More signs of momentum in Austin:  I’m a fan of Evernote, and in particular I think they’ve been smart about their application development strategy.  But today recently came news that Evernote is opening a development lab in Austin, which is great news for Austin, and hopefully for Evernote as well.

Credit to Austin Startup for bringing it to my attention first – there’s also an article on the Austin-American Statesman.  I also learned something new from the Austin Startup post:

Note that both Rich and Evernote’s CEO Phil Libin are no strangers to Austin; during the early 2000′s they spent their time at Vignette.

I didn’t realize they were previously at Vignette.  Nice Austin connection.  They’re getting started the right way – hosting a happy hour downtown and getting their job postings up.

Coming next week, several startup-oriented events, culminating in Capital Factory’s Demo Day ’11, and the ATX Startup Crawl afterward.

I mentioned momentum in the Austin startup scene… with IPOs and the Startup District and all the funding events this year in Austin, it is looking like interesting times ahead.

Eugene Sepulveda writes about Austin’s Startup America, “Startup Austin”:

At yesterday’s luncheon, John Price cited a statistic I didn’t know, nearly every job created since the 1990s is from a company less than 5 years old.

It is all about jobs.  Vast (John Price’s firm) has been hiring into Austin for a few years now.  I know at BP3 we’re doing our best to contribute to job growth as we enter our 5th year in business.  But what exactly is this Startup Austin thing?  According to Eugene:

It’s about bringing together a coalition of mentors, advisors, funders, major corporations and service providers to deliver strategic and substantive resources to help entrepreneurs start and scale companies. It’s especially focused on leading existing firms with high-growth potential (what they call “speedups”).

Scaling fast-growing firms sounds good to me – although I have to wonder how much help the major corporations and service providers really are in some cases.  I also agree with Eugene, they should stick with Startup Austin for now – other Texas cities have their own culture and business culture, and we shouldn’t try to lay claim to the whole state just from our one city.  It isn’t a knock against the rest of the state, just admitting the limits of the group as it is.

TIBCO has announced its acquisition of Nimbus today:

Nimbus provides a strong complement to TIBCO’s event-enabled infrastructure software platform. Whereas TIBCO has traditionally focused on the automation of data, systems, and processes, Nimbus allows business users to collaboratively describe and document all aspects of a business – from operational best practices to organizational and system models. These are combined with robust governance capabilities that can deliver a process-focused “Intelligent Operations Manual” across the enterprise, linked to supporting data and systems. Nimbus focuses on the vast majority of processes that are often not captured in enterprise applications and automated workflows, and it has found particular traction with business transformation, compliance-led, and continuous improvement initiatives.

On the face of it it seems like a very complementary acquisition – I don’t see a lot of overlap between the market needs Nimbus addresses versus the market needs TIBCO addresses.  This might be seen as a move by TIBCO to inject some more business-friendly DNA into its veins, as right now TIBCO is seen as more of a speeds-n-feeds vendor than a business process management vendor.

Neil Ward-Dutton was first to the presses with his analysis of the buy:

Nimbus is happy to point out that historically it’s had a hard time selling to IT, and this has slowed down sales cycles; part of the challenge for it has been that Control doesn’t fit neatly into any mainstream product category (including BPA). TIBCO can help with the IT selling angle; but it’s important to recognise, too, that Nimbus can potentially give TIBCO a massive leg-up in terms of developing a more business-engaged field sales capability.

It sounds like a good synergistic match.  Neil characterizes Nimbus as a company with “annual revenues of around £10m and around 100 employees” – which implies the purchase price was easily digestible for a company the size of TIBCO.  Still, as we’ve seen with the IBM acquisition of Lombardi, sometimes a small (relatively) acquisition can have an outsized impact on the buyer.

Clay Richardson of Forrester also weighs in on the purchase:

So, why did TIBCO acquire Nimbus?  In many ways this deal is a nod to the “Empowered BT” trend, where more technical capability is being moved into the business.  For vendors like TIBCO, this means building – or buying – functionality that puts business stakeholders in the driver’s seat.  Over the past six months, one of the top inquiry topics I’ve seen from clients is around “models for increasing business engagement within BPM suites”.  In short,  I’ve fielded numerous calls from business stakeholders scratching their heads saying “I wrote the check for this BPM suite, but the IT guys are the only ones that can touch it.”

Empowered BT trend is a great way to sum up with the Nimbus folks (Ian Gotts in particular) have been preaching in their blogs and sales pitches.  Clay wraps up with this note:

TIBCO’s acquisition of Nimbus will be welcomed news to existing TIBCO customers looking to improve business engagement and – if executed effectively – should allow the developer-centric vendor to compete more effectively against more business-oriented players such as Appian and Lombardi  (i.e., IBM BPM 7.5).

I got a chuckle out of the last line.  But Clay is right – TIBCO needed something to help them compete with more business-oriented products on the market – what isn’t clear is whether Nimbus also needed to partner up with someone to keep going (as one person on twitter put it – is the lack of execution for one just as bad as the lack of business-focus for the other?).  I’m looking forward to seeing how well Nimbus is integrated, what role Ian Gotts is taking on, and how the analysts view on this acquisition evolves over the coming weeks.  So far no one is arguing that this is a bad fit… but we’re only a few hours in!

Jacob Ukelson recently said:

There was an interesting discussion on ebizQ around the question “What does enterprise tech have to learn from Steve Jobs’ success?” What made it even more interesting for me is that even though the question was asked of the process community, not one person answered “better process management” and certainly not “leveraging a BPMS”. So does that mean that even the process community doesn’t see any way to link outsize success to better process management? – or is this just a quirk related to Apple?

Two thoughts:  first, I think it is a good thing that BPM/BPMS advocates weren’t attempting to take credit for success we didn’t cause.  This doesn’t mean Apple doesn’t have good processes or differentiating process, but with all modesty, I think we have more to learn from Apple than vice versa when it comes to how to run a business process.  It isn’t enough to point at Apple’s success and declare victory for our (or someone else’s) interpretation of how they run their business – we have to tease out the correlated or causal elements and then show that they can be applied intentionally elsewhere.  Instead we should be pointing to those who are succeeding as an example to emulate, not a proof point of our approach – they’re only a proof point if they’re following our lead, rather than the other way around.

Second, I’ve actually made a connection between Apple and BPM several times over the years. I linked to the thread of articles in my ebizQ comment but I don’t blame anyone for not reading them all!

In particular, this one gets the most page views: http://www.bp-3.com/blogs/2009/01/apple-and-business-process-management/

Jacob is wrong in saying that process isn’t what makes Apple great, but he may have a point that process is “table stakes” in the areas we usually think of it (supply chain management, manufacturing, etc.).  Apple’s differentiated processes are their processes for product design and user interface, not to mention their go-to-market decisioning process.  All the great designs in the world wouldn’t be enough if they didn’t have the supply chain process prowess to back them up. But, similarly, all the process prowess in the world isn’t enough if you don’t have the ability to design (see Dell, HP).

Moreover, Apple doesn’t just excel at process where it is obvious.  They’ve innovated with manufacturing process (aluminum casings, glass casings, etc.) that have also differentiated their profit margins and product designs.  These are process improvements – but they’re also process improvements where it really matters.

Jacob goes on to say:

It is clear that companies need to manage processes well, but that isn’t what makes a company great. I am sure Apple had some really good processes, but today those are table stakes. The real battlefield is in the realm of knowledge workers – design, user experience, innovation, customer understanding – and most of today’s process thinking and tools don’t help much there.  That is why I don’t think ignoring process as a success factor is a quirk related to Apple, it reflects what is really important for a company to be successful in today’s world. Process won’t make your company great – design, user experience, customer understanding and innovation will.

Design, by the way, is a process… So is developing a good user experience. The companies that are good at this have process around it – just ask Genentech or Frog Design, to name two. It isn’t “automation” the way most people think when you say “process” but it is a process nonetheless.  But if your focus on process doesn’t include user experience (voice of the customer) – you may find yourself non-differentiated on measures other than price.

I wouldn’t draw too many conclusions from the ebizQ crowd being momentarily focused on product design, etc.  I’m sure that there’s good process behind those efforts at Apple, and it looks to me like we just take it for granted.

SXSW-interactive fully exposes its process for selecting panels and sessions to attendees. I’m not sure what the genesis of this crowd-sourced way of planning content was, but the effect is remarkable. It starts with nominating ideas.  Then there’s a round of voting. An expert panel also has input to the final outcome.  Amazingly, it scales.  Why does it work?

For one, SXSWi (SWSX interactive) is constantly being reinvented.  What at one point was primarily a vehicle for bloggers to gather and share, has morphed into an event that covers a range of topics:

• Blogging
• Social media
• Mobile tech
• Startups of all stripes
• Design
• Freelancers
• Social issues
• Raising capital, venture capital, etc.
• Etc.

The balance of these topics has been shifting over time.  A few years ago there weren’t really any topics on geolocation – but there were a lot of those last year.  There was even a whole day focused on lean startups.

This process for selecting sessions and panels is not only a great way to engage with the community – it is a great way to let the conference evolve and adapt with the interests of attendees.  It is impossible to imagine the organizers of SXSWi coming up with several thousand sessions over 5 days. But crowdsourced – it is not only possible to do, the attendees will create the content, give the presentations, mediate the discussions… SXSWi actually has to prune the content, and yet there are still time slots with 150 concurrent sessions.

All of this benefit is managed through their panel picking process. SXSWi is being reborn again as we speak, with round 1 of panel picking under way.  You can get a sense for the variety in sessions just from that Austin Startup link – social media, semantic web, women in Tech, elevator pitches.  And that’s a small sampling of the options.

Don’t like the sessions from last year?  Nominate and vote for your own for 2012!  I’ve voted, and I’m looking forward to see what makes the cut for next year.

Bazaarvoice has filed for an IPO:

In the “you knew this was coming” category, Bazaarvoice filed for an Initial Public Offering (IPO) of it’s stock today. The news is being covered by TechCrunch and The Statesman. The company is one of the fastest growing in Austin, going from 70 employees in April 2007 to over 600 today. In conversations with company co-founder and CEO Brett Hurt, he has always characterized the company’s financial condition by saying that they could stop growing and be a profitable company any time they wanted to. But as long as the market for their software continues to be strong, the company will invest in losses.

I think this IPO will be really good for Austin’s economy, and in particular the startup ecosystem.  Austinites have been saying for years that we needed a few wins under our belt, to keep the virtuous cycle of capital formation and talent development going.  With wins like HomeAway and hopefully now Bazaarvoice (not to mention a few other IPOs over the last year), and the respectable fundraising for new startups – it feels like we’re setting up Austin for the next 5-10 years of startup ecosystem.

Congratulations to our friends over at Bazaarvoice, and good luck in the public stock market!

Based on local news story frequency and content, it looks like the concept of a startup district in Austin is gaining momentum.

I missed an news story a couple of weeks ago on the KXAN site:

“We’re looking at shared co-working space that entrepreneurs can come into and really rent a desk, so to speak, and sit among their peers and other partners and grow companies such that we are growing that base of our own, as well as recruiting new tech companies in the area and making this whole eco-system stronger,” said Davenport.

It was nice to see them checking out offices we have friends at – Boundless Network (a Lombardi customer), Vast (which has a few Lombardi alumni), and Thinktiv:

Some of those spaces include the offices of Vast , Boundless Network and Thinktiv . All of the offices have high ceilings and open floor plans where employees can discuss their ideas freely. The Chamber wants to have the space downtown because of the creativity it can provide to start-up businesses.

There seems to be a general consensus that the energy and optics of a downtown space are best for attracting talent.  However, I was lured to Austin by a company with an office on the hill and a view of the lake, the 360 bridge, and downtown.  There’s more than one way to attract talent, but downtown has density and diversity going for it, which is more important for this kind of endeavor.

One worry I have is the potential negative impact on existing companies that serve the startup community here – the coworking spaces that already exist likely inspired this effort-  I just hope there is still a business model for them that makes sense if this goes through.

Joannes Vermorel, of Lokad, has guest-posted on A Smart Bear blog on the topic of email.  Specifically, why your company should have a single email address.  But to the BPM consultant, it reads like an email process manifesto for your company.

It is a fascinating read on (email) process, thought that wasn’t necessarily the intent.  Some of the highlights:

1. The dangers of building too much process too soon – before the true requirements emerge.  Spinning off too many email addresses complicates your organization’s ability to respond correctly.
2. The problem with exposing your internal processes and organizations to your customers and partners, by having many different contact email addresses for your company.  Your customers and partners don’t care about your internal structure, they just want one contact point that works.
3. How to deal with inbound email flow – routing emails to the people most appropriate to respond.
4. The benefits of shared information within your team.  Everyone knows about the communications happening, and can see the history and context.

Along the way, we learn from Joannes that not advertising a public email is bad.

What are the benefits to moving to a single email account?

• Improved responsiveness
• Smarter replies (better quality)
• Peer reviews of email communication
• Better Morale
• Resilience to turnover

That’s a pretty good benefit from a process change.  Joannes sums it up:

Finally, I believe that the single email approach remains valid no matter if you happen to be two guys in a garage or MegaCorp Inc, but I digress. Are you still exposing a number of emails not equal to one? What are you waiting for?

I think the biggest point to take away – is keeping it simple for customers, and not foisting your own company’s complexity upon them.  That sounds like a great principle of process improvement to me.

Steve Jobs has resigned the CEO post at Apple.  And Twitter is alive with eulogies.  A little premature, perhaps.  But maybe not.  Either way, as Tim Cook takes the CEO helm and Steve moves to the board room, it is a good moment to take a step back and reflect on what Steve Jobs – and by implication, Apple – have meant for us.

John Gruber of Daring Fireball:

Reading around the web an hour ago, looking for confirmation of the then-minutes-old news that Steve Jobs had resigned as CEO, I repeatedly encountered and bridled each time at use of the adjective “shocking” to describe the announcement. But my initial resentment was unwarranted. This is not out of nowhere, it’s not even unexpected. We could all see this was coming — but it is a shock.

Om Malik posted a very personal take on the day’s news, more specifically troubled by Jobs’ health:

It is incredibly hard for me to write right now. To me, like many of you, it is an incredibly emotional moment. I cannot look at Twitter, and through the mist in my eyes, I am having a tough time focusing on the screen of this computer. I cannot hear the sounds of the street or the ring of my phone. The second hand on my watch moves slowly, ever so slowly. I want to wake up and find it was all a nightmare.

I don’t know Steve Jobs personally, but reading Om’s piece caused me to reflect a bit myself on the impact on my life.  Incidentally, Steve had a big impact on my course.  I was an avid PC user when I arrived at Stanford in the 90′s.  But Apple was the preferred platform, and I promptly bought one for writing papers and doing programming assignments.  But what really got my attention where the NeXT workstations in each residential computer cluster.  When I saw a class called “CS193d – programming on the NeXT”, I had to sign up.  It didn’t exactly jive with my “introduction to AI” course that required writing pages of prolog (fun).  The first assignment, to my recollection, was to build a graphical calculator application on the NeXT.  We had approximately 5 days to do it, and it took less than one.  I was hooked.

I didn’t realize it – but I had just set myself on a path.  A path of being interested in User Interface design, despite my lack of formal training.  A path that would take me to a computer science degree – partly because I really enjoyed writing applications on the NeXT.  And a path that would lead to a job in Austin, Texas.  I landed an internship thanks to my NeXT class and my determination to land the job.  And that internship gave me the object oriented design experience and work experience that I could talk about in job interviews, and actually landed me the job offers I received.  After I had accepted an offer with a little 50-person company in Austin, I got an email from someone at NeXT about interviewing there (I had submitted my resume many months earlier).  I politely declined, having already accepted a job – who knows how life would have turned out if I had taken the interview!

Fast forward and here I’m typing today on my MacBook Pro, oft-accused of being an Apple fan boy.  Well I’m guilty, because the Apple products I use have really improved my life.  And when you see your 2 year old swiping through photo albums on your iPad or iPhone, there are only two thoughts that go through your head:

1. “That is amazing” – because there was no hope of this same child using your BlackBerry or Windows Mobile Phone (pre7) the same way.
2. “Hm. I’m really going to have to clean that screen when he’s done” – because two-year-olds are messy.

I saw the stock was down quite a bit after-hours today.  But I think John Gruber said it well:

“Jobs’s greatest creation isn’t any Apple product. It is Apple itself.”

Many of my peers in software came of age during the age of Web 1.0 – where profit was never really part of the metrics for running the business.  Even in Web 2.0 – or in the whole set of startups going on now whatever the label – there isn’t as much focus on making money as you might think.

Partly, there are forces that teach us to use free products and services:

1. Great free services:  Gmail (and others), Google Maps, freemium models for everything from dropbox to tripit.
2. Open source:  lots of commercial products are facing real competition from open source projects focused on the same space.

But some of us were never comfortable with businesses that don’t make money (there is a difference between not making money yet and not making money at all).  If a product or service is compelling enough, customers will pay for it.  If it isn’t, they won’t.  At times, the price they’ll pay is less than the cost of providing the product or service – and then it makes sense to find other means of funding or monetizing (ads for Google’s Gmail for example).  But typically, a good product will command a price more than the cost of production.

Also, making money is a good habit to get into as a company.  Companies that are profitable early in their history tend to stay that way for a long time.  Companies that lose money early tend to keep losing money.

One difference between the software and hardware world is that lack of profit seems to come to light faster.  When Apple released the iPad, its claims that it was priced aggressively were scoffed by industry pundits who were used to Apple being “the most expensive car on the lot”.  But as more recent “tablet” entrants have shown, Apple really did price the iPad aggressively.  And yet, aggressively still means at a healthy profit!

As HP WebOS tablets fly off the shelves at $99 a pop, some have now argued that HP should have pushed a bunch of tablets into customers hands at $99 or $199.  But that’s not aggressive pricing, that’s profit-killing pricing.  John Gruber covers this really well on Daring Fireball :

That wouldn’t fly. Selling TouchPads at a steep loss wouldn’t just burn a ton of cash “at first”. It would burn a ton of cash continuously, every time one was sold.

[...]

Sustainable businesses are built on profit.

Amen.  And John’s point is right, in my view – without a way to make money post-sale on each of these tablets, the prospects for a loss-leader strategy are not good.  Making money is a habit, and a discipline.  In this case, HP tried to do the right thing at first – price them an aggressive, but profitable , price.  That wasn’t working.  The value proposition wasn’t good enough vis-a-vis the iPad.  But a lower priced device isn’t viable for HP’s business.

When I work with vendors, I want to know they’re making money.  Otherwise their business isn’t sustainable – and how do I know I won’t be holding the bag when I needed them most?  And as our business and our needs grow, how will they continue to support our business?  They have to have profits to reinvest!

If a company isn’t making money, it should still be in search of its scalable business model – it isn’t a real business yet.   If the model is set, and the company is losing money, it isn’t a business anymore, and the company should be in search of a recovery path.

John Reynolds wrote a post recently about Interdependent tasks, and the resulting complexity. John takes a simple example, the vacation approval process, and then points out what makes the difference between a cute model and a real implementation:

Sam can’t really (in good conscience) make a Decision about any Vacation Request in isolation.  Only one Employee can be absent at any one time, so every Decision that Sam makes potentially effects all of the Pending Requests.  To be fair to everyone, Sam needs to take into account all of the Pending Vacation Requests before rendering a Decision on any of them.

And further:

Examples like these are what makes implementing “real world” processes hard.  Processes seldom execute in a vacuum, and work done within one instance often influences other instances.  Participants often have to consider multiple Tasks together, rather than performing each task in isolation.

He’s right, of course.  This is why a demonstration of a BPM solution can look easy, but the actual implementation actually takes real work and thought.

John purposely held back from suggesting a clever BPMN modeling solution or other trick of the trade to give us something to think about. I’ll give you my thoughts on how to approach the problem.   But in a general sense, this falls back into a general process pattern:

• a process model that does a decent job of representing one process “instance”.
• another process that manages the set of all processes
• yet another process that is the maintenance and improvement of the process definition and the management of process instances collectively.

What John is describing is a variation on the second level of process.  It already goes without saying that we need to manage a set of vacation requests collectively.  The extra wrinkle is that at a step in the approval process, the process should present context to the user, that likely includes:

• All pending and approved vacation requests for other team members
• Possibly other pending and approved vacation requests for people on other teams
• Remaining vacation days for this person
• Remaining days in the year in which to use those days
• Time since last vacation

All of this information gives the Approver context in which to make the decision.  The individual process’ execution flow hasn’t gotten more complicated. But the implementation details of that Approve step got more interesting.  Luckily, the information above will be pretty easy to provide if your BPMS had reasonable tracking and introspection capabilities.  So if we simply invest some trust in our user, and supply them with the information they need to make a decision, we’ll get really good outcomes with minimum implementation headaches.

Sometimes the really interesting bits in a process implementation aren’t in the BPMN.  As John points out, we shouldn’t assume that every detail should be captured in a BPMN model.

Anatoly recently did a podcast with ebizQ’s Peter Schoof.  The transcript was posted on Anatoly’s blog, and well worth reading, but something he said in the pre-amble really caught my attention:

My activities in BPMN got me a reputation of an expert in process modeling. Let it be so; yet I believe it’s rather the basics of the craft than its top and personally I’m more interested in issues arising at BPM and performance consulting intersection and business process BPMS implementation methodology. It’s a common story: the public is more attracted to what an expert considers almost trivial while what he treats as an achievement may come unnoticed. As an example, the most popular posts at this blog are those tagged “FAQ”.

I added the emphasis in the second sentence, and included the whole paragraph for context.  One of the most difficult things to explain to novices and newcomers to BPM is that although the basics sound easy in black and white, a lot of judgment and experience comes to bear in making subjectively good decisions about how to leverage BPM techniques.  Rightly, this is not what people want to hear.  They want to hear that it is a science, an engineering discipline, if not a mathematical formula.  But it is not so.

I’ve often said what makes the difference between the average BPM practitioner and a really good one is that the best practitioners have a sense for how all the individual simple things will come together into a cohesive outcome – each individual action being pretty easy, but the combination of actions, and knowing which action to execute when, and under what circumstances-  that is the secret sauce of BPM.

What Anatoly’s blog largely provides is an insight into how he thinks through these basics – the subtleties that are like lego bricks – individually sort of simple (2×4, 2×2, etc. ) but in combination quite interesting business problems can be addressed. And it is the basics you need to master first.

Just noticed this today, thanks to Twitter:

IBM has a great BPM resource on its site: BPM for Dummies (IBM edition). It’s a mini ebook, and could prove to be what gets you on the road to leverage BPM to gain total visibility into your organization.

Unfortunately it requires registration but this is probably a small price to pay for a free book.

Ran across this blog post by Daniel Selman from April of 2011:

 For the past few months I have been leading a small, but very dedicated, team that has been improving the consumability of core ILOG BRMS components/APIs and supporting the BPM team as they perform the integration of the ILOG components within the BPM design and runtime. I believe it will lead to a considerably better rules experience for BPM customers as well as provide a smooth migration path to the full ILOG BRMS, if and when required. Of course it also just makes good engineering sense to share ILOG’s expertise and code in the business rules space with our comrades in the BPM team.

Pretty cool to see these groups working together – this is the kind of collaboration that I have to admit rarely happens outside of either an open source project (semi-rare) or a single company (semi-rare).  What I like best is the tone of his blog – he really sounds interested in seeing the best of ILOG getting up-take with those BPM customers.

As if I needed any excuses to take coffee meetings (I don’t), Mark Suster has provided some great ammunition for those not inclined to partake:

I know I’m getting repetitive. It is with great intent. Whatever amount you’re getting out and talking with prospects, customers, employees, recruits, competitors, press, investors, potential investors … it’s never enough. [...]

For almost everybody else I work with I know that a little more dedication to coffee meetings would have a positive impact. Your biz dev discussion that goes nowhere today will plants seeds in somebody’s mind 18 months from now.

Yet most of us resist the coffee meetings seeing them as a distraction from: shipping our release, refining our business plan, working on our new website, etc. You have to do both. Wake up early. Turn coffee into late-night drinks. Never eat lunch alone.

I couldn’t agree more.  Early in my career I didn’t understand the value of eating lunch with colleagues and friends other than as entertainment.  I didn’t understand the value of meeting with people outside my firm.  But I learned. I learned that these incidental, accidental contacts can be very valuable.  So I started behaving in a way that increases the odds of these happy coincidences.  Meeting people for coffee, organizing lunch meetings, meeting with people in various cities when I travel, and making sure I meet with people outside my own business and my own industry. Also, being open to take meetings from people when I don’t see a direct relevance to my business.

On the whole, it has paid off handsomely.  At a minimum, I’ve become much better informed about Austin, about my industry, and about other people’s businesses.  At best, I’ve formed connections that will help BP3 and my own career for years to come.  I’ve certainly managed to hire some fantastic people on the basis of personal and professional connections made over coffee (and lunch).

So get out there and buy some coffee.

(disclosure: the author owns a few coffee-related stocks, and he is definitely talking up his own book! )

Update: In the interest of clarity I’ve updated the second-to-last paragraph of this post.

Anyone following the #BPM hashtag on twitter has probably been amused at times because we also get a fair number of posts about BPM the XM/Sirius station as well.

But in this case, Emily Burns of Pega has decided music offers a metaphor for BPM vs. Case Management:

Recently I was describing to someone the difference between BPM and Case Management, and found that music lends itself very nicely as a metaphor—specifically, the contrast between solo and ensemble works and the contrast between Classical and jazz.

I couldn’t disagree more.  Any use of an analogy like this, especially when it is loaded to make one party sound better than the other, is easy to pick apart.  In particular she states that “the closest musical metaphor to traditional BPM is the performance of a solo piece; a piece of music written to be performed by an individual person.”  I’m not sure what kind of BPM Emily Burns has been familiar with, but I have yet to see a BPM project for one person.  or built around one process-actor (or even multiple process actors all playing out the same role in the process).  BPM projects are cross-functional and typically cross-departmental.

The core of her argument is on more common footing with the idea that case management accommodates improvisation whereas BPM does not.  But I’d hardly equate case management with a jazz ensemble.  Nor BPM with classical music.  Music is art.  Office work may not be routine, but it isn’t typically what I’d call art.

Comparisons and analogies around Case Management and BPM always trip up if one is willing to dig into specifics.  Often, the people making the comparisons do so with an implicit (unstated) assumption that all the interactions between process participants has to be modeled in a tool to be effective (or coordinated in a tool at runtime to be effective).  This just isn’t the case – normal human interaction takes place outside of tooling – whether you are a BPM advocate or a Case Management advocate.  There’s no need to model the conversation in the hall, the conversation over the cube wall, the agreements made between coworkers over lunch.

What it boils down to is simple – most case management approaches really focus on improving the outcome of a single case, largely ignoring the consequences at volume.  Case Management approaches seem more appropriate to work “processes” (cases) that can not be well-designed a priori.  BPM approaches, on the other hand, tend to focus on optimizing aggregate outcomes rather than a single outcome.  BPM approaches seem more appropriate to work “processes” (cases) that can be largely designed in advance (a priori).

The analogies may be comforting, they may help explain an opinion or a point of view, but let’s not mistake them for proof. (Or in particular, proof that one approach is better than the other)

So no sooner had I written about Google’s unnecessary surfeit of enemies than Google goes out and acquires Moto, likely creating a few more difficulties in the marketplace.  On the surface it seems to:

1. confirm how weak Android’s patent position really was
2. validate what Apple’s execs and fans have been saying about the value of integrated over fragmented (“open”) at least in the mobile space.
3. calls into question the whole android venture.

Maybe #1 and #2 are obvious and don’t need further explanation.  But for #3, Horace Dediu of Asymco asks the question I’ve been asking: “Is Android profitable? The debit column just increased by $12 billion. Good luck with those ads.”

Seriously.  Google has been saying Android is profitable.  But I think you have to measure the credit part of the ledger as revenues accrued by Android that would not have otherwise been accrued:

• Ads on Android that arguably would not have otherwise been sold on another platform
• Licensing fees (I don’t think there are any)
• Etc.

Horace Dediu goes on to give a better explanation than I did as to the perils Google has entertained:

The lesson (and warning) was that a licensor that is also a licensee makes other licensees uncomfortable. The supplier is also a competitor. This is classic channel conflict and never ends well.

Apple and Microsoft have to be pleased that their patent strategy just caused Google to spend $12B.  Android is certainly no longer free to Google – whether it is free to handset OEMs or not.

John Gruber’s Daring Fireball really digs into all the details, and if we’re wondering whether there was a real cost to Google for taking the path of aggressively pursuing Android:

Look at Google’s financial results. They reported $8.5 billion in net income this year, and $6.5 billion last year. That’s for all of Google. They’re offering $12.5 billion for Motorola. So Google just spent almost two years of its profits to buy a second-rate phone maker that itself is unprofitable,1 almost went bankrupt, and is arguably only the third-best maker of Android devices, behind HTC and Samsung.

That definitely puts $12B into perspective.  Nearly 2 years of profit.  I’m not sure that Google wouldn’t have been better off, financially, just partnering with Apple and other OEMs and taking a more passive approach to Android.  Still, acquiring Moto may be the right thing to do given where Google finds itself today – the best path forward may be to double down on the Android investment.  But an alternate path would be to make Android more open – by opening up the development process and assets and scaling back Google’s own financial commitment to it while letting the community drive (making Android a bit more like Linux in the process).

This article in TechCrunch hit a chord with me – because I have picked up on some of the same issues with Google:

But why? Why is Google now a villain to many in the industry? I don’t believe it’s because they’re evil, I believe it simply relates to the Plainview quote. Increasingly, Google is trying to do everything. And they have the arrogance to think that they can. And it’s pissing people off.

Actually, it doesn’t piss me off, personally.  But, I want to put the Steve Jobs question to Google:  what are you going to say “No” to?  And how do you know that you’re doing the right thing when you say No?

Right now it feels like Google says “yes” to a lot of projects.  But they say “no” to very few markets.  I’ll take Android as an example.  Google had a strong ally in Apple (and vice versa).  They had common market interests, common competitors (e.g. Microsoft).  If Apple spurred on a new generation of phones that consumed more Google ads, that’s good for Google (and doesn’t require Google to launch its own phone OS).  If Google’s great apps (maps, gmail, search) worked well on iPhones, Apple sells more phones.

But by betting the farm on Android, Google lost a great partner and ally.  Not that any of these relationships is guaranteed forever, but I certainly expected the alliance to last longer than a year or two.  And I’m not convinced that Google gets more revenue per device from Android than it does from iPhones – I’ve yet to see someone break those #’s out so that we can understand if their Android investment *actually* makes sense.

The TechCrunch article covers lots of other areas where Google is competing with major industry titans or at least category killers in the niche areas.  My takeaway from this is that perhaps Google hasn’t learned the power of “No”.

At BP3, we’re all about BPM.  That’s it.  When we get asked to build a custom app, if it isn’t BPM, we politely decline.  If it is a big integration project – politely decline.  Saying no has power.  Our branding is focused on what we actually do, and do well.  It doesn’t get diluted by a less-than-stellar performance on something outside our core competency.  It also allows us to partner effectively with companies that can really help our business – they know what we do, what we do well, and what we don’t do.  And therefore they can shape their partnering strategy accordingly without worrying about whether we’ll be interested in the food on their plate and not just happy with what is on our BPM plate.

Maybe it is too late for Google to put the genie back in the bottle – but we can look back and think about how things might be different.  They could have taken a bit more “hands-off” approach to Android  – sponsoring the project but not getting too invested in pushing it to vendors and carriers – let those vendors do more of the heavy lifting, and not getting involved in positioning against Apple or any other specific phone vendors.  A bit more hands-off approach might have preserved their relationship to Apple without undermining their goal of having the lowest common denominator phones capable of browsing the web or running a Google Search (and seeing a Google ad).  Would the value of good partnerships with firms like Apple outweigh the benefits of an Android?

When you’re looking at your own business, what is it you don’t do?  What would you say no to?

Mike Gammage on Sourcing Shangri-La:

To avoid continually tripping up, to be able to implement Management 2.0 thinking, the enterprise needs a cortex, a way of pulling it all together:  an integrated management platform.  And its language has to be end-to-end business process because that can be universally understood across the enterprise. So it’s a BPM platform.

In the BPM platform, business process becomes the key by which we describe what the enterprise does, and how it all fits together – and how we analyse what the impact of change will be.

But it goes way beyond this. The BPM platform integrates process with real-time metrics, risks and controls, compliance and quality management – all within one governance framework. It deploys process to every desktop and mobile device as a personalized intelligent operations manual.  It also provides the collaborative framework that enables a culture of continuous improvement.

Worth reading the whole thing.  I’m still digesting it.  Well, partly I’m still getting over the use of “2.0″ on yet another word.  But Mike makes good points about balancing the need for autonomy and innovation with the need for predictability or compliance.  In fact, a similar discussion broke out on ebizQ recently, with Ian Gotts and Theo Priestley representing two ends of the spectrum quite well.  As I noted in my own comment: “you want innovation, but not in *every* aspect of your business.”

An interesting developerWorks blog about the benefits of customer engagement via Twitter. The title says it all:  “developerWorks Twitter account saving over $600k per month: what uplift will Google+ provide?”

Interestingly the $600k/month claim comes from what they would have to pay for 200,000 clicks per month through other channels (e.g. paid search).  Of course, this under-estimates the value to IBM, because twitter accounts like @developerWorks build rapport and trust with customers and partners (I’d call that engagement, but marketing professionals might disagree). I’d not have even thought of quantifying the value of a twitter account in this fashion, but I’m going to change my calculus in the future.

When I worked at a BPMS vendor we added partners and some customers to an internal technical mailing list.  The level of engagement with these techies was much improved, and helped convert skeptics into advocates of our company and products.  This was in pre-twitter days.  I’m not sure the effect on twitter is quite as strong per person, but like the mailing list, it can humanize a company and a product, and it exposes customers to your professionals and experts.  That has to be a good thing.