[Vizzini has just cut the rope The Dread Pirate Roberts is climbing up]
Vizzini: HE DIDN’T FALL? INCONCEIVABLE.
Inigo Montoya: You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

- from The Princess Bride

Normally being an “expert” – one who has acquired expertise – is a good thing.  Generally I recommend that people strive to develop deep expertise in a few areas of interest.  Become an expert.

But there are times when it works against you – Jason Cohen has some great anecdotes in a blog post about when being an “expert” can be harmful.  These cautionary tales show how people who have expertise might not take full advantage of it, by assuming their expertise leads to the answer – instead of assuming their expertise would give them avenues for learning…

As BPM practitioners we have to remain open to the idea that we don’t know what we think we know… I think we’ve all both participated in this, and seen it happen to others:

The worst is when you’re an “expert” because then you’re even less likely to challenge your assumptions.

As an “expert” you’ve devised your own laws about what makes your market different from other markets, and what makes your company unique. Even with prior experience, this knowledge based largely on feeling, not fact.

In BPM in particular, we have to set aside what our “expert” voice is telling us inside our head.  We have to listen to what we’re hearing from our customers.  Similarly, we need to help customers set aside their assumptions about what software will do for them, about what their real processes are, just to name two topics. We’re on a journey together with our customers and that requires learning and listening.

Sometimes being an expert conflicts with listening – but only if you think being an expert means you have all the answers.

Great read from the founders of Yipit, on the long hard road to become and overnight success:

So, it’s now February of 2010, over two and half years since we started, and we have yet another idea: build an aggregator for the early but quickly growing daily deal industry. The idea was sound, timely and right up our alley since we had been doing local deal aggregation for the last 9 months.

And, in just three days, everything changed.

We launched the new idea in a three-day scramble, got some initial press, users loved it, and four months later raised $1 million from amazing investors. A year after that, we’ve raised $6 million, made real revenue, attracted hundreds of thousands of users, and recruited amazing people to join our team (we’re hiring! join us!). And, best of all, we’re just getting started.

I really liked the raw honesty of this post.  I just quoted the happy part – 2.5 years in.  But there’s also this part:

“So, what do you do?”

Ugh. I hated that question.

The truth was that we were trying to start a new venture but we hadn’t really made any progress.

Anyone with a struggling startup can relate to this.  I’ve felt this same awkwardness explaining what we do – not so much because we’re struggling but because BPM isn’t exactly a buzzword for the masses or a great conversation starter at social events.  But I’d much rather be telling people about what we do at BP3 as a BPM services firm than, say, a dating site (not that there’s anything wrong with that!).

I’ve noticed when I explain how we started BP3, people have assumed that we only left Lombardi at the moment IBM acquired the company.  Not so.  We started BP3 about 2.5, almost 3 years, before IBM acquired Lombardi.  An investor would probably call that being “early”.  It wasn’t about the acquisition or potential acquisition.  It was about starting a company that could be the best BPM services firm we could be.

That 2-3 years was great formative time for us to build our reputation, our culture, our team.  It takes a long time to build the foundations for success – especially when you’re bootstrapping – but people don’t always remember how long it takes.  All of a sudden, it looks like success and they wonder how it materialized out of the blue.  But we’re in it for the long run, and we always were.

In closing, congratuations to Yipit on their “overnight” success!

Sad news today.  Not too much to say today that we haven’t said before.  Better writers, with stronger ties to Steve, and better stories to tell, have written and spoken about Steve more eloquently:

Walt Mossberg: The Steve Jobs I knew

AppleInsider recaps Bill Gates, Bob Iger, Barack Obama, Eric Schmidt, Michael Dell, Mark Zuckerberg, Carol Bartz, Jerry Brown.

GigaOm covers a similar list of celebrity reactions.

Steve on Steve, at the Stanford Commencement Address in 2005 (yes, I’m very jealous about that one).

And that, as they say, is just the tip of the iceberg. Thanks, Steve.

We’re well-overdue to comment on the Forrester BPF 2011 event, partly because we weren’t in attendance this year.  To make up for lost time, we’re linking here to some of the best coverage of the event that we saw in blogging.

First, two articles by Anne Stuart on ebizQ.  The first post, early returns, focuses on this year’s theme for the event, “Customer Engagement”:

“What was good enough before is not good enough today,” Derek Miers, a Forrester principal analyst, warned in one of the event’s opening sessions. And, he added, customer-engagement approaches that work right now won’t be sufficient for long; they’ll need to continue evolving to meet changing customer needs. “We almost have to rebuild the ship while we’re at sea,” he noted.

This sounds like a riff on continuous process improvement – you don’t “arrive at the destination” so much as always take a step back and see how you can improve and then refocus your efforts.  The landscape is changing, so the same goals may not stay relevant over time.

Next up was a post of shorthand notes from a session about getting started with DCM.

Sandy Kemsley once again takes the honors for Most Complete Coverage of the event, with no less than 5 posts tagged accordingly.  In one post, “Empowering the Customer Through Process Improvement and BPM“, she notes:

They [Nokia Siemens Networks] are a big SAP customer, but find that they use Appian BPM to fill the gaps that SAP just doesn’t do without major customization, and to bridge between different systems. They’ve implemented BPM in five major business areas with more than 22,000 users. By reusing some components but adapting to each particular business area, they’re able to roll out new systems in a matter of months. They are pushing into social capabilities to facilitate faster decision-making, and mobile platforms to better support remote users.

Wait, I thought SAP = BPM? Well, layering process on top of SAP is a common BPM deployment story. In another summary, this particular phrasing rang true for me:

Looking at processes in customer experience, we need to use Lean principles to eliminate waste from the customer viewpoint, not just the company viewpoint. We need to understand the full customer journey and all of the touchpoints that need to be managed, and ensure that the end-to-end customer processes are properly defined and orchestrated. This can lead to businesses reorganizing to eliminate business functional silos in favor of process-focused organizational models.

I think the concept of eliminating waste from the customer experience as well as from the company viewpoint is critical.  All too often ill-thought process improvement exercises just “squeeze the balloon”  – moving a burden from one part of the process to another, from one group to another.  If the group you’re moving the process burden to is your customer, look out…

We hope to get to BPF12 next year – for some reason this one flew below the radar all year and sneaked up on us while we were busy making BPM projects happen!

Neil Ward-Dutton is following up on previous work he’s done looking at BPM practices at big firms. We’ll start with this, wherein Neil tells us Capgemini are lining up their ducks:

Top Line Initiatives within Capgemini are identified where a need is seen for an internal ‘accelerator’ (my word) that can place the company to play in high-growth market sectors – and furthermore, where the potential is seen for the company to grow at twice the overall market growth rate. In line with BPM having been identified as a Top Line Intiative, Capgemini is looking to grow its BPM project delivery business 40% per year for the next 4-5 years.

Well, this is both what is right and wrong about the big consulting firms.  What’s right: they’ve realized BPM is a growing market opportunity and worth investing in.

What’s wrong:  that’s the only motivation behind these companies getting into BPM.  There’s no passion for business improvement, process improvement, or business process management.  There’s no raison d’être.

But there are a few other positive notes here to pick out:

The company has realised that the traditional body-shopping approach doesn’t work; and it’s also realised that trying to push a significant proportion of project work offshore is also going to be difficult – particularly in the early stages of engagement with a customer. Rather, it aims to create small project teams of between 6 and 12 consultants, working onsite with customers and getting business and technology representatives from the customer’s side collaborating with them as much as possible. It’s aiming to structure projects to deliver results in 3-6 months, and its goal is to build relationships with clients so that it can set up sequences of such projects that overall create engagements that last 2-3 years.

It is encouraging to hear that some of the big consulting firms are finally coming to grips with this – the project work for most BPM projects needs to be local.  Now if only customers will come to the same conclusions…

What Capgemini sees as small teams (6-12) would represent large BPM teams if they’re only focused on the BPM parts of the business (and not supporting aspects, e.g. technology integrations, etc.).  CapGemini is focused on the right time-frames:  3-6 months for results. The “2-3 year’s” for overall engagements however- when you’re a smaller firm like BP3 that longer term relationship has to be earned, we don’t go in assuming it will be there.  We execute the project, and try to acquit ourselves well enough that if there are additional projects we’ll be invited into planning discussions – or better yet, invited to help funnel additional project ideas into funded projects.

Great read on Capgemini – and instructive for other companies looking at BPM services…

Fabienne: Whose motorcycle is this?
Butch: It’s a chopper, baby.
Fabienne: Whose chopper is this?
Butch: It’s Zed’s.
Fabienne: Who’s Zed?
Butch: Zed’s dead, baby. Zed’s dead.

- Pulp Fiction

There have been raft loads of articles and blogs written about “Millenials” over the last few years (not to mention Generations X and Y).  Chris Taylor has decided to take his shot, on BPM for Real-  “Does Generation Z have a ’2-second advantage’”?

What happens when a whole generation that has lived their entire lives with the ability to feed information to themselves (and at a time and format of their choosing) becomes the dominant group in the workforce?

My bias against these generational stereotypes is well recorded, but let’s review this one.  I expect predecessors to Generation X wondered what would happen when kids showed up at work who grew up their whole lives with a computer at home.  Of course, only a minority of kids at that point – but still more than in any previous generation.  Maybe it is because I was one of those lucky kids that I’m not particularly concerned about the changes this will effect on our society or workplace.

Chris Taylor explains:

I recently read The Two-Second Advantage, a Malcolm Gladwell-like book about how we learn and build mental models that predict what will happen next based on experience and data that arrives so quickly it would overwhelm–if not for our learned ability to work through it. Most of Generation Z has been living in a state of information overload longer than any human beings before them, and the result should be a capability to handle a complex world even better than we do. They should have more complete mental models for the workings of the world due to their ability to know whatever they choose, whenever they want. If you buy into the ideas of this book, they are likely developing a “two-second advantage” that should give them a leg up on the older generations.

Perhaps the new generation will be better equipped than the previous.  However, the world will change fast enough to make them feel as ill-equipped for the next transition as many of of those writing about Generation Z appear to feel now.  By objective measures, the rate of change appears to be increasing.

But the way information-technology-adept people deal with the world is not by addressing its complexity, typically.  It is by simplifying it.  Rather than having more complete models, they technologically adept will have meta-models that don’t require completeness.  We just had the Austin City Limits Music Festival here.  In the complete model world, I’d know pretty much all the acts performing, and that I was interested in, and on which of 8 stages they’re playing, and at what time.  I’d do my research before the concert and figure it all out in advance by sampling songs by various artists that are performing.

In the simplified world, as I’m walking to the concert I download an iPhone App that tells me what bands  are playing on what stages at what times.  I can quickly browse the bands and see if any of them appeal.  I can group-text my friends to find out what they’re listening to (more than one stage is active at the same time) – and that’s built in to the app if I don’t already use a group-texting application.  You can guess which of these two approaches describes my ACL Festival experience…

Think how “getting directions” has changed since GPS and maps have become so ubiquitous on cell phones.  You don’t really need directions, you just need a destination.  The only directions someone needs to give you are the little bits that never show up in a navigation system or map: “don’t turn in the first drive, use the second driveway”.

So the software and hardware is delivering the results of increasingly complex interactions with other systems.  Let’s face it, my iPhone computing directions to a destination using maps and GPS is much more complicated from a systems view, than someone scribbling directions on a piece of paper.  But the end-result to the user is actually simpler than the old way of doing things. I think that’s actually the metaphor to use going forward. The touch interfaces today give even infants a chance to interact – because the cause-and-effect is more clear.  So the interaction isn’t just the tactile (as it might be when they play with a physical keyboard), it is direct manipulation – something their brains are already wired to learn from.  The systems of the future (software and hardware) are likely to appeal more directly to the way our brains already work – and thus feel more natural to us, even as they get more complicated in principle, behind the scenes.

It isn’t really an issue of generational advantage- if you buy into Malcolm Gladwell’s thinking on practice – it takes about 10,000 hours to become an expert at something.  Any one, of any age, can become an expert if they put in that 10,000 hours of purposeful use with technology.  There’s no reason to let your kid be the only one in the house with a “2 second advantage”.  I watched my own parents leapfrog technology shifts.  They both bought iPhones before most of my friends.  They still have trouble using Microsoft Windows.  But they use their iPhones and iPad, and Kindle, just fine.  Don’t let these generational tags define you, or your views of others.  Besides, the idea of “2 seconds” being a short time is already a sort of generational bias, isn’t it?  But it does roll off the tongue better than a 2 nanosecond advantage.