The early reviews of IBM BPM 7.5 were out last week, while IBM Impact was still in full swing.  It seems that the analysts in attendance were of differing opinions about the strength of IBM’s update to 7.5 – with Clay Richardson disappointed, and the other analysts ranging from reassured to impressed.

Clay’s review (“IBM Adds Fresh Coat Of Paint And New Tires To BPM Offering, But Still Needs To Rev Engine“) starts off:

So far, IBM is following the product integration roadmap John Rymer and I laid out in our report published immediately following IBM’s acquisition of Lombardi.

I’m sure IBM looks at it as, they were following their own roadmap and some of the points just happen to coincide with what analysts were clamoring for. One thing that the analyst community doesn’t seem to be comfortable with is that IBM doesn’t say much about future releases – they cite disclosure rules – and they only announce releases within the same quarter they’re to be released.  But beyond that, I think it is quite right that the decision about *how* to integrate Lombardi and WPS had not been finalized at this time last year.

With today’s announcement, IBM checks off the first point of integration on our list: establishing a single repository across Lombardi Teamworks and Websphere Process Server. With Business Process Manager V7.5, IBM will deliver a single repository for process assets that leverages Lombardi’s impressive “snapshot” version management and governance capabilities, providing a unified approach to administering and reusing process and integration assets.

I imagine that this retrofit to WPS and integration designer was actually quite a lot of work – and likely addressed the hardest technical parts of the integration of these two products.  But Clay goes on to say:

Although IBM has done a great job of delivering a unified repository, the core BPM engines and development environments will continue as standalone and separate entities — at least for BPM V7.5. While this is not surprising — we predicted that it would take three to four years for IBM to completely integrate Lombardi and WPS into a single unfied environment — we expected IBM to communicate a strategy or vision for merging the engines as part of this announcement.

I think this is a distinction that won’t matter to users.  It might surprise Clay to know that Lombardi, since 2005, effectively had two engines under the hood.  But it certainly never felt that way to users.  And with the integrated rules engine in IBM BPM 7.5, you could say it has 4 engines.  The point is – as long as the functionality works well together, this distinction won’t matter to process authors.  There’s also an option to deploy the whole stack into a single VM – particularly useful for developer machines.  Most people won’t quibble over different sections of code running inside a VM.  After all, an engine is just a body of code that transforms inputs into outputs based on current state plus a model which provides context.  A good BPMS will have more than one such body of code.  Even a good rule suite will have more than one engine.

So the issue in the future isn’t how many engines IBM will have embedded in its BPM suite.  The questions to ask are:

1. Will future versions feel like one product or two or more products.  Clearly the direction is to make IBM BPM feel like one product.
2. Will new versions of IBM BPM provide the same transformations of input to output given the same state and model context.

Information Week ran a story that reads very much like Clay’s:

IBM’s approach can be contrasted with that of Oracle, which took a decisive step in 2010 when it integrated the AquaLogic BPM system it acquired with BEA with its own legacy BPM product. That move yielded a single product and a clear roadmap, but it also forced existing customers of both products to do considerable migration work to move forward.

Except that when their article contrasts IBM and Oracle, it fails to mention that Oracle bought BEA in January 2008, nearly 3 years earlier (Clay, however, was more fair in his comparison).  And yet the expectation is that IBM provide this transformation in a year.

But while Clay was focused on the need to consolidate engines, others focused on the market signals IBM was sending.

As Bruce Silver wrote in his rebuttal:

Some have called it just “a new coat of paint” on the existing offerings, because the (Lombardi) Process Designer and the (WPS) Integration Designer tools are both still there, and both runtime engines are still there as well.  But that misses the point.  Where IBM last year was pushing separate fit-for-purpose BPMSs – something nobody really wants – they now can offer a single BPMS that has the combined functionality of WPS and WLE.

I agree with Bruce – at a detail-level, it also ignores the interface makeover WPS Integration Designer got, to match the repository unification (which added significant versioning functionality to WPS).   At a big picture level, it misses the point, which Bruce makes:

Beyond that, this announcement represents a major shift in IBM’s strategy for addressing the BPM marketplace.  You might even call it a palace coup:  the Lombardi/human/business-centric value system overthrowing the old WebSphere/integration/developer-centric value system, or even a BPM perspective rising above the SOA perspective.  Given the existing installed-base investment on the two sides, this is truly a wag-the-dog moment.

I think this represents IBM’s move to capture the business-oriented perspective of the BPM market – something that was part product functionality, part product design, and partly go-to-market.  Bruce’s summary:

And here’s the thing:  it’s ONE product.  You get it all.  Business-empowered design, what-you-see-is-what-you-execute, and instant playback.  SOA and integration services.  Powerful business rules. [...] but I think everyone is surprised they got it done already.

Bruce has another post on the BPMS Endgame which predicts that IBM will focus on BPMN2 engine work for the 8.0 release timeframe.

Neil Ward-Dutton also rebuts Forrester’s assessment:

However when you look deeper, the release of Business Process Manager marks a significant departure for IBM, and warrants a thorough reappraisal of IBM’s competitive position.

He also hits on a few key points of integration:

1. Unified repository toolset
2. Unified governance toolset
3. Single Deployment runtime foundation (no more copying EAR and WAR files around)
4. Single Administration environment

Better yet:

Business Process Manager makes the relationship clear: Process Designer is aimed at business-facing teams collaborating to optimise business processes; Integration Designer is aimed at IT teams working to orchestrate the integration of systems to support the optimisation of those processes. Again – these two environments work together through the use of a shared repository and governance toolset.

Tony Baer also humorously commented on the Lombardification of IBM BPM.  Unlike David Brakoniecki, I couldn’t resist revisiting the analyst reviews.  David points out a few of the “unsung features” in the 7.5 release:

• A powerful REST API which in theory should allow better and richer user interfaces to be built
• A new charting technology (based on iLog jViews, I think)

I’d add to that the deployment characteristics – the fact that we will be able to build solutions with both the Process Designer and the Integration Designer – and then manage and deploy them from the same repository, to the same run-time clusters – is a big improvement over the state of the art in the previous versions.  And it appears to be a big improvement in how both WLE and WPS previously managed deployments.

Sandy Kemsley took more time to write her analysis, and it demonstrates her extra time to reflect.  I liked the shout out to our sleuthing out the announcement ahead of time (maybe IBM should include me on their analyst briefings so that we’ll be embargoed as well!…).  She writes:

It’s important to look at how the IBM organization has realigned to allow for the new product release: Phil Gilbert, former president and CTO of Lombardi, now has overall responsibility for all of WebSphere BPM – including both the former Lombardi and WebSphere BPM products – plus ILOG rules management. Neil Ward-Dutton referred to this as the reverse takeover of IBM by Lombardi; when I had a chance for a 1:1 with Phil at Impact, I told him that we’d all bet that he would be gone from IBM after a year. He admitted that he originally thought so too, until they gave him the opportunity to do exactly what he knew needed to be done: bring together all of the IBM BPM offerings into a unified offering. This new product announcement is the beginning of that unification, but they still have a ways to go.

When the buyout happened I often heard this argument that Phil would be gone within a year.  But, living in Austin, I’ve seen a few promising startups purchased by IBM in my day (Tivoli and Webify just to name two), and I’ve also known Phil for… 10-12 years now.  My sense was that IBM has the scope and opportunity on the big stage that Phil would really relish taking advantage of.  IBM is big enough to make the right role for someone like Phil – in a way that very few companies can.  If they were willing to do it, I felt like they had a chance to hang on to Phil.  I felt the same way about most of the people acquired with Lombardi – some would leave, but IBM has the reach and size and money to keep people if it chooses (and if it acts in time).

Regarding that “two engines” argument from Clay:

However, from the customer/user standpoint, it’s wrapped into a single Process Server, so if IBM ever gets around to refactoring into a single engine, that could be made fairly transparent to their customers, but would likely have the benefit of reducing IBM’s internal engineering costs around maintaining one versus two engines.

I think Sandy hits it just right.  The issue isn’t how many engines are under the hood – it is what does it feel like to the customer.  Regarding the lack of a cloud offering for BPM: “They need to rethink their strategy on this, and stop offering expensive custom hosted or private ‘cloud’ platforms as their only cloud alternatives.”  Again, I think Sandy’s right. It is hard to tell in what time frame it really starts to hurt, but the trend lines are there, and they’re plain to see.

Great reviews and perspectives to soak up.  Nothing I like more than reading these competing perspectives and conclusions and then reconciling with my own opinions and the impressions of the BP3 team.

Much has now been written about IBM BPM 7.5.  We’ve blogged about it before Impact, and we’ve obliquely referenced it since Impact.  And we’ve enjoyed reading all the other reviews out there.

So we won’t rehash the feature by feature, blow-by-blow nature of product reviews (we’ll save that for another post!).  Let’s just take a big step back and look at the big picture, and I’ll tell you how we, at BP3, really feel about it.

I’m a Lombardi Customer… Now What?

First, for Lombardi customers.  There’s no doubt that this is A Good Thing.  The Lombardi Way has prevailed within IBM in a sense – the experience of IBM BPM is going to feel a lot like Lombardi – and yet a lot of time and effort is going into things Lombardi could never afford to invest in (configuration management, integration).  ILOG baked into the product line means no more guessing how best to handle rules issues in your processes.  There’s a clear migration path up to 7.5, and clear software entitlements. But most of all, IBM BPM makes Websphere manageable for the customers who really wanted BPM rather than Websphere (in other words, the app server is behind the curtain, not in front of it).

Most of all, Lombardi Customers can breathe a sigh of relief that IBM is not throwing out the golden goose that lays the eggs. From a Lombardi point of view, it is going to look like lots of extra goodies in the bag, with very few downsides from a feature-function point of view.

But I’m a WPS Customer… Now What?

WPS Customers should also be in good shape.  While the migration to 7.5 does not automatically convey the Process Designer, they’re existing WPS efforts should migrate up just fine (the WPS engine is intact).  If you add Process Designer to the mix, you’ll find you now have a great BPM tooling for addressing use cases that might have been more challenging in the WPS environment.  The new tooling should be more accessible to your team, and make it easier to address a broader set of use cases.  Most WPS customers won’t breathe a sigh of relief because (a) they always assumed WPS would dominate the ultimate BPM solution, or (b) because they are happy to have access to the Lombardi-style version of BPM.

I was about to Buy IBM WPS or Lombardi… Now What?

Just buy IBM BPM.  Your choices got simpler.  If you need to design integration flows with clear atomicity and transactional semantics, go for the advanced version of IBM BPM.  Otherwise, you’ll probably want to start out on the Standard version if you’re a larger company, and express if you’re running a pilot or smaller organization.  You no longer have to worry about betting on the wrong horse.  This is something we can give IBM credit for – their product strategy didn’t involve abandoning either of their main BPM product lines or leaving behind either set of customers.

I Work for IBM… Is This a Good Thing?

You bet it is.  Now you can sell and deliver on one value proposition with conceptually minor permutations.  No more product conflict.  The WPS heritage assets are now defined toward a different use case (automated workflows and integrations) than the heritage Lombardi assets (Human-centric BPM, if you will).  Build your processes in process designer, and build integration flows and lights-out processing in the Integration Designer.  And integrate the two in the Process Designer.

I’m an Analyst Covering BPM… Now What?

Well, I guess your job got a little easier.  IBM really has one BPM offering you need to analyze, rather than 2-3.  And it seems to capture the best attributes of Lombardi, WPS, and ILOG.  As Phil Gilbert said to us at bpmCamp shortly after the acquisition: “IBM clearly has the assets and technology to put together the best BPM offering in the market.”  The only question was: would they?  Would they actually put those assets front and center and create the offering?

Well they have.  Adjust those magic quadrants, waves, and rankings.

I’m a Lombardi Consultant or Consulting Firm… Now What?

This is nothing but good news as far as BP3 is concerned.  We couldn’t be happier with the direction IBM took with BPM 7.5.  Including dropping all the awkward naming of previous versions.  We believe we are the best Lombardi BPM services provider, and we aim to continue that record by aiming to be the best IBM BPM services provider.  We think IBM put the right horse (Process Designer) in front of the cart (Integration Designer), and we’re really looking forward to leveraging all the new features of 7.5 (to review: ILOG rules, Integration Designer, Profile Manager, Business Monitor, etc.).  We’re incredibly relieved that they didn’t EOL Lombardi.

And I think there will be a lot of WPS customers who will want to understand, better, what this whole Lombardi point-of-view is all about.  We think they’ll want to talk to someone like BP3.

It’s All About the Experience

Importantly, this release keeps the focus on the things that matter in BPM deployments – time to market, ease of use for the 80% case, ability to go as deep as need be in the 20% case, and a focus on the “business” view of BPM, not just the IT view.

But most importantly, this release signals that the engine(s) don’t matter… What matters is the EXPERIENCE.

IBM (and specifically Phil Gilbert) is planting the flag and saying the experience around BPM matters more than which specific technologies are behind it, it even matters more than the Websphere branding in front of the old names.  In the future, if IBM resolves the offering down to a single engine, it would likely be transparent to us because that engine would be running off of the repository we have today, and running behind the user experience we have today (or, an improved version of the same).  Do I really care if the code running my Process Designer-authored process is Lombardi heritage or WPS heritage?  I don’t really care, so long as it still behaves the same way.  In other words, so long as it implements the “interface” and gives me that “WYSIWYG” feel, I’m happy.

Much has been made by Clay Richardson and others about “multiple BPM engines.”  But trust me when I say that these engines consist of a relatively small percentage of the total lines of code involved in these products.  It is like the algorithmic core of a bigger software entity.  No one is suggesting that the ILOG engine has to be consolidated with the BPM engines to save cost.  It doesn’t make any sense to do that, does it?  So why consolidate the BPEL and BPMN engines? (Again, it may just not make sense to merge these two entities in a meaningful way).  IBM feels that it has already merged them in the two ways that matter most:

1. the BPM “engines” install, run, and operate as one software process or entity, inside a single JVM.
2. the BPM “engines” are unified behind common UI treatment, and common data models, reporting infrastructure, and rules interactions.  In a sense, they “behave the same”.  Users of IBM BPM won’t think of these things as separate engines. They might think of the modeling as separate user cases, but they won’t need to care, nor will they care, about what kind of “engine” is processing the model.  The diagram and details attached to it will define all the behavioral semantics.

I also had another takeaway from Impact, on the BPM front.  ACM is going to be a subset of the BPM offering, from a product point of view.  I saw two customer presentations that covered case management style dynamic processes that were home grown on top of their Lombardi implementations.  They were very interesting, and not that complicated.  And if these scenarios can be built on top of the platform, by customers… Certainly these are use cases that IBM could include in their BPM product offering – either as part of the IBM BPM offering or as part of the BlueworksLive offering.  Or both.  That’s the thing with IBM – they don’t have to choose, they can leverage the genius of the ‘and’. And if IBM doesn’t do it, someone like BP3 will.

Where Do We Go from Here?

Nothing has validated our investment in Lombardi more than the release of IBM BPM 7.5.  I think John Reynold’s post on the subject captures how I feel as well.  This is important. As pivotal as finding out last year at Impact that IBM was truly getting behind its new Lombardi BPM software.  This year it is pivotal in that we’re finding out that the last year has been one of real investment in the platform and real results.  This isn’t just window dressing, it is substance. I understand why people unfamiliar with the workings of Lombardi and WPS might feel differently, but with respect, they’re wrong.  If you know how it works under the hood, this is significant.

…and Thanks!

Given that this is the culmination of hard work from so many people that I hold in high regard, it seems appropriate to say thanks.  I was recruited to Lombardi by Toby Cappello, Scott Bonneau,  and Phil Gilbert – not to mention Rainer Ribback and Brian Witherly.  And Lombardi allowed me to meet Lance Gibbs, and Flournoy Henry, among others.  We built the services team I wanted to build at Lombardi – geographically dispersed (localized), highly skilled, and very experienced consultants.  It was completely counter to the prevailing trends at the time: off-shore (remote), commoditized/cheap (lower skill level), and inexperienced consultants.  The results:

• a much more successful, and mature, customer base
• a better feedback loop into the product development team
• a great talent pool for pulling into other senior or leadership roles in the company
• lower financial risk to the company, at the price of somewhat lower margins on services.

Our competitors that relied on the prevailing strategies ended up with smaller companies, fewer referenceable and less mature customers.  I think the Lombardi brand, in consulting circles within BPM, will continue to be strong for years to come.  I want to thank Lombardi for giving me that opportunity to put my best ideas to work for the business.  And learning from round 1, we’re applying these ideas to BP3 as well – and earning the rewards of this long-term view.

Everyone who was a part of Lombardi, if they’re still paying attention, should feel a greater sense of accomplishment with this release, than they likely did with the original sale of the company to IBM.   Kudos as well to IBM, you have truly figured out how to leverage a fine asset on the product side, and I have no doubt about the dividends it will pay in the years to come.

OK folks. Back to work.

Joe Heller, CIO of Caterpillar, gave an outstanding lesson in lasting business partnerships at IBM’s Impact conference on Day 1 (Monday, April 11th, 2011).  Joe was highly quotable (“There is dirt in the wrong place all over the world, and we are there to put it in the right place”), but beneath these quotes is a deep sense of business value over time.

And he wasn’t shy about sharing real dollar values in savings.

I think David Brakoniecki sums it up best in his post:

83 years of Partnership – Caterpillar has had a relationship with IBM for 83 years.
From a business perspective, I find this mind-blowing.  Having worked the last 12 years in small businesses and start-ups, I’m lucky if I can point to a continuing business relationship that goes back 5 years.
In recent times, the recession has claimed several major brands so it’s easy to forget that long-term business partnerships are not only possible but also worth having.  It’s mpressive that the CIO of Caterpillar was willing to stand on stage and say that IBM has never disappointed him in his 38 years of working together.

It is a pretty remarkable partnership.

Other thoughts on Day 1′s General session:

• The video wall is truly massive.  The room itself is massive.  And I can’t imagine how they’ll fit more than 8000 people in one room next year.
• It is also interesting how cultural differences come out in a conference like this.  At one point, Marie Weick, in the middle of a very well-delivered segment, repeated some advice once given to her: “In your career you can only move forward or fall behind”.  From the perspective of someone outside the corporate ladder-climbing world, this sounds off – a career is more than two dimensions measured forward and back.  I would wish for everyone to realize that early in their career rather than late.
• Dr. Burns has one of the most compelling cases for application of technology – pediatric care.  It is well worth watching on the livestream video.
• It takes an immense amount of coffee to serve this many people.  Don’t expect to find coffee at the coffee stations right outside the main event.
• Impact Day 1 kicked off on an odd note, with the opening musical performance.  At some point three of the musicians switched from instruments to iPads to finish their musical number (and of course, you can’t tell if they’re actually playing or if it was all pre-recorded, but one wonders).  It was an interesting choice to kick off the conference.

Notes from the Rest of Day 1

After the General Session, I wanted to see what IBM was saying about “which BPM to use” in one of the early sessions of the day.  Sometimes it is good to get the official positioning so that you understand how far out of alignment your own opinions are.

IBM’s positioning of BlueworksLive is:

1. No training to use
2. Social Application, which helps scale social talk across the business
3. Doc and discovery tool that is easy to use
4. Automate simple processes

At this point, I noticed the room was full.  More than full.  This would continue in virtually every BPM session that touched on Lombardi heritage at all.  IBM’s conference organizers continue to under-estimate the demand for Lombardi-BPM-themed content – but we can hope that next year will be different under the IBM BPM branding.

Someone described BlueworksLive as “Powerpoint for process applications”.

There is an open question for IBM, which remains unanswered: How to support the partner community with this product?  IBM really depends on its partner channel to expose customers to products.  Unfortunately BlueworksLive leaves a lot to be desired from a partner point of view (one could even argue that the automation is competitive with partner service offerings).  I think the answer is to simply add a few features that will make this product more partner-friendly:

• the ability to move models from one corporate account to another (so that I can move drafts created in my sandbox to the customer’s BlueworksLive spaces).
• an expert BPMN diagramming mode that allows expert modelers to be more precise in their process definitions.
• more features like the “playback” feature that was introduced in the last BlueworksLive update.

Next, IBM positioned IBM BPM as targeted at the high volume, repeatable processes, while BlueworksLive is focused on the long tail processes.  Both products offer “tooling that is easy to use” (relatively speaking), “transactional integrity and scale”,  “unified environment for governance, visibility, and control”, and versioning.  (Of course, they achieve this in very different ways and targeted at different processes and users.)

Next up, I went to a hands-on lab for BlueworksLive. But, being a newcomer to Impact, it wasn’t what I expected, so I said hi to a few people and then went to take a certification test in another room.

Lunch was a forgettable affair in the trade show area.  We left lunch quickly and met up with the analysts and bloggers who were sequestered on the first floor of the conference getting the low-down on all things IBM.  Flournoy and I were able to meet with Neil Ward-Dutton , and then he was nice enough to call out Sandy Kemsley (nice to meet for the first time!), Clay Richardson, and Bruce Silver.  It was great to hear their early impressions on the IBM BPM 7.5 release first hand – it definitely added color to the blogs they wrote later.  We shared notes and there was, generally, consensus (except for Clay).   It is too bad they are isolated from the rest of the conference, I think it would be really interesting for them to see how other people interpret what they’re hearing in typical Impact sessions (I imagine they got some of this if they stayed through til Tuesday or Wednesday).

In the afternoon I saw the “Measuring Quality” session by Fahad Osmani and Sean Pizel, of IBM.  It was a wide-ranging presentation, best to get the presentation slides rather than rely on my notes.  They suggest some new measurements for BPM projects, and pointed out that programs that deliver value, repeatedly, almost always turn into successes.

We then went into a meeting with folks from the IBM partner enablement community.  We were impressed by how motivated IBM’s partner groups were to make sure BP3 is successful as an IBM partner.  It was an intense and productive conversation, and we left with concrete follow ups.  The quality of the meetings their partner group set up for us was quite impressive.

After the partner session, I made it to the second Lincoln Trust presentation of the day (I had heard great reviews of their first session of the day, just prior).  In this session they talked about their strategy for addressing a high volume of processes (100′s) with a small team and small budget.  The answer, of course, was to have standard lightweight process definitions that could represent more than one of these processes.  The key outcomes they were looking for were tracking (for visibility), standardization, and governance.  By implementing lightweight processes that could act more generically, they gave themselves a lot more data about each process before investing in building something more technically demanding.

The Lincoln Trust approach reminds me quite a lot of the Banco Espirito (BES) approach.  At this point, the team dove into technical details behind their implementation (great content).

We had dinner with a fellow BPM practitioner and long-time colleague, and then headed over to iTKO’s party at Tao Beach, where we were able to catch up with friends at their company and IBMers who also joined in.  iTKO was a Diamond sponsor of Impact – quite a step up from last year.  They made a big splash and they’ve had a great year.  Kudos to the iTKO team for a big contribution to the quality of the conference.

At the end of Day 1, I was motivated and exhausted. It was time to rest up for Day 2.

Day 2 of IBM Impact started off well.  I went down to breakfast and sat with a senior member of IBM technical staff, as well as a few gentlemen visiting from Farmer’s Insurance.  Good conversation over a light breakfast, followed by the keynote.

Katie Lindendoll was our emcee for Day 2.  Steve Mills followed her with a fluid, yet technical, presentation of IBM software in the context of 100 years of IBM history.   A couple of key points jumped out at me and into my notes from the session (which were light, because Steve does a good job demanding your attention while he’s talking):

• You should own your own process and your own data.  This is a theme IBM hit on several times.  It seems to support two legs of IBM’s business – on-premise software and “private clouds”.  But it also is a more philosophical point that IBM believes a move to the cloud should not give up your control over process and data.
• Your processes power your company.  (I didn’t count how many times he said the word “process” – but I should have.  It might have been a record for IBM keynotes).
• “Not lots of new things in IT, but there are lots of improving things in IT”.  Well said.
• Big focus on reducing TCO – Most IT organizations spend 80% of their budget just maintaining what they have in production.
• Hammering on atomicity – transactional accuracy – as a key underpinning to good (and accurate) processes (“We saw this problem coming, and understood what people would want to do with it”)

Next up was Phil Gilbert, formerly CTO and President of Lombardi, now VP of BPM at IBM.  He starts with the thought that we shouldn’t be talking about transforming.  We should start with “transformed” – as in, if you’re sitting in the audience, you’ve already been transformed by the economic and technical environment.  A couple of key stats:

• 50Billion devices connected to the internet by 2020 (Nokia estimate)
• 70% of businesses outsource a key process
• $488B lost to inefficiencies each year
• 20% of revenues over next 5 years will come from unknown sources

The chief argument: complexity is increasing, at an increasing rate.  And yet IT spend is flat or down over the last few years, with no sign of significant change.

The livestream is here, and embedded below (fast forward to 23:30 for Phil’s contribution):

Phil did a good job rebutting a key argument often used against BPM – putting power in the hands of the business does not mean turning business users into developers.  Just like we didn’t turn attorneys into typists when we introduced computers, and yet they all manage their own documents and have much higher personal productivity than we could have imagined in the era of typists.

Four key themes for the talks today were re-emphasized:  Visibility, Governance, Simplicity, and Power.

I liked his thought on six-sigma: “Doing improvement without assuming technology just is NOT where we are today in the real world.  We need to account for the technology as well in our work.”  Something we’ve been arguing as well, since at least 2007.

Then he introduced IBM BPM 7.5 – the joining of Websphere Lombardi Edition and WPS.  My old colleague Brandon Baxter was brought in to assist with the demo.  New branding/interface on the Integration Designer to make it match the Process Designer.  Phil lays it out afterward:  “They have to not just work together.  They have to work the same”

They also showed of revamped critical path management functionality, showing projected due dates and changes to the process and the implied affect on due date.  Projections can be optimistic, pessimistic, or historically most likely dates.

Phil ended with a note on tying many products together (paraphrasing from my notes):

It isn’t a weakness to have overlapping technical solutions for common – but not identical – problem spaces.

A 75-year partnership with Caterpillar did not just start with a computer.  Enabling a new platform for business.  And a commitment to bring along the things that came before.  We’re not dogmatic, but we are leaders.

Following Phil’s talk was a surprisingly good roundtable with two executives from Nationwide Insurance and two executives from Verizon Wireless.  Pretty good shout-outs to ILOG on this panel.

Wrapping up Day 2 was Scott Klososky.  And his first point was something I can get behind- that technology is art not engineering.  In light of this, and the changes to our lives that technology is weaving, we need leaders with new skills – and they need to add these skills at a faster rate than we’ve been seeing.  They need to be able to predict the future accurately and be visionary, accurately.  And then invest the time, money, and people to get there in time!

He then emphasized augmented intelligence, long term leadership (short term leadership is just “management”), and how to leverage social media to stay well-read in your area of expertise.

 Great way to start Day 2 at Impact.

Other Notes from Day 2

Later, I attended a session on UI-building on IBM BPM. Unfortunately so much time was spent on rehashing the normal ways of building UIs that we didn’t get enough time in the session to really see something different and new, though we did get a very deep technical dive on some of the approaches for different types of UIs.

In the afternoon, I spent some time with David Brakoniecki (of Axispoint) sharing notes on sessions we’d been to at the conference, and the market in general. It was the first time we’d met in person (previously only on Twitter) so I guess we now have to admit David is a real live person.

Then we hit Clay Richardson’s session on why BPM is hot. Though it seemed more focused on why BPM efforts are sometimes “hitting the wall”. Short version: lots of running analogies, a focus on the personality “types” you have in BPM initiatives (though I’m not fond of all the short-hand names like “Guru” and “Prodigy”). A key point of emphasis was active leadership from either the business owner, business analyst, or process architect. A process analyst cannot be an order taker – has to be more assertive and involved.

After that was a very good session on BPM Architectures by Zach Roadhouse and Karri Carlson-Neumann – in which they described how IBM BPM 7.5 now takes full advantage of Websphere’s Profile Manager. This allows much better, repeatable, control over exactly how IBM BPM is deployed, without requiring the writing of a great many scripts. They reviewed scenarios from the trivial (all-in-one-JVM) to the complex (clustering multiple services independently and layering them across your servers). It has all the advantages of Ant scripts (accuracy, repeatability), without requiring us to actually learn all the ins and outs of manipulating Websphere via Ant.

The three of us (Lance, Flournoy, and myself) finally were able to meet in the same place – at dinner.

Sandy Kemsley has good coverage of the other conference going on this week in the BPM space: AppianWorld.

Unlike Sandy, we weren’t about to try to do two conferences in one week!

Three of her blogs on the conference:

• Gartner Keynote
• Matt Calkins, future direction of Appian, and
• Malcolm Ross with a product update

I think where Appian is making their bet is obvious:  SaaS deployment in the cloud, and a new mobile-compatible interface, Tempo.  Tempo is certainly better than any of the other BPM interfaces I’ve seen on an iOS device.  Hopefully other BPM vendors will wake up to the need to really innovate on the mobile interfaces.  I worry that companies like IBM, in particular, worry too much about being cross-platform on all the mobile devices, rather than taking a more Evernote strategy of being device specific with the edge, and either in the cloud or highly compatible on the server. (The important part is the re-use on the server, not the re-use of UI bits on the client).

Today’s sessions included a competitive case study session reviewing 4-5 case studies of competitive wins, and sharing techniques.

It seems to me that you could sum up winning against competition as: Don’t be a jerk. Care about your customer. Provide great customer service. And have a good product.  Oh, and if you can find an unequivocal differentiator, drive that nail all the way through the deal.

It was pretty good stuff but very anecdotal in nature and not content that I feel comfortable conveying verbatim.

Lunch + Keynote was the usual round of buffet plus happy news from the front of the room – record registration at Impact (8000), record partner registration (I forget if it was 800 or 850 business partners registered), more sessions than ever, etc. Clearly IBM is on something of a roll.  We heard from several of IBM’s execs, and then they also gave out business partner awards.

After the break, I went to listen to Dave Marquard’s discussion of the current BPM offering and the value propositions of each piece.  Good session and unfortunately I had to leave before it was over.  But I don’t think anyone minded as it was standing room only at that point and someone was happy to take my chair!  Clearly some interest in this BPM stuff.

I took a break and then, when Lance Gibbs, our fearless CEO, arrived, we headed down to the expo center for the general reception, where we were able to catch up with a few colleagues at IBM, as well as a couple partners in PrincetonBlue, Centric, and Apex.  Next, it was on to dinner… and then to meet Flournoy Henry (directly from the airport) at the Penn & Teller show.  I was suitably impressed by their act, and we were treated to great booth seating.  Thanks again to the two of them for giving us tickets to the show!

Looking forward to the keynote tomorrow morning.  Not looking forward to the early wake-up call!

Tomorrow Today is the Business Partner summit at IBM Impact, and then Monday we have the beginning of the Main Event – Keynotes and Comedians and Music and all.

I flew in early this year so that I could attend the whole Business Partner Summit.

On my flight from Austin, I gave my seat up to a guy much larger than me, who clearly needed the extra leg room on our Southwest flight.  Turns out that he, and the guy behind him, were Penn and Teller.  Small world.  And just like that, I found myself the holder of tickets to their Sunday night show.

Now that I’m here, I’m looking forward to catching up with a few friends.  I met up with two current colleagues in the BPM world who also worked with me at my first employer in Austin.  It is a small world!  One of them works in partnerships at IBM and the other helps run an IBM partner overseas.  And we all used to work together in the same building 10 years ago, for a different company.  I used the afternoon to check out the spa and decompress before things really get busy here, and then it was out to dinner with aforementioned colleagues.

The weather is cooler than expected here in Vegas, but I’m not complaining.  I already feel a bit behind the curve on sleep just trying to keep up with normal business and family communications and also get out of the room and meet up with colleagues. If you’re at Impact and you’d like to meet up, drop me a line or look for me on twitter (@sfrancisatx).

More to come from the Business Partner Summit sessions.

Steve Blank was the star speaker among an incredibly strong cast of speakers at the Lean Startup sessions at SXSW-interactive.  The room was packed, and SXSW volunteers were keeping more people out in the halls to obey fire codes.  There would have been people sitting on stairs and on the floor if allowed.  I guess there were a few of those, but mostly just near the power outlets (people who didn’t have iPads to take notes on).

Steve speaks as well (or better) than he writes.  His talk was engaging and energizing.  He started his talk (and a blog post I’ll quote here, based on the same topic) discussing a quick history of the four waves of startup investing:

• The Golden Age (1970 – 1995): Build a growing business with a consistently profitable track record (after at least 5 quarters,) and go public when it’s time.
• Dot.com Bubble (1995-2000): “Anything goes” as public markets clamor for ideas, vague promises of future growth, and IPOs happen absent regard for history or profitability.
• Lean Startups/Back to Basics (2000-2010): No IPO’s, limited VC cash, lack of confidence and funding fuels “lean startup” era with limited M&A and even less IPO activity.
• The New Bubble: (2011 – 2014): Here we go again….

Not everyone agrees that there is a bubble.  Of course, in order to disarm the “is it a bubble or is it not” discussion, he simply says “if you believe it IS a bubble, then the question is, are the rules different in a bubble than they are otherwise?  Are the rules different now, than they were for the previous ten years?”

It is hard to argue that the rules aren’t different.  Or at least that some tactics that would have been counter-productive or futile before, are now quite effective and productive.

The basic argument is that from 2001 to 2010, the Lean Startup was the way to go – conserving capital, focusing on learning and iterating, and finding a business model that could scale.  As he put it:

Startups began to recognize that they weren’t merely a smaller version of a large company. Rather they understood that a startup is a temporary organization designed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model. This meant that startups needed their own tools, techniques and methodologies distinct from those used in large companies. The concepts of Minimum Viable Product and the Pivot entered the lexicon along with Customer Discovery and Validation.

So far so good.  But what has changed in 2011, and going forward toward 2014?

1. Breathtaking scale.  The addressable market for startups is vastly bigger than it once was.  And so is the ability for startups to serve that scale (via Amazon web services, for example). Mark Suster commented on this in his SXSW recap.
2. New Exits.  There are simply better options for startups to exit now, than there have been over the last 10 years.  IPOs are back on the table.  Acquisitions are at higher valuations.  And the companies that are IPO’ing will have real profits and revenue, and massive customer #’s.
3. Better tools are available – AWS, S3, Google App Engine, Rackspace, etc.  These scaling tools weren’t there 10 years ago.  Moreover, developer productivity is up with new tools like Ruby, Rails, etc.

It seems that the key change Steve is advocating for startups is visibility.  That previously, press exposure might have hurt you by locking you into the wrong path, but going forward, press would help you by expanding your user base, and increasing your visibility for potential acquirers.

But of course, all this advice only applies if you believe there is a new Internet bubble.

There were some great quotes in the talk.  My favorite:  “There are no 10 year startups. There are only 2 year startups attached to 8 year failures.”

Steve pulls no punches, but he does deliver his critiques with a smile and sense of humor.

Slideshow, embedded below, also tells the story quite well:

 
There’s also a great Q&A with Steve Blank on GigaOm – in which he discusses how the total available market has exploded in size, and how he believes a great CEO with a great product could have come out of SXSW-interactive highly visible and talked about. In other words, he still sees SXSW as a place where you could launch.

I was pretty surprised at how impressed Mark Suster was with SXSW-interactive.  I mean, I understand why it was such a great experience for me and many others in my shoes, but I admit to feeling that, surely for VCs and folks like Mark, SXSW is a little annoyingly out of the way or annoying in that it is such a throng of people.  Or something like that.  But no:

SXSW was magic. I can’t imagine having been at a better event. I was listening to NPR on my drive in yesterday morning. They were talking about the music portion of the show. A band was saying, “I can’t believe that at one event you could get access to the band managers of Lady Gaga, FooFighters, etc. Every night you are just hanging out with big name bands and the teams around them that brought them to their peak.”

I couldn’t have said it any better replacing music with tech.

His post has a lot of name-dropping – but you know, some of those names are friends of mine and local Austinites (more prominent in startup circles, for sure, than I am).  So there’s a certain “reality” to what he’s saying that I can relate to.  It was nice to see some Austinites make his list of people he enjoyed meeting with.  Of course, who wouldn’t enjoy the conversations he had?  Steve Blank? Dave McClure? Gary V? I was just happy to get to see some of these folks present and hold court at SXSW.

I need to write a post explaining why the Lean Startup has relevance to BPM, in a logical, specific way.  But before I do that, I want to get the raw impressions and data I’ve collected from watching sessions at SXSW and then I’ll post my analysis.  Because much of this content is available on the web, the key attraction to the event was to hear it live, rather than Memorex – much of the analysis is the same, but with fresh input.

Eric Ries kicked off the SXSW Lean Startup event with a good introduction to Lean startups.  My notes from the session (rough notes):

• Entrepreneurs are everywhere
• Lean Startup is about Validated Learning:
  • Build
  • Measure
  • Learn
• (scribbled something about innovation)

Next, Eric talked about Scientific Management, and Fred Taylor. On the one hand, a scientific approach to business is generally a good thing, and on the other, his approach falls on its face in startups.  The argument seems to be, that in startups, we would collectively benefit from a more scientific, rigorous approach (rather than the trial and error that often happens, and rather than the waterfall approach we often see).  But also, that scientific approach has to account for the fact that the both the problem and solution are not well-known. Taylor assumes the problem and solution are well understood.

The key idea is the Pivot.  His example:  Groupon was building “petition++” and made a huge pivot to daily deals.  Their first daily deal was for pizza at the pizza place in their building.  A very humble beginning, but also a very useful way to start testing their concept in the real world.

So the goal is to reduce time required to pivot (rephrasing: reduce the time required to learn what you need to know, so that you can pivot effectively sooner rather than later).

The Waterfall/Taylor approach just doesn’t work well in startup land (I had visions of Phil Gilbert’s old bucket brigade slides when I saw Eric’s slides).  Eric points out he was kind of annoyed to find out that even manufacturing doesn’t follow a Tayloristic approach anymore – they’re using Lean.  So why are people teaching software and engineering still teaching this approach that is proven to be wrong?

The problem with a waterfall approach: Achieving failure, on time, on budget, with high quality, good design.  Only one problem:  wrong product.

Deming and Ohno put the focus on the customer, and lean manufacturing as the way to get there.

Customer Develment + Agile Development

Agile Development was a big improvement to delivery models for software companies.  But even agile doesn’t work well, by itself, in startups.  It needed to be paired up with Customer Development (Steve Blank’s process for hypothesis testing your business model, at right).  Meanwhile, it becomes clearer when to employ the two key parts of a lean startup: the approach to unknown problems, and the approach to unknown solutions…

Unknown Problem, Unknown Solution

Not that executing these two models is necessarily easy, but it sure is a whole lot easier to do right if you know which situation you’re in.  If your problem is known, and solution is unknown, Agile development is a good choice. But if your problem is unknown as well, then you need to employ the customer development process to dig into what problem you’re really solving.

Eric described the cycles at IMVU, by way of example. And explained that the “pivot” is one cycle through the “build-measure-learn” loop.  A great quote was that “learning is the fundamental measure of progress” in a lean startup – not revenue, or users, or any other metric that a typical board might latch on to.

Translating to BPM terms: The pivot in business process management would be when we take what we learned from our last process improvement, measure what is really happening, and identify the new opportunities and tackle those.  In BPM we’re not pivoting the company hypothesis, just the hypothesis for where the bang-for-the-buck is in the process.

I particularly like his coverage of Lean myths:

1. Lean means cheap. On the contrary, lean is about speed much more than about cost.
2. Lean Startup is only for Web2.0 style companies. Actually, Lean Startup applies to all companies that face uncertainty in what the customers will want.
3. Lean Startups are bootstrapped. In fact, many lean startups are ambitious and can deploy large amounts of capital (see, Groupon).
4. Lean Startups replace vision with data. Actually, lean startups test the vision with real data. They still require vision!

Eric’s talk was followed by case studies on pivots by Pascal Louis-Perez (Wealthfront), Ash Maurya (USERcycle), Parker Thompson (Pivotal Labs).

Perhaps the most interesting nugget from these three case studies, with respect to the customers BP3 works with – was Pascal’s presentation on Wealthfront.  His company processes manages over $180MM.  And yet they have a continuous deployment setup – meaning they deploy changes to production as much as 30 times a day.  Their company puts lie to the idea that a highly regulated industry with very important financial outcomes can’t adopt a continuous deployment development model.  I’m not advocating that every Fortune 500 company do the same with BPM – but clearly there is a happy middle-ground between 18-month roll-outs and 30 times a day…  And whatever your number of days between deployments is, we should be looking at ways to reduce that number.

Ash Maurya was up next (slides here), and I admit to being surprised when he presented the use of kan ban boards to visualize the workflow of feature ideas (this is, truly, treating development of product as something that can be measured and improved and understood). He advocated moving only so fast as you can learn or aid the process of learning – that moving faster than that, or slower than that, amounts to waste (a big no-no in Lean thinking).

Parker Thompson, of Pivotal, advocated having a vision, but being humble and pragmatic in the near term.  If testing with users or customers proves that your vision isn’t getting traction, don’t assume you have the wrong test subjects, be willing to revisit your hypothesis and test different ideas.

Following SXSW-interactive, I found I had a collection of interesting bookmarks to resources from the conference.  I thought I’d share with everyone else who might (or might not) be interested :

First, we have everything tagged with SXSW on Slideshare.  Some great content – but buyer beware!

Next up, the Lean Startup folks pulled together a great collection of the content covered during the Lean Startup sessions.  Note that this link links to their 2011 content – which is more than just what was covered in SXSW, but it is pretty easy so far to discern which is which.

Next, Austin’s own Omar Gallega gives his 5 ways to fix SXSW next year. Generally I agree with his advice.  Except for one:  he recommends trimming panels by a third.  Quantity of panels isn’t the problem I was experiencing.  Almost every session I went to was jam-packed.  Fewer sessions means that each session needs a bigger room (on average) to accommodate the same # of people.  I’m not sure that’s the answer.  The solution to quality isn’t to prevent people from getting their panel in, so much as it is to make sure there is always quality content to compete. I don’t think there’s a good way to determine quality without stifling what makes SXSW great (for example, some of the presenters at the lean sessions were first tiem SXSW presenters).

If you want to read my favorite set of Tweets for the conference (Gary Chou asked for a TiVo for Tweets), you can look at Snap Bird’s capture of @elliotloh’s tweets.  Just keep in mind it is in reverse order…

Clay Richardson of Forrester covers SXSW-interactive as well.  He recaps three of the more interesting sessions (which represented interesting trends of conversation).

And these were just a few.  If you have other interesting resources you’ve run across please feel free to add to the comment stream!

Is this Shark too big to Jump?

Every year, attendees of SXSW ask if it has “jumped the shark” – usually a reference to out-of-control attendance, but also often used in reference to its growing appeal to “mainstream” audiences, sponsors, and media.

Legitimately, people wondered if a conference of 12000+ last year could still be meaningful to attendees.  It was a big jump in attendance (30-40%), and the organization of the conference struggled to keep up.  Hallways were jam-packed with people between sessions, and logistics seemed problematic (transportation and food were scarce, and so were spare plugs for recharging phones and laptops).

Early reports that SXSW would be even bigger this year raised the usual concerns – is SXSW-interactive too big?  Too big to create value for attendees?  The final numbers came in somewhere between 19,000 and 20,000 – an almost shocking increase, and by far the biggest tech conference I’ve attended (approximately 3x the size of IBM Impact 2010).  It is amazing that Austin, a moderately sized city, can host such a large conference (we’re not talking about a traditional conference destination like Las Vegas or Orlando).  But SXSW compensates for this shortage of convention center space by branching out – to 10 venues in 2011.  This year it did a better job of grouping similar content in the same venue (campus), cutting down on the mad dashes across Austin from one session to another.  In a sense, SXSW is evolving into a set of smaller conferences – each of which is growing independently under the overall umbrella and branding of SXSW.  The organizers of SXSW of course have some experience with this… it is how they approached growing the Film and Interactive portions of the festival without missing a beat with the music festival.

It’s Over

John Gruber of Daring Fireball weighs in on SXSW as well:

As Budd says, you can’t go from a conference of 2,500 attendees to one of 25,000 attendees without turning the event into something entirely different. … Once it outgrew the Austin Convention Center, though, it grew into something I no longer enjoyed. I don’t see how anyone could claim that the conference now is anything but broken.

Only in comparison to an event profile from 2005.  It just isn’t the same event.  Or really, set of events.  This same complaint is leveled by Austinites all the time… about Austin!  People lament that the town it used to be is lost.  It has grown beyond its sleepy beginnings.  But the alternative is what?  Not having the robust economic growth that has made Austin one of the most interesting cities to live in? I’ll take the growth, thank you – I’ve seen the alternatives.

In the context of SXSW – what is the alternative?  A conference to which the same people come every year for 25 years, every year just a bit older than last year?  The truth is, you can’t keep a conference like this the same – it has to evolve.  Admittedly, the organizers can limit attendance, or raise prices to artificially limit attendance (one could argue they tried that by raising prices for 2011…).  But would lack of growth be better than what SXSW has achieved?  I can’t say for sure, but I don’t think so.

John Gruber also laments the lack of attendance at a talk scheduled too far from the epicenter;

A prime example: Despite the fact that there were almost 25,000 attendees, almost no one saw Matt Haughey’s excellent talk in person, because the conference schedulers put Haughey in an obscure location across the river, a mile away from the Austin Convention Center. There were about 30 or 40 people in the room for his talk.

This sort of thing is truly unfortunate.  There was a similar attendance issue at Craig Venter’s amazing talk on synthetic life-  one of the best talks I’ve seen on any subject.  It was scheduled at 9:30am on Monday morning.  I’m sure a lot of people were still sleeping off a long night out from Sunday night.  But I’d hardly call a conference broken for scheduling quality content at 9:30am.  I think there’s a lot of room for improvement in scheduling and grouping content together. But I have some faith that SXSW organizers are working it out.  I don’t know anyone who attended the Lean Startup sessions who walked away from SXSW feeling that the content wasn’t top notch.  I also attended a packed BattleDecks session that was, to put it mildly, less than value-added.  Voting with feet sometimes produces surprising results in both directions.

In the echo chamber of folks who didn’t go to sessions, talking about how bad the session content was, skipping the conference or just skipping the sessions seems like a good idea.  But I think they missed the boat for the average conference-goer – as usual the content was there, and rich – but it takes more work to find what you want because there are, literally, as many as 120 sessions happening concurrently.  You read that right.  In my opinion, if you’re not in that “influencer elite” class of attendee, you’re probably going to enjoy the content if you give it a chance. That opinion is validated by a couple of experienced startup veterans that came to SXSW for the first time this year and really enjoyed it.  Anecdotal data, I’ll admit.

Reinventing SXSWi… again…

One of the things that sets SXSW-interactive apart is that it reinvents itself – from “multimedia” to a blogger convention, to a tech/startup convention, to a convention with a strong streak of mobile and geo-location content (and all the while a gaming track has been growing in size)… The organizers don’t come up with the ideas that shape and reshape the conference, for the most part – the attendees and speakers do – by submitting and then voting on topics.  The Lean Startup track that Eric Ries, et al, created was driven by people outside the SXSW organizational structure, but with the help of SXSW once that theme became apparent.  How many conferences have you been to where the messaging is controlled by 2-3 people who work at a single company and have a particular agenda (or product, or service) to push? SXSW avoids that trap- whether on purpose or by accident.

After attending this year’s conference, if anything has “jumped the shark”, it is saying that SXSW has jumped the shark:

Depending on what you read or who you talk to, this was definitely the year that SXSW jumped the shark. In fact, I think we even declared it over before it even began. What was once a conference that was hip, now attracts the guy in the buttoned-up shirt — therefore, it’s over.

Except, it isn’t.  And if there is anyplace where the button-up shirt can meet with the guy in tshirt and Birkenstocks, Austin is it.  MG Siegler goes on to say:

Everything just felt fragmented — including the apps that did try to launch there. There was simply too much going on for what was initially conceived as a smaller show. This year was like watching a mouse trying to give birth to an elephant.

The other side of the coin is that SXSW is just too big for a few insiders to control the message, or to even groupthink what the message should be.  The fragmentation may be precisely what SXSW needed to handle the influx of people, who can’t fit into a single building let alone a single room in Austin. As for fragmentation, I like how Hugh Forrest put it:

Forrest said that for next year, the festival crew will look at quality control for panels, although the abundance of content is not something that will likely go away. “Yes, there’s too much stuff, but it’s part of what we’re trying to do here. That’s a feature, not a flaw.”

In other words: your problem isn’t going to be lack of choice at SXSW.  The problem will be choosing where to invest your time.  The adjustment I made from 2010 to 2011 was to more carefully plan out my first two days before the conference started – having 2-3 sessions marked for each time-slot that I thought were interesting and in a location I was willing to walk to.   I also planned what session or time frame I was going to ditch, so that I could eat lunch.  There just isn’t time to decide where you want to go after the previous session – you need to have it narrowed down to a shorter “interest list” and then make a bee-line for that session in case it is crowded.  Good sessions are often standing room only.

You Can’t Launch Product at SXSWi- Not Anymore. Or Can You?

It appears that I’m not the only one that feels SXSW is becoming a must-attend event.  But Michael Lazerow comes to one bad conclusion: that the days of breaking products at SXSW are over:

As for the product wars we all know and love, let me just say that this year marks the end of launching products (at least successfully) at SXSW. With launches being the only thing more prevalent than parties at SXSW, two things will happen with your product if you debut at SXSW:

• No one cares. There is too much noise. 99.9999% of the companies fit into this category.
• Everyone cares and you crash. SXSW is so big now that if people do notice and decide to check out your product en masse, you will crash as you can’t handle the traffic.

So either you crash and burn because no one notices, or you crash and burn because you actually crash and burn. It’s crucial to begin growing an active user base a few months before SXSW so you can improve the product and scale the infrastructure.

He goes on to say that SXSW is the kindling, not the firestarter.  Not sure about the analogy but I think he has a point – it can accelerate adoption for a product that already has a loyal following.   But launching a product to all 20,000 attendees at SXSW-i no longer makes sense (except when it does).  But it doesn’t mean you can’t have a successful launch  – you just have to aim at a more targeted or niche segment of the attendees – the conference’s attendees are too fragmented in demographics, and too large in number, to target in one conference with one message – but it doesn’t mean you can’t launch.  But it is only with the benefit of hindsight that we can tell if SXSW gave your launch the boost it needed to attain orbit.

The Myth, and The Legend

In fact, Charlie O’Donnell of First Round Capital does a great job of explaining the myth of the SXSW launch, and why we shouldn’t be quite so focused on the successful launch of new technology as an indicator of success.  Essentially, Twitter was the perfect app to launch at an event like SXSW, and now that we have it, it isn’t clear yet what the next “right app, right time, right conference” confluence will be.  As he put it:

What SXSW has always been about is people.  It is the single best place in the creative innovation world to build relationships and get to know people.  I have friends from all over the world that I’ve met over the last five years that I can’t wait to see in Austin every year.  It’s where I met Rob May from Backupify for the first time in person–and I got to back him through First Round four years later.

Going back to fragmentation and cognitive dissonance, I love this article from Inc. magazine on what you missed at SXSW:

• Five days is enough to start a company.  The startup bus movement is in effect, and while it hasn’t churned out a blockbuster hit, it has given its participants a short primer on “starting up”.
• Gamification will blanket the earth… but…
• Gamification doesn’t matter.  Yes. You read that right.  Different points of view, strongly expressed, in different panels or discussions.
• Influencers will inherit the earth.  Get used to it.
• Ignore the influencers, and focus on a subset of mainstream users.

Hm. Conflicting advice!

Random Observations

My experiences at SXSW interactive have been so positive that I’ll be back in 2012.  The opportunity to step outside the day-to-day and get exposed to this kind of cross-pollination just doesn’t happen every day – and for me, being in Austin, this is a no-brainer.  I’ll share a couple of other random observations…

I noticed a few apps in particular were getting a lot of traction this year:

• Foodspotting.  I started using it at last year’s SXSW, and saw an awful lot of foodspotting on twitter this year.
• A friend of mine introduced me to Hashable late last year, but I didn’t really start using it until SXSW this year.  When you’re meeting with other active twitter users it is a nice way to “say thanks” when you get a meet-up.
• Groupme – I don’t use it but people were talking about using it.  However, I didn’t see any viral effect – none of my friends at SXSW sent me an invite or were asking me to sign up so that we could “group chat”.  This one hasn’t filtered down to the “general audience” at SXSW.
• Other opinions here.

There are other reasons to keep coming to SXSW.  The Austin360 Food Trailer guide is just one reason (25 Austin food trailers, critic’s picks ) – if Austin isn’t Ground Zero for the food trailer movement, I don’t know where it is. Free food trailer food was abundant at SXSW, thanks to Hashable, Foodspotting, and other startups at SXSW.

Another is the likely-to-be-annual Das IronGeek Competition (congrats Joshua Baer on winning it this year!) – if you haven’t tried one of their mechanical keyboards, you should. They’re amazingly responsive and fast.  It is hard to describe without actually trying one. The competition consisted of:

• Typing at Das Keyboard
• A Fear Factor dig in the sand for smart phone accessories from Seidio
• SXSW trivia from Triviatise
• Old school air hockey from MapQuest
• Build a server rack from SoftLayer

Who doesn’t want to win the Dwight Schroot trophy?  And where else can you compete for the Das IronGeek prize, attend a talk on synthetic life, attend a talk on the singularity, learn about lean startups, meet the CEO of your favorite iPhone app, and win tickets to a Big Boi concert?  Not to mention good BBQ and Tacos all week.

The parties and social gatherings are another reason to attend – but I had more fun taking friends to local restaurants that weren’t hosting those events- treating them to unique local food.

Ok Ok, So Who Won SXSW 2011?

And in case you missed it, the product that “won” SXSW was the 2D barcode:

I’m talking 2D barcodes (i.e., QR Codes, Microsoft Tag…) that link the physical world to mobile. My client John Puterbaugh, CEO of Nellymoser and a pioneer in the development of technology that seamlessly delivers rich content to mobile devices, summed it up when he said on his PSFK panel:

“2D barcodes codes are to mobile what the URL was to the Internet.”

If you don’t believe me (or John), here’s a collection of the images I captured at almost every turn during my time in Austin.

I have to admit that the pictures don’t lie.  QR codes were everywhere.  Including on all of our badges.  And yet, I used them more in 2010 than I did in 2011, and I didn’t see anyone else taking advantage of them either.  Not sure if I’d call it winning, but they sure were ubiquitous.

See you next year, folks.

Day 4 started off right, and got better from there.  Parking was quick, and coffee in hand I strolled into Ballroom D just as Craig Venter was starting to talk about synthetic life.  I whipped out my iPad2 and started taking notes.  Yes, I was feeling pretty good about my new charger-free existence (I really do love the long battery life).

Lest you think SXSW is all about frivolous social media and twittering away late into the night (literally and figuratively), Sunday’s sessions brought a random substantiveness to my SXSW experience, and had me thinking about things outside my usual domain.  And lest you buy into the hype by some (Vivek Wadhwa you know who you are), that Silicon Valley (and startups in general) are focused on ephemeral, superficial things, Craig Venter just completely shattered my notions of what can be done today in genomics.

As I entered, Craig was discussing their goal: to make a living, self-replicating bacteria cell, driven by artificially generated DNA.

Craig’s construct: to discuss this in terms of hardware (virus, bacteria, yeast) and software (DNA).  Several minutes were spent explaining how DNA strands were spliced together to form strands more than 100,000 “letters” long.  Fascinating process of experimentation, followed by investing in discovering an automatable process that a robot can perform.  Literally.  (Not just automated in the BPM sense of the word, by software).

Eventually they achieved a one-step, in vitro assembly that worked at 50′C, which could be automated.  More examples could be pursued, larger pieces, more automation, more robotics.

A study in 2007 showed that just by changing the DNA in a cell, they could convert one species into another.  And still have a fully functional organism.

Paraphrasing a quote: “We think that the software recognized the DNA of the original species as foreign and ‘ate it up.’  All the characteristics of the original species are gone.”  He reminded us how often DNA is replaced – 20% an hour, or something to that effect (I might have missed the exact timing/numbers…) and asked, imagine if you had to change 20% of your car parts every hour to keep your car running.  It is amazing stuff that goes on inside our bodies.

To be sure that they had the real, unique organism, they encoded messages within the genetic code – an “easter egg” in the genome – quotes from James Joyce and others.

So now they’re focused on the software for designing new cells and organisms – there aren’t enough scientists to understand all the possibilities, so software will do much of the combinatorics and analysis.  But why bother? what’s the point?

• World population of nearly 7 billion has demands our earth and tech cannot supply without continued technological change. 3 people alive today for every 1 alive when Venter was born.  Genomics can help address the food requirements of such a population.
• Additionally, flu vaccines, and eventually an HIV vaccine, may be formulated.  HIV presents a challenge due to its rapid genetic code changes, so we need new approaches.  A flu vaccine using their rig takes 24 hours to produce, rather than the 3-6 months required by today’s techniques.
• Energy demand is increasing even faster than population growth.  The Keeling curve shows increases in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.  So bio-engineered micro-algae can do a great job synthesizing sunlight and CO2 into combustible fuels.  The questions is can we scale this to get billions of gallons of fuel in 10 years?

If we based our energy needs on corn sugar replacement, we’d need a cornfield the size of 3 United States’.  But if we can do it with micro-algae, we’d need a field the size of Maryland.  Not easy, but at least it is achievable.

Clearly, Craig Venter is focused on how to solve the big problems.  One might say that he is on the path of a “Smarter Planet” but with a completely different approach than our friends at IBM.  It is fascinating.

My second session seemed to just gel perfectly with the Venter talk.  From Biological  artificially created life to synthetic artificial life.  The second panel was a discussion of the “Singularity” – the point beyond which we can’t imagine what our life(lives) will be like, because the rate of change is so fast we can’t understand the implications.  Usually this is considered to be because an Artificial Intelligence achieves sentience (the Vernor Vinge hypthoesis), but this is not the only thought model.  Our three panelists, experts in the field of AI, discussed their views.

First, the difficulty of context for computers.  The following two statements:

1. Mary and Sue are sisters
2. Mary and Sue are mothers

To us, it is easy to see that in statement #1, the obvious implication is that they are related and sisters, not that they both happen to have sisters and are not related.  In statement #2, it is obvious they are both mothers, not the mother of each other, and not necessarily related in any way.  But this sort of context is hard for computers.  Hard for Watson. Doug Lenat theorizes that we are now close to modeling computer systems that will be able to leverage fact systems for context and inference engines for generating outcomes that make sense.

Vassar took the point of view that if the singularity is in 2030′s, the point is to live well now – to enjoy your life, not to worry about what happens after 2030.  He had an oddly humanistic angle to his arguments:

• We are not very good at deliberate thought, but we seem to get a lot of mileage from the little deliberate thought we engage in.
• Machines are good at deliberate thought, but not very good at the non-deliberate thoughts that humans do quite naturally.
• If you have a good understanding of intelligence, by definition you have super human intelligence, whether you have an AI or not.
• If we understood ourselves as well as we understood societies, we’d already be creating people.
• Society does things – it does not decide to do things. Society isn’t intentional.
• We tell good stories about caring about things – but looking at our actions you would not conclude that we DO care about these things.

Vita-Moore was focused on the artistic, and the idea of extending life through cybernetics, rather than Ray Kurzweils view of uploading intelligence into a computer.  She talked about aesthetics and how we would feel about some of these changes as they happen.

The third session was focused on Business Models -but it was such an introductory discussion that I couldn’t last through it.  I left and joined a friend (Amar Rama) for lunch at the Driskill Hotel’s 1886 Bakery and Cafe.  We thought it would be far enough from the convention center-  we were wrong. It was packed.  We got a table, and looked over only to find ourselves sitting right next to Jane Kim of Hashable again.

We missed the keynote of the day, Felicia Day’s talk.  From what our friends wrote about it, it was a great session.  But we did stop by Vast, saw some of the Startup Bus competitors, and a couple of small Austin startups in that same building.  Good conversation followed, before we headed back to the convention center for another session.

My next session was “Abolish the Hourly: How Value Pricing Wins Clients” – a great content-rich session by a couple of successful professional services (agency) firms.  Jon Lax and Lee Dale led an entertaining discussion and case walk-through – in a room packed literally beyond capacity – with people sitting in chairs, on the floor, and in the hallway outside.  But there two key questions left unanswered, and I’ll have to track down the panelists:

1. When we say “value based pricing” – is “value” defined as the value the customer accrues from a successful project?  Or is it the value the customer sets as the amount they’re willing to spend to get the project implemented.
2. If we take value as customer-accrued value , then we have two values – customer-accrued and customer-willing-to-pay.  The question is, what is a spread between those values that works?  ie, if the project has $10MM in value to a customer, what should that customer be willing to pay to get the the help they want?

After this session, I walked down to the Four Seasons bar for a Trilogy Alumni reunion.  It was great to see all the alumni that were back in town because of SXSW-interactive.  It is astonishing to see the level of success and influence our alumni have within their companies – startups in NYC, SF, Bay Area, and Austin.  Not to mention the influence they have in the investor community. I think this influence and network is only going to improve over the next 10 years.  Thanks to Joshua Baer and OtherInbox for sponsoring the happy hour!

After several hours of catching up with some of the smartest and most engaging people I’ve ever met, we decamped to Blue Ribbon BBQ (reviews on Urban Spoon here, another Trilogy Alumni founded service, seems appropriate).  The BBQ was amazing, but they need some work on their BBQ sauce (I know I know, good BBQ doesn’t need sauce, but I still believe if you’re going to put it on the table it better be good!).

Having taken my two visitors (and friends) to fine Mexican dining and fine BBQ dining, I felt my mission of representing Austin’s eating establishments well had been met!

From there, we proceeded to the Hashable party.  And then, to the Mashable party.  At that point, we declared we were only going to parties that end in -ashable.   And yes, a good bit of the value of SXSW is reconnecting with your friends (old and new) at the end of the day to share stories about the day and your lives.  Something you can’t do with livestreamed, virtual conferences.

I have one more SXSW post in me (besides my writeups of the Lean sessions), which will focus on my conclusions from SXSW… look for that tomorrow.

I was struggling Sunday morning, Day 3 of SXSW 2011.  I wasn’t the only one.  The universe had played a cruel joke on all of us and put US Daylight savings leap forward in the middle of SXSW-interactive.    Which of course, meant one hour less sleep during a week in which we all could have used an extra hour of sleep. The 9:30 lineup of content looked a bit weaker than normal, or perhaps it was just that I was too tired to get excited about it.

As I parked at the Four Seasons downtown and walked toward the convention center, I had a choice:  get to the session on “The Death of Relational Databases”, or get a Korean-Mexican fusion Taco at the FoodSpotting parking lot.  I opted for the taco.  And while there, ran into a few interesting characters including an old colleague of mine who once accompanied me on a six month project in Ottawa in the winter.  From there I eschewed a set of fantastic panels (Hacking the News Desiging iPad interfaces, and others) in order to stop by the NY startup meetup.  Briefly reconnected with Hashable and Foursquare and Gary Chou of USV. (I ran into Jane Kim from Hashable so often I’m convinced that she has a twin).

As I rushed off to the convention center again to catch the next set of sessions, my previously well-picked schedule for some reason refused to synchronize with my iPhone (nor my iPad).  Picking from the list, quickly, I dropped into a session on co-working.  It was a little too dry for me and I stepped out of it and moved on out.

As a family revolving around two entrepreneurs and two kids, sometimes things just break down.  We had one of those days.  Our babysitter for the day couldn’t stay late.  I went home early, skipping some good 5pm sessions and leaving a 3:30 session early to make it in time for the cut-off.  I had a wonderful evening with our two kids that made the weekend seem a little less hectic and a little bit more grounded.  They asked me about every 2 seconds if they could play with my iPad2.  As my son would put it: “mmm iPad2? Daddy’s iPad?” which translated means “let me play with your new toy Daddy, pllleeeeeeeeaaasseee!” ).  But we played outside and got the kids to bed, and then I hit twitter and other media to catch up on some of the sessions my friends had attended ( great live-tweeting from the events).

Day 3 was the kind of day you have when you’re tired, and haven’t planned your schedule in advance in terms of which sessions have the content you really want to see.  You feel disjointed, late, frustrated by the crowds.  And it was almost a relief to just hang it up for the day and head home.

But Day 4 was a good rebound… more on that in the next post…

My advice to festival goers – when you have a day like I did, on Day 3 – just pack it in – head to the hotel or house, and take a nap.  Something interesting and energizing will await you when you wake up, and you’ll enjoy it even more.

One of the sessions I missed: Tired of F@#king Social Media Experts? You can’t make this stuff up.  Good reviews of that session too (who says panels are dull!)

The Lean Startup is a phenomenon.  Day 2 proved it.  Day 2 was not a typical SXSW experience. Instead of scrambling all over downtown Austin to get to sessions, I stayed in one place all day at the lovely AT&T Center.  Eric Ries (@ericries) acted as emcee for the all-day event, which was literally packed wall-to-wall with people and content all day long.

I took copious notes throughout the day.  This day’s sessions were the highlight for me.  The concepts in lean startups and minimum viable product are so relevant for BPM, and not as well understood by our BPM community as you might think. After all, the Lean Startup is focused on areas where the problem is unknown or uncertain, and the solution is also unknown.  In BPM, we face a similar problem – it might be more accurate to say that the problems are “estimated” and the solution is “estimated” – but the point is, we don’t know for sure that we’re solving the right problem before we start the BPM journey, and we don’t know for sure that each solution we iterate is the right solution.  It takes iterations of customer discovery and agile development to get us to a better hypothesis about the problem and solution.  If this sounds like crazy talk, bear with me and read blog posts I’ll put up over the next few days that dig into this further.

Overall the sessions violated one aspect of the spirit of SXSW – there were very few breaks (I counted 2, and one was 30 minutes for lunch), no time for hallway conversation, and no breaks to get out of your middle row seat so that you could have such a hallway conversation.  All of these fantastic entrepreneurs in one space, one room, and we could hardly talk, except via the backchannel of twitter and the like. I think it only worked at SXSW because the sessions were at the AT&T Conference Center, far removed from the center of gravity for SXSW, the Austin Convention Center.

The content was first rate, and there’s too much for one blog post to cover!  But they could have split some of the sessions into two rooms to really make the feel more like SXSW.  It would have forced choices – you can’t go to everything- but the choices would have been good choices, and twitter and blogs allow us to follow content in another session if we’re motivated to. And it would have allowed the schedule to BREATHE a little bit.  Trust me, it needed it.  Finally, it would have allowed for the people who couldn’t get into the sessions in the afternoon to actually participate or watch at least a relevant session, if not the one they were hoping for.  I felt that there was a lot of value pent up in the entrepreneurs in the room, that wasn’t unlocked because there just wasn’t any time at all for the sidebar conversations.

Eric “Pivot” Ries was the emcee, but we had significant appearances and contribution from Dave “Nice to #$@!ing meet you!” McClure , Steve “Epiphany” Blank, and many other entrepreneurs.  My favorite talk, and the one that I was most looking forward to, was Steve Blank’s discussion of new rules for the new bubble.  For this session, even more than the others, it was standing room only, with people sitting on the floors and standing in the hall to listen in.

I had the good fortune of meeting up with fellow Austin entrepreneurs while I was there-  Jeff Chambers, and Ed Roman.  I also spent most of the day sitting with Elliot Loh (@elliotloh) visiting from SF.

Later I got to introduce a couple of my friends from out of town to Garridos, a great modern Mexican restaurant downtown.  We also checked out the Frog Design SXSW Opening party, which, as usual, involved some crazy technical and interactive features, as well as massive lines to get in.

Day 2 was an incredibly long day, with so many notes I knew I couldn’t hope to get my blog up-to-date by the time I finished the day.

The main takeaways:

1. The Lean Startup movement is grounded in real empirical data, real case studies, and real results.  It is no longer an “interesting idea” and seems to be on its way to being accepted as the “best way” to approach starting up your company.
2. Entrpreneurs, investors, and academics from the Bay Area believe there is a sort of “bubble” in investing.  On the other hand, they also believe that the companies likely to go public now are companies that have real scale and make real money.
3. There’s an incredible interest among entrepreneurs to improve their game – especially the ones that are building their companies with minimal or no outside investment.
4. SXSW-interactive has the power to draw an amazing group of people to one spot, to even one room, in Austin, TX.

If they had added an after-party on-site, or a good strong networking break, this would have been the key place to be on Saturday.  As it was, it was the key place to be but no one else would know you were there, and you’d have to track down your like-minded entrepreneurs later in the conference (good luck finding them!).

Day 1 is over.  For me.  For many people at SXSW interactive, 11:30pm is just midway through the evening. But Day zero was interesting too.  We attended a tech happy hour on Thursday night.  Surprisingly, I ran into an ex-IBM consultant who is starting a BPM practice at an IBM partner.  Small world!  You don’t often run into people you don’t know, who are doing BPM, I’ve found.  Especially unusual at a non-BPM related event…

Day 1 started frenetically.  Wake up early, teacher’s conference for our daughter, coffee, get the office and get contracts, paperwork, bills, emails, and a dozen other things done as soon as possible … to make sure I could get down to the first SXSW session at 2pm.

(Update: Photo Gallery by Austin360)

Things started off right.  I found parking in the convention center garage, no crazy antics required.  $9 for all-day parking.  Cost of business.  As I exited, I realized I was only one block away from Hashable‘s sponsored free taco stand.  Coincidentally, my wife‘s company, Red Velvet Events, is helping them out with a few planning/logistics items during SXSW, and we had the good fortune of having met a few folks at Hashable at a happy hour earlier in the week.  Trusting that they wouldn’t have a crummy taco truck, I walked over.  GREAAAT taco.  And Jane Kim (VP Business Development, Hashable), and Elliot Loh were there. Elliot and I went to school together at Stanford and both worked at the same company out of school.  It was a nice reunion to run into him.  The three of us wandered over to the convention hall and then split up to three different sessions.  That worked pretty well because Elliot tweets the goings-on in his sessions like a mad man so I could follow his session, and at the same time follow my own.

First session:  Conference Startups.  The format was a “core conversation” where the room and chair arrangement is concentric and intimate to foster spontaneous, but still centralized, conversation.  The moderators were great, and the conversation moved smoothly from one topic to another, almost as if the audience was in on the script. I was interested in this session, despite other strong sessions in this slot, because we have previously hosted the bpmCamp unconference and have intentions to do it again in the near future.  With that in mind, I hoped to get some new ideas from the conversations.

A shotgun sampling of advice I heard:

• Get a clear yes or no from sponsors.  If you don’t get one, you haven’t asked clearly enough for what you want.  “You haven’t really asked if you don’t get a no”
• Find the experts, and then find out who you could bring to your conference that would blow their minds.
• Market the conference.  Presumption is that it takes 7 times before someone acts on hearing about a conference.
• (At this point, I noticed this session was standing room only … unreal )
• Mizzou School of Journalism was represented – looking for ways to foster more participation in the community in Columbia, Missouri.
• Discussion of Ignite and TedX – you can lend your brand to other regions, cities, and venues… you don’t have to own every one of them.
• People like great speakers, and conversations – but they don’t often like panels.  People want to be engaged in the conference, not just talked to.
• Food and coffee are more important than you think.  No really. They’re more important than you think.
• Some discussion of tools – lanyrd, eventBrite, etc.

Ultimately, people still want a live connection, face-to-face.

Session 2:  Time for comic relief.  I headed back to a VERY crowded Austin Convention Center (they set up a book signing right across from an info center booth, right in front of the entrance to one of the main Ballrooms.  Suffice to say, TRAFFIC JAM and poor positioning of obstacles go hand-in-hand.  Made it to Battle Decks.  Got a coveted seat at the end of the row (making it easy to bail on the session if it sucked).  It was a huge room, big projection screen of slides.  The presenters don’t know the slides in advance.  They just have to adlib their presentation based on what comes up.  This comedy is not for the politically correct or faint of heart.  The very first word out of the emcee’s mouth might have been an F-bomb.  The presenters were judged on coherence, comedy, and sexual innuendo.  Enough said.  Sadly, the slides were funnier than the presenters.  I gave up after 2.5 presenters weren’t making me laugh enough.

Decided to check out the pop-up Apple store – and get coffee at one of the dozens of coffee stands on the way out of the convention center (pro tip: no line, because everyone was still in session).  Checked in on foursquare, and won tickets to the Big Boi concert on Monday night.  If you don’t know who that is, then you’re probably in my demographic and so now I have to figure out if we’re going to go or not!

Ok.  Stopped at 4th and Trinity to meet Elliot for the walk to the Apple store.  Ran into fellow entrepreneur Aruni.  Also, ran into two guys dressed as super heros to promote their website.  Yes, we’re at SXSW.  Elliot pings me: he’s at 6th and Trinity. All right. We meet at the Apple store. Pretty amazing mini-story. They lease the place on Monday.  An empty store front at 6th and Congress – a very important intersection in Austin.  Wednesday morning the black drapes go up and the construction begins.  Friday at 5pm, the drapes come down and an apple store nearly as nice as any I have seen opens up – wood floors, wood tables, ipad2′s EVERYWHERE.  But also a healthy supply of demo machines and phones.

Ok.  The line was around the block, around two corners.  We walked back to the Convention Center to listen to Clay Shirky talk about the various online events surrounding the events in Egypt, and other countries in the Middle East.  He really went in depth about the history of the movement to oust Mubarak.  There was more to it than a spontaneous rally a few weeks ago.  Years of groundswell support led up to that moment.  It hit especially close to home because one of our very good business partners is based in Cairo, Egypt, as well as one of my close friends from school (who lives there with his family).  Incredibly informative talk, and the Q&A session brought China and other countries into the conversation in really interesting ways.

During the session, I realized that none other than Clay Richardson of Forrester is here, tweeting about the talk.  Or rather, he realized I was sitting in the room making snarky comments on twitter.  We met up in person for the first time.  A second BPM connection at SXSW.  Two more than I made when I came last year.  We had a great mini-meetup and then split up to find our various dinner commitments.  Met a fellow entrepreneur, Tony Chen, for dinner at a good sushi restaurant downtown.

After dinner, we thought, “hey, surely the line at the Apple Store has died down by now!” and walked back over there (quite a few blocks).  Sure enough. The line looked reasonable.  Ten minutes later, chatting amiably with Apple store staffers, we were buying iPads.  The staff were brought in from all over Texas – Texas all-stars.  It showed too – all the good things about Apple retail employees were even more apparent with these folks. Happy Happy Happy.  Helpful. Interested in what business I was in and how we use iPads (um, figuring that one out!)  Painless process.  Unlike phone activation.

Hint: Apple, stop activating phones on opening day. The lines would move SO much faster and you could actually blow out your opening day sales numbers.

We then walked down the street back to the parking garage like rock stars, constantly being asked if we had just bought an iPad2 at the pop-up Apple store.  (One wonders what else we would be carrying in Apple bags and Apple boxes of that size.  Still, it was a nice conversation starter).  On the way back to the garage, we passed a cross-dressing band (playing good music…), and a group of people changing costume (not sure from what or into what – they were in a slight state of undress) – ooops!  And then passed a fleet of pedi-cabs offering to give us rides to wherever.  Tony headed out to some of the night time party activities, I headed home to rest up, and write this blog post!

(Well, I might have had an interest in setting up my new iPad2 as well… )

It starts tomorrow.  But the unofficial pre-parties and meetups have already started.  The map of the 10 “campuses” for SXSW-interactive 2011 is included in this post (linking to the original).  All but the AT&T Conference Center are walking distance from the Austin Convention Center (which is ground zero for SXSW-interactive).  Preparatory discussions on mailing lists have included extensive lists of downtown restaurants, BBQ restaurants, and where to get the best migas (thanks Gary Chou!).  If you haven’t had migas before, or haven’t had them in Austin – try them.  Its breakfast, it is good, and it is quintessential Austin.

If you needed another sign that SXSW was cool, besides the fact that Foursquare is designing oodles of custom badges for it, Apple is actually opening a temporary store just for SXSW, as noted by an article in the Austin-American Statesman, and in GigaOm.  If they’re selling iPad 2′s… expect to see long lines!  Apparently they found the site on Monday, started work on Wednesday, and open for a 2 week limited engagement on Friday!

There are a lot of Canadians coming down – there’s a Maple Leaf Lounge for meeting up with fellow Canadians.  And at least one of our visitors from the far north is blogging about his experiences.  Great first post!  There’s also a big NYC contingent, and several meetups down here (I think sponsored or instigated by Hashable in some cases).

Of course many people swear that the conference is too big and each year they say it will be their last.  But often they do come back.  And blog about it.

I’m excited to see how this year’s event unfolds.  More to come over the next week.

Additional Resources:

• Unofficial event calendar for SXSW on Plancast
• Ten new Mobile Apps GigaOm recommends for SXSW
• The StartupCrawl starts today… wow. Lots of startups.
• Interesting list of distinguished speakers at SXSW…
• So many more that I haven’t even touched on!

SXSWi 2011 Map, courtesy of Cox News

That’s right.  SXSW-interactive is coming to Austin.  Soon.  This week, even.

It all started innocently enough – a few “multimedia nerds” years ago.  And then the focus shifted to blogging, before blogging was cool.  And then… something happened last year.

Maybe SXSW-interactive jumped the shark.  Or maybe it just tapped into the zeitgeist.  But there was a feeling last year that it was its own living thing – not something easily contained.

Attendance was up, way up.  More than 14,000 people had access to SXSW-interactive last year (although, that includes premium badge holders who might have focused more on the film and music portions of SXSW).  An article I read, just days ago, estimated that actual attendance could be up 30-40% again this year – and that SXSWi briefly entertained capping attendance for the first time.  Its hard to imagine SXSWi being bigger this year than it was last year.  To put it somewhat in perspective, I attended IBM Impact last year – a huge conference with over 6000 attendees… And SXSW-interactive was twice that size.  (And the wifi and 3g coverage mostly worked… unlike my experience at Impact last year)

SXSWi has split the event into 10 campuses – at least one of which is so far away you can’t walk to the other parts of SXSW (though the AT&T Center at UT is a fabulous facility to hold meetings and conferences in!).

So how do you make sense of the Nerdpocalypse?  First, if you live in Austin, and aren’t attending SXSW – just pretend downtown Austin doesn’t exist for the next two weeks.  You’ll be happier that way, because festival-goers are going to take over every eating establishment and parking spot Austin has to offer.

If you’re going to SXSW-interactive, check out some of the following resources:

The SXSW side-parties database, by Austin360.

Joshua Baer’s Austinpreneur’s Guide to SXSW 2011

The Unofficial Apps Showcase (you know, for SXSW)

SXSW official “social” site

Julie Germany’s How to Survive SXSW Interactive post

And, I feel sure, there will be many other resources worth reading on the subject – but these are just a few to get you started.

Some of our regular readers, if they’ve gotten this far, may be wondering, what does SXSW have to do with BPM?  Well, nothing explicitly.  But there are several topic areas that are tangential to what we do at BP3 and impact our work and lives.  I intend to get some of that famous “cross-pollination” experience, and reconnect with colleagues near and far at the same time.

I’m planning on attending the SXSWi/LeanStartup sessions – some of my favorite bloggers and startup experts are on panels or speaking that day, at the AT&T Conference Center.  But I also intend to catch Craig Venter’s talk, and several other topics that will probably get my brain going.  And I’ll be looking for tidbits to take back to BP3, or to BPM, or just to keep in my head.

I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again – don’t underestimate the value of meeting real people who are excited about what they’re doing – it’s incredibly energizing.

Lance Gibbs and Scott Francis, of BP3, and Reid Denny, of Wells Fargo, will be presenting at IBM Impact in April (you can find the sessions here):

Program:  Technology
Track:  BPM and Decision Management
Sub-track:  BPM: From Projects to Programs
Session Type:  Lecture, Level:  Beginner
Speaker(s):  Scott Francis, BP3; Reid Denny, Wells Fargo Bank N.A.; Lance Gibbs, BP3

Abstract:  These are practices which keep the business engaged throughout the BPM lifecyle, ensuring their value-added player role. The session will cover typical challenges companies have when it comes to getting and keeping the business stakeholders involved in their early BPM program days. Most companies are very used to a model where functional requirements are provided by the business and then handed off for IT to deliver against. In BPM, the importance of having a process focus versus a set of functional descriptions cannot be emphasized enough so the approach has to change dramatically for increased chance of success to occur, and for the organization to get the most value out of the process solutions.

We’re honored to have this opportunity to present alongside Wells Fargo’s Reid Denny.  Reid has been running an innovation group within Wells Fargo that has been doing great things for their business and we think there is a lot to learn from their story.

If you’re going to be at Impact 2011, April 10-15, look us up.  There are some great sessions planned – already over 100 sessions just around BPM.  We’d love to meet more people in the BPM space in person.

Topics at bpmCamp are taking shape based on feedback from attendees and prospective attendees.

A few highlights:

• A look inside the black box that is Websphere Lombardi Edition (v7) and Teamworks v6.
• Fronting Teamworks with FLEX – who says good process can’t be pretty?  Greg Harley, a BP3 and Lombardi Alumn, and currently product architect at IBM, shows off some techniques for getting the most out of your BPM platform.
• Using Ajax to spruce up more common Coach interfaces in Lombardi BPM.
• Agile Development with BPM: Revisiting Value-based delivery
• How to dig your way out of process debt.  Revisiting the process debt topic, how do we address debt and pay it down?

bpmCamp is only 3 weeks away – time is short (register here!) – and we still have room for registrants.  If you can’t make it, make sure someone on your team *does* make it to bpmCamp.  I can guarantee that they’ll take home some really interesting learning and experience.

IBM Lombardi folks – you’re invited.  Come on down.