Anatoly often posts the best examples and cautionary tales in BPMN2. In the latest post, he derides the limited usability of Swim Lanes in BPMN 2 – And he has a point.

On the one hand, embedded subprocesses can’t have swim lanes (the best way to think about these is simply a set of collapsed activities, for notational convenience).

On the other hand, “Reusable subprocesses introduce additional complexity because unlike embedded they are executed in a separate data context”.

Anatoly’s conclusion is that overusing reusable subprocesses is bad practice, because of this overhead.  I conclude differently:  the BPMS should minimize or optimize this overhead – and the business process designer should be able to ignore it on a robust BPMS.  To make a coding analogy:  we should be talking about the difference between an embedded block of code and a function call.  Yes there is overhead, but it should be managed by the BPMS transparently.

In fact, some BPMS authoring environments don’t even allow for the embedded subprocess- treating it as just a special case of the reusable subprocess who’s primary difference is that it doesn’t happen to be re-used. I don’t think we should optimize around the shortcomings of a particular BPMS too much, in terms of our general BPMS modeling advice.  However, I’ll concede that once you’ve chosen your BPMS, you might as well optimize somewhat around its capabilities as they become known to you, and model accordingly.

Really insightful comments from Jack Dorsey on being “CEO”. Mirroring Steve Jobs’ notion that focus is about saying “no”, Jack talks about editing:

We have all these inputs, we have all these places that we could go – all these things that we could do – but we need to present one cohesive story to the world.

We’re often asked at BP3 why we don’t do X, or Y, or Z.  (Insert your own favorite ideas)

Before we offer any new service, offering, toolkit, or product, we take a long look at whether that is in-line with what we want BP3 to be when we grow up.  If you diffuse the focus too soon, you lose traction in your core market.  We think we have a lot of ground to cover doing what we’re doing before we need to branch out – but we have one or two innovations in our offering that we’re going to keep investing in. When you work with software vendors with as broad an offering as IBM has, it is tempting to widen your reach – and it becomes even more important to edit your service offering, to focus on your core competencies.

When we edit at BP3, process is our filter.

Fred Wilson (and others) have been advocating for immigration reform – and in particular for doing a better job of hanging onto talented people who want to start companies in the US (thus, the startup visa movement).

Vivek Wadwha, Eric Ries, and now Mike Bloomberg have all weighed-in in favor of the Startup Visa.  Bloomberg has also advocated allowing any foreign nationals to immediately get a green card with their diploma – allowing them to stay and work here in the United States.

As Fred writes:

Do yourself a favor and read the entire speech. It’s not long. Mike lays out a sensible and intelligent way to reform immigration laws without getting into the contentious issues that have held back immigration reform for many years. And if you agree with the Mayor, do everyone a favor and call your elected officials in Washington and tell them you are also for intelligent immigration reform (as opposed to comprehensive immigration reform). I’ve done that and it has helped. Getting your voice into the chorus on intelligent immigration reform would be helpful too

One thing is clear – our visa and green card processes are broken.  There is no transparency, and no predictability.  And we’re losing out on a lot of talent and a lot of well-educated graduates (arguably bad process outcomes).

Neil Ward-Dutton and MWD have published a brief piece about TIBCO and ActiveMatrix BPM. There’s a more in-depth assessment available as well, coming down the pike.

A couple highlights from his write-up:

• Revenue was up 25% year-on-year
• License revenue up 32% year-on-year
• Non-GAAP operating profit up 31% year-on-year.

TIBCO is now rapidly approaching $1 billion in annual revenue; and its acquisitions have helped it broaden its market footprint into healthcare, retail and other industries.

But specifically the BPM part of the business doesn’t seem to be standing out (the growth doesn’t look that different from the company as a whole):

Q2 BPM license revenue was 9% of the total $83m; that’s around $7.5m. TIBCO declares that this is up 33% year-on-year – which is a good sign – but I’m guessing that at the moment, the company hasn’t yet seen a return on its very significant redevelopment investment.

From what I understand ActiveMatrix BPM was a “start over” rewrite of their BPM offering… and from what we’re seeing/hearing anecdotally, it is taking acts of heroic proportions to make big deals happen.

Incidentally, wholesale rewrites of a product are rarely the right thing to do.  They open up all the existing customers to re-examine their go-forward choices… and then they have a new, less mature product to go pitch against entrenched competition.  Let’s suppose you build a better mousetrap that scales better (in theory).  Prospect A says “can you show me the three references where it scales to x million transactions per time unit?” and… well you can’t, can you?  It is a new product after all.  And then if you get a customer to buy into it – maybe it scales, maybe it doesn’t.  Scale is just one dimension- there’s feature-fit, UI/UX, production support, etc.  So many unknowns to answer, that the old product had answers for (maybe bad answers, but answers nonetheless).  But, ironically, a company does have to have the courage to rewrite pieces of their software – or to acquire new pieces of software (as Tibco has done).  Sometimes the difference between a product rewrite and a “module” rewrite is one of perspective, but one rule of thumb is that the product is a SKU – something you sell.  A module isn’t sold independently.

I think the move to ActiveMatrix BPM was more problematic than it appeared on the surface. Putting the $7.5M in perspective… if that is up 33% over prior year, they were as low as $5.625M the year before… This is about the scale of pure-play BPM vendors… but TIBCO + Staffware used to be much bigger than those vendors at the time of their merger…  Their momentum seems to have been in the wrong direction… (when I worked for one of those pure-play vendors, we always looked forward to competing against Tibco in a BPM deal cycle…)

Steve Guengerich on Austin’s “Emerging” Tech Sector:

It was that “Tech sector sort of emerging here” comment that triggered my double-take.

I know most AustinStartup.com readers are pretty informed tech followers, so this may not be news to many of you, but I think it would fair to say that the tech sector in Austin is beyond the “emerging” stage.

In fact, semiconductor companies like Altera, far from being latecomers to our scene, were actually among some of the first big employers to plant their flags in central Texas. We didn’t get one of our many nicknames – Silicon Hills – by accident.

Back in the 1980s, Austin won a couple of national bake-offs to bring the Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation (aka, MCC) and Sematech to anchor the region’s federal and industry R&D funding in semiconductors.

Through the years, we’ve accumulated a number of big names: Motorola, IBM, AMD, Freescale, Spansion, and Samsung. Not surprisingly, we’ve also attracted major presences from the world’s largest suppliers of semiconductor manufacturing equipment, with Applied Materials and Tokyo Electron. This doesn’t count the presence from Intel, ARM, and others, with substantial teams of chip designers in Austin.

I guess we shouldn’t be surprised since, from some journalists’ point of view, tech sector in Austin equals SXSW-interactive…

Steve Golab of FG Squared writes in the Austin Business Journal:

I hate to break it to you. The phrase “thought leadership” has jumped the shark. A social media Web tsunami has spun out over the past decade and made it easier for everybody to claim an area of thought leadership.

Maybe thought leadership is overused. But so is “jumped the shark”.  Steve’s premise is that people who are really good at what they do spend more time doing and less time talking about what they’re doing.  He has a point:

Coming up with brilliant ideas, launching innovative products, developing great new approaches to problems is indeed thought leadership. Combining your assets together in a different way to create new value is indeed thought leadership.

Merely talking about your ideas — typically reinforced by speaking at events or getting coverage in the press — is not.

Inside your organization, communication and leadership can be done while doing – in other words, you can lead by example.  And people in your organization will be aware of it, and they’ll talk to you and understand your way of thinking.  If you’re a “thought leader” they’re going to be influenced by your thinking.

But if you want to influence people outside your organization you have to transition to writing or social media that can reach people outside your organization.  I think the point Steve is missing is that to be a “thought leader” you need to excel at both doing and communicating.  All the brilliant ideas in your head don’t lead and don’t communicate by themselves.  On the other hand, pure communication skills alone won’t cut it.  You have to be deep in your area of expertise.

John Reynolds, commenting on Sandy Kemsley’s blog, where she was writing about Shell’s BPM success story:

Note that Sandy’s tale mentions Templates, but it doesn’t say a thing about Frameworks… and to me that’s very significant…

As a Professional Programmer, my life revolved around Frameworks (OWL, MFC, Struts, Spring, etc.)  Each of these Frameworks provided a wonderfully powerful foundation on which I could build my custom applications.  I simply can’t imagine life as a Professional Programmer without programming Frameworks.

Pardon me for over-simplifying, but a Framework is something that “you bolt pieces on to”.  The Framework provides the internal structure of your program, and you can build many diverse and wonderful programs on top of any really good Framework.

If you are an Occasional Business Programmer you’ve probably found that Frameworks aren’t quite what you’re looking for.  Frameworks are really powerful and really flexible – but all that power and flexibility comes at a price – you really have to know what you’re doing to use them.

I think the narrower interpretation of the word Template is useful to the “Occasional Business Programmer”.  Of course from a technical point of view, most of what gets pitched in the BPM industry as “templates” are really Frameworks, using the definitions John uses above.  And Frameworks, as such, are problematic.  They require not only being an expert on underlying BPM technologies, but also on the APIs (programming interfaces) of the Framework itself.  For people that are more than occasional programmers, patterns will help more than frameworks – as they’ll apply to more situations.  Borrowing from a Navy Seals slogan, I think patterns “equip the man”, whereas with Frameworks tempt one to “man the equipment”.

Pega has has impressive financial performance over the last few years, as Neil Ward-Dutton documents:

The company is currently publishing full-year revenue guidance of around $430m for 2011 – up from $330m or so last year – which means it’s grown 30% in each of the last three years. As it digests its Chordiant acquisition and finds ways to combine the technologies it now has to hand for new customer scenarios, the company is clearly riding high and full of confidence[...]“

But Neil asks a few questions that I think are pretty interesting:

But – is it actually a BPM technology provider?

Well, it spent a lot of effort getting re-branded as a BPM provider a few years ago, when BPM was an up-and-coming tag for a category of software.  But Pega was never really a pure-play BPM software vendor. This is the first time I’ve seen an analyst of any kind question whether Pega is really in the BPM business.

So onto the other question, quickly: is Pegasystems a BPM technology provider? In his opening keynote, Alan Trefler claimed that the company’s recent growth makes it more than 10 times larger than its nearest pure-play BPM rival – but in truth this comparison is a little sneaky. Pegasystems isn’t really a BPM pure-play.

It is a BPM technology provider – but in the same way that SAP’s BPM investments make it a BPM provider.

It actually does matter – the difference between the mentality of a pure play and an SAP is larger than one might think.  The distance is so great, in fact, that IBM bought Lombardi to get that pure-play DNA into its veins.  But Neil doesn’t find that question nearly as interesting as whether Pega is selling to IT or selling to Business.  It is an interesting point:

They talk about Pega technology as a way to make the thorny tradeoff between the need for consistency in business execution, the need for competitive differentiation, and the need to specialise execution for particular markets and segments. They are fantastic advocates for the business benefits of working with Pegasystems. But these are not people who really naturally engage with the idea of ‘situational layer cakes’.

I’m sure Pega would argue that they just have to do both – sell to the business and IT.  That’s not a bad recipe.  But from reading Neil’s post, it sounds like Pega isn’t sure what its organizing principle is – what is the mission?  Improving business processes?  Improving customer service?  “Driving Customer Success” is admirable but bland -  it describes a whole host of companies in different industries…

From SXSW website:

Launched at SXSW 2009, Austin, Texas startup OtherInbox has experienced strong growth and recently surpassed a major milestone, one million users. That growth is more than double over last year.

Their Organizer email application lets users regain control over their cluttered inbox by automatically organizing opt-in email and sending out a daily digest.

The utility of OtherInbox hasn’t just been recognized by users. Companies like Yahoo! and Google have included OtherInbox in their webmail and it will also be on AOL’s new Phoenix product.

I was an early adopter of OtherInbox myself.  So early, I got victimized by one of the pivots (from email address defender to email organizer).  I still use it, it is still a great service.

Lance wrote up a description of a BlueworksLive template we’ve shared with the IBM BlueworksLive community, and it is now published on the BlueworksLive Blog.  It is mostly just a way for us to give back a little to a community of BPM practitioners and software developers and product people that have given so much to us as well.

Ready to get your Lean Agile BPM Delivery going? When we all talk about Business Process Management, thoughts which spring to mind are “Order to Cash”, “Customer Provisioning and Servicing”, “Account Opening” and the like. Another critical business process is the actual implementation of a business process solution. BP3 is an IBM Partner and pure-play BPM consulting firm named by Gartner Research in their Who’s-Who in BPM report that exclusively works within the IBM BPM portfolio to get customers the results they need. One key aspect of getting those results is to employ an implementation process which is treated like any other critical business process. It’s a process which is managed, measured and continuously improved for the benefit of scaling from a single BPM project, to a BPM program, to ultimately a culture that competes and differentiates on process in their marketplace.

Please check out the BlueworksLive blog, and our template…

After a long drought, could there really be 7 Austin IPOs this year?  (which doesn’t even include companies that IPOed with significant Austin operations, like Demand Media)

The company is the seventh in Austin to file an IPO this year. Freescale Semiconductor Inc. moved forward with its sale in May, raising a less than hoped for $783 million. Also last month, WhiteGlove House Call Health Inc. registered to complete a $31.6 million IPO, but that deal has yet to close. Austin-based VOC Energy Trust raised about $217.7 million, before expenses, with its initial public offering on May 10. Also, San Marcos-based Thermon officially went public on May 5 with expectations to raise about $120 million.

Earlier this year, HomeAway Inc. registered to complete a $230 million IPO and Newgistics Inc. filed for a $86.3 million offering.

Can’t remember ever seeing so many maturing companies in Austin (including OtherInbox, which just hit a million users, Bazaarvoice, Vast, and others).  Oh, and HomeAway appears to be pricing at $24 or so…

Adam Deane’s blog post put me in a commenting mood, but I thought I’d share on our own blog as well.  Apologies for muddling the terms Adam used – I used “independent” to reference an individual contractor, and “pureplay BPM” to represent a vendor focused only on BPM services.  He does a great job of calling out the challenges and pros cons of different types of consultants, but I wouldn’t be me if I didn’t write an essay-length comment in response… content follows:

Interesting post. I’ve put my thoughts on this subject together previously here:
http://www.bp-3.com/blogs/2010/03/why-we-need-pure-play-bpm-consulting-firms/

The problem with one-man-band – if you find a great one, they’re a big help to a project and bring specialization to the table. But they’re not a team. They don’t have other experts with a range of skills to fall back on. When they get out in the deep end, they’re (usually) on their own. Yes there are google groups and wikis and the like – but there’s no one else in the boat with them. The problem for the consultants themselves is that they have to be working and selling at the same time. And if they sell work, but the timing doesn’t work for their current project, they have conflicts. And if they wait to sell until the previous project is finished they can end up with significant bench time. Added to that, they often get held over the barrel on rates because customers assume they can’t afford to sit out the market and wait for a better deal.

Vendor-consultancies, when done right, are a big value-add to the ecosystem. They do have an inherent conflict, in that they can’t really blame a product short-coming for their having to do extra work on a project. Often, when there is a product shortcoming, they’re asked to do work gratis to make up for it. The temptation to “camp out” is much less when the vendor is small – the vendor wants those consultants freed up to redeploy at new-sales customers. So actually the problem is the opposite- the problem is trying to retain consultants long enough on your project to make a difference.

Independent consultants- I call them pure play BPM consultancies – are actually more valuable in the implementation phase than the selection phase. Too many independents will suddenly fail to have an opinion about the “right answer” during an eval – they want to be part of the implementation regardless of what product is selected. I’ve always thought that that was a bit of a cop-out. You need to form an opinion during the eval and present your findings and opinion and why. Otherwise, what is the customer paying you for?

Also, a good pureplay consultancy will have a better balance between the twin evils of running away too soon and staying too long. Why? Because their mission in life isn’t to sell more customers, it is to sell more value. More value to one customer is easier than more value to 1000 customers. or 10. But also, they’re not likely to be big enough to back up a bus and unload 100+ consultants at your door. And because their exposure is smaller, it is easier for them to walk away and go to another customer opportunity when the time is right for the current customer – without laying off the team or having them sit on the bench for months, as might happen at a really large firm.

I don’t see the trend toward more independent consultancies however – at least, as related to credit crunch – the credit crunch simply isn’t easing for small businesses. At all. They want 3 years of history. But also, there are really good job opportunities for these folks – they can capture much of the value of being independent with much less risk. And, if they join a small consultancy (like, say, BP3), they have a chance to build something bigger than themselves – contribute to a team and a mission.

There may be a trend toward more independent consultancies, but I think the causes are independent of credit.

For what its worth, I hope my comments don’t come across as knocking vendor consultants nor independents. I’m just aware of the shortcomings (and strengths) of both situations, having done both myself  Now, as part of an “pure BPM consultancy” I feel good about the tradeoffs we’ve made and the kind of company we are. But so much of “what is right” for a consultant depends on their own individual situation – and I’ve seen dramatic exceptions to the downsides I’ve mentioned (people who get great rates, and have a “team” of supporters despite not having a literal team, etc.). I’ve also seen vendor consultants do a great job (as Chris Sanchez says – the mission is successful product launch for the customer – that’s not a bad mission! )

In fact, I think there’s a very symbiotic relationship between the three “outside” consulting groups we’ve been talking the most about- individual contractors, vendor consultants, and pureplay consultancies. individuals can augment the skills or geographic coverage of the other two organizations, and tend to be people with a lot of industry experience. Vendors are very focused on that initial successful deploy – but paired up with a pureplay consultancy that is more long-term focused, you often get a good blend, presuming their is a good working relationship.

Sanooj brings up a great point about “internal” consultants. I haven’t played that role personally, so I’m less qualified to comment. But I think it has its own challenges  I do know that when we’ve been able to partner with a good internal consultant, we often get very good results.

[Editor's Note:]  Gary Samuelson joined bp3 full-time in 2011, after years of collaborating on-and-off.  Gary’s been delivering BPM solutions for years, and has been deep into technology development and consulting throughout his career.  We’ll be sharing his blog posts here, republished with his permission – and we think he brings a different voice and perspective and sweet-spot for subject matter to our BPM-focused blog.  Thanks, Gary, for adding to the community!

—

Shared with permission by Gary Samuelson, click here for original blog entry.

[Author's note:]  Quick Forward: In keen interest of fewer keystrokes-per-noun, I’ll refer to IBM Business Process Manager Advanced as “iBPM”.

Think of a phat buffet – a Las Vegas buffet. All good – yes? This is iBPM Advanced: a nicely packaged collection of deep technologies spanning light-weight dojo widgets, through aggregation and hosting platforms, and on into security and high-availability.

My first impression, though honestly skeptical, is good. We’re looking at the result of serious thinking and efforts on software tools and frameworks for building out and maintaining sustainable Business Process Management.

The individual pieces within iBPM are, by themselves, point-solutions. These bits aren’t new… Together though, in their aggregate form, a composite immerges with some voice and resonance as to direction…

An example?

In the BPM space we usually end up wanting and then building several custom web-UIs (pages and widgets). String these pages together and you get a user-facing process with various back-end service integrations. Moving forward – within “corporate client” each business unit has a need and each “need” gets its own: look, feature, and function. Into this mix add the voice-of-reusability. The same web-UI is then tweaked… re-factoring, and so on until we end-up spending more time in polish.

Measuring progress against business value (not building software), BPM projects tend to lose themselves early on low-value platitudes (look-n-feel and reusability) – all good for vision and heated debate but very bad on business. This isn’t to say such topics lack importance. All must be heard…

Now let’s approach the “UI-debate” with a brick… as in building structures – one brick at a time. IBM-BPM Advanced brings in “Business Space” – this technology allows for the use and re-use of “Web 2.0” widgets and functions. Rather than losing ourselves in debate, each end-user (literally) has the tools and building blocks for assembling their own uniquely personalized look-n-feel.

The BPM team can now better specialize and deliver on re-usable components within a framework built for this pattern. The “one-off” solution is over… iBPM Advanced provides a nice framework for us to quickly bridge across a common BPM pitfall. The UI and re-usability debate ends with “drop-in” Business Space (aka Mashup).

From Columbus, Ohio, OSU reports on a new lighter, stronger steel-making process:

The basic process of heat-treating steel has changed little in the modern age, and engineer Suresh Babu is one of few researchers worldwide who still study how to tune the properties of steel in detail. He’s an associate professor of materials science and engineering at Ohio State, and Director of the National Science Foundation (NSF) Center for Integrative Materials Joining for Energy Applications, headquartered at the university.

“Steel is what we would call a ‘mature technology.’ We’d like to think we know most everything about it,” he said. “If someone invented a way to strengthen the strongest steels even a few percent, that would be a big deal. But 7 percent? That’s huge.”

Yet, when inventor Gary Cola initially approached him, Babu didn’t know what to think.

“The process that Gary described – it shouldn’t have worked,” he said. “I didn’t believe him. So he took my students and me to Detroit.”

Cola showed them his proprietary lab setup at SFP Works, LLC., where rollers carried steel sheets through flames as hot as 1100 degrees Celsius and then into a cooling liquid bath.

Though the typical temperature and length of time for hardening varies by industry, most steels are heat-treated at around 900 degrees Celsius for a few hours. Others are heated at similar temperatures for days.

Cola’s entire process took less than 10 seconds.

So, better product, shorter process, less energy input required… what was the tradeoff again?  Just a great example that sometimes an improvement is just that: an improvement.

A few great blog posts covering IRM BPM Europe.  This is a joint EA and BPM conference that was quite well attended by people I follow in the BPM space, but we weren’t able to attend this year.  A few of the highlights here:

It seemed that quite a few BPM practitioners were impressed with Alec Sharp’s presentation on June 9th:

The main point of the discussion is again that the human issues are the key for effective business process re-organization.And Organization Development (OD) is a perfect discipline that can complement the BPM initiatives.

Sandy Kemsley, as always, had excellent coverage of the event – and started off with an explanation of why EA and BPM conferences might be co-located:

EA provides a framework to structure for transiting from strategy to implementation. BPM – from architecture through implementation – is a process-centric slice that intersects EA at points, but also includes process-specific operational activities. They present EA and BPM as collaborative, synergistic disciplines

Sandy has great coverage of several more sessions, including “Designing a Breakout Business Strategy“, and Building a Business Architecture capability at Shell:

The EA and process design CoE have been combined (interesting idea) into a single EA CoE, including process architects and business architects, among other architect positions; I’m not sure that you could include an entire BPM CoE within an EA CoE due to BPM’s operational implementation focus, but there are certainly a lot of overlapping activities and functions, and should have overlapping roles and resources.

She also had another good reference to EA and BPM – Claus Jensen’s presentations and a recent red book.

Adam Deane has perhaps the best overall review of the event in a single post:

I was fortunate enough to attend both the Gartner EA conference and the IRM BPM/EAC conference this year.
Gartner added a BPM track to their EA conference.
IRM combined the EA and BPM conferences into one joint conference.

There were some subtle differences between the conferences:
Gartner’s message to the EAs: “Wake up and start embracing the business”
IRM’s message to the EAs: “Too late. Enterprise Architecture has already been divided into IT architecture and Business architecture. Deal with it”

Gartner focused on the future of EA: Energetic, Gamification, Business oriented.
IRM focused on the past: Trips down memory lane, The glory days of EA that have long gone, The “has been”.

Interesting dichotomy – at least that is how it struck Adam.

The Economist, a venerable institution in its own right, posts a fascinating article about IBM’s 100 years:

IT IS not, by any means, the world’s oldest company. There are Japanese hotels dating back to the 8th century, German breweries that hail from the 11th and an Italian bank with roots in the 15th. What is unusual about IBM, which celebrates its 100th birthday next week, is that it has been so successful for so long in the fast-moving field of technology. How has it done it?

So really.  What is the secret?  I think the Economist has a good handle on the answer:

IBM’s secret is that it is built around an idea that transcends any particular product or technology. Its strategy is to package technology for use by businesses.

This partly explains why IBM and Caterpillar have had an 80-year partnership. But the Economist takes it a step further and asks the question – who else has an elegant organizing principle and products that are meeting success in the marketplace?

No surprise as to the first answer:

The most obvious example is Apple (founded in 1976). Like IBM, it had a near-death experience in the 1990s, and it is dangerously dependent on its founder, Steve Jobs. But it has a powerful organising idea: take the latest technology, package it in a simple, elegant form and sell it at a premium price. Apple has done this with personal computers, music players, smartphones and tablet computers, and is now moving into cloud-based services (see article). Each time it has grabbed an existing technology and produced an easier-to-use and prettier version than anyone else. This approach can be applied to whatever technology is flavour of the month: Apple has already shifted from PCs to mobile devices.

It also doesn’t hurt that Apple is nearly halfway to the 100-year mark already… But the Economist posits that Amazon and Facebook have similar organizing principles (make it easy to buy stuff, and make it easy to share stuff).  This theory also helps explain why a company like Dell can be so dominant during a long phase of the IT cycle, but has trouble adapting when its business model innovations finally get adopted by the market in general.

So… what is your firm’s organizing principle?

For my money, this is (so far) the best quick-highlights view of iOS5:

Many of the new features in iOS 5 are things we’ve been sitting, waiting, and wishing for since the iPhone first launched. Complete with a more robust notification scheme and a brand new messaging protocol, Apple has filled in many of the gaps that have left it behind other OSs like Android and webOS.

In particular, I think the notifications changes are interesting.  The first take on notifications was visually nice but just didn’t scale – as though designed for people who would get the occasional push notification or SMS text.  But the reality is that some people get too many push notifications to count in a day.  A new approach was needed for a world where all the apps leverage the notification system as well.

With messaging – and Apple made note of this during the keynote – there was an oddity in that iPads and iPod Touches were left out of the messaging game.  And it probably rankled that BlackBerry had their own messenger product that would soon also work on iPhones, and would also bypass the SMS toll booth.

Business Insider has a good series of screenshots of the new features, but without much commentary or analysis to go with it.

The Activiti in Action blog has some great content with regard to integrating Mule ESB or Apache Camel with Activiti.  The technical discussion is motivated with the following preamble:

The Activiti Engine provides a powerful Java API that makes it very easy to for example deploy process definitions, implement custom logic and unit test your processes. When you want to connect remotely to the Activiti Engine there’s a REST API to communicate with the process engine. But what if you want to start a new process instance by sending a JMS message, or invoke a web service from a BPMN 2.0 process?

By default, the BPMN 2.0 specification provides support for doing web service calls via a specific web service task. The Activiti Engine also provides support for a web service task, but it may be a bit cumbersome to implement due to the large amount of additional XML elements needed. And this task does only SOAP web service calls, so JMS messages etc.

Luckily the Activiti community comes to the rescue. In the next release of Activiti you’ll see two interesting new Activiti modules, one for Mule ESB integration and one for Apache Camel integration. A big thumbs up to Esteban (Mule ESB contribution) and Maciek (Apache Camel contribution). But if you already want to play around, just checkout the Activiti source code at http://svn.codehaus.org/activiti/. Let’s walk through some simple examples to get a good overview of these modules.

It is really a great, detailed post with lots of example code and explanation.  It is one of the things I’ve always liked about a good open source community – the level of shared examples and how-tos is outstanding.

(Note: the “next release” referenced above has now been released)

Change can sneak up on you… Or sometimes, it comes accompanied by more press and blog coverage than one can imagine, as with the iPad and its implied impact on PCs.

Very few people thought the iPad would impact consumer PC growth in an obviously measurable fashion.  But this chart from the Business Insider seems to say otherwise.  It isn’t enough to call it cause-and-effect, but it sure looks like correlation.  As the underdog in the PC market, Apple doesn’t have to worry about undercutting its own “PC” business.  Apple can be content to disrupt others’ businesses (although I don’t believe this is how Apple looks at it – they’d likely look at the disruption as a side effect, rather than the purpose of the iPad).

So today Apples WWDC 2011 kicked off with an interesting keynote address.  From the updates to iOS5 and MacOSX10 (Lion), it looks like quite a few startups just discovered they have a new competitor in their backyard – one that sells shiny baubles and great software.  It is going to take a while to digest the impact of these changes, but I’m looking forward to reading more in-depth analysis post-WWDC.

These are three different things.  Recently Dave Brakoniecki commented that most successful change implementations or BPM programs had executive sponsorship.  And I responded that, of course, there is selection bias involved- because successful programs will collect executive sponsorship.  I attempted to encourage those “stuck in the middle” to find a way to succeed, and use that success as leverage to get sponsorship and support from executives.

Jacob Ukelson commented (cleverly) that this could have been “more about Business Politics Management” – a subject he wrote about previously.  We even got a nice ebizQ discussion out of the topic.  Adam Deane followed up with a missive on Business Politics Management as well… but this is where I think our paths diverge:

The task should go to head of the department for his review. But everyone knows that Mister X needs to be bypassed. Sometimes it’s because he is a slacker, he will never do the task, he has been in the organisation for years, he doesn’t care about the “procedure” and there is no one to discipline him. Sometimes it’s because he is too powerful and can get away with murder. In any case, trying to force the process to make him do the task will end in tears. The best way is to bypass.

Actually, this isn’t the kind of business politics that interests me.  This isn’t leadership this is conflict avoidance (or resolution).  The politics around the particulars within a process are there – and you have to manage them – but the success or failure of your project depends more upon the leadership of your team and the sponsorship of executives – not the politicking of tweaks in the process.

And lest someone get confused, sponsorship isn’t the same thing as leading in most organizations, though it should be either leading or coaching (taking a vested interest in the outcomes).

Jacob returns to the subject here, but whereas Adam addresses design time of processes, Jacob focuses on run-time:

So yes, Business Politics Management is the cousin of Business Process Management – a kissing cousin. Most BPMS vendors don’t consider politics something a BPMS should address. In my opinion as long as BPMS tools ignore all the stuff that goes on around the process (i.e. politics), but has influence on the outcome of the process – they have a big hole in functionality.

Whether you agree with Jacob’s assessment of BPMS vendors or not, what Dave Brakoniecki and I were more focused on is whether executive sponsorship is a pre-requisite for success for your change management or BPM program?  Or is it sometimes a byproduct of a successfully run program?  Should you just give up if you can’t get the executive sponsorship lined up before you start the project?  (I’m not just talking about funding, I’m talking about truly sponsoring)

It seems even with Business Politics Management we have different ideas about what BPM means… But I’ll step away from the terminology and just focus on the funding and executive support – these are things you will have with successful programs by the end, but at the beginning you may have to go it alone for a bit first.