Blog

I flew up with Ivan Kornienko to the Asilomar conference facility in California on Tuesday – for the brand-new bpmNEXT conference.  The conference, as you may know, is hosted by Nathaniel Palmer and Bruce Silver. We started out in style … Continue reading →

NLP to Starships Day 4 of SXSW was one last blur of sessions.  I started out with something perhaps too cerebral for my not-quite caffeinated state:  Practical Natural Language Processing.  It was a good primer on the state of things … Continue reading →

Tom Baeyens, previously a founding member of jBPM and then Activiti, has now started a new firm, Effektif, which will focus on BPM in the cloud.   Gero Decker of Signavio is involved as well as an investor and partner. The … Continue reading →

We’ve been noticing a disturbing trend of late among BPM customers migrating from Teamworks 6 (or similar) to IBM BPM v8.  There seems to be a trend that customers are migrating their models but attempting to avoid migrating runtime data. … Continue reading →

Belatedly I’m getting these SXSW recaps posted! On Day 3, the usual SXSW fatigue sets in – people show up a little later, and the time change (Daylight Savings) doesn’t help!  I started with Houndstooth Coffee – not sure I … Continue reading →

It has always bothered me that people think programming is a “rote” exercise. “Hand me the requirements and the code practically writes itself.”  We’re all willing to accept that writing a short story, a novella, or a novel is an … Continue reading →

If you lived on the beach and never went swimming in the ocean, are you really living?  If you live in Austin and never listen to live music, are you really living? Two articles recently call to mind the expectations … Continue reading →

There are so many people who are jaded about the SXSW experience.  I can understand that. It is overwhelming in its size and scope as it spreads out in Austin’s Downtown area. And some people don’t like to be mixed … Continue reading →

In “How Coders can Save the American Factory“, Tim Fernholz raises a few interesting data points: First, it enables increased efficiency with time. SpaceX, the world’s first commercial spacecraft that docked with the International Space Station last summer, leveraged software … Continue reading →

Day 1 of SXSW 2013 is in the books.  It was a pretty good day.  For me, it started back in the office – with a view of downtown but too far to walk.  Conference calls started at 8:30am – … Continue reading →

Here we are, on the eve of the Nerdpocalypse (aka South-by-Southwest), which occurs every year in Austin about this time.  It is almost hard to remember that this started with a music festival and that the interactive part almost happened … Continue reading →

Jonathan Berkowitz’s post on Thinktiv’s blog articulates something perfectly that lots of us have been observing in Enterprise software. There’s a technical differentiation recession. “Tech diff” was the single largest moat one could build around enterprise software. Back then, the … Continue reading →

You’ve been to SXSW before – and you’ve done the Salt Lick run, you’ve eaten at various trailer eateries, and maybe had a few too many “passed appetizer” dinners… So I thought I’d recommend a few places that, to me, … Continue reading →

Two great blogs about why nobody copies Apple – one by Horace Dediu, and another by Charlie Kindel. Horace asks the question – why doesn’t anyone copy Apple? Put another way: Why is it that everyone wants to copy Apple’s … Continue reading →

Reading about why TapSavvy Chose Austin (in the spirit of the I Choose Austin meme), there’s a current running underneath the reasons why they chose Austin: Austin has become home to B2B innovation.  Mike Maples Jr. has talked about it … Continue reading →

We’ve previously discussed how BPM can dramatically improve aggregate outcomes in healthcare.  This isn’t just about cost, but about saving lives: DR. PATRICIA GABOW, Denver Health and Hospital Authority: What that translated to at Denver Health last year is that … Continue reading →

I missed the news from a week ago that Pegasystems had reported 4th Quarter and Fiscal Year 2012 numbers.  Revenue was up 25% for the fourth quarter, year-over-year.  Fourth quarter net income was $20M, compared to a loss of nearly … Continue reading →

Marissa Mayer and Yahoo are getting a surprising amount of heat for a recent decision to have Yahoos work in the office, or quit.  A lot of people take issue with this.  They rightly point out that if “working from … Continue reading →

Great article in the Statesman on Sunday about Thinktiv, by perhaps Austin’s best connected tech reporter, Lori Hawkins.  It centers on how Thinktiv is revising the startup process for their customers: “I knew exactly what the software would do and … Continue reading →

One of the analogies I have used in the midst of a business transformation is the desire to have a “flashlight” which projects out at increasing intensity as we move through successive phases. Simply stated, it is difficult to make … Continue reading →

Giff Constable’s post, Hire Carefully Doesn’t Have the Same Ring, is spot-on.  He is riffing on a Fast Company article: “Why ‘Hire Slow, Fire Fast’ Is A Bunch Of BS,” or so says Danny Boice in a recent Fast Company … Continue reading →

I liked Dave Brakoniecki’s analysis of a Kofax – sponsored report from Forrester with interesting BPM market size numbers: Here are the headlines: I think the BPM numbers are just about what you’d expect from Forrester or one of the … Continue reading →

Chris Dixon writes some great stuff on his blog. And this one on the Credentials Trap is no exception. I talk a lot to people who are deciding between startups and established companies. They’re usually early in their careers and … Continue reading →

ReadWriteWeb has a great article on how to make BYOD (Bring your own device) successful in your enterprise. Our product manager for BP Mobility pointed out that the top-10 list mirrors our approach to Mobile, two of which jump out … Continue reading →

We’ve blogged before about the benefits of native mobile apps for BPM (and in particular, why a native iOS app is a good place to start). But one of the things we’ve learned in working with customers is that there’s … Continue reading →

We’ve been honored to have speaking roles at IBM Impact for each of the last 3 years.  We’re hoping to return to the speaker’s podium again in 2013!  I really like some of the sessions we proposed, and thought it … Continue reading →

Giff Constable opines in on the Tech Company meme: I keep on running into large companies who say they are not a technology company. All I want to do is shake them and say, “Don’t you get it? We’re all … Continue reading →

Caught this article in the Austin American-Statesman the other day about Austin manufacturing output growing 4x the rate of the overall local economy: Local manufacturing output has skyrocketed over the past decade, growing more than four times faster than the … Continue reading →

I haven’t been following Intalio closely since Ishmael moved on.  But they just posted about their Q4 results, and in the interest of making comparisons with Appian‘s results, we should review their statements as well. Obviously things are going well … Continue reading →

Gary Comerford is thoughtful, as usual in his recent post on “BPM Disruption“: There are certain individuals in the BPM stream who seek to disrupt the status quo. Some of them are blatantly provocative with what they say, others are … Continue reading →

Last year I was honored (and surprised) to be named an IBM Websphere Champion. I didn’t quite realize at the time how selective the program is (and consequently, it is a small number of champions).  Moreover, you have to re-qualify … Continue reading →

Sandy Kemsley’s writeup of IBMConnect highlights and updates is worth reading.  There are a couple of nuggets in particular to entice you to read the post: I don’t know a lot about HR systems, although I’m seeing a huge potential … Continue reading →

EbizQ had to ask the question: “Should there be a BPMN 3.0 and, if so, what additions should it include?” One point of view was that the spec needed to be split into 4 specs, with more targeted purposes and … Continue reading →

I liked this thought by Om Malik, and Max Levchin, on the long view: When asked, he said that it is time to get off the four-year-cycle of the Silicon Valley startup. However, to solve bigger problems, sometimes you need … Continue reading →

Anatoly’s 2nd BPMN Assumption is that the organization has mechanisms for task assignment and transfer.  This is, strangely, one of the things that trips up people new to BPM.  Why?  Because in traditional flowcharts, the hand-off is something you would … Continue reading →

Paul D’arcy’s blog (Science of Revenue) discusses the disruptive marketing of Tesla: Tesla is creatively using marketing to upend the auto industry business model: There are no Tesla dealers There are no commissioned sales people Tesla cars are marketed and … Continue reading →

Another good post from Anatoly on BPMN pitfalls.  In this post, he discusses a problem of timing, with respect to BPMN messages between processes.  The key example is illustrated by his diagram as follows: A process A sends BPMN message … Continue reading →

Establishment and refinement of a “Process Center of Excellence” (PCoE) is one of the initiatives we’re currently working on with our clients. Though many companies have a process management team or teams within the enterprise, frequently there are capability gaps … Continue reading →

Appian reported results for Q4 and 2012 that indicate BPM is anything but dead.  We already knew it wasn’t dead for IBM and Pega, but it isn’t even dead for the independent software vendors like Appian!  Of course, they are … Continue reading →

bpmNEXT is coming March 19-21, at Asilomar Conference Center on the Monterey Peninsula.  I’m excited to be attending, but also honored to be presenting.  I like that Bruce and company have taken a different approach to this conference: No how-tos, … Continue reading →

 Orthogonal is one of my favorite words.  From Merriam Webster: 1  a : intersecting or lying at right angles    b : having perpendicular slopes or tangents at the point of intersection 5  statistically independent I don’t claim that I use … Continue reading →

Austin’s economy continues to crank right along.  While the unemployment crept upward slightly, Austin created more than 34,000 jobs in 2012, more jobs than we’ve created here since 2006. The commission doesn’t immediately adjust local data to reflect the impact … Continue reading →

While no one was looking, IBM has continued to ratchet up the functionality available in BlueworksLive.  In the October 2012 release: Improvements to navigating and filtering The layout algorithm has been improved, with better support for parallel flows.  This is … Continue reading →

Part 1 of Anatoly’s BPMN assumptions postings is spot-on: “All Information is Stored“.  I thought we could add some additional context and color to his posts here.  It would be easy to read the title and misconstrue his point.  The … Continue reading →

Asymco has a new post on “The Race to a Billion” – and it is quite interesting:     Amazing. Facebook (free) nearly at a billion users.  Set that aside.  More impressive is Android’s approach toward 1 billion users – … Continue reading →

There’s a lot of advice in startup circles advising entrepreneurs to not be shy – to ask for the help they want.  To avail themselves of many free resources that are available (and which they might assume they need to … Continue reading →

Great article on RedMonk regarding the importance of design to IBM.  The questions is whether an IBM can convert some of its R&D spend to Design spend, and achieve better financial results.  And whether “packaging” a vertically integrated software stack … Continue reading →

Thanks to a link on daring fireball, I read this entertaining comment thread on the BBC’s website.  Mostly, it consists of Android users complaining that the BBC releases apps on iOS first. But the BBC comes back with a very … Continue reading →

I like Chris Taylor’s post on barriers to effective BPM. He lists three of the key problems for BPM initiatives, and it reminded me of some of the issues customers have often confronted in adopting BPM. The first problem he … Continue reading →

Steve Denning offers interesting analysis in his article on Forbes, “Why Apple and GE Are Bringing Back Manufacturing“, as well as a harsh judgment against out-sourcing, calling it “the most short-sighted business decision in history”. He recounts that Apple is … Continue reading →