of people on their SOA teams: a few highly skilled experts rather than an army of low-skill-level novices.

As I’ve said many times before:

An hour of labor is not the output of your well-spent money, it is the input.

An hour of labor is an input, along with skill, experience, context, intelligence.  The output is a deliverable, an outcome, a business result.  Therefore, the quality of that input has a dramatic effect on the quality of the output.

Neil thinks the big vendors may be turning their lack of focus on BPM around – Capgemini is launching a Pega practice, and several other big firms have had similar announcements, with Pega, Cordys, IBM, etc. .  I still think the best value for your money is going to be the pureplay BPM Services firms – I’ve said so before (and I’ll say it again!).

These big vendors announce initiatives all the time – and it always involves hundreds of people in the press release.  I wouldn’t hold my breath – I’ll just wait for the success stories to show up in blogs and analyst coverage.  I’d venture that most of these firms won’t pick up the right BPM DNA unless they acquire a boutique BPM firm to get it (much as IBM purchased Lombardi, partly to pick up its BPM DNA). 

I need to write a post explaining why the Lean Startup has relevance to BPM, in a logical, specific way.  But before I do that, I want to get the raw impressions and data I’ve collected from watching sessions at SXSW and then I’ll post my analysis.  Because much of this content is available on the web, the key attraction to the event was to hear it live, rather than Memorex – much of the analysis is the same, but with fresh input.

Eric Ries kicked off the SXSW Lean Startup event with a good introduction to Lean startups.  My notes from the session (rough notes):

• Entrepreneurs are everywhere
• Lean Startup is about Validated Learning:
  • Build
  • Measure
  • Learn
• (scribbled something about innovation)

Next, Eric talked about Scientific Management, and Fred Taylor. On the one hand, a scientific approach to business is generally a good thing, and on the other, his approach falls on its face in startups.  The argument seems to be, that in startups, we would collectively benefit from a more scientific, rigorous approach (rather than the trial and error that often happens, and rather than the waterfall approach we often see).  But also, that scientific approach has to account for the fact that the both the problem and solution are not well-known. Taylor assumes the problem and solution are well understood.

The key idea is the Pivot.  His example:  Groupon was building “petition++” and made a huge pivot to daily deals.  Their first daily deal was for pizza at the pizza place in their building.  A very humble beginning, but also a very useful way to start testing their concept in the real world.

So the goal is to reduce time required to pivot (rephrasing: reduce the time required to learn what you need to know, so that you can pivot effectively sooner rather than later).

The Waterfall/Taylor approach just doesn’t work well in startup land (I had visions of Phil Gilbert’s old bucket brigade slides when I saw Eric’s slides).  Eric points out he was kind of annoyed to find out that even manufacturing doesn’t follow a Tayloristic approach anymore – they’re using Lean.  So why are people teaching software and engineering still teaching this approach that is proven to be wrong?

The problem with a waterfall approach: Achieving failure, on time, on budget, with high quality, good design.  Only one problem:  wrong product.

Deming and Ohno put the focus on the customer, and lean manufacturing as the way to get there.

Customer Develment + Agile Development

Agile Development was a big improvement to delivery models for software companies.  But even agile doesn’t work well, by itself, in startups.  It needed to be paired up with Customer Development (Steve Blank’s process for hypothesis testing your business model, at right).  Meanwhile, it becomes clearer when to employ the two key parts of a lean startup: the approach to unknown problems, and the approach to unknown solutions…

Unknown Problem, Unknown Solution

Not that executing these two models is necessarily easy, but it sure is a whole lot easier to do right if you know which situation you’re in.  If your problem is known, and solution is unknown, Agile development is a good choice. But if your problem is unknown as well, then you need to employ the customer development process to dig into what problem you’re really solving.

Eric described the cycles at IMVU, by way of example. And explained that the “pivot” is one cycle through the “build-measure-learn” loop.  A great quote was that “learning is the fundamental measure of progress” in a lean startup – not revenue, or users, or any other metric that a typical board might latch on to.

Translating to BPM terms: The pivot in business process management would be when we take what we learned from our last process improvement, measure what is really happening, and identify the new opportunities and tackle those.  In BPM we’re not pivoting the company hypothesis, just the hypothesis for where the bang-for-the-buck is in the process.

I particularly like his coverage of Lean myths:

1. Lean means cheap. On the contrary, lean is about speed much more than about cost.
2. Lean Startup is only for Web2.0 style companies. Actually, Lean Startup applies to all companies that face uncertainty in what the customers will want.
3. Lean Startups are bootstrapped. In fact, many lean startups are ambitious and can deploy large amounts of capital (see, Groupon).
4. Lean Startups replace vision with data. Actually, lean startups test the vision with real data. They still require vision!

Eric’s talk was followed by case studies on pivots by Pascal Louis-Perez (Wealthfront), Ash Maurya (USERcycle), Parker Thompson (Pivotal Labs).

Perhaps the most interesting nugget from these three case studies, with respect to the customers BP3 works with – was Pascal’s presentation on Wealthfront.  His company processes manages over $180MM.  And yet they have a continuous deployment setup – meaning they deploy changes to production as much as 30 times a day.  Their company puts lie to the idea that a highly regulated industry with very important financial outcomes can’t adopt a continuous deployment development model.  I’m not advocating that every Fortune 500 company do the same with BPM – but clearly there is a happy middle-ground between 18-month roll-outs and 30 times a day…  And whatever your number of days between deployments is, we should be looking at ways to reduce that number.

Ash Maurya was up next (slides here), and I admit to being surprised when he presented the use of kan ban boards to visualize the workflow of feature ideas (this is, truly, treating development of product as something that can be measured and improved and understood). He advocated moving only so fast as you can learn or aid the process of learning – that moving faster than that, or slower than that, amounts to waste (a big no-no in Lean thinking).

Parker Thompson, of Pivotal, advocated having a vision, but being humble and pragmatic in the near term.  If testing with users or customers proves that your vision isn’t getting traction, don’t assume you have the wrong test subjects, be willing to revisit your hypothesis and test different ideas.

I recall not long ago -oh wait, two years ago (June 2009) -  poking fun at SAP’s BPM strategy:

Your last point about the definition of BPM reminds me of a press release SAP did about 2 years ago about BPM… which, if you read their definition, was merely EAI (integration services), and a “totally new groundbreaking category of software” that they called Collaborative Application Frameworks (CAF)… which would be available in … you guessed it… 2 years… and if you read the definition slowly, you realize that CAF was describing a BPMS. Curiously, I haven’t seen a press release about CAF being released into the wild. And their attempt to rebrand EAI as BPM hasn’t taken with the market…

Well.  Based on Bruce’s blog, it looks like 2 years after my comment, and 4 years after SAP’s strategic statement on BPM and CAF, SAP has finally delivered something that approximates what some people would call BPM:

Yesterday I got a look at SAP’s BPM v7.3, now in “ramp-up” (extended beta).  I hadn’t heard much lately about SAP in the BPM area, so I was really surprised to see how far they have come.  The new offering, called the “Process Orchestration Solution”, combines NetWeaver BPM, focused on human tasks, and NetWeaver Process Integration, which provides SOA, ESB, adapters, and Enterprise Service Repository (ESR).

Sorry, I should have said that they’ve delivered it into Beta, not GA.  Bruce’s review is positive, and, I think, reflects his low expectations going into the review.  Based on his review, SAP may finally be getting their BPM act together, and if the other vendors in the space sit still or get comfortable, they’ll get lapped in capability in some areas.

However, SAP is still focused on BPM as a way to add value to their existing application suites, rather than a standalone technology/application offering.  It should be something they can sell into their install base of SAP customers (which is quite large), but I doubt it would get traction out side of that audience as some of the differentiating features are SAP-ERP specific.

Even if I were an SAP customer, I’d still be tempted to use a third-party BPMS because there are processes that simply don’t touch SAP, and if you just want one BPMS, it seems to give you more flexibility.  But for tactical SAP-focused process improvement, or simply as a cheaper way to customize SAP to your needs, this could be a big time saver.

John Reynolds, of IBM, writes:

These experiences with “Departmental BPM” are what make Irene’s recollections of Notes’ Databases resonate so strongly with me.  The ability for a small team to develop and deploy a focussed solution is a very powerful thing… and immensely valuable for the business.  It’s a fantastic “group experience”.

But just like Notes’ Databases, there comes a time when the ability for “anyone” to develop and deploy a managed business process begins to raise “red flags” for those who have to manage the enterprise as a whole.  As BPM spreads through the enterprise, the natural tendency to want to control that spread takes hold.

I’ve experienced this first hand… Early successes with BPM, run as small agile projects, attract the attention of enterprise level architects and program managers, who react with horror at the anarchy and call a halt until control can be re-imposed.

It is all too easy for IT to kill the golden goose that lays the eggs, while trying to make sure that these departmental efforts don’t get out of control.  There’s a legitimate governance concern – but like most things, if you hold too tightly you suffocate the opportunities.  The IT governance concerns should be mostly about visibility, and less about control.  Sadly, there is often more concern about control.

Following SXSW-interactive, I found I had a collection of interesting bookmarks to resources from the conference.  I thought I’d share with everyone else who might (or might not) be interested :

First, we have everything tagged with SXSW on Slideshare.  Some great content – but buyer beware!

Next up, the Lean Startup folks pulled together a great collection of the content covered during the Lean Startup sessions.  Note that this link links to their 2011 content – which is more than just what was covered in SXSW, but it is pretty easy so far to discern which is which.

Next, Austin’s own Omar Gallega gives his 5 ways to fix SXSW next year. Generally I agree with his advice.  Except for one:  he recommends trimming panels by a third.  Quantity of panels isn’t the problem I was experiencing.  Almost every session I went to was jam-packed.  Fewer sessions means that each session needs a bigger room (on average) to accommodate the same # of people.  I’m not sure that’s the answer.  The solution to quality isn’t to prevent people from getting their panel in, so much as it is to make sure there is always quality content to compete. I don’t think there’s a good way to determine quality without stifling what makes SXSW great (for example, some of the presenters at the lean sessions were first tiem SXSW presenters).

If you want to read my favorite set of Tweets for the conference (Gary Chou asked for a TiVo for Tweets), you can look at Snap Bird’s capture of @elliotloh’s tweets.  Just keep in mind it is in reverse order…

Clay Richardson of Forrester covers SXSW-interactive as well.  He recaps three of the more interesting sessions (which represented interesting trends of conversation).

And these were just a few.  If you have other interesting resources you’ve run across please feel free to add to the comment stream!

John Reynolds (of IBM and Lombardi fame) has posted tips for building a task-focused user-interface.  He does a great job of articulating the “iterative-playback” two-step that defines our approach to building out process UI (and process):

With this in mind, you’ll see the logic of the process that we’ve adopted:

1. Build “Just Enough” human interface to give you the ability to “step through” this activity and all of the paths of your process
2. Define “Just Enough” of your interfaces to underlying integrations to give your integration developers the information that they need to start building the “real” integrations
3. Get a fully functional task UI working as soon as your “real” integrations are ready
4. After everything is functional, then (and only then) work on making the task UI “pretty”

On that last point (step 4) – remember that “everything functional” goes beyond a specific human task – All the human tasks should be functional before you worry about making any of them pretty.

This is great articulation of the approach we pushed and developed at Lombardi between 2003 and 2007.  It looks like the team has continued to improve on the definition of this approach (including defining Blueworks process maps for it).  But I think the four-step list is easier to “grok“.

Despite the simplicity of the approach, many people fail to adhere to it. The more technically savvy the person is, the more likely they are to deviate from this process.  For some of these folks, I explain it in Computer Science terms – analogous to iterative deepening to find the right solution for each UI, and for the whole application’s UI in general.  It isn’t quite as simple as breadth-first, but it is closer to breadth first than depth first.

There is a reason for taking this approach to building process UI :

Your biggest risk in the project is that you’re requirements are wrong or misunderstood.  Your best expression of requirements is typically the User Interface.

Because of that, you need to iterate on the UI.  And if you go too deep -either by prettying or over-integrating with back-end systems – you create friction on that iterative process that isn’t required.  That adds cost and slows time-to-market.

Great post from Marco Arment about a week ago, regarding the new Samsung products that are supposed to compete with the iPod Touch.  Just the beginning is telling:

Apple should be scared of the upcoming competition:

Samsung presented some of the first significant competition to the iPod touch…

I’d call it “potential competition” — it’s not competition if it doesn’t exist yet. And when it does, it’s not really a competitor if it doesn’t sell very well. It’d be difficult to say, for instance, that the Zune was ever really providing “significant competition” to the iPod.

in years…

…ever.

Both run Android 2.2 and will be upgradable to 2.3 in the future.

2.3 has been out for a few months already, and we know how good the Android device manufacturers are at getting updates issued after a device’s sale.

I thought the new target was 3.0.  The android ecosystem is just not up to the challenge yet.  And the manufacturers are having trouble matching Apple just on hardware innovation, forget the software for a moment.

Now, keep in mind, I’m not a fan of the iPod Touch.  I’d rather have an iPhone or an iPad.  But I’d sure rather have a Touch than one of these Samsung devices.

Jacob Ukelson’s post about extending Data Loss Prevention through ACM took time out to list out four areas of “process” work if you will:

• BPM (Business Process Management) – The focus is on structured data (forms) and structured flow.
• ECM (Enterprise Content Management) – The focus is on unstructured data (documents) and structured flow.
• DCM (Dynamic Case Management) – The focus is on structured+unstructured data (forms and documents) and semi-structured flow.
• ACM – The focus is on structured+unstructured data (forms and documents) and unstructured flow.

Sandy Kemsley commented on Twitter that she sees these four ideas as more of a spectrum from more structured to more unstructured, rather than four distinct areas.  I agree.  In fact, she later wrote a detailed post about it, including the following depiction:

Spectrum from structured to unstructured - courtesy Column 2, Sandy Kemsley

Sandy’s working on a whitepaper on the subject, which I’m looking forward to reading, as I happen to agree with her starting point thesis (and her visualization is better than mine, in this post!)

Another visualization is with two axes, however- “Data” and “Process” – which can exist across some wide spectrum of how much structure is there.  The standard 2×2 chart comes to mind.  One might draw it like this:

This would likely make everyone outside of the BPM “purists” happy.  But it isn’t quite representative, as it makes it look like the four boxes are really distinct, rather than blurry.  And the placement of ACM and DCM isn’t right on this chart, but bear with me.

But as Sandy noted, it isn’t clear that the other three things aren’t also “BPM”.  The chart many BPM practitioners would draw for this looks like the following, with BPM dominating the landscape and covering a wide spectrum, and the other ideas covering rather smaller areas of the spectrum.

BPM 2x2, Alternate View

I think this is how many BPM practitioners see the world (whether we agree or disagree with this view, we can agree some people hold this view).  Note, the spectrum is not weighted based on the number of processes  – the density of processes in each pixel, if you will.  I think most people would agree that there are more unstructured processes than structured ones in the universe today.

A third view that I’m seeing emerge:  It is all BPM and we’re just talking about the definitions of different branches of the main tree.  Some would argue, reasonably, that this dilutes what “BPM” means too much, and some would argue that arguing that something that walks like process and talks like process should be considered “in scope” for BPM.

Jacob and I agree that the differences are largely one of focus – of the vendors and of the practitioners, rather than technical capability.  Keeping in mind that the differences in focus might make it much easier or much harder to deliver a solution in the sweet spot of one of these approaches to process.

Very interesting post from Tom Baeyens on Activiti’s approach to ad-hoc processes and how that plays into their overall BPM strategy – as well as how it relates to BPMN2:

The first step that we’re adding now to Activiti is a snappy environment in which that kind of collaboration is supported. Apart from the tasks that are created by process instances, you’ll be able to create tasks dynamically on the fly. It will be possible to involve people with these tasks, have discussions and associate any kind of content like plain URL’s, Alfresco docs, Google docs etc to the task (aka case). Furthermore, it will be possible to create sub tasks dynamically. Here’s one of our early mockups:

I think it is smart for Activiti not to *just* focus on the engine, but also think about collaboration and other features that weren’t as strong in the previous generation of BPM tooling. The interesting tidbit in Tom’s email (to me) was this:

In some cases, this might grow to become pretty complex processes. At that point, Activiti KickStart modeling might be too limited as that is targeted at non technical people. Because Activiti is based on BPMN 2.0, it will be possible to move these organically grown processes into full BPMN 2.0 based modeling tools.

This reveals that even with KickStart and their tackling of ad-hoc, they intend to represent the outcome as a BPMN2 model (XML), and therefore it is a model that can be “uplifted” to a more structured or managed process as it matures or when it becomes valuable enough to manage in that way. If they can pull this off gracefully it sets a high bar for other BPM products.

I’ll share some more thoughts on “unstructured” knowledge work in the next post…

Is this Shark too big to Jump?

Every year, attendees of SXSW ask if it has “jumped the shark” – usually a reference to out-of-control attendance, but also often used in reference to its growing appeal to “mainstream” audiences, sponsors, and media.

Legitimately, people wondered if a conference of 12000+ last year could still be meaningful to attendees.  It was a big jump in attendance (30-40%), and the organization of the conference struggled to keep up.  Hallways were jam-packed with people between sessions, and logistics seemed problematic (transportation and food were scarce, and so were spare plugs for recharging phones and laptops).

Early reports that SXSW would be even bigger this year raised the usual concerns – is SXSW-interactive too big?  Too big to create value for attendees?  The final numbers came in somewhere between 19,000 and 20,000 – an almost shocking increase, and by far the biggest tech conference I’ve attended (approximately 3x the size of IBM Impact 2010).  It is amazing that Austin, a moderately sized city, can host such a large conference (we’re not talking about a traditional conference destination like Las Vegas or Orlando).  But SXSW compensates for this shortage of convention center space by branching out – to 10 venues in 2011.  This year it did a better job of grouping similar content in the same venue (campus), cutting down on the mad dashes across Austin from one session to another.  In a sense, SXSW is evolving into a set of smaller conferences – each of which is growing independently under the overall umbrella and branding of SXSW.  The organizers of SXSW of course have some experience with this… it is how they approached growing the Film and Interactive portions of the festival without missing a beat with the music festival.

It’s Over

John Gruber of Daring Fireball weighs in on SXSW as well:

As Budd says, you can’t go from a conference of 2,500 attendees to one of 25,000 attendees without turning the event into something entirely different. … Once it outgrew the Austin Convention Center, though, it grew into something I no longer enjoyed. I don’t see how anyone could claim that the conference now is anything but broken.

Only in comparison to an event profile from 2005.  It just isn’t the same event.  Or really, set of events.  This same complaint is leveled by Austinites all the time… about Austin!  People lament that the town it used to be is lost.  It has grown beyond its sleepy beginnings.  But the alternative is what?  Not having the robust economic growth that has made Austin one of the most interesting cities to live in? I’ll take the growth, thank you – I’ve seen the alternatives.

In the context of SXSW – what is the alternative?  A conference to which the same people come every year for 25 years, every year just a bit older than last year?  The truth is, you can’t keep a conference like this the same – it has to evolve.  Admittedly, the organizers can limit attendance, or raise prices to artificially limit attendance (one could argue they tried that by raising prices for 2011…).  But would lack of growth be better than what SXSW has achieved?  I can’t say for sure, but I don’t think so.

John Gruber also laments the lack of attendance at a talk scheduled too far from the epicenter;

A prime example: Despite the fact that there were almost 25,000 attendees, almost no one saw Matt Haughey’s excellent talk in person, because the conference schedulers put Haughey in an obscure location across the river, a mile away from the Austin Convention Center. There were about 30 or 40 people in the room for his talk.

This sort of thing is truly unfortunate.  There was a similar attendance issue at Craig Venter’s amazing talk on synthetic life-  one of the best talks I’ve seen on any subject.  It was scheduled at 9:30am on Monday morning.  I’m sure a lot of people were still sleeping off a long night out from Sunday night.  But I’d hardly call a conference broken for scheduling quality content at 9:30am.  I think there’s a lot of room for improvement in scheduling and grouping content together. But I have some faith that SXSW organizers are working it out.  I don’t know anyone who attended the Lean Startup sessions who walked away from SXSW feeling that the content wasn’t top notch.  I also attended a packed BattleDecks session that was, to put it mildly, less than value-added.  Voting with feet sometimes produces surprising results in both directions.

In the echo chamber of folks who didn’t go to sessions, talking about how bad the session content was, skipping the conference or just skipping the sessions seems like a good idea.  But I think they missed the boat for the average conference-goer – as usual the content was there, and rich – but it takes more work to find what you want because there are, literally, as many as 120 sessions happening concurrently.  You read that right.  In my opinion, if you’re not in that “influencer elite” class of attendee, you’re probably going to enjoy the content if you give it a chance. That opinion is validated by a couple of experienced startup veterans that came to SXSW for the first time this year and really enjoyed it.  Anecdotal data, I’ll admit.

Reinventing SXSWi… again…

One of the things that sets SXSW-interactive apart is that it reinvents itself – from “multimedia” to a blogger convention, to a tech/startup convention, to a convention with a strong streak of mobile and geo-location content (and all the while a gaming track has been growing in size)… The organizers don’t come up with the ideas that shape and reshape the conference, for the most part – the attendees and speakers do – by submitting and then voting on topics.  The Lean Startup track that Eric Ries, et al, created was driven by people outside the SXSW organizational structure, but with the help of SXSW once that theme became apparent.  How many conferences have you been to where the messaging is controlled by 2-3 people who work at a single company and have a particular agenda (or product, or service) to push? SXSW avoids that trap- whether on purpose or by accident.

After attending this year’s conference, if anything has “jumped the shark”, it is saying that SXSW has jumped the shark:

Depending on what you read or who you talk to, this was definitely the year that SXSW jumped the shark. In fact, I think we even declared it over before it even began. What was once a conference that was hip, now attracts the guy in the buttoned-up shirt — therefore, it’s over.

Except, it isn’t.  And if there is anyplace where the button-up shirt can meet with the guy in tshirt and Birkenstocks, Austin is it.  MG Siegler goes on to say:

Everything just felt fragmented — including the apps that did try to launch there. There was simply too much going on for what was initially conceived as a smaller show. This year was like watching a mouse trying to give birth to an elephant.

The other side of the coin is that SXSW is just too big for a few insiders to control the message, or to even groupthink what the message should be.  The fragmentation may be precisely what SXSW needed to handle the influx of people, who can’t fit into a single building let alone a single room in Austin. As for fragmentation, I like how Hugh Forrest put it:

Forrest said that for next year, the festival crew will look at quality control for panels, although the abundance of content is not something that will likely go away. “Yes, there’s too much stuff, but it’s part of what we’re trying to do here. That’s a feature, not a flaw.”

In other words: your problem isn’t going to be lack of choice at SXSW.  The problem will be choosing where to invest your time.  The adjustment I made from 2010 to 2011 was to more carefully plan out my first two days before the conference started – having 2-3 sessions marked for each time-slot that I thought were interesting and in a location I was willing to walk to.   I also planned what session or time frame I was going to ditch, so that I could eat lunch.  There just isn’t time to decide where you want to go after the previous session – you need to have it narrowed down to a shorter “interest list” and then make a bee-line for that session in case it is crowded.  Good sessions are often standing room only.

You Can’t Launch Product at SXSWi- Not Anymore. Or Can You?

It appears that I’m not the only one that feels SXSW is becoming a must-attend event.  But Michael Lazerow comes to one bad conclusion: that the days of breaking products at SXSW are over:

As for the product wars we all know and love, let me just say that this year marks the end of launching products (at least successfully) at SXSW. With launches being the only thing more prevalent than parties at SXSW, two things will happen with your product if you debut at SXSW:

• No one cares. There is too much noise. 99.9999% of the companies fit into this category.
• Everyone cares and you crash. SXSW is so big now that if people do notice and decide to check out your product en masse, you will crash as you can’t handle the traffic.

So either you crash and burn because no one notices, or you crash and burn because you actually crash and burn. It’s crucial to begin growing an active user base a few months before SXSW so you can improve the product and scale the infrastructure.

He goes on to say that SXSW is the kindling, not the firestarter.  Not sure about the analogy but I think he has a point – it can accelerate adoption for a product that already has a loyal following.   But launching a product to all 20,000 attendees at SXSW-i no longer makes sense (except when it does).  But it doesn’t mean you can’t have a successful launch  – you just have to aim at a more targeted or niche segment of the attendees – the conference’s attendees are too fragmented in demographics, and too large in number, to target in one conference with one message – but it doesn’t mean you can’t launch.  But it is only with the benefit of hindsight that we can tell if SXSW gave your launch the boost it needed to attain orbit.

The Myth, and The Legend

In fact, Charlie O’Donnell of First Round Capital does a great job of explaining the myth of the SXSW launch, and why we shouldn’t be quite so focused on the successful launch of new technology as an indicator of success.  Essentially, Twitter was the perfect app to launch at an event like SXSW, and now that we have it, it isn’t clear yet what the next “right app, right time, right conference” confluence will be.  As he put it:

What SXSW has always been about is people.  It is the single best place in the creative innovation world to build relationships and get to know people.  I have friends from all over the world that I’ve met over the last five years that I can’t wait to see in Austin every year.  It’s where I met Rob May from Backupify for the first time in person–and I got to back him through First Round four years later.

Going back to fragmentation and cognitive dissonance, I love this article from Inc. magazine on what you missed at SXSW:

• Five days is enough to start a company.  The startup bus movement is in effect, and while it hasn’t churned out a blockbuster hit, it has given its participants a short primer on “starting up”.
• Gamification will blanket the earth… but…
• Gamification doesn’t matter.  Yes. You read that right.  Different points of view, strongly expressed, in different panels or discussions.
• Influencers will inherit the earth.  Get used to it.
• Ignore the influencers, and focus on a subset of mainstream users.

Hm. Conflicting advice!

Random Observations

My experiences at SXSW interactive have been so positive that I’ll be back in 2012.  The opportunity to step outside the day-to-day and get exposed to this kind of cross-pollination just doesn’t happen every day – and for me, being in Austin, this is a no-brainer.  I’ll share a couple of other random observations…

I noticed a few apps in particular were getting a lot of traction this year:

• Foodspotting.  I started using it at last year’s SXSW, and saw an awful lot of foodspotting on twitter this year.
• A friend of mine introduced me to Hashable late last year, but I didn’t really start using it until SXSW this year.  When you’re meeting with other active twitter users it is a nice way to “say thanks” when you get a meet-up.
• Groupme – I don’t use it but people were talking about using it.  However, I didn’t see any viral effect – none of my friends at SXSW sent me an invite or were asking me to sign up so that we could “group chat”.  This one hasn’t filtered down to the “general audience” at SXSW.
• Other opinions here.

There are other reasons to keep coming to SXSW.  The Austin360 Food Trailer guide is just one reason (25 Austin food trailers, critic’s picks ) – if Austin isn’t Ground Zero for the food trailer movement, I don’t know where it is. Free food trailer food was abundant at SXSW, thanks to Hashable, Foodspotting, and other startups at SXSW.

Another is the likely-to-be-annual Das IronGeek Competition (congrats Joshua Baer on winning it this year!) – if you haven’t tried one of their mechanical keyboards, you should. They’re amazingly responsive and fast.  It is hard to describe without actually trying one. The competition consisted of:

• Typing at Das Keyboard
• A Fear Factor dig in the sand for smart phone accessories from Seidio
• SXSW trivia from Triviatise
• Old school air hockey from MapQuest
• Build a server rack from SoftLayer

Who doesn’t want to win the Dwight Schroot trophy?  And where else can you compete for the Das IronGeek prize, attend a talk on synthetic life, attend a talk on the singularity, learn about lean startups, meet the CEO of your favorite iPhone app, and win tickets to a Big Boi concert?  Not to mention good BBQ and Tacos all week.

The parties and social gatherings are another reason to attend – but I had more fun taking friends to local restaurants that weren’t hosting those events- treating them to unique local food.

Ok Ok, So Who Won SXSW 2011?

And in case you missed it, the product that “won” SXSW was the 2D barcode:

I’m talking 2D barcodes (i.e., QR Codes, Microsoft Tag…) that link the physical world to mobile. My client John Puterbaugh, CEO of Nellymoser and a pioneer in the development of technology that seamlessly delivers rich content to mobile devices, summed it up when he said on his PSFK panel:

“2D barcodes codes are to mobile what the URL was to the Internet.”

If you don’t believe me (or John), here’s a collection of the images I captured at almost every turn during my time in Austin.

I have to admit that the pictures don’t lie.  QR codes were everywhere.  Including on all of our badges.  And yet, I used them more in 2010 than I did in 2011, and I didn’t see anyone else taking advantage of them either.  Not sure if I’d call it winning, but they sure were ubiquitous.

See you next year, folks.

Gary Comerford of the Process Cafe has a 3-part series on the State of BPM.  It’s quite a good read so far, into part 2.  And there’s a bit that particularly relates to what Bruce Silver and I were writing about earlier this week:

However, on the flip side many organizations remain “process ignorant” when it comes to BPM because many still don’t necessarily understand exactly how things are getting done in their own business. Some cited issues such as a lack of interchange standards between process modeling and execution tools, which can render system interoperability difficult. One reason that this issue exists is that organizations are using modeling-only tools that lack an execution component. Organizations are finding the breadth of available BPM systems confusing in that each vendor interface will dictate how business processes are to be designed and applied. Could it be that a single unified interchange system will prevail in the future which will allow any modelling tool to interchange data with any execution tool? The salesman at some of the larger vendors will tell you that this already exists, but seeing the number of forum questions that appear from developers who are building these execution systems, it is apparent that all is not totally well from this point of view. 

Yes, using model-only tools is fine – but one must understand that they start model-only and they end model-only.  When you move to execution, you start over.  Literally.  The good news is – usually – the original models don’t take that long to re-author in an executable model approach.

Interchange does not yet work to the satisfaction of technical users, let alone business users.  If the salesmen of large software companies are saying this they’re mistaken.  Some tools can export their own models to “BPMN2″ and import that same BPMN2 export back in.  This is not the same as importing the model from a third-party tool.  The “good” news is that all the vendors have at least a small motivation to implement importing.  The “bad” news is that none have any interest in building the exporters (I believe that will be up to the open-source community).

Day 4 started off right, and got better from there.  Parking was quick, and coffee in hand I strolled into Ballroom D just as Craig Venter was starting to talk about synthetic life.  I whipped out my iPad2 and started taking notes.  Yes, I was feeling pretty good about my new charger-free existence (I really do love the long battery life).

Lest you think SXSW is all about frivolous social media and twittering away late into the night (literally and figuratively), Sunday’s sessions brought a random substantiveness to my SXSW experience, and had me thinking about things outside my usual domain.  And lest you buy into the hype by some (Vivek Wadhwa you know who you are), that Silicon Valley (and startups in general) are focused on ephemeral, superficial things, Craig Venter just completely shattered my notions of what can be done today in genomics.

As I entered, Craig was discussing their goal: to make a living, self-replicating bacteria cell, driven by artificially generated DNA.

Craig’s construct: to discuss this in terms of hardware (virus, bacteria, yeast) and software (DNA).  Several minutes were spent explaining how DNA strands were spliced together to form strands more than 100,000 “letters” long.  Fascinating process of experimentation, followed by investing in discovering an automatable process that a robot can perform.  Literally.  (Not just automated in the BPM sense of the word, by software).

Eventually they achieved a one-step, in vitro assembly that worked at 50′C, which could be automated.  More examples could be pursued, larger pieces, more automation, more robotics.

A study in 2007 showed that just by changing the DNA in a cell, they could convert one species into another.  And still have a fully functional organism.

Paraphrasing a quote: “We think that the software recognized the DNA of the original species as foreign and ‘ate it up.’  All the characteristics of the original species are gone.”  He reminded us how often DNA is replaced – 20% an hour, or something to that effect (I might have missed the exact timing/numbers…) and asked, imagine if you had to change 20% of your car parts every hour to keep your car running.  It is amazing stuff that goes on inside our bodies.

To be sure that they had the real, unique organism, they encoded messages within the genetic code – an “easter egg” in the genome – quotes from James Joyce and others.

So now they’re focused on the software for designing new cells and organisms – there aren’t enough scientists to understand all the possibilities, so software will do much of the combinatorics and analysis.  But why bother? what’s the point?

• World population of nearly 7 billion has demands our earth and tech cannot supply without continued technological change. 3 people alive today for every 1 alive when Venter was born.  Genomics can help address the food requirements of such a population.
• Additionally, flu vaccines, and eventually an HIV vaccine, may be formulated.  HIV presents a challenge due to its rapid genetic code changes, so we need new approaches.  A flu vaccine using their rig takes 24 hours to produce, rather than the 3-6 months required by today’s techniques.
• Energy demand is increasing even faster than population growth.  The Keeling curve shows increases in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.  So bio-engineered micro-algae can do a great job synthesizing sunlight and CO2 into combustible fuels.  The questions is can we scale this to get billions of gallons of fuel in 10 years?

If we based our energy needs on corn sugar replacement, we’d need a cornfield the size of 3 United States’.  But if we can do it with micro-algae, we’d need a field the size of Maryland.  Not easy, but at least it is achievable.

Clearly, Craig Venter is focused on how to solve the big problems.  One might say that he is on the path of a “Smarter Planet” but with a completely different approach than our friends at IBM.  It is fascinating.

My second session seemed to just gel perfectly with the Venter talk.  From Biological  artificially created life to synthetic artificial life.  The second panel was a discussion of the “Singularity” – the point beyond which we can’t imagine what our life(lives) will be like, because the rate of change is so fast we can’t understand the implications.  Usually this is considered to be because an Artificial Intelligence achieves sentience (the Vernor Vinge hypthoesis), but this is not the only thought model.  Our three panelists, experts in the field of AI, discussed their views.

First, the difficulty of context for computers.  The following two statements:

1. Mary and Sue are sisters
2. Mary and Sue are mothers

To us, it is easy to see that in statement #1, the obvious implication is that they are related and sisters, not that they both happen to have sisters and are not related.  In statement #2, it is obvious they are both mothers, not the mother of each other, and not necessarily related in any way.  But this sort of context is hard for computers.  Hard for Watson. Doug Lenat theorizes that we are now close to modeling computer systems that will be able to leverage fact systems for context and inference engines for generating outcomes that make sense.

Vassar took the point of view that if the singularity is in 2030′s, the point is to live well now – to enjoy your life, not to worry about what happens after 2030.  He had an oddly humanistic angle to his arguments:

• We are not very good at deliberate thought, but we seem to get a lot of mileage from the little deliberate thought we engage in.
• Machines are good at deliberate thought, but not very good at the non-deliberate thoughts that humans do quite naturally.
• If you have a good understanding of intelligence, by definition you have super human intelligence, whether you have an AI or not.
• If we understood ourselves as well as we understood societies, we’d already be creating people.
• Society does things – it does not decide to do things. Society isn’t intentional.
• We tell good stories about caring about things – but looking at our actions you would not conclude that we DO care about these things.

Vita-Moore was focused on the artistic, and the idea of extending life through cybernetics, rather than Ray Kurzweils view of uploading intelligence into a computer.  She talked about aesthetics and how we would feel about some of these changes as they happen.

The third session was focused on Business Models -but it was such an introductory discussion that I couldn’t last through it.  I left and joined a friend (Amar Rama) for lunch at the Driskill Hotel’s 1886 Bakery and Cafe.  We thought it would be far enough from the convention center-  we were wrong. It was packed.  We got a table, and looked over only to find ourselves sitting right next to Jane Kim of Hashable again.

We missed the keynote of the day, Felicia Day’s talk.  From what our friends wrote about it, it was a great session.  But we did stop by Vast, saw some of the Startup Bus competitors, and a couple of small Austin startups in that same building.  Good conversation followed, before we headed back to the convention center for another session.

My next session was “Abolish the Hourly: How Value Pricing Wins Clients” – a great content-rich session by a couple of successful professional services (agency) firms.  Jon Lax and Lee Dale led an entertaining discussion and case walk-through – in a room packed literally beyond capacity – with people sitting in chairs, on the floor, and in the hallway outside.  But there two key questions left unanswered, and I’ll have to track down the panelists:

1. When we say “value based pricing” – is “value” defined as the value the customer accrues from a successful project?  Or is it the value the customer sets as the amount they’re willing to spend to get the project implemented.
2. If we take value as customer-accrued value , then we have two values – customer-accrued and customer-willing-to-pay.  The question is, what is a spread between those values that works?  ie, if the project has $10MM in value to a customer, what should that customer be willing to pay to get the the help they want?

After this session, I walked down to the Four Seasons bar for a Trilogy Alumni reunion.  It was great to see all the alumni that were back in town because of SXSW-interactive.  It is astonishing to see the level of success and influence our alumni have within their companies – startups in NYC, SF, Bay Area, and Austin.  Not to mention the influence they have in the investor community. I think this influence and network is only going to improve over the next 10 years.  Thanks to Joshua Baer and OtherInbox for sponsoring the happy hour!

After several hours of catching up with some of the smartest and most engaging people I’ve ever met, we decamped to Blue Ribbon BBQ (reviews on Urban Spoon here, another Trilogy Alumni founded service, seems appropriate).  The BBQ was amazing, but they need some work on their BBQ sauce (I know I know, good BBQ doesn’t need sauce, but I still believe if you’re going to put it on the table it better be good!).

Having taken my two visitors (and friends) to fine Mexican dining and fine BBQ dining, I felt my mission of representing Austin’s eating establishments well had been met!

From there, we proceeded to the Hashable party.  And then, to the Mashable party.  At that point, we declared we were only going to parties that end in -ashable.   And yes, a good bit of the value of SXSW is reconnecting with your friends (old and new) at the end of the day to share stories about the day and your lives.  Something you can’t do with livestreamed, virtual conferences.

I have one more SXSW post in me (besides my writeups of the Lean sessions), which will focus on my conclusions from SXSW… look for that tomorrow.

I was struggling Sunday morning, Day 3 of SXSW 2011.  I wasn’t the only one.  The universe had played a cruel joke on all of us and put US Daylight savings leap forward in the middle of SXSW-interactive.    Which of course, meant one hour less sleep during a week in which we all could have used an extra hour of sleep. The 9:30 lineup of content looked a bit weaker than normal, or perhaps it was just that I was too tired to get excited about it.

As I parked at the Four Seasons downtown and walked toward the convention center, I had a choice:  get to the session on “The Death of Relational Databases”, or get a Korean-Mexican fusion Taco at the FoodSpotting parking lot.  I opted for the taco.  And while there, ran into a few interesting characters including an old colleague of mine who once accompanied me on a six month project in Ottawa in the winter.  From there I eschewed a set of fantastic panels (Hacking the News Desiging iPad interfaces, and others) in order to stop by the NY startup meetup.  Briefly reconnected with Hashable and Foursquare and Gary Chou of USV. (I ran into Jane Kim from Hashable so often I’m convinced that she has a twin).

As I rushed off to the convention center again to catch the next set of sessions, my previously well-picked schedule for some reason refused to synchronize with my iPhone (nor my iPad).  Picking from the list, quickly, I dropped into a session on co-working.  It was a little too dry for me and I stepped out of it and moved on out.

As a family revolving around two entrepreneurs and two kids, sometimes things just break down.  We had one of those days.  Our babysitter for the day couldn’t stay late.  I went home early, skipping some good 5pm sessions and leaving a 3:30 session early to make it in time for the cut-off.  I had a wonderful evening with our two kids that made the weekend seem a little less hectic and a little bit more grounded.  They asked me about every 2 seconds if they could play with my iPad2.  As my son would put it: “mmm iPad2? Daddy’s iPad?” which translated means “let me play with your new toy Daddy, pllleeeeeeeeaaasseee!” ).  But we played outside and got the kids to bed, and then I hit twitter and other media to catch up on some of the sessions my friends had attended ( great live-tweeting from the events).

Day 3 was the kind of day you have when you’re tired, and haven’t planned your schedule in advance in terms of which sessions have the content you really want to see.  You feel disjointed, late, frustrated by the crowds.  And it was almost a relief to just hang it up for the day and head home.

But Day 4 was a good rebound… more on that in the next post…

My advice to festival goers – when you have a day like I did, on Day 3 – just pack it in – head to the hotel or house, and take a nap.  Something interesting and energizing will await you when you wake up, and you’ll enjoy it even more.

One of the sessions I missed: Tired of F@#king Social Media Experts? You can’t make this stuff up.  Good reviews of that session too (who says panels are dull!)

Anatoly Belychook’s recent post on Cross Functional patterns is covers the idea of buffering when choreographing processes between different functional groups.  As he points out, the “cardinality” of different functional organizations may be different – where one part of the organization might be dealing with a single order or invoice at a time, another part of the organization may prefer to work on batches of orders or invoices (e.g. paying invoices at End of Month), in other words, they need a buffer.  Of course, this pattern may seem obvious, but the good ones should seem obvious once properly explained.

Anatoly’s posts on patterns (rather than templates) have been good in the past, and this is no exception.  He’s using BizAgi modeler to generate the images and they look sharp.  Other vendors who produce models should take note and allow for crisp export of images of the models – to promote sharing on blogs, among other reasons!