George Lawrie of Forrester recently wrote:

One pioneer that I interviewed was immensely proud of his lightning roll out of a guerilla app to support his firm’s front office in advising clients on complex product choices. I asked him about future plans and sheepishly he admitted they would be starting again from scratch because the guerilla app was unable to leverage enterprise services exposing critical data about product offerings. He remarked ruefully that sometimes you do have to follow the IT standards “yellow brick road” rather than just head for the hills, but wouldn’t it be great to have the best of both worlds, with both agile deployment and full advantage taken of enterprise assets and data?

Well this practically sounds like a call-out for how to approach BPM the right way – roll-out the guerrilla app (usually these are around a specific process) with a BPMS.  But when you’re ready to leverage enterprise services and data, you simply add those features to your process, a bit like a layer cake.  In fact, this avoids one of the key failure modes of BPM projects:  trying to cement integrations to early, instead of focusing on getting the actual process right first.

Actually, my least favorite seat on a certain model of plane that flies in and out of Austin is 27E.  Some planes manage to pack the lavatory, the kitchen, the divider wall right behind you (no reclining!), and engine noise all in one truly fantastically bad seat.

Jason Cohen asks the question: why?  Why not spend time either improving the worst case experiences for your customers – or better yet, eliminating them entirely?  Would it be such a bad idea for the airlines to eliminate a few of these bad seats?  To put more insulation in? To offer some freebie or consolation prize for the bad seat?

Eliminating these worst-case experiences doesn’t mean radically changing your business. It just means saying no to customers or projects that aren’t a good fit:

Bill impressed them and they were ready to begin, but Bill decided this was too far outside his experience and so told them, while it would be interesting and fun for him, and he was confident in his abilities, he isn’t comfortable accepting this job, because he wants no chance that they’ll have a bad experience.

Of course this only won the customer over still more. Bill won’t do this particular gig, but I guarantee that when something else comes up in six months, he’ll automatically be offered the job. As for me, I’m going to continue connecting customers with Bill because there is no seat 32B with Bill.

Saying “No” requires that you know yourself- or your firm – well enough to know what you’re not going to do.  Buried in the example is the fact hat Jason’s startup is referring this consulting business to a consultant – rather than doing it in-house.  Another example of knowing when something is outside the suite spot.

Now I need to go think about how to eliminate seat 32B for our customers at BP3!  Looking at this from a BPM/process perspective, however, I’ve often see customers look at this the wrong way – focusing on all the exceptions before they have the average case nailed down tight.  What Jason has described here isn’t handling every exception, it is recognizing a bad situation and either avoiding it (saying no), or figuring out how to make it not feel like seat 32B. A precursor to this is actually getting the average case nailed down and sorted out.

There’s been a bit of a blast of news about the Austin Technology Council (ATC) taking a delegation of Austin CEOs to Silicon Valley to recruit technical talent to Austin:

“These events are about Austin making a pretty loud statement in the Bay Area,” said Julie Huls, president, Austin Technology Council.  “Texas is a New Economy State, and we have a killer combination to support it: high-paying tech jobs, fast-growing companies, a low cost of living, and a relaxed way of life.  Over 100 of our area CEOs were together in May at an ATC CEO Summit and one key call to action was to bring more tech talent to Austin.  We are proud to deliver on that idea in a couple weeks in San Francisco and Sunnyvale.”

Some of the best companies in Austin are represented in this trip – and some great CEOs for sure.  These are people that Austin has a lot to be thankful for.  I may not be sure that sending the CEOs en masse is the best way to recruit tech talent to Austin, but I certainly don’t blame Austin CEOs for recruiting in other markets.  From my time at Trilogy and Lombardi, and now BP3, I know a thing or two about recruiting talent to a firm.  I think this event in the Bay Area is more about news cycle than actual recruiting.  Hoping to plant the seeds for the future.  Clearly there is a need for more skilled people in Austin:

Austin currently has several dozen technology companies hiring 40 or more new programmers each.

Integrating new talent into Austin is clearly good for the local economy and ecosystem.  I was part of one of these waves of immigration to Austin back in the mid-90′s – and the imports are now the CEOs and hiring managers at literally dozens of local companies.  But the long term solution to this problem should be a mix of approaches – recruiting and retaining talent from universities, industry, and various locations inside and outside of Austin. Too many of the startups in Austin have stopped college recruiting and really developing their own talent – which is easy to understand when a company has a horizon to exit of less than four years. But it isn’t just college recruiting – it is also hiring people with experience who have the potential to do more – and then challenging them to do it!  Don’t just hire Ruby on Rails experts and developers – hire people that you believe can become Ruby on Rails experts.

The strategy we take at BP3 isn’t to import talent – but to hire our talent where they live – so long as they’re willing to travel to customer sites.  If they live in California, that’s where we hire them and where they base out of.  If we hire them in Minneapolis, that’s where they’re based out of.  It is actually part of our goal to have geographic diversity, and it means that we can hire people that other companies can’t touch as easily. But it has a bigger benefit for our clients-  as we add staff, we’re more likely to be able to serve our customers with local staff rather than a team that has to travel to be there in person.  High touch, high value, we like to call it.

Vivek Wadhwa’s article in the Washington Post was a brilliant assessment of the “talent shortage” in the USA – first by calling out the objectives of the President’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness:

The council is holding a series of meetings to find ways to fix a perceived national problem: an engineering shortage. Otellini and the council claim that such a shortage seriously threatens America’s ability to create jobs, and that the U.S. risks losing its innovation edge to China and India, which are producing a million engineers per year — 12 times as many as the United States.

But next, by explaining what is wrong with this logic:

The graduation statistics most commonly touted then were: China graduates 600,000 per year, India, 350,000, and the U.S., 70,000. We found that, in 2004, when comparing apples with apples, the U.S. had graduated more engineers (roughly 140,000) than India had (roughly 120,000).

Wow.  Wadhwa’s analyis just does not agree with conventional wisdom.  Wadhwa predicts that great numbers of engineers in India and China will face unemployment or jobs in fields unrelated to engineering.  This is where he cuts to the heart of it:

Then there is the question of whether there is a shortage of engineers in the United States. Salaries are the best indicator of shortages. In most engineering professions, salaries have not increased more than inflation over the past two decades. But in some specialized fields of software engineering in Silicon Valley and in professions such as petroleum engineering, there have been huge spikes.

So, there are shortages in a few critical areas, but overall there is not a shortage of engineering talent.  Again, this matches with the data that I’ve been seeing.  It also better reflects the proliferation of engineering-derivative majors in US universities.

If I were these local Austin CEOs, however, I’d also be shopping in other parts of the country outside of Silicon Valley and Austin, and I might also focus more time on universities – graduates are more likely to relocate and take a chance on a place like Austin.  But that requires a long-term strategy toward staffing that not all companies have.

I’m hoping that companies in Austin, and in general, will start taking the time to invest more in the people they’ve got, and hiring more people with potential, rather than just looking to find someone who has done it all before.

I have to applaud this article from the Business Insider, because it puts into words so well, something that I’ve been trying to articulate since 2008 (their emphasis):

Now here’s the interesting thing about Groupon: Despite its massive unprofitability, it’s a jobs-creating behemoth. According to its last updated S-1 filing, it’s got 9,625 employees, up from 37 in June 30, 2009.

So awesome, especially since that explosion basically coincides with the bottom of the recession.

But it’s not making money. So why is it adding so many jobs? Simple, because demand for its services and offers has been ridiculous.

Demand = jobs.

Right.  It isn’t actually profit that creates jobs.  At BP3, we don’t hire more people because we are more profitable and want to spend those dollars on hiring.  We hire more people because there is additional under-served demand for our services.  The article goes on:

If you offered Groupon a tax break, it wouldn’t make a difference because it’s not profitable. But even if it were, and you cut its corporate taxes, allowing more money to filter to the bottom line, unless that somehow translated into more demand for its products, it wouldn’t need to hire more people.

Again, correct.  Higher taxes aren’t “good for business”, but lower corporate taxes don’t lead to hiring (and jobs) either.  But hey, maybe this Groupon thing is just an exception.  Maybe other businesses with demand are refusing to hire because of their high tax burden? But I haven’t heard of such.  SalesForce seems to be doing fine, if you listen to Benioff:

We’re adding more than 1,000 new positions this year. Plus acquisitions. We’re aggressively growing the company….I’m not an economist, I don’t look like an economist. But as I said on our last earnings call, I don’t think there’s going to be a double dip because I talk to customers and they’re all growing, maybe not at 10% or 20% or 30%, but they’re all growing. I feel good about jobs, I feel good about the economy….

There’s demand for BPM as well – and so my colleagues in BPM aren’t seeing the recession or the possibility of one either.  Our customers are investing in their businesses (and most of them appear to be hiring in IT).  The jobs are just going where the demand of customers is strongest.

Sandy has published a review of Active Endpoints’ CloudExtend, an extension of the SalesForce platform that ads some BPM capabilities to the SalesForce platform.  Interestingly it looks like it is deployed “alongside” SalesForce as opposed to being “on” the SalesForce platform. Apparently they’re not the only vendor interested in this type of use case:

We’re starting to see client-side screen flow creation from a few of the BPMS vendors – I covered TIBCO’s Page Flow Models in my review of AMX/BPM last year – but those screen flows are only available at a step in a larger BPMS model, whereas Cloud Extend has encapsulated that capability for use in other platforms. For small, nimble vendors who don’t need to own the whole application, providing embeddable process functionality for data-centric applications can make a lot of sense, especially in a cloud environment where they don’t need to worry about the usual software OEM problems of installation and maintenance.

It is an interesting approach, and perhaps comfortable to Active Endpoints as they previously OEM’ed their BPMS engine to other vendors.  I can’t picture IBM or SAP or Oracle following this approach, for example.

I’m curious about whatever happened to Salesforce’s Visual Process Manager and whether it will end up competing with Cloud Extend; I had a briefing of Visual Process Manager over a year ago that amounted to little, and I haven’t heard anything about it since.

As I was reading Sandy’s review, I was thinking the same thing.  What did happen to Visual Process Manager?  Is it just not fitting the bill?  Maybe we’ll hear more from Dreamforce.

In a recent Austin Technology Council (ATC) CEO Summit, talent shortage were a hot topic.  Which sounds crazy when the unemployment rate is north of 8% in Austin, and in Texas.  AustinStartup’s George Dearing did a good job addressing a few of the key issues.  It’s a really good read.

• 77% of respondents agree that there will be a shortage of technically skilled talent in the future.
• 71% of respondents agree that there is a shortage of technically skilled talent at the present time in Austin.
• More than half of respondents believe that talent issues have limited their organization’s productivity and efficiency.

Future Talent Shortage:  I think the overall concern for the future is valid – but overstated.  Technology and productivity advancements often have surprisingly dislocating affects on employment.  In the 1990′s, VLSI and CAD tools got to the point where 4 Electrical Engineers could do the work that had required 100 engineers just a couple years previously.  I watched my fellow class of ’94 graduates in EE go into software companies instead of working for Intel and the like – there just weren’t the number of new jobs in electrical engineering and chip design that there had been in previous years.  In Austin I’ve followed the chip business with some interest – and I would venture to say that the number of chip designers employed here probably declined into the early 2000′s… until the market changed.  Now there are a lot of different chip applications – mobile devices and analog applications have created opportunities for a lot more applications – and for more engineers.  And, with the tools at our disposal today, it may make economic sense to tweak chip designs for much smaller volumes than in 1995.

What’s my point?  Technology employment is volatile.  That results in under-representation in STEM (Science Technology Engineering Math) majors, and it results in people with little STEM education joining STEM-related fields in boom times… and it results in people with STEM backgrounds exiting these fields when the boom eventually turns to bust.

When I was entering college I heard and read the same concerns about there not being enough engineers.  Somehow we made it to 2011 anyway. All I know is, STEM majors are going to be good choices for college students for many years to come.

Shortage of Talent in Austin Right Now:  I don’t see it.  I was just talking with someone today at a local software company who commented how hard it was to find the right people in Austin.  I expressed sympathy – after all, BPM is a bit of a niche business,  so I can relate in that not everyone is an expert in BPM software.  But his complaint was that people don’t spend enough time retraining themselves to be prepared for the technology shifts – learning a new platform or language.  He has a point – if you’re in high tech and you’re not willing to invest in your own skills you’re making a mistake.  But it seemed clear his expectation was that his company shouldn’t have to make an investment in someone ramping up.

But, on the other hand.  This reminds me a bit of companies who hire interns but don’t expect to teach the intern anything.   If you’re hiring high tech workers, you have to be willing to mix it up.  Sure, hire a few people with expertise in the relevant technologies.  But don’t be afraid to hire people with varying degrees of learning curve required to be proficient in the job.  We hired an intern this summer who didn’t know how to do what we wanted him to do this summer.  And he figured it out.  And I dare say he probably has a bit more confidence that the next time someone asks him to just figure something out, he will.

Talent Issues Limiting Growth.  All I can say here is – developing talent and growing costs money.  For many years, many companies have gotten by with minimum investment in people.  I don’t mean training classes.  I mean investing in real opportunities for people to learn by doing as well as training.  And then investing enough in retaining talent so that the investment in education and self-improvement pays off.

I have to quote a telling paragraph from the original post:

Brooking’s analysis opens up several discussion points. With diversity and the educational pieces presumably in place, what then are the  obstacles to acquiring the right talent? Are companies just terrible at recruiting? Are all the good engineers are in Silicon Valley or overseas? Perhaps even more provocative, are companies really investing in people and training their employees to become more highly-skilled instead of sourcing things out to get the razor-thin margins necessary to sustain their models? Whatever the case, the NYT surfaced data from the National Employment Law Project [below] showing low-end jobs are actually the ones making a comeback, again leading me to question how aggressive some companies are really approaching the recruiting process.

Great work.  By next summer, I’ll report on some of our own talent investments at BP3.  Maybe it is just the lack of VC funding that allows us to look further out for our investments than just the next year.  We have time to invest and grow with the team we hire.

IBM Impact Blog has published a guest post written by yours truly.  It is part of a four-pillar effort, and the theme for the pillar of my post was simplicity.  So why talk about upgrades if the goal is simplicity? After all, there’s no such thing as simple upgrades of in-flight process data is there?

My thought in writing this way was to focus on how to simplify your approach to upgrading, and also to cover the good work IBM has done to make upgrading easier when you can’t take some of the shortcuts we outlined.  You can find more material on the topic of simplicity on the BP3 blog using the simplicity tag.

Upgrading is also fresh on IBM customers’ minds these days.  We’re getting more requests than ever for help upgrading.  Happy to contribute back to the community a little advice about how to get from point A to point B.