The Lean Startup is a phenomenon.  Day 2 proved it.  Day 2 was not a typical SXSW experience. Instead of scrambling all over downtown Austin to get to sessions, I stayed in one place all day at the lovely AT&T Center.  Eric Ries (@ericries) acted as emcee for the all-day event, which was literally packed wall-to-wall with people and content all day long.

I took copious notes throughout the day.  This day’s sessions were the highlight for me.  The concepts in lean startups and minimum viable product are so relevant for BPM, and not as well understood by our BPM community as you might think. After all, the Lean Startup is focused on areas where the problem is unknown or uncertain, and the solution is also unknown.  In BPM, we face a similar problem – it might be more accurate to say that the problems are “estimated” and the solution is “estimated” – but the point is, we don’t know for sure that we’re solving the right problem before we start the BPM journey, and we don’t know for sure that each solution we iterate is the right solution.  It takes iterations of customer discovery and agile development to get us to a better hypothesis about the problem and solution.  If this sounds like crazy talk, bear with me and read blog posts I’ll put up over the next few days that dig into this further.

Overall the sessions violated one aspect of the spirit of SXSW – there were very few breaks (I counted 2, and one was 30 minutes for lunch), no time for hallway conversation, and no breaks to get out of your middle row seat so that you could have such a hallway conversation.  All of these fantastic entrepreneurs in one space, one room, and we could hardly talk, except via the backchannel of twitter and the like. I think it only worked at SXSW because the sessions were at the AT&T Conference Center, far removed from the center of gravity for SXSW, the Austin Convention Center.

The content was first rate, and there’s too much for one blog post to cover!  But they could have split some of the sessions into two rooms to really make the feel more like SXSW.  It would have forced choices – you can’t go to everything- but the choices would have been good choices, and twitter and blogs allow us to follow content in another session if we’re motivated to. And it would have allowed the schedule to BREATHE a little bit.  Trust me, it needed it.  Finally, it would have allowed for the people who couldn’t get into the sessions in the afternoon to actually participate or watch at least a relevant session, if not the one they were hoping for.  I felt that there was a lot of value pent up in the entrepreneurs in the room, that wasn’t unlocked because there just wasn’t any time at all for the sidebar conversations.

Eric “Pivot” Ries was the emcee, but we had significant appearances and contribution from Dave “Nice to #$@!ing meet you!” McClure , Steve “Epiphany” Blank, and many other entrepreneurs.  My favorite talk, and the one that I was most looking forward to, was Steve Blank’s discussion of new rules for the new bubble.  For this session, even more than the others, it was standing room only, with people sitting on the floors and standing in the hall to listen in.

I had the good fortune of meeting up with fellow Austin entrepreneurs while I was there-  Jeff Chambers, and Ed Roman.  I also spent most of the day sitting with Elliot Loh (@elliotloh) visiting from SF.

Later I got to introduce a couple of my friends from out of town to Garridos, a great modern Mexican restaurant downtown.  We also checked out the Frog Design SXSW Opening party, which, as usual, involved some crazy technical and interactive features, as well as massive lines to get in.

Day 2 was an incredibly long day, with so many notes I knew I couldn’t hope to get my blog up-to-date by the time I finished the day.

The main takeaways:

1. The Lean Startup movement is grounded in real empirical data, real case studies, and real results.  It is no longer an “interesting idea” and seems to be on its way to being accepted as the “best way” to approach starting up your company.
2. Entrpreneurs, investors, and academics from the Bay Area believe there is a sort of “bubble” in investing.  On the other hand, they also believe that the companies likely to go public now are companies that have real scale and make real money.
3. There’s an incredible interest among entrepreneurs to improve their game – especially the ones that are building their companies with minimal or no outside investment.
4. SXSW-interactive has the power to draw an amazing group of people to one spot, to even one room, in Austin, TX.

If they had added an after-party on-site, or a good strong networking break, this would have been the key place to be on Saturday.  As it was, it was the key place to be but no one else would know you were there, and you’d have to track down your like-minded entrepreneurs later in the conference (good luck finding them!).

I was surprised the OpenText acquisition of Metastorm didn’t garner a little more attention in the press.  It certainly got less airplay than the acquisitions of Lombardi and Savvion received last year.  Maybe it is just a sign of how busy things are for the people who cover the space.

MWD recently published their take on the acquisition:

OpenText is no stranger to acquisitions, of course – its 2009 acquisition of Vignette being the most high-profile to date. But with key competitors IBM and Oracle now very firmly in the BPM game and pushing forward with investments to combine ECM and BPM capabilities for case management applications, it’s no surprise that OpenText would be on the lookout for a suitable BPM tools vendor.

That’s about how it reads to me, too.

ebizQ has a two part series on BPM and Lean – something we’ve written about in the past and our own Lance Gibbs is a proponent of:

Lean is actually a process of experimentation, rapid iterative cycles of learning and testing, where the next step, the next future state, is a hypothesis waiting to be tested before it is adopted. This is significantly different from implementation, where you select a “known” target state and budget time and resources to achieve it. Many traditional IT budgeting and governance processes resist this incremental, experimental approach – it feels risky and uncertain. But the reason so many projects disappoint is that it is impossible to truly know what the final end state will be.

Exactly – it isn’t about the end-state, it is about the journey.  Very appropriate for the BPM mindset.  The first part hits on a few other key points as well, including the idea that Lean is not just about cost-cutting (which sounds familiar to the BPM advocates out there).

Day 1 is over.  For me.  For many people at SXSW interactive, 11:30pm is just midway through the evening. But Day zero was interesting too.  We attended a tech happy hour on Thursday night.  Surprisingly, I ran into an ex-IBM consultant who is starting a BPM practice at an IBM partner.  Small world!  You don’t often run into people you don’t know, who are doing BPM, I’ve found.  Especially unusual at a non-BPM related event…

Day 1 started frenetically.  Wake up early, teacher’s conference for our daughter, coffee, get the office and get contracts, paperwork, bills, emails, and a dozen other things done as soon as possible … to make sure I could get down to the first SXSW session at 2pm.

(Update: Photo Gallery by Austin360)

Things started off right.  I found parking in the convention center garage, no crazy antics required.  $9 for all-day parking.  Cost of business.  As I exited, I realized I was only one block away from Hashable‘s sponsored free taco stand.  Coincidentally, my wife‘s company, Red Velvet Events, is helping them out with a few planning/logistics items during SXSW, and we had the good fortune of having met a few folks at Hashable at a happy hour earlier in the week.  Trusting that they wouldn’t have a crummy taco truck, I walked over.  GREAAAT taco.  And Jane Kim (VP Business Development, Hashable), and Elliot Loh were there. Elliot and I went to school together at Stanford and both worked at the same company out of school.  It was a nice reunion to run into him.  The three of us wandered over to the convention hall and then split up to three different sessions.  That worked pretty well because Elliot tweets the goings-on in his sessions like a mad man so I could follow his session, and at the same time follow my own.

First session:  Conference Startups.  The format was a “core conversation” where the room and chair arrangement is concentric and intimate to foster spontaneous, but still centralized, conversation.  The moderators were great, and the conversation moved smoothly from one topic to another, almost as if the audience was in on the script. I was interested in this session, despite other strong sessions in this slot, because we have previously hosted the bpmCamp unconference and have intentions to do it again in the near future.  With that in mind, I hoped to get some new ideas from the conversations.

A shotgun sampling of advice I heard:

• Get a clear yes or no from sponsors.  If you don’t get one, you haven’t asked clearly enough for what you want.  “You haven’t really asked if you don’t get a no”
• Find the experts, and then find out who you could bring to your conference that would blow their minds.
• Market the conference.  Presumption is that it takes 7 times before someone acts on hearing about a conference.
• (At this point, I noticed this session was standing room only … unreal )
• Mizzou School of Journalism was represented – looking for ways to foster more participation in the community in Columbia, Missouri.
• Discussion of Ignite and TedX – you can lend your brand to other regions, cities, and venues… you don’t have to own every one of them.
• People like great speakers, and conversations – but they don’t often like panels.  People want to be engaged in the conference, not just talked to.
• Food and coffee are more important than you think.  No really. They’re more important than you think.
• Some discussion of tools – lanyrd, eventBrite, etc.

Ultimately, people still want a live connection, face-to-face.

Session 2:  Time for comic relief.  I headed back to a VERY crowded Austin Convention Center (they set up a book signing right across from an info center booth, right in front of the entrance to one of the main Ballrooms.  Suffice to say, TRAFFIC JAM and poor positioning of obstacles go hand-in-hand.  Made it to Battle Decks.  Got a coveted seat at the end of the row (making it easy to bail on the session if it sucked).  It was a huge room, big projection screen of slides.  The presenters don’t know the slides in advance.  They just have to adlib their presentation based on what comes up.  This comedy is not for the politically correct or faint of heart.  The very first word out of the emcee’s mouth might have been an F-bomb.  The presenters were judged on coherence, comedy, and sexual innuendo.  Enough said.  Sadly, the slides were funnier than the presenters.  I gave up after 2.5 presenters weren’t making me laugh enough.

Decided to check out the pop-up Apple store – and get coffee at one of the dozens of coffee stands on the way out of the convention center (pro tip: no line, because everyone was still in session).  Checked in on foursquare, and won tickets to the Big Boi concert on Monday night.  If you don’t know who that is, then you’re probably in my demographic and so now I have to figure out if we’re going to go or not!

Ok.  Stopped at 4th and Trinity to meet Elliot for the walk to the Apple store.  Ran into fellow entrepreneur Aruni.  Also, ran into two guys dressed as super heros to promote their website.  Yes, we’re at SXSW.  Elliot pings me: he’s at 6th and Trinity. All right. We meet at the Apple store. Pretty amazing mini-story. They lease the place on Monday.  An empty store front at 6th and Congress – a very important intersection in Austin.  Wednesday morning the black drapes go up and the construction begins.  Friday at 5pm, the drapes come down and an apple store nearly as nice as any I have seen opens up – wood floors, wood tables, ipad2′s EVERYWHERE.  But also a healthy supply of demo machines and phones.

Ok.  The line was around the block, around two corners.  We walked back to the Convention Center to listen to Clay Shirky talk about the various online events surrounding the events in Egypt, and other countries in the Middle East.  He really went in depth about the history of the movement to oust Mubarak.  There was more to it than a spontaneous rally a few weeks ago.  Years of groundswell support led up to that moment.  It hit especially close to home because one of our very good business partners is based in Cairo, Egypt, as well as one of my close friends from school (who lives there with his family).  Incredibly informative talk, and the Q&A session brought China and other countries into the conversation in really interesting ways.

During the session, I realized that none other than Clay Richardson of Forrester is here, tweeting about the talk.  Or rather, he realized I was sitting in the room making snarky comments on twitter.  We met up in person for the first time.  A second BPM connection at SXSW.  Two more than I made when I came last year.  We had a great mini-meetup and then split up to find our various dinner commitments.  Met a fellow entrepreneur, Tony Chen, for dinner at a good sushi restaurant downtown.

After dinner, we thought, “hey, surely the line at the Apple Store has died down by now!” and walked back over there (quite a few blocks).  Sure enough. The line looked reasonable.  Ten minutes later, chatting amiably with Apple store staffers, we were buying iPads.  The staff were brought in from all over Texas – Texas all-stars.  It showed too – all the good things about Apple retail employees were even more apparent with these folks. Happy Happy Happy.  Helpful. Interested in what business I was in and how we use iPads (um, figuring that one out!)  Painless process.  Unlike phone activation.

Hint: Apple, stop activating phones on opening day. The lines would move SO much faster and you could actually blow out your opening day sales numbers.

We then walked down the street back to the parking garage like rock stars, constantly being asked if we had just bought an iPad2 at the pop-up Apple store.  (One wonders what else we would be carrying in Apple bags and Apple boxes of that size.  Still, it was a nice conversation starter).  On the way back to the garage, we passed a cross-dressing band (playing good music…), and a group of people changing costume (not sure from what or into what – they were in a slight state of undress) – ooops!  And then passed a fleet of pedi-cabs offering to give us rides to wherever.  Tony headed out to some of the night time party activities, I headed home to rest up, and write this blog post!

(Well, I might have had an interest in setting up my new iPad2 as well… )

Interesting post from Mike Gammage on the current “Cloud” mania overtaking IT:

There’s a similar sense of mass delusion, and nowhere more than in the world of outsourcing. A.T. Kearney’s Arjun Sethi created a stir last year with The End of Outsourcing As We Know It, arguing that Cloud services will replace existing IT outsourcing within five years. HfS published Cloud Will Transform Business As We Know It, quoting results from its research collaboration with the LSE on Cloud in outsourcing.

The hype about Cloud is obscuring some truths that won’t go away. Many of these clouds are going to precipitate as tears before long.

At Nimbus, we’ve seen a lot of systems implementation failures. Often we’re the first process paramedics on the scene. The consultation with the distraught exec usually ends: “So let me get this right – you set about this ERP implementation without a clear understanding of your end-to-end processes, or of how automation would impact them, or a means of effective collaboration for the stakeholders, or a means to publish the new processes in a way that would make it easy for the end users who would execute them, or a governance framework?”.

The truth is, of course, that whether it’s a Cloud service or on-premise, a successful implementation requires exactly the same rigor.

Ouch.  Definitely a heavy dose of reality.

It starts tomorrow.  But the unofficial pre-parties and meetups have already started.  The map of the 10 “campuses” for SXSW-interactive 2011 is included in this post (linking to the original).  All but the AT&T Conference Center are walking distance from the Austin Convention Center (which is ground zero for SXSW-interactive).  Preparatory discussions on mailing lists have included extensive lists of downtown restaurants, BBQ restaurants, and where to get the best migas (thanks Gary Chou!).  If you haven’t had migas before, or haven’t had them in Austin – try them.  Its breakfast, it is good, and it is quintessential Austin.

If you needed another sign that SXSW was cool, besides the fact that Foursquare is designing oodles of custom badges for it, Apple is actually opening a temporary store just for SXSW, as noted by an article in the Austin-American Statesman, and in GigaOm.  If they’re selling iPad 2′s… expect to see long lines!  Apparently they found the site on Monday, started work on Wednesday, and open for a 2 week limited engagement on Friday!

There are a lot of Canadians coming down – there’s a Maple Leaf Lounge for meeting up with fellow Canadians.  And at least one of our visitors from the far north is blogging about his experiences.  Great first post!  There’s also a big NYC contingent, and several meetups down here (I think sponsored or instigated by Hashable in some cases).

Of course many people swear that the conference is too big and each year they say it will be their last.  But often they do come back.  And blog about it.

I’m excited to see how this year’s event unfolds.  More to come over the next week.

Additional Resources:

• Unofficial event calendar for SXSW on Plancast
• Ten new Mobile Apps GigaOm recommends for SXSW
• The StartupCrawl starts today… wow. Lots of startups.
• Interesting list of distinguished speakers at SXSW…
• So many more that I haven’t even touched on!

SXSWi 2011 Map, courtesy of Cox News

We’ve commented before on the economy, and hiring, and jobs.  As a small business, these are topics very near and dear to our hearts.  I’ve been waiting for the optimism that we feel, and that I see in Austin, TX, to start showing up in statistics.  Finally, it seems it might be.  ADP’s latest report showed and increase of 217,000 jobs in February (the largest increase since November 2006!). Small companies accounted for all but 13,000 of this increase.

We did our part – hiring 2 more seasoned BPM veterans in February.  We still see more opportunity out the front window than we do in the rear view mirror.  BPM in general is still growing.  The software platforms we know best have a lot of market momentum.  We’re bullish on 2011, and on the long-term prospects of business process management and our consulting practice.

To put it in perspective, at some point this year, we’ll have a team 3x the size that we started with in 2010.  And we’re seeing other small businesses – often in service industries0 – picking up  hiring activity as well.  And the market for software developers in Austin has markedly improved.  Hopefully this is the beginning of a long, steady recovery.

Think we’re the exception to the rule?  Check out the results of the Austin Technology Incubator’s survey of technology companies in Austin.  81% are increasing staff.  34% of all respondents are increasing staff by more than 10%.  Only 5% of respondents are decreasing staff.  Key findings:

• 33% launched their company in the last five years. The median year founded was 2001.
• Approximately half (55%) were headquartered in Austin.
• 4 out of 5 were privately owned.
• 37% earned more than $10M.
• Software companies represented approximately a quarter of the respondents.
• 21% employed more than 100 people. 45% employed between 1 and 10 people in the Austin area.
• In 2010, 53% increased their headcount, 32% didn’t make any changes and 15% decreased their headcount

With spring already here, and SXSW starting tomorrow (unofficial events starting tonight), optimism is the word for the day in Austin.

Looks like the PKBoK and the ABPMP BoK may not play nice in the same sandbox.  PKI have their sights set on an open collaboration around a body of knowledge for BPM that is transparent and freely available, to advance a common understanding of the state of the art.  Its hard to fault their mission, or Sandy Kemsley’s characterization of her involvement:

I’m a firm believer in free and open information exchange – not always a popular view amongst independents like myself who make our living selling our knowledge and experience to organizations – and that principle is why I became involved in the Process Knowledge Initiative and its creation of an open-source body of knowledge for process information. The idea of the PKI’s BoK [...] is that the BPM community needs a body of knowledge that is freely available to all, and where everyone in the community can contribute. To that end, we’ve launched a public wiki that contains some starting framework pieces for the BoK, and are starting to accept community contributions in the form of public comments. Soon, I hope, we will have enough in place to open this up for community editing; in order to do that, we need to have some safeguards in place to make sure that special interests don’t hijack the conversation.

But, Sandy tells us, the ABPMP sees this effort as a competitive threat to their own BoK.  I think ABPMP is in the unenviable position of trying to fight the future.  As if you couldn’t already find good information on BPM on wikipedia, and among the many blogs on the internet, they seem to feel threatened by the notion of another BoK:

The ABPMP “Presidents Annual Report 2010” provided a financial and legal update that included the statement “Due to the increase in trademark filings, our legal costs will be an ongoing fixed cost of doing business going forward and will be budgeted on an annual basis to align our trademark filings with our growth strategies outside the US.” In other words, they’re using my membership fees to pay their lawyers to sue others who attempt to create bodies of knowledge in the BPM space where the name might possibly be confused with the ABPMP BPM CBOK. Tony Benedict, president of ABPMP International, already fired a warning shot at the PKI with an email stating “You cannot use BPM BOK in any of your publications, digital or otherwise as it violates our trademark.  Please refrain from doing so or ABPMP will take legal action.” This is not how I want my ABPMP membership fees spent. Also, we never used the term “BPM BoK”.

There’s only one part of ABPMP’s argument I can agree with: I sure wish the Process Knowledge Initiative would *not* use a term like BoK.  It is awkward phrasing and really a wiki better captures the spirit of what professionals in the BPM space are looking for anyway.

I hardly think ABPMP is doing itself any favors in this instance.  Instead, they should be contributing to PKI’s efforts – and if they continue to sell their own BoK, do so as a curated body of knowledge written by select experts, rather than a community site.  I think there is a market for both.

That’s right.  SXSW-interactive is coming to Austin.  Soon.  This week, even.

It all started innocently enough – a few “multimedia nerds” years ago.  And then the focus shifted to blogging, before blogging was cool.  And then… something happened last year.

Maybe SXSW-interactive jumped the shark.  Or maybe it just tapped into the zeitgeist.  But there was a feeling last year that it was its own living thing – not something easily contained.

Attendance was up, way up.  More than 14,000 people had access to SXSW-interactive last year (although, that includes premium badge holders who might have focused more on the film and music portions of SXSW).  An article I read, just days ago, estimated that actual attendance could be up 30-40% again this year – and that SXSWi briefly entertained capping attendance for the first time.  Its hard to imagine SXSWi being bigger this year than it was last year.  To put it somewhat in perspective, I attended IBM Impact last year – a huge conference with over 6000 attendees… And SXSW-interactive was twice that size.  (And the wifi and 3g coverage mostly worked… unlike my experience at Impact last year)

SXSWi has split the event into 10 campuses – at least one of which is so far away you can’t walk to the other parts of SXSW (though the AT&T Center at UT is a fabulous facility to hold meetings and conferences in!).

So how do you make sense of the Nerdpocalypse?  First, if you live in Austin, and aren’t attending SXSW – just pretend downtown Austin doesn’t exist for the next two weeks.  You’ll be happier that way, because festival-goers are going to take over every eating establishment and parking spot Austin has to offer.

If you’re going to SXSW-interactive, check out some of the following resources:

The SXSW side-parties database, by Austin360.

Joshua Baer’s Austinpreneur’s Guide to SXSW 2011

The Unofficial Apps Showcase (you know, for SXSW)

SXSW official “social” site

Julie Germany’s How to Survive SXSW Interactive post

And, I feel sure, there will be many other resources worth reading on the subject – but these are just a few to get you started.

Some of our regular readers, if they’ve gotten this far, may be wondering, what does SXSW have to do with BPM?  Well, nothing explicitly.  But there are several topic areas that are tangential to what we do at BP3 and impact our work and lives.  I intend to get some of that famous “cross-pollination” experience, and reconnect with colleagues near and far at the same time.

I’m planning on attending the SXSWi/LeanStartup sessions – some of my favorite bloggers and startup experts are on panels or speaking that day, at the AT&T Conference Center.  But I also intend to catch Craig Venter’s talk, and several other topics that will probably get my brain going.  And I’ll be looking for tidbits to take back to BP3, or to BPM, or just to keep in my head.

I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again – don’t underestimate the value of meeting real people who are excited about what they’re doing – it’s incredibly energizing.

Architects are discovering BPMN, and Bruce Silver has explained how business architecture relates to BPMN or BPM more broadly:

When business process architecture enumerates processes that are not really processes, or activities that are not really activities, usually the problem is that what is enumerated are actually functions or capabilities, not specific actions (or sequences of actions) performed repeatedly in the course of business, with each instance having a well-defined start and end.  Even when labeled VERB-NOUN to suggest an action, they may be things performed continuously rather than repeatedly. Activity names starting with “Manage”, “Monitor”, or “Maintain” typically fall into this category.

I’m glad to hear that Bruce observes that architects are increasingly discovering BPMN – we’re seeing the same thing at BP3, though we’re not as involved in BPMN training.  Good to see that market validation.  I think it is also a symptom of more organizations looking to extend BPM implementations beyond the project.

The state of mobile process apps is pretty… underwhelming.  After reading David’s post about process apps, I wasn’t any more enthused:

As the table below shows, the type of BPM App best represented in the App Stores I visited could be described as a ‘BPM Participation App’, that is, an App that acts as a client to a remote BPM server allowing the user to start and track cases, and complete work items from an Inbox. Note that the table is simply the result of myself as a ‘mystery shopper’ visiting these stores (which included an Australian filter in some cases) – there may be other BPM vendors with an iPad story (for example), but they just weren’t in evidence in the store on the week that I looked.

My take on iPhone and iPad and Android BPM apps to-date:  unimaginative.  They don’t re-invent or re-imagine the experience one would want to take advantage of mobility, location, or touchscreens.  They’re just barely-adapted to the new form factor by shrinking the amount of information at your disposal.   If the various BPM vendors exposed better APIs for building apps, and made their support for those APIs more clear and committed, we’d consider writing our own iPhone apps for users (there are a few exceptions, such as Activiti’s interfaces).  For now, we’re in wait-and-see mode.

I was surprised to find this piece on ebizQ, covering the “emerging star of business process modeling“, BPMN 2.0.  BPM and BPMN get a lot of coverage in the forums on ebizQ, but don’t as often show up as topics for articles (at least, that hit my radar screen).   Of particular note is Jon Siegel’s concise separation of three key business process concepts: conversation, orchestration, and choreography:

The underlying idea is that “a set of processes form choreography if they communicate and there is no overarching process in charge of it,” explains Jon Siegel, OMG’s vice president for technology transfer. He says BPMN is fantastic at modeling, but the addition of choreography represents a major step forward in version 2.0. He says choreography was inserted belatedly because BPMN was first designed and came into widespread use a time when there wasn’t as much Internet-based commerce and choreographic processes were unusual, if they happened at all.

In contrast, Siegel says, “orchestration” is the BPMN word for conduct of a process internal to a business entity. “These days, a substantial fraction of e-commerce is choreography-based rather than conversation-based or orchestration-based,” he notes. “So the language had to be upgraded to take this into account, particularly for business users to help them to model their systems.”

I don’t think I’ve seen such a concise description, if you just take the first sentence of the first paragraph, and then the second paragraph, that neatly puts each type of interaction in its place.

Most people reading the title probably think Apple already has good customer service.  But I’ll let you in on a secret (sarcasm alert):  those Apple Stores are packed with people and the customer service operation needs some help to scale to the new market position finds itself in.  And as Apple’s market share and unit volume in its business grows, the rough edges of customer service will become more apparent without some retooling.

Reports are that Apple will launch “Joint Venture” – Apple just launched “Joint Venture“- a new service targeted at small businesses that leverage Apple products.  There are already service options that are well-publicised: One-to-one and Applecare; and there are service options available to business partners that are not well publicized (or perhaps they consisted of piloting certain business services over the last year before rolling them out nationwide).

The last time I went into an Apple store to return a laptop (we had misordered, it wasn’t Apple’s fault), they offered to sign us up for a business account – and since then they’ve offered somewhat better service around both ordering hardware and picking up orders at the store or getting help at the store.  But there hasn’t been a fee for this service, that I’m aware of.

From Apple Insider:

Joint Venture will also provide customers with personal setup data transfer, limited group training sessions (up to 3 sessions per year, for up to 8 people at a time) and access to a website to schedule phone support appointments with Apple Genius technicians, according to one person familiar with the matter. Apple will reportedly continue to offer its AppleCare and One to One plans alongside Joint Venture.

This is good: helping customers transition to Macs, and training users who aren’t comfortable.  In our business we’re about 50% Mac and 50% Windows-based.  The Windows users primarily just want to stick to what they’re comfortable with when they sign up for a new job.  I can relate to that – don’t let a switch in Operating Systems impact your productivity.  A better set of transitioning services would be A Good Thing for such users – allowing us to push a few more in that direction.

Further details:

Customers enrolled in the plan will receive priority service at the Genius Bar and gain access to an exclusive Apple Genius-manned technical support number at the corporate office. Similar to Apple’s ProCare service plan, customers will be first in line for repairs.During repairs that take longer than 24 hours to complete, customers may be eligible to borrow 15-inch MacBook Pros with iWork and Microsoft Office preinstalled.

I like the phone-support option – faster than driving to the nearest Apple Store.  I think the thing that Dell provides that really one-ups Apple is the on-site technical assistance – literally sending someone to your office to fix your laptop while you wait.  And it is actually affordable for a distributed business like bp3.

But the most critical service Apple needs to provide is one that I’ve been asking for, for more than two years:  loaner machines.  I have always thought that if they rolled out a loaner program, they’d get businesses (and consumers!) wanting to sign up for this left-and-right.  At least, they will once they need a loaner machine (I picture a lot of “wait til I really need it” sign-ups for consumers, but businesses will think ahead).  I found a local authorized Mac repair shop (Austin MacWorks) that rented a nearly identical machine to me for a week – all I had to do was swap the hard drive from one machine to the other, and I was ready to go.  They then sent my machine off for an 11-day video card repair.  It worked great – but it was expensive.  I think the repair shop was missing an opportunity to build a loaner business that complements its repair business.  Certainly Apple was missing a real opportunity.  I’m happy to say that now they are offering a real loaner program with Joint Venture.  This is “A Good Thing”.

After all – when you take your BMW in for service, do they tell you to call a cab, or do they give you a loaner car?  You bet they do.

(And this is a service that virtually all luxury brands offer, and most non-luxury dealerships now offer some form of loaner program in the United States at least).

Bijoy Goswami – a good friend from Stanford and fellow transplant to Austin in the 90′s – has been involved in the entrepreneurial scene in Austin for more than a decade.  It started with his first startup, Aviri, from which he became interested in starting up in general, and bootstrapping in particular.  He founded the group Bootstrap Austin in 2003 (it spawned a series of Bootstrap chapters in other cities), and it has become a support network of sorts for Austinites with the particular illness that leads to them to want to start their own business.

Bijoy and others in Austin have helped articulate and define stages of starting up, giving people a common terminology and phraseology for what they’re doing, despite the fact that they might have startups targeted at substantially different markets.  For example, Bijoy was an advocate of the terms Maven, Relater, and Evangelist personalities – helping entrepreneurs understand why one person may not be able to “do it all” without help.  And terms like Ideation, Valley of Death, and Growth took on real, concrete meaning.

But in the last year or two, Bijoy has refined his talking points to focus on Austin’s “startup scene” – a set of complementary organizations and events and startups that all combine to create an environment that encourages and supports entrepreneurship in Austin.  In Austin, you’re not strange for wanting to start your own company.  You’re also not unusual if your startup dreams don’t extend to building the next Google.

In a teaser for SXSW-interactive coming up, Bijoy has put out an article in the Austin Business Journal reminding readers about Austin’s great support for startups and new ventures.  I’m looking forward to SXSWi – one of the seminal events in the Austin entrepreneurial scene – there are few events that pull so many of our community together in one place – and yet mix in entrepreneurs from all over the country as well.

March has arrived, as well as Activiti 5.3:

• Added BPMN multi instance (==foreach) support
• Added BPMN intermediate timer catch event
• Added business rule task with Drools integration
• Improved Spring integrations: added possibility to limit visibility of beans and also exposed spring beans in scripts
• Added administrator console to manage users and groups
• Added automatic DB type discovery
• Various bug fixes

Not bad for a point-release.  Activiti seems to be adding BPMN support pretty quickly  – important to eliminate those “but it doesn’t do … ” objections early on.  And, to set a precedent of just making progress on extending BPMN support. Impressive so far!

Love Anatoly’s analogy in a recent post, Laws of BPM Robotics.  But my favorite line was in the first sentence:

One of our BPM project’s sponsor said at the very beginning, when we discussed the possible project: “my employees don’t need a control, they need help”. I argued at the moment, but later I realized that he was right.

This notion of helping versus controlling is at the root of doing BPM right.  There are those who will say “helping” isn’t BPM, its ACM, or Adaptive, or something to that effect.  But if you’re a BPM practitioner there is no reason to limit yourself this way.  Good business process depends upon people doing their jobs well – and helping them seems like a key element in getting the job done well.

I like Anatoly’s laws for the “BPM Robots” that should do work for us, supporting our own efforts:

1. A robot will never be able to do what you are able to do.
2. A robot will do only a part of what you are doing.
3. A robot will do only a part that you won’t like to do yourself.

Some will argue that BPM is only about routine work. But rather, one piece of BPM is removing or simplifying routine work in order to leave the core value-added work for the people who do it.  In other words, the goal of BPM isn’t routine work – it is to expose the real work by draining the swamp of the routine, mundane, unnecessary, and non-value-added.